1.

Bernard Malamud The Magic Barrel + The Theme of the

Three Caskets
2. Alice Walker Nineteen Fifty-Five
3. David Wong Louie The Barbarians Are Coming
4. Raymond Carver What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love
5. Richard Ford Rock Springs
6. Mukherjee Bharati The Management of Grief
7. Lee Smith / Bernard Malamud Intensive Care / Angel
Levine
8. Tim OBrien The Things They Carried
9. Sherman Alexie This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix
Arizona

almost entirely to his studies, as a result of which,

understandably, he had found himself without time
for a social life and the company of young women.
Therefore he thought it the better part of trial and
error of embarrassing fumbling to call in an
experienced person to advise him on these matters.
He remarked in passing that the function of the
marriage broker was ancient and honorable, highly
approved in the Jewish community, because it made
practical the necessary without hindering joy.
Moreover, his own parents had been brought
together by a matchmaker. They had made, if not a
financially profitable marriage since neither had
possessed any worldly goods to speak of at least a
successful one in the sense of their everlasting
devotion to each other. Salzman listened in
embarrassed surprise, sensing a sort of apology.
Later, however, he experienced a glow of pride in his
work, an emotion that had left him years ago, and he
heartily approved of Finkle.
The two went to their business. Leo had led
Salzman to the only clear place in the room, a table
near a window that overlooked the lamp-lit city. He
seated himself at the matchmakers side but facing
him, attempting by an act of will to suppress the
unpleasant tickle in his throat. Salzman eagerly
unstrapped his portfolio and removed a loose rubber
band from a thin packet of much-handled cards. As
he flipped through them, a gesture and sound that
physically hurt Leo, the student pretended not to see
and gazed steadfastly out the window. Although it
was still February, winter was on its last legs, signs
of which he had for the first time in years begun to
notice. He now observed the round white moon,
moving high in the sky through a cloud menagerie,
and watched with half-open mouth as it penetrated a
huge hen, and dropped out of her like an egg laying
itself. Salzman, though pretending through eyeglasses he had just slipped on, to be engaged in
scanning the writing on the cards, stole occasional
glances at the young mans distinguished face,
noting with pleasure the long, severe scholars nose,
brown eyes heavy with learning, sensitive yet ascetic
lips, and a certain, almost hollow quality of the dark
cheeks. He gazed around at shelves upon shelves of
books and let out a soft, contented sigh.
When Leos eyes fell upon the cards, he counted
six spread out in Salzmans hand.
So few? he asked in disappointment.
You wouldnt believe me how much cards I got in
my office, Salzman replied. The drawers are
already filled to the top, so I keep them now in a
barrel, but is every girl good for a new rabbi?
Leo blushed at this, regretting all he had revealed
of himself in a curriculum vitae he had sent to
Salzman. He had thought it best to acquaint him
with his strict standards and specifications, but in
having done so, felt he had told the marriage broker
more than was absolutely necessary.
He hesitantly inquired, Do you keep photographs
of your clients on file?
First comes family, amount of dowry, also what
kind of promises, Salzman replied, unbuttoning his
tight coat and settling himself in the chair. After
comes pictures, rabbi.
Call me Mr. Finkle. Im not yet a rabbi.

1
Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud
The Magic Barrel
Not long ago there lived in uptown New York, in a
small, almost meager room, though crowded with
books, Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student in the
Yeshivah University. Finkle, after six years of study,
was to be ordained in June and had been advised by
an acquaintance that he might find it easier to win
himself a congregation if he were married. Since he
had no present prospects of marriage, after two
tormented days of turning it over in his mind, he
called in Pinye Salzman, a marriage broker whose
two-line advertisement he had read in the Forward.
The matchmaker appeared one night out of the
dark fourth-floor hallway of the graystone rooming
house where Finkle lived, grasping a black, strapped
portfolio that had been worn thin with use. Salzman,
who had been long in the business, was of slight but
dignified build, wearing an old hat, and an overcoat
too short and tight for him. He smelled frankly of
fish, which he loved to eat, and although he was
missing a few teeth, his presence was not
displeasing, because of an amiable manner curiously
contrasted with mournful eyes. His voice, his lips,
his wisp of beard, his bony fingers were animated,
but give him a moment of repose and his mild blue
eyes revealed a depth of sadness, a characteristic
that put Leo a little at ease although the situation,
for him, was inherently tense.
He at once informed Salzman why he had asked
him to come, explaining that his home was in
Cleveland, and that but for his parents, who had
married comparatively late in life, he was alone in
the world. He had for six years devoted himself
2

Salzman said he would, but instead called him

doctor, which he changed to rabbi when Leo was not
listening too attentively.
Salzman adjusted his horn-rimmed spectacles,
gently cleared his throat and read in an eager voice
the contents of the top card:
Sophie P. Twenty-four years. Widow one year. No
children. Educated high school and two years
college. Father promises eight thousand dollars. Has
wonderful wholesale business. Also real estate. On
the mothers side comes teachers, also one actor.
Well known on Second Avenue.
Leo gazed up in surprise. Did you say a widow?
A widow dont mean spoiled, rabbi. She lived with
her husband maybe four months. He was a sick boy
she made a mistake to marry him.
Marrying a widow has never entered my mind.
This is because you have no experience. A widow,
especially if she is young and healthy like this girl, is
a wonderful person to marry. She will be thankful to
you the rest of her life. Believe me, if I was looking
now for a bride, I would marry a widow.
Leo reflected, then shook his head.
Salzman hunched his shoulders in an almost
imperceptible gesture of disappointment. He placed
the card down on the wooden table and began to
read another:
Lily H. High school teacher. Regular. Not a
substitute. Has savings and new Dodge car. Lived in
Paris one year. Father is successful dentist thirty-five
years. Interested in professional man. Well
Americanized family. Wonderful opportunity.
I knew her personally, said Salzman. I wish you
could see this girl. She is a doll. Also very intelligent.
All day you could talk to her about books and
theyater and what not. She also knows current
events.
I dont believe you mentioned her age?
Her age? Salzman said, raising his brows. Her
age is thirty-two years.

Salzman reluctantly turned up the third card:

Ruth K. Nineteen years. Honor student. Father
offers thirteen thousand cash to the right
bridegroom. He is a medical doctor. Stomach
specialist with marvelous practice. Brother in law
owns garment business. Particular people.
Salzman looked as if he had read his trump card.
Did you say nineteen? Leo asked with interest.
On the dot.
Is she attractive? He blushed. Pretty?
Salzman kissed his finger tips. A little doll. On
this I give you my word. Let me call the father
tonight and you will see what means pretty.
But Leo was troubled. Youre sure shes that
young?
This I am positive. The father will show you the
birth certificate.
Are you positive there isnt something wrong with
her? Leo insisted.
Who says there is wrong?
I dont understand why an American girl her age
should go to a marriage broker.
A smile spread over Salzmans face.
So for the same reason you went, she comes.
Leo flushed. I am passed for time.
Salzman, realizing he had been tactless, quickly
explained. The father came, not her. He wants she
should have the best, so he looks around himself.
When we will locate the right boy he will introduce
him and encourage. This makes a better marriage
than if a young girl without experience takes for
herself. I dont have to tell you this.
But dont you think this young girl believes in
love? Leo spoke uneasily.
Salzman was about was about to guffaw but caught
himself and said soberly, Love comes with the right
person, not before.
Leo parted dry lips but did not speak. Noticing that
Salzman had snatched a glance at the next card, he
cleverly asked, How is her health?
Perfect, Salzman said, breathing with difficulty.
Of course, she is a little lame on her right foot from
an auto accident that it happened to her when she
was twelve years, but nobody notices on account she
is so brilliant and also beautiful.
Leo got up heavily and went to the window. He felt
curiously bitter and upbraided himself for having
called in the marriage broker. Finally, he shook his
head.
Why not? Salzman persisted, the pitch of his
voice rising.
Because I detest stomach specialists.
So what do you care what is his business? After
you marry her do you need him? Who says he must
come every Friday night in your house?
Ashamed of the way the talk was going, Leo
dismissed Salzman, who went home with heavy,
melancholy eyes.
Though he had felt only relief at the marriage
brokers departure, Leo was in low spirits the next
day. He explained it as rising from Salzmans failure
to produce a suitable bride for him. He did not care
for his type of clientele. But when Leo found himself
hesitating whether to seek out another matchmaker,
one more polished than Pinye, he wondered if it

Leo said after a while, Im afraid that seems a

little too old.
Salzman let out a laugh. So how old are you,
rabbi?
Twenty-seven.
So what is the difference, tell me, between
twenty-seven and thirty-two? My own wife is seven
years older than me. So what did I suffer? Nothing.
If Rothschilds daughter wants to marry you, would
you say on account her age, no?
Yes, Leo said dryly.
Salzman shook off the no in the eyes. Five years
dont mean a thing. I give you my word that when
you will live with her for one week you will forget her
age. What does it mean five years that she lived
more and knows more than somebody who is
younger? On this girl, God bless her, years are not
wasted. Each one that it comes makes better the
bargain.
What subject does she teach in high school?
Languages. If you heard the way she speaks
French, you will think it is music. I am in the
business twenty-five years, and I recommend her
with my whole heart. Believe me, I know what Im
talking, rabbi.
Whats on the next card? Leo said abruptly.
3

could be protestations to the contrary, and

although he honored his father and mother that he
did not, in essence, care for the matchmaking
institution? This thought he quickly put out of mind
yet found himself still upset. All day he ran around
the woods missed an important appointment,
forgot to give out his laundry, walked out of a
Broadway cafeteria without paying and had to run
back with the ticket in his hand; had even not
recognized his landlady in the street when she
passed with a friend and courteously called out, A
good evening to you, Doctor Finkle. By nightfall,
however, he had regained sufficient calm to sink his
nose into a book and there found peace from his
thoughts.
Almost at once there came a knock on the door.
Before Leo could say enter, Salzman, commercial
cupid, was standing in the room. His face was gray
and meager, his expression hungry, and he looked as
if he would expire on his feet. Yet the marriage
broker managed, by some trick of the muscles to
display a broad smile.
So good evening. I am invited?
Leo nodded, disturbed to see him again, yet
unwilling to ask the man to leave.
Beaming still, Salzman laid his portfolio on the
table. Rabbi, I got for you tonight good news.
Ive asked you not to call me rabbi. Im still a
student.
Your worries are finished. I have for you a firstclass bride.
Leave me in peace concerning this subject. Leo
pretended lack of interest.
The world will dance at your wedding.
Please, Mr. Salzman, no more.
But first must come back my strength, Salzman
said weakly. He fumbled with the portfolio straps
and took out of the leather case an oily paper bag,
from which he extracted a hard, seeded roll and a
small, smoked white fish. With a quick emotion of
his hand he stripped the fish out of its skin and
began ravenously to chew. All day in a rush, he
muttered.
Leo watched him eat.
A sliced tomato you have maybe? Salzman
hesitantly inquired.
No.
The marriage broker shut his eyes and ate. When
he had finished he carefully cleaned up the crumbs
and rolled up the remains of the fish, in the paper
bag. His spectacled eyes roamed the room until he
discovered, amid some piles of books, a one-burner
gas stove. Lifting his hat he humbly asked, A glass
of tea you got, rabbi?
Conscience-stricken, Leo rose and brewed the tea.
He served it with a chunk of lemon and two cubes of
lump sugar, delighting Salzman.
After he had drunk his tea, Salzmans strength and
good spirits were restored.
So tell me rabbi, he said amiably, you
considered some more the three clients I mentioned
yesterday?
There was no need to consider.
Why not?
None of them suits me.
What then suits you?

Leo let it pass because he could give only a

confused answer.
Without waiting for a reply, Salzman asked, You
remember this girl I talked to you the high school
teacher?
Age thirty-two?
But surprisingly, Salzmans face lit in a smile. Age
twenty-nine.
Leo shot him a look. Reduced from thirty-two?
A mistake, Salzman avowed. I talked today with
the dentist. He took me to his safety deposit box and
showed me the birth certificate. She was twenty-nine
years last August. They made her a party in the
mountains where she went for her vacation. When
her father spoke to me the first time I forgot to write
the age and I told you thirty-two, but now I
remember this was a different client, a widow.
The same one you told me about? I thought she
was twenty-four?
A different. Am I responsible that the world is
filled with widows?
No, but Im not interested in them, nor for that
matter, in school teachers.
Salzman pulled his clasped hand to his breast.
Looking at the ceiling he devoutly exclaimed,
Yiddishe kinder, what can I say to somebody that he
is not interested in high school teachers? So what
then you are interested?
Leo flushed but controlled himself.
In what else will you be interested, Salzman
went on, if you not interested in this fine girl that
she speaks four languages and has personally in the
bank ten thousand dollars? Also her father
guarantees further twelve thousand. Also she has a
new car, wonderful clothes, talks on all subjects, and
she will give you a first-class home and children.
How near do we come in our life to paradise?
If shes so wonderful, why wasnt she married ten
years ago?
Why? said Salzman with a heavy laugh. Why?
Because she is partikiler. This is why. She wants the
best.
Leo was silent, amused at how he had entangled
himself. But Salzman had arouse his interest in Lily
H., and he began seriously to consider calling on her.
When the marriage broker observed how intently
Leos mind was at work on the facts he had supplied,
he felt certain they would soon come to an
agreement.
Late Saturday afternoon, conscious of Salzman,
Leo Finkle walked with Lily Hirschorn along
Riverside Drive. He walked briskly and erectly,
wearing with distinction the black fedora he had that
morning taken with trepidation out of the dusty hat
box on his closet shelf, and the heavy black Saturday
coat he had throughly whisked clean. Leo also owned
a walking stick, a present from a distant relative, but
quickly put temptation aside and did not use it. Lily,
petite and not unpretty, had on something signifying
the approach of spring. She was au courant,
animatedly, with all sorts of subjects, and he
weighed her words and found her surprisingly sound
score another for Salzman, whom he uneasily
sensed to be somewhere around, hiding perhaps
high in a tree along the street, flashing the lady
signals with a pocket mirror; or perhaps a clovenhoofed Pan, piping nuptial ditties as he danced his
4

invisible way before them, strewing wild buds on the

walk and purple grapes in their path, symbolizing
fruit of a union, though there was of course still
none.
Lily startled Leo by remarking, I was thinking of
Mr. Salzman, a curious figure, wouldnt you say?
Not certain what to answer, he nodded.
She bravely went on, blushing, I for one am
grateful for his introducing us. Arent you?
He courteously replied, I am.
I mean, she said with a little laugh and it was
all in good taste, to at least gave the effect of being
not in bad do you mind that we came together
so?
He was not displeased with her honesty,
recognizing that she meant to set the relationship
aright, and understanding that it took a certain
amount of experience in life, and courage, to want to
do it quite that way. One had to have some sort of
past to make that kind of beginning.
He said that he did not mind. Salzmans function
was traditional and honorable valuable for what it
might achieve, which, he pointed out, was frequently
nothing.
Lily agreed with a sigh. They walked on for a while
and she said after a long silence, again with a
nervous laugh, Would you mind if I asked you
something a little bit personal? Frankly, I find the
subject fascinating. Although Leo shrugged, she
went on half embarrassedly, How was it that you
came to your calling? I mean was it a sudden
passionate inspiration?
Leo, after a time, slowly replied, I was always
interested in the Law.
You saw revealed in it the presence of the
Highest?
He nodded and changed the subject. I understand
that you spent a little time in Paris, Miss
Hirschorn?
Oh, did Mr. Salzman tell you, Rabbi Finkle? Leo
winced but she went on, It was ages ago and almost
forgotten. I remember I had to return for my sisters
wedding.
And Lily would not be put off. When, she asked
in a trembly voice, did you become enamored of
God?
He stared at her. Then it came to him that she was
talking not about Leo Finkle, but of a total stranger,
some mystical figure, perhaps even passionate
prophet that Salzman had dreamed up for her no
relation to the living or dead. Leo trembled with rage
and weakness. The trickster had obviously sold her a
bill of goods, just as he had him, whod expected to
become acquainted with a young lady of twentynine, only to behold, the moment he laid eyes upon
her strained and anxious face, a woman past thirtyfive and aging rapidly. Only his self control had kept
him this long in her presence.
I am not, he said gravely, a talented religious
person. and in seeking words to go on, found
himself possessed by shame and fear. I think, he
said in a strained manner, that I came to God not
because I love Him, but because I did not.
This confession he spoke harshly because its
unexpectedness shook him.
Lily wilted. Leo saw a profusion of loaves of bread
go flying like ducks high over his head, not unlike

the winged loaves by which he had counted himself

to sleep last night. Mercifully, then, it snowed, which
he would not put past Salzmans machinations.

He was infuriated with the marriage broker and

swore he would throw him out of the room the
minute he reappeared. But Salzman did not come
that night, and when Leos anger had subsided, an
unaccountable despair grew in its place. At first he
thought this was caused by his disappointment in
Lily, but before long it became evident that he had
involved himself with Salzman without a true
knowledge of his own intent. He gradually realized
with an emptiness that seized him with six hands
that he had called in the broker to find him a bride
because he was incapable of doing it himself. This
terrifying insight he had derived as a result of his
meeting and conversation with Lily Hirschorn. Her
probing questions had somehow irritated him into
revealing to himself more than her the true
nature of his relationship to God, and from that it
had come upon him, with shocking force, that apart
from his parents, he had never loved anyone. Or
perhaps it went the other way, that he did not love
God so well as he might, because he had not loved
man. It seemed to Leo that his whole life stood
starkly revealed and he saw himself for the first time
as he truly was unloved and loveless. This bitter
but somehow not fully unexpected revelation
brought him to a point to panic, controlled only by
extraordinary effort. He covered his face with his
hands and cried.
The week that followed was the worst of his life.
He did not eat and lost weight. His beard darkened
and grew ragged. He stopped attending seminars
and almost never opened a book. He seriously
considered leaving the Yeshiva, although he was
deeply troubled at the thought of the loss of all his
years of study saw them like pages torn from a
book, strewn over the city and at the devastating
effect of this decision upon his parents. But he had
lived without knowledge of himself, and never in the
Five Books and all the Commentaries mea culpa
had the truth been revealed to him. He did not know
where to turn, and in all this desolating loneliness
there was no to whom, although he often thought of
Lily but not once could bring himself to go
downstairs and make the call. He became touchy
and irritable, especially with his landlady, who asked
him all manner of personal questions; on the other
hand sensing his own disagreeableness, he waylaid
her on the stairs and apologized abjectly, until
mortified, she ran from him. Out of this, however, he
drew the consolation that he was a Jew and that a
Jew suffered. But generally, as the long and terrible
week drew to a close, he regained his composure and
some idea of purpose in life to go on as planned.
Although he was imperfect, the ideal was not. As for
his quest of a bride, the thought of continuing
afflicted him with anxiety and heartburn, yet
perhaps with this new knowledge of himself he
would be more successful than in the past. Perhaps
love would now come to him and a bride to that love.
And for this sanctified seeking who needed a
Salzman?
5

The marriage broker, a skeleton with haunted

eyes, returned that very night. He looked, withal, the
picture of frustrated expectancy as if he had
steadfastly waited the week at Miss Lily Hirschorns
side for a telephone call that never came.
Casually coughing, Salzman came immediately to
the point: So how did you like her?
Leos anger rose and he could not refrain from
chiding the matchmaker: Why did you lie to me,
Salzman?
Salzmans pale face went dead white, the world
had snowed on him.
Did you not state that she was twenty-nine? Leo
insisted.
I give you my word
She was thirty-five, if a day. At least thirty-five.
Of this dont be too sure. Her father told me
Never mind. The worst of it was that you lied to
her.
How did I lie to her, tell me?
You told her things abut me that werent true.
You made out to be more, consequently less than I
am. She had in mind a totally different person, a sort
of semi-mystical Wonder Rabbi.
All I said, you was a religious man.
I can imagine.
Salzman sighed. This is my weakness that I have,
he confessed. My wife says to me I shouldnt be a
salesman, but when I have two fine people that they
would be wonderful to be married, I am so happy
that I talk too much. He smiled wanly. This is why
Salzman is a poor man.

active social life. Of course it would cost something,

but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when
there were no corners left he would make circles
rounder. All the while Salzmans pictures had lain on
the table, gathering dust. Occasionally as Leo sat
studying, or enjoying a cup of tea, his eyes fell on the
manila envelope, but he never opened it.
The days went by and no social life to speak of
developed with a member of the opposite sex it
was difficult, given the circumstances of his
situation. One morning Leo toiled up the stairs to his
room and stared out the window at the city.
Although the day was bright his view of it was dark.
For some time he watched the people in the street
below hurrying along and then turned with a heavy
heart to his little room. On the table was the packet.
With a sudden relentless gesture he tore it open. For
a half-hour he stood by the table in a state of
excitement, examining the photographs of the ladies
Salzman had included. Finally, with a deep sigh he
put them down. There were six, of varying degree of
attractiveness, but look at them along enough and
they all became Lily Hirschorn: all past their prime,
all starved behind bright smiles, not a true
personality in the lot. Life, despite their frantic
yoohooings, had passed them by; they were pictures
in a brief case that stank of fish. After a while,
however, as Leo attempted to return the
photographs into the envelope, he found in it
another, a snapshot of the type taken by a machine
for a quarter. He gazed at it a moment and let out a
cry.
Her face deeply moved him. Why, he could at first
not say. It gave him the impression of youth spring
flowers, yet age a sense of having been used to the
bone, wasted; this came from the eyes, which were
hauntingly familiar, yet absolutely strange. He had a
vivid impression that he had met her before, but try
as he might he could not place her although he could
almost recall her name, as he had read it in her own
handwriting. No, this couldnt be; he would have
remembered her. It was not, he affirmed, that she
had an extraordinary beauty no, though her face
was attractive enough; it was that something about
her moved him. Feature for feature, even some of the
ladies of the photographs could do better; but she
lapsed forth to this heart had lived, or wanted to
more than just wanted, perhaps regretted how she
had lived had somehow deeply suffered: it could be
seen in the depths of those reluctant eyes, and from
the way the light enclosed and shone from her, and
within her, opening realms of possibility: this was
her own. Her he desired. His head ached and eyes
narrowed with the intensity of his gazing, then as if
an obscure fog had blown up in the mind, he
experienced fear of her and was aware that he had
received an impression, somehow, of evil. He
shuddered, saying softly, it is thus with us all. Leo
brewed some tea in a small pot and sat sipping it
without sugar, to calm himself. But before he had
finished drinking, again with excitement he
examined the face and found it good: good for Leo
Finkle. Only such a one could understand him and
help him seek whatever he was seeking. She might,
perhaps, love him. How she had happened to be
among the discards in Salzmans barrel he could

Leos anger left him. Well, Salzman, Im afraid

thats all.
The marriage broker fastened hungry eyes on him.
You dont want any more a bride?
I do, said Leo, but I have decided to seek her in
a different way. I am no longer interested in an
arranged marriage. To be frank, I now admit the
necessity of premarital love. That is, I want to be in
love with the one I marry.
Love? said Salzman, astounded. After a moment
he remarked For us, our love is our life, not for the
ladies. In the ghetto they
I know, I know, said Leo. Ive thought of it
often. Love, I have said to myself, should be a byproduct of living and worship rather than its own
end. Yet for myself I find it necessary to establish the
level of my need and fulfill it.
Salzman shrugged but answered, Listen, rabbi, if
you want love, this I can find for you also. I have
such beautiful clients that you will love them the
minute your eyes will see them.
Leo smiled unhappily. Im afraid you dont
understand.
But Salzman hastily unstrapped his portfolio and
withdrew a manila packet from it.
Pictures, he said, quickly laying the envelope on
the table.
Leo called after him to take the pictures away, but
as if on the wings of the wind, Salzman had
disappeared.
March came. Leo had returned to his regular
routine. Although he felt not quite himself yet
lacked energy he was making plans for a more
6

never guess, but he knew he must urgently go find

her.
Leo rushed downstairs, grabbed up the Bronx
telephone book, and searched for Salzmans home
address. He was not listed, nor was his office.
Neither was he in the Manhattan book. But Leo
remembered having written down the address on a
slip of paper after he had read Salzmans
advertisement in the personals column of the
Forward. He ran up to his room and tore through his
papers, without luck. It was exasperating. Just when
he needed the matchmaker he was nowhere to be
found. Fortunately Leo remembered to look in his
wallet. There on a card he found his name written
and a Bronx address. No phone number was listed,
the reason Leo now recalled he had originally
communicated with Salzman by letter. He got on his
coat, put a hat on over his skull cap and hurried to
the subway station. All the way to the far end of the
Bronx he sat on the edge of his seat. He was more
than once tempted to take out the picture and see if
the girls face was as he remembered it, but he
refrained, allowing the snapshot to remain in his
inside coat pocket, content to have her so close.
When the train pulled into the station he was waiting
at the door and bolted out. He quickly located the
street Salzman had advertised.
The building he sought was less than a block from
the subway, but it was not an office building, nor
even a loft, nor a store in which one could rent office
space. It was a very old tenement house. Leo found
Salzmans name in pencil on a soiled tag under the
bell and climbed three dark flights to his apartment.
When he knocked, the door was opened by a think,
asthmatic, gray-haired woman in felt slippers.
Yes? she said, expecting nothing. She listened
without listening. He could have sworn he had seen
her, too, before but knew it was an illusion.
Salzman does he live here? Pinye Salzman, he
said, the matchmaker?
She stared at him a long minute. Of course.
He felt embarrassed. Is he in?
No. Her mouth, thought left open, offered
nothing more.
The matter is urgent. Can you tell me where his
office is?
In the air. She pointed upward.
You mean he has no office? Leo asked.
In his socks.
He peered into the apartment. It was sunless and
dingy, one large room divided by a half-open curtain,
beyond which he could see a sagging metal bed. The
near side of the room was crowded with rickety
chairs, old bureaus, a three-legged table, racks of
cooking utensils, and all the apparatus of a kitchen.
But there was no sign of Salzman or his magic barrel,
probably also a figment of the imagination. An odor
of frying fish made weak to the knees.
Where is he? he insisted. Ive got to see your
husband.
At length she answered, So who knows where he
is? Every time he thinks a new thought he runs to a
different place. Go home, he will find you.
Tell him Leo Finkle.
She gave no sign she had heard.
He walked downstairs, depressed.
But Salzman, breathless, stood waiting at his door.

Leo was astounded and overjoyed. How did you

get here before me?
I rushed.
Come inside.
They entered. Leo fixed tea, and a sardine
sandwich for Salzman. As they were drinking he
reached behind him for the packet of pictures and
handed them to the marriage broker.
Salzman put down his glass and said expectantly,
You found somebody you like?
Not among these.
The marriage broker turned away.
Here is the one I want. Leo held forth the
snapshot.
Salzman slipped on his glasses and took the
picture into his trembling hand. He turned ghastly
and let out a groan.
Whats the matter? cried Leo.
Excuse me. Was an accident this picture. She isnt
for you?
Salzman frantically shoved the manila packet into
his portfolio. He thrust the snapshot into his pocket
and fled down the stairs.
Leo, after momentary paralysis, gave chase and
cornered the marriage broker in the vestibule. The
landlady made hysterical out cries but neither of
them listened.
Give me back the picture, Salzman.
No. The pain in his eyes was terrible.
Tell me who she is then.
This I cant tell you. Excuse me.
He made to depart, but Leo, forgetting himself,
seized the matchmaker by his tight coat and shook
him frenziedly.
Please, sighed Salzman. Please.
Leo ashamedly let him go. Tell me who she is, he
begged. Its very important to me to know.
She is not for you. She is a wild one wild,
without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.
What do you mean wild?
Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was
a sin. This is why to me she is dead now.
In Gods name, what do you mean?
Her I cant introduce to you, Salzman cried.
Why are you so excited?
Why, he asks, Salzman said, bursting into tear.
This is my baby, my Stella, she should burn in hell.
Leo hurried up to bed and hid under the covers.
Under the covers he thought his life through.
Although he soon fell asleep he could not sleep her
out of his mind. He woke, beating his breast. Though
he prayed to be rid of her, his prayers went
unanswered. Through days of torment he endlessly
struggled not to love her; fearing success, he escaped
it. He then concluded to convert her to goodness,
himself to God. The idea alternately nauseated and
exalted him.
He perhaps did not know that he had come to a
final decision until he encountered Salzman in a
Broadway cafeteria. He was sitting alone at a rear
table, sucking the bony remains of a fish. The
marriage broker appeared haggard, and transparent
to the point of vanishing.
7

Salzman looked up at first without recognizing

him. Leo had grown a pointed beard and his eyes
were weighted with wisdom.
Salzman, he said, love has at last come to my
heart.
Who can love from a picture? mocked the
marriage broker.
It is not impossible.
If you can love her, then you can love anybody.
Let me show you some new clients that they just sent
me their photographs. One is a little doll.
Just her I want, Leo murmured.
Dont be a fool, doctor Dont bother with her.
Put me in touch with her, Salzman, Leo said
humbly. Perhaps I can be of service.
Salzman had stopped eating and Leo understood
with emotion that it was now arranged.
Leaving the cafeteria, he was, however, afflicted by
a tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it
all to happen this way.

Corey Fischer and Max G. Moore star in Traveling

Jewish Theatre's production of 2 x Malamud: The
Jewbird & The Magic Barrel

On The Magic Barrel

Introduction
Bernard Malamud's short story, "The Magic Barrel,"
was first published in the Partisan Review in 1954,
and reprinted in 1958 in Malamud's first volume of
short fiction. This tale of a rabbinical student's
misadventures with a marriage broker was quite well
received in the 1950s, and Malamud's collection of
short stories,The Magic Barrel, won the National
Book Award for fiction in 1959.

Leo was informed by better that she would meet

him on a certain corner, and she was there one
spring night, waiting under a street lamp. He
appeared carrying a small bouquet of violets and
rosebuds. Stella stood by the lamp post, smoking.
She wore white with red shoes, which fitted his
expectations, although in a troubled moment he had
imagined the dress red, and only the shoes white.
She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that
her eyes clearly her fathers were filled with
desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own
redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the
sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.
Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a
wall, chanted prayers for the dead.
1958

As Malamud attained a reputation as a respected

novelist in the 1960s and 1970s, his short stories
were widely anthologized and attracted considerable
attention from literary students and scholars.
A writer in the Jewish-American tradition, Malamud
wrote stories that explore issues and themes central
to the Jewish community. A love story with a
surprising outcome, "The Magic Barrel" traces a
young man's struggle to come to terms with his
identity and poses the religious question of how
peopleJews and others may come to love God. Is
human love, the story asks, a necessary first step to
loving God? Malamud's "The Magic Barrel" is a story
remarkable for its economy, using just a few strokes
to create compelling and complex characters.

The Magic Barrel Summary | Detailed

Summary
On a cold day in February, Leo Finkle, a 27-year-old
rabbinical student at New York's Yeshivah
University, is sitting in his small apartment
regretting the fact that he decided to call in a
matchmaker to help him find a wife. However,
Finkle knows that he needs to find a wife if he wants
to get an appointment as a rabbi after he graduates,
so he patiently waits for Pinye Salzman to arrive and,
hopefully, arrange a suitable match for him.
Pinye Salzman arrives and cuts a not displeasing
figure with his dignified air and wizened looks.
However, he is also missing teeth and he smells
distinctly of fish, which he eats constantly, so he is
not entirely pleasant either. However, more
importantly, he carries a binder holding pictures of
eligible Jewish women with him, and Finkle hopes
that it holds a woman for him.
To explain himself, Finkle tells Salzman that he is a
student too wrapped up in his studies to have a
8

proper social life and, but for his parents in

Cleveland, he is quite alone. Thus, with few female
prospects in his life, he has called in a marriage
broker, which Finkle considers a very honored
position in the Jewish community, to make
"practical the necessary without hindering the joy."
(2) Salzman, of course, is quite pleased with the kind
words that Finkle offers him, and Salzman opens his
binder to offer pictures and descriptions of some
women that are looking to marry.

Over the next two weeks, Finkle neglects his studies

and neglects to take care of his self as he begins to do
some serious soul-searching. Though he considers
dropping out of the Yeshivah, he does finally
determine that he should continue his studies and
finish school, as planned. However, he still needs to
find a wife, but he is not going to use Salzman to do
it for him.
The night that Finkle decides he does not needs
Salzman, the matchmaker himself appears with a
new batch of photographs. Of course, Salzman first
asks about Lily, but Finkle accuses Salzman of lying
to both him and Lily. Salzman apologizes profusely
and offers explanations, but Finkle tells him that he
is in search of love, not a convenient marriage
partner. Of course, Salzman offers him an envelope
of photos to look at, but Finkle wants nothing to do
with it. However, before Finkle can give the photos
back to him, Salzman rushes out the door.

Unfortunately, Finkle looks at the pictures, hears

Salzman's descriptions and decides that none of
these women is for him. One is too old, one is a
widow, another's father is a stomach specialist and
none of them really entices Finkle. Of course,
Salzman argues and tells him that these are all fine
women who would make him very happy, but Finkle
disapproves of all of them and, in frustration, sends
Salzman away.
The next day, Leo Finkle is pondering his decision
not to see any of the women that Salzman offered
and wonders whether he made the right choice.
However, Salzman appears at his door that very
same night and says that Lily Hirschorn, a 32-yearold woman that he mentioned the previous day, is
actually only 29 and, therefore, not too old for
Finkle. Of course, Finkle is immediately suspicious
and suspects that Salzman is lying in order to make
him meet the woman, but Finkle decides to pay her a
visit anyway.

The month turns to March and Finkle makes plans

to have a real social life so that he can fall in love.
However, it never materializes and Finkle realizes
that he is simply not in a situation that allows him to
go out and meet women. After all, he is a poor
university student who studies diligently and he has
neither the time nor the funds to spend on evenings
out. Thus, as he comes to grips with his plight, he
opens Salzman's envelope of pictures.
As Finkle looks through the pictures, he realizes that
there is nobody in there who interests him. They are
all tired old women who are past their prime, just
like Lily Hirschorn, and Finkle, frustrated, puts the
pictures back into the envelope. However, as Finkle
puts the pictures back in, a small picture that he had
not noticed falls out.

Leo Finkle and Lily Hirschorn's evening together is

unfortuntely, a disaster. Not only is Lily at least 35
years old, but also she seems to have an idea that
Finkle is some sort of eminently holy man who can
see into the mind of God. Though Finkle is
comfortable with her at first, Lily turns the
conversation to Finkle's studies with a clear
expectation that he will help her see into his
understanding of divine truths. Obviously, Salzman
built up Finkle as some sort of mystic or prophet,
and Finkle cannot provide her with any of the
answers that she is looking for. In fact, when Lily
asks Finkle why he learned to love God, Finkle hears
himself say, "I came to God not because I loved Him,
but because I did not." (12) This is not the answer
Lily is looking for and the evening ends in
disappointment for both of them.

When Finkle sees the picture, he realizes that he has

found the woman he is looking for. She is young,
beautiful and alive in a way that he cannot describe.
Though she looks familiar, Finkle knows that he
would have remembered meeting such a woman
and, therefore, they must have never met. However,
he knows that he must meet this mystery woman
and he immediately runs out to talk to Salzman.
When Finkle arrives at Salzman's home, his wife
informs Finkle that her husband is out. However,
Finkle leaves a message telling Salzman to come
over. Then, surprisingly, Salzman is waiting at
Finkle's door when he returns.

The next day, Leo Finkle is furious at Salzman for

lying to both him and Lily. However, the more Finkle
thinks about it, the more he realizes that he is
furious at himself. After all, he should be able to
meet women on his own, but his complete inability
to have a real social life and his total ineptitude with
women has forced him to speak with a marriage
broker in order to find a wife. However, the thing
that really angers Finkle is the realization that he is
studying to be a rabbi because he does not love God,
which he only came to understand when he was
speaking with Lily Hirschorn. Furthermore, Finkle
has never loved anybody, except for his parents, and
no one has ever loved him. Thus, he finds himself
unloved, loveless and very, very lonely.

After Finkle provides Salzman with tea and a sardine

sandwich, he shows Salzman the picture and says
that he wants to meet that particular woman.
However, Salzman is shocked and refuses, though he
does not explain why at first. When Finkle presses
Salzman to let him meet the woman that Salzman
says that the picture is of his daughter Stella, and she
is dead to him and she should rot in hell.
After Salzman leaves, Finkle is so shocked by the
revelation that he hides in bed, trying to get Stella
9

out of his mind. Unfortunately, he cannot. For days,

he is tortured with longing for her, though he tries to
beat his feelings down and forget the image of the
woman he loves. However, instead of destroying his
feelings, he decides that it is up to him to convert her
to goodness and bring her back to God. Thus, when
Finkle meets Salzman in a cafeteria in the Bronx, he
convinces Salzman to arrange a meeting and let him
try to help Stella.

with Stella, asks her father where he might find her,

the matchmaker replies: She is a wild one wild,
without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi. When
he finally meets Stella she is smoking, leaning
against a lamp post in the classic stance of the
prostitute, but Leo believes he sees in her eyes a
desperate innocence.

Finally, the night arrives that Finkle is to finally

meet Stella. They are to meet on a corner under a
streetlight and Finkle brings a bouquet of flowers for
her. Then, when Finkle sees her in person, he runs
toward this shy, yet confident woman that he has
loved since he saw her picture. However, just around
the corner, Pinye Salzman chants prayers for the
dead.

Identity

Themes

Malamuds Leo Finkle is a character trying to figure

out who he really is. Having spent the last six years
of his life deep in study for ordination as a rabbi, he
is an isolated and passionless man, disconnected
from human emotion. When Lily Hirschorn asks
him how he came to discover his calling as a rabbi,
Leo responds with embarrassment: I am not a
talented religious person. . . . I think . . . that I came
to God, not because I loved him, but because I did
not. In other words, Leo hopes that by becoming a
rabbi he might learn to love himself and the people
around him. Leo is in despair after his conversation
with Lily because . . . he saw himself for the first
time as he truly was unloved and loveless.

Characters
Leo Finkle
Leo Finkle has spent the last six years studying to
become a rabbi at New Yorks Yeshivah University.
Because he believes that he will have a better chance
of getting employment with a congregation if he is
married, Leo consults a professional matchmaker.
Leo is a cold person; he comes to realize that he did
not love God so well as he might, because he had not
loved man. When Finkle falls in love with Salzmans
daughter, Stella, the rabbinical student must
confront his own emotional failings.

As he realizes the truth about himself, he becomes

desperate to change. Leo determines to reform
himself and renew his life. Leo continues to search
for a bride, but without the matchmakers help: . . .
he regained his composure and some idea of purpose
in life: to go on as planned. Although he was
imperfect, the ideal was not. The ideal, in this case,
is love. Leo comes to believe that through love the
love he feels when he first sees the photograph of
Stella Salzman he may begin his life anew, and
forge an identity based on something more positive.
When at last he meets Stella he

Lily Hirschorn
Lily Hirschorn is introduced to Leo Finkle, the
rabbinical student, by Pinye Salzman, the
matchmaker. She is a schoolteacher, comes from a
good family, converses on many topics, and Leo
considers her not unpretty. It soon becomes clear,
however, that the match between them will not
work.

pictured, in her, his own redemption. That

redemption, the storys ending leads us to hope, will
be Leos discovery through Stella of an identity based
on love.

Pinye Salzman

God and Religion

Leo consults Pinye Salzman, who is a professional

matchmaker. Salzman is an elderly man who lives in
great poverty. He is unkempt in appearance and
smells of fish. While Salzman works to bring couples
together, Leo has reason to believe that the
matchmaker, or commercial cupid, is occasionally
dishonest about the age and financial status of his
clients. Salzman seems greatly dismayed when Leo
falls in love with Stella. Yet Leo begins to suspect
that Pinye, whom he thinks of as a trickster, had
planned it all to happen this way.

Central to Malamuds The Magic Barrel is the idea

that to love God, one must love man first. Finkle is
uncomfortable with Lilys questions because they
make him realize the true nature of his relationship
to God. He comes to realize that he did not love
God as well as he might, because he had not loved
man. In spite of the zeal with which he has pursued
his rabbinical studies, Leos approach to God, as the
narrative reveals, is one of cold, analytical
formalism. Unable fully to love Gods creatures, Leo
Finkle cannot fully love God.

Stella Salzman

Once again, the agent of change in Leos life seems to

be Stella Salzman. The text strongly implies that by
loving Stella, by believing in her, Leo will be able to
come to God. Just before his meeting with Stella,
Leo concluded to convert her to goodness, him to

Stella Salzman is the daughter of Pinye Salzman, the

matchmaker. Salzman has disowned his daughter,
evidently because she has committed some grave act
of disobedience. When Leo, who has fallen in love
10

God. To love Stella, it seems, will be Leos true

ordination, his true rite of passage to the love of God.

Russian Jew at the turn of the century (Malamuds

father, for example) might read the Torah in
Hebrew, speak to his gentile neighbors in Russian,
and conduct the affairs of his business and
household in Yiddish.

Topics for Further Study

When did Jewish people settle in large

numbers in New York City? Describe the
Jewish communities in New York City or in
another large American city. In what way
can The Magic Barrel be read as a story
about the descendants of immigrants?
In chapter twenty of the Book of Exodus in
the Bible, Moses sets forth the Ten
Commandments to the Israelites. Do the
characters in The Magic Barrel follow the
Commandments? What does this say about
them?
What does the story suggest about the
relation between love and self-knowledge?
What must Leo Finkle learn about himself
before he is truly able to love?

Since World War II, Yiddish has become less

prevalent in Europe and in the immigrant Jewish
communities of North America. In another
generation, it may totally die out. Many of
Malamuds characters, however, still use the idiom.
When Salzman asks Leo, A glass tea you got,
rabbi?; when he exclaims, what can I say to
somebody that he is not interested in school
teachers?; and when he laments, This is my baby,
my Stella, she should burn in hell, the reader hears
an idiomatic version of English seasoned with the
cadences of Yiddish speech.

Historical Context
Malamuds The Magic Barrel was first published
by the Partisan Review in 1954 and reprinted as the
title story in Malamuds first volume of short fiction
in 1958. The period between those two dates was an
eventful time in American history. In 1954 the
United States Supreme Court unanimously rejected
the concept of segregation in the case of Brown v.
Board of Education, which found that the practice of
maintaining separate classrooms or separate schools
for black and white students was unconstitutional.

Style
Point of View
Point of view is a term that describes who tells a
story, or through whose eyes we see the events of a
narrative. The point of view in Malamuds The
Magic Barrel is third person limited. In the third
person limited point of view, the narrator is not a
character in the story, but someone outside of it who
refers to the characters as he, she, and they.
This outside narrator, however, is not omniscient,
but is limited to the perceptions of one of the
characters in the story. The narrator of the story
views the events of the story through the eyes of Leo
Finkle even though it is not Leo telling the story.

In the same year Senator Joseph McCarthy was

censured by the Senate for having unjustly accused
hundreds of Americans of being communists. In
1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first
satellite to successfully orbit the earth, sparking
concern that the Soviets would take control of space.
While the text of The Magic Barrel is almost
entirely free of topical or historical references that
might allow readers to place the events of the story
at a particular date, one detail establishes Leos
encounter with Salzman as taking place roughly at
the time of the storys publication in the mid-fifties.
Finkle is about to complete his six-year course of
study to become a rabbi at New York Citys Yeshivah
University. Yeshivah, in Hebrew, means a place of
study. Yeshivah University is the oldest and most
distinguished Jewish institution of higher learning
in the United States. While its history goes back to
1886, the school was not named Yeshivah until 1945,
when its charter was revised. At the end of the
traditional six years of study to become a rabbi, then,
Leo would probably be considering marriage
sometime early in the 1950s.

Symbolism
Symbolism is a literary device that uses an action, a
person, a thing, or an image to stand for something
else. In Malamuds The Magic Barrel the coming of
spring plays an important symbolic role. The story
begins in February, when winter was on its last
legs, and ends one spring night as Leo approaches
Stella Salzman under a street lamp. The storys
progression from winter to spring is an effective
symbol for the emotional rebirth that Leo undergoes
as he struggles to grow as a human being.
Idiom
Idiom may be defined as a specialized vocabulary
used by a particular group, or a manner of
expression peculiar to a given people. In other
words, different groups of people speak in different
ways. While the narrator and most of the characters
in The Magic Barrel speak standard English, Pinye
Salzman, the matchmaker, speaks Yiddish. Written
in Hebrew characters and based on the grammar of
medieval German, Yiddish was the common
language of many European Jewish communities. A

By consulting a professional matchmaker to find a

bride, Leo is acting more like his immigrant
grandparents than an American Jew of the 1950s. In
Yiddish, the secular language of many European and
American Jewish communities, the word for
matchmaker is shadchen (pronounced shod-hun).
Before the seventeenth century, the shadchen was a
highly respected person, responsible for the
11

perpetuation of the Jewish people through arranged

marriages. As European Jewish communities grew
larger and as modern secular notions of romantic
love became pervasive, professional matchmakers
became less scrupulous in their dealings and were
frequently the objects of satire and derision. Indeed
a wealth of humor at the expense of
the shadchen developed during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries; representative is the remark of
the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916),
who quipped that the shadchen was best defined as
a dealer in livestock.

Leo Finkle into the existential nature of love. When

at the end of the story Salzman says Kaddish, the
traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, he is
commemorating the death of the old Leo who was
incapable of love. But he is also celebrating Leos
birth into a new life.
Both Richard Reynolds and Bates Hoffer offer
interpretations of The Magic Barrel based on
specific Jewish religious traditions. Reynoldss focus
is on the role of Kaddish, maintaining that Salzman
hopes that Leo will bring Stella, the prodigal
daughter, back to a moral life. In that case, reciting
the Kaddish is particularly appropriate given the
ancient prayers emphasis on resurrection. Hoffer
compares the five-part structure of the story to the
Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, the
sacred text of Judaism) and claims that Leo has
broken a majority of the ten commandments.

Regardless, the shadchen tradition survived Jewish

immigration to the United States. In his history of
Jewish immigrant life on New York Citys lower east
side, World of our Fathers, Irving Howe describes
the typicalshadchen as similar to Malamuds Pinye
Salzman: Affecting an ecclesiastic bearing, the
matchmaker wore a somber black suit with a halffrock effect, a silk yarmulke (skullcap), a full beard.
The matchmaker, according to Howe, customarily
received 5 percent of the dowry in addition to a flat
fee, neither one nor both enough to make him rich.
Pinye Salzman is in many ways, then, a stereotypical
figure who has stepped from the world of Jewish oral
humor into the pages of Malamuds story. Leo, in
seeking the shadchens help in the 1950s, reveals
himself not only as a formal, but as a very old
fashioned young man.

Finally Carmen Cramer maintains that Leos story is

a journey of emotional maturity. Rather, The Magic
Barrel chronicles the rabbinical students
Americanization, his gradual assimilation into
American culture. Cramer asserts that Finkle
possesses few of the typical American traits
decisiveness, emotionality, action-orientation but
he melts into the American pot by the end of
Bernard Malamuds polished piece of writing. . . .
Compare & Contrast

Critical Overview

When Malamuds The Magic Barrel first appeared

in Partisan Review in 1954, it provided a colorful
glimpse into the world of American Jews. Fours
years later, after his second novel, The Assistant, had
been enthusiastically received, Malamud reprinted
The Magic Barrel as the title story in a collection of
his short fiction. The collection sold well, and was
praised by reviewers for its honesty, irony, and acute
perception of the moral dilemmas of American Jews.
It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1959.

1950s: Decades of immigration from

Eastern and Western Europe have led to a
considerable Jewish population in the
United States. Strong and vibrant Jewish
communities thrive in many American
cities. Yet discrimination against the Jewish
people exists.
1990s: Through
intermarriage
and
assimilation, many people in the Jewish
community believe that Jewish culture is
endangered. Unfortunately, discrimination
still exists in the United States, but many
groups
fight
misinformation
and
discrimination against Jews.

Between the publication of the collection in 1958 and

his death in 1986, Bernard Malamud became one of
Americas most respected writers of fiction,
publishing six more novels and numerous collections
of short fiction. Malamuds writing has been the
subject of critical debate for three decades. Writing
in 1966, Sidney Richman examines the emotional
sterility of the protagonist Leo Finkle. According to
Richman, . . . Finkle knows the word but not the
spirit; and he makes it clear that in a secret part of
his heart he knows it.

1950s: The Jewish matchmaker, also

known as the shadchen, performs a vital
function within the community. Arranged
marriage, although losing popularity among
Jewish families, is still a viable option for
young Jewish men and women of age.
1990s: Matchmaking is considered an
antiquated tradition. It is mainly used in
orthodox Jewish communities, as other
networking opportunities allow Jewish men
and women to meet and find possible
marriage partners.

