Reality as Ambiguity

One of your oldest and dearest friends was bemoaning the fact at lunch Monday that short stories of today, particularly those in the New Yorker, aren't as pleasurable as they once were; they are more ambiguous, he observed, sometimes deliberately so.

A reason for this, you ventured, is the growing resistance to the one-size-fits-all kind of endings of the past in which the payoff was more like the punchline of a joke, making the entire story a joke rather  than a nuanced narrative.  Another reason is because endings in reality are so hard come by today; we are more used to ambiguity, catch words, outright solecisms.  There are more emerging splinter groups and less finality.  Fiction reflects its time, whether we know it or not,whether we agree with the concept--or not.  Your pal has openers to sit at the table; he's written over thirty-five books, numerous essays.  He probably does not write short stories anymore because having one's second ever short story chosen for inclusion in one of the Best of collections could make a writer a bit self-conscious.  Barnaby Conrad may affect not minding being self-conscious but you suspect he is not at all happy being so, prompting him to take great pains not to be.


Jacques Derida and Michel Focault to the contrary notwithstanding, writers do matter in the sense that they have produced the text in the first place (unless they happened to have been Raymond Carver,who was undone literally and  figuratively by  Gordon Lish.  We do not have to know or like the author; in fact,it is probably to our advantage in many cases if we know nothing about the writer,reading merely for the adventure of the ride the author has promised by having allowed the story to be published.  Some authors, particularly novelists, will say things in interview situations or in prologues to the effect that it is not profitable for the reader to attempt to see the author in any of his or her characters.  Forget entirely the ways many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers went out of their way to publish anonymously.  Much of the reason behind this had its roots in the English law wherein writers were likely to be held responsible for libel, slander, and other related improprieties, punishable offenses that could and did have harmful effects on the wallet and the bum.  Whatever the reasons, an anonymous or pseudonymous author, knowingly or not, was worth a sponsoring membership in the Deconstructionist Club of the early twenty-first century, giving breath to the later philosophy of criticism we think of as post-modernism.

Many of the newer works appear before us as thinly disguised masters or doctoral theses, wanting, oh, wanting to remove trace elements of authorial emotion, wanting instead a panegyric to scholarly clarity which is not the same thing as emotional or even psychological clarity.  The author's scholarship and even handedness may be evident as subtext rather than the story teller's subtext of the difference between what is said and what is felt.


These are ambiguous, contentious, polar times, with new splinter groups splintering forth every day,each with an agenda, each with an adversary; in some cases, adversaries may be seen as tormentors.


Your own interpretation of the modern short story is of a negotiated settlement, skillful to the extent that none of the principals gets hurt, or perhaps even suggesting that some degree of discomfort resides in all human relationships.  Deborah Eisenberg is,in your eyes, the ideal short story writer for the time; her characters are filled with purpose, often driven to it,but they are lucky if things work out for them at the end; a number of her stories are represented by aching and longing that are emotional equivalents of the recent oil spill off Louisiana,  pouring millions of gallons of angst into an already muddied and beleaguered sea.


Conrad's holiday gift to you was a year's subscription to the New Yorker.  It is not so much that he cannot see irony in having given me the antithesis of his tastes in short fiction as it is that the thought of being ironic might make him uncomfortable.

Surprise: It isn't about you

When you first set foot on the trail, hesitant in the same way a bicyclist is hesitant when riding on a narrow, crowded street, you wished to show off your understanding if not your mastery of the techniques you believed were the conventional techniques used to demonstrate an understanding of what went into a story and what did not.

Like that same metaphorical bicyclist from the previous paragraph, you felt you had enough of a sense of balance to try a few tricks, equivalents of not holding the handlebars, perhaps even the literary equivalent of rolling through stop signs, even popping a wheelie.  Now that you look back on your younger self, you realize much of it was about you and your wish to show off rather than experience the thrill of the ride.  You were more interested in acquisition of, then demonstrating the acquisition of technique rather than withdrawing your callow ass from the scene as you allow the characters to take over, leading you but also the readers to a destination they might find entertaining or shocking or funny or some manner of revelatory.

Your public persona probably doesn't know as much about the work at hand as you like to think it does or, to take it a plateau or two upward, you probably don't know as much about writing as you have presumed to know in your published work about writing and literature.  You've reached a place where it isn't so much about what your public persona knows or doesn't know as it is about how well your private persona is keeping up with your public persons.

