GAGA'S STUDY

Later when I read John Cheever and his imitators and mentors and models there was a recurring story, that seemed so exotic to me, of how a guy kind of drunk returns home late at night and crawls into bed, and then discovers he is in the wrong house. As a child I never lived in a house that could be mistaken for any other. In Connecticut, there was the cramped part with low ceilings and a Dutch oven and small fireplaces and wide old hand split floor boards, and in the more open and rickety parts added later, including a room with many windows called The Big Room, there was so little insulation that in my upstairs bedroom I was in the middle of everything that went on downstairs – the drinking and the fighting and the occasional gaiety – the ceiling downstairs being the same thin boards that were also the floor in the part of the house that had been added in pre-commuter days to form a boarding house.

To my delight, for needs in board house days, there was, from my upstairs room, a wobbly old outside staircase leading down and out into the world beyond this family that often seemed to think so little of me.

In the summers, we were mostly in New Hampshire at White Pines, though sometimes White Wings, or the Farm House or the House on the Hill, but usually White Pines, the biggest, newest and most formal of our grandparents’ places, approached by a long dirt-road twisting driveway that came out on a gravel drive encircling a formal lawn, the gravel drive taking you to the front door of White Pines. In the entry, if you turned left, a big bathroom was one flight down, the telephone room a half flight up, and you passed a cane rack with so many walking sticks it was as if no man ever went walking without one. And from there through French doors into the infinitely long main room at the end near the kitchen and the servants’ dining room and a restaurant size stove and three big pantries, and bins holds a year's supply of rice and sugar and flour – and a box where numbers would drop down showing which of the many bedrooms needed a servant, and then more pantries and the back stairs to the servant’s sleeping rooms, which were barricaded off from the rooms that could make numbers drop down, and then further along past the kitchen was the Boys' Wing, where male children were meant to live, with a nurse when they were young, which was on a second story now because of the configuration of the land, above a big playroom that in turn led to the garage where rested by grandfather's old brown Dodge touring car, and sometimes a much fancier touring car owned by my Great Uncle Jehan, who was a prince from Rajasthan who had been in America for 45 years on a student visa to do a thesis at Colombia.

Then back at the main entrance to White Pines, if you turned right when you walked in you had to tiptoe because you were near the entrance now to my grandfather's study. The big old door on which he wrote on yellow foolscap which would be sent to a clever woman in the village who knew how to operate a typewriter. This exciting room with Socialist Realist drawings of hearty workers in Russia, where my grandfather had been in the Kerensky Revolution, and an “UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU” poster form his patriotic World War I days, and a working crossbow that was never explained, and a Franklin stove – but mainly all those books, some of which brought life to me, such as the works of Turgenev, whom no one had told me about, and some brought fear, especially a child-rearing manual that, judging from its 1910 publication date, was probably used on my father. It said you should discipline boys to sleep with their hands outside the covers and you should sew up their pockets for otherwise they would do nasty things and ruin their minds.

Near the bookcases there was a small iron circular staircase leading up to a trap door that opened into my grandfather’s suite of rooms – men and women never seemed to sleep together in this house – pulling himself up through the trap door to his dressing room and his big bathroom that had a doctor’s scale in it, and his bedroom and, for warm nights, his sleeping porch. His study faced not on the back of the house, where he would have had a spectacular but distracting view of the Franconia Range, but rather faced on the gravel drive that ran around the formal lawn at the front. He was on this side because if he heard a vehicle approaching on the long twisting drive (where drivers honked constantly in case someone was coming the other way) he could look out from behind the blinds to see who it was. And it could well be someone he did not want to see. That was the explanation for the circular iron stairway to the trap door in the ceiling.

The Aqua Mustang 3 - PARKWAYS

I am noticing everything as I drive along in countryside four months after having noticed just too late that the first leaves had appeared.

Seeing how the trees, darker shades of green now, are billowing up and out, billowing as I watch, on either side of the roads I take up into New England and then back again to the city. From Vermont, where I am staying, I shoot down to New York once a week and then return using different routes. One of my favorites is the leg I do on the old Taconic Parkway, which is still in the 1930s as was Connecticut’s old Merritt Parkway when I turned 16 and took the family car, an aging Plymouth convertible, all the way down to Greenwich – so far away, 20 miles, that my parents argued long before letting me make the journey on my own. And then I was on my way, flying solo to this amazing girl, Kitty, whom I had met in the summer of 1950 at a swimming place in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. This girl Kitty who represented for me everything that the future might hold – if I could somehow leave the past behind.