Theodore C. Miller, in 1972, compares The Magic

Barrel to Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter, pointing
out that both stories explore the love of the minister
and the whore. Unlike Hawthornes minister,
Arthur Dimmesdale, however, Malamuds rabbinical
student, Finkle, comes to accept Stella for the
reason that he accepts universal guilt. Miller also
contends that Salzman has arranged the love affair
between Leo and Stella because he wishes to initiate
12

Criticism

a study of the same material over a wide field. He

writes: "The identity of Portia's three suitors is clear
from their choice: the Prince of Morocco chooses the
gold caskethe is the sun; the Prince of Arragon
chooses the silver caskethe is the moon; Bassanio
chooses the leaden caskethe is the star youth." In
support of this explanation he cites an episode from the
Esto nian folk-epic "Kalewipoeg," in which the three
suitors appear undisguisedly as the sun, moon and star
youths (the last being "the Pole-star's eldest boy") and
once again the bride falls to the lot of the third.
Thus our little problem has led us to an astral myth!
The only pity is that with this explanation we are not at
the end of the matter. The question is not exhausted,
for we do not share the belief of some investigators that
myths were read in the heavens and brought down to
earth; we are more inclined to judge with Otto Rank4
that they were projected on to the heavens after having
arisen elsewhere under purely human conditions. It is
in this human content that our interest lies.
Let us look once more at our material. In the
Estonian epic, just as in the tale from the Gesta
Romanorum, the subject is a girl choosing between the
three suitors; in the scene from The Merchant of Venice
the subject is apparently the same, but at the same time
something appears in it that is in the nature of an
inversion of the theme: a man chooses between three
caskets. If what we were concerned with were a dream, it
would occur to us at once that caskets are also
women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and
therefore of a woman herself like coffers, boxes, cases,
baskets, and so on.5 If we boldly assume that there are
symbolic substitutions of the same kind in myths as
well, then the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice
really becomes the inversion we suspected. With a
wave of the wand, as though we were in a fairy tale,
we have stripped the astral garment from our theme;
and now we see that the theme is a human one, a
man's choice between three women.
This same content, however, is to be found in another
scene of Shakespeare's, in one of his most powerfully
moving dramas; not the choice of a bride this time, yet
linked by many hidden similarities to the choice of the
casket in The Merchant of Venice. The old King Lear
resolves to divide his kingdom while he is still alive
among his three daughters, in proportion to the amount
of love that each of them expresses for him. The two elder
ones, Goneril and Regan, exhaust themselves in
asseverations and laudations of their love for him; the
third, Cordelia, refuses to do so. He should have
recognized the unassuming, speechless love of his third
daughter and rewarded it, but he does not recognize
it. He disowns Cordelia, and divides the kingdom
between the other two, to his own and the general ruin.
Is not this once more the scene of a choice between
three women, of whom the youngest is the best, the most
excellent one?
There will at once occur to us other scenes from
myths, fairy tales and literature, with the same
situation as their content. The shepherd Paris has to
choose between three goddesses, of whom he declares
the third to be the most beautiful. Cinderella, again, is a
youngest daughter, who is preferred by the prince to her
two elder sisters. Psyche, in Apuleius's story, is the
youngest and fairest of three sisters. Psyche is, on the
one hand, revered as Aphrodite in human form; on the
other, she is treated by that goddess as Cinderella was

Freud invokes the concept of reaction formation: a

thing consumed (or almost consumed) by its opposite.
The third casket and the third daughter have been
transformed into the prizes. Yet, says Freud, lead
seems dull as compared to gold and silver just as
Cordelia lavishes no praise on her father and then
dies. According to Freud, her deathall deathis the
underlying wager of such interpretive choices. To
return to its mythic origins, Shakespeare's story
harkens back to the bifurcation of woman as the
goddess of love and the goddess of death. Cordelia
and that leaden casket appear to be what man
desires most: the unconditional love of a woman (his
mother), but they are both imbued with the
destruction that mother earth brings. Cordelia's
death thus is not her own; it is the dream image of
Lear's own death; "the silent Goddess of Death, will
take him into her arms."

THE THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS

I

Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy and

the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion
for posing and solving a small problem.
The first of these scenes is the suitors' choice between
the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. The fair and
wise Portia is bound at her father's bidding to take as
her husband only that one of her suitors who chooses
the right casket from among the three before him. The
three caskets are of gold, silver and lead: the right
casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two
suitors have already departed unsuccessful: they have
chosen gold and silver. Bassanio, the third, decides in
favour of lead; thereby he wins the bride, whose
affection was already his before the trial of fortune.
Each of the suitors gives reasons for his choice in a
speech in which he praises the metal he prefers and
depreciates the other two. The most difficult task thus
falls to the share of the fortunate third suitor; what he
finds to say in glorification of lead as against gold and
silver is little and has a forced ring. If in psycho-analytic
practice we were confronted with such a speech, we
should suspect that there were concealed motives
behind the unsatisfying reasons produced.
Shakespeare did not himself invent this oracle of the
choice of a casket; he took it from a tale in the Gesra
fiomanorum,1 in which a girl has to make the same
choice to win the Emperor's son.2 Here too the third
metal, lead, is the bringer of fortune. It is not hard to
guess that we have here an ancient theme, which
requires to be interpreted, accounted for and traced
back to its origin. A first conjecture as to the meaning
of this choice between gold, silver and lead is quickly
confirmed by a statement of Stuck-en's,3 who has made
13

treated by her stepmother and is set the task of

sorting a heap of mixed seeds, which she accomplishes
with the help of small creatures (doves in the case of
Cinderella, ants in the case of Psyche).6 Anyone who
cared to make a wider survey of the material would
undoubtedly discover other versions of the same theme
preserving the same essential features.
Let us be content with Cordelia, Aphrodite, Cinderella
and Psyche. In all the stories the three women, of whom
the third is the most excellent one, must surely be
regarded as in some way alike if they are represented
as sisters. (We must not be led astray by the fact that
Lear's choice is between three daughters; this may
mean nothing more than that he has to be represented
as an old man. An old man cannot very well choose
between three women in any other way. Thus they
become his daughters.)
But who are these three sisters and why must the
choice fall on the third? If we could answer this question,
we should be in possession of the interpretation we are
seeking. We have once already made use of an
application of psycho-analytic technique, when we
explained the three caskets symbolically as three
women. If we have the courage to proceed in the same
way, we shall be setting foot on a path which will lead
us
first
to
something
unexpected
and
incomprehensible, but which will perhaps, by a
devious route, bring us to a goal.
It must strike us that this excellent third woman has
in several instances certain peculiar qualities besides
her beauty. They are qualities that seem to be tending
towards some kind of unity; we must certainly not
expect to find them equally well marked in every
example. Cordelia makes herself unrecognizable,
inconspicuous like lead, she remains dumb, she "loves
and is silent."7 Cinderella hides so that she cannot be
found. We may perhaps be allowed to equate
concealment and dumbness. These would of course be
only two instances out of the five we have picked out.
But there is an intimation of the same thing to be
found, curiously enough, in two other cases. We have
decided to compare Cordelia, with her obstinate
refusal, to lead. In Bassanio's short speech while he
is choosing the casket, he says of lead (without in any
way leading up to the remark):

If we decide to regard the peculiarities of our "third

one" as concentrated in her "dumbness," then psychoanalysis will tell us that in dreams dumbness is a
common representation of death.11
More than ten years ago a highly intelligent man told me
a dream which he wanted to use as evidence of the
telepathic nature of dreams. In it he saw an absent
friend from whom he had received no news for a very
long time, and reproached him energetically for his
silence. The friend made no reply. It afterwards turned
out that he had met his death by suicide at about the
time of the dream. Let us leave the problem of telepathy
on one side:12 there seems, however, not to be any
doubt that here the dumbness in the dream
represented death. Hiding and being unfindablea
thing which confronts the prince in the fairy tale of
Cinderella three times, is another unmistakable
symbol of death in dreams; so, too, is a marked pallor,
of which the "paleness" of the lead in one reading of
Shakespeare's text is a reminder. 13 It would be very much
easier for us to transpose these interpretations from the
language of dreams to be mode of expression used in
the myth that is now under consideration if we could
make it seem probable that dumbness must be
interpreted as a sign of being dead in productions
other than dreams.
At this point I will single out the ninth story in
Grimm's Fairy Tales, which bears the title "The
Twelve Brothers."14 A king and a queen have twelve
children, all boys. The king declares that if the
thirteenth child is a girl, the boys will have to die. In
expectation of her birth he has twelve coffins made. With
their mother's help the twelve sons take refuge in a
hidden wood, and swear death to any girl they may
meet. A girl is born, grows up, and learns one day from
her mother that she has had twelve brothers. She decides
to seek them out, and in the wood she finds the
youngest; he recognizes her, but is anxious to hide her
on account of the brothers' oath. The sister says: "I
will gladly die, if by so doing I can save my twelve
brothers." The brothers welcome her affectionately,
however, and she stays with them and looks after their
house for them. In a little garden beside the house grow
twelve lilies. The girl picks them and gives one to each
brother. At that moment the brothers are changed into
ravens, and disappear, together with the house and
garden. (Ravens are spirit-birds; the killing of the
twelve brothers by their sister is represented by the
picking of the flowers, just as it is at the beginning of the
story by the coffins and the disappearance of the
brothers.) The girl, who is once more ready to save her
brothers from death, is now told that as a condition she
must be dumb for seven years, and not speak a single
word. She submits to the test, which brings her herself
into mortal danger. She herself, that is, dies for her
brothers, as she promised to do before she met them.
By remaining dumb she succeeds at last in setting the
ravens free.
In the story of "The Six Swans"15 the brothers who are
changed into birds are set free in exactly the same way
they are restored to life by their sister's dumbness.
The girl has made a firm resolve to free her brothers,
"even if it should cost her her life"; and once again (being
the wife of the king) she risks her own life because she
refuses to give up her dumbness in order to defend
herself against evil accusations.

Thy paleness8 moves me more than eloquence.

That is to say: "Thy plainness moves me more than the
blatant nature of the other two." Gold and silver are
"loud"; lead is dumb in fact like Cordelia, who
"loves and is silent."9
In the ancient Greek accounts of the Judgement of
Paris, nothing is said of any such reticence on the part
of Aphrodite. Each of the three goddesses speaks to the
youth and tries to win him by promises. But, oddly
enough, in a quite modern handling of the same scene
this characteristic of the third one which has struck us
makes its appearance again. In the libretto of Offenbach's
La Belle Helene, Paris, after telling of the solicitations of
the other two goddesses, describes Aphrodite's
behaviour in this competition tor the beauty-prize:
La troisieme, ah! la troisieme . . .
La troisieme ne dit rien.
EiJe eut le prix tout de meme . . .10
14

It would certainly be possible to collect further

evidence from fairy tales that dumbness is to be
understood as representing death. These indications
would lead us to conclude that the third one of the
sisters between whom the choice is made is a dead
woman. But she may be something else as well
namely, Death itself, the Goddess of Death. Thanks to a
displacement that is far from infrequent, the qualities
that a deity imparts to men are ascribed to the deity
himself. Such a displacement will surprise us least of
all in relation to the Goddess of Death, since in
modern versions and representations, which these
stories would thus be forestalling, Death itself is nothing
other than a dead man.
But if the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death,
the sisters are known to us. They are the Fates, the
Moerae, the Parcae or the Norns, the third of whom is
called Atropos, the inexorable.

and of the divine Order which causes the same thing to

recur in Nature in an unalterable sequence.
This discovery of Nature reacted on the conception of
human life. The nature-myth changed into a human
myth: the weather-goddesses became goddesses of Fate.
But this aspect of the Horae found expression only in
the Moerae, who watch over the necessary ordering of
human life as inexorably as do the Horae over the
regular order of nature. The ineluctable severity of Law
and its relation to death and dissolution, which had been
avoided in the charming figures of the Horae, were now
stamped upon the Moerae, as though men had only
perceived the full seriousness of natural law when they
had to submit their own selves to it.
The names of the three spinners, too, have been
significantly explained by mythologists. Lachesis, the
name of the second, seems to denote "the accidental
that is included in the regularity of destiny"18or, as we
should say, "experience"; just as Atropos stands for "the
ineluctable"Death. Clotho would then be left to mean
the innate disposition with its fateful implications.
But now it is time to return to the theme which we are
trying to interpretthe theme of the choice between
three sisters. We shall be deeply disappointed to
discover how unintelligible the situations under review
become and what contradictions of their apparent
content result, if we apply to them the interpretation
that we have found. On our supposition the third of the
sisters is the Goddess of Death, Death itself. But in the
Judgement of Paris she is the Goddess of Love, in the
tale of Apuleius she is someone comparable to the
goddess for her beauty, in The Merchant of Venice she
is the fairest and wisest of women, in King Lear she
is the one loyal daughter. We may ask whether there
can be a more complete contradiction. Perhaps,
improbable though it may seem, there is a still more
complete one lying close at hand. Indeed, there
certainly is; since, whenever our theme occurs, the
choice between the women is free, and yet it falls on
death. For, after all, no one chooses death, and it is
only by a fatality that one falls a victim to it.
However, contradictions of a certain kind
replacements by the precise oppositeoffer no
serious difficulty to the work of analytic interpretation.
We shall not appeal here to the fact that contraries are
so often represented by one and the same element in
the modes of expression used by the unconscious, as
for instance in dreams.19 But we shall remember that
there are motive forces in mental life which bring about
replacement by the opposite in the form of what is known
as reaction-formation; and it is precisely in the
revelation of such hidden forces as these that we look for
the reward of this enquiry. The Moerae were created as a
result of a discovery that warned man that he too is a
part of nature and therefore subject to the immutable
law of death. Something in man was bound to struggle
against this subjection, for it is only with extreme
unwillingness that he gives up his claim to an
exceptional position. Man, as we know, makes use of his
imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that
reality does not satisfy. So his imagination rebelled
against the recognition of the truth embodied in the
myth of the Moerae, and constructed instead the myth
derived from it, in which the Goddess of Death was
replaced by the Goddess of Love and by what was
equivalent to her in human shape. The third of the
sisters was no longer Death; she was the fairest, best,

II
We will for the time being put aside the task of inserting
the interpretation that we have found into our myth,
and listen to what the mythologists have to teach us
about the role and origin of the Fates.16
The earliest Greek mythology (in Homer) only knew a
single Molpa, personifying inevitable fate. The further
development of this one Moera into a company of three
(or less often two) sister-goddesses probably came
about on the basis of other divine figures to which the
Moerae were closely relatedthe Graces and the Horae
[the Seasons].
The Horae were originally goddesses of the waters of
the sky, dispensing rain and dew, and of the clouds
from which rain falls; and, since the clouds were
conceived of as something that has been spun, it came
about that these goddesses were looked upon as
spinners, an attribute that then became attached to the
Moerae. In the sun-favoured Mediterranean lands it is
the rain on which the fertility of the soil depends, and
thus the Horae became vegetation goddesses. The
beauty of flowers and the abundance of fruit was their
doing, and they were accredited with a wealth of
agreeable and charming traits. They became the divine
representatives of the Seasons, and it is possibly owing
to this connection that there were three of them, if the
sacred nature of the number three is not a sufficient
explanation. For the peoples of antiquity at first
distinguished only three seasons: winter, spring and
summer. Autumn was only added in late Graeco-Roman
times, after which the Horae were often represented in
art as four in number.
The Horae retained their relation to time. Later they
presided over the times of day, as they did at first over
the times of the year; and at last their name came to be
merely a designation of the hours (heure, ora). The
Norns of German mythology are akin to the Horae and
the Moerae and exhibit this time-signification in their
names.17 It was inevitable, however, that a deeper view
should come to be taken of the essential nature of these
deities, and that their essence should be transposed
on to the regularity with which the seasons change.
The Horae thus became the guardians of natural law
15

most desirable and most lovable of women. Nor was

this substitution in any way technically difficult: it was
prepared for by an ancient ambivalence, it was carried
out along a primaeval line of connection which could
not long have been forgotten. The Goddess of Love
herself, who now took the place of the Goddess of Death,
had once been identical with her. Even the Greek
Aphrodite had not wholly relinquished her connection
with the underworld, although she had long
surrendered her chthonic role to other divine figures,
to Persephone, or to the tri-form Artemis-Hecate. The
great Mother-goddesses of the oriental peoples,
however, all seem to have been both creators and
destroyersboth goddesses of life and fertility and
goddesses of death. Thus the replacement by a wishful
opposite in our theme harks back to a primaeval
identity.
The same consideration answers the question how
the feature of a choice came into the myth of the three
sisters. Here again there has been a wishful reversal.
Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In
this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized
intellectually. No greater triumph of wish-fulfilment is
conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is
obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a
figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of
women.
On closer inspection we observe, to be sure, that the
original myth is not so thoroughly distorted that traces
of it do not show through and betray its presence. The
free choice between the three sisters is, properly
speaking, no free choice, for it must necessarily fall
on the third if every kind of evil is not to come about,
as it does in King Lear. The fairest and best of women,
who has taken the place of the Death-goddess, has kept
certain characteristics that border on the uncanny, so
that from them we have been able to guess at what lies
beneath.20
So far we have been following out the myth and its
transformation, and it is to be hoped that we have
correctly indicated the hidden causes of the
transformation. We may now turn our interest to the
way in which the dramatist has made use of the
theme. We get an impression that a reduction of the
theme to the original myth is being carried out in his
work, so that we once more have a sense of the moving
significance which had been weakened by the
distortion. It is by means of this reduction of the
distortion, this partial return to the original, that the
dramatist achieves his more profound effect upon us.
To avoid misunderstandings, I should like to say that
it is not my purpose to deny that King Lear's dramatic
story is intended to inculcate two wise lessons: that
one should not give up one's possessions and rights
during one's lifetime, and that one must guard against
accepting flattery at its face value. These and similar
warnings are undoubtedly brought out by the play; but
it seems to me quite impossible to explain the
overpowering effect of King Lear from the impression that
such a train of thought would produce, or to suppose
that the dramatist's personal motives did not go beyond
the intention of teaching these lessons. It is suggested,
too, that his purpose was to present the tragedy of
ingratitude, the sting of which he may well have felt in
his own heart, and that the effect of the play rests on the
purely formal element of its artistic presentation; but

this cannot, so it seems to me, take the place of the

understanding brought to us by the explanation we
have reached of the theme of the choice between the
three sisters.
Lear is an old man. It is for this reason, as we have
already said, that the three sisters appear as his
daughters. The relationship of a father to his children,
which might be a fruitful source of many dramatic
situations, is not turned to further account in the play.
But Lear is not only an old man: he is a dying man. In
this way the extraordinary premiss of the division of
his inheritance loses all its strangeness. But the
doomed man is not willing to renounce the love of
women; he insists on hearing how much he is loved.
Let us now recall the moving final scene, one of the
culminating points of tragedy in modern drama. Lear
carries Cordelia's dead body on to the stage. Cordelia
is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes
intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess
who, like the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries
away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal
wisdom, clothed in the primaeval myth, bids the old
man renounce love, choose death and make friends
with the necessity of dying.
The dramatist brings us nearer to the ancient theme
by representing the man who makes the choice
between the three sisters as aged and dying. The
regressive revision which he has thus applied to the
myth, distorted as it was by wishful transformation,
allows us enough glimpses of its original meaning to
enable us perhaps to reach as well a superficial
allegorical interpretation of the three female figures in
the theme. We might argue that what is represented
here are the three inevitable relations that a man has
with a womanthe woman who bears him, the woman
who is his mate and the woman who destroys him; or
that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the
mother in the course of a man's lifethe mother
herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern,
and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once
more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the
love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the
third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death,
will take him into her arms.

NOTES
1. [A mediaeval collection of stories of unknown
authorship.]Trans.
2.
3.

Brandes (1896).
Stucken (1907, 655).

4. Rank (1909, 8 ff.).

5. [See The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a),
Standard Ed., 5, 354.]Trans.
6. I have to thank Dr. Otto Rank for calling my
attention to these similarities. [Cf. a reference to this
in Chapter XII of Group Psychology (1921c),
Standard Ed., 18,136.]Trans.
7. [From an aside of Cordelia's, Act I, Scene 1.]
Trans.
8. "Plainness" according to another reading.
9. In Schlegel's translation this allusion is quite
16

lost: indeed, it is given the opposite meaning: "Dein

schlichtes VVesen spricht beredt mich an." ["Thy
plainness speaks to me with eloquence."]Trans.

On "The Theme of the Three Caskets"

10.
[Literally: "The third one, ah! the third one . . .
the third one said nothing. She won the prize all the
same."The quotation is from Act I, Scene 7, of
Meilhac and Halevy's libretto. In the German version
used by Freud "the third one" "blieb
stumm""remained dumb."]Trans.
11. In Stekel's Sprache des Traumes, too,
dumbness is mentioned among the "death" symbols
(1911a, 351). [Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900a), Standard Ed., 5, 357.] Trans.
12. [Cf. Freud's later paper on "Dreams and
Telepathy" (1922a).]Trans.
13.

Stekel (1911a), loc. cit.

14. ["Die zwolf Briider." Grimm, 1918, 1, 42.]

Trans.
15. ["Die sechs Schwane." Grimm, 1918, 1, 217
(No. 49).]Trans.
16. What follows is taken from Roscher's lexicon
[1884-1937], under the relevant headings.
17. [Their names may be rendered: "What was,"
"What is," "What shall be."]Trans.
18. Roscher [ibid.], quotingPreller, ed. Robert
(1894).

In "The Theme of the Three Caskets," Sigmund

Freud presents a wealth of extremely complex
thoughts in just a few short pages. At the beginning
are two scenes from Shakespeare, in which the
number three plays an essential role: First, the
choice of three pretenders to Portia's hand
between threemetal caskets in The Merchant of
Venice; and second, in King Lear the dying King's
partition
of
his
kingdom
between
his three daughters, according to the love they show
for him. In both these two plots, the humblest thing
is shown to be the most precious: plain lead on one
side, the mute love of Cordelia on the other.
Although Freud initially draws on Shakespeare as his
source for the choice between caskets; he ends up
relying on myths that deal with the choice a woman
must make between three pretenders, but which is
inverted (as in the case of the choice between the
three caskets and in the logic of the dream) into the
choice a man makes between three caskets, that is,
three women.

19. [Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a),

Standard Ed., 4, 318.]Trans.
20. The Psyche of Apuleius's story has kept many
traits that remind us of her relation with death. Her
wedding is celebrated like a funeral, she has to
descend into the underworld, and afterwards she
sinks into a deathlike sleep (Otto Rank).On the
significance of Psyche as goddess of the spring and
as "Bride of Death," cf. Zinzow (1881).In another of
Grimm's Tales ("The Goose-girl at the Fountain"
["Die Gansehirtin am Brunnen," 1918, 2, 300], No.
179) there is, as in "Cinderella," an alternation
between the beautiful and the ugly aspect of the
third sister, in which one may no doubt see an
indication of her double naturebefore and after the
substitution. This third daughter is repudiated by
her father, after a test which is almost the same as
the one in King Lear. Like her sisters, she has to
declare how fond she is of their father, but can find
no expression for her love but a comparison with
salt. (Kindly communicated by Dr. Hanns Sachs.)

This leads Freud to evoke other scenes that turn on

the number three in myths, folklore and literature,
for instance constellations of three sisters where the
choice always fall upon the third one who is the most
unique. Freud identifies this uniqueness of the third
as her "muteness," and then recalls how muteness in
psychic life is typically a representation of death. The
third daughter, seen from this perspective, may be
viewed as Death, the Goddess of Death. The sisters
appear, consequently, as the three daughters of Fate
according to mythological tradition, the
three Moirai, Parcae, or Norns.
Freud's detour through mythology makes the
goddesses of fate represent the inexorable Law of
Nature, and thus of the passing of time and the
ineluctability of death as well.
17

Returning to the choice between three sisters, Freud

seeks to soften any resultant contradictions between
this detour through mythology and the specific
choice itself by reminding us that fantasy activity
typically inverts what is disagreeable into its
contrary. Fatality, the inexorability of death, is
transformed into a free choice. InKing Lear the old
man appears at the end carrying the dead Cordelia in
his arms. Freud refers the powerful effect this
produces to the latent message transpiring behind
the manifest representation of the scene: in fact it is
Cordelia, Goddess of Death, who carries the dead
king off the battlefield.

in the history of Jewish-American writing. For

perhaps a decade, from the mid-1950s to the mid1960s, the American literary imagination seemed to
have been captured by a series of books by and about
Jews. In 1953 Saul Bellow published The Adventures
of Augie March, a story of tragicomic misadventures
set in Chicagos Jewish immigrant milieu. In 1957
Malamud brought out his second novel, The
Assistant, the tale of an impoverished Brooklyn
grocer who becomes a kind of Jewish everyman.
1959 saw the literary debut of Philip Roth,
whose Goodbye, Columbus was the account of a
doomed love affair between two Jewish young
people divided by social class.

Although a minor work, this magisterial essay

demonstrates concretely, even in its use of free
association, thefecundity of the analytical method
when applied to literature, myths, and folklore;
while at the same time illustrating the laws of
psychical functioning, such as the inversion of a wish
into its opposite.

Goodbye Columbus won the prestigious National

Book Award for fiction in 1960, as Bellows Augie
March had done in 1954, and as Malamuds
collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, had in
1959. Equally distinguished Jewish-American
writers such as Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller,
and Chaim Potok attracted attention on the
literary scene during these years as well.

In a letter to Sndor Ferenczi dated July 9, 1913,

Freud revealed that the "subjective condition" he
was in when writing this essay was occasioned by the
fact that his third child, Anna, was beginning to
occupy a very unique place in his life.

The novelists who made their reputations during this

time didnt always have Jewish concerns as the focus
of their fiction. Still, for a decade or so, Malamuds
fiction seemed to be part of a movement of the
American novel toward the lives and problems of
Jews. Of course, Jewish-American fiction was not
invented in the 1950s; novels by and about American
Jews comprised a tradition of some significance and
depth by the time Malamud began his career. In one
important respect in its theme of change and
conflict between generations Malamuds The
Magic Barrel is solidly embedded in the tradition of
Jewish-American fiction.

Source Citation
Freud, Sigmund. (1913f). Das Motiv der
Kstchenwahl. Imago 2, 257-266; GW, 10, 24-37;
The theme of the three caskets. SE, 12: 291-301.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, and Ferenczi, Sndor (1992-2000).
The correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sndor
Ferenczi. (Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder, and Patrizia
Giampieri-Deutsch, Eds.; Peter T. Hoffer, Trans.).;
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.

The first important Jewish-American novel was

Mary Antins The Promised Land of 1912. Born in
Russian Poland, Antin immigrated to Boston as a
child in 1894 and became a social worker in the
immigrant neighborhoods of that city. The Promised
Land is based on Antins own immigrant experience,
contrasting the poverty and persecution of Jewish
life in Eastern Europe with the freedom and
economic opportunity available to immigrants in the
United States.

Benjamin Goluboff

The vision of America is not so happy, however,

in The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan
(1917). Cahan was a Russian immigrant who found
success in America as an editor and journalist. (He
edited the The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish
newspaper in which Leo Finkle reads Pinye
Salzmans ad.) Like his creator, David Levinsky
encounters an America where opportunity is
purchased at great sacrifice. As David rises in New
Yorks garment industry, his success costs him love
and personal integrity. Most of all, Davids success
results in his betrayal of those Jewish spiritual
traditions that had sustained his ancestors in Russia.
David ends the novel as a representative of an
immigrant generation that has lost the integrity of
its ancestors.

Goluboff has taught English at Lake Forest College

in Lake Forest, Illinois. In the following essay, he
places the story within the context of Jewish fiction
of the 1950s and focuses on the theme of
intergenerational relations.
Consequently, Finkles transformed character
would suggest that, unlike their ancestors, the
younger generation is open to passion, to change,
and to new beginnings exempt from the influence of
tradition.
Publishing The Magic Barrel in 1954, Bernard
Malamud was at the beginning of his career, and
near the beginning of a brief and remarkable period
18

The theme of change and conflict among generations

appears powerfully in Anzia Yezierskas 1925
novel Bread Givers. Yezierskas novel dramatizes the
conflict between Sara Smolinsky, a lively young
Jewish woman, and her dictatorial father, a Russian
immigrant Rabbi. Rabbi Smolinsky has devoted his
life to study of the Torah, and insists that his
daughters work to support him as he continues his
studies in America. Sara dreams of receiving a
secular American education and becoming a teacher,
but to do so she must defy the will of her father:
More and more I began to see that father, in his
innocent craziness to hold up the Light of the Law to
his children, was a tyrant more terrible than the Tsar
from Russia. Sara eventually realizes her dream,
becoming a teacher in the New York Public Schools,
but only at the price of breaking off her relationship
with her father. When the two reconcile at the end of
the novel, it is because Sara has come to recognize
that the drive and will that allowed her to finish her
education came from her father.

his new resolve to find love on his own.) In his

fragmentary response Salzman seems to say that for
the older generation those who had lived in the
Jewish ghettoes of Europe romantic love was a
frivolous luxury. Survival was what mattered (our
life), not the ladies. With that remark, Salzman
appears to inhabit a past whose dangers are no
longer real to any but himself.
Finkles transformation is complete when he falls in
love with the photograph of Salzmans daughter,
Stella, left accidentally among pictures of the
matchmakers other clients. Loving this fallen
woman, and loving her only on the basis of her
photograph, is just the passionate leap of faith of
which Leo has been previously incapable. His eyes
now weighted with wisdom, Leo has learned at last
the redemptive nature of passion.
Old Salzman, however, is more inflexibly than ever
rooted in tradition. He considers his daughter dead
because of her mysterious sin, and even Finkles
newfound passion for her cant restore Stella to the
living in her fathers eyes. In the storys mysterious
final section, Finkle rushes to Stella with a bouquet
of flowers while: Around the comer, Salzman,
leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.

As Leo Finkle and Pinye Salzman pursue each other

through the pages of Malamuds The Magic Barrel,
the theme of generational conflict presents itself
with rich ambivalence. Its as clear from his
profession an arranger of marriages in the way
traditional to nineteenth-century European Jewish
communities as it is from his Yiddish-inflected
speech that Pinye Salzman is the storys
representative of an older generation of immigrant
Jews. Leo Finkle, born in Cleveland and bearing a
gentile given name, as clearly embodies a younger
population perhaps those second- or thirdgeneration American Jews who came to maturity in
the 1950s. Whats less clear, however, is with which
of the two generations the story encourages us to
empathize. Who has moral authority in the story, old
Salzman or young Finkle?

If we interpret Salzmans Kaddish the traditional

Jewish prayer for the dead as being for his
daughter, then as representative of the older
generation Salzman is so committed to tradition that
he sees only death where life had just begun.
Consequently, Finkles transformed character would
suggest that, unlike their ancestors, the younger
generation is open to passion, to change, and to new
beginnings exempt from the influence of tradition.
One problem with this interpretation is that the
story more than once suggests that Finkles sudden
passion for Stella might not have been an accident,
that it might have been planned by the wily Salzman.
Finkle suspects that the old man is capable of
intrigue. As he walks with Lily Hirschorn, Finkle
senses Salzman to be somewhere around, hiding
perhaps high in a tree along the street, flashing the
lady signals with a pocket mirror. . . . Just before
the storys conclusion, when Salzman has finally
agreed to let Finkle meet Stella, Leo is suddenly
afflicted by a tormenting suspicion that Salzman
had planned it all to happen this way. If Leos
meeting with Stella is part of the matchmakers plan,
then we would have to attribute to him, and to the
older generation he represents, a knowledge of
human frailty and passion superior to that of the
formalistic rabbinical student.

It is tempting to read the story as favoring youth,

especially in light of the emotional transformation
that Leo Finkle undergoes. Leo enters the story as a
cold and passionless young man. He requires a bride
not because he is in love, but because he is about to
be ordained as a rabbi and believes that he will find a
congregation more readily if he is married. Leo
praises Salzmans profession with chilly formalism;
the matchmaker, he says, makes practical the
necessary without hindering joy. After his date with
Lily Hirschorn, Leo comes to recognize and deplore
his own passionlessness. Prompted by the
matchmaker, Lily had expected Finkle to be a man of
great human and spiritual fervor. Leo disappoints
her, of course, and sees himself for the first time as
he truly was unloved and loveless.
In the aftermath of this revelation, Leo appears to
change. He tells the matchmaker, I now admit the
necessity of premarital love. That is, I want to be in
love with the one I marry. Salzmans reply to this
declaration seems to identify the matchmaker with
the older generation: Love? said Salzman,
astounded. After a moment he remarked, For us,
our love is our life, not for the ladies. In the ghetto
they . (Finkle interrupts here with more about

What, then, do we make of the Salzmans

saying Kaddish at the storys conclusion? If his plan
has been all along to educate Leo in the necessity of
passion, then it would be inconsistent with that plan
for Salzman to mourn just when he has succeeded in
bringing the lovers together. Critic Theodore C.
Miller has suggested a persuasive way out of this
dilemma: . . . if Salzman has planned the whole
19

episode,
then
the
matchmaker
through
his Kaddish is commemorating the death of the old
Leo who was incapable of love. But he is also
celebrating Leos birth into a new life. Viewed in
this way, the matchmakers prayer of mourning
celebrates the success of his plan for Leo and Stella,
the Yiddishe kinder (Jewish children).

altogether: he is either a magician or a demon and

exists outside all ordinary determinations (279).
Kleins proposition works better inverted: Salzman
exists entirely
within ordinary determinations.
Everything he does is explicable in naturalistic
terms. Thus approached, the story becomes more
dramatic and ingenious. The happy ending is no
longer assured in advance by elfin sorcery: celestial
ingenuity yields to the human variety. Salzmans
magical powers, like the magic in the barrel,
vanish whence they came: Finkles distracted
globe. A naturalistic interpretation is consistent
with Malamuds authorial creed: I would never, he
said in a rare interview, deliberately flatten a
character to create a stereotype.... Most of all Im
out to create real and passionate human beings
(Field and Field 16).(1)

Because Malamuds The Magic Barrel is a work of

art and not a sociological study of inter-generational
relations, it must remain a matter of interpretation
whether the story privileges the older or younger
generation. Because its central interpretive question
involves this judgment between two generations,
however, The Magic Barrel is a story solidly
grounded in the tradition of Jewish-American
fiction.
Source: Benjamin Goluboff, Overview of The
Magic Barrel, for Short Stories for Students, The
Gale Group, 2000.

The story can be profitably read along the following

lines. Even before he meets Finkle, on the basis of
what the student revealed of himself
in a
curriculum vitae (Malamud 195), the broker
contemplates a marriage between his daughter,
Stella, and the new client.(2) After he meets the
student, the intention solidifies. Salzman heartily
approved of Finkle (194) and let out a so,
contented sigh (195). As commercial Cupid,
Salzman hopes to do to Finkle what Eros does to the
lovelorn in Medieval and Renaissance emblems: put
a hood over his head (hoodwink). If his stratagem
works, he will in one swoop save his daughter and
elevate his own social status. From the outset,
Salzman envisions Finkle as son-in-law, persistently
calling him rabbitrying the respected epithet on
for sizeand assuming a proprietary air. To preserve
an appearance of occupational integrity and, more
importantly, to buy time to sound his prey, the
broker masks, consummately as it turns out, his
predatory intent.

Malamuds Unmagic Barrel

by Gary Sloan

Salzmans comments about his clients disclose his

hidden intent. The remarks are rife with double
entendres and subtexts. His thespian skills, lavishly
on parade throughout the story, are foretold: On the
mothers side comes... one actor (196). Around
Finkle, he is always on: he adjusted his hornrimmed spectacles, gently cleared his throat and
read in an eager voice... . He can under- as well as
overact. When Finkle spurns Sophie P., as Salzman
secretly wishes, the broker hunched his shoulders
in
an
almost
imperceptible
gesture
of
disappointment (196).
Rather than betoken
wizardly locomotion, as some have thought, his
sudden
entrances and exits have a patented
theatrical quality. His motives, too, are of ordinary
provenance. Like Ruth K.s parents, he and his wife
are particular people (197) when it comes to a sonin-lay. They are interested in a professional man,
and in his anxiety to reel Finkle in, Salzman has
become, a la Ruth K.s father, a specialist in stomach
disorders (197). If the broker can land his catch, his
daughter will be thankful for the rest of her life
(196). In another passage ostensibly about Ruth K.,
Salzman obliquely reveals why he is playing

Pinye Salzman, the impoverished marriage broker

in Bernard Malamuds popular story The Magic
Barrel, is usually perceived as an insoluble mixture
of the preternatural and the prosaic, ethereal mentor
and plebeian hustler. He is a shaman and a savant,
a prophet and a procurer at the same time (Gunn
83), half criminal, half messenger of God
(Richman 119). He exists in the realm of sheer
fantasy and in the earthy sphere of gefilte fish,
dingy tenements, and Broadway cafeterias
(Reynolds 101). He possesses in equal measure the
human and the magical characteristics of the god
Pan (Storey 180). He appears now as a human
being, now as possessed of supernatural powers, but
never indubitably either (Dessner, Revisions
253). He is scheming pimp and holy spirit, placed
on earth to bring Leo Finkle from an arid knowledge
of the law to the perception that he can fulfill the
spirit of the law only by loving in this world
(Solotaroff 36). He is the archetypal Trickster who
symbolizes the instinctual and irrational, driven by
the basic needs of sex and hunger (May 94).
Marcus Klein removes him from the human sphere
20

matchmaker for his daughter. We may be glossed

as Salzman and his wife:

flushes, twice, when Salzman asks what interests

him (198, 201). Sophie P., a 24-year-old widow, does
not pass muster. She is damaged goods. Though he
will finally agree to meet Lily H., she hasnt a chance
either: she is neither young nor libidinous, and has a
discomfiting idee fixe on holy men. The 19-year-old,
pretty (or so Salzman says) Ruth K. fails to meet
the exacting specifications because she is a little
lame on the right foot (198). Finkle wants a perfect
ten.

He [Ruths father] wants she should have the best, so

he looks around himself. When we will locate the
right boy he will introduce him and encourage. This
makes a better marriage than if a young girl without
experience takes for herself. (198)
When a curiously bitter Finkle rejects Ruth K. out
of hand, a sullen Salzman imagines himself fatherin-law non grata.

Finkles finicky standards constitute a daunting

challenge for the
matchmaker. Bruised, not
beautified by poverty (208), Stellas only kinship
with Cinderella is the phonic one. Finkle needs a jolt
lest, caught, he prove not worth the catching. The
proximate agent of shock will be Lily Hirschorn,
votary (as Salzman well knows) of the caricaturally
devout. Primed for her man enamored of God
(203), a semi-mystical Wonder Rabbi (206), Lily
will function as gadfly, albeit an unwitting one. Her
balked expectations, Salzman hopes, will induce in
Finkle a guilty conscience. Rightly plumbed, he
might lower his standards a bit.

Finally, he [Finkle] shook his head.

Why not Salzman persisted, the pitch of his voice
rising.
Because I detest stomach specialists.
So what do you care what is his business After you
marry her do you need him Who says he must come
every Friday night in our house? (199)

At his second meeting with Finkle, Salzman again

shows no trace of shamanic disposition. His anxiety
is unfeigned. He is an all-too-mortal schemer in
extremis: His face was gray and meager, his
expression hungry, and he looked as if he would
expire on his feet. His histrionic faculty taxed, he
manages, by some trick of the muscles, to display a
broad smile (199). By upping the anteLily is not
only wealthy, stylish, and cultivated, he tells Finkle,
but, like him, partikiler (202)Salzman at last
mediates a rendezvous.

To net the slippery student, Salzman must do two

things: (1) insure that Finkle is disenchanted with
the regular clients, and (2) correctly package Stella.
The first task is easily discharged. Destitute of magic
powers, the broker has been unable to ward off the
inexorable incursion of modernity.
The
matchmaking institution, like the much-handled
cards (194), has become superannuated. Desirable
prospects now fend for themselves. Hence, the
broker is poor and ill-fed, lives in a very old
tenement house (210), and constantly rushes, a
hapless luftmensch trying to drum up business.
When Finkle remarked that the function of the
marriage broker was ancient and honorable and
that his own parents, brought together by a
matchmaker, had had a successful marriage,
Salzman, machinations already afoot, listened in
embarrassed surprise (194). Finkles respect seems
to Salzman as antiquated as the institution the
broker represents (Finkle later admits he does not
really care for it [199]). The praise nevertheless
rekindles an extinguished idealism: Salzman
experienced a glow of pride in his work, an emotion
that had left him years ago (194). Stella and Finkle
are, as Salzman might say to his wife, two fine
people that they would be wonderful to be married
(207).

When he next sees Finkle, a week later and

subsequent to the rendezvous, the harried broker is
a skeleton with haunted eyes (206). Again, he
shows not a sign of sorcerous clairvoyance. He is
painfully ignorant of the status of his gambit. He
stalwartly feigns a nonchalant attitude:
Casually coughing, Salzman came immediately to
the point: So how did you like her?
Leos anger rose and he could not refrain from
chiding the matchmaker: Why did you lie to me,
Salzman?
Salzmans pale face went dead white, the world had
snowed o him.(206)

Even at the first meeting, Salzman gets an inkling of

the guise in which Stella must eventually appear.
With 25 years in the business, he readily discerns
where Finkles chief interest lies. Notwithstanding
the scholars nose and ascetic lips (195), the
sheltered student seeks a decidedly sublunary love.
He wants a wide field from which to choose: So
few, he asks when he sees Salzman holding but six
cards (195). His second question is, Do you keep
photographs of your clients on file, (195). He has
an eye out for someone young, fresh, and sexy, but
not
too intimidating.(3) Understandably, he

For a perilous moment, Salzman thinks he has been

hoisted on his own petard, hence the apoplectic
reaction. When he realizes Finkle is alluding to Lily,
not Stella, he reclaims his histrionic flair and, with
glib avowals of innocence, smoothly parries the
accusations. Finkle is still son-in-law designate:
The marriage broker fastened hungry eyes on him
(207). Since Finkle is no longer interested in an
arranged marriage (207), Salzman must pin his
hopes on the cheap snapshot of Stella. In a field of
wilting lilies, Stella may flourish.
21

flowers (208), Stella embodies, or so Finkle thinks,

his oxymoronic dream girl: the perpetually virginal
painted woman. Later, when he sees her under the
street lamp, he imagines in a troubled moment
she has on a red dress instead of a white one.
Consciously, he has adopted the role of savior. An
unabashed slut might be hard to convert...to
goodness (213). The virginal white assuages his
austere conscience.

When, unable to fend for himself, Finkle turns in last

resort to the pictures the broker has left, he sees
women all past their prime, all starved behind
bright smiles, not a true personality in the lot. Life,
despite their yoohooings, had passed them by
(208). In them, perhaps, he glimpses his own
future. Then, he beholds Stella, vibrant youth in a
moribund gallery. In his glandular, revved-up
imagination, she smacks of earthy sensuality and
forbidden fruitowing in part, one surmises, to a
lascivious mien coached by her father. Finkle
received an impression, somehow of evil (209)in
the original version, filth (Dessner, Revisions
259).(4) Later, like Jehovah marveling at his own
creation, he examined the face and found it good.
She alone could understand him and help him seek
whatever he was seeking (209). What he seeks is
sexual gratification, but he remains, consciously at
least, ignorant of the need. In this respect, Salzman
(as well as the reader) is well ahead of him.

From start to finish, the story is firmly situated on

the rock of human passion, foible, and aspiration.
Salzmans lot is not without pathos. By contrast,
Malamuds treatment of Finkle is unremittingly
comic(5)
Finkles condition is throughout
reminiscent of Byrons pubescent Don
Juan,
befuddled by his sexual awakening: Now well turn
to Juan. / Poor little fellow! he had no idea / Of his
own case, and never hit the true one (Don Juan,
Canto the First, stanza 86).
The narrators diction is occasionally impish: Finkle
watches with half open mouth as the moon
penetrates a hen-like cloud before dropping out
like an egg (195). The student is at last aroused by
fantasies of Lily H. and walks erectly to meet her,
discreetly, however, resisting the urge to use his
phallic walking stick (202). Later, he solemnly tells
Salzman: I am no longer interested in an arranged
marriage. To be frank, I now admit the necessity of
premarital love. Embarrassed by the Freudian slip
the euphemism for premarital sexhe quickly
emends: That is, I want to be in love with the one I
marry (207). The last we see of Finkle he is rushing
toward Stella with flowers outthrust (214). The
climactically placed verb could hardly be better.

When Finkle, via Mrs. Salzman, summons the

marriage broker, Salzman has
long been on
tenterhooks, the outcome of his ploy in limbo.
Adrenalin pumping, he arrives breathless, having,
he says, rushed (211). When Finkle flashes the
snapshot of Stella and ejaculates, Here is the one I
want (211), Salzman puts on, as one might say, a
stellar performance: he slipped on his glasses and
took the picture into his trembling hand. He turned
ghastly and let out a groan (211-12). Knowing that
Finkle bridles at the hard sale, Salzman now refuses
to sell. The scene is unabashed burlesque, even to a
chase and a hysterical woman, with Salzman now
the masterful human impresario. Slow on the
uptake, Finkle does not immediately grasp that
Stella is (supposed to be) a sexual dynamo.
Salzmans metaphorical inventiveness is sorely
tasked:

For some readers, Stella is even more problematic

than her father. Lionel Trilling remarked that one
need not believe Stella is what her father makes her
out to bepossibly her sexual life is marked merely
by a freedom of the kind that now morality scarcely
reproves (173). Actually, one need not suppose
Stella has any sexual experience at all. In the final
vignette, her eyes are full of desperate innocence,
and she awaits Finkle uneasily and shyly. The
cigarette and red pumps can be glossed as her
thespian fathers contributions, part of the
packaging. This might be Stellas first date.

She is not for you. She is a wild one-wild, without

shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.
What do you mean wild?
Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a
sin. This is why to me she is dead now.
In Gods name, what do you mean?

In the final, often discussed sentence, Salzman,

concealed chaperone, chanted prayers for the
dead. The dead are Stella Salzman and Leo Finkle.
(6) The tone is ambivalent. Though pleased to have
landed his professional man, Salzman knows that
marriage can be lethal to romantic illusions. Earlier,
when Finkle opines that Ruth K. believes in love,
Salzman can barely suppress a guffaw (198). Finkles
love, he long ago deduced, is Iagos sect or scion
of lust. Knowing marriage demands sterner stuff,
Salzman, pious Jew, naturally seeks the aid of higher
powers, having none of his own.

Her I cant introduce to you, Salzman cried.

Why are you so excited?
Why, he asks, Salzman said, bursting into tears.
This is my baby, my Stella, she should burn in
hell. (212)
Salzman is excited because his ploy is working. He
has wrapped Stella in the perfect garb. In Finkles
subconscious, the unholy litany of sin, hell,
wild, and animal reverberates with aphrodisiac
potency. With her impression of youth and spring

NOTES
22

1. Asked whether he read criticism of his own works,

Malamud replied: I like imaginative interpretations
of my books, whether I agree with them or not. I
enjoy criticism that views the work in ways I havent
anticipatedthat surprises me (15).

