Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then feels the need for some kind of contact…

In the late 1990s, I taught Anglo-American law at Charles University in Prague. The law faculty is a dusty, gloomy building that squats on the bank of the Vltava River. Everything about the place is huge, the height of the ceilings, the doors, especially the doors. I’ve never seen rooms with such heavy doors. You had to yank them open with two hands. Kafka got a law degree at the faculty in 1906. It wasn’t hard to imagine him swallowed up by that building, and I spent a lot of time that year thinking about him wandering those halls not built to human scale. I had a lot of time to think. My job wasn’t very taxing. Even showing up to teach seemed optional. Sometimes I had five students; other days it was just me and a guy named Jan. Jan had a cousin who lived in East Lansing.

A lot of people pass through Prague and dream up some dopey kinship with Kafka and I took the fact that not only was I irrelevant – a key thing – but was also doing time in the very same building as he once walked as a kind of license. I am as lost here on the face of the earth as he was. Maybe one of the reasons we always return to him is because nobody writes about loneliness like he does, and loneliness is something we desperately seek. I often look for it and can’t find it anywhere.

I once went to one of those naked spa-like retreats they have here in California. God only knows what the hell I was thinking. To get away from all that noisy flesh, I fled, proudly fully clothed, up to the top of a mountain and sat alone on a yoga mat in a strange little hippie hut. Then – I was joined by a very chatty guy wearing nothing but hiking boots and a thong. Hey man, what’s with all the layers? You want to discuss this?

But here’s the thing, as much as I wanted to bludgeon the guy to death with my yoga mat, I was grateful for him, too, because as much as I told myself I wanted it, needed it, being lonely is not only scary, it’s work. As long as he was there to loathe, I didn’t have to be completely with myself. Which is exhausting.

Kafka, I was talking about Franz Kafka. I guess what I’m getting at is that true loneliness is a rare and difficult thing and we want it, we don’t want it, we want it.

Maybe it’s always been this way. Here’s a totally unprovable theory I’ve been developing in my garage over the past couple of hours concerning Kafka. Franz wasn’t lonely at all. Take a look at his diaries. He makes my social life in 2012 look dismal.  The last time I went to a party was an Obama fundraiser in 2008. Kafka? We’re talking about a guy who was at the café all the time. He was a serial engager who never married. A man who constantly ran to people as well as away from them. My thought of the day (it is now late dusk, the kitchen has changed colors, and I haven’t turned on the light yet) is that Kafka wrote so much about loneliness because he so often dreamed of attaining it – not because he had it.

His work affirms the bizarre contradiction that as much as we talk about it we are actually very rarely by ourselves in this crowded universe.  This may have seemed wrong to Kafka given how much time, he knew too well, that all of us will be spending companionless, in a dark hole.

Of course our proximity to other human beings doesn’t mean we actually connect to them. But the gulf between us when we are in the same room is a different story altogether. If only Gregor was able to speak to his sister and thank her for everything that she was obliged to do for him…

I’m talking here about this more fundamental question: Alone, or with others in the first place?  The noise of ourselves versus the noise of our brethren.

He wrote some of the greatest brief stories ever written, stories that sometimes unfold in a single paragraph like a fist opening. Often they are about this weird and endless struggle between our desire for loneliness and our horror of it.

One tiny story is “The Streetwindow,” written not long after his graduation from law school. It’s about how all a lone person has to do is look out the window at a city street and he can’t help but be carried away by the messy parade of humanity.

And even if his state is such that he is not seeking anything at all and merely steps to the window-ledge as a weary man, letting his eyes wander up and down between the public and the sky, and he is reluctant to look and has his head titled back a little, yet for all that the horses down below will drag him into the train of their wagons and their tumult and so in the end towards the harmony of man.

At some point, much as we talk a big game about going it alone, we can’t help but be pulled to the window. Come on into my hut and talk things over with me, thong man.

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Over New Year’s (yeah, a lonely voice likes to party), I re-read one of Havel’s plays, “Largo Desolato,” a play about a dissident philosopher named Leopold who fears being sent to prison, but who also fears not being sent to prison, a beautiful Havelian situation. How fast it happens. Now Václav Havel too speaks with the sad, fearless authority of a writer from the grave. But something else, something strange, a little miraculous. This freshly dead writer began whispering to me like nothing happened. He went on talking as if the headlines were all fiction. Don’t listen to all the hollow tributes about my selfless, angelic qualities, I’m still here, and I’m still making trouble, and I’m no saint…

Here’s Leopold in “Largo Desolato,” the reluctant hero everybody is waiting on. Fellow intellectuals and dissidents, as well as ordinary workers, are waiting for him to write something really juicy this time, something that will really stick it to the regime. But like any other, ordinary writer, Leopold’s having trouble knowing what to say next.

Leopold: It’s funny but when I run out of excuses for putting off writing and make up my mind to start,

I stumble over the first banality – pencil or pen? – which paper? – and then this thing starts –

Lucy: What thing?

Leopold: The cycle thing –

Lucy: What’s that?

Leopold: My thoughts just start going round in a loop –

Lucy: Hm –

Leopold: Look, do we have to talk about me?

Lucy: You love to talk about yourself!

Havel once said in an interview that of all his plays, “Largo Desolato” was the most directly autobiographical. He went on to say that if he sometimes wrote harsh portrayals of real people in his plays, he saved the roughest treatment for himself. This is a good rule of thumb for those of us who write about our families and friends. Do it. But manhandle yourself worse.

What I appreciate most about Leopold is how comically unbrave he is. How terrified he is. He spends much of the play furtively looking out the keyhole, quivering, waiting for the secret police to show up. When they do arrive, he seriously considers taking the deal the two cops offer. All he has to do is disavow “a certain essay” he has written and they won’t send him to prison. Not only does he dream, wistfully, of selling out, he’s vain as all hell. A serial philanderer, Leopold is always looking forward to the next conquest, the one that will lead, at last!, to genuine love. In short, Leopold’s a guy, a human being.

There’s a hilarious, over-the-top scene at the end of the play when a young fan named Marguerite comes to visit the renowned philosopher. She loves his work, and also believes she loves him, and Leopold, in spite of his great inner turmoil over the big questions, in spite of the fact that he may well be the conscience of his nation, lays his lonely guy routine on thick.

Leopold: Ah, my dear girl, I really don’t know if I’m capable of love –

Marguerite: Don’t tell me that you’ve never felt anything towards a woman –

Leopold: Nervousness – more with some, less with others –

Marguerite: You need love! Mad passionate true love! Didn’t
you yourself write in Phenomenology of Responsibility that a person
who doesn’t love doesn’t exist? Only love will give you the strength
to stand up to them!

Leopold: That’s easy for you to say, Marguerite, but where
would one find it?

(Marguerite takes a quick drink, winces and quietly blurts out.)

Marguerite: With me!

Leopold: What? You?

There’s a certain courageous honestly in Havel, in his plays, in his essays.  Its rare in people, writers, even harder to find in politicians. Ask any Czech and they also might tell you that Havel could be scoldy, lectury, unafraid to monologue, tedious, etc. And yet many Czechs, I think, loved him. More now than ever, of course. So it goes with love and loss. Complicated love, family love.

A Czech neighbor of mine in San Francisco, upon hearing the news and having no one to speak to who could truly understand her grief, went out to Golden Gate Park to lay a flower at the feet of the statue of another Czech writer/ president, Thomas Masaryk. Masaryk, the first Czech President, and also a philosopher, wrote many books, including a groundbreaking study of suicide.[1] You’ve got to hand it to Czechs for electing thinkers.

As president Havel had to make choices he may not have made as a writer. A president – even one whose post was largely ceremonial – often can’t afford the luxury of being subtle. The bombing of Serbia by NATO, which Havel backed, wasn’t subtle. I was teaching human rights on the law faculty of Charles University in 1999, and I got an earful from my students about Havel being a complete hypocrite. The man who wrote “The Power and the Powerless” favors murdering civilians to stop Milosevic? I pointed out that what Milosevic was up to in Kosovo wasn’t very subtle either and that it seemed only the gun would stop him. Needless to say, my students had a point. For a man like Václav Havel to support the use of brute force strength rather than more humane, creative means – that must have been a hard pill to swallow.

But he was a man, a writer, who was well aware of his own imperfections. Nowhere in Havel’s work is he more unguarded than in Letters to Olga, a collection of letters he wrote to his wife while he was serving his third stint in prison, a term that lasted from 1979 to 1982. Although Letters to Olga contains breathtaking writing throughout, it doesn’t always show the hero of the Velvet Revolution/ Divorce in the best light. When he was arrested that time, he was found by the police at a girlfriend’s apartment in Prague. Havel responds to Olga’s understandable coldness.

You said you were not sending me a kiss and that I know why.
I don’t know why! I do know, however, that you mustn’t write
such things to me – I felt miserable for several days. These letters
are all one has here. You read them a dozen times. Turn them over in
your mind, every detail is either a delight or a torment and makes you
aware of how helpless you are. In other words, you must write me nice
letters. And number them, put a date on them, and above all, be as
exhaustive as you can, and write legibly.

He also says she should do a better job of maintaining the country house, build up a philosophical library for when he’s released, and learn to drive. Model husband, no. Pain in the ass? Narcissistic? See under: Writer. And like Leopold, Havel too must have contemplated countless times how easy it might have been to simply sell out, to give up being a martyr in exchange for his freedom. Thus, Havel knew the price of resisting.

In “Largo Desolato,” Leopold unheroically muses about how much easier life might be if only he disavowed his words. “It was wonderful when nobody was interested in me – when nobody expected anything from me, nobody urged me to do anything – I just browsed around the second-handbookshops…”

This is the man who will lead a revolution? Why not? I’ll take my fictional heroes, as I take my presidents, flawed – or not at all. Those who believe they’ve cornered the market on all the answers are the ones to be wary of, in literature, politics, life. I’ll take the confused, the mistake-ridden, the still trying to figure it all out. Again Havel speaks from prison:

What else is there to say about my life? I’ve read a book on the
Etruscans, and I’m reading one on Carthage; I’m studying a little
English, doing a little yoga, playing some chess (though my partner is
too good and I don’t enjoy it), and trying to come to terms with the
lack of lack of light by day and the lack of darkness at night.

Part of a writer’s job is to try and shed some light on the mysterious contradictions that we human beings try and square in order to get through the day. How revolutionary peacemakers turn around and justify the bombing of civilians is only one example. I imagine that President Havel was as relentless with himself in office, with the choices he had to make, as he was in his writing, as he was with his wife when he was doing time, and ultimately, as he was with his country. I’ll take a human being over consistency any day. I’ll also take the guy who knows how to laugh. Now that this particular flawed man is dead, we should listen to him even more closely than ever.

If you don’t want to dissolve in your own seriousness to the
point where you become ridiculous to everyone, you must have a healthy
awareness of your own ridiculousness and nothingness. As a matter of
fact, the more serious what you are doing is, the more important it
becomes not to lose this awareness.[2]

[1] In Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization (1881), Masaryk argued, among other things, that sucide rates would rise with an increase in modernization. He was right.

