The Destiny Thief E-Book

Richard Russo

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A master of the novel, short story and memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Everybody's Foolnow gives us his very first collection of personal essays, thoughts on writing, reading and living. In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend and reader. From a commencement speech to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humour in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain's value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery, The Destiny Thief reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America's most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo's writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the perspective of one of our greatest writers.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR THE DESTINY THIEF

‘As a whole, the book is a quest to understand nothing less than why life turns out the way it does … He weaves scenes from [his] destiny-swapping years – the gut-punching failures; the life of teaching that enabled the life of writing – with literary long takes, illuminating a winding road trip … Perhaps what’s most admirable about these essays is their genial and searching tone. In this know-it-all age Russo places his faith in the ideals of art – ambiguity, paradox, heresy, the sublime – over the black-and-white ideologies or our current politics.’ New York Times

‘All-encompassing… . Anyone in search of an eye-opening series of essays by a distinguished writer about writing and the writing life need look no further.’ National Book Review

‘Splendid… . These are wise, personal pieces, and readers get to know the author as a comforting, funny, and welcoming guy.’ Kirkus

‘Certain to please anyone familiar with his short fiction and novels… . The unselfconscious voice threading through these nine explorations of writing, writers, and everyday life is a welcome alternative to the all-too-common introspection and fraught “literariness” found in many recent memoir and essay collections from prominent authors. Readers seeking a deeply insightful record of the creative process and the life guiding it will find resonance here.’ Library Journal (starred)

‘For aspiring writers, Russo’s musings on the art and craft of the novel are a trove of knowledge and guidance. For adoring readers, they are a window into the imagination and inspiration for Russo’s beloved novels, screenplays, and short stories… . Few authors seem as approachable in print and, one suspects, in person as acclaimed novelist Russo.’ Booklist

‘Russo’s colorful book offers his novel’s fans more of his dazzling and moving writing, often revealing glimpses of forces that drive a bestselling fiction writer.’ Publishers Weekly

Contents

The Destiny Thief

The Gravestone and the Commode

Getting Good

Address to the Graduates of Colby College

The Pickwick Papers

Imagining Jenny

What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience

Mark Twain’s Nonfiction

The Boss in Bulgaria

Acknowledgments

The Destiny Thief

“As a writer, you aren’t anybody until you become somebody.”

—James Salter

“I am the same man I was when I was a struggling nobody … still a writer trying to find his way through a maze. Should I be anything else?”

—Raymond Chandler

Some time ago I had a lengthy telephone conversation with a man I’ll call David. I’d known him nearly forty years earlier at the University of Arizona, where we shared a fiction workshop taught by the writer Robert C. S. Downs, who encouraged both of us, but David especially. At the time I was finishing up my PhD in American literature, so when I asked Downs about taking a workshop, I assumed he’d put me in one at the graduate level, but he didn’t. My prose, he explained, was full of jargon and intellectual pretension. Most writers had about a thousand pages of shitty prose in them, he went on, and these have to be expelled before they can hope to write seriously. “In your case,” he added, “make it two thousand.” And so, pushing thirty, I swallowed my pride and enrolled in a workshop full of twenty-year-olds, many of whom were better writers than I was.

David was working on a novel about a rock-and-roll band, and having once played in a band myself, I was envious of both his subject matter and his bold talent and even more jealous of the fact that at age twenty he’d already figured out what he wanted to do with his life, whereas I’d wasted the better part of a decade pursuing an advanced degree I no longer really wanted. What I didn’t know about David was what a rough time he was having outside the classroom. His mother, whom he’d dearly loved, had recently died of cancer, and his father was an emotional tyrant. David himself had very little money and was drinking heavily. Indeed, the fiction workshop—his dream of becoming a novelist one day—was just about all that was holding him together. Then, near the end of the semester, he got in trouble, courtesy of his poet girlfriend. She’d been assigned six poems, and the day before they were due she hadn’t written a single line. When she told David she was thinking about dropping the course, he said, “Nonsense. We’ll write them now. How hard can it be?” So they sat down and did just that, the girlfriend writing three poems, David the other three.