. The Playfulness of Bernard Malamuds The

Magic Barrel. Essays in Literature 15 (1988):
87-101.
Field, Leslie and Joyce. An Interview with Bernard
Malamud. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Ed. Leslie and Joyce Field.
Englewood Cliffs, N: Prentice-Hall, 1975. 8-17.
Gunn, Giles B. Bernard Malamud and the High Cost
of Living. Adversity and Grace: Studies in
Recent American Literature. Ed. Nathan A. Scott.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. 59-85.
Klein, Marcus. After Alienation. Cleveland: World,
1964.
Malamud, Bernard. The Magic Barrel. New York:
Farrar, 1958.
May, Charles E. Something Fishy in The Magic
Barrel. Studies in American Fiction 14 (1986):
93-98.
Ochshorn, Kathleen G. The Hearts Essential
Landscape: Bernard Malamuds Hero. American
University Studies 24. New York: Peter Lang,
1990.
Reynolds, Richard. The Magic Barrel: Pinye
Salzmans Kadish. Studies in Short Fiction 10
(1973): 100-02.
Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud. New York:
Twayne, 1966.
Solotaroff, Robert. Bernard Malamud: A Study of the
Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Storey, Michael L. Pinye Salzman, Pan and The
Magic Barrel. Studies in Short Fiction 18
(1981): 180-83
Trilling, Lionel. Prefacer to the Experience of
Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1979.
Studies in Short Fiction . Newberry: Winter 1995.
Vol. 32 , Iss. 1; pg. 51 ISSN/ISBN: 00393789
Copyright Newberry College Winter 1995

2. While several readers echo Finkles suspicion that

Salzman planned it all to happen that way (213),
they believe the plan begins only with the placement
of Stellas picture in the envelope. A few believe it
begins earlier, but they adduce the fact as further
evidence of
Salzmans supernatural powers of
ordination (See Storey 180; May 95-96; Ochshorn
61-62). Finkles suspicion may be Malamuds way of
alerting readers to his own narrative strategy.
3. Storey, May, and Dessner (Playfulness) have all
commented on the sexual dimension. It seems to me
they do not go far enough.
4. The story was first published in 1954 in The
Parisan Review and later revised for the 1958
collection The Magic Barrel. In Revisions,
Dessner lists all the differences, most of them minor,
between the versions.
5. In the course of the story, Finkle does not learn as
much about himself as he thinks. Even as he chides
himself for egoism, he wants love to come to him
(206), Stella to help him, to find in her his own
redemption (209, 214; italics added). When Finkle
plumes himself on his new self-awareness, the
narrative voice is distantly wry, the mode comic:
Never in the Five Books and all the Commentaries
mea culpahad the truth been revealed to him....
[H]e drew the consolation that he was a Jew and
that a Jew suffered (205). Perhaps with this new
knowledge of himself he would be more successful
than in the past (206). He had grown a pointed
beard and his eyes were weighted with wisdom
(213).
After Salzman scandalizes Stella, the
treatment of Finkle is pure slapstick:
Leo hurried up to bed and hid under the covers.
Under the covers he thought his life through.
Although he soon fell asleep he could not sleep her
out of his mind. He woke, beating his breast. Though
he prayed to be rid of her, his prayers went
unanswered. Through days of torment he endlessly
struggled not to love her; fearing success, he escaped
it. (213)

Biography
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) is considered
one of the most prominent figures in JewishAmerican literature, a movement that originated in
the 1930s and is known for its tragicomic elements.
Malamud's stories and novels, in which
reality and fantasy are frequently interlaced, have
been compared to parables, myths, and allegories
and often illustrate the importance of moral
obligation. Although he draws upon his Jewish
heritage to address the themes of sin, suffering, and
redemption, Malamud emphasizes human contact
and compassion over orthodox religious dogma.
Malamud's characters, while often awkward and
isolated from society, evoke both pity and humor
through their attempts at survival and salvation.
Sheldon J. Hershinow observed: "Out of the
everyday defeats and indignities of ordinary people,
Malamud creates beautiful parables that capture the
joy as well as the pain of life; he expresses the dignity
of the human spirit searching for freedom and moral

6. Salzmans previous application of the word to

Stella (to me she is dead now) has been often
noted. The word is also applied earlier to Finkle.
The devout image Lily has of him has no relation,
the narrator reports, to the living or dead Finkle
(204).
WORKS CITED
Dessner, Lawrence. Malamuds Revisions to The
Magic
Barrel.
Critique:
Studies
in
Contemporary Fiction 30 (1989): 252-60.
23

growth in the face of hardship, injustice, and the

existential anguish of life.
Malamud was born April 28, 1914, in
Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants.
His parents, whom he described as "gentle, honest,
kindly people," were not highly educated and knew
very little about literature or the arts: "There were no
books that I remember in the house, no records,
music, pictures on the wall." Malamud attended high
school in Brooklyn and received his Bachelor's
degree from the City College of New York in 1936.
After graduation, he worked in a factory and as a
clerk at the Census Bureau in Washington, D. C.
Although he wrote in his spare time, Malamud did
not begin writing seriously until the advent of World
War II and the subsequent horrors of the Holocaust.
He questioned his religious identity and started
reading about Jewish tradition and history. He
explained: "I was concerned with what Jews stood
for, with their getting down to the bare bones of
things. I was concerned with their ethnicality--how
Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living." In
1949, he began teaching at Oregon State University;
he left this post in 1961 to teach creative writing at
Bennington College in Vermont. He remained there
until shortly before his death in 1986.
Malamud's first novel, The Natural (1952),
is considered one of his most symbolic works. While
the novel ostensibly traces the life of Roy Hobbs, an
American baseball player, the work has underlying
mythic elements and explores such themes as
initiation and isolation. For instance, some reviewers
cited evidence of the Arthurian legend of the Holy
Grail; others applied T. S. Eliot's "wasteland" myth
in their analyses. The Natural also foreshadows
what would become Malamud's predominant
narrative focus: a suffering protagonist struggling to
reconcile moral dilemmas, to act according to what
is right, and to accept the complexities and
hardships of existence. Malamud's second novel,
The Assistant (1957), portrays the life of Morris
Bober, a Jewish immigrant who owns a grocery store
in Brooklyn. Although he is struggling to survive
financially, Bober hires a cynical anti-Semitic youth,
Frank Alpine, after learning that the man is
homeless and on the verge of starvation. Through
this contact Frank learns to find grace and dignity in
his own identity. Described as a naturalistic fable,
this novel affirms the redemptive value of
maintaining faith in the goodness of the human soul.
Malamud's first collection of short stories, The
Magic Barrel (1958), was awarded the National
Book award in 1959. Like The Assistant, most of the
stories in this collection depict the search for hope
and meaning within the grim entrapment of poor
urban settings and were influenced by Yiddish
folktales and Hasidic traditions. Many of Malamud's
best-known short stories, including "The Last
Mohican," "Angel Levine," and "Idiots First," were
republished in The Stories of Bernard Malamud in
1983.
A New Life (1961), considered one of
Malamud's most realistic novels, is based in part on
Malamud's teaching career at Oregon State
University. This work focuses on an ex-alcoholic Jew
from New York City who, in order to escape his
reputation as a drunkard, becomes a professor at an

agricultural and technical college in the Pacific

Northwest. Interweaving the protagonist's quest for
significance and self-respect with a satiric mockery
of academia, Malamud explores the destructive
nature of idealism, how love can lead to deception,
and the pain of loneliness. Malamud's next novel,
The Fixer (1966), is considered one of his most
powerful works. The winner of both the Pulitzer
Prize and the National Book Award, this book is
derived from the historical account of Mendel
Beiliss, a Russian Jew who was accused of
murdering a Christian child. Drawing upon Eastern
European Jewish mysticism, The Fixer turns this
terrifying story of torture and humiliation into a
parable of human triumph. With The Tenants (1971),
Malamud returns to a New York City setting, where
the theme of self-exploration is developed through
the contrast between two writers, one Jewish and the
other black, struggling to survive in an urban ghetto.
Within the context of their confrontations about
artistic standards, Malamud also explores how race
informs cultural identity, the purpose of literature,
and the conflict between art and life. Alvin B. Kernan
commented: "[ The Tenants] is extraordinarily
powerful and compelling in its realization of the view
that is central to the conception of literature as a
social institution: that literature and the arts are an
inescapable part of society."
Malamud further addresses the nature of
literature and the role of the artist in Dubin's Lives
(1979). In this work, the protagonist, William Dubin,
attempts to create a sense of worth for himself, both
as a man and as a writer. A biographer who escapes
into his work to avoid the reality of his life, Dubin
bumbles through comically disastrous attempts at
love and passion in an effort to find self-fulfillment.
Malamud's next novel, God's Grace (1982), differs
from his earlier works in scope and presentation of
subject matter. Set in the near future immediately
after a nuclear disaster which leaves only one human
being alive, God's Grace explores the darkness of
human morality, the nature of God, and the vanity
and destruction associated with contemporary life.
Critical reception to this work varied greatly. Some
critics felt that the contrast between the serious
moral fable and the protagonist's penchant for
alternately conversing with God and a group of apes
unique and challenging; others believed the
structure of the novel did not support the
seriousness and ambition of its themes. However,
God's Grace, like all of his works, reveals Malamud's
motivations as a writer and expresses his profound
humanistic concerns. Malamud explained: "It seems
to me that the writer's most important task, no
matter what the current theory of man, or his
prevailing mood, is to recapture his image as human
being as each of us in his secret heart knows it to be."
Novelist and short story writer Bernard
Malamud grew up on New York's East Side where
his Russian-Jewish immigrant parents worked in
their grocery store sixteen hours a day. Malamud
attended high school and college during the height of
the Depression. His own and his family's experience
is clearly echoed in his fiction, much of which
chronicles, as Mervyn Rothstein declares in the New
York Times, "simple people struggling to make their
lives better in a world of bad luck." His writings also
24

are strongly influenced by classic nineteenthcentury American writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Henry
James. In addition his works reflect a postHolocaust consciousness in addressing Jewish
concerns and employing literary conventions drawn
from earlier Jewish literature.
The first major period of Malamud's work
extended from 1949 to 1961 when he was teaching
composition at Oregon State College. Producing
three novels and a collection of short stories during
this period, he won several fiction prizes, including
the National Book Award. Each of the first three
novels feature a schlemiel figure who tries to restore
a Wasteland to a Paradise against a Jewish
background. The setting varies in the novels, but in
the short fiction is most often the East Side of New
York. "The Prison" portrays a small New York
grocery store based on that of Malamud's parents, in
which a young Italian, Tommy Castelli, is trapped.
Similarly "The Cost of Living"--a predecessor of The
Assistant--and "The Bill" both present the grocery
store as a sort of prison. As Leslie and Joyce Field
observe in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of
Critical Essays, "In Malamud's fictional world, there
is always a prison," and in a 1973 interview with the
Fields, Malamud said: "Necessity is the primary
prison, though the bars are not visible to all."
Beneath most Malamudian surfaces lie similar moral
and allegorical meanings.
Malamud's first novel, The Natural, is, as
Earl R. Wasserman declares in Bernard Malamud
and the Critics, "the necessary reference text for a
reading of his subsequent fiction." The work is a
mythic novel, based on the Arthurian legends, in
which the Parsifal figure, Roy (King) Hobbs, restores
fertility to the Fisher King, Pop Fisher, the manager
of a baseball team called The Knights. Pitcher Roy
appears as an Arthurian Knight modeled in part on
Babe Ruth, but his character also probably is drawn
from Chretien de Troye's medieval tale, Lancelot of
the Cart, featuring a Lancelot who is most often
unhorsed and frequently humiliated. As Peter L.
Hays has said in The Fiction of Bernard Malamud,
"Like Lancelot, Malamud's heroes are cut to ribbons
in their quests for love and fortune."
The novel's title is baseball slang for a player
with natural talent, but it can also mean, as it did in
the Middle Ages, an innocent fool. As Philip Roth
has said in Reading Myself and Others, this is "not
baseball as it is played in Yankee Stadium, but a
wild, wacky game." Roy thinks of himself as "Sir
Percy lancing Sir Maldemer, or the first son (with a
rock in his paw) ranged against the primitive papa."
Even more Freudian is Roy's lancelike bat,
Wonderboy, which droops when its phallic hero goes
into a slump and finally splits at the novel's
conclusion.
In an echo of the Black Sox scandal of 1919,
Roy is bribed to throw the pennant game by evileyed Gus Sands, whose Pot of Fire nightclub and
chorus girls wielding pitchforks suggest hell itself.
Though there are few obvious Jewish traces in The
Natural, the prank Roy plays on Gus is a retelling of
a Yiddish prankster tale, with the challenge by the
prankster, the foil or victim's reaction, and the retort
or prank--here Roy's pulling silver dollars out of

Gus's ears and nose. Yet Roy's success is only

temporary. As Glenn Meeter notes in Bernard
Malamud and Philip Roth: A Critical Essay, "From
the grail legend also we know that Roy will fail; for
the true grail seeker must understand the
supernatural character of his quest, and Roy does
not." In the end Roy, defeated, throws his bribe
money in the face of Judge Banner, who is a
dispenser of "dark wisdom, parables and aphorisms
which punctuate his conversation, making him seem
a cynical Poor Richard," as Iska Alter remarks in The
Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the
Fiction of Bernard Malamud. This dramatic scene,
and others in Malamud's work, accord with his
statement in a 1973 interview: "My novels are close
to plays."
Other influences are also clearly at work in
Malamud's first novel. The Natural has significant
references to birds and flowers and steady reminders
of the passage of the seasons. The simplicity of this
pastoral style at its best allows the presentation of
complex ideas in a natural way. A second influence,
as Malamud acknowledged, is film technique. For
example, there are quick movie-like changes of
scene, called jump cuts, when Roy and Memo Paris
are tricked into sleeping with each other. In
addition, the portrayal of Roy has a Chaplinesque
quality of humor to it. Though Malamud would
never again write non-Jewish fiction, The Natural
was a treasure house of reusable motifs and methods
for all his subsequent work.
In 1954 Malamud published one of his
greatest short stories, "The Magic Barrel," which
Sanford Pinsker, in Bernard Malamud: A Collection
of Critical Essays, calls "a nearly perfect blend of
form and content." In this story the matchmaker
Pinye Salzman, using cards listing eligible women
and drawn from his magic barrel, tricks student
rabbi Leo Finkle into a love match with Salzman's
daughter, Stella, a streetwalker. In Judaism, Marcia
Booher Gealy describes the structural essence of
such Hasidic-influenced stories: (1) the inward
journey; (2) the older man tutoring the younger; (3)
the triumph of love; (4) the reality of evil; and (5)
transformation through the tale itself. This structure
merges with another influence, that of nineteenthcentury American romanticism, for Malamud often
joins the Hasidic and Hawthornian in his fables. As
Renee Winegarten comments in Bernard Malamud:
A Collection of Critical Essays, "His magic barrels
and silver crowns, whatever their seal, firmly belong
in the moral, allegorical realm of scarlet letters,
white whales and golden bowls."
Concerning Salzman, as Irving Howe has
said in World of Our Fathers, "The matchmaker, or
shadkhn, is a stereotypical Yiddish figure: slightly
comic, slightly sad, at the edge of destitution." Such
confidence men reappear in Malamud's fiction, in
"The Silver Crown," for example. And Salzman
shows Malamud's early perfection of a JewishAmerican speech, which is neither pure Yiddish
dialect nor mere literary chat, but an imaginative
combination of both. Kathryn Hellerstein observes
in The State of the Language that Yiddish speakers
in Malamud's works are "elderly, static, or declining"
and concludes that for Malamud, Yiddish figures are
25

"a spectral presence of the constraining, delimited,

stultified past."
What many critics have referred to as
Malamud's finest novel, The Assistant, appeared in
1957. As Ihab Hassan has said in The Fiction of
Bernard Malamud, "The Assistant, I believe, will
prove a classic not only of Jewish but of American
literature." Frank Alpine, "the assistant," suggests St.
Francis of Assisi, whose biography, The Little
Flowers, is Alpine's favorite book and whose
stigmata he at one point seems to emulate. Like Roy
in The Natural, Frank is the Parsifal figure who must
bring fertility, or at least new life, to the Fisher King,
here the grocery store owner Morris Bober. Some
critics have contended that Bober may parallel
philosopher Martin Buber, whose I-THOU
philosophy of human relations Bober seems,
however instinctively, to share, though Malamud
himself denied any use of Buber in this novel.
When he stands under a "No Trust" sign,
Bober also recalls Melville's novel, The Confidence
Man. Giving food to a drunk woman who will never
pay, Morris teaches Frank to have compassion for
others. Yet Frank cannot control his passion for
Morris's daughter, Helen. Thus when Frank saves
Helen from an attempted rape, he fails the trial of
the Perilous Bed, rapes her just as she is about to
admit her love for him, and loses her.
Frank and Morris represent a familiar motif
in Malamud's works, that of the father-son pair, the
schlemiel-schlimazel twins. Malamud likes these
doublings and there are three other father/son pairs
in the novel. A favorite definition of these types is
that the schlemiel spills his teacup, and the
schlimazel is the one he spills it on. Norman Leer,
thinking perhaps of Russian novelist Feodor
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, speaks in
Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of
Literature and Ideas of "the notion of the divided
self, and the attraction of two characters who mirror
a part of each other, and are thereby drawn together
as doubles."
Another recurrent feature of Malamudian
narrative, the Holocaust, is never far from the
surface, though it appears almost always in an
oblique way. Morris, in despair over his luckless
grocery store/prison, turns on the gas to commit
suicide, a reminder of the gas chambers of the
Holocaust. And here Malamud introduces from the
world of fantasy a professional arsonist who is like a
figure from hell--recalling the night club women and
their pitchforks in The Natural. In The Assistant, at
Morris's funeral, Frank halts the ceremony by falling
into the open grave while trying to see the rose
Helen had thrown into it. The characters in
Malamud's fiction frequently dream, and in Frank's
dream, St. Francis successfully gives Frank's rose to
Helen. Rachel Ertel declares in Le Roman juif
americain: Une Ecriture minoritaire, "By going
constantly from the real to the supernatural,
Bernard Malamud deadens, nullifies the disbelief of
the reader and gives himself elbow room to narrate
the fables, the parables that make up his novels and
short stories."
In 1958, with the publication of his first
volume of short stories, The Magic Barrel, Malamud
received national recognition and in 1959 won the

National Book Award for the collection. All the

stories in the volume display Malamud's continuing
debt to Hawthorne; as Jackson J. Benson says in
The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, the two writers
"possess the ability to combine, with great skill,
reality and the dream, the natural and supernatural."
Thus there is a kinship between Malamud's "Idiots
First," "The Silver Crown," and "The Magic Barrel"
and Hawthorne's short stories "My Kinsman, Major
Molineux," "Young Goodman Brown," and "The
Birthmark." Moreover, "The First Seven Years"-featuring Feld, a Polish immigrant shoemaker who
refuses to speak Yiddish and who wants his daughter
Miriam to marry a rising young suitor, Max, rather
than his middle-aged but devoted helper, Sobel--is
reminiscent of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," with its
warning about "hardness of the heart." However,
"The First Seven Years" is Hawthorne plus
Holocaust, for Sobel had barely escaped Hitler's
incinerators.
In the years from 1949 to 1961 Malamud
slowly became "one of the foremost writers of moral
fiction in America," as Jeffrey Helterman comments
in Understanding Bernard Malamud. Of his last
work in this first period, Sheldon J. Hershinow
remarks in Bernard Malamud: "A New Life is
Malamud's first attempt at social satire, and much of
the novel is given over to it." Its hero, marginal Jew
Sy Levin, shows the complexity behind the names of
practically all major characters in Malamud. In City
of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970, Tony
Tanner explains that the name Levin means the east,
or light; it is also associated with lightning. Tanner
writes: "I have it direct from Mr. Malamud that by a
pun on `leaven' he is suggesting what the marginal
Jew may bring in attitude to the American scene."
Levin, whose fictional career resembles that of
Malamud, is a former high school teacher who joins
the faculty at Cascadia University in Easchester,
Oregon, a name that suggests a castle of ease.
According to Mark Goldman, in a Critique review,
"Early in the novel, Levin is the tenderfoot
Easterner, the academic sad sack, or schlimazel of
Yiddish literature, invoking nature like a tenement
Rousseau." Levin, then is the schlemiel as lecturer,
who teaches his first class with his fly open, then
bumbles his way into an affair with a coed, Nadalee,
a lady of the lake who has written an essay on nude
bathing. As Sandy Cohen says in Bernard Malamud
and the Trial by Love, "Malamud's favorite method
of portraying a protagonist's struggle to overcome
his vanity is to symbolize it in terms of the Grail
myth. Thus Levin's journey to meet Nadalee takes on
certain aspects of the grail quest." Indeed, Levin
journeys "in his trusty Hudson, his lance at his side."
Later Levin makes love in the woods to
Pauline Gilley; in an echo of English novelist D. H.
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Pauline also
has an impotent husband, Gerald Gilley, future
chairman of the English Department. Against this
pastoral background, complete with the passage of
the seasons, Levin is also the American Adam: as
Hershinow observes, "Immersed in the writings of
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, Levin believes
wholeheartedly the metaphors about America as a
New-World Garden of Eden. By going west he feels
26

he can recapture his lost innocence and escape the

past--become the New-World Adam."
This major love affair is also Hawthornian:
as Paul Witherington notes in Western American
Literature, "Levin's affair with Pauline matures in
Hawthorne fashion to an inner drama of the
ambiguities of paradise." In fact, Levin sees himself
as "Arthur Dimmesdale Levin, locked in stocks on a
platform in the town square, a red A stapled on his
chest." From Levin's point of view, Pauline, whose
love earned him his scarlet letter A, is also the
tantalizing shiksa, the Gentile temptress of so many
Jewish-American novels, not only those of Malamud
but also of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth among
others. As Frederick Cople Jaher points out in the
American Quarterly, to Jewish men, such women
seem to be "exotic insiders" and so represent "tickets
of admission into American society."
At the conclusion of the novel, Gilley asks
Levin why he wants to take on two adopted children
and Gilley's apparently barren wife. Levin replies,
"Because I can, you son of a bitch." And Levin,
defeated in academe, but having impregnated the
barren Pauline, whose flat breasts are beginning to
swell, drives away with his new family, having
agreed with Gilley never again to teach in a
university. This ending, as so often in Malamud, is
ambiguous, for Levin is no longer in romantic love
with Pauline. Here is what Critique contributor Ruth
B. Mandel calls "ironic affirmation"--"The
affirmation itself is ironic in that the state of grace is
unaccompanied by paradise."
After Malamud's move back east to
Bennington College, his second period (roughly
1961-1970) began, and both his stories and his next
two novels took a more cosmopolitan and
international direction. In Bernard Malamud,
Sidney Richman perceptively observes that the title
story in Idiots First is "a morality [play] a la
Everyman in which the sense of a real world (if only
the sense of it) is utterly absorbed by a dreamlandscape, a never-never-land New York City
through which an elderly Jew named Mendel
wanders in search of comfort and aid." Mendel is
indeed a Jewish Everyman, who tries to dodge the
Angel of Death (here named Ginzburg) to arrange
for the future of his handicapped son, Isaac.
Another short story, "The Maid's Shoes,"
reveals the new subject matter and style. Professor
Orlando Krantz, who plays the part of the
comparatively wealthy American as Everyman, tries
to give a small gift to his poor Italian maid, Rosa, but
it is a gift without the understanding that the
impoverished European needs: "But though they
shared the same roof, and even the same hot water
bottle and bathtub, they almost never shared
speech." Here, failures of the heart, common to the
fiction of the first period, are extended to complete
failures of empathy. Furthermore, the story is no
longer fantastic, as in Malamud's first period, but
realistic. Of Rosa, Malamud writes: "She was fortyfive and looked older. Her face was worn but her hair
was black, and her eyes and lips were pretty. She had
few good teeth. When she laughed she was
embarrassed around the mouth." Finally, the story
has a single consistent point of view instead of the
omniscient point of view of the earlier stories. Yet

since that omniscient narration contained

Malamud's often compassionate comments that are
a part of his first period manner, these newer stories
have a bleaker cast to them.
Next to The Assistant in critical reputation
comes The Fixer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award in 1967. In a search for a
suffering Everyman plot, Malamud had thought of
several subjects--the trial of Alfred Dreyfus and the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, among others--before deciding
on a story he had heard from his father as a boy, that
of the trial of Mendel Beiliss for ritual bloodletting
and murder in 1913 in Russia. Through this story,
Malamud also tries to answer the question of how
the death camps in Germany had been possible.
Hero Yakov Bok's last name suggests a scapegoat,
and also the goat mentioned in the song chanted for
the end of the Passover Seder as a symbol of Jewish
survival. As Malamud said in an interview with
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York
Times Book Review, it was necessary "to
mythologize--that is, to make metaphors and
symbols of the major events and characters."
The novel itself covers two years, spring 1911
to winter 1913, during which Bok is imprisoned after
being falsely accused of the ritual murder of a
Gentile boy. Without legal counsel Bok suffers
betrayal, gangrene, poison, and freezing cold, and
finally turns inward to develop a sense of freedom.
In prison this Everyman fixer learns through
suffering to overcome, at least in part, his initial
agnosticism, and his doubts of what is meant by the
Chosen People. He rejects both suicide and a
pardon, and accepts his Jewishness. Finally, in a
dream encounter with Tsar Nicholas II, Bok shoots
the Tsar. As John F. Desmond writes in Renascence:
Essays on Values in Literature, "Yakov has come to
understand that no man is apolitical, especially a
Jew; consequently, if his chance came, as it does in
the imaginary meeting with the Tsar, he would not
hesitate to kill the ruler as a beginning step towards
purging that society of its agents of repression and
injustice, and thus strike a blow for freedom and
humanity." Bok, at least in his dream, is no longer
the passive suffering servant of Isaiah, portrayed in
many of Malamud's first period fictions, but one who
seeks revenge. Has Bok lost more important values?
The dream setting leaves the ending ambiguous, but
Malamud's real subject is not so much Bok himself,
as those, like the Germans, other Europeans, and
Americans during the Holocaust, who either
participate in, or passively observe, the treatment of
Everyman as victim. As the Fields remark, Malamud
repeatedly tried to make clear, especially in this
second period, that Jewish victims are Everyman as
victim, for history, sooner or later, treats all men as
Jews.
The final major work of this second period
was Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. As Leslie
A. Field has written in Bernard Malamud: A
Collection of Critical Essays, "Of all the Malamud
characters, early and late, one must return to Arthur
Fidelman as the Malamud schlemiel par excellence."
The Fidelman stories appeared both separately in
magazines and in two story collections from 1958 to
1969, and they were not originally thought of as a
unit. But the last three stories are tightly linked, and
27

as Robert Ducharme asserts in Art and Idea in the

Novels of Bernard Malamud: Toward "The Fixer,"
Malamud deliberately saved the last story for the
book because he didn't want to let readers know the
ending. Three genres merge in Pictures of Fidelman,
that of the Kunstlerroman or artist novel, the
Bildungsroman or education novel, and the
Huckleberry Finn-like picaresque novel, in which
the main character wanders through a series of
adventures. Fidelman (faith man) encounters
Susskind (sweet child) in the first story or chapter,
"Last Mohican." Susskind is a Jewish folktale type, a
chnorrer, or as Goldman terms him, "a beggar with
style," who wants the second of Fidelman's two suits.
Rebuffed, Susskind steals the first chapter of
Fidelman's book on Italian artist Giotto di Bondone.
Hershinow suggests that "Susskind becomes for
Fidelman a kind of dybbuk (demon) who inhabits his
conscience, destroying his peace of mind." As Cohen
remarks, "So Fidelman begins an active search for
Susskind who begins to take on the roles of alterego, superego, and symbol for Fidelman's true
heritage and past." Here again is the familiar
Malamud motif of the journey that changes a life.
In pursuit, Fidelman visits a synagogue, a
Jewish ghetto, and a graveyard that contains victims
of the Holocaust. Both at the cemetery and in his
crazy pursuit of Susskind, Schlemiel Fidelman
recalls Frank Alpine in The Assistant, for Fidelman
too is linked to St. Francis. In a dream Fidelman sees
Susskind, who shows him a Giotto fresco in which
St. Francis gives his clothing to a poor knight. As
Sidney Richman affirms in Bernard Malamud and
the Critics, "In the same fashion as Frankie Alpine,
Fidelman must discover that the way to the self is
paradoxically through another; and the answer is
heralded by a sudden alteration of the pursuit." At
the end of this artistic pilgrim's progress, "against
his will, Fidelman learns what the ancient rabbis
taught and what Susskind has always known: Jews-that is, human beings, menschen, in Malamud's
terms--are responsible for each other. That is the
essence of being human," Michael Brown relates in
Judaism.
Fidelman must learn in the next stories what
makes a great artist. For example, in the fourth
story, "A Pimp's Revenge," Fidelman returns his
mistress, Esmeralda, to prostitution to pay for his
constantly repainted masterwork, a portrait of her,
first as Mother and Son, then as Brother and Sister,
and finally as Prostitute and Procurer. "The truth is I
am afraid to paint, like I might find out something
about myself," Fidelman says. Esmeralda knows the
secret: "If I have my choice, I'll take life. If there's
not that there's no art." Barbara Lefcowitz justly
argues in Literature and Psychology, "Where
Malamud excels is in his subtle and nearly always
comical juxtaposition of a neurotic character against
a deeper and wider moral and historical context."
Fidelman finally produces a masterpiece, but,
second-rate artist that he is, can't let it alone, and
mars it. The genius knows when to stop, but
Everyman does not, and Esmeralda calls him a
murderer.
In the final story, "Glass Blower of Venice,"
Fidelman tries to play artist once more, under the
reluctant teaching of his homosexual lover Beppo,

but at last gives up art for craftsmanship and returns

to America. Fidelman, the craftsman, no longer the
inadequate artist, has finally achieved the goals
toward which Susskind--and later Esmeralda-pointed him. Samuel I. Bellman argues in Critique
that "more than any other Malamudian character
Fidelman is constantly growing, realizing himself,
transforming his unsatisfactory old life into a more
satisfactory new one." In Bernard Malamud: A
Collection of Critical Essays, Sheldon N. Grebstein
praises the juxtaposition of "the coarsely sexual and
the sublimely aesthetic." Indeed, no other work of
Malamud shows so much appetite for life; as
Helterman has argued: "[Fidelman] also seeks, and
occasionally participates in, a richness of passion not
typical of Malamud's urban heroes." The epigraph
for Pictures of Fidelman is from Yeats: "The intellect
of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of
the work." However, the new Fidelman chooses
"both."
The Tenants inaugurated Malamud's third
and final period. In the works of this period the
heroic structuring of the first period is gone, as are
the Wandering Jews and the Everyman motifs of the
second. Beneath differing surface plots, though, a
new structural likeness appears. Before 1971
Malamud's typical Jewish characters tend to move
towards responsibility rather than towards
achievement; but from 1971 on, they become
extraordinary achievers, or machers.
In The Tenants Harry Lesser, a minor
Jewish novelist, is writing a novel about being
unable to finish a novel, in a kind of infinite
regression. He keeps on living in the apartment
building that landlord Levenspiel (leaven game)
wants to tear down; then a squatter, black writer
Willie Spearmint (Willie Shakespeare), moves into
the building. Willie and Harry are the kind of
doubled pair (drawn from Edgar Allan Poe and
Dostoevsky) that Malamud is fond of, for Harry's
writing is all form, and Willie's is all vitality. Harry
takes over Irene, Willie's Jewish girl; Willie burns
Harry's manuscript; Harry axes Willie's typewriter;
and in a final burst of overachievement, Willie brains
Harry and Harry castrates Willie. The Tenants "ends
in a scream of language," reports Malcolm Bradbury
in Encounter. Though the novel hints at two other
possible endings--by fire, or by Harry's marriage to
Irene--Levenspiel has the last word, which is
Rachmones, or mercy.
Though The Tenants did little for Malamud's
reputation, he continued to place stories in top
American magazines. Mervyn Rothstein reported in
the New York Times that Malamud said at the end of
his life, "With me, it's story, story, story." In
Malamud's next-to-last collection, Rembrandt's
Hat, only one story, "The Silver Crown," is
predominantly Jewish, in sharp contrast to his first
collection, while other stories are more reminiscent
of Chekhov. There is even a visit to the Chekhov
Museum in "Man in the Drawer," a story that shows
the fascination with achievement so dominant in
Malamud's final period. Howard Harvitz, an
intellectual tourist in Russia and a marginal Jew, has
changed his name from Harris back to Harvitz.
Hardly a creative writer himself, he is doing a piece
on museums. A Russian writer, Levitansky--also a
28

marginal Jew, but a determined achiever in spite of

official opposition--intends to smuggle his stories
out of Russia. Harvitz at first doesn't want this
charge, but discovers that four of the stories show
heroes not taking responsibility. After reading them,
Harvitz timorously takes the stories out of Russia.
Dubin's Lives took Malamud over five years
to write, twice as long as any previous novel. Ralph
Tyler in the New York Times Book Review reports
that Malamud said Dubin's Lives was "his attempt at
bigness, at summing up what he ... learned over the
long haul." In the novel, the biographer Dubin is an
isolated achiever, no mere recorder of biographical
facts but a creative, even fictionalizing biographer:
"One must transcend autobiographical detail by
inventing it after it is remembered." Dubin is trying
to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence, a writer who
made passion his religion, yet was impotent. There
had been a glancing counterpointing of Lawrence's
career in A New Life, but here this motif is much
enlarged; as David Levin observes in Virginia
Quarterly Review, "The complexities of Dubin's
subsequent adventures often run parallel to events
in Lawrence's life."
In the kind of psychomachia, or inner
struggle, which some critics see as the essence of
American fiction, Dubin, as Helterman notes, "loses
his memory, his sexual powers, his ability to work,
even his ability to relate to his family. At first, the
only compensation for these losses is a kind of highgrade nostalgia brought about by a process called
reverie." These reveries lead Dubin to a liaison with
young Fanny Bick, whose first name comes from
English novelist Jane Austen's heroine in Mansfield
Park, Fanny Price; Fanny Bick is an Austen heroine
with glands. Like a number of heroines in
Malamud's fiction, she is significantly associated
with wildflowers, fruit, and bird flights. Chiara
Briganti remarks in Studies in American Jewish
Literature that "all the female characters in
Malamud's fiction share a common shallowness and
common values: they all respect marriage and family
life, and, whatever their past, they all seek
fulfillment through a permanent relationship with a
man." But Fanny breaks this stereotypical pattern,
for at the end of Dubin's Lives she ambitiously
intends to become a lawyer.
Dubin's affair in Venice, where the youthful
Fanny almost immediately betrays him with their
gondolier, is that of the schlemiel lover seen before
in Frank Alpine and Sy Levin. Barbara Quart, in
Studies in American Jewish Literature, has seen a
further problem: "While Malamud's central
characters try to break out of their solitude, they
appear to fear love and women as much as they long
for them." But dominant among familiar motifs is
the character of Dubin as the isolated overachiever,
who moves his study from his country house into the
barn to devote all possible energy and space to his
biography. Dubin even begrudges time wasted
thinking about Fanny, with whom he is genuinely in
love.
Malamud's last finished novel, God's Grace,
treats both the original Holocaust and a new,
imagined Holocaust of the future. In ImmigrantSurvivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent
Jewish- American Literature, Dorothy Seldman

Bilik has pointed out that the question of why God

permitted the Holocaust has been an issue in
Malamud's fiction for thirty years; indeed, for
Malamud the Holocaust has been the ultimate mark
of inhumanity, and God's Grace treats the Holocaust
not only as man's inhumanity to man, but as God's
inhumanity to man. The novel is a wild, at times
brilliant, at times confusing description of a second
Noah's Flood. Calvin Cohn, a paleologist and the son
of a rabbi-cantor, had been doing underseas
research when the Djanks and the Druzhkies (Yanks
and Russians) launched an atomic Holocaust and
destroyed every other human. Calvin recalls many
Biblical and literary figures: Parsifal, Romeo,
Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, and Ahab. His
Eve and Juliet is Mary Madelyn, a chimpanzee. An
albino ape appears (possibly an oblique reference to
Moby Dick) with other apes as Yahoos from
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and the
chimpanzee Buz serves as Cohn's Isaac, Caliban, and
man Friday. There is even an Arthurian spear used
to harpoon the albino ape.
[]
This complex novel baffled its first
reviewers; for example, Joseph Epstein wrote in
Commentary: "Much of the humor in the novel is of
the kind known as faintly amusing, but the chimp
humor, on the scale of wit, is roughly three full rungs
down from transvestite jokes." Part of the difficulty
in the novel is that God's Grace does not fall into a
clear genre category; in a 1982 Christian Science
Monitor article, Victor Howes called it "somewhat
east of sci-fi, somewhat west of allegory." However,
like much of Malamud's work, God's Grace not only
reflects the Jewish Old Testament but also partakes
of an American colonial genre, the Jeremiad, or
warning of future disaster.
Malamud's final, but unfinished work, "The
Tribe," concerns the adventures of a Russian Jewish
peddlar, Yozip, among the western Indians. As Nan
Robertson recounts in the New York Times, the
schlemiel hero Yozip becomes a marshal, is
kidnapped by a tribe of Indians, and has a dialogue
with an Indian chief about obtaining his freedom.
Malamud gave few interviews, but those
he did grant provided the best
commentary on his work, as when he
told Michiko Kakutani in the New York
Times: "People say I write so much about
misery, but you write about what you
write best. As you are grooved, so you
are grieved. And the grieving is that no
matter how much happiness or success
you collect, you cannot obliterate your
early
experience."
Yet
perhaps
Malamud's contribution is clearest in his
greatest invention, his Jewish-American
dialect, comic even at the height of
tragedy. For example, Calvin Cohn,
sacrificed by the chimpanzee Buz in a
wild inversion of the story of Abraham
and Isaac, reflects that God after all has
let him live out his life; Cohn then asks
himself--forgetting his educated speech
and reverting to the Yiddish rhythms of
29

his youth--"Maybe tomorrow the world

to come?" In such comic-serious
questioning, Malamud captures the voice
of the past and gives it relevance to the
present.

30

2
Alice Walker

Traynor here just loves your songs. Don't you,

Traynor? He nudges Traynor with his elbow.
Traynor blinks, says something I can't catch in a
pitch I don't register.
The boy learned to sing and dance livin' round
you people out in the country. Practically cut his
teeth on you.
Traynor looks up at me and bites his thumbnail.
I laugh.
Well, one way or another they leave with my
agreement that they can record one of my songs. The
deacon writes me a check for five hundred dollars,
the boy grunts his awareness of the transaction, and
I am laughing all over myself by the time I rejoin J.
T.
Just as I am snuggling down beside him though I
hear the front door bell going off again.
Forgit his hat? asks J. T.
I hope not, I say.
The deacon stands there leaning on the door
frame and once again I'm thinking of those sweatylooking eyeballs of his. I wonder if sweat makes your
eyeballs pink because his are sure pink. Pink and
gray and it strikes me that nobody I'd care to know is
behind them.
I forgot one little thing, he says pleasantly. I
forgot to tell you Traynor and I would like to buy up
all of those records you made of the song. I tell you
we sure do love it.
Well, love it or not, I'm not so stupid as to let
them do that without making 'em pay. So I says,
Well, that's gonna cost you. Because, really, that
song never did sell all that good, so I was glad they
was going to buy it up. But on the other hand, them
two listening to my song by themselves, and nobody
else getting to hear me sing it, give me a pause.
Well, one way or another the deacon showed me
where I would come out ahead on any deal he had
proposed so far. Didn't I give you five hundred
dollars? he asked. What white man&emdash;and
don't even need to mention colored--would give you
more? We buy up all your records of that particular
song: first, you git royalties. Let me ask you, how
much you sell that song for in the first place? Fifty
dollars? A hundred, I say. And no royalties from it
yet, right? Right. Well, when we buy up all of them
records you gonna git royalties. And that's gonna
make all them race record shops sit up and take
notice of Gracie Mae Still. And they gonna push all
them other records of yourn they got. And you no
doubt will become one of the big name colored
recording artists. And then we can offer you another
five hundred dollars for letting us do all this for you.
And by God you'll be sittin' pretty! You can go out
and buy you the kind of outfit a star should have.
Plenty sequins and yards of red satin.
I had done unlocked the screen when I saw I
could get some more money out of him. Now I held
it wide open while he squeezed through the opening
between me and the door. He whipped out another
piece of paper and I signed it.
He sort of trotted out to the car and slid in beside
Traynor, whose head was back against the seat. They
swung around in a u-turn in front of the house and
then they was gone.
J. T. was putting his shirt on when I got back to
the bedroom. Yankees beat the Orioles 10-6, he said.

NINETEEN FIFTY-FIVE
1955
The car is a brandnew red Thunderbird
convertible, and it's passed the house more than
once. It slows down real slow now, and stops at the
curb. An older gentleman dressed like a Baptist
deacon gets out on the side near the house, and a
young fellow who looks about sixteen gets out on the
driver's side. They are white, and I wonder what in
the world they doing in this neighborhood.
Well, I say to J. T., put your shirt on, anyway, and
let me clean these glasses offa the table.
We had been watching the ballgame on TV. I
wasn't actually watching, I was sort of daydreaming,
with my foots up in J. T.'s lap.
I seen 'em coming on up the walk, brisk, like they
coming to sell something, and then they rung the
bell, and J. T. declined to put on a shirt but instead
disappeared into the bedroom where the other
television is. I turned down the one in the living
room; I figured I'd be rid of these two double quick
and J. T. could come back out again.
Are you Gracie Mae Still? asked the old guy, when
I opened the door and put my hand on the lock
inside the screen.
And I don't need to buy a thing, said I.
What makes you think we're sellin'? he asks, in
that hearty Southern way that makes my eyeballs
ache.
Well, one way or another and they're inside the
house and the first thing the young fellow does is
raise the TV a couple of decibels. He's about five feet
nine, sort of womanish looking, with real dark white
skin and a red pouting mouth. His hair is black and
curly and he looks like a Loosianna creole.
About one of your songs, says the deacon. He is
maybe sixty, with white hair and beard, white silk
shirt, black linen suit, black tie and black shoes. His
cold gray eyes look like they're sweating.
One of my songs?
31

I believe I'll drive out to Paschal's pond and go

fishing. Wanta go?
While I was putting on my pants J. T. was
holding the two checks.
I'm real proud of a woman that can make cash
money without leavin' home, he said. And I said
Umph. Because we met on the road with me singing
in first one little low-life jook after another, making
ten dollars a night for myself if I was lucky, and
sometimes bringin' home nothing but my life. And J.
T. just loved them times. The way I was fast and
flashy and always on the go from one town to
another. He loved the way my singin' made the dirt
farmers cry like babies and the womens shout
Honey, hush! But that's mens. They loves any style
to which you can get 'em accustomed.
1956
My little grandbaby called me one night on the
phone: Little Mama, Little Mama, there's a white
man on the television singing one of your songs!
Turn on channel 5.
Lord, if it wasn't Traynor. Still looking half asleep
from the neck up, but kind of awake in a nasty way
from the waist down. He wasn't doing too bad with
my song either, but it wasn't just the song the people
in the audience was screeching and screaming over,
it was that nasty little jerk he was doing from the
waist down.
Well, Lord have mercy, I said, listening to him. If
I'da closed my eyes, it could have been me. He had
followed every turning of my voice, side streets,
avenues, red lights, train crossings and all. It give me
a chill.
Everywhere I went I heard Traynor singing my
song, and all the little white girls just eating it up. I
never had so many ponytails switched across my line
of vision in my life. They was so proud. He was a
genius.
Well, all that year I was trying to lose weight
anyway and that and high blood pressure and sugar
kept me pretty well occupied. Traynor had made a
smash from a song of mine, I still had seven hundred
dollars of the original one thousand dollars in the
bank, and I felt if I could just bring my weight down,
life would be sweet.
1957
I lost ten pounds in 1956. That's what I give
myself for Christmas. And J. T. and me and the
children and their friends and grandkids of all
description had just finished dinner--over which I
had put on nine and a half of my lost ten--when who
should appear at the front door but Traynor. Little
Mama, Little Mama! It's that white man who
sings_______________. The children didn't call
it my song anymore. Nobody did. It was funny how
that happened. Traynor and the deacon had bought
up all my records, true, but on his record he had put
"written by Gracie Mae Still." But that was just
another name on the label, like "produced by Apex
Records."
On the TV he was inclined to dress like the
deacon told him. But now he looked presentable.
Merry Christmas, said he.
And same to you, Son.
I don't know why I called him Son. Well, one way
or another they're all our sons. The only requirement

is that they be younger than us. But then again,

Traynor seemed to be aging by the minute.
You looks tired, I said. Come on in and have a
glass of Christmas cheer.
J. T. ain't never in his life been able to act decent
to a white man he wasn't working for, but he poured
Traynor a glass of bourbon and water, then he took
all the children and grandkids and friends and
whatnot out to the den. After while I heard Traynor's
voice singing the song, coming from the stereo
console. It was just the kind of Christmas present my
kids would consider cute.
I looked at Traynor, complicit. But he looked like
it was the last thing in the world he wanted to hear.
His head was pitched forward over his lap, his hands
holding his glass and his elbows on his knees.
I done sung that song seem like a million times
this year, he said. I sung it on the Grand Ole Opry, I
sung it on the Ed Sullivan show. I sung it on Mike
Douglas, I sung it at the Cotton Bowl, the Orange
Bowl. I sung it at Festivals. I sung it at Fairs. I sung it
overseas in Rome, Italy, and once in a submarine
underseas. I've sung it and sung it, and I'm making
forty thousand dollars a day offa it, and you know
what, I don't have the faintest notion what that song
means.
Whatchumean, what do it mean? It mean what it
says. All I could think was: These suckers is making
forty thousand a day offa my song and now they
gonna come back and try to swindle me out of the
original thousand.
It's just a song, I said. Cagey. When you fool
around with a lot of no count mens you sing a bunch
of 'em. I shrugged.
Oh, he said. Well. He started brightening up. I
just come by to tell you I think you are a great singer.
He didn't blush, saying that. Just said it straight
out.
And I brought you a little Christmas present too.
Now you take this little box and you hold it until I
drive off. Then you take it outside under that first
streetlight back up the street aways in front of that
green house. Then you open the box and see . . .
Well, just see.
What had come over this boy, I wondered,
holding the box. I looked out the window in time to
see another white man come up and get in the car
with him and then two more cars full of white mens
start out behind him. They was all in long black cars
that looked like a funeral procession.
Little Mama, Little Mama, what it is? One of my
grandkids come running up and started pulling at
the box. It was wrapped in gay Christmas
paper&emdash;the thick, rich kind that it's hard to
picture folks making just to throw away.
J. T. and the rest of the crowd followed me out
the house, up the street to the streetlight and in front
of the green house. Nothing was there but
somebody's goldgrilled white Cadillac. Brandnew
and most distracting. We got to looking at it so till I
almost forgot the little box in my hand. While the
others were busy making 'miration I carefully took
off the paper and ribbon and folded them up and put
them in my pants pocket. What should I see but a
pair of genuine solid gold caddy keys.
Dangling the keys in front of everybody's nose, I
unlocked the caddy, motioned for J.T. to git in on the
32

other side, and us didn't come back home for two

days.
1960
Well, the boy was sure nuff famous by now. He
was still a mite shy of twenty but already they was
calling him the Emperor of Rock and Roll.
Then what should happen but the draft.
Well, says J. T. There goes all this Emperor of
Rock and Roll business.
But even in the army the womens was on him like
white on rice. We watched it on the News.
Dear Gracie Mae [he wrote from Germany],
How you? Fine I hope as this leaues me doing
real well. Before I come in the army I was gaining a
lot of weight and gitting jittery from making all
them dumb movies. But now l exercise and eat right
and get plenty of rest. I'm more awake than I been
in ten years. I wonder if you are writing any more
songs?
Sincerely, Traynor
I wrote him back:
Dear Son,
We is all fine in the Lord's good grace and hope
this finds you the same. J. T. and me be out all times
of the day and night in that car you give me--which
you know you didn't have to do. Oh, and I do
appreciate the mink and the new self-cleaning
oven. But if you send anymore stuff to eat from
Germany I'm going to have to open up a store in
the neighborhood just to get rid of it. Really, we
have more than enough of everything. The Lord is
good to us and we don't know Want.
Glad to here you is well and gitting your right
rest. There ain't nothing like exercising to help that
along. J. T. and me work some part of every day
that we don't go fishing in the garden.
Well, so long Soldier.
Sincerely,
Gracie Mae
He wrote:
Dear Gracie Mae,
I hope you and J. T. Iike that automatic power
tiller I had one of the stores back home send you. I
went through a mountain of catalogs looking for
it&emdash;I wanted something that even a woman
could use.
I've been thinking about writing some songs of
my own but every time I finish one it don't seem to
be about nothing I've actually lived myself. My
agent keeps sending me other people's songs but
they just sound mooney. I can hardly git through
'em without gagging.
Everybody still loves that song of yours. They
ask me all the time what do I think it means, really.
I mean, they want to know just what I want to
know. Where out of your life did it come from?
Sincerely,
Traynor
1968
I didn't see the boy for seven years. No. Eight.
Because just about everybody was dead when I saw
him again. Malcolm X, King, the president and his
brother, and even J. T. J. T. died of a head cold. It
just settled in his head like a block of ice, he said,
and nothing we did moved it until one day he just
leaned out the bed and died.