The Plymouth had been green, which is close to the aqua of the Mustang. And the Merritt Parkway, in Connecticut, was so like the Taconic, up in New York state. This new present on the Taconic in the aqua Mustang when everything seems possible, and that other present, years back in time, when I had traveled the Merritt Parkway in a family Plymouth. It had been much like now, the way the world had been opening up for me.

These pioneering four-lane highways seen in actuality but always having the feel of something seen in a book. Nothing like the trucker lobby’s Eisenhower interstates that came after I was first driving. These old parkways with their landscaping – passages into nature rather than detours around commercial strips. And surely on these roads were people of my future – beautiful sophisticated people on their way to restaurants or roadhouses or summer theaters in Fairfield County or Westchester – and of course on beyond to the mountains which are called green in Vermont, and white in New Hampshire, which refers to winter time, but in summer are sometimes green, sometimes more like blue, when not gray granite.

And in each of these present times, in the fifties and in the eighties, there were these dreamlike elements. And there was something else too – something from yet another past time intruding. For life in the fifties, as again now in the eighties, could get back in unexpected ways to what I had first known – an appealing if static world of big formal houses with striped awnings and white birdbaths beneath the granite mountains.

New Hampshire was a constant. I did not harp on it like other members of my family did. I had never returned to live there, or even set up a summer place there. Yet I had to admit New Hampshire offered the security of a place that would not go away – those summer places and summer people so mired in the past – always there somewhere inside me – this summer side of Franconia, New Hampshire, filled with distinguished old men and women covered with liver spots – this static summer place where I nonetheless had young friends at swimming holes, climbed mountains with girls and boys, fell out of love with a girl from my prep school’s sister school, and in love with Kitty.

The White Mountains, where the grownups talk was so much about the past – 19th century days in lakeside mansions north of Chicago, or “tramping” (the upper class word for hiking) in Bavaria, or my grandfather in the glorious days of World War I, which he saw first from the German and then from the Allied side. My grandfather in the Russian Revolution, and then as a Socialist in the radical settlement house movement in New York. So unlikely, it sometimes seemed, that past when he was a Socialist that they talked about here in this very Republican summer place which was so tight that Jews were not allowed in the hotels – not even his old doctor friend Harry Lorbar from settlement house days. And it was not just the hidebound summer people, for there was a parallel Republican world of actual year-round people, working people whose families had been here forever and were known to my family as quaint New Englanders, or simply as "natives."

But in the Mustang the past went out of consciousness as smoothly as it came in and seemed of little weight. The Taconic in 1986 seemed a passage through a kind of wonderland. This was just before California-style entrances and exits were added. Rather, there were still little lanes going off at right angles into bowers that were recesses in the billowing trees.

Surely there would be strip malls and fast food places on the other sides of the bowers, but the several times I turned off and went through a bower to look, I found myself in an area of rolling hills, or one of little white picket fence villages, or one of fields with red barns and cows or horses or sheep. This was how it was that summer of 1986. It would have been fantasy if I had not been so aware of the reality of all sights and sounds and smells.

But, bowers to the contrary, the past and its darkness never stayed away for long. Across the border from Vermont was the last of our family’s big old formal summer houses, this one a rambling building with antique furniture called The Farm House. And there I had a twin brother, who was the good twin when we were growing up. He had been locked into the role of the good little boy who said cute things for the pleasure of the elders, a role he must have found suffocating, he the boy who learned to read before he went to school and pleased his teachers almost as much as he pleased his parents and grandparents – as much as I displeased them all. He was such a joy to them – making up for me, the slow, bad-boy, non-identical twin brother who got the worst grades in the same schools where the good twin got the best grades, was picked last where his brother was picked first, was constantly in trouble for lethargy or worse.

Things changed when I came into my own in boarding school where I was far away from home, but there was always this dangerous dichotomy. A hopeful present. A formidable past that was meant to wipe out any present. And now that my twin and I were getting into our middle years it was much the same and even worse. I had a book out about the Philippines, written and researched in situations of great danger with my journalist friend Max Vanzi. Much of what it portrayed as seen by us from the embattled opposition side, especially from the New People’s Army, Maoist rebels that were in every province in this former U.S. colony that was now run by an egregious dictator and his wife, old friends of our own ruling Reagans, and where America still had its biggest overseas military bases.

