Friends: Human and Literary

Reading allows the luxury of friendship with persons you may never otherwise meet, not least of all because they lived out their lifespan before you were born. You approach these literary friends with the same degree of reserve, suspicion, and cynicism you express when going to a gathering, a library, or a bookstore, thinking yourself fortunate to come away from a gathering, a library, or a bookstore with the prospects for a new friendship.

Friendships--human and literary--represent landscapes fraught with complexity, challenge, and accommodation. Your human friends are often faced with the need to be tolerant of what one of them called your tendency toward execrable puns; you often need to be tolerant of a prolific literary friend such as McMurtry or the late, lamented Robert B. Parker for their occasional duds. To enter into either kind of friendship requires you to ante up trust and a willingness to be honest beyond the boundaries of vulnerability.

A friend is someone who will not tell you the truth for your own good, that role best served by parents or adversaries, thus giving you the opportunity not to listen. A friend is someone who may become a temporary adversary who is, nevertheless, willing to trust that you will eventually consider his or her entire resume as your friend. Nor is a friend someone who will lie to you with the intent of keeping you from harm's way. Human and literary friends may lie to you and you to them; this is a given because you are all humans, alive or with your work completed.

There are any number of reasons for having friends, the most basic among them is the comfort of companionship with like minds that leads to growth toward rather than growth away. As you grow from association with human friends, you wish them to have association with you from which they may grow.

Friends in both categories, literary and human, define you to yourself, to your friends, and to adversaries whom you may, in time, befriend.

Sometimes, in your work area, in your bedroom, and in the garage, other times in libraries or book stores, you see and feel the nostalgia of ongoing friendships and those that simply ran out of steam. In terms of your own life, the oldest book you have is one given to you on your thirteenth birthday; it is a large, thick volume that contains all of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and that remarkable first-person venture that immediately upon reading made you feel good because you had indeed read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and indeed already knew the personage of Huckleberry Finn. This particular friend also contains portions of Life on the Mississippi, Puddin'head Wilson, A Connecticut Yankee, and several segments from Roughing It and The Innocents Abroad. This one book reminds you of John Dryden, speaking of Geoffrey Chaucer. "Here," Dryden said of Chaucer, "is God's plenty." Much as you thought at various times to tread the path of religiosity, you are not so and only invoke one of God's names to give vent to some sort of anger or damnation, but as a metaphor, you rather like Dryden's view because, although not a great fan of his, you are fond of Chaucer, fond enough to usurp what Dryden said of him and apply it to this thick, crumbly wellspring of friendship.

Reality Check

In our personal lives we interact with friends, family, associates. If we are of the writing bent or the teaching bent, we interact with students and readers, wanting to exchange with them on yet another level than the level of friend, family, and associate. To these students or readers, we want to convey, to pass along information, to encourage. As well, we want to entertain. There is no expressed or implied hierarchy in the listed order of these things. It is not wrong for instance to want to entertain our students or encourage our readers.

There is yet another level at which we interact, offering many of the things we offer to our friends, family, and associates; in the bargain we add the things we wish to offer our students and readers. This level is, of course, the level of the self. I surely have moments where I wish to entertain myself or encourage myself. There are also moments where I wish to pass along information, moments where I am reminded of the process I go through when I wish to offer a sales person a check or credit card but cannot find my wallet, which is to say I cannot always locate the encouragement or entertainment I hope to offer myself, much less the information.

This laundry list of associations and associates and relationships is multifarious depending on my mood in a given moment and my target of intentions. Whether knowingly or not, I draw on this swath of associations, responses, and agendas while informing the interactions between characters, either in short stories or longer works. This point is a border crossing between countries; it is easier to get into Mexico or Canada than to get out of them and back to the U.S.; the Brits seem to want to know what took me so long in getting there in the first place and at least during the gurgling administration of George W. Bush, they seemed to wonder why I would want to return to such a place.

Going from relations between self and friends, family, associates, and the like to relations among characters is going from arithmetic progression to the exponential--because there are so many of them and relatively so few of me and friends, family, associates. One of the first things I notice when crossing the border is that spoken language becomes different; it is no longer conversational, thus such conversational tropes as I might use need to be harnessed. "How are things going?" innocent enough, needs to be countered with "You're asking how things are going?" Of course I could render that response "You're asking how things are going?"which in fact does add an edge of attitude to the response somewhat different than the mere repetition.

As things stand, the mere repetition, "You're asking how things are going." suggests/infers/implies the respondent being absorbed in another task and the possibility that a request for a progress report about the respondent's mental or physical well-being borders on a distraction if not an imposition.

Or look at it this way. An individual utters another character's name, punctuating it with a question mark. "Marta?" Which may be taken to mean Is that you? or Are you there?

Add one word, an innocent enough word. "Now,Marta." Suddenly an edge is there, possibly impatience. And by adding one more word, "Damn it, Marta," we have seemingly exploded possibilities for dialogue as opposed to conversation. Yet there is more to come. Look at the possibilities of mere repetition. "Marta. Marta. Marta." How quickly such a repetition yanks us by the collar into the dialogue, curious to see what happens next as opposed to hoping the characters will conversationally reveal some dramatic tidbit.

When we are in the dramatic arena, our characters are seeming to converse but are conversing with their emotions instead of their minds, sending us readers signals by which we interpret the dramatic cloud over the arena that is scene. In such cases, silence is not silence but rather the characters playing on what their feelings are whispering to them.

Imagine yourself trying to please someone, say a work-level superior or a teacher. Allow yourself to feel that emotional agenda. Put an identifying sticker on that in order to come back to it when you need one of your characters trying to please another character. Imagine you, trying to please yourself.

Now, shut up and listen. Even the pause or silences are valuable.

Next week--or maybe this week, the tennis game of truth.

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.