His good friend Horace helped me put him away,

and then about a year later Horace and me started
going together. We was sitting out on the front porch
swing one summer night, dusk-dark, and I saw this
great procession of lights winding to a stop.
Holy Toledo! said Horace. (He's got a real sexy
voice like Ray Charles.) Look at it. He meant the long
line of flashy cars and the white men in white
summer suits jumping out on the drivers' sides and
standing at attention. With wings they could pass for
angels, with hoods they could be the Klan.
Traynor comes waddling up the walk.
And suddenly I know what it is he could pass for.
An Arab like the ones you see in storybooks. Plump
and soft and with never a care about weight. Because
with so much money, who cares? Traynor is almost
dressed like someone from a storybook too. He has
on, I swear, about ten necklaces. Two sets of
bracelets on his arms, at least one ring on every
finger, and some kind of shining buckles on his
shoes, so that when he walks you get quite a few
twinkling lights.
Gracie Mae, he says, coming up to give me a hug.
J. T.
I explain that J. T. passed. That this is Horace.
Horace, he says, puzzled but polite, sort of
rocking back on his heels, Horace.
That's it for Horace. He goes in the house and
don't come back.
Looks like you and me is gained a few, I say.
He laughs. The first time I ever heard him laugh.
It don't sound much like a laugh and I can't swear
that it's better than no laugh a'tall.
He's gitting fat for sure, but he's still slim
compared to me. I'll never see three hundred pounds
again and I've just about said (excuse me) fuck it. I
got to thinking about it one day an' I thought: aside
from the fact that they say it's unhealthy, my fat ain't
never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me.
My kids ain't never complained. Plus they's fat. And
fat like I is I looks distinguished. You see me coming
and know somebody's there.
Gracie Mae, he says, I've come with a personal
invitation to you to my house tomorrow for dinner.
He laughed. What did it sound like? I couldn't place
it. See them men out there? he asked me. I'm sick
and tired of eating with them. They don't never have
nothing to talk about. That's why I eat so much. But
if you come to dinner tomorrow we can talk about
the old days. You can tell me about that farm I
bought you.
I sold it, I said.
You did?
Yeah, I said, I did. Just cause I said I liked to
exercise by working in a garden didn't mean I
wanted five hundred acres! Anyhow, I'm a city girl
now. Raised in the country it's true. Dirt poor--the
whole bit--but that's all behind me now.
Oh well, he said, I didn't mean to offend you.
We sat a few minutes listening to the crickets.
Then he said: You wrote that song while you was
still on the farm, didn't you, or was it right after you
left?
You had somebody spying on me? I asked.
You and Bessie Smith got into a fight over it once,
he said.
You is been spying on me!
33

But I don't know what the fight was about, he

said. Just like I don't know what happened to your
second husband. Your first one died in the Texas
electric chair. Did you know that? Your third one
beat you up, stole your touring costumes and your
car and retired with a chorine to Tuskegee. He
laughed. He's still there.
I had been mad, but suddenly I calmed down.
Traynor was talking very dreamily. It was dark but
seems like I could tell his eyes weren't right. It was
like something was sitting there talking to me but
not necessarily with a person behind it.
You gave up on marrying and seem happier for it.
He laughed again. I married but it never went like it
was supposed to. I never could squeeze any of my
own life either into it or out of it. It was like singing
somebody else's record. I copied the way it was
sposed to be exactly but I never had a clue what
marriage meant.
I bought her a diamond ring big as your fist. I
bought her clothes. I built her a mansion. But right
away she didn't want the boys to stay there. Said
they smoked up the bottom floor. Hell, there were
poe floors.
No need to grieve, I said. No need to. Plenty more
where she come from.
He perked up. That's part of what that song
means, ain't it? No need to grieve. Whatever it is,
there's plenty more down the line.
I never really believed that way back when I
wrote that song, I said. It was all bluffing then. The
trick is to live long enough to put your young bluffs
to use. Now if I was to sing that song today I'd tear it
up. 'Cause I done lived long enough to know it's true.
Them words could hold me up.
I ain't lived that long, he said.
Look like you on your way, I said. I don't know
why, but the boy seemed to need some encouraging.
And I don't know, seem like one way or another you
talk to rich white folks and you end up reassuring
them. But what the hell, by now I feel something for
the boy. I wouldn't be in his bed all alone in the
middle of the night for nothing. Couldn't be nothing
worse than being famous the world over for
something you don't even understand. That's what I
tried to tell Bessie. She wanted that same song.
Overheard me practicing it one day, said, with her
hands on her hips: Gracie Mae, I'ma sing your song
tonight. I likes it.
Your lips be too swole to sing, I said. She was
mean and she was strong, but I trounced her.
Ain't you famous enough with your own stuff? I
said. Leave mine alone. Later on, she thanked me. By
then she was Miss Bessie Smith to the World, and I
was still Miss Gracie Mae Nobody from Notasulga.

Sell it. Give it to the children. Live in it on

weekends. It don't matter what I do. He sure don't
care.
Horace just stood there shaking his head. Mama
you sure looks good, he says. Wake me up when you
git back.
Fool, I say, and pat my wig in front of the mirror.
The boy's house is something else. First you come
to this mountain, and then you commence to drive
and drive up this road that's lined with magnolias.
Do magnolias grow on mountains? I was wondering.
And you come to lakes and you come to ponds and
you come to deer and you come up on some sheep.
And I figure these two is sposed to represent
England and Wales. Or something out of Europe.
And you just keep on coming to stuff. And it's all
pretty. Only the man driving my car don't look at
nothing but the road. Fool. And then finally, after all
this time, you begin to go up the driveway. And
there's more magnolias--only they're not in such
good shape. It's sort of cool up this high and I don't
think they're gonna make it. And then I see this
building that looks like if it had a name it would be
The Tara Hotel. Columns and steps and outdoor
chandeliers and rocking chairs. Rocking chairs?
Well, and there's the boy on the steps dressed in a
dark green satin jacket like you see folks ~vearing on
TV late at night, and he looks sort of like a fat
dracula with all that house rising behind him, and
standing beside him there's this little white vision of
loveliness that he introduces as his wife.
He's nervous when he introduces us and he says
to her: This is Gracie Mae Still, I want you to know
me. I mean . . . and she gives him a look that would
fry meat.
Won't you come in, Gracie Mae, she says, and
that's the last I see of her.
He fishes around for something to say or do and
decides to escort me to the kitchen. We go through
the entry and the parlor and the breakfast room and
the dining room and the servants' passage and
finally get there. The first thing I notice is that,
altogether, there are five stoves. He looks about to
introduce rne to one.
Wait a minute, I say. Kitchens don't do nothing
for me. Let's go sit on the front porch.
Well, we hike back and we sit in the rocking
chairs rocking until dinner.
Gracie Mae, he says down the table, taking a
piece of fried chicken from the woman standing over
him, I got a little surprise for you.
It's a house, ain't it? I ask, spearing a chitlin.
You're getting spoiled, he says. And the way he
says spoiled sounds funny. He slurs it. It sounds like
his tongue is too thick for his mouth. Just that quick
he's finished the chicken and is now eating chitlins
and a pork chop. Me spoiled, I'm thinking.
I already got a house. Horace is right this minute
painting the kitchen. I bought that house. My kids
feel comfortable in that house.
But this one I bought you is just like mine. Only a
little smaller.
I still don't need no house. And anyway who
would clean it?
He looks surprised.
Really, I think, some peoples advance so slowly.

The next day all these limousines arrived to pick

me up. Five cars and twelve bodyguards. Horace
picked that morning to start painting the kitchen.
Don't paint the kitchen, fool, I said. The only
reason that dumb boy of ours is going to show me
his mansion is because he intends to present us with
a new house.
What you gonna do with it? he asked me,
standing there in his shirtsleeves stirring the paint.
34

I hadn't thought of that. But what the hell, I'll get

you somebody to live in.
I don't want other folks living 'round me. Makes
me nervous.
You don't? It do?
What I want to wake up and see folks I don't even
know for?
He just sits there downtable staring at me. Some
of that feeling is in the song, ain't it? Not the words,
the feeling. What I want to wake up and see folks I
don't even know for? But I see twenty folks a day I
don't even know, including my wife.
This food wouldn't be bad to wake up to though, I
said. The boy had found the genius of corn bread.
He looked at me real hard. He laughed. Short.
They want what you got but they don't want you.
They want what I got only it ain't mine. That's what
makes 'em so hungry for me when I sing. They
getting the flavor of something but they ain't getting
the thing itself. They like a pack of hound dogs trying
to gobble up a scent.
You talking'bout your fans?
Right. Right. He says.
Don't worry 'bout your fans, I say. They don't
know their asses from a hole in the ground. I doubt
there's a honest one in the bunch.
That's the point. Dammit, that's the point! He
hits the table with his fist. It's so solid it don't even
quiver. You need a honest audience! You can't have
folks that's just gonna lie right back to you.
Yeah, I say, it was small compared to yours, but I
had one. It would have been worth my life to try to
sing 'em somebody else's stuflf that I didn't know
nothing about.
He must have pressed a buzzer under the table.
One of his flunkies zombies up.
Git Johnny Carson, he says.
On the phone? asks the zombie.
On the phone, says Traynor, what you think I
mean, git him offa the front porch? Move your ass.
So two weeks later we's on the Johnny Carson
show.
Traynor is all corseted down nice and looks a
little bit fat but mostly good. And all the women that
grew up on him and my song squeal and squeal.
Traynor says: The lady who wrote my first hit record
is here with us tonight, and she's agreed to sing it for
all of us, just like she sung it forty-five years ago.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the great Gracie Mae Stilll
Well, I had tried to lose a couple of pounds my
own self, but failing that I had me a very big dress
made. So I sort of rolls over next to Traynor, who is
dwarfted by me, so that when he puts his arm
around back of me to try to hug me it looks funny to
the audience and they laugh.
I can see this pisses him off. But I smile out there
at 'em. Imagine squealing for twenty years and not
knowing why you're squealing? No more sense of
endings and beginnings than hogs.
It don't matter, Son, I say. Don't fret none over
me.
I commence to sing. And I sound wonderful.
Being able to sing good ain't all about having a good
singing voice a'tall. A good singing voice helps. But
when you come up in the Hard Shell Baptist church
like I did you understand early that the fellow that
sings is the singer. Them that waits for programs

and arrangements and letters from home is just good

voices occupying body space.
So there I am singing my own song, my own way.
And I give it all I got and enjoy every minute of it.
When I finish Traynor is standing up clapping and
clapping and beaming at first me and then the
audience like I'm his mama for true. The audience
claps politely for about two seconds.
Traynor looks disgusted.
He comes over and tries to hug me again. The
audience laughs.
Johnny Carson looks at us like we both weird.
Traynor is mad as hell. He's supposed to sing
something called a love ballad. But instead he takes
the mike, turns to me and says: Now see if my
imitation still holds up. He goes into the same song,
our song, I think, looking out at his flaky audience.
And he sings it just the way he always did. My voice,
my tone, my inflection, everything. But he forgets a
couple of lines. Even before he's finished the
matronly squeals begin.
He sits down next to me looking whipped.
It don't matter, Son, I say, patting his hand. You
don't even know those people. Try to make the
people you know happy.
Is that in the song? he asks.
Maybe. I say.
1977
For a few years I hear from him, then nothing. But
trying to lose weight takes all the attention I got to
spare. I finally faced up to the fact that my fat is the
hurt I don't admit, not even to myself, and that I
been trying to bury it from the day I was born. But
also when you git real old, to tell the truth, it ain't as
pleasant. It gits lumpy and slack. Yuck. So one day I
said to Horace, I'ma git this shit offa me.
And he fell in with the program like he always try
to do and Lord such a procession of salads and
cottage cheese and fruit juice!
One night I dreamed Traynor had split up with
his fifteenth wife. He said: You meet 'em for no
reason. You date 'em for no reason. You marry 'em
for no reason. I do it all but I swear it's just like
somebody else doing it. I feel like I can't
rememberLife.
The boy's in trouble, I said to Horace.
You've always said that, he said.
I have?
Yeah. You always said he looked asleep. You can't
sleep through life if you wants to live it.
You not such a fool after all, I said, pushing
myself up with my cane and hobbling over to where
he was. Let me sit down on your lap, I said, while
this salad I ate takes effect.
In the morning we heard Traynor was dead.
Some said fat, some said heart, some said alcohol,
some said drugs. One of the children called from
Detroit. Them dumb fans of his is on a crying
rampage, she said. You just ought to turn on the TV.
But I didn't want to see 'em. They was crying and
crying and didn't even know what they was crying
for. One day this is going to be a pitiful country, I
thought.

35

Alice Walker's "Nineteen Fifty-Five": fiction and fact.

"Nineteen Fifty-five" is the opening story in Alice
Walker's 1981 collection You Can't Keep a Good
Woman Down. Early reviewers identified its two
principal characters, Traynor and Gracie Mae "Little
Mama" Still, with Elvis Presley and Willie Mae "Big
Mama" Thornton.(1) Elvis is an important figure in
popular music and culture; Willie Mae Thornton
represents personal, artistic, and ethical values
admired by Walker. The author bases her characters
on these real people but abandons biographical
accuracy to amplify the symbolic meaning of each
character. In this process, Ebas becomes an
interloper destroyed by stealing what he does not
understand. The Thornton character is poor but
authentic, and she succeeds as a person even though
her career flops. Thus each character stands for an
idea that helps develop the theme of being true to
one's self. Examining how Walker turns Elvis and
Thornton into fictional characters provides insight
into her creative method. The most casual reader
will note similarities between Traynor and Elvis.
Like Elvis, Traynor gives away Cadillacs and houses.
The character serves in the army in Germany. He is a
singer who performs to screaming teenagers and
punctuates his songs with a "nasty little jerk ... from
the waist down."(2) "His hair is black and curly and
he looks like a Loosianna creole."(3) Traynor even
has a manager who resembles Elvis's Colonel Parker,
and the character lives in a grand mansion like
Graceland. Walker's Gracie Mae Still is based on the
blues and rock singer, Willie Mae Thornton. In the
story, Gracie sells Traynor a song for $500; his
version of it, closely patterned on hers, becomes a hit
and triggers his rise to fame. In 1956, Elvis recorded
"Hound Dog" on the RCA Victor label.

all black musicians who have been ripped off by

nasty white music business CEOs.
This won't happen of course. Media arrogance and
dishonesty means we are eternally bound to live in a
skewed world where Elvis is king of rock'n'roll,
Clapton is the guitar god, Sinatra is the voice and
Astaire is the greatest dancer. Accustomed as we are
to this parade of white heroes, the case of Elvis is
particularly infuriating because for many black
people he represents the most successful white
appropriation of a black genre to date.
Elvis also signifies the foul way so many black
writers and performers, such as Little Richard, were
treated by the music industry. The enduring image
of Elvis is a constant reflection of society's then
refusal to accept anything other than the nonthreatening and subservient negro: Sammy Davies
Jnr and Nat King Cole. The Elvis myth to this day
clouds the true picture of rock'n'roll and leaves its
many originators without due recognition. So what is
left for black people to celebrate? How he admirably
borrowed our songs, attitude and dance moves?
Public Enemy's prolific commentator, Chuck D, was
clear on why he felt compelled to attack the
pretender's iconic status. In their 1989 song Fight
the Power, he rapped: "Elvis was a hero to most/ But
he never meant shit to me you see/ Straight up racist
that sucker was simple and plain/ Motherfuck him
and John Wayne."
To contend that Elvis was a racist is hardly shocking.
("The only thing black people can do for me is shine
my shoes and buy my music", he once opined.) And,
as a dirt poor Southerner raised in close but separate
proximity to black people, his racism would hardly
have distinguished him from millions of others.
Chuck D's attack was not aimed at Elvis the person,
but Elvis the institution.
But in the face of much black criticism of Elvis, some
writers have offered their own theories as to why the
singer should be awarded more, not less accolades.
Michael T Bertrand's Race, Rock and Elvis contends
that the arrival of Elvis and rock'n'roll helped white
Southerners to rethink their attitude to race and
gave as yet unacknowledged impetus to the
burgeoning civil rights movement. And this week the
Daily Mirror's Tony Parsons imagined a world
without Elvis as a cultural armageddon. "Elvis
changed the soul of modern music," he argues.
"Without him, Madonna would be a teacher in
Detroit." He also quotes John Lennon's remark that
"before Elvis there was nothing". An Elvis-free world
would have seen black music remaining
"underground" and "segregated", Parsons suggests.

He wasn't my king
For black people, Elvis, more than any
other performer, epitomises the theft of
their music and dance
Helen Kolawole
Thursday August 15, 2002
The Guardian
As another celebration of a dead white hero winds
up, in this hallowed Week of Elvis, shouldn't the
entertainment industry hold its own truth and
reconciliation commission?

But the reality is, black music never stays

underground. White people always seek it out, dilute
it and eventually claim it as their own. From Pat
Boone's Tutti Frutti to current boyband sensations N
Sync and Blue. This is fine, but be honest about it.

It needn't be a vehicle for retribution, just

somewhere where tales of white appropriation of
black culture, not to mention outright theft, can
finally be laid to rest. Following Michael Jackson's
recent outburst accusing Sony chief, Tony Mottola,
of racism, perhaps he could officiate and champion
36

Putting Parsons's vision into practice, let's imagine

that instead of Elvis mania, Big Momma Thornton author of Hound Dog - reigns supreme with her ode
to no-good men. Big Momma's cultural conquest
gives birth to a radical white teen culture and a
complete and lasting overhaul of America's putrid
racial politics. White teens frighten their parents
silly with their extreme bids not to become Elvis's
pale imitation of the black performers he witnessed,
but the very image of Big Momma. Sounds
outlandish? Any more audacious than stubbornly
maintaining that this talented - but more
importantly white - man deserves to be king of a
genre created by black people?

Music is the art I most envy... musicians [are] at one

with their cultures and their historical subconscious.
I am trying to arrive at that place where Black music
already is; to arrive at that unself-conscious sense of
collective oneness; that naturalness, that (even when
anguished) grace. (In Search 259, 264)
Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie
Smith form a sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in
the tradition of black women singers, rather than
among the literati .... Like Billie and Bessie she
followed her own road, believed in her own gods,
pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate
herself from the common people. (In Search 91)
These influences are most clearly seen in works like
the short story Nineteen Fifty-five, from her 1981
collection You Cant Keep A Good Woman Down,
and in her novel The Color Purple. In Nineteen
Fifty-five and The Color Purple, Walker talks back
to blues musicians and writers, signifying
extensively on Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes
Were Watching God as well as on specific musical
pieces of several singer/composers. In signifying,
following Henry Louis Gatess usage, Walker
repeats with a difference (xxii-xxiii, xxvii)
traditional material, revising and personalizing it,
giving, in the words of Sherley Anne Williams, a
traditional statement about a traditional situation a
new response (37). In Nineteen Fifty-five Walker
begins to explore the significance of the female blues
singer and the blues she sings - for creative artists
like herself, for others in the community, and for the
society as a whole. This exploration is continued in
The Color Purple, where Walker probes in more
detail the role of the blues woman as a model and
catalyst for change in her community.
In Nineteen Fifty-five and The Color Purple,
Walker employs the character, language, structure,
and perspective of the blues to celebrate the lives
and works of blues women, to articulate the
complexity of their struggles, and to expose and
confront the oppressive forces facing Black women
in America. In her portraits of blues women, Walker
shows us the vitality, resiliency, creativity, and
spirituality
of
African
American
women,
illuminating the core aesthetic concepts which have
been crucial to their survival in a society that has
largely used and abused them for its own purposes.
Indeed, in Walkers works, African American women
performers and their performances symbolize
vitality and aliveness, and the will and spirit not only
to endure but potentially to flourish. The blues
woman, whose song is true to her own experience
and rooted in the values and beliefs of the
community, empowers those who love her and
effects change in those around her. Her outer
struggles and inner conflicts reflect issues of
oppression in society as they have been internalized
within the community.
In addition to blues characters, Walker employs
blues forms, themes, images, and linguistic
techniques. Her forms - letters and diary entries are like blues stanzas in their rich compactness and
self-containedness; like blues pieces, her works take
shape from the repetition and variation of these core
units. Walkers focus on the complexities and manysidedness of love and relationship repeats the
subject of many blues. As in Their Eyes and the

Whether we remember him as an obese, drug-addled

misogynist or a hip-swinging rebel, let's call him
what he is - the all-conquering great white hope and demand the entertainment industry never again
makes such a deceitful claim.
A short story from Alice Walker's You Can't Keep A
Good Woman Down holds particular poignancy.
"Nineteen Fifty-Five" begins when an emerging
rock'n'roll star, Traynor, accompanied by his musical
svengali, visits the home of black songstress Gracie
May Still. The svengali tells Gracie: "The boy learned
to sing and dance livin' round you people out in the
country. Practically cut his teeth on you." The pair
buy up all of Gracie's songs and Traynor quickly
triumphs as the "emperor of rock and roll". Walker
tells how little white girls ate him up. "They was so
proud. He was a genius," she writes.
But many years later, spoilt by wealth, sycophants
and too many chitlins, Traynor revisits Gracie May.
The deflated emperor admits that he hasn't
understood the meaning behind his greatest hit. It is
recommended reading this Elvis week.
Helen Kolawole is a former music editor of Pride
magazine

You Just Cant Keep a Good Woman

Down: Alice Walker sings the blues
African American Review, Summer, 1996, by Maria
V. Johnson
Oh - Just cant keep a real good woman down
Oh - Just cant keep a real good woman down
If you throw me down here Papa, I rise up in some
other town (Miller)
Alice Walker has been profoundly influenced and
inspired both by African American music and
musicians and by writers whose work is grounded in
music and in the expressive folk traditions of African
Americans. Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were
Watching God and the blues music of blues women
like Bessie Smith rank among Walkers most
significant musical/literary influences.(1) In her
words,
37

blues, paradox and contradiction are explored in the

context of relationships, projected via responses to
the traditional situations of these relationships and
articulated using contrast and oppositional
structures. The blues womens motto You cant keep
a good woman down, which is at the heart of
Nineteen Fifty-five, also resonates the struggles
and triumphs of many women in The Color Purple.
In both Nineteen Fifty-five and The Color Purple,
Walker repeats and varies many of the core
oppositions, blues images, and linguistic techniques
Hurston employs in Their Eyes. Finally, Walker uses
singing and laughter as metaphors for voice, and
uses core songs both to encapsulate primary themes
and to mark significant points in the structure and
thematic development of these pieces. In this essay, I
explore Alice Walkers use of the blues in the short
story Nineteen Fifty-five, leaving a detailed
examination of the blues in The Color Purple for a
forthcoming article.
In her title, dedication, and epigraph to You Cant
Keep A Good Woman Down (1981), Walker both
encapsulates the essence of the theme which unites
the stories in the volume and alludes to the
signifyin(g) relationship of her work, particularly the
story Nineteen Fifty-five, to the lives and work of
several others from the past. Walkers reference to
Mamie Smith and Perry (You Cant Keep A Good
Man Down) Bradford in her dedication is
particularly important for several reasons. First, it
alludes to an historical event that was especially
significant in both African American and American
music history. Mamie Smiths recording of You
Cant Keep A Good Man Down, coupled with This
Thing Called Love, made on February 14, 1920, is
the first documented recording of a Black woman
singer (Southern 365). Perry Bradford was the
composer and Smiths manager as well. The
immediate and overwhelming commercial success of
this recording led directly to more recordings by
Mamie Smith, along with the recording of numerous
other African American women singers, thereby
ushering in the era of the so-called classic blues.
Second, Walkers allusion evokes the ironic story
behind this recording, celebrating the remarkable
feat of Bradford himself. It was due to the
determination and unflagging persistence of African
American song writer and entrepreneur Perry
Bradford (whose nickname was Mule) that this
historic recording happened. The white managers at
Okeh Records, after finally agreeing to record his
songs, opposed Bradfords choice of a Black singer;
they urged him to have the popular white singer and
imitator of African American styles, Sophie Tucker,
sing his songs. Fortunately, at the last minute Sophie
Tucker could not be there; Mamie Smith was called
in and history was made (Lieb 20, Albertson 34; see
also Bradford).
On one level, then, the title of Walkers short story
collection You Cant Keep A Good Woman Down
signifies on the title of Bradfords historic
composition You Cant Keep A Good Man Down.
In signifying, Walker changes the focus to women.
Whereas You Cant Keep A Good Man Down
acknowledges the power and determination of good
men, Walkers collection celebrates the strength
and resilience of good women who resist and

persist in the face of abuse. On another level,

Walkers stories of women persisting in You Cant
Keep A Good Woman Down also signify on
Bradfords story of persistence, a story which he
himself tells in Born With the Blues: His Own Story.
On a third level, Gracie Mae and Traynors unnamed
song and their story told in Nineteen Fifty-five
signify on Bradfords song and story. His/story is
behind and a part of Walkers story; both concern
the racist and exploitative phenomenon of white
singers imitating or covering the songs of African
Americans. In this regard, Walkers story Nineteen
Fifty-five and unnamed song signify even more
clearly on the story of Willie Mae Big Mama
Thornton and Elvis Presley and their song, Hound
Dog - perhaps the most famous cover story. (I
shall return to this later.) Through multiple levels of
signifying, then, Walker links prominent instances of
this cover phenomenon, exposing the fact of its
repetition throughout American history and
reminding us that it is, indeed, a tradition by now
(I Love 1).
Walkers title also makes close reference to another
song, You Just Cant Keep A Good Woman Down
(1928), a 12-bar blues sung and composed by blues
woman Lillian Miller, which also signifies on
Bradfords You Cant Keep A Good Man Down
(Miller, Smith). The title, theme, and content of
Millers song reflect the essence of the empowering
assertion and affirmation found in many womens
blues, and the theme is a common blues theme
found in several songs by Bessie Smith and others.
Millers song testifies to the blues roots of Walkers
title, theme, and use of signifyin(g)(2):
If you catch me stealin, Papa please dont tell on me
[2x]
My new man has quit me and Im stealin back to my
used to be
You may see me smilin, and you may think Im glad
(ah, but you dont know)
You may see me smilin, you may think Im glad
But you can never tell, the trouble sweet Mama have
had
I dont want no man thats gonna play me and stall
(dont mean maybe)
I dont want no man thats gonna play me and stall
I just want a Daddy, really let me have it all
All of you men are, [ever] so hard to please [2x]
You got old and young women, wearin dresses up
above their
Oh - Just cant keep a real good woman down [2x]
If you throw me down here Papa, I rise up in some
other town
Sweet sixteen and Ive never been refused
Im sweet sixteen, never been refused
Ive got a brand new car Daddy, and its never been
used (Miller)
Like Walkers title, dedication, and epigraph, the
lyrics of Lillian Millers song reflect the essence of
the theme which unites the stories in Walkers
volume. The collection shows African American
women whose spirits will not be crushed, good
women who will not be kept down and who when
thrown down rise up again in some other town. They
are women who struggle and suffer a great deal, who
are oppressed but not defeated; women who
command respect and reject the mistreatment of
38

men. Like the blues people alluded to in Walkers

dedication, they insist on the value and beauty of
the authentic; they insist on the value and beauty of
themselves; they insist on being themselves, and
they demand that their needs be accommodated.
In Nineteen Fifty-five, Walker, too, insists on the
value and beauty of blues women and authentic(3)
blues music, celebrating the vitality of African
American expressive culture and the resilient
creative spirit of the Black woman blues artist. Told
from the blues womans perspective in first-person
narration, Nineteen Fifty-five grounds the stories
in the volume, encapsulating and projecting the
essence of the theme which unites them in the
colorful and eloquent language and voice of the blues
woman narrator. As in Hurstons Their Eyes,
Walker, in Nineteen Fifty-five, sings the blues and
tells the story of the blues through a blues woman
who sings and tells her own story. In signifying on
the songs and stories of Bradford, Miller, Hurston,
and Thornton, Walker celebrates and gives voice to
the tradition both by recording it and passing it on,
and by creating her own personal expression within
it.
The story Nineteen Fifty-five documents the
relationship between Gracie Mae Still, a veteran
blues composer and singer, and Traynor, a young,
white, soon-to-be-rich rock n roll star. Traynors
fame and fortune rest on the success of his cover
recording in 1955-56 of a Gracie Mae Still
composition dating back to 1923. Gracie Maes
narrative follows their relationship, through visits,
correspondence, and television performances, from
the day Traynor comes to ask for Gracie Maes
permission to record the song in 1955 to the day of
Traynors death in 1977. Traynor, blessed with
fame and fortune but plagued by an emptiness and
confusion in both his professional and personal
lives, is drawn to the Black female creator of his first
hit record, as he is to her song, in his search for
authenticity and meaning.
The relationship between Gracie Mae and Traynor
develops as Traynor struggles to understand the
song which has made him famous. The song and the
composer become the vehicles through which he
seeks meaning in his life. Although he is a tragic
figure, unable ever to find himself or to find meaning
in his life, Traynor comes to understand a great deal
about his own unhappiness from his association with
Gracie Mae. Walkers story demonstrates the truth of
Herman Hesses statement, given in her epigraph,
that it is harder to kill something that is spiritually
alive (Gracie Mae) than it is to bring the dead back
to life (Traynor).
Walker uses blues techniques of contrast and ironic
juxtaposition to articulate discrepancies between
appearances and reality, between what appears to be
and what is, exposing the contradictions and
hypocrisy of the white material world, while
demonstrating the vital and authentic character,
value, and beauty of Gracie Mae and her music.
Using
oppositional
language
and
ironic
juxtaposition, Walker contrasts: (1) Traynors
appearance of material well-being with his reality of
spiritual bankruptcy, (2) Traynors appearance of
extreme and lasting world-wide fame, success, and
popularity (The Emperor of Rock and Roll) with

Gracie Maes appearance of moderate local fame,

short-lived and long forgotten (Gracie Mae Nobody
from Notasulga), and (3) Traynors spiritual reality,
which is empty, confused, and devoid of meaning,
with Gracie Maes spiritual reality, which is very
much alive, filled with creativity, and blossoming
with the wisdom of age. Walker repeats this core
opposition between appearances and reality with
variations, articulating it in many guises as the story
develops. Black/white, rich/poor, famous/unknown,
young/old,
alive/dead,
asleep/awake,
meaningful/empty,
somebody/nobody,
something/nothing are some of the manifestations
this core opposition takes. Variations of this
opposition are embodied in Walkers descriptions of
Gracie Mae and Traynor: in their appearances and
the images they project, in their songs and musical
performances, and in their social interactions.
As in the blues, Walkers use of opposition and
contrast occurs within a framework of core materials
which are repeated and varied. A standard blues
piece consists of a series of stanzas each of which
follows a basic harmonic structure (I IV I V I) and
text form (AAB) which is repeated and varied as a
piece progresses to give it a large-scale shape. Within
this structure there are core elements - pitches,
contours, images, phrases, lines of text, chords which are varied using core means - embellishment,
vibrato, syncopation, timbrai nuance - to create
unlimited possibilities for rendering the same
stanza, song, or structure. Similarly, Walkers
Nineteen Fifty-five is a series of interactions; as the
interaction unit is repeated, the form of the
interaction varies (visits, television performances,
letters). The story is also a sequence of diary entries
distinguished by date. Diary entries provide
structural frames in which the various forms of
interaction are set (see figure on p. 226). Moreover,
behind the interaction unit there is a core
relationship - that between Gracie Mae and Traynor
- as well as a core song - which connects the two
even before they have met. In subsequent visits,
correspondence, and performances, this core tune
is repeated and embellished as Traynor discovers
pieces of the songs meaning, as core images
(projected by Traynor and Gracie Mae) are
elaborated, and as new takes on the core
oppositions are made.
As in the blues, it is by exposing core materials themes, characters, relationships, oppositions again and again in varied forms, in interaction after
interaction, that Walker brings her readers to a
deeper understanding of their significance. As in the
blues, Walkers story takes shape in a way which
both indulges in and transcends the repetitions at
the core of its formal structure.
The story culminates with Gracie Mae and Traynors
joint appearance on The Johnny Carson Show.
Structurally ingenious, this final performance
provides a forum for elements of music, image, and
social
dynamics
to come together. This
social/musical interaction provides an ideal stage for
Alice Walker to dramatize the core oppositions of the
story and the contrasting aesthetic values,
perspectives, and personalities of two vastly different
individuals and cultures. It is important to the
structural development of Walkers story that both
39

Gracie Mae and Traynor sing their song on the

same stage, and especially significant that they do
not sing it together, but rather each in turn. This
juxtaposition of performances is both essential to
Walkers dramatic illumination of contrast, and also
symbolic of the walls that separate and divide the
two individuals and cultures.
As in the blues, Walker uses personification as a
structural vehicle to explore a wide range of issues
and experiences of struggle and conflict. As I would
argue that the blues personifies struggle by
projecting issues of struggle vis-a-vis relationship
dynamics
and
articulating
responses
to
relationships, Walker uses the relationship between
two characters - their interactions and responses - as
a vehicle to [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] explore
the differences and conflicts between two cultures.
Moreover, by juxtaposing the aesthetic approaches
of Gracie Mae and Traynor - the process of signifying
or repetition with a difference with that of
imitation or direct repetition - Walker examines
implications of these cultural differences and the
barriers to developing relationships across
differences in the context of a racist and patriarchal
society.
At the beginning of the story, Traynor and his music
agent come to Gracie Maes house to get permission
to record her song and to buy up all of the copies of
her record of the song. In this first interaction
Walker performs several variations on the
opposition between appearances and reality, using
contrast in her descriptions of these two characters
to evoke Gracie Maes wariness of the duo, her
difference from them, and the boundaries she
creates between herself and these white people she
does not know who want something of hers. Gracie
Mae calls Traynors music agent the deacon
because he is dressed like a Baptist deacon. In
naming him the deacon, Walker suggests the
discrepancy between his outer affect - one who goes
about serving and saving souls - and his true motive
- to make money off of African American musicians.
Her description also contrasts the deacons looks
(creepy) with his manner (pleasant). Significantly, it
is the deacons eyes which most expressively embody
this discrepancy between appearance and reality:
His cold gray eyes look like theyre sweating.... I
wonder if sweat makes your eyeballs pink because
his are sure pink. Pink and gray and it strikes me
that nobody Id care to know is behind them. (4-5)
The deacon appears to be a contradiction. His
cold gray/sweaty pink eyes make him appear
untrustworthy. Through her description of the
deacons eyes, Gracie Mae conveys her uneasiness
with him and the hypocrisy he carries. Providing
access to the reality behind the appearance, his eyes
warn her to be on her guard.
On the other hand, Gracie Maes description of this
first encounter contrasts Traynor with the deacon.
While the deacon is an older gentleman with a
smooth and talkative manner, Traynor is young,
awkward, and non-verbal. The older man does all of
the talking and negotiating; ... the boy [merely]
grunts his awareness of the transaction.... Traynors
only attempt to speak produces what Gracie Mae
describes as something I cant catch in a pitch I
dont register (4). In juxtaposing Traynor with the

deacon, Walker sets into relief Traynors powerless

dependency and lack of voice, using the metaphor of
voice to suggest his loss of agency and lack of
grounding. At the same time, Walkers description
highlights
the
cultural
differences
and
communication gap between Gracie Mae and
Traynor.
Traynors appearance also embodies contradiction.
We glimpse this when Gracie Mae first sees Traynor
doing her song on television. She describes him in
terms of an opposition - asleep/awake. He looks
half asleep from the neck up, but kind of awake in a
nasty way from the waist down (6). Internally,
spiritually dead, Traynors sexuality appears to be
split off, externalized, something that he is wearing
- apart from him, not a part of him. Ironically, it is
this aspect of his appearance his objectification of
sexuality - rather than the song itself to which the
audience responds: He wasnt doing too bad with
my song either, but it wasnt just the song the people
in the audience was screeching and screaming over,
it was that nasty little jerk he was doing from the
waist down (6-7).
In Traynors second visit to Gracie Mae, Traynor and
the Deacon are opposed again, exposing another
discrepancy in Traynors appearance. Using ironic
juxtaposition, Walker contrasts Traynors otherdefined deacon-imposed television image (his oncamera appearance) with the more presentable self
which he brings to Gracie Maes (his off-camera
appearance): On the TV he was inclined to dress
like the deacon told him. But now he looked
presentable (7).
In subsequent visits, as Traynors wealth and fame
grow, Walker intensifies her descriptions of the
discrepancy between Traynors appearance of
material well-being and the reality of his spiritual
bankruptcy. In addition, she begins directly to
contrast the characters of Gracie Mae and Traynor,
using their song as a metaphor to probe questions
of meaning and spiritual well-being. As Traynor
lacks voice, he also lacks his own song - a song which
resonates his own life experience. In 1960, in a letter
to Gracie Mae, Traynor articulates the connection
between singing and living: Ive been thinking
about writing some songs of my own but every time I
finish one it dont seem to be about nothing Ive
actually lived myself (11). To write and sing his own
song is to give voice to himself and meaning to his
life. Since he lacks his own song, his life lacks
meaning.
In contrast, the song that Gracie Mae sings is
meaningful and true, more so at the time of the
story than when she wrote and first sang the song,
because it resonates her experience. She says, ... if I
was to sing that song today Id tear it up.... Them
words could hold me up (14). Her language evokes
the strength and empowerment that come from
telling it like it is, singing her truth and giving
voice to her experiences through song. Gracie Mae
teaches that, like the song itself, a songs meaning is
not inherent or fixed. It grows and changes with
time, with shifting contexts and new experiences.
Meaning varies from one performer and audience
member to the next, and emerges anew in each
performance, deepening with the wisdom of lived
experience and age. As Bernice Johnson Reagon says
40

of singing in the African American tradition, The

songs are free and they have the meaning placed in
them by the singers (2).
When Traynor comes to visit Gracie Mae in 1968,
Walkers exploration of the discrepancy between his
appearance of material wealth and spiritual vacuity
takes on new dimensions. In her language, Walker
embodies several layers of opposition and ironic
inversion. First, the connections between wealth and
appearances and the appearance of wealth with
deceit are ironically embodied in Walkers
description of the arrival of Traynor and his
entourage: With wings they could pass for angels,
with hoods they could be the Klan (11). Evoking the
same sense of wariness evidenced in Gracie Maes
initial description of the Deacon, the reality
encapsulated in this compact blues line is that Klan
members do pass for angels in this society, as racist
religion passes for spirituality, and record agents
pass for deacons, greedy men for saviors. Walker
suggests the close connection between wealth and
deceit in American society, as exemplified in the
music business.
Second, Walker contrasts Traynors lack of vital
substance with Gracie Maes strong personal
presence, articulating an ironic inversion. Traynor,
the one who appears materially weighted down and
solid, is in reality lacking in substance, amorphous, a
body without soul; conversely, Gracie Mae, who does
not depend on material things, is solid, defined,
boundaried, a body with a soul. In contrast to
Traynor, whose eyes werent right and who Gracie
Mae describes as something ... sitting there talking
to me but not necessarily with a person behind it
(13), Gracie Mae looks distinguished. You see me
coming and know somebodys there (12). By
italicizing thing, Gracie Mae underscores Traynors
lack of vitality; by italicizing there, she highlights his
lack of presence. As with the Deacon, Traynors eyes
provide an entre into the spiritual reality behind the
appearance. Like his eyes, Traynors laugh also lacks
life:
He laughs. The first time I ever heard him laugh. It
dont sound much like a laugh and I cant swear that
its better than no laugh atall.
Then he laughs again: What did it sound like? I
couldnt place it (12). Like his voice during the first
visit, Traynors laugh does not register. Like his eyes,
his laugh is empty. Like Mr. Turners laugh in
Hurstons Their Eyes (214-15), Traynors laugh is
powerless and vanishing; it lacks soul. For both
Hurston and Walker, laughter symbolizes vitality. To
laugh - really laugh - is to be responsive, to be alive
and really living. Loss of laughter and an inability to
laugh indicate a loss of life, a loss of self. A solid,
grounded, full-powered laugh, like the voice that
sings its own song, reflects the personality, the
somebody, behind it.
Third, using Gracie Maes relationship with Bessie
Smith as a metaphor, Walker explores the question
of fame in relation to spiritual health, exposing a
threefold opposition and a second ironic inversion.
Walker identifies Gracie Mae with obscure African
American creative artists like Lillian Miller. She does
not become famous in the way either Bessie Smith or
Traynor did. As Walker contrasts Traynor with
Gracie Mae, she also contrasts Bessie Smith with

Gracie Mae. Gracie Mae and Bessie Smith fight,

because Bessie, like Traynor, wants to sing Gracie
Maes song, but Gracie Mae thinks that, like herself,
Bessie should stick with her own songs, her own
experience, and become famous for her own songs,
her own self. Couldnt be nothing worse than being
famous the world over for something you dont even
understand (14).
By insisting on the value and beauty of the
authentic, Walker opposes any sacrifice of self to
make money or acquire fame. In Nineteen Fiftyfive Walker probes the question What does it mean
to be someone? Her story suggests that a person
living for fame, fortune, and being known often
sacrifices her or his humanity for a thing, whereas to
be yourself, sing your own song, live your own life is
to be somebody. The inversion Walker dramatizes,
also
an
important
manifestation
of
the
appearance/reality opposition, is that a nobody
(one who is not famous) is often more somebody
(her- or himself) than a somebody (one who is
famous), because that person is more likely to be
spiritually grounded rather than materially
obsessed. We hear Walker playing on this threepronged opposition when Gracie Mae says, By then
she was Miss Bessie Smith to the World, and I was
still Gracie Mae Nobody from Notasulga (14). Here
Walker also puns on Gracie Maes last name - Still
and still. Both Bessie Smith and Traynor were
famous, while Gracie Mae was not. Both Bessie
Smith and Traynor are dead and died young;
Traynor lost his somebodyness among things. In
contrast, Gracie Mae Nobody is Gracie Mae s/Still;
she is alive in spirit as well as in body - and
somebody, as she has always been and always will
be.
Walkers exploration of materialism culminates in
Gracie Maes visit to Traynors house in 1968, where
we see for the first time his home environment.
Walker captures the vastness of Traynors material
wealth in her humorous and exaggerated description
of Gracie Maes experience of the journey to visit
him, which makes use of personification as well as
hyperbole: When they finally get to the kitchen, the
first thing Gracie Mae notices is that, altogether,
there are five stoves. He looks about to introduce me
to one (16). By projecting Gracie Maes response to
Traynors mountain castle, Walker intensifies her
examination of the contrasts between their lifestyles,
as well as her probing of the spiritual reality behind
Traynors appearance of material well-being. By
exaggerating and personifying Traynors material
wealth, and juxtaposing these images with images in
which Traynor appears objectified, Walker
caricatures an inversion between person and object
which dramatizes the contrast between Traynors
material wealth and spiritual destitution, and the
discrepancies between appearance and reality. We
see how too much and too big can be oppressive
and alienating, obstructing and obscuring ones
relationship to oneself and to others. Ironically,
Traynors too much room (five floors, a whole
mountain) results in too little space for himself.
Walkers articulation of the opposition between
appearances and reality and dramatization of the
contrasts between Gracie Mae and Traynor reach a
peak in the final interaction when the two appear
41

together on The Johnny Carson Show (1968).

Contrasts occur on several levels at once: (1) how
Gracie Mae and Traynor look and their attitudes
toward how they look, (2) their performances of
their song and their approaches to singing, and (3)
the audiences responses to their performances and
their reactions to the audience response.
Traynor is all corseted down, trying to appear thin,
while Gracie Mae, having failed to lose weight, has
had ... a very big dress made (18). Traynors
approach is to try to hide this aspect of his physical
reality, while Gracie Mae acknowledges it and works
with it, bringing style to it. It is as if Traynor is trying
to appear as he did in 1956. Second, in her
juxtaposition of their performances, Walker captures
the vast differences between their approaches to
singing and attitudes toward it. Describing her own
performance, Gracie Mae says:
... I sound - wonderful. Being able to sing good aint
all about having a good singing voice atall. A good
singing voice helps. But when you come up in the
Hard Shell Baptist church like I did you understand
early that the fellow that sings is the singer. Them
that waits for programs and arrangements and
letters from home is just good voices occupying body
space.... I am singing my own song, my own way.
And I give it all Ive got and enjoy every minute of it.
(18)
Describing Traynors performance, she says:
... he sings it just the way he always did. My voice,
my tone, my inflection, everything. But he forgets a
couple of lines. (18-19)
By juxtaposing the two contrasting performances,
Walker sets into relief important elements of Gracie
Maes background and the aesthetic principles and
values which are reflected in her singing. Walkers
passage
vividly illustrates
ethnomusicologist
Mellonee
Burnims
contention
(159)
that
performance symbolizes and generates a sense of
vitality in African American culture. In detailing
what makes for a wonderful sound in the African
American tradition, Gracie Mae suggests that it is
not the quality of the voice itself so much as the
spirit of the person behind it that makes for the good
singer. She speaks of the importance of the church
and the integral role it plays in the everyday life of
the Black community. The name Hard Shell Baptist
church signifies the groundedness and durability of
the Black church as a stabilizing force in the African
American community. The name also alludes to the
sanctuary which the church has provided African
Americans historically. On a third level, Hard Shell
suggests the role of the Black church in providing
lessons in survival and teaching music as a strategy
of struggle.
Gracie Mae also speaks of the importance of being
present in the moment and being moved by the
spirit, and alludes to the traditional process of
learning [music] by doing. Again illustrating core
African American aesthetics identified by Burnim
(159, 162), she speaks of the importance of
individuality and personal expression - of making a
song her own and creating it anew in each
performance - and of the necessity for total personal
involvement, for putting all of herself into each
performance and singing for her self and for her own
enjoyment.

