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Why write? And if against all the advice of parents, teachers, and other organized criminals, you feel that you must write, what are you going to write about? Write about experience, write about what you know. Must you chase after wars and jump into a bull ring to provoke experiences to write about? How do we explain Emily Dickinson? She wrote more than a thousand marrow-deep poems without venturing far from her father’s house in Amherst. On the one hand there is the experience of confronting life head-on in order to make it yield some myth to live by, and on the other hand the experience of probing and quarrying-out the inner life that may be hidden from consciousness like the roots of sleep. The experiences that lend themselves to authenticity in writing are, I think, the ones holding us together in the condition of humanity. I loved words, the sound of words, before I could read. The experience is probably a universal one. Dylan Thomas, for example, loved just the words of nursery rhymes, what they stood for and meant being of very secondary importance. After he began to read for himself, “love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable” came to life. “And as I read more and more,” Thomas declared, “my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else." Thomas, I think, gives us a primary reason why some of us write. As a child in North Carolina I was so absent-minded that once I climbed into the bathtub still wearing my shoes and socks and took off my pajamas before getting into bed. Where was the mind from which I was absent? Dreaming. The dreams of childhood often hover at the brink of a dark abyss of incomprehensible and inconsolable sorrow and inside us make a sound like the cry of a bird in its grief. This sort of suffering is also one of the primary reasons why some of us write, and if I may be forgiven for being sententious, I am saying that you have to suffer in order to write. When at the age of fourteen I went down a long, lonesome road away from home in order to attend a school in New England, the god of remembering Time watched over me. I could still inhale aromas of the damp pine wine of Carolina sawdust, see butterflies floating in winking glitter in and out of sunstreams, hear grasshoppery murmurations in the wilderness and the whispering water of a muddy river, its silence, lost, but rushing forever. In honor of Time, I wrote a sketch about these memories and published it in the school’s literary magazine. I found my voice at an early age. When I went to college, however, I lost my voice. Unable to write about what I knew in my heart, I wrote in imitation of authors whom we were required to read. This is not a plea for dropping out of college. In fact, I realized that I had to read in order to write. I also had to gain experience away from college. Thus I came to see what war had done to the people and cities of France and England. I came to work alongside ex-cons, wetbacks, and veteran drunks in the wheatfields of Oklahoma and Kansas. I joined a gold-mining expedition in British Columbia. I loaded freight cars at the dock of a Minneapolis jam factory where my buddies, tubercular cooks, spat into vats of boiling strawberries. Upon graduation from Yale, instead of running for President, I volunteered as a buck-private in the U.S. Army. I was soon dutifully radiated as a guinea pig during the testing of an atomic bomb in Nevada. Although I never faced a firing squad, I did learn what it is like for human beings to have their backs against a wall - - in sum, enough experience to suffer the slings and arrows of a writer’s outrageous fortune. My progress as a writer can be summarized in four phases. In the first I am out of the Army, living in New York in order to take a creative writing course at the New School. I survive on a diet of rice and used tea bags. Sharing rent with me is a Korean War veteran of Scottish descent. He plays the bagpipes while I lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet seat, and begin to recover the voice I had lost. I fall in love with Maria, a beautiful young actress, and passion, in deference to common sense - - writing is just dreaming - - prompts me to take a “real” job. I become for $75 a week an advertising research assistant for a major life nsurance company. But when I am given the task of writing the annual report that will go out to 50-million policyholders, I come a cropper: I am unfit to write the kind of prose that Mark Twain called “tears and flapdoodle….soul-butter and hogwash.” I realize that if I must have employment, it must be of a kind that frees me to write out of the imagination. I’ll go to graduate school and then become a teacher. As soon as Maria learns of this plan, which involves my leaving New York for the provinces, she breaks off the relationship and goes on tour as understudy to Veronica Lake; later, she marries a sensible fellow who doesn’t write. Why write? Phase Two: I am in a southern institution preparing myself for a Ph.D. in English. Secretly, by way of keeping sanity, I write poetry, and I win a prize from the Academy of American Poets. That is my first mistake. My second mistake is that I act the part of Lucky, the schizophrenic slave, in a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot - - and get rave reviews, perhaps because of type-casting. When the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Footnotes discovers these transgressions against serious scholarship, he confronts me in a hallway. “You’re just a poet, not a scholar!” he fumes. “Sir, I’m both.” I say this with quiet conviction. “Don’t be impertinent!” The face of the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Footnotes is hot . “I’ll get you a job at North Texas.” His voice has death-sentence tones. What he really has in mind for me is a zip code far from North Texas, some place especially reserved for poets and slaves - - like Siberia. His thin tight smile curls back into a smirk. “I suppose you believe,” he says, “ you can teach in the Ivy League?” Two years later, having left the southern institution, I write a scholarly book, complete my Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge, and accept a professorship at an Ivy League university. I’m sitting in the catbird seat. I am supporting my family. The university likes my work. I like my work. Why, after all, bother to write? Phase Three. In Massachusetts my cousin, Mrs. Emily Pitkin, fully aware that she might lose her life due to a heart condition if she carries to full-term her pregnancy, gives birth to a healthy baby and shortly thereafter dies at the age of thirty-six. She, like the heroine of a novel by Henry James, has nobly drunk the full cup of life, whereas I have strayed from my path. I must write. I must follow my bliss. I resign my professorship, borrow some money, take my family to England 60 where we can live cheaply, write four hours a day almost every day for seven years, teach night classes at an American airbase, 80-100 contact and preparation hours per week, and finally from a sluice of one-million words pluck out 80,000, like nuggets, that resemble a novel. I am braced for rejection by the massed hordes of editors who are paid to hate writers. In the fourth and final phase of this Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jerk, I take stock of the cost of becoming a novelist. So far, dozens of editors have rejected my novel. I am not earning enough money to make ends meet. Soon, unless I return to the States - - I am hoping for a job at the new University of Colorado at Colorado Springs - - my children will be showing the wornout heels of their shoes to kind folks at the nearest church. For years it had been my custom on the way home from the airbase to stop at the Fox Inn, near Oxford, for a pint of bitter ale. Always the proprietor, Mr. Shebbeare, greeted me by calling out in loud voice, “How are the colonies this evening?” I had clenched metal teeth and said nothing. I needed to give Mr. Shebbeare a cordial comeuppance. “How are the colonies this evening?” he sang out to me one night before I left England. I had already moved mentally from the confinement of exile to the vast spaces of the West. “By the way, Mr. Shebbeare,” I said after a pause, “I’m giving a tea party on the Fourth of July. Would you like to come?” I knew what I had to write - - I had to write about my land, my people. I had to write about - - and in - - the country of the heart. Having posed a question, “Why write?”, I will essay an answer to it. Barry Lopez, nature writer and storyteller, in a story about the oral histories of Native American peoples, wrote: “Everything is held together with stories… That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” The word stories gives us a broad spectrum of possibilities and may be said to include, comprehensively, poetry, literature, myths, histories, epistles, journals, even movies and television shows. Suppose we in America didn’t have the King James Version of the stories in the Bible. Because it is often felt that English is how God sounds, we would feel lost without our King James to help to hold us together. The love of language implies loving otherness. Stories and compassion are inextricably intermixed, holding us together in an empathetic way. The language loved by poets and storytellers has the capacity for keeping us human. This, a dangerous capacity, may inspire hatred among “right-thinking people, ” in Flaubert’s caustic phrase. Beneath the hatred lies fear, fear of exotic strangers like poets, storytellers, and philosophers. Coercive government especially is threatened by those who love the otherness of humanity. One must be careful to distinguish heart from mind when invoking capital - H Humanity. Hundreds of millions of people are oppressed under the spurious, ideological banner of Humanity, a sympathy perhaps but one extended by the mind. Extending sympathy with the mind is then not enough to save us from authoritarian rule or from extinction. On the other hand, extending sympathy with the heart, the glacier-slow movement of individuals toward some sense of kinship with humankind, kinship of their own desiring and making, may also not be enough. Nevertheless that is the only movement in which liberty has meaning. What we need is a change in the human weather, compassion as, if you will, atonement spelled at-one-ment. Compassion, indeed, is now a planetary imperative. Without compassion to hold us together, what we are likely to bequeath to future generations on Earth is a new Stone Age in which whatever fire first stirred in whatever