When you know even less than you think you know

For those of you who've heard this one before (i.e., anyone who's ever taken my classes), just skip to the next paragraph. Or to the end. Or to Tiffany, Lynn's, or Karen's awesome blog posts. This post, I’m afraid, is unforgivably long.

I knew hardly anything about writing when I went to graduate school, back in my early twenties, and to compensate for this I read voraciously, mostly the writers my instructors were talking about. Through the charity of a dear friend (thanks, Rachel!), I was invited to sit in on the great Andre Dubus's private workshop, held in his home well outside of Boston. He was one of the writers I'd been reading a lot, and I admired, maybe even adored, his work. Being young and so much less sophisticated than most writers I knew—I was from the West, after all, and had taken a total of one writing class in college—I was nervous. When it came time to attend the meeting, I had no car so I did what any sane aspiring writer would do: I rode in the back of a stranger's stationwagon. Yes, in that trapezoidal, seatbelt-free space known to harbor pets and luggage. I prayed that our trip, which involved quite a bit of highway travel, would be uneventful. As far as I remember, it was.

When we got there, Dubus was kind and welcoming, remarking that there were all kinds of Duprees where he came from in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He thought it likely he'd run around with some of my relatives. I played along and didn’t mention the part about my entire family being from Michigan, having emigrated via Canada. I was generally relieved when the spotlight moved off of me and back onto him, where I felt it belonged. 

I sat in stunned silence while Dubus read us a draft of his essay, "Sacraments." The essay had been typed and hand corrected, and after he read it, people in the room proceeded to tentatively critique it. But I just sat there and marveled in the afterglow of the story he told of making sandwiches for his daughters, how it felt like a sacrament, how phone calls from a woman, his new lover, felt like a sacrament, and how feeding his father chipped ice and cigarettes on his deathbed also felt sacramental. In the essay, he recalls sitting up with his sister one night as his father died, sitting in the kitchen drinking and crying, and how he told her that the next morning he would tell his father he loved him. But his father died before the next morning.

"For years I regretted not saying the words," he wrote. "But I did not understand love then, and the sacraments that make it tactile. I had not lived enough and lost enough to enable me to know the holiness of working with meat and mustard and bread; of moving on wheels or wings or by foot from one place to another; of holding a telephone and speaking into it and listening to a voice; of lighting a cigarette and placing it between the fingers of a man trying to enjoy tobacco and bourbon and his family as he dies."

In my own sacramental act, I swiped my copy of the essay. I'm looking at it now. Back then, it moved me to just look at it, so I’d take it out from time to time and lose myself in the sentences.  It was with strangely mixed feelings, then, that a semester or two later I was assigned to take a fiction course from his eponymous son, Andre Dubus III.

These are the things I thought I knew about Andre Dubus III, before he even spoke a word:

1. Lots of the ladies liked him; maybe he was a bit vain with his long hair, tight jeans, and cowboy boots. Still, my first impression was that he looked kind.
2. I'd heard that he had a dancer wife and five million kids and was working at least ten jobs to support them.
3. I felt a mix of compassion and perhaps envy at the fact that his father,  rightly celebrated, had so marked the literary ground before him.
4. He was the heir to a literary dynasty, I thought.
5. Did I think maybe writing was easier for Andre III because of this (perceived) literary dynasty?
6. I was skeptical that he could fill his father's shoes.

