Bert was once a poet and has two or three delicate, spindly-thin books I occasionally see in used bookstore racks. For years, he had a wild-man’s reputation for getting drunk at public readings and telling audiences of nuns and clubwomen to go straight to hell, then falling off stages into deep trance-like sleeps and getting into fistfights in the homes of professors who had invited him there and thought he was an artist. Eventually, of course, he ended up in a rehab hospital in Minnesota and, later, running a poetry program in a small New Hampshire college — very like the one I taught at — and eventually getting fired for shacking up with most of his female students, several of whom he moved right into the house with his wife. It is not an unusual story, though that was all years ago. He came to sports writing precisely as I did, and now lives nearby on a farm in the hills outside of Haddam with his second wife, Penny, and their two daughters, and raises sheepdogs in addition to writing about books. Bert’s specialty, when he was a sportswriter, was ice hockey, and I will commend him by saying he was very good at making an uninteresting game played by Canadians seem sometimes more than uninteresting. Many of our writers are former college teachers or once-aspiring writers who simply couldn’t take it, or rougher-cut graduates of Ivy League schools who didn’t want to be stockbrokers or divorce lawyers. The day of the old bulldog reporter up from the Des Moines Register or the Fargo Dakotan—your Al Bucks and your Granny Rices — are long gone, though that wasn’t as true when I started twelve years ago.
Bert and I have talked about this subject on our train rides through the New Jersey beltland — why he quit writing, why I did. And we’ve agreed, to an extent, that we both got gloomy in an attempt to be serious, and that we didn’t understand the vital necessity of the play of light and dark in literature. I thought my stories were good at the time (even today I think I might like them). They seemed to have a feeling for the human dilemma and they did seem hard-nosed and old-eyed about things. It was also true, though, that there were a good many descriptions of the weather and the moon, and that most of them were set in places like remote hunting camps on Canadian Lakes, or in the suburbs, or Arizona or Vermont, places I had never been, and many of them ended with men staring out snowy windows in New England boarding schools or with somebody driving fast down a dark dirt road, or banging his hand into a wall or telling someone else he could never really love his wife, and bringing on hard emptinesses. They also seemed to depend on silence a lot. I seemed, I felt later, to have been stuck in bad stereotypes. All my men were too serious, too brooding and humorless, characters at loggerheads with imponderable dilemmas, and much less interesting than my female characters, who were always of secondary importance but free-spirited and sharp-witted.
For Bert, being serious meant he ended up writing poems about stones and savaged birds’ nests, and empty houses where imaginary brothers he believed were himself had died grisly ritual deaths, until finally, in fact, he could no longer write a line, and substituted getting drunk as a donkey, shacking up with his students and convincing them how important poetry was by boinking the daylights out of them in its name. He has described this to me as a failure to remain “intellectually pliant.”
But we were both stuck like kids who had reached the end of what they know they know. I did not, in fact, know how people felt about most things — and didn’t know what else to do or where to look. And needless to say that is the very place where the great writers — your Tolstoys and your George Eliots — soar off to become great. But because I didn’t soar off to become great — and neither did Bert — I have to conclude we suffered a failure of imagination right there in the most obvious way. We lost our authority, if that is a clear way of putting it.
What I did, as I began writing Tangier, which I hoped would have some autobiographical parts set in a military school, was become more and more grave — over my literary voice, my sentences and their construction (they became like some heavy metallic embroidery no one including me would want to read), and my themes, which became darker and darker. My characters generally embodied the attitude that life is always going to be a damn nasty and probably baffling business, but somebody has to go on slogging through it. This, of course, can eventually lead to terrible cynicism, since I knew life wasn’t like that at all — but was a lot more interesting — only I couldn’t write about it that way. Though before that could happen, I lost heart in stringing such things together, became distracted, and quit. Bert assures me his own lines took on the same glum, damask quality. “Waking each day / at the end / of a long cave / soil is jammed / in my nostrils / I bite through / soil and roots / and bones and / dream of a separate existence” were some he quoted me from memory one day right on the train. He quit writing not long after he wrote them and went chasing after his students for relief.
It is no coincidence that I got married just as my literary career and my talents for it were succumbing to gross seriousness. I was crying out, you might say, for the play of light and dark, and there is no play of light and dark quite like marriage and private life. I was seeing that same long and empty horizon that X says she sees now, the table set for one, and I needed to turn from literature back to life, where I could get somewhere. It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?
3
By a quarter to ten I have surrendered to the day and am in my Malibu and down Hoving Road, headed for the Great Woods Road and the Pheasant Run & Meadow condos where Vicki lives — really nearer to Hightstown than to Haddam proper.
Something brief should be said, I think, about Haddam, where I’ve lived these fourteen years and could live forever.
It is not a hard town to understand. Picture in your mind a small Connecticut village, say Redding Ridge or Easton, or one of the nicer fieldstone-wall suburbs back of the Merritt Parkway, and Haddam is like these, more so than a typical town in the Garden State.
Settled in 1795 by a wool merchant from Long Island named Wallace Haddam, the town is a largely wooded community of twelve thousand souls set in the low and roily hills of the New Jersey central section, east of the Delaware. It is on the train line midway between New York and Philadelphia, and for that reason it’s not so easy to say what we’re a suburb of — commuters go both ways. Though as a result, a small-town, out-of-the-mainstream feeling exists here, as engrossed as any in New Hampshire, but retaining the best of what New Jersey offers: assurance that mystery is never longed for, nor meaningful mystery shunned. This is the reason a town like New Orleans defeats itself. It longs for a mystery it doesn’t have and never will, if it ever did. New Orleans should take my advice and take after Haddam, where it is not at all hard for a literalist to contemplate the world.
It is not a churchy town, though there are enough around because of the tiny Theological Institute that’s here (a bequest from Wallace Haddam). They have their own brick and copper Scottish Reform Assembly with a choir and organ that raises the roof three days a week. But it is a village with its business in the world.