To come to the point,it is not at all about you, public or private; it is about them,the characters and concepts you bring forth, and the freedom you are willing to give them.  You have written and lectured endlessly about the obsessive and compulsive natures of the writing persona; you have paid only modest lip service to the control-freak nature of most writers, yourself included.

The beginning writer treats sincere editorial suggestion as an affront, a direct personal attack:  You never liked my work.  The accomplished writer welcomes editorial vision and suggestion.  Even if the suggestion is not taken, the fact of it being given at a particular point sends the clear message that a trained eye has found a soft spot, a place where less is needed so that the truth stands out in bold relief.
The emerging writer treats editorial commentary as though it were a thesis committee,challenging the methodology, sources, and intellectual arc of the thesis.  Small wonder many beginning writers are able to convince themselves that there is an ongoing conspiracy against them that will be kept in force until there is, by some magical transmutation of base elements into gold, a radical combustion.  As you read between the lines, which is to say the personal letters, of a number of prominent authors, you will find them carping away at critics,publishers, and literary agents, even to the point at times of taking on readers for having had the gall to dislike a particular work.

Confident writers--confident artists of any stripe--are rare.  Anxious artists are continuously comparing themselves to writers whose success mystifies, even baffles them, directing their frustrations--wrongly, you argue--against the public, reverting to thinking it is about them again and damn the public's stupidity for not seeing who the true artist is.

The confident writer trusts the characters, says in so many words and in so many refreshing ways, It isn't about me; it's all about them.

Another fine mess you've got us in

 You return to favored places, hopeful of recapturing events and conditions you found comforting, pleasurable, possibly inspiring in the past.  In similar mindset, you return to books you've already read, music you've heard before beyond your ability to remember the number of times.  You also approach these already-read or heard ventures with the distinct hope of discovering something you hadn't noticed before.  In all such returns, you are emphatic in being up for revelations that transport you to places you had yet to visit.

You think Heraclitus had it right when he spoke about not being able to bathe in the same river twice;  the river is different and you bring different experiences as well as any number of new cells to the experience.  Even so, you return to older haunts, even while trying out the new.  After all, if you were to discover a restaurant you enjoyed as much as you enjoy the Via Maestra 42, here in Santa Barbara, wouldn't you want to return for another experience?  If you discovered a writer you admired as much as Joan Didion or Louise Erdrich, wouldn't you wish to fall upon that writer's next work?

In this frame of mind, after a long, collegial discussion about your manuscript with your editor--she who went to bat for it, wanted to acquire it, saw in it an entire dimension you'd not considered when you wrote it--you return to this place where endorphins once sprang forth.  You see a place that seemed magical to you, but now your senses are tuned for something else; your eye falls on an unnecessary word, a too generous hand with a modifier where none was needed.

You returned, looking for the sense of discovery so prevalent during your writing of it, but it is no longer the same place, it is a work place and you are the shop foreman, charged with quality control.  You did not think to return to work, but you should know by now that this what there is.  Soon, July or August, your editor said, there will be books and others will have the opportunity to see if they can find the connections you found, the pleasures and comforts you found, the expansive sense of the writing self as it chews into the concepts before it as though they were discreet meals, made with the hand of a crafter rather than an hourly worker.

Your editor spoke of making the tent large enough to include those who love to read story as well as those who love to write it.  "All this,"  she said, "can go in.  Should go in."  There was a pause, which meant the proverbial other shoe was to be dropped.  "I'm thinking,"  she said, "that the manuscript is already long enough.  But of course, that shouldn't be any problem for you."  Which is her way, the editor's way of saying, "That shouldn't be any problem for you, because, after all, that's what writers do, isn't it?"  How many times have you asked that same rhetorical question from your editor's desk?

Your own question for yourself, opening the file that contains what you intended as the finished product:  Did you come here as a tourist or a worker?

In Search of Lost Time

    Because the stem of your watch was extended during one of the moments you probed the pockets of your denim jeans, looking for your keys or a pocket knife, or perhaps even for pocket change, time came to a halt for you.  This was no H.G. Wells time-machine extravaganza in which time became frozen, rather it was the illusion of time having conveniently moved slower than its normal wont.  You were led to believe it was ten or twelve after six when all the while, it had been ten or twelve past six two hours ago--two hours and growing.