These are the things I thought I knew about him after I'd studied with him for a semester:

1. It was true he was the busiest man on the planet. He did have a good number of kids--could have been 3 or 4--and we all knew the semi-probability that he’d miss class altogether. Fortunately, I was working two jobs and could relate. Who was more relieved than I when he said, at the beginning of class one day, "Andrea! I'm so sorry I missed our conference yesterday." (I hadn't remembered either. I forgave him with great alacrity.)
2. He had the spirit of a motivational speaker, drilling into us the true notion that you don't have to be a wizard of plot or language or even the human condition to write. You have to tap into characters and discover their truth. "Character truth" was the battle cry, as was "More--with a capital M," meaning he didn’t necessarily want more pages from us, but More Truth. I still think of those two concepts when I write.
3. He was kind, and genuine, and smart.
4. He never really seemed to register who I was--or I don't think he did, which somehow felt good.  Need to talk to shrink about that one. In retrospect, I think he was doing what so many of us do—trying to keep track of too many different things. To focus might have taken him off focus, in a strange way.
5. He wasn't afraid to commiserate. He was working on what would become the House of Sand and Fog when I was in his class, and I'll never forget him coming in one day, visibly distraught. It soon came out that the previous night he'd trashed 150 or so pages (at least that's the number in my flawed memory) because he'd not maintained the "character truth."  By so doing, and by telling us about it, he probably gave the class our most valuable and lasting lesson.
6. While I probably had ungenerous thoughts about doors being opened for him because of his name, what I really remember thinking was that it took a lot of courage to go into writing, given who his father was. I remember him telling us how hard he tried to do something, anything, else.
7. I figured he grew up surrounded by writers, surrounded by books, and that, perhaps like me, he found "real" work too tedious so he had opted for the life of writing. About this one, I of course have learned I was completely and totally wrong.

The reason I'm coming around to this memory yet again is that I'm almost done with his memoir, Townies, which came out not too long ago. From the first anecdote of the story, I realized how simple my first and later impressions of Andre III were. At the beginning of the memoir, his father, long divorced from his mother, stops by to pick Andre up for a run. It comes out that the father and son share a certain heightened attention to their physical bodies—Andre the elder as a holdover from his years in the Marines, and Andre III as a newly discovered route to self-preservation. Andre is 16 and has discovered the power of boxing gyms and working out, but he has no running shoes—nothing even close to running shoes. So he borrows his older sister’s sneakers, at least two sizes too small.  The older Andre proceeds to lead him on a run through the rolling hills of Kenoza Lake—five and a half miles that somehow the younger Andre, through sheer grit and determination, survives. Somewhere during the run, his feet have gone numb, so the reader shares the agony when, at the parking lot after the 5.5 miles are over, Pop Andre says, “You up for the second lap?”

It’s a testament to how much the younger Andre wanted to impress his father, wanted to somehow fulfill the promise of this gesture his father had made toward connection, that he endured the second lap. (His feet were another story—let’s just say he had to peel the socks off his bloody, swollen feet, and that “all ten toes had split open at the sides like sausages over a fire.”)

Okay, you can read all of that for yourself in Andre's remarkable, absorbing memoir, but here are a few things I know now:

1. I didn’t know anything about Andre III, or his father, or their relationship. As Pop Andre might have put it, “I had not lived enough and lost enough” yet to realize how little I knew, but, that hallmark of youth, I thought I'd been through it all.
2. Andre III’s story, at least the one in Townie, is not about anything close to literary privilege—it’s about poverty, broken families, male aggression, finding and transforming oneself, and that tenuous ability or failure to truly connect with people, even (or especially) our own family.
3. I had more in common with Andre III than I ever would have imagined, and not just our kind of similar names. Growing up in single-parent homes with not enough money, feeling the need to make rapid and decisive departures to places where you might completely remake yourself—well, it’s the story of a lot of writers, I suppose. But the thing about good literature is you feel that connection viscerally, under the skin. The connection can help take the edge off unpleasant memories, and help us recall the fond ones.
4. He didn't need to fill his father's shoes---none of us does. We do, however, need to find our own shoes.
5. And the most important thing of all, a lesson I seem destined to learn forever: no one is truly knowable.  No one.  I’m aware that, having read his memoir, I’ve gained access to part of Andre III (and part of myself), and that my understanding will always be provisional and incomplete.

Isn’t that why we all keep doing this crazy art?

--aed