Indigo, p.10
Indigo, page 10
The hidden sentiments that Grace did not say but that made the phenomenon of Grace Paley and that made you want to hold her hand or hope she’d take your hand are in italics: Oh, Norman and I go back a ways, sometimes nasty, usually okay, he’s combative but really sweet, like all of you he’s just a boy being boys, he won’t be troubling me now, or anyone, I’m afraid, no, he’s too old and sick, bless his heart.
You heard in “No, he’s too old and sick,” the six little words that actually came out of her, without all the excelsior I have supplied, that Norman’s a sport, he’s okay. A mother does not disown. The six words said: If we have Grace, we have a mother, there she is getting some orange juice, thank God. Settle down.
At other times I recall her suggesting that Donald Barthelme’s early death clearly owed to his smoking and drinking to excess, which she attributed to machismo and I think called “silly.” Here it was again: men will be boys. Men insist on being boys. Men are boys. One can find many a woman to dispense this sentiment, you’ll need not strain yourself turning over rocks to find them, but I submit it is rare to find one saying it with only a hint of vexation and a large heart full of understanding, if not a soupçon of fellow-traveler glee. “He was silly,” she says, smacking the gum, her eyes as bright as fried marbles. At this moment it is tenable that Grace Paley is herself a boy, a tired boy. She won’t as a boy throw in and vote to ban girls from the tree fort, no, but she will raise some funds for the tree fort, and she is going to climb up there with you even if you ban her, smiling and seeing that a better time is had up there than if it is just the boys up there. That was Grace Paley, to the best of my hazarding: a boy. A literary boy who’d been a hot woman and who had had children and who took care of men and what of the world she could.
Lena Padgett, Nan Morrison
Women Who Lead You to Books
I had an aunt whose husband died in WWII and who played poker and smoked and drank and took very good casual care of me. She was the only relative of mine of whom I can say I was fond. She gave me back scratches, and not short ones, with heavy red fingernails, and we popped popcorn in a sauce-pot on the stove so inexpertly and negligently that the popped corn always lifted the lid off and went all over the kitchen. If she had asked, and if I had not already become the bourgeois snot I was to become, I’d have run away with her. This is all tangentially related to the first book that spoke to me.
In my aunt’s bookshelf, filled with paperbacks of the high-acid prematurely brown type, which seemed to be love westerns, or something at any rate that did not interest me, I one day discovered, in a mass edition already brown itself, and looking from its spine almost like a love western, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. I opened it and knew instantly I was in the presence of something radical—not merely not a love western, but not a love western to the second or third power. The high italics count was spooky, electric-looking. These were the passages about the writing, not the writing itself (the second power), and scanning with my early testosterone radar I spied sodomy and things (the third power) and secreted the book away.
I studied it. Mailer was a man who went around writing, “Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind . . . ,” and who found insupportable the role of nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I was finding insupportable, I suppose, the role of nice goy boy afraid to run away with his aunt, which I hadn’t thought of, and who wasn’t going to propose it, anyway, but I was finding something insupportable, or I wouldn’t have waited out those purple, electric sentences, and I wouldn’t have thought it a cool thing to call oneself a vain and bullying body of our time.
I took Mailer at his word: you advertise yourself to become a writer, and not surprisingly I then read what might be called celebrity authors—Capote, Vidal, Tennessee Williams: writers who spent a visible portion of themselves talking about writing or themselves or themselves as writers, or, viz., Mailer and Vidal, fighting about writing. As I studied this celebrity I became aware of a spectrum toward its obverse: for a Mailer there was, say, a Roth, then a Bellow; and, well, you have the picture.
The second book that spoke to me—an asinine locution: I mean that hissed or yelled at me, frightened me—was also, I realize now, provided me by a woman who smoked and drank and took very good casual care of me, though this was a careful and deliberate professional casualness, and she was the only English professor of whom it may be said I was ever fond. I was at her house late one night and revealed—apropos of what, I cannot fathom, but in the general atmosphere of my having threatened her with my being not a mere stooge of her classroom criticism (it was late, and I was mixing the drinks, her sane husband had retired), and in the general atmosphere of her having promised me that she would be my mentor, then, if I would write—that I had never read Faulkner.