They both thought the results were pretty good, but the girlfriend was unprepared for the praise lavished on the poems, in particular the one David had written about his mother. After class, she made the mistake of confiding to a classmate that all of the poems had been written the night before, half of them by her boyfriend. When her friend reported the infraction, both she and David were hauled before Downs, the director of creative writing, to explain themselves. The girlfriend arrived at the meeting determined to defend the work as her own. David, they agreed beforehand, would admit only to offering advice. But this wasn’t Downs’s first experience with academic dishonesty, and instead of asking if she’d written the poems in question, he quoted the best line from the whole batch of poems and asked if she’d written it; she immediately broke down.

Since she’d come clean and it was her first offense, Downs said he’d recommend a D in the course but no mark on her record. He then turned to his star fiction writer and said, “Good poems.” David sighed, accepting the compliment, proud to have written the line that his mentor so admired, but fearful of what came next. The dishonesty charge was the least of it, he confessed. He was out of money and about to be evicted from the shithole where he was living. He’d dropped the rest of his courses earlier in the term, and though he hated the idea, there was nothing to do but return home in defeat. He hadn’t intended to tell Downs any of this, but there he was, spilling his guts about how much the workshop meant to him and how much he hated the idea of not completing it. When he asked what his grade would be, Downs said he’d be getting the A he’d earned and added, perhaps to bolster his spirits, that it would likely be the only one in the class. Apparently we were not a stellar group. “What about Rick?” David asked. After all, I was a grad student. Downs shrugged. “Rick doesn’t want to be a writer. He wants to be a teacher.” (He was wrong about that, but he couldn’t have known. After getting the PhD, I did plan on applying for teaching positions.)

Now fast-forward to 2002. For both David and me a lot has happened. He’s eventually finished his undergraduate degree, then gone on to graduate school for an MFA in poetry, not fiction. He has married, had kids, is teaching college to support his writing habit and has become middle-aged. He’s continued to struggle periodically with alcohol but remained functional, enjoyed success as a poet and become something of a legend among his students. Along the way he’s finished that rock-and-roll novel, but frustrated by his inability to find an agent, finally published it himself. Maybe his life isn’t the one he imagined back in Tucson, but for the most part he’s been pretty happy.

Until one day he picks up the University of Arizona alumni magazine and discovers that a student from his undergraduate workshop (who did indeed get a B) has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. According to the article, the prizewinner taught for a while before quitting to write full-time. David feels something inside him come untethered—and really, who could blame him? Somehow he and I have swapped destinies. He is the teacher, I the writer. He wants someone to explain the cosmic mechanism by which such a cruel joke could be perpetrated. In fact, he’d like me to explain.

As if I’d know.

I’ve written a lot about destiny in my fiction, not because I understand it, but because I’d like to. If David was puzzled by the narrative arc of our lives, he wasn’t alone. At the risk of sounding falsely modest, I have to say I’m not aware of anyone—teacher, family member, friend—who predicted anything like the great good fortune that has befallen me in the writing career that I came to fairly late. Some years ago I ran into an old girlfriend who said she’d been following my work with both pleasure and mystification. “I always thought you were a nice enough guy,” she told me, clearly trying to puzzle it through and not wanting to hurt my feelings, “but I never dreamed you had books in you.” I know exactly how she felt. I can’t explain it even now. Anyone who’s interested in my early life can have a look at my memoir Elsewhere, though for the purposes of this discussion a thumbnail sketch will suffice. I lived the first eighteen years of my life in Gloversville, a poor mill town in upstate New York. Raised Catholic, I was for many years an altar boy. My parents separated when I was a kid, so I was brought up by my nervous mother, who hated where we lived, and by my grandparents, who owned the house we lived in. If my mother was adamant about anything, it was that, as an American, I could be whatever I wanted to be. That I was as good as anybody. I was always to remember this in case anyone had the temerity to suggest otherwise.

