Please, sir, may I have some more?

On one memorable afternoon when you were between jobs and writing projects, the world seemed too open for comfort.  You found yourself amid a similar group of between-the-cracks writers, gathered at an idyllic and hospitable park just off Coldwater Canyon in the affluent fringes of L.A.'s San Fernando Valley.

The sun was still up, lunch was down, and so was your luck.  The most pressing need was the need of mid-thirties and forties men to play at baseball.  Before long, your group intentions broadcast themselves to others in the park.  You were joined by a group of younger players, in need of distractions from the angst and tug of their own generation.

Under most circumstances, having nine available players per team is its own grandness.  You recall being on a team that included not only the former President of the Writers' Guild (who reminded you the Volkswagen sunroof with a decadent FM radio you drove had been financed by the Credit Union), but as well a publicist who had only recently introduced you to a longtime crush from your earlier years, the actress Veronica Lake, by telling her of your amatory interests, and a writer whose screen play you had once attempted to acquire for a former employer who had authorized you to go as high as fifty thousand dollars for the rights to novelize the screenplay.  You were gently told by his agent, "Shelly, dear, Bob cannot afford to do anything for fifty thousand dollars."

These elements of the day and the game and the combined admiration and suspicions shared among the adults come to you across the years that are, themselves at the spine and heart of this essay.  "Don't fucking pitch inside to Irwin," for instance.  "Somebody has to fucking be catcher.  We could rotate; you know, take turns."  These and other forgotten voices are brought back from having been filed away in distant memory by yet another voice, one of the younger players, who was positioned at second base.  You had just made a routine catch of a fly ball in shallow center field.  The inning was still alive, with a runner at first, thinking perhaps to advance to second after your catch.  "Over here,sir,"  the young second baseman called.  "Throw it over here, sir."

It was the sir.  The advance guard of generational differences was closing in on you. You may have been a sir then but you did not feel like one, did not want to be recognized as one.  You wanted to be the young hot shot, able to sit at the table with the staff on sitcoms, contributing your share of ideas, then sneaking home after work to get at something truly solid such as a short story or a novel, working with real editors and publishers instead of producers who wanted girlfriends' dogs written into scripts.

It is somewhat of a leap to get from that game to the present-day activities.  The leap arcs over a gaping chasm in which you recall the storm of outrage Somerset Maugham drew down on himself when asked by a charming lady what advice she could give her son, who wanted to be a writer.  "Give him twenty pounds [which at the time was the equivalent of one hundred dollars] and tell him to go to hell."  You also recall individuals who were technical writers urging you to get a job with a defense company, allowing you to write technical manuals as a hedge against starvation.  You recall an earlier girlfriend urging you to take education courses because teachers had entire summers in which to write. You recall yet another chum who urged you to join him at the Department of Motor Vehicles, giving and grading drivers' license examinations, while a fraternity brother, after several miss-starts in careers, signed on with the post office and urged you to follow.  Think law, yet another urged.  You'd be good at law--you're argumentative.

You have in fact had any number of jobs, perhaps the one thing you have in common with your brother and sister writers.  You were a shill at a carnival, the manager of a Guess Your Age concession, a luggage repair person, and perhaps one of the best non-writing jobs ever, the manager of a parking lot at the corner of Wilshire and Dunsmuir in the Los Angeles Miracle Mile.  Even during the droughts between publication, even with such jobs as an auctioneer's assistant and a guard at a chicken processing plant, the word was out on you that you were a writer, that while others did things such as take vacations, have girlfriends, get married, follow career paths, you wrote, each page coming from a series of second-hand typewriters effectively burning a bridge in the conventional world.

