Call If You Need Me (25 page)

“Forever” was different. I wrote the poem in 1970, just before Christmas, in a workroom in a garage in Palo Alto; and it was a poem that I must have written fifty or sixty times before I felt I had it right. I remember that when I wrote the first draft it was raining hard outside. I had this worktable set up in the garage, and every now and then I would look out of the little garage window toward the house. It was late at night. Everyone inside the house was asleep. The rain seemed a part of that “Forever” I was approaching in my mind.

“Looking for Work” was written the following August, in the afternoon, in an apartment house in Sacramento during a confusing and difficult summer. My children and my wife had gone to the park. The temperature was nearly a hundred degrees, and I was barefoot and in swimming trunks. When I walked across the tile floors of the apartment, my feet left tracks.

“Wes Hardin” was also written in Sacramento. But it came
a few months later, in October, and in a different residence, a house on a dead-end road called, if you can believe it, Lunar Lane. It was early in the morning, eight o’clock or so, and my wife had just left the house to drop the children off at school and go on to her job. I had the day in front of me, a rare day in which to write, but instead of trying to write anything I picked up a book that had come in the mail and began to read about outlaws of the Old West. I came to a photograph of John Wesley Hardin and stopped there. In a little while, I roughed out the poem.

“Marriage” is the most recent poem in this particular group of poems and was written in a two-room apartment in Iowa City in April 1978. My wife and I had been separated for months. But we had gotten back together on a trial basis for what, as it turned out, would prove to be a very short time. But we were trying once more to see if we could put our marriage back together. Our children, both of them grown now, were someplace in California, pretty much on their own. Still, I was worried about them. I was also worried about myself and my wife and our marriage of twenty-some years that we were making one final effort to preserve. I was alive with apprehensions of all sorts. I wrote the poem in the evening, my wife in one room and I in the other. The fears I was experiencing found a place to go.

The reconciliation didn’t work out, but that’s another story.

In its way, this poem is a kind of love letter to my wife, the poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. At the time I wrote the poem, in March 1984, I was spending time by myself in our house in Port Angeles, Washington. Prior to March I’d been in Syracuse, New York, where we live most of the time and where Tess teaches at the university. But in September 1983, my publisher had brought out
Cathedral
, a book of my short stories. After the book was published, there was such an extended hubbub for a while—a period of time that stretched right on into the new year—that I was thrown off my stride and couldn’t seem to find my way back into my work. And this literary commotion came in addition to the usual social activities we normally engage in when living in Syracuse—dinners with friends, movies, concerts, fiction and poetry readings at the university.

In many regards, it was a “high” time, a good time, certainly, but frustrating for me as well: I was finding it hard to get back to my work. It was Tess who, seeing my frustration, suggested I go out alone to our house in Port Angeles in hopes of finding the necessary peace and quiet that I felt I needed to begin writing again. I headed west with the intention of writing fiction once I’d arrived. But after I’d settled into the house and been still for a while, I began, much to my surprise, to write poems. (I say “surprise” because I hadn’t written a poem in over two years and didn’t know if I ever would again.)

Though “For Tess” is not, strictly speaking, “autobiographical”—I hadn’t used a red Daredevil lure to fish with for years and do not carry Tess’s dad’s pocketknife with me; and I didn’t
go fishing on the day the poem seems to be taking place; nor was I “followed for a while” by a dog named “Dixie”—all of the things taking place in the poem
had
happened at one time or another, and I remembered, and I put these details into the poem. But—and this is important—the emotion in the poem, the sentiment (not to be confused, ever, with sentimentality)—the sentiment is true in every line, and it is given in clear and precise language. Further, the details in the poem are lively and specific. And insofar as the narrative or storytelling aspect is concerned, I think the poem is authentic and convincing. (I don’t have much patience with poems that use rhetoric to keep them going, or unengaged abstract pseudopoetic language. I tend to shy away from the abstract and rhetorical in literature, as well as in life.)

“For Tess” tells a little story
and
captures a moment. Remember that a poem is not simply an act of self-expression. A poem or a story—any literary work that presumes to call itself art—is an act of communication between the writer and reader. Anyone can express himself, or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply
express
themselves, is communicate, yes? The need is always to translate one’s thoughts and deepest concerns into language which casts these thoughts and concerns into a form—fictional or poetic—in the hope that a reader might understand and experience those same feelings and concerns. Other understandings and feelings contributed by the reader always accompany a piece of writing. That’s inevitable and even desirable. But if the main cargo of what the writer had to give is left at the depot, then that piece of writing, to my way of thinking, has largely failed. I think I’m right in feeling that being understood is a fundamental assumption that every good writer makes or rather a goal that he or she works toward.

A final note. Not only did I attempt to capture and hold—that is to say, make permanent—a specific moment through a progression of specific details—I realized, halfway through the poem,
that what I was writing was nothing less than a love poem. (One of the few love poems I’ve ever written, by the way.) For, not only was I addressing the poem
to
Tess, the woman who has shared my life for the past ten years, giving her some “news” of my life in Port Angeles—here I’m thinking of Ezra Pound’s remark that “literature is news that stays news”—but I was taking the occasion to say that I was grateful to her for coming into my life when she did, back in 1977. She made an immense difference and helped change my life in profound ways.

That’s one of the things I was trying to “say” in the poem. And I’m pleased if I reached her and, because of that, touched other readers as well—gave them a little of the real emotion I was feeling when I wrote the poem.

In early 1987 an editor at E. P. Dutton sent me a copy of the newly published Henri Troyat biography,
Chekhov
. Immediately upon the book’s arrival, I put aside what I was doing and started reading. I seem to recall reading the book pretty much straight through, able, at the time, to devote entire afternoons and evenings to it.

