Fish as Metaphor and Reality

Sometimes as a youngster, you tried your hand at fishing.  The results were often more frustrating than the satisfying fishing stories so many of your friends tell, but if only in metaphor, you did catch something every bit as meaningful to you than the fish you did not catch.

Because it had never occurred to you to investigate fishing, your memory bites onto the tempting bait of your father, appearing before you, revealing to you with the same sense of importance as a rabbi unrolling a Torah, a display of small hooks.  "With these,"  he said, "You will be able to catch fish--" his hands spread to a remarkable width,"--this long.  First, you will need a line."  From is pocket he drew a tidy skein, black and shiny, radiant with the implication of tensile strength.  "And of course, something to attract the fish."  You were then led to the back yard, where a patch of sunburned grass awaited under a clothesline holder that reminded you of a saguaro cactus.  Your father, who was always gifted at producing things, showed you a shovel with which, in a single scoop of the earth under the clothesline, unearthed a clutch of worms. "Fish,"  he said, "are attracted to worms."

Your mother, who wanted no truck with worms, informed you that fish may also be attracted to tiny pieces of hamburger, chunks of bread, even pellets of peanut butter, none of which she had scruples about handling.

The early venues for your fishing expeditions were invariably what was called Westlake Park, now called MacArthur Park, in the lower reaches of Wilshire Boulevard in midtown Los Angeles.  There were indeed fish there, and beyond your ken of sensitivity, you spent considerable time there because, just across the street, were the offices of an eye surgeon-opthamologist whose patient you were in hopes of correcting a strabismus.  Although many fish were attracted to the various bait you set out for them (including worms you did not tell your mother about), none of them were motivated to fulfill your father's predictions.

Some years later, your fishing expeditions extended to the Santa Monica Pier at the far western extreme of Wilshire Boulevard, where you actually caught a fish or two but really learned how to fish by yelling obscenities at the fishermen on the incoming boats, provoking them to throw fish at you.

A hook in time became a word.  The line became a sentence.  The bait became, gradually an ironic statement and then, later still, what a character wanted, what a character dreamed of, or a character being forced to make a decision.

As you became more deeply involved with publishing, your fishing expeditions tended to be overtly social, arranged by printers and manufacturers and paper companies for their clients.  Thus your first experience with waders and a spinning reel which was guaranteed to bring forth rainbow and brown trout found you at the crack of sunrise, badly hung over, in the cold waters of eastern Tennessee, wondering about your balance.  Hush puppies and trout sauteed in bacon grease are, you discovered, excellent anodynes to the common hangover.  Ventures of a similar nature were repeated--sans hangover--off the coastlines of northern and central California, all of them having to do more with the social than the fishing.

Thus it is the metaphor of fishing rather than the act of fishing that attracts you.  He who is probably your closest friend, Barnaby Conrad, gets a gleam in his eye when you mention woolly buggers and other of the so-called dry fly fishing lures.  He is a catch-and-release man and although he has in fact written thirty-seven books, soon to be thirty-nine, he has no need to see a metaphor so much as the activity itself.  In the larger sense, this is true.  There is action and there is metaphor.  Action may become metaphor, but metaphor rarely becomes action.  Writing is about action, and even though Mr. Conrad is a catch-and-release man, he is not at all adverse to a trout fillet or two for breakfast of a late summer's morning after being out in the river with his four-beat cast and his instincts honed for where the big ones may be lurking, just below the surface.

Outcome

Most of the people you know on any level beyond the mere familiarity of acquaintance are interested in outcome. Not surprisingly then, many of these individuals are writers or engage in some form of art whether it is photography, ceramics, music (which surely includes dance), or acting. Others, no strangers to reading and art, pursue their quest for outcome as scholars, scientists, attorneys, community activists. Only this morning one such friend spoke to you of his pursuit for outcome as it related to translations, his energy effervescing behind his need to get down his espresso and bridge the distance between the coffee shop where you breakfasted and the university where his class was scheduled for 9:30. Another such friend had no class but was interested in getting to his lab where he was pursuing a project that involved mud, a project that literally had his whiskers twitching.

It is your observation that those who are not interested directly in tracking outcomes born of their own projects are nevertheless interested in the outcome of baseball games, competitive celebrity-wannabe shows, even elections. Some of us like to look to outcomes as portents of extensive if not massive future behavior. In other words, outcomes as building blocks for additional building blocks. At this moment, the political climate and a certain N-sampling of past history suggest that after Barack Obama's decisive victory, he is likely to lose ground in the forthcoming bi-election. You even recall your hard-nosed political science instructor pronouncing: "The party that wins the election loses the bi-election."

You also notice more so now than you did as an undergraduate the way bias invades expectations (and hopes) related to outcomes. It is a fact that there have been six special congressional elections since Barack Obama's inauguration as POTUS, each of these won handily by a Democrat. This aggregate result at least stands as a rebuke to the general view that the 2010 elections will be seriously bad news for the Democratic Party and President Obama. We are all of us, of course, our expectations of outcome set on high flame, awaiting the actual results.

Story is your focus in these vagrant paragraphs. By definition and convention, story is an outcome in which contrary agendas clash, where behavior and sometimes ingenuity trump logic, and where more experienced writers need to discover again that the most emotionally laden and satisfying outcomes have their origins in listening to the characters they have created.

Take the leap with me to late sixteenth century Prague, where Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel created a creature out of mud,a golem, brought him to life by inscribing the Hebrew word for truth on the creature's head, then instructed the creature to defend the Jewish community against a virulent wave of anti-Semitism. After the Golem had completed its mission, the Rabbi deleted the first letter of the Hebrew word for truth from its head, leaving the word met, which is Hebrew for death, whereupon the golem crumbled to the clay from which it came. This story is presented as legend just as, later, the invention of a story about a particular Robin of Locksley morphed into Robin Hood, each tale having an outcome that at least temporarily provided satisfaction and perhaps even inspiration to the listener. Farther back in time came the story of The Iliad which, so far as we know, may have happened exactly as described in the epic poem of the Homer poets, giving at least an accurate picture of what societies were like at one time and also providing some an inspiration for survival and perseverance and observation of then prevalent custom.