Earlier in this same year I was to buy the Mustang in Vermont, my brother had turned up in the Philippines with the CIA. After half a century our childhood rivalry was still being played out, now in places where it could easily lead to the death of either or both or us

He was probably on the New Hampshire side right now, since it was summer. He was probably sitting on his screen porch with his English wife, possibly wearing a necktie and argyle socks, looking out toward the mountains, just like we did when we were infants.

I was on the Vermont side and everything was different here. And yet there was a voiceover from somewhere playing my head that could appear at the oddest moments. It was my brother’s voice reporting on what I was seeing. Not exactly what I was seeing, but what he was telling me I was seeing. His version of reality, not mine.

Little in the landscape had changed since we were children. But one exception was that in the best farmland, which was almost all on the Vermont side, the picturesque old silos, made of wood and built much the way the old coopers built barrels, had very recently been replaced by shiny dark blue silos apparently made of Plexiglas. I was seeing this change myself for the first time. And I was also hearing my brother’s voice telling me I would see it – as if he were right here in the car and I had not arrived yet. Reality being not what I saw but more like what I read in a book, whose author would have to be my rival twin brother. The one entrusted by the family with its story the way they wanted it to be told – entrusted to cover up most of what would be in any version of reality that was my own.

The Aqua Mustang 2 - FOOTHILLS

It is April 1st, 1986, April Fools Days, which would have been my 9th annivesary if that marriage had lasted, which is why I remember it is April 1. I am walking along West 25th Street between the dark old VA building at the 7th Avenue end and this small newer place, near 8th, which, strangely, has a concrete latticed façade that looks Venetian, and from which I have a view down over a neglected garden and up and out almost to the Battery, this place where I live alone if not lonely now that I am looking into new sides of life. An exciting time of new beginnings. As I walk on my block now I notice that one of the trees – there are a lot of small trees on the block, easily not noticed, protected by small iron fixtures around them in the small squares of earth in the sidewalk. As I look up, I notice for the first time that the first light green embryonic leaves have already started coming out. And I wonder if on any year I had noticed the actual moment the leaves first peeped out, me so attuned to nature, I thought, though so suddenly aware this year that I have been living in cities all my adult life – using countryside only for clear-cut adventure, in cities sometimes where there is death in the streets and sometimes cities where there are outdoor cafés everywhere, but always cities. So attuned to nature, I thought, but maybe I was wrong. For I had missed this crucial moment of the leaves’ birth – April 1 this year. Have I ever caught such a crucial moment? But I swear I will never miss it again.

And I am thinking of this four months later as I drive in Vermont in the amusing old aqua Mustang I got on the spur of the moment – a chrome relief of a wild horse on the front, a hard top since it is a hardtop convertible, a convertible built so that it can never be converted. And on the instrument panel is a gauge that shows me exactly how fast the engine is turning over, the sort of information I would need if I were a race car driver whose life depended on very, very precise timing of the shifting of gears – except that this convertible, that has no top that can go down, has an automatic transmission and hence no gears that can be manuallly shifted – just the dashboard gauge that I would need if it did. And I love this car and its lessons in the non-linear. I am remembering a girl named Sue – we both worked at Time-Life and of course slept together – Sue telling me as we ate Belgian waffles at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair about this silly new car, called a Mustang, for safe suburban people who want to seem like they are daring sports car people but get it wrong. The subject came up as we were talking about the silly mechanical Abraham Lincoln we had just seen in the Disney pavilion.

I am driving along now in Vermont, where I do not have good reason to be – though there is an old friend up here, and Vermont is definitely not New Hampshire, scene of my sometimes hopeful and often perilous youth, but these matters, a friend nearby and a place that is not New Hampshire, were not sufficient-seeming reasons. I knew many people everywhere and I knew a million places that were not New Hampshire. I was cruising around without a reason after all those years of traveling in which there was never a trip for which I did not have a reason whether it was to catch a war in West Africa, or research a book I might or might not write in Burma, or interview a central American dictator, or get laid on an island, but now no reason, moving through Vermont where I have no history, and the tapes are always playing on the Mustang's tape deck, playing songs I missed when I was away, some of the best of them now heard for the first time, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, though not actually Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell for I never heard of them in the places were I was, but their songs, filtered now in the aqua Mustang through the more cornball Roger Whittaker and Judy Collins, but giving me the taste of it, of what I had missed and who I was, and as I drove along, up and down foothills of the Green Mountians and round and round corners, sometimes following water that rushes over smooth stones, stepping hard on the gas pedal when I hit a rare straight stretch with no one coming the other way, drove without a plan with the music playing – ersatz versions maybe, but nonetheless important to me – feeling excited yet more peaceful than I ever had before, though knowing my life depended on what I could encounter in this new world for which I had no plans.