[2] From Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Huizdala (1991).

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I mourn him like a lost brother. I’ve no right to say this. It’s ridiculous. Yet some voices, we convince ourselves, can’t be lived without. Their words, our oxygen. So it is with Babel. I cling stupidly, desperately almost, to the embarrassing illusion that the man was put on earth (and shot twice in the head by Stalin’s goons) for the sole purpose of giving me pleasure in my cold garage. This sounds wrong. But why not just say it? Why not shout it to the dog walkers across the street in Precita Park? Hey Yatzee’s dad, Hey Punim’s mom, Isaac Babel’s prose is so achingly heart gnawing, it gives me a sexual charge.

I talk in my head and even I don’t listen anymore.

Yatzee’s dad and Punim’s mom watch the dogs sniff each other. Yatzee and Punim circle. They sniff each other some more. Life’s dance. The minutes wander by, another afternoon procrastinated into sweet oblivion. In my city, to each his own sexual charge. A Russian short story writer dead since 1940? Go to town bud, have all the fun you can muster. We got dogs to walk.

Stolen, ducktaped copy.

I’ve been resisting writing anything about The One for years. What could I possibly say beyond what my teacher and friend Andre Dubus said to me almost 17 years ago when I borrowed his copy of Collected Stories, the old Meridian edition translated by Walter Morrison, the one with the guy on the cover dressed up to look like Babel. That big furry hat, those goofy glasses. This was apparently before any photographs of the man were available in the west. The publisher wanted to give the impression of Babel as a little Jew playing dress-up, the four-eyed book worm who goes off riding with the big bad Cossacks. I hoarded the book, read and re-read it like a starveling. For weeks. Until Dubus called me and roared into the phone. “Where the my Isaac Babel? Get your own goddamn copy!”

I never did return it. Andre. Isaac Babel, another thing I didn’t get the chance to thank you for.

Nothing more need be said, get it, steal it, and yet having nothing better to do for the last couple of hours, I’ve been hunting through four different translations in search of a bad Babel sentence, my theory being that one must exist somewhere.  All writers are entitled to bad sentences. How can a writer, even the very greatest of writers, know they are mortal if every sentence hits the mark? Our bad sentences, the imperfections that make us who we are. To each our own bad sentences, I say.

The man himself talked about this in a speech to the 1934 Moscow Writers’ Conference (think Soviet version of manic AWP). Babel had no desire to speak and yet he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. In Stalin’s Russia, writers had to speak, had to write. Silence itself was taken not only as an affront, but an act of subversion.

“…everything is given to us by the party and the government and only one thing is taken away: the freedom to write badly. Comrades, we must not conceal that this is an important right, and it is no small thing to take away.”

Even in that atmosphere, Babel went for a laugh and I’ll bet he got it. With the benefit of awful hindsight, the quip works like a typical Babel sentence. Brief, funny, grief soaked. You laugh till you look down at your chest and you realize your heart’s bleeding.

The man wasn’t even allowed to live long enough to write badly.

It is tempting to say Stalin did literature a favor. But who would ever wish their brother dead, even if the long shadow of inevitable failure itself looms down the years? The story goes that Stalin had never even read Babel before he had him murdered. It may be apocryphal but I accept it as I accept other myths I live by. In the middle of the night Stalin called a sycophantic literary critic and asked him, “Tell me, Ivan Yegorovich, is this Babel character as good as people say?”

The sycophantic critic couldn’t quite figure out the right answer and so in a moment of panic Yegorovich said what he actually thought.

“He’s better.”

If it’s not true, it’s still true. If Stalin had actually read Babel, he wouldn’t have been able to tell if he was any good or not. Men (and it is always men) who on a whim can – and do – order the deaths of millions of people are, in my garage view, incapable of reading well because reading well requires reading humanely. If Stalin (a mediocre poet himself) had truly read Isaac Babel, he would have sunk to his knees and wept. Would he have closed the gulags? No. Literature has never had much success interfering with the business of tyranny. (Ask Obama about Guantanamo and Obama’s a
reader.) And yet and yet. I still, in spite of everything, grip tight my faith in the power of stories to stick it to power.

Sermon over. Where was I? Right, a bad sentence. Here’s the best I can do. This is from “Evening,” part of the Red Cavalry stories:

The night consoled us in our sorrows, a light wind fanned us like a mother’s skirt and the grasses below gleamed with dewy freshness.[1]

Gleamed with dewy freshness? Oh, Isaac, say it isn’t so. I just got done telling the entire Rumpian world that you never penned a single –

Check another translation:

The night comforted us in our anguish; a light breeze rustled over us like a mother’s skirt and the weeds below us glittered with freshness and moisture.[2]

Weeds I like better than grass, but glistened with freshness and moisture? Lets try this again:

Night comforted us in our miseries, a light wind fanned us like a mother’s skirt, and the grass below sparkled with freshness and moisture.[3]

Okay, okay. We can no longer blame this on the poor, unloved translators without whose thankless work we would never know these stories in the first place. The stuff with the wet grass clunks whether it glistens, gleams, or sparkles. So we’ll split the difference 50/50. Call it a bad phrase within a luminous sentence. Because I’d saw off my right thumb to have written the light wind fanned us like a mother’s skirt. In the larger context of the story, the line is even more glorious. These two guys lying on the wet grass are soldiers in the middle of a nasty war on the Polish frontier. They’ll be lucky if they see tomorrow morning, forget their mothers. In a later Red Cavalry story called, “The Song,” Babel writes, “When there’s a revolution on, a mother’s an episode.”

Isaac Babel

I often forget what actually happens in a Babel story. I think this is because what actually happens is never – on it’s own – especially surprising. Death is coming, we know its coming, there’s no getting around it; it either strikes or, at the very least, lurks in nearly every story.[4] Something else I’m getting at, something far more intangible and difficult to explain. I think it has something to do with the fact that a Babel story always unfurls in real time so that to re-read is to completely re-experience. It’s a little like sex. Do we crave sex again because we’re wondering how it will all turn out? Not the outcome, the flesh, the wanting of the flesh – again, again, again. Not the plot, the details, the sentences, the moments. In Babel, every moment demands attention. He reminds us that this is how intensely we should be observing the world when we aren’t reading. An old man’s watery eyes. The sun like a lopped off head, rolling down the sky. A Polish officer’s too fancy underwear. Ribbons of dust. A rabbi’s son, a revolutionary, buried at a forgotten station.

In Babel even the most routine moment, is – always – uniquely and flaringly alive. Therefore any attempt to claim him, as I tried to do above, is doomed in the face of the work itself.  He’s a Russian writer; he’s a Jewish writer. He’s a Jewish Russian writer. He’s both and neither. May as well call him a Madagascarian writer. A Delawarean writer. A Mormon writer. Why not? Because Babel, like Gogol and Chekhov before him, can never be contained by ethnic, political, cultural, or any other cages. He knew so much about us human beings. He knew how relentlessly cruel we are to each other, and also how, less common but still pervasive, gentle we can be.

This is not to say Babel wasn’t completely immersed in his own world. The Poet C.D. Wright has a beautiful variant on former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil’s line, “All Politics is local.” Wright says all salvation is local. Babel probably believed this. He refused to immigrate to Paris when he had the chance because he couldn’t bear the idea of not living in Russia. For him, if there was going to be any salvation, it was going to be at home, in his own language, with his own people. Their jokes, their miseries. In spite of everything his letters show he was optimistic about the future. In 1933, Babel wrote, “The collective farm movement has made great progress this year and now limitless vistas are opening up – the land is being transformed…The winter here is extraordinary mild and beautiful. There’s a lot of snow. I feel well.” Yet if Russians were going to go down, he would go down with them. A Russian, a Jew, a hesitant revolutionary. A human writer.

Zora Neale Hurston

So no claimings and no boxing him up. However, in the event that tonight I am mugged while walking the dog up Bernal Hill, and the mugger, rather than asking for my emptyish wallet, demands at gunpoint that I compare Babel to another writer, I’m ready with an answer. I wouldn’t look to Babel’s kinsmen like Gogol or Chekhov or Kafka or Singer or Malamud or Bellow or even Leonard Michaels, who at times has real Babelian rhythms. For me, the writer with as acute an eye and ear: Babel’s near exact contemporary, Zora Neale Hurston.[5] Her sentences have a similar way of detonating in the brain. And Hurston’s fiercely individual characters – like Babel’s – represent nobody but themselves. Both often write about isolated souls in conflict with the unruly rabble known as the rest of humanity. Both reported from so deep within their own respective territories – in her case, the south, the Bible; in his, Odessa, the Bible – that, again, their intimacy with the local rises to the universal. Both spoke the hard truths to societies that either couldn’t or refused to listen. And both were silenced. Hurston by entrenched racism and indifference; Babel by the bullet.

Then she saw all of the colored people standing in the back of the courtroom. Packed tight like celery, only much darker than that. They were all against her, she could see. So many were against her that a light slap from each of them would have beat her to death. She felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts. They were there with their tongues locked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks. The only killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white folks.

In the face of all this hostility, Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God holds on to her own soul and never once stops seeing the world in her own way. All are against her, packed like celery. If everybody in the courtroom gave Janie a slap, she’d be beaten to death. The beauty and horror of this line astounds. Think about all those light slaps adding up.

And a page earlier, a line that might have brought Babel himself to his knees. Janie wonders how she will possibly endure the turn her life has taken.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its own right to weep.

It will end. Somehow, it always does. And people either endure, or they don’t. But this doesn’t mean Janie doesn’t have the right to weep.

In Babel’s work nowhere is this absolute right to weep (possibly the only pure, inalienable right we have) more empathically expressed than in the 1932 story, “The End of the Almshouse”. A band of elderly poorhouse Jews are working in a cemetery not long after the fall of the Romanov’s and the birth of the Soviet Union. Amid the general euphoria, confusion, poverty, and wretchedness of that time, the Jews of the Almshouse make a pretty good living renting out a single coffin, using it and re-using it for seemingly non-stop funerals.

Timber at that time had vanished from Odessa. The rented coffin did not lie idle. At home and during the funeral services the deceased person remained inside the oak box, but he was put into the grave wrapped only in a shroud.

By itself the detail of the rented coffin would be wonderful. A lesser writer would mine it even further for laughs. Not Babel. He ends the paragraph with, “This is a forgotten Jewish law.”

That is, for dust thou art and unto dust though shalt return. That is, fancy coffin or no fancy coffin, we’re all going to join the worms, and this has always been the law, everybody’s law.

