This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (4 page)

Jane Cooper was a kind and gentle soul whose poor health was exceedingly bad the year I studied with her. She faded in her own class, which was primarily run by a group of seniors and several graduate students, the best of whom was a woman named Robyn. Robyn drove a Volvo and wore a raccoon coat. She was not only an astute writer, she was the kind of critic who, in a matter of a few thoughtful sentences, could show that the poem up for discussion was a pile of sentimental, disconnected words. I admired Robyn and was terrified of her, and soon I had so assimilated her critical voice that I was able to bring the full weight of her intelligence to bear on my work without her actually needing to be in the room. I could hear her explaining how what I was writing would fail, and so I scratched it out and started over. But I knew she wouldn't deem my second effort to be any better. Before long I was able to think the sentence, anticipate her critique of it, and decide against it, all without ever uncapping my pen. I called this “editing myself off the page.” My great gush of youthful confidence was constricted to a smaller and smaller passage until finally my writing was down to a trickle, and then a drip. I'm not even sure how I passed the class.

At the end of that year, I moved my poetry books to the bottom shelf and signed up to study fiction with Allan Gurganus. I thank Robyn for that. I would have arrived at fiction eventually, but without her unwitting encouragement it could have taken me considerably longer.

Most of what I know about writing I learned from Allan, and it is a testament to my great good luck (heart-stopping, in retrospect, such dumb luck) that it was his classroom I turned up in when I first started to write stories. Bad habits are easy to acquire and excruciating to break. I came to him a blank slate, drained of all the confidence I had brought with me to that first poetry class. I knew I still wanted to be a writer, but now I wasn't sure what that even meant. I needed someone to tell me how to go forward. The course that Allan set me on was one that has guided my life ever since. It was the course of hard work. But he also managed, and may God bless him forever for this, to make the work appear to be a thing of beauty.

Allan had what must have been the best office on campus, with a fireplace and French doors leading out onto a garden, which in the spring was full of heavy French tulips and dogwood trees. There were hardback volumes of Chekhov and a framed black-and-white photo of John Cheever. There were drawings Allan had done, postcards from exotic friends in exotic places, a large crazy quilt on the wall made out of satins and velvets. When he walked into a room, we stirred, we leaned towards him. Everybody did. Allan, young, with a handful of well-published stories, was as dazzling to us as Chekhov or Cheever themselves would have been.

There was an enormous generosity in him. The class, a weekly fiction workshop that lasted two semesters, had fourteen people in it. I remember each of them. I remember their stories in a way I cannot remember stories from any other class I have taken or taught since. The deal was as follows: we were to write a story a week, every week, until it was over. For a while there were assignments, the most skeletal nudges towards plot:
write a story about an animal; write a fairy tale; write a story from the point of view of . . .
and so forth. Then even those little starters fell away and we were out there alone, typing. I am respectful of people whose college careers consisted of classes I was (am) unfit to audit—inorganic chemistry, advanced statistics, upper-level Greek—but I would say the best of them would have struggled under this particular load. Ninety percent of what I know about fiction writing I learned that year. Write it out. Tell the truth. Stack up the pages. Learn to write by writing. Slowing down was for later, years later. We were to keep going at all costs. To miss a week was to have two stories due, which was a little like taking in a mouthful of water when you were doing your best not to drown.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out. Think of the diamonds, or, for that matter, the ever-practical coal that must be chipped out of the mine. Had I wound up with a different sort of teacher, one who suggested we keep an ear cocked for the muse instead of hoisting a pick, I don't think I would have gotten very far.

W
hy is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration? Chances are, any child who stays with an instrument for more than two weeks has some adult making her practice, and any child who sticks with it longer than that does so because she understands that practice makes her play better and that there is a deep, soul-satisfying pleasure in improvement. If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, “I'll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!” you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to
The New Yorker
. Perhaps you're thinking here that playing an instrument is not an art itself but an interpretation of the composer's art, but I stand by my metaphor. The
art
of writing comes way down the line, as does the
art
of interpreting Bach. Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, put it away, write another story. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sediment. The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the freshwater underneath. Does this sound like a lot of work without any guarantee of success? Well, yes, but it also calls into question our definition of success. Playing the cello, we're more likely to realize that the pleasure
is
the practice, the ability to create this beautiful sound; not to do it as well as Yo-Yo Ma, but still, to touch the hem of the gown that is art itself. Allan Gurganus taught me how to love the practice, and how to write in a quantity that would allow me to figure out for myself what I was actually good at. I got better at closing the gap between my hand and my head by clocking in the hours, stacking up the pages. Somewhere in all my years of practice, I don't know where exactly, I arrived at the art. I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