Outcomes are risky business in general; no one can be completely happy with them. If they are too bright and cheerful, they are seen as bubbly optimism. If they are as laden with implication as, say, Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, they may be seen as overly grim, cynical reflections on such well-trod themes as The Meaning of Life. Outcomes have led Barnaby Conrad to observe (more than once, alas) that stories about animals are fated to unhappy endings. Today, while making that observation in relation to Madison, a much loved gray parrot who lost out to a marauding rat, that human life was similarly targeted.

And yet we persist in pursuing human affairs, even ones we consider relatively dumb, drawn about the metaphorical camp fire of the oral tale or the reading lamp of the solitary reader in the sure knowledge that the behavior of the invented individuals is of greater significance than the final outcome. In the end, we all of us, as Jack London's character did in "To Build a Fire," run out of matches. A heavy collection of snow on a branch above us melts from the fire we have created, causing it to drop precipitously, extinguishing the fire we labored to create. Speaking of London, he true enough gave us "To Build a Fire," but he also gave us a shot at a way out with another, lesser known story, "A Loss of Face."

Is it weakness of intellect, Birdie, I cried...

The fact of you agreeing to be one of the two judges in a fiction contest--short stories and stand-alone segments of novels--reminds you once again of the notional climate inherent in any contest and/or submissions landscape. There is, for instance, the fact of you with a work of your own in submission for two months with a publisher whose books you have published two reviews. Speaking of which, there is the persistent campaign being waged by the author of a self-published book to have you review his project, despite your assurances that anything you might think to say about the work would hardly encourage anyone to read it, much less to buy it. There is also the incest of you living in a city with a larger-than-median percentage of writers, both published and aspiring, and, speaking of the nooks and crannies of interconnectedness, the other judge in this latest writing contest is not only a friend but someone who became a friend as a direct consequence of a published review of his last major novel.

There were also times when the writers' conference with which you are associated, in concert with the local daily newspaper, had a yearly contest, the awards being full and partial scholarships to the conference. As a judge in this contest, you frequently gave the highest marks to those submissions you thought had the least to recommend them, your theory being that they most richly needed the writers' conference.

Let us take a number, say one hundred, representing the number of times you have served as a judge in a contest. This is separate from the approximately one thousand book reviews you have written and at least ten thousand full manuscripts or manuscript proposals you have had a say on in your capacity at various editorial venues. Is there some terse, cogent philosophy you can articulate to describe the process by which you cast your lot for or against? If such terse, cogent philosophy existed, it might be this: If something aroused the adrenaline of your interest to the point where you felt invested in the outcome, you stood for it. If not, not.

What causes the adrenaline to flow in a genre you think you hate or at least have no interest in? What causes the adrenaline not to flow when the work is in a landscape you admire, written by an author whose work you admire? You would think a man with your experience would be able to give Power Point answers, the slides already on the screen of your mind, but the added fact is that you are vastly impatient with Power Point presentations, thinking them a gross sham.

The simplest answer--pace William of Occam--is that you like what you like on the basis of external chemistry. Same is so with individual persons; you like something in their manner or stature or posture or tone of voice or a combination of these and no doubt reflecting sexual, intellectual, and artistic considerations in the summary. You do not, accordingly, apply a cookie-cutter set of standards so much as you apply a chemical response which you then begin to break down into more component parts such as potential readership, artistic and intellectual challenges inherent.

Do you, in effect, say or think to another person, Thanks for letting us see you, but unfortunately...you are not right for us? No doubt you do.

How many manuscripts have you accepted without any thought of editorial suggestion?

How many friends and acquaintances have you accepted without any thought at all of wishing to tweak some large or small mischief?

Added to this calculus, how many novels or short stories, even by your own reckoning, even novels or short stories by Louise Erdrich, are perfect?

Is Conrad perfect? Wolfe? Fagan? Cook?

You know from intimate association and those tumultuous teen years when intimate association was put on hold that you least of all are in any way perfect and you are well able to live with that, just as you are able to live with the utter anarchy of unfinished business and clangorous coincidence in fiction.

Accordingly, even though you are hired, or in this recent case enlisted to judge, you do so by the one reliable standard you have encountered so far, the utter anarchy of chemistry.

Thanks for the Memory

You, it appears, have a quirky memory. In yesterday's New York Times op-ed section, the economist Paul Krugman got off a nice rejoinder about lunatic Republicans, using the trope There's no sanity clause. This took you back immediately to a moment at least sixty years in the past, from an old Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera, in which Chico and Groucho were in the midst of a riff on contracts. During the course of the riff, Chico uttered the line, "Everybody knows there's no sanity clause." Krugman's deft, Christmas-day use of the pun was effective; many of the news and opinion bloggers you follow caught it, remarking on its originality. You even Twittered one of them with the citation.

Twice during a prolonged afternoon lunch conversation with Barnaby Conrad and Sandy Vanocer, you were transported back to events you'd witnessed or had read about in order to supply a slight correction to the record, an unintentional role you played as historian. True to form, Conrad commented on this trick memory of yours. Even though Sandy's reminiscences of his past as a newsman were interesting and vivid, you were drawn into the on-going debate within you about the nature of memory, particularly the awareness that your memory of an event is tinged with the colors you impart and may well differ from the memory of another who experienced the same event. Sometimes the difference of the memory resides within the nuance of a particular word. You, for instance, always thought of David Brinkley's voice as wry and amused. Sandy, who knew Brinkley personally and worked with him considered his voice dry and bordering on incredulous. Other times, although the memory comes to you wrapped in more than one sense, say visual and aural, or visual and smell, you wonder if the memory took place or that you are remembering your invention of it, life, as it were, lived as though you had wished rather than as it actually happened. And then there is the not inconsiderable use of that word "actually." Actually means really, or existing as a matter of fact. Compare actual with fictional. Did it happen or did you invent it? Much of your writing life has been focused on invention, in some measure because you felt that not enough of note was happening to you in real life, thus your need to invent it. Possibly because you were not satisfied with the outcome of things in your real life, you sought to rearrange the furniture of events to better suit your sense of self. Possibly.

