In order to be admitted into this advanced track workshop, MEMOIR

In order to be admitted into this
advanced track workshop,
REVISION AND SELF-EDITING:
SHAPING A WORK OF
IMAGINATION INTO A WORK OF
ART (FOCUS ON FICTION AND
you must print this file
and do all the reading and writing
assignments listed on the four
page outline.
MEMOIR),
Please bring the printed file and
all of the completed writing
assignments for discussion to the
workshop.
1) Let's look at some bad (published) writing from an important editor in the 1960s, Hiram Hayden, who
failed to edit himself. Read the opening section of his 785 page novel, THE HANDS OF ESAU (see file).
Hiram Haydn in addition to publishing THE HANDS OF ESAU (1963), and another novel THE TIME IS
NOON, published a book about his editing life, called WORDS AND FACES(where he recalls William
Faulkner among others). He was the founder of the New School writing progam and later taught at
other colleges. He also was a founding editor of Atheneum Press after years at Random House, where
he worked with William Styron and Ayn Rand, among others. In the 1970s he was editor of THE
AMERICAN SCHOLAR. He also edited an anthology of Elizabethan poetry.
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In Blake Bailey's A TRAGIC HONESTY,there is also an account of Hadyn's courting Richard Yates's
REVOLUTIONARYROAD and wanting to change the ending. And Norman Mailer skewers Hadyn in
ADVERTISEMENTSFOR MYSELF,as an editor who took Styron's advice and rejected Mailer's DEERPARK.
2) Read original galleys of Jayne Anne Phillips's story "EI Paso," which appeared in PLOUGHSHARESand
later in her 1975 collection BLACKTICKETS(in his front page New York Time review, John Irving singled it
out as the best story). What are the effects of each minute change? What standards and lessons
underlie the changes? Look particularly at Rita's section about the funeral pyre.
3) Read the documents pertaining to Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver's story, "A Small, Good
Thing" into "The Bath." The first file includes the two stories. The second includes Carver's poignant
correspondence with Lish, protesting Lish's changes and cuts to the entire 1981 collection, WHAT WE
TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE. The third file includes D.T. Max's "The Carver Chronicles"
about the evolution of the Lish/Carver editorial relationship.
All revision begins with a sense of audience. One person? Several people? "Fit readers though few"?
People who know you and share your interests and expectations?
demographic?
Strangers? What age group? What
In our discussions, I will assume literate adults as our audience, people who come to
reading fiction and memoir for entertainment,
communion, and wisdom. A "literary audience."
Projecting yourself as audience is like speaking to a mirror. You know what you are thinking (or think
that you do), but "the mirror stage" is also an attempt to
see and hear yourself as others see and hear
you. You discover the disjunction between knowing yourself as a subject and seeing yourself as an
object.
Most of us write for a few good voices in our heads, voices that we've incorporated from reading and
listening. Teachers, editors, and agents represent "ideal readers," although with slightly different
agendas from each other. Add to that copy editors.
What is the goal of revising? To make your story and its sentences clearer, richer, more concise, and
more emphatic. To get deeper into the consciousness of the characters. To shape a work of
imagination into a work of art.
"Most of my first drafts read like soap opera. I have to go over and over a scene before I get deep
enough into to bring it off. I think I'd be a slick, superficial writer if I didn't revise all the time. The first
draft of Revolutionary Road was very thin, very sentimental.
whom any careless reader could identify.
I made the Wheelers sort of nice folks with
Everything they said was exactly what they meant, and they
talked very earnestly together even when they were quarreling.
what a mistake that was-that
It took me a long time to figure out
the best way to handle it was to have them nearly always miss each
other's points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There's a great deal of
dialogue between them in the finished book, both when they're affectionate and when they're fighting,
but there's almost no communication."
1)
Rough draft: get it down, description, dialogue, narrative framing of scenes...both about what
you think is important and what you discover. Overwrite.
2)
Second draft: fill in and live up to detail and texture of assumptions
3)
Finish ...new set of eyes to confirm or question.
Is this considering/hooking
the reader? Time.
Return after more experience or different frame of mind. Kill your darlings. Forget how hard it
was to write, treat it coldly as material. The cutting room floor. Reorganize. Leave out without
losing. Work on it was if it were by someone else.
Be reckless, shameless, irresponsible and self-indulgent, but get something down. Then return as an
emotionless diagnostician.
You need distance. The less we recognize our own words, the better we can judge them. Save all drafts.
Read your words aloud to yourself, to a tape recorder, or have others read them out loud
Character. Do I have all the characters I need? Can I afford to do with two buddies or one instead of
three? Are any of my main characters too flat? Are my main characters sufficiently motivated?
Characters should want things.
Plot. What's the first interesting thing that happens in my store? I have chosen the necessary events
with which to tell my story? The ending should be unpredictable not only for the reader but for the
writer.
Point of view. Have I chosen the best pov? Should I stick to one character's pov or alternate?
Do I keep
the pov consistent?
Description. Sensory imagery. The reader should hear see smell taste and fell what your characters do.
Specific sensations that grip the senses, not the intellect.
"Beautiful hair" vs. "her hair streamed like
turnings of steaming copper and bronze from a spinning lathe down both sides of her face" Specific vs.
Abstract.
Dialogue. What characters mean rather than what they state. Subtext. Dialogue reveals more than it
says. Bring speech to mind rather than tape record it. Dialogue symbolizes speech.
Flashbacks. A flashback is a digression that works. Beware flashbacks within flashbacks. Ask yourself
why you don't tell your story in chronological order.
Theme. Intuitive vs. Conscious vs. forced. When themes emerge, we're responsible for recognizing and
highlighting them.
An account of my own revisions (self-editing):
The story of revising TRIBAL SCARSinto SWEET DREAMS,
esp. the final sentence, from "I want her free" to "She is her own story now." The four versions of ANNA
MAYE pons, cutting from 500 pages to 300. And still pending revision: STRANGERSAND NEIGHBORS,
glossing details of town politics and offering more of the Manager's inner life.
Build a collective list of common problems in fiction: cliche, inappropriate
diction, abrupt point of view
switches, passive voice, needless detail, indefinite pronouns, scenes that only convey information
and
could be put into narration, narration that relates dramatic material and should be put into scene. Read
your ms. once all the way through for every problem on the list.
Work against your weaknesses. Notebook explorations.
Imagine your story as film. What information
is conveyed in the opening shots? Other strategies.
Recommended books and articles about revision.
WRITE AND REVISEFOR PUBLICATION, by Jack Smith.
NAMING THE WORLD: AND OTHER EXERCISESFORTHE CREATIVEWRITER, edited by Bret Anthony
Johnston. GOTHAM WRITERSWORKSHOP: WRITING FICTION, edited by Alexander Steele. GOOD
PROSE:THE ART OF NONFICTION, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd.
The Hands of Esau
was the news he brought. But, since it was both good and
startling news, why not hasten home the faster with it?
His meditation was brought up as short by this simple and
obvious question as though it were one of the gigantic construction hurdles placed across the road. Was it possible, at
the age of forty-five, never before to have wondered at so
regular and peculiar a contradiction in one's reactions? For it
was true, he could see now, that he always preferred to delay.
fulfillment of whatever sort, to dally on the road to the moment of completion, realization, triumph. Once it was sure.
Once he knew that nothing could prevent its final consummation.
It was perverse, he thought, as the car bumped. along the
second detour-it was downright perverse not to sail with the
full force of the winds of joy when it was possible; the opportunity came seldom enough. What sort of prudence or secretiveness was at work to make him cover with both hands, like
a love-starved child, what it would seem natural to hold aloft
proudly? What was the- origin of this emotional miserlinessif that was what it was that made him want to hug to himself, alone, the news of a distinction won, a recognition
granted, rather than to share it with someone?
Someone? With Julie. They had had their seemingly interminable ups and downs, ins and outs, he thought as he
cleared the last bump on the dirt road and emerged on the
final stretch of pavement leading to Blake's Wood Road; they
had, in fact, gone through their particular and exquisite hell
together-but when he thought of sharing, he thought only of
Julie. And he could not remember a time during the worst of
their agonies, at the peak of a period of wild recriminatibns
and long sullen silences (even this spring), when she had failed
to respond to such news as he was bringing. At first there
might be a dry "That's nice" or "Good. Congratulations," but
before long he would hear a humming sound from the kitchen.
Then, looking in, he would see that she had begun to glow
with that inner light concealed at other times just under the
creamy pallor of her skin.
It was always then, at this point, that she would turn toward .him, smiling, and then that her large black eyes would
lose their somberness and shine with pride and love. She would
shyly reacih up to lock her arms around his neck and raise her
mouth. And later, from another room, he would llear her
singing gaily in the kitchen.
He pushed down harder on the accelerator. Suddenly he
could not wait to tell her about the call from Abe Fortune.
("Mr. Herrick, this is Abe Fortune. You don't know me, but
I know a good deal about you, and I'd like to know more ... ")
He turned the corner onto their road so fast that tlhe gravel
red
ki and clanged under the fenders ....
ere was' an unwonted quietness about the place. In his
preoccupation, Walton was aware first merely of an emptiness,
. an absence surrounding the large white clayboarc hotlse; then
he realized that it was the children he was missing. Almost always at least one of them sighted the car down the road and
raced to the driveway to meet him. He felt disproportionately
disappointed. Tonight it would have added an extra measure
to the plenitude he already fe~t to be greeted by Jennifer's
impish flowerface, Timmy's 10vi.D@, awkward capers and shy
grin, or Peter's intent, searching gaze-as though he sought
to read in his father's expression some augury of the future,
some presentiment 'of his own destiny.
Disappointment slipped unobtrusively into a feeling of betrayal; tenderness for the children into a concern lest something was wrong-someone ill, injured or lost. Caught in this
anxiety, as yet undefined, Walton noted only morosely and
passingly that the whole bed of jonquils was in bloom now; he
ducked hurriedly under the rose trellis, taking the short cut to
the front terrace and tihe house. Letting the screen door slam
behind him, he dropped his brief case in the front hall and
called, "Julie!"
There was no answer. The sound rang up the stairs and
thinned out into a flat sweet double vowel far above him. He
thought of calling the maid's name, then remembered that it
was Wednesday and sihe would not be here. Muttering half in
dismay, half in anger, he stamped through the living room,
the dining room, and opened the swinging door into the
kitchen.
Julie was there. She was standing before the sink, gazing,
in deep absorption, out the window. Walton knew instantly
that she had not heard him, that she was not even now aware
of his presence. The sadness of her expression was strange to
him. He had often seen her sad, but now he was immediately
aware of a subtle difference. There was in this expression a
resol.ution, a finality of purpose, it seemed to him, that made
it more poignant and at the same time alien.
SUe)1t,motionless, watching iher, he felt a yearning that he
could nbt identify. It was so inclusive, it seemed to.him, that it
could not be related to any single object-it was, rather, a
rS
o
The Hands of Esau
vision, vague and majestic, of the monument that might have
been his life-but rimmed round, at its base, with the discrepant failures of- daily experience, the broken pots and shards
of one unfulfilled intent after another.
And yet he was instantly aware that he was wrong, was
romantically blurring the truth. His longing was directly related to this slender supple :figure before him. Julie ... Where
she leaned against a cabinet, the rounded line of one slim
arm was broken at the elbow, and it seemed to him he could
even make out the familiar tender creases on the inside curve
of the elbow. AQd that head, poised, still: the shining black
hair, cu~ short, parted to one side; the full mouth, so oddly
~ensual In a face that was otherwise delicate, sensitive, broodIng.
And then he knew that the Ibnging he felt was for all the
lost occasions, for all the moments in which he might, given
the imaginative understanding-or
was it simply the capacity
to care: stripped of shallow ego, of all pretenses of devotion
and conventional sentiments, all hollow, elaborate assertions
of intent and determination?-have
stepped across the then
small break in the ground between them. But instead time
after time, he had stood where he was as though paraiyzed,
even pressing down with his feet at the edge of the hole, until
the ground crumbled beneath him and widened the gap.
And now here, he thought miserably, she was so removed,
separate-suddenly,
it seemed to him in this moment of insight-across a very chasm, that he felt, sharply and painfully,
that he had lost her, and it seemed to him that he could not
bear it. Yet. he did not dare to break in upon her silence, to
announce himself by so much as the shifting of his stance.
And then at last, without turning around, she said, "Hello.
Walton, I've been watching the birds at the feeding trough.
I've counted six different kinds in only a few minutes. But
the bluejays get everything."
He felt as though some tremendous load had been lifted
from him, leaving him lightheaded, fatuously relieved. He
blurted out the first thing that came to mind, the remnant of
his earlier fear.
"Julie, the kids? Where are they? Is anything wrong?"
She :fillallyturned theri and faced him, and now he Saw that
he had not been wrong about her sadness--.eithe.r about its
presence or its quality. And again he feLt, a seizure of fearor guilt? or, shame? He did not know.
"The children are at the beach for a picnic supper with the
Leonards," Julie said quietly. "They won't be back for another hour or so."
She crossed the room with the subtly swaying walk that had
been the first thing about her to entrance Walton. It was so
delicate and so natural a movement of the hips and shoulders
" that it bore no relation at all to the usual connotation of a
swaying gait as exaggerated, affected, or even a sexual invitation. It was so simple and so fluid a motion as to make most
other people seem to Walton ever after to be badly jointed.
Including himself, he thought now, while he mechanically
(as though she had bidden him) and awkwardly swung onto
the bench opposite the one on which she had sat down. The
breakfast table was between them; he thought of it as between them, separating them, keeping them apart. He could
not rid himself of his malaise, his sense of imminent but indefinable disaster; for a fleeting moment he remembered t~e
drive home, and his anticipation was now stale and sour 1D
his mouth. He could not overcome this rising panic within
him, and he kept futilely repeating to himself, "But there's
nothing to be afraid of, nothing really wrong."
Yet their silence persisted, and the notion came to him
suddenly-' . almost desperately-that
if he could just reach
across the table and touch her, everything would' change. But
even as an erotic image swam feverishly, but without passion,
to the surface of his mind, increasing his tension, he knew
that he could not do it--eould not, here and now, do anything
but wait.
"Walton, I'm going to leave you."
This sensation seemed to be relief: No worse than that,
then? No worse! What could be worse? In the name of God,
what had he been fearing? With what fantastic reassurance
was he wrapping himself against the cold?
.
This was overt. That was all: the very worst, openly sald
and known could be dealt with, at whatever cost. He looked
directly at 'her, saw in amazement that the resolution in her
eyes had already softened. Pride rose stiff within him.
He felt, rejected it, but knew that the rejection was t~ e~elusively cerebral to have decisive force. Something WIthin
him-something he didn't like-was calculating: then. if she
coulq so s,wiftly lose her resolution, this was not ,the one irrevocable time that only now he realized he had always anticipCj.ted-that u1tim~te arctic time when he would be finally
alone. And yet to know reprieve (if only a hinting at it) and
to take disadvantage of it, almost spitefully (against wh()m?)
to persist toward the dreaded eventuality: this was worse than
perversity; this approached madness. And yet he-whoever he
was-could gain no ascendancy over this Lucifer-like pride;
at the most he could hold it in check. So when he spoke in
reply, it was evenly and carefully.
"You've said that before, Julie. And I hope it isn't any
more true this time."
Julie's expression had changed again. She was regarding
him in steady, dispassionate appraisal. She stretched out a
hand and said ql!ietly, "Let me have a cigarette, please. No,
I'm really going, Walton. I'm not angry; I'm not saying this
because I'm hurt over what happened this morning. I'm too
tired, too worn out, to be either angry or hurt."
He found a full package in his pocket; ripped it open
savagely, and extended it to her. Watching her hand as though
it had a discrete life of its own (the slender, tapered fingers,
the soft, slightly plump pad in the palm below the thumb, the
finely modeled bones-as she turned her hand over-that led
to the knuckles), it seemed to him, in a burst of feeling now,
that he could make love to it the rest of his life, without
atiety.
'.
.
Watching angrily the trembling of his own hand as he held
out to her the lighted match, he thought wildly, If she goes,
I'll cut it off and keep it. Oh, Julie. Oh, Julie, Julie, Julie ...
"This morning?" he heard himself saying almost suavely.
"This morning? You mean losing my temper when I burned
myself-"
She broke in, and he could not endure the contempt in her
voice and her eyes.
"Losing your temper when you burned yourselfl No, I do
not mean losing your temper when you burned yourself! But
I do mean your saying that to describe what really happened
this morning. I mean all the. little superficial explanations of
the real things that neither of us can bear; I mean all the
pain and hurt we give each other. But when you start questioning me like that-like some shyster lawyer who is going to
win his case by sticking to the surface of things and pretending
there's nothing more to it-that is what I mean. Part of what
I mean. I can't get to you, you won't let me, and you pretend,
first of all to yourself, that what happens to us is only little
exasperations and quarrels-that·w.~ hav.e,a:deeply.happy marriage (I'm so sick of that word 'deeply') with just little
scratches on it. And we don,'t ha,ve MlY ki,nd q,f a happy
marriage at all, not even a shallowly happy marriage. And I
G
can't stand your never looking at what's really there, but only
at what you would like to have therel"
.
Her voice was shaky now, and he saw that she was begmning to weep. Yet he could not resist saying, even knowing
the consequences, "What in God's name difference do~s .my
vocabulary make? So I say 'deeply' a lot .... Is that a cnmmal
action?" But this time he could, and did, reverse himselfand urgently. "Oh Julie, I didn't mean that. I'm so stupid. To
hell with 'deeply' and any other word. Just let me try to ~nderstand better. You're right, of course-my danmed stupId and
puerile pride, picking at things and not coming to grips with
what matters. Don't go, Julie; give me another chance."
She raised her now tear-smudged face, and for a moment
smiled.
"Just-just so you know what I'm talking about. Just so
you really hear and understand what I mean. Walton, I'm .not
asking for a divorce. I don'~ even want a legal .separatIOn.
I haven't forgotten what it would mean to the chIldren, and
I've told you before, I'll do anything I can. to keep ?s from
just breaking in two. But we can't go on talking about-. another
chance': we~ve both had. too many other. chances. for it to
mean anything any more."
. .
Her earne.stness now and this half-reassurance restored hIm.
He asked gravely and quietly, "Then what do you mean by
saying you're leaving me, Julie?"
She stretched out her hand slowly, almost shyly, and
touched his.
"I thought," she said, "that I'd take the children to Fath.er's
-at the Vineyard-for the summer. Only leave early, a lIttle
over two weeks from now. They'd miss just one real school,
week; the one after Memorial Day doesn't matter, it's just
closing week, and with Jenny's play school and Tim's kindergarten, it doesn't inake any difference, anyway. So if you'd
speak to Peter's teacher, and she says it would be all right-"
She stopped abruptly and looked at him directly, with an
expression of naked honesty and-it seemed to him-affection
too.
"You see," she said, smiling wryly, while her voice grew
shaky again. "You see, even when I'm talking about leavjng
you for 'a while, I'm asking your help in making arrangements
to leave you."
"
. .
'
He caught her hand in bis, held it tightly; some ferment was
working in him now: if, during this sumnier alone (so he'd
I., :~:"" '.•.
I-t",t
S~e I'd met this old dirt farmer in a har d;e nighr
hefor,e. Said he waS selling his tnlrk dlcap and I <'<lUld wnl('
dUWli
l<.l L1 Rosa and pick it up. S:lid S.\Ou and it didn't
run
100 bad bUI I'd beller buy it now. So J hilclled down Sunday
morning. mud churches on all threc din strrClS ringing tlll·ir
bb •..k bells. I found him ..wringin!: a chid.en·s nC'ek in thC'
'·ard. did it quick and finished bdr,re he look"d al me. Dark
~camed fare under a'broad hat and lhe rhilkcn h,ad ;1 lillie
dangling thing hanging oUt his·fist. I told him, s;lid I'd wille
about the truck, did he still 'Wam - thinking 'We were bOlh
prC'ttl' drunk and he might have drr'arned he IJiJd a truck,
since it didn't look likC' he had apylhing bUI a sbanry huusc
that le:enC'd inca dirt. He 'spat and Jilrned
for mC' to follow
- 'L.,.
him. holding the chicken now byGYsplayed feel thaI were
rr..•
bright orange in the rising hcat. The nails on his hands WCfe
.:alored that samC' dull shine as hen's claws.
Us walking in rhe dWt yard past old rires and a roucn
bC'c1spring, mule ried to a pump by the chicken shed, :end he
<tands finallv by this thing that's a red ~O's Chevy Wilh a
huilt·on
bed shelved with chicken cages. Crosses and a
blackened
corn husk doll hanging from the mirror, keys
strung on a hair ribbon. I got in and drove around ~c yard
fast, chickens squawking and the old"dogs snappilJl( OIlthe
wheels. The old man squatted where l1e was, .plucked tlie
hen. Frathers flrw and dropped as I pulled up. I said lhe
truck ran good and if he had the tilk I'd pay him nllW and
takr it.
He motioneJ
ml' imide a housc ~(}tllehow dark C'ven in
all'lhar
ItgIiumclluf
wool shawls and- vineg<lt. Me bliftd -_.
stumblinR
into a table and voices. Spanish curses, stOp :lIld
start. I loole up :end .Rica. she's standing Ihere nor Ihri:c' feet
aW:l~·. having rir~d
the curtains off unl' window; shc's
screaming in her voice mat goes
an lhe lighr ours
in all over her. Hut yellow grav)' of lig 11, er a, eyes, an
the rcd skin tighl, blouse loose "Id lacr ripped at the
shoulder.
I w:.lnred to roll my hand in her,.! l'Ould fc.t., hcr wet
against my !t·gs. The old woman stands by lhe SIOVC( silk uf
her f:lce shinin . and when she lurns I SC'l' shc', nOl rrvin
._~
bUt one eyeX' weeps.
Ita walks pas! me Steaming frum her
~
hands. the cheap plastic curtains clutched and dragginl(.
,
I w:lt/rh the old man rummage in • drawer hUl,ofecl hc;V::...>'--.
at thr end of the long roo/ll. Rita -moviljg~bc:ridll1g
over :.l
small chair. Old inan counts the money and I turn to watch
her. Thr light rolling now, IC'aked inro the dark, ripplcs the
skins Of the dark and flies fly up in loose knots. Low slow
buzz in corners yellowed and pulled OUt by the ligh! that
rolls across the surf:eces of Ihing~ in ydlow blocks. Dust in the
lIght. and her bod)' moving down the long room pulb a
white path likC' an animal leaving water. She bends from Iht·
waist. Under the clolh her thighs arc muscles, long Hlrves,
h b
and shc is bending over a chair. In the chair sits a ~
",ho,,'
_
II 'j
head is too 'big. He makes a SOil sound, like lhe low wli;;t"Zc
of bab~' shC'Cp. His Icgs don't reach (he floor; his ~kin is
strrtchru
tight and IRlR6h.~
likC' Ihe
1
I IS under iL
His hair ~~white :lnd fine. swirled on his man-size
lea ~
and I know ht: is :l child only by the way he cradIC'; a shoe w
~
hIS f .lce _Rocks rhC' shoe slow in shorr arms. Rita nas hcr hands
"'in his hair, hC'r shoulder.; rensed and cUfVC'd~J-&'"
catches in hCI throat and comes out low, folding into lhe
yello'\\' room. Thick juicC' of light cirding, curling us in. Child
~hC'ezing and rocking, rocking the shoe slow, his mouth on
it. It is her shoe and Rita croons, rocking with him. pulling
the shOt" away.
't.
":"
••.:"'" ~
7..•.•..~ ~~..• ,~~~
.1 bought m)' mOlher thoSt' 1:1~~~t"Sso she wouldn't have
to live in the dark, spent $.IOU 011 ~n El Paso d'K'rl1r so sht,
could see in the lighr without the- l"}'e burning. And shl"
wouldn't we:1.f them. Would hick ,hem and mOVl"like- a bat
in the dark, the window~ (Oveml. Tilt' child in hi~rh~ir with
he. ~ounds, she singing her "lf1~' I"••.in tilt' dark. he weaving
in his chair. Me youngest of six, ancl at ne~r lifty she ~ave
birth to him, his white skin and his head hanging like a
heavy bloom on the neck th~t muldn't
move it. His eyes
rolling back to ~ee in th~t heaJ Ihat must have !leen a lidd of
snow imide. No father. she ~aiJ. He is what was in me. And
the eye in her too. still pouring from her slow. Bringing grain
from the store on the mufe, sht' rrossed against the light and
a truck knocked her down, the mule.kirking
her face, And so
the eye weeps and hurts in the daylight. Pounding meal on
tht' wood tahlr sht' sings in thl" 110Irklike she sang then, my
live brothers building cars ill the yard :llIU me Ihey call
bruhit.z, little witch.
.