In my junior year, I studied with Grace Paley. The fact that I even met Grace Paley, much less sat in her classroom for an entire year, is a wonder to me even now. There was no better short story writer, and very possibly no better person, though she would smack me on the head with a newspaper were she around to hear me say such a thing. (Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of
The Collected Stories
by Grace Paley
.
) The lesson that Grace taught was a complicated one, and I will admit I had been out of her class for a couple of years before I fully understood all she had given me. I was used to Allan, who was as diligent a teacher as he was a writer. He was where he said he would be at the appointed minute, our manuscripts meticulously commented on in his trademark brown ink. He gave assignments and picked readings that spoke directly to our needs. But when we went to Grace's classroom there was often a cancellation notice taped to the door—
Grace has gone to Chile to protest human rights violations
, or something of that nature. Or I would be sitting outside her office, waiting for our scheduled conference, but the door stayed closed. I could hear someone in there, and frequently that someone was crying. After half an hour or so, Grace would pop her head out, telling me very kindly that I should go. “She's having troubles,” she would say of that unseen person who had arrived before me. If I held up my poor little short story, a reminder of why I was there, she would smile and nod. “You'll be fine.”

Oh, Grace, with her raveling sweaters and thick socks, her gray hair flying in every direction, the dulcet tones of Brooklyn in her voice, she was a masterpiece of human life. There was the time she came to class and said she couldn't return our stories because she had been robbed the night before. A burglar had broken into her apartment and tied her to the kitchen chair. She then proceeded to talk to him about his hard life for more than an hour. In the end he took her camera and her bag full of our homework. I'm sure I was not alone in thinking how lucky that guy was to have gotten so much of Grace's undivided attention. Another time, she came to class and herded us all into a school van, then she drove us to Times Square. We were to march with the assembling throngs to the Marine recruitment office chanting
USA, CIA, out of Grenada!
It was crowded and cold and after we were sent off down Forty-second Street with our signs we never did find Grace or the van again. I once heard her read her story “The Loudest Voice” in a small room at Sarah Lawrence where we all sat on pillows. Somewhere in the middle of the reading she stopped, said her tooth was bothering her, reached into her mouth, pulled out a back molar, and kept on going.

Like most of my classmates, I was young and filled with a degree of self-interest that could rightly be called selfishness. Nothing was more important than the stories we wrote, the Sturm und Drang of our college lives. Grace wanted us to be better people than we were, and she knew that the chances of our becoming real writers depended on it. Instead of telling us what to do, she showed us. Human rights violations were more important than fiction. Giving your full attention to a person who is suffering was bigger than marking up a story, bigger than writing a story. Grace turned out a slender but vital body of work during her life. She kept her editors waiting longer than her students. She taught me that writing must not be compartmentalized. You don't step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.

The last time I saw Grace was at a luncheon at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was being treated for breast cancer. Her hearing was bad and she didn't answer my questions about how she was doing. She gave me a hug instead. “You wouldn't believe all the nice people I've met at chemotherapy,” she told me.

My last fiction teacher in college was Russell Banks, and the lesson I got from him came in a single conversation that changed everything I did from that day on. He told me I was a good writer, that I would never get any substantial criticism from the other students in the class because my stories were polished and well put together. But then he told me I was shallow, that I skated along on the surface, being clever. He said if I wanted to be a better writer, I was the only person who could push myself to do it. It was up to me to challenge myself, to be vigilant about finding the places in my own work where I was just getting by. “You have to ask yourself,” he said to me, “if you want to write great literature or great television.”

I remember leaving his office and stepping out into the full blooming springtime. I was dizzy. I felt as if he had just taken my head off and reattached it at a slightly different angle, and as disquieting as the sensation was, I knew that my head would be better now. The world I was walking in was a different place than the one I had been in an hour before. I was going to do a better job. There are in life a few miraculous moments when the right person is there to tell you what you need to hear and you are still open enough, impressionable enough, to take it in. When I thought about the writer I had wanted to be when I was a child, the one who was noble and hungry and lived for art, that person was not shallow. I would go back to my better, deeper self.

I've run into Russell many times over the years and I've told him how he changed my life. He says he has no memory of the conversation, a fact which does not trouble me in the least. I too have given a lot of advice I've forgotten about over the years. I can only hope it was half as good as Russell's.

While I give due credit to Sarah Lawrence for having hired the right people and for fostering a philosophy of education in which a young writer could thrive, I also realize that there was a large component of luck involved. It's a wonderful thing to find a great teacher, but we also have to find him or her at a time in life when we're able to listen to and trust and implement the lessons we are given. The same is true of the books we read. I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open. For this reason I've always been grateful (and somewhat amazed) that I read
The Magic Mountain
in my high school English class. That novel's basic plot—a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement—became the story line for just about everything I've ever written. (Then again, that was also the plot of
The Poseidon Adventure
, a cheesy 1970s disaster flick I had seen several years earlier that also had an impact on me.) I was greatly affected by Saul Bellow's novel
Humboldt's Gift
, which I read when I was fourteen or fifteen, not long after it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I read it because a copy was lying around the house after both my mother and stepfather had finished it. I'm certain it was much too adult for me then, but I can still bring up more of the imagery and emotion from that novel than anything I've read in a long time. It was because of
Humboldt
that I went on to read the stories of Delmore Schwartz, and fell in love with
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
. Even as a teenager I knew a brilliant title when I saw it.