The Aqua Mustang 1 - QUICK SALE

I was in Vermont for the summer. Vermont in part because it was not New Hampshire. And luckily, not knowing Vermont well, I had not wound up in one of those precious stage-set villages where you are given tours of hooked rug old houses, which in one room may have a cuddly sleeping cat that turns out to be a 19th century dead cat stuffed by a taxidermist – that kind of Vermont town were summer ladies come out of the antique stores talking through their noses in high-pitched fake British tones such as they would have earned long ago in Anglophile boarding schools. Those fake British accents that were so common in my family – whose base was over in New Hampshire.

Vermont at this time had a liberal-left woman governor, and in one of its cities a Socialist mayor. New Hampshire had recently has a governor who had been transplanted from Virginia and ran on a platform opposing the aging hippies, the ones still around from the sixties, and the new young hippies who were coming into life. He wanted to keep them on the Vermont side of the border. And they were not the only people he wanted to keep out. He talked of states rights, that old Southern code word for apartheid – even though few people in New Hampshire had ever seen a black person, unless you counted the servants some summer people brought with them. New Hampshire where the rocky farm land had become fallow, where, the land had been so bad to start with that people had always by their wits – Live Free or Die was the slogan now on the license plates made in the state’s prisons – whereas this year the Vermont plates said simply, “Green Mountains.”

New Hampshire’s roads were rutted, and although there had to be free public education because of old federal mandates, there was not a single public kindergarten in the state. And though there was an occasional village green it was likely to be bare of greenery – unlike in Vermont where there were trees and flowering shrubs and old-time bandstands on the very green greens, and on some evenings bands in the bandstands, and on many days both aging and young artistic-looking people playing guitars. And moreover the old bitter New England boiled dinners has given way in present-day Vermont to nouvelle cuisine restaurants and snack bars.

I went across the border to New Hampshire one day to see what I could get there for lunch now. I stopped in at the Littleton Diner – Littleton the place were my grandmother would go with a servant to shop for the food that was stored up by the summer people - who dressed for dinner in big formal houses with striped awnings and grounds dotted with marble birdbaths and benches. Rich houses beneath the White Mountains and in the midst of rural poverty. The White Mountains, the highest in the East, sometimes soft and green below the timber line, often gray and black – these mountains where people were forever being killed in avalanches or sudden winter storms that might come in August. Or lightning. Or Mama bears. But that was my childhood, and now I was somewhere near midlife and safely in the gentle green mountains of Vermont, both literally and in my head and heart. The special that day at the Littleton Diner was, I swear, cheeseburger quiche.

I had written a piece for Penthouse that covered me financially for the summer, even though I had pretty much stopped writing altogether in this time my life was changing. I was staying in Rutland with my old friend Peter Cooper, who came from the same Connecticut town I came from and who had been an extreme drinking partner in my first days in New York City but now wrote books and ran a state alcoholism clinic, and lived with his second wife on a road where you could smell the foliage but that was far being too quaint. It came to dead end where, if you walked few feet over grass, you would be on an artery complete with a Cumberland Farms, a Burger King, a Timberland outlet and also, right at the point where you stepped over the grass patch, an Esso station, where there was a gleaming old aqua Mustang with a FOR SALE sign – $1,200.

I was pretty broke but Penthouse, which was very right wing, had paid me far more than what I wrote was worth (I gave them a first-person left wing article about some wonderful Communist insurgents in one of my old Asian haunts, knowing they would never print it, despite all the sex in it, but would pay me anyway). Now, actually, just like a man with a real income, I pulled a check book out of my back pocket and, wrote a check on the spot for $1200. I liked that car and I had become aware recently that I had not owned a car for 17 years, during which I had been in cities or in territory too wild for passable roads. The last car had been a Humber in Singapore, the one before that a Rover in Bangkok, tank-like British vehicles that were nothing at all like this lighthearted Mustang. And though I felt lighthearted, I did check it out before I signed the check and drove it away. I made sure it had a functioning tape deck.