Be our common demise as it may. When you’re alive and you’re hungry, you got to make a living.  If you rent out a casket, you rent out a casket. Death is money in a time of immense change, upheavel. And that upheavel asserts itself – literally – in the second page of the story when a Jewish Bolshevik named Gersh is buried in the cemetery with the full honors of a revolutionary hero. The commander of the division eulogizes, drones:

Comrade Gersh joined the Bolshevik Worker’s Party and worked as a propagandist and liaison agent. In 1913, Comrade Gersh began to undergo repression together with Sonya Yanovskaya, Ivan Sokolov and Monoszon in the town of Nikolayev…

As he winds his speech down, the Jewish gravediggers prepare to dump Gersh out of the casket when the commander – in a classic Babelian moment – halts them with a nudge of his spur. “Leave it…Leave it as it is…Gersh did service to the Republic.” And so Gersh is buried in a coffin that had doubled as a cash cow.

Of course, the old Jews don’t take their loss lightly. The old folks of the Kofman Almshouse rise with their shovels and their wheelbarrows, many riding in wheelchairs (which Babel calls invalid carriages). They rise. They seize the little dignity they’ve got left. It’s Simon-Volf and Doba-Leya and Meyer Beskonechny and the rest versus the entire Russian Revolution. What could be more impossible, absurd? Though for a brief moment, you think they’ve got a shot. A doctor comes to the almshouse in the name of the progress, to inoculate the Jews against smallpox. This is the moment they choose to rebel and the rebellion begins with shoutings – words. The only real weapon left to weak folks. It’s Meyer Beskonechny who starts it. He tells the doctor, he’s got nothing for her to jab. How can she jab him if he’s got no flesh for her to jab?

“Life is sweepings,” Beskonechy muttered, “the world is a brothel, people are crooks…”[6]

As always, it’s comical till it isn’t. Soon the old folks will not only be out a coffin, they’re going to be evicted. The cemetery itself will be nationalized. But Babel, like Hurston, is never preoccupied with suffering alone, and the Jews aren’t stock victims. Our inhumanity to each other goes without saying. It’s how people respond to the inhumanity that counts. To confer victimhood on one’s characters is to see them only as a type, as the fulfillment of an idea, and people can never – if you watch them closely enough – be corralled into an idea. In Babel they will always fight their way out with humor laced with grief. “Life is sweepings.” It’s the magnificent refrain of the story, and I’m (happily) not even sure I understand it completely. Sweepings? Garbage? Refuse? Ruin? I get it even if I don’t get it. Life is sweepings. The world is a brothel. People are crooks. And then, well, you know what happens.

Hurston again:

So Jaime began to think of death. Death, that strange being with huge square toes who lived in the west…

And Babel:

The sun surfaced above the leafy treetops of the cemetery. Arye-Leyb put his fingers to his eyes. Out of their dimmed hollows crept a tear.

__________________________________________________

[1] David McDuff, translation

[2] Peter Constantine translation. Constantine has taken a lot of hits for his comprehensive translation of Babel published in 2002. Unfortunately, and I hate this say it, he deserves them. Constantine has done some great translating of other writers but his Babel is at times abominable. I speak no Russian, and I’ve no right to say this, either. But I stand by it. Constantine’s Babel too often lacks timing and rhythm in English. Further he fails to appreciate what he himself indentifies as “the different registers of Babel’s voice.” His tone remains too consistent throughout the massive collection of all Babel’s known work. Most treasonous of all, Constantine doesn’t seem to get Babel’s sense of humor. For more on this, see two excellent pieces critical of the Constantine translation: Alex Abramovich in Slate and Francine Prose in Harper’s.

[3] Walter Morrison translation.

[4] Unless we are talking about “Crossing into Poland” when the shock of death itself is revealed to be actually lying next to Lyutov, in bed.

[5] Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama. Babel came along three years later, in 1894, in Odessa.

[6] David McDuff, translation

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Am I alone here? Doesn’t it seem as though there is a lot of pressure these days to be positive? For instance, Facebook [1] is so relentlessly cheerful that it feels like entering some kind of Stepford universe. Which can be pleasing. I mean the Stepford wives are all beautiful and they live in beautiful, mortgage-free houses. And I speak as someone who is just as guilty of spreading this false positivity as anybody else. Just the other day I posted a picture of me and my kid. I’m not saying she’s not adorable, and I’m not saying I don’t want to show her off, but note that I didn’t post a photograph of the epic meltdown she had the other day at the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor when she threw a half eaten chimichanga at an elderly diner. Only the good times, only the perfect moments.

There are days I wish I lived a long time before the internet, say back in the 1860’s, when America had a great, depressed president. Not that there weren’t other problems those years. Huh? Where was I? Oh. This is The Lonely Voice, a column for the sad out there who still read books made of murdered trees. Think of the Lonely Voice as the opposite of self-help. What I’m after is giving you a unhelpful dose of fresh grief. And though I’m not entirely sure anybody actually reads this, here we are again. If writing short stories is like blowing your nose into oblivion that writing about short stories is a little like…

I can’t come up with anything.

Right now I am alone in my garage, with my books, and the rim of an old car tire from a car that no longer exists. Here and there the gnawing mice peep out of the walls. They say hello. I say hello back. I say, I’m reading a great story by so and so. They retreat to their wood chips and old, rusty dust.

The Lonely Voice takes its name from one of the few great books about short stories, Frank O’Connor’s 1962 book of the same title. O’Connor argues that great short stories are often the voice of the outsider, the voice of a member of a submerged population. I love this idea. Certain novels are said to capture the Zeitgeist of certain generations. A story, no matter the time or place, is always a lone voice, seeking your attention, your love even, by virtue of its singularity. No Zeitgeist, an annoying word anyhow, needed.

In O’Connor’s theory, stories speak for the least heard among us, for instance, the poor in a rich country. Put your ear to the floor and listen.

I try and write about stories because I believe someone should. I’m by no means the only one who does so. (See the great stuff out of England at The Short Review, a site run by a short story writer, Tania Hershman.) Somebody should because for as long as people have been scribbling stuff down on murdered trees, some of the most dangerous writing has been in the form of the shortish story. Think Job, think Herodotus. Leap a few years to Melville. “Bartebly ” has more provactivity  (Isaac, is this a word? [2]) in it than how many millions of pages written since? Every time I read Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” I am more befuffeled  (even if this isn’t a word, leave it[3]) and more in love with Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield, a couple who make up one of the strangest of all literary marriages. (Brief plot summary: Mr. Wakefield moves around the corner and one city block away from his wife – and lives there, unbeknownst to her, for the next thirty years, watching her get old.) Why does he do it? The world will never know. The plot isn’t half of it. The story is 9 pages long, and bottomless.

The characters in certain stories are the family I never fight with. Virgie in Eudora Welty’s “The Wanderers” is one of the heroes of my life. If I could only be as brave facing my failures as Virgie is.  And again, I don’t love “The Wanderers” because I understand it, or because it teaches me anything, or because it explains my fucked-up society, but because it captures, fleetingly, both the pain and exhilaration of being alive.

Are “Bartelby,” “Wakefield,” and “The Wanderers,” happy stories? Not a one. But the misery is truly wondrous. Bartelby dies, unknown and unknowable, in prison. Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield are reunited but not before their lives are nearly over. Virgie may yet triumph, but the weight of all that’s gone wrong in her life will always drag her down, bring her home, at least in her mind, wherever in the world she happens to end up.  But I’m always out here wishing her well, and thus, in my mind, Virgie never dies.

I’ll leave my personal giants, Melville, Hawthorne, and Welty, for another day. Today’s installment of the column concerns a lesser-known, Swiss author, and yet someone who is no less a world-class storywriter: Robert Walser.  So unique was Walser in his time that his contemporaries compared Franz Kafka to him, not the other way around. I worry that these days Walser is more known for how he died than what he wrote so lets get this out of way. Walser died in a Swiss insane asylum after famously declaring, “I didn’t come here to write, I came here to be crazy.” One day he roamed away from the asylum and into the adjacent forest. Later, they found him frozen to death in nothing but a bathrobe.

Before Walser retreated into self-imposed madness he wrote some of the oddest stories of the last century. Among them is “Kleist in Thun” about the German writer Heinrich von Kleist, author of “The Marquise of O,” a story that begins with this remarkable sentence:

In M –, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O –, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; that she was resolved, out of consideration to her family, to marry him.

“Kleist in Thun” opens with the narrator reading a plaque on a house. We never learn exactly what the plaque says. Presumably something like Here once slept the legendary German writer Kleist. From the plaque there is a brilliant transition-less movement directly into Kleist’s psyche as he wanders around Thun taking in the sites – in 1802.

Spring has come. Around Thun the fields are thick with flowers, fragrance everywhere, hum of bees, work, sounds fall, one idles about; in the heat of the sun you could go mad. It is as if radiant red stupefying waves rise up in his head whenever he sits at his table and tries to write. He curses his craft. He had intended to become a farmer when he came to Switzerland. Nice idea, that. Easy to think up in Potsdam. Poets anyway think up such things easily enough. Often he sits at the window.

I’ve got a friend who manages the family farm in Georgia, Sapelo Farms. Some of the most succulent produce in America is grown there. I am always threatening to quit my day job – what is my day job? – and take the bus south and throw myself onto the fertile Georgian soil. I’d be as useless as Kleist.

Often he sits at the window.

Why is this line so devastating?  It’s hard for me to say exactly. I relate, that’s part of it. If there was a window in this garage, I’d be looking out of it right now. I think writers even without windows spend most of their lives looking out the window. What do we hope to see out there?

Part of it is because Kleist will commit suicide a few years after his stay in Thun, a fact that is left out of the story, and yet at the same time it is here, somehow, in every line.

It’s clear that in Thun, Kleist is a bit unhinged; he lurches from suffering to ecstasy, often in the same paragraph, sometimes within the same sentence. Walser so inhabits his character that from the second paragraph you completely forget that there’s somebody from another era narrating this story. So effective is Walser’s ventriloquism that even when he tells you, I am being a ventriloquist, you could care less. As a reader, Kleist’s voice overcomes you, so fully are you in his mind, and in his heart, as he tries, vainly, to control the sensations that are flooding his imagination.

His problems seem to be that he feels too much. He can’t turn down his emotions. Everything he sees in this perfect little Swiss town begins to mean something, to take on almost sacred significance.

Sundays Kleist likes, and market days also, when everything ripples and swarms with blue smocks and the costumes of the peasant women on the road, and on the narrow main street…Grocers announce their cheap treasures with beguiling country cries. And usually on such a market day there shines the most brilliant, the hottest, the silliest sun. Kleist likes to be pushed hither and thither by the bright bland throng of folk. Everywhere there is the smell of cheese.

You’d think Kleist was actually happy, and in a way, he is. He’s happy the only way miserable people know how to be, which is whole hog.