Gracie Mae contrasts her own spiritual approach

with good voices occupying body space, which, in
its use of objectification, alludes to Traynors
somethingness and material approach. As is clear
from Gracie Maes description of his performance,
Traynor is still copying Gracie Mae, as he was in
1956: side streets, avenues, red lights, train
crossings and all (7). In 1968 he copies himself in
1956 copying Gracie Mae in 1923. He does nothing
musically to make it his own song. He is not enjoying
himself, nor is he present with the music in the
moment. In his contempt for his audience and for
himself and in his disgust with the audiences
response, he forgets a couple of lines of the song.
By juxtaposing the two performances, Walker also
illuminates several levels of contrast in the
audience/performer dynamics. On the one hand, the
audience responds to Traynor with the same
matronly squeals as in 1956, but shows little
interest in Gracie Mae. On the other hand, while the
audience claps politely for about two seconds for
Gracie Mae, Traynor stands and claps and claps and
beams at Gracie Mae and at the audience like [she]
his mama for true (18). The reactions of Gracie Mae
and Traynor to their audiences responses are also
vastly different. When Traynor gives Gracie Mae a
hug, the audience laughs, responding to the contrast
in appearance between the two. Gracie Mae smiles,
acknowledging the comical aspect of the moment,
while Traynor gets mad. Traynor again becomes
angry and disgusted at the audiences responses to
the two performances and feels defeated, whereas
Gracie Mae, undaunted by the audience, consoles
Traynor as a mother would a child.
In sum, Traynor concerns himself with the responses
of an audience of people he feels contempt for but
does not know; he surrounds himself regularly with
people he cares little for and does not know. He eats
and sleeps with people he does not know - including
his wife. In contrast, Gracie Mae surrounds herself
with the people she loves and knows, trying only to
make the people she knows and cares about happy.
She concerns herself with pleasing her audience
insofar as they are people she knows. Pleasing
them means singing out of her own experience,
insisting on the value and beauty of her own
experience and her own voice, and pleasing herself
first. Gracie Maes audience was small, it was honest,
it was intimate. Like Ma Rainey, she really knew
these people (Lieb 17). And they responded to the
truth she put out, which resonated their own
experience. Her singing made the dirt farmers cry
like babies and the womens shout Honey, hush! (6).
In contrast, Traynors audience is huge, dishonest,
and undiscriminating, on him like white on rice
(9).
As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, Alice
Walkers fictional character Traynor bears a clear
relationship to the real-life figure Elvis Presley. In
her characterization of Traynor, Walker repeats
many aspects of Presleys appearance and career,
including the following.(4) Presley began recording
in 1954, just out of high school. By 1956, his records
were reaching number one on the pop charts, and he
was fast becoming a wealthy man. While still a
young man he was hailed as The King of Rock n
Roll.(5) He also made numerous movies and
42

television appearances. He was drafted into the army

in March 1958, served much of his time in Germany,
and was discharged in March 1960. He was known to
give generous gifts - cars, televisions, diamond rings
- to family members, friends, fans, and
acquaintances. He was also known to travel with his
entourage in a fleet of Cadillacs which were always
on hand. It was the wiggle movement Elvis the
Pelvis made with his hips in those first
performances of fast R & B numbers that led the
young white women and girls to scream and shout
for more. He was married, divorced, and had
numerous short-lived relationships with women. He
gained a great deal of weight in his later years,
tipping the scales at 250 pounds in August 1977
when he died of heart failure related to drug use at
the age of 42.
Throughout Presleys career, his success was largely
due to his numerous covers of R & B records by
African American composers and performers. While
Presley made an enormous amount of money singing
and recording the songs of African Americans, the
African American originators saw very little. This
longstanding tradition of racism and exploitation
in the American music industry, which appeared in a
slightly different guise in the classic blues era, dates
back to minstrelsy, when white men in blackface
imitated African Americans (Toll). In the case of
rock n roll, as Walker suggests in her descriptions
of Traynors copying Gracie Maes song (7, 18), white
performers like Elvis often copied the records they
covered down to the details of the arrangements and
the dance movements that went with them. When
Elvis sang Black music, white audiences ate it up.
Sam Phillips of Sun records, who had recorded Black
R & B performers for years, knew that if he could
find a white man who could sing Black music like an
African American, he could make a star and a killing.
He did both with Elvis (Goldman 110). Presley
learned the blues from listening to Arthur Big Boy
Crudup, Roy Brown, and other African American
musicians in Tupelo, Mississippi, where he grew up.
His first two records made in 1954 were covers of
Crudups blues piece Thats All Right, originally
recorded in 1946, and Roy Browns R & B hit Good
Rockin Tonight, originally recorded in 1947. But it
was Presleys cover of Hound Dog in 1956, a song
originally recorded in 1952 by R & B singer Willie
Mae Big Mama Thornton, which became a millionseller and sent him to the top of the national charts
(Cotten 91).(6)
While Walkers character Gracie Mae differs
somewhat from the real-life blues figure and
originator of Elviss million-seller record Hound
Dog, some notable similarities exist between the
two. The late great Willie Mae Big Mama Thornton
is a contemporary R & B legend whose career reflects
the continuance of the blues tradition from the
1940s through the 1980s. Her exceptional voice and
powerful presence, and the image she projected,
exerted considerable influence on many - Elvis
Presley and Janis Joplin among them. Big Mama
Thornton combined the qualities of several
generations of the best country and classic blues
women. Chris Strachowitz, who recorded and
publicized her in the 1960s, called her the greatest
female blues singer of any decade. Strachowitzs

description of her aesthetic approach to singing

matches the essential qualities of Walkers character
to a tee. He says:
At all times Big Mama is herself - she doesnt try to
be anybody else.... Big Mama sings music she feels songs which have meaning for her - blues which
deals with everyday life as she experienced it.... Big
Mama makes [a song] into her own personal
expression. (Liner notes)
Thulani Daviss description of Big Mamas
performance in the 1980 concert Blues Is A Woman,
which occurred alongside classic blues legend Sippie
Wallace and others, also captures something of the
individual quality of her voice, presence, and image:
The concerts finest moment was Big Mama
Thornton, who sported a mans 3-piece suit
(completely offsetting all the sequins and chiffon)
topped with a straw hat and showing a mans gold
watch. She sat at stage center and talked and played
a few pieces she wanted to play (not on the
program).... she wore out the harmonica & wailed &
rocked the house. She set the standard for what its
all about. She was the woman who left home, left
home early, and she reminded me of a song they say
was sung way back before 1910 that women blues
singers took over as their own: Aint nobodys
bizness if I do. (Davis 56; emphasis added)
Like Gracie Mae, Willie Mae Big Mama Thornton
was a big woman for most of her life, weighing some
300 pounds in 1965 (Strachowitz).(7) Moreover, the
name Gracie Mae itself suggests some connection to
Willie Mae Thornton.
One difference between character and real-life singer
is that Big Mama Thornton did not compose Hound
Dog; the popular songwriting team Lieber and
Stoller did that. Nevertheless, as Strachowitzs
comments suggest, she made the song her own in
performance, embellishing the text and adding a
humorous ad lib monologue. A second difference is
that Walkers character, Gracie Mae Still, made her
original recording of the unnamed song in 1923,
while Thornton recorded Hound Dog in 1952.
Walkers character is a classic blues singer and
composer, a contemporary friend and rival of Bessie
Smith, whereas Thornton was an R & B performer
and composer. Yet, like Big Mama Thornton, Gracie
Mae Still embodies several generations of blues
women. In the character of Gracie Mae, Walker
celebrates the long herstorical tradition of the
blues and the lives and work of its Black female
creators, from Bessie Smith to Willie Mae Big
Mama Thornton, Aretha Franklin, and beyond.
As Gracie Mae embodies many singers, her song
embodies many songs. Although Walker uses three
blanks (----- ----- -----), loosely suggesting a threeword title, she chooses not to specify the songs title
because it could be many songs, and its meaning
extends beyond the particulars of any one song. (8)
At the same time, Walkers story would appear to
signify on the song Hound Dog, and, in any case,
an examination of the song provides an interesting
reading of aspects of the storys meaning.
You aint nothin but a hound dog, been snoopin
round my door [2x]
You can wag your tail, but I aint gonna feed you no
more.
43

You told me you was high class, but I could see

through that
Yes, you told me you was high class, but I could see
through that
And Daddy I know, you aint no real cool cat.
You made me feel so blue, you made me weep and
moan
You made me feel so blue, yeah you made me weep
and moan
Cause you aint lookin for a woman, all youre
lookin is for a home. (Thornton)
The songs image of the hound dog wagging and
snooping suggests the deceitful, low-down ways of a
no-good man, whose outward appearance and
initial words and gestures are contradicted by the
reality of his intentions and his ultimate behavior.
He acts friendly (wags his tail) as though he cares
for the singer personally, but thats only because he
wants something (food, sex, a home). While he tells
her he is respectable, committed, and able and
willing to pull his weight (high class), experience
tells her that she should be wary.
The blues image of the hound dog from Big Mama
Thorntons song becomes a core image in Walkers
story. At a moment of clarity and despair, inspired
by his exchanges with Gracie Mae, Traynor says to
her:
They want what you got but they dont want you.
They want what I got only it aint mine. Thats what
makes em so hungry for me when I sing. They
getting the flavor of something but they aint getting
the thing itself. They like a pack of hound dogs trying
to gobble up a scent. (17)
At this moment Traynor comes closest to singing his
own blues song. His words contain the contrast, the
paradox, the ironic juxtaposition and inversion, and
even the sensual imagery and feeling of the blues.
The language is reminiscent of Hurstons description
of Daisy Blunt in Their Eyes, in which she contrasts
the white and black in Daisys clothes, eyes, and hair,
using sensual and sexually suggestive blues imagery
to celebrate Daisys Black femaleness and to
articulate an African American image of beauty (10506).
In the same way in which Hurston discusses Daisys
black hair having a white flavor, Walker describes
white music having a Black flavor. Traynors white
audience gobbles up the Black flavor that the white
singer (Traynor) copying the Black singer (Gracie
Mae) is putting out. While Traynor refers in the
hound dog passage to his young white audience, he
also speaks of his own position and relation to
Gracie Maes song. Traynor, too, has got the flavor of
the song and has gobbled up [its] scent. Hes onto
some part of the songs meaning, and beginning to
comprehend his own life - but the full meaning of
the song, the life, and the experience behind the
song still eludes him. The image of the hound dog
describes Traynors pursuit of Gracie Mae, his
pursuit of the songs meaning, and his pursuit of self;
it also describes his pursuit of fame and fortune and
his attempts at relationships and marriage:
It was like singing somebody elses record. I copied
the way it was supposed to be exactly but I never had
a clue what marriage meant.... I never could squeeze
any of my own life either into it or out of it. (13)

In both Big Mama Thorntons song and Alice

Walkers story, the hound dogs (Traynor, white
people, men) want what the Black womans got, but
they dont want her. They aint lookin for a woman,
[they] lookin for a home. Theyre hungry for food;
theyre gobbling up a scent. Theyre pursuing
something, not someone; the flavor of something,
not the thing itself; the appearance of things, not the
people behind them; material comfort rather than
spiritual well-being.
Traynor in all his wealth and fame (in the words of
Thorntons song) appears to be high class, and he
attempts to share this status with Gracie Mae,
buying her cars and houses and appliances and
more, but as the song says, she see[s] through that
and know[s he] aint no real cool cat. She says no
thank you to his lifestyle. She appreciates a brand
new Cadillac and wouldnt mind waking up to
homemade cornbread every morning, but as for a
house with a kitchen with five stoves and a long hike
to the porch and people she doesnt even know all
around her, she says thanks but no thanks (16-17).
In signifying on the song and story of Big Mama
Thornton, Elvis Presley, and Hound Dog, Walkers
crucial difference comes in the fact that Traynor
seeks to understand the meaning of the song he
sings by pursuing his relationship with its creator. A
clue to Walkers interest in Elvis and to the
significance of her fictional development of the
relationship between Traynor and Gracie Mae in
Nineteen Fifty-five appears in her fourth novel,
The Temple of My Familiar (1989). Here Ola (an
Olinkan man) and Fanny Nzingha (his African
American daughter) discuss Olas ideas for a play
about Elvis Presley. Ola clearly perceives Elvis to be
Native American in aspects of his dress (buckskin,
fringe, silver) and in aspects of his appearance (thick
black hair, full lips), and culturally just as black as
the other white people in Mississippi. Ola and
Fannie imagine Elviss little bump and grind as
originally a movement of the circle dance, and his
hiccupy singing style as once a war whoop or an
Indian love call. Ola listens to Elvis to hear where
commercial and mainstream cultural success takes
people, a part of whose lineage is hidden even from
themselves, in a country that insists on racial,
cultural and historical amnesia, if you wake up one
century and find yourself white. Ola says: in
[Elvis] white Americans found a reason to express
their longing and appreciation for the repressed
Native American and Black parts of themselves
(188). Ola suggests that the weeping of white
maidens over Elviss death is white Americas
weeping over the loss of the other both within
themselves and without (189).
Indeed, in the character of Traynor, Walker herself
explores questions of success and identity, using the
image and story of Elvis Presley as a vehicle. Olas
comments in Temple suggest that part of Traynors
attraction to Gracie Mae and his search for the
meaning of her song is his longing for the lost
African American parts of himself which are
embodied in his Loosianna creole features (4),
while part of his audiences hungry adulation is
white Americas longing for the cut-off and repressed
African American part of themselves.
44

and lack of familial support could and did take on African American
female performers.
8. Similarly, in The Color Purple, Walker does not specify Mr. -----s
last name because he could be many men; there are many like him.

In Nineteen Fifty-five, as in Temple, Walker

explores the idea that human beings want, above all
else, to love each other freely regardless of tribe
(189) and recognizes musicians efforts to bridge the
gap. In Temple, for example, through the character
of Miss Lissie, Walker acknowledges the efforts of
Janis Joplin, whose immediate musical momma
was also Big Mama Thornton. (Their song was
Ball n Chain.) Miss Lissie says: She knew Bessie
Smith was her momma, and she sang her guts out
trying to tear open that closed door between them
(369). In Nineteen Fifty-five, Walker similarly uses
this mother/child image to describe the relationship
which develops between Gracie Mae and Traynor (78, 18). In pursuing the meaning of Gracie Maes song
through developing a relationship with its creator,
Traynor begins to know himself as he begins to know
Gracie Mae.
It seems to me that Walker, In Nineteen Fifty-five,
uses a blues mode to sow the seeds for her explicit
critique of essentialist notions of identity in The
Temple of My Familiar. After several centuries of
cohabitation in the Southern U.S. (not to mention
the centuries of contact in Europe, Africa, Asia, and
elsewhere before that), Walker argues, white and
Black (and Native) cultures can no longer be
realistically considered independent or pure; and,
in this context, the maintenance of strict definitions
of individuals as Black or white becomes absurd.
Walker teaches that these prescriptive definitions
not only keep people from one another but, as
exemplified in the case of Traynor, often tragically
keep people from themselves.
Notes
1. This article is a revision of a chapter from my dissertation, Voices
of Struggle: An Exploration of the Relationship Between African
American Womens Music and Literature, U of California-Berkeley,
1992.
2. I am not suggesting that Walker knew of the existence of Millers
song or had actually heard the recording, nor am I suggesting that
Walker was consciously signifying on Millers song/title. It is highly
likely, however, that Miller, recording in 1928 (like Walker writing
today), was aware of Bradfords song, if not from Mamie Smiths
recording in 1920 then from the circulation of the song which that
popular recording would have generated, and that she wes in some
sense consciously signifyin(g) on it. The theme itself is a common
blues theme reflected in many songs by Bessie Smith and others, and
Walker undoubtedly knew that. Millers recording testifies to the
cultural groundedness of Walkers blues, as well as to the fact that the
signifyin(g) process itself operates within the blues tradition.
3. It seems to me that Walkers use of the term authentic here is not so
much indicative of an essentialist view of African American culture as
it is about individuals being true to themselves and the primary
agents of their own lives. For Walker, it is not so much the presence or
absence of Blackness and Black style that makes for authentic
blues music as it is the presence or absence of vitality, of purpose, of
oneself in ones life/performance. The Black sound in and of itself
can signify neither Blackness nor meaning.
4. The details of Elvis Presleys life and career that follow are compiled
from Cotten and Goldman.
5. The name Traynor suggests an apprentice - one who is in training which in Walkers story is Traynors relationship to Gracie Mae. As
Elvis was known by many by his first name only, Traynor is not given a
last name in Walkers story. His lack of a last name is perhaps also
indicative of his lack of cultural and personal grounding and identity.
6. A more detailed look at Elvis Presleys life would reveal many more
similarities as well as many differences between Elvis and Walkers
character, and suggest additional interpretations of the details of
Walkers story. However, this is beyond the scope of this article.
7. While Thornton was a big woman during her prime, she lost a great
deal of weight in the last years of her life when she was hospitalized for
sickness related to alcohol abuse; her early deterioration and untimely
death in 1984 at the age of 58 were largely due to alcohol abuse. This
paints a reality grimmer than Walkers story. In The Color Purple,
Walker begins to explore the physical and psychological toll which
involvement in the music business, racism, sexism, life on the road,

45

3
David Wong Louie

Her name is Lisa Lee, and as she put it when she

phoned and invited herself to dinner, Sterling Lung,
King says youre fabulous. He said Id like you even if
you couldnt cook. I was flattered, of course, but as
soon as we hung up, I felt crowded by her
presumptions, as I do whenever some know-it-all
enters my kitchen and counsels me on ways to
improve whatever I have on the stove: more salt,
more pepper, or once even more cardamom.
To my credit, I did try to discourage her with the
warning that New Haven is clear across the state, a
solid two-and-a-half-hour drive away. How can that
be? she said. Were in the same area code. I
couldnt imagine what Jim King might have told her;
Lisa Lee was undaunted. Im sure youll make the
drive worthwhile.
In bed that night I puzzled over the phone call.
Why had Lisa Lee been put up to this? I tried to
contact Jim King, but was unsuccessful; the alumni
office at the CIA wouldnt divulge his exact
whereabouts, a condition of his employment. I
mulled over the facts, scarce as they were. Finally I
decided: Jim King must have a stake in this, he must
be in pursuit of this Lisa Lee and is simply using me
as bait. My role is that of a culinary Cupid. Fair
enough. One day Ill call in the favor, have King set
me up with a Kennedy.
I was so pleased with my revelation that I bounced
out of bed and wrote to Bliss. On the back of a John
and Yoko postcard (its their wedding day), I
shouldve known better, but I spilled the beans. I put
it all down, except the bit about King and the debt
hell repay with a Kennedy.
Im innocent; totally up-front, right? But honesty
isnt enough for Bliss. Shell never admit it, but some
corn-yellow tooth is going to go unpulled because
shes jealous, in love, and coming east to protect
what she believes is hers.
So it goes, the laden table, the overflowing cup.

David Wong Louie was

born and raised in New
York. He received a
Bachelors Degree in
English from Vassar
College and an MFA
from the University of
Iowa. His first book, the
story collection Pangs
of Love, won The Los
Angeles Times Book
Review First Fiction
Award, the Ploughshares
First
Fiction
Book
Award, was a New York
Times Book Review Notable of 1991 and a Voice
Literary Supplement Favorite of 1991. Louie is
currently an Associate Professor at the Department
of English and the Asian-American Studies Center at
UCLA. He lives in Venice, California with his wife
and son.
Studies: M.F.A. Creative Writing, The University of
Iowa, 1981; B.A. Vassar College, 1977
Interests: Asian American Studies, Creative Writing
Selected Publications: The Barbarians Are
Coming, 2000; Pangs of Love, 1991.

The Barbarians Are Coming

Feast or famine. My plate is suddenly full. One day
my Bliss is in Iowa, studying dentistry, gazing at the
gums and decay of hog farmers and their kin. She
claims she can eyeball a patients teeth and see
through to whats rotten. And now shes coming
home for a quick visit, a thousand miles, without
even the excuse of a national holiday or school
calendar break. Dont you have teeth to clean? I
asked hopefully when she called with the news. At
my insistence we use long-distance sparingly, only
when something truly important comes up. Since
Im still up in the air about our future as a couple,
why throw away good money until Im sure about
what Im doing: its the difference between
carnations for her birthday and a cashmere sweater.
I have us writing postcards back and forth. Short and
sweet, public enough so things can never get too
involved or serious. A pictures worth a thousand
words.
Heres the rest of the picture: I am twenty-six
years old, and was recently anointed the new
resident chef at the Richfield Ladies Club in
Richfield, Connecticut. I make lunch and tea, and in
the evenings Im on my own. A few weeks back, an
old classmate at the CIA (thats the Culinary
Institute of America), Jim King, now pastry chef for
one of the Kennedy widows, and hating it, told an
acquaintance of his who had just started her course
work at the Yale Graduate School of Design to call
me if she ever wanted a great home-cooked meal.

Im talking to Fuchs, the butcher I buy from. How

about a nice capon? Fuchs says. He has muttonchop
sideburns and a nose with hairs like alfalfa sprouts. I
grimace; with his talk of capons, Fuchs suddenly
assumes a sinister, perverted cast.
Ive never cooked capon before. Serving castrated
rooster isnt my bag. All I want is a four-, four-and-ahalf-pounder, a biggish bird so Lisa Lee wont think
Im going cheap on her.
Fuchs tears off a square of orange butcher paper,
which he lays on the scale, then plops the bird on
top. Fresh, he says. Be my guest, take a whiff.
Fuchs wont steer you wrong. Pound for pound, you
cant buy better than this.
Cool refrigerated air rises off the dank yellow skin.
Im surprised at you, Fuchs. I would think youd be
more sympathetic to his plight, I say, fingering the
ex-rooster.
Why? Because Im a member of the tribe?
Because I was circumcised?
No. Because you have one to circumcise. I poke
the bird. Us guys have got to stick together, Fuchs.
Think about it: Snip! And as if thats not bad enough,
they throw him back in with the others to plump, big
and fat, and he struts around like cocks do, big man
in barnyard, only the hens are snickering behind his
back. Think how he mustve felt.
46

Sterling, what gives? Since when did you become

psychologist to the poultry world? He wraps the
capon, ties the bundle with brown twine. Hey,
speaking of snip, how about whats-her-name, the
one they let play against the ladies at the U.S. Open
last year. Whatever happened to heror should I say
him? Renee Richards, tennis pro, who in a recent
former life was Richard Raskind, medical doctor. I
remember the first time I saw her in the newspaper,
she was in her tennis whites, in one of those
ridiculously skimpy skirts female players wear in
order to show off their panties. I was immediately
drawn to her looks, found her rather sexy even, that
is, until I read the accompanying article detailing her
surgical transformation. Cant tell a she from a he?
I scolded myself. What kind of man are you?
A woman enters the store. A young housewife
dressed in an outfit; her shoes, belt, and lipstick
match. Fuchs snaps back to his business mode: So
how many of these capons would you like, sir? I
guarantee you, the ladies at the club will adore this
flesh.
The new customer is browsing the beef-pork-lamb
end of the refrigerated case. I look at her, then at
Fuchs, who rolls his eyes and whispers, That one
was never a doctor.
I nod; hes got that right! Thats it for today, I
say.
Hey, these birds are meaty, Fuchs says, but just
one wont feed that crowd at the club.
Its not for the ladies. I laugh nervously. I have
this art student from Yale, a total stranger, coming
for dinner. A friend of a friend, that sort of thing.
Why so glum? Yale, you say. At least shes smart.
How do you know shes a she?
Because a guy gets hamburger. She, he indicates
the housewife, with a tip of his head, gets the bird.
Youre right, shes a she. Lisa Lee.
Chinese too, Sterling! Better than good.
I stare at Fuchs as though he were a freak, natural
or manmade, himself a capon.
Whyre you looking at me like Madame Chiang
Kai-shek just burst from my forehead?
I shake the shock from my eyes. I never imagined
she might be Chinese.
Madame Chiang?
No, Lisa Lee.
The other customer sets her purse on top of the
meat case.
To her Fuchs says, Im almost through here,
miss. To me he says, Lees a Chinese name. Am I
right?
Sure, but Ive been thinking Robert E. Lee. Vivien
Leigh. Sara Lee.
And dont forget Richard Day-lee and F. Lee Baylee.
Be serious.
And theres that jujitsu guyBruce Lee. Fuchs
scratches his bald spot. Geez, when you think of it,
hardly anyones Chinese.
I hand over some money. Fuchs offers to charge
the purchase to the Ladies Club account.
Personal use.
Boy, you Chinese are honest, Fuchs says. Well, I
wish I was in your shoes, having a blind date like
that. He winks, and at that moment, as half his face
collapses, I see him as a man from an earlier time in

human history, someone who could effortlessly tilt

back the chin of a lamb and slash its throat.
Leaving the store, I hear Fuchs say to his
customer, So, I see you like looking at meat
I walk to the Ladies Club with the capon bundle
under my arm. I know Fuchs must be right. Hanging
around death as he does all day, he sees things. Lisa
Lee is Chinese, which explains why Jim King has put
her up to our meeting; he thinks well make a cute
couple together, a pair of matching bookends.
I try to imagine Lisa Lee and immediately conjure
up my sisters. I see them, one after the other, their
faces like post office mug shots, and under their
chins, instead of a serial number, is a plaque that
reads Lisa Lee. I know its wrongheaded, even a bit
spooky, and entirely indicative of bad wiring inside
me, but in my heart every Chinese woman registers
as an aunt, my mother, my sisters, or the Hong Kong
girl whose picture my mother keeps taped to the
kitchen mirror. They hold no romantic interest for
me.
I pass Kim the greengrocer. People in town think
he is Chinese. I backtrack, enter the store. Lisa Lee:
bean sprouts, snow peas. I rarely do business with
Kim, who charges four times wholesale and wont
cut me a break, ripping me off, his Asian brother,
along with everyone else. Six bucks a pound for snow
peas! Kims making a mint and getting fat, even his
wire-rims look fat. And he speaks only enough
English to kiss up to the housewives with his
America is good place, You look nice, Cheap,
cheap stuff. With me, he doesnt botherwhat is
another Oriental going to get him?
I pay, and feel pickpocketed. My own money, and
whats it going to get me? Not so cheap, I say to
Kim, with a smile, angling for a discount. But he just
eyes me, a stray thats wandered in off the street.
You not have to buy, he says, and shrugs.
Normally I have no use for bean sprouts and snow
peas, even at half the price. They are not part of who
I am as a chef. But just as tennis requires a can of
balls, a milkshake a drinking straw, a dinner guest
named Lisa Lee requires the appropriate vegetable
matter. Blind date, I say, holding my purchases up
by my ear. I can see from Kims blank expression
that he has failed to grasp my meaning: he cant see
that my hands are tied, that I must go against the
grain, that under routine circumstances I wouldnt
tolerate this economic exploitation.
Kim says, America is land of plenty. Why you
want a blind girl for?
When I get homethat is, the small apartment that
comes with the job, four hundred square feet, the top
floor of the carriage house in the rear of the Ladies
Club propertyI find a postcard from Bliss in the
mail. A giant ear of corn that takes up the entire
length of a flatbed truck. She alternates between
sending the mutant-corn postcard and sending the
one of the colossal hog with antelope horns. She
writes: A guy comes in complaining about a
toothache but he doesnt know which tooth aches.
The X rays dont know any better, and neither do my
professors. But then I had a hunch, this feeling; I
borrowed a light and checked his eyes and his ears.
And bingo! There was a moth in there and a foot of
47

yarn! When it was all over, Moth Ears asked me out

for a beer. He said, Are you spoken for? I had never
heard it put that way. Sterling, have you spoken for
me? I love you. See you Friday, the 16th.
I check the calendar. Today is Friday, the fifteenth.
Is she coming today, or tomorrow, the sixteenth?
Friday, as she says, or Saturday? Somethings wrong.
As much as I hate having to do so, I have to phone
her, paying premium daytime rates, no less. When
she doesnt answer, Im relieved, spared the toll
chargesthough I know thats an inappropriate
response. Shes probably already in the air. I need to
straighten the matter out. I try Lisa Lees number;
she isnt at home either. Perhaps both are speeding,
in opposite directionsLisa Lee from the east, Bliss
from the westto the same trembling destination.

and swung it down to my hip, cutting wide arcs that I

hoped would alert her to the fact I was still awake
and miserable, bored, and ready for surrender.
On one of these sweeps she grabbed my hand
later she would argue I had offered it to herand
when my arm pendulumed up toward my head, she
leapt out of her chair like a fish from the sea.
Without the slightest break in her song she was lured
into my bedso goes her version of how we ended
up making love that first time. As we lay naked
between the sheets, chills from the fever stiffening
my body, she held me to her enormous heat and
asked if she might come again, another day, with
more soup, and unsteadily, I said, Yes.
I admit I was the one who had made first contact.
Soon after I arrived in Richfield, I saw her name in
our college alumni magazine and called her. We had
been marginal friends at Swarthmore, both art
history majors, but she was a couple of classes ahead
of me, and we traveled in different social circles (her
group was acid and orgies; mine was wine and onenight stands). After running hard with the in
crowd her first four semesters, she turned serious
as a junior, finding peace in the study of Gothic
cathedrals. At the art history majors costume party
during her Senior Week, we spoke for the first time.
She went as Notre Dame, a dishwasher box, with
splendidly painted details of the original and
posterboard flying buttresses hanging off at her sides
like spider legs; her face was that of a gargoyle. Guys
joked about coming to worship, going on a
pilgrimage. I went as Warhols Brillo box. Our
costumes were huge hits but left us on the sidelines,
victims of our own geniuswhat a drag trying to
boogie with your body in a cardboard box.
When I tracked her down at her parents place in
New Canaan, she was completely surprised. We met
for lunch on one of my first off-days from the Ladies
Club. She was no longer the hippie shed been in
school. While her long, frizzy brown hair was still
her most distinguishing attribute, in the four years
since I had last seen her she had lost the roundness
in her face and had traded in her T-shirts and Indian
print skirts for tailored clothing. Between graduation
and dental school, she had worked for her father,
who owned and managed properties and acquired
things. Even though she slept under his roof and
received a salary from him, she seemed to harbor
boundless hostility toward her father. In her lingo,
he was capitalist pig scum, who apparently felt
morally justified in his own brand of bigotry because
his parents were Holocaust survivors. After the
initial weekend lunches at local restaurants, I invited
her to my apartment for dinner. Then came the day
she showed up at my door with the soup.
I rub the mustard onto the capons skin, with its
largish pores and nipple-like bumps; the mustards
whole seeds, tiny orbs rolling between my palm and
the lubricated skin, produce a highly erotic
sensation.
The telephone rings and I jump, embarrassed by
the pleasure Im taking. My mind leaps from the
capon to Lisa Lee. She must be calling to cancel our
date; perhaps she has a project due and cant come
to dinner.
But the instant I lift the receiver I realize I dont
want to hear that message at all.

I rinse the bird, salt its body cavity, and curse Fuchs.
Before Fuchs, Lisa Lee was just a hungry student
coming for a home-cooked meal; a stranger shows
up uninvited at your door, you feed him. Or her.
Theres a right and a wrong, and I was prepared to
do the right thing. In the end even Bliss wouldnt
have objected to that. But talking to Fuchs has put
me in a fix. Now my innocent little dinner, my
mission of mercy, has transformed into a date. With
a Chinese girl, of all things!
Bliss and I had been seeing each other on a regular
basis for only a few months when she asked me to
move with her to Iowa and set up house. I told her
no, I had my job with the ladies. She then offered to
defer the start of her second year of dental school
and stay with me. Fearing the escalation in the level
of our commitment to each other such a sacrifice
would signify, I had to tell her no again. I was
flattered, but was even more bewildered by her
eagerness to alter her plans. In my eyes we were, at
best, a fringe couple. Yes, we were going out.
Sleeping together. I was happy to have her in my life.
I was new in town, knocking myself out trying to
impress my employers, and if Id been living close to
friends, in familiar surroundings, I might not have
indulged the relationship as I did. We were pals, we
hung out, we ate lots of food, we drank good wine,
we had sex occasionally. But moving in together, in
the Midwest? Was she kidding? That was far beyond
where I was. The trouble then, as now, was that I
never meant for things to get too serious. At the risk
of sounding like a junior high schooler: I liked her
but I didnt love her.
I towel off the capon, massage mustard onto its
skin. It feels no different from any of the hundreds of
chickens Ive cooked, but I cant get used to touching
this thing. Bliss would have no qualms; after all, she
wants to drill teeth for a living. Nothing seems to
bother her. When she wedged her way into my life,
arriving unannounced like an angel with a pot of
soup, I was sick, a vibrating mass of germs, but she
laid on her hands and helped me undress and made
my bed and massaged my back and sat nearby,
singing French folk songs and Joni Mitchell. I
couldnt sleep because of the singing but was too
polite, indeed, too beholden, indeed, too afraid to
ask her to cut short her concertthat was what it
was, for she seemed to pause between songs for
imaginary applause. The moment came when I
dislodged my arm, which was pillowing my head,
48

Im here! Im here, Im here, Im here!

Its Bliss. Originally, she explains, she planned to
fly in tomorrow, but a classmate, Ray, has a wedding
to attend in Greenwich, and she caught a ride, saving
money, his drive-buddy. At this moment they are
outside Syracuse, still hours shy of Connecticut.
Im skipping my parents, she says. She sounds
all juiced up, still speedy from the road. Its a hitand-run visit. Im not even stopping in, theyll want
to feed me, take me shopping, you know, monopolize
my time. Im going to stay with you.
Love is a lot like cooking. When either is
successful, theres a delicate chemistry in operation,
a fine balance between the constituent parts. If you
have the perfect recipe for vichyssoise, you dont
monkey with it. Weve had a workable arrangement.
The U.S. Postal Service has kept us connected; we
have a standing agreement to take holidays together.
Thats plenty. Why spoil a good thing?
Were going to stop by Randazzos, Bliss says.
Come join us. Im letting Ray buy me drinks. She
informs me that Ray is a third-year dental student;
he has been a good help to her, and twice has taken
her hunting for ring-necked pheasant in the
harvested cornfields.
Im stuck here, I tell her. Im experimenting
with a new recipe. Which is the truth.
Always other women, she says.
I hear the sarcasm in her voice, understand she
means the club ladies I have to feed, but suspect she
also means Lisa Lee. For a moment I consider
putting an end to the intrigue, inviting her and that
guy Ray to join us for dinner. A foursome around the
table. Me and Bliss. Ray and Lisa Lee. At the mere
thought of such a pairing I experience a biting pang
of jealousy.
Silvy, whats the matter? she says, into the silent
line. Its me, Bliss. Are you upset with me? Come
on, tell me. Do you feel threatened by Ray?
I keep seeing the four of us around the table; Nay,
some generic Midwesterner in a hunting cap and
ammo vest, and Lisa Lee, who at that moment I
imagine as my sister Lucy.
Its true we spent the night together in the car.
But hes just a friend.
I stay silent.
Im sorry. Nothing happened. Dont be that way.
You know me. Im already spoken for.
After we hang up I try to reach Lisa Lee again. No
answer, of course, shes also on her way. But I dont
panic. Bliss has hundreds of miles to go, a couple of
hours drinking at Randazzos. If Im really lucky
shell catch dinner there.

beam angularity in her cheeks, through her

shoulders.
Then it hits me, like the icicle that fell six stories
and opened my head when I was a boy: She can pass
for Renee Richardss double.
Are you all right? she asks. Didnt King tell
you?
Tell me what, that she, Lisa Lee, was once a he?
Its okay. You can stare, she says. Im used to it,
people are always gawking at my size.
She eats and drinks lustily; she has so much space to
fill. I think of horses Ive seen, their magnificent
dimensions, the monumental daily task of keeping
their bodies stoked. For all the energy and attention
she gives to her food, she maintains a nonstop
conversation, remarkable for its seamless splice of
words, breaths, bites, and swallows. What do you
call these? she says, helping herself to the snow
peas.
Snow peas.
No, she says. I mean in Chinese.
I ask about her studies. I dont comprehend much
of her response. Its all very abstract, highly
theoretical. But in the end she confesses that what
shes truly into is interior design. Every designer
with a name in Milan and New York, she begins, is a
man. She says this has to change. Women are cooped
up in their homes all day, surrounded by things
designed by men. Knives and forks, she says, is
macho eating. Stab and cut, out on the hunt. She
critiques my flatware, my stemware, my dishes. Its
junk, cheap stuff, but shes a grad student and finds
things to say, just as Bliss is awed by exotic gum
diseases.
She loads up on capon. Ive barely touched any of
the bird, too much excitement, and Im still too
squeamish. Call it cross-species male solidarity. But
I love watching someone enjoy my cooking,
especially a woman, one who eats (theres no other
way of putting it) like a man, with pig-at-the-trough
mindlessness, so different from Bliss, with her onagain, off-again diets, her sensitivity to ingredients,
her likes and dislikes, allergies, calorie counts, moral
guidelines.
Lisa Lee takes on a leg, itself almost a pound of
flesh. As she sinks her teeth into the perfectly
browned skin, my mind explodes with the inevitable
question: Why Bliss? How can she say she loves me
if she doesnt love all of me, including my food?
What am I but a cook? You love me, love what I
cook! How should I regard a so-called lover who
would extract essential ingredients from my dishes,
capers, for instance, her fingers pinching the
offending orbs like fleas off a dog, then flicking them
onto the table, as if she had seen Warning:
Radioactive Materials printed on each itty-bitty
bud. I imagine Bliss encountering the roasted capon,
which to a normal diner like Lisa Lee is just a plump
bird. But Bliss has an uncanny knack for putting two
and two together, even when there isnt a two and
two to put together. What are you trying to do to
me? she would say, her suspicions touching me like
the worst accusation, and I would hang my head in
shame, accepting responsibility for the roosters sad
fate, feeling the tug of its peppercorn-sized testicles
that guilt has strung around my neck. Souvenirs of

She fills the doorway, her head and its swirl of

dark hair eclipse the early-evening sun. Her face is in
shadow. She stabs jugs of wine into the room: I got
Inglenook red and white, she says. I didnt know
how you swing, so I blanketed the field.
I backpedal from the door, and as soon as I vacate
a space, Lisa Lee fills it.
She is six feet tall. My first thought is, Where is
Lisa Lee, the Chinese Lisa Lee that Fuchs had
promised, where is she in this high-rise protoplasm?
Still, I cant help noticing her beauty, the cool sort,
good American bones and narrow green eyes. Ive
seen her before, especially the gangliness, the I49

war. Men! Disgusted with me and the bird, she

would go on diets: For days, no meat. For weeks, no
sex.
Lisa Lee relinquishes her knife and fork. That was
so good! Youre everything King said youd be. She
smiles, greasy lips, a fleck of capon skin on her chin
like a beauty mark. Her satisfied look pleases me to
no end. I start to clear the table. The jug of white she
brought is gone. Amazing we choked down so much
cheap wine. If youre a man, she says, youll uncap
the other bottle. In the kitchen I set down the
dishes, and as I open the red, the telephone rings.
Were on Eighty-four, near Poughkeepsie, Bliss
reports. Theyre at a rest area, making use of the
facilities. Im going to skip the drinks with Ray. Ive
already worried you enough about him. Im so, so
sorry.
I watch as Lisa Lee stacks the dirty dishes. What
remarkable size! An infinite capacity to consume and
thereby to love. Her mastications were gestures of
love. She catches me staring, holds a finger
perpendicular to her lips, admonishing herself to
keep quiet. She seems to know who it is Im talking
to, seems familiar and comfortable with situations of
this sort. She steps free of her noisy shoes, and as I
watch her move toward me, I wish I could just as
easily step from my entanglement with Bliss. Pluck
her from my life as cold-bloodedly as she would a
bay leaf from a stew Ive made, a tooth from
someones head.
Dont change your plans because of me, I say.
You like Randazzos. Have some drinks. Ill see you
afterwards. Im not going anywhere.
Lisa Lee takes the opened jug of red from my
hands, fishes a glass from the sink, pours, and
drinks. I watch her swallow, the little hitch in her
throat; if only the hitch were the clasp of a zipper
that ran down to her navel, which unzipped revealed
Lisa Lees Chinese self. I want this to happen for
Blisss sake: should she arrive while Lisa Lee is still
here, I could simply pass her off as my cousin. Bliss
would love her.
I check my watch. With or without drinks they
cant possibly get here before Ive served coffee and
dessert and sent Lisa Lee on her way.
I get off the phone with Bliss. We leave things
hanging. Ill take care of business on my end; I cant
worry about what I cant control.
Where does this go? Lisa Lee holds the platter
containing the remains of the capon.
Let me take that. Ill pack you some leftovers to
take home.
What kind of man are you? she says, welding
hands to hips. Youre going to make me drive all
that way, in my condition?
Do I have a choice? True, the picture of her
backing down the driveway is frightening enough,
forget the two and a half hours on the interstate. The
decent thing to do would be to tuck her safely into
my bed for the night. But Bliss stands in the way of
such a right and moral act. What Lisa Lee needs is
sleep, to pass the hours of her overindulgence out of
harms way. A nights undisturbed digestion, then,
upon waking, to eat and love again. Bliss will deny
her her well-deserved rest. So much more the pity,
sleep the simple thing it is. Its a staggering thought,
yet I know that before the night is through I will do

Blisss bidding. She will insist that Lisa Lee must go.
And should Lisa Lee, heaven forbid, doze while shes
behind the wheel and jump the center divider, a
grand jury surely will charge Bliss, not me. Still,
what comfort is that?
I brew a pot of coffee. From the living room
Lisa Lee calls, What kind of wine smells like that?
Minutes later I carry in a tray with coffee and a
rich chocolate torte. She is seated on the pea-green
couch. My rickshaw driver lamp gives her skin a
yellowish hue. Her eyes narrow in concentration, as
she fastidiously rolls a joint.
What are you doing?
First her expression is, Dont mess with me; then
she says, Youre not chicken, are you? A girl only
lives once. She slips the joint into her smiling
mouth and slowly reams it through her lips.
We drink the coffee, we eat the chocolate torte.
Afterward she seems more together, the alchemy of
bread dough in a 375-degree oven. Now I can send
her homeBliss can send her homewith regrets
but diminished fear for her safety.
Then she lights up.
The marijuana will counteract the effects of the
caffeine in the coffee and the chocolate. When I run
this past her she says, Maybe pot stimulates me.
You dont know my body.
But I do know. Her body, her outsized frame, its
long rib cage that imprisons the real Lisa Lee, my
counterfeit cousin inside her. Theres the reason for
her vast appetite; she must eat for two, and like her
master, the one trapped inside also loves my food,
also loves all of me.
She offers me a hit. I scissor the joint, just to get it
away from her. She watches me, with a smile that
she knows my secrets. I like your hands, she coos
in a hushed tone. I like what they do to ordinary
things. What a miracle that chicken was.
Should I tell her the truth? Straighten her out as to
which fowl is which? She doesnt need my help, her
powers of perception are unparalleled; after all, she
saw the miracle in the dish, and the transformation
of the capon into something delicious, respectable,
beautiful is nothing short of miraculous.
Chicken! Im the chicken around here. Too chicken
to insist that Lisa Lee stay; too chicken to tell Bliss
not to come, tell her shes not spoken for. Im brave
only with my parents; I stared down their anger
when (at their nosy insistence) I confessed I was
dating someone (Bliss), and they acted hurt and
surprised she wasnt Chinese, even though none of
my previous girlfriends was of the Asian persuasion
either. What do these girls see in you? Youre so
stupid, you think they think youre pretty, dont
you? I defended myself with a raging silence. But
what do they see? Im a decent enough guy, but there
are plenty of decent guys; Im competent in bed, but
competence is rampant. The standard is Robert
Redford, and on more than one occasion Ive stood
before the bathroom mirror with a picture of the
actor held up to my face and gauged the extent of my
deficiencies. What Bliss sees in me, I cant answer.
The mechanics of her fierce affection is a mystery.
And its this mystery that freezes me, makes love
cruel. In all my relationships love has felt like
charity, needed and hungrily received; I am Pip from
50

Great Expectations, fat on anothers generosity but

crippled by the uncertainty over what motivates my
benefactors heart. With Lisa Lee at least I know she
loves my food.
The telephone rings again. Lisa Lee smirks, arches
her eyebrows. Popular guy, arent you? she says.
You dont have to answer, you know.
A temptation, a perfect opportunity to bump Bliss
from the picture. But I dont have the nerve.
Bliss is at Randazzos, ahead of schedule. Theyre
going to have drinks and a bite to eat. For a split
second I take offense, am actually jealous: eating at a
spaghetti joint, when she knows Im concocting
something new and fabulous in my kitchen. Im
shocked by the speed with which theyve made
Connecticut, but grateful for the regained hours her
dining out provides. Thats fine. Ill be here, waiting
for you, I say. For reasons unknown, I add, But tell
me, what made you change your mind? You said you
were coming here directly.
She says, At first I thought I had upset you
because I was traveling in close quarters with a man.
But then I realized I cant upset you. You dont care
what I do. So it must be that youd rather I hadnt
come. Ill just go to my parents house.
Thats silly. Its just that my hands are full. Then
I say, Youre spending an awful lot of time with that
Ray. And why shouldnt I say this? It costs me
nothing, and its what she wants to hear.
Theres a prolonged silence on the other end, after
which, with the usual cheerful lilt back in her voice,
Bliss says, You really mean that?

rousing her, its something I do, a phantom order I

have no choice but to obey. How does this look to
someone outside, peeking in through the window?
You see a woman in bedasleep or restingat peace
with her choices in life, safe and secure, and a man
on the edge of the mattress, which, to judge from his
posture, must seem like the very edge of the world to
him; he is alone on the brink, though the woman is
there; and you see how worries have fused his
vertebrae into a single length of bone, how rest wont
come easily to this man, who wants to leap but cant.
Lisa Lee stretches, tightening her muscles,
pushing roughly away from me. At once I miss her
ardently, it is out of all proportion, but true.
Then it comes to me in a rush. And I feel tricked
and double-crossed when I realize that the person
Im missing most right now is Bliss. I miss how she
tells me what to think, what to do. Once, back in the
early days, when she ate and loved unquestioningly,
I prepared a simple dinner, from recipes I cant even
recall, and at its conclusion she exclaimed, That
meal is beyond seduction. That, darling, was a
proposal of marriage. Weeks later she started
dropping hints about living together, about one day
marrying, and when I grew exasperated with such
talk, she fired back that I, with that meal, had
planted the idea of marriage in her head.
I want Bliss to come to my rescue, as she did with
soup in the beginning, my personal Red Cross. No
one chooses the Red Cross, but when disaster
strikes, the Red Cross is there.
Lisa Lee sweetly, softly belches. Her loving
appetite! I study the fleck of roasted skin still on her
chin, the dark brown of a nipple. I remember some
graffiti in the mens room at cooking school:

After I hang up I stay in the kitchen and pack a

doggie bag for Lisa Lee. Fuchs was right about the
capons size. A lot of meat. Big. And theres never
been a blinder date. Wait till I tell him. I can hear
him now: Okay, so shes not Chinese, you cant have
everything. Already you got smart. Now you say shes
beautiful and handsome too! And big! You cant buy
any better
When I return to the living room shes no longer
there. At first Im relieved, one problem solved. But
immediately I realize her absence depresses me.
I find her in my bed, apparently asleep, her jeans
on, her blouse off. The top sheet slashes diagonally
across her, toga style, leaving her shoulder exposed.
When I check, shes taking sleeps slow, steady
breaths. Hey, hey, I say, tapping her on the
shoulder.
She opens and closes her eyes. Mmmmm ... she
says, but there is no telling why. Asleep again, she
shifts her position and does something with her
hands, and the sheet flies off, magically, and shes
naked for the briefest instant, and Im not sure if its
happened by accident or design. The fleeting sight of
her long, lanky torso burns into my memory, her
breasts as tidy as teacups upended on a clear pine
board.
I sit on the edge of the mattress. Lisa, I say
softly, wake up. Lisa Lee yawns, rolls onto her side,
curls her body around my spine. It must be the
surprise of our bodies touching and the
thoroughness of the contact that make me feel
enveloped by her. I lean into the heat of her skin, as
plants turn toward light, palm her shoulder, and
shake her. But my heart isnt behind the business of

There once was a girl named

Red,
Whose passions were stirred
when fed.
A little French wining,
Fine Epicurean dining,
And soon youll be eating in
bed.
But Lisa Lee is not like that girl Red. Lisa Lee isnt
about love or pleasure. Whats made her so right, all
night, is the fact she isnt Bliss.
Its time to act. Time to put my life in order.
I swing my legs onto the bed and slowly slide
down next to her. She drapes a heavy arm across my
waist and breathes metabolized smoke and wine
against my face. When she shifts her weight, her
knee scrapes the top of my knee, her pelvis bumps
my thigh. Shes making all the moves. My record
with Bliss is still clean, my hands as good as tied to
my sides. But why hold back? Bliss isnt the Red
Cross, her soul isnt dressed in nurses whites. Her
habitual kindness, like American foreign aid, comes
with strings attached. Around the room I see her
touches: the curtains she sewed; the plants she
bought and reminds me to water; the Matisse
goldfish poster that she framed; the bookcase she
knocked together, painted black, and stocked with
thin volumes of poetry. This is nothing but interior
51

design. This nights struggle is about my interior

design, how I am configured inside, how I want the
four chambers of my heart arranged, my likes and
loves, my duty and desire, not how she wants those
parts to be.
If I accept Lisa Lees sleepy advances, I can do so
with the knowledge that no one is better equipped
than Bliss to weather the pain of this bums
indiscretion. She has the recipe for the healing soup,
and strong hands to catch herself when she falls.
And a heart that all along has loved for two.
Lisa Lee pulls me closer, grinds her nose into my
neck, rubs her zipper against my hip, and I sense
that it is time. But when I turn to kiss her, her body
suddenly goes limp, rubbery-limbed, her joints in
aspic, and she softly, undeniably, snores.

When Bliss and I first got together, she told me

she could read a persons life simply by looking in his
mouth. I loved this idea, my imagination locked on
palmists and the articulate lines in hands, or
psychics who can predict a life by the shape of a
skull. Tell me about myself, I said. At one time,
she said, you brushed with a hard toothbrush. The
size of your cavities suggests youve had good dental
care. And so on. But not a word about my luck,
about my destiny, about whether Im a trustworthy
or a dangerous man, about what will happen next.
I close my eyes and sink deeper into the water.
Someone knocks at the apartment door. I sit up,
splash water on my face, then lean back, and wait.
The door opens and closes. I could have set the
deadbolt, but thought better of doing so. That would
not be playing fair.
Its a long time before she comes to the bathroom,
and by then, as is her wont, and now her burden, she
mustve put two and two together: Lisa Lees car in
the drive, the wineglasses, the empty bottle, the
dishes, the birds naked bones. Lisa Lee, of course, in
my bed. She has to have figured things out by the
time she opens the bathroom door and steps inside,
preceded by a rush of the outer rooms cooler air.
She stands just this side of the doorway, her brown
hair swept high on her head, wearing a long white
skirt, a white tank top, a mans unbuttoned
workshirt. And a light lipstick because she knows my
weakness for girlie things. Now her sane medium
build and middling good looks are breathtaking. She
hides from me her clenched, polished teeth. Who is
that monster in my bed? You prefer that Amazon to
me? How dare you? Get your ass out of that tub
and rid our home of that bitch!
But she says none of these things.
She says, I dont see why it is that you dont love
me, and steps forward, deeper into the bathroom,
crossing the small distance between door and tub in
four steps, instead of the usual two. With those extra
steps she gives me a chance to formulate a response,
one that will save the moment, dispute her
statement, wash away her hurt. Say, What do you
mean not love you, of course I do, I do, I do. Or say,
Someone in our bed? Your eyes are playing tricks
on you. Or say, What did you expect? I am what I
am, a twenty-six-year-old man who naturally
dreads the C word, commitment, as others do
cancer.
But I do the worst thing, though I wont know it
for years. I close my eyes and allow her to approach.
I feel her steps, feel her kneel by the tub. I smell
her citrusy perfume, a fresh, recent application,
barely diluted by her own sweat and oils, the
fragrance borne by the vapor rising from the bath.
She scoops water with her hand hooked like a
flamingos beak, and she might have shared the
wildly strange coloring of that fabulous bird just
then, so incomprehensible is she. This is the last,
she says. Its done. Theres nothing in me that
forgives you. When she brings the water up to my
head I cower, as if what rains down were sharp
pieces of glass. The water trickles through her
fingers and falls on my hair and into my eyes.
She washes my back, shampoos my hair. I lift my
head, defying the force of her hands, and look at her
amazed through the bubbles. She is two people: shes

I slip out of bed. In the kitchen I stand staring at the

nights ruins, the capon carcass, the dishes. Lisa
Lees scent lifts from my clothing. Thats all Im
doingstanding and staringmy mind blank. Then I
realize it isnt quite just standing and staring, Im
actually waiting. For the Red Cross, for 911, for
sympathetic Band-Aid-hearted Bliss to tell me what
to do with the person in my bed, before she arrives
and discovers her herself.
I run a bath. Hide the evidence. Get rid of Lisa Lees
scent, her vague perfume. I can accomplish that
much myself.
I look in on Lisa Lee. I call her. She doesnt stir. I
shut the bedroom door. Let her sleep. Sleep will
protect her.
I undress and climb into the bath. The water is
hot, my skin reddens, darkening the way paper
stains with oil. I am poached. In a soup. As a boy I
cultivated a reputation for my tolerance of
discomforts. On car trips I would stand so others
could sit; I would eat slightly moldy fruit; I would
wait for hours while my parents shopped in
Chinatown, would wear my sisters hand-me-downs
and endure scalding bath water, and never complain.
It was a boys notion of heroic duty then, its a grasp
at self-styled absolution now.
Slowly I recline, until I have submerged my
shoulders. Soon I pop my legs outits too hotand
prop my heels on the edge of the tub, steam swirling
off my skin, and I imagine it isnt just steam but
some essence of myself that Im better left without,
lifting. Bliss likes my legs, and she has told me so,
and with their hair weighted down by water, they are
more apparent, better defined. Once she said that I
had the body of a Renaissance Christ, his lean, tight
torso, evident ribs, and well-muscled legs that
reflected a society on the go, exploring seas and
deserts, in a time enamored with substantiality, a
heavenly earth; its a Christ fed on game, jungle fowl
from new worlds, spiced meats, sesame seeds,
saffron, silk, and gold. Theres more there than
meets the eye, she said. The muscularity of the
Christs in the oils of the Florentine Leonardo and the
Venetian Titian and their disciples isnt just an
expression of piety, its also a reflection of their
patrons good fortunes. These paintings achieve
paradoxical feats of illusionsubstance and spirit;
they want you to see what is there, and believe it,
and what is not there, and believe it.
52

biting her bottom lip, trembling, though fighting

back tears, but on top her big brown eyes have
shrunken to tiny pellets of anger and hate. She
pushes my head forward, chin to chest, and digging
her fingers once again into my soapy hair works such
a thick lather that when she massages my scalp it
feels as if the top of my head were falling off. As if
she has hold of my mind, pulling me this way then
that.
She says, If I had my pliers here, you know what
Id do? Id yank every tooth from her fucking head.
Strangely enough, her voice is stripped of hurt or
passion.
And that is what breaks my heart: I am her
earthquake, her hurricane, her personal flood.
Doesnt she see that? I want to save her. I should
know the way, simply follow her example. Tell her to
stay angry, let it grow and abscess, until her only
alternative is to yank me from her life.
But the moment passes when she starts rinsing my
hair, both hands scooping water.
She helps me from the bath. My legs are wobbly,
and I have to touch her here and there for support.
Everywhere I touch her blue workshirt I leave a dark
handprint that spreads.
She grabs a large purple towel. She holds it open,
stretched wide between her hands, and after the
slightest hesitation I go to her, let her wrap the towel
over my head, across my shoulders, let her pull my
body against hers. Its over, she says, working the
towel roughly, its like youre dead now. I am
dazed, spinning wildly inside, losing myself in this
dark, sheltering place, under the wing of some
strange bird.

