Robert Root

 

Children are usually introduced to storytelling and learning to read through picture books, only gradually outgrowing reliance on the visual and gaining mastery of the textual. Reorienting myself to bookstores I once frequented but mostly avoided in these pandemic years, I realized that children's sections helped us become aware of our grandchildren's aging. Where we once browsed picture books, we later browsed various fantasy or adventure or sports series, depending on which grandchild we were shopping for. Occasionally we took all the kids to bookstores to make their own choices—how could we be sure which Harry Potter novel or Wings of Fire adventure they hadn't yet read? Eventually, one by one, they wandered off into teen or young adult sections where we were less familiar with titles and authors. I assumed that, just as I had, they'd outgrow books with illustrations and read narratives presented solely in words. But times changed—one familiar bookstore relocated their voluminous offerings in manga and graphic novels unavoidably close to the restrooms, the last thing you see going in, the first thing you see coming out.

 

I haven't bought a newspaper in a long time, so can't report on what's become of Sunday funnies or daily comics pages. I read them regularly as a child, adventure stories in particular: "Terry and the Pirates," "Steve Canyon," "Prince Valiant," "The Phantom," "Tarzan," "The Lone Ranger," many of them also accessible on radio or in comic books. Often on Sundays my father took my sister, my brother, and me down to Kipp's Cigar Store to pick up a copy of the Buffalo Courier-Express and buy each of us a comic book. I first favored superheroes and western adventures but eventually began collecting Classics Illustrated, the comic series offering illustrated versions of long-established novels and epic poems. I especially preferred those with swashbuckling or frontier themes: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, The Knights of the Round Table, The Talisman, The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, Men of Iron, Two Years Before the Mast, and the like.

 

Cinemascope films then popular often emphasized historic spectacle, and I bought comic book versions of them as well—the comic version of the film Helen of Troy disappointed me because it changed the movie's ending and didn't square with The Iliad in my Classics Illustrated version. Classics Illustrated convinced me that serious stories could be told visually—I also saw any movie adapted from an adventure novel or epic tale—and they often sent me to the literary works they illustrated, enhancing my reading.

 

In recent years, I've frequently read books that my grandchildren read first or were reading when I visited. Some were clearly designed for young children—A Treasury of Curious George and Sandra Boynton's Snoozers—and some were clearly trafficking the market for print works in series—graphic adaptations of the Wings of Fire adventure novels, for example—while others merited attention for visually exploring aspects of young people's lives—Raina Telgemeier's graphic novels like Smile, Drama, and Ghosts, or Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts. The New York Times Book Review offers monthly lists of Children's Bestsellers (Middle Grade Hardcover, Young Adult Hardcover, Picture Books, and Series) and a separate list of Graphic Books and Manga, all aimed at younger readers.

 

As it happens, long before I started reading my grandchildren's graphic books, my affection for graphic storytelling had been fostered by a gift copy of Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, published in 1991 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the same year Maus II was published, concluding the story based on Spiegelman's father's experiences as a Jew in Germany during the Holocaust. The Jews are portrayed as mice, the Nazis as cats, and other nationalities as other animals. The concept challenged some critics, but most readers found it powerful and absorbing, and it opened the door to the concept of the graphic narrative or graphic novel.

 

The aftermath has been a highly effective and affecting range of graphic narratives, including novels, biographies, and memoirs. Marjane Satrapi's powerful Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2004) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2005), set in Iran, were eventually made into an animated film and, like Spiegelman's Maus, published in a single volume. Alison Bechdel's first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was published in 2007 and its sequel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, its title playing off P. D. Eastman's classic children's book, in 2013; her third memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength was published this year. All the books I've mentioned are engaging, expressive, and as powerful as many of the recent text-bound memoirs I've read. I have a feeling we'll keep going graphic for a while.

 

Some years ago, while I was researching the Rhine River, Sue and I toured the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. My familiarity with his paintings was enhanced by that visit and by a museum guide I purchased and read on the plane trip home from the Netherlands. The guide was still on a bookshelf in our study, somehow not yet stored in a box in our garage. But it wasn't my only Van Gogh book. I also owned a copy of Vincent, a graphic biography written and illustrated by the Dutch author Barbara Stok (Laura Watkinson translated it), a volume in the Art Masters Series, which also includes translated graphic biographies of Magritte, Munch, Gauguin, Picasso, and Dali.

 

I'd read Vincent years before but the recent "Beyond Van Gogh" exhibit in Milwaukee prompted me to read it through a few more times. Barbara Stok often draws on materials preserved in the Van Gogh Museum, especially letters from Vincent to his supportive brother, Theo. She provides a balanced portrait of the artist, including his conflicts with other people, his self-absorption and isolation, his tendency to alienate others, as well as his dedication to his artistry. Her illustrations have a cartoon-like quality when dealing with characters, and moments of Van Gogh's anxiety, anger, and anguish are presented with distorted images.