“What?”
She was out of her chair and gone and back, dropping in my lap a Modern Library Absalom, Absalom! with, I noticed, opening it, her maiden name on the flyleaf. In that mysterious sequence of events which conspires to make a boy a writer—facts and forces that are anybody’s guess and are always tedious if anybody starts the guessing—this was a heavyweight moment.
“I am appalled.”
I could only chuckle, because she was. Here I was, unread and unready, proclaiming I would write, and here she was, read and ready to coach in a mission that was holy, and I the supplicant had not read the Scripture. What miracle prevented her throwing me out of the house? The hour, the booze, the novelty of a boy who would so presume? Was she bored by the correct boys at school?
I was partly in love—a literary mother! but sort of not a mother! (that maiden name contained a magic suggestion—a woman was taking notice of me)—and I was in possession of the Word. The tissuey pages of the book, the tight type, the “Absalom!”—whatever that meant—the gift was mystical in my hand. This was as close to a religious experience as I am likely to suffer on Earth.
As had happened to me with the actual Bible, I began to try to read this weirdly holy book, and couldn’t. But I had a secular mother non-mother looking over my shoulder, not the dubious authority of Protestantism. I read to page 60 or so of Absalom, Absalom! four or five times, as I recall. Each time I stalled out like a car going up a hill.
Somehow on one of the uphill runs I made it to page 100 or so, and then began the breathtaking downhill seduction, the rush, the delightful surrender to fictive gravity, and I was not the same boy when I finished the book. I could not have explicated the thing (could not today), did not know who said what to whom two percent of the time, and yet was entirely aboard the Dixie Limited, as I would learn later Flannery O’Connor called him. How could something so preposterously private be remotely public? How could the book-club ladies who objected to the “difficulty” be at once correct and not correct? How—alas, who cares?
I would then read about a third of the oeuvre, using as a springboard a copy of the Viking Portable Faulkner which I never returned to the local county library, and which I yet have as I negotiate an amnesty with them which will allow me to come in safely against my prodigious, twenty-five-year, $37,500 fine. I stopped there (in the reading, at a third of the Faulkner corpus; the fine presumably mounts yet). Any more Faulkner, I felt, and I would not dare presume write myself. Any more evidence of this Olympic steam a boy they called Bill or Count No Count could learn to blow and there would be no point attempting to make steam myself.
In order not to give up, Walker Percy (I regard Percy the child of Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner) is a good homeopathic cure against dying of Faulkneritis. This drinking mothering professor of mine also introduced me to Percy. She found The Moviegoer a tad “cute,” at variance with the prevailing opinion of the day. I was more attracted to the more or less openly “flawed” The Last Gentleman, which made me want to be its hero for a good solid three weeks, an improvement, aesthetically speaking, to wanting to be Norman Mailer.
Denis Johnson
For the Denis Johnson Memorial
October 2, 2017, NYC
I am writing this from Florida, where my house has just been flooded by Hurricane Irma. If you have trouble following me it is because I will have trouble composing. My marbles are scattered all over the floor, and the floor recently had eighteen inches of swamp water on it. A lesser or greater siren—a swamp amphibian—swam by me in the kitchen, just before I blew up the stove trying to cook eggs for the boys who helped me hump the furniture to the second floor. I did not go to hospital with burnt hand only because I’d have had to swim, in the dark, with a burnt hand. None of this is relevant. What is relevant is that Denis is gone. Focus, Powell.
A natural literary law is that the ardor with which an editor asks for a blurb is in inverse proportion to the chances that he or she will use the blurb. I am no longer able to write a blurb that will be used on a book. My latest rejected blurb, for a book called The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens, went like this:
The central figure here, the titular Australian, is unmanned with a quiet, wise, sure-footed humor that is winning and subtle and seductive. Condensing this sentiment to its second-class citizens, Ms. Smith-Stevens is quiet, wise, sure-footed, winning, subtle, and seductive.
