Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

What’s essential to Brautigan’s life and work had so little to do with the sixties. The hippie California he moved to and became famous in was an outlandish trope for the future and a new society, but Brautigan was a solitary and his sentences were broken from the beginning and never found the sort of healing expansion Carver eventually arrived at. Carver’s sentences discovered generosity and grew longer late in his career; Brautigan’s didn’t. One of the truths about suicide is that it’s hardly ever about the future. It’s the past the suicide can’t face, and although disgrace appears to be the exception, the one instance where suicide seems to be about the future, even in Oedipus , it’s her past Jocasta can’t accept, once it’s come to light. Brautigan never really left the Pacific Northwest, and all his sentences ever needed for completion was a death.

There’s a fair chance I’ll be on the best-seller list this season, not as a writer but as a character in someone else’s fiction. It’s supposed to be a secret, my true identity. I know I shouldn’t talk about the book qua book — it’s not seemly, I’ve been told — but I can’t resist making a few general observations about what it feels like to find myself in a novel. Naturally I wonder where characters come from, and this particular angle, this perspective, the idea that someone might make use of me — of my hair, my clothes, my smell, my words, my little bundle of biographical facts — for material in a story is just too strange and juicy to pass up. Strictly speaking I’m the antagonist, or one of them, thwarting the heroine, and I appear in the book thinly, predictably disguised as a painter (meaning I’m moody, romantic, and dead broke). I’ve chopped up and rearranged a few people myself, making fiction. My poor motley father’s appeared in my stories as a dead Vietnam vet, pill-addled insurance underwriter, mental patient, deranged mountaineer, and sentimental rapist — all this on top of having to live his regular life as. whatever. I can’t help it. Every time my soul goes black I see his big hilarious grin. He’s never said a single word to me about my writing, except to observe that it’s bullshit. Deep down I’m sure he just doesn’t dig the way he figures in my imagination, and in order to redress some of the distortions I’ve pushed into public, he’s currently shopping a manuscript of his own, called La Famiglia . It’s a trilogy! He has every right to hack out his own tale and set the record straight. I’ve read parts of what appeared to be the variorum edition of the book, replete with scholarly notes, annotations, emendations, furnished by the world’s leading authority on my father — i.e., my father — and enjoyed it quite a bit. I hope he publishes it.

The book I’m in was written by an ex-love, and our shared experience is, I suppose, communal property. I don’t come off badly as a character. The novel isn’t some kind of slander or calumny or even the farrago of complaints you might imagine. Quite the opposite — on finishing a first read of the book I thought: I gave you better material than that! As a character I’m patient, gentle, and steady, I look good and I smell good, I’m intermittently wise, I don’t ever act like the miserable broken bad animal that I was in real life. I was a monster! (Or perhaps not — is that possible? Was I decent, on occasion? I’ve got a weather-eye for misery but really don’t see happiness or goodness as well as I should.) But forget life — in the book I’ve been Oprah-fied or Fabio-cated — altered, at any rate, but not really transformed. It’s more like I’ve been redecorated. The cosmetic improvements feel like a neutering to me, but I believe the intent was to treat me gingerly, with circumspection, perhaps to flatter, perhaps to idealize. Still, the delicate conventions of romance have swept away some of the dirt and grit (also a convention, I’m sure) that I consider an essential part of my life. Elsewhere in the book I find myself quoted and (once again!) misunderstood, and there are bits of autobiography — one bit in particular that was tremendously painful and humiliating to me — that have been washed in soft soap to make the annoying narrator more likable. And then, here and there, my character is portrayed as yet another version of that man who gets mocked in sitcoms, a lumpy, obtuse, uncommunicative, clueless goofball. I get a little knocked around by the zeitgeist, a typical man, a wide target, an effigy stuffed with generic gripes. I’m a cliché! I probably deserve it — but does the book?

It’s weird, the whole relation of fiction to fact. Recently I gave a reading in Seattle. A woman I’ve taught came up to talk about whatever, and started in, eventually, about a couple of my recent stories. She said, how can I read you (Me? Not the work?) the same now that we have a history? A history? I’ve always thought of this woman as a stalker. I like her, but she patronizes me, and whenever I see her at a public event she’s always sighing sadly and tolerantly, as if she alone possesses a special wisdom about me or the situation. It’s like she’s watching me with great pity as I’m being hauled off to some kind of doom I can’t really comprehend. It gives me the creeps. And she feels completely free to touch me in public — that night she reached right in and straightened the collar on my coat, so, she said, I’d look good for my “adoring fans.” Huh? Later I was told, by her friend, that this woman said she was able to spot me from across the crowded basement at Elliott Bay merely by seeing my knees. My knees are bulky knobs of bone like everybody else’s, and I was wearing my usual attire of droopy brown corduroys, plus if my dress code has any animating principle whatsoever it’s anonymity. When it comes to clothes I’ve always been a frightened boy, opting, as we do, for bulk and dullness and colors of the sort the world fades to when left alone — I build in a little neglect in advance of real abandonment.

She brought up typewriters. I’d published a story about a typewriter repairman and his schizoid son. To me the story was a vague attempt to create a world in which love between men wasn’t laughable. I was so sad about this problem — it descended on me, a pure mood, a scary hollow — that I had to write in order not to feel totally bereft. I was desperate and obsessed in the writing because I needed to believe that that world of love really might exist, if not for me, somewhere, for someone. Now, this stalker-woman had once given me a lovely old Underwood that, beautiful as the machine was, I felt highly ambivalent about accepting. I sensed I was agreeing to something unstated, that I was obligating myself, that I was making a swap. We both know the place that was one of the models for the repair shop in my story, although I’d actually set the business on another street in Seattle, mostly because the real street is boring and my make-believe street has a better view of the water. But to this woman, I think, the story was about the real shop and the real guy and, I fear, some sly, public acknowledgment, on my part, of our private shared interest in old manual typewriters. It was as if the story were a tryst we’d had, some clandestine rendezvous. I always feel like that woman is making a fiction out of me.

But how do I feel about being turned into a character in an actual novel? I’ve been asking people, just casually, if there are any ethics about this kind of thing, and happily most people say there aren’t. I agree. For a lot of people who write there’s an unspoken, prior silence that feels nearly conspiratorial; a heavy suggestion that you don’t tell the truth, don’t mention the drunk father, the cold mother, the rapist next door, the molester at church, the sorrow and despair of even a thing as small and forgettable as a Sunday afternoon; some pressure against saying out loud what’s obvious. Sometimes we literally make a pact — don’t tell! — but more often shame or confusion or a profound dislocating pain does the work of swearing us in. We keep secrets and hold to silence because what’s obvious is overwhelming, it’s baffling and mysterious. The very surface of life makes the sinister suggestion, and that’s one of the reasons the best writers I know are fascinated by the ordinary — it’s so shockingly alive with trouble. When you deny the surface, then the impulse to write prose dies, I think, and I’m with Bellow’s Augie March on this, that there’s no fineness or accuracy of suppression, that by holding down one thing you hold down the adjoining. If I believe that for myself, I’ve got to believe it for others too.