At dusk dK townspeople came to be healed. Paid her in
rom and cloth. Then the corn Stacked by the door and
tomatQCS hung [Q dry and sides of bacon, their whirl' f:1l rhicle
a..~m,· ""aist. She in her whitl" shawl!- and her almo:.l black
skin 'PUt her hands in powdns ground from roUlS, Tht'
\'illagers ~.
her sound 9o'hedill~ over thyn
Their e)e~
flulrer and their hands unchnrh.
lerkmg as sounds ~
~"'"",-£ .
Muenes dio~' mucne muene. Thev rise when iI'S done.- all(1
. I .
bow to the ""itch their childrell we;n '( touch. Castanets slow
:
dull dad: follo...x chem, !IlC:ir rn'! I:l!ill£ "wal' ill till' darL-. __
.f..lt.,,,,,...J
yard. From the time 1 was a b;lbr she gave me a sharp Slick
and told me 10 dr.zw them in Ihe din to keep/theK spirils
. .from ~~made
hr.-r wit<'hing dlllls"from husb;
'(
,
L~c..k.,
""hen I was ol"aC:r shegavemt' p~jl1lf·toC1j'aw-i1icirr.ll'es~-T
"-',
<>••••••••• j
-
.
made them: farmc-r's heads and I\oitered women already old.
In the morning by the PUIllP her Iw\(b Wt'f(' ,hadoY.' ill
the ,,'ater :Ind rhe bu,kels Wl':'t' full. stllim'd alld ",Id. Slle
straij;~ten~9
ullder them.JitLhL.d.llai&~.ilHmJt"'t"ft--. .
wimer, Her sons alrC:&dymen whu 1I~"••EI,k.r wun~ ~!1~ll.pL~ ..
"J--~
the door sa,,' her loUch herself, smuuthing ber old dress so il
.
hung floacing, She lifted the buckets and wet the din, W.ti:'r
darkl'oed
her feet, the toes yellnwl"d :lOd hard, sules
<"aJ!,lused white. The w
her fl"et arrhed: the casl.nets her
,
long finger,'
( eir fast loud dack in rhc-h~i'thc
-'
"7:,
.
',soLIn.
__ .~
.-:-~1~JE~i(,!f1s.1~i=~-·Y
wel"ks to l.a5 Vegas. Reno. SomeuiTii::s'whcn he c:Ime1)ark we
mo\'('.! to hOlels in EJ Paso and 1'()lIgl11 dll!hl"sin
SlUres,
Remember.
shr.-'d say. cr.zdtcd voire darking lIll her lel"lh,
You ain't no Spanish brats - Yuu gut gypsy blood .nd your
Daddl"S Apache checks, I remember her lonR' fingl"rs on my
fart'. He didn't come back. The house W:IS her power .nJ she
wuuldn't
leave. The cown still CIt'eps ro hl'r at dusk. women
wilh smwls low ovc-r faces. Tht' pri('sl says it's sanilege. Ihl'y
. heaping ashes by the door.
lel\l:r.. round I!S ru,'(: hambllr~l"rS, !lurk ,h ••k", o'II"n rin!:\
fried gold, I w~lk up Ihere ~nd ~ wOlllan wirh her hair dyed
brass sw~bs rhe coumer wirh a r~g. Her wide grin red. her
fnJm tooch gold, she leIs me (:11kand WolWllIj1l1l
..112911 she
fingers my palm;' c.••.•.•••
4- ••,· d-.. ••~c,
:'
Ice cre:lm packC'd har dmeltS sluw on my h:IIUls,:o.sI'm
walking back. 1 see Rit" hirching by rhe side of the road. I
h~nd her a cone, /(C'tin the truck and sran ir. Shc r1imbs in.
MUlor idling, sweet rold in our mourhs, 1 pull her ;\cross the
seat and press my lingrrs hard at the base of hC'r neck. My
bre ••rh comes ouc ~ ral:licd curve aJ;aiosl her l'yn, . I "
,
He so in love with her'it was sumerhing III sec. Du~e so
c:lught up and deoicart'o like a single eye [0 his own lovillg.
How she touched it off, I sl;lppose he was ahuur to P~C~,lt in
before' he 5:191 het and thuught du:re 91". still somt'lhillg to
do. W:I.Iking up rhe hill, rouching .him with her hip"and
walking, she moved; her hip was delicate and hlue beside his
thigh..
"
.., .•
Tl:1is 91:15 El P:IMI. I%'>-.."She danced illlOPll'ss bars, 'S;lid
r~al1}'she ,was a painter but she needed supplies. Supplies she
said are always hard ro gC't,' someri"!es you jusl have ~:'pU[,
OUT and ~er them ano go (lff with them. It wal pM", he
w2!1ted to go off with her bUt in rht' summer in El PaSo: it's
hard to rTlQveanywhere except dowll rhe street to Iht·'1):1;-'. 1
remember there'w:ls alway. dog pul:e on the sidl"Walks'in EI
PaSo. All those smys /:el th~ swe~rs around noon am) pring
up the' garbage thcy ate in., rhe bark allcy"s of beane~~ ar
dawn, Think ab,oul Tt'xas and thcle's )hose .kinny fan(led
ribs heaving.
/'
, Dude used to ~o down to Bimpy's nights and watch her
dalKe. fjimpy was a I(ll"asy.knecd old faggot who liked him
plelll}' and gave ll, free hllurbon. Sh ' .-pm!' oye[.b~
songs
0 a num_~!,,~
.. us,.WI1n~~~Weal w.du·:'1 ""'r
P:lpCl :UJd •••·c·o h:lve lu keep lighrinl( it. She d"nrl'o uti mis
thtee-foot-5quare red stage, under two old ceiling fa,is'r~al
looked like,little ':lirplane propellers. Shr movt'() unJc:r tneir
skt.'py drone: always rhere w..s something about to brt:a~ 'our.
Froin our tablt· in the rurncr [ wuld .\nwllthe old roSt·ss,n'ell
of h,er. She was dark-hairt'd aod bla<,k.e~ed Ihoul{h she S)'Iore
she' .wasn't Spani.h. mcdium sized btll small oont'd )Vi,th
grec:n apple breasls; thl'll ~udd('IJly her Iwi.ICdchiid-bc:uing
hips thar were somehow off·ccncer and rulbl gerHk 1(' the
Iefl whell she walked, rolling .10'10' lip thehilJ paSl tk plate
glass liquor stores. Dancing, she'd rhrow her dusty Sfcm past
lhe rwo old spots Rimp\' had and 1Ilt' wwl>uys threw bills on
stage. Dude hated lhe' dalKing; s:lid she w:c; frigid :IS h~1l
afcerw:l.td;. like loving a wind;up doll except for her rriou~h
and the eurves il mok on in'the dark. She wouldn'l 'cv\:n
move with the lights on"he ~id.
: :.
, After the show she'd stay and help Bimp sweC'p Ufl ~nd
then we'd walk OUI lilt' door ~nro the oily night. Everything
wide awake and then tht' fat yam-skinned WllnlCn lalking
Spanish to their boyfriends. ,walking wilh their stl'mmc:d
I
••
rhf.
~
~
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'p\ •••. J.-~~
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U JU:'l
''(
1)l,:JIJ);
"'i'n'I""port:lOt
lhcrt, in the lil-l.IP bl;l('k IU h:lvl: he-I,voile wirh its
.honeyed dr:lwl and bitter ed~c; she walking slope slide up
.the hill, whisper of her nylons brushing and, the Mexican
:bOys shooting craps on the sidew:Ilk. They :Iin'l'Ilullhine:en,
.she:'d say when lhe:y lotked up at het heds clicking, Old
.enough. My d.uldy madc a small ("nunt" al naps: lie: wed to
all it dealin with the demon. She'd say Ih:ll alld slap Dude
on the ass.'
'.
•:
, ..' She'd boillhose stark black Columbian bc2ll$on a stove
in their flat :lOd it'd heal up the kill'hen so w,id:have to sit
OUt the window on tht" roof. By litis limC'the 11lwnW:t5 nt"ar
silent and slt"aming ~lllWlike a We-Iiron. Alwafs drink hot
coffee on hm nil:rus, shc'd say. Brings the,s;weat to lhe
outside and Ie:tsyou ,Iee:p. Dude: d'lzed with his hc:ad in he:r
lap and she:'d turn tv Int". ask me:. oils arc on sak,and could
~hc boricw a few bucks till next wee:k. You know:,she'd say,
cwisting his hair in her fingel'S, The:m stal'S arC'jUlitholes in
the sky after all. And while I'm sleeping in that hot bed
everything I ever lhought o( having falls inlO crh.
Finally I'd gOo 10 bed ;ma hear them in thl: h.ill going
back and forth to the bathroom, him usuall~rUnk by then
and tripping at rlt. door. Pe:ople up and do'.yn the h.1I1
behind dool'S)'cllcd al him to ShUIup. Her arms/caching ,in
the: yellow blouse to grab the: light string, her hip~ moving in
their funny bumbling slow "walk past my door. not quite
touching his ltgs, and the mosquitos loudet than her quiet
Laughter: this wa.~4 a.m. in EI Paso.
'
.•
I saw him a l'Ouplc o( ye:arslater in Toledo. ~id he:W;lS
imo raring junk ,'OIl'S,said it W:lSsome: kick. Said you're
teOiring alound :Ind around under the light in these rhings
that are:all,l:uing 10 fly apart anu pile:up ..Said he heard-she:
was living down in Austin with some dyke:. Said cracking up
Ihose cae; w:co grt':lr, said hI:'wa~making money arielcracking
[hem up "":ISsomt" kick. it w-d rl-.J1ysomelhing.:
Ii
-----
"
I
'.
When I opcoed the: place in '46 I didn' t think no onc:
fOuld pull nothin ove:r me again. I was in the: war JUSt like
anypnt: else. aill'l no one gonna tdl md gOt :Iny c1e:bt.I had
enough tin (ouo and muddy boots and hair li"e 1O !;lStme.
anc goddamn hig lie:is what il was, I figured Ihat OUI."Dlere
:lin'r no losing or winning anywhere is what I figured OUt,
ain '[ nobody /:onna pitch me:,into no fake: comest al::lin. I
saikd into San Fr:ln with a knee like:a rorltscre:w.and the salt
air mOideit aehe:'likt' 01 bitch. I cam~ baek home and opcne:d
the: place and,.&ur~d I !"a5 sranding ground. B:lck then the
Mexicans U5Cdto skunk around :It'the alle:ydoor lilJ,J !Olde:m
to ~t it. I <:111 stT I:'m,now. slinking uff in their re:d shirrs
unde:r thaI one Slreet lamp betwe:e:nthe: trasb cans, My own
gpndmothe:r w.~ a Mex.,She smelle:d like a rorte:n cantdoupc
and raved in Spanish about the: goddamn Church' that did
norhin but bur)' hl:'r cndless brats and the man that ~at he:r.
The:rt' ain't nu lusing or winning. Thcse black-eyeU'thieves
and yellow Mex buys think I got something they W:Ult,let e:m
swagge:r in the from door 50 what. I could tdl e:m if tney ask
- no martcr whal the:y gal th('y got more: to gee: and the:
thing don'r e:no. Gaining like: a squirrd on a wh~c1. sure.
, When I saw them three kids I knew whal the: game "..as.Her
" saying what I ne:e:de:dwas a danee:r, the dude: pretty ;u a rode:u
, s~:ll;."andhis 5,idekil'kune:of the:m hu~ched-up wau'hers. I said
Llsien, j gOt me a d:lnre:r. and she said Try me OUI.The:dude:
· stood then: grinding a bult into thi: floor in his high-heeled
, boots. I said Well I don't allow na"danrers in hcre 'Without
: e:scom, ~Ie:nty
rough in here ya knu",:•.~h~_a~.~hila.
· ddphill. She: said she was. from La Rosa, one of ilie:fll dirt
,eating border towns. and'llaughe:d,said You didri'l gerfar
•didja. She smiled. her mouth d.uk· pink and thqsf ,'flashy
,Spanish teeth mong as 'in animal's. The: rowbqy. finally
.looked at me:,said, rolling thefilterofhiscigarctre,.'f~'11
be
·here :u'nine, The watche~ stood the:re looking from.face: to
,face: like he: was judgc of ,the wholc: damn game and 'I said
'Suit yourselves.
. •"
B:J,k rhl'" I "'.J' ;/ CJfj1t'IHrr lik,' 1'\'l'I}"Ill' I quil >,llOul
we-m dllwn 1lI TexJs .• ir ~II t111,k :11"/~I"" iI's like: ~wim.
ming, I was I" I l"vC"rin ,/1):J1I WIIIll>. [:11'.150'Ulllnll'1 't'('ping
~r the- "':Jlr, '1'1.:111l~1 OIUI Iwat 11IIIlt·, Jftn jllll ami drinb
Y"U up, St-(t.heen Ihere- all hn lik, TIw SIC.", in het(II",r
",h.lt I was tJlillkinl( in r\llllm thilk. f"ullllf II': IJt'r hla,k hair
in rh~ shee-ts;1 wllunJ Ihread. d,i •.k bl:ll'k lint" lIfdrJ.wing~
she Jeept hid, Iwr rhJrm.lt·d fingertips, ~Jlt' worked on lhe
avenue, rurned Iri(k~ in a hotel room \I·ilh J b'u,' ,e-iling and
anI' light hulh in J frillged shade. J IlIld 1Jl'r.Ii",id 2'011glHI" _:
StOP thi~ and she ~aiJ Well, Shl"J Jan,e bIll sl't: wam'lrani"
ing no slop to fafOler~ in •. beAnery, TIle diffm:nl is, she: s.id,
I say how I'm U5tc.J.
W;llking at dusk ,i,rough the- alleys, h"ttle tl wlJ wine
i~ •• bag, she ~'.~f!'l1Ml
m)' w.isl. COliS;,"wkd, r:lUghl al
~";.t'';1
)
uur feel. Her skin was •.Jways hat :me pulling her to m)' ,ht'st
late ;It night. "'r hnnds CUt and sure from rarri'ng feed srl.re:
roofs, B)· nl),'O thuse days 1 was a walking fl'Vt'r anJ since I
~/'
firSt saw hl'/' I rume into the he;lt Ihe pl ••.•, rllt' hear like a
,(.:..
bitch dog .Ild I'""d WIth il
_
~
_
, See when I (Ome home It IS die h(l~lalt n'''''l,:1lld she IS " "
:JIlt!
..
lYing
nakt,d un dw roof.
Bduw lhe
.srrCL·tS
~(c: rruok,:d
:1I1<J
'j
pa>t rhem the 1I11,b run off whilt, rUlling lh,ir lighrL,,J.lL __,.:,
crUiSing. Trair" jerking sluggish (hange Gj(S in the hardbaked yard. lit-side her on the sltinl(leJ heal, I smdl her ~alt
skin and sht' lau/:hing pulls my Lre to her rhrllal, Imc.J sales
of her feet on 111)' kg~. We roll. hot shjngh'~ prl'~.'ed 10 our
backs and larer the shower is cold; her brca,ls ,so dark (he
nipples are J cherry bl •.ck. We drin~ it't'd whi~kei' ill jelly
glasscs and she danrt'S up rhe hall cfri[iping, lhmwing w;lIeroff her hair.
~
./
In the slilled sp;lre. window OIlIhe end p"ime:d OVtr and
light through the rr;lI'ked painl palte-rned on dl{' ,lanlC'd
floor. her bark i" beadt'J and swaring. In Ihe d"se: heal she
moves up lht' hit ..' ,h.do •.•..
t·d halJ. \X/;II('r huk{'d up p:m lhe
drain spills cold pa"l' iTIj' feel Ontu lhe !luur 'ltld in our WUOlS
we twist and wet the sheers, sleep in the:ir damp. Her hair
looped in m)' hand~ dries· slo .•••.
; paSI lIS the lfa;m dad and
whi,tk du·;. Ill'" "pell howls.,
, •. ~
__-ilet']t
\\,a, I"" hur 10 cook and we :1U-aVI"aduslipl"~',,
---penos_ white rheese ln b~d, culd UtU frorlH'J ill '/ur mo'Lllhs
and p<lS1 the' \\ ind" .•••.Ihe fauones dmtgl'{! shifl' CilY lighls
rame on. hlue ;lnd rink nl'on swod "1I1 "001 :lnd ,Ill' kaning
inlo rhe mirror pain.ed her fa, e: for dll' ual. I I~Jf:;t:t "II (,f'it
but her JarquereJ erts. And she Stepping off Iht, rurb in
tho~e hi,l1;h.heded shlles, kids in Chnie' grinning, The light
changed and cars revl'ed LIP: shc' Ilt~
rJugh, my eye and
fumbkd
between lilt' bUltlll'lS un m~' shin, !>Il-"ing her
fingers harJ inw en)' rhes!.
Sometimes she came back from Bimp's so late the lighl
\\Ias coming up Ikt'n wilh a john: she only did ir she said
when the money was 100 good 10 pass up. She~d (orne home
wjth a honk of br~ncfy. ger into bed with a pal'k of I ards and
we'J play p"kn 10 win till the sun was flar on rhe floor.
Cal'US buckkd lin;dl)' and Ihltlwn ag:Jin.lt lilt' \Vall, s!J;llb
Jr~wn. We' lal' rhl'll' Sl·e. until we wuld talk. Her fare in cltl'
whitt· bed ,h'er (:1(1' bl' the winr1ow. hl'!' hand on the shad('
drawing Jown Ihe d"rk: light behind thl' sh~de a, she: SlUOd
there colored hl'l' to"e blurn'd and fading like a I'hOltJgraph.
,It's all righr jus, ,\)ml' here
L
/ )
Like I said, I had another dancer. She was blond, from
[he e-:l.SC.
up nonh I think. She had che look of someone
didn 'c sweac much, JUStburned a coal inside. Ran off finally
with some slick Mcx to Panama. Could tell easy she was one
co le-:lvehome- over and over till her ft'et wore down [0 a root
rhat just· planted where she ran out of steam. The- men liked
chac white hair and light eyes and those:rhinestone shoes she
wore. She had th:1t hard crumpled look of a dame chat' s been
around but don'c know why. I knew she was thirty.five but I
hired her anyway. Them white blonds is scarce down here.
I pUt em onscage together the first night and ther. set up
a wheel the whole place was turning on. 'what with the
smaller one and her seventeen-year-old's tits and th~m hips
moving so, you knew she'd bee-n used since she ~as old
enough to wiggle: Them border girls Starr with big brother in
the alley. them towns full of female things dropping litters in
the sm:et. She moved with that clinched dart face: all of it a
f1St in her hips. and be-side her the raIl blond looked like a
movie magazine none of em could touch. There was some
kind of confusion. smelled like burning rubber. Spjlc drinks
and a goddamn brawl in the back at the card rable. I got em
offstage and turned up the lights and ordered everyone OUt
of the place. W~ JUStme picking up broken glass and the
girls leaning by the bar and the cWomen dealing a hand at
the corner table- like nothin happened. The girls werc
dressed. the blond fooling with her necklace. talking low,
Her blue eyes drinking that Spanish mouth she say'soft. Hey
Honey. how long you figure on dancing with that SWilY back
of yours and that funny hip - damn. cap you get this thing
fastened - no. here - Lemme pUt it on 'and you can maybe:
pinch it with your teeth -~he
Icans over the Spanish. her ~
red lips apan like she's still 'talking. beer tip-ped in her hand
and dripping all over their stockings, And the smaller one.
black hair ro her waise. hands midway in the air. srands therelike a stone~ying over and over. I can't fix it. I can't f1Xit,
Aft~r tliarThad-em-alr't':mate '"ignn and a week litter'the
blond split. The cowboy and his sidekick was in hcre nigli.€)
with the Spanish. the two of em diddling with cards a'nd race
forms in theecorner, Figure it's been ren year.;ago, Gaye me a
few good tips and the-n same as now -when I hit at t/;Ietrack
I blow it' all same night. ain't nobody gonna tell me I won
nothin.
(j;]
THE BLOND
f"",l-i<I)'
,
Rira, She leeftrhe aveenue,)mell of urine and spent sex in
1\
ehe halls. ~ed
her fWffi-t.fle-winclow-,the dude' askingil h~'ho
is that? She '~Jrom Chicage. !-heard-Rita say. Lived!J--2
across rbe 1u.U....R.iu...h=othsm:ill..£ace:
We eroded johns c.....,
and ocher things; me by her door in blue light, cogna~ in my
hand and my robe open. I asked her low. A toast to tl)e hungry jokers? mouth on my r:lise9 glas~ and she let me,in ... '
She ler on likc w? never knew eaClh,other. but them hot
nights I told her s[~ie~'/!v,Aike
hcj it was when I was
2. ~kr..eo;. Lik.se-vemeen like htt. G (neetc Hatcher ....••.
as my name then, in
Maine all the grey years."Ginette Haccher born and dicd in
Maine. she dying chere still I guess, I took the name the first
truck driver gave me. called me Babe and I answered to it
ever since. I left my husband that I only saw in the datk after
, the boats come in or before they went OUt, that man' always
cold and fish slime on his hands, I left soon as the baby was
born. thinking the best anyone could tell the kid was that
Mama took off. There something OUt there beside-sthat grey
wet, that heavy roll. My cousins and uncles was all lobstermen sipes I PO r~Rl~r.
My dad too. but h~ died when I
.-'7was so young aU he is [0 me is a furred chest and smeJl of
"'--.J
oiled rope, He died of lobster is what Mom said. and she
killed hundreds of them, Scratch-clink of those claws against
the .boiling potS was a woman sound, a metallic scratch round
as nngs.
L......,
__ ..
_ •• _
..•
.••••••
., •• - .•••••
61\.1
,)UUA.,
l1U
@7
color cold; 1 kept £ish eyes in bottles and sold them ~J1
summer 10 the tourists. 10 rhe queers and dandies and the
p ••imed old things wilh poodles. =:::;:::>
~ One, an old woman With money asked me to come to
her hOle-1 and read Ihe Bible 10 her. She op~lled it to the
J
book otoRc:¥4tt"'!~:c"d
I started In. After awhtl~IIIXlktd..Y~;;',k:l
and she was starin
out the wmdow like a sln'pwalker, her
~
old h••t in her~ap.
'" 5RC~H!g
Ihe hal pin slow-i1lf6-<:.flef fi"gtr 9\ er i
. She s••id wh ••t a blessed child 1 W:l.S
to come to w m 0
here by the sea so far from hC:l.tmd
""'.,..,...•••,L. •• '/
corruption. I sat
es M~'am. ~~
__ ft'f.i-..tnd swotinQ) ~
and~.
She .. uti tFylAg·not':'W.plUI,
a-bubtrt~
thfoa<. The fire comes from the feet, she said, From the
walkers and the bl ••ck hair. She didn't see me anymore. I
grabbed my sweater and ran home llCroSSthe hotel belICh, the
big umbrellas blind a~d rolli~ on their sides. I found twenty
doll ••rs ~-m
ffi)~rpgeket. Ualllt ••:nJ&,d·rt:rtel " ••
"'5 -""~~
~(""...jiktt4"!lltl'''laA8 f. bought me some red
patent leather spike heels. I -hid them in my room and only
pUt them on at night and I W:l.Sthe walker walking and the
dllncer ~
in my firey feet, and holes iA the floor where
-e-I burned through.
Tires on the big trucks burn. You smell them in the cab,
smell the motor boiling; my suitellSe wedged between my
knees and the trucker laughing Well Babe, looks like you
mem to keep going. I lived everywhere and been to Mexico. 1
danced mostly, waited tables, worked in a library once and
couldn't fee:! my feet for the shiny floor. ~6 : ill 'N
• J ~
!TUA
h
II , aatE! bai IFF"
By the timc:l gOt to
Bimp's those nights 1 WllS lllrea~ loaded. ~Iur, dark oiled
skins P:l.St the lights, ice in glasses. Cold
i.n a circk; hot
whiskeY}10t Te~.,,~Pe
Rita showW UP~SB~ss(h __
~-Biack
eyes
sunk in, burned. young.
rvo'M
n
=,
~!~
\ '6M UlOW5
;;;;s;;=,
They say the world ends in fire: and ice; 1: say it's already
over. That hot pavement burns you straight Ihrough; that'S
why 1 did it, kept moving - No slow cooking and my claws
ra.king walls. These streets, raunchy brass. my feet on fire
burns up that dead ice.
I split way sourh with a rich dude. Red birds and blackeyed men. Been some since then. I'm doing OK, I got it
made, and the cold don't come so much now.
I lived with Dude those months in two ,rooms, rickety
bed on blocks and past the windows rhe roel ste:l.ffied between shingles. Long noons I cut the tin rar bl,lbbles with my
nails, oils warm on the pap
the rubes heated till their
,
lettering came off in my h ncl!.I. rew the trains: red &iI,ShCL_~.
,
and the tracks black rips u
em.
iSJjaiids felt furred
with dust. When he WllSroofing, the linc:s and crosses in his
7
paims came out. Tar smudged them, left Jlhe: whorls of his
C,;I
fingers and the-ir black smell on my hips.