 

Except for those quotes from Vincent's writing, dialogue is the only available text in the book—there are no separate narrative passages. The artist's unbalanced interactions with his circumstances are often presented without dialogue. In the absence of dialogue, the reader must rely on images, often having to make sense of what Van Gogh is feeling or reacting to by studying the context of where he appears or of what he looks at or of what he refuses to acknowledge. In one sequence, we see him noticing a starry night, then walking with his easel and equipment into the countryside to set up a daylong session painting distant wheatfields. The act of painting takes up five wordless panels, until an appreciative bystander approaches and they converse amicably. In another sequence, where he and Gauguin have set up easels in the countryside, the silent six-panel sequence of Van Gogh painting a sower at work adds images of a young Vincent and Theo enjoying the landscape; it's a way to suggest what Vincent is imagining or remembering as he paints, the personal immersion he entertains in his art.

 

Stok's graphic biography manages to visually narrate the course of Vincent's artistic development and engagement and to intimate his isolation and remoteness from others even as he devotes himself to his work and relies on his brother. One sequence shows him having sex with a prostitute and chatting with her afterward, revealing how tangential and unrealistic his relations with others usually are. Repeatedly he returns to his artwork and Stok often replicates some of his best-known paintings: "The Yellow House," "The Bedroom," "The Almond Blossom," "Wheatfields under thunderclouds." She includes the dark moments—the severing of his ear, the residence in an asylum—but omits his death by suicide.

 

Instead, the book ends with a calm conversation between Vincent and Theo about taking a more positive view of existence followed by several dialogue-free facing pages. For the first two, each with four panels, Vincent walks off to prepare to paint. Then the reader is presented with a single image across two pages, Vincent on a dirt road that extends through a wheatfield, painting blue sky, crows on the ground behind him. In the subsequent two-page image he is still painting but our perspective is further away from him, he's deeper in the field, and some crows are taking flight. In the final two-page panorama, Stok reproduces his painting "Wheatfield with crows," the birds in flight, Vincent no longer visible.

 

The Van Gogh Museum Guide informs readers that Vincent felt himself a failure and died after shooting himself in the chest. His brother Theo died six months later. The guide contains a small photo of their tombstones which Stok reproduces in a drawing on the last page of her graphic biography. Her ending is more peaceful and positive than Van Gogh's biography reports. When I first read Vincent years ago, I didn't expect it to be as authoritative as a scholarly study, but I probably didn't appreciate how both evocative and informative it is. My "immersive experience" with Van Gogh prompted me to read the book again differently, to pay closer attention to all those text-free panels and illustrated sequences—to comprehend by what I was seeing, by what was portrayed on the page. Like the immersive exhibit, it gave me an alternative entry into Van Gogh's art. It also raised my level of appreciation for how astute and powerful graphic narrative can be.

 

 

I attended the "Beyond Van Gogh" exhibit at the Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee twice in one week, first in a family group that included Sue's sister Sarah, visiting from Michigan, then a few days later I returned with our son Tom, visiting from California, whom we hadn't seen in person in a year and a half. I thought that, as someone working with animation on both Cartoon Network and Hulu, he'd be interested in the "Immersive Experience" the exhibit promoted. Of course, what he'd bring to the exhibit would be different from what I brought to it.

 

"Beyond Van Gogh" immerses viewers in Vincent Van Gogh's artwork through audio-visual animation that surrounds them with colors, shapes, music, motion, and quotes from his writing. You enter through a room hung with rows of empty picture frames and dangling panels of explanation and quotation mounted on backgrounds from his paintings. Weaving your way among the rows, you enter a second room with black walls where wavering white dots slowly congeal into the shape of Vincent's face. In a much larger third room Van Gogh's paintings are projected onto every surface—the walls, several tall square columns, every inch of flooring.

 

It's hard to know where to fix your attention. With light and color pulsing around and below you, everything competes for your scrutiny. You may recognize individual paintings you've seen displayed in museums you've visited or encountered online or in books, but it's hard not to be disoriented by the size and scope of what encircles you. The paintings are not mounted in isolation on the walls but projected expansively onto every surface. Moreover, they are often in motion, morphing from one image to another, flowing off the walls and across the floor beneath your feet. You and all the dark figures around you are—Well, yes!—immersed in Van Gogh's artwork.