My mostly absent father had come to a whole different set of conclusions. He was part of the Normandy invasion and returned from the war with a personal philosophy that fit neatly onto his favorite coffee mug, which I still have: HERE’S TO YOU AS GOOD AS YOU ARE AND HERE’S TO ME, AS BAD AS I AM, BUT AS GOOD AS YOU ARE AND AS BAD AS I AM, I’M AS GOOD AS YOU ARE, AS BAD AS I AM. It was, now that I think about it, the joke version of my mother’s mantra, and to complete this gag the mug’s handle was on the inside of the cylinder. Call it an object lesson: that being as good as anybody might not be of much use if you had to go through life with a basic design flaw. For my father, being born poor was just such a flaw. Having a name that ended in a vowel was another.

But never mind, my mother said. In addition to America, she believed in education and its ability to negate any of these flaws. My high school was tiny, and without expending much effort I flourished there. I had enough of my father’s easy charm to talk most people into giving me what I wanted; and on the others I could employ my mother’s tidal persistence, her innate ability to nick away at people until they gave me what I was after, just to be rid of me. The University of Arizona was twice the size of my hometown, though, and what a rude awakening that was. My first day there I went to the registrar’s office, hoping to do something out of sequence, probably register early for classes, and was met by a grim woman who sized me up at a glance. Holding up a hand to stop me midexplanation, she said, “Have you matriculated?” The question stopped me cold. I didn’t want to admit I had no idea what the word meant. Her tone made it sound rather personal, almost sexual, but that couldn’t be, could it? I had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, though, so I said no, not recently, but I was willing to if it was strictly necessary. Tomorrow, I was told sternly. I was a freshman and would matriculate with the rest of my class tomorrow and not before. What I was asking for, she explained, was special treatment, and I wasn’t going to get it, not from her.

My roommate that first semester was a boy from a tiny Arizona mining town that he was clearly homesick for already, less than twenty-four hours after leaving it. He couldn’t tell me enough about the place, which was apparently perfect in every respect. He seemed to have little interest in his classes, and as the semester wore on he had a devil of a time making friends. He wanted to pledge a fraternity, but none would have him. Back home he had a girlfriend, but at the university the girls he asked out gave him the once-over and said no in a way that made him understand he was wrong to have asked. At first he did poorly in his classes, which seemed to surprise him, but then he did worse; finally the dean of students requested an interview, at which it was decided that he’d be happier at a junior college closer to home. I was glad when he left and not just because it meant I’d have our room to myself for the rest of the term; in the brief time we’d shared it, I’d come to loathe him viscerally, though at the time I didn’t understand why. Now it couldn’t be clearer. Looking at him, his face alive with angry zits, was like looking in the mirror.

And so, badly shaken and far from home, I set about developing a strategy for surviving at an institution determined to make me understand that while I might be as good as anybody, I was certainly no better. The gist of my plan was this: I would (1) pretend to know things I didn’t rather than risk the humiliation of ignorance and (2) conceal, as far as humanly possible, who I was and where I came from. I’d figure out what I was supposed to like and admire, and would do so even when I didn’t. In other words, I would lie through my teeth about everything. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only liar there. College is, after all, where we go to reinvent ourselves, to sever our ties with the past, to become the person we always wanted to be and were prevented from being by people who knew better. Actually, none of this is quite as bad as it sounds. Many years later, giving a commencement address at the college from which my younger daughter was graduating, I would compare going to college to entering the witness-protection program. You’re supposed to try on a new identity or two. Indeed, it would not only defeat the purpose, it would be downright dangerous to leave the program easily recognizable as the person who’d entered it.

Anyway, I changed. I took my classes more seriously than I’d done in high school, not out of any abstract love of learning but rather because the competition was stiffer, and I figured the more I actually knew, the less I’d have to pretend to know. I ditched all the “stylish” clothes I’d brought with me from the East and dressed in western jeans with button flies. I had to be taught that these worked better if you buttoned from the bottom up, not from the top down. There was a lot to learn, but I was gradually able to blend in. When asked where I was from, I substituted “upstate New York” for “Gloversville,” a deft maneuver that allowed me to trade embarrassment over my origins, a new experience, for guilt, which, having been raised Catholic, I was used to. Summers, when I returned to Gloversville to work road construction with my father, were the toughest. Because in truth I was very happy to be back home and living in the house where I’d grown up, where people knew the old me. I hadn’t realized just how much I loved my grandparents until I saw them again that first summer, and in their company I felt the sting of my dogged efforts at reinvention out west. I began to understand that in denying where I was from, I was also denying them and the many sacrifices they’d made for my mother and me.

