Beginning of the End

This should be easy. Mostly words. No need to prove anything. That stuff is all in the can already. It’s Thanksgiving Day and I am thankful for everything, the rough as well as the smooth. I am especially thankful that I was enabled to become this old, which provides a perspective not available by any other means. Only late in life is it possible to look back and see patterns in the paths, the equally fruitful roles played by both intention and seeming error, even disaster, in producing a hopefully wiser child than the one who began the journey.

I have not finished drawing breath. I haven’t stopped writing. For me that’s part of the breathing process. It’s just that I have become more philosophical, more accepting, of what I can still hope to accomplish with the grand ideas that keep coming but seem to dwell more in the realm of fantasy than reality. Reality is a word that has become quite loaded for me, so I use it here advisedly. I am not expecting big stuff I have in mind to come to completion. Not in the cards. Another loaded turn of phrase for me. But you know what I mean in this at least.

My sense of solitude, a lifelong companion sometimes in the background and sometimes straddling my shoulders but always loitering nearby, is increasing of late. I have been given enormous gifts, staggeringly large gifts, and I have tried to live up to them even when they looked to be breaking me. I am not unhappy, if that word means anything, I do not feel life or my fellow men owe me anything, I am not lonely, but I am now more than ever alone. There’s no one to tell but the blank on the page and the screen.

When I say ‘you,’ I am using the old trick taught to public speakers who wish to connect with their audience. Pick out one face in the crowd and speak directly to the person inside that face. Not a face in the front row because you will appear to be looking down, not at the audience. Farther back, in the middle rows maybe, where you can still get a glimpse of eyes and mouth. That’s me at this podium. Not fixating on the front row, those closest in terms of distance and time but behind them, not even to the next rows in line, but probably a face in the rows after that second set, where I have to speak up to reach them.

One danger of this approach is, of course, the possibility that those closest to the podium will be able to detect that you are not really speaking to them in particular but some other one(s) farther away. This is a risk I have taken and am most likely paying for these days with my intimates and contemporaries, who can be forgiven for thinking that I am not really interested in their response but overlooking them and even looking down on them to a significant degree. Which is true and not true at the same time.

Whose face in the later rows have I fastened on? A young solitary adventurer not yet born who believes in defiance of all the naysayers that there is beauty and purpose and meaning in human life and will devote a lifetime in pursuit of those truths. He (or she, if she’s had the androgen wave) is too young to have made any final decision about a principal area of focus or its minuteness or grandeur. Breakthroughs, epiphanies, pure connections can occur at every scale and kind of endeavor. The promise can be seen in the eyes, even at a distance, from the podium. Maybe they’re your eyes. I can’t be sure there’s no one in the early rows I’ve been “overlooking,” just that I haven’t come across them in recent years.

It could be that I have just pissed off people I shouldn’t have. I am reminded of some critic’s observation that no writer worth his salt was ever a complete sonofabitch. And someone else’s rejoinder that the critic must never have met John O’Hara. Whom I have found to be an exemplary and important writer. Exemplary not its usual connotation of someone to be imitated, but in its stricter denotative sense of serving as a revealing example. Important because the example he sets has multiple dimensions. 

Pretty early on I developed a practice of learning about famous writers by reading one or two of their shorter works first to see if the bigger ones would be worth the time investment. It wasn’t an ironclad rule but experience reinforced its value to me. By happenstance I learned about O’Hara from two of his short works, a novella called “Appointment in Samarra” and a short-short New Yorker story called “Exactly Eight Thousand Dollars Exactly.” I did go on to read other O’Hara stuff, but not a lot of it. Those first two, and a couple of Hollywood movies, told me what I felt I needed to know. He was a master of the short fiction of his day.

“Appointment,” like most youthful works of 20th century writers, told me where and what he came from, environments I was familiar with. His Gibbsville was a slight renaming of his hometown, Pottsville, Pennsylvania. His protagonist, Julian English, was middle class, married, well educated, moderately prosperous, and floundering. The story is a grim comedy of errors leading to the death of English, whose desperate final plight was in reality not nearly as grave as he had thought. The point of the story, and of the title expressly, was that his death was nevertheless inevitable, no matter how trivial its causes might have been. Okay then.