Can you trust your memory? With some exceptions, the answer is yes, particularly if the memory is of a formula, a mantra, a fact that can be easily checked against two or more sources. Can memory in general be trusted? Well, that depends, and thus does a boundary line emerge between fact and fiction, between participation in an event and self-interest. That wasn't your idea, someone tells you, that was my idea, in a grand sense taking possession of the memory. You experience a squeeze of irritation, knowing it was in fact your idea, in effect wrenching the memory back from an individual who has been suddenly transported from the ranks of family, friend, lover to opponent in the Monopoly game of memory. Then an interior voice speaks to you, Screw it. Let him/her have the memory. You know the truth. Thus in one mighty concession, you have become bigger, more humane in your own eyes, a tower of empathy. You know with rigid certainty that you would never give a woman a gardenia. More likely you would have given roses or camellias but never gardenias. Of all the flowers you know and admire, the gardenia is so far down on the list that you would not even think of it much less give it. If she wants to remember gardenias, be my guest. Thus you are delivered to the nobility of allowing her memory of an event to vibrate reality for her. But you know better; you know the truth and of course, storyteller that you are, you live in the memory of truth.

So then, all the stories you tell of yourself are true? Well, you have a point there. Although he had no say in the mentorship, you have taken the memories of being mentored by Mark Twain, and he has indirectly whispered in your ear that making yourself the butt of a story can work wonders with an audience, even more so than making yourself the hero. In fact, making yourself even slightly heroic tends to heat up the room with the boredom factor. The eyes begin to roll upward, the yawns, at first stifled, tend to break through, and there, you've done it again, you've committed the act of boring an audience.

What emerges in any discussion of memory is the literary equivalent and mixed metaphor of the political football, moved up and down the grid at will and whim, one major truth being that we cling to memories as the dear and defining gifts that they are, incredulous that anyone would think to take them away from us or supplant them with their own.

Dearth in the Afternoon

Conrad (Barnaby, not Joseph) is most likely your closest friend, a connection bridged across many improbabilities not the least of them being the fact that you read him intensely and carefully before you met him and certainly before your days in San Francisco, when you'd wander over to his saloon with a group of chums from The Old Spaghetti Factory Cafe on Green Street.  There was a time in your twenties when your interest in bullfighting reached a peak and, after reading the encyclopedic and self-important Death in the Afternoon by EMH, you first checked in on Conrad, only to be put off by what your own ignorance of the Spanish language caused you to think Conrad was just like EMH, going to the extreme of dedicating a book to himself.  (Va por ti, Barnabito is taken literally, It goes for you, little Barnaby, as in his first-born son, whom you would meet years later.)

Somehow, you were called in to serve on the faculty of Conrad's Santa Barbara Writers' Conference in 1980, and when the Conference ended while June morphed into July, you were invited to lunch again and again, from which point your friendship grew.

Yesterday, at yet another lunch (Mondays and Thursdays have become your lunch days with BC), he extended a book toward you and asked you to read a marked passage.  The book was Sammy, an autobiography of Sammy Davis, Jr, with help from a collaborator.  Two weeks earlier, (at the same restaurant) Conrad had shown you yet another book, Golden Dreams, which was a history of California in the 1950s, written by Kevin Starr, professor emeritus at USC, and also librarian emeritus of California.  There was not only a photo of Conrad but several mentions of him throughout the text.  "It is amazing that he remembered these specific events,"  Conrad said, speaking to their accuracy.

The Sammy Davis, Jr. book had a three- or four-paragraph description of how Conrad, solicitous of Davis' interest in bullfighting, met with him frequently to show him how to manipulate the cape and muleta, then took him on several occasions to Tijuana, during the off-season, working out with him in the bull ring, showing him how to work with young calves and cows.

"None of this is true," Conrad said.  "We had some long discussions about bulls, but we were both quite drunk, and the closest his narrative came to accuracy was the time he visited my saloon and I used a table cloth to demonstrate the Veronica and media-Veronica.  The rest is entirely invented."

"But to him, it was all real,"  I countered.

"Spoken like a fiction writer,"  Conrad observed.  "Fiction writers love to see magic in the ordinary." 

You nodded.  This observation is one of Conrad's bedrock beliefs.  He expressed it to you in his dedication of his last novel, which at the time caused you to argue that there was nothing ordinary about the novel.  "True enough," he said at the time, "but it might have been."

"What is the more real?"  I asked.  "Sammy Davis's vision or Kevin Starr's?"

"I should have ordered your fish taco,"  he reflected, "and you should have ordered my enchilada.  Perhaps next time."

Which is about as much of an explanation as can be made:  We are in constant effort to take in as much as we can of an incident before filing it away for later use, at which time it emerges with a life of its own, whereupon we bring it forth as elements in an illustrated illusion.  Thus we are all magicians, rearranging reality for effect.

"I will tell you," Conrad said, "that one year not too long ago at the Bohemian Groves Summer Camp Gathering, "I shared a tent with Starr and a few others and I can tell you that he is a melodious snorer."

When I was at the luncheon where Starr spoke about his book, and I had the opportunity to introduce myself to him as a friend of Conrad, I saw his frankly stodgy face crinkle into a much more agreeable smile of recognition.  "How IS Barney?" Starr asked.  Of course, knowing Starr was a melodious snorer had already worked its magic on me.