 

Individual images often come to life. Gazing at one familiar Van Gogh self-portrait towering over me on a nearby square column, his face spilling onto two sides, I saw his left eye blink—or was it a wink? Clouds changed shape in the "Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds" image. As the "Wheatfield with Crows" landscape unrolled across the wall and flowed onto the floor, the crows began flapping their wings and flying across blue sky. "Sunflowers" arose all around us. The "Almond Blossom" painting spread itself across one wall after another until it encircled the room and then its blossoms began sailing across every wall and every column and every patron and everywhere underfoot. At other art exhibits I've taken snapshots to aid my memory; here I started a long video that made me rotate around the room and linger on the closest column, blossoms abounding, until I became aware of the walls slowly changing their image, the blossoms no longer falling and another landscape emerging behind them.

 

Swirls of light on a dark blue background became "The Starry Night," overwhelmingly immersive. The soundtrack played an instrumental version of Don McLean's tune "Vincent," the one that repeats the phrase "Starry, starry night." The melody for Paul Simon's "America" played as well—both tunes would repeat in my head often over the coming days and make me struggle to recall their lyrics. "The Bedroom." "The Yellow House." "Vase of Gladioli." "Vase with Irises." "The Potato Eaters." Self-portrait after self-portrait lining the walls. An abundance of the artist's signatures inscribing themselves in multi-colored squares and rectangles. Countless images constantly replacing one another.

 

I felt absorbed into it—thoroughly immersed. Each time I visited, I left uncertain how to describe it. We all found it overwhelming, my son most impressed by its technology and the effects attempted. "Immersive experiences" have proliferated in recent years. "Beyond Van Gogh" is only one of several such Van Gogh exhibits, some considerably more extravagant and theatrical, and other artists, including Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali, have also been subjected to the approach. Imagine being immersed in Kahlo's "The Wounded Deer" or Dali's "The Persistence of Memory."

 

Such exhibits inspire mixed reactions. Loath to have artworks transformed into animated entertainment, purists prefer gazing silently upon the originals. I like that too, though in a museum it often means maneuvering my way around other viewers hoping for a close-up look. One screen in the Van Gogh exhibit claimed that the "unlikely pairing of the digital and the classical allows one to dive into this world of paint, to experience it from the inside, to vibrate with it." It can be argued that immersive viewing is apt to send you back into the art itself, trying to get closer to his artistry, if only on a computer screen. Van Gogh surely absorbed himself deeply in his paintings; perhaps he'd appreciate experiencing such a thorough immersion in them this way.

 

Notes: A review by Ben Davis of two other Van Gogh Immersive Experiences and a review by Sarah Cascone of the Frida Kahlo exhibit "Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva" can both be found online in artnet news.

 

Feighan, Maureen. "New 'Beyond Van Gogh' immersive art exhibition fascinates," The Detroit News, June 25, 2021.

 

Schulman, Sandra. "Beyond Van Gogh: Starry Night, Sunflowers and Immersive Madness," Florida Daily Post, April 15, 2021.

 

My wife and I usually visit art museums wherever we live and wherever we travel. I can easily conjure up memories of halls and stairwells in museums in Chicago and Milwaukee and Detroit, the ones we visit most often, and imagine positioning myself in front of an artwork, shuffling among other viewers, squinting at tags identifying title, artist, composition elements, and date. Different sizes of squares or rectangles on the wall require shifts in distance for better viewing. Sometimes we purchase reproductions to hang in our household among photos and paintings by family and friends. Sometimes I'll step near one of them before I leave a room, almost close enough to step into the image or help it spill out into the space before me. We are silent and static as we face one another.

 

Our European travel always included museum visits: the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi in Florence, the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, everywhere amidst bustling tourists clattering from room to room, audio guides pressed to their ears listening to explanations of selected artworks. I appreciate having immediate access to the history and provenance of artists and artworks, but more often I simply gaze at the paintings, as I do photographs of my family on bookshelves and cabinet tops in our home, noting moments frozen in time. Any chance of interaction or interpretation depends on the viewer's memory or imagination. Conversation with a work of art depends not only on what the artist determined should be viewed but also on what the viewer brings to the painting.

 

Most of us are accustomed to more dynamic means of communication. As readers we expect to interpret texts that offer verbal cues, a process equivalent to viewing artworks, but more often we are audiences interpreting performances, what we hear on radios or audio sites, what we see on television or computer or theater screens, not only videos and films but also live interactions with family and friends and associates. Dog-walkers pass by our condo daily, communicating aloud with distant listeners they may see on their cellphones or only hear on headphones, barely aware of the animal guiding them along the sidewalk. We Facebook and Zoom and Google those we share personal and business gatherings with, sometimes a diverting panoply of faces, sometimes more intimately one person at a time,

 

During the recent pandemic year, we've often relied on remote digital interaction. Sometimes it's a plus, communicating with people from a distance, seeing faces of those whose voices we usually only heard on the phone or whom we seldom saw in person because of travel expenses or scheduling. Bookstores now post interviews and readings with distant writers who would never have appeared locally. Our laptops let us participate, even post "chats," as if we were an audience in a live television program. Our chapter of the Ice Age Trail Alliance conducted some monthly meetings that way, the safest way to keep in touch.