He walks on, past women with skirts lifted high, past girls who carry baskets on their heads, calm, almost noble, like the Italian women he has seen carrying jugs in paintings, past shouting men and drunken men, past policeman, past schoolboys moving with their schoolboy purposes, past shadowy alcoves which smell cool, past ropes, sticks, foodstuffs, imitation jewelry, jaws, noses, hats, horses, veils, blankets, woolen stockings, sausages, balls of butter, and slabs of cheese…

Alice Munro once wrote that she was in such awe of Eudora Welty’s prose all she could do in an essay was quote her. I feel similarly here about the apparent ease of Walser’s sentences. Even in translation, this list is breathtaking. Woolen stockings, sausages, balls of butter! Can’t you see it all? All the natural bounty, all the bland prosperousness of this Swiss town. Kleist is the sort of writer – the sort of person, let’s say – who become more alive, the more he watches other people going about their daily business. And think about it, if you pause a little and simply watch people, the world does become, in all its mundanity, a little miraculous. This morning, out for a walk early on Mission Street I stopped in front of the fish store between 22^nd and 23^rd and watched the arrival of the day’s delivery. Two men were draining fish from a tank attached to the back of flatbed truck into a barrel set on the street. Some of the fish didn’t make it into the barrel, and I watched one – it may have been a mackerel – flop in the middle of Mission.

With apologies to PETA, there was something thrilling about that fish fighting for life. Then: A Chevy with shiny chrome hubcaps ended it all.

Now I may have been under the spell of Walser at that moment. I’d been reading “Kleist in Thun” as I was walking down the sidewalk. So it may be that was especially alive to the details of my own world, details that I often ignore. But in a larger sense I think it was simply because I’d stopped to watch the moment unfold.

I’d never thought about it before. How did fish get from trucks into the fish store itself? For that matter, I’m not sure I’ve ever thought much about how fish get from the ocean to my plate. And there it all was. On Mission Street. The whole story with a different ending. A mackerel crushed dead by a souped-up Impala.

Stories that make us pause a little, that’s what I guess I’m advocating for today. But not in a cheesy, joyful, easy embrace of life way. Life isn’t beautiful, but it can be a warped miracle, if we pay attention.

Maybe we write in order to try and feel things we know we should feel in life but often don’t. Maybe we write – and read – because we don’t pay enough attention when we’re out in the world. In Kleist’s case, or at least in Walser’s imagining of Kleist’s case, his attempt to replicate what he saw and felt watching the good people of Thun, failed. Kleist stops being able to write because his words so pale in comparison to what he gets – as an outsider – merely from looking out his window.

What he writes makes him grimace: his creations miscarry.

Not that paying attention itself isn’t dangerous. It is. Maybe this is why so few people seem to do it for any serious length of time. (Again, I include myself. There are days I spend more time checking my email than I spend with my daughter.) Kleist, according to Walser, paid too much attention, and was, eventually, overcome by it.

There’s no lesson here.

***

[1] I exclude from this flippant analysis the Facebook that, among other things, drives the Occupied protests, brings down tyrannical middle-eastern governments, and helps financially strapped authors sell books.

[2] “Isaac” is the Rumpus managing editor, and he would like the reader to know this note was left intentionally.

[3] As was this one.

Related Posts:

• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
• THE LONELY VOICE #11: Eudora Welty, Total Bad Ass
• THE LONELY VOICE #10: Two Boys Fighting, Omaha Nebraska
• THE LONELY VOICE #8: In Praise of Inaction, Bellow’s “The Old System”

Census, 1980

Miriam dressed up as the Easter bunny for Easter Seals. That bulbous-headed costume, those big floppy feet. She volunteered for the March of Dimes. She sold magazine subscriptions. She trained to be a docent at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and could speak at length about mummification and hieroglyphics. She worked as a substitute high school teacher, Gordon Tech, Lane Tech, Maine West, Glenbrook South. She also worked as a census taker. In 1980, the year the Second City was demoted to third and Jane Byrne was so livid she threatened to sue the federal government for defaming Chicago’s character, Miriam tramped the streets of the city to count the people.

Popper would go door to door with her and listen to the song and dance. Yes, I’m with the government but the Census Bureau is an independent agency under the auspices of the Commerce Department charged solely with the collection of numerical and demographical data. We’re not interested in, for instance, your criminal record, tax history, immigration status…

Slam.

Knock again.

All information is strictly confidential. It is against federal law to share information collected by the census. The government merely wants to –

Slam.

Knock, knock, again.

The census is a constitutional mandate. The founding fathers believed that the lifeblood of democracy itself was dependent on an accurate –

Slam.

Banging on the door, Look, do me a favor, and just throw out a number, any number –

***

Miriam in a trench coat, sunglasses on her head, carrying a bundle of questionnaires and booklets. Anything, anything to get out of the suburbs. On the Kennedy Expressway – the City rising – she would say, Look around, observe! And Popper would call out the sights: Old Orchard, Morton Salt, Aabbitt Adhesives, The Polish Catholic Union, Ukrainian National Bank, Magikist Lips, Budweiser, Mickey the Smoke Stack!

She loved construction, she loved muggings. She loved traffic. She loved traffic reports. 14 minutes to the Circle Exchange. Kennedy, 19 Minutes to Montrose, the Ryan outbound 28 minutes to 95th, Lake Shore Drive free and clear from Monroe to Hollywood, fender bender on the inbound Ike, gaper’s block from Manheim to the Post Office—Traffic sponsored by Ray Hara’s King Datsun, home of king-sized discounts…

“That’s us. 19 minutes to Montrose! We’re flying in today….”

A Fall River girl in Chicago and she couldn’t get enough. New England was stale, complacent. Chicago was about the new. Knock it down, big boy, and build me something better. The City of “I Will” won’t be slowed by sentimental nostalgia. And Miriam, census taker, counter of souls, was now a real cog in this unstoppable wheel of energy. This remarkable place where a woman – a woman! – was even elected Himself.

But census taking, the act itself, is its own special hell. Popper began, even then, to understand the shame that can come when attempting to answer even the most basic questions about one’s life.

In his census memories it is always raining and they are always drenched. And Miriam would say, “Enough of this already, let’s have a drink.” And so together they’d flee to the nearest bar, never more than a block or two away, and she’d plunk her stack on the bar and say to the bartender, usually a slow-eyed man emerging out of a corner of darkness, “Give me a martini. Very very dry.”

To Popper: “Cola or Uncola?”

“Uncola. No, wait. A Coke. No, uncola. No, wait, a Coke.”

She’d given up smoking by then but she always held an unlit red-tipped cigarette between her fingers.

“How many persons in your household?”

“Humans only?”

“Humans only.”

“Four.”

“Immediate family?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are all four in your immediate family? The people you live with?”

“I’m confused.”

“Occupation?”

“Archeologist.”

“Highest degree attained?”

“Huh?”

“What grade are you in?”

“Fifth.”

“Years in the state of Illinois, not excluding terms of military service?”

“Whole life.”

“Religion?”

“I know, I know. We’re Jewish but I don’t have to be. I can be anything – ”

***

He remembers this. They were on South Pulaski and the door of a basement apartment was immediately opened by an alarmingly tall woman with a wild mass of orange hair. She swatted away the speech. “Come on in, Commerce Department.”

The woman lived in a single room, a kitchen and a living room. Rain was banging on the little rectangular windows. She lived eye-level with the wet feet going by on the sidewalk. One lamp hung from a chain, a single bulb behind a tattered red shade. The light in the room was the color of washed out blood. You could tell where the border between the kitchen and the living was supposed to be by where the linoleum ended and the worn, banana-colored carpet began, but her stuff didn’t seem to care what was the kitchen and what was wasn’t. In the reddish shadows, he could see scattered piles of newspapers, old mail, coupon books, clothes and unwashed dishes. Spent Kleenex was strewn across the apartment like little crumplets of flowers. On the single chair in the room was a plant the size of a man. Shoved into one corner was an upright piano that doubled as a bookshelf and a place for shoes. On the sofa, a small load of lumber.

“Make yourself at home!”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to trouble you. I only have a few very brief – ”

“Sit.”

For a few moments they stood there confused. Sit where? The woman motioned toward the chairless kitchen table. As they got closer, they saw that on the other side of the table, wedged against the wall, was another, lower, couch. On it were crumpled sheets and a pillow. They sat. The orange-haired woman might have been tall enough for the couch to double as a bed and a kitchen chair, but Miriam and her kid were smallish people. Miriam scooted forward so that at least her head and arm were above the table. Popper did his best to do the same, shoving his chin just over the edge.

“No! Sit back! Make yourselves comfortable!”

Miriam propped her papers up on her knees and poised her pencil. The woman joined them on the couch bed.

“Move over a bit, honey,” Miriam said.

“So what was it you wanted to ask me, Commerce Department?”

“How many people in your household?”

The orange-haired woman swayed backwards and laughed. Then she stopped and abruptly stood up. The effect was like a trampoline. The two of them flung upward.

The woman looked around the apartment as if she were looking for somebody who’d been hiding.

“You know I used to have a lot of men,” she said and reached down and set her large hand on the top of Popper’s head. “Cute when they’re little. They ought to snip it off early.”

“Age,” Miriam said. “You can be approximate.”

“Are you married? You must be married. Petite, pretty. Although I notice, no ring. It’s in your pocket? Men talk easier that way. Answer your questions?”

“Source of monthly income?”

“Happily married?”

Miriam changed her grip on her pencil and sank deeper into the half couch.

“Disability,” the orange-haired woman said to buoy her a little. “I’m on disability. 160 a week. Monthly, that’s – You’re not from here.”

“Massachusetts,” Miriam said. “I’m from Massachusetts. Alternate source of income? Stock dividends, bond yields, interest on long-term saving accounts – ”

“Would you two like some pretzels? I’m sure the little monkey eats pretzels.” From the front pocket of her blue jeans she yanked out a crumpled bag of pretzels and handed it to Popper. He took one pretzel and listened to himself chomp in his own ears.

“Doesn’t talk much does he, Commerce Department?”

“I’ve only got a few more –”

“Oh, don’t be shy. Ask away.”

“Would you consider yourself white, black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian or Aleutian Islander and/or Eskimo?”

The rain went on banging on the windows. Miriam was diligent. She soldiered on. The training manual had said expect certain countees to be resistant. Remember the three P’s: Patience, Persistence, Politeness.

“And my hair’s not really red.”

“It’s not?”

“I dye it. Out of vanity. I’m not saying I was ever beautiful. Not like you. I was never as beautiful as someone like you. I can only imagine what you must have looked like as a child.”

“Highest degree attained?” Miriam whispered.

“I’m not lonely. You can think what you want.”

He watched his mother write this down. She’d begun to write it all down, everything. But he remembers thinking this was true. The red-haired woman wasn’t lonely. It was the two of them who had come to her out of the rain.

“Occupation?”

“Insomniac.”

“What’s he do?”

“Who?”

“Your other monkey.”

“He’s an attorney.”

Miriam wrote this down also. Popper read it. My other monkey is an attorney.

“Religious affiliation?”

The orange-haired woman watched his mother so intently and for so long that the afternoon collapsed. The patterns of wrinkles radiating from her eyes were like fresh cobwebs. She reached for Miriam’s throat with her big fingers and held them there, gently.

Popper spoke then for the first time all afternoon, nearly shrieking,“It’s not required!”

 ***

The last shred of outside light now gone, only that blood light, but the rain still banging on the little windows. He doesn’t remember leaving. He doesn’t remember the walk back to the car, South Pulaski reaching flat for uncountable miles, or even the rain, the rain beading on his mother’s coat, the rain in his shoes, the rain in his eyes, the silence between the two of them on the drive home, none of it.

