Broken Vessels Read online

  1986

  INTO THE SILENCE

  FROM TIME TO time I’ve read or heard a strange notion: many writers come from the South, because southerners have a tradition of telling stories. I did not grow up in the true South. I grew up in southern Louisiana, in a place of Cajuns and Creoles and Catholics. In the neighborhood where I spent most of my boyhood, only a few girls and boys were Protestants. Most of us came home on Ash Wednesday with dark grey crosses on our foreheads. From the third through the twelfth grades I learned from Christian Brothers at Cathedral School in Lafayette. The first class of the day was religion, and the Brothers told stories: from the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints, and they also told stories to show and dramatize morality. And through the rest of the day, in other classes, they told us stories, in their worthy attempt to teach us about the earth and its people, the living and the dead. They were not southerners. Two were from France; and Pancho Villa had sent one out of Mexico, in a freight train carrying nuns and Christian Brothers and priests. He told us that story too.

  When I left Louisiana in 1958 to become a Marine lieutenant, I met real southerners, drawling Protestants who had never eaten a crawfish. They told stories. So did everyone else I knew. We were all very young and there were a lot of babies and, often, after parties, some people of both genders spoke with amusement and sometimes derision about the young mothers gathered at one part of a room, talking about babies. Even now, because I have many young friends, and also two very young daughters, I hear this amusement or derision after parties. I confess to taking part in the amusement, now and years ago, in Quantico, Virginia, and Camp Pendleton, California. I was wrong.

  The mothers were not talking abstractly about infancy and early childhood. They were telling stories about their children, so that a listener could see and hear and perhaps even smell and touch the child who was not in the room, not even in the house, but at the mother’s home, usually in the care of a teenage girl. The mothers were also talking about their motherhood, and to convey those deep emotions and physical and spiritual changes in their lives, they chose what we have always chosen with our friends: they told stories with concrete language, with words that appeal to our senses. We talk abstractly with people whose love or affection or respect we don’t want, so we keep them at bay, we do not tell them any of the stories that are part of the collection of stories that is our earthly lives.

  In one life, there are so many of these stories and they are so different from each other, that I have come to mistrust a particular sort of novel: the sort that attempts to tell the whole story of a human life or human lives. Unless the novel ends in death, and even then I remain unconvinced: for, with a few magnificent exceptions, those novels by the very nature of their form — they must, finally, end — have left out enough stories to make at least another book.

  Years ago, when I believed or at least hoped it would work, I spent some time in marriage counseling. The counseling did not work because it was one last try at keeping two people lovingly in the same home and, unlike baseball and other pursuits, like writing fiction, a last act of will to stay married usually comes too late. What we did in the counselor’s office was tell stories. A good counselor won’t let you get by with the lack of honesty and commitment we bring to abstractions. And when we told these stories we discovered the truths that were their essence, that were the very reasons we needed to tell the stories; and, like honest fiction writers, we did not know the truth of the stories until we told them. Or, more accurately, until the stories told themselves, took their form and direction from the tactile language of our memory, our pain, and our hope.

  Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.

  1986

  A SALUTE TO MISTER YATES

  RICHARD YATES IS one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in most nations of the world. I have been his friend for thirty-three years, and he has most often needed money, and has never complained to me about that, or about anything else either. For several years in the seventies and eighties, Dick lived in an apartment on Beacon Street in Boston. It is a street with trees and good old brick buildings. He lived on the second floor, in two rooms. The front room was where he wrote and slept. A door at the far end of it, behind his desk, opened to the kitchen; and adjacent to that was the room I never saw him enter. I suppose his youngest daughter, Gina, slept there when she came to visit. Gina’s paintings and drawings hung in the first room, above the bed against one wall, and his desk facing another.

  His desk was two tables he placed in the shape of an L; he sat inside of it, the leg of the L on his right, and a window on his left. Below the window was an alley and parking spaces. On the floor near the kitchen was a small radio, plugged into an outlet; he listened to classical music. The back of a couch was against the long table of the L, and the couch faced the apartment’s door, the bathroom, his shelf of books, the closet, and the bed. When I went to visit him I sat on the couch, and he sat on the bed, and we drank Michelob and talked about writing, and writers.

  Fluffs of dust were on the floor, and to some eyes that one room where he lived may have looked dirty and cluttered. It was never cluttered. He wrote with a pencil on legal pads; but usually, when I went to see him, he was working on a typed draft, his manual typewriter on the shorter table, before his straight wooden chair; and the typed manuscript stacked on the long table, along with galley proofs and other writers’ manuscripts he was reading. His room reminded me of my own bachelor apartments, where I too lived in one room, and rarely entered the other, and my childrens’ paintings and drawings hung on the walls: the bed always made, the refrigerator stocked with breakfast food and beer, and every manuscript and book and bit of clothing in place, readily at hand. It was, I believed — and still do — a place that should have been left intact when Dick moved, a place young writers should be able to go to, and sit in, and ask themselves whether or not their commitment to writing had enough heart to live, thirty years later, as Dick did: with time his only luxury, and absolute honesty one of his few rewards.