Some days in bed we kept the fans turning, buzzing; we
had cold win, and couse brown bread. Alnight
the bus
were crowdc:d with drunks, some of rhem sick in the hC:Lt.
Dancing, I saw the flat brushed land outside Ihe house in L:1
Rosa, looking tawny- olored from the shadd rooms, but OUt
f' L
there, walkin
1 f,
. hard hot sand and rh~ rolor sprea4('
1< r
into
lISled br~
I
I think of what happened a"'r\dit happens each time the
s
\X'hen I go back
are padding the can with
skins. Insiue in IS e the child's face is drawn and blue. He
breathes faim strangled bleats and my mother waits, sewing
;- I 1·
pelt5 to wrap him. At dark he il lIillllM-t.We leave with the sk... +<-<.l;, ~",
cm:. In the skins his face- is white and his light hair"l~g
lISa' ;-.
11-<.""
girl's. The hitched mule swings its head, flares nostrils at the fresh smell and moves skittish toward the hills. The old man
l
'e
-sa,.t
t\
\ ••
4 nc
it- v../
\,~ClTt.
If
UI;UU>
111 orunmeo mil. snunu:s to low ch;mt, and she walles
behind lIli-, scatters fine powder on the ground. Cart JIOCk.ing ..JY.
slow and the child's face in my lap is sunken, lids on rolled
eyes tight closed. All night we
vin on th~2!QPC(L~
lan%Jllmd rol1~ its barred striped 'b • y:TnJce:d;md tD ~..:...tI",AI~
slashed in the foothills where we Stop,
e un e w
. .
•••.
from the carr,.,
••• rie ir with cords. She knQtslr::uher'in the /)....
dari: ;md her moccasined feet walk slow around us. The old
~
-.~
•.•• l..
m;m's voice is hoarse.~c
quiet we lift the chfu!..g~ni!!g.
.I~•••~
r:,~
. 1 th b
I
.
~.
.•.• -...
.",1. ,•••. ,.•••~ ..,.~. I ••
Jang e
e race ets on 15 arms. WQ SUIE a'd aZice ~
f(,..,'
.ciN1!i~"R"'t
dUlR M! pile ls:FUl&;/\,lghtsdried skins S4
1·••••
wnpped round a sock, touches him: and he IS blID1ing:---'~---:3-'t-''''''nJ
Throug~re I think I see his face move. ~w
her
L 11-:r:
•.
back, diggin~
cJawing at the hot wood under hIm. ."
__.
_
.
They watch me pull f1:xmesv-ea1lIE !lim. itbgniag nAA 1:1
•• 1. t
hi I"'etd, h;~'-·
-." J '
-be'
II ~ c. !lunning round the stench IlalI and their old
•••.J hc~ ••••.J ~
faces over me say I have only dreamed.·I smell the skins and
all ,t;~0
his flesh, the incense burning under him.
Mule leading then down the ravine to where the light
stretches outon land like a smooth film of eg. I stumble and
touch the animal's hide, feel ~under
stiff mo1.!.sc:Y.
hair.
~ib,
The old man walking ah,ead is straight. his bliCk a lea~hen:d
1\
board under cloth. She Stays the:re by the smoking ~mell.
Quiet, she waits to take the bones.
, '
Hows walking, sun high now and the road a surI:den
empty strip. The old man waits for me. then turns in the
glare: and says, You dreamed. I see his knife and senpe
b;mded on his waisr, know he's not lOinl back for her. I
won't go back to her eirher. Smoke still in my mouth, hmell
the wheeling birds and the tight white -face: behind the
bristled fite. Old man walking away on·'the road and ·the~ _
are trUcks, homs, voices, Baby wanna ride? .
'
O~. ~
§"A~ ~l.-r
.1."
"1:
DUDE
I
/
.
.
I remember the:'rains had st:lrted, blown in off the gulf.
. She'd been·so La-ROS:l. Alwa~ when she came back
was
this hunted dog, stringy and gutted and ready to gna~ its
own foot. I came in and she' was walking circles in the: room.
rubbing her hands. I saw her fingers wen: tom, bruised
purple under the nails. Smell of burning paint ;md there on
. the floor the rolled drawings were tom and b
#
10m0 I.lu.:""
to stomp it out';(heard her low moa!!)";~i1c:d;
saw...,... a......~ /.
matches in her hanmhe smiting anacossmg the:m in the air ,....,
./
when: they'd flare ana fall smoking. I grabbed her arms and \.V
everything was bre:xking, chairs cracking on the floor ;md the
.-.
light bulb splintering. I ~_,-·_~
•. her hair' on fire -e::""
under my hand and I rolled her ooro the bed. All the ,time
she moaned long and low like I wasn't·there: except that this
thing was on top of her. Her eyes were calm and he:r bu.rried
hair broke in my hand. 1 pulled her down ;md heard my
brc:acil coming high and warc:red like a woman's. I hit her
hard 4nd she fell and lay there: words now in the moaning.
and her lips moving. She drooled and the spit flecked red
where her reeth had cur. I stood over her and yelled for her to
see me. Her eyes rolling past me pulled my hands td her
clothes and the cloth ripped. I slapped her, kept slappin* her
and my l=1ds were flsts. I looked up and he's watchin~ us,
always goddamn watching us - then he is talking qu~etly
and pulling her from under me.
.'
,.'.
I n:member rains blown in and coming slow that night,
me in the comer by the open window, rain on thin curtains
whipping my face, The coffee boiled till it W2s thick and
niuddy 9
I ,the whiskey in it buming,..and my cut -.Q- .
knuckles made it hard to hold the cup. He wnppeifJicr in
blankets, held her on the couch, watched her ~
slee~
her h;mds twitching and her eyes moving under the li'h,.,
.,
'-7 .
s~
',)f:i
!
Q
.A
J
•
r WIO.-J
He was ramming his fists into the floor besi~e her head
but he thougbt he was hitting her and asked me later had he
killed her. The floor was splintered, fine wood in his hands;
and she under him stared glazed at the ct1ling, Her
'mumbled Spanish mixed in the room with the sick sulphur'
smell of something burned. When I pulled'her from under'
him I saw her hair was burned ragged and her shirt seared ih
the back. I took it off and wrapped her in blankets; she was
shivering. There was broken glass and her fingers were bloodied somehow. She kept talking to nothing, ~ossing her hea~
from side to side, hands clinched in my hair so tight that'
when I lay her down I ran't move from her. Have ro bend,
over her, my face close though she doesn't see me; I touch,
her lips, the cuts scabbing and her teeth flecked with the dull
dried blood. I smell her breath coming shallow and fast, say
her name over and over until she hears me. 'Almost focusing
she slides her hands slow from my hair down my face to her
breasts, holding them.
Late that night, Dude sits by the window. Rain spills in;
he watches the smokey trains jerk in the yard, moisture on
warm SOOta fine dusr in the air. Not watching her sleep, he
blinks like he's slapped when he hears her clutch her throat
and turn. I talk, Dude smells her on his split knuckles and
the streaked curtains move all night.
Toward morning he walked the room, circling from
door to window, thighs tensed in his jeans. Hands held
delicate, he looked at me, His eyes I think were grey 'and
heavy-lashed; the lid of the right one'drooped and sofrened
that side of his face. Seeing me, his eyes paled in the slanted
light. He didn't say anything and turned, His poinred boots
tapped a faint click on the srairs each step down:
.
She woke up in twisred blankets and raised her fingers
to her fare. We are the bread slow, her mouth bleeding a
little. I'm seeing her in summer by the stove in their room,
sweat clouding ;h~r hair and her Jips,pursed with cl)eapwine;
she smoothing her cohon skirr and throwing back'her hair to
bend over rhe burner with a cigarette, frowning as the blue
flame jets up fast. On the street under my window she. is
walking early in the day, tight black skirt ripped in the slit
that moves on her leg. Looking back she Sees me watching
and buys carnations from the blind man on the corner, walks
back tossing them up to me. She laughs and the flowers faIling all around her are pale, their long stems tangling. The
street is shaded in buildings and her face turned up to me is
lost in black hair. She is small and she is washed in grilled
ili~~.
"
Fingers too swollen to button her shirt, she asked me
would I get her somthing to soak them in. At the drugst!)re
buying antiseptic and gauze I felt her standing shakily by rhe
couch, touching her mouth with her purple fingers. Walking
back fast I knew she was gone. took almost nothing. The
ashed drawings were swept up and thrown probably from the
window. He left for good soon after, thirty pounds of Mexican grass stashed in the truck for a connection in Detroit. I
went far north as I could get, snow that winter in Ottawa a
constam slow sift that cooled and cleaned a dirt heat I kept
feeling for months; having nothing of her but a sketch 'I'd
taken from where she hid them: a picture of trains qark
'slashed on tracks, and behind them the sky opens up li~e a
hole.
'I
\ \
l
,I {
" '.\
., .......J
\ '
~\l~
Monday morning, the birthday boy was walking to school with anher boy. They were passing a bag of potato chips back and forth and
I he birthday boy was trying to find out what his friend intended to
I~ivehim for his birthday that afternoon. Without looking, the birthday boy stepped off the curb at an intersection and was immediately
knocked down by a car. He fell on his side with his head in the gutter
and his legs out in the road. His eyes were closed, but his legs moved
hack and forth as if he were trying to climb over something. His friend
dropped the potato chips and started to cry. The car had gone a hun-l*
dred feet or so and stopped in the middle of the road. The man in the
driver's seat loo~ed back ovet his shoulder. He waited until the boy got
unsteadIly to hIS feet. The boy wobbled a little. He looked dazed, but
okay. The driver put the car into gear and drove away.
The birthday boy didn't cry, but he didn't have anything to say
about anything either. He wouldn't answer when his friend asked him
what it felt like to be hit by a car. He walked home, and his friend
went on to school. But after the birthday boy was inside his house and
was telling his mother about it - she sitting beside him on the sofa,
holding his hands in her lap, saying, "Scotty, honey, are you sure you
reel all right, baby?" thinking she would call the doctor anyway - he
suddenly lay back on the sofa, closed his eyes, and went limp. When she
couldn't wake him up, she hurried to the telephone and called her husband at work. Howard told her to remain calm, remain calm, and then
he called an ambulance for the child and left for the hospital himself.
Of course, the birthday party was canceled. The child was in the
hospital with a mild concussion and suffering from shock. There'd
heen vomiting, and his lungs had'taken in fluid which needed pumping out that afternoon. Now he simply seemed to be in a very deep
sleep '- but no coma, Dr. Francis had emphasized, no coma, when he
saw the alarm in the parents' eyes. At eleven o'clock that night, when
the boy seemed to be resting comfortably enough after the many X-rays
and the lab work, and it was just a matter of his waking up and coming around, Howard left the hospital. He and Ann had been at the ./
hospital with the child since that afternoon, and he was going home
for a short while to bathe and change clothes. "I'll be back in an hour,"
he said. She nodded. "It's fine," she said. ''I'll be right here." He kissed
her on the forehead, and they touched hands. She sat in the chait beside the bed and looked at the child. She was waiting for him to wake
'up and be all right. Then she could begin to relax.
Howard drove home from the hospital. He took the wet, dark streets
very fast, then caught himself and slowed down. Until now, his life
Oil
III
A Small, Good Thing
Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After
looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped
onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favorite. The cake she
chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting ar the other end.
His name, scorrY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The
baker, who was an oldet man with a thick neck, listened without saying
anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next
Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps
cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again,
where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on
his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He'd just come to
~ work and he'd be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry.
She gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the
oven, in plenty of time for the child's party that afternoon. The baker
was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information. He made her feel
uncomfortable, and she didn't like that. While he was bent over the
counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and
wondered if he'd ever done anything else with his life besides be a
baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to
her that everyone, especially someone the baker's age - a man old
enough to be her father - must have children who'd gone through
this special time of cakes and birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was abrupt with her - not rude, just
abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with him. She looked into
the back of the bakery and could see a long, heavy wooden table with
aluminum pie pans stacked at one end, and beside the table a metal
/ container filled with empty racks. There was an enormous oven. A radio
was playing country-Western music.
The baker finished printing the information on the special order
card and closed up the binder. He looked at her and said, "Monday
morning." She thanked him and drove home.
~I
had gone smoothly and to his satisfactiof! - college, marriage, another
year of college for the akanced degree i::jJ~Qess, a junior partnership
in an investment firm. Fatherhood. He was happy and, so far, lucky he knew that. His parents were still living, his brothers and his sister
were established, his friends from college had gone out to take their
places in the world. So far, he had kept away from any real harm, from
those forces he knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a
man if th<; luck went bad, if things suddenly turned. He pulled into
the driveway and parked. His left leg began to tremble. He sat in the
car for a minute and tried to deal with the present situation in a rational manner. Scotty had been hit by a car and was in the hospital,
but he was going to be all right. Howard closed his eyes and ran his
hand over his face. He got out of the cat and went up to the front door.
The dog was barking inside the house. The telephone rang and rang
while he unlocked the door and fumbled for the light switch. He
,-s-houldn't have left the hospital, he shouldn't have. "Goddamn it!" he
said. He picked up the receiver and said, "I just walked in the door!"
"There's a cake here that wasn't picked up," the voice on the other
end of the line said.
"What are you saying?" Howard asked.
"A cake," the voice said. "A sixteen-dollar cake."
Howard held the receiver against his ear, trying to understand. "I
don't know anything about a cake," he said. "Jesus, what are you talking about?"
"Don't hand me that," the voice said.
Howard hung up the telephone. He went into the kitchen and
poured himself some whiskey. He called the hospital. But the child's
condition remained the same; he was still sleeping and nothing had
changed there. While water poured into the tub, Howard lathered his
face and shaved. He'd just stretched out in the tub and closed his eyes
when the telephone rang again. He hauled himself out, grabbed a
towel, and hurried through the house, saying, "Stupid, stupid," for hav.j ing left the hospital. But when he picked up the receiver and shouted,
"Hello!" there was no sound at the other end of the line. Then the
caller hung up.
f
He arrived back at the hospital a little after midnight. Ann still sat in
the chair beside the bed. She looked up at Howard, and then she
looked back at the child. The child's eyes stayed closed, the head was
still wrapped in bandages. His breathing was quiet and regular. From
an apparatus over the bed hung a bottle of glucose with a tube running
from the bottle to the boy's arm.
"How is he?" Howard said. "What's all this?" waving at the glucose
the tube.
"Dr. Francis's orders," she said. "He needs nourishment. He needs
I'll .keep up his strength.
Why doesn't he wake up, Howard? 1 don't
Ill1derstand, if he's all right."
Howard put his hand against the back of her head. He ran his fingers through her hair. "He's going to be all right. He'll wake up in a
little while. Dr. Francis knows what's what."
After a time, he said, "Maybe you should go home and get some
rl'st. I'll stay here. Just don't put up with this creep who k'eeps calling.
Ilang up right away."
~'"
"Who's calling?" she asked.
"I don't know who, just somebody with nothing better to do than
call up people. You go on now."
She shook her head. "No," she said, 'Tm fine."
"Really," he said. "Go home for a while, and then come back and
spell me in the morning. It'll be all right. What did Dr. Francis say)
lie said Scotty's going to be all right. We don't have to worry. He's
Jilst sleeping now, that's all."
A nurse pushed the door open. She nodded at them as she went to
1 he bedside. She took the left arm out from under the covers and put
h,',· fingers on the wrist, found the pulse, then consulted het watch. In
\1 little while, she put the arm back undet the covers and moved to the
loot of the bed, where she wrote something on a clipboard attached to
lite bed.
"How is he)" Ann said. Howard's hand was a weight on her shoulI kr. She was awate of the pressure from his fingers.
"He's stable," the nurse said. Then she said, "Doctor will be in again
::ltortly. Doctor's back in the hospital. He's making rounds right now."
"I was saying maybe she'd want to go home and get a little rest,"
ttoward said. "After the doctor comes," he said.
"She could do that," the nurse said. "I think you should both feel
tl'~'e to do that, if you wish." The nurse was a big Scandinavian woman
with blond hair. There was the trace of an accent in her speech.
"We'll see what the doctor says," Ann said. "I want to talk to the
doctor. 1 don't think he should keep sleeping like this. 1 don't think
I hat's a good sign." She brought her hand up to het eyes and let her
brad come forward a little. Howard's grip tightened on her shoulder,
,II III then his hand moved up to her neck, where his fingers began to
Idlcad the muscles there.
"Dr. Francis will be here in a few minutes," the nurse said. Then
',Iit' left the room.
,IIKl
T
Howard gazed at his son for a time, the small chest quietly rising
and falling under the covers. For the first time since the terrible minutes after Ann's telephone call to him at his office, he felt a genuine
fear starting in his limbs. He began shaking his head. Scotty was fine,
but instead of sleeping at home in his own bed, he was in a hospital
bed with bandages around his head and a tube in his arm. But this
help was what he needed right now.
Dr. Francis came in and shook hands with Howard, though they'd
just seen ea.ch other a few hours before. Ann got up from the chair.
"Doctor?"
"Ann," he said and nodded. "Let's just first see how he's doing," the
doctor said. He moved to the side of the bed and took the boy's pulse.
He peeled back one eyelid and then the other. Howard and Ann stood
beside the doctor and watched. Then the doctor turned. back the covers
and listened to the boy's heart and lungs with his stethoscope. He
pressed his fingers here and there on the abdomen. When he was finished, he went to the end of the bed and studied the chart. He noted
the time, scribbled something on the chart, and then looked at Howard and Ann.
"Doctot, how is he?" Howatd said. "What's the matter with him
exactly?"
"Why doesn't he wake up?" Ann said.
The doctor was a handsome, big-shouldered man with a tanned
face. He wore a three-piece blue suit, a striped tie, and ivory cuff1inks.
His gray hair was combed along the sides of his head, and he looked as
j if he had just come from a concert. "He's all right," the doctor said.
"Nothing to shout about, he could be better, I think. But he's all right.
Still, I wish he'd wake up. He should wake up pretty soon." The doctor
looked at the boy again. "We'll know some more in a couple of hours,
)
after the results of a few more tests are in. Bur he's all right, believe
J me, except for the hairline fracture of the skull. He does have that."
"Oh, no," Ann said.
"And a bit of a concussion, as I said before. Of course, you know
he's in shock," the doctor said. "Sometimes you see this in shock cases.
This sleeping."
"But he's our of any real danger?" Howard said. "You 'said before
he's not in a coma. You wouldn't call this a coma, then - would you,
doctor?" Howard waited. He looked at the doctor.
"No, I don't want to call it a coma," the doctor said and glanced
over at the boy once more. "He's just in a very deep sleep. It's a restorative measure the body is taking on its own. He's our of any real danger,
I'd say that for certain, yes. But we'll know more when he wakes up
and the other tests are in," the doctor said.
"It's a coma," Ann said. "Of sorts."
"It's not a coma yet, not exactly," the doctor said. "I wouldn't want
lO call it ~!lli!. Not yet, anyway. He's suffered shock. In shock cases,
lhis kind of reaction is common enough; it's a temporaty reaction to
hodily rrauma. Coma. Well, coma is a deep, prolonged unconsciousness, somerhing that could go on for days, or weeks even. Scotty's not
in that area, not as far as we can tell. I'm certain his condition will
~how improvement by morning. I'm betting that it will. We'll know
more when he wakes up, which shouldn't be long now. Of course, you
may do as you like, stay hete or go home for a time. But by all means
feel free to leave the hospital for a while if you wam. This is not easy, I
know." The doctor gazed at the boy again, watching him, and then he
LUrnedto Ann and said, "You try not to worry, little mother. Believe
me, we're doing all that can be done. It's just a question of a little
more time now." He nodded at her, shook hands with Howard again,
and then he left the room.
Ann put her hand over the child's forehead. "At least he doesn't have
a fever," she said. Then she said, "My God, he feels so cold, though. ,
I Ioward? Is he supposed to feel like this) Feel his head."
Howard touched the child's temples. His own breathing had slowed. '
"I think he's supposed to feel this way right now," he said. "He's in .
shock, remember) That's what the doctor said. The doctor was just in
here. He would have said something if Scotty wasn't okay."
Ann stood there a while longer, working her lip with her teeth.
Then she moved over to her chair and sat down.
Howard sat in the chair next to her chair. They looked at each
other. He wanted to say something else and reassme her, but he was
afraid, too. He rook her hand and put it in his lap, and this made him
f'eel better, her hand being there. 'He picked up her hand and squeezed
it. Then he just held her hand. They sat like that for a while, watching
lhe boy and not talking. From time to time, he squeezed her hand. Fi- ./
I
nally, she too~way.
- •
1'7
()
'''I've been praying," she said.
{
He nodded.
She said, "I almost thought I'd forgotten how, but it came back to
me. All I had to do was close my eyes and say, 'Please God, help us help Scotty,' and then the rest was easy. The words were right there.
Maybe if you prayed, too," she said to him.
'Tve already prayed," he said. "I prayed this afternoon, yesterday afternoon, I mean - after you called, while I was driving to the hospi• tal. I've been praying," he said.
"That's good," she said. For the first time, she felt they were
together in it, this trouble. She realized with a start that, until now, it
had only been happening to her and to Scotty. She hadn't let Howard
into it, though he was there and needed all along. Sht felt glad to be
his wife.
The same nurse came in and took the boy's pulse again and chtcked
tht flow from the bottle hanging above tht btd.
In an hour, another doctor came in. He said his name was Parsons,
from Radiology. He had a bushy mustache. He was wearing loafers, a
Western shirt, and a pair of jeans.
"We're' going to take him downstairs for more pictures," he told
them. "We need to do some more pictures, and we want to do a scan."
"What's that?" Ann said. "A scan?" She stood between this new
doctor and the bed. "I thought you'd already taken all your X-rays."
''I'm afraid we need some more," he said. "Nothing to be alarmed
about. We just need some more pictures, and we want to do a brain
scan on him."
"My God," Ann said.
"It's perfectly normal procedure in cases like this," this new doctor
said. "We just need to find out for sure why he isn't back awake yet.
It's normal medical procedure, and nothing to be alarmed about. We'll
be taking him down in a few minutes," this doctor said.
In a little while, two orderlies came into the room with ;~ey.
They were black-haired, dark-complexioned men in whitt uniforms,
and they said a few words to each other in a foreign tongue as they unhooked the boy from the tube and moved him from his bed to the gurney. Then they wheeled him from the room. Howard and Ann got on
the same elevator. Ann gazed at the child. She closed her eyes as the elevator began its descent. The orderlies stood at either end of the gurney wirhout saying anything, though once one of the men made a
comment to the other in theit own language, and the othet man nodded slowly in tesponse .. ~~
Later that morning, just as the sun was beginning to lighten the
windows in the waiting room outside the X-ray department, they
brought the boy out and moved him back up to his room. Howard and
Ann rode up on the elevator with him once more, and once more they
took up their places beside the bed.
They waited all day, bur still the boy did not wake up. Occasionally,
one of them would leave the room to go downstairs to the cafeteria to
drink coffee and then, as if suddenly remembering and feeling guilty,
get up from the table and hurry back to the room. Dr. Francis came
again that afternoon and examined the boy once more and then left
after telling them he was coming along and could wake up at any
minute now. Nurses, different nurses from the night before, came in
From time to time. Then a young woman from the lab knocked and
mtered the room. She wore white slacks and a white blouse and carried
n little tray of things which she put on the stand beside the bed. Without a word to them, she took blood from the boy's arm. Howard closed
his eyes as the woman found the right place on the boy's arm and
pushed the needle in.
"I don't undersrand this," Ann said to the woman.
"Doctor's orders," the young woman said. "I do what I'm told. They
say draw that one, I draw. What's wrong wirh him, anyway?" she said.
"He's a sweetie."
"He was hit by a car," Howard said. "A hit-and-run."
The young woman shook her head and looked again at the boy.
Then she took her tray and left the room.
"Why won't he wake up?" Ann said. "Howard) I want some answers from these people."
Howard didn't say anything. He sat down again in the chair and
crossed one leg over the other. He rubbed his face. He looked at his son
:tnd then he settled back in the chair, dosed his eyes, and went to
sleep.
Ann walked to the window and looktd out at the parking lot. It
was night, and cars were driving into and out of the parking lot with
their lights on. She stood at the window with her hands gripping the
sill, and knew in htr heart that they were into something now, somerhing hard. Sht was afraid, and her teeth began to chatter until she
I ightened her jaws. She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital and
someone, a woman in a long coat, get into the car. She wished she were
I hat woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here
I() somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her:
when she stepped our of the car: ready to say Mom and let her gather
him in her arms.
In a little while, Howard woke up. He looked at the boy again.
Then he got up from the chair, stretched, and went over to stand beside her at the window. They both stared our at the parking lot. They
didn't say anything. Bur they seemed to feel each other's insides now,
:IS though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural
way.