***

Line drawings by Eric Orner.

Learn more about The Rumpus Book Club here.

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A woman is talking very fast to a man who is one table away from her. I’m facing the two of them, trying not to make it too obvious that I’m spying. She’s elegant and made-up with a puffy face and large hoop earrings, and holds a very docile Afghan hound by a short leash. The dog is as exquisitely coifed as she is; his tail curlicues upward like a thin wisp of smoke. The dog doesn’t give a damn what the woman is saying, but the man at the next table does. He’s trying to be nonchalant about it – yet as the woman talks he leans toward her and nods his head as if to say more, more, tell it to me faster. The listening man has a bullet-shaped, hairless head and is wearing a powder blue shirt with his collar pointing straight up. On the underside of the collar, what would normally be hidden, but is now purposely visible to the world, an inexplicable line of English, The Best Company of Guys.

Of course, I could have this all wrong. They could be talking about politics or doughnuts or shampoo for all I really know. Still, I’d bet the house I will never own that this has something to do with a juicy bit of local news, with people who shouldn’t be having sex – but are. Plus, if they were talking about doughnuts the dog would have perked up by now. I’m in Albania, in Tirana, the capital city, where I’m not even sure they have doughnuts, at least not as we know them.[1] Don’t worry this isn’t a piece of travel writing. I see a piece of travel writing and I run for cover. What I’m doing here is too long a story for this space. Suffice it to say that I came here because I had a random idea for a story that was going to be set in Tirana. I’ve been here two days and already I know this was a screwball idea. This happens. I get something in my head like I absolutely must set a new story in Tirana. My life will not be worth living another minute until I go to Tirana. Most of these missions fail as miserably as this one apparently has, and so I’m not at all surprised to be here in this café, loitering over cold coffee, watching these two gossip in a language I don’t understand.

At the same time, I’m in the middle of a John Cheever story called, “The World of Apples.” In my bag are two novels by the great Albanian Ismail Kadare but I have this habit of never reading anything that’s relevant to the given moment I happen to be living. Go to Albania to write a story. While there, read about Wasps cavorting in Connecticut. “The World of Apples” is the title story of the collection and I’m reading the book in the original hardcover. I stole it from a friend’s house a few years ago. I’m sure he’s still wondering what happened to it. I’ll bet its worth a little something. Another habit: coveting a book and then once I have it, sticking it on the shelf and forgetting about it. Anyway, on my way out the door to the airport, I happened to stuff it in my bag. Chicago to Warsaw, Warsaw to Tirana on Lot Polish Airlines. Lot is awesome; they still let you smoke on the plane. The No Smoking sign is lit but the flight attendants all look the other way. Even the kids light up on Lot. It’s nice to read Cheever in a smaller collection rather than that crammed red Collected Stories. On the cover of my friend Bill Crouch’s stolen book is an enormous Granny Smith.

“The World of Apples” is not set in Connecticut. It’s about an old poet named Bascomb, originally a New Englander who has been living in an Italian villa for the past thirty years. Yet, like us all, no matter where we happen to live, in all the ways that count, Bascomb remains an outsider.

The beauties of the place were various and gloomy. He would always be a stranger there, but his strangeness seemed to him to be some metaphor involving time as if, climbing strange stairs, past strange walls, he climbed through hours, months, years and decades.

Bascomb is famous. He’s won every literary prize on the planet, except one. The story opens with the old poet swatting flies with a copy of La Stampa murmuring to himself, Why no Nobel Prize? But the story is less about common, insatiable writely ambition than about what a writer does when he’s simply got nothing left to say. All of Bascomb’s best friends, poets of equal stature, have killed themselves. Like so many of Cheever’s people, Bascomb is completely befuddled. His work’s in decline; he’s becoming more and more forgetful. He spends hours in bed trying to remember Lord Bryon’s first name. And how to live out the remaining days as opposed to simply doing away with them?  Bascomb quotes to himself Cocteau[2] who said that writing poetry is the exploitation of a substrata of memory that is imperfectly understood. This is all well and good but what happens when you’ve got no memory left to misunderstand? On top of all this, the only thing this old widower can think about, night and day, is sex.  Every morning, all he can muster up are lurid little ditties, pornographic limericks that he burns in the oven before lunch. Ashamed of himself, he flees to Rome where he goes to a concert, but hardly hears the music. He’s too busy stripping the soprano is in his mind.

One more thing about Albania. I thought it would be cement-colored. Cement-colored and echoey and sad. I thought the ghost of Enver Hoxha would lurk around every gloomy corner.  It’s July and it’s sunny. The story I had planned to write was going to be a cement-colored story. I should have come in December, clearly. Behind me, in the ungloomy recesses of this well lit café, are gambling machines with colored lights that keep blinking on and off. WIN CASH NOW WIN CASH NOW WIN. There’s also pop music, American songs sung in English by Albanian singers. I kind of like it. I think this is supposed to be Ke$ha. Tick Tock on the clock, but the party don’t stop. Shit, is this travel writing?

A Projected View of Sleek, Modern Tirana

My gossipers – my gossipers go on gossiping. The woman is coming to the moment. I can see it in her eyes. They are becoming wet with heightened anxiety; the best and most unbelievable part about to be disclosed. We’re on the verge of story climax here, people. She’s trying to control the words that flow faster and faster. And for his part the upturned collar man keeps edging closer as if by almost touching her she’ll come out with it now – now – now. But the thrill – the ecstasy – is never the story itself but the telling and once you reach that point where its all out in the open, that’s it, there’s no going back, ever. I’ve stumbled on a metaphor here. Here’s another. It’s over. She’s told him. He knows all there is to know. And now they both look a little depressed, spent, though at this very moment they are still laughing. There is something about the way they are laughing that is the opposite of laughing. Do you know what I mean, when laughing itself is a way of hiding, of retreating deeper inside yourself?

The Afghan hound woman’s face is less puffy now as if the secret had given weight to her face that’s now disappeared. Now she regrets having told it in the first place. If she’d kept it to herself, the news would still be hers. The dog starts to fidget; he knows any minute now he’ll finally be able to go home. His master is starting to get the sad look she wears at home since his other master left, years ago now. Upturned collar is starting to pull away also. He tilts his cup into his mouth even though he’s long since finished his espresso. He too lives alone. It’s why he spends so much time at this cafe. He says something dry, maybe something like the Albanian equivalent to “It figures” or “It just goes to show you” or “It takes all kinds”. They’re wrapping the conversation up – and I know I’m projecting here (my whole life consists of projecting emotions onto other people, some real, others I make up), but these two acquaintances have begun to think about how the story, the illicit (and now seemingly, to them, tired) story, relates to their own passionless lives, their own long trail of mistakes.

Meanwhile, in my book, Bascomb sleeps with his maid. This is a temporary salve. Sex itself is no better than thinking about it. His mind continues to be plagued. His poetry – gone.  He spends an entire morning writing FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK across page after page. Next, Bascomb sets off on a pilgrimage suggested by the maid, Maria, to a chapel in the mountains where he might make an offering to a sacred angel with the supposed power to heal whatever it is that ails him. There’s this pitch-perfect Cheever line:

All Bascomb knew of pilgrimages was that you walked and for some reason carried a seashell.

What does everything I’ve rambled about here have to do with each other? Nothing. I happen to be in Albania. I happen to be reading Cheever. The two are utterly devoid of any meaningful connection.[3] These are nothing more than random notes written at a wobbly plastic table at the Las Vegas Cafe in Tirana by a goof lamenting another failed idea. But here’s my stab. For all the non-stop socializing his characters do (and the sex they sometimes have), Cheever is the loneliest of writers. Bascomb, for all his fame, all the legions of admirers who constantly climb up the steep steps to his villa to pay homage to the great man, is lonely. For his dead wife, for his lost talent. My two gossips are lonely. The story they’ve just exchanged has only made them more so. They sit a few moments in silence and think of two happy people who shouldn’t be – but are! – whooping it up somewhere behind the closed shudders of some flat deep in this sun-drenched ex-draconian paradise. Why couldn’t, for once, it be them? And they proceed to remember all the reasons it isn’t them. It’s always better to be the subject of gossip than the gossiper. But it will never – never – be them.

I’m a little lonely myself. In Albania. What else is new?

The lady with the Afghan hound stands. She tosses some change on her table. The change plings and the dog barks. Kiblets at home at last. Upturned collar blows them both a kiss. With his other hand, he twirls his empty coffee cup around his thumb. Go, go, Valmira, leave me in peace. And the Tiranian afternoon begins to have a rosy, cheerful look as young Albanians get ready for a night of partying on the renamed The Boulevard of the Heroes of the Nation; the street used to be called, ironically, The Boulevard of Our Hero Stalin, back in the days when Enver Hoxha ruled this tiny country with a sense of paranoia matched only by the likes of Idi Amin and Pol Pot. Hoxha was a complete nutcase, for instance he wrote 60 books about how great he was at everything, so good that he outlawed God, his only plausible competition.[4] And Bascomb? Bascomb who is as present in this cafe as all the rest of us lonelys? I watch these two, I read, I watch these two, I lament the cost of my plane ticket (even Lot isn’t cheap). And the whole time Bascomb is dying. He is dying and he treks across Abruzzi lugging his lust with him like fat awkward suitcase. At the chapel of the angel, he drops to his knees and offers blessings to his heroes:

God bless Walt Whitman. God Bless Hart Crane. God Bless Dylan Thomas. God Bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.

Not the most inspired list but Bascomb is old school, and how many American poets today would offer a blessing to Hemingway? But it’s what happens after the chapel scene that provides Bascomb with some actual relief. He remembers something. He comes across a waterfall that sends him back to an image of another waterfall, in Vermont, to himself as a young boy watching, from a stand of trees, his white-haired father strip off all his clothes and dive head first into that brimming cascade. Back then it had confused him. What in hell was his father up to? The middle of a workday? Buck naked?

Now he did what his father had done – unlaced his shoes, tore at the buttons of his shirt and knowing that a mossy stone or the force of the water could be the end of him he stepped naked into the torrent, bellowing like his father.

Something comes to me now. When I was eleven or twelve, I overheard, from the other side of the fence and hidden by trees, one of our neighbors talking with another neighbor about a certain married woman who walked her dog down a particular street every night in order to rendezvous with a certain married man, also walking his dog down that same particular street. I can still hear Mrs. Gerstad’s voice, so viscously excited she could hardly get the words out. And Mrs. Krasner saying, “Oh, Please, Gilda, really, I don’t believe a word of this. Walking her dog?” In that case, I was more interested in the substance than the nuance. I soon realized it was my mother Mrs. Gerstadt was talking about.