I’d made my choice, though, and there was no going back. I was becoming someone else. Someone better. However high the cost, I’d pay it.

In the late seventies, just as I was completing my PhD, the market for academics went into the tank. The first year, I went job hunting with my friend Kevin McIlvoy, who had, if memory serves, three interviews; I had just one. Even though the rooms were discounted, we couldn’t afford to stay in the MLA convention hotels. Indeed, we could barely pay for the gas it took to get there. That Christmas my wife bought me a tweed jacket so I’d look the part when presenting myself as a scholar. Mc thought his interviews went well, but at some point on the long drive home, the same realization dawned on both of us—that in order for either of us to be offered the jobs we’d applied for, all the flights carrying other applicants home to Stanford and Princeton and Ann Arbor and Berkeley would have to crash. What troubled me almost as much as not getting the job I’d interviewed for was the remote—okay, extremely remote—possibility that I actually might. I’d managed to publish three chapters from my dissertation on the early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown, which almost made up for my dubious state-university pedigree. At the end of my interview, the department chair shook my hand and told me he was impressed that I was publishing so significantly right out of the gate. “If we offer you the position,” he said, “you’ll be our man in Charles Brockden Brown.” No doubt he meant this as a compliment, but my blood ran cold because by then I’d pretty much quit scholarship. And when someone with better credentials backed out at the last minute, I’d been offered the last slot in Arizona’s MFA program. I was feverishly writing fiction now, pumping out story after story, though I hadn’t published anything yet. I’d also begun work on a novel.

I needn’t have worried, of course. None of the flights carrying real scholars back to Harvard and Columbia crashed, and I wasn’t offered the job. Which meant I had one final year to finish my stalled dissertation and make myself into a writer. Could I do that? Sure. Why not?

_________

Here’s a short inventory of what I’d learned by the time I left the University of Arizona in 1980, with an MFA in fiction and a PhD in American literature. I knew:

quite a lot about the nineteenth-century novel, Twain and Dickens in particular.

less about the twentieth century, very little about the eighteenth.

enough about Gass, Elkin, Barthelme, Coover, Vonnegut and the other postmoderns to know they didn’t speak to me.

how to create characters that, for the most part, rang true.

that it’s conflict, more than plot, that drives the best stories forward.

that characters had to speak out of their own need, not their author’s.

the ins and outs of point of view.

I also half knew a few other things. For instance, I had a theoretical understanding of tone—that it represents the writer’s attitude toward his material, and that I wasn’t going to be any good until I’d mastered its practice.

Before leaving Arizona, I gave my just-completed novel—set in Tucson—to Downs, who’d continued to encourage me despite his unshakable belief that I would end up an academic. I was hoping to be told I was wrong, that the book was good, but deep down I knew it wasn’t, and so I wasn’t surprised by his verdict that the book was mostly inert. What knocked the stuffing out of me, though, was what he considered its silver lining. There was, he said, one short section, about forty pages of backstory set in a small upstate New York mill town, that came vividly to life. “You know that world,” he told me. Even now I remember how the blood rushed to my face and roared in my ears. “Not really,” I told the man who’d been kind enough to read my novel and tell me the truth about it. “I made that all up.” I mean, come on. What did he think I was, a rube?

Better, I thought, to be somebody’s man in Charles Brockden Brown.

My first academic posting was at a branch campus of Penn State University, where I taught what everybody in the English department did—a ton of freshman composition and the occasional lit course designed to keep us from swallowing the entire bottle of amphetamines instead of just the one or two required to keep us grading papers deep into the night. My lit-class syllabus that first year was made up entirely of books I’d taught before. Not very adventurous, but I could use the time saved for writing stories. One night, preparing for my morning class on Steinbeck, I came across the following passage in Cannery Row:

Up in back of the vacant lot is … the stern and stately whore house of Dora Flood; a decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned sporting house where a man can take a glass of beer among friends. This is no fly-by-night clip-joint but a sturdy, virtuous club, built, maintained and disciplined by Dora who, madam and girl for fifty years, has through the exercise of special gifts of tact and honesty, charity and a certain realism, made herself respected by the intelligent, the learned, and the kind. And by the same token she is hated by the twisted and lascivi-ous sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don’t like it very much.