If marginality had a crest, you could wear it sewn to your blazer pocket.  "If you had any money," the great trial lawyer, Melvin Belli once told me, "I'd sue you."  To which you replied, "If I had any, I'd let you."  It was over his failure to deal with edits you'd suggested for his book project.  You are in a real sense the kind of person written about in a play by William Saroyan, whom you knew, and Maxwell Anderson, whom you did not know.  You were the surfer of the sea of ideas, playing on your used typewriters with the abandon of the zither player in the sound track of The Third Man, all of which you confess not from some attempt at false modesty or any kind of modesty at all, but rather from the awareness that there is no true career path in the work you have chosen except the path of trying your damnedest to get things down as they come to you, take the consequences, and learn how to gauge the literary suspense needed in fiction from the suspense of gauging how to keep your check book balanced and alive.  Just the other day, a writing pal, Randy Weiss, who has worked his way well up the corporate ladder at Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, where you have indeed banked these many years. Randy gave you a green elastic bracelet of the sort you used to see worn by those commemorating Missing in Action service persons in the Viet Nam conflict and, later, on a happier note, the Lance Armstrong "Livestrong" campaign, which you were almost tempted to follow because you are now a few months from being seven years free of cancer yourself.  But the bracelet Randy gave you has more than a merry feel to it.  Placing on your wrist, he said, "Wear this and you will never bounce a check."  This was a joke.  Irony.  Magic.  You take it as recognition that you are one of a fraternity and sorority of greater meaning to you, those of the men and women who each as an individual has merely survived the process and continues in the process.  At this very moment, you have taken time from a job editing a truly dreadful project from a person who has goals and ideals every bit as lofty and grand as your own.  You can respect that just as you respect the splendid editor at a major house who this very day was so sorry she could not justify taking on and giving a home to a project of yours making the rounds like an actor going on audition call.

It is impossible to tell anyone how to make any progress or headway in this remarkable enterprise called writing without writing your autobiography because it is different for each of us, the paths slithering forth with every page we fill and sometimes even with every tap on the delete key.  Back in the day, typewriters did not have delete keys but they did have the ability to produce rows of X's.  A man in Los Angeles keeps sending me emails asking your advice about which school his son should attend and which courses he should take.  You think he comes back to you because you have a different answer each time.  Or maybe it is because of your writing style.

If you like something well enough and long enough, you will in some way have it, either as a reality or a blazing memory.  Over your bed is a water color done by Henry Miller, who began to notice you looking at it each time you visited his home.  One day he said he thought you ought to have it and you said you did not believe you could afford it and he said you could.  Some times in your mind there are events, stories, circumstances that seem somehow to be a part of a fabric, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry of ventures and misadventures.  Some of them you are not yet able to afford but by looking at them with enough intensity and belief, you are able to find ways to bring them down out of your head and onto your note pad or your computer screen.  Then, with some shuffle of energy and expectation, you find that you are after all able to afford them.

Love Thy Characters

True enough, one robin doesn't make a spring, but one Louise Erdrich short story often makes a novel--or at least a part of one. Of all the major short story writers producing materials today, her short stories, which stand firmly on their own dramatic feet, are the ones most likely to find their way into a novel.

Tobias Wolff? Not so much; perhaps his last venture being the opening chapter of his novel, The Old School, which first appeared in a different form as a short story in The New Yorker. Alice Munro? Much as her stories have many of the features of a novel, including multiple point of view, and are to this reader satisfying in their unsettling way of revealing symptomatic behavior and attitudes, she continues to let the matter rest with the shorter form. Tom Boyle? Although I think any given short story of his has an amazing mixture of gravitas, wild humor, and a complete willingness to take no prisoners, I don't see him linking the stories together nor do I see his novels appearing to be stitched short form ventures.

All of which gets us back to this week's (November 3, 2008) issue of The New Yorker, which contains Erdrich's short story, "The Fat Man's Race," stunning enough in its stand-alone self but even more promising in its portent of being a part of another of Erdrich's ensemble-cast novels which began with Love Medicine, which is, of course, a series of chapters that have a second life as short stories. In and of itself, "The Fat Man's Race" does in its first two paragraphs what a well-wrought story should do: it introduces characters (note plural here), agendas, personalities, and agendas. The second paragraph, which is only one brief sentence, immediately brings the unthinkable to pass, and from there becomes a wild, careening ride down icy curves with no restraining rails to keep the car from breaking loose and diving off the road.