Dear Editor: The Dog Ate My Revision

hard luck story--a narrative of misfortune offered to secure the hearer's sympathy and possible financial contribution; an offered excuse as in The dog ate my homework; a narrative offered as mitigation for any non-performance.

All stories have some kind of end-game goal, some intended effect on the hearer/reader. Is it laughter? Perhaps the author's intent is education, or irony, or reversal. Perhaps the narrative is offered in self-defense, or the adjunct of self-defense, excuse. As long as we're dwelling on the conditional perhaps, might be the intent of a story is to make the teller sound modest--moi?--or resourceful.

Surely one of the more plentiful among dramatic narratives is the hard-luck story or its close relative, the sob story. The purpose is to evoke or elicit sympathy for the teller, both in the nature of troubles piled on and in the way the load is borne by the forces of Nature and natural disaster.

You could say--and probably will, once you think about it--that The Book of Job is the classic hard-luck story, not only because of the trials visited upon Job but as well because of the capricious nature of the way the visitation was set in motion. Job happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when those polar representations of The Cosmic Forces got into a bragging and betting mood.



Ishmael's was a hard luck story in that he signed on the Pequod with no other thought to get away from the depressing nature of life on shore, only to find life at sea a cluster of disaster in which he was lucky to escape with his life. Heathcliff and Cathy saw the chemistry of their mutual attraction torn into a hard luck story in Wuthering Heights, and the unnamed protagonist/narrator of Rebecca saw her dreams of a romantic future turn into a hard luck story, ditto Charles Ryder for being pulled into the swirl and eddy of the Marchmain family in Brideshead Revisited, and while still on the subject of Evelyn Waugh, look at the hard luck story he contrived for the hapless protagonist of the haunting short story, "The Man Who Loved Dickens."


deus ex machina--a too convenient solution for a dramatic problem; a way of removing an obstacle that seems to have come from an independent, even unrelated source such as mere chance or accident.

Originally a device in ancient Greek drama at a time when gods were thought to have a hand in determining the outcomes of human affairs, the name now evokes the presence of any dramatic resolution that creaks and groans its way to a mechanical-seeming outcome. Indeed, in some performances, characters representing gods were lowered onto the stage by means of a basket-and-winch device.

Hint: in ancient Greek drama, competition and jealousies among gods and goddesses was assumed, thus even at that level, personality and motive informed godly activities. In modern stories, personalities, differing agendas, and cultural squabbles produce the best mechanisms for initiating and resolving plot complications.

Further hint: it is acceptable for obstacles to grow larger, complexities to grow more intense by accident, but their resolutions must be more convincing in their engineering. Think as endings or resolutions as mediated settlements.

In the Beginning

There is a piece of constructive wisdom in television drama that calls for the thrust of the story to be made apparent before the director's credit rolls. Or else. Or else the viewer will click the channel selector to something more promising. In actual time elapsed, the director's credit rolls about ninety seconds in, at most two minutes. This means the intent in television drama is to inform the reader whose story this is, what it's about, and what the risks are.

By virtue of formatting conventions, the short story writer gets about a hundred words of text on the opening page and at most another two fifty on the second page to get the reader to sign on. A novel may proceed at a more leisurely pace, perhaps three or four pages of text.

These three standards are all subject to the laws of contemporary convention; they may change over time as, indeed, they have changed on their way to becoming what they are now. Take a novel of Thomas Hardy, since he is generally acknowledged to have been the rider of the cusp between the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Most of Hardy's novels begin with one or more characters walking down a road somewhere in the westernmost part of England, say Devon. We are treated to a description of the countryside, the narrow roads, the stone walls, the thatched-roof cottages. Then we are presented some sense of what the characters are doing out on such a road, either prefaced or followed by a thorough physical description of the individuals so that even were you to have skipped some of the description, you'd nevertheless be able to recognize the characters should you encounter them in your neighborhood pub or your local school or theater. Only then would you find some clue about what irked, intrigued, or preyed upon one or more of the characters. You do ultimately find out what the story is in Hardy's novels; in The Mayor of Casterbridge, you find out in so memorable way that it has seldom been duplicated. Depending on when if ever you read The Mayor, the opening may still be with you, holding you by the throat in a tighter grip even than Charles Dickens' grip employed in Great Expectations.

In many contemporary novels and short stories, enough care is accorded the characters that the reader begins to suspect something of consequence will happen soon enough to cause the kinds of curiosity associated with suspense, while in others, some intriguing set of circumstances appears to be in play from the very beginning. Tobial Wolff's remarkable short story, Bullet in the Brain, seems to encompass both these approaches with a maximum of economy and dramatic force. It is yet another tribute to Wolff's skills that he has us investing in a character unlikeable at the outset; only toward the very end does he give us clues that Anders, the protagonist, was at an earlier time a nice person

Modern stories and memorable stories from past times begin with a momentum suggesting a decision will be needed, an impasse reached, an alternative given, a consequence to be dealt with. It is not a spoiler to use Marilynne Robinson's remarkable novel, Housekeeping, as a prime example of this opening velocity. Ruth, the young narrator, and her younger sister are withdrawn from their school and small town, thanks to their mother having cast out their father. They are moved to another small town to live with their grandmother, whereupon their grandfather is killed in a spectacular train wreck and their mother becomes a suicide. There is enough velocity there to last for the entire novel, but author Robinson continues to pile it on. Remarkably, Housekeeping is not an operatic melodrama; it is many other things, most of them arguably literary in nature, where melodrama is supplanted by ambiguity.

Opening velocity is a matter of choice, a moment in the orbit of a story where too much background or explanation become the equivalent of albatrosses, weighing the story down instead of helping it take off. Action or volition rather than introspection are the Swiss Army knives and Leatherman tools of the narrative opening, the goal being to get the reader invested in the character by means of being invested in the character's actions. Time enough later on to slow the story down for background material and physical description.