 

The art museums we're familiar with have been cautious about determining what would be the most prudent approach to allowing the public to visit in person. Many have found ways to display some of their art online, generating either internet tours of certain exhibits or posting special digital programming. In the past I've appreciated that kind of access to works of special interest to me. The Museo Del Prado has an extensive internet site for Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych, one of my favorite artworks; it lets online visitors view the triptych both as a whole and in multiple close-ups of its parts and offers abundant multimedia links with closed captions (in English). For anyone who is unlikely to ever make it physically to the Prado, it's a thorough and engaging use of digital technology, ultimately more informative than standing among a host of other visitors to look at the actual painting itself. (Example: My son's photo of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre beyond a row of hands holding up cameras.)

 

But having digital access is not the same as scanning the original artifact itself, developing an awareness of the artist's presence in the design and the execution, and gaining a realization of your own presence next to it. Some of us need to discern the brushwork up close in hopes of understanding what the artist saw emerging on the canvas, while others of us resist thinking about how the painting came about and consider only the totality of what's visible before them. Sometimes the medium is the message and other times it deflects the message. I often ask myself what I'm responding to and why I'm responding that way. The answers may depend on how I see the art.

 

 

Note: Bosch, Hieronymus. The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych. Museo Nacional del Prado. Calle Ruiz de Alarcón 23. Madrid. 2801

 

 

Joan Didion's essay "Last Words," originally published in 1998, opens with the first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. Didion claims to have reread it when she learned that Hemingway's final novel would be published the following year, though he had died in 1961 and the last novel published in his lifetime had been The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. He had drafted portions of other work—The Old Man and the Sea was essentially the fourth part of an unfinished four-part novel. After his death, across forty-five years, his family and his publisher released three novels and two memoirs culled from manuscripts he'd given up on, as well as collections of his short fiction, reporting, and correspondence. He had hoped—had requested—that all that material would be destroyed after his death.

 

"Last Words," which appeared in The New Yorker twenty-three years ago, is the second-to-last essay in Didion's most recent collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, made up of twelve essays published between 1968 and 2000 in The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and, most recently, The New Yorker. Only one of the essays, "Why I Write," was familiar to me, and because I've read all her novels, memoirs, essay collections, and her play published since Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968, I was happy to get this broad ranging gathering of unfamiliar pieces.

 

The last of Hemingway's novels, True at First Light, is taken from his incomplete African novel, started before 1954 and abandoned in 1956 after 810 pages. Didion follows his mention of it in his Selected Letters, a posthumous collection, and notes when "a certain silence [falls] on the matter." She writes, "Eight hundred and ten pages or no, there comes a point at which every writer knows when a book is not working, and every writer also knows when the reserves of will and energy and memory and concentration required to make the thing work simply may not be available." Hemingway had abandoned an earlier four-part manuscript before starting the African novel, eventually published one part as The Old Man and the Sea, and another part was published after his death as Islands in the Stream. The African novel was edited and shortened by half by one of Hemingway's sons and published as True at Half Light.

 

Hemingway's widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, who decided to ignore her husband's wishes and publish work of his that he did not believe was publishable, claimed, "Except for punctuation and the obviously overlooked 'ands' and 'buts' we would present his prose and poetry to readers as he wrote it, letting the gaps lie where they were." Didion reacts strongly to that editorial decision.

 

"Well, there you are. You care about the punctuation or you don't, and Hemingway did. You care about the 'ands" and the 'buts' or you don't, and Hemingway did. You think something is in shape to be published or you don't, and Hemingway didn't." She later claims that "the publication of unfinished work is a denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it." She thinks the excerpts being published "can be read only as something not yet made, notes, scenes in the process of being set down, words set down but not yet written."

 

The essay begins with that opening paragraph from A Farewell to Arms and Didion confesses that, as a girl of twelve or thirteen, she imagined being able to "one day arrange 126 such words myself." She reports on what she sees: "Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other 103 have one. Twenty-four of the words are 'the,' fifteen are 'and.' There are four commas." Didion's five sentences have thirty-one words. Her next sentence, detailing "the liturgical cadence of the paragraph," is itself 115 words long. It is a sharply observed reading of Hemingway's paragraph and in its own style an homage to the elements of his writing that make it so vital, especially when the words are those he felt he really needed to publish.