brutish and fetid cave our nearer ancestors to conceive and cling to the mythology of themselves as human will be extinguished and forgotten. Then our cold, lonely, unsupported souls shall be set adrift, like the planet itself, among myriads of mythless stars. By now you may agree with me that stories are crucially important to our survival. Argentina’s great storyteller, Jorge Luis Borges, worked for most of his life as a librarian. When Juan Perón and the fascists came to power in the mid -1940s, Borges was removed from his library duties and, quote, “promoted,” as “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets.” Refusing to be humiliated and crushed, Borges wrote: “ Dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against those sad monopolies is one of the many duties of writers." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet Union hero in the Second World War, was expelled from the Writers’ Union in November, 1969. On October 8, 1970, there came the amazing news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Immediately he was slandered. People who read his works were dismissed from their jobs and expelled from universities. Late in December, 1973, the Russian edition of The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West. In it Solzhenitsyn challenged an authoritarian regime that between 1918 and 1955 had destroyed tens of millions of innocent people. Early in 1974 he was arrested and charged with high treason. He survived, and this is what he wrote in his Nobel Prize Lecture: [Literature] becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. Once called by Gabriel García Márquez “the greatest poet of the twentieth century - - in any language,” Pablo Neruda was born in 1904 in Chile, a nation of some 12-million people. In Chile the proposition that literature is its soul is deeply felt among most of its citizenry. Neruda first became known for his heartwrenching love sonnets. When he joined the antifascist movement in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, his poetry merged with his political activity. He served in the Chilean senate from 1945 until he was exiled for his support for striking miners. He returned to Chile in 1952 and for the next twenty-one years lived there as a people’s poet. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On September 11, 1973, a U.S.-sponsored military coup d’etat led by General Pinochet overthrew the popular government. Neruda died just twelve days later at the age of sixty-nine. He had cancer, it is true, but it is not an altogether sentimental or propagandistic assumption that he died of a broken heart. Let us listen to his heart:
Neruda’s wake was held in the middle of a muddy, flooded room that was once his library. Books and documents were floating in the mud along with furniture. The day before, a stream had been diverted into the house by the military who smashed everything in sight with their rifle butts and left the house flooded. When the funeral procession began, word spread, and the name Pablo Neruda opened doors and windows, stopped buses and emptied them, brought people out running from distant streets, thousands of people, almost all poor, people of the shantytowns, each of them becoming Pablo Neruda, each of them singing with him. For suddenly a poor woman had begun to chant Neruda’s verses, and everyone had taken up the song: ‘I have been reborn many times, from the depths/of defeated stars… reconstructing the threats/of eternities that I populated with my hands…’ ” Nearly two decades later, Chile’s new, democratically elected President ordered Neruda’s exhumation and reburial on the coast at Isla Negra. Thousands lined the roads and tossed flowers on the poet’s flag-draped casket as it passed. The entire nation listened to non-stop radio and television broadcasts devoted to celebration of “a national hero, a hero of letters, a hero of humanity.” On July 12, 2004, Chile commemorated the centennial of Neruda’s birth. Cities and towns held parades. Passing ships sounded their horns. Dignitaries from all over the world gathered at Isla Negra and at Parral, the poet’s birthplace. Poetry, it is said, fell from the sky. Under the influence of Puritanism and its corollaries, the cult of individualism and the belief that we are not only separated from nature but divinely ordained to subdue it, we in America tend strongly to regard literary and other arts as, at best, leisure-time activities. We sometimes behave as if we have no history, and powerful forces, including political ones, encourage us to be immobilized in nattentiveness, a kind of deep sleep. What, one wonders, is holding us together? As a nation that values unbridled liberty over social cooperation, can we, like Chile, ever assert that literature is our soul? Oddly, we can. More than eighty years ago the English novelist D. H. Lawrence, in a pioneering study of classic American literature, made a startling discovery: “The essential American soul,” he declared, “is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” The character of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer was, he argued, the prototype. If we look back at literary greats, at Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, for example, we can in one way or another discover in their stories an American