Even though you understand full well the mechanics of what happened, down to the possible moment when the glitch took place (you were changing from a pair of cords into a pair of tattered denims, thinking to toss the cords into the wash for tomorrow), you nevertheless feel cheated of the time you thought you had.  This brings you round the loop of logic to the fact of enjoying moments such as these, however they are filled with tension.  You are moving from one venue to another, which involves logistics, trips, where to put things, which things to toss or give away, which things to transport now.  You are involved in preparing a list of projects you'd like to piggy-back onto the publishing agreement now in its final stages, all the details having been worked out to the mutual satisfaction (and optimism) of, as they say in contract jargon, both parties, i.e. that entity referred to hereinafter as Author and that entity who shall be referred to hereafter as Publisher.  No time for modesty here:  you're saying in as many words, take your choice among these three, a complete revision of a book (Secrets of Successful Fiction Writing) you wrote in 1991, an audacious bid to write volume two of Studies in Classic American Literature, volume one of which, written in 1923, argued (persuasively, you thought) that America was still looking to England for its literary heroes), written by D. H. Lawrence.  You'd chose fourteen modern (mostly living) authors to go up against the fourteen in Lawrence's work, your major point being that the tables are rather turned in two ways, England and Europe are looking to the U.S., while the U.S. is looking in some measure to its Asian and Latino imports.  The last project, has long intrigued you; its title comes from a review Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about a convention of nineteenth century crackpots, eccentrics, and loonies all of whom, you argue, had for all their madness, much more stature than our own pack of crazies.  The particular Emerson locution you so admire is "Mad Men,Mad Women, Men with Beards."  You would attach a subtitle to help make the point that everything seems better in the past, but in this case, our own historic nutcases, such as Sylvester Graham, "inventor" of the graham cracker, win the race hands down.

Each of the three require a certain edge you feel you have grown into, having yourself spent so much time on the edge, where ease, leisure, and unfettered expanses of time seem so abstract in comparison to the realities that obtain.  

A new story.

Nothing is where it once was, the proportions are different, the light is different; windows are not where they ought to be but of course ought is the operant word and condition.  Ought in this case refers to conditions from the past.  Everything is exactly where it seems to fit best; the situation and circumstances are different but they are taking on a sense of having been where they now are for some time, longer than seems possible.

You are no longer at 652 Hot Springs, where things were where they ought to be because you had a hand in arranging them to be there.  This is no different from a new story or a new essay or a new review, where you in a sense feel your way along in the dark, trying to make things fit or perhaps reaching the conclusion that they don't belong, they need to be moved elsewhere or discarded.

During the course of any given day, you do not find it unusual to venture into places you have not been before, you adapt with ease, taking in details, orienting yourself, lining up points of reference.  You adjust in the same way to the surroundings of a story, becoming a part of the setting, venturing into the time frame.  Story, too is often a place where nothing is as it once was; you cast about for familiar faces and things, much the way Sally is doing now, sniffing at the new and the moved, the things that were once somewhere else.

409 East Sola is a new story.

The Things You Carried--or Not

Story is never so alive as when it requires decisions to be made.

These decisions can be large matters of ethics which, when examined in close range, are not all that momentous because the answers are already well understood.  A moral person is likely to make moral decisions, only on rare occasions being tempted to make immoral ones.  Of course story is resident in such moments, particularly if the moral person does in fact make the immoral decision, whereupon story begins, and we are able to track its consequences.

Story also seethes in potential when an immoral individual suddenly--or perhaps not so suddenly--decides on something moral, which purposes we also track.

Your belief holds the smaller matters to be more important because they are quirkier, have more edge to them, and do tend to refract if not reflect some grander ethical scale.  Decisions of a small matter have been in the forefront of your activities lately because of the need to do something you find more a chore than an occasion of trauma.

You do not like to move from one living arrangement to another; it was a serious chore moving to your present lodgings at 652 Hot Springs Road from 1367 Danielson Road, a geographical distance of less than two miles, although it meant leaving a three bedroom, two bath condo for a cottage perhaps fifty percent smaller.  You were able to adjust to the size, thanks in no small part to what was once the water tower of the estate on which you live,  As well there was a garage in which you surprised yourself by being able to nail sheet rock and particle board to the beams and braces, creating a relatively snug venue you turned into a library, complete with over a thousand books, many of which have succumbed to mildew and other indignities associated with being leaked upon by the torrents of rain that have visited us over the eleven years of your stay here.