Accomplished writers rarely find the optimal place for beginning in early drafts, choosing other methods for beginning the actual setting down of words, methods such as starting with characters in the middle of an argument, with characters pointedly trying not to argue with one another, with characters misunderstanding one another. Some accomplished writers begin with weather reports or scenic descriptions of the landscape; others still begin with descriptions of the characters or some thematic statement relative to the story; in any case, most begin with the goal of writing long then cutting short, setting down everything they can think of, then purposefully cutting it back, mindful of the weight each word carries.

If there is such a thing as the five-thousand-word short story, as many books on writing technique suggest, a significant approach might be to get down ten thousand words on a particular story, then remove five thousand of those words.

For some years, Barnaby Conrad gave an intriguing exercise in his workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference: Write a five-hundred-word sentence--any five-hundred-word sentence. Not all that many years back, one of the students in Conrad's workshop was a former newspaper reporter, Fanny Flagg, whose approach to the five-hundred-word sentence made her recall an incident from her childhood, which she called prophetically, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe."

Whatever it takes to get it going. Then come back to look for the place where the events begin gathering a momentum. Find the spot where it is impossible to insert explanations, adjectives, adverbs, and weather reports. That's the place. Right there.

The Key

There are a number of keys to be found in my desk, most of which have a purpose I readily remember, but among my trove there is a key that unlocks no recognition or memory whatsoever.

There are two basic approaches to cleaning house, the guilt-driven approach, which is perfunctory in nature, usually involving a quick vacuum and shifting piles of newspapers and magazines from one room to another; and the writing approach, which is more intense and thorough as the writer considers the implications of the current writing problem and accordingly processes or denies it.

I was in the latter, methodically cleaning my desk, when I came upon the key. Still no clue, and so I moved it to another room, which is a step taken toward discarding it entirely, avoiding future embarrassments of recognition.

The image of the key has remained however to trigger by association its literary association the roman a clef, which is the second of two French words having literary significance. The other, of course, is denouement or unknotting, a term we learn early on in our attempts to claim the more formal tools of writing fiction for our own toolkit.

Roman a clef is a novel with a key, meaning that the characters and incidents are slightly changed but not so much that knowledgeable readers will mistake the intent that they relate to real persons in real situations. In recent years the roman a clef has been given the wax job of cynicism whereby its contents must be truer than the biography because the identity and circumstances needed to be altered.

One of the more famous of romans a clef is Summerset Maugham's The Moon and Six Pence in which the Maugham character Charles Strickland bears more than passing similarity to the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. It is a compelling enough story although far from the polished technique of other Maugham novels and, particularly, the gem-like hardness and clarity of his short fiction. Nor does it compare well to another Maugham roman a clef, Cakes and Ale, which takes its title from a memorable line in Twelfth Night. Cakes and Ale, which Maugham stoutly denied was based on real people and real events, is argued to be an accounting of the final years of the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, his widow, and her subsequent romantic liaison with another novelist, Horace Walpole, best described as the Tom Clancy of his day. The Walpole-like character was mercilessly skewered, rendered as a feckless bumbler, and by indirection the widow of the late great novelist was added to the shiskebab skewer, her taste in taking up with such a man placing her somewhere between the onions and tomatoes. The matter actually came before an English court, which found Maugham's protestations interesting, given that there was another character in the novel, a medical doctor named William Ashenden, who spoke with a stutter, walked with a limp. Maugham, you see, had a medical degree, spoke with a slight stutter, and walked with a slight limp. Maugham also went on to write a novel called Ashenden, or The Secret Agent. Maugham was known to have had a deep reverence for Thomas Hardy. Thus the delicious gossip and speculation attendant on the roman a clef.

Another of my favorite romans a clef is Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow, in which one of the important characters, Mark Rampion, rings true to Huxley's friend, D. H. Lawrence, while another character bears comparison to John Middleton Murry. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is widely recognized as a prism refracting the lives of two of Fitzgerald's expatriate friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and I still recall one of my undergraduate professors at UCLA inducing me to read the novels of Thomas Love Peacock because they contained so much, as he put it, delicious and accurate scandal. In my dear friend Barnaby Conrad's novel, Matador, the protagonist, Pacote, bears an eerie resemblance to the famed Spanish torero, Manolete. Indeed, Conrad and Manolete were friends. Yet another UCLA prof, knowing of my interest in Hawthorne, urged me to read The Blythedale Romance in order to get a sense of the individuals with whom Hawthorne lived and worked while in residence at the Utopian society called Brook Farm.

True enough, the roman a clef is a kind of historical core sampling. I first picked up and read Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men knowing it was based on the legendary Louisiana populist, Huey Long, thinking to get flavor rather than actual fact, because at that time I was more interested in flavor than actual fact.

The point I raise here begins in the form of a rhetorical question: Don't we all write romans a clef at some point in our career? We pull characters in from the sidewalks of our memory, subjecting them to casting calls as we prepare the dramatis personae of our novels and short stories, luxuriating in the convenience of being able to borrow a trait from one character, add it to the physique of another, and the ethnicity or lack thereof in yet another. We reset frustrating events in our life so that there is no longer the frustration of missed opportunity but rather instead the challenge foaming forth from met expectations. We return to fond memories, sometimes those involving persons no longer alive, rewriting them with the same tantivy we used in signaling a bartender for another round at some magical gathering. Years after the fact, I set down convivial events in a variety of places, but so many of them really began in The Old Spaghetti Factory and Excelsior Coffee House on Green near Grant in San Francisco, or in the Brass Rail on C Street in Virginia City, Nevada. Having got their essence to my liking, I lift them out of time and place and context and place them where they will do me the most good, in my current work, with a quick nod to the real individuals and events and places of the past.

Roman a clef. Novel with a key. The key opens the door to the inner landscape where all truth had its big bang at the moment of the individual writer's birth, spinning, expanding ever outward toward a common human destiny.