 

It's taken me a few drafts to get my overview of Didion's essay and my comments reacting to it in shape to be posted here. I appreciate being reminded that the process takes time, repeated reading, and a variety of revisions. Most of my posts here have gone through that process; those that didn't get posted were those "not yet made," "not yet written." I have to remember that the writing will tell me when and if it's ready to go out into the world. It won't always be ready and I should let it go unpublished if it isn't.

 

 

The typescript of my unfinished mystery novel, The Graves of Academe, runs 154 double-spaced pages and 16 short chapters typed on the back of pale dittoed handouts or photocopies of pages from my dissertation—if I reverse the pages, I can read discontinuous excerpts from "The Problematics of Marriage: English Comedy 1688-1710." The mystery's opening three chapters in first person are revised by hand to third; the prologue and 13 more chapters, written years later, are in third person. Eight more chapters were tentatively planned.

 

I vaguely recall starting it in 1976 on highways between Iowa and Michigan. Unemployed after my post-doctoral year, Central Michigan University had turned me down for a composition position, but then abruptly hired me when a senior professor died unexpectedly and I was the only rejectee who could teach his popular course, the Bible as Literature. Thus was my career launched. Driving interstates alone, talking out loud to stay awake, I started to generate a first-person narrative about a recent midwestern-PhD hired precipitously at a Great Lakes university where the death of a senior faculty member—a murder—would require him to teach the victim's Shakespeare class.

 

I wrote those first three chapters but then the demands of preparing new classes and seeking academic standing through conference papers and creating a scholarly book from a dissertation chapter made me set it aside. It wasn't until years later, again making solitary cross-country road trips, that I remembered generating scenes aloud and thought of completing the mystery. Changes in my life over six years altered the manuscript's outlook. Chapters 4 through 16 would now be in third person and take a different perspective. While John Rice, the mystery's protagonist, and I had both left midwestern grad schools for Great Lakes universities, both expecting to move on after three years so our schools could avoid giving us tenure, I at least would receive tenure and stay there a total of 28 years. I had been divorced and lived alone for a few years until eventually marrying again; Rice's bachelor relationships with women had become more complicated and I imagined him taking a trilogy of murder mysteries to work everything out.

 

Recently I read The Graves of Academe typescript again, expecting to clean up typos and copy the text onto the computer, but by the time I reached the end, I felt no impulse to complete its narrative. Much of what's there no doubt displays aspects of who I was when I started it, and especially when I tried to continue it, but I don't identify with John Rice as I once did. My relationship to the plot line and the characters changed and I couldn't imagine reviving commitment.

 

As it turns out, I'd forgotten also later completing a different detective story. "Cruel as the Grave" was submitted to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and very quickly rejected. It's a straight-forward detective story, 49 typescript pages long, in which Lt. Will Dryden investigates and solves the case handily and is spurred by the background of the murder to recognize a need for romance in his own life. Its dialogue and plot conform to the conventions of mysteries I'd read and television episodes I'd viewed and drew on elements of investigation and police procedure I'd witnessed often in programs we'd watched. Except for some of the detective's angst about his earlier divorce, I don't sense much of a personal investment from me in the narrative. That is, it is very much different from The Graves of Academe where I can zero in on the background inspiration for certain characters and situations. Probably the Hitchcock magazine found it formulaic, maybe even predictable. I didn't pursue publication for it after that rejection.

 

What I realize now is how much writing of various kinds I was doing when I flirted with mystery writing. I'd spent a year as a singer-songwriter, been writing around 35 short essays for local public radio annually, and published my first academic book. In addition to a second marriage and a new household and an expanding academic career, enough was happening to make inventing mysteries an unnecessary distraction. I had sound professional reasons for turning to scholarly writing and considerable pleasure in all that other writing—perhaps my critical and creative needs were well satisfied when I stopped writing fiction.

 

That may be what I've learned revisiting the fiction I wrote in the past. The stories that seem to work best are those where some part of me inhabits the central character, where the narrative grows out of issues that nag at me, where the storytelling at least provides some tentative resolution that partly satisfies me, whether it satisfies the character who grew out of me or not. I gain more by writing essays and memoirs.

 

I came into the idea of writing about my early fiction with the expectation that it would be interesting—and possibly amusing—to figure out why I once wrote fiction and—perhaps riskier—to learn what kind of a fiction writer I was. My second effort at confronting an old short story—I might have said "examining" but in this case "confronting" seems more appropriate—tackled "On the Bus." The story centers on the self-absorption and isolation of Mort, a single man working in a department store by day and taking college classes in the evening. Already I've analyzed the story more in this paragraph than I likely did whenever I wrote it.