I have always remembered the moment with shame, for my mother and for myself. Yet, here’s another angle on the memory. It could even be the truth. Seeing Mrs. Gerstadt (she had a colossal hairy mole on her nose, nobody slept with her including Mr. Gerstadt) and Mrs. Krasner again today, I now remember – in vivid cement-colors – being happy for my mother. I was ten or eleven but I thought, good for her. Mom has seemed a little lighter on her feet lately. It may have been one of the most inspired moments of my life. God knows there haven’t been that many since. It also may never have happened but what’s it matter now that I’ve come to Tirana to revise it?

It’s our previously misunderstood memories that give us our content. (Says Jean Cocteau, very avant-garde Frenchman.)

***

[1] I heard on NPR a few months back that some form of the doughnut is actually common to nearly every culture on the face of the earth. This is neither here nor there but I thought it was interesting.

[2] Under normal circumstances, anybody who would quote Cocteau (the same kind of folks who might quote Foucault) would also make me run for cover but Basomb is dying so he gets a pass.

[3] So said my editor, Rock Fitzgerald. Well, Rock said it nicer. Rock said, Orner, I kind of like the piece, it’s different, but sort of feels like the Cheever part is tacked on. Maybe you’re trying to write another sort of essay and shoe-horning in the short story part because you know we’re the only outfit who’ll run your haphazard shit and call it the Lonely Voice? But whatever we’ll run it. Why not? We got a kick ass Dear Sugar right on the heels, baby.

[4] Struck for smelling like travel writing.

Related Posts:

• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #11: Eudora Welty, Total Bad Ass
• THE LONELY VOICE #10: Two Boys Fighting, Omaha Nebraska
• THE LONELY VOICE #8: In Praise of Inaction, Bellow’s “The Old System”
• THE LONELY VOICE #5, The Rumpus Short Story Column: We Are All Lizzie Borden

Why is she so magnificent? This is the best I can do: Eudora Welty is so good she can’t even be imitated. Consider all the Hemingway imitators, the Carver imitators, the Denis Johnson imitators, the Foster Wallace imitators, and so on. I’ve never read a story and thought, with the exception of Munro[1], here’s a writer writing under the influence of Eudora Welty. This is because Welty, shows us how to see – and not, thankfully – merely how to write in a certain distinct way.

Welty doesn’t even imitate herself, and show me a writer, even the best of writers, who doesn’t, at times, fall into this trap. Welty’s stories, even when they are set in the same place, among the same people, are always utterly distinct, each one its own completely separate universe. Most important: every one of her characters is an individual, irreplaceable and unforgettable. Think of Virgie and Snowdie MacClain in The Golden Apples. Think of William Wallace in “The Wide Net.” Think of Bowman in “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” Think of the assassin in “Where is The Voice Coming From?”

Still, I wonder if in spite of her legions of beloved readers and her worldwide fame, there doesn’t still hang about Welty something genteel. She’s that cute little old lady drinking tea on her screen porch in Jackson, Mississippi, writing her quaint stories. Oh, Eudora Welty, I know her! She wrote that story about that lady who lives in the Post Office. That one seriously killed me!

Young Eudora Welty

Writing about someone you worship too much is never a good idea, and I plead guilty of loving Welty too much. I should stop now. Yet, I’m going to forge ahead because I woke up this morning with an essential and inconvertible truth roaring in my ears: Eudora Welty is a total bad ass.[2]

Yet today’s Lonely Voice wouldn’t exist had not the managing editor of the Rumpus, the Maxwell Perkinseque Isaac Fitzgerald, called and asked me to write a new column. Asked? Fitzgerald begged. He said, If you could see my knees, they’re on the carpet buddy, for you, for you. What choice did I have but to come up with something fast? The man was desperate.[3]

But here’s my problem. I find myself in an unusual situation. At the moment, I’m on a remote island in South Carolina without a book of stories to my name. How is this possible you ask? The Lonely Voice without stories? Has he too gone over to the dark side where people only read (and write) novels because conventional wisdom (and certain major publishers) says short stories don’t sell?

The truth is I had a book of stories – an achingly beautiful one – Harvey Swados’s Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn.[4] I left it on the plane. I tried the goddamn 1-800 number for Delta’s lost and found division (a subcontractor with no link to Delta) about sixty times and got nothing but the recorded message.

So I’m here, in this undisclosed island location in the cradle of the confederacy, living in a house. It’s a very beautiful house, surrounded by tidal salt marsh. In the morning, I sit with my coffee and watch the blue herons make footprints in the clay. It’s also an extremely literate house. It contains many many shelves of books. Each room, more books. There are biographies, history books, Russian novels, some very interesting and scholarly works on the plants and birds of Low Country.  And not a collection of stories in sight. Not even an old underlined high school copy of Dubliners forgotten, dusty, having fallen behind a bookshelf in 1977.

So, dear Isaac, for you I had to do what I had to do. I’m writing this one based on shaky memory. If I make mistakes and misremember and thereby do injustice to my hero, my humble apologies to all my three readers (many thanks to Tony Donahue who has been a loyal reader of this column since the beginning) and the ghost of Eudora herself.[5]

***

I’m newish to the south. Yesterday, I visited the remains of a plantation. I took the driving tour. It was fascinating and I really enjoyed the loblolly pines and the palmettos (State Tree) and the many birds – the pine warblers and the yellow-throated warblers – and, like any good Yankee, sat through the whole thing with a scowl, annoying my host, and waiting for some tangible evidence of the slavery that built the place. It came near the exit. I quote from my guidebook:

To the right of the information kiosk, you will see the chimney of a slave house, the remains of one of many such dwellings that once dotted the property. We hope you’ve had a pleasant visit and hope to see you again soon!

This got me thinking about a story. I’m less prone to having an actual experience than I am to relating something I’m seeing to something I’ve read. Am I alone here? Needless to say some people find this habit very irritating.

So I looked at this forlorn, cabinless chimney squatting there in the dust, ringed by a chain link fence so people didn’t steal any of the loose bricks, and I didn’t think of the generations of women who might once have cooked meals in this very spot. Instead, I thought of Welty’s “The Burning.” It was if I needed Welty to help me see what I was seeing. Do you know what I mean?

“The Burning” is in her last full-length collection, The Bride of Innisfallen. Although the book contains some of her very greatest work, it got mixed reviews when it came out. Some people wanted to know where’s that quaint little Eudora of Why I Live at the P.O.? Because this shit is hard.

Hard, and also, the stories are, at times, brutal. Few stories about slavery have whacked me as much as “The Burning.”[6] It’s a chaotic story, set toward the tail end of the Civil War. Welty captures – in real time – how it feels to suddenly live in world that is utterly unlike the way it was yesterday. And so what we see is what her character’s see – which is, at least on a first reading, almost complete bedlam.

I wish I had a copy of the story in front of me but here’s what I still see in vivid colors: A union soldier riding a horse through the front door of a plantation house. That’s the first image in the story. This is followed by a crowd of newly emancipated slaves trailing the horse and rider into the mansion. A young girl, also a former slave, but still allied with the two matrons of the house – dances up to the front of the line with a message for Miss 1 and Miss 2. (I can’t remember their names.) The former slave’s name though, I’m sure, is Delilah.[7] What Delilah’s message was, I don’t know. What happens next is a confused tumult made more difficult by Welty’s giving us what’s happening from Delilah’s perspective.

The upshot is that the union soldiers have ridden into the house because they have orders from General Sherman to burn it down. Miss 1 and Miss 2 politely, daintily, refuse to leave. The soldier then gets off the horse, hands the bridle to Delilah, and proceeds to chase around Miss 2, the younger, prettier one. Then, right there in the drawing room, he either rapes her or attempts to rape her. Again, I could be literarily wrong about this, and I remember thinking, did what I think just happened happen? Because the language is all a jumble. Delilah is either shell-shocked by what she’s seeing or has, literally, no words to describe it. But I do know this for sure: the soldier falls upon Miss 2 and then we get her forehead banging against the floor. And I remember a description, after this, something along the lines of:

Miss 2 is asleep somewhere but not in her eyes.

Strange and oddly funny dialogue comes next, as Miss 1 attempts to revive Miss 2 after what the two might have simply called a “ravishing.” This is the uncomfortable thing about this story, and much of Welty’s work, you don’t want to laugh, you do laugh, you have to laugh. In this, Welty is Kafka’s true peer. And nowhere do I want to laugh less than “The Burning” and yet I always laugh. Delilah is hilarious – and this world is so off-kilter, even at times, wacky, you might think, if you miss what’s actually happening, that it’s solely a comic story. Ultimately though that’s exactly what it might be, depending on one’s definition of comedy.

But nothing here is quaint and the rape, or near rape, of Miss 2 conjures images of all the black women who were so often raped during (and after) slavery. Welty herself suggests this by having Miss 1 offer Delilah to the soldiers since she’s heard they like that sort of thing.

Now those soldiers aren’t kidding. They’ve got to get back to business. They’re going to burn the house to the ground on General Sherman’s orders. And I might say, Yankee that I am, burn it the hell to the ground. Only there’s a problem. Once Miss 1 and Miss 2 leave the house (Delilah herself is dragged) and the soldiers move toward it with their lit torches, it becomes alarmingly clear that someone is still inside the house. A baby, Miss 2’s – Phinny – who for some reason is always kept hidden out of sight upstairs.

The house, it burns.

In the second half we find Miss 1 and Miss 2 and Delilah wandering the smoking ruins of Jackson, Mississippi, which, like their house, has also been torched to the ground by Sherman.[8] The three of them point out landmarks, what had been at this corner, what had been across this street. Hey, there’s where the customhouse used to be! There’s where Miss Audrey’s house was! At this point in the story though, Miss 2 begins mourning Phinny. Delilah says maybe he didn’t even die, maybe he escaped. But Miss 2 knows this couldn’t be true. Then Miss 1 says something like, ‘Have you forgotten that our Phinny was black?”

Phinny: the great family secret. Miss 2 had a child with a slave. And it was better to let that child burn than suffer the humiliation of that truth in front of Union soldiers.

Miss 2’s response is deluded and comic and sick at the same time. There is, Welty seems to say, something inherently and terribly funny in the lowest possible human degradations. These lines I may actually be I’m quoting correctly:

He was white. He’s black now.

What concerned Welty above all was the essential humanity of her people – even at their most inhumane moments. Neither Miss 1 or Miss 1 are caricatures. Nor is Delilah. Welty couldn’t have written a caricature if she tried. Think about her great southern kinsman, Flannery O’Connor (who Welty herself admired). O’Connor, at times, seems to have the opposite problem. She couldn’t help but write caricatures, and they were often good ones. But Welty – never. She always gives us individual souls on the page. But you want Southern gothic, try this story.

I’m going to allude now to the ending so stop reading this if you don’t want to know it. “The Burning” concludes with an image so searing it almost makes you forget that amazing horse marching in through the front door. Yet if a story is re-readable, as all great ones must be, what’s it matter? Anyway, each time I read it, the end still surprises me.

All pretense of humor falls away in the last few pages – and yet, in its way, somehow, god only knows how – it’s still goddamn funny. It’s not only funny that Miss 1 and Miss 2 can’t live without power (such as any women had power in those days), it’s funny that neither of them can’t exist in a world they don’t recognize at all. It’s also funny that now they can’t even live with themselves given what they allowed to happen to Phinny. And, finally, it’s funny, that these two ladies can’t even kill themselves without having to climb up on Delilah’s back in order to reach the noose that Delilah, doing their bidding, has already hung from the high branch.