Publishers Weekly
Louie is elegant, funny, a touch spooky,
and he has as fine a hair-trigger control of
alienation and absurdity as any of the best
of his generation.
Richard Eder, New York Newsday
Louies work transcends the restrictions of
ethnic labels and markets: Hes not just a
talented young sian-American writer; hes a
talented young write, period.
Charles Solomon, Los Angeles Times
Book Review

Chinese-American seeks identity in

ironic tale
by Robin Vidimos
The chasm between generations is both deep
and wide in The Barbarians Are Coming.
In his first novel, David Wong Louie narrates
the trials of a first-generation Chinese-American
struggling through cultural divides to reconcile his
roles as son, husband father and adult. Its a darkly
comic story filled with irony, but this entertaining
tale of one mans growth into his heritage, and into
understanding maturity, is ultimately quite moving.
Sterling Lung, a 26-year-old bachelor, is out on
his own and struggling mightily to settle into his
skin. A recent graduate of the prestigious Culinary
Institute of America, hes taken his first job as the
resident chef for the Bridgefield Ladies Club. The
only clouds on his optimistic horizon are the
pervasive expectations of the Connecticut ladies at
the club, of his parents, even of his best friend the
local butcher, that he act as Chinese as he looks.
Sought distance
Its a familiar and long-running battle. Sterling,
the youngest of four children and his parents only
son, has gone to great lengths to distance himself
from the pervasive culture of his immigrant parents.
His parents long-standing plan involves an
arranged marriage to a Chinese girl of their
choosing. Sterling responds by defiantly avoiding
any relationships with Oriental women, saying he
finds them as attractive as another sister.
He sidesteps his parents career plans for him,
subversively pursuing cooking over a medical career.
Hes not even a good Chinese chef, preferring to
concentrate his efforts on mastering French cuisine.
His unspoken but well-demonstrated life goal is to
be as American as possible.
His ongoing battle with parents Genius and Zsa
Zsa has receded to background noise when he gets a
call from his current girlfriend. Bliss, a nice Jewish
girl from Connecticut, takes a weekend break from

An ambitious and
appealing first novel,
brilliant in its scathing
insights

Louies

coruscating novel is ull

of astonishing writing,
but the real delight is his wit and humor as
he keeps plucking away the rickly petals of
his characters desires until he finds their
hearts.

53

her dental school stint to tell Sterling hes going to be

a father.
Takes the plunge
Faced with the imminent reality of giving his
parents a much-wanted grandson, though not quite
in the way theyd hoped, Sterling agrees to marry
Bliss. Its a step that plunges him into a new culture,
different from the one hes worked to escape, but one
whose rules and traditions are equally strong.
This plot lays good groundwork for a fine
comedy of manners. Louie, however, delves deep
under this surface with rich results. As Sterling,
through his sons, is drawn into a Jewish culture, hes
also pulled into the Chinese one. Its a journey he
pursues under duress, but it is the only path open to
him that will lead to an understanding of who he is.
The Barbarians Are Coming is told largely as a
first-person narrative, from Sterlings point of view.
It is an effective device that draws the reader into the
mind and heart of this solipsistic, often sarcastic,
young man.
His determination to escape his parents
controlling grasp is understandable, but a story told
from only Sterlings point of view would be shallow
and unbalanced. Full understanding dawns when
Louie inserts flashbacks from Genius life as a
struggling immigrant. It then becomes clear that
Genius love, an emotion that Sterling thought
nonexistent, was truly there, though it was
demonstrated through meeting responsibilities, not
through gestures of affection or even approval.
The picture that emerges is a culture of duty,
certainly felt by the son for the father, but just as
clearly from the father to the son. Its a revelation
that doesnt make the picture warmer or happier, but
does make it understandable.

lunches at a Wasp ladies club in Connecticut. But

soon enough, Sterlings parents conspire to import a
picture bride, Yuk, from Hong Kong for him to
marry and carry on the Lung line; his sometime
girlfriend, Bliss, a Jewish dental student, announces
that shes pregnant; his father falls ill with renal
cancer; and the snotty ladies at the club, who talk
without moving their lips, want him to cook, of all
things, Chinese dishes, that barefoot food, eat-withsticks food. Under harvest moons, rinse off the
maggots, slice, and steam . . . squatting-in-still-water
food. Pole-across-your-shoulders, hooves-in-thehouse food.

The heart of the book lies in Sterlings

acceptance of himself, and his father, in the context
of both cultures, and ultimately accepting that the
Chinese and American pieces are both essential
parts of his being.
The Denver Post

As in his story collection, Pangs of Love, Louie

draws great humor from clashes of assimilation.
Some of the best moments in The Barbarians
Are Coming involve Morton Sass, Blisss father, a
mendacious investor who convinces Sterling, after
he marries Bliss and bears two sons, to host a
cooking show on cable TV. Later, Sass sells the rights
to the show, and its retooled into a humiliating
Chinese parody called The Peeking Duck, with
Sterling assuming the voice of Hop Sing, the
houseboy on Bonanza, as he gives viewers what
they want: Today I make velly famous dish . . .
Shlimp and robster sauce! This one velly good and
velly chlicky dish. Aw time peoples say, Wah! Where
is robster?

His entire life, he has been rebelling against his

culture and his parents, immigrants who have the
droll nicknames of Genius and Zsa Zsa. Sterling grew
up in the back of their laundry in Lynbrook, Long
Island, and instead of becoming a doctor as theyd
wished, he went to Swarthmore and majored in art
history, then trained to become a French chef. In
their eyes I was a scoundrel, a dumb-as-dirt ingrate.
This was the reward for their sacrifice, leaving home
for America, for lean lives among the barbarians.
He has proved to be a particular disappointment to
his father, with whom his relationship has always
been remote and cold. During one hilarious and
poignant scene, Genius seems to cherish a used
refrigerator more than his son, lovingly wiping it
down after it has been installed: Cut off from the
rest of the family, my father basked in the
refrigerators chilled air, its silvery vapors, its measly
lights glow. What I saw in my fathers gentle
cleaning of each egg holders deep dimple was
kindness, and the pang I felt, like fingers fanning in
my throat, was envy.

Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer and book

reviewer who regularly contributes to Buzz in the
Burbs.

Book Review, Fall 2000, Ploughshares

Yet the heart and power of Louies novel lies more in

the tragedy, not the comedy, of the Lung menthe
father, doomed by a love affair with a white woman
when he first arrives in the U.S.; the son, while
begrudging his fathers aloofness, unable to see the
selfish distance he himself creates, failing his
parents, wife, and children, all in the desperate
attempt to overcome the unremarkableness of being
a Lung.

rev. of
The Barbarians Are Coming
by David Wong Louie
by Don Lee
Sterling Lung has problems. The narrator of David
Wong Louies first novel, The Barbarians Are
Coming, is a recent graduate of the CIAthe
Culinary Institute of Americaand he has landed
what he regards as a plum job, cooking haute cuisine

Don Lee is the author of a new novel, Wrack and Ruin.

He is also the author of the novel Country of Origin,
which won an American Book Award, the Edgar Award
54

for Best First Novel, and a Mixed Media Watch Image

Award for Outstanding Fiction, and the story collection
Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First
Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He received the 2007 Fred R. Brown Literary Award from
the University of Pittsburgh. He has received an O. Henry
Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been
published The Kenyon Review, GQ, New England
Review, The North American Review, The Gettysburg
Review, Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, American Short
Fiction, and Glimmer Train. From 1989 to 2007, he was
the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares. From
2007 to 2008, he taught creative writing at Macalester
College in St. Paul. He will begin teaching in the graduate
creative writing program at Western Michigan University,
in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the fall of 2008.

55

4
Raymond Carver

Mel let out his breath. He held his glass and

turned to Laura and me. The man threatened to kill
me, Mel said. He finished his drink and reached for
the gin bottle. Terris a romantic. Terris of the
Kick-me-so-Ill-know-you-love-me school. Terri,
hon, dont look that way. Mel reached across the
table and touched Terris cheek with his fingers. He
grinned at her.
Now he wants to make up, Terri said.
Make up what? Mel said. What is there to
make up? I know what I know. Thats all.
Howd we get started on this subject anyway?
Terri said. She raised her glass and drank from it.
Herb always has love on his mind, she said. Dont
you, honey? She smiled, and I thought that was the
last of it.
I just wouldnt call Ed s behavior love. Thats all
Im saying, honey, Mel said. What about you
guys? Mel said to Laura and me. Does that sound
like love to you?
Im the wrong person to ask, I said. I didnt
even know the man. Ive only heard his name
mentioned in passing. I wouldnt know. Youd have
to know all the particulars. But I think what youre
saying is that love is an absolute.
Mel said, The kind of love Im talking about is.
The kind of love Im talking about, you dont try to
kill people.
Laura said , I dont know anything about Ed , or
anything about the situation. But who can judge
anyone elses situation?
I touched the back of Lauras hand. She gave me a
quick smile. I picked up Lauras hand. It was warm,
the nails polished, perfectly manicured. I encircled
the broad wrist with my fingers, and I held her.
When I left he drank rat poison, Terri said. She
clasped her arms with her hands. They took him to
the hospital in Santa Fe. Thats where we lived then,
about ten miles out. They saved his life. But his gums
went crazy from it. . I mean they pulled away from
his teeth. After that his teeth stood out like fangs. My
God, Terri said. She waited a minute, then let go of
her arms and picked up her glass.
What people wont do! Laura said.
Hes out of the action now, Mel said. Hes
dead.
Mel handed me the saucer of limes. I took a
section, squeezed it over my drink, and stirred the
ice cubes with my finger.
It gets worse, Terri said. He shot himself in the
mouth. But he bungled that too. Poor Ed , she said.
Terri shook her head.
Poor Ed
nothing, Mel said. He was
dangerous.
Mel was forty-five years old. He was tall and
rangy with curly soft hair. His face and arms were
brown from the tennis he played. When he was
sober, his gestures, all his movements, were precise,
very careful.
He did love me though, Mel. Grant me that,
Terri said. Thats all Im asking. He didnt love me
the way you love me. Im not saying that. But he
loved me. You can grant me that, cant you?
What do you mean, He bungled it? I said .
Laura leaned forward with her glass. She put her
elbows on the table and held her glass in both hands.
She glanced from Mel to Terri and waited with a

What We Talk About

When We Talk About Love

My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel

McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives
him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen
table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from
the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and
me and his second wife, TeresaTerri, we called her
and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque
then. But we were all from somewhere else.
There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and
the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow
got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was
nothing less than spiritual love. He said hed spent
five years in a seminary before quitting to go to
medical school. He said he still looked back on
those years in the seminary as the most important in
his life.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived
with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her.
Then Terri said, He beat me up one night. He
dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He
kept saying, I love you, I love you, you bitch. He
went on dragging me around the living room. My
head kept knocking on things. Terri looked around
the table . What do you do with love like that?
She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face,
dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back.
She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long
pendant earrings.
My God, dont be silly. Thats not love, and you
know it, Mel said. I dont know what youd call it,
but I sure know you wouldnt call it love.
Say what you want to, but I know it was , Terri
said. It may sound crazy to you, but its true just
the same. People are different, Mel . Sure,
sometimes he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he
loved me. In his own way, maybe, but he loved me.
There was love there, Mel . Dont say there wasnt .
56

look of bewilderment on her open face, as if amazed

that such things happened to people you were
friendly with .
Howd he bungle it when he killed himself? I
said .
Ill tell you what happened, Mel said. He took
this twenty-two pistol hed bought to threaten Terri
and me with. Oh , Im serious, the man was always
threatening. You should have seen the way we lived
in those days. Like fugitives. I even bought a gun
myself. Can you believe it? A guy like me? But I did. I
bought one for self-defense and carried it in the
glove compartment. Sometimes Id have to leave the
apartment in the middle of the night. To go to the
hospital, you know? Terri and I werent married
then, and my first wife had the house and kids, the
dog, everything, and Terri and I were living in this
apartment here. Sometimes, as I say, Id get a call in
the middle of the night and have to go in to the
hospital at two or three in the morning. Itd be dark
out there in the parking lot and Id break into a
sweat before I could even get to my car. I never knew
if he was going to come up out of the shrubbery or
from behind a car and start shooting. I mean, the
man was crazy. He was capable of wiring a bomb,
anything. He used to call my service at all hours and
say he needed to talk to the doctor, and when Id
return the call hed say, Son of a bitch, your days are
numbered. Little things like that. It was scary, Im
telling you.
I still feel sorry for him, Terri said.
It sounds like a nightmare, Laura said. But
what exactly happened after he shot himself?
Laura is a legal secretary. Wed met in a
professional capacity. Before we knew it, it was a
courtship. Shes thirty-five, three years younger than
I am. In addition to being in love, we like each other
and enjoy one anothers company. Shes easy to be
with.
What happened? Laura asked again.
Mel said, He shot himself in the mouth in his
room. Someone heard the shot and told the
manager. They came in with a passkey, saw what
had happened, and called an ambulance. I happened
to be there when they brought him, alive, but past
recall . The man lived for three days. His head
swelled up to twice the size of a normal head. Id
never seen anything like it, and I hope I never do
again. Terri wanted to go in and sit with him when
she found out about it. We had a fight over it. I
didnt think she should see him like that. I didnt
think she should see him, and I still dont.
Who won the fight? Laura said.
I was in the room with him when he died, Terri
said. He never came up out of it. But I sat with him.
He didnt have anyone else.
He was dangerous, Mel said. If you call that
love, you can have it.
It was love, Terri said. Sure it was abnormal in
most peoples eyes. But he was willing to die for it.
He did die for it.
I sure as hell wouldnt call it love, Mel said. I
mean, no one knows what he did it for. Ive seen a
lot of suicides, and I couldnt say anyone ever knew
what they did it for .

Mel put his hands behind his neck and tilted his
chair back . Im not interested in that kind of love,
he said. If thats love, you can have it.
Terri said, We were afraid. Mel even made a
will out and wrote to his brother in California who
used to be a Green Beret. Mel told him who to look
for if something happened to him
Terri drank from her glass. She said, But Mels
rightwe lived like fugitives. We were afraid. Mel
was, werent you, honey? I even called the police at
one point, but they were no help. They said they
couldnt do anything until Ed actually did
something. Isnt that a laugh? Terri said.
She poured the last of the gin into her glass and
waggled the bottle. Mel got up from the table and
went to the cupboard. He took down another bottle.
Well, Nick and I know what love is Laura said.
For us, I mean, Laura said. She bumped my knee
with her knee. Youre supposed to say something
now, Laura said, and turned her smile on me.
For an answer, I took Lauras hand and raised it
to my lips. I made a big production out of kissing her
hand. Everyone was amused.
Were lucky, I said.
You guys, Terri said. Stop that now. Youre
making me sick. Youre still on a honeymoon, for
Gods sake . Youre still gaga, for crying out loud .
Just wait. How long have you been together now?
How long has it been? A year? Longer than a year.
Going on a year and a half, Laura said, flushed
and smiling.
Oh, now , Terri said. Wait a while.
She held her drink and gazed at Laura.
Im only kidding, Terri said.
Mel opened the gin and went around the table
with the bottle.
Here, you guys, he said. Lets have a toast. I
want to propose a toast. A toast to love. To true
love, Mel said.
We touched glasses.
To love, we said.
Outside in the backyard, one of the dogs began to
bark. The leaves of the aspen that leaned past the
window ticked against the glass . The afternoon
sunlight was like a presence in thise room, the
spacious light of ease and generosity. We could have
been anywhere, somewhere enchanted. We raised
our glasses again and grinned at each other like
children who had agreed on something forbidden .
Ill tell you what real love is, Mel said. I mean,
Ill give you a good example. And then you can draw
your own conclusions. He poured more gin into his
glass. He added an ice cube and a sliver of lime. We
waited and sipped our drinks. Laura and I touched
knees again. I put a hand on her warm thigh and left
it there.
What do any of us really know about love? Mel
said. It seems to me were just beginners at love.
We say we love each other and we do, I dont doubt
it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love
each other too. You know the kind of love Im talking
about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives
you to someone special, as well as love of the other
persons being, his or her essence, as it were . Carnal
love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-today caring about the other person. But sometimes I
have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must
57

have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did.

So I suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terri
and Ed . He thought about it and then he went on.
There was a time when I thought I loved my first
wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I
do. How do you explain that? What happened to
that love? What happened to it, is what Id like to
know. I wish someone could tell me. Then theres Ed
. Okay, were back to Ed . He loves Terri so much he
tries to kill her and he winds up killing himself. Mel
stopped talking and swallowed from his glass . You
guys have been together eighteen months and you
love each other. I t shows all over you. You glow
with it. But you both loved other people before you
met each other. Youve both been married before,
just like us. And you probably loved other people
before that too, even. Terri and I have been together
five years, been married for four. And the terrible
thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing, too,
the saving grace, you might say, is that if something
happened to one of usexcuse me for saying this
but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I
think the other one, the other person , would grieve
for a while, you know, but then the surviving party
would go out and love again, have someone else soon
enough. All this, all of this love were talking about it
would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.
Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you
to set me straight if you think Im wrong. I want to
know. I mean, I dont know anything, and Im the
first one to admit it.
Mel , for Gods sake, Terri said. She reached
out and took hold of his wrist. Are you getting
drunk? Honey? Are you drunk?
Honey, Im just talking, Mel said. All right? I
dont have to be drunk to say what I think . I mean,
were all just talking, right? Mel said. He fixed his
eyes on her.
Sweetie , Im not criticizing, Terri said.
She picked up her glass.
Im not on call today, Mel said. Let me remind
you of that. I am not on call .
Mel , we love you, Laura said.
Mel looked at Laura. He looked at her as if he
couldnt place her, as if she was not the woman she
was.
Love you too, Laura, Mel said. And you, Nick,
love you too. You know something? Mel said. You
guys are our pals, Mel said.
He picked up his glass.
Mel said, I was going to tell you about
something. I mean, I was going to prove a point.
You see, this happened a few months ago, but its
still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel
ashamed when we talk like we know what we re
talking about when we talk about love.
Come on now, Terri said. Dont talk like
youre drunk if youre not drunk.
Just shut up for once in your life, Mel said very
quietly. Will you do me a favor and do that for a
minute? So as I was saying, theres this old couple
who had this car wreck out on the interstate? A kid
hit them and they were all torn to shit and nobody
was giving them much chance to pull through.
Terri looked at us and then back at Mel . She
seemed anxious, or maybe thats too strong a word.
Mel was handing the bottle around the table.

I was on call that night, Mel said. It was in

May or maybe it was June. Terri and I had just sat
down to dinner when the hospital called. Thered
been this thing out on the interstate. Drunk kid,
teenager, plowed his dads pickup into this camper
with this old couple in it. They were up in their midseventies, that couple. The kid eighteen, nineteen,
somethinghe was DOA. Taken the steering wheel
through his sternum. The old couple, they were
alive, you understand. I mean, just barely. But they
had everything. Multiple
fractures , internal
injuries, hemorrhaging, contusions, lacerations, the
works, and they each of them had themselves
concussions. They were in a bad way, believe me.
And, of course, their age was two strikesagainst
them. Id say she was worse off than he was.
Ruptured spleen along with everything else. Both
kneecaps broken. But theyd been wearing their
seatbelts and, God knows, thats what saved them
for the time being.
Folks, this is an advertisement for the National
Safety Council, Terri said. This is your spokesman,
Doctor Melvin R. McGinnis, talking. Terri laughed.
Mel, she said, sometimes youre just too much
sometimes. But I love you, hon,ey She said.
Honey, I love you, Mel said.
He leaned across the table. Terri met him
halfway. They kissed.
Terris right, Mel said as he settled himself
again. Get those seatbelts on . But seriously, they
were in some shape, those oldsters . By the time I
got down there, the kid was dead, as I said. He was
off in a corner, laid out on a gurney. I took one look
at the old couple and told the ER nurse to get me a
neurologist and an orthopedic man and a couple of
surgeons down there right away.
He drank from his glass. Ill try to keep this
short, he said. So we took the two of them up to the
OR and worked like fuck on them most of the night
They had these incredible reserves, those two . You
see that once in a while. So we did everything that
could be done, and toward morning we re giving
them a fifty-fifty chance, maybe less than that for her
. So here they are, still alive the next morning. So,
okay, we move them into the ICU, which is where
they both kept plugging away at it for two weeks,
hitting it better and better on all the scopes. So we
transfer them out to their own room.
Mel stopped talking. Here, he said, lets drink
this cheapo gin the hell up. Then were going to
dinner, right? Terri and I know a new place. Thats
where well go, to this new place we know about. But
were not going until we finish up this cut-rate, lousy
gin.
Terri said, We havent actually eaten there yet.
But it looks good. From the outside, you know.
I like food, Mel said. If I had it to do all over
again, Id be a chef, you know? Right, Terri? Mel
said.
He laughed. He fingered the ice in his glass.
Terri knows. Terri can tell you. But let me say
this. If I could come back again in a different life, a
different time and all, you know what? Id like to
come back as a knight. You were pretty safe wearing
all that armor. It was all right being a knight until
gunpowder and muskets and pistols came along.
58

Mel would like to ride a horse and carry a

lance, Terri said.
Carry a womans scarf with you everywhere,
Laura said.
Or just a woman, Mel said.
Shame on you, Laura said.
Terri said, Suppose you came back as a serf. The
serfs didnt have it so good in those days, Terri said.
The serfs never had it good, Mel said. But I
guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isnt
that the way it worked? But then everyone is always
a vessel to someone else. Isnt that right? Terri? But
what I liked about knights, besides their ladies, was
that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they
couldnt get hurt very easy. No cars in those days,
you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your
ass .
Vassals, Terri said.
What? Mel said.
Vassals, Mel said. They were called vassals ,
not vessels .
Vassals, vessels, Mel said, what the fucks the
difference? You knew what I meant anyway. All
right , Mel said. So Im not educated. I learned my
stuff. Im a heart surgeon, sure, but Im just a
mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things.
Shit, Mel said.
Modesty doesnt become you, Terri said.
Hes just a humble sawbones , I said. But
sometimes they suffocated in all that armor, Mel .
Theyd even have heart attacks if it got too hot and
they were too tired and worn out. I read somewhere
that theyd fall off their horses and not be able to get
up because they were too tired to stand with all that
armor on them. They got trampled by their own
horses sometimes.
Thats terrible, Mel said. Thats a terrible
image, Nicky. I guess theyd just lay there and wait
until somebody came along and made a shish kebab
out of them.
Some other vessel , Terri said.
Thats right, Mel said. Some vassal would
come along and spear the bastard in the name of
love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in
those days.
Same things we fight over these days, Mel said.
Laura said, Nothings changed.
The color was still high in Lauras cheeks. Her
eyes were bright. She brought her glass to her lips.
Mel poured himself another drink. He looked at
the label closely as if studying a long row of numbers
. Then he slowly put the bottle down on the table and
reached for the tonic water.
What about the old couple? Laura said. You
didnt finish that story you started.
Laura was having a hard time lighting her
cigarette. Her matches kept going out.
The sunshine inside the room was different now,
changing, getting thinner . But the leaves outside
the window were still shimmering, and I stared at
the pattern they made on the panes and on the
Formica counter. They werent the same patterns, of
course.
What about that old couple? I said.
Older but wiser, Terri said.
Mel stared at her.

Terri said, Go on with your story, hon. I was

only kidding. Then what happened?
Terri, sometimes, Mel said.
Please, Mel , Terri said. Dont always be so
serious, sweetie. Cant you take a joke?
Wheres the joke? Mel said.
He held his glass and gazed steadily at his wife .
What happened? Laura said.
Mel fastened his eyes on Laura. He said, Laura,
if I didnt have Terri and if I didnt love her so much,
and if Nick wasnt my best friend, Id fall in love with
you. Id carry you off, honey, He said.
Tell your story, Terri said. Then well go to
that new place, okay ?
Okay, Mel said. Where was I? he said. He
stared at the table and then he began again .
I dropped in to see each of them every day,
sometimes twice a day if I was up doing other calls
anyway. C asts and bandages, head to foot, the both
of them. You know, youve seen it in the movies .
Thats just the way they looked, just like in the
movies . Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouthholes. And she had to have her legs slung up on top
of it. Well, the husband was very depressed for the
longest while. Even after he found out that his wife
was going to pull through , he was still very
depressed. Not about the accident , though . I mean,
the accident was one thing, but it wasnt everything.
Id get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and hed say
no, it wasnt the accident exactly but it was because
he couldnt see her through his eye-holes. He said
that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you
imagine? Im telling you, the mans heart was
breaking because he couldnt turn his goddamn head
and see his goddamn wife.
Mel looked around the table and shook his head
at what he was going to say.
I mean, it was killing the old fart just becayse he
couldnt look at the fucking woman.
We all looked at Mel.
Do you see what Im saying?
Maybe we were a little drunk by then. I know it
was hard keeping things in focus. The light was
draining out of the room, going back through the
window where it had come from. Yet nobody made a
move to get up from the table to turn on the
overhead light,
Listen, Mel said . Lets finish this fucking gin.
Theres about enough left here for one shooter all
around. Then lets go eat. Lets go to the new place .
Hes depressed , Terri said. Mel , why dont
you take a pill?
Herb shook his head. Ive taken everything there
is.
We all need a pill now and then , I said.
Some people are born needing them , Terri
said. She was using her finger to rub at something on
the table. Then she stopped rubbing.
I think I want to call my kids before we go eat,
Mel said. Is that all right with everybody? Ill call
my kids, He said.
Terri said, What if Marjorie answers the phone?
You guys, youve heard us on the subject of Marjorie.
Honey, you know you dont want to talk to Marjorie.
Itll make you feel even worse.
I dont want to talk to Marjorie, Mel said. But
I want to talk to my kids.
59

There isnt a day goes by that Mel doesnt say he

wishes shed get married again. Or else die, Terri
said. For one thing, Terri said, shes bankrupting
us. Mel says its just to spite him that she wont get
married again. She has a boyfriend who lives with
her and the kids , so Mel is supporting the boyfriend
too .
Shes allergic to bees, Mel said. If Im not
praying shell get married again, Im praying shell
get herself stung to death by a swarm of fucking
bees.
Shame on you, Laura said.
Bzzzzzz, Mel said, turning his fingers into bees
and buzzing them at Terris throat. Then he let his
hands drop all the way to his sides .
Shes vicious, Mel said. Sometimes I think Ill
go up there dressed like a beekeeper. You know, that
hat thats like a helmet with the plate that comes
down over your face, the big gloves, and the padded
coat? Ill knock on the door and let loose a hive of
bees in the house. But first Id make sure the kids
were out, of course.
He crossed one leg over the other. Then he put
both feet on the floor and leaned forward, elbows on
the table, his chin cupped in his hands.
Maybe I wont call the kids, after all. Maybe it
isnt such a hot idea. Maybe well just go eat. How
does that sound?
Sounds fine to me, I said. Eat or not eat. Or
keep drinking. I could head right on out into the
sunset.
What does that mean, honey? Laura said.
It just means what I said, I said . It means I
could just keep going. Thats all it means .
I could eat something myself, Laura said. I
dont think Ive ever been so hungry in my life. Is
there something to nibble on ?
Ill put out some cheese and crackers, Terri
said.
But Terri just sat there. She did not get up to get
anything.
Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the
table.
Gins gone, Mel said.
Terri said, Now what?
I could hear my heart beating. I could hear
everyones heart. I could hear the human noise we
sat there making, not one of us moving, not even
when the room went dark. [1981]

Critical Essay on,

What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love
By Liz Brent
Carver is best known for his minimalist writing style,
as embodied in a sparse use of language and paired
down prose. He is also known as a neo-realist,
capturing the working class milieu of blue-collar
America with his mundane, naturalistic, everyday
dialogue. Nevertheless, he does make use of
figurative language throughout What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love by exploring its
central
themes
of
love,
relationships,
communication, and alcoholism. Through the
imagery of the knights armor, the beekeepers
protective clothing, the pill and the word heart,
Carver demonstrates that the surface level
conversation of his four characters is only the tip of
an emotional iceberg.
The image of the human heart takes on figurative
connotations in the story, as it is referred to both in
the mechanical sense, of the functioning of the
human heart, and the symbolic sense, as the organ of
love. Since the character of Mel dominates the
conversation, much of the figurative language is
expressive of his own feelings about the subject of
love. The image of the human heart takes on
figurative connotations in the story, as it is referred
to both in the mechanical sense, of the functioning of
the human heart, and the symbolic sense, as the
organ of love. Mel is a cardiologist, a doctor who
operates on peoples hearts. The opening sentences
of the story, in retrospect, play on the irony of Mel, a
heart doctor, claiming to be an expert on matters of
the heart: My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel
McGinnis is a cardiologist, so sometimes that gives
him the right. Mel even describes his own work as
that of just a mechanic, marking the difference
between expertise in heart surgery and knowledge of
60

true love. When he tells the story of the old couple

injured in the near-fatal car accident, the word
heart again takes on a double meaning. Mel
concludes his story, in which the old man and
woman are so bandaged up that they cannot see each
other even though their beds are next to each other
in the same hospital room, by stating that the mans
heart was breaking because he couldnt turn his
goddamn head and see his goddamn wife. Mel is
using the word heart in the figurative sense here,
but it also refers back to the fact that Mel himself
had been the attending cardiologist for the old
couple in the aftermath of the car accident.

The image of the heart comes up here, implying that

the armor Mel uses to protect himself from
emotional suffering in the name of love (a heart
attack) can be the very cause of his suffering. In
reference to Mels alcoholism, his use of alcohol to
protect himself from heartache may actually lead to
a heart attack in terms of the demise of his marriage
and other personal relationships, as well as some
form of heart attack in the sense that alcoholism can
be fatal. (This may seem like a leap of logic, but,
given that this story was written not long after
Carver nearly died from alcoholism and eventually
quit drinking, it is not an unreasonable
interpretation.) Mels interest in armor as a means of
protecting himself from love is made clear when he
adds that, were a knight to be made vulnerable by
the weight of his armor, Some vassal would come
along and spear the bastard in the name of love.

Another central element of figurative speech in this

story revolves around Mels mention that, if he could
come back in a different life, he would want to be a
knight. Mels fascination with the armor worn by a
knight is perhaps a heavyhanded image of Mels
need to protect himself emotionally against the
ravages of love. Mel explains that You were pretty
safe wearing all that armor. The image is extended
to suggest that Mels protective emotional armor has
failed to protect him against the dangers of new love:
It was all right being a knight until gunpowder and
muskets and pistols came along. Mel goes on to
expand upon his fascination with the protective
armor of knights: what I liked about knights,
besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of
armor, you know, and they couldnt get hurt very
easy. Mel is expressing a desire to be protected from
getting hurt at an emotional level in his
relationships with others.

The imagery of taking a pill combines several

figurative themes in the story. As Mel becomes more
clearly drunk, his conversation acquires an
antagonistic edge.
Hes depressed, Terri said. Mel, why dont you take
a pill? Mel shook his head. Ive taken everything
there is. We all need a pill now and then, I said.
Some people are born needing them, Terri said.
Here, the characters themselves are consciously
using the phrase to take a pill in a figurative sense.
But the pill imagery also echoes with the fact that
Mel is a doctor, whose job is, in general terms, to
give people pills to make them feel better. Mels own
pill is clearly alcohol, and his comment that Ive
taken everything there is expresses a deep despair
at ever finding a cure for his personal heartaches.

At this point, the discussion of the knight turns on a

pun that comes out of Mels misuse of the term
vessel when he means vassal. A vassal is a
servant to another, and Mel, using vessel by
accident, attempts to point out that even knights
were subservient to others. The idea of servitude is
extended symbolically when Mel points out, But
then everyone is always a vessel to someone. At this
point Terri corrects him, supplying the proper term,
vassal for vessel.

The figurative language combining the use of

alcohol, as contained in a vessel, or the swallowing of
a pill, as administered by a doctor, as a means of
curing the emotional pain caused by love, is also
expressed in Terris explanation that her abusive exhusband, Ed, drank rat poison when she left him.
Like Mels consumption of alcohol, or his figurative
need to take a pill, Eds consumption of rat poison
is his own self-destructive attempt to medicate his
own emotional pain in the face of his love for Terri.
Terri explains the effect of the poison; Eds life was
saved at the hospital, but his gums went crazy from
it. I mean they pulled away from his teeth. After that,
his teeth stood out like fangs. The image of Eds
teeth turning into fangs symbolizes the fact that Ed,
an extremely violent and abusive man, is akin to a
beast who threatens Terri with his fangs. More
indirectly, there is a suggestion that, just as Eds
drinking of rat poison in an attempt to cure his
emotional pain turns him into a fanged beast, so
Mels drinking of alcohol in an attempt to cure his
own emotional pain may be turning him into a beast,
posing a threat of danger to Terri.

Mels incorrect use of vessel has further figurative

implications. Mel is an alcoholic, and a vessel is an
object designed to contain something, usually in
reference to a liquid, as a cup or chalice. Through
this play on words, the connection is made to Mels
use of alcohol, which he drinks out of a vessel, or
glass, as his means of protective armor against
emotional injury. Furthermore, a vessel, such as an
empty vessel may be read figuratively to indicate
that everyone is a vessel to be filled with the love,
false or true, of another.
Nick, the narrator, points out to Mel that the armor
worn by knights had its drawbacks. Nicks comment
extends the metaphor of the armor as emotional
armor in explaining that ones emotional defenses,
or armor, can end up suffocating the knight in the
name of protecting him from harm:

Mel later uses the imagery of a beekeepers

protective clothing to express a similar desire for
some form of protection from love. In discussing his
ex-wife Marjorie, he explains that she is allergic to

But sometimes they suffocated in all that armor,

Mel. Theyd even have heart attacks if it got too hot
and they were too tired and worn out.
61

bees, saying that if Im not praying shell get

married again, Im praying shell get herself stung to
death by a swarm of f--ing bees. He then makes
what is perhaps his most outwardly menacing
gesture toward his wife: Bzzzzzzz, Mel said,
turning his fingers into bees and buzzing them at
Terris throat.
Mels expression of hatred for his ex-wife and his
wish that she would die is used as a thinly veiled
expression of a similar hatred for Terri. The gesture
of buzzing his fingers around her neck combines the
figurative image of murder by bee sting into a more
literal physical gesture threateningly aimed at Terris
throat. The armor imagery is echoed here in his
description of the beekeepers protective clothing:
Sometimes I think Ill go there dressed like a
beekeeper. You know, that hat thats like a helmet
with the plate that comes down over your face, the
big gloves, and the padded coat? Ill knock on the
door and let loose a hive of bees in the house.

Carvers Couples Talk About Love

The double implications of the word heart come back

into play in the closing image of the story. As the two
couples sit in the dark in silence, the narrator
explains, I could hear my heart beating. I could hear
everyones heart. The narrator uses the literal image
of a silence so profound that he can actually hear the
beating of his own and the others hearts to express a
symbolic feeling that he can hear everyones heart.
It is as if the excess of human emotion aroused by
the discussion of true love hums about the room
without any hope of articulate expression between
the two couples. The term vessel, mentioned earlier,
is also echoed with Mels enigmatic gesture in the
closing moments of the story, when he turns his
glass of gin upside down on the table. Mel has
emptied his vessel of alcohol, the gins gone, and
they are left with nothing but an ominous feeling of
emotional emptiness.

by Fred Moramarco
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is
one of Ray Carvers best known stories and the title
of one of his major collections. Carver probably used
the story as a title for a collection because many of
his stories express puzzlement about the odd and
battered condition of love in the contemporary
world. He often uses his fiction to explore that
condition and reflect back to us just what it is that
we do talk about when we talk about love. Love, of
course, is one of those words that has been so beaten
down in twentieth century discourse, particularly the
rhetoric of advertising and pop culture, that its hard
to know what anyone means by it anymore. T.S.
Eliot prefaced his Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
with a quotation from Dantes Inferno, anticipating
the hell that the word would suffer in a mass society
where some people, like Erich Segal, who wrote the
immensely popular novel Love Story in the early
seventies, think that love means never having to say
youre sorry, and others, like Bob Dylan, tell us that
Love is just a four letter word. We love our mothers,
our Hondas, our baseball teams and movie stars, as
well our favorite ice-cream flavors and pizza
toppings. The word along with a picture of a cherub
adorns the #1 selling U.S. postage stamp, and occurs
often in the titles of porno movies, religious
sermons, new age self-help guides, romantic novels,
and tv shows, including The Love Boat, which
reminds us how often the word is used in association
with vacations, leisure time, romantic retreats,
sexual liaisons.

Although Carver is considered a minimalist writer,

whose stories take on meaning more in what is not
said than what is said, his use of figurative language
gives depth to his stories by expanding upon their
central themes.
Source: Liz Brent, Critical Essay on What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love, Short Stories for
Students, Vol. 12, The Gale Group, 2001.

Where the word seems to provide most difficulty,

however, is in the area of human relationships,
particularly relationships between men and women.
It also provides difficulties in relationships between
men and men as well as women and women, but
Carvers focus, in this story and in most of his work,
is heterosexual love and its complications in late
20th century America. The story is one of Carvers
62

several multiple couple stories, where two or more

heterosexual couples spend some time together
socializing, usually drinking, often flirting and
almost always miscommunicating. Others of this
type include Feathers, Neighbors, Put Yourself
in My Shoes, Whats in Alaska, Tell the Women
Were Going, and After the Denim, to name only
the most prominent in Carvers most complete
collection of short stories, Where Im Calling From.

of the lease prohibited it. Further, he accuses the

Myers of vandalizing the Morgans personal
possessions. The Myers are astonished by these
accusations, and leave with the observation that
Those people are crazy. But the storys title implies
that it is the writers job to see the world and events
not only from his own perpsective, but to recreate
the world as others see it as well. Meyers is one of
very few Carver protagonists who is a writer, and as
a writer he takes others possessions and identity
with very few qualms.

When Robert Altman made his well-received film,

Short Cuts, adapted from a dozen or so Carver
stories, he used the device of linked, contrasting
couples as a unifying factor in the movie, which
shifts perspective from couple to couple as they
spend a typical day in Los Angeles, framed by two
archetypal Southern California events each of the
characters experiencespraying the L.A. Basin from
helicopters with pesticides, and a run-of-the mill 6
point something L.A. earthquake. The genre may
ultimately owe something to a very popular comedic
film of the early seventies called Bob, and Carol, and
Ted, and Alice, which was absolutely shocking when
it first appeared, but today is so old hat that even TV
sitcoms have exhausted it.

Whats in Alaska contrasts two couples with much

more in common than the Morgans and the Myers.
The story revolves around Jack and Marys visit to
the house of their friends Carl and Helen to get
stoned. It is implied, through various slips of the
tongue, facilitated by liberal use of marijuana, that
Carl and Mary may be having an affair with one
another. The story examines that pivotal point in a
marriage where one of the partners realizes that the
other has been cheating. This moment is symbolized
by the entrance of Carl and Helens housecat with a
dead mouse in its jaws. It is a kind of objective
correlative for the future of the relationship, a
future that looks bleak and that Mary, particularly,
does not want to face. On the way home she tells
Jack, When we get home, Jack, I want to be fucked,
talked to, diverted. Divert me Jack. I need to be
diverted tonight (83-84)

Carver, however, uses the genre freshly and for very

specific purposes. InNeighbors, it becomes a study
in voyeurismhow one couple, Bill and Arlene
Miller, inhabit briefly the lives of their neighbors,
Harriet and Jim Stone, while the Stones are on
vacation and the Millers watch their apartment.
The venture into another couples lives excites the
Millers and momentarily adds sexual energy and
vitality to their relationship. But we are ultimately
doomed to live our own lives, not those of others,
and the ending of the story finds the Millers locked
out of their neighbors apartment, clinging to one
another as if in a storm:

After the Denim uses the two-couple motif to

contrast generations. James and Edith Packer meet
their younger doubles dressed in denim at a Bingo
game. The denim suggests the casual, relaxed
attitude toward life embodied in the younger
couples actions. The Packers life is ritualized,
settled, while the younger couple is open to
possibilities and assertive. The Packers feel
displaced by the couple because they occupy the
Packers usual parking spot and bingo seats. James
particularly feels increasing animosity toward the
couple in denim because they seem oblivious to the
passage of time and the ravages of age. He finds
himself wanting to straighten them out. If only
they had to sit with him in the waiting room! Hed
set those floozies straight! Hed tell them what was
waiting for you after the denim and the earrings,
after touching each other and cheating at games
(77). In this story Carver faces the reality that, as
John Irving put it in The World According to Garp,
we are all terminal cases, and even enduring
relationships like that of the Packers, end in death
and loss.

He tried the knob. It was locked. Then she tried the

knob. It would not turn. Her lips wer parted, and her
breathing was hard, expectant. He opened his arms
and she moved into them.
Dont worry, he said into her ear. For Gods sake,
dont worry. They stayed there. They held each
other. They leaned into the door as if against a wind,
and braced themselves.
Put Yourself in My Shoes is also about one couple
watching anothers house, but it is less about
voyeurism than it is about clashing and contrary
value systems. The story also explores the ways in
which a writer can use the lives of others as a source
for his own work. The Meyers and the Morgans are
the two couples in question here. The Meyers pay a
holiday visit to the Morgans whose home they had
rented while the older couple was away in Europe.
The story takes increasingly bizarre turns ultimately
pitting the couples against one another as
adversaries. The Morgans put on a great show of
hospitality for the Myers, but clearly, as the story
progresses, something is seething beneath the
surface. Mr. Morgan has been harboring a grudge
that the Myers invaded his house, brought a cat
there even though his wife has asthma and the terms

In Feathers, the uneasy relationship between the

narrator, Jack, and his wife, Fran is contrasted with
the easy and obvious expressions of love between
Bud and Olla, the couple whose home they visit. Jack
and Bud are working buddies, but shortly after Buds
wife, Olla, gives birth to a child, he invites his friend
and his wife to their home for dinner. Jack and Fran
are a very different kind of couple than Bud and Olla.
They live reclusive lives, scarcely venturing from
their apartment after returning from work.
Accepting a dinner invitation to Bud and Ollas home
is a major event in their lives, but they have little
63

social grace and hardly know how to act in a social

situation. The warmth and love expressed in Bud
and Ollas housesymbolized by a peacock Bud
bought for his wife, a plaster mold of Ollas crooked
teeth that sits atop the TV (Bud paid for her teeth to
be straightenedsomething she always wanted to do
and she keeps the mold out to remind her of his
kindness), and most of all the ugly baby that they
express deep affection for. So affected are Fran and
Jack by their visit to Bud and Ollas place, that when
they get home Fran decides she wants to emulate
their lives by having a child:

possibility of love. His background as a seminarian

before attending medical school taught him that
spiritual love is the only real love: The kind of
love Im talking about, he says, you dont try to kill
people. Terri, reflecting something of the battered
woman profile, persists in her view that Ed loved
her: In his own way maybe, but he loved me. There
was love there Mel. Dont say there wasnt. This
conflict is a 1980s version of the epiphany that
occurs at the end of James Joyces The Dead when
Gabriel Conroy discovers his wife Gretta had a
relationship with a man (appropriately named)
Michael Furey who loved her so much he caught
pneumonia while singing her love songs on a cold
and rainy night imploring her not to leave. Though
Michael Furey and Ed on the surface may seem the
antithesis of one another, both are utterly dependent
on the woman they love; neither finds life worth
living without her. While this kind of passionate
intensity is an anathema in an age of codependency, Joyce and Carver want us to consider
questions about the meaning of love as it actually
occurs in the worldboth the world of early 20th
century Dublin that Joyce wrote about, and the
world of late 20th century Albuquerque, New
Mexico, the transient western U.S. city where
Carvers story is set. Carvers story, however, is much
less place specific than Joyces. In an Interview
with Gail Caldwell, Carver says that most of his
stories could take place anywhere: its an
emotional landscape Im most interested in. These
four people in What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love could be sitting around a table in
Albuquerque, or El Pasobut they could just as
easily be in Wichita or Syracuse.

After we got home from Bud and Ollas that night,

and we were under the covers, Fran said, Honey fill
me up with your seed! When she said that, I heard
her all way down to my toes, and I hollered and let
go (354).
But once again, Carver seems to be saying we need to
live our own lives, not that of others, because once
Fran and Jack have a child, their lives go downhill.
They become less and less communicative, more and
more set in their ways. Mostly, as Jack puts it near
the storys end, its just the TV.
But the real tour-de-force of Carvers multiple couple
stories is What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love, a story that combines elements of some
of these others but raises them to a new intensity.
The entire story takes place in the narrators kitchen
where he and his wife are sitting around a table with
another couple drinking gin and talking. As the story
begins the kitchen is flooded with daylight, and the
character who utters much of the storys dialogue,
Mel, is holding forth on the subject of love. Its
significant that Mel is a heart surgeon, for we are
about to get a dissection of the ways of the heart in
the contemporary world. In addition, the fact that
Mel is a doctor has the others deferring to him
constantly. The story is narrated by the male half of
one of the couples, a man named Nick who tells us in
the very first sentences: My friend Mel McGinnis
was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and
sometimes that gives him the right. This
immediately establishes Mels social status and
authority, anticipating his domination of the
conversation. In fact, nearly 80% of the dialogue in
the story is Mels and his views on love virtually roll
over those of the others.

The emotional landscape of What We Talk About

involves recording the state of mind of the two
couples as they move through a mid-afternoon and
early evening talking about all kinds of love
spiritual, carnal, platonic, possessive, brutal,
obsessive, unrequited, and even parental, searching
for what real love is. Mel and Terris tumultuous
and volatile love history of love is explicitly
contrasted that of with Nick and Laura, who are also
in a second marriage but have known one another
for just a year and a half and are still in a state of
what some pop psychologists call limmerance, that
remarkable time in the early days of a relationship
when lovers have a hard time keeping their eyes and
hands off one another. Mel, who is the narrator of
the story, says I touched the back of Lauras hand.
She gave me a quick smile. I picked up Lauras hand.
It was warm, the nails polished, perfectly manicured.
I encircled the broad wrist with my fingers, and I
held her. Yet despite the physical connection
between Nick and Laura, theirs is a relationship of
what we might call lite intimacy. Mels description
of it as virtually perfection itself has a hollow ring to
it: Laura is a legal secretary. Wed met in a
professional capacity. Before we knew it, it was a
courtship. Shes thirty-five, three years younger than
I am. In addition to being in love, we like each other
and enjoy one anothers company. Shes easy to be
with. This is the ideal contemporary relationship
between a man and a woman who are friends as well
as lovers, and the operative word here is easy. We

Mel and his second wife Terri are a relatively

seasoned couple (by contemporary standards)they
have been married four years and together for five
who have been through a good deal together. Both
had tumultuous previous relationships. Mel has a
very hostile relationship with his ex-wife, Marjorie;
hes still paying her alimony and toward the end of
the story he says Shes allergic to bees.If Im not
praying shell get married again, Im praying shell
get herself stung to death by a swarm of fucking
bees. Terri, meanwhile, was previously involved
with a batterer named Ed, who shot himself after
Terri and Mel moved in together. Terris insistence
that Ed loved herand that he was willing to die for
his love is a sore point between the couple. Mel
insists equally that Eds violence negates the
64

all seek easy relationships, but the real world keeps

intruding. And, of course, the trouble with easy
relationships is embodied in the clich, easy come,
easy go.