The door opened and Dr. Francis came in. He was wearing a different suit and tie this time. His gray hair was combed along the sides of
his head, and he looked as if he had just shaved. He went straight to
the bed and examined the boy. "He ought to have come around by
• now. There's just no good reason for this," he said. "But I can tell you
we're all convinced he's our of any danger. We'll just feel better when
he wakes up. There's no reason, absolutely none, why he shouldn't
/
come around. Very soon. Oh, he'll have himself a dilly of a headache
when he does, you can count on that. But all of his signs are fine.
They're as normal as can be."
"It is a coma, then?" Ann said.
:
The doctor rubbed his smooth cheek. "We'll call it that for the
time being, until he wakes up. But you must bewoen out. This is
i hard. I know this is hard. Feel free to go out for a bite," he said. "It
\would d~ you good. I'll put a nutse in here while you're gone if ~ou'll
feel bette.c about going. Go and have yourselves somethmg to eat.
"I couldn't eat anything," Ann said.
"Do what you need to do, of course," the doctor said. "Anyway, I
wanted to tell you that all the signs are good, the tests are negative,
nothing showed up at all, and just as soon as he wakes up he'll be over
the hill."
"Thank you, doctor," Howard said. He shook hands with the doctor
again. The doctor patted Howard's shoulder and went out.
"I suppose one of us should go home and check on things," Howard
said. "Slug needs to be fed, for one thing."
~
"Call one of the neighbors," Ann said. "Call the Morgans. Anyone
will feed a dog if you ask them to."
"All right," Howard said. After a while, he said, "Honey, why don't
yot! do it? Why don't you go home and check on things, and then
come back? It'll do you good. I'll be right here with him. Seriously,"
he said. "We need to keep up our strength on this. We'll want to be
here for a while even after he wakes up."
"Why don't you go?" she said. "Feed Slug. Feed yourself."
"I already went," he said. "I was gone ror exactly an hour and fifteen
j minutes.
You go home for an hour and freshen up. Then come back."
She tried to think about it, but she was too tired. She closed her
eyes and tried to think about it again. After a time, she said, "Maybe I
will go home for a few minutes. Maybe if I'm not just sitting right
here watching him every second, he'll wake up and be all right. You
know? Maybe he'll wake up if I'm not here. I'll go home and take a
bath and put on clean clothes. I'll feed Slug. Then I'll come back."
"I'll be right here," he said. "You go on home, honey. I'll keep an
eye on things here." His eyes were bloodshot and small, as if he'd been
drinking for a long time. His clothes were rumpled. His beard had
come out again. She touched his face, and then she took her hand back.
She understood he wanted to be by himself for a while, not have to
talk or share his worry for a time. She picked her purse up from the
nightstand, and he helped her into her coat.
"I won't be gone long," she said.
"Just sit and rest for a little while when you get home," he said.
"Eat something. Take a bath. Mter you get out of the bath, just sit for
a while and rest. It'll do you a world of good, you'll see. Then come
back," he said. "Let's try not to worry. You heard what Dr. Francis said."
She stood in her coat for a minute trying to recall the doctor's exact
words, looking for any nuances, any hint of something behind his
words other than what he had said. She tried to remember if his expression had changed any when he bent over to examine the child. She
remembered the way his features had composed themselves as he rolled
back the child's eyelids and then listened to his breathing.
She went to the door, where she turned and looked back. She
looked at the child, and then she looked at the father. Howard nodded.
She stepped out of the room and pulled the door closed behind her.
She went past the nurses' station and down to the end of the corridor, looking for the elevator. At the end of the corridor, she turned to
her right and entered a little waiting room ~
wicker chairs. There was a middle-aged man in a khaki shirt and
pants, a' baS"eballcap pushed back on his head. A large woman wearing
,1 housedress and slippers was slumped in one of the chairs. A teenaged
girl in jeans, hair done in dozens of little braids, lay stretched out in
one of rhe chairs smoking a cigarette, her legs crossed at the ankles.
The family swung their eyes to Ann as she entered the room. The little
{able was littered with hamburger wrappers and Styrofoam cups.
"Franklin," the large woman said as she roused herself. "Is it about
Franklin?" Her eyes widened. "Tell me now, lady," the woman said. "Is
it about Franklin?" She was trying to rise from her chair, but the man
had closed his hand over her arm.
"Here, here," he said. "Evelyn."
''I'm sorry," Ann said. 'Tm'looking for the elevator. My son is in
{he hospital, and now I can't find the elevator."
"Elevator is down that way, turn left," the man said as he aimed a
linger.
The girl drew on her cigarette and stared at Ann. Her eyes were
narrowed to slits, and her broad lips parted slowly as she let the smoke
('scape. The Negro woman let her head fall on her shoulder and looked
Hwayfrom Ann, no longer interested.
"My son was hit by a car," Ann said to the man. She seemed to
Ileed to explain herself. "He has a concussion and a little skull fracture,
hut he's going to be all right. He's in shock now, but it might be some
kind of coma, too. That's what really worries us, the coma part. I'm
• going out for a little while, but my husband is with him. Maybe he'll
wake up while I'm gone."
\
"That's too bad," the man said and shifted in the chair. He shook
t. his head. He looked down at the table, and then he looked back at
Ann. She was still standing there. He said, "Our Franklin, he's on the
operating table. Somebody cut him. Tried to kill him. There was a
fight where he was at. At this party. They say he was just standing and
watching. Not bothering nobody. But that don't mean nothing these
days. Now he's on the operating table. We're JUSthoping and praying,
that's all we can do now." He gazed at het steadily.
Ann I09ked at the girl again, who was still watching het, and at the
older woman, who kept her head down, but whose eyes were now
closed. Ann saw the lips moving silently, making words. She had an
urge to ask what those words were. She wanted to talk more with these
people who were in the sa!lle kind of waiting she was in. She was
aftaid, and they were afraid. They had that in common. She would
have liked to have said something else about the accident, told them
I more about Scotty, that it had happened on the day· of his birthday,
\ Monday, and that he was still unconscious. Yet she didn't know how to
begin. She stood looking at them without saying anything more.
She went down the corridor the man had indicated and found the
elevator. She waited a minute in front of the closed doors, still wondering if she was doing the right thing. Then she put out her finger and
.Jl. touched the button.
~~ ,\VI> .oCt.."
C"',. v"""
She pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. She closed her eyes
and leaned her head against the wheel for a minute. She listened to the
ticking sounds the engine made as it began to cool. Then she got out
of the car. She could hear the dog barking inside the house. She went
to the front door, which was unlocked. She went inside and turned on
lights and put on a kettle of water for tea. She opened some dogfood
and fed Slug on the back porch. The dog ate in hungry li.t.r;1esmacks. It
kept running into the kitchen to see that-;he was going to stay. As she
sat down on the sofa with her tea, the telephone rang.
"Yes!" she said as she answered. "Hello!"
"Mrs. Weiss," a man's voice said. It was five o'clock in the morning,
and she thought she could hear machinery or equipment of some kind
in the background.
"Yes, yes! What is it?" she said. "This is Mrs. Weiss. This is she.
What is it, please?" She listened to whatever it was in the background.
"Is it Scotty, for Christ's sake?"
"Scotty," the man's voice said. "It's about Scotty, yes. It has to do
with Scotty, that problem. Have you forgotten about SCOtty?"the man
said. Then he hung up.
-)
She dialed the hospital's number and asked for the third floor. She
demanded information about her son from the nurse who answered the
relephone. Then she asked to speak to her husband. It was, she said, an
emergency.
She waited, turning the telephone cord in her fingers. She closed
her eyes and felt sick at her stOmach. She would have to make herself
eat. Slug came in from the back porch and lay down near her feet. He
wagged his tail. She pulled at his ear while he licked her fingers.
Howard was on rhe line.
"Somebody just called here," she said. She twisted the telephone
cord. "He said it was about Scotty," she cried.
"Scotty's fine," Howard told her. "I mean, he's srill sleeping. There's .
been no cbange. Tbe nurse bas been in twice since you've been gone. A
nurse or else a doctor. He's all right."
"This man called. He said it was about Scotty," she told him.
"Honey, you rest for a little while, you need the rest. It must be
Lhat same caller I had. Just forget it. Come back down here after you've
rested. Ihen wetl-lmve breakfast or something."
"Breakfast," she said. "I don'r want any breakfast."
"You know what I mean," he said. "Juice, something. I don't know.
I don't know anything, Ann. Jesus, I'm not hungry, either. Ann, it's
hard to talk now. I'm standing here at the desk. Dr. Francis is coming
again at eight o'clock this morning. He's going ro have something to
rell us then, something more definite. That's what one of the nurses
said. She didn't know any more than that. Ann? Honey, maybe we'll
know something more then. At eight o'clock. Come back here before
eight. Meanwhile, I'm right here and Scotty's all right. He's Still the
same," he added.
"I was drinking a cup of tea," she said, "when the telephone rang.
They said it was about Scotty. There was a noise in the background.
Was there a noise in the background on that call you had, Howard?"
"I don't remember," he said. "Maybe the driver of the car, maybe iV', ,'"
he's a psychopath and found out about Scotty somehow. But I'm here I
with him. Just rest like you were going to do. Take a bath and come
back by seven or so, and we'll talk to the doctor togetber when he gets
here. It's going to be all right, honey. I'm here, and there are doctors
:lnd nurses around. They say his condition is stable."
"I'm scared to death," she said.
She ran water, undressed, and got into the rub. She washed and
Iried quickly, not taking the time to wash her hair. She put on clean
underwear, wool slacks, and a sweater. She went into the living room,
where the dog looked up at her and let its tail thump once against
the floor. It was just starting to get light outside when she went out to
the car.
She drove into the parking lot of the hospital and found a space
close to the front door. She felt she was in some obscure way responsible for what had happened to the child. She let her thoughts move to
the Negro family. She remembeted
the name Franklin and the table
that was covered with hamburger papers, and the teenaged girl staring
at her as she drew on her cigarette. "Don't have children," she told the
girl's image as she entered the front door of the hospital. "For God's
sake, don't."
She took the elevator up to the third floor with two nurses who were
just going on duty. It was Wednesday morning, a few minutes before
seven. There was a page for a Dr. Madison as the elevator doors slid
open on the third floor. She got off behind the nurses, who turned in
the other direction and continued the conversation she had interrupted
when she'd gotten into the elevator. She walked down the corridor to
the little alcove where the Negro family had been waiting. They were
gone now, but the chairs were scattered in such a way that it looked as
if people had just jumped up from them the minute before. The tabletop was cluttered with the same cups and papers, the ashtray was filled.
with cigarette butts.
She stopped at the nurses' station. A nurse was standing behind the
counter, brushing her hair and yawning.
"There was a Negro boy in surgery last night," Ann said. "Franklin
was his name. His family was in the waiting room. I'd like to inquire
abour his condition."
A nurse who was sitting at a desk behind the coumer looked up
from a chatt in front of her. The telephone buzzed and she picked up
the receiver, but she kept her eyes on Ann.
"He passed away," said the nurse at the counter. The nurse held the
hairbrush and kept looking at her. "Are you a friend of the family or
! what/"
"
"I met the family last night," Ann said. "My own son is in the hospital. I guess he's in shock. We don't know for sure what's wrong. I
just wondered about Franklin, that's all. Thank you." She moved down
the corridor. Elevator doors the same color as the walls slid open and a
gaunt, bald man in white pants and white canvas shoes pulled a heavy
cart off the elevator. She hadn't noticed these doors last night. The man
wheeled the cart out into the corridor and stopped in front of the room
nearest the elevator and consulted a clipboard. Then he reached down
and slid a tray out of the cart. He rapped lightly on the door and entered the toom. She could smell the unpleasant odors of warm food as
she passed the cart. She hurried on without looking at any of the
nurses and pushed open the door to the child's room.
Howard was standing at the window with his hands behind his
back. He rurned around as she came in.
"How is he/" she said. She went over to the bed. She dropped her
purse on the floor beside the nightstand. It seemed to her she had been
gone a long time. She touched the child's face. "Howard/"
"Dr. Francis was here a little while ago," Howard said. She looked
at him closely and thought his shoulders were bunched a little.
"I thought he wasn't coming until eight o'clock this morning," she
said quickly.
"There was another doctor with him. A neurologist."
"A neurologist," she said.
Howard nodded. His shoulders were bunching, she could see that.
"What'd they say, Howardl For Christ's sake, what'd they sayl What
.
IS
. I"
It.
"They said they're going to take him down and run more rests on
him, Ann. They think they're going to operate, honey. Honey, they are
going to operate. They can't figure our why he won't wake up. It's
more than just shock or concussion, they know that much now. It's in
his skull, the fracture, it has something, something to do with that,
I hey think. So they're going to operate. I tried to call you, but I guess
you'd already left the house."
"Oh, God," she said. "Oh, please, Howard, please," she said, taking
his arms.
"Look!" Howard said. "Scotty! Look, Ann!" He turned her toward
I he bed.
The boy had opened his eyes, then closed them. He opened them
again now. The eyes stared straight ahead for a minute, then moved
slowly in his head until they rested on Howard and Ann, then traveled
awayagam.
"Scorry," his mother said, moving to the bed.
"Hey, Scott," his father said. "Hey, son."
They leaned over the bed. Howard took the child's hand in his
hands and began to pat and squeeze the hand. Ann bent over the boy
and kissed his forehead again and again. She put her hands on either
side of his face. "Scotty, honey, it's Mommy and Daddy," she said.
"Scotty?"
The boy looked at them, but without any sign of recognition. Then
his mouth opened, his eyes scrunched closed, and he howled until he
lwei no more air in his lungs. His face seemed to relax and soften then.
I I is lips parted as his last breath was puffed through his throat and exhided gently through the clenched teeth.
have to be cleared
The doctors called it a hidden occlusion and said it was a one-in-amillion circumstance.
Maybe if it could have been detected somehow
, and surgery undertaken immediately, they could have saved him. But
more than likely not. In any case, what would they have been looking
for? Nothing had shown up in the tests or in the X-rays.
Dr. Francis was shaken. "I can'r tell you how badly I feel. I'm so
very sorry, I ean't tell you," he said as he led them into the docrors'
lounge. There was a doctor sitting in a chair with his legs hooked over
the back of another chair, watching an early-morning
TV show. He
was weating a green delivery room outfir, loose green pants and green
blouse, and a green cap that covered his hair. He looked at Howard
and Ann and then looked at Dr. Francis. He got to his feet and turned
off the set and went out of the room. Dr. Francis guided Ann to the
sofa, sat down beside her, and began to talk in a low, consoling voice.
At one point, he leaned over and embraced her. She could feel his chest
rising and falling evenly against her shoulder. She kept her eyes open
and let him hold her. Howard went into the bathroom, but he left the
door open. After a violent fit of weeping, he ran water and washed his
face. Then he came out and sat down at the little table that held "arelephone. He looked at the telephone as though deciding what to do first.
He made some calls. After a time, Dr. Francis used the telephone.
"Is there anything else I can do for the moment'"
he asked them.
Howard shook his head. Ann stared at Dr. Francis as if unable to
comprehend his words.
The doctor walked them to the hospital's frout door. People were
entering and leaving the hospital. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. Ann was aware of how slowly, almost reluctantly, she moved her
feet. It seemed to her that Dr. Francis was making them leave when
she felt they should stay, when it would be more the right thing to do
to stay. She gazed out into the parking lot and then turned around and
looked back at the front of the hospital. She began shaking her head.
"No, no," she said. "I can't leave him here, no." She heard herself say
that and thought how unfair it was that the only words that came out
were the sort of words used on TV shows where people were stunned
by violent or sudden deaths. She wanted her words to be her own.
"No," she said, and for some reason the memory of the Negro woman's
head lolling on the woman's shoulder came to her. "No," she said
again.
"I'll be talking to you later in the day," the doctor was saying to
Howard. "There are still some things that have to be done, things that
up to our satisfaction.
Some
things
that
need
explaining."
"An autopsy," Howard said.
Dr. Francis nodded.
"I understand," Howard said. Then he said, "Oh, Jesus. No, I don't
understand, docror. I can't, I can't. I JUSt can't."
Dr. Francis put his arm around Howard's shoulders. 'Tm sorry. God,
how I'm sorry." He let go of Howard's shoulders and held out his hand.
Howard looked at the band, and then he took it. Dr. Francis put his
arms around Ann once more. He seemed full of some goodness she
didn't understand. She let her head rest on his shoulder, but her eyes
stayed open. She kepr looking at the hospital. As they drove out of the
parking lot, she looked back at rhe hospital.
At home, sbe sat on the sofa with her hands in her coat pockets. Howard closed the door to the child's room. He got the coffee-maker going
and then he found an empty box. He had thought to pick up some of /
the child's things that were scattered around the living room. Bur instead he sat down beside her on the sofa, pushed the box to one SIde,
and leaned forward, arms between his knees. He began to weep. She
pulled his head over into her lap and patted his shoulder. "He's gone,"
she said. She kept patting his shoulder. Over his sobs, she could hear
the coffee-maker hissing in the kitchen. "There, there," she said tenderly. "Howard, he's gone. He's gone and now we'll have to get used to
that. To being alone."
In a little while, Howard got up and began moving aimlessly
around the room with the box, not putting
anything
into it, bur
collecting some things together on the floor at one end of the sofa.
She continued to sit with her hands in her coat pockets. Howard put
the box down and brought coffee into the living room. Later, Ann
made calls to relatives. After each call had been placed and the party
had answered, Ann would blurt our a few words and cry for a minute. Then she would quietly explain, in a measured voice, what had
happened and tell them about arrangements.
Howard took the box
out to the garage, where he saw the child's bicycle. He dropped the
box and sat down on the pavement beside the bicycle. He took hold
of the bicycle awkwardly so that it leaned against his chest. He held
it, the rubber pedal sticking into his chest. He gave the wheel a
turn.
Ann hung up the telephone after talking to her sister. She was look• ing up another number when the telephone rang. She picked it up on
the first ring.
J
J
"Hello," she said, and she heard something in the background, a
humming noise. "Hello!" she said. "For God's s~ke," she said. "Who is
this? What is it you want?"
!
"Your Scotty, I got him ready for you," the man's voice said. "Did
you forget him?"
"You evil bastard!" she shouted into the receiver. "How can you do
this, you evil son of a bitch?"
"Scotty," the man said. "Have you forgotten about Scotty?" Then
the man hung up on het.
Howard heard the shouting and came in to find her with her head
on her arms over the table, weeping. He picked. up the receiver and listened to the dial tone.
Much later, just before midnight, after they had dealt with many things,
the telephone rang again.
"You answer it," she said. "Howard, it's him, r know." They were
sitting at the kitchen table with coffee in front of them. Howard had
a small glass of whiskey beside his cup. He answered on the third ring.
"Hello," he said. "Who is this' Hello! Hello'" The line went dead.
"He hung up," Howard said. "Whoever it was."
"It was him," she said. "That bastard, I'd like to kill him," she said.
''I'd like to shoot him and watch him kick," she said.
"Ann, my God," he said.
"Could you hear anything?" she said. "In the background? A noise,
machinery, something humming?"
"Nothing, really. Nothing like that," he said. "There wasn't much
time. I think there was some radio music. Yes, there was a radio going,
that's all r could tell. I don't know what in God's name is going on,"
he said.
'vi-:.
She shook her head. "If I could, could get my bands on bim." It
came to her then. She knew who it was. Scotty, the cake, the telephone
number. She pushed the chair away from the table and got up. "Drive
me down to the shopping center," sbe said. "Howard."
"What are you saying?"
"The shopping center. I know who it is who's calling. I know who
it is. It's the baker, the son-of-a-bitching baker, Howard. I had him
bake a cake for Scotty's birthday. That's who's calling. That's who has
the number and keeps calling us. To harass us about tbat cake. The
baker, tbat bastatd."
'f/';
They drove down to the shopping center. The sky was clear and stars
were out. It was cold, and they ran the heater in the car. They parked
in front of the bakery. All of the shops and stores were closed, but there
were cars at the far end of the lot in front of the movie theater. The
hakery windows were dark, but wben they looked through tbe glass
they could see a light in the back room and, now and then, a big man
in an apron moving in and out of the white, even light. Tbrough the
glass, she could see the display cases and some little tables with chairs.
She tried the door. She rapped on the glass. But if the baker heard
them, he gave no sign. He didn't look in their direction.
They drove around behind the bakery and parked. They got out of
the car. Thete was a lighted window too high up for them to see in~ide. A sign near the back door said THE PANTRY BAKEHY, SPECIAL
ORDERS. She could hear faintly a tadio playing inside and something
creak - an oven door as it was pulled down? She knocked on the door
ilnd waited. Then she knocked again, louder. The radio was turned
down and there was a scraping sound now, the distinct sound of something, a drawer, being pulled open and then closed.
Someone unlocked tbe door and opened it. The baker stood in the
light and peered out at them. "I'm closed for business," he said. "What
do you want at this hour? It's midnight. Are you drunk or something?"
She stepped into the light that fell through the open door. He
hlinked his heavy eyelids as he recognized her. "It's you," he said.
"It's me," she said. "Scotty's mother. This is Scotty's father. We'd
like to come in."
The baker said, "I'm busy now. I have work to do."
She had stepped inside the doorway anyway. Howard came in behind her. The baker moved back. "It smells like a bakery in here.
Doesn't it smell like a bakery in here, Howard?"
"What do you want?" the baker said. "Maybe you want your cake?
That's it, you decided you want your cake. You ordered a cake, didn't
you?"
"You're pretty smart for a baker," she said. "Howard, this is the
man who's been calling us." She clenched her fists. She stated at him
rlercely. There was a deep burning inside her, an anger that made her (/
Ice! larger than herself, larger than either of these~
"Just a minute here," the baker said. "You want to pick up your
I hree-day-old cake? That it? I don't want to argue with you, lady.
There it sits over there, getting stale. I'll give it to you for half of what
I quoted you. No. You want it? You can have it. It's no good to me, no
good to anyone now. It cost me time and money to make that cake. If
you want it, okay, if you don't, that's okay, too. I have to get back to
work." He looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth.
"More cakes," she said. She knew she was in concrol of it, of what
was increasing in her. She was calm.
"Lady, I work sixteen hours a day in this place to earn a living," the
haker said. He wiped his hands on his apron. "I work night and day in
here, trying to make ends meet." A look crossed Ann's face that made
/ the baker move back and say, "No trouble, now." He reached to the
counter and picked up a rolling pin with his right hand and began to
tap it against the palm of his other hand. "You want the cake or not? I
have to get back to work. Bakers work at night," he said again. His
eyes were small, mean-looking, she thought, nearly lost in the bristly
flesh around his cheeks. His neck was thick with fat.
"I know bakers work at night," Ann said. "They make phone calls
at night, too. You bastard," she said.
The baker' continued to tap the rolling pin against his hand. He
glanced at Howard. "Careful, careful," he said to Howard.
"My son's dead," she said with a cold, even finality. "He was hit by
a car Monday morning. We've been waiting with him until he died.
But, of course, you couldn't be expected to know that, could you? Bakers can't know everything - can they, Mr. Baker? But he's dead. He's
dead, you bastard!" Just as suddenly as it had welled in her, the anger
dwindled, gave way to something else, a dizzy feeling of nausea. She
leaned against the wooden table that was sprinkled with flour, put her
hands over her face, and began to cry, her shoulders rocking back and
forth. "It isn't fair," she said. "It isn't, isn't fair."
Howard put his hand at the small of her back and looked at the
baker. "Shame on you," Howard said to him. "Shame."
The baker put the rolling pin back on the counter. He undid his
apron and threw it on the counter. He looked at them, and then he
shook his head slowly. He pulled a chair out from under the card table
that held papers and receipts, an adding machine, and a t~one
di,tecrory. "Please sit down," he said. "Let me get you a chair," he said
to Howard. "Sit down now, please." The baker went into the front of
the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs. "Please sit
down, you people."
Ann wiped her eyes and looked at the baker. "I wanted to kill you,"
she said. "I wanted you dead."
The baker had cleared a space for them at the table. He shoved the
adding machine to one side, along with the stacks of notepaper and receipts. He pushed the telephone directory onto the floor, where it
landed with a thud. Howard and Ann sat down and pulled their chairs
up to the table. The baker sat down, too.
"Let me say how sorry I am," the baker said, putting his elbows on
the table. "God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I'm just a baker.
I don't claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a
different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.
But I'm nor any longer, if I ever was. Now I'm just a baker. That don't
excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I'm deeply sorry. I'm sorry
for your son, and sorry for my part in this," the baker said. He spread
his hands out on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms. "I
don't have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must
be feeling. All I can say to you now is that I'm sorry. Forgive me, if
you can," the baker said. 'Tm not an evil man, I don't think. Not evil,
like you said on rhe phone. You got to understand what it comes down
to is I don't know how to act anymore, it would seem. Please," the man
said, "let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?"
It was warm inside the bakety. Howard stood up from the table and
took off his coat. He helped Ann from her. coat. The baker looked at
them for a minute and then nodded and got up from the table. He
went to the oven and turned off some switches. He found cups and
poured coffee ftom an electric coffee-maker. He put a carton of cream
on the table, and a bowl of sugar.