Dora is a great woman, a great big woman with flaming orange hair and a taste for Nile green evening dresses.

I pause here, because that’s where I ground to a halt at the time, dumbstruck, my jaw open on a hinge. How had I not seen it before? As I said earlier, I understood that “tone” was a writer’s attitude toward his subject matter, but I somehow hadn’t imagined how this attitude might manifest itself in actual language. Dora Flood, we’re told, is a great woman. The word “great,” used to modify a noun, seems to convey a value judgment about her character. Except Dora’s supposed greatness is immediately undermined by “a great big woman,” and suddenly “great” modifies not a noun but another adjective, “big,” and the meaning pivots slyly. We’re no longer talking about Dora’s moral attributes, but rather her physical size. Further, her “taste for Nile green evening dresses” to offset her bright orange hair actually suggests a lack of taste. The words say one thing but mean another. Lurking somewhere in the rhetorical shadows is an authorial presence, a disembodied voice, and it’s tempting to identify that voice as Steinbeck’s until we remember The Grapes of Wrath and The Red Pony, where the voice is different, more earnest, less playful. It’s not so much the John Steinbeck we sense behind the curtain as a John Steinbeck, the author in a particular mood, chosen specifically for the material at hand.

I’d been told before that writers had to have two identities: their real-life one—who they are with their spouses and colleagues and friends—as well as another, who they become when they sit down to write. This second identity, I now saw, was fluid, as changeable as the weather, as unfixed as our emotions. As readers, we naturally expect novels to introduce us to a new cast of characters and dramatic events, but could it also be that the writer has to reinvent himself for the purpose of telling each new story? If he’s free to invent a different voice for each new book, then which is his true one? And how is it remotely fair for Steinbeck to possess so many voices when I, even after dutifully expelling my two thousand pages of wretched prose, still didn’t have a single one?

What pissed me off even more than this glaring inequity was that the voice Steinbeck used in Cannery Row was so damnably familiar. I’d heard it many times before—and not in any book, either. The wry insistence that we understand Dora’s establishment isn’t a whore house so much as a sporting house? That what goes on there could actually be construed as virtuous? That people who object to prostitution are small-minded? Outside of Cannery Row, where had I heard conventional morality mocked so winningly? Who else in my experience had cunningly insinuated that there was more than one kind of charity? Who, back when I was an altar boy, had demanded of me a certain realism when it came to moral matters? How was it, I asked myself, that John Steinbeck was suddenly speaking to me in my own father’s voice, a voice that, once I’d recognized it, I felt every bit as entitled to as his signature widow’s peak. This wasn’t a voice I’d have to imitate, as I’d tried to do with Salinger and Twain and Raymond Chandler. It was already mine. Or it would be if I could grow into it. But how?

That evening, I dug out the novel I hadn’t looked at since leaving Arizona and reread the forty pages Downs had liked. He’d been right, of course, damn his hide. Like it or not, I did really know this mill town, and now I saw what I’d missed earlier—that there was no reason a whole novel shouldn’t be set there. What I’d thought of as my novel’s backstory was the story, but I just hadn’t let it be. They weren’t exactly good, those forty pages, but they were mine, which was more than could be said for the other two hundred.

This should’ve been good news, right? Wasn’t it the breakthrough every writer longs for? For the last year I’d been churning out stories and sending them to magazines as diverse as The New Yorker and Mademoiselle and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And to what purpose? What I’d wanted was for editors to like and admire me, never suspecting the simple truth that as yet there was no me to like, much less to admire. Now I could set aside all that silly striving and get down to the real business of becoming a writer.