Of course, Mel is actually the last one to admit it,

and his confused, drunken monologue has a kind of
terrible clarity and honesty to it. When I read this
passage in my class, my Southern California
students, nearly all of them from families that have
experienced divorce, both understand it and are
bewildered by it simultaneously. Which is to say they
recognize it as the contemporary world they live in
a world of serial relationships where one years love
is the next years courtroom adversary.

The transience of contemporary relationships

creates a need for the charactersand by extension
for us as readersto redefine what love is and what
it means to love someone. The entire story revolves
around a central passage, delivered as a monologue
by Mel, that connects love with time as has occurred
in contemporary culture. Though the myth of
eternal love persists, the reality of contemporary
transitory relationships has shaken its foundations. I
need to quote this central passage in its entirety
because it capsulizes the essence of Carvers
narrative. As Mel drinks more and more, the
question implied by the storys title becomes more
and more urgent. Just what do we talk about when
we talk about love between human beings today?
Does the word mean what it has always meant, or is
there something about late 20th century life that has
radically altered its meaning:

Both Mel and Terri on the one hand, and Nick and
Laura on the otheras well as Mel and Marjorie and
Terri and Edare contrasted with yet another couple
referred to in the story, an elderly couple in their
mid-seventies who have been in an auto accident.
Significantly, their camper was slammed by a
teenage drunk driver who was killed in the accident.
The old couple survived, but just barely. Carver
intends the couple to represent our traditional
conception of lovelifetime monogamya love that
lasts until death do us part. What troubles Mel
about the love between this old couple is that the
husband is upset not so much because he and his
wife are badly injured, but because his face is
bandaged so severely he cannot move his head and
look at his wife. This kind of dependence is much
closer to the love of Ed for Terri or the love of
Michael Furey for Gretta than it is to either the love
of Mel for Terri or the love of Nick for Laura. This
kind of love involves dependence, vulnerability and
need, all highly unfashionable qualities in a world of
you do your thing and Ill do mine. Can you
imagine? Mel says in an increasingly boozeinfluenced diatribe, Im telling you the mans heart
was breaking because he couldnt turn his goddamn
head and see his goddamn wifeI mean it was
killing the old fart because he couldnt look at the
fucking woman. In Mels world, love is disposable,
and disposable love is an oxymoron.

What do any of us really know about love? Mel

said. It seems to me were just beginners at love. We
say we love each other and we do, I dont doubt it. I
love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each
other too. You know the kind of love Im talking
about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives
you to someone special, as well as love of the other
persons being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal
love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day to day
caring about the other person. But sometimes I have
a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have
loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. So I
suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terri and Ed.
He thought about it and then he went on. There was
a time when I thought I loved my first wife more
than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do
you explain that? What happened to that love? What
happened to it, is what Id like to know. I wish
someone could tell me. Then theres Ed. Okay, so
were back to Ed. He loves Terri so much he tries to
kill her and he winds up killing himself. Mel stopped
talking and swallowed from his glass. You guys have
been together eighteen months and you love each
other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But
you both loved other people before you met each
other. Youve both been married before, just like us.
And you probably loved other people before that too,
even. Terri and I have been together five years, been
married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible
thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you
might say, is that if something happened to one of us
excuse me for saying thisbut if something
happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other
one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you
know, but then the surviving party would go out and
love again, and have someone else soon enough. All
this, all of this love, were talking about, it would be
just a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base?
Because I want you to set me straight if you think
Im wrong. I want to know. I mean, I dont know
anything, and Im the first one to admit it.

Carver underscores our contemporary confusion

about love with two motifs he uses as structural
elements in the story: alcohol and light. Nick
associates the two in his first description of the
setting. The four of us were sitting around his
[Mels] kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the
kitchen from the big window behind the sink. The
gin is poured liberally throughout and four pages
into the story, Mel opens a second bottle and
proposes a toast to true love. At this point the
couples are in a kind of enchanted, fairy tale state, at
the point in their drinking when the world seems to
be basking in a rose-colored glow. Again the
consumption of gin is related to the light in the
room. The afternoon sun was like a presence in this
room, the spacious light of ease and generosity. We
could have been anywhere, somewhere enchanted.
We raised our glasses again and grinned at each
other like children who had agreed on something
forbidden. The emotional landscape here is
conspiratorial. The two couples appear to be moving
toward a revelation but the booze has created an
illusory sense of well being.. At this point, Mel goes
into his monologue about love in the contemporary
world and Terris response makes clear the tone of
65

voice in which it is delivered: Mel, for Gods sake

Are you getting drunk? Honey? Are you drunk?

Serial, transient love is to love as booze is to food. It

gives the characters the illusion of having arrived
somewhere, but leaves them empty and
undernourished. And the more we talk about love,
the more it becomes clear that we know virtually
nothing about it. The storys conclusion is a
masterful strokea dark, existential moment when
humanity is stripped of its illusionsthe gin is
finished, and all Nick hears, and consequently we as
readers hear, is the sound of four human hearts
beating in the darkness. Love and all our
conceptions of it in this context are human
constructs, what we call today a socially constructed
reality that we employ to give meaning to the
biological actuality of our flesh and blood, of our
pulses pounding in the darkness. I could hear my
heart beating. I could hear everyones heart. I could
hear the human noise we sat there making, not one
of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
One can almost hear the anguished cry of Eugene
ONeills Jimmy Tomorrow from The Iceman
Cometh hovering behind Carvers last sentences:
What did you do to the booze, Hickey, what did you
do to the booze?

Because Carver wrote as a recovering alcoholic,

alcohol often plays an important role in many of his
stories. Drinking is often contrasted with eating.
Food is almost always presented as both nourishing
and nurturing. Eating is a communal activity, a
small good thing, as the title of one of his stories
has itwhile alcohol is a kind of empty substitute for
it that neither nourishes nor nurtures but distorts
and confuses. As the conversation continues, Mel
makes exactly this contrast. lets drink this cheapo
gin the hell up. Then were going to dinner, right?
Terri and I know a new place. Thats where well go,
to this new place we know about. But were not going
until we finish up this cut-rate, lousy gin. Even
more pointedly, Mel says I like foodIf I had it to
do all over again, Id be a chef, you know? But
eating keeps getting put aside for more drinking. Mel
has passed the state of a euphoric high and is now
moving into a somnambulant stupor: Mel poured
himself another drink. He looked at the label closely
as if studying a long row of numbers. Then he slowly
put the bottle down on the table and slowly reached
for the tonic water. Things are indeed moving very
slowly at this point, and after Mel finishes the story
about the old couple, Nick offers a masterful
understatement, yet again linking alcohol and light:
Maybe we were a little drunk by then. I know it was
hard keeping things in focus. The light was draining
out of the room, going back through the window
where it had come from. Yet nobody made a move to
get up from the table to turn on the overhead light.
The kitchensignificantly a place where food is
preparedgets darker and darker and things move
more and more slowly. Mel especially seems to be
moving in slow motioneach of his movements is
ponderous and exaggerated. It takes him a long time
merely to cross one leg over the other. The couples
keep talking about food, about going out to eat, but
continue drinking until all the liquor is gone. Mel
thinks about calling his children (a sentimental
insertion of parental love in the midst of all this
confusion about love) but finally decides against it.
Maybe I wont call the kids after all. Maybe it isnt
such a hot idea. Maybe well just go eat. How does
that sound.? Nick responds confusedly: Sounds
fine to meEat or not eat. Or keep drinking. I could
head right on out into the sunset. Laura is
perplexed by Nicks response, but she underscores
the poverty of the conversation about love when she
says I dont think Ive ever been so hungry in my
life. Is there something to nibble on? This is
certainly a figurative as well as literal statement. All
of the characters are hungry for love, but love as we
too often experience it in the contemporary world is
a shallow substitute for the real thing. Being hungry
for love is one thing, but doing something about that
hunger is another. Never one to miss an opportunity
for humor in the midst of gravity, Carver has Terri
respond to Lauras request for something to nibble
on with this: Ill put out some cheese and crackers,
Terri said. But Terri just sat there. She did not get up
to get anything.

Fred Moramarco is a professor at San

Diego State University.

Looking for Raymond Carver

by A. O. Scott
(fragments)
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel
myself
beloved on the earth.
Plenty of writers are admired, celebrated, imitated,
and hyped. Very few writers can, as Raymond Carver
does in his poem Late Fragment, call themselves
beloved. In the years since his death in 1988, at fifty,
from lung cancer, Carvers reputation has
blossomed. He has gone from being an influential
and controversialmember of a briefly fashionable
school of experimental fiction to being an
international icon of traditional American literary
values. His geniusbut more his honesty, his
decency, his commitment to the exigencies of craft
is praised by an extraordinarily diverse cross section
of his peers.
Richard Ford, whose work, like Carvers, carries the
Hemingway tradition of masculine virtue into the
perilous world of discount stores, suburban sprawl,
and no-fault divorce, published a tribute to his old
friend in The New Yorker last year. Jay McInerney, a
student of Carvers at Syracuse in the early 1980s
whose cheeky, cosmopolitan sensibility seems, at
66

first glance, antithetical to Carvers plain-spoken

provinciality, has written memorably, and movingly,
about his teacher. And Carvers stripped-down
vignettes of ordinary life in the United States have
been championed by such heroes of international
postmodern super-fiction as Salman Rushdie, Amos
Oz, and Haruki Murakami, who is also Carvers
principal Japanese translator.

the cruelties and betrayals that finally wrecked his

marriageturn up again and again in his poetry. As
Gallagher puts it, Rays appetite for inventorying
domestic havoc is often relentless. Inventory is
perhaps more apt than Gallagher would wish, given
the formal slackness of so many of the poems, but
the poems in All of Us will serve, for serious readers
of Carvers fiction, as a useful storehouse of
biographical information, and as irrefutable
cumulative evidence of how closely bound up
Carvers stories are with the events of his life. .

Carvers influence has proven remarkably durable

and protean: the chronicles of family dysfunction,
addiction, and recovery that dominate American
writing in the late 1990s may owe as much to his
example as did the flood of laconic, present-tense
short fiction that nearly drowned it in the mid1980s.

[]
This kind of reticence, the balked, clumsy attempt to
express an experience paralyzed in its enormity and
yet at the same time resolutely ordinary - the
destruction of a family - resembles the way many of
the characters in Carvers stories express themselves.
At the end of Why Dont You Dance?, for example,
the point of view shift from the man at the window
to a young woman who had stopped with her
boyfriend to check out the junk on the mans lawn:

[]
At the beginning of the story Why Dont You
Dance? a nameless man drinks whiskey and stares
through his kitchen window at the contents of his
house, arranged in the front yard:
The chiffonier stood a few feet from the foot
of the bed. He had emptied the drawers into
cartons that morning, and the cartons were
in the living room. A portable heater was
next to the chiffonier. A rattan chair with a
decorator pillow stood at the foot of the bed.
The buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a
part of the driveway. A yellow muslin cloth,
much too large, a gift, covered the table and
hung down over the sides. A potted fern was
on the table, along with a box of silverware
and a record player, also gifts.

Weeeks later, she said: The guy was about

middle-aged.
[]
She kept talking. She told everyone. There
was more to it, and she was trying to get it
talked out. After a time, she gave up trying.
The girl knows she has witnessed something terrible,
but lacks the resourcesquite literally, the
vocabularyto explain to herself or anyone else what
she has seen. She can only say what happened, and it
isnt enoughthere is more to it. But in her
inarticulate state she is not much different from the
narrator of the story, or indeed, as the poems and
essays suggest, from Carver himself. And yet, the
girls inability to say more, when coupled with
Carvers refusal to say morethe words husband,
wife, divorce, alcoholism, bankruptcy, and despair
occur nowhere in the storymanages to say it all.

In some ways, All of Us resembles this tableauthe

interior furnishings of a life dragged out into the
sunlight, where they seem incongruous and, at the
same time, desperately sad. The pathos of Why
Dont You Dance?surely a case of ordinary objects
acquiring power by being rendered in ordinary
languageintensifies when we learn, early on in the
collected poems, that the man at the window is
Carver himself. Distress Sale begins with a catalog
of household goods:
Early one Sunday morning everything
outside
the childs canopy bed and vanity table,
the sofa, end tables and lamps, boxes
of assorted books and records.

To his admirers, Carvers taciturnity becomes its

own kind of eloquence. But critics, especially those
who are bothered by Carvers disproportionate
influence on other writers, have complained about
how much he leaves out. For Sven Birkerts, writing
in 1986, the fiction of Carver and his followers is
marked by a total refusal of any vision of larger
social connection. And it is true that the inhabitants
of Carvers world appear to exist not only in states of
isolation and impermanence, but, to borrow a
phrase from George W.S. Trow, in a context of no
context, without geographical, social, or historical
coordinates. We seldom learn the name of the town,
or even the state, in which a given story takes place.
The stories tend to be devoid of the cultural and
commercial referencespopular songs, brand
names, moviesthat so many contemporary writers
use to fix their narratives in time and space. And
though Carver began writing in the early 1960s, and

These things belong to someone else, a family

reduced to selling off all their possessions. The
speaker is a friendIm staying with them, trying to
dry outwhose sympathy is both deepened and
limited by the fact that hes not much better off than
they are: I reach for my wallet and that is how I
understand it:/I cant help anyone.
In fact, as Carver recorded in poems like
Bankruptcy and The Miracle, he and his first
wife, Maryann, were twice forced to declare
bankruptcy. And the hardships of Carvers early
adulthoodthe alcoholism, the financial insecurity,
67

came to prominence over the next two decades, his

stories, at first glance, take no notice of the social
and political tumult of the era. We never know who
the president is, or whether men have walked on the
moon; the characters never read newspapers; and
nobody expresses any political interests or opinions.
As far as I can tell, Vietnam is mentioned exactly
once: in Vitamins the leering, predatory behavior
of a black man named Nelsonone of the very few
nonwhite characters who appear in Carvers workis
ascribed to the fact that he is a veteran just returned
from combat in Southeast Asia.

curious, suspicious, and disgusted reactions of the

small-town working class to interlopers from the
urban, well-to-do counterculture. Jerry and Molly
and Sam, Nobody Said Anything, and Bicycles,
Muscles, Cigarettes, among others, are ultimately
about how the spread of the suburbs transformed
family life, and about the crisis of masculinity that
resulted. Carvers work, read closely and in the
aggregate, also carries a lot of news about feminism,
work-ing conditions, and substance abuse in latetwentieth-century provincial America.
To generalize in this way is, of course, to engage in a
kind of analytical discourse Carver resolutely
mistrusted. More often than not, the big talkers in
Carvers stories are in possession of a degree of class
privilege. My friend Mel McGinnis was talking,
goes the famous opening of What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love. Mel McGinnis is a
cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the
right. The imperious homeowner in Put Yourself in
My Shoes and the jealous college teacher in Will
You Please Be Quiet, Please? also come to mind.
People who carry on as if they know what theyre
talking about are regarded with suspicion. Carvers
greatest sympathy is reserved for those characters
who struggle to use language to make sense of
things, but who founder or fail in the attempt.

[]
Im much more interested in my characters, Carver
once told an interviewer, in the people in my story,
than I am in any potential reader. This is a
statement of artistic priorities, to be sure, but it also
amounts to an expression of solidarity. Carvers
characters are a lot like him: they marrytoo young,
divorce too late, and drink too much. Their midlife
crises occur in their early thirties. They are menaced
by debt and sporadically employed. Childhood in
Carvers world consists of the uncomprehending,
often brutal imitation of adults; adulthood, which
comes suddenly and irreversibly, is a state of
mourning for lost possibilities punctuated by
eruptions of childishness. The desire for
permanence, for stability, for home and family and
steady work, is perpetually at war with the impulse
to flee, to strike it rich, or just to be left alone.

It is striking how many of his stories turn on the

inability or refusal of people to say what happened.
Think of the girl at the end of Why Dont You
Dance?, unable to convey the fullness of what she
has seen on the strange mans lawn, or the narrator
of Where is Everyone?, clamming up at his AA
meetings. And there are many more examples.
Why, Honey? is a mothers desperate, almost
incoherent, and yet strangely formal effort (Dear
Sir, it begins) to explain to a nameless, prying
stranger how her darling son went wrong. In
Distance (also published as Everything Stuck to
Him), a father, asked by his grown daughter to tell
her what it was like when she was a kid, produces a
fairy tale of young parenthood (the main characters
in which are referred to only as the boy and the
girl) that leaves both teller and listener unsettled,
unenlightened, and remote from each other.

The spareness of Carvers style represents not

parsimoniousness, but tact. It represents, above all,
an absolute loyalty to the people he writes about. Its
as if Carver, in deciding to become the kind of
person who has his own library, and who will
someday see his own name under the words edited
by, at the same time swore to remain true not only
to the delivery boy he had been, but to that boys
original state of ignorance. In his recent introduction
to The Best American Stories of the Twentieth
Century, John Updike writes, somewhat ruefully,
that the fiction of Carver and fellow minimalists like
Barthelme and Ann Beattie involves a withdrawal of
authorial guidance, an existential determination to
let things speak out of their own silence. This is well
put, but it would be more accurate in Carvers case to
say that he is motivated by a moral determination to
let persons speak out of their own deep reticence.
The exercise of authorial guidance would imply, for
him, an unprincipled claim to omniscience, an
assertion that he knows more than his characters
and is, therefore, better than they are.

And then there is Cathedral, one of Carvers most

beloved stories and the closest thing he produced to
an allegory of his own method. The narrator is
visited by a garrulous blind man, an old friend of his
wifes, whose arrival he anticipates with
apprehension. The two men end up smoking
marijuana together, while the television airs a
documentary about the cathedrals of Europe. It
starts to bother the narrator that his new
acquaintance, while he knows something about the
history of church-building, has no idea of what
cathedrals really are, and he tries to tell him about
them:

To read Where Im Calling From from beginning to

end, supplemented by some of the stories from
earlier collections that Carver chose not to reprint, is
to discover that a great deal of what is supposed to
be missingin particular, the changing social
landscape of the United Stateshas been there all
along, but that it has been witnessed from a
perspective almost without precedent in American
literature. Stories like What Do You Do in San
Francisco? and After the Denim record the

Theyre really big, I said. Theyre massive.

Theyre built of stone. Marble, too,
sometimes. In those olden days, when they
built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to
God. In those olden days, God was an
68

anotherastheyaresimilar.Minimalism,moreover,isnot
theonlyandmaynotbethemostimportantattributethat
theirfictionmoreorlessshares;thoselabelsthemselves
suggest some other aspects and concerns of the New
AmericanShortStoryanditsproportionatecounterpart,
thethreeeighthinchnovel.ButitistheirminimalismI
shallspeakof(briefly)here,anditsantecedence:theidea
that,inartatleast,lessismore.
Itisanideasurelyasold,asenduringlyattractiveand
asubiquitousasitsopposite.In thebeginningwas the
Word:onlylatercametheBible,nottomentionthethree
deckerVictoriannovel.TheoracleatDelphididnotsay,
Exhaustive analysis and comprehension of ones own
psychemaybeprerequisitetoanunderstandingofones
behavior and of the world at large; it said, Know
thyself. Such inherently minimalist genres as oracles
(fromtheDelphicshrineofApollotothemodernfortune
cookie),proverbs,maxims,aphorisms,epigrams,pensees,
mottoes,slogansandquipsarepopularineveryhuman
century and culture especially in oral cultures and
subcultures, where mnemonic staying power has high
priorityandmanyspecimensofthemareselfreflexive
or selfdemonstrative: minimalism about minimalism.
Brevityisthesoulofwit.Silence isgolden.Vita
brevisest,arslongaSenecawarnsaspiringpoetsinhis
third Epistle; Eschew surplusage, recommends Mark
Twain.
Against the largescale classical prose pleasures of
Herodotus, Thucydides and Petronius, there are the
miniature delightsofAesops fables and Theophrastus
Characters. Against such verse epics as the Iliad, the
OdysseyandtheAeneidandthemuchlongerSanskrit
Ramayana,MahabharataandOceanofStoryaresuch
venerable supercompressive poetic forms as the
palindrome (there are long examples, but the ones we
remember are Madam, Im Adam and Sex at noon
taxes),orthesinglecouplet(amoderninstanceisOgden
NashsCandyisdandy/But liquorisquicker), orthe
feudalJapanesehaikuanditsWesternechoesintheearly
20thcentury imagists up to the contemporary skinny
poemsof,say,RobertCreeley.Thereareevensingle
wordpoems,orsinglewordsthatoughttobepoems;the
best one I know of I found in the Guinness Book of
WorldRecords,listedasthemostsuccinctword:The
Tierra del Fuegian word mamihlapinatapei. In the
languageoftheLandofFire,mamihlapinatapeiissaid
tomean:lookingintoeachotherseyes,eachhopingthat
theotherwillinitiatewhatbothwanttodobutneither
choosestocommence.
Thegenreoftheshortstory,asPoedistinguishedit
from the traditional tale in his 1842 review of
Hawthornes first collection of stories, is an early
manifestoofmodernnarrativeminimalism:Inthewhole
compositionthereshouldbenowordwritten,ofwhich
thetendency...isnottothepreestablisheddesign....
Unduelengthis...tobeavoided.Poescodification
informs such later 19thcentury masters of terseness,
selectivityandimplicitness(asopposedtoleisurelyonce
uponatimelessness, luxuriant abundance, explicit and
extended analysis) as Guy de Maupassant and Anton
Chekhov.Show,donttell,saidHenryJamesineffectand
atlengthinhisprefacestothe1908NewYorkeditionof
his novels. And dont tell a word more than you

important part of everyones life. You could

tell this from their cathedral-building. Im
sorry, I said, but it looks like thats the best
I can do for you. Im just no good at it.
The blind man proposes that they draw a cathedral
instead, and they dothe narrators eyes closed, the
blind mans hand guiding his. The narrator
undergoes an epiphany: It was like nothing else in
my life up to now.
The reader is left out: the mens shared experience,
visual and tactile, is beyond the reach of words. But
the frustrating vicariousness of the story is also the
source of its power. Art, according to Carver, is a
matter of the blind leading the tongue-tied. Carver
was an artist of a rare and valuable kind: he told
simple stories, and made it look hard.
New York Review of Books, Aug 12 99

JOHNBARTH
AFewWordsAboutMinimalism*
Less is more, said Walter Gropius, or Alberto
Giacometti,orLaszloMoholyNagy,orHenri Guadier
Brzeska, or Constantin Brancusi, or Le Corbusier or
LudwigMiesvanderRohe;theremark(firstmadeinfact
byRobertBrowning)hasbeenseverallyattributedtoall
ofthosemoreorlesscelebratedmoreorlessminimalists.
LiketheBauhausmotto,Formfollowsfunction,itis
itselfamemorablespecimenoftheminimalistesthetic,of
whichacardinal principleisthatartisticeffect maybe
enhanced byaradical economyofartisticmeans,even
where such parsimony compromises other values:
completeness, for example, or richness or precision of
statement.
The power of that esthetic principle is easy to
demonstrate: contrast my eminently forgettable
formulation of it above artistic effect may be
enhanced,etc.withtheunforgettableassertionLessis
more.Orconsiderthefollowingproposition,firstwith,
andthenwithout,itsparentheticalelements:
Minimalism(ofonesortoranother)istheprinciple
(oneoftheprinciples,anyhow)underlying(whatIand
manyanotherinterestedobserverconsidertobeperhaps)
themostimpressivephenomenononthecurrent(North
American,especiallytheUnitedStates)literaryscene(the
gringo equivalent to el boom in the Latin American
novel):Imeanthenewfloweringofthe(North)American
short story (in particular the kind of terse, oblique,
realisticorhyperrealistic,slightlyplotted,extrospective,
coolsurfacedfictionassociatedinthelast5or10years
withsuchexcellentwritersasFrederickBarthelme,Ann
Beattie, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, James
Robison, Mary Robison and Tobias Wolff, and both
praised and damned under such labels as KMart
realism, hick chic, DietPepsi minimalism and
postVietnam, postliterary, postmodernist bluecollar
neoearlyHemingwayism).
Like any clutch of artists collectively labeled, the
writersjustmentionedareatleastasdifferentfromone
69

absolutelyneedto,addedyoungErnestHeningway,who
thusdescribedhisnewtheoryintheearly1920s:You
couldomitanythingifyouknewthatyouomitted,andthe
omittedpartwouldstrenthenthestoryandmakepeople
feelsomethingmorethantheyunderstood.
TheBauhausFunctionalistswerebythenalreadybusy
unornamenting and abstracting modern architecture,
painting and design; and while functionalism and
minimalism are not the same thing, to say nothing of
abstractionismandminimalism(thereisnothingabstract
aboutthoseearlyHemingwaystories),theyspringfrom
thesameimpluse:tostripawaythesuperfluousinorder
to reveal the necessary, the essential. Never mind that
Voltairehadpointedout,acenturyandahalfbefore,how
indispensablethesuperfluouscanbe(Lesuperflu,chose
sinecessaire);justas,inmodernpainting,theprocessof
stripping away leads from PostImpressionism through
CubismtotheradicalminimalismofKasimirMalevichs
WhiteonWhiteof1918,andAdReinhardtsallbut
imageless black paintings of the 1950s, so in 20th
centuryliteraturetheminimalistsuccessionleadsthrough
Hemingways new theory to the shorter ficciones of
Jorge Luis Borges and the everterser texts of Samuel
Beckett,perhapsculminatinginhisplayBreath(1969):
The curtain opens on a dimly lit stage, empty but for
scatteredrubbish;thereisheardasinglerecordedhuman
cry,thenasingleamplifiedinspirationandexpirationof
breathaccompaniedbyabrighteningandredimmingof
thelights,thenagainthecry.Thirtyfivesecondsafterit
opened,thecurtaincloses.
But it closes only on the play, not on the modern
tradition of literary minimalism, which honorably
continuesinsuchnextgenerationwritersas,inAmerica,
Donald Barthelme (The fragment is the only form I
trust,saysacharacterinhisslendernovelSnowWhite)
and,intheliterarygenerationoverlappingandfollowing
his, the plentiful authors of the New American Short
Story.
Oldornew,fictioncanbeminimalistinanyorallof
several ways.Thereareminimalismsofunit,form and
scale:shortwords,shortsentencesandparagraphs,super
short stories, those threeeighthinch thin novels
aforementioned, and even minimal bibliographies
(Borges fiction adds up to a few modest, though
powerfullyinfluential,shortstorycollections).Thereare
minimalisms of style: a strippeddown vocabulary; a
strippeddown syntax that avoids periodic sentences,
serial predications and complex subordinating
constructions;astrippeddownrhetoricthatmayeschew
figurative language altogether; a strippeddown, non
emotive tone. And there are minimalisms of material:
minimalcharacters,minimalexposition(allthatDavid
Copperfieldkindofcrap,saysJ.D.Salingerscatcherin
the rye), minimal mises en scene, minimal action,
minimalplot.
Found together in their purest forms, these several
minimalismsadduptoanartthatinthewordsofits
archpriest,SamuelBeckett,speakingofthepainterBram
VanVeldeexpressesthatthereisnothingtoexpress,
nothing with which to express, nothing from which to
express, no power to express, no desire to express
togetherwiththeobligationtoexpress.Buttheyarenot
always found together. There are very short works of

greatrhetorical,emotionalandthematicrichness,suchas
Borgess essential page, Borges and I; and there are
instances of what may fairly be called longwinded
minimalism,suchasSamuelBeckettsstarkmonumental
trilogyfromtheearly50s:Molloy,MaloneDiesandThe
Unnameable. Parallels abound in the other arts: the
miniature, in painting, is characteristically brimful
(miniaturismisnotminimalism);JosephCornellslittle
boxes contain universes. The large paintings of Mark
Rothko,FranzKlineandBarnettNewman,ontheother
hand,areasundetailedastheWashingtonMonument.
ThemedievalRomanCatholicChurchrecognizedtwo
oppositeroadstograce: thevianegativaofthemonks
cell and the hermits cave, and the via affirmativa of
immersion in human affairs, of being in the world
whetherornotoneisofit.Criticshaveaptlyborrowed
those terms to characterize the difference between Mr.
Beckett, for example, and his erstwhile master James
Joyce, himself a maximalist except in his early works.
Otherthanbonedeepdisposition,whichisnodoubtthe
great determinant, what inclines a writer sometimes
almostaculturalgenerationofwriterstotheNegational
Path?
For individuals, it may be by their own
acknowledgment largely a matter of past or present
personal circumstances. Raymond Carver writes of a
literary apprenticeship in which his short poems and
storieswerecarvedinpreciousquarterhoursstolenfrom
aharrowingdomesticandeconomicsituation;thoughhe
nowhasprofessionaltimeaplenty,thenotionbesetshim
that should he presume to attempt even a short novel,
hell wake to find himself back in those wretched
circumstances.AnoppositecasewasBorgess:hisnear
total blindness in his later decades obliged him to the
short forms that he had elected for other, nonphysical
reasonswhenhewassighted.
...
To account for a trend, literary sociologists and
culture watchers point to more general historical and
philosophical factors not excluding the factor of
powerfulmodelslikeBorgesandBeckett.Theinfluence
of early Hemingway on Raymond Carver, say, is as
apparentastheinfluenceofMr.Carverinturnonahost
of other New American ShortStory writers, and on a
much more numerous host of apprentices in American
college fictionwriting programs. But why this model
rather than that, other than its mere and sheer artistic
prowess, on which after all it has no monopoly?
Doubtless because this one is felt, by the writers thus
moreorlessinfluenced,tospeakmorestronglytotheir
conditionandthatoftheirreaders.
Andwhatisthatcondition,inthecaseofthecool
surface realistminimalist storytellers of the American
1970s and 80s? In my conversation with them, my
readingoftheircriticsbothpositiveandnegativeandmy
dealingswithrecentandcurrentapprenticewriters,Ihave
heardcited,amongotherfactors,thesehalfdozen,ranked
hereinnoparticularorder:
*OurnationalhangoverfromtheVietnamWar,feltby
many to be a trauma literally and figuratively
unspeakable. I dont want to talk about it is the
characteristicattitudeofNamveteransinthefictionof
AnnBeattie,JayneAnnePhillipsandBobbieAnnMason
70

asitisamongmanyoftheirreallifecounterparts(and
as it was among their numberless 20thcentury
forerunners,especiallyaftertheFirstWorldWar).Thisis,
ofcourse,oneofthetwoclassicattitudestotrauma,the
otherbeingitsopposite,anditcancertainlyconduceto
hedged,nonintrospective,evenminimalistdiscourse:one
remembersHemingwaysearlystorySoldiersHome.
*Themoreorlesscoincidentenergycrisisof197376,
andtheassociatedreactionagainstAmericanexcessand
wastefulnessingeneral.Thepopularityofthesubcompact
car parallels that (in literary circles, at least) of the
subcompactnovelandtheminifictionthoughnot,one
observes,oftheminiskirt,whichhadnothingtodowith
conservingmaterial.
*Thenationaldeclineinreadingandwritingskills,not
onlyamongtheyoung(includingevenyoungapprentice
writers,asagroup),butamongtheirteachers,manyof
whom are themselves the product of an everless
demanding educational system and a society whose
narrativedramatic entertainment and tastes come far
more from movies and television than from literature.
Thisisnottodisparagetheliteracyandgeneraleducation
ofthosewritersmentionedabove,ortosuggestthatthe
greatwritersofthepastwereuniformlyflawlessspellers
andgrammarians,ofwidepersonalliteraryculture.Some
were, some werent; some of todays are, some arent.
Butatleastamongthoseofouraspiringwriterspromising
enough to be admitted into good graduate writing
programsandsurelytheyarenottheinferiorspecimens
of their breed the general decline in basic language
skillsoverthelasttwodecadesisinarguableenoughto
make meworry insomeinstances about theirteaching
undergraduates.Rarelyintheirownwriting,whateverits
considerableothermerits,willonefindasentenceofany
syntactical complexity,forexample,andinasmuchasa
languages repertoire of otherthanbasic syntactical
devices permits its users to articulate otherthanbasic
thoughts and feelings, DickandJane prose tends to be
emotionallyandintellectually poorer thanHenryJames
prose. Among the great minimalist writers, this
impoverishmentiselectedandstrategic:simplificationin
theinterestofstrength,orofsomeothervalue.Among
thelessgreatitmaybefautedemieux.Amongtodays
commonreadersitispandemic.
*Alongwiththisdecline,aneverdwindlingreaderly
attention span. The long popular novel still has its
devotees, especially aboard large airplanes and on
beaches;butitcanscarcelybedoubtedthatmanyofthe
hourswebourgeoisnowspendwithourtelevisionsand
video cassette recorders, and in our cars and at the
movies,weusedtospendreadingnovelsandnovellasand
notsoshort stories, partly because those glitzy other
distractions werent there and partly because we were
moregenerallyconditionedforsustainedconcentration,in
our pleasures as well as in our work. The Austrian
novelistRobertMusilwascomplainingby1930(inhis
maxinovelTheManWithoutQualities)thatwelivein
theageofthemagazine,tooimpatientalreadyinthe
twitchy 20s to read books. Half a century later, in
America at elast, even the largecirculation magazine
marketforfictionhaddwindledtoahandfulofoutlets;
thereaderswerentthere.Itisatouchingparadoxofthe
New American Short Story so admirably

straightforward anddemocraticofaccess,sosteepedin
brand names and the popular culture that it perforce
appears mainly in very smallcirculation literary
quarterliesinsteadofthelikesofColliers,Libertyand
The Saturday Evening Post. But The New Yorker and
Esquirecantpublisheverybody.
*Together with all the above, a reaction on these
authors part against the ironic, blackhumoristic
fabulism and/or the (sometimes academic)
intellectuality and/or the density, here byzantine, there
baroque, of some of their immediate American literary
antecedents: the likes of Donald Barthelme, Robert
Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis and William
Gass, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon,
Kurt Vonnegut (and, I shall presume, myself as well).
Thisreaction,whereitexists,wouldseemtopertainas
much to our successors relentless realism as to their
minimalism:amongthedistinguishedbrothersBarthelme,
DonaldsproductionsarenolessleanthanFredericksor
the upandcoming Stevens; but their characteristic
material,angleofattackandresultantflavoraredifferent
indeed. The formal intricacy of Elder Brothers story
Sentence, for example (a single ninepage
nonsentence),orthedirectthoughsatiricalintellectuality
ofhisKierkegaardUnfairtoSchlegel,areasforeignto
theKMartRealistsasarethemanicflightsofGravitys
Rainbow.Soitgoes:Thedialoguebetweenfantastand
realist, fabulator and quotidianist, like the dialogue
between maximalist and minimalist, is as old as
storytelling,andbynomeansalwaysadversary.Thereare
innumerablecombinations,coalitions,linecrossingsand
workingsofbothsidesofthestreet.
*The reaction against the all but inescapable
hyperboleofAmericanadvertising,bothcommercialand
political, with its hightech manipulativeness and
glamorouslies,asubiquitousasandmorepollutedthan
the air we breathe. How understandable that such an
ambiance, together with whatever other items in this
catalogue, might inspire a fiction dedicated to homely,
understated, programmatically unglamorous, even
minimalisticTellingItLikeItIs.
That has ever been the ground inspiration, moral
philosophicalincharacter,ofminimalismanditskissing
cousinrealismintheirmanyavatarsoverthecenturies,in
thefineartsandelsewhere:thefeelingthatthelanguage
(orwhatever)hasforwhateverreasonsbecomeexcessive,
cluttered, corrupted, fancy, false. It is the Puritans
reaction against baroque Catholicism; it is Thoreaus
putting behind him even the meager comforts of the
villageofConcord.
TotheLostGenerationofWorldWarIsurvivors,says
one of their famous spokesmen (Frederic Henry in
HemingwaysAFarewelltoArms),Abstractwordssuch
as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.
WassilyKandinskysaidhesoughtnottheshell,butthe
nut.ThefunctionalismoftheBauhauswasinspiredin
part by admiration for machine technology, in part by
revulsionagainstthefancyclutteroftheGildedAge,in
languageaswellaselsewhere.Thesinkingoftheelegant
Titanichascometosymbolizetheendofthatage,asthe
sight of some workmen crushed by a falling Victorian
cornice symbolized for young Frank Lloyd Wright the
dead weight of functionless architectural decoration.
71

Flaubert raged against the blague of bourgeois speech,

bureaucraticspeechinparticular;hispassionforthemot
juste involved far more subtraction than addition. The
baroque inspires its opposite: after the excesses of
scholasticism comes Descartess radical reductionism
letusdoubtanddiscardeverythingnotselfevidentand
seewhetheranythingindubitableremainsuponwhichto
rebuild. And among the scholastics themselves, three
centuriesbeforeDescartes,WilliamofOckhamhonedhis
celebratedrazor:Entianonsuntmultiplicanda(Entities
arenottobemultiplied).
Inshort,lessismore.
Beyond their individual and historically local
impulses,then,themoreorlessminimalistauthorsofthe
New American Short Story are reenacting a cyclical
correction in the history (and the microhistories) of
literatureandofartingeneral:acycletobefoundaswell,
with longer rhythms, in the history of philosophy, the
historyoftheculture.RenaissancesbegetReformations,
which then beget CounterReformations; the seven fat
yearsaresucceededbysevenlean,afterwhichwe,noless
than the people of Genesis, may look forward to the
recorrection.
Forifthereismuchtoadmireinartisticausterity,its
oppositeisnotwithoutmeritsandjoysaswell.Thereare
theminimalistpleasuresofEmilyDickinsonZeroat
theBoneandthemaximalistonesofWaltWhitman;
the lowfat rewards of Samuel Becketts Texts for
Nothing andthehighcaloriedelightsofGabriel Garcia
Marquezs OneHundredYearsof Solitude.There truly
are more ways than one to heaven. As between
minimalism anditsopposite,Ipitythereader orthe
writer, ortheage tooaddicted toeither tosavorthe
other.
* Copyright c 1986 by The New York Times
Company.Reprintedbypermission.
WeberStudiesdoesnotordinarilypublishpreviously
publishedmaterial.We havemadeanexceptioninthe
case of this essay for two reasons. The essay was
speciallywrittenforandpresentedattheFirstNational
Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State
Collegeonl7Aprill986.Secondly,thetopicpresented
hereinisimportantenoughtowarrantrepublicationfor
ourreaders.

Well, as it happens I do have a few stories on

hand, and Im sending them along within the next
day or two. I hope you can find something you like.
July 15, 1970
Hombre, thanks for the superb assist on the
stories. No one has done that for me since I was 18, I
mean it. High time I think, too. Feel the stories are
first class now, but whatever the outcome there, I
appreciate the fine eye you turned on them. Hang
tough.
January 19, 1971
I think its a fine story. Took about all yr changes,
added a few things here and there. Hope to get it
retyped by this evening and back off to you. No later
than tomorrow, sure. Thanks for going over it.
Listen, something you said a long time ago, the thing
itself is what matters. Is true, in the end. Im not
bothered. Ive always been the slowest kid in class
anyway, right down there. But I keep trying, even at
this advanced age. So lean on it, if you see things. If I
dont agree, Ill say something, never fear.
November 11, 1974
Well, listen, cant exactly tell you how pleased
and so on about the prospects of having a collection
out under your aegis . . . along with McGraw-Hill, of
course. First reaction was to run out and buy two
bottles of champagne for a champagne breakfast. . . .
But all that is neither here nor there. What Im
concerned about and thrilled about is having out a
book of stories, & from there on I intend, brother, to
set the globe afire, believe me. . . . Ill tell you this,
youve not backed a bad horse. . . . About the editing
necessary in some of the stories. Tell me which ones
and Ill go after it, or them. Tell me which ones. Or I
will leave it up to you & you tell me what you think
needs done or doing.
September 27, 1977
The most wonderful thing about this stay in
McKinleyville, though, is that Ive got sober and
intend to stay that way. Ive never done anything in
my life Ive felt so good about as getting and staying
sober. What can I say? [Lish had left Esquire.]
Youve made a single-handed impression on
American letters that has helped fix the course of
American letters. And, of course, you know, old
bean, just what an influence youve exercised on my
life. Just knowing you were there, at your desk, was
an inspiration for me to write, and you know I mean
that. You, my friend, are my idea of an ideal reader,
always have been, always, that is, forever, will be. So
you loomed large on the literary scene, and that is a
fact, as well as a truth, but you loomed large in my
conscious and unconscious life as well.
September 8, 1978
Tess Gallagher, that Irish lass, I like to have fallen
in love with her. She left, went to Tucson on business
shell be teaching there next year, shes on a Guggy
this yearthen returned and we spent a fine week
together, I put her on a plane to Seattle yesterday,
today I get a dozen red roses from her.
February 1, 1979
Im going to Mardi Gras with Tess; and the Fords
are coming down in March for spring break and
were going into Mexico by train for a week. . . . Im
happy, and Im sober. Its aces right now, Gordon. I
know better than anyone a fellow is never out of the
woods, but right now its aces, and Im enjoying it.

The New Yorker, December 24, 2007

Letters written by Raymond Carver to Gordon
Lish (and one letter by Lish to Carver) during the
years 1969 to 1983, when Lish was editing Carvers
work at Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf. Serves as an
introduction to Carvers story Beginners, also
published in The New Yorker

Letters to an Editor
by Raymond Carver
Following
are
excerpts
from
Carvers
correspondence with Lish, from 1969 to 1983.
November 12, 1969
72

May 10, 1980

As for lunch, lord, it was the high point of my
visit to NYC, nothing mindless or silly, at least not on
your part. I delight in your company, simple as that.
You know, I feel closer to you than I do to my own
brother. Have for a long time, years. We dont see
each other that often, or talk on the phone weekly,
etc., but I know youre there and its important to
me. Besides, youre my herodont you know? Ever
since you left PA [Palo Alto] and went out into the
Great World and began sending me messages back
from time to time what it was like out there. Your
friendship and your concern have enriched my life.
Theres no question of your importance to me.
Youre my mainstay. Man, I love you. I dont make
that declaration lightly either. . . . For Christs sweet
sake, not to worry about taking a pencil to the stories
if you can make them better; and if anyone can you
can. I want them to be the best possible stories, and I
want them to be around for a while. . . . I never
figured I was going to get rich or even earn a living
writing stories and poems. Be enough, you know, to
have Knopf do a book of mine and have you as my
editor. So open the throttle. Ramming speed.
July 8, 1980, 8 A.M.
Dearest Gordon,
Ive got to pull out of this one. Please hear me.
Ive been up all night thinking on this, and nothing
but this, so help me. Ive looked at it from every side,
Ive compared both versions of the edited mssthe
first one is better, I truly believe, if some things are
carried over from the second to the firstuntil my
eyes are nearly to fall out of my head. You are a
wonder, a genius, and theres no doubt of that, better
than any two of Max Perkins, etc., etc. And Im not
unmindful of the fact of my immense debt to you, a
debt I can simply never, never repay. This whole new
life I have, so many of the friends I now have, this
job up here, everything, I owe to you for Will You
Please. Youve given me some degree of immortality
already. Youve made so many of the stories in this
collection better, far better than they were before.
And maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no one
had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing
that your versions are better than some of the ones I
had sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it.
But Tess has seen all of these and gone over them
closely. Donald Hall has seen many of the new ones
(and discussed them at length with me and offered
his services in reviewing the collection) and Richard
Ford, Toby Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, too, some of them.
. . . How can I explain to these fellows when I see
them, as I will see them, what happened to the story
in the meantime, after its book publication? Maybe if
the book were not to come out for 18 months or two
years, it would be different. But right now,
everything is too new. . . . Gordon, the changes are
brilliant and for the better in most casesI look at
What We Talk About . . . (Beginners) and I see
what it is that youve done, what youve pulled out of
it, and Im awed and astonished, startled even, with
your insights. But its too close right now, that story.
Now much of this has to do with my sobriety and
with my new-found (and fragile, I see) mental health
and well-being. Ill tell you the truth, my very sanity
is on the line here. I dont want to sound
melodramatic here, but Ive come back from the

grave here to
start
writing
stories
once
more. As I think
you may know,
Id given up
entirely, thrown
it in and was
looking forward
to dying, that
release. But I
kept thinking,
Ill wait until
after
the
election to kill
myself, or wait
until after this
or
that
happened,
usually
something
down the road a
ways, but it was
never far from
my mind in
those dark days,
not all that long
ago. Now, Im incomparably better, I have my health
back, money in the bank, the right woman for this
time of my life, a decent job, blah blah. But I havent
written a word since I gave you the collection,
waiting for your reaction, that reaction means so
much to me. Now, Im afraid, mortally afraid, I feel
it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its
present edited form, I may never write another story,
thats how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories
are to my sense of regaining my health and mental
well-being. . . .
Please help me with this, Gordon. I feel as if this
is the most important decision Ive ever been faced
with, no shit. I ask for your understanding. Next to
my wife, and now Tess, you have been and are the
most important individual in my life, and thats the
truth. I dont want to lose your love or regard over
this, oh God no. It would be like having a part of
myself die, a spiritual part. Jesus, Im jabbering now.
But if this causes you undue complication and grief
and you perhaps understandably become pissed and
discouraged with me, well, Im the poorer for it, and
my life will not be the same again. True. On the other
hand, if the book comes out and I cant feel the kind
of pride and pleasure in it that I want, if I feel Ive
somehow too far stepped out of bounds, crossed that
line a little too far, why then I cant feel good about
myself, or maybe even write again; right now I feel
its that serious, and if I cant feel absolutely good
about it, I feel Id be done for. I do. Lord God I just
dont know what else to say. Im awash with
confusion and paranoia. Fatigue too, that too.
Please, Gordon, for Gods sake help me in this
and try to understand. Listen. Ill say it again, if I
have any standing or reputation or credibility in the
world, I owe it to you. I owe you this more-or-less
pretty interesting life I have. But if I go ahead with
this as it is, it will not be good for me. The book will
not be, as it should, a cause for joyous celebration,
but one of defense and explanation. . . . I know that
73

the discomfort of this decision of mine is at its

highest now, its rampant, I feel nearly wild with it.
But I know it will cause you grief as well,
explanations, more work, stopping everything in its
tracks and coming up with valid reasons for why.
But, eventually, my discomfort and yours, will go
away, therell be a grieving, Im grieving right now,
but it will go away. But if I dont speak now, and
speak from the heart, and halt things now, I foresee
a terrible time ahead for me. The demons I have to
deal with every day, or night, nearly, might, Im
afraid, simply rise up and take me over.
Of course I know I shouldnt have signed the
contract without first reading the collection and
making my fears, if any, known to you beforehand,
before signing. So what should we do now, please
advise? Can you lay it all on me and get me out of the
contract someway? Can you put the book off until
Winter or Spring of 1982 and let them know I want
to have the stories in the collection published in
magazines first (and thats the truth, several of them
are committed to places with publication way off
next year)? Tell them I want the magazine
publications first, and then the book out when Im
up for tenure here that spring of 1982? And then
decide next year what, for sure, to do? Or else can or
should everything just be stopped now, I send back
the Knopf check, if its on the way, or else you stop it
there? And meanwhile I pay you for the hours, days
and nights, Im sure, youve spent on this. Goddamn
it, Im just nearly crazy with this. Im getting into a
state over it. No, I dont think it shd. be put off. I
think it had best be stopped.
I thought the editing, especially in the first
version, was brilliant, as I said. The stories I cant let
go of in their entirety are these. Community Center
(If It Please You) and The Bath (A Small Good
Thing) and Id want some more of the old couple,
Anna and Henry Gates, in What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love (Beginners). I would not
want Mr. Fixit (Where Is Everyone) in the book in
its present state. The story Distance should not
have its title changed to Everything Stuck to Him.
Nor the little piece Mine to Popular Mechanics.
Dummy should keep its title. A Serious Talk is
fine for Pie. I think Want to See Something is
fine, is better than I Could See the Smallest Things.
...
Im just much too close to all of this right now.
Its even hard for me to think right now. I think, in
all, maybe its just too soon for me for another
collection. I know that next spring is too soon in any
case. Absolutely too soon. I think I had best pull out,
Gordon, before it goes any further. I realize I stand
every chance of losing your love and friendship over
this. But I strongly feel I stand every chance of losing
my soul and my mental health over it, if I dont take
that risk. Im still in the process of recovery and
trying to get well from the alcoholism, and I just
cant take any chances, something as momentous
and permanent as this, that would put my head in
some jeopardy. Thats it, its in my head. You have
made so many of these stories better, my God, with
the lighter editing and trimming. But those others,
those three, I guess, Im liable to croak if they came
out that way. Even though they may be closer to
works of art than the original and people be reading