____________________________________________________________

[1] Munro, who rarely writes non-fiction, once wrote a tiny appreciation of Welty that appeared in the Georgia Review years ago. All she could do was throw up her hands and quote.

[2] And she makes other story writers with bad ass reputations look almost domesticated by comparison. Jesus’ Son? Solid, loved it, and I like my drugs as much as the next guy. But there are times I got to have it in the gut, when I need to know what its truly like to live in the brain of another person, and so, Welty.

[3] I lie. Isaac didn’t call. He texted. And what he said, translated from text language, was, Orner, you got any of those short story ditties lying around? We’re running low on content, need some filler. (Hey Isaac? Is there any way to do a footnote of a footnote?) Because this isn’t true either. What he wrote was, We’re actually fine on content, we have more than enough content, the Rumpus is on a serious roll, but there are times we need to run original content at off times… I’ll take what I can get. And besides, I need the cash, and at the Rumpus, as you know, the pay’s good.

[4] I highly recommend this book. Swados was of the greats, and a real live socialist to boot. The title story alone (not about socialism) is worth the book. Maybe, if I ever get that call back from Delta’s subcontractor, I’ll write about it.

[5] By the way, no Internet or computers on this uncharted island either. A handwritten version of this column was delivered to the Rumpus via a network of unidentified couriers who made their way across the country to San Francisco via a fleet of black Econline vans. Also, I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to read fiction online. I need that flesh made paper in order to feel anything.

[6] Right now I can only compare the experience of reading about slavery in “The Burning” to certain novels: Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, Johnson’s The Middle Passage, Morrison’s Beloved, and Jones’s The Known World.

[7] I remember this because of that lady on the radio, Delilah, who makes you feel better about your love life and plays a song that will help you face tomorrow with a smile on your face. You know who I mean? Plays a lot of light rock? Last time I read “The Burning,” I thought, right, Delilah, like that lady on the radio…

[8] By the way, I’m told by my host that Sherman didn’t burn Charleston, South Carolina because he had a Confederate babe there.

Related Posts:

• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
• THE LONELY VOICE #10: Two Boys Fighting, Omaha Nebraska
• THE LONELY VOICE #8: In Praise of Inaction, Bellow’s “The Old System”
• THE LONELY VOICE #5, The Rumpus Short Story Column: We Are All Lizzie Borden

The black boy takes two steps backward and one step forward, swings and intentionally misses. Behind him is home. He’s tired, hungry. He feels vaguely guilty, knowing that he could, if he wanted to, finish this off easy. The white boy is known to be of limited intelligence. Actually, he’s an oaf. He’s repeated the third grade more times then anybody can remember. This year, they had to take the drawer out of his desk so his knees would fit.  In his mind, the black boy refers to the white boy as potato mouthed. He can’t even taunt right. All the more reason not to want to beat him up. What would be the point? But there you are. This is a fight. Fighters must fight.

The white boy isn’t thinking about any of this. He’s only trying to survive and not trip over his untied shoelaces. He checks the clock on the bank. How much longer is this going to go on? It’s no longer a question of who will win.

Nobody is going to win. The dilemma is how nobody is going to lose.

The black boy’s name is, definitely, Eustace Beecher. The white boy’s name is less certain. It might be Emil Hrdilc. Both of them, if they ever existed at all, are long dead. Even the school where all this began—gone. There’s a highway there now.

The fight itself is a half-remembered glimpse rescued from oblivion.

It’s a story by Wright Morris. Morris wrote upwards of 30 books.[1] He was from Nebraska but lived much of his life in California dreaming of Nebraska. Nebraska has a way of being forgotten, just like Wright Morris. He died in California in the late 1990s. I put his best work right up there with Faulkner, Welty, and Bellow.

Morris was also a photographer and among the first, in a novel called The Home Place, to use photos as an integral part of the narrative. The structures of some of his novels are complex, at times beautifully and insanely so (see Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree), but he never loses touch with the earth, with the dust, with the ways his people talk to each other and, importantly, don’t talk to each other. In a Morris story or a novel, when people talk, they say something. If they’ve got nothing to say, they keep quiet. Sometimes for years.  (See Cora Adkins in Plains Song.)

But this doesn’t mean his people don’t talk to themselves. No writer I know of captures as dramatically the complete brain confusion (and wonder) that goes into simply being alive on a given day than Wright Morris. It’s only that his characters—like us all—are often so isolated from other people by the cage of their own heads.  Even when, as in the case of this story, “A Fight Between A White Boy and a Black Boy in the Dusk of a Fall Afternoon in Omaha, Nebraska,”[2] two characters are doing something as intimate as fighting, they are still, when all is said and done, having a completely separate experience. It’s as though this fight—this dance—is an attempt to overcome what divides them.

In book after book, Morris tries to solve the problem of our loneliness. The presence of other people, even those we deeply love, never seems to make us less—I wish I had another word here but I don’t—alone. And in Morris’s work this essential truth is both exhilarating (because his people see the world in their own unique and often comic way) and terrible (because they can never quite translate their personal visions well enough to truly share them with other people). Morris’s characters are constantly asking themselves hard and brave questions, the sort of questions people never ask out loud. This is Cora in Plains Song at the end of her life, wondering, silently, how it would have been if she’d done it all differently. What if she’d never come west from Ohio? What if she never married Emerson and stayed put?

Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe in, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present . . .?  Would it have been better if she’d stayed with her father, a gentle man with a cracked, pleading voice?

I find myself returning to Morris a lot lately. I’m not entirely sure why. It might be because I crave more silence in fiction. Is it me? Or is it the noisier the better now—with everything?

Meanwhile, in this tiny four-page story, the fight continues. The black boy keeps edging toward home, the darkened Negro section of town.  There’s only one streetlight gleaming at the far end of the street like a halo. The white boy, the poor potato-headed oaf, follows him. The story obviously means to say something about race relations in the Midwest, in the early years of the last century. But there’s rarely anything especially overt in a Morris story.  These are two individual boys fighting a fight they never even wanted. They don’t represent anybody but themselves, Eustace and Emil. Maybe his name is Emil. It’s the outside world that refers to them as a black boy and a white boy.

The one spectator left to watch this fight stands revealed in the glow of the bakery window. One pocket is weighted with marbles; the buckles of his britches are below his knees. He watches the fighters edge into darkness where the white shirt of the black boy is like an object levitated at a séance. Nothing else can be seen. Black boy and white boy are swallowed up. For a moment one can hear the shuffling feet of the white boy; then that, too, dissolves into darkness.

The narrator announces his presence late in the story.  He’s a man remembering something he once saw at dusk, in Omaha. Maybe memory itself is the wonder (and loneliness) of trying to dredge up what we know we will never see again.

Somewhere, still running, there is a white boy who saw all of this and will swear to it; otherwise, nothing of what he saw remains. The Negro section, the bakery on the corner, the red-brick school with the one second-floor window (the one that opens out on the fire escape) outlined by the chalk dust where they slapped erasers—all that is gone, the earth leveled and displaced to accommodate the ramps of the new freeway. The cloverleaf approaches look great from the air.

And yet: Maybe experiencing something in real time is, ultimately, less powerful, less vivid, than remembering it years, decades, later.  Is this the fleeting solution?  Our visions do sometimes translate, if imperfectly. We remember, we tell, we write, we read. Occasionally, we emerge from our own heads, and, for a while, we meet each other. Stories take the edge off all the time we spend alone, trapped in the fever of our own thoughts. A man remembers, and I, who have only driven through Omaha on my way someplace else, never forget a small thing that once happened there.

Two dead men are boys again. The sun hovers just above the plains, the blood-red light. They’re back in the schoolyard. The other boys are back too, egging them on. Come on! Come on! The fight becomes a dance. The black boy feels his vague sense of guilt. The white boy tries, desperately, to hold his own. His shoelaces, once again, are untied.

***

All photos by Wright Morris.

Related Posts:

• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
• THE LONELY VOICE #11: Eudora Welty, Total Bad Ass
• THE LONELY VOICE #8: In Praise of Inaction, Bellow’s “The Old System”
• THE LONELY VOICE #5, The Rumpus Short Story Column: We Are All Lizzie Borden

This particular story I didn’t think I needed to re-read. I thought already knew it. Read “Voices From the Moon” once and you carry it with you for good. From the opening lines It’s divorce that did it the characters become your people. Dubus adds family to the fucked-up family you already have.

For years, I’ve been walking around remembering this as a wrenching, unbearably sad story. This afternoon, I put the book down and stared out the window for an hour. I’ve had it all wrong. “Voices From the Moon” is joyous. Achingly hard-won but nonetheless, genuinely – even fervently – joyous.
On the surface at least the scenario is straight out of Maury Povich.[2] A divorced father named Greg is not only sleeping with his son Larry’s ex-wife Brenda, but plans to marry her.

The story opens with Greg’s much younger son, twelve-year old Richie, over-hearing his father confessing all this to Larry.

“It just happened. It always just happens.”

“Beautiful. What happened to will?”

“Don’t talk to me about will. Did you will your marriage to end? Did your mother and me? Will is for those bullshit guys to write books about. Out here it’s – ”

“ – Survival of the quickest, right. Woops, sorry, so, out of the way, boy, I’m grabbing your ex-wife.”

Yet the story is the opposite of sensational.  Sensational would be easy. Screaming and shouting would be easy.  Demonizing the father and making an innocent victim of the son would be easy.

Dubus never lets his people off easy.

Instead, “Voices From the Moon” is a passionate meditation on the nature of faith and love.  Early on, in one of the most telling – and comic – lines, Richie thinks, “It will be hard to be a Catholic in this house.” I’ll say.  Yet the sentiment reminds me of one of Kafka’s diary entries where he writes something along the lines of, Jew? I have enough trouble being a human being. Now you want me to be a Jew? It’s tough enough to be a human being or a Catholic or a Jew at any time but when your father does something that makes your life even harder –as fathers tend to do – in this case something as absurd and harmful as falling for your brother’s ex-wife, what’s a kid to do?

It will be hard to be a Catholic in this house. Funny – and also dead serious. Rather than condescend to (or dumb down) this twelve year-old as so many lesser writers would, Dubus endows him with empathy and wisdom. Richie is a deeply devout person who hopes to become a priest.  Needless to say, his father’s actions complicate his life. But rather than blame him, Richie assumes the burden of his father’s choice. To top it off, and it’s worth mentioning this entire story happens over the course of a single night and day, Richie himself is rapidly falling in love with a girl in the neighborhood, Melissa Donnelly. Melissa Donnelly smokes and wears cut-offs. So this is a twelve year-old kid with a lot on his mind. This is Richie in church on the morning after his father and brother have had their talk:

Beneath the host, Father Oberti’s face was upturned and transformed. It was a look Richie noticed only on young priests, and only when they consecrated the bread and wine. In movies he has seen faces like it, men or women gazing at a lover, their lips and eyes seeming near both tears and a murmur of love, but they only resembled what he saw in Father Oberti’s face, and were not at all the same.