  He woke each morning at seven and ate breakfast, then worked till noon, when he walked perhaps a hundred yards to Massachusetts Avenue, where it intersects with Beacon Street, and across it to a restaurant called The Crossroads. After lunch he napped, then wrote till evening and returned to The Crossroads for dinner and, even if I ate with him, even if we had dates, he went home around ten o’clock. He did not go to movies, and he never plugged in the television set Penelope Mortimer gave him after she taught at Boston University, then went back to England. It was on the living room floor, facing the couch, its cord lying behind it like a tail.

  On Beacon Street now there is only resident parking, but in those days I left my car near Dick’s and walked to the Red Sox games. One warm and dry and sunny afternoon, a Saturday in spring, I was walking past The Crossroads, toward Fenway Park, when Dick walked out of the restaurant. He had just eaten lunch and, as always, wore a suit and tie. I have rarely seen him without a tie. I had time before the game for a beer, so we went into The Crossroads and sat in a booth, and I congratulated him on receiving a second Guggenheim grant.

  “How much did you get?” I said.

  “Well,” he said, smiling. “How much did you get?”

  He was talking about several years earlier, in 1975.

  “I asked for twenty,” I said. “But I was making eleven-five teaching, so they gave me twelve.”

  He nodded, his eyes merry.

  “The first time,” he said, “I got sixty-five hundred. But that was nearly tw
enty years ago, Andre. This time I got sixteen thousand.”

  “Sixteen? That’s my salary, and I’m having a hard time in Haverhill. Can you make it on sixteen in Boston?”

  “Well, Andre,” he said, like a man holding a full house in five card stud, “I think I can make it on sixteen thousand dollars.”

  “You’re wonderful,” I said. “You’re the only writer I know, your age, who isn’t always worrying about money, talking about money: mortgages and cars and second cars and boats —”

  “I don’t really think those guys want all that stuff.”

  “If they gave you a hundred thousand you wouldn’t buy a damned thing, would you? You’d live in the same place and write every day and you wouldn’t change a thing, would you.”

  “I don’t want money,” he said. “I just want readers.”

  1988

  SELLING STORIES

  WE SHORT STORY writers are spared some of the major temptations: we don’t make money for ourselves or anybody else, so the people who make money from writers leave us alone. No one gives us large advances on stories we haven’t written. I have never envied a writer who makes a lot of money, because the causal combination of money and writing frightens me. The act of writing alone is all I can muster the courage to face in the morning; if my livelihood and the expectations of publishers depended on it, I doubt that I could do it at all. So, like the poets, short story writers live in a safer world. There is no one to sell out to, there is no one to hurry a manuscript for; our only debt is to ourselves, and to those stories that speak to us from wherever they live until we write them. And every writer has stories that only he can give birth to and, until he does, they float like bodiless spirits crying to be born. I have been teaching fiction writing to very young students for ten years, and I am still saddened when one of them leaves a story unborn, before I can hear it all; and, like a nuance of death, I can feel that story and its people drifting away forever.

  But that’s a different matter, and has to do with confronting oneself at the writing desk, where there are always temptations. When all that is done and the story is in the mail, we don’t have to worry about much until someone decides to publish it. Then, with some magazines, we have to do a bit of thinking. I’m forty-one, so I’ve done a lot of thinking, but I still don’t have many answers. Except one: I prefer to publish in quarterlies. That is not the whole truth. I would like to publish in Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly, but I never have, simply because I haven’t written anything they liked enough to publish.

  For reasons I’ve forgotten, I used to want to publish in Esquire, and there was a time when I mailed stories by special delivery to their fiction editor. Because he had read a story of mine in Northwest Review and written to me and said from now on, send everything directly to me. His assistant, a woman I never met but whom I liked anyway, wrote, saying that if the story in Northwest Review was one she had rejected, she would apologetically and happily walk through Central Park alone at midnight. This stirred in me memories of one of the sweetest and saddest images of my boyhood: a World War II movie — was it So Proudly We Hail? — about nurses or WACs or whatever on an island in the Pacific. Near the end of the movie, one of the girls puts a hand grenade between her breasts, walks into the jungle, and when the Japanese soldiers come out of the brush and surround her, she pulls the pin. That might have been Lana Turner. I wrote the kind woman at Esquire, told her she had indeed rejected the story that her boss liked, but Northwest Review had taken it and paid for it with a check for ten dollars from the state of Oregon, and she should not walk through that park even at high noon.

  But after that I mailed stories to her boss, who rejected them all. This was not disappointing, and if there’s anything serious in this piece, here it is, and it’s for any young writer who may be reading this and wondering why: In my nineteenth summer I began submitting stories to the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, Mademoiselle, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, through all the commercial magazines, then the quarterlies listed in the back of Foley’s Best American Short Stories. I knew the stories weren’t good enough to be published, but I also knew it was time to enter the game, and by my early twenties I was so used to rejections that they didn’t bother me anymore, and they still don’t. From magazines, that is. Book publishers are a different story, and there’s not room for that one here.