So, why did those forty pages cause my spirits to plummet? Why, for the first time, did I feel like giving up? No doubt part of my despair had to do with the magnitude of the mistake I’d been faithful to for so long. Over the last twelve months or so, a few of my stories had been accepted by little magazines, and mainstream editors sometimes added short notes—Try us again—at the bottom of their rejection letters. I’d allowed this evidence to convince me that I was becoming a better writer, that I was close, whereas now I saw clearly that I was just becoming more skilled, more sure-handed with my tools, which isn’t the same thing. I wasn’t close at all. Discovering who I was as a writer might be the final piece of the puzzle, but it also sent me back to the beginning. Yesterday, before visiting Dora Flood’s whorehouse, I had a dozen stories ready to send out to magazines, each one representing the break I’d been longing for. Now I understood they all belonged in the trash. If, armed with my newfound identity, I went right back to work, it might be a year or more before I had anything to show anybody. Close? This was starting over.

Nor was that the worst. Sure, rereading those forty pages, seeing their potential, had been exhilarating, but it was also dispiriting. If at long last I’d found not just my material but also the voice I’d need to bring it into sharp focus, did it necessarily follow that the result would be a book anybody wanted to read? Okay, great, I’d discovered a “me,” but it was the same low-rent mill-town “me” I’d been fleeing ever since I left Gloversville. The new me I’d hoped to discover in Arizona was more like Dickens’s me or Cheever’s or Ross Macdonald’s. They all had a good me, the lucky bastards. My me sucked. Earlier in the semester, when my department chair in far-off State College somehow got wind of the fact that I was writing stories instead of doing research, he warned me to quit. I’d been hired as a scholar, not a fiction writer, and by ignoring my scholarship I was endangering my chances for tenure and promotion. Though I all but told him to go fuck himself, now I wondered if maybe he was right. We were broke, and my wife was pregnant with our second child, so maybe it was time to forget trying to become someone I really wasn’t and settle for being somebody’s man in Charles Brockden Brown. That, at least, was a living.

Destiny is forged in moments like these. Curiosity and discovery in Manichaean balance with despair and self-loathing. Writing, like life itself, is difficult. Many truly talented people give up every day.

_________

The publication of my first novel, Mohawk, whose origin was those flawed pages that Downs liked, got me my first job as a writer at Southern Illinois University. There, in Carbondale, I also had the great good fortune to meet and become fast friends with the poet Rodney Jones. He hailed from Alabama, and his background—small town, lower-middle class—was similar to my own. Rodney seemed as surprised as I was to have had some success doing something so different from what had been expected of him. SIU was very much a blue-collar campus, which suited us fine. We were both committed not only to our craft but also to our student writers, many of them first-generation college students, as well as to the program we’d been given free rein to develop. Most semesters we had students in common and gossiped about them—who was writing what, who showing real promise—like a couple of matrons over a clothesline. One beery Friday afternoon, Rodney was singing the praises of a young poet while I was of my best fiction writer, only to shortly discover we were talking about the same person. He’d come to the university over the objections of his family, none of whom had ever been out of the tiny Ohio River town he was writing about, and all of whom saw education as a waste of time and money. He was quiet and seemed to have few friends, and by snooping around in his academic records we discovered he hadn’t distinguished himself in his other classes. Indeed, as the term progressed we began getting worried notes from other professors that he was in danger of flunking their courses. But he wrote poetry and prose as if his hands were on fire.

Though I don’t think it occurred to us at the time, Rodney and I probably both saw a lot of ourselves—Rodney’s rural Alabama and my upstate New York—in what he was writing. We each took him aside to let him know his talent was rare and it was our job to help him nurture it if that’s what he wanted. As a junior, his stories and poems were good enough to get him into the best MFA programs in the country. We even offered to go to bat for him with his more doubtful professors, for whom, he freely admitted, he hadn’t worked nearly so hard, caring nothing for the subjects they taught. More than anything, he seemed genuinely baffled that we were so interested in him. Nobody else ever had been. Were we idiots? Then, near the end of the term, he vanished—from our classes, from the dorm, from campus. A family emergency, we thought, since he’d notified no one that he was leaving. Except he never returned. We assumed he’d simply flunked out. Without any real justification, Rodney and I gave him incompletes so as to leave the door open.