The third sentence above is uniquely Dubusian. It starts one place (Father Oberti’s face) and suggests a comparison (the face resembles the faces of people in love in the movies) before rejecting the comparison in favor of the sanctity of the thing itself. For Richie, lovers in the movies were only like Father Oberti’s face as he holds up the host. They were not at all the same. The false comparison though, somehow, strengthens our sense of the real thing. Richie recognizes that authentic faith is something different, tangible while at the same time unexplainable in words – not unlike the love he feels for his father and his older brother.

Later, Richie wonders if sadness itself will be his cross to bear.

Because we will always do damage to our own familes. And all the faith and love in the world will never make us stop. As Brenda puts it to herself, she’d always believed “in trying one’s best to be a decent human being whose life did not spread harm.” And now look at her, she’s not only fucking Larry’s father, she’s going to marry him.

What happens when, as is so often the case, it’s love itself – who we choose to love – that causes all the harm?  But the sorrowful mystery raised by this story is not about how we might avoid spreading the harm. It is about how we behave in the aftermath of the harm.  Do we compound it? Or is there another way?

Here I turn to my own favorite character, Joan, Greg’s ex-wife and Richie, Larry, and Carol’s mother. Two years before the story starts, Joan committed what many might consider an even more unforgiveable sin against conventional morality.  She’s a mother who – exhausted of her marriage – walked out on her ten year-old son.  Now she lives alone in an apartment in a neighboring town. She sees Richie regularly but even so the hurt never relents.

She would rather endure carrying Richie in her womb, and the bursting pain of bearing him, than what she had suffered the day she told him and, that same day, left him, and what she had to keep enduring, it seemed, for the rest of her life.

When Larry confronts her with the story of Greg and Brenda, Joan’s reaction is at once harsh, beautiful, and surprising.

“We don’t have to live great lives,” Joan says. “We just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.”

Amen, Joan.

***

Andre Dubus was my teacher. I was also lucky enough to call him a friend.  For much of the time I knew him, the last seven years of his life, he was in a lot of physical and emotional pain. When I think of Andre now, and I think of him often, I think of the way he used to silently search my face for the sources of my pain. Sometimes he’d say, “Have you called your father?” Then he’d guffaw. Then he’d stop. “Seriously, have you? In weeks? Have you called your father?”

Today I re-read one of his greatest stories and, for a brief time, will be better for it. The best any writer can hope for.  Seamus Heaney once wrote that the hardest of all things to practice is daily decency. “Voices From the Moon” echoes this and then some.

____________________________________________________________

1. The story was originally published as a short novel. It is currently in print as section of Andre Dubus’ Selected Stories (Vintage, 1995). I look at it as akin to Chekhov’s late stories, many of which were over a hundred pages long. Chekhov’s “My Life” was among Dubus’s favorites.

2. I’m told my TV reference here is hopelessly out of date. I’m surprised. Maury Povich isn’t on anymore? Feel free to substitute Jersey Shore here.

***

A version of this column will appear as the Afterward to the forthcoming Italian edition of Voices From the Moon, translated by Nicola Manuppelli for Edizioni Mattioli.

Photo of Andre Dubus by Marion Ettlinger.

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James Frey
Incredibly Expensive Apartment
New York, NY

A big thanks to James[1] for prodding the Lonely Voice out of retirement. He got me thinking about why we do what we do, why we read what we read. I’m not sure that any great story can be summed up in a high concept pitch, capable of being summed up in one sentence. In spite of what Frey and countless others are ceaselessly peddling, fiction deserves better than to be stuffed into pre-packaged boxes, heavy on plot and action.

I know I’m not alone in this. At least I hope I’m not. But a lot of times, I actually prefer stories where not much happens, where plot is not king. For me, clever plots can often be tedious and forced. I don’t want my fiction movie-ready. No, character is what I’m after. In a world where human contact seems to becoming less and less important, I find myself craving, now more than ever, the ability of a good story to bring me into the mind of a stranger. Don’t burden me with something happening all the time. What I want is to know people. I want to invade their most intimate spaces. Aren’t the greatest dramas of our lives mostly centered around who we wake up with in the morning? By this I mean, ourselves and of course that other person (or lack of that other person.) Is this me? And who is this other person, really? And how different would it be if this other person was that other person? In fiction, as in nowhere else, I can cross the most forbidden borders.

In today’s Lonely Voice, a man sleeps until noon and then spends the afternoon looking out the window at the dying day remembering the only authentic love he’s ever truly known.

Saul Bellow’s “The Old System” opens like this:

It was a thoughtful day for Dr. Braun. Winter. Saturday. The short end of December.

Bellow’s not kidding. It is a thoughtful day for Dr. Braun. A very thoughtful day. Dr. Braun will now spend the next 20 pages thinking. It is also, for me, one example of a certain kind of great short story, a meditation on death and grief that stops time while at the same time animating the past. On this winter morning, Dr. Braun, a scientist, is thinking of the two people on earth he may have actually loved. Two cousins, Isaac and Tina. Schenectady, New York in the 1920’s and 30’s. Nothing about this particular morning sends (or in that terrible writingish word, triggers) Dr. Braun back to the past unless it is only the fading light of a foreshortened day. Bellow doesn’t need to create any false cause and effect.

Dr. Braun remembers because he happens to remember. He looks out across the alley from his kitchen window, at the circular tank of a laundry and discovers, “a sentiment approaching.” That’s all. A sentiment, a feeling nudged, not forced, into his head by the dark December noon.

The sentiment, as he drank his coffee, was for two cousins in upstate New York, the Mohawk Valley. They were dead. Isaac Braun and his sister Tina. Tina was first to go. Two years later, Isaac died. Braun now discovered that he and Cousin Isaac loved each other. For whatever use or meaning this fact might have within the peculiar system of light, movement, contact and perishing in which he tried to find stability. Toward Tina, Dr. Braun’s feelings were less clear. More passionate once, but at present more detached.

In his quest to find stability, Dr. Braun continues to remember. He remembers a certain sycamore tree beside the Mohawk River. He remembers a country cottage in the Adirondacks. He remembers drainage ditches, polliwogs, cousin Mutt (Isaac and Tina’s less loved brother) dancing in his undershirt, singing that old song about sticking his nose up a nanny goats ass. He remembers Tina coming to his sick bed where he is recovering from a bee sting and lifting up her dress…

As with any other piece of writing by Bellow, the writing here catapults not on action but on the language, in this case the language of Dr. Braun’s memories. This story, in spite of the fact that literally nothing happens in the sense of present action, is not at all static. First, there is the movement of, and relationship between, Bellow’s sentences. Take a look at this description of Isaac and Tina’s mother, the hard-hearted battleaxe Aunt Rose.

Her face was red, her hair powerful, black. She had a sharp nose. To cut mercy like a cotton thread.

Powerful hair? All right, not Bellow’s greatest line. But I would give my toes to have followed the sentence ‘She had a sharp nose’ with To cut mercy like a cotton thread. Don’t you know Aunt Rose now? Can’t you not only see her knife-like nose but also into her soul?

Or listen to this, about a minor character, Tina’s husband, a minor hoodlum whose father sold peanuts at Coney Island. “His baldness was total, like a purge.”

The entire story, as I’ve been saying, takes place over the course of one afternoon while Dr. Braun drinks coffee and looks out the window at the icicles hanging off the tank across the alley. Isaac and Tina had a falling out as siblings sometimes do. Over money. Tina accused Isaac of fleecing her. Isaac said she abandoned him at his moment of greatest need. The years pass. Isaac gets richer and richer. He’s a real estate developer. Strip malls and cheap apartment buildings. Tina watches with increasing envy and hate. Here’s her take (through the brain of Dr. Braun) of her wealthy, pious, Orthodox brother:

He, too, kept the psalms near. As active worldly Jews for centuries had done. One copy lay in the glove compartment of his Cadillac. To which his great gloomy sister referred with a twist of the face…She said, ‘He reads the Tehillim aloud in his air conditioned Caddy when there’s a long freight train at the crossing. That crook! He’d pick God’s pocket!

Memory, of course, is not only unreliable; it is very often a spool of wholesale lies. And thank god for it. What if what you remembered was actually true? Be careful what you wish for. You wouldn’t be able to lie to yourself if your memory had a truth meter. But the fact is that ordinarily we aren’t after truth when we remember. Often, we are going for something far more elusive, something that is just out of our grasp, something that increases mystery rather than answers concrete questions.

Or as Bellow puts it when speaking about our inability to know even those who are closest to us “Those who try to interpret humankind through its eyes are in for much strangeness – perplexity.”

As well as Dr. Braun knows his people, their love for each other (and his love for them) rests upon the great perplexity of love itself. He remembers much but this doesn’t mean he has it all figured out. He never will. He only knows there is something about these two cousins – Isaac and Tina – that holds him, today, in his kitchen, with his cold coffee.

One especially remarkable aspect of the story is not only does Dr. Braun sit and think but he also – like any fiction writer – invents thoughts for the characters he’s thinking about. In other words, a character thinks about another character thinking! For me this borders on story ecstasy. Dr. Braun is making this stuff up and I’m buying everything he’s selling. I got a put a story this good down and take a walk around the block.

This is dead Isaac thinking about his dead parents:

Isaac was concerned about his parents. Down there, how were they? The wet, the cold, above all the worms worried him. In frost, his hearth shrank for Aunt Rose and Uncle Braun, though as a builder he knew they were beneath the frost line.

Knowing you’ll be buried under the frost line, does this make you feel better about the grave? Notice something else? Isaac’s mother and father are referred to as Aunt Rose and Uncle Braun. That’s not how Isaac would, in his own mind, think of his own parents. And yet Bellow isn’t making a mistake here. It’s how Isaac via Dr. Braun refers to them – so what you get is a kind of linguistic fusion. The grief of the dead and the grief of the living come together through a man who in twenty pages hasn’t moved an inch.

Eventually something does happen in “The Old System.” Tina is diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. On her deathbed, she refuses to see Isaac who, as a good brother and a pious Jew, keeps trying to see her before she dies. I won’t give away what happens. I’ll only say its hilarious and moving. So there’s plot after all! Yes. But plot born of character born of memory.

Great stories, great characters, will be written so long as people, in their confusion, love and laugh and grieve. And to hell with what really happened. Memory is nothing if not invention. I quote a portion of the glorious ending of “The Old System.” This won’t give anything away. It’s only Dr. Braun beginning, silently, to soar.

Oh, these Jews – these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts! Dr. Braun often wanted nothing more than to stop all this. For what came of it? One after another you gave over your dying. One by one they went. You went. Childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. And these tears! When you wept them from the heart. You felt you justified something, understood something. Again, nothing! It was only an imitation of understanding. A promise that mankind might – might, mind you – eventually, through its gift which might – might again! – be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death.

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