The best moments in reading are when you come across something-- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things--which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone who is even long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.I have always loved that speech. It is a way to encourage a student and to illuminate a crucial idea about writing and thinking: we are not alone in our thoughts. Others have come before us, and their good ideas lead us to our own.
I was reminded of the Bennett while reading a sweet interview with Julie Buntin, whose debut novel, Marlena, haunted me for weeks after I read it earlier this Spring. Her book focusses on the all- consuming year long friendship between two disparate high school girls, aged 15 and 17. On the novel's third page we are told that one of the girls, the titular Marlena, drowns that year in November.
Carrying that knowledge through Buntin's sharply observed lives of the girls gives the book the feel of watching a train wreck in super-slow motion. There is a sense of dread, but it is impossible to turn away. The story is told by Cat, the younger of the doomed pair, who at present is stumbling toward 40 and living in New York, a deeply bruised, even now, survivor of that time. The book is a remarkable portrait of a the two young women and equally deft at revealing the dead-end existence in a small town in Northern Michigan among people who have little and seek solace in drink and drugs.
The interview focuses on how much Buntin was influenced in shaping her novel, and indeed in her choice to become a writer, by reading Lorrie Moore's, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Moore's wonderful short novel concerns two close high school friends and is similarly told in flashback form. Here is Buntin in praise of Moore and also giving us the gift of remembering why it matters to read and read
I read it first as a teenager attending a boarding school I felt sure had made an egregious error in letting me in.....Mornings at dawn I'd sneak out of the dorms and down to a picnic table on the lakeshore to smoke and read....I finished Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? on one of those morning and looked up to find the sun rising on a changed world......I wanted to see like her. I even wanted to sound like her.....Influence is a tricky thing. I think it starts with love, with resonance, with the exhilarating feeling that what you've read articulates something you've always felt but never had the words for. It's reading something and jumping into the conversation to say, yes, it was this way for me too....... When I was finally ready to write a novel, when I thought about what I wanted to say, I thought about that girl sitting on the picnic table, how deeply she felt and how afraid she was to use her voice. I thought about being a teenager, my friendships in those years. Wiggling out of a bedroom window, storms of laughter and sleepovers that lasted weeks, all that luxurious, menacing boredom, how terribly vulnerable we had been. I thought about how nothing has ever felt quite as bright and potent as that time, and how I'll never get back there.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? gave me permission to try.(Read the entire interview HERE)
Buntin's act of homage led me to the memory of another. In the early mid-1980s I was invited to a party to celebrate the launching of a new series that Random House was introducing called, Vintage Contemporaries. It was a terrific, fresh series with great, youngish writers. I was living in New York after graduate school in Boston, and had nothing to do with the book business. I was invited thanks to my dear friend Melanie Fleishman who had worked on developing the series at Random House, and had become the manager of Endicott Books on the Upper West side which was hosting the event. (Melanie is now, in addition to many other jobs, the principal frontlist buyer for Arcadia Books! )
The first group of writers in the series were Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City), Thomas McGuane (The Bushwhacked Piano), James Crumley (Dancing Bear), Janet Hobhouse (Dancing in the Dark),Anita Brookner (The Debut), and Raymond Carver (Cathedral). If memory serves, all were there and most were reading short pieces. McGuane and Carver were huge heroes of mine and I had read most of what they had written. I was agog and probably missed many of the other glittering literati who were in attendance. The time came for the readings and we gravitated to chairs. As fate sometimes allows, Tom McGuane sat down next to me. We made a bit of small talk (mine much smaller than his) and I asked why he wasn't reading. He replied with quiet charm that he, "did not feel comfortable reading and was nervous around the other writers." After Raymond Carver finished reading the title story of Cathedral to stunned, appreciative silence followed by prolonged applause, McGuane leaned to me and whispered, "That's why I don't read at theses events. How do you follow that?! It's a perfect story!" It was such a heartfelt sentiment that I realized for the first time how generous writers could be.
Ray Carver died of cancer in 1988. He was 50. The first two thirds of his adult life were a constant struggle with alcohol and bad choices. Through it all he wrote superb short stories of the plainness of American lives. The last ten years of his life he was sober and living with the poet Tess Gallagher and he wrote indelible stories and poems. When he died the New York Times eulogized him as "The American Chekhov". He was close friends with a number of writers, including the novelist, Richard Ford. Carver and Ford both loved to fish and they frequently spent time together on the water. Carver dedicated his poem "Wind" to Ford. (read it HERE) In it they are fishing with little luck and decide to go in when Ford sees "wind moving across the water".
They sit mesmerized until the wind passes over the boat. Here is the end of the poem
You can feel the smile growing through the words.
.........The birds going crazy now
Boat rocking from side to side."Jesus," you say, "I never saw anything like it.""Richard," I say--"You'll never see that in Manhattan, my friend."
That poem is in a collection of Carver's called Ultramarine. His last book of poems was published posthumously. It is a book I return to over and over. It contains his final poems, poems by others whom he admired, and snippets from Chekhov's stories. The form of his book was inspired by a book by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz called Unattainable Earth. Carver and Gallagher decided to title his book, A New Path To the Waterfall.
And then deep into the novel something wonderful occurs. The father shares with us his hope that he and his son will find, "a new path to the waterfall."
I put the book down and gazed up at the surrounding mountains grateful for Ford and Carver, for friendships, and for paying homage when we can.
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