The Wife of Bathos

Geoffrey Chaucer's memorable and excellent tale and its descriptive prologue of Allison is one of the most popular of all The Canterbury Tales, remarkable for the detailed description of women in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 

 Chaucer couldn't have know it on any conscious level but the time frame was later to be called The Late Middle Ages, thus has time added another dimension to the construct because Allison was herself in the later part of her middle age. You could not have wanted (nor found) a more layered description of a woman who had in ample degrees a heart, a mind, a curiosity, and ample wit; she would brook no nonsense, had an admirable set of rules, was willing to take risks, particularly those involving a stand of principal against convention. 

 To use a currently popular figure of speech, The Wife of Bath set the bar high for authors to follow when the time came to introduce on stage or page as admirable-yet-earthy female character. Johnson and Marlowe tried, Shakespeare came closer, particularly when he borrowed from yet another Chaucer woman, Cressyde, in his creation of Cressida. Tennyson failed, I think, in his version of Guenevere, making us wait some years until Virginia Stephen Wolff got it so admirably with Mrs. Dalloway, and Joyce so spectacularly with Gretta in The Dead and, of course, Milly Bloom in Ulysses.

John McCain, senior United States Senator from Arizona, currently running for two offices, POW of all time and President of the United States, attempted to upstage these noble attempts by placing a character of his own creation (or should I take the cheap shot and say creationism?) by introducing into our midst Mrs. Gov.

The sudden appearance in our midst of the commonplace is one way to regard Sarah Palin. Another way to regard her is as a distraction; still another way to regard her is as someone who believed(s) man and dinosaur inhabited the planet simultaneously.

I am reminded of an experience I once had when, in the company of Digby Wolfe, I visited an iconic L.A. nightspot, Slate Brothers, a place for watching performers perform, for eating over-priced mediocre food and drinking fashionably overpriced drinks. I was drawn along unwillingly our target was a man I dislike intensely, a man Wolfe assured me was quite different from his stage persona. 

 We were watching Don Rickles as a potential for a project we were essaying. As Rickles came on to do his act, a somewhat over liquored individual at a ringside table began doing his act in earnest, stepping on some of Rickles' lines, injecting a note of competition and tension into the atmosphere. Rickles' irritation became manifest as he began to fly swat at the drunk, directing the audience's attention to him, reminding the audience how one individual was impacting on what they'd paid money to hear and witness.

The attention seemed to fuel the drunk more than the alcoholic content of his beverage. Rickles now turned full force on him, and here's where the lession was learned. "Rickles has gone too far," Wolfe whispered to me. "The audience is beginning to side with the drunk."

Sure enough, Rickles had gone too far with his insults and the audience began to boo him--not the drunk, him.

"He's completely lost it," Wolfe whispered.

To his credit, Rickles seemed to recognize this shift as well. At length, he recognized Wolfe in the audience, shrugged, then turned his insults to the audience before storming off stage and into the inner bowels of his dressing room.

The moral is this: the audience can and will turn. Palin's once wildly enthusiastic audience is beginning to turn, not so much on her but on the man who put her in a position where she daily faced humiliation.

Give us someone to root for, Barnaby Conrad pleads, meaning a character however flawed who seems to want to reach a place of being effective in dealing with the unanticipated flux of life. We rooted for the screen version of Fast Eddie Felson, true enough because he was portrayed by Paul Newman, because he wanted to be the best at something.

A handy and telling criticism of a particular dramatic situation has the circumstances devolving from pathos to bathos, from poignancy to overly ridiculed excess. No matter who the characters or what their motives, we must not do them, however expedient our intentions, what the senior Senator from Arizona has done to the Governor of Alaska.

In fact, Love them all as if they were your own because in fact, they are.

Failure as a Role Model

Showing up for the conventional Thursday lunch with Conrad, which is to say Barnaby, not Joseph, I see a chunk of restaurant window, a portion of sign, and some coin-operated gum ball machines. Thinking this could be a nice shot, I reach into my pocket, remove the Leica and fire away. With luck, you'll see one in a moment or two. From the sideline comes a voice urging me to take a shot of him. Indeed, it is the youngest of the male Conrad siblings, Winston. Fair enough. BC and I are with some regularity joined by a next generation Conrad.

After we are inside and our orders are given, Winston, who has written a book, Hemingway's Italy, reacts to a comment I made about a small town in Montana by remarking that there lived the late Gregory Hemingway, the younger son of the Hemingway. And BC, who has written about and crossed paths with the Hemingway, begins to suggest that Winston has enough contact with the Hemingway family to merit another book. Against Winston's demurral, I volunteer the statistics on books written about Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and Abraham Lincoln. Winston is wavering but still not convinced. I decide to drop my one and only card, which is a low trump but nevertheless of trump rank. I will give you a detailed reminiscence of my undergraduate years in some contact with Gregory Hemingway. Winston's trump card is that Greg's nephew has written the book BC is talking about; he offers to bring it forth next week.

At that point our meals are served and we lapse into favorite the Hemingway stories. BC has the trump card here, one that even surpasses Hemingway's being rankled by BC's temerity in daring to have written the quintessential novel about bullfighting, Matador, based on the life of Manolete, whom BC knew as a friend and the Hemingway did not. BC has found a quote from the Hemingway that he will use in his latest book, The 101 Greatest Openings (of novels) Ever Published. The quote will appear on the first right-hand page after the copyright page--the epigram. "Don't tell them," the quote will assert, "that we had to learn how to write. Let them think we were born that way."

Hearing that, my respect for EMH took a new upward thrust.

I by no means object to the concept of a writer's writer, but each time I see the blurbed assessment that someone--anyone--is a born writer, those parts of me that can curl do. Some writers have a greater sense of poetry or story or drama or theme or descriptive ability; some even have all these in one package, but they do not arrive with right- or left-handedness or color of eye or size or shape or skin coloring. Only work removes the traces of work. Those of us who have been at it from early in our career and are still not content with what has been achieved realize only too well how much it has cost to be where we are, to say nothing of how much it will cost to get where we aspire.