  So I wasn’t disappointed by the rapid-fire rejections from the man at Esquire. But I was confused. Some editors are like lovers, friends, dogs, or roads that one has known for a long time: they are consistent, and I can understand their rejections, even predict them, as after a while you can predict that when the moon is full your friend will go on a tequila drunk and your girl will suddenly cry. The man at Esquire had no pattern at all, or perhaps it was one I couldn’t figure out. I stopped trying to. For years I had not been able to figure out what the magazine itself was: at times it was serious, at times distasteful, at times silly. I still don’t know what it is, and I rarely pay the near-price of a six-pack for it unless it has a sure thing: Cheever or Styron or someone else who is always worth the price, whatever it may be. It would be nice to appear in Esquire, but nice finally isn’t very much, and one can live peacefully without it.

  You see why I say we short story writers live in a safe world. If Esquire paid fifty thousand dollars for a story then I might be tempted to learn what their fiction man likes, and what the magazine is really for, or who it is for. The next step would be trying to write what he or they or it likes and that is, of course, one of the many beginnings of one of the many endings of a writer.

  And now the New Yorker, that magazine hallowed by so many who do not write fiction, and not hallowed by so many who do. Three of my stories have appeared amid their good cartoons and their advertisements for things that exclude all but the rich. This was long ago, and it would be nice to publish there again, because I have four dollars in my savings account, and bills unpaid. Nice, but nothing more. The New Yorker frightens me, and I said this to one of its editors, a compassionate man whom I’ve never met, but who phoned me one night, a night when he was drinking alone, to say he hoped his letter of rejection had not hurt my feelings. When he learned I was sober, or not yet drunk, he told me to make myself a drink; so, standing in my kitchen, I drank several gin gimlets with this good man drinking his scotch in New York, and finally I told him his magazine scared me.

  “Scares you? Why?”

  “Because you pay so much money.”

  “We don’t pay as much as TV Guides.”

  “And when there’s so much money involved it gets to be very hard to say no to those little changes your boss always wants.”

  I was referring to the first story they had bought, back in 1967, when they told me I should delete the words “horny,” “brown-nose,” and “diaphragm.” I was young then, less easily angered, more easily impressed, and I deleted the words. It wasn’t the money. I had no idea as I cleaned up my manuscript that I would be paid $2,250. When I got the check I was excited, but scared too, and I should have been: for years after that, to this day in fact, as soon as a story I’m working on takes a downward abdominal dip, I say to myself: There goes the New Yorker. And I say it with relief, and with that great freedom one feels when writing with no market at all in mind.

  Sometimes I buy the New Yorker, for the stories and the baseball writing of Roger Angell. But always I am angered while I read it, for I keep seeing those advertisements that bracket the stories. And, since I don’t know anyone who reads the New Yorker every week or even every month, I can’t figure out who does, and why. I can only assume that the publishers know, and that the advertisements are for those people, and in my mind they look very much like the people in the magazine’s cartoons. Which is not what really bothers me anyway, since art is for everyone. What angers me is seeing art juxtaposed with advertisements for things which have no use at all except to decorate the body, to turn people into Christmas trees, to turn their vis
ion away from where art is trying to take them.

  I have an agent who has become a friend, and I love him as both. Without hyperbole, I can say that he does not make enough money from my work in a year to supply himself with cigarettes. Our arrangement is this: after he has sent a story to as many commercial magazines as he can find, I try the quarterlies. In 1976 he sold a story of mine to Penthouse for $1,000. My 90 percent of that pleased me, but I did not laugh all the way to the bank. On the way to the bank is Magee’s, the newsstand, variety store, and lunch counter in town, and I stopped for my first look at Penthouse. That afternoon I went to see an old friend of mine, who is also an older friend, a philosopher by trade, a man I have gone to through the years for advice.

  “Do you think it’s immoral to publish in Penthouse?” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s immoral to publish anywhere.”

  “Well, I just looked at it, and they have pictures of cunnilingus.”

  “That’s not cunnilingus. That’s a camera angle.”

  “If you came home and found your wife poised three inches over some guy’s mouth, you wouldn’t use this kind of casuistry.”

  “Not me: I’m a voyeur. I’d pull up a chair and watch. What do you care if some guy wants to look at those pictures?”

  “I don’t. I just don’t know if that’s any place to put a story. But it’s not that simple. The New Yorker advertises twenty-five-hundred-dollar gold ballpoints. I don’t know if that’s any place for a story either.”

  “You know what your problem is? You know how you feel about those gold ballpoints. And in your personal life you’re closer to Penthouse than you are to gold ballpoints, but you don’t want to be public about it. I’d say take their money and forget about it.”