"You probably need to eat something," the baker said. "I hope
you'll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating ,
is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said.
He sern-d t em warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing
still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter.
Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He
waited until they each rook a roll from the platter and began to eat.
"It's good to eat something," he said, watching them. "There's more.
Ear up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world in here."
They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the
rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the
baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they
were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say.
They nodded when thebaker began to speak of loneliness, ancl of the
sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle
years. He told them what it was Jike to be childless all these years. To
repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The
party food, the celebrations he'd worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The
tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He
had a necessary rrade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn't a florist.
It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime
than flowers.
"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy
bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the
caste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate
what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight
under the fluorescent trays of light. Tl1f'Y talked on i~to the early
morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and tbey did not
lhink of leaving.
The birthday boy told his mother what had happened. They sat toge~her on the sofa. She held his hands in her lap. This is what she was
domg when the boy pulled his hands away and lay down on his back.
1
The Bath
\I't
{'oj
J
Saturday afternoon the mother drove to the bakery in the shopping
center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of
cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favorite.
The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and a hmnchmg pad
under a sprinkling of white stars. The name SCOTTY would be iced on
in green as if it were the name of the spaceship.
. ,
The baker listened thoughtfully when the mother told him Scotty
would be eight years old. He was an older man, this baker, and he
wore a curious apron, a heavy thing with loops that went under hiS
arms and around his back and then crossed in front again where they
were tied in a very thick knot. He kept wiping his hands on the front
of the apron as he listened to the woman, his wet eyes examining her
lips as she studied the samples and talked.
He let her take her time. He was in no hurry.
The mother decided on the spaceship cake, and then she gave the
baker her name and her telephone number. The cake would be ready
Monday morning, in plenty of time for the party Monday afternoon.
This was all the baker was willing to say. No pleasantries, just thiS
/ small exchange, the barest information, nothing that was not necessary.
Monday morning, the boy was walking to school. He was in the company of another boy, the tWOboys passing a bag of potat~ chips back
and forth between them. The birthday boy was trymg to trick the other
boy into telling what he was going to give in the way of a present.
.
At an intersection, without looking, the birthday boy stepped of(
, the curb, and was promptly knocked down by a car. He fell on his side,
his head in the gutter, his legs in the road moving as if he were climb-
:,li
',:,-
ing a wall.
'
.
Tn5'-other boy stood holding the potato chips. He was wondenng jf'
he should finIsh the rest or continue on to school.
The birthday boy did not cry. But neither did he wish to talk any~
more. He would not answer when the other boy asked what it felt lik.'
to be hit by ,1 car. The birthday boy got up and turned bac~(~or homu,
at which time the other boy waved good-bye ;111(\ headed otf tor school,
-1 birthday party never happened. The birthday boy was in
Of -c~~~~,Jhe
1 he nospital instead. The mother sat by the bed. She was waiting for
(he boy to wake up. The father hurried over from his office. He sat next
~(~the mother. So now the both of them waited for the boy to wake up.
Ihey waited for hours, and then the father went home to take a bath.
The man drove home from the hospital. He drove the streets faster
Ihan he should. It had been a good life till now. There had been work,
latherhood, family. The man had been lucky and happy. But fear made
111111 want a bath.
---~'
'
H~d
into the driveway. He sat in the car trying to make his
Irgs work. Th~ child had been hit by a car and he was in the hospital,
hut he was gomg to be all right. The man got out of the car and went
\II' to the door. The dog was barking and the telephone was ringing. It
kl'pt nn~mg while the man unlocked the door and felt the wall for the
v'
vi •••.•.
light SWitch.
l
~e pic~ed up the receiver. He said, "I just gO[ in the door "
, fhere s a cake that wasn't picked up."
fhiS is what the voice on the other end said.
"What are you saying:>"the father said.
"The cake," the voice said. "Sixteen dollars."
The h~sband held the receiver against his ear, trying to understand.
Ill- Said, I don't know anything about it."
"Don't hand me that," the voice said.
The husband hung up the telephone. He went into the kitchen and
IlIt(~r:dhims~lf some whiskey. He called the hospitaL
I he child s condmon remamed the same.
While the water ran into the tub, the man lathered his face and
~It.lv(;d.He was in the tub when he heard the telephone again. He got
illIlIself out and hurned through the house, saying, "Stupid, stupid,"
1,,'( Huse he wouldn't be doing this if he'd stayed where he was in the
Itll''1Hral.He picked up the receiver and shouted, "Hello!"
'I'he v()i~esaid, "It's ready."
,'II<' father got back to the hospital after midnight. The wife was sit11111', Irt
the chair by the bed. She looked up at the husband and then
~\W looked back at the child. From an apparatus over the bed hung a
I H tllIe With a tube running from the bottle to the child.
"What's this?" the father said.
"Glucose," the mother said.
The husband put his hand to the back of the woman's head.
"He's going to wake up," the man said.
"I know," the woman said.
In a little while the man said, "Go home and let me take over."
She shook her head. "No," she said.
"Really," he said. "Go home for a while. You don't have to watry.
He's sleeping, is all."
A nurse; pushed open the door. She nodded to them as she went to
the bed. She took the left arm our from under the covers and put her
fingers on the wrist. She put the arm back under the covers and wrote
on the clipboard attached to the bed.
.
"How is he?" the mother said.
"Stable," the nurse said. Then she said, "Doctor will be in again
shortly."
"I was saying maybe she'd want to go home and get a little rest,"
the man said. "After the doctor comes."
"She could do that," the nurse said.
The woman said, "We'll see what the doctor says." She brought her
hand up to her eyes and leaned her head forward.
The nurse said, "Of course."
The father gazed at his son, the small chest inflating and deflating
under the covers. He tilt more fe-,!!,,E.ow.
He began shaking his head.
He talked to himself like this. The child is fine. Instead of sleeping at
home, he's doing it here. Sleep is the same wherever you do it.
The doctor came in. He shook hands with the man. The woman got up
from the chair.
"Ann," the doctor said and nodded. The doctor said, "let's just see
how he's doing." He moved to the bed and touched the boy's wrist. He
peeled back an eyelid and then the other. He turned back the covers
and listened to the heart. He pressed his fingers here and there on the
body. He went to the end of the bed and studied the chart. He noted
the time, scribbled on the chart, and then he considered the mother
and the father.
This doctor was a handsome man. His skin was moist and tan. He
wore a three-piece suit, a vivid tie, and on his shirt were cufflinks.
The mother was talking to herself"like'this. He has just come from
somewhere with an audience. They gave him a special medal.
The doctor said, "Nothing to shout about, but nothing to worry
about. He should wake up pretty soon." The doctor looked at the boy
again. "We'll know more after the tests are in."
"Oh, no," the mother said.
The doctor said, "Sometimes you see this."
The father said, "You wouldn't call this a coma, then?"
The father waited and looked at the doctor.
"No, I don't want to call it that," the doctor said. "He's sleeping.
It's restorative. The body is doing what it has to do."
"It's a coma," the mother said. "A kind of coma."
The doctor said, "I wouldn't call it that."
He took the woman's hands and patted them. He shook hands with
lhe husband.
The woman put her fingers on the child's forehead and kept them
there for a while. "At least he doesn't have a fever," she said. Then she
said, "I don't know. Feel his head."
The man put his fingers on the boy's forehead. The man said, "I
rhink he's supposed to feel this way."
The woman stood there awhile longer, working her lip with her
leeth. Then she moved to her chair and sat down.
The husband sat in the chair beside her. He wanted to say somerhing else. But there was no saying what it should be. He took her
hand and put ir in his lap. This made him feel better. It made him feel
he was saying something. They sat like that for a while, watching the
hoy, not talking. From time to time he squeezed her hand until she
took it away.
''I've been praying," she said.
"Me too," the father said. "I've been praying tOo."
A nurse came back in and checked the flow from the bottle.
A doctor came in and said' what his name was. This doctor was
wearing loafers.
"We're going to take him downstairs for more pictures," he said.
"And we want to do a scan."
"A scan?" the mother said. She stood between this new doctor and
the bed.
"It's nothing," he said.
"My God," she said.
Two orderlies came in. They wheeled a thing like a bed. They unhooked the boy from the tube and slid him over onto the thing with
wheels.
r t was after sunup when they brought the b~}'
oy",back out. The
mother and father followed the orderlies into the elevatOr and up to the
room. Once more the parents took up their places next to the bed.
.J
They waited all day. The boy did not wake up. The doctor came
again and examined the boy again and lefr after saying the same things
again. Nurses came in. Doctors came in. A technician came in and took
blood.
"I don't understand this," the mother said to the technician.
"Doctor's orders," the technician said.
The mother went to the window and looked out at the parking lot.
Cars with their lights on were driving in and out. She stood at the
window with her hands on the sill. She was talking to herself like this.
We're into something now, something hard.
She was afraid.
She saw a car stop and a woman in a long coat get into it. She made
believe she was that woman. She made believe she was driving away
from here to someplace else.
The doctor came in. He looked tanned and healthier than ever. He
went to the bed and examined the boy. He said, "His signs are fine.
Everything's good."
The mother said, "But he's sleeping."
"Yes," the doctor said.
The husband said, "She's tired. She's starved."
The doctor said, "She should rest. She should eat. Ann," the doctor
said.
"Thank you," the husband said.
He shook hands with the doctor and the doctor patted their shoulders and left.
J
"I suppose one of us should go home and check on things," the man
said. "The dog needs to be fed."
"Call the neighbors," the wife said. "Someone will feed him if you
ask them to."
She tried to think who. She closed her eyes and tried to think anything at all. After a time she said, "Maybe I'll do it. Maybe if I'm not
here watching, he'll wake up. Maybe it's because I'm watching that he
won't."
"That could be it," the husband said.
"I'll go home and take a bath and put on something clean," the
woman said.
-_.."I think you should do that," the man said.
She picked up her purse. He helped her into her coat. She moved to
the door, and looked back. She looked at the cl~ild, and then she looked
at the father. The husband nodded and smiled.
:'lll' went past the nurses' station and down to the end of the corridor,
where she turned and saw a little waiting room, a family in there, all
ing in wicker chairs, a man in a khaki shirr, a baseball cap pushed
IUl<'k on his head, a large woman wearing a housedress, slippers, a girl
III jeans, hair in dozens of kinky braids, the table littered with flimsy
wrappers and styrofoam and coffee sticks and packets of salt and
'1111
Ill'pper .
"Nelson," the woman said. "Is ir about Nelson?"
The woman's eyes widened.
"Tell me now, lady," the woman said. "Is it about Nelson?"
The woman was trying to get up from her chair. But the man had
Ids hand closed ovet her arm.
"Here, here," the man said.
"I'm sorry," the mother said. "I'm looking for the elevator. My son J
1\ in the hospital. I can't find the elevator."
"Elevator is down that way," the man said, and he aimed a finger in
IIll' right direction.
"My son was hit by a car," the mother said. "But he's going to be
1111 right. He's in shock now, but it might be some kind of coma too.
J'hat's what worries us, the coma part. I'm going out for a little while.
Maybe I'll take a bath. But my husband is with him. He's watching.
'J'here's a chance everything will change when I'm gone, ~L ~is
Alln Weiss,"
.Th~~an shifted in his chair, He shook his head.
He said, "Our Nelson."
pulled into the driveway. The'dog ran out from behind the house.
lie ran in circles on the grass. She closed her eyes and leaned her head
'1,I~ainstthe wheel. She listened to the ticking of the engine.
She got out of the car and went to the door. She turned on lights
IIIIII put on water for tea, She opened a can and fed the dog. She sat
,Iown on the sofa with her tea.
The telephone rang.
"Yes!" she said. "Hello!" she said.
"Mrs. Weiss," a man's voice said.
"Yes," she said. "This is Mrs. Weiss. Is it about Scotty?" she said.
"SCOtty,"the voice said, "It is about Scotty," the voice said. "It has
111 do with Scotty, yes,"
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inclusion in Fires Carver titled it "On Writing." The essay "Fin:M"
was first published in the autumn 1982 issue of Antacus. It appeared
in slightly different torm in the £.1111982 issue of Syracwe Scholar
Carver had written "Fires" at the request of editors Ted Solotarolt
and Stephen Berg for inclusion in the Harper & Row anthology 11/
Praise of What Persists, and it appeared in tl1at book in I983. 'II1\'
fourth essay, "Introduction to Whn'c I'm Calling From," original I
appeared as "A Special Message for the First Edition" prefaced t'o
the signed, limited edition of Whe1'e I'm Calli1Jg Front: New am{
Selected St01'ies published by the Franklin Library in 1988. For de
scriptive purposes the essay was editorially renamed "On Where I'1II
Calling Front" when it was posthumously included among Carver'M
uncollected writings in No Rel'oics, Plqase (1991) and Call If Tim
Need Me (2000). This volume prints the essay t1'om the Franklin
Library eclition under the title "Introduction to Where FIn Calling
F1'om."
Begirmers:
The Manuscript
Ver'sion of
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Beginners is the manuscript version of the 17 stories that were pub·
lished in book form as What We Talfz About When We Tal/z Abonl
Love by Alfred A. Knopf on April 20, 1981. The manuscript, which
Carver's editor Gordon Lish shortened to less than half its original
length in two rounds of close line-editing, is preserved in the Lilly
Library of Indiana University. The editors of this volume have restored the stories to their original forms by transcribing Carver's
typewritten words that lie beneath Lish's alterations in ink on the
typescripts. For ease of comparison, and because Carver's manuscript
included no title page or table of contents, the stories in tllis section
are arranged in the same sequence as in What We Talk About When
We Talk About Love. The title, Beginners, has been provided by the
editors because the story "Beginners" corresponds to the title story
of What We Talk AbOl~t When We Talfz Aboltt Love.
Lish was a literary mainstay during Carver's alcoholic years of the
1970S. He published Carver's fiction in Esquire, recommended him
to editors and agents in New York City, and made possible the publication of his first collection of .stories, Will You Please Be Quiet,
Please?, in 1976. In the years that followed, Carver's life changed. On
June 2, 1977, be stopped drinking. In 1978 his first marriage ended in
separation (divorce would follow in 1982), and in 1979 he began living
with tile writer Tess Gallagher. After years of temporary jobs and un·
employment he was appointed senior professor of English at Syra-'
cuse University, where he began teaching in January 1980. During
these same years Lish left Esqltire and joined the publishing firm of
Alfred A. Knopf. The twO men kept in contact by Jetter and discussed the possibility of publishing a new collection of Carver's fiction under Lisb's editorship at Knopf. In early May 1980 they met in
New York City, where Carver gave Lish a manuscript of new and revised short stories.
From Carver's perspective, the manuscript he gave Lish was substantially complete. Ush had previously edited several of the stories,
and the bulk of them had been published in periodicals and/or
small-press books. Nonetheless, shortly after returning to Syracuse,
Carver evidently received a query. In a letter dated May TO, 1980, he
told Lish "not to worry about taking a pencil to the stories if you
can make them berter." He added, "If you see ways to put more
muscle in the stories, don't hesitate to do so." He valued his editor's
skills so higbly that he offered to pay the cost of retyping if the
marked-up manuscript required it.
While Carver finisbed the semester in Syracuse and prepared to
travel to tbe Pacific Northwest tor the summer, Lish edited tlle manuscript. As he later said, what struck him in Carver's writing was "a
peculiar bleakness." To foreground that bleakness, he cut the stories
radically, reducing plot, c1laracter development, and figurative language to a minimum. Some stories were sbortened by a third, several by more than a half, and two by three-quarters of their original
length. The overall reduction of the manuscript in word count was 55%·
Lisb worked quickly, cutting the stories to his pattern for tlle
book. The project was on a fast track. Five weeks after receiving the
manuscript, he mailed a revised and retyped version to Syracuse. It
arrived just as Carver and Gallagher were departing tor Alaska. After
failing to reach Lish by telephone, Carver mailed him a note on June
13, 1980, and promised to call later. "The collection loo{zs terrific,
though I haven't been abl.e to read more tban the title page-which
title is fine, I think." He enclosed payment for the typist, gave a
mailing address in Fairbanks, and left without examining the edited
manuscript.
While Carver and Gallagher participated in the Midnight Sun
Writers' Conference, Lish edited the collection a second time. Once
again he had the manuscript retyped. At the end oOune, while Gallagher remained in Port Angeles, Carver briefly returned to Syracuse.
There he awaited the second edited version of the manuscript, apparently without having read the first revision. On July 4-, 1980, he
wrote Lish tllat the "revised collection" had not yet arrived. Time
was short, since he was scheduled to fly back to Washington State in
ten days. To cover the second rOlllld of typing costs, he enclosed a
blank check. On July 7 he received what Lish presented as the finished text of the book. Wben he read the edited manuscript he was
shocked by the extensive changes that he found. "A Small, Good
Thing," a 37-page story, had been cut to 12 pages and renamed "The
Bath." A 26-page story, "If It Please You," had been cut to 14-pages
and renamed "Community Center." (Lish later changed the title to
"After the Denim.") A Is-page story, "VVhereIs Everyone?" had been
shortened to five pages and renamed "Mr. CoHee and Mr. Fixit."
"Beginners," a 33-page story, had been cut to 19 pages and renamed
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Even "Mine,"
a soo-word story previously edited by Lish and published twice, had
been further condensed and renamed "Popular Mechanics."
Ati:er a sleepless night, cady on the morning of July 8, 1980,
Carver wrote an anguished letter.
Dearest Gordon,
I've got to pull out of this one. Please hear me. f've been up
all night thinking on this, and nothing but this, so help me.
I've looked at it from every side, I've compared both versions
of the edited mss-the first one is better, t truly believe, jf
some things arc carried over fi-om the second to the firstuntil my eyes are neady to fall out of my head. You are a wonder, a genius, and there's no doubt of that, better than any
two of Max Perkins, etc. ete. And I'm not unmindful of the
fact of my immense debt to you, a debt I can simply never,
never repay. This whole new life I have, so many of the friends
I now have, this job up here, everything, I owe to yOLLfor
WILL YOU PLEASE. You've given me some degree of immortality already. You've made so many of the stories in this
collection better, far better than they were before. And maybe
if I were alone, by myself, and no one had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing that your versions are better than
some of the ones I sent, maybe I could get into this and go
with it. But Tess has seen all of these and gone over them
closely. Donald Hall has seen many of the new ones (and discussed them at length with me and oftered his services in
reviewing the collection) and Richard Ford, Toby Wolft~
-Geoffrey Wolff, too, some of them. This new issue of TRIQUAR.TERLY, out a few days ago, has a story by Toby W,
one by Ford, Kittredge, McGuane, and "WI, ere Is Everyone?"
("Mr. Fixit"). How can I explain to these fellows when I see
them, as I will see them, what happened to the story in the
meantime, after its book publication? Maybe if the book were
not to come out for 18 months or two years, it would be different. But right now, everything is too new. Why TRI-
QUARTERLY has just taken another one, but that will not,
cannot, come out until Fall-Winter 1981-1982. Gordon, the
changes arc hrilliant and tor the better in most cases-I look
at "What We Talk About.
." ("Beginners") and I see what
it is that you've done, what you've pulled out of it, and I'm
awed and astonished, startled even, with your insights. But it's
too close right now, that story. Now much of this has to do
with my sobriety and with m)' new-tound (and fi-agile, I see)
mental health and well-being. I'll tell you the truth, my very
sanity is on the line here. 1 don't want to sound melodramatic
here, but I've come back ti'om the grave here to start writing
stories once more. As I think you may know, I'd given up entirely, thrown it in and was looking tcwward to dying, that release. But I kept thinking, I'll wait until after the election to
kill myself~ or wait until ati:er this or that happened, usually
something down the road a ways, but it was never tar tI'om my
mind in those dark days, not all that long ago. Now, I'm incomparably better, I have my health back, money in the bank,
the right woman for this time of my lite, a decent job, blah
blah. But I haven't written a word since I gave you the collection, waiting for your reaction, that reaction means so much
to me. Now, I'm afraid, mortally afraid, I feel it, that if the
book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I
may never write anodlCr story, that's how closely, God Forbid,
some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health
and mental well-being. As I say, maybe if I had 18 months or
two years, some distance frol11 these pieces and a good deal
more writing under my belt, I could and would go with it.
Likely so. But I can't now. I just can't, I don't know what else
to say.
Please help me with this, Gordon. I teel as if tllis is the most
important decision I've ever been faced with, no shit. I ask tor
your understanding. Next to my wife, and now Tess, you have
been and are the most important individual in my life, and
that's the truth. I don't want to lose your love or regard over
this, oh God no. It would be like having a part of myself die,
a spiritual part. Jesus, I'm jabbering now. But if this causes you
undue complication and grief and you perhaps understandably
become pissed and discouraged with me, well, I'm the poorer
for it, and my life will not be the same again. True. On the
other hand, if the book comes out and I can't teel the kind of
pride and pleasure in it that I want, if I feel I've somehow too
far stepped out of bounds, crossed that line a litde too far, why
then I can't feel good about myself, or maybe even write
again; right now I feel it's that serious, and if I can't feci absolutely good about it, I feel I'd be done for. I do. Lord God
I just don't know what else to say. I'm awash with confusion
and paranoia. Fatigue too, dlat too.
Please, Gordon, tor God's sakc help me in this and try to
understand. Listen. I'll say it again, if I have any standing or
reputation or credibility in the world, I olVe it to you. I owe
you this more-or-less pretty interesting lite I have. But if I go
ahead with this as it is, it will not bc good I"Clrme. The book
will not be, as it should, a cause fc.)rjoyous celebration, but
one of defense and explanation. All this is complicatedly, and
maybe not so complicatedly, tied up with my feelings of worth
and self-esteem since I quit drinking. I just can't do it, I can't
take the risk as to what might happen to me. I know that the
discomfort of this decision of mine is at its highest now, it's
rampant, I feel nearly wild wid1 it. But I know it will cause you
grief as well, explanations, more work, stopping everything in
its tracks and coming up with valid reasons t(lr why. But, eventually, my discomfort and yours, will go away, there'll be a
grieving, I'm grieving right now, but it will go awa)'. But if I
don't speak now, and speak fi'om the heart, and halt things
now, I foresee a terrible time ahead for me. The demons I
have to deal with every day, or night, nearly, might, I'm afraid,
simply rise up and take me over.
Of course I know I shouldn't have signed the contract without first reading the collection and making my fears, if any,
known to you beforehand, before signing. So what should we
do now, please advise? Can you lay it all on me and get me out
of the contract someway? Can you put the book off until Winter or Spring of 1982 and let them know I want to have the
stories in the collection published in magazines first (and
that's d1e truth, several of them are committed to places with
publication way off next year)? Tell them I want the magazine
publications first, and then the book out when I'm Llp tor
tenure here that spring of 1982? And then decide next year
what, for sure, to do? Or else can or should everything just be
stopped now, I send back the Knopf check, if it's on the way,
or else you stop it there? And meanwhile I pay you for the
hours, days and nights, I'm sure, you've spent on this. Goddamn it, I'm just nearly crazy with this. I'm getting into a
state over it. No, I don't think it should be put off. I think it
had best be stopped.
I dl0Ught the editing, especially in the first version, was brilliant, as I said. The stories I can't let go of in their entirety are
these. "Community Center" (It Please You) and "The Bath"
(A Small Good Thing) and I'd want some more of the old
couple, Anna and Henry Gates, in "V\That We Talk About
When We Talk About Love" (Beginners). I would not want
"Mr. Fixit" (Where Is Everyone) in the book in its present
state. The story "Distance" should not have its title changed
to "Everything Stuck to Him." Nor the little piece "Mine" to
"Popular Mechanics." "Dummy" should keep its title. "A
Serious Talk" is fine tur "Pic." I think "Want to See Something?" is fine, is better than "I Could See the Smallest
Things." Otherwise, with the exception of little things here
and there, incorporating some of the changes from version #2
into #1, I could live with and be happy with. That little business at the end of "Pie" (A Serious Talk) him leaving the
house with the ashtray, that's just inspired and wonderful.
There are so many places like that the ms is stronger and
clearer and more wonderful. But I could not have "Mr. Fixit"
published the way it is in the present collection. Either the
wholc story, the one that's in T1UQUA.RTERLY now, or at
least the better part of it, or else not at all.
I'm just much too close to all of this right now. It's even
hard for me to think right now. J think, in all, maybe it's just
too soon for me for another collection. I know that next spring
is too soon in any case. Absolmcly too soon. I think I had best
pull am, Gordon, before it goes any further. I realize I stand
every chance of losing your love and fi'iendship over d1is. But
I strongly feel I stand every chance of losing my soul and my
mental healtll over it, if I don't take that risk. I'm still in the
process of recovery and trying to get well from the alcoholism,
and I just can't take any chances, somed1ing as momentous
and permanent as tl1is, dlat would put my head in some jeopardy. That's it, it's in my head. You have made so many of
these stories better, my God, with the lighter editing and trimming. But those others, those three, I guess, I'm liable to
croak if they came out that way. Even though they may be
closer to works of art than the originals and people be reading
them 50 years fr0111now, they're still apt to cause my demise,
I'm serious, they're so intimately hooked up with my getting
well, recovering, gaining back some little self-esteem and feeling of worth as a writer and a human being.