Now you are no longer a man with a wife, you are a widower; as well you have been politely informed by your landlord that much as he regarded your presence here, the time has come for your cottage to become the cottage for the appropriate caretaker of his mother, the Grand Dame of the estate.  And so, the thrust of this venture which has led you to compare the decisions needed in order to complete a book (or a story, for that matter) and the decisions of what to take--keep--and what to discard when moving a bit over five miles west of here to 409 E. Sola Street, where your venue will be a rather generous kitchen, a large studio room which will serve as a combination bedroom, sitting room, and office, plus a yard for Sally, large enough you have determined, for some outdoor furniture and some serious thinking over of things al fresco as well as in camera.

Much of what you have accumulated these past eleven years needs to go; there is simply no room for it, and the mechanics and expense of storing things makes too complex a consequence.  You have limited yourself to one hundred books which you will take with you, one candidate for which you purchased only yesterday when you toured the William Eggleston exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts.  That book plus the remarkable Eggleston you were given as a Christmas gift now reduce your potential to 98.  When you consider the Omnibus edition of The Works of Mark Twain you were given some years ago, in fact almost a month to the day after your thirteenth birthday, you are down to 97.  Not to forget The American Heritage Unabridged  dictionary of the English Language nor indeed The Chicago Manual of Style, which is to the publishing industry what The Old Testament is to religion, another twelve over-sized art books, and at least eight books about or containing the work of one Geoffrey Chaucer, and you begin to think you have invented a serious problem for yourself in re the titles "available" to you.  Which novels could you say farewell to?  And what of the argument of securing electronic download of some books on a storage device, obviating the need for shelf space.  Do you really want to keep a copy of The Heart of Darkness?  And in anticipation of the electronic solution, you have already downloaded( dislike that word) Middlemarch on your new Droid X phone, thus allowing you to toss the paperbound edition.  And what of your collection of Big Little Books or your collection of massmarket paperback with their lurid and vigorous covers, all of them printed on non acid-free paper, thus the eventuality that they will give up the ghost at about the time you do?

Books are not the only things to be considered, there is a large overstuffed chair given you by your father when you were sixteen, long since consigned to the garage, but now its fate seems clearer. As well, a set of dressers and chests from your late mother's tastes and preferences, some your companions for at least twenty years, but also facing the gallows because there is no place for them at 409 E.Sola Street, Santa Barbara 93101, nor items of kitchen tools, kept more for sentiment than use.  When, indeed, did you last use the wooden bowl your maternal grandmother used for preparing gefulte fish?  And whence came those awful iced tea spoons with the pagodas and Japanese fan ornaments?  Clothing becomes yet another matter.  The list goes on to such a degree that its very extensive reach becomes its own death sentence.



Traveling light is not seen as a virtue until it is time to travel.  The things you keep, have kept, are more often than not things of sentiment.  It is easy to see the comfort in tangible things.  Just yesterday, you noticed Liz Kuball's childhood companion, Bunny, tucked in a safe bedside chair, when you visited her Los Angeles apartment yesterday.  Bunny made you ache for the presence of your own stuffed animal, a dog, probably modeled after a wire-hair terrier.  His eyes were missing, a wire armature protruded from one of his front paws.  Appropriate for the historical era in which he was presented to you, his name was Prosperity.  Like you, he was a child of the Great Depression.  How Bunny made you long for Prosperity.  He would have made the cut.  Had you his presence, he would have gone to 409 E. Sola with you, but of course he is retreated into the shadowy past and the way he will come with you to 409 E. Sola is in the long run the best way of all, making you think to imagine your last word will be Prosperity, surely worth a comment to he or she who may be with you.

Stories do attract a good deal of clutter just as living spaces do.  You have decisions to make on so many levels.  Thinking about the conundrums, you realize that decisions define you, what you keep, what you consign to the trash, what you have accumulated in the first place.

Most of us are excellent in accumulating memories and impressions; these as well define us, make us who we are, sometimes detracting other times adding stature.  What you hope always to take with you are memories such as of prosperity, and of Annie, and of Jake, and of your splendid sister, Pennee; also of your lovers and your friends, and of students.  Of the two mentors on whose lathes of technique you were formed, Rachel Maddux and Virginia Gilmore.  Of the books you read and loved, the books you read and hated enough to write ripostes; of the things you have written and have left behind, of the things you have written that have eluded you as Prosperity has eluded you, of the books you hope to write, of the books you will write; all this defines you as you ought to be defined if you are to be defined at all.