soul that is hard, isolate, stoic, and occasionally even a killer. Furthermore, non-literary stories and even the images of living idols seem to fit the type. Recall movies starring Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne, or the latest episode of Donald Trump impersonating himself on “The Apprentice,” and you get the idea. We are a tough bunch, hard and intact in moral integrity, almost selfless; we endure. When the bad guys threaten to overwhelm us, lo, a gun-toting messiah rides into town, kills the varmints, and disappears into the sunset. Lawrence’s insights were brilliant but their message gave an oversimplified picture of the American soul. Our codes of behavior are not always either Anglo-Saxon or as excessively masculine as his portrait would suggest. He overlooked Melville’s sociability, he mocked Whitman’s exuberant embrace of an inclusive humanity, and he ignored or was ignorant of writers whom we accept as helping to define us, women such as Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather, as well as voices from regions outside the Northeast and the voices of multiculturalism. We need not abolish Lawrence’s words for the soul, but we can extend the list to include as part of the essence such words as consensual, nonviolent, world-related and transcendental. The literature of America, in fact, yields stories about an indivisible humanity. Frank Waters in this perspective is a towering giant of American and world literature. He was born in Colorado Springs on July 25, 1902. He died at his home in Arroyo Seco near Taos, New Mexico, on June 3, 1995, after a thirty-book career and, I believe, seven nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Comparable in stature to contemporaries such as Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, he wrote novels like The Man who Killed the Deer that are classics. They did not rival him, however, in depth of vision, nor were they philosophers. Waters achieved mastery as both a novelist and a philosopher, a phenomenon rarely met with either here or abroad. His “quest for the cosmic,” as it has been aptly called, demanded differing modes of expression, more than one approach, but all approaches were expressions of an implicate order in the universe. He found confirmations for his hardrock mysticism in the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and David Bohm, in the depth psychology of Carl Jung, in the Eastern philosophy of Maharshi, and in the “evolutionary” mythologies of Native American and Mesoamerican peoples. He proposed as the sanctuary for the psychic life of humankind a coming world of consciousness, aiming the proposal at curing our spiritual condition rather than at merely expressing it as his contemporaries did in nihilism or as a Waste-Land. We’re going to bounce back,” he liked to say in his slow, low, colloquial voice. When the protagonist of The Man Who Killed the Deer emerges into increased awareness, Waters describes the moment in a single sentence of elegant simplicity and profound significance: “So little by little the richness and the wonder and the mystery of life stole in upon him.” Prior to this moment the protagonist has been an American of the type already discussed, a male ego, an overly rationalistic individual, solid, separate, and alone, cut off from and headed for domination of family, tribe, society and the universe, a nominative “he” acting upon life. And suddenly he becomes an objective “him” receiving the richness and the wonder and the mystery of life. His moment of self-transcendence relates him to otherness. Waters is saying that we are all sharing the same kind of life, we are all One, we are all connected. I first met Frank in 1982 when he was eighty-one years old, tall and thin and a bit fraillooking although it was obvious he had not so long ago been as handsome as Gary Cooper. Before long he and Barbara invited me and Inés into their home in Seco, a small, 200-year-old adobe cottage sheltered under soaring, putty-colored aspens at the 8,500-foot elevation. Out in the meadows behind the house, a couple of horses roamed in grasses among wild plum thickets, chokecherries, Apache plume, and Indian paintbrush. A silver-gray feather floated out of the sky and landed at Inés’s feet. She picked it up. “Oh,” Frank said in a meaningful tone, “that’s good luck. You weren’t looking for it.” Anyone familiar with his world-view will be forgiven for seeing behind such a seemingly simple superstition a student of the Way, Indian or small-b Buddhist, because the rational, ego-driven seeker – and that included for him the people who seek self-transcendence through drugs – will always fall short of the goal, will always return to the ego, whereas the richness and the wonder and the mystery of life, like a feather symbolizing the intersection of time and eternity, are already here-and-now waiting to steal in upon us. The living room was as humble and unpretentious as Frank, himself. A sofa, a few armchairs. A glass-topped coffee table full of seashells. A kiva fireplace blazing, faintly filling the air with scent of piñon. An ancient trastero, gift of Mabel Dodge Luhan. A bookcase filled with books, above it kachina dolls and a small framed photograph of Jung. On the white walls, paintings, including Lady Brett’s of pueblo life and Fechin’s