I know you must teel angry and betrayed and pissed atE
God's sake, I'm sorry. I can pay you for the time you've put in
on d1is, but I can't begin to help or do anything about the
trouble and grief I may be causing there in the editorial and
business offices that you'll have to go through. Forgive me for
this, please. But I'm just going to have to wait a while yet for
another book, 18 months, two years, it's okay now, as long as
I'm writing and have some sense of worth in the process. Your
fi'iendship and your concern and general championing of me
have meant, and mean still, more to me than I can ever say. I
could never begin to repay you, as you must know. I honor
and respect yOll, and I love. you more than my brother. But
you will have to get me olT the hook here Gordon, it's true. I
just can't go another step forward with this endeavor. So
please advise what to do now. I'm going out of town tomorrow, but I will be back Saturday. Monday morning I'm leaving
for the West Coast, Bellingham and Pt. Townsend, as I think
I mentioned, and I'll hook up with Tess out there and reUlrn
here on the 30th of T uly. My address here is
832 Maryland Avenue
Syracuse, NY I32TO
As I say, I'm confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid, yes, of the
consequences for me if the collection came Out in its present
form. So help me, please, yet again. Don't, please, make this
too hard for me, for I'm just likely to start coming unraveled
IGlowing how I've displeased and disappointed you. God
almighty, Gordon.
Ray [signed]
Please do the necessary things to stOp production of the book.
Please try and forgive me, this breach.
Not long afterward, Carver spoke to Lish by telephone. No record
of their conversation is preserved, but Lish's point of view prevailed.
The contract remained in force, and production of the book proceeded at filll speed. By this time the mechanisms of publication
were out of Carver's hands. He may not have realized this, because
he spent July 10, 1980, belatedly comparing the first and second
edited versions of the book. That evening he wrote Lish a letter filled
with equivocations. On the one hand, he was thrilled at the prospect
of a book with Knopf and deeply grateful to his editor. "It's a beauty
for sure," he began, "it is, and I'm honored and gratefill for your attentions to it." On the other hand, he had nagging doubts about the
cuts made to the stories. He proposed specific changes to the edited
text, "small enough" but "significant." These were largely restorations of material Lish had deleted during the second editing. "I have
serious questions or reservations," Carver wrote, "or I wouldn't
have marked the things I did." His fear was that the pared-down stories would malce his writing seem disjointed. "I'm mortally afraid of
taking out toO much fi'om the stories, of making them too thin, not
enough connecting tissue to them."
Rather than attempt to salvage "Where Is Everyone?" which had
been cut by more than three-quarters and renamed "Mr. CoHee and
Mr. Fixit," Carver requested that it be dropped fi'om the collection.
The original story was in press at TriOJtartedy, and he understood
that the editor was submitting it for a possible O. Henry Award.
Moreover, as a story about an alcoholic just beginning to face his
problems, "Where Is Everyone?" marked a turning point in his own
recovery. "I have a lot of rampant and complicated feelings about
that story," he explained, "no matter if it is never included in a book
in any torm whatsoever." He finished the letter the next morning,
restating that he was "thrilled with this book and that you're bringing it out with Knopf." Eager to rejoin Gallagher in Port Angeles,
he focused on endorsements and publicity. To build anticipation for
the new book, the previously unpublished stories would need to be
rushed into magazines. By the end of the letter, Carver had slipped
back into the deferential posture he had asslll1)ed toward Lish during
his drinking years. "lance told you I thought I could die happy after
having a story in E>'quire,"he wrote. "Now a book out with Knopf
-and such a book! And there'll be more, you'll see. I'm drawing a
long second wind," He closed "with my love" and promised he
would write again "sometime or another" in the future.
By the eve of Carver's departure from Syracuse, the night of Tuly
14-,1980, he had left the form of the book to his editor's discretion.
"1 know yOll have my best interests at heart," he said in a letter,
"and you'll do everything and more to further those interests." Not
wanting to be "a pest of an author," he asked only that Lish "please
look at" the restorations he had proposed: "if you think I'm being
my own worst enemy, you know, well then, stick to the final version
of the second edited version." The resistance he bad voiced a week
earlier had collapsed, as had his self-confidence. "Maybe I am wrong
in this, maybe you are 100% correct, just please give them another
hard look. That's all." His only firm directive was that "Mr. Coffee
and Mr. Fixit" should not be included in the book.
How did Lish respond to Carver's unease about the editing of
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love? In August 1998 he
told The NelP Y01'k Times Magazine, "My sense of it was that there
was a letter and that 1 just went ahead." In due course he sent
Carver proofs of What We Talk Abottt When We Talk Abottt Lope. "I
still haven't done anything but glance at the galleys you sent up,"
Carver wrote 011October 6, 1980. "Took the 'wind out of my sails
some when you said to send them back to you so soon without
reading them even." Had he read them, he would have found that
LICATION: "Why Don't You Dance?" Qj4aTteTly West, Autumn
1978; The PaTis Review, Spring 1981.The version in The Paris Review
was the product of Lish's first editing of Beginners. In 1977 Carver
had submitted a story entitled "Why Don't You Dance?" to Esquire.
Lish had edited it and changed the title to "I Am Going to Sit
Down," but no version ever appeared in Esquire. As published in
QJlartedy West the story included many but not all of Lish's suggested changes and is nearly identical to the text in Beginners.
SUBSEQUENT PUBLICATION: "Why Don't You Dance?" was
collected in WICF as it appeared in WWTA.
AbbTeviations
eainneTs,
untitled
mam.lscript preserve.,d amfoInr'~
B 2)
Beginners
I L II Lrbrary o·
the Gordon Lish papers rn t:te I Y
Wi
di'ma Univetsity as "R"ymond Carver, Wh~
e
T~l/l About, When We Talk About Love, . anu,
F'
D' fi:" Net edltonal reduction of
scnptIrst ra.
. .
of
each story in the manuscnpt ISext
wor d -coLIn
ressed as a percentage.
'.,
A
CathedTal ~athed1'al, first edition (New York: Alfred
'
Knopf, [983)
..
(S
Fins: Essays, Poems, StoTies, first edmon
anta
Barbara: Capra Press, 1983).
..
.
'S
d OtheT Stones (Santa Barbara.
Funous easons an
.
'
Capra Press, 1977). The papers ot Capra Press are
housed at the Lilly Library.
.
Whe1'eI'm Calling F1'om:New and Selected StOTles,
first edition (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
We Talh About When We Talli Ab?ut Love,
81
first edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopt, 19 )
I~J~t
.
. 8- O'emanuscript cut"by 9% for
Why Don't You Dance? Begmne~s, pa"'D
>" PREVIOUS PUB.
. . WWT:A 'lS "Whv Don t You ance.
mcluslon \l:l
<
}
Viewfinder. Beginners: 6-page manuscript cut by 30% for inclusion
in WWTA as "Viewfinder." PREVIOUS PUBLICATION: As "View
Finder," lima Review, Winter 1978, and Quarterly West, Spring-Summer 1978. These two versions, which are virtually identical, included
many of Lish's suggested changes to "The Mill," an earlier story by
Carver that remains unpublished. The title "The Mill" was based on
the handless man's observation: "You're going through the mill
now." Lish deleted that sentence and renamed the story "Viewfinder" based on a word that occurs twice in the original text. Eftorts to publish "Viewfinder" in EsquiTe came to a halt when Lish
ceased to be fiction editor in September 1977. The text in Quarterly
West is identical to the text in Beginners. SUBSEQUENT PUBLI·
CATION: None.
Where Is Everyone? Beginners: Is-page manuscript cut by 78% for
inclusion in WWTA as "Mr, Coffee and Mr. Fixit." PREVIOUS
PUBLICATION: "Where Is Everyone?" TriQuarterly, Spring 1980.
The text in TriQuarterly is identical to the text in Beginners except
for differences in punctuation. NOTE ON WWTA: In Lish's first
editing of the story he changed the daughter's name from Kate to
Melody, changed the wife's name from Cynthia to Myrna, and eliminated all references to the son, Mike, He renamed the story "Mr.
Fixit" but later changed that to "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit." SUBSEQUENT PUBLICATION: As "Where Is Everyone?" in Fires.
The text in Fires is identical to the text in TriQuarterly except for
light editing by Carver, including his deletion of the line "I don't
know where everyone is at borne." As a result, the line appears only
in TriQuarterly and Beginners.
Gazebo. Beginners: 13-page manuscript cut by 44% tor inclusion
in WWTA as "Gazebo." PREVIOUS PUBLICATION: A version
of "Gazebo" that was the product of Lish's first editing of Beginners appeared in Missou1·i Review, Fall 1980. SUBSEQUENT
The Carver Chronicles
For much of the past 20 years, Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A.
Knopf who is now retired, has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial role in
the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver. The details varied from telling
to telling, but the basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that
they were more his than Carver's. No one quite knew what to make of his statements.
Carver, who died 10 years ago this month, never responded in public to them. Basically it
was Lish's word against common sense. Lish had written fiction, too: Ifhe was such a
great talent, why did so few people care about his own work? As the years passed, Lish
became reluctant to discuss the subject. Maybe he was choosing silence over people's
doubt. Maybe he had rethought what his contribution had been -- or simply moved on.
Seven years ago, Lish arranged for the sale of his papers to the Lilly Library at Indiana
University. Since then, only a few Carver scholars have examined the Lish manuscripts
thoroughly. When one tried to publish his conclusions, Carver's widow and literary
executor, the poet Tess Gallagher, effectively blocked him with copyright cautions and
pressure. I'd heard about this scholar's work (and its failure to be published) through a
friend. So I decided to visit the archive myself.
What I found there, when I began looking at the manuscripts of stories like "Fat" and
"Tell the Women We're Going," were pages full of editorial marks -- strikeouts, additions
and marginal comments in Lish's sprawling handwriting. It looked as if a temperamental
7-year-old had somehow got hold of the stories. As I was reading, one of the archivists
came over. I thought she was going to reprimand me for some violation of the library
rules. But that wasn't why she was there. She wanted to talk about Carver. "I started
reading the folders," she said, "but then I stopped when I saw what was in there."
It's understandable that Lish's assertions have never been taken seriously. The eccentric
editor is up against an American icon. When he died at age 50 from lung cancer, Carver
was considered by many to be America's most important short-story writer. His stories
were beautiful and moving. At a New York City memorial service, Robert Gottlieb, then
the editor of The New Yorker, said succinctly, "America has just lost the writer it could
least afford to lose." Carver is no longer a writer of the moment, the way David Foster
Wallace is today, but many of his stories -- "Cathedral," "Will You Please Be Quiet,
Please?" and "Errand" -- are firmly established in the literary canon. A vanguard figure in
the 1980's, Carver has become establishment fiction.
That doesn't capture his claim on us, though. It goes deeper than his work. Born in the
rural Northwest, Carver was the child of an alcoholic sawmill worker and a waitress. He
first learned to write through a correspondence course. He lived in poverty and suffered
multiple bouts of alcoholism throughout his 30's. He struggled in a difficult marriage
with his high-school girlfriend, Maryann Burk. Through it all he remained a generous,
determined man -- fiction's comeback kid. By 1980, he had quit drinking and moved in
with Tess Gallagher, with whom he spent the rest of his life. "I know better than anyone a
fellow is never out of the woods," he wrote to Lish in one of dozens ofletters archived at
the Lilly. "But right now it's aces, and I'm enjoying it." Carver's life and work inspired
faith, not skepticism.
Still, a quick look through Carver's books would suggest that what Lish claims might
have some merit. There is an evident gap between the early style of "Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please?" and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Carver's first
two major collections, and his later work in "Cathedral" and "Where I'm Calling From."
In subject matter, the stories share a great deal. They are mostly about the working poor- unemployed salesmen, waitresses, motel managers -- in the midst of disheartening lives.
But the early collections, which Lish edited, are stripped to the bone. They are minimalist
in style with an almost abstract feel. They drop their characters back down where they
find them, inarticulate and alone, drunk at noon. The later two collections are fuller,
touched by optimism, even sentimentality.
Many critics over the years have noticed this difference and explained it in terms of
biography. The Carver of the early stories, it has been said, was in despair. As he grew
successful, however, the writer learned about hopefulness and love, and it soaked into his
fiction. This redemptive story was burnished through countless retellings by Tess
Gallagher. Most critics seemed satisfied by this literal-minded explanation: happy writers
write happy stories.
Sitting under the coffered ceiling of the Lilly, I began pulling out folders from the two
boxes marked "Carver." Here were the stories from his first two collections as well as
from "Cathedral" in versions from manuscript to printer's galleys. I had previously seen
some manuscripts in the Carver holdings at Ohio State University, an archive to which
Gallagher has said she will ultimately give the Carver papers in her possession. The
manuscripts at O.S.u. are clean, almost without editing marks, as if they'd gone straight
from author to typesetter. Where there are multiple drafts of a manuscript, the procession
is unremarkable: the annotations in Carver's tiny handwriting drive the story confidently
from draft to draft until the story achieves its finished form.
The Lilly manuscripts are different. There are countless cuts and additions to the pages;
entire paragraphs have been added. Lish's black felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate
the original text. In the case of Carver's 1981 collection, "What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love," Lish cut about half the original words and rewrote 10 of the 13
endings. "Carol, story ends here," he would note for the benefit of his typist.
In "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit," for example, Lish cut 70 percent of the original words.
With a longer story, "A Small, Good Thing," in which a couple anxiously wait for their
child to come out of a coma, Lish cut the text by a third, eliminating most of the
description -- and all of the introspection. He retitled it "The Bath," altering the story's
redemptive tone to one of Beckettian despair. In Lish's version, you no longer know if the
child lives or dies.
Lish was constantly on guard against what he saw as Carver's creeping sentimentality. In
the original manuscripts, Carver's characters talk about their feelings. They talk about
regrets. When they do bad things, they cry. When Lish got hold of Carver, they stopped
crying. They stopped feeling. Lish loved deadpan last lines, and he freely wrote them in:
"The women, they weren't there when I left, and they wouldn't be there when I got back"
("Night School"). Other times, he cut away whole sections to leave a sentence from inside
the story as the end: "There were dogs and there were dogs. Some dogs you just couldn't
do anything with" ("Jerry and Molly and Sam"). On occasion, Carver reversed his
changes, but in most cases Lish's handwriting became part of Carver's next draft, which
became the published story.
"Fat" was one of the first stories Carver gave Lish to edit. It became the lead story in
"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" In "Fat," a restaurant waitress recounts to her friend
Rita a large meal she served to a ravenous but melancholy obese man. The waitress's
lover, Rudy, the restaurant cook, feels jealous. When they get home, he insists on having
sex with her, but her mind remains with her experiences in the restaurant: the fat man has
touched her in some way, made her feel dissatisfied with her life. This was how Carver
wrote it, more as an anecdote than a story. It proved excellent material for Lish's talents.
Some of what Lish does is technical: he moves the story into the present tense, for
example. And he eliminates the waitress's self-reflectiveness, so we seem more involved
than she does in what she is feeling. (Critics would later declare such touches to be
trademark techniques of Carver.) Most important, Lish picks up on the "long, thick,
creamy fingers" Carver gives the fat man, and finds in this the story's core -- the
connection between longing and sexuality.
"My God, Rita, those were fingers," the waitress tells her girlfriend, who herself has
"dainty fmgers." At the end, when Rudy gets into bed with her, she observes, "Rudy is a
tiny thing and hardly there at al1."These lines -- and several others -- were written by
Lish. In Lish's hands, fatness becomes sexual potency, fullness, presence. He finds the
resonance Carver missed.
If "Fat" was a successful-- if unusually extensive -- edit, Lish's efforts on another story,
"Tell the Women We're Going," seemed closer to a wholesale rewrite. Written by Carver
in the late 1960's or early 79's, the story was unusual for him, one of the few in which the
violence implicit in his characters becomes explicit. The story first made an appearance
as "Friendship" in Sou'wester, a small literary magazine. By the time it appeared in the
"What We Talk About" collection, Lish had retitled it -- and cut it by 40 percent. The
story is set near the town in which Carver grew up, Yakima, Wash. Bill and his tougher
friend Jerry take a break from their wives at a barbecue and drive offlooking for action.
They fmd two teen-age girls bicycling along the road and try to get their attention. Things
go awry. After a tense pursuit full of strange pleas and laughs, Jerry rapes and kills
Sharon -- a scene that Bill, who has dropped behind, arrives in time to witness. He cries
out, asserting in that moment the horror that the reader feels, too.
What's noteworthy about the story is the way Carver makes a boring afternoon build to
murder. Lish didn't care about this. He was after more abstract effects. He made cuts on
every page. Bill becomes just a passive companion to Jerry. The pursuit is eliminated: the
violence now comes out of nowhere and is almost hallucinogenic. "[Bill] never knew
what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock," Lish wrote in. "Jerry used the
same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was
supposed to be Bill's." The story ends right there. One wonders how Carver must have
felt when he saw that.
As I thumbed through various manuscripts at the Lilly, my face was flushed. I wanted
Carver to win, whatever that might mean. He had shown writers the value of measuring
your words. He had come along in the early 1970's when the first "post-modem"
novelists, writers like John Barth and Donald Barthelme, dominated the literary scene.
Their cerebral stories were admirable, but they were hard to love. Carver broke up their
racket.
My favorite story had always been the sly "They're Not Your Husband." An unemployed
salesman, Earl, goes to the restaurant where his wife, Doreen, is a waitress, and without
identifying himself tries to goad the male customers into checking her out. He needs the
validation. I particularly loved a description of Doreen's thighs as she bends over to scoop
ice cream: "rumpled and gray and a little hairy, [with] veins that spread in a berserk
display." The story also has a wonderful ending: "Then she put the unfinished chocolate
sundae in front of [Earl] and went to total up his check." Lish didn't edit this story much, I
discovered, but it turned out he had written the first sentence and rewritten the second. In
Carver's version, the thighs are barely mentioned. In his original ending, Doreen just
reaches for a coffeepot.
Overall, Lish's editorial changes generally struck me as for the better. Some of the cuts
were brilliant, like the expert cropping of a picture. His additions gave the stories new
dimensions, bringing out moments that I was sure Carver must have loved to see. Other
changes, like those in "Tell the Women We're Going," struck me as bullying and
competitive. Lish was redirecting Carver's vision in the service of his own fictional goals.
The act felt parasitic. Lish's techniques also grew tired more quickly than did Carver's.
After a while, the endless "I say," "he says" tags Lish placed on so much of the dialogue
felt gimmicky. In all cases, however, I had one sustained reaction: For better or worse,
Lish was in there.
Back in New York I contacted Lish. Much has changed for "Captain Fiction," as the
once-dapper Lish was nicknamed during his Esquire heyday. Now 64, he is a widower,
living alone in a spacious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He shuffles
around in his socks, his long white hair and loose clothes making him look like a
vanquished sorcerer.
We sat across from each other at his kitchen table and I asked him what had happened. "I
don't like talking about the Carver period," he said, "because of my sustained sense of his
betrayal and because it seems bad form to discuss this." I was aware that he had been a
radio actor before becoming an editor. Was he playing his reluctance up for me? "This
puts me in an absolutely impossible light," he continued. "I can only be despised for my
participation. "
Lish already has plenty of enemies: By the 1990's, his aggressive editing, controversial
private fiction seminars and taste for publicity had cost him many friends. "I said no to
the people to whom one doesn't say no," he said. In 1994, after a decade ~ which the
writers he was championing found fewer and fewer readers, Knopf fired him. He now
writes fiction full time. His latest is titled "Self-Imitation of Myself." Reading his stories
is like looking at the gears of a clock that's missing a face.
Lish's "sustained sense of betrayal" was, of course, also a strong motivator toward
conversation. He was still embittered, he said, by the biting ingratitude of "this
mediocrity" he had plucked from obscurity. When Lish is excited, his psoriasis acts up;
he pulled a cooking spoon from his shelf and began scratching his back. And he began to
tell me his version of the story.
In 1969 he persuaded Esquire to hire him as fiction editor. He promised to find new
voices, to clear out the cobwebs. It was quite a leap for a part-time literary editor from
Palo Alto, Calif. The pressure was on to produce.
One of his friends was Carver, who was editing educational materials in an office across
the street from where Lish had worked. They were drinking pals, Carver tall, handsome,
and deliberate, Lish short and wiry. Lish was the more worldly and aggressive. Maryann
Burk-Carver recalls them walking down a Palo Alto street with Lish asking every woman
they passed to sleep with him; he was trying to prove to Carver that you only had to ask
to get what you wanted from life. At this point Carver had a small reputation, but he was
not a name. "He was not known, not known at all, to the persons I would be delivering
stories to for approval," Lish remembers.
Lish contacted Carver, who quickly sent off several stories to him. Lish reworked and
returned them, using as his model the disorienting, unemotive stories of James Purdy, the
author of "Why Can't They Tell You Why?" The stories -- "Fat," "Neighbors" and "Are
You a Doctor?" -- wound up as Carver's first national magazine publications. Lish had a
genius for beating the drums for his writers. He was friends with important writers like
Cynthia Ozick and Harold Brodkey. Critics quickly took notice of the "new" voice in
fiction Lish was championing, of its radical compression (many stories were but a few
pages long) and stark silences. Much was made of Carver's name -- although Lish was
the one doing the carving.
In 1976 Carver collected his stories in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" including a
version ofthe title story that Lish had cut. In The New York Times Book Review, the
novelist Geoffrey Wolff, who would later become a friend of Carver's, hailed the stories,
describing them as "carefully shaped" and "shorn of ornamentation," marked by "spells of
quiet and tensed apprehension." In fact, Wolff wrote, Carver's prose "carries his mark
everywhere: I would like to believe that having read the stories I could identify him on
the evidence of a paragraph." The collection was nominated for a National Book Award.
Carver was gaining confidence from his success and writing more ambitiously. And he
was fmding out the world wasn't so harsh. He had friends now, acolytes even. He
separated from Maryann and became involved with Tess Gallagher. He bought a boat and
celebrated it in a poem in which he imagined it filled with his friends.
His editor's confidence was also growing. Lish thought of himself as Carver's
ventriloquist. "I could not believe no one had stumbled on what was going on," he says. A
collision was inevitable.
Initially, Carver had been grateful for Lish's help -- or perhaps just compliant or cowed.
Carver was in a bad place in his life, beset by drink and poverty. Lish was his way to a
readership. Nevertheless, Carver's unease was evident from the beginning. These letters
are in the Lish archives. Responding to an edit in December 1969, Carver wrote:
"Everything considered, it's a better story now than when I first mailed it your way -which is the important thing, I'm sure." He echoed these sentiments in January 1971.
"Took all ofyr changes and added a few things here and there," he wrote, taking pains to
add that he was "not bothered" by the extent of Lish's edit. Carver had a role in keeping
the romance going, too. "You've made a single-handed impression on American letters,"
he wrote Lish in September 1977. "And, of course, you know, old bean, just what
influence you've exercised on my life." He even offered to pay the charges for any work
Lish sends out to be retyped.
After "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" they began work on a second collection, which
Lish would ultimately title "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." (Carver
had called it "Beginners.") Lish was editing more heavily now. He treated Carver as ifhe
barely had a vote. Meanwhile, Carver was becoming a known literary figure. In 1978 he
won a Guggenheim Fellowship. The next year he became a professor of English at
Syracuse University.
Carver began to object to Lish's editing, but he wasn't sure what to object to. He wrote a
five-page letter in July 1980 telling Lish that he could not allow him to publish "What We
Talk About" as Lish had edited it. He wrote, "Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no
one had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing that your versions are better than
some of the ones I sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it." But he feared being
caught'. "Tess has seen all of these and gone over them closely. Donald Hall has seen
many of the new ones ... and Richard Ford, Toby Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, too, some of
them .... How can I explain to these fellows when I see them, as I will see them, what
happened?" He begged to be let out of his contract or at least to delay publication:
"Please, Gordon, for God's sake help me in this and try to understand
I've got to pull
out of this one. Please hear me. I've been up all night thinking on this
I'll say it again,
if I have any standing or reputation or cedibi1ity [sic] in the world, I owe it to you. I owe
you this more-or-Iess pretty interesting life I have [but] I can't take the risk as to what
might happen to me." In the same letter, he wrote imploringly, "[M]y very sanity is on the
line here .... I feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited
form, I may never write another story."
Lish does not recall being moved. "My sense of it was that there was a letter and that I
just went ahead." He knew what was best for Carver -- even if Carver didn't see it that
way. In the end, "What We Talk About" was published much as Lish wanted.