The New Yorker story came later, and I was impressed. The ne’er-do-well brother of the owner of a manufacturing business arrives at company headquarters to ask for a loan. His treatment at the company gate makes it clear that he is persona non grata in this place. His brother is cold when they meet, so he makes it clear that he is only asking because he needs a very precise amount of money, “exactly eight thousand dollars, exactly.” If he can have this sum, he will go away, never to return. The brother has heard all this before and isn’t buying the angle of approach. There is unpleasantness surrounding a fatal accident which occurred in this very factory in the past, the kind of unpleasantness no brother can forgive even a sibling. And that’s basically that. There are no detailed descriptions, no flashbacks, no expository authorial asides to the reader, just a straightforward telling of what happens step by step between the gate and the parting.

As with Hemingway’s best short fiction, the O’Hara story shows you how little you can do to craft an effective work of fiction. It’s an archetype of what came to be called The New Yorker short story. And it doesn’t matter whether you like John O’Hara or not. It’s perfectly fine if he’s a perfect sonofabitch. Some writing conceptions require it. Chances are that critic never met Ambrose Bierce, Evelyn Waugh, or Dylan Thomas either. Or Hemingway for that matter. 

The list of writers whose works I admire at least in part includes many I don’t think I would have liked personally. It’s just not necessary. There are also writers I think I’d dislike personally whose works I don’t admire particularly, no matter how much talent they evince. And writers I probably would have liked whose writings don’t do much for me. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning?) It just doesn’t matter. In the end it’s all, always, about the writing.

Many we can never know personally. These are the ones who consciously conceive of writing as a performance, not a confessional, disguised autobiography, or a statement of victimhood. The greatest writer of all time? By majority opinion, William Shakespeare, playwright beyond compare. Which of his legion of characters is he? Some, none, or all? Opinionating about this is fun, nothing more. Edgar Allan Poe was the first writer I encountered to make me aware of writing as a “thing” unto itself. He was always coming in from out in left field somewhere to perform a story or a poem or even an essay for us. He famously hurt his reputation as a poet by describing the metrical calculations by which he composed “The Raven,” which or may not have been as scientific as he makes it seem. I loved him extravagantly for this without knowing anything at all about his personality or social interactions.

Does this discussion of writers and writing and liking or not look like a digression? It isn’t. One of my more recent posts on the Internet is a weathered parchment page from the Vennich Manuscript which features an engraving of a tree accompanied by the same line of text repeated dozens of times: “The manuscript is writing itself… The manuscript is writing itself… The manuscript is writing itself…”

And so it is. Which has vital corollaries. It is the manuscript being composed that determines the right tone, style, format, appearance, and choice of vocabulary and sentence structure of the completed work. Why it is also the case that all writing is a performance. And all writing is therefore fiction. All of it.

As this is. Fiction does not necessarily mean untrue. It means choices have been made. Dozens, even hundreds of them. Including what is put in and what is left out. 

What is being put in and what is being left out. Left out would be, for example (and rarely for me), images in this manuscript. Put in? Things I’ve thought and known about my creative life I’ve never said anywhere else as plainly and directly. 

Do I really think I am the greatest American writer of the last 75 years? Great is a big word. There are certainly other writers in that timeframe who can do things with words I cannot or have not set myself to do, just as there’s no writer who has done everything with words that I have done. I leave the greatness discussion to others. What I do think, however, is that I am likely the most important writer of the last 75 years and for who knows how long in the future. Whether anyone likes me, or that idea, or not.

Why am I leaving out the pictures. Because I intend to publish this one as a physical book, whether anyone reads it or not. I want it on the record. And I want to minimize the formatting difficulty of posting it as an electronic file. Doing the linear words-only thing is also a constraint that simplifies the writing process. There are other kinds of omissions with the same purpose. Making things easier rather than harder for myself for a change.

On that note, it’s probably time for a snack. I’ll be back by and by.