Fear

Fear is not a guest you'd invite over for iced tea and cucumber sandwiches of a leisurely afternoon.  Fear never waits for invitations; it barges in like an unwanted guest, often catching you while you are in the midst of something else, perhaps sleeping or taking a shower or writing or not writing.  

Perhaps you're waiting for someone or fighting the mechanics of a deadline, which seems to be getting away from your control.  Fear, you realize, loves catching you off guard, rendering you without defense mechanisms, which is not the worst thing, the worst thing is when fear catches you before you reach the state of confidence you usually have in effect as you operate your way through the labyrinths and alleyways of your life.  Fear takes so much of your energy and attention, triggers such severe forms of survival mechanisms and despair that you feel close to if not entirely naked in the most existential sense.

Grief is a tough enough emotion to cope with, but at least it will sit down to a cup of coffee with you or some music, even to the point of suggesting particular compositions to help you.  With grief you are in a kind of partnership.  With fear you are on the run as the Nazis go from house to house, demanding to know if any Jews or other non-Aryans are living therein; your goal is to be away from the source, but you do not always recognize the source.  

You have tried on occasion to get fear to come out for a drink or coffee or even some conversation, but fear is not having any of that; it is the classic schoolyard bully; it wants to humiliate you, prove once and for all its dominance over you, even wanting to make you pay in kind for the last two or three times you stood up to it, laughed it down.

For much of your life, you have been attracted to individuals who seem to radiate confidence, who prepare for their performances, who are able to quote men and women from history who have been paradigms of self-confidence and self-reliance.  Some men have a taste for blondes and while you have found many blondes attractive, you have similarly found yourself attracted to brunettes and redheads.  There used to be a particular type who, even on a non-sexual wave length, would draw your attention. Many of the men you admired seemed to have a built-in arsenal of confidence and know how; fear to them seemed as alien as penguins in Hawaii.

Thanks to what you've begun to think of as the immediate present, you've admired two women who seemed comfortable in their confident assurance, whose public moments seemed to you to radiate purpose, direction, and drive,  One wishes to be a writer but has not written much, the other has an advanced degree in the facets of psychology related to motivation.

Both seemed to you to achieve a melt down at about the same time as you followed their arc across Facebook like fireworks displays on the Fourth of July.  You are sincere in your doubt that either would consider herself to have had a melt down.  What you saw was a blizzard of quotations from diverse sources, tails pinned on the donkeys of purpose, exhortations to all who would listen to be a part of the solution, to take a hand in destiny, to do something for the species.  

What you saw was sincerity writ large, but what you also saw was a crack in the armor of confidence and purposefulness.
What you saw is not by any means a gender issue because you began to recognize the same thing in men and women:  what you saw was loneliness and the fear of ongoing, continuing loneliness.

One of your major beliefs is that from loneliness we writers write to provide the dramatic effect of light from lighthouses.  We write to find our way and to share the journey of discovery with others.  Sometimes we need to show disturbing images and situations because they are our own fears and our own fears are by definition disturbing, distracting.  

You and many you know fear such generalities as death, disappointment, rejection, failure.  Our knowledge of these elements may temporarily elude the viscera and become more abstracted thinking or strained logic, but eventually we begin to see through persistent attempt how even in death, disappointment, rejection, and failure, there is some apparatus for dignity, and if not dignity, if that is lost to us as well, then a presence of grace in the death, disappointment, rejection, and failure.

You have solved nothing; you will experience numbing fear when you least expect it or, were you to expect it, in ways well beyond your anticipation.  But you are also onto the awareness of a basic strategy in martial arts, wherein the experienced participant uses his own energy as well as that of his opponent.  Fear is a necessary source in story, it is a vital presence in your own eventual understanding of why individuals behave as they do.  

When you are perfect in your confidence, you are apt to overlook small, remarkable details such as those noted with such regularity by the photographer William Eggleston or by writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck and Annie Proulx.  When these worthies come to expose their feelings, there is an entire relationship they have negotiated with fear, a relationship that allows them to proceed with a willingness to risk failure, to lose everything.

Fear may not stay for tea and cucumber sandwiches, but you, once you sense its presence, can turn on the flame under the kettle.