So I drive off listening to Judy Collins singing about how this girl named Suzanne who serves me tea and oranges that come all the way from China, and who takes my hand and leads me to the river and she's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters. And the sun comes up like honey... I drive off in Vermont, the anti-New Hampshire, suddenly elated with the thought, as Judy Collins begins to sing, that I have broken a barrier by recognizing at last how important music is to me, who never sang. How fine that the whole landscape of my life is changing. And I want to travel with her, and I want to travel blind, and I know that she will trust me for I’ve touched her perfect body with my mind.

Written Word 66 - THE END OF INSIGHT

Words. Faith in words. I think of the saints, all of whom wrestle with faith in ways that mere pious people never do. I was no saint, in either life or literature, but I had wrestled with faith in words the way correct, orthodox writers never do. And I had fled writing for six years, like a monk fleeing a monastery.

I had lived on writing for thirty years and then come to despise writing, which came to seem as false and useless to me as would a failed religion. When I did come back to the written word after six years away there were certain things I did not anticipate – as in making the mistake of thinking I could also come back to my old faith in the logic of outcomes, logic being so tied to the use of words. I was back as if my return had been inevitable, my sudden need now for words as well as images to find out what had happened and who I was. And now I had to figure out what this return to words would mean in a life that had been so satisfying without words.

The changes that had come in my life in this period when I was not writing had led to many surprises, not the least being conscious awareness for the first time of spiritual hunger for realms where I did not have the illusion I could know outcomes before I stepped into them – real life being like real writing in which so much happens that I would be a fool, I now thought, to start with a fixed, untested if logical conclusion and think I could live my way into it.

My world had changed so much that at the time when I was returning to writing I was studying at a university – something I would not have gone near in my professional writing years and was very careful about now. But I did not go to study writing. I went to look into theology.

The university was this marvelously open and liberal Jesuit place, Boston College – part of a Catholic world that I had often respected when seen as an agnostic, and that I had been careful to avoid intellectually, though its intellectuals attracted me.
What really attracted me most, over the years when I was outside it, was its warmth and daring. I had missed warmth and daring in a self-consciously respectable Episcopalian family - though in adolescence I did have a loving Catholic girlfriend. Most of what I knew of Catholic worlds at first hand came later and had nothing to do with harsh nuns wielding rulers or silly anti-Communists or people who picketed worthy movies, but rather with people I encountered in dangerous places who did not fit the anti-Catholic clichés – especially quietly heroic clerical and lay activists in places like Taiwan and the Borneo part of Indonesia, and Somoza’s Nicaragua and the Haiti of the Duvaliers and the Philippines of the Marcoses.

And right now, as part of what I was doing at Boston College, I was across the Charles River at a place called Weston exploring the 16th-century Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola – and it meant writing again. For the exercises entail stepping right into stories, which might be stories from the past but will inevitably be the writer’s most crucial stories in the present. People I knew now had used the exercises to change their lives – to leave religious life or go into it – to leave or go into marriages – to leave or to take on careers and vocations – and I was captivated by the Ignatian proposition that you could find God’s will if you stepped into your story this way. It was not that I thought there was no revelation outside the Catholic church. And not that I had a liking for the right-wing Pope. But I went now for Ignatian spirituality. And I went now for the reassuring view of James Joyce whose definition of Catholicism, as reiterated by Tom Groome, was “Here comes everyone.”

Yet in conflict with what I was discovering, I made a serious error in my return now to writing. I thought that with words I could and should bring logic back into my life again. Some saints, after all, had spoken of logic as one of God’s gifts. And so I wrote with intense rationality to figure out something that concerned me night and day at this moment I was studying Ignatius.

I was on the verge of making a major move in my life – another marriage, this time to a bright and sexy woman with two children. The connection I was about to make meant I would have to come to terms with how one of the children, a coddled, sarcastic boy, lorded it over everyone as the designated prince in his family – the one who got the good grades and always managed to please his elders – which to me meant an insufferable good-boy, this potential step-son. This boy who took short cuts to please his elders, and spent energy on putting down his vibrant younger sister. It was so disturbing, the prospect of living with this guy, that I thought maybe I better drop the marriage, even though I wanted it. I was keyed up and horny and did not want to back out. And maybe was overreacting. So I decided I would write about the situation as honestly as I could, and see where I came out.