“Condensing this sentiment to its second-class citizens” tries to refer to the bromide that adjectives are not first-class words like nouns and verbs. I thought I was pretty clever in whacking that idiocy en route to praising the book with good adjectives. Ms. Smith-Stevens wrote me quickly:
My editor was wondering if we could kind of combine the two sentences to read like this:
Ms. Smith-Stevens, like the titular Australian, is unmanned with a quiet, wise, sure-footed humor that is winning and subtle and seductive.
I wrote Ms. Smith-Stevens more quickly that I did not think her editor could seriously want me to say that she, a girl, or a woman, as you choose, could be unmanned, even by her own book, or especially by her own book, which presumably the editor, who had bought it, liked.
After some back and forth, for which Ms. Smith-Stevens apologized, and which apology I accepted because she was—full disclosure—a student of mine and I wanted to help her, we (they) arrived at this for the book jacket:
The Australian is unmanned with a quiet, wise, sure-footed humor that is winning and subtle and seductive.
Dumb blurb in the can! All right. Now I am ready to focus. Thirty-one years ago when Denis Johnson and I won Whitings together he told The New York Times, when asked what he would do with the money, “I’m going to buy me one of them genius pigs.” That alerted me to the possibility of the presence of wit. I looked at Angels and Fiskadoro—a book I have heard but do not credit he wanted later to disown; I want to steal the Vietnamese woman floating in the ocean for four days—and decided Denis Johnson was the competition. And then Jesus’ Son came in the mail asking me for a blurb. From I think FSG, where I was walking the plank. I sat down, marshaled the marbles, which I could do then, bore down as hard as I can with my pencil, made a muscle with my head, and wrote:
Mr. Johnson takes loss through some kind of sound barrier, past which celebrations of joy in destitution appear. For clean line, for deftness, for hard honest comedy there is no better than Denis Johnson.
The blurb was accepted as I wrote it, mirabile dictu. Perhaps because no one could say it not true. I am yet proud of the two-adjective one-noun phrase “hard honest comedy,” and that is what I am sticking to, and that is why I have labored on like this from soggy Florida with all my shit ruint to tender the highest praise I can with respect to writing and with respect to a writer: the best is hard honest comedy, and Denis Johnson was the best at it.
Just go look at those squished baby rabbits again.
Spode
I have been writing about my dog, I discover, for twenty-two years, twice as long as he lived and he dead now eighteen years. What would compel a man who fancies himself unsentimental and sane to such a thing? The dog, moreover, was also unsentimental and sane.
In 1988, in Rome, where I was enjoying the beneficence of the Prix de Rome, in the shock of discovering that my three years of Latin in junior high school and my perusing a basic Italian book on the way to Rome did not provide me, alas, with proficient Italian, which discovery by itself suggests I did not deserve the Prix—in short, while I was hiding in Rome from Italy, suddenly Texas, where I had spent the previous ten years in a kind of civilian Vietnam tour (roofing), came into focus. Texas’s pride in itself, which reduces or inflates to pride in pride itself sometimes, suddenly became a manageable nostalgia. Strange emotions are to be had if you spend a year in a country you think full of people yelling at you under the duress of comprehending nothing they are yelling. Even country music suddenly sounded spectrally good; somehow I had a tape by the Trio (Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt, I think) that I played in the high-ceilinged artists’ studios in the Academy, and it sounded like a music of the spheres with what may as well have been Odysseus’s sirens singing it. I even envisioned for the first time getting some pointy-toe Lucheses, maybe even a hat. One morning, hungover (I was not hiding from Peroni), I composed myself and composed this:
Yesterday a few things happened. Every day a few do. My dog beat up another dog. He does this when he can. It’s his living, more or less, though I’ve never let him make money doing it. He could. Beating up other dogs is his thing. He means no harm by it, expects other dogs to beat him up—no anxiety about it. If anything makes him nervous, it’s that he won’t get a chance to beat up or be beaten up. He’s healthy. I don’t think I am.
