Elementos formativos desde los vínculos

by

L

k. A

peace? Yeah, today that, and tomorrow the end of hunger in Africa. What do you mean, as my father used to say, rome wasn’t built in a day? For me, you’re beginning to gather, speed is of no little premium. Hence, if two or three or—god help me!—four stories go bust before independence Day, no big deal, because i know that, come thanksgiving, i’ll have at least one to be reasonably proud of, one to show to a stranger with a check-book and a publication that reaches Americans at bulk rate.

i am also eager to horse around with the fundamentals of my faith. Second person?

Why the dickens not? Ditto with the present tense. How about a story in the subjunc-tive mood? Can do (and, golly, was once done by yours truly, an undertaking, owing to related sleights of hand with time, that nearly broke my head in half). What about multiple thirds? Or telling a story backwards? Maybe a story of one sentence (another chance, by the way, to practice one’s grammar and gifts at subordination). You say you want to tell a story in 1,500 words exactly. go to it. not use quotation marks for dia-logue? that, too. For story is a form that invites heedless experimentation—a form, in fact, whose principle virtue is its possibility, its fluidity. (You want proof? Okay, smarty-pants, define the form, beginning with the easiest of questions: How long is the story?

Or this: When does a story become a novella, a novelette, or a, uh, long story? geez, at least we know, with all due respect to the differences among Spenser and Shakespeare and Petrarch, that a sonnet is fourteen lines long. With a story, the “rules” are less fixed and more ambiguous. Length? Mr. E.A. Poe said it should be read at one sitting. this, of course, was before the red-eye to London, the bus ride to Katmandu—all sittings almost impossible to sit through.)

Another reason to write short is that you don’t have to know very much. More proof?

try this: think of your favorite novel. now think what X had to know to write that book—the facts, if you will. Moby-Dick? the minutiae about knots alone were worth one darned chapter. The Great Gatsby? Man, how much time do you have for a lesson or two about shirts? go ahead, try it yourself. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Libra by Don DeLillo. And Lord help you if you should undertake to create your own world. Does the name William Faulkner mean anything to you? Or what about ray Bradbury? the Denis Johnson who wrote Fiskadoro? Lordy, you might even have to invent a language à la A Clockwork Orange. With a story, even one about places long ago or never were, you can, well, fake it. i once, for example, wrote a story about a father who was obsessed with his brother’s death on the Bataan Death March at the beginning of World War ii. to do right by the material, i read one book—and, no pun intended, a short one at that—to learn the history, to find the names, to get the anecdotes. to write a story on UFOs, i read another book. to concoct some artful lies about Pancho Villa and Black Jack Per-shing, maybe three books.

Washington irving, he of the Headless Horseman and the minor role in Catch-22, used to say that writing at novel length inevitably lead to “dull patches.” not surprisingly, i, in the words of the miracle that is Smokey robinson, second that emotion, especially be-cause i agree with the aforementioned Mr. Poe that we writers ought not to write even one word that does not, as he put it, contribute to the “unity of effect.” this, folks, is hard to do. Harder than getting into heaven, methinks. the story writer cannot be self-indulgent

or indifferent to the need to hurry along to the next dramatic moment. We have to make our mark, often not subtly at all, and press on. “His skin looked like week-old pork,” we type and are thus finished describing the software tycoon with the tongs and the barbe-cue mitt and a mistress with a charge card to Frederick’s of Hollywood. “Her voice made my hair melt,” we type and dare not go into any more detail about, say, her full-sprung thighs or her peculiarly fetching way of getting from hither to yon. no, the emphasis for the story writer is brevity, an aesthetic economy where less is more.

Similarly significant to understand is that, metaphorically speaking, you don’t of-ten turn corners in stories nowadays where what you’ve discovered about Debbie-do or old Phinizy Spalding is grave enough to scare the pants off you, or have you wondering why that bit of “news” was yours to behold. novelists, i think, run the risk of learn-ing stuff about themselves through their characters that might well give the lie to the easy convictions they cleave to as citizens. What, you wonder, did it cost John O’Hara to write BUtterfield 8? Or what horrible truth was John Cheever coming to in Oh, What a Paradise It Seems? And how long did it take William Styron to start breathing again when he finished the last chapter in Lie Down in Darkness? to be sure, such remarkable looks into the dark well of us can, and do, happen with story. in fact, i have argued else-where that we ought not ever to write a story that will only cost us time to get between margins. Still, with the novel—unique to its form, dear readers—much is demanded, not least a broader, more comprehensive sense of character, which is to say, finally, a more straightforward and more honest view of ourselves, the analogues for the selves we breathe into life with language. You can’t, i fear, spend years with Dr. Jekyll without having more than one heart-to-heart with Señor Hyde.

i am here to say that a story is nicely accommodating to material, the “stuff” you’re alive to fictionalize. in the twenty-seven years since i published my first “histoire” (the only word in French worth repeating in polite company), i’ve written about, oh, a duke’s mixture of men and women bedeviled by the roil and rue of lived life. i’ve a hapless hero who killed two dogs, another who believed his mutt could speak enough English to pass the SAts. in an attempt to learn what structure alone can “say,” i’ve told two differ-ent stories precisely the same way. i’ve given myself over to a guy, shaped like the Pills-bury Doughboy, who aims to get out of his draft physical by wearing india silk panties (crotchless, of course) and smooching a general or two. At various times in my career, into my head, always unbidden, have sprung, in addition to the usual rakes and floun-ders, a football coach with a fondness for high heels, a professional “voice” breaking into his own house, a teenager watching his father destroy a brand-new set of Wilson golf clubs, two former college buddies who like to hold up Stop n gos, a being from

“outer-goddam-space,” a mother who makes no apology for being a drunk, a twice-di-vorced scoundrel who likes to box waltz with women in the aisles of his local food mart, a banker who watches his wife—evidently naked, at least from the waist up—drive by in the Volvo sedan of his bridge partner, a woman in love with an ex-g.i. who hears voices and owns a russian handgun to do battle with them, a smart-mouth delinquent whose directions to his place in the desert take six pages, and a session drummer with aston-ishingly bad taste in sweethearts. Why, i’ve even presumed to take up residence in the

interior life of a thug named Fork—a sad sack, really, who offered to be to us what pesti-lence had been to our forebears. in short, whatever has interested me, and a lot certainly has, i’ve had a form accommodating enough to do the heavy lifting that art is.

novel writing, so E.L. Doctorow is said to have once remarked, is like driving at night on an unfamiliar road. For the story writer i am, that trip to the end of Lonely Street is neither less daunting nor less spooky; it’s just shorter. Like our brothers and sisters who go long, we at the “to” end of narrative’s “fro” must be equally watchful, equally vigilant, equally attentive to what surprises will spring out at us from the dark.

i likewise believe that story writing fits well with these parlous and busy times. in my own case, i went short in part because, with a wife and two children and no little desire to be an acceptable husband and father, i had no time to go long, especially with the tenure clock ticking in the background. We had soccer practice to go to, trombone les-sons to take, school plays, trips to the orthodontist—the alpha and omega, in short, of all that’s involved in rearing youngsters you mean to keep clear of woe and despair and ignorance. Hence, i wrote at night, after story time. i wrote when i didn’t have class to teach (or, sigh, prepare for). i wrote when there was no department meeting, no advisee rapping at my chamber door, no sleep to have, no administrator to knock some sense into. i wrote when i didn’t have papers to grade, softball to play, flesh to press, or shilly to shally. Mainly, however, i wrote short because, well, after thirty pages i began to lie.

i have, i should finally confess, tried to go long. three times, in fact. the painful auto-biographical novel (featuring a young man far too sensitive for the crudities of the mod-ern world). the pornographic novel (yes, literally). the historical novel (see that mouth-breathing son-of-a-gun Pancho Villa from above). With each, fortunately, i learned yet more about being brief, about what to leave out, about how to cut, about why, among other things, all the little birdies go tweet-tweet-tweet. i learned the felicity of the right word at the right time. i learned, very quickly, to get to the dadgum point. i learned not to overstay my welcome, to leave the party well before the fistfights start and the drunks get to singing college fraternity songs. i learned to fish, not cut bait. i learned that a good title is worth a chapter all by its lonesome; that a name—tump, for example, or Mr.

Pitiful—is worth, at the very least, a page of vital statistics. i learned that writing is not necessarily prose. i learned, to coin a phrase, to make time fly, days and even years disap-pearing in a sentence. i made pals with the angel that is white space. i became explicit, maddeningly so. i learned to kill two, sometimes three, narrative birds with one stone.

And, yes, i’ve learned what i can’t do. i’ve learned what i have is the stamina, the time, the imagination, or the courage to type—not the least valuable lesson, importantly, one can learn about one’s singular, miserable self. And, best of all, i am not through learning.

i don’t expect that i’ll change—too little time left to become passingly good at the high and low of another genre. Besides, i have more, albeit short, to say. And short, as the poet reminds us, is sweet, right? in any event, i have nothing rousing to finish with, no rhetorical flourish of the sort you might think to underline or commit to memory.

rather, i hope my words have become a comfort to those similarly afflicted with the need to be brief. Had i been a more proficient writer, this, too, would have been shorter.