And I got a good part of the story right, including that the adventurous younger sister seemed to have the real potential in fields that were supposed to be her older brother’s alone – writing and drawing included . And that this was forbidden to anyone else in the family except her brother. Some members seemed to delight in predicting a horrible end for this engaging girl, who was just now entering her teens. The boy was skilled at putting his sister down and was not above lies and some larceny and at the same time, in the family version, he was still the good little boy – the good littlle boy even thought his actual age was 20.

And as I wrote about all this – about it more than in it – I began to see an overriding reason why the situation was so upsetting to me that it felt like unmanageable chaos even though I wanted the marriage. This son was a family policeman enforcing a false family version of reality. He was billed as the artistic one, but he was also, it seemed to me, the one stopping art and life from breaking out. It seemed to me as I wrote that he had exactly the role in his family and with his sister that my twin brother, Peter, had had in our family and with me. (Years after we had left home, my parents acquired two gray cats who were brothers and named them Good Cat and Bad Cat.)

Both Peter and this boy, I thought, had been forced into what they did for the benefit not of themselves but of their families. Fulfilling sick needs of others. But although I could feel, or at least thought I should feel, compassion for them as victims, these were situations dominated by the the most harmful sorts of false versions of reality.

And then I made the mistake of thinking that this insight, tying the boy to my brother and to ideas about false and also alternative versions of reality, was enough. I was thinking again, as I had before big changes in my life began, that insight ever could be enough. And so again I used insight to go against something I knew. If I could get to the correct formulation of what I faced, I could handle it all, I thought. And so I did what I had wanted to do in the first place. I went ahead with the marriage. And I really did want this woman.

And the marriage started to fall apart at the start, and despite energy and money and insight, and some inadequate couples therapy, it very soon fell apart altogether. And I very soon knew I never would have gotten into it if I had really stepped into the story when I wrote about it, which was probably what Ignatius meant – recreated the story so that it was in my bones, as opposed to burying it in insight.

Written Word 65 - DEMONS: a story changes

The first few times I went into the story, I thought I had captured that strange time when I should have been on top of the world because my novel, an actual novel, was coming out, and did come out, published at the start of the seventies by a hot new house, Harper’s Magazine Press, which was half owned by the ridiculously venerable and orthodox Harper & Row, the other half owned by Harper’s Magazine, which was in turn owned by humorless Midwest newspaper tycoons and which also had been around since the beginning of time. But for just this moment Harper’s was between its old stuffy version and a stuffier new version, and for this moment it was the hottest magazine in town. It was run by Willie Morris, a young, celebrated Southern writer who was riding the crest and had recently become the most exciting and cool and irreverent magazine editor in New York City. He drove the nervous owners of the two Harpers crazy. His magazine caused talk all over town and way beyond, which to the owners was not a gentlemanly thing to do. Among those who could appear in the office any day might be Norman Mailer or some other famous writer, or some angry feminist, or somebody from the suddenly surging gay rights movement, or someone advocating bomb throwing – all the things most editors, as over at the New York Times, were sweeping under the rug.

Harper’s Magazine Press, run by another exciting editor named Herman Golub, was in with Willie’s magazine, not with staid old Harper & Row. The magazine office, in a Park Avenue South building with two bars down below, was where I spent so many of my days now. It was filled with boisterous, often drunk and famous people, and some famous ones who stopped with a couple of beers, such as Bill Moyers, who, like me, was on the small spring list,but did not drink the way I and some of the others did.

All these new and exciting friends to drink with. Which got me to front tables at Elaine’s and parties where a middle of the road celebrity might be Sargent Shriver or David Rockefeller. And there in the stores now was my mostly true-story novel, filled with eroticism and violence in Bangkok, a story that was up-to-the-minute topical since American soldiers were still at the time of publication getting five-day leaves to get laid in Bangkok, and spies of many nations were still racing around that sybaritic city, conning and assassinating each other. My name, which before I was ever published I had I’d made into a pretentious three-name author’s name, was nearly as large as the title, Where Dragons Dwell. On the back was me in a hungover Humphrey Bogart pose with a cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. And in this time, first getting the book accepted, then spending the advance as I moved about the world wrapping up chapters, and then the prepublication months with all the parties that I was now entitled to, and finally the aftermath with the book in a few bookstore windows – all this just in time, for I was 36. And in truth this time was in so many ways one of the worst times in my life – the deep feelings of hopelessness, the crazed drinking, a new doomed affair with a publishing girl. And if alone after the drinking, middle-of-the-night international phone calls to ex-girlfriends and girls I thought might have been girlfriends. Anyone who might love me. So bad I moved in mid-winter to a waterside cottage that had no phone., Ever deepening depression. Remorse. Near fatal loneliness.