Beckett had it right. Go out and fail. The go out and fail better next time.

The Four Hoarse Men of the Apocalypse

Sitting at Peet's Coffee & Tea this morning, Jerry Freedman and I begin going over the notes we'd each made for the book on writing fiction it appears likely we will undertake. We have already begun looking for an edge, an approach that is at once positive and practical. Each of us, without consulting the other, came up with one of the more iconic--I seem to be in love with that word--writing books that while practical and positive enough in its way, seemed to give us the edge, the starting momentum. The book is Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird .

When Bird by Bird first appeared, Barnaby Conrad used some family connections to bring her from her Bay Area home to be a guest speaker at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, where her performance was electric and inspiring. To a degree, so was her text, particularly the chapter entitled "The Shitty First Draft." 

 I am one of the few book reviewers in America to have given her in the L.A. Times a less-than-flattering review on an earlier novel, Joe Jones. She remembered. And roared. But afterwards, sent me the most lovely note and we ended up quite respecting one another. That's all back story to the fact that neither Jerry or I believe in shitty first drafts, and so the approach to our book began. A major focus will be on revision, but it is the manner of doing so that will make our project different and, I dare say, useful.

As it so happened, Conrad dropped among other things the Atlantic Monthly fiction issue on me at lunch yesterday. I am always suspicious of such issues, not only from the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, but many literary journals and the so-called Best-of-the-Year collections and the O.Henry Prize Collection, thinking it fortunate for me to find one story I really like per issue. 

The Atlantic had a Tobias Wolfe, "Bible." Ever since I stumbled some years back on "In the Garden of American Martyrs," I've liked his work and the way he makes it possible for him to present a good relevant chunk of a character thanks to back story and subtext, or to put it another way for The Individual Voice, what the characters bring on stage with the and how they often speak at crossed purposes with their true feelings.

"The Bible" is a lovely example; it is about a woman who is kidnapped by a man who is obviously but not overtly identified as a Muslim. The man makes it pointedly clear that his motive has nothing to do with money or sex. Within the arc of the story, the woman realizes she may have momentarily lost power to her captor but is rapidly gaining it back to effect a lovely and stunning ending. Talking about this story gave us another approach to dealing with the definition of what story is today and what it is not.

There is one more element related to finding one's individual voice that came from Jerry remembering back to the time when he was in my novel beginnings class and I gave him a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa that turned him on. Not to forget the alchemy that is to be found in the old Rogers and Hammerstein song, "If I Loved You,"as it relates to a vital psychological concept and a technique from the esteemed actor, Uta Hagen.

Pictures at eleven.

Screw it; pictures now.

You're Getting to Be a Hobbit with Me

Discovery comes peeking over your shoulder whenever you empty your pockets on your desk, open a book you've previously read, or look through your car for something you think you may have left there. Discovery can also stand on a ladder or chair, straining for a better look whenever you enter the garage you so laboriously turned into a study (but rarely use now because you've switched to laptop computers and because the cable modem seemed to have developed the habit of turning off whenever you were in the midst of something truly interesting

There are things in your pocket and in books and sometimes in the car that truly amaze you, things that in essence remind you of the protagonist of Richard Powers's latest novel, The Echo Maker. Like this afflicted young man, you have the sense of someone or somebody's going to a great deal of trouble to imitate your handwriting, then use it to scrawl and scratch notes that were meant to remind you of things, or directions to places of whose reality you have no doubt but of whose relevance to you there is considerable doubt.

I am one of the few who know of J. R. R. Tolkein without being a fan of either The Hobbit or, later, The Lord of the Rings cycle. My interest in him has to do with the fact that he professed Anglo-Saxon at my old buddy Brian Fagan's alma mater, Pembroke College, and that while doing so, he found a scrap of paper on which he wrote--and promptly lost under a pile of other papers--the first sentence of what was to become The Hobbit.

I try to keep some sense of order about such scribblings of my own; at times I even try to keep a drawer or pile or even a PendaFlex file for the notes and concepts I suspect may have been produced by complete strangers.

There is no discipline to curiosity nor is there any to discovery; they both descend upon you like out-of-town friends or relatives, unanticipated, possibly even unwanted.

If I put in sufficient time trying to decode or give context to these mysterious and mystifying notes, I am often able to remember their origin, a spark or two of enthusiasm, a flash of energy, the lightning-in-a-bottle of an incandescent idea that has for a moment illuminated the darkness of my cranial cavity.

Late last week, having begun a list of 100 genre novels for use in my class this summer, it came to me--well, first it came to Barnaby Conrad--that I could get a twofer, some titles for my list and five or six novels I'd read in the past for my Book Talk column for The Montecito Journal, where I alternate a newly published work with something done well into the past.

One of the books I found in the library (remember the garage?) was The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler, with seven or eight place marks inserted here and there throughout the text. Thinking these place marks had been set to alert me to some quotable material, I began to read them.

I mostly do not do things in the library (garage) anymore, because of the ongoing odor of mildew that began with a severe rainstorm some years back, and because it simply isn't fun.

The Chandler trumped the mildew and the relative lack of fun. I have no idea why those particular places were marked but I do know that I had read enough of the novel to complete the rereading, rush to my newest laptop, and begin work on a retrospective look at The Little Sister.

Chandler has not been with us since 1959, not in person, but this, one of his least known, holds up and catches me immediately by having a woman from Manhattan, Kansas, hire Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, to find her gone missing brother, last known whereabouts a rooming house on Idaho Street in Bay City.

Bay City is to Santa Monica what Ross Macdonald's and Sue Grafton's Santa Teresa is to Santa Barbara. I was born and raised in Santa Monica, and just as he had with the rest of what we like to think of as the Los Angeles Basin, he "got" Santa Monica as it was back then when southern California was finding its way back from World War II.

There are a number of scraps from the garage, a few from my pocket, and one from my car that could either be from me or a student who writes like me.