Even though I've for some years managed to convince myself that I no longer read for pleasure, but rather for the intense focus of discovery (of the author's techniques, of world visions, of assorted mementos and hidden messages I may have missed, of inspiration and understanding), Louise Erdrich is one of two or three authors for whom such lofty ends disappear and the agenda of pleasure lurches forth like a bored teen-ager getting out of school for the afternoon. Another such author is Jim Harrison, whose latest novel, The English Major, made itself known to me as a book that wanted to be brought home. But that is a matter for later.

Erdrich's characters suffer long bouts of yearning or expectation or fear or a combination of things that make them ideal candidates for being in the kinds of brief encounters that somehow will link into a larger story arc. Her short stories remind me of an enormous quilt made by sewing together any number of smaller Bayeux Tapestries, a metaphor rich in irony for the primary reason that the Bayeux Tapestry is of itself quite large. Her characters want such things as love, respect, understanding, an unfolding of some art or artifice or agenda they sense to be blooming within them. They often get what they want but do not recognize it or they do recognize it and immediately become suspicious of it. Many of her characters, while not formal scientists, seek some form of living proof that will confirm or eradicate their beliefs. Nevertheless, superstition, the supernatural, and the magical whisper dissenting votes into their ear, causing great internal disruptions which they try to mitigate by drinking large quantities of alcohol, making large quantities of live, playing subversive jokes, and drawing others along by the force of their reckless energy.

You would be hard put to find any of her characters whom you could say with certainty she did not love, which is, I believe, the clue to her effectiveness as a story teller. By loving them, she is free not to have to defend them; they may do as they wish to whomever they wish, their random acts seeming driven and perhaps even desperate, but never meanspirited. By loving her characters, Erdrich is free to grant them leave to do what they will and later to own up with the consequences. As a result, her middle-aged characters have much more cogent conversations with their children, thinking that somehow they may learn something from their children as well as passing along such information as survival entails. Her middle-aged characters want in the confines of their secret selves to be seen as sources of wisdom for earlier generations, but they have too much heart to want to be venerated and too much wisdom to allow them to accept the veneration were it to be offered.

The Tapistry of Story

The Bayeux Tapestry is a visual rendition of the Norman conquest of England, the defeat of the English King Harold at Hastings in 1066 by William the Conqueror, who succeeded Harold. Indeed, Harold died in the battle, a fact confirmed by contemporary records as well as The Tapestry.

There were not many readers or writers at the time, and although heraldry--the use of family coats of arms on shields and other armament--the forerunner of the Old School tie, was in limited use, crests and insignia did not appear to any great extent on The Tapestry.

With the exception of some brief annotations in Latin, The Tapestry did its work in pictures.

To some extent, story is formed as a tapestry, the occasional annotation added here or there, the detail of a character's heraldry or habits or background added there, a dot of color to be filled in or connected to another dot, an entire texture emerging in rows of stitches.

One of the major issues in the Bayeux Tapestry appears to be which of two figures represents King Harold, the one with the arrow in his eye or the one adjacent to it, with a spear in his torso. A closer examination of this tapestry reveals some holes where needlework may have been edited out or redone in another color.

In my earlier musings about how the writer sees story, the historian sees history, the human witness to life sees life, by putting myself into all these situations as me, I recognize a pattern of color and light sensitivity, detail sensitivity, and relevant blindness to facts, to ability t discern, to poor memory, to ego, to agenda.

I do not believe any character sees a complete picture and indeed, when it comes time to create a character, I don't want the complexity of the full person, only the necessary details that will allow first me as writer and then the reader to see relevant things.

What, you may ask, is relevant? Is there some standard for relevancy, some equivalent of the eye chart at the DMV or the oculist's office, you know the one E FP TOZ LPED EDFCZP.

No, of course not, because we are not to be so easily defined, nor do we so easily define others or their events.

There were feelings before there was language to describe them it is not an easy exploration we undertake when we set forth to explore new terrain with new people or, for that matter, familiar terrain with familiar people. We must keep alert for the potsherds and artifacts that will help us identify the individuals who made, used, and possibly even broke them.