A re-creation
from notes
Down at the Kachemak Bay Writing
Conference an literary agent named Jim Ruttman scared many novice writers with
his frank honest appraisals of the current publishing scene. Among other comments, he observed, “you must
be equipped to hear no an excruciating number of times.” But, he also said that we must believe: “I am
worthy of an exception.” Suspend these
two truths in your mind and hold them there in dramatic tension.
I saw Footnote
this week, an Israeli film buy Joseph Cedars, about a pair of scholars, father
and son. The premise of the film is that
the father is mistakenly awarded an important national literary prize that was
intended for his son. The father is old,
isolated, and embittered. The son is the
opposite, plus he’s productive.
The
scenes that struck me were the responses of both father and son upon learning
they have won the award. The father cuts the announcement out of the newspaper,
places it in a folder, puts the folder in an envelope and files it, hides it
really, among an indistinguishable stack of folders. The son, is informed of the mistake and
receives an official announcement that he is the winner. Not wanting to steal
his father’s thunder he, too, hides the announcement from any one’s eyes. These scenes are not at all the point of the
film, which is more about sons and fathers.
There’s another
film, and please forgive me that my first two references here derived from film
rather than literature, that has left a scene in my mind, and it’s called Light
Sleeper. I remember nothing whatever of the film except for one image. Its main character was Willem Dafoe. In the story he might have been a pimp, or
something of that nature. But all I
remember of him was that he was a compulsive writer. He filled up notebook after notebook, hardly
removing his pen from the page. And when
he filled up a notebook, he opened the window and flung it out into the night
and picked up a blank one and resumed scribbling.
There
is some quiet message here about the nature of awards. If you’re writing for recognition, publication,
the hope of external recognition: you will be disappointed. And yet, if you’re
writing solely for yourself, as some sort of therapy, as was the Willem Dafoe
character, you hardly need an MFA program, just go to it, no one’s stopping
you.
When
in doubt it is best to remember Jim Harrison’s adage: “To be an artist is to be
a member of a 10,00 year guild, not a competitor on a horse race.”
When
students ask, as they often do, why writers write about such depressing
subjects, I turn them to Borges who said, “ I have always known that my destiny
was, above all, a literary destiny, that bad things, and some good, would
happen to me, but inn the long run all of it would be converted into
words. Particularly the bad things,
since happiness is its own reward.” But
this line can also tell us something about writing, that it, too, must be its
own reward.
I want to shift gears here to
remind you how necessary it is for a writer to be a passionate reader. Also, at Kachemak Bay was Barry Lopez. One of his offhanded remarks—I don’t think he
was stressing this at all, but it really struck me––was that before he turned
sixteen he had read Moby Dick six or seven times. He added that whenever he went to new
country, he went to bookstore, and
bought that language’s translation of Moby Dick. He said he found this reassuring. (By the way, Lopez was not reassured by
much—that is a different subject). This
led me to think not just about Moby Dick, but of all the texts that I have read
repeatedly over and over again. How many
of you own books that you have you read at least three times? How many of your favorite books do you own in
translation?
I
think of my life long love affair with The Great Gatsby—I never tire of reading
it. I think of my multiple copies of Lowry’s
Under the Volcano—I have to read every new introduction—Spenders’ and
Vollman’s. Or translations of Daumal’s
Mount Analogue, leading finally to the original French (which I do not even speak
or read!).
The point being:
without this passion for reading, your chances of writing anything your readers
will be passionate about will be greatly diminished.
Finally, I wish to say something
about influence, and in an backhanded way speak personally a little about our
guest, Gary Snyder. When I was finishing
my graduate work I had a tough time with my oral preliminary exam. I was practically struck dumb (by which I
mean mute, though the other sense of dumb applies as well). Probably I was over-caffeinated to the point
of paralysis. But one of the interlocutors took pity on me and lobbed me an
easy pitch, the obvious question: “Who have you been influenced by?” Even on this question I hesitated, and
François, Camoin, kindly added, “besides Gary Snyder, of course.” Now, I had
never thought of myself as influenced by Synder, whose work I had known for
years, but as a prose writer I didn’t necessarily think of him as a literary
influence. However, this was enough of a “clue,” that I was able to speak, with
reasonable lucidity about the influence of Gary’s Han Shan translations of the Cold
Mountain poems as an influence, which to that second I had never understood
before. Later, I realized that Snyder
had indeed been an influence, although the influence might be more personal
than literary.
Which
reminds me: I don’t quite remember meeting Gary for the first time. This is odd, as I had known his work for so
long, forty years now—I must have felt that my relationship with him was
already intimate, if not personal. I
know that we met within a three year period when I was teaching at UC Davis in
the early 1990s, me as a kind of slave laborer in the galleys of the good ship
Composition and Gary in a sweet chair that enabled him to commute from his
mountain home (and most importantly, provide him with health insurance—which a poet
needs as much as any other person).
But
I do remember being fortunate to introduce Gary to someone else. We were
holding a literary event featuring American writers who had written about their
Viet Nam experiences. They gathered at
Davis to mark the twentieth year anniversary of the fall of Saigon—the end of
the American presence in Viet Nam. I
was teaching an undergraduate nonfiction course and I arranged for one of the
guests, Larry Heinemann, to visit my class.
Unfortunately Larry is best known for winning the American Book Award
for his novel, Paco’s Story. Unfortunate
because the context this appears is
usually to mention that the award should have gone to Toni Morrison for Beloved. Paco’s Story is often cited as some kind of racist
or sexist flouting of literary quality. But,
I have to say that literary awards depend on human judges and Viet Nam probably
had more of a stranglehold on the American literary imagination in 1977, than
Morrison’s issues did at that historical moment. Note: see Harrison, above.
In
any case, Heinemann and I were talking after class and he said, not out of the
blue, I realized, that the biggest influence on him as a writer was Gary
Snyder. This caught me even more off-guard than the news that Snyder was my own
most obvious influence, as the violence which could be seen as Heinemann’s
subject was basically nowhere present in Snyder.
And,
Heinemann said, could I arrange for them to meet?
But
I couldn’t really introduce them—Gary and I moved in separate universes, and he
was seldom present on campus. Just as I
was about to explain this, up bounded Gary; he had a jaunty stride yet was ion no hurry.
And I left them there chatting happily outside of Sproul Hall home of
the Department of English and tallest building in Solano County.
So, influence. It
comes at you in surprising ways, it will strike you sideways from an angle you
don’t expect. Watch for it.
At this point I
probably closed by advising them to work hard, get some rest and exercise, and
not drink too much, though these admonishments are not in my notes. In the end, the only advice they took was to
work hard, which is really, all I could hope for.