These scraps of paper become like land mines; I wake from memory of their content, or a connection materializes when I am in the midst of something quite other.

It is as though these notes are like small pieces of myself, time capsules of me at an earlier age or with an attitude that makes me wonder about myself in ways that I have not.

The archaeologist at work.

Connecting the Dots

Sitting at the outside patio of the Xanadu Bakery & Coffee shop yesterday afternoon with two long-term pals, Brian Fagan, and Steve Cook, I experienced one of those introspective flashes of wonderment in which I simultaneously celebrated our friendship and experienced the great curiosity at how we became friends.

The Xanadu has long been a venue for coffee even though the coffee there is worse even than Starbucks. I would walk with my then dog Molly from our condo on Danielson Road, along Coast Village Road to the shopping mall we locals came to think of as the mall of Von's of the Stars, in honor of the glitzy market, Von's, where so many carpetbagger residents from down below--Los Angeles--came to shop.
My morning group then consisted of Louie Dula and Phil Preston, actors; Ben Frank, a sculptor; and Jack, the butcher from Von's. Long before we were properly introduced and before I knew him to profess English Lit at the nearby Westmont College, I'd see Cook, often with a group of young people, holding forth on some aspect of literature. Once, on my way inside for a coffee refill, I heard Cook making an observation about Nathaniel West, an observation I could not let go unchallenged.

Cook challenged my challenge. "How do you know that?" he asked.

"Because John Sanford told me so and John was sharing a cabin with West that summer and was there while it was happening."

"You know Sanford?"

"Drives an old model Jaguar, loves Sara Lee coffee cake, hates Republicans."

"Listen," Cook said, "maybe we could talk later."

We have been talking ever since.

Until he recently went emeritus at UCSB, Brian Fagan professed archaeology. Now he merely gives private lectures, revises his text books, and turns out what I will call scientific mysteries and curiosities at the rate of one book every eighteen months. My memory of how we met is less clear than my memory of the beginnings with Cook. Suffice it to say that some years past while editing The Santa Barbara Review, I acquired a splendid Fagan rumination on camel saddles, and have edited at least five of his books, including the most recently published, Fish on Friday, and the most recently finished, The Elephant in the Living Room: A Global History of Drought.

Cook, Fagan, and I have stood one another glasses of the local ale in the downtown section of Fagan's birthplace, Lyme Regis, most recently famous for being the site where the film version of The French Lieutenant's Woman was filmed, and not too far from a spot where Fagan gently took my arm to deter my progress: "Mind! You're stepping on Jane Austen."

At a party simultaneously celebrating Cook's fiftieth birthday and his having been granted tenure at Westmont (an evangelical Christian liberal arts and science college), when it came my turn to say a few commemorative words, I gave the blessing for wine in Hebrew, then offered a l'chayim--good health.

Cook's wife, Terri, once observed to me that there seemed to be no power point in the tri-partite friendship, we seemed somehow to admire, respect, be amused by, and not be overly impressed by each other.

Before meeting these two worthies, I'd lunched at Joe's with Barnaby Conrad, which may in fact have caused the speculation I indulged with Fagan and Cook. Conrad began his academic career at Chapel Hill, then moved to New Haven to get his B.A. from Yale before going on to various art institutes in Mexico and Spain. I'd read all his earlier works on bullfighting as a younger man. When I arrived in Santa Barbara to step onto the tenure track at a scholarly publisher, I was recruited for a career day program on writing-publishing at Cate, the local prep school where Conrad taught art. This was an opportunity to thank the man for the joys I'd had from reading his books.

Some months later, I saw Conrad at a party of the sort where, because of the boredom factor, it was easy--too easy--to take advantage of the plentiful display of red wine. And yet again, at a boring party, our paths crossed to the point where Conrad invited me to try my hand at a workshop at his writers' conference, the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference.

We are not at all alike, which is perhaps the draw. In addition to his close friendship with Herb Caen, the journalist who put San Francisco on the map and even after his death has kept it there, Conrad knows a seemingly endless stream of men and women I grew up on, either in admiration or in a kind of at-a-distance opposition. William F. Buckley, Jr. comes to mind in that context, although his son, Chris, with whom I shared a splendid turkey salad at Conrad's, fits the "other" side.

Conrad and I meet at least twice a week for lunch, which is an on-going exchange of books, things torn from newspapers and magazines, gossip, speculation. In the process, Conrad is fond of saying that he writes the books I suggest but which I am too lazy to write. Santa Barbara, being the small, smarmy place it has become, enlivens the possibility of contact with familiar faces, and although I have my share of recognized acquaintances, my share is dwarfed, overwhelmed, by those who approach him with a greeting. Thus my great joy for the one time I was able to trump him: We were seated at our usual table at the Montecito Pharmacy Coffee Shop when a pleasant-looking woman, actually a neighbor of his, greeted him by name. Ever the gentleman, Conrad sought to introduce me, but I waved his attempt off. "No need," I said. "I've probably known Sylvia longer than you. Providence, Rhode Island. John Howland Elementary School, right, Sylvia?"

"Right, Shelly," She said.

"Well, I'll be--" Conrad said. Because among his other qualities, Conrad is never damned, and darned simply doesn't suit him.

Why me? I sometimes find myself thinking. There is no answer, really, and so I go on, setting things aside to bring for our lunches, things I believe will interest him because they somehow catch a vision of the world, not through a lens, but through a prism.

Well, that leaves him who is in Canberra at the moment and who, for reasons I shall probably never learn to my satisfaction. We have exchanged confidences and ambitions over many a plate of pasta, Digby Wolfe and I have ; we have shared classes and advised each the other on unshared classes.

Why me? I think from time to time, enjoying the seemingly unexplainable riches of confidences, confidence, and comfort that has come upon me . Somewhere within this maze of friendly pole stars is a map of the heavens--my heavens--that will help me navigate through this succession of events we call days.