The story I’m these days busy writing, titled Gladiolas, is growing longer by thousands of thoughts, words and deeds than I imagined it would. I’m not surprised that it’s turning out that way. After all, if truth be told, I write in much the same manner as I speak: long in the tongue and oftentimes long-winded.
I’ve decided not to post any more of that particular work of art here (oh yes it is!). Not for now, maybe not forever. For the moment, anyway. Let’s say for the moment.
Because for the moment I’m having too much fun following the characters’ unexpected twists and turns through the dark forest, in spite of the tangled trees — the complicated, foolish changes of heart that afterward seem as if they were inevitable. Too much fun to want to rush the mystery to a forced conclusion. The thing’s turning into a book, a book of the sort I like to read. Complete with moonlit nights, bay-windowed mansions, and lust-saturated love affairs.
I own a second reason for my hesitation to click the publish button just yet. I am a proud, card-carrying perfectionist. Yes, I understand the difficulties many writers experience in company with their schizoid-fractured voices, mental cross-eyed editors, dysfunctional inner-adolescents and armor-suited enemies of Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way Brigade. “The problem is,” the oft-repeated explanation goes, “we become our own harshest critics.”
But what’s wrong with paying heed to one’s inborn critical soul mate? I ask. Good for those armored soldiers who dare to challenge Julia on the battlefield, I say. We should be our own harshest critics. I wish more people who claim to be writers would criticize, edit, rewrite and polish their stories before they beam them down to Planet Amazonia or launch them on their way to Star Base CrushSomeWords.com.
Literary snobs, unite!
Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I beseech the blessed memory of Maxwell Perkins ever-sanctified, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me. I am an unrepentant sinner.
So, although my half-dozen breathless fans have been nagging — nay begging — me to post Gladiolas, Part II, pronto, I must disappoint my audience. For now, at least. Perhaps for an eternity. Maybe, maybe, maybe comes the day I plant Gladiolas on Planet Amazonia, in the same garden that grows such fine works of art as How To Write How-To-Write Books and Sell Them To Chat-room Habitués Who Fancy Themselves Cameron’s Congregationalists.
Still, today I want some form of this show to go on, because I’m hungry to write and fill this long-unattended space.
And because I’ve been re-reading, and thinking about Raymond Carver. So I’ll talk about Raymond Carver, self-immolated artist and superior successor to Papa’s Pen.
I suspect that were Carver alive and writing today, he’d have difficulty finding curious, interested readers.
Why do I think this is true?
Carver’s style with words is spare. Most of the “language,” then, must exist between the lines he wrote, and therefore preexist inside a reader’s head.
Take for instance Carver’s story, Fat. The story’s narrator tells you, in words here paraphrased by me:
A fat man walked into a diner. He sat down and ordered a large meal. The waitress wrote down the order. She gave the order to the cook. The cook was her husband. The cook said, “That man sure is fat. He’s that fattest man I’ve ever seen.” The waitress served the fat man. She was kind to him. Each word she spoke was spoken in a respectful tone of voice. The fat man had fat fingers. He puffed when he breathed. He ate three slices of bread, smeared thick with butter. He ate a big salad. He ate meat and potatoes. He referred to himself as “we.” “We don’t usually eat this much. But we are hungry.”
The fat man ate not one, but two desserts.
Later that night, the waitress and her husband closed the diner and went home. The waitress cooked and served her husband a meal. The husband said again, “That man sure was fat.” The wife did not answer her husband. They went to bed. The husband wanted sex. He climbed on top of his wife. She let him do it, because she did not want to argue. But she felt fat. She could not feel her husband.
The End.
A reader needs to think in order to feel entertained by stories like Fat. Most people who nowadays read fiction don’t want to think too much. They want to escape, in much the same way as television sit-coms permit them to escape. Little effort. No dictionary necessary. Familiar plot lines. Outward action (Bang, bang shoot-’em-up. No inner-emotional turmoil, please; I had enough of that at work all day).
But Raymond Carver won’t allow you to escape, not unless you choose to put his book back on the shelf and click the remote instead.
Lest you decide that I’m here condemning people for their unwillingness to invest effort when they read, permit me to say that when I first read Carver’s stories, although something about them tickled my fancy, I could not comprehend what I was reading. I thought, for instance, that Fat was about a fat man who ate too much, a cook who felt dazed by the sight of such a big man, and a waitress who went through the motions that had become her life, both at work and at home.
I understood no more than that. I “got” the point that the waitress was bored with living, but I understood nothing of the connection between her husband’s insecure arrogance and her disgust with him. I never considered the suggestion that her husband’s judgmental attitude made him far more distasteful a sight in her eyes than the self-effacing fat man’s pudgy fingers and ceaseless appetite. Matter of fact, until this very second, I hadn’t thought of any connection between the fat man’s appetite for food and the husband’s appetite for loveless sex (and isn’t that sudden discovery part of the magic involved with the writing process?).
Back then, on the day when I first read Raymond Carver, I was capable of understanding no more of life than that of the life I’d lived. Same is true, of course, today.
The year was 1985. I was a young man. I was an even younger writer. I was a hungry reader. I was a woman’s lover, and because of all this, I was full of myself. I didn’t so much think that I would live forever, as I thought that only other people died.
I walked the streets of Santa Monica, California. I parked my car near Fifth and Wilshire on a Saturday morning in summertime. For several years I’d been married to a Jewish woman in Philadelphia, PA. I adored her, and so she soon grew tired of being so much adored and so little respected. She left me, and I left Philadelphia. One-way ticket to the rest of my life.
I ate breakfast at Zucky’s Diner. I’d learned to appreciate diners and Jewish food when I lived in Philadelphia.
And books. After eating a breakfast almost as big as that of Carver’s fat man, I felt hungry for books. Half a block from the diner was a store called Pacific Books. Small store, perhaps a thousand volumes tops on the shelves. Literary titles. History texts. Atlases and scientific journals. I liked the aroma of the place. Quiet carpets on the floor. Faint classical music in the air. Customers who spoke in whispered tones.
I studied the books’ spines. I touched their covers. I pulled them close to my face and breathed the spice of possibility. Yes, I was like that. And yes again, I am still like that.
Raymond Carver lived on one of those shelves. I didn’t know him. I could not have known that day that he was busy dying, that he’d been killing himself for many years by way of alcohol, tobacco and dissatisfaction. I could not have known that in three years’ time he would be dead. All I knew that day, when I opened one of his books, was that a story named Fat was short enough that I could read it — from beginning to end — in brief enough a slice of time that I wouldn’t seem a stingy customer to the lady at the counter.
And all I knew, once I finished reading Carver’s story was that it made me think, and made me want to think some more.