Then the end. Two months after publication, the book still out there, it was the week I was supposed to be addressing the formidable Middlebury Writers Conference, where I had hoped for groupies, or at least praise. Instead I went to the airport and flew to Beirut, which once in the past, when I was on my way to Africa, I had found it to be a profoundly discouraging city that rode on anti-Semitism and pretended to be like Paris. When I had been there before I had also found it so puritanical that my then girlfriend Vannie and I had had to claim we were cousins to get a hotel room together (incest was fine, but nothing else). This place, pre-civil war Beirut, the end of the world. What had gotten into me?


When years later I wrote about that year, 1971, the year I was 36 and being published, the story kept changing. The first couple of times I stepped back into that time it seemed crystal clear that my destructive depression then had to do, on a direct line, with the family of origin. As clear as that C follows B follows A. For so many years I had tried hard not to think about those people who qualifed as my nearest and dearest – my father, himself a publisher, sometimes generous but now telling me how bad it was that I had this novel, and how awful that I was living on advance money and did not have a regular job. My mother, the smartest one in the family, telling me, as she drank, and as my father told me, what a thorn I was in the family's collective side. And my old college roommate, who by now had married the widow of a publisher and moved into Upper East Side Waspdom, where he and his wife served popovers and floating island,was no more encouraging. And my twin brother was telling everyone who would listen that it was just plain wrong. So in my mind when I went back into the story there were, at first, no loose ends. In the version that came first, B followed A and C followed B, the villains were all in the family or close to it, and there were no more questions about the near suicidal despair that hit me just as everything was working out.

But I had to go into the story again and again, for I kept coming upon less easy to explain parts.This return to the story was more than 20 years later. The Authentic Writing Workshops were underway,and now I saw that what had happened to me was what I was seeing happen to so many accomplished writers. For whatever the specifics of the writers' life stories, there are always these demons who fly in from some dark,formidable place to tell the writers they are nothing. All of them, even writers who might have the support of a father and a brother and an old friend. Even writers who might be garnering Pulitzer Prizes and American Book Awards.

The demons who tell anyone who innovates to get with the program, respect the old accepted writers, respect the views of your teachers, and anyone who writes in the New York Review of Books, and anyone who belongs to the Modern Language Association, and especially anyone in your family, whether the family is literate or not. If someone likes your writing, do not trust that person. Even if that person is the person you most love and/or the literary figure you most respect. Do not trust them. Who cares about your version? Anyone who is honest with you would say you offer nothing but self-indulgence, whiney self-indulgence. Any success is a fluke.

When I went back into the story of that time with Harpers, the sad ending becomes more and more inevitable, and less easy to explain. My late father may have contributed, and maybe my brother and my mother and my old roommate did too – but when I went back into the story they were the least of it.

As I kept going back into the story – which is what a writer has to do – it was not just my father and brother and old roommate that made me want to kill myself just as my writing career took off. The demons hate the fact that stories with loose ends just hang there raising questions and bringing discomfort to the smug. Only really bad books sew everything up in neat if synthetic ways, but this is something the demons want badly. The demons understand that the only resolution, the only closure, that counts is that you must renounce what you have done. Burn your manuscripts or distort them beyond recognition. And try, you sorry little confessional twerp, to force into being writing that will disturb none of the nice people. None of your betters. Sew it up. Force closure. Final closure almost never happens in life, but the demons insist upon closure. For it is life, including life found in art, that they, with the help of human critics, are out to destroy.

To the demons life is cheap.

THIS FEBRUARY BREAK, COMING TO AN END

The stories here are about to resume, postings to start this week. The delay resulted from home-stretch work, not quite finished, on my soon-to-appear new book, which is a memoir on creating memoir.