On the third or fourth day, nearing the end of the book, I came to the little passage where Chekhov’s doctor—a Badenweiler physician by the name of Dr. Schwöhrer, who attended Chekhov during his last days—is summoned by Olga Knipper Chekhov to the dying writer’s bedside in the early morning hours of July 2, 1904. It is clear that Chekhov has only a little while to live. Without any comment on the matter, Troyat tells his readers that this Dr. Schwöhrer ordered up a bottle of champagne. Nobody had asked for champagne, of course; he just took it upon himself to do it. But this little piece of human business struck me as an extraordinary action. Before I really knew what I was going to do with it, or how I was going to proceed, I felt I had been launched into a short story of my own then and there. I wrote a few lines and then a page or two more. How did Dr. Schwöhrer go about ordering champagne and at that late hour at this hotel in Germany? How was it delivered to the room and by whom, etc.? What was the protocol involved when the champagne arrived? Then I stopped and went ahead to finish reading the biography.

But just as soon as I’d finished the book I once again turned my attention back to Dr. Schwöhrer and that business of the champagne. I was seriously interested in what I was doing. But
what
was
I doing? The only thing that was clear to me was that I thought I saw an opportunity to pay homage—if I could bring it off, do it rightly and honorably—to Chekhov, the writer who has meant so much to me for such a long time.

I tried out ten or twelve openings to the piece, first one beginning and then another, but nothing felt right. Gradually I began to move the story away from those final moments back to the occasion of Chekhov’s first public hemorrhage from tuberculosis, something that occurred in a restaurant in Moscow in the company of his friend and publisher, Suvorin. Then came the hospitalization and the scene with Tolstoy, the trip with Olga to Badenweiler, the brief period of time there in the hotel together before the end, the young bellman who makes two important appearances in the Chekhov suite and, at the end, the mortician who, like the bellman, isn’t to be found in the biographical account.

The story was a hard one to write, given the factual basis of the material. I couldn’t stray from what had happened, nor did I want to. As much as anything, I needed to figure out how to breathe life into actions that were merely suggested or not given moment in the biographical telling. And, finally, I saw that I needed to set my imagination free and simply invent within the confines of the story. I knew as I was writing this story that it was a good deal different from anything I’d ever done before. I’m pleased, and grateful, that it seems to have come together.

I wrote and published my first short story in 1963, twenty-five years ago, and have been drawn to short story writing ever since. I think in part (but only in part) this inclination toward brevity and intensity has to do with the fact that I am a poet as well as a story writer. I began writing and publishing poetry and fiction at more or less the same time, back in the early 1960s when I was still an undergraduate. But this dual relationship as poet and short story writer doesn’t explain everything. I’m hooked on writing short stories and couldn’t get off them even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.

I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact—so crucially important to me back at the beginning and even now still a consideration—that the story can be written and read in one sitting. (Like poems!)

In the beginning—and perhaps still—the most important short story writers to me were Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Frank O’Connor and V. S. Pritchett. I forget who first passed along a copy of Babel’s
Collected Stories
to me, but I do remember coming across a line from one of his greatest stories. I copied it into the little notebook I carried around with me everywhere in those days. The narrator, speaking about Maupassant and the writing of fiction, says: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”

When I first read this it came to me with the force of revelation. This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images, as well as the exact and
correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn away his eyes from the text unless the house caught fire. Vain wishes perhaps, to ask words to assume the power of actions, but clearly a young writer’s wishes. Still, the idea of writing clearly with authority enough to hold and engage the reader persisted. This remains one of my primary goals today.

My first book of stories,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
, did not appear until 1976, thirteen years after the first story was written. This long delay between composition, magazine and book publication was due in part to a young marriage, the exigencies of child rearing and blue-collar laboring jobs, a little education on the fly—and never enough money to go around at the end of each month. (It was during this long period, too, that I was trying to learn my craft as a writer, how to be as subtle as a river current when very little else in my life was subtle.)

After the thirteen-year period it took to put the first book together and to find a publisher who, I might add, was most reluctant to engage in such a cockeyed enterprise—a first book of stories by an unknown writer!—I tried to learn to write fast when I had the time, writing stories when the spirit was with me and letting them pile up in a drawer; and then going back to look at them carefully and coldly later on, from a remove, after things had calmed down, after things had, all too regrettably, gone back to “normal.”

Inevitably, life being what it is, there were often great swatches of time that simply disappeared, long periods when I did not write any fiction. (How I wish I had those years back now!) Sometimes a year or two would pass when I couldn’t even think about writing stories. Often, though, I was able to spend some of that time writing poems, and this proved important because in writing the poetry the flame didn’t entirely putter out, as I sometimes feared it might. Mysteriously, or so it would seem to me, there would come a time to turn to fiction again. The circumstances in my life would be right or at least improved and the ferocious
desire to write would take hold of me, and I would begin.

I wrote
Cathedral
—eight of these stories are reprinted here—in a period of fifteen months. But during that two-year period before I began to work on those stories, I found myself in a period of stocktaking, of trying to discover where I wanted to go with whatever new stories I was going to write and how I wanted to write them. My previous book,
What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
, had been in many ways a watershed book for me, but it was a book I didn’t want to duplicate or write again. So I simply waited. I taught at Syracuse University. I wrote some poems and book reviews, and an essay or two. And then one morning something happened. After a good night’s sleep, I went to my desk and wrote the story “Cathedral.” I knew it was a different kind of story for me, no question. Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly.