This fall, I was rereading a Ray Bradbury story before class. He wrote some of his best work in the campus library, and I enjoy telling students to check out his old typewriter, which they keep behind glass. Until recently I also told them to visit his yellow house in Cheviot Hills. Then they bulldozed it.
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On a warm LA morning, I set aside Bradbury to read an article about another writer I love, Cormac McCarthy. His books have felt like cornerstones of what’s possible in modern literature. Sutree kinda changed my life. The trilogy altered my perception of beauty and chaos and what’s happening when things go wrong. Fundamental to my relationship with the American west, where I was born and have spent most of my adult years, was his portrayal of the land and its history. I can’t imagine a life without him. The first two times I ever read an entire book, finished it in a big gulp, then immediately reread it I did with two of his books in a row. (Guess which ones.)
Have I thought over the years that much about the man himself? Is part of reading’s joy the freedom of not really caring?
*
The clock is ticking and I need to teach Bradbury and I’m speed-reading a Vanity Fair piece with growing alarm. Had I wanted to know more than what I already knew about Cormac? What do we know about Thomas Pynchon, for instance? How much was life enhanced by reading those New York Times profiles of Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore, or Lore Segal?
In the Vanity Fair piece, there’s a 16-year-old runaway. “Rescued.” She becomes a secret girlfriend of Cormac’s. The letters between an old man and a child are hard to read. There’s even a suggestion by the magazine writer that (in this secret girlfriend’s style, speech patterns, and way of life) we have a concrete inspiration for made-up characters many of us have loved and mourned and thought about again and again.
I introduced William T. Vollmann at a reading and when my own book came out I mailed him a copy and he wrote back with four hand-scrawled pages.
I need to get to class. I’m walking and trying to puzzle out how I feel and why I think I am so mad. What do we search for in stories? It’s one thing to teach Bradbury’s ideas about state control and personal freedom. It’s another thing to walk to class and try to privately mourn… what? That Cormac was a bad dude? That one of my favorite writers was a monster? Here’s the deal: I do not know what to think and I can’t say exactly why.
*
Books and writers have given me many things—safety, comfort, entertainment, direction. I had this rule, until I didn’t, that I would finish the final page with a freshly lit cigarette. An early earth-mover for me was Rule of the Bone, that Russell Banks novel about a runaway teen and his adventures in Jamaica. Fourteen when I read it, I was doubly shocked as it was my dad who had recommended it. I suppose I eventually looked past all the sex, violence and drugs to realize it was a pretty coherent defense of adventure, risk-taking, and staying true to one’s ideals. It was also about being a good son. I think of it so often.
Years later I met Banks at a writing conference. I told him how much Bone meant to me, and he accepted the praise. Some other writers overheard me, and made fun of my taste over dinners of fish and wine.
How much did it matter whether or not I had met the author? What role did imaginary or real people play in whether a book had the juice to keep us thinking about it years later? Why do stories stay with us and demand reading and re-reading? What was I learning as I struggled to reckon with what I knew and had not known about Cormac?
Another huge book for me was The Atlas, a collection by William T. Vollmann. When I was a teenager I ached to be as brave and insane as he seemed to be. There was a story in which he held a gun to his head while he gave a reading. Or that he was so obsessed with getting the words out he would simply dash to the food area of where he happened to be living, shovel Cheerios into his mouth, then race back to the keyboard. Did I admire this? Would I be like that?
Then, because I happened to be attending the same small college he himself had attended, I got the chance to meet him, when he entered my room one afternoon and asked to borrow a book. Many years later I introduced him at a reading and when my own book came out I mailed him a copy and he wrote back with four hand-scrawled pages. The main advice: Try writing about something other than your wife. I’m probably getting ahead of myself.
A detour, before so much else went down: The Quiet American helped me the summer I was 21 and living in Cambodia, where I ran with a fast crew of journalists and fell in love with the sport of writing and editing, and also with the woman I’d come to marry. Graham Greene is dead so I guess maybe I should leave his lessons about fear and piety and arrogance out of this essay. Still, another quick detour: In New York, it was Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell, when I was an editor at The Village Voice and trying to write essays about the city. I spent a whole day drinking liquor and eating bologna sandwiches at an off-track betting parlor and took the bus to Staten Island but Mitchell was dead too.
You wouldn’t want to ask Padgett Powell something boring so I think my first flurry of emails to him, from our little bedroom in Jakarta, was about how to get from Istanbul to Tbilisi.
What am I afraid of? What is this essay about? What am I resisting? Joseph Mitchell supposedly reported to his New Yorker offices every day for like 40 years and never again wrote anything worth publishing. I re-read my own youthful essays just now and they are pretty plain. Let me try to get more specific about more recent events.
Nick Flynn was tall and funny and approachable. At the table everyone poured wine and he asked for water and I was too self-absorbed to imagine how that evening felt for him and his sobriety. I did know a bit about his marriage and it was inspiring to me—two creative types making it work—as was his zeal for parenting. After meeting him I flew back to Istanbul to care for my own child and hooked up my computer so I could Skype (pre-Zoom!) with the child’s mother, who lived in Baghdad. I doubt I’ve ever written a paragraph as worthwhile as any of Nick’s—about his dad and his work or his life in Boston. I keep trying.
You wouldn’t want to ask Padgett Powell something boring so I think my first flurry of emails to him, from our little bedroom in Jakarta, was about how to get from Istanbul to Tbilisi, where my wife would be working. The next summer, when I saw him again in Russia, we walked fast and argued about boxing and whether writing about sports was too easy. I haven’t talked to Padgett in a while and that’s my fault, probably. I check and have about ten half-written emails to him.
I think my best story probably involves Robert Coover, the way he gamely let me into his graduate workshop when I was a foolish 20-year-old with clothes that didn’t quite fit. A few summers later, he attended my birthday, when we marched a hundred people from the Stravinsky at the Mariinsky to our apartment on Millionairskya, from which you could see both the Neva and the Church of Spilt Blood. He stabbed a turkey leg with a pen knife and drank wine straight from the bottle but it was even more nourishing, to eat lunch later with he and his wife Pilar, in a dark and quiet restaurant, talking about where and how to live and why. I admired his sharp trench coat and still have a to-do list somewhere that involves finding one like it. RIP.
In those drafty Russian rooms another summer I was a little mean to Dave Eggers, suggesting his projects weren’t quite serious enough. He told me I was wrong but recognizing my youth and poverty he let me finish his salad. I think in the last 20 years he has done plenty to show me how wrong I was. I still have his email address somewhere.
When cornered at the bar or after a talk George Saunders didn’t have any idea about how to be mean and would instead give everyone and anyone his complete and loving attention. Watching him with his kids was to see a patient and present father who loved his life. Would you be surprised to learn that he used an AOL address? Annoyingly, he also wrote back so generously, so quickly, to a guy after he moved to Beirut and was struggling with his feelings. I say annoyingly because I never knew how to say thanks. I haven’t bothered him in a long time. I check and there are no half-written emails in my drafts. Let the man work.
When cornered at the bar or after a talk George Saunders didn’t have any idea about how to be mean and would instead give everyone and anyone his complete and loving attention.
You are probably noticing it was mainly men. I also got to meet Mary Gaitskill, who was so wild and intense it made a sickening plot twist when it was her head raised a bit too high on the boat and who suffered a wound as a result of hitting the bridge and yet the injury seemed only to make her more fierce and impatient to be heard.
With Karren Russel we were all so starstruck one admirer fell into a bush.
Elif Batuman took me to an event in Istanbul honoring writers in Turkey who had been jailed but we had trouble hearing the main speaker over the scream of police sirens and the call to prayer. I even got to walk one evening with Miranda July, delicate and bird-like, seeming to dance her way across the bridge in Tampa as we trekked from hotel to theater. Even a simple evening’s walk was a kind of performance. She didn’t seem like the kind of person to be shy but her hands shook as we waited for the elevator.
*
I’m lucky. I’ve met many writers over the years and I like to think I am a decent judge of people in the same way I imagine I am a credible judge of good writing. So what was it about Cormac—his dark past and questionable choices—that jarred me so? What was I searching for with this essay? Why did I care so much?
Friends, knowing my calamity, tried to weigh in. On a lively text thread with my besties one entry said it was an “act of devotion” to even read the ponderous story about a man and his secret girlfriend. Another entry called it “gossip” and most damning of all was the line from one friend about yearning for “stories of male chivalry toward vulnerable women that don’t involve their penises.”
That was it, wasn’t it? McCarthy was 42. The girl was 16. I’m a 45-year-old college instructor, regularly facing a room of 18 year olds. The power dynamic is as obvious as it is inescapable. I remember my first few years, when I didn’t realize how dangerous it was to shut my door when I was speaking one-on-one with someone so young. Now I make a cautious and reverent process of propping open the door, gesturing at the exit.
How could Cormac, a father and great writer and a guy some of us cared so much about, size up a similar imbalance and think, yes, this is something that makes sense, I am attracted to the dynamics here, and moreover I will enjoy this. Did he think about the young girl? Did he think about us? Where does the writer stop and the man begin? (And am I being selfish? Doesn’t the actual woman involved—and her memories—matter more than anything any of us have to say?)
Just what am I getting at, with my paltry memories of famous writers? In my most cherished little stories, I seem to care whether or not writers were nice to me and people like me. The imbalance is inescapable. The world is cruel. Why do we write and why do we read? What power do we grant others over us? Especially when they’re so good at telling us stories we want to hear?
In theory the question is simple: Can you separate the art from the artist? I want to say the answer is just as simple. I want to point to someone heinous like Matt Gaetz or the rogue’s gallery of monsters about to take power over us. I want to say there are bright red lines and it’s all very clear and writers, more than maybe anyone else, should be keenly aware of how conduct becomes a binding contract. I want to say that from goodness comes more goodness.
What I know is I treasure the memories of the great writers I’ve met—the feeling of squaring a world I learned about in someone’s stories with the way the person who wrote those stories moves in the world. When I had the chance, I’m glad I told Russell Banks I loved Bone. I may yet email George Saunders again. I hope Miranda July is okay. I bet Karen Russell is still making people fall into bushes. Elif Batuman is probably the most exciting writer on the planet.
What I can also say is this: Email me any time. I’ll write back.