sketch of Frank as a young man. Now, years later, I cherish the sight of Frank seated in an armchair, firelight and lamplight reflected in bolo tie and silver belt buckle, a book of French poems by Paul Valéry in one hand, in the other hand a good strong vodka martini, suddenly throwing back his head with laughter and beginning a story with, “ Well, let me tell you…” Another sight I cherish of Frank is of him in his bedroom-study, sunlight streaming in from the morning, silhouetting him as he sits at the old wooden desk, his gaze distant, his fingers poised above that tiny portable Olivetti typewriter of his. It was almost as dysfunctional as the American family. But it clicked out masterpieces that will be read a hundred years from now. Once when Frank was nearly ninety and going slightly blind, we all decided to have a picnic high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Frank was driving his old Galaxie, the one that pretended to have shock absorbers, and as we came down from Seco into a flat stretch of road in the valley, I in the back seat noted that he was doing 65 in a 45-mph zone, swerving hell-forleather on the wrong side of the road. “Frank,” Barbara said calmly, “do you see that car coming straight at us?” Frank muttered something. I couldn’t hear him because I was suffering a bit of emotional dysentery, waiting for the mother of all automobile collisions. At the last moment Frank changed lanes. We all looked at him. He had this big, wait-till-we-get-to-the-Daytona-500- speedway grin on his face. The picnic site was in a glade at over 9000 feet elevation. A cathedral of trees towered over us; the sun slanted down as if from stained-glass windows that were bluer than blue. After a delicious luncheon of sandwiches, deviled eggs and fruit, Barbara and Inés went for a walk, leaving me and Frank to talk – or not. We chose not. Frank rested his head against a log, let the rays of the sun engulf him, giving himself up, as was his habit, to a thoughtless silence. I, too, felt becalmed in quietude. The sensation is best described by Frank, himself, in Mountain Dialogues: “All the sensual morning sounds seem to merge into one sound, the steady hum of silence itself, the voice of the living land, or perhaps the sound of the moving universe itself.” Ultimately, white silence speaks of the unity of a living universe. Being human, however, we are separated and alienated from realization of this truth. As Frank Waters wrote in The Man Who Killed the Deer:
Why write? We write because we hear that cry of every human heart. NOTES “tears and flapdoodle….hogwash”: Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Boston:Houghton Miflin Company, 1958), 138. “Everything….compassion”: “Winter Count 1973 : Geese, They Flew Over in a Storm,” from Barry Lopez, Winter Count, 1981. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. “English is how God sounds”: “Champions of the King James Version feel that if God spoke English, this is how he would sound.” John B. Gabel, Charles B. Wheeler, Anthony D. York, The Bible as Literature: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11. “right-thinking people”: Gustave Flaubert, letter to George Sand quoted in Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert, A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 295. “Inspector of Poultry….duties of writers.” Borges: Garden of the Forking Paths. Author Homepage.” Allen B. Ruch, “Visions from the Library Basement. A Mid Life Rebirth” in “Biography.” ( 21 Sept., 2004). MORE INFO-> [Literature]….nation”: “Presentation Speech. Nobel Lecture,1970.” (Sect. 5 of 7). Online. MORE INFO-> “The greatest poet….in any language.” “Introduction,” in “100 Years of Pablo Neruda. ” April 3rd, 2004. Online. MORE INFO-> “I am nothing….with my hands”: “Pablo Neruda’s Funeral.” The narrative of the funeral was taken from a tape recording of Neruda’s funeral done by Carlos Ortiz Tejeda; transcribed by Ricardo Garibay; translated by Mauricio Schoijet. Reprinted by permission of University Review. Copyright 1973, Entelechy Press Corp. Ibid. “I am nothing more.…sing with me.” Poem excerpt. Pablo Neruda, “Let the Rail Splitter Awake,” V. The Waldeen Translation. Ibid. For the Spanish version of the poem, refer to Pablo Neruda, “Que despierte el leñador,” VI, Canto General, 1950. “a national hero …. of humanity”: “A National Sonnet for Neruda.” Deccan Herald. June 27, 2004. MORE INFO-> “values unbridled liberty over social cooperation”: this thesis is explored in Wallace Stegner’s essay collection, The Sound of Mountain Water, Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1969. “ the essential American soul ”: D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), 62. The first edition was published in 1923. “quest for the cosmic”: Barbara Waters, ed., Pure Waters: Frank Waters and the Quest for the Cosmic. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002. “So little by little…upon him”: Frank Waters, The Man Who Killed the Deer (New York: Pocket Books, 1971), 134. “All the sensual…universe itself”: Frank Waters, Mountain Dialogues (Athens: Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press, 1981), 54. “The brotherhood of man…cry of every human heart”: Frank Waters, The Man Who Killed the Deer, op. cit., 199 |
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