Loitering: New and Collected Essays (28 page)

It’s weird, the whole relation of fiction to fact. Recently I gave a reading in Seattle. A woman I’ve taught came up to talk about whatever, and started in, eventually, about a couple of my recent stories. She said, how can I read you (Me? Not the work?) the same now that we have a history? A history? I’ve always thought of this woman as a stalker. I like her, but she patronizes me, and whenever I see her at a public event she’s always sighing sadly and tolerantly, as if she alone possesses a special wisdom about me or the situation. It’s like she’s watching me with great pity as I’m being hauled off to some kind of doom I can’t really comprehend. It gives me the creeps. And she feels completely free to touch me in public—that night she reached right in and straightened the collar on my coat, so, she said, I’d look good for my “adoring fans.” Huh? Later I was told, by her friend, that this woman said she was able to spot me from across the crowded basement at Elliott Bay merely by seeing my knees. My knees are bulky knobs of bone like everybody else’s, and I was wearing my usual attire of droopy brown corduroys, plus if my dress code has any animating principle whatsoever it’s anonymity. When it comes to clothes I’ve always been a frightened boy, opting, as we do, for bulk and
dullness and colors of the sort the world fades to when left alone—I build in a little neglect in advance of real abandonment.

She brought up typewriters. I’d published a story about a typewriter repairman and his schizoid son. To me the story was a vague attempt to create a world in which love between men wasn’t laughable. I was so sad about this problem—it descended on me, a pure mood, a scary hollow—that I had to write in order not to feel totally bereft. I was desperate and obsessed in the writing because I needed to believe that that world of love really might exist, if not for me, somewhere, for someone. Now, this stalker-woman had once given me a lovely old Underwood that, beautiful as the machine was, I felt highly ambivalent about accepting. I sensed I was agreeing to something unstated, that I was obligating myself, that I was making a swap. We both know the place that was one of the models for the repair shop in my story, although I’d actually set the business on another street in Seattle, mostly because the real street is boring and my make-believe street has a better view of the water. But to this woman, I think, the story was about the real shop and the real guy and, I fear, some sly, public acknowledgment, on my part, of our private shared interest in old manual typewriters. It was as if the story were a tryst we’d had, some
clandestine rendezvous. I always feel like that woman is making a fiction out of me.

But how do I feel about being turned into a character in an actual novel? I’ve been asking people, just casually, if there are any ethics about this kind of thing, and happily most people say there aren’t. I agree. For a lot of people who write there’s an unspoken, prior silence that feels nearly conspiratorial; a heavy suggestion that you don’t tell the truth, don’t mention the drunk father, the cold mother, the rapist next door, the molester at church, the sorrow and despair of even a thing as small and forgettable as a Sunday afternoon; some pressure against saying out loud what’s obvious. Sometimes we literally make a pact—don’t tell!—but more often shame or confusion or a profound dislocating pain does the work of swearing us in. We keep secrets and hold to silence because what’s obvious is overwhelming, it’s baffling and mysterious. The very surface of life makes the sinister suggestion, and that’s one of the reasons the best writers I know are fascinated by the ordinary—it’s so shockingly alive with trouble. When you deny the surface, then the impulse to write prose dies, I think, and I’m with Bellow’s Augie March on this, that there’s no fineness or accuracy of suppression, that by holding down one thing you
hold down the adjoining. If I believe that for myself, I’ve got to believe it for others too.

In part owing to its epistolary form there’s not much
Bovary, c’est moi
in the book, and my character in particular isn’t the sort that emerges from contradictions deep inside the author’s soul. I’m there in a chunky undigested way. I kind of hang out in the novel like a big dope. Real life weighs down my character, I think, and he never achieves autonomy, any meaningful freedom from the facts. In an interview with the
Paris Review
, Graham Greene said, “One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use . . . and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.” I’m photographed—and yet at the same time, stuck in a vague real-life fidelity, my character seems sociological, his presence in the book determined by the demands of genre, a phenomenon coughed up by the culture at large. These things aren’t contradictory. A novel in letters is naturally apostrophic, addressing absent persons, and my character feels absent to the point of vacancy. He has no inner life and hence no conflicts or desires of his own. I think he’s supposed to be a big character but in fact he has a minor feel, always walking in the door at the right moment, a creaky mechanism servicing
the needs of a melodrama. Writers generally pay for their melodrama by resorting to types, in essence turning all their characters, in Forster’s formulation, flat. My character is the dullest part of an otherwise lively story. He’s there because I was there in life, but life is a bad reason for including a character in a story. The book would have been way better had he been cut from it.