 

As an undergraduate I'd taken a course from Professor Leo Rockas in which we alternately studied, in translation, the short stories of Anton Chekhov and the essays of Friedrich Nietzsche. Over the semester, we were assigned three projects for each writer: a critical assessment, like the kind of lit/crit paper written in other English classes; an imitation or homage, something inspired by each writer's example; and a parody or satire of each writer's style. It was a good class. I didn't much like Nietzsche (Also Sprach Zarathustra; Nietzsche contra Wagner) or agree with his outlook, but my attack on him ("Root contra Nietzsche") was judged by my prof to be the most Nietzschean paper that semester. It alarmed me a little to think I might have been recruited by the German philosopher.

 

Chekhov's influence on me was deeper and more positive. My stories became more grounded, more restrained, more narrowly focused. "The End of Wisdom" probably shows that influence, though the conclusion might be more moralistic than Chekhov would have written. I may have intended "On the Bus" to follow that model. It's essentially a third-person portrayal of a lonely, inhibited, self-conscious college student who fantasizes futilely about a woman he observes in an apartment window and on a bus, is later attracted to a classmate he also restrains himself from connecting with, and in the end considers the possible consequences of his self-imposed remoteness. Realizing that the first woman is in a problematic relationship he imagines he might have rescued her from propels him to connect with the second woman.

 

It's a long story. Certain narrative elements help identify the author. At one point Mort's workplace is mentioned: "On his job he was the only young man in the store, except for two who worked on delivery. The men's clothing department was run by two older men, one near retirement who begrudged Mort's presence all together, and a middle-aged man who was civil but distant. Most of the women in the store were middle-aged except for a clique of girls his age who worked in the notions department and whose witty interchanges frightened him from attempting any closer contact than a nod of hello." During one summer, I had sold men's clothing for my hometown department store, a more positive experience than Mort's but very similar.

 

The sense of isolation the character exhibits was familiar to me, and the short story draws partly on that persistent and long-lived feeling. I'm sure the story was written while I was a master's candidate in the University of Iowa writing program; there are markings on the manuscript, probably by my graduate advisor (he underlined the "begrudged" remark, for example), but no critical comments. I remember him muttering disapprovingly about my writing, "Chekhovian, eh?" (For other, more complicated reasons, by the end of my first semester I stopped pursuing an MFA and earned an MA and then a PhD instead.)

 

The typescript of "On the Bus" was an early draft never revised any further. Reading it now, I'm aware of how much sentence level editing it needs, a question of prose style, but also how contrived that optimistic reversal at the end seems, hinting at a positive future for the main character. By the time I wrote it I was a college graduate, a former high school English teacher, a graduate student, and a husband, in many ways a different person than my main character. I'd like to think I was more accomplished, more mature, more settled than he, but I also recognize how familiar his insecurity, uncertainty, and isolation were to me. At least one family member objected to the focus on lovelorn bachelorhood, which made me wonder how to write a story that didn't draw in any way, no matter how remote, on my own individual psychology and background experiences.

 

None of my MFA classmates seemed to be writing Chekhovian short stories or tales with happy endings. I didn't know how I would become a different kind of writer. I stopped writing short stories once I left the MFA program.

 

 

The first story I read in the folder of my old short stories was titled "The End of Wisdom." I'm not certain when it was written but suspect it's from my undergraduate days. Certain narrative elements made me remember circumstances in my own experience that very likely were only a few years behind me. It was a tale of a boy's observation of parishioners at Catholic mass, contrasting his familiarity with an early Sunday morning service centered on children with his exposure to behaviors of adult attendees at a later service. Until the very end of the story, the reader shares the boy's perspective. Noel wakes on a Sunday morning to learn that his family have overslept; he and his mother have missed the nine o'clock "Children's Mass" and will have to attend the regular 12:00 service at St. Andrew's, a service he has never been to.

 

Noel thinks about the nine o'clock mass, realizing "it wasn't really piety that made him love" it. "It was sitting in special pews right up at the front of the church, next to Harry Seefeldt and Roger Shamus, who had both made their first communion with him. It was listening to Father Hubert talking especially to them, and not so much to the adults. It was singing from the children's hymnbook the songs they had practiced in church school every Wednesday before their First Communion Day." I'm not sure who Noel's friends are based on, though I had Catholic friends as a child, but immediately I conjure up the interior of St. Patrick's church, the one my family (except for my Presbyterian father) attended, and the experience of making my First Communion and regular attendance at the 9:15 Children's mass presided over by Father Roy Chrissy. Clearly, I'm drawing on familiar Sunday morning and Wednesday afternoon activities I experienced until well into my teens. Father Hubert draws strongly on my memories of Father Crissy: "Noel always thought that Father Hubert and God were very much alike; he could tell because Father always understood what they were saying in the Bible and he could always explain it so well to the children. Noel sometimes thought religion was really just being good and church was feeling good."