The book received front-page reviews. Critics praised its minimalist style and announced
a new school of fiction. Even so, Carver continued to press for stylistic control over his
work. He insisted that if Lish wanted to edit his next collection, he would have to keep
his hands off. "I can't undergo [that] kind of surgical amputation and transplantation," he
wrote Ush in August 1982. "Please help me with this book as a good editor, the best ..
.not as my ghost," he pleaded two months later.
Ush reluctantly complied. "So be it," he wrote in December 1982 after giving the
manuscript to "Cathedral" only a light edit -- although he wrote some acerbic criticisms in
the margins. Even then, Carver feared a sneak attack. "I don't need to tell you that it's
critical for me that there not be any messing around with titles or text," he warned Lish.
Publicly; Carver also began to make a break. He made a point of telling interviewers that
he controlled every aspect of his stories, invoking the adage that he knew a story was
finished when he went through it once and put the commas in, then went through again
and took the commas out.
Lish was angered by Carver's rebellion. He began asking his friends whether he should
make his "surrogate work" public. They advised him to keep quiet. Don DeLillo, for
example, warned him against taking Carver on. "I appreciate, and am in sympathy with,
everything you say in your letter," he wrote to Lish. "But the fact is: there is no exposing
Carver. ... Even if people knew, from Carver himself, that you are largely responsible
for his best work, they would immediately forget it. It is too much to absorb. Too
complicated. Makes reading the guy's work an ambiguous thing at best. People wouldn't
think less of Carver for having had to lean so heavily on an editor; they'd resent Lish for
complicating the reading of the stories.
Once Carver ended his professional relationship with Lish, he never looked back. He
didn't need to. "Cathedral" was his most celebrated work yet. Famous writers wanted to
meet him; Saul Bellow wrote him an appreciative note. The collection was nominated for
both a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Proudly, Carver wrote a letter
to Lish in which he noted that the title story "went straight from the typewriter into the
mai1."
Indeed, many writers and critics see Carver's later work -- stories like "Blackbird Pie" and
"Errand" -- as his best efforts, his final brilliant flowering. Seen in this light, the Lish
period, though responsible for bringing him to national attention, was an apprenticeship
to be transcended. Some of Carver's friends certainly saw it that way. The poet Donald
Hall read a manuscript copy of "The Bath" before Lish cut it. He asked Carver's
permission to publish the original version under its original title, "A Small, Good Thing,"
in Ploughshares magazine. In this more expansive, uplifting form, the story won a 1983
O. Henry Award. "I was hearthurt at what had happened to that story," Hall remembers.
"I've wondered in my head why Lish did what he did. Was it unconscious jealousy?"
That is one way to explain the Lish-Carver relationship. The story is complicated by, of
all people, Tess Gallagher. The poet, who now lives in Port Angeles, Wash., is generally
seen as the heroine of the Carver saga. And with reason. When she met Carver in 1977,
he was just turning a corner in his life, trying to control his drinking. She was ready for
the job of keeping him sober. "God has given you to me to take care of," she told him.
Gallagher made a home for him in which to work. She taught him to say no to Lish and
ultimately to free himself from him, winning the long tug of war for Carver's soul. She
encouraged him to publish "Where I'm Calling From," a selection of7 new and 30 old
stories, in the form he wanted posterity to read. (Carver never explained, however, that he
was, in some cases, reversing Lish's edits.)
So Gallagher helped Carver to find his true voice. Weirdly, though, many of her
pronouncements also have the effect of claiming a piece of Carver's work. Although she
declined several requests to be interviewed for this article, Gallagher has described in
detail her contribution to two of Carver's greatest stories, "Cathedral" and "Errand."
Unlike Lish's claims, they cannot be checked against original drafts, because most of
Carver's late manuscripts remain in her hands. Besides, the collaboration she describes
would be so intimate that no traces were likely to remain.
But in the 1992 PBS documentary "To Write and Keep Kind" and in a series of
unpublished interviews, Gallagher emphasized that she had given Carver the original idea
for "Cathedral" -- or, more accurately, that he had stolen it from her. The story focuses on
the discomfort that a husband feels when his wife brings a blind friend into their home.
Tess herself had a blind acquaintance whom she talked about with Carver; she said she
was planning to write a story about him when Carver "scooped" her. In addition,
Gallagher claimed that she had written or helped shape several key lines. She spoke of
the story as a joint effort.
Then there's "Errand," Carver's last published story. It tells of Anton Chekhov's early
death; the work has a special status among Carver readers because Carver identified with
Chekhov and because, although Carver said he did not know he had cancer when he
wrote it, it limns his own death. The end of "Errand" takes place in a Badenweiler hotel
room in 1904. The point of view of the story gracefully shifts from Chekhov, this man of
letters dying of tuberculosis, to a young waiter worrying about a cork that has fallen to
the floor in the room. The widow is lost in grief, and he is preoccupied with the cork. The
ending is classically Chekovian in its attention to the waiter and his worries, and it fuses
elegantly Carver's death, his life and his work.
As Gallagher explained in "To Write and Keep Kind," Carver had trouble envisioning the
end of the tale: "Ray had written many, many drafts and didn't know how to get out of
this story." So she came to his aid. "I was empathizing with his waiter character," she said
to the camera, "and I said, that waiter is going to be looking down and you know what
he's going to see? He's going to see that cork that popped out of the Champagne. I think
the ending is involved with his response to that cork, and that he's going to bend down to
get that and we're going to know something from that gesture, that action."
Collaboration between a literary husband and wife is not unusual. Nor is th~ft: F. Scott
Fitzgerald lifted pages from the diaries of his wife, Zelda, for the sanitarium sections of
"Tender Is the Night." Such entanglements still arouse discomfort. In an interview,
Gallagher said that she had always kept their collaboration private, because "people's
ideas about authorship are perhaps a bit fixed and unimaginative when it comes to what
really happens when two writers live together." This has emerged as a theme of hers. Her
next book is to be called "Soul Barnacles: On the Literature of a Relationship, Tess
Gallagher and Raymond Carver."
Perhaps Gallagher and Lish did make their marks on Carver's fiction. But who needs
them? Carver is enough. That's how Carver's friends -- Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff,
Mona Simpson -- feel. "I have absolute confidence that Ray wrote everything in his
stories according to my understanding of how writers write what they write," Ford said.
He said he feared that any discussion of the archives would "inadvertently diminish Ray."
Simpson expressed a lack of surprise. "I think people already assume an editor helps to
make the work better. Who would want one who didn't?" Wolff said it reminded him
what a good idea it is to destroy your drafts.
I mentioned the competing, and in some cases overlapping, claims of collaboration to
Dick Day, Carver's college writing teacher at Humboldt State University. He thought his
own influence was negligible. "I know any time I read a sentence by Carver that it's
Carver's," he said. "Ray's voice was his own and it's authentic." A top editor at Knopf
finds the very idea of co-authorship noxious. "I never met an author so many people
claimed a piece of," he says.
How far can one take the question of influence, anyway? When I spoke with Maryann
Carver about her ex-husband's work, she cited her impact on the story "Will You Please
Be Quiet, Please?" In the story, a husband and wife have an altercation over a past affair.
When I pressed for details, she said it would be "crude" to get specific. Then she showed
me where her tooth had entered her lip.
DeLillo had pointed out in his letter to Lish how central the idea of authenticity is to our
literary culture. We have the text on the printed page. Why complicate our enjoyment of
the stories by focusing on how they came to be written? To ask is to transgress. Besides,
that writers take the help that is offered is not news. Chekhov, Carver's idol, used to pay
friends 10 kopecks for an anecdote and 20 for a plot. Carver came out of the 1970's
workshop tradition, in which you showed a story around and took the suggestions you
found useful. What's so strange about a smart writer taking smart advice? "I edit my
writers a lot or a little," says Gary Fisketjon, the editor at large at Knopf who worked with
Carver after Lish. "Either way, it's their story."
Academics familiar with the Lish papers see the question of collaboration as more
complex. "If you exalt the individual writer as the romantic figure who brings out these
things from the depths of his soul," says Carol Polsgrove, a professor at Indiana
University who has written about the archives, "then, yes, the awareness of Lish's role
diminishes Carver's work somewhat. But if you look at writing and publishing as a social
act, which I think it is, the stories are the stories that they are." Her view is becoming
more widespread: a new form ofliterary analysis, "genetic criticism," focllses on the
evolution of literary manuscripts from drafts to published form, taking into account the
inevitable impact of editors and publishers.
Brian Evenson, a professor of English at Oklahoma State University, is the scholar whose
findings Gallagher fought to keep unpublished. (The essay had been under consideration
for an upcoming anthology, "Critical Essays on Raymond Carver," when Gallagher got
wind of the submission and issued the publisher a copyright warning.) In Evenson's eyes,
"You really have to say that Lish is almost as responsible as Carver for the stories he
worked on." He feels the work really has to be admitted to be a "collaboration" -- almost
like a musical with book and music by different artists. All the characters, the settings
and the plots are Carver's. Carver country conceived of as a physical place with a given
population is still Carver country. But the minimalist tone, for good or ill, was Lish's. He
was more avant-garde than Carver, whose real voice was closer to his plain-spoken
poetry. That's how he wrote before he met Lish, and that's how he wrote after. "It's no
wonder Carver grew angry when critics called him a minimalist," Evenson says. "That
was Lish."
What does one make ofliterature that is the product of collaboration? Some historical
perspective is in order. Consider Ezra Pound's revising of "The Wasteland" in 1922.
Pound did for T. S. Eliot something of what Lish did for Carver. He made liberal cuts to
the poem, shortening it by half and eliminating the strong element of parody. (The
original title had been "He Do the Police in Different Voices. ") Pound found a voice -not necessarily the voice Eliot intended -- and honed it brilliantly. He helped make him a
modernist cause celebre. Eliot acknowledged the debt obliquely, praising Pound as il
miglior fabbro ("the greater craftsman") in his dedication. When Eliot outgrew Pound, he
moved on. Scholars learned of the extent of this collaboration only with the discovery of
the original manuscripts in 1968. This has not hurt Eliot's reputation. Seen in the larger
context of his career, the fact that his masterpiece did not read quite like anything else he
wrote did not lessen his stature or importance. Somehow it has come to seem natural.
Thomas Wolfe, on the other hand, did not come in for such gentle handling. Wolfe was a
brilliant writer, but there was a lot about writing a novel he never understood. He dumped
the 330,000- word manuscript of his first novel, "Look Homeward, Angel," on the desk of
his editor, Maxwell Perkins; in long sessions, Perkins cut, revised and made suggestions
(always with Wolfe's consent). Wolfe decided to publicize the situation, much to the
embarrassment of Perkins, who thought the editing process should be private. By Wolfe's
second book, Perkins was mixing and matching batches of manuscripts, connecting the
dots with Wolfe as he went along. After Wolfe died in 1938, Edward Aswell, an editor at
Harper & Brothers, went even further. He created two more books out of the million
words Wolfe left behind, creating composite characters and sometimes adding his own
words. As these revelations have become known in the past two decades, Wolfe's
reputation has dimmed considerably. "We have been threatened with scholarly
publication of Wolfe's original manuscripts, and doubtless the threats will be fulfilled,"
wrote the critic Harold Bloom in 1987, "but the originals are most unlikely to revive
Wolfe's almost-dead reputation."
Between these two examples sits Carver. To be sure, some of the early stories were so
transformed by Lish that they should be considered the product of two minds. But what
about the later stories Gallagher claims to have influenced? It's hard to say. That Carver's
relationship with Gallagher was consensual rather than antagonistic matters, but what's
most compelling is that the stories from "Cathedral" feel as if they came from him. They
share a common voice, a brightness. If Gallagher helped him, so much the better. To
paraphrase Mona Simpson, who would want a wife who didn't? Of course, one day,
Gallagher may reveal a deeper level of collaboration. It's one thing to guide the pen;
another to hold it. If that day comes, I suspect I will start to feel about Carver the way I
do about Wolfe: namely, that he was a writer who never left a clear record of his talents.
DeLillo is right: this is a culture in which we want a single name on the front of the book.
But why place so high a price on purity? The stories are what they are, regardless.
Perhaps that's why Carver was not inclined to talk openly about the editing process. He
was a private man and nonconfrontational. "Ray once said to me, 'Who needs trouble?' "
remembers Tobias Wolff. "He wanted everything to be peaceful." When interviewers
asked Carver about his relationship with "Captain Fiction," he always acknowledged Lish
as a friend, a talented editor, a man who had been there for him at a crucial time. But he
carefully avoided talking about the back-and-forth of their editing relationship, why it
had ended or what it might reveal for those interested in his work.
In 1982, however, he came close. He was in a discussion with students at the University
of Akron and, in response to a student's question, he began talking about the editor-writer
relationship. He ticked off all the famous examples of heavy editing: F. Scott Fitzgerald's
cutting of Hemingway's "Sun Also Rises," Perkins and Wolfe, Pound and Eliot. Carver
quoted Pound's explanation of the process: "It's immensely important that great poems be
written, but it makes not a jot of difference who writes them."
All the same, in a world where not even the Nobel Prize guarantees immortality -- think
Henrik Pontoppidan -- nothing is certain. Some writers disappear only to come back, like
Zora Neale Hurston (thanks to the interest generated by Alice Walker). Others fade, it
would seem, for good. Not surprisingly, writers or their descendants make efforts to stack
the deck.
Posthumous publication is most helpful in keeping the public interested in a dead writer.
With the publication of All of Us: The Collected Poems next month, there will have been
almost as many Raymond Carver books published after his death as before. That's no
match for Virginia Woolf, however. Her letters, diaries and miscellany now take up at
least 30 volumes, giving her a publication rate only Joyce Carol Oates could match.
Henry James rewrote his own texts for posterity; Norman Mailer engaged in a similar
ploy with his recent anthology, The Time of Our Time, providing his own. greatest-hits
guide to his work.
Finding the right biographer is crucial. The idea nowadays is to pick someone you like
before someone you don't picks you. Tess Gallagher, who hasn't authorized a biography
of Raymond Carver, is now talking to Jay McInerney, who studied with her husband,
about writing one. Such plans don't always work. Robert Frost put his fate in the hands of
his friend Lawrance Thompson -- only to watch Thompson's admiration turn to dislike. It
was perhaps Thomas Hardy who took the matter to its logical conclusion, secretly writing
his own biography and then having his widow publish the work under her own name.
Beyond that, the best you can do is try to control the information that gets out. Franz
Kafka took the famously extreme view when he asked his friend Max Brod to bum all his
work, even to the last page. (Brod decided not to honor this request -- and who can blame
him?) Other authors carefully arrange their papers for posterity. Saul Bellow has placed
his manuscripts and letters at the University of Chicago. Toni Morrison used to keep hers
at home -- but after a fire almost consumed them, she placed them at Princeton. Allen
Ginsberg sold not just his letters and journals, but also a pair of old tennis shoes and other
personal memorabilia to Stanford shortly before his death. Access to the documents (or
the shoes) is available to interested scholars.
Who looks after an author's work after he or she dies? Usually, it's the writer's spouse or
lover; sometimes it's another family member, a friend or a scholar. These watchdogs are
formally known as executors -- and informally as keepers of the flame.
Keepers of the flame must make decisions about everything from the placement of
archives to posthumous publication. They tend to be loyal, beleaguered and a bit
capricious. Their ace in the hole is permission to quote from the work, a power that
prompted the following advice from the biographer Justin Kaplan: Shoot the widow.
T. S. Eliot's widow, Valerie, has been a typically unpredictable executor. Peter Ackroyd
had to insert paraphrases into his 1984 Eliot biography after Valerie refused him the right
to quote from letters and unpublished works. Although she has guarded many Eliot
manuscripts with secrecy, she did allow the poet's bawdy juvenilia to be published in
1996. And she provided Andrew Lloyd Webber with unpublished poetry fragments for
his musical Cats.
Executors tend to be protective by nature, but this instinct can turn extreme. Ted Hughes,
widower of Sylvia Plath, destroyed the last volume of Plath's diary after her 1963 suicide.
It was an act, he claimed, designed to protect their two children from additional grief.
Although feminist scholars condemned Hughes, his act had many precursors: Lord
Byron's friends, for example, torched the poet's supposedly salacious memoirs, fearing
scandal. More recently, letters written by James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, were burned by
her nephew Stephen Joyce. He did so pre-emptively after his grandmother, Nora, was the
subject of a biography. I didn't want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers
going over them, he told dismayed Joyce scholars in 1988.
Other executors tirelessly promote the deceased's work. Tess Gallagher is of this school.
She has been Raymond Carver's constant champion, doing everything from reading his
work in public to issuing posthumous works and encouraging film interest. (She worked
with Robert Altman on the 1993 movie Short Cuts.) At times, all this vigilance can seem
thankless. Widows don't get much applause in America, Gallagher has lamented.
Alas, not all the work in the world will bring the beloved back. As Elaine Steinbeck says:
The hardest part of being a keeper of the flame is just being lonely for your husband. I
think we would all say the same thing.
D.T. Max, a contributing editor at The Paris Review, last wrote for the magazine about
the novelist Terry McMillan.
1) I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard to
his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision
of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active_figure, interesting
him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as
disponibles. saw them subject to chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly,
but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to
invent and select. and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures
themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. -Henry James
2) You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of character. There is another ego, according to
whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it
needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single
radically unchanged element.
-D.H.Lawrence
3) A character in a book is real ... when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose
to tell us all he knows--many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he
will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we
get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life .... For human intercourse ... is seen
to be haunted bya spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we
cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect
knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the
general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.
E.M. Forster
attractive or ugly (by what standards)? Healthy or sick? strong or weak? body a concern or
something to take for granted? do body's demands (sex, hunger, exercise, sleep, etc.) conflict with
circumstances? does he/she naturally have a lot of energy? Too much? Less than conditions ask?
typical gestures?
PHYSICAL:
INTELLECTUAL: what are hislher capacities? smart or dumb? how educated and in what? what are
primary interests? what kind of mind? imaginative? obtuse? what ideas? What is on his/her
mind?
EMOTIONAL:
how strong are his/her feelings? can X feel? is X passionate?
does X deal with passions?
how
big or mean hearted? what does X feel about? sensitive?
MORAL: how does X feed hislher spirit? What are X's spiritual needs? what are the sources ofX's pride?
What are X's values? what is X'S need or capacity for love? hate? praise? ambition? what does X think of
hislherself? can X BE what X believes is valuable? how permanent and dependable are X's values? how
.reliable? what can X experience and what can't he/she? does X feel guilt? fear? feel free or trapped?
meaningful or meaningless? why? how strong and how organized is X's will, conscience, aesthetic sense?
A) Customs: what are X's habits? X's ordinary day? rituals? patterns of time, money, energy, life
spent? how does X usually meet experience?
B) Responsibilities: to self? to others? what can't walk away from?
ECONOMIC: how does X fmd means to live--food, board, insurance payments, etc? is X in debt? how
well does X live, by what standards? what is X's physical environment? how much of XISday is spent
on providing for self and others? how stable is X' s economic condition? who and what depend on
X?
SOCIAL: how is X involved with other people? how much does X need involvement (or seek to
avoid it)? can X live alone? does X have men friends? what sort? women friends? what sort? is X
capable of friendship? of love? of hurt? of treachery? what does X look for in people? How is X
valued by people? what do people think of X? what people? how does X want people to think of
him/her? what people? .
A) Family: married? children? parents? siblings? relatives? what is XISrelation to them?
love? Hate? duty? how does X value family? how does X provide for family? treat them? who
are they? to whom?
B) Community: what does X expect of community (law, order, trash collection,
supermarkets, employment, friendship)? what does it expect of X? how established is X? what
is hislher reputation? does X have roots? has X had roots? what sort? where is X from? what
are the values ofX's community? do they conflict with X's values?
EXPERIENTIAL:
A) Lessons from the past: what has X learned from life? Is X bitter, blithe, egotistical, giving? how
educated is X's heart? has X faced death, loss, sex, betrayal, ignominy, etc.--the beasts in hislher jungle?
what does X consider to be wisdom? How wise is it? how has the past changed X? influenced X's present
B) Fate (future experience): the inevitable (X will age, die; X will have to deal with people; X
will face taxation, etc ... ), the probable (if proud, X will probably learn humility; if single,
Xwill probably love and marry; if healthy X will probably get sick and well again), the
possible and
accidental (X might win a contest; if doomed, might win grace; if walking down a street, might
have a piano fall on himlher). Given X's capacities and attitudes, how will these kinds of future
experience change X? How does X regard the future now? Dreams? Nightmares? Is X in control of
the future, or think he/she is?
VERBAL: what tone or tones in his/her speeches, or writing, or consciousness? what vocabulary
/vocabularies? what dialect? what speech habits? syntax? how literary? how rhetorical?
metaphorical? ironic? poetic? proverbial? can X meet experience with words? the right words?
CONTRAST AND PARALLEL
CONFIDANTES
RACE
What sort of questions do YOU as a writer ask about people and yourself? What realities about
people do you think the best characters in fiction can bring to mind?
I've blown off writing to instead read a few of the litmags my wife has yet to recycle, the result
being the usual horror--as well as these thoughts about dialogue:
1) If you have a quoted paragraph of dialogue wherein one character says more than one sentence,
PUT THE DARNED DIALOGUE TAG EARLY ON IN THE QUOTE, certainly no later than the
first quoted sentence. Reasons for this strike me as obvious but are apparently not so to everyone:
a) Using the dialogue tag late in a long quote forces the reader to guess who's speaking when we're
all better off (you the writer and we your readers) if your reader knows who's speaking & therefore
can focus entirely on what your character says.
Yes, Joey, we DO like to make the reader guess, but not about things as trivial as who's talking.
Let's put suspense into, for example, PLOT.
b) The later in the quote you use the tag, the more likely your reader will figure out who's speaking
before you present the tag--which would then make the tag redundant. (& in case it hasn't
occurred: redundancy stinks.)
c) For you grammar geeks: Quoted dialogue along with the words "she said" comprises a sentence,
& what's between the quote marks is the OBJECT of that sentence. This itself should explain to
you why the tag needs be used before the speaker of a paragraph of dialogue begins her/his second
sentence. If you don't understand what I mean by this, ask in a comment box below--& I (or maybe
another grammar geek who need not deal with Dave the Plumber) will answer.
2) Don't break up dialogue with the sentence "He paused." Freaking SHOW the pause. Do so by
having the character observe something, do something, react w/ body language--hey, here's your
chance to wow us. Don't be g.d.lazy. Laziness bores.
3) If you've used a "S/He paused" in a story & gotten that story published, consider yourselflucky.
Sort of. Because, yeah, you got that pub, but now you're forever on record as being mediocre.
4) Lop the word "Well" off the beginning of99% of your lines of dialogue." "Well" appears in
conversations you cut & run from. "Well" means the writer was clueless about the next line of the
story but so loved hitting the keys she typed "Well."
5) People don't CHORTLE sentences. They don't really SNICKER them either. I know there's
fiction out there wherein dialogue tags would have us think people as well snort & sigh as they
utter lines of dialogue, but come on.
Precision, folks. If your story's good enough to showcase, let precision help it shine. & if your
story isn't good enough to tell, precision can make it better.
6) Yes, do tighten individual lines of dialogue by cutting unnecessary words, but also, before you
chisel a line & thus make it an object of your infatuation, consider AXING THE STUPID THING
ALTOGETHER.
A lot of dialogue is just there to chat with the writer while he/she figures out where the story at its
best is headed.
Enough for now--I need to--I don't know, look up Dave the Plumber on Facebook? So I'll step
away & let you all explore this topic more in your comment boxes. Use as many of those bastards
as you want. But before you start, let me say this in summary:
We all love to read good dialogue. So don't mess with us. Don't raise our hopes by typing a pair of
quote marks--followed by warm milk.
Great fiction almost always includes great dialogue.
what they say and by what others say about them.
As with drama we get to know characters by
If the dialogue is flat, the characters will be
flat. If the dialogue seems off, or not believable, or real, we won't trust the characters as authentic
beings.
Grant Tracey, author of three story collections and editor of the North American
Review, emphasizes the importance of dialogue in solid character development: "Dialogue is about
giving characters space to breathe, to step out from the author's controlling voice to speak from a
real authentic place of their own ...Through dialogue characters are at their most autonomous and
free."
It's this distinct speaking voice, in the larger context of the story's narrative voice, that
sounding dialogue, writers can sometimes depend on their own background or experience, at other
times on research of various kinds, and imaginative powers.
Robert Garner McBrearty, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, likes
"doing 'Texans. ", He grew up with that language on his "ear and mind" and has a feel for
handling the regional speech patterns. Still, he emphasizes, there's some skill involved-you
have
to make sure you don't overdo it. As an example he cites his story "Episode," the title story of his
winning collection, which has a "distinct Texas flavor in the dialogue." The language is "fairly
subtle," says McBrearty. "They don't sound like a bunch of hicks."