That is a not inaccurate portrait of a boy a bit trembly from the circumstances I was in and of this dog that would come to compel me to write about him for twenty-two years. The speaker in the story is very loosely based on a small-time would-be dogfighter I had met in Texas whom I have already in flinging him into fictitude falsely ennobled with mental capacity. But the dog is my dog, a pit bull bought five years earlier in North Carolina but essentially a Texas dog, his sire bred thirty miles (Baytown) from where I was living (Houston), his dam’s main progenitors bred in San Antonio. For the cognoscenti, he was a heavy Carver dog by way of Stinson (who bred Art) and Perry and Cummings. For the skeptical who will drop the veil of Michael Vick discreditability in front of whatever honorable utterance I might now come up with about the fighting dog, this dog was bred as well as any professional fighting dog you could buy, or steal, at that moment in the world. And that is why a sane and unsentimental man is compelled to write about him for twenty-two years even though the dog was not allowed to fight professionally. This is tantamount to saying one had a good racehorse bred in Kentucky of champion horses and one loved the horse though he was never allowed to race. The characteristics that would have made a splendid racing horse made him a splendid non-racing horse. It is a finally silly-looking argument, and I make it.
I waited another thirteen years before succumbing to the urge to memorialize the dog some more, the dog then dead seven years and my missing him only in its early fester. In 2001 I wrote this about him for the American Kennel Club Gazette, whose editorial diplomacy suggested that we call the dog an Am Staff (American Staffordshire terrier, which unlike the generic pit bull the AKC recognizes) if it came up (we didn’t let it) and that we change, rather comically, the word fighting to confrontation, and fight to confront:
A dog is the only friend you can have in life who will go with you wherever you want to go, whenever you want to go, without question and without putting on his pants. That is the quintessence of dog that secures our affection.
No questions, no pants, my dog, until he was killed at age 11 by a bobcat, was ready to go. He was capable of intimating that I was his first choice in traveling companion. No, that is inaccurate. You do not perceive in a dog the mechanism of choice, or preference, or judgment, or valuing one thing over another, and this is the second facet of the dog that wins us. He is coming with you because you are you. You? Let’s go! With you, it’s all good, he says, and you cannot help but love a thing that says that.
My dog would lead, get ahead by 50 feet, and select a fork in the trail and take it. If I paused at the fork, said, “Spode, this way,” indicating the other fork, he would hustle back agreeably and take it. This was a complex, loveable moment: In it he said, Shucks! Alas, I presume! Goofy me! Shoulda known! You’re right, boss! Better all around this way! And off he went down the path to the next fork, unabashedly presuming to pick a path there and repeat the little minuet of false humility if I again called him back. He’d do this all day, grinning.
My dog did not lie abed depressed. You don’t get depression from a dog. A dog doesn’t do down. This is the third magical facet in the bright furry diamond that a dog is. He’s ready if you are, he’s not wearing any clothes, and he’s not depressed, and what on earth is better than that?
Near the end, my dog did lie abed a bit longer when he heard a noise than he would have when young. He was 11, had no canines left, was partially paralyzed in the rear from weird coral-like ossifications on his lumbar vertebrae. So when the bobcat (if it was not an outright panther, which over time I have come to think it was) made its first unprovoked snarl just outside his house, he let it go. When the cat made a second horror-movie noise, it was too much. He got up, creaked out there, apparently engaged big cat with no teeth to engage it with, apparently got cut pretty badly, hiked about a third of a mile down some of our path forks to a place where fish die on our property after high water, bled copiously there on his good German-steel collar, was found there a week later with the help of buzzards, and had his bones recovered there six months later, which I bleached and have boxed in a Rubbermaid Roughneck. It was not the worst day of his life. There was not a finer moment than confrontation, and there was not a finer thing to confront than an impossibly large cat—almost his size or three times his size—and if the cat prevailed, well, to him, that was another occasion for the grinning aw-shucks shrugging off of dubious judgment, so what. His collar is still in the woods, corroded by the salt in his blood to an inflexible rusty mass reminiscent of an abandoned bicycle chain.