 

The adult mass is a troubling experience for Noel. Parishioners are preoccupied and distracted by the people around them: a young couple flirty and silly, an older couple grumpy and argumentative, a fat woman in their row impolite and surly, two teen boys sneaking out of the church before the mass starts, a single woman uncomfortable to find herself sitting in a pew near the only black man in the church. (One sign of the age of this story is that the black man is referred to as a negro, as my mother was adamant that we politely call such people.) The mass is presided over by Father Tiebolt, an older, less congenial, more remote priest than Father Hubert, who conducts the service somewhat disinterestedly. People are rude on the way to take communion and eager to leave before the mass has fully ended.

 

At the end of the story Noel's mother explains to his Catholic father why Noel came home unhappy. She encourages her husband to watch the people at the five o'clock mass and "think about how they look to a child just feeling the full majesty of the church." She remembers Father Hubert a week earlier preaching the line from Psalms: "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" and asks, "What is it when you don't fear, when you don't seem to care? Because that's what he saw." The story ends with the suggestion that mother and son both know "simultaneously and separately that nothing either of them said could bring back everything that had been lost that morning."

 

The story strikes me as rather moralistic or propagandistic, essentially arguing over proper behavior at church service while also suggesting how parishioners might become disenchanted or disengaged from religious practice and possibly from religion itself. I'm not sure when I wrote this, but I did stop attending Catholic services in my teens, later struggled to get involved again after marriage in a Catholic service, but ultimately stepped away from religion altogether. I sense a nostalgia here for the kind of involvement I had with the church in childhood; it influenced my moral and philosophical leanings for much of my early adult life by what it taught, though I would argue that honesty and empathy and compassion and kindness are all things we can practice without being dominated by doctrine.

 

So, I'm left to wonder: is "The End of Wisdom" urging a more considerate, conscientious commitment to practicing religion or is it justifying my own disengagement from it?

 

For the next few years after I graduated from college and married, I lived in an apartment in my hometown and taught 11th and 12th grade English classes in a small town on the Lake Ontario shoreline. Memories of those years flooded back when I started to write about two short stories composed while I taught at that high school and lived in that apartment and, in an earlier draft of this post, much more came out that didn't relate to the stories and had to be deleted. Most of my family still lived in my hometown then and we often visited them and enjoyed their company, but I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life in my hometown. My college had been only 70 miles away, an hour and a half's drive south, and my work now was 16 miles away, a half-hour's drive north. I'd seen little of the world beyond western New York. Actually, it was only because New York State required me to earn more than a bachelor's degree to keep on teaching that we ended up moving to Iowa so I could study writing in graduate school.

 

My first year of high school teaching had sometimes challenged my temperament, but over time, as I attempted to behave more like myself rather than pretending to be an authoritative and commanding figure, I began to feel pretty much at home in the role. My habit of writing often allowed me to step aside from my pedagogical persona. I occasionally published short reviews of television shows for the weekend edition of the Buffalo Evening News and continued to compose short fiction. Material I've unearthed from a folder of old typescripts from that period reveals that I drew on both my working environment and my residential situation for inspiration. Two completed stories I've found both remind me where I was then and what I imagined about my circumstances at the time.

 

"One of the Guys" is set in a men's faculty room in a small-town high school. Reading the opening almost instantaneously makes me envision both the setting that prompted it and the faces of the men I spent free periods with there at the time. The school had two separate faculty lounges, each gender-specific, on opposite wings of the building; rather than go into the faculty room just down the hall from my classroom, I quickly learned, I needed to navigate two long hallways to use the bathroom in the men's lounge. The short story centers on a young English teacher, newly hired, as he tries to connect with other male faculty, some of them military veterans his father's age, one young enough to have been their student who identifies with them completely. The story centers on the new teacher's frustrations with his peers and ends with him giving up on becoming one of the guys and finding community with his wife's elementary faculty friends.

 

"Agnes Dunrose's Hobby" was a completely different story, centered on an older woman's solitary life in a second-floor apartment and her efforts to interpret the lives of the people around her with whom she has no actual social contact. In my real life, the older woman who lived above us only complained about the noise in our apartment once, and we had little interaction with her, partly because we left early in the morning for our jobs in that country school district many miles away and also because we often spent free time elsewhere with my brother and his family or my parents or with friends we eventually made at work. Agnes Dunrose's hobby is spying on neighbors and culminates in her efforts to get a reaction from the newlywed couple downstairs by interfering with the temperature of their shower water. The young husband lurches away from the suddenly overheated flow, loses his balance in the bathtub, and dies when hits his head in the fall. The story ends with Agnes moving out of town to a retirement community where she might not be so isolated as in her apartment and perhaps less inclined to engage herself in a problematic hobby.