When it comes to handling regional dialect, Catherine Brady, co-winner ofthe 2002
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and author of Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction,
emphasizes that the writer has "to develop an ear-to
be alert for the idiosyncratic qualities of
speech and to respect them." She warns against such variant spellings as "I lak to be goin'" for "I
like to be going"-word
corruptions that are "implicitly condescending" as well as "sloppy."
What's needed instead, says Brady, is a close attention to "the syntax and expressions that
characterize a particular dialect or slang."
Steven Wingate, winner of the Bakeless Prize for his collection Wijeshopping, spots one
thing writers tend to ignore about dialect-overall
characterization:
For one thing, says Wingate,
writers need to attend to "body language, which can reveal a great deal about how a character
communicates."
And they should keep this principle in mind: "If a character is rendered well
overall, dialect or jargony speech patterns will be easier to do-and
doses-because
more effective in small
characterization doesn't depend so much on them."
Handling dialect well is one thing; making it fully accessible to your readers is another.
Josh Weil, like McBrearty, has a close familiarity with his subject-the
south-along
with the speech patterns and dialect of its inhabitants.
Appalachian
Yet the challenge for Weil
has been how to make the Appalachian dialect harmonize well with the rest of the narrative. In the
first two novellas of The New Valley, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, Weil
connects dialect and speech inflections tonally with narrative voice.
"So the rhythms and patterns
and musicality of the way people speak in the mountains crept organically into the voice in the
narration."
At first glance, this may not seem all that important, says Weil, yet it is: "It creates a
subtle connection between the music of the narrator and the musicality of the ch<l:racters'speech."
This tonal harmony between character speech and narrative voice "eases the reader into a more
easy acceptance ofthe dialect in dialogue."
The writer's challenge might be how to handle dialect in another country, in a completely
different culture.
Midge Raymond, author of the prize-winning Forgetting English, drew on her
experience living in Taiwan to write her title story, which required a strong sense for Chinese
speech patterns. Had she not lived and traveled throughout Asia, she wouldn't have known, for
instance, which English words native Chinese speakers have problems with pronouncing and
which articles (a, the, etc.), they regularly leave out of English sentences. Since she was learning
Chinese at the time, Raymond says, this enhanced her understanding of Chinese speech patterns.
Yet authors sometimes have neither direct experience--at
Midge Raymond had-nor
least not the sustained kind that
geographical or cultural roots to draw on. Yet a particular character
they're introducing requires that they write outside their own language background.
Doing this
will take "comprehensive research," Catherine Brady states, "but it comes in the form oftalking
and listening rather than reading." Ellen Sussman, author of both nonfiction and fiction, most
recently the novel French Lessons, says: "When I'm trying to learn a new voice, I try every
possible way to first hear those voices. I'll rent movies where the characters speak that dialect. I'll
find YouTube videos with characters from that world." David Hubbard, a short story writer from
Carlsbad, California, even makes trips to different areas of the country to listen to the way people
talk to each other. But as we've seen, getting a sense ofthe regional dialect, while absolutely
necessary, is only the beginning. The rest is putting it into play-and
not overdoing it.
Carolina De Robertis, author of the prize-winning The Invisible Mountain, speaks of the
"added challenges" writers face in writing outside their own cultural or ethnic background. "There
is the potential danger of falling into stereotypes-especially
when the cultural group we're
writing about is historically marginalized. There is plenty of bad writing, and even decent writing,
that falls into this trap."
Ethnic stereotypes need to be avoided, says De Robertis. "Stereotypes are
not only sociopolitically problematic; they also bleed the vitality from fiction.". This second result
alone, De Robertis believes, should prompt writers to be sure their characters reflect as much
"complex humanity as possible"-and
dialogue plays a critical part in characterization.
It's this complex humanity that Irina Reyn, the Russia-born author of What Happened to
Anna K, respects as she writes ethnic characters, and in her case it means opting for "very little
dialect."
She wants to develop her characters fully as individuals. "I usually allow speech
patterns, tone and voice to guide presentation of a character," says Reyn. "I am very sensitive to
the dangers of representing otherness."
So is Joe Benevento, the author of The Odd Squad, a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction
Book Award.
Benevento believes that accurately representing slang, dialect, and words peculiar
to a given ethnicity is quite important.
He feels comfortable, he says, doing a Cuban store owner
as well as an Italian-American grandmother but not a Cajun character since he lacks the sufficient
firsthand experience to do so. But from what Benevento has seen, his own emphasis on
verisimilitude is surprisingly not shared by a lot of agents, editors, and readers.
For Italian-
American language, for example, most people, says Benevento, seem to be ignorant of certain
linguistic nuances, as when Mickey Rourke's supposedly Italian-American character in The Pope
of Greenwich Village responds to the question "Capisc?" ("You understand?") with the ridiculous
response "Capisc" ("You understand") instead of "Capisco" ("I understand ").
"I've rarely seen working class dialogue done right-Italian
As for fiction,
Americans are always stereotyped,
even though not all of us are Mafia wannabes, and the other dialects I also know about, Latino,
black, Jewish, etc., are also usually botched. But it doesn't seem to matter." Why is this?
Benevento explains that a "veneer of verisimilitude" is apparently enough if readers are
sufficiently hooked by the characters and plot. Yet this is problematic for Benevento, who holds
that writers who ignore verisimilitude create ethnic stereotypes and "botched" representations of
ethnicity of several kinds.
Midge Raymond also believes dialogue should be accurately represented. She avoids
writing dialogue for a given ethnic group unless she's sure she "can get it right."
While extensive
research might conceivably work, Raymond does believe the best way to capture the dialect of
ethnic groups outside one's own is immersion: "hearing voices firsthand."
gain such firsthand experience?
But what if you can't
There is one resource to consider, as a second option, says
Raymond: the Library of Congress' Center for Applied Linguistics Collection has recorded 118
hours of audio documenting North American English dialects, and this is available online
(http://memory.loc. gov/ammem/ collections/linguistics/).
One controversial issue that sometimes arises is whether or not a writer not of a given
ethnicity even has a right to create a character from an ethnic background not the writer's own.
Writers are sometimes criticized for doing this, just as male writers are sometimes criticized for
creating women protagonists. Clirr Garstang, author of the award-winning In an Uncharted
Country and editor of Prime Number Magazine, calls such criticism "ridiculous." For him, "A
fiction writer is free to assume any identity he or she needs to for the purpose of telling a story; the
only obligation is to do it well, and that's a whole other challenge."
SOCIAL CLASS
DeWitt Henry, founder of Ploughshares, came from an upper middle class background, certainly
not the working class that he wrote about in his novel The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, winner of
the inaugural Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.
Yet, growing up, Henry did have a good deal of
exposure to different social classes and ethnic groups, including working class idiom and speech
patterns. For his novel he was able to draw on this fund oflanguage experience.
The question for
Henry was how to do it well.
"A primary focus for me," says Henry, "in writing The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, was
to translate articulate perceptions into the vocabularies and idioms of my characters." Since each
character was quite different, Henry found this to be "painstaking, slow work."
He found himself
initially writing speech/thought in his "own literary vocabulary," then struggling for a "translation,
which was sometimes silence and gesture and sometimes vernacular and cliche."
technique comes, Henry believes, from developing "an ear" or "an eye"-and
The right
this takes a regular
regimen, which he likens to the rigors of an athlete's training.
While Robert Garner McBrearty has sometimes depended on his Texas roots, he's also
done informal "field research" such as watching movies, TV, and the news to create working class
characters.
Working different jobs and eavesdropping on the way working class people talk has
been one avenue that has really paid off. Then the challenge is to get these characters down in
writing.
McBrearty tends to start from just a little and take it from there, relying on his
imaginative powers.
"The idea is sort of like if one gets a little piece of the character, then the
writer goes to work filling the character out." Once McBrearty gets that first line down, he's
usually able to "tap into the way the person speaks"-that
is, ifhe writes from "inside the
character" versus "planting dialogue in someone's mouth." On the whole, he does feel more
comfortable creating characters he's familiar with, and yet he's seen successes with material
gained from eavesdropping too.
The issue of realistic speech, along with dialect, naturally arises in historical fiction. But
here the reach of years, when the writer goes deeply into the past, can present an additional
problem.
How does one obtain all the linguistic information one needs? And then, how does one
handle it?
Edmund White is the author of many commercial press works of fiction, including Fanny:
A Fiction, set in the pre-Civil War period, and based on the life of Fanny Trollope, mother of the
famous novelist, Anthony Trollope. In this work White includes a runaway black slave named
Jupiter Higgins. To handle Higgins with authenticity, he did extensive research, reading "slave
narratives and fiction written before 1900 in which there were black characters."
He didn't read
"any technical linguistic studies on black speech of that period," but White says he would have if
he'd come across them at the British Library, where he conducted his research.
He did skim
hundreds of books there. As far as Jupiter Higgins' speech patterns and dialect, White notes that
he "had him quote from the Bible, from hymns and from the oratory of preachers." White did
have one distinct advantage. He could draw on his growing up in the South, where he picked up
the speech patterns of Southern Blacks, including "their ways of emphasizing a word and many of
their vocabulary choices."
As with contemporary regional dialect, handling dialect in historical fiction can be quite
demanding. In The Circus in Winter, some of which takes place before the Civil War, Cathy Day
sought to capture her characters' voices "accurately, but not literally"-a
difficult balance to
achieve. With her novel-in-progress, set in the Gilded Age, Day faces new challenges.
people of that cultural milieu speak?"
"How did
For answers, she's been doing considerable research:
reading Edith Wharton, the first edition of Emily Post's Etiquette, and the society pages ofthe New
York Times. The tone, as well as the vocabulary of this Edwardian era, is quite different from our
own, Day points out, and she hopes to get a firm handle on "the lilt and cadences and rhythms of
those voices."
Day doesn't believe you need to cover every base, though, just a few "dated
phrases, old-timey words"-just
enough to make her characters' speech sound real.
Josh Weil has wrestled with black slave dialect in his new novella Solarium. He feels
comfortable with white southern dialect, picking this up from neighbors in Virginia.
Handling
slave dialect, however, has called for a lot of research. He finds this dialect "fascinating and
wonderful and full of music."
As a result, he says, "for a long time, I stuck to my guns, writing
the first person slave sections in full-bore slave dialect." Yet this dialect led to problems: first, the
difficulty of reading it; second, the fact that it was so "overpowering" that it caused readers to
focus "on the way the words sounded instead of what they were saying."
So Weil reduced the
amount of dialect and left just enough that the dialect now adds to, versus detracts from, the story.
In the current version of his novella, it isn't used in first person narration, but only "when a
narrator is relaying the speech of others." This technique makes the slave dialect easier for the
reader to accept, Weil believes.
Ellen Sussman has eavesdropped for a few days at a time at a garage in order to pick up
"mechanic talk."
To pick up jargon she believes you have to be in the language as much as
possible: "The research is best when it's real immersion-then
we can find our way to characters
who really speak the language."
Once one's gathered the material, again the question is, how do you handle it? With
jargon this means finding a way not to explain it.
For Grant Tracey it has to be "real, natural sounding."
To make sure this happens,
Tracey says: "Whatever job a character has let the dialogue reflect the milieu of their environment
without worrying about explaining what they're talking about to readers outside that environment.
Trust readers to get it through context."
John Yunker, author of The Tourist Trail, solved the
issue of exposition in his environmental novel by introducing outsiders to the world of penguin
naturalists and animal activists so that the characters pick up the jargon themselves.
This
technique helped him avoid "overtly painful exposition."
As we've seen, sometimes you can depend on your background or experience when writing
regional or ethnic speech patterns, or dialect, or group jargon, but you may need to do research if
you lack the needed background. But wouldn't you be wise simply to avoid dealing with
characters outside your own ethnic, cultural, or language background?
Wouldn't that be playing it
safe? Why risk being "off'?
Catherine Brady urges writers to take the challenge: "It's actually hard for me to imagine
an American writer whose social world is so insular that slhe never encounters other dialects or
speech patterns, and I also think that dialect and slang and regional (or even generational) speech
patterns enrich dialogue-they're
its 'poetic rhythm.' So I would encourage any writer to try to
render differences in speech pattern while always remembering that slhe's not trying to create a
sociologically accurate composite but a believable individual."
Mark Wisniewski, author of Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, also sees a
problem with writerly insularity, especially when it leads to autobiographical fiction: "I
recommend using dialect that's not your own. It forces you out of your own manner of speaking
the ego clouds the writer's perception of what engages the average reader. AnY,way the use of
dialect can keep you from falling into the I'm-so-interesting
trap."
Skip Horack, author of the historical novel The Eden Hunter, reminds us of an important
truth: Ifwriters had always avoided certain kinds of characters, there would be "a whole lot of
sentiment: la: an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling
sentimental: 1a: marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or
emotional idealism b: resulting from feeling rather than reason or
thought 2: having an excess or affectation of sentiment or sensibility
sentimentalize:
to look upon or imbue with sentiment
1) Mark Twain satirizes the sentimental
depiction of death in the high-falutin'
art around
Grangerford horne:
love for and
the aristocratic
They had pictures hung on the alls--mainly Washingtons and
Layfayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called 'Signing
the Declaration.' There was some that they called crayons, which one
of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only
fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see
before--blacker,
mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim
black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a
cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel
bonnet with a black veil, and white slippers, like a chisel, and she
was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping
willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white
handkerchief and a reticule and underneath the picture it said "Shall
I Never See Thee More Alas." Another one was a young lady with her
hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there
in front of a comb like a chair back, and she was crying into a
handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its
back in her other hand with its heels up,' and underneath the picture
it said "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup lolore Alas ... "
These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to
take
to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me
the fantods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid
out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what
she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned with her disposition
she was having a better time in the graveyard ...
2) What about the reality of death--as one of the realities that
fiction tries to deal with or "bring to mind." Some blatant examples
of sentimental death scenes are the death of Little Liza in Uncle
Tom's Cabin, Clarissa in Richardson's Clarissa, Old Goriot in Balzac's
Old Goriot, Barazov in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, or this scene, one
of many, out of Dickens:
"Stay, Jo! What now?"
"'tis time for me to go to that there berryin ground,sir," he returns
with a wild look.
"Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, JO?"
"Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed,
he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground, sir,
and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be berried.
He used fur to say to, me, 'I am as poor as you to-day. Jo. he ses. I
wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now, and have come there to be
laid along with him."
"By-and-by, Jo. By-and-by."
I
*
*
*
"I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin--a-gropincatch hold your hand."
"Jo, can you say what I say?"
"I'll say any think as you say, sir, fur I knows its good."
"OUR FATHER."
The light is come upon the dark benighted way.
Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right
Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women,
born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us
every day.
3) Tolstoy said of Andreyev's treatments of death (The Seven That Were
Hanged) that they didn't frighten him. Compare the description of a
death in Anna Karenina:
For a long time, it seemed a very long time to Levin,
the sick man lay motionless. He was still alive and from time
to time he sighed. The mental strain made Levin tired. He felt that
withstanding all mental efforts he could not grasp what
that's it meant. He felt that he was already lagging far behind
the dying man. He could no longer think of the problem of death, but
he could not help thinking of what he would have to do very soon:
close the dead man's eyes, dress him, order the coffin.
And the strange thing was that he felt completely indifferent,
experiencing neither sorrow nor sense of any feeling for his
brother at that moment, it was rather one of envy for the knowledge
the dying man possessed, but which he could not possess.
He sat for a long time like that, expecting the end.
But the end did not come. The door opened and Kitty appeared.
Levin got up to stop her. But as he got up he heard the dying
man make a movement.
"Don't go," said Nikolai and stretched out his hand.
Levin gave him his hand and angrily motioned his wife away with
his other hand.
With the dying man's hand in his, he sat for half an
hour, an hour, another hour. He was no longer thinking of death.
He was wondering what Kitty was doing, who lived in the next room,
whether the doctor owned the house he occupied. He felt hungry
and sleepy. He carefully disengaged his hand and felt his brother's
legs. The legs were cold, but his brother was still breathing. Levin
tried again to leave the room on tiptoe, but the sick man stirred
again and said: "Don't go."
Day began to break; the sick man's condition remained
the same. Quietly disengaging his hand and without looking at
the dying man, Levin went to his room and fell asleep. When he awoke,
instead of the news of his brother's death which he expected, he
learned that the sick man had returned to his earlier condition. He
was again sitting up, coughing, eating, and talking; he ceased talking
of death, and began expressing hopes of recovery, and became irritable
and gloomier than ever.
No one, neither Kitty nor his brother, could
calm him. He was cross with everybody, was rude to everybody and
blamed everybody for his sufferings and demanded that they should
fetch a specialist from Moscow. Whenever they asked him how he felt,
he invariably replied with an expression of malice and reproach:
"I'm suffering terribly, unbearably!"
The sick man suffered more and more, especially from bedsores,
which would no longer heal, and was more and more cross with those
about him, reproaching
them for everything
and especially
for not
bringing the specialist from Moscow. Kitty tired her best to help him
and calm him, but all was in vain, and Levin could see that she was
worn out physically
and mentally, though she would not admit it. The
feeling .of death evoked in them all by his taking leave of life on
the night he had for his brother was destroyed. They all knew that he
would quite inevitably
die soon, that he was half dead already. They all had only one wish
that he would die quickly, and they all did their best to conceal it
and went on giving him medicines out of bottles, tried to discover new
remedies and doctors, and deceived him and themselves and one another.
It was all a lie, a disgusting, offensive, blasphemous lie. And
because of his character and because he loved the dying man more than
the others did, Levin felt this lie most painfully.
5) Here is a more
the Dead:
recent
description
from William
Gibson's
A Mass
for
I led the prie~t down the stairs to the door, where I gave
him ten dollars, and not longer after my sister unlocked it again to
the doctor. She and I hovered near while he sat beside our mother,
taking her pulse and temperature, and only his shot of morphine put
her thirst to sleep; I asked him to leave some. It was a busier day,
the elder son was back from college for the holidays, and later the
half-blind Nellie was brought to the door by a crony. Sole survivor of
their schooldays when my mother had befriended her as a stricken girl,
she sat at the bed through the afternoon until the daylight failed and
the lamps in the house went on; they spoke seldom, but old ghosts were
in the room. My mother dozed, or flopped a hand, or mumbled; once she
said, but to no one, "Let me look pretty." To me at her flank with
alcohol and needle she sighed, "Oh, Billy, you have to see
everything"--with
reason, my glimpse of the lean groin wherein I was
conceived was not innocent of a flicker of the erotic--and I thumbed
the morphine in. After a time she murmured, "My husband, my husband,
no one could play piano like my husband," and drifted into sleep. I
was to drive Nellie home for supper but she lingered, would neither
eat with us nor go, sat, could not be bugged, and I was impatient but
suddenly knew what she knew, to rise from the bedside was to take
leave of my mother forever.
Next day she died. In the hours before dawn she awoke
and attempted to crawl out of bed, the nurse restrained her, but she
babbled of a trip, she must get dressed and pack for a trip; reporting
this at breakfast the nurse said it was not uncommon in the dying.
When I sat to my mother's hand it was too cool, and at the blanket's
edge her foot was gross, purpling around the heel. With her jaw
hanging and eyes adroop she was conscious half of the morning,
breathing over her caked tongue in a distress neither my sister nor I
could suffer. I injected her thigh with morphine, and once again-often, in those four days--said in her ear, "I love you"; I had said
it many times in the years preceding, that dutiful lie in my mouth and
it turned out to be true. She slept until after lunch, with my sister
at the bedside, and when she awoke to more distress I emptied a second
needle into her thigh. It may have been the load she could not carry
into another day; she fell into a sleep like a coma ...
I was on my couch in the basement with a letter my wife had
brought--from my young worldling, middle-aged,
divorced, unemployed,
asking for five thousand dollars so he might write a play--when my
sister called that the nurse wanted me. I ran up the two flights of
stairs to the bedside where the nurse made way from the pillow; I saw
my mother's face had come to life, her eyeballs wide and bulging, her
mouth open as in a despairing cry, mute, and out of that cavity I then
heard an exhalation which was not human breath, low, even, long, it
was air leaving a crypt. The others had followed my run, and before
our eyes the miracle went out of my mother. Something altered less
than a shadow, the eyeballs simply died, her dropped mouth was the
gaping of death; she had abandoned her body to us. All that had kept
it flesh was soul, and within a minute of the stilling of the blood it
was a corruption, yellowing, a great haggard doll of evil in the bed,
unclean and sickening. I could not take my eyes from it.
JOHN GARDNER ON SENTIMENTALITY
(FROM ON MORAL FICTION)
AND FRIGIDITY
Let us turn now to faults far graver than mere clumsiness-not
faults
of technique, but faults of soul: sentimentality,
frigidity, and
mannerism.
Faults of soul, I've said; but I don't mean those words as a Calvinist
would.
Faults of soul, like faults of technique, can be corrected.
In fact the main work a writing teacher does, and the main work the
writer must do for himself, is bring about change in the writer's
basic character, helping to make him that "true poet," as Milton said,
without whom there can be no true Poem.
Sentimentality
in all its forms is the attempt to get some effect
without providing due cause. (I take for granted that the reader
understands the difference between sentiment in fiction, that is,
emotion or feeling, and sentimentality,
emotion or feeling that rings
false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or
exaggeration.
Without sentiment, fiction is worthless.
Sentimentality,
on the other hand, can make mush of the finest
characters, actions, and ideas.)
The theory of fiction as a vivid,
uninterrupted
dream in the reader's mind logically requires an
assertion that legitimate cause in fiction can be of only one kind:
drama; that is, character in action.
Once it is dramatically
established that a character is worthy of our sympathy and love, the
story-teller has every right (even the obligation, some would say) to
give sharp focus to our grief at the misfortunes of that character by
means of powerful, appropriate rhetoric. (If the emotional moment has
been well established, plain statements may be just as effective.
Think of Chekov.)
The result is strong sentiment, not
sentimentality.
But if the story-teller tries to make us burst into
tears at the misfortunes of some character we hardly know; if the
story-teller appeals to stock response (our love for God or country,
our pity for the downtrodden, the presumed warm feelings all decent
people have for children and small animals); if he tries to make us
cry by cheap melodrama, telling us the victim that we hardly know is
all innocence and goodness and the oppressor all vile blackheartedness; or if he tries to win us over not by the detailed and
authentic virtues of the unfortunate but by rhetorical cliches, by
breathless sentences, or by superdramatic one-sentence paragraphs
("Then she saw the gun")-sentences
of the kind favored by porno and
thriller writers-then
the effect is sentimentality,
and no reader
who's experienced the power of real fiction will be pleased by it.
In great fiction we are moved by what happens, not by the whimpering
and bawling of the writer's presentation of what happens.
That is, in
great fiction, we are moved by characters and events, not by the
emotion of the person who happenes to be telling the story .
The fault Longinus identified as "frigidity" occurs in fiction
whenever the author reveals by some slip or self-regarding
intrusion
that he is less concerned about his characters than he ought to
be-less concerned, that is, than any decent human being observing the
situation would naturally be.
I like grit.
I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.
As we know
from the Russians, a lot of good fiction is sentimental.
I had this
argument in Hollywood; I said, 'You guys out here in Glitzville don't
realize that life is Dickensian.' Everywhere you look people are
deeply totemistic without knowing it: they have their lucky objects
and secret feelings from childhood.
The trouble in New York is, urban
novelists don't want to, give people the dimensions they deserve.
The
novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human
behaviour, and then he just dries up.
Irony is always scratching your
tired ass, whatever way you look at it.
I would rather give full vent
to all human loves and disappointments,
and take a chance on being
corny, then die a smartass.
In the following examples, note not only the visual images, but those of touch, motion, sound,
taste, and smell, and images that fuse a response to two or more of these kinds in a single
reference.
A young woman wearing a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the door of the house to
greet Monsieur Bovary, and she ushered him into the kitchen, where a big, open fire was blazing.
Around its edges the farm hands' breakfast was bubbling in small pots of assorted sizes. Damp
clothes were drying inside the vast chimney-opening. The fire shovel, the tongs, and the nose of
the bellows, all of colossal proportions, shone like polished steel; and along the walls hung a lavish
array of kitchen utensils, glimmering in the bright light of the fire and in the first rays of the sun
that were now beginning to come in through the windowpanes .
.. .At such moments they had already said goodbye, and stood there silent; the breeze eddied
around her, swirling the stray wisps of hair at her neck, or sending her apron strings flying like
streamers around her waist. Once she was standing there on a day of thaw, when the bark of the
trees in the farmyard was oozing sap and the snow was melting on the roofs. She went inside for
her parasol, and opened it. The parasol was of rosy iridescent silk, and the sun pouring through it
painted the white skin of her face with flickering patches of light. Beneath it she smiled at the
springlike warmth; and drops of water could be heard falling one by one on the taut moire.
Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died;
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens the fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive a while she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind or all the charm is fled.
*
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavendered,
While he from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transfereed
From Fez, and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Sararcand to cedared Lebanon.