Brock Clarke: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

“But where should I go?” I asked them.

“You could go anywhere,” my mother said. Back then I thought she was the harder parent of the two and had had high hopes for me, so the disappointment weighed on her more heavily. I remember that my mother was a dry well at my trial when the jury brought back the verdict, although my father had wept loudly and wetly, and he was starting to cry now, too. I hated to see them like this: one cold, the other weepy. There was a time when I was six and they taught me to skate on a pond at the Amherst public golf course. The ice was so thick and clean and glimmery that the fish and errant golf balls were happy to be frozen in it. The sun was streaking the falling snow, making it less cold. When I finally made it around the perimeter of the pond without falling, my mother and father gave me a long ovation; they were a united front of tickled, proud parenthood. Those times were gone: gone, gone, forever gone.

“Maybe you could go to college, Sam,” my father said after he’d gotten ahold of himself.

“That’s a good idea,” my mother said. “We’d be happy to pay for it.”

“OK,” I said, because I was looking at them closely, really scrutinizing them for the first time since I’d been home from prison, and I could see what I’d done to them. Before I burned down the Emily Dickinson House, they seemed to be normal, healthy, somewhat happy Americans who took vacations and gardened and who’d weathered a rough patch or two (when I was a boy, my father left us for three years, and after he left us, my mother started telling me tall tales about the Emily Dickinson House, and all of this is part of the larger story I will get to and couldn’t avoid even if I wanted). Now they looked like skeletons dressed in corduroy and loafers. Their eyes were sunken and wanting to permanently retreat all the way back into their skulls. A few minutes earlier, I’d been telling them about my virginity and the lecherous Arthur Andersen accountant. My parents, as far as I knew back then, were both modest Yankees who didn’t like to hear about anyone’s private business, but the College of Me insisted that it was healthy and necessary to tell the people we love everything. Now I was regretting it. Why do we hurt our parents the way we do? There’s no way to make sense of it except as practice for then hurting our children the way we do.

“OK,” I said again. “I’ll go to college.” And then: “I love you both.”

“Oh, us too,” my father said, and then started weeping again.

“We certainly do,” my mother said. And then to my father: “Bradley, quit crying.”

Later that night, after my mother had gone to sleep, my father came into my room without knocking, stood over my bed, then leaned down — either to say something to me or to see if I was asleep. I wasn’t asleep: I was thinking hopeful thoughts about my future, of how I would go to college and make a clean, honest, painless life for myself, and how proud my parents would be once I’d made it. My father, bent over at the waist the way he was, looked like a crane there to either lift me up with its hook or wreck me with its heavy ball.

“Come downstairs,” my father whispered, his face close to mine in the darkness. “I want to show you something.”

I got out of bed, followed him downstairs. My father walked into his study, which was — like most of the rooms in the house — lined floor to ceiling with overflowing bookshelves. He sat in a chair, opened the end table drawer next to him, pulled out a Converse shoe box, the sort of box in which you kept your old photos or Christmas cards, and handed it to me. I took the lid off the box and saw that there were envelopes inside, envelopes slit open with a letter opener. The envelopes were addressed to me, all of them. The letters were still inside the envelopes, so I took them out and read them.

There were at least a hundred letters. Some of them, as I mentioned, were from scholars of American literature, damning me to hell, et cetera. There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail — the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions — and so I didn’t pay much attention to those letters at all. I’d also received several letters from your ordinary arson enthusiasts, which were minor variations on the “Burn, baby, burn” theme. These particular letters didn’t affect me much, either. The fact that the world was full of kooks wasn’t any bigger news than the fact that the world was full of bores.

But there were other letters. They were from all over New England and beyond: from Portland, Bristol, Boston, Burlington, Derry, Chicopee, Hartford, Providence, Pittsfield — from towns and cities in New York and Pennsylvania, too. They were all from people who lived near the homes of writers and who wanted me to burn those houses down. A man in New London, Connecticut, wanted me to burn Eugene O’Neill’s home because of what an awful drunk O’Neill was and what a bad example he set for the schoolchildren visiting his home, who needed, after all, more positive role models in the here and now. A woman in Lenox, Massachusetts, wanted me to torch Edith Wharton’s house because visitors to Wharton’s house parked in front of the woman’s mailbox and because Wharton was always, in her opinion, something of a whiner and a phony. A dairy farmer in Cooperstown, New York, wanted me to pour gasoline down the chimney of the James Fenimore Cooper House because the dairy farmer couldn’t stand the thought of someone being from such a rich family when his family was so awfully poor. “I’ve had it harder than Cooper ever did,” the man wrote. “That family’s got money up to here and they charge ten dollars’ admission to their home and people pay it. Won’t you please burn that son-of-a-bitching house right to the ground for us? We’ll pay, too; I’ll sell some of our herd if I have to. I look forward to your response.”

There were more letters, and they all wanted the same thing. All of them wanted me to burn down the houses of a variety of dead writers — Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some of the correspondents wanted me to burn down the homes of writers I’d never even heard of. All of the letter writers were willing to wait for me to get out of prison. And all of them were willing to pay me.

“Wow,” I said to my father when I was done reading. He hadn’t said anything in a while. It was interesting: when my mother was around, my father always appeared weak minded and softhearted — a slight, unnecessary, and mostly foolish human being. But now, in that room, with those letters, he seemed to me wise — silent and massive like a Buddha in wire-rimmed glasses. I felt the enormity of the situation, in my throat and face and elsewhere. “Why didn’t you tell me about these letters while I was in prison?”

He looked at me but didn’t say anything. This was a test of sorts, because this, of course, is what the wise do: they test the unwise to make them less so.

“You wanted to protect me,” I said, and he nodded. It heartened me to know I could give him the right answer, and so I persisted. “You wanted to protect me from these people who thought I was an arsonist.”

My father couldn’t leave this one alone. He went into a violent struggle with his better judgment, wrestling with his mouth as he started and stopped himself from speaking a dozen times. It was like watching Atlas gear up to hoist that big boulder we now live on. Finally my father got it out and said sadly, so sadly, “Sam, you are an arsonist.”

Oh, how that hurt! But it was true, and I needed to hear it, needed my father to tell it to me, just as we all need our fathers to tell us the truth, as someday I’ll tell it to my children, too. And someday my children will do to me what I did to my father: they will deny it, the truth.