 

"One of the Guys" draws heavily on my own experience; "Agnes Dunrose's Hobby" arises out of imagining a fictional life. As I consider them together now, I discover some familiarity with their themes: individual isolation in different settings, one mostly social, the other mostly psychological, both ending with the main characters altering their environments. I have a strong suspicion that there may have been some kind of link between those main characters' behaviors and the mindset of the newlywed teacher who created them. I don't remember ever attempting to publish either of them. Reading them now, I don't have an urge to try.

 

 

My early fiction tended to draw on familiar circumstances and settings. Rereading it, I persistently identify, sometimes vaguely, sometimes sharply, real life individuals who inspired characters. Usually, I recognize myself in the protagonist who reacts to events and interacts with other characters. "The Albatross," however, breaks away from that routine somewhat. To write it, I had to inhabit the personality of someone I assumed was essentially unlike me.

 

The main character, Dr. Stephen Coleridge Barclay, an aging English professor at a small college, is unhappily married, drinks heavily, and combats loneliness through affairs with co-eds. He's waiting in a hotel room above a bar for his latest lover to arrive and as he thinks about her, he remembers the first one who was his mistress for a long time before she graduated. Their relationship, though transient, was one each of them valued. In flashbacks Barclay fondly remembers their time together, believing her to have been more sincere, more committed, more compassionate than any of those who succeeded her. He struggles to convince himself that this new relationship might evolve like that first one. At the end of the story, as they prepare to have sex, his new mistress asks him to recite a poem, as if that will make the moment more romantic or at least temper his unease.

 

The short story has two literary allusions that try to deepen the sense of what the main character wrestles with. In the final scene of my typescript Barclay starts to recite Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun . . .", which the girl might possibly find romantic but the reader, having learned of Barclay's sense of her physical and intellectual shortcomings compared to his first lover, should find painfully ironic. In the version of the story published in The Experimentalist, our college literary magazine, Shakespeare's sonnet is replaced by Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnet 43, which begins, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," possibly a more direct address. Both sonnets are declarations of love, but the Shakespeare quote internalizes Barclay's misgivings more and Browning's emphasizes his conflicted hypocrisy.

 

Barclay's middle name, Coleridge, links him to the poet best known for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Barclay's students and colleagues sometimes refer to him as that title character and, given not only his age but also his awareness of the dead albatross tied around the mariner's neck, Barclay also identifies with him. In my story, Barclay's albatross is entirely symbolic, a metaphor for his uncontrolled need for a young mistress, even one apparently accommodating but obviously insincere and not as genuinely affectionate as his first mistress. To convince himself to continue the affair, he tells her as he undresses, "You're no albatross. You're a bird of paradise."

 

When I wrote "The Albatross," I was a college student in my early twenties, sexually inexperienced, but somehow aware of a relationship between an older professor and a young woman I'd taken classes with. I'd been in one of his classes and knew his daughter, also a classmate of mine. When I reread the story, I can envision that man, that co-ed, the inn where their assignations take place, the streets of that college town. I'd taken good fiction writing courses there, in one composing fiction in the vein of Anton Chekhov and in both trying to inhabit the motives and the needs of someone other than myself. I must have given thought to the real-life situation of people I knew and wondered what would come of it. The story is essentially an attempt to imagine the psychological aftermath of such an affair on an aging teacher.

 

I published the story in The Experimentalist, probably assuming no one else would make the connection between fiction and real life. Several people did, and a few chided me for publicly exposing a relationship of which they too were aware. So, I was chagrined when my classmate who had been the real professor's lover approached me in the college center to talk about it. She and the professor had both read the story and discussed it together. To my surprise and embarrassed relief, they both felt I'd given a sympathetic and insightful reading of the future they faced. They knew they would break up when she graduated, and the professor dreaded her absence, his future emptied of the companionship she gave him. What would he do without her? Would he end up like Stephen Coleridge Barclay? I was pleased they thought me sympathetic.

 

I don't know what any reader who didn't know the background thought of the story. I know my classmate moved on; I don't know what the professor did. I think it may be the best story I ever wrote.

 

 

Notes: Bob Root, "The Albatross," The Experimentalist. Volume XII (Spring 1966): 39-45.

 

The Literary Magazine Project A Look at Geneseo's History Through Student Publications.