There’s no factory that turns life into fiction, no machine for digging up good raw material and stamping out stories. Anyone who’s taught creative writing has heard the excuse “But this really happened” as a way to justify the most implausible events. A lot of readers, however, want to smelt fiction in order to separate the truth from the slag, not the uppercase sort of Truth but the humdrum kind that conforms to facts, to actuality. At readings people often ask what part of a story is true, as if assaying its value, the idea being that the fictional element is an alloy, an impurity that debases real events. The general preference is for naïve readings, I’ve found, where authenticity is measured or verified or defined by facts—the writer’s bio says he was an acrobat, and the main character in his novel is, it turns out, an acrobat. I tend to see everything written as some form of fiction, more or less convincing. Still, the urge to resolve the fiction into something irreducible—real life, the genuine article—doesn’t go away. I’ve talked to students about
that typewriter story and inevitably the question comes up, phrased more or less like this: Where do you get your inspiration? I know what they want to hear, and I give it to them: My brother is schizophrenic. But I’m quick to add that the story isn’t about my brother, that it comes from somewhere else and goes off to its own, individual destiny. I do have a good ear for crazy talk because I’ve listened to gobs of it. I have a feel for the loneliness of loving a mentally ill person who can never really return that love. I’m a fan of old typewriters and, for Christmas, was just given my best machine ever, a classic Olivetti Valentine, designed by the great Ettore Sottsass. So that story has typewriters and rain, Seattle streets and schizophrenics, Catholicism and donuts and city buses and social workers—stuff I know about—but it isn’t about me or my brother or anyone I could call on the phone.

Certain images presided over the writing—of a wall of typewriters, each with a blank white sheet of bond rolled in the platen, an image that haunted me like a dream for three years before I wrote the story; of a man in a worn blue smock hunched at his bench while his grown son says the rosary, and particularly the silence between them, the invasion of small sounds, of the tools, the glass beads, the rain against the window; of the love that exists in old objects, and how those objects, loved over time, might teach an otherwise inarticulate
man to be steady and strong and loving toward all broken things, including his son. Perhaps that’s what the story is about. Or perhaps it’s about the technical challenges, the difficulty of writing “I love you” so that it isn’t ironic or disgusting or a pathetic joke; of using crazy dialogue in a way that feels just right—without condescension or sentimentality—and therefore in some way makes a legitimate home for the voice of a mentally ill man; of capturing the sound of the sentences, a sound that isn’t precious, by eliminating, as much as possible, the emotional fussiness of commas—instead using hard consonants and the natural stresses of our largely iambic language to create the rhythm. I was in a phase of full-blown anti-comma mania as I wrote, believing robust American prose could be written with hardly any punctuation. The man I was writing about was a practical man, a man whose life wouldn’t admit many clauses or qualifications, many refinements—he would see his life as one headlong statement, without pauses or the luxury of separations or second thoughts, lacking a certain inwardness, and I wanted that rhythm in the story. That’s the most autobiographical part of the story, this whole silly personal drama about punctuation.

When the writer first sent me a manuscript of the novel I kept marginal notes as I read, objecting to passages, characterizations, factual discrepancies. Your father
wasn’t like that, your mother, your sister, your brother, etc. Or: This never happened, that’s not quite accurate, what about when, etc. Partway through the book I gave up, realizing I was arguing raw material, debating the very nature of life itself, fighting against history, memory, language, failed love, death, faith, everything. I felt claustrophobic, suffocated, having at that old life, those dead arguments. I really didn’t like the book as an experience, but I wasn’t sure how to say that, because . . . just because, let’s say. In the end I gave her some notes that I thought were pretty balanced and sane but probably were not. When I received a signed copy of the book a few months later, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I put it on the kitchen table, set it on the floor, took it across the yard to my writing shed and stuck it on the bookshelf, brought it back to the house, held it, stared at it, then finally carried it out to the shed again, where it sat for a while, behind me, on an old gray typing table. But it was giving the room bad juju and I could feel a knot building between my shoulder blades as I worked. I stopped writing and took half a milligram of lorazepam and right about the time the benzo softened my bad mood, I picked up the book again and found my name—my real, actual name—in the acknowledgments, where the writer thanked me for being a great reader and a true friend.

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

by Richard Hugo

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down. The last good kiss

you had was years ago. You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year. The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage. Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss