Bookends Page 11

  Don’t take advances; sell your work only when it is complete. A monetary obligation to one’s publisher placed all kinds of undue pressure, both subtle and overt, on the writer, chief among them the aforementioned pressure to persist on a fucked project well beyond the point of reason. The pressure of an advance put the writer into the frame of mind that kept a nation, for example, after vast expenditure of moral, human, and financial treasure, fighting a war for years beyond even the most delusive hope of victory. And yet writers needed money, the same as everyone else, and when it became available they were no less likely than anybody else to take it. If you had a family to support, and hoped to buy not only food, clothing, and Polly Pocket So Hip Cruise Ship play sets, but also some time in which actually to write novels, refusing to take advances meant you had to be wealthier, more optimistic, stronger-willed, or far better at managing your time than most of the writers I knew. Therefore:

  Persevere. Because in later years, as I worked first on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and then on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, for both of which I accepted generous advances from publishers, the Hand of Dread returned, many, many times, to entwine its chill fingers among my inward organs. Many times while writing those books, I felt myself overwhelmed with panic, doubt, a certainty of failure. If I had chosen to learn from lesson 1, I would have laid both books aside before I wasted as much time on them as I had on Fountain City. And yet I had stumbled onward, written myself around or through or out of my doubt and difficulty, finishing the books as well as I could manage to finish them, and moving on to the next.

  Just before I finally gave up the effort to find the lesson in the disaster of Fountain City, to see in it what Richard Sennett, in his lovely study The Craftsman, calls a “salutary failure,” I produced the annotations that follow this preface. After an absence of several years, I dove back down to the wrecked book I had abandoned at the sea-bottom of my hard drive, to see what treasure, if any, I might hoist up. What I found, more than any salutary wisdom, was a strangely intact record of my life during the time I was writing the book, a bubble of ancient air trapped in the caulked hull of the sunken novel. Neighbors, arguments with my ex-wife, meals eaten, hostels haunted, shoes I used to have, all had made their way into the book, invisibly and unknown as such to anyone but me. I also found all kinds of bits and pieces of my childhood and life before my work on the novel began, stories and anecdotes and people and settings that, having served nobly and without complaint to feed the needs of the failed novel, receded or vanished completely from my own lived memory, until I rediscovered them, touched by the reunion, in the pages of Fountain City.

  As I began to adumbrate, by means of numbered notes, this idea of a “life in the margins,” I also found myself following and uncovering traces of the mysterious life of a book, any book, the history of its birth, growth, evolution, and—in this instance—its untimely death. Believing fervently as I do that nothing succeeds like failure, I hoped to dig up, and to share, like a special commission appointed by Congress to investigate some disaster, the lessons of the wreck of Fountain City, in the hope that others might learn from, and thus receive the salutary benefit of, my mistakes. But then other, more pressing obligations intruded before I could produce annotations for more than the first four chapters, and the great brined and barnacled hulk sank back to the silence and dark, and so in that effort, too, as in so many others before and since an afternoon in Venice twenty-three years ago, when I foolishly thought I knew everything there was to know about being lost, I failed. (2010)

  Outros

  Fountain City, excerpt

  IT GOES ON LIKE THAT FOR QUITE SOME TIME, FROM PARIS TO Florida, from sorrow to rapture, from miscue to false step, and now even the annotations themselves have, like the apparatus and tackle of some failed salvage operation, become encrusted with disuse and hold within them the evocative air of the time when I sent them unreeling down into the depths.

  Reading through these chapters once again to prepare them for publication, mildly alert for typos, all hope of deriving some helpful lesson from them long since exhausted, I confess that I found myself grooving on them, just a little bit, here and there. And when I came to the end of this little sample I felt toward them the surprising stirring of what I might call a sense of fruitful incompletion, a desire, or at least a wish, that this book might, after all, have been steered to its intended destination. Surely, I thought, if I show these chapters to my wife, she would be able to figure out what parts of the story needed to be weeded or whacked into alignment—

  And that was the moment that I realized, after eighteen years, what went wrong with Fountain City. I understood, at last, the lesson to be drawn from this disaster, the finding of my investigatory committee:

  Marry a strong, talented, vocal, articulate, and above all persuasive reader.

  The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was written while I was in the MFA program at UC Irvine, and it had plenty of readers among my teachers and workshop-mates, many of them readers who were strong, talented, et cetera, sensitive alike to the corn and the bullshit in my language, the flaws and the untapped resources in my story construction, the overlong and the overhasty, the useless and the underexploited. But for one reason and another, some marital, some personal, some just the breaks, I wrote Fountain City pretty much alone. I had an editor and an agent, and they generously gave me their notes and support and intelligent suggestions, but I didn’t have anyone leaning on me, the way a good workshop leans on you, steadily, consistently, even daily, so that ultimately leaning becomes indistinguishable from holding you upright.

  By the time I met Ayelet Waldman, it seemed to be too late. I was sick of the damn book beyond any hope of leaning or support. And yet in the years that followed, as I wrote other books, Ayelet managed to drag, hoist, cajole, or lure me across many such dread-filled patches, through many months during which I and my lame-ass novel, any of my lame-ass novels, felt fucked. But now I see that the reason Ayelet failed to pull off this feat that very first time, when, as my new girlfriend, she read what was to be the last complete draft of Fountain City, was not because she read it too late. It was because she read it too soon. She read it before she had settled in as my First Reader, as a novelist’s spouse. She read it before she had learned to harness the talent, strength, advocacy, and all the skills of articulate persuasion she possessed and had—unbeknownst to her or anyone—been cultivating all her life as a passionate and opinionated devourer of novels. She didn’t even really know, yet, that you could just get in there and hack a lousy novel all to pieces with a red pencil, and that—once he was through cursing and refuting and denying you—your novelist would actually thank you for having done so. Ayelet could have saved this book, I thought, when I had finished looking these chapters over. Maybe, someday, given time, she will. (2010)

  The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

  I STARTED TO WRITE THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH IN APRIL OF 1985, in Ralph’s room. Ralph was the Christian name of a man I never met, the previous owner of my mother’s house on Colton Drive, in the Montclair District of Oakland, California. His so-called room was in fact a crawl space, twice as long as it was wide, and it was not very wide. It had a cement floor and a naked lightbulb. It smelled like dirt, though not in a bad way—like soil, and cold dust, and bicycle grease. Most people would have used it for suitcases and tire chains and the lawn darts set, but at some point this Ralph had built himself a big, high, bulky workbench in there. He built it of plywood and four-by-fours, with a surface that came level to the waist of a tall man standing. It might have been a fine workbench, but it made a lousy desk, which is how I used it.

  I was living with my mother and my stepfather that spring, working as an assistant in my stepfather’s optometry office and trying to get the hang of California. I had moved from Pittsburgh in December with the intention of applying to an MFA program out here. At the University of Pittsburgh I’d had three great writing teachers—Dennis Bartel, Eve Shelnutt
, and Chuck Kinder—and of them Bartel had an MFA from UC Irvine, and Kinder had studied writing at Stanford. Both gentlemen had said they would put in a good word for me at their respective alma maters. I’m sure Kinder did his best, but his effort could not avail, and in the end I found myself headed to UCI.

  That winter I had been down to check out Irvine, whose writing program was staffed by a couple of novelists, Oakley Hall and MacDonald Harris. Of the seven first-year MFA candidates I met during my brief visit—they would of course be second-years when I showed up the next fall—all were at work on novels (three of which, by my count, were subsequently published—a pretty high rate). I rode the ferry and ate a frozen banana at Balboa Island, and looked at the ocean, and wondered if Southern California would ever feel less strange to me, less of a place where people I would never know led lives I couldn’t imagine, than Northern California did. There were lots of young women walking around in swimsuits and negligibly short pants and I suppose I probably wondered how many of them I would never get to sleep with. I was kind of on a losing streak with women at the time. I was in a bad way, actually. I was lonely and homesick. I missed Pittsburgh. I missed the friends I had made there, friends of whom I felt, with what strikes me now as a fair amount of drama-queenliness, that (1) I would never see them again on this side of the River Styx and (2) that they were indissolubly bound to me by chains of fire. My loneliness and homesickness were of intense interest to me at the time, as were young women in short pants, and novels, and my eternal-yet-forever-lost friendships, and when I read a page of Remembrance of Things Past (as it was then known), the book that was my project for the year, I felt all those interests mesh, like teeth in a cog, with the teeth of Grammar and Style, and I would imagine myself, spasmodically, a writer. I hope you can infer from the above description that I was not yet twenty-two years old.

  I returned to chill gray Oakland from sunny Orange County, to the little basement room in my mother’s house where I did some of my finest feeling lonely and homesick. There I ventured through a few more pages of Swann’s Way and fretted about all those people I was soon going to be surrounded and taught by, people who were and knew themselves to be proud practitioners of novelism. Was everyone obliged to write a novel? Could I write a novel? Did I want to write a novel? What the hell was a novel, anyway, when you came right down to it? A really, really, really long short story? I hoped so, because that was the only thing I knew for certain that I could manage, sort of, to write.

  Now here I was, basically required by law apparently, to start writing a goddamned novel, just because all of these windy people down at Irvine were unable to contain themselves. What kind of novel would I write? Had the time come to leave my current writing self behind?

  The truth was that I had come to a rough patch in my understanding of what I wanted my writing to be. I was in a state of confusion. Over the past four years I had been struggling to find a way to accommodate my taste for the fiction I had been reading with the greatest pleasure for the better part of my life—fantasy, horror, crime, and science fiction—to the way that I had come to feel about the English language, which was that it and I seemed to have something going. Something (on my side at least) much closer to deep, passionate, physical, and intellectual love than anything else I had ever experienced with a human up to that point. But when it came to the use of language, somehow, my verbal ambition and my ability felt hard to frame or fulfill within the context of traditional genre fiction. I had found some writers, such as J. G. Ballard, Italo Calvino, J. L. Borges, and Donald Barthelme, who wrote at the critical point of language, where vapor turns to starry plasma, and yet who worked, at least sometimes, in the terms and tropes of genre fiction. They all paid a price, however. The finer and more masterly their play with language, the less connected to the conventions of traditional, bourgeois narrative form—unified point of view, coherent causal sequence of events, linear structure, naturalistic presentation—their fiction seemed to become. Duly I had written my share of pseudo-Ballard, quasi-Calvino, and neo-Borges. I had fun doing it. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop preferring the traditional, bourgeois narrative form.

  I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and “round” characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill—or rather I didn’t want to lose—that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, which was sometimes called “the sense of wonder.” If my subject matter couldn’t do it—if I wasn’t writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together—then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up the eye sockets for a week. But I didn’t want to write science fiction, or a version of science fiction, some kind of pierced-and-tattooed, doctorate-holding, ironical stepchild of science fiction. I wanted to write something with reach. Welty and Faulkner started and ended in small towns in Mississippi but somehow managed to plant flags at the end of time and in the minds of readers around the world. A good science fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach—it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself—but somehow, in the end, it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind. I wasn’t considering any actual, numerical readership here—I wasn’t so bold. Rather I was thinking about the set of axioms that speculative fiction assumed, and how it was a set that seemed to narrow and refine and program its audience, like a protein that coded for a certain suite of traits. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. (Twenty-two, I was twenty-two!)

  I paced around my room in the basement, back and forth past the bookcase where my stepfather kept the books he had bought and read in his own college days. All right, I told myself, take the practical side of things for a moment. Let’s say that I did write a novel. Your basic, old-fashioned, here-and-now novel. Where would I write it? Novels took time, I assumed. They must require long hours of uninterrupted work. I needed a place where I could set up my computer, and spread out, and get my daily work done without distraction: Ralph’s room. It had served Ralph as a room of his own; perhaps it would also serve me.

  I lugged my computer in there and up onto the workbench. It was an Osborne 1a. I had bought it in 1983 for all that was left of my bar mitzvah money plus everything I had managed to save since. It was the size of a portable sewing machine in its molded plastic case, with two five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk drives, no hard drive, and 64KB of memory. At twenty-five pounds you could shlep it onto an airplane and it would just barely fit under the seat in front of you. Its screen was glowing green and slightly smaller than a three-by-five index card. It ran the CP/M operating system and had come bundled with a fine word processing program called WordStar. It never crashed, and it never failed, and I loved it immoderately. But when I hoisted it onto the surface of Ralph’s workbench, and opened up one of the folding chairs that my mother stored in the crawl space, and sat down, I found that I could not reach its keys. Even standing up I could not reach the computer’s fold-down keyboard without bending my forearms into contorted penguin flappers. So I dragged over the black steamer trunk my aunt Gail had bequeathed to me at some point in her wanderings and set the folding chair on top of it. The four rubber caps of the chair’s steel legs fit on the trunk’s lid with absurd precision, without half an inch to spare at any corner. Then I mounted the chair. I fell off. I repositioned it, and mounted it again more gingerly. I found that if I held very still, typed very chastely, and never, ever, rocked back and forth, I would be fine. Now I just needed to figure out what novel I was going to write.

  I went back out to my room and shambled irritably back and forth from the door that led to the hot tub to the door that went upstairs, mapping out the confines of my skull like the
bear at the Pittsburgh zoo. And my eye lighted on a relic of my stepfather’s time at BU: The Great Gatsby.

  The Great Gatsby had been the favorite novel of one of those aforementioned friends whom I had decided that, for reasons of emotional grandeur and self-poignance, I was doomed never to meet up with again in this vale of tears. At his urging I had read it a couple of years earlier, without incident or effect. Now I had the sudden intuition that if I read it again, right now, this minute, something important might result: it might change my life. Or maybe there would be something in it that I could steal.

  I lay on the bed, opened its cracked paper covers—it was an old Scribner trade paperback, the edition whose cover looked like it might have been one of old Ralph’s wood shop projects—and this time The Great Gatsby read me. The mythographic cast of my mind in that era, the ideas of friendship and self-invention and problematic women, the sense, invoked so thrillingly in the book’s closing paragraphs, that the small, at times tawdry love-sex-and-violence story of a few people could rehearse the entire history of the United States of America from its founding vision to the Black Sox scandal—The Great Gatsby did what every necessary piece of fiction does as you pass though that fruitful phase of your writing life: made me want to do something just like it.

  I began to detect the germ of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh as I finished Fitzgerald’s masterpiece: I would write a novel about friendship and its impossibility, about self-inventors and dreamers of giant dreams, about problematic women and the men who make them that way. I put it back in its place on the shelf and as I did so I noticed its immediate neighbor: an old Meridian Books paperback edition of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, the one with the lipstick-print-and-curly-script cover art by Paul Bacon. I had never read Goodbye, Columbus, and as I got back into bed with it I remarked, in its lyric and conversational style, its evocation of an Eastern summer, its consciously hyperbolic presentation of the mythic Brenda Patimkin and her family of healthy, dumb, fruit-eating Jews, and its drawing of large American conclusions from small socio-erotic situations, how influenced Roth had clearly been by his own youthful reading of the Fitzgerald novel. That gave me encouragement; it made me feel as if I were preparing to sail to Cathay along a route that had already proven passable and profitable for others.