them 50 years from now, theyre still apt to cause my

demise, Im serious, theyre so intimately hooked up
with my getting well, recovering, gaining back some
little self-esteem and feeling of worth as a writer and
a human being.
I know you must feel angry and betrayed and
pissed off. Gods sake, Im sorry. I can pay you for
the time youve put in on this, but I cant begin to
help or do anything about the trouble and grief I
may be causing there in the editorial and business
offices that youll have to go through. Forgive me for
this, please. But Im just going to have to wait a while
yet for another book, 18 months, two years, its okay
now, as long as Im writing and have some sense of
worth in the process. Your friendship and your
concern and general championing of me have meant,
and mean still, more to me than I can ever say. I
could never begin to repay you, as you must know. I
honor and respect you, and I love you more than my
brother. But you will have to get me off the hook
here Gordon, its true. I just cant go another step
forward with this endeavor. So please advise what to
do now. . . . As I say, Im confused, tired, paranoid,
and afraid, yes, of the consequences for me if the
collection came out in its present form. So help me,
please, yet again. Dont, please, make this too hard
for me, for Im just likely to start coming unraveled
knowing how Ive displeased and disappointed you.
God almighty, Gordon.
Ray
Please do the necessary things to stop production
of the book. Please try and forgive me, this breach.
July 10, 1980
Please look through the enclosed copy of What
We Talk About, the entire collection. Youll see that
nearly all of the changes I suggest are small enough,
but I think theyre significant and they all can be
found in the first edited ms version you sent me. Its
just, not just, but its a question of reinstating some
of the things that were taken out in the second
version. But I feel strongly some of those things
taken out should be back in the finished stories.
Gazebo, for instance. In this, too, she was right.
That ending is far superior and gives the story the
right, the just ending, the narrators sense of loss,
and a sharp, perfect ending for the story. Otherwise,
the narrator is a lout, a son of a bitch, and totally
insensitive to everything hes been telling us.
Otherwise, why even is he telling the story, I wonder.
July 14, 1980
Im thrilled about the book and its impending
publication. Im stoked about it, and Im already
starting to think about the next one. More than
thinking about it, in fact. Fact is, Im giving some
thought to taking the second semester off to do
nothing but write and write through the summer as
well. . . . Things are in full swing, and I am just
generally excited, specifically too. I know you have
my best interests at heart, and youll do everything
and more to further those interests. . . . I wont harp
or dog, for I know the book is going to astonish and
give pleasure. So just these last words on the matter:
please look at the suggestions Ive penciled in and
entertain those suggestions seriously, even if finally
you decide otherwise; if you think Im being my own
worst enemy, you know, well then, stick to the final
version of the second edited version. But do give
74

those things a hard third or fourth look. My greatest

fear is, or was, having them too pared, and Im
thinking of Community Center and The Bath
both of which lost several pages each in the second
editing. I want that sense of beauty and mystery they
have now, but I dont want to lose track, lose touch
with the little human connections I saw in the first
version you sent me. They seemed somehow to be
fuller in the best sense, in that first ed. version.
Maybe I am wrong in this, maybe you are 100%
correct, just please give them another hard look.
Thats all. That and what I said about Where Is
Everyone?Mr. Coffee, Mr. Fixit.
August 11, 1982
Now I dont know for sure how were going to
work out some of the disagreements were bound to
have over some of these stories Ive written and am
writing this very minute. And Im going to give you
the
book
[Cathedral]
on
schedule,
in
November. . . . Anyway, youre the best editor there
is, and a writer yourself, you bet, and you have to call
them the way you see them. Fair enough. But I may
not be in agreement with you, and this is whats
worrying me right this minute. . . .
Forgive me. But hear me out. Im saying that
despite all and fuck all, Ive been writing short
stories ever since I landed out here in this woodsy
cranny. Ive got five new ones, no six, counting the
one I just typed out a second draft of earlier tonight
and hope to finish, at least have some more drafts of,
before the week is out. Ive been writing as if my life
depended on it and like theres no tomorrow. And we
both know that first may be true, and theres always
likelihood of the second. (And fuck no, I cant get off
the cigarettes either.) . . . But one thing is certain
the stories in this new collection are going to be
fuller than the ones in the earlier books. And this, for
Christs sake, is to the good. Im not the same writer
I used to be. But I know there are going to be stories
in these 14 or 15 I give you that youre going to draw
back from, that arent going to fit anyones notion of
what a Carver short story ought to beyours, mine,
the reading public at large, the critics. But Im not
them, Im not us, Im me. Some of these stories may
not fit smoothly or neatly, inevitably, alongside the
rest. But, Gordon, Gods truth, and I may as well say
it out now, I cant undergo the kind of surgical
amputation and transplant that might make them
someway fit into the carton so the lid will close.
There may have to be limbs and heads of hair
sticking out. My heart wont take it otherwise. It will
simply burst, and I mean that. Dearest friend of all,
brother, you know what Im saying, and I know you
understand. Even if you think Im dead wrong. . . .
I love your heart, you must know that. But I cant
write these stories and have to feel inhibitedif I feel
inhibited Im not going to write them at alland feel
that if you, the reader I want to please more than
any, dont like them, youre going to re-write them
from top to bottom. Why, if I think that the pen will
fall right out of my fingers, and I may not be able to
pick it up. . . .
You understand Im not saying, or even remotely
thinking, that these new and year-old stories are
beyond criticism, or that they wont need editing.
Not true. Not true in either case. Youre as close to
me, and my work, you couldnt be closer, if you were

my blood brother. Youre the left side of me. Or the

right side, take your pick. But I guess Im trying to
say here that were going to have to work very closely
together on this bookthe most important book of
them all for me, at every stage, and be careful and
understanding with each other. Gordon, the last
book passed as if in a dream for me. This one cant
go that way, and we both know it.
October 3, 1982
Listen, Ive finished work on the new Knopf book
of stories. Last week I got them all back from the
typist and I spent all day today reading them
through. Its going to be something, that book. I
thought I would try and put them in order, the order
Id like to see them in the book, but just a few
minutes ago gave up on that. Ill leave that up to you.
I dont have a title, either. We talked, a year ago,
about calling the book Cathedral. Thats fine with
me and maybe lead off with that story and finish
with Fever, a long story, or A Small Good Thing,
another long story. But I will leave the arrangement
of the stories up to you. You know I want and have to
have autonomy on this book and that the stories
have to come out looking very essentially the way
they look right now. Im of course not saying we cant
change words or phrases or a line here and there,
and punctuation, sure. But after youve read the
book, Ill come down and well talk about titles, the
ordering, or any suggestions you might have.
October 29, 1982
As I said before, I would be happy with either
title, Cathedral or Where Im Calling From. . . .
My biggest concern, as you know, is that the stories
remain intact. Oh, Christ, sure, you know, if you see
some words or sentences that can be trimmed, thats
fine, trim them. You know what Im saying. Please
help me with this book as a good editor, the best . . .
but not as my ghost. I tell you, I may be reading it all
wrongand if I am, I dont care, in a very profound
waybut I think there is a great deal of good will
established toward me, or for me; and this book, the
stories, are going to be so different, in so many
regards, from so many of the earlier stories, that the
book is going to be met with a good show of
enthusiasm, even celebration. And, yes, Im eager to
have that artist you were talking about do something
for the cover, if she can. Yes, for sure. I hope that
works out. (But that, finally, will be your final
decision; the matter of the text, in this case, has to be
mine.)
November 19, 1982
From Lish to Carver
Dear RayHeres Where Im Calling From
reworked to the extent that I think it must beas
basic as I can keep it. Im aware that weve agreed
that I will try to keep my editing of the stories as
slight as I deem possible, that you do not want me to
do the extensive work I did on the first two
collections. So be it, Ray. What you see in this
sample is that minimum: to do less than this, would
be, in my judgment, to expose you too greatly. At all
events, look: if this is in keeping with your wishes,
call quickly and say soand I will then be guided
thereby in my handling of the rest of the stories.
Love, G.
January 21, 1983
From Carver to Lish
75

Whats the matter, dont you love me anymore? I

never hear from you. Have you forgotten me
already? Well, Im going back to the [Paris Review]
interview and take out all the good things I said
about you.

thing about a poem is that there is i nstant

gratification. And if something goes wrong, its right
there. It would be a hard thing for me to work for
months on a novel and then have it be bad. It would
be a tremendous investment for me, and I dont have
a very long attention span.
If it is fair to say that Carvers poems resemble his
short stories, it is equally true that his short stories
have a poetic intensity. The language is very clear
and deceptively simple. The reader is never certain
where the action is going until she-he arrives.
Raymond Carver has tremendous skill with
dialogue, and his characters remain tangible in the
most bizarre situations.
In the story, Whats In Alaska, Mary and Carl
spend an evening with Jack and Helen, trying out
the water pipe Jack received for his birthday. Carver
not only simulates the conversations of four stoned
adults with amusing accuracy, he succeeds in subtly
suggesting a series of conflicts that create a kind of
subliminal tension in the reader, a tension that
culminates in the disturbing last line of the story.
Carvers fiction quite often encourages a kind of
empathic response in his readers. This is due to his
keen eye for common, small details, details we
imagine unique to our personal histories. Therefore
we sometimes forget we are reading fictions, suspec t
that we are dealing with echoes of our own words,
our own lives.
We refill our coffee cups and I ask him about
process, the origins of his stories. He pauses for a
moment.
A lot of things come from experience, or
sometimes from something Ive heard, a line
somewhere.
I mention that often his titles are taken from lines
in his stories. He leans forward.
You start writing. Sometimes you dont find
what you are trying to say in the story until you turn
a line, and then suddenly you know where the story
is going. You just have to discover as you go. Then
when you get that first draft, you go back.
Everything is important in a story, every word,
every punctuation mark. I believe very much in
economy in fiction. Some of my stories, like
Neighbors, were three times as long in their first
drafts. I really like the process of rewriting.
Beginnings are very important. A story is either
blessed or cursed with its opening lines. Editors have
so many manuscripts to look through that often all
they do is look at the first paragraph or two, unless
its an author they know.
Apparently Carver knows what hes doing,
because his stories have been included in some of
the most competitive collections in the country: Best
American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories.
The longest pause in our conversation follows my
question, What do you think about writing
programs, such as the Iowa Writers Workshop? I
know you were a student here several years ago.
I think writing programs can be a good thing, a
place to learn craft. Of course, one problem is that a
lot of people who are active in the writing program
are never heard from again after they leave it. They
move away from the school and they just stop
writing.

Echoes of Our Own Lives

Interview with Raymond Carver, 2000 David
Koehne,
Conducted April 15, 1978.
It is late afternoon, a
Saturday and we are sitting in
my apartment drinking coffee.
Outside the living room window
some neighborhood children are
arguing. A station wagon moves
slowly down the street. It could be the opening scene
from one of his short stories, because it is seemingly
ordinary. Raymond Carver lights his cigarette,
gestures slightly with the match, leans forward.
You are not your characters, but your characters
are you, he says.
An interesting observation, considering the many
roles that Carver has played in his lifetime. He has
been a janitor, a saw mill hand, a delivery man, a
retail clerk, and an editor of a publishing firm. He
taught fiction writing at several universities,
including the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1973-1974.
For the next few months, however, Carver will
simply be living in Iowa City, working on several
writing projects before leaving the Midwest to join
the faculty of Goddard College in Vermont.
This is a new time in my life. My children are
both grown, and I just received a Guggenheim
Fellowship. I have large blocks of time to work with,
he says.
Ive been working on a novel. I had already
received an advance from the publisher, but theyve
agreed to accept a collection of short stories this fall,
instead.
Carver has previously published two collections
of his short stories: Will you Please Be Quiet,
Please?, which was a National Book Award nominee
for 1977, and Furious Seasons, which contains his
Pushcart Prize-winning story, So Much Water So
Close To Home.
Carver thinks of himself primarily as a fiction
writer, although he has published three excellent
volumes of poetry and is assembling a fourth.
A year ago I thought I d never write another
poem. I dont know exactly what it is, but since Ive
been in Iowa City Ive written an entire book. The
past few weeks have been very good.
We talk a while about the division that is
sometimes evident between a writers poetry and
her-his prose. I suggest that Carvers poems often
resemble his fiction. He lights another cigarette.
I believe a plotline is very important. Whether I
am writing a poem or writing prose I am still trying
to tell a story. For a long time I wrote poems because
I didnt have the time to write short stories. The nice
76

My time at Iowa wasnt very productive. I didnt

put much work up. I was here for two semesters and
I left before I could get my M.F.A.
The important thing is to find someone you can
work with. For me it was John Gardner. He was
there at a very important time in my development.
Carver will read in the English lounge at 8 p.m.
today; he will read, perhaps, the title story from his
new collection of short fiction, Why Dont You
Dance? [not published under this title].
I might read another story, also, he says. Put
Yourself In My Shoes. Ill decide on Tuesday.
Carver stands up, looks at me, his cup in his
hand. Is there anymore coffee? he asks.

77

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Rock Springs

5
Richard Ford

Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading

for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends
from the old glory days who wouldn't turn me in to
the police. I had managed to scrape with the law in
Kalispell over several bad checkswhich is a prison
crime in Montana. And I knew Edna was already
looking at her cards and thinking about a move,
since it wasn't the first time I'd been in law scrapes
in my life. She herself had already had her own
troubles, losing her kids and keeping her exhusband, Danny, from breaking in her house and
stealing her things while she was at work, which was
really why I had moved in in the first place, that and
needing to give my litde daughter, Cheryl, a better
shake in things.
I don't know what was between Edna and me,
just beached by the same tides when you got down
to it. Though love has been built on frailer ground
than that, as I well know. And when I came in the
house that afternoon, I just asked her if she wanted
to go to Florida with me, leave things where they
sat, and she said, "Why not? My datebook's not that
full."
Edna and I had been a pair eight months, more
or less man and wife, some of which time I had
been out of work, and some when Fd worked at the
dog track as a lead-out and could help with the rent
and talk sense to Danny when he came around.
Danny was afraid of me because Edna had told him
I'd been in prison in Florida for killing a man,
though that wasn't true. I had once been in jail in
Tallahassee for stealing tires and had gotten into a
fight on the county farm where a man had lost his
eye. But I hadn't done the hurting, and Edna just
wanted the story worse than it was so Danny
wouldn't act crazy and make her have to take her
kids back, since she had made a good adjustment to
not having them, and I already had Cheryl with me.
I'm not a violent person and would never put a
man's eye out, much less kill someone. My former
wife, Helen, would come all the way from Waikiki
Beach to testify to that. We never had violence, and
I believe in crossing the street to stay out of trouble's way. Though Danny didn't know that.
But we were half down through Wyoming, going
toward 1-80 and feeling good about things, when
the oil light flashed on in die car I'd stolen, a sign I
knew to be a bad one.
I'd gotten us a good car, a cranberry Mercedes
I'd stolen out of an ophthalmologist's lot in
Whitefish, Montana. I stole it because I thought it
would be comfortable over a long haul, because I
thought it got good mileage, which it didn't, and
because I'd never had a good car in my life, just old
Chevy junkers and used trucks back from when I
was a kid swamping citrus with Cubans.

RICHARD FORD (1944-) was born in Jackson,

Mississippi, the only child of a traveling salesman for
a starch company, and was raised in Mississippi and
in Arkansas. He went to college at Michigan State
University, where he met Kristina Hensley, to
whom he has been married since 1968. Ford
attended law school briefly before entering the
University of California at Irvine, where he received
his M.F.A. in fiction writing in 1970. His novels are
A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The
Sportswriter, Wildlife, and, most recently, Women
with Men and Independence Day, the only novel to
win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner
Award for fiction. Ford has taught writing and
literature at the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor, at Princeton University, and at Williams
College. He lives in New Orleans, where Kristina, is
the head of the city-planning commission. He
travels frequently and also spends time on a
plantation in the Mississippi Delta and at his cabin
in Chinook, Montana.

89

The car made us all high that day. I ran the

windows up and down, and Edna told us some
jokes and made faces. She could be lively. Her
features would light up like a beacon and you could
see her beauty, which wasn't ordinary. It all made
me giddy, and I drove clear down to Bozeman, then
straight on through the park to Jackson Hole. I
rented us the bridal suite in the Quality Court in
Jackson and left Cheryl and her little dog, Duke,
sleeping while Edna and I drove to a rib barn and
drank beer and laughed till after midnight. It felt
like a whole new beginning for us, bad memories
left behind and a new horizon to build on. I got so
worked up, I had a tattoo done on my arm that said
FAMOUS TIMES, and Edna bought a Bailey hat with
an Indian feather band and a little turquoise-andsilver bracelet for Cheryl, and we made love on the
seat of the car in the Quality Court parking lot just
as the sun was burning up on the Snake River, and
everything seemed tlien like the end of the rainbow.
It was that very enthusiasm, in fact, that made me
keep the car one day longer instead of driving it
into the river and stealing another one, like I
should've done and had done before.
Where the car went bad there wasn't a town in
sight or even a house, just some low mountains
maybe fifty miles away or maybe a hundred, a
barbed-wire fence in both directions, hardpan
prairie, and some hawks riding the evening air
seizing insects.
I got out to look at the motor, and Edna got out
with Cheryl and the dog to let them have a pee by
the car. I checked the water and checked the oil
stick, and both of them said perfect.
"What's that light mean, Earl?" Edna said. She
had come and stood by the car with her hat on. She
was just sizing things up for herself.
"We shouldn't run it," I said. "Something's not
right in the oil."
She looked around at Cheryl and Little Dulce,
who were peeing on the hardtop side-by-side like
two little dolls, then out at the mountains, which
were becoming black and lost in the distance.
"What're we doing?" she said. She wasn't worried
yet, but she wanted to know what I was thinking
about.
"Let me try it again."
"That's a good idea," she said, and we all got
back in the car.
When I turned the motor over, it started right
away and the red light stayed off and there weren't
any noises to make you think something was
wrong. I let it idle a minute, then pushed the
accelerator down and watched the red bulb. But
there wasn't any light on, and I started wondering if
maybe I hadn't dreamed I saw it, Or that it had
been the sun catching an angle off the window
chrome, or maybe I was scared of something and
didn't know it.
"What's the matter with it, Daddy?" Cheryl said
from the backseat. I looked back at her, and she

had on her turquoise bracelet and Edna's hat set

back on the back of her head and that little blackand-white Heinz dog on her lap. She looked like a
little cowgirl in the movies.
"Nothing, honey, everything's fine now," I said.
"Little Duke tinkled where I tinkled," Cheryl
said, and laughed.
"You're two of a kind," Edna said, not looking
back. Edna was usually good with Cheryl, but I
knew she was tired now. We hadn't had much
sleep, and she had a tendency to get cranky when
she didn't sleep. "We oughta ditch this damn car
first chance we get," she said.
"What's the first chance we got?" I asked,
because I knew she'd been at the map, .
"Rock Springs, Wyoming," Edna said with
conviction. "Thirty miles down this road." She
pointed out ahead.
I had wanted all along to drive the car into
Florida like a big success story. But I knew Edna
was right about it, that we shouldn't take crazy
chances. I had kept thinking of it as my car and not
the ophthalmologist's, and that was how you got
caught in these things,
"Then my belief is we ought to go to Rock
Springs and negotiate ourselves a new car," I said. I
wanted to stay upbeat, like everything was panning
out right.
"That's a great idea," Edna said, and she leaned
over and kissed me hard on the mouth.
"That's a great idea," Cheryl said. "Let's pull on
out of here right now."
The sunset that day I remember as being the
prettiest I'd ever seen. Just as it touched the rim of
the horizon, it all at once fired the air into jewels
and red sequins the precise likes of which I had
never seen before and haven't seen since. The West
has it all over everywhere for sunsets, even Florida,
where it's supposedly flat but where half the time
trees block your view.
"It's cocktail hour," Edna said after we'd driven
awhile. "We ought to have a drink and celebrate
something." She felt better thinking we were going
to get rid of the car. It certainly had dark troubles
and was something you'd want to put behind you.
Edna had out a whiskey bottle and some plastic
cups and was measuring levels on the glove-box lid.
She liked drinking, and she liked drinking in the
car, which was something you got used to in
Montana, where it wasn't against the law, but
where, strangely enough, a bad check would land
you in Deer Lodge Prison for a year.
"Did I ever tell you I once had a monkey?" Edna
said, setting my drink on the dashboard where I
could reach it when I was ready. Her spirits were
already picked up. She was like that, up one minute
and down the next. "I don't think you ever did tell
me that," I said. "Where were you then?"
"Missoula," she said. She put her bare feet on the
dash and rested the cup on her breasts. "I was
waitressing at the AmVets. This was before I met
90

you. Some guy came in one day with a monkey. A

spider monkey. And I said, just to be joking, Til roll
you for that monkey.' And the guy said, 'Just one
roll?' And I said, 'Sure.' He put the monkey down
on the bar, picked up the cup, and rolled out
boxcars. I picked it up and rolled out three fives.
And I just stood there looking at the guy. He was
just some guy passing through, I guess a vet. He got
a strange look on his faceI'm sure not as strange
as the one I hadbut he looked kind of sad and
surprised and satisfied all at once. I said, 'We can
roll again.' But he said, 'No, I never roll twice for
anything.' And he sat and drank a beer and talked
about one thing and another for a while, about
nuclear war and building a stronghold somewhere
up in the Bitterroot, whatever it was, while I just
watched the monkey, wondering what I was going
to do with it when the guy left. And pretty soon he
got up and said, 'Well, good-bye, Chipper'that
was this monkey's name, of course. And then he left
before I could say anything. And the monkey just
sat on the bar all that night. I don't know what
made me think of that, Earl. Just something weird.
I'm letting my mind wander."
"That's perfectly fine," I said. I took a drink of
my drink. "I'd never own a monkey," I said after a
minute. "They're too nasty. I'm sure Cheryl would
like a monkey, though, wouldn't you, honey?"
Cheryl was down on the seat playing with Little
Duke. She used to talk about monkeys all the time
then. "What'd you ever do with that monkey?" I
said, watching the speedometer. We were having to
go slower now because the red light kept fluttering
on. And all I could do to keep it off was go slower.
We were going maybe thirty-five and it was an hour
before dark, and I was hoping Rock Springs wasn't
far away.
"You really want to know?" Edna said. She gave
me a quick glance, then looked back at the empty
desert as if she was brooding over it.
"Sure," I said. I was still upbeat. I figured I could
worry about breaking down and let other people be
happy for a change.
"I kept it a week." And she seemed gloomy all of
a sudden, as if she saw some aspect of the story she
had never seen before. "I took it home and back
and forth to the Am Vets on my shifts. And it didn't
cause any trouble. I fixed a chair up for it to sit on,
back of the bar, and people liked it. It made a nice
little clicking noise. We changed its name to Mary
because the bartender figured out it was a girl.
Though I was never really comfortable with it at
home. I felt like it watched me too much. Then one
day a guy came in, some guy who'd been in
Vietnam, still wore a fatigue coat. And he said to
me, 'Don't you know that a monkey'U kill you? It's
got more strength in its fingers than you got in your
whole body.' He said people had been killed in
Vietnam by monkeys, bunches of them marauding
while you were asleep, killing you and covering you
with leaves. I didn't believe a word of it, except that
when I got home and got undressed I started

looking over across the room at Mary on her chair

in the dark watching me. And I got the creeps. And
after a while I got up and went out to the car, got a
length of clothesline wire, and came back in and
wired her to the doorknob through her little silver
collar, then went back and tried to sleep. And I
guess I must've slept the sleep of the deadthough
I don't remember itbecause when I got up I found
Mary had tipped off her chair-back and hanged
herself on the wire line. I'd made it too short."
Edna seemed badly affected by that story and
slid low in die seat so she couldn't see out over the
dash. "Isn't that a shameful story, Earl, what happened to that poor little monkey?"
"I see a town! I see a town!" Cheryl started
yelling from the backseat, and right up Little Duke
started yapping and the whole car fell into a racket.
And sure enough she had seen something I hadn't,
which was Rock Springs, Wyoming, at the bottom
of a long hill, a little glowing jewel in the desert
with 1-80 running on the north side and the black
desert spread out behind.
"That's it, honey," I said. "That's where we're
going. You saw it first." "We're hungry," Cheryl
said. "Little Duke wants some fish, and I want
spaghetti." She put her arms around my neck and
hugged me.
"Then you'll just get it," I said. "You can have
anything you want. And so can Edna and so can
Little Duke." I looked over at Edna, smiling, but
she was staring at me with eyes that were fierce
with anger. "What's wrong?" I said.
"Don't you care anything about that awful thing
that happened to me?" Her mouth was drawn tight,
and her eyes kept cutting back at Cheryl and Little
Duke, as if they had been tormenting her.
"Of course I do," I said. "I thought that was an
awful thing." I didn't want her to be unhappy. We
were almost there, and pretty soon we could sit
down and have a real meal without thinking
somebody might be hurting us.
"You want to know what I did with that
monkey?" Edna said.
"Sure I do," I said.
"I put her in a green garbage bag, put it in the
trunk of my car, drove to the dump, and threw her
in the trash." She was staring at me darkly, as if the
story meant something to her that was real
important but that only she could see and that the
rest of the world was a fool for.
"Well, that's horrible," I said. "But I don't see
what else you could do. You didn't mean to kill it.
You'd have done it differently if you had. And then
you had to get rid of it, and I don't know what else
you could have done. Throwing it away might seem
unsympathetic to somebody, probably, but not to
me. Sometimes that's all you can do, and you can't
worry about what somebody else thinks." I tried to
smile at her, but the red light was staying on if I
pushed the accelerator at all, and I was trying to
gauge if we could coast to Rock Springs before the
91

car gave out completely. I looked at Edna again.

"What else can I say?" I said.
"Nothing," she said, and stared back at the dark
highway. "I should've known that's what you'd
think. You've got a character that leaves something
out, Earl. I've known that a long time."
"And yet here you are," I said. "And you're not
doing so bad. Things could be a lot worse. At least
we're all together here."
"Things could always be worse," Edna said. "You
could go to the electric chair tomorrow."
"That's right," I said. "And somewhere
somebody probably will. Only it won't be you."
"I'm hungry," said Cheryl. "When're we gonna
eat? Let's find a motel. I'm tired of this. Little
Duke's tired of it too."
Where the car stopped rolling was some distance
from the town, though you could see the clear
oudine of the interstate in the dark with Rock
Springs lighting up the sky behind. You could hear
die big tractors hitting, die spacers in the overpass,
revving up for the climb to the mountains.
I shut off the lights.
"What're we going to do now?" Edna said
irritably, giving me a bitter look.
"I'm figuring it," I said. "It won't be hard,
whatever it is. You won't have to do anything."
"I'd hope not," she said and looked the other
way.
Across the road and across a dry wash a hundred
yards was what looked like a huge mobile-home
town, with a factory or a refinery of some kind lit
up behind it and in full swing. There were lights on
in a lot of the mobile homes, and there were cars
moving along an access road that ended near the
freeway overpass a mile the other way. The lights in
the mobile homes seemed friendly to me, and I
knew right then what I should do.
"Get out," I said, opening my door.
"Are we walking?" Edna said.
"We're pushing."
"I'm not pushing." Edna reached up and locked
her door.
"All right," I said. "Then you just steer."
"You're pushing us to Rock Springs, are you,
Earl? It doesn't look like it's more than about three
miles."
"I'll push," Cheryl said from the back.
"No, hon. Daddy 11 push. You just get out with
Little Duke and move out of the way."
Edna gave me a threatening look, just as if I'd
tried to hit her. But when I got out she slid into my
seat and took the wheel, staring angrily ahead
straight into the cottonwood scrub.
"Edna can't drive that car," Cheryl said from out
in the dark. "She'll run it in the ditch."
"Yes, she can, hon. Edna can drive it as good as I
can. Probably better."
"No she can't," Cheryl said. "No she can't either."
And I thought she was about to cry, but she didn't.

I told Edna to keep the ignition on so it wouldn't

lock up and to steer into the cottonwoods with the
parking lights on so she could see. And when I
started, she steered it straight off into the trees, and
Lkept pushing until we were twenty yards into the
cover and the tires sank in the soft sand and nothing at all could be seen from the road.
"Now where are we?" she said, sitting at the
wheel. Her voice was tired and hard, and I knew
she could have put a good meal to use. She had a
sweet nature, and I recognized that this wasn't her
fault but mine. Only I wished she could be more
hopeful.
"You stay right here, and I'll go over to that
trailer park and call us a cab;" I said.
"What cab?" Edna said, her mouth wrinkled as if
she'd never heard anything like that in her life.
"There'll be cabs," I said, and tried to smile at
her. "There's cabs everywhere."
"What're you going to tell him when he gets
here? Our stolen car broke down and we need a
ride to where we can steal another one,? That'll bea
big hit, Earl."
"I'll talk," I said. "You just listen to the radio for
ten minutes and then walk on out to the shoulder
like nothing was suspicious. And you and Cheryl act
nice. She doesn't need to know about this car."
"Like we're not suspicious enough already,
right?" Edna looked up at me out of the lighted car.
"You don't think right, did you know that, Earl?
You think the world's stupid and you're smart. But
that's not how it is. I feel sorry for you. You
might've been something, but things just went
crazy someplace."
I had a thought about poor Danny. He was a vet
and crazy as a shit-house mouse, and I was glad he
wasn't in for all this. "Just get the baby in the car," I
said, trying to be patient. "I'm hungry like you are."
"I'm tired of this," Edna said. "I wish I'd stayed
in Montana."
"Then you can go back in the morning," I said.
"I'll buy the ticket and put you on the bus. But not
till then."
"Just get on with it, Earl." She slumped down in
the seat, turning off the parking lights with one foot
and the radio on with the other.
The mobile-home community was as big as any I'd
ever seen. It was attached in some way to the plant
that was lighted up behind it, because I could see a
car once in a while leave one of the trailer streets,
turn in the direction of the plant, then go slowly
into it. Everything in the plant was white, and you
could see that all the trailers were painted white
and looked exactly alike. A deep hum came out of
the plant, and I thought as I got closer that it
wouldn't be a location I'd ever want to work in.
I went right to the first trailer where there was a
light, and knocked on the metal door. Kids' toys
were lying in the gravel around the little wood
steps, and I could hear talking on TV that suddenly
92

went off. I heard a woman's voice talking, and then

the door opened wide.
A large Negro woman with a wide, friendly face
stood in the doorway. She smiled at me and moved
forward as if she was going to come out, but she
stopped at the top step. There was a little Negro
boy behind her peeping out from behind her legs,
watching me with his eyes half closed. The trailer
had
that feeling that no one else was inside, which was a
feeling I knew something about.
"I'm sorry to intrude," I said. "But I've run up on
a little bad luck tonight. My names Earl
Middleton."
The woman looked at me, then out into the night
toward the freeway as if what I had said was
something she was going to be able to see. ""What
kind of bad luck?" she said, looking down at me
again.
"My car broke down out on the highway," I said.
"I can't fix it myself, and I wondered if I could use
your phone to call for help."
The woman smiled down at me knowingly. "We
can't live without cars, can we?"
"That's the honest truth," I said.
"They're like our hearts," she said, her face
shining in the little bulb light that burned beside
the door. "Where's your car situated?"
I turned and looked over into the dark, but I
couldn't see anything because of where we'd put it.
"It's over there," I said. "You can't see it in the
dark"
"Who all's with you now?" the woman said.
"Have you got your wife with you?"
"She's with my little girl and our dog in the car,"
I said. "My daughter's asleep or I would have
brought them."
"They shouldn't be left in the dark by
themselves," the woman said and frowned. "There's
too much unsavoriness out there."
"The best I can do is hurry back." I tried to look
sincere, since everything except Cheryl being asleep
and Edna being my wife was the truth. The truth is
meant to serve you if you'll let it, and I wanted it to
serve me. "I'll pay for the phone call," I said. "If
you'll bring the phone to the door I'll call from right
here."
The woman looked at me again as if she was
searching for a truth of her own, then back out into
the night. She was maybe in her sixties, but I
couldn't say for sure. "You're not going to rob me,
are you, Mr. Middleton?" She smiled like it was a
joke between us.
"Not tonight," I said, and smiled a genuine
smile. "I'm not up to it tonight. Maybe another
time."
"Then I guess Terrel and I canlet you use our
phone with Daddy not here, can't we, Terrel? This
is my grandson, Terrel Junior, Mr. Middleton." She
put her hand on the boy's head and looked down at
him. "Terrel won't talk. Though if he did he'd tell

you to use our phone. He's a sweet boy." She

opened die screen for me to come in.
The trailer was a big one with a new rug and a
new couch and a living room that expanded to give
the space of a real house. Something good and
sweet was cooking in the kitchen, and the trailer
felt like it was somebody's comfortable new home
instead of just temporary. I've lived in trailers, but
they were just snailbacks with one room and no
toilet, and they always felt cramped and unhappy
though I've thought maybe it might've been me that
was unhappy in them.
There was a big Sony TV and a lot of kids' toys
scattered on the floor. I recognized a Greyhound
bus I'd gotten for Cheryl. The phone was beside a
new leather recliner, and the Negro woman pointed
for me to sit down and call and gave me the phone
book. Terrel began fingering his toy's and the
woman sat on the couch while I called, watching
me and smiling.
There were three listings for cab companies, all
with one number different. I called the numbers in
order and didn't get an answer until the last one,
which answered with the name of the second
company. I said I was on the highway beyond the
interstate and that my wife and family needed to be
taken to town and I would arrange for a tow later.
While I was giving the location, I looked up the
name of a tow service to tell the driver in case he
asked.
When I hung up, the Negro woman was sitting
looking at me with the same look she had been
staring with into the dark, a look that seemed to
want truth. She was smiling, though. Something
pleased her and I reminded her of it.
"This is a very nice home," I said, resting in the
recliner, which felt like the driver's seat of the
Mercedes, and where I'd have been happy to stay.
"This isn't our house, Mr. Middleton," the Negro
woman said. "The company owns these. They give
them to us for nothing. We have our own home in
Rockford, Illinois."
"That's wonderful," I said.
"It's never wonderful when you have to be away
from home, Mr. Middle-ton, though we're only here
three months, and it'll be easier when Terrel Junior
begins his special school. You see, our son was
killed in the war, and his wife ran off without Terrel
Junior. Though you shouldn't worry. He can't
understand us. His little feelings can't be hurt." The
woman folded her hands in her lap and smiled in a
satisfied way. She was an attractive woman, and
had on a blue-and-pink floral dress diat made her
seem bigger than she could've been, just the right
woman to sit on the couch she was sitting on. She
was good natures picture, and I was glad she could
be, with her little brain-damaged boy, living in a
place where no one in his right mind would want to
live a minute. "Where do you live, Mr. Middleton?"
she said politely, smiling in the same sympathetic
way.
93

"My family and I are in transit," I said. "I'm an

ophthalmologist, and we're moving back to Florida,
where I'm from. I'm setting up practice in some
little town where it's warm year-round. I haven't
decided where."
"Florida's a wonderful place," the woman said. "I
think Terrel would like it there."
Could I ask you something? 1 said.
"You certainly may," tlie woman said. Terrel had
begun pushing his Greyhound across the front of
the TV screen, making a scratch that no one watching the set could miss. "Stop that, Terrel Junior,"
the woman said quiedy. But Terrel kept pushing his
bus on the glass, and she smiled at me again as if
we both understood something sad. Except I knew
Cheryl would never damage a television set. She
had respect for nice things, and I was sorry for the
lady that Terrel didn't. "What did you want to ask?"
the woman said.
"What goes on in that plant or whatever it is
back there beyond these trailers, where all the
lights are on?"
"Gold," the woman said and smiled.
"It's what?" I said.
"Gold," the Negro woman said, smiling as she
had for almost all the time I'd been there. "It's a
gold mine."
"They're mining gold back there?" I said,
pointing.
"Every night and every day." She smiled in a
pleased way. __
"Does your husband work there?" I said.
"He's the assayer," she said. "He controls the
quality. He works three months a year, and we live
the rest of the time at home in Rockford. We've
waited a long time for this. We've been happy to
have our grandson, but I won't say I'll be sorry to
have him go. We're ready to start our lives over."
She smiled broadly at me and then at Terrel, who
was giving her a spiteful look from the floor. "You
said you had a daughter," the Negro woman said.
"And what's her name?"
"Irma Cheryl," I said. "She's named for my
mother."
"That's nice. And she's healthy, too. I can see it
in your face." She looked at Terrel Junior with pity.
"I guess I'm lucky," I said.
"So far you are. But children bring you grief, the
same way they bring you joy. We were unhappy for
a long time before my husband got his job in the
gold mine. Now, when Terrel starts to school, we'll
be kids again." She stood up. "You might miss your
cab, Mr. Middleton," she said, walking toward the
door, though not to be forcing me out. She was too
polite. "If we can't see your car, the cab surely won't
be able to."
"That's true." I got up off die recliner, where I'd
been so comfortable. "None of us have eaten yet,
and your food makes me know how hungry we
probably all are."

"There are fine restaurants in town, and you'll

find them," the Negro woman said. "I'm sorry you
didn't meet my husband. He's a wonderful man.
He's everything to me."
"Tell him I appreciate the phone," I said. "You
saved me."
"You weren't hard to save," the woman said.
"Saving people is what we were all put on earth to
do. I just passed you on to whatever's coming to
you."
"Let's hope it's good," I said, stepping back into
the dark.
"I'll be hoping, Mr. Middleton. Terrel and I will
both be hoping."
I waved to her as I walked out into the darkness
toward the car where it was hidden in the night.
The cab had already arrived when I got there. I
could see its little red-and-green roof lights all the
way across the dry wash, and it made me worry that
Edna was already saying sometxiing to get us in
trouble, something about the car or where we'd
come from, something that would cast suspicion on
us. I thought, then, how I never planned things well
enough. There was always a gap between my plan
and what happened, and I only responded to things
as they came along and hoped I wouldn't get in
trouble. I was an offender in the law's eyes. But I
always thought differendy, as if I weren't an
offender and had no intention of being one, which
was the truth. But as I read on a napkin once,
between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies.
And I had a hard time with my acts, which were
oftentimes offender's acts, and my ideas, which
were as good as the gold they mined there where the
bright lights were blazing.
"We're waiting for you, Daddy," Cheryl said
when I crossed the road. "The taxicab's already
here."
"I see, hon," I said, and gave Cheryl a big hug.
The cabdriver was sitting in the driver's seat having
a smoke with the lights on inside. Edna was leaning
against the back of the cab between the taillights,
wearing her Bailey hat. "What'd you tell him?" I
said when I got close.
"Nothing," she said. "What's there to tell?"
"Did he see the car?"
She glanced over in the direction of tlie trees
where we had hid the Mercedes. Nothing was
visible in the darkness, though I could hear Little
Duke combing around in the underbrush tracking
something, his little collar tinkling. "Where're we
going?" she said. "I'm so hungry I could pass out."
"Edna's in a terrible mood," Cheryl said. "She
already snapped at me."
"We're tired, honey," I said. "So try to be nicer."
"She's never nice," Cheryl said.
"Run go get Little Duke," I said. "And hurry
back."
94

"I guess my questions come last here, right?"

Edna said.
I put my arm around her. "That's not true."
"Did you find somebody over there in the trailers
you'd rather stay with? You were gone long
enough."
"That's not a thing to say," I said. "I was just
trying to make things look right, so we don't get put
in jail."
"Soyou don't, you mean." Edna laughed a little
laugh I didn't like hearing.
"That's right. So I don't," I said. "I'd be the one in
Dutch." I stared out at the big, lighted assemblage
of white buildings and white lights beyond the
trailer community, plumes of white smoke escaping
up into the heardess Wyoming sky, the whole
company of buildings looking like some unbelievable casde, humming away in a distorted dream.
"You know what all those buildings are there?" I
said to Edna, who hadn't moved and who didn't
really seem to care if she ever moved anymore ever.
"No. But I can't say it matters, because it isn't a
motel and it isn't a restaurant."
"It's a gold mine," I said, staring at the gold
mine, which, I knew now, was a greater distance
from us than it seemed, though it seemed huge and
near, up against the cold sky. I thought there
should've been a wall around it with guards instead
of just the lights and no fence. It seemed as if
anyone could go in and take what they wanted, just
the way I had gone up to that woman's trailer and
used the telephone, though that obviously wasn't
true.
Edna began to laugh then. Not the mean laugh I
didn't like, but a laugh that had something caring
behind it, a full laugh that enjoyed a joke, a laugh
she was laughing the first time I laid eyes on her, in
Missoula in the East Gate Bar in 1979, a laugh we
used to laugh together when Cheryl was still with
her mother and I was working steady at the track
and not stealing cars or passing bogus checks to
merchants. A better time all around. And for some
reason it made me laugh just hearing her, and we
both stood there behind the cab in the dark,
laughing at the gold mine in the desert, me with my
arm around her and Cheryl out rusding up Little
Duke and the cabdriver smoking in the cab and our
stolen Mercedes-Benz, which I'd had such hopes
for in Florida, stuck up to its axle in sand, where I'd
never get to see it again.
"I always wondered what a gold mine would look
like when I saw it," Edna said, still laughing, wiping
a tear from her eye.
"Me too," I said. "I was always curious about it."
"We're a couple of fools, aren't we, Earl?" she
said, unable to quit laughing completely. "We're
two of a kind."
"It might be a good sign, though," I said.
"How could it be? It's not our gold mine. There
aren't any drive-up windows." She was still
laughing.

"We've seen it," I said, pointing. "That's it right

there. It may mean we're getting closer. Some
people never see it at all."
"In a pig's eye, Earl," she said. "You and me see
it in a pig's eye."
And she turned and got in the cab to go.
The cabdriver didn't ask anything about our car or
where it was, to mean he'd noticed something queer.
All of which made me feel like we had made a clean
break from the car and couldn't be connected with it
until it was too late, if ever. The driver told us a lot
about Rock Springs while he drove, that because of
the gold mine a lot of people had moved there in
just six months, people from all over, including New
York, and that most of them lived out in the trailers.
Prostitutes from New York City, who he called "Bgirls," had come into town, he said, on the
prosperity tide, and Cadillacs with New York plates
cruised the little streets every night, full of Negroes
with big hats who ran the women. He told us that
everybody who got in his cab now wanted to know
where the women were, and when he got our call he
almost didn't come because some of the trailers
were brothels operated by the mine for engineers
and computer people away from home. He said he
got tired of running back and forth out there just for
vile business. He said that 60 Minutes had even
done a program about Rock Springs and that a
blow-up had resulted in Cheyenne, though nothing
could be done unless the boom left town. "It's
prosperity's fruit," the driver said. "I'd rather be
poor, which is lucky for me."
He said all the motels were sky-high, but since
we were a family he could show us a nice one that
was affordable. But I told him we wanted a firstrate place where they took animals, and the money
didn't matter because we had had a hard day and
wanted to finish on a high note. I also knew that it
was in the little nowhere places that die police look
for you and find you. People I'd known were always
being arrested in cheap hotels and tourist courts
with names you'd never heard of before. Never in
Holiday Inns orTraveLodges.
I asked him to drive us to the middle of town and
back out again so Cheryl could see the train station,
and while we were there I saw a pink Cadillac with
New York plates and a TV aerial being driven
slowly by a Negro in a big hat down a narrow street
where there were just bars and a Chinese
restaurant. It was an odd sight, nothing you could
ever expect.
"There's your pure criminal element," the
cabdriver said and seemed sad. "I'm sorry for
people like you to see a thing like that. We've got a
nice town here, but there're some that want to ruin
it for everybody. There used to be a way to deal
with trash and criminals, but those days are gone
forever."
"You said it," Edna said.
95

"You shouldn't let it get you down," I said to

him. "There's more of you than them. And there
always will be. You're die best advertisement this
town has. I know Cheryl will remember you and not
that man, won't you, honey?" But Cheryl was
asleep by then, holding Little Duke in her arms on
the taxi seat.
The driver took us to the Ramada Inn on the
interstate, not far from where we'd broken down. I
had a small pain of regret as we drove under the
Ramada awning that we hadn't driven up in a
cranberry-colored Mercedes but instead in a beatup old Chrysler taxi driven by an old man full of
complaints.
Though I knew it was for the best. We were better
off without that car; better, really, in any other car
but that one, where the signs had turned bad.
I registered under another name and paid for the
room in cash so there wouldn't be any questions.
On the line where it said "Representing" I wrote
"Ophthalmologist" and put "M.D." after the name.
It had a nice look to it, even though it wasn't my
name.
When we got to the room, which was in the back
where I'd asked for it, I put Cheryl on one of the
beds and Little Duke beside her so they'd sleep.
She'd missed dinner, but it only meant she'd be
hungry in the morning, when she could have
anything she wanted. A few missed meals don't
make a kid bad. I'd missed a lot of them myself and
haven't turned out completely bad.
"Let's have some fried chicken," I said to Edna
when she came out of the bathroom. "They have
good fried chicken at Ramadas, and I noticed the
buffet was still up. Cheryl can stay right here, where
it's safe, till we're back."
"I guess I'm not hungry anymore," Edna said.
She stood at the window staring out into the dark. I
could see out the window past her some yellowish
foggy glow in the sky. For a moment I thought it
was the gold mine out in the distance lighting the
night, though it was only the interstate.
"We could order up," I said. "Whatever you
want. There's a menu on the phone book. You could
just have a salad."
"You go ahead," she said. "I've lost my hungry
spirit." She sat on the bed beside Cheryl and Little
Duke and looked at them in a sweet way and put
her hand on Cheryl's cheek just as if she'd had a
fever. "Sweet little girl," she said. "Everybody loves
you."
"What do you want to do?" I said. "I'd like to eat.
Maybe I'll order up some chicken."
"Why don't you do that?" she said. "It's your
favorite." And she smiled at me from the bed.
I sat on the other bed and dialed room service. I
asked for chicken, garden salad, potato and a roll,
plus a piece of hot apple pie and iced tea. I realized
I hadn't eaten all day. When I put down the phone I
saw that Edna was watching me, not in a hateful
way or a loving way, just in a way that seemed to

say she didn't understand something and was going

to ask me about it.
"When did watching me get so entertaining?" I
said and smiled at her. I was trying to be friendly. I
knew how tired she must be. It was after nine
o'clock.
"I was just thinking how much I hated being in a
motel without a car that was mine to drive. Isn't
that funny? I started feeling like that last night
when that purple car wasn't mine. That purple car
just gave me the willies, I guess, Earl."
"One of those cars outside is yours," I said. "Just
stand right there and pick it out."
"I know," she said. "But that's different, isn't it?"
She reached and got her blue Bailey hat, put it on
her head, and set it way back like Dale Evans. She
looked sweet. "I used to like to go to motels, you
know," she said. "There's something secret about
them and freeI was never paying, of course.-But
you felt safe from everything and free to do what
you wanted because you'd made the decision to be
there and paid that price, and all the rest was tie
good part. Fucking and everything, you know." She
smiled at me in a good-natured way.
"Isn't that the way this is?" I was sitting on the
bed, watching her, not
knowing what to expect her to say next.
"I don't guess it is, Earl," she said and stared out
the window. "I'm thirty-two and I'm going to have
to give up on motels. I can't keep that fantasy going
anymore."
"Don't you like this place?" I said and looked
around at the room. I appreciated the modern
paintings and the lowboy bureau and the big TV. It
seemed like a plenty nice enough place to me,
considering where we'd been.
"No, I don't," Edna said with real conviction.
"There's no use in my getting mad at you about it. It
isn't your fault. You do the best you can for everybody. But every trip teaches you something. And
I've learned I need to give up on motels before
some bad thing happens to me. I'm sorry."
"What does that mean?" I said, because I really
didn't know what she had in mind to do, though I
should've guessed.
"I guess I'll take that ticket you mentioned," she
said, and got up and faced the window.
"Tomorrow's soon enough. We haven't got a car to
take me anyhow."
"Well, that's a fine thing," I said, sitting on the
bed, feeling like I was in shock. I wanted to say
something to her, to argue with her, but I couldn't
think what to say that seemed right. I didn't want
to be mad at her, but it made me mad.
"You've got a right to be mad at me, Earl," she
said, "but I don't think you can really blame me."
She turned around and faced me and sat on the
win-dowsill, her hands on her knees. Someone
knocked on die door, and I just yelled for them to
set the tiny down and put it on the bill.
96

"I guess I do blame you," I said, and I was angry.

I thought about how I couid've disappeared into
that trailer community and hadn't, had come back
to keep things going, had tried to take control of
diings for everybody when they looked bad.
"Don't. I wish you wouldn't," Edna said and
smiled at me like she wanted me to hug her.
"Anybody ought to have their choice in things if
they can. Don't you believe that, Earl? Here I am
out here in the desert where I don't know anything,
in a stolen car, in a motel room under an assumed
name, with no money of my own, a kid that's not
mine, and the law after me. And I have a choice to
get out of all of it by getting on a bus. What would
you do? I know exactly what you'd do."
"You think you do," I said. But I didn't want to
get into an argument about it and tell her all I
could've done and didn't do. Because it wouldn't
have done any good. When you get to the point of
arguing, you're past the point of changing
anybody's mind, even though it's supposed to be
the other way, and maybe for some classes of
people it is, just never mine.
Edna smiled at me and came across the room
and put her arms around me where I was sitting on
the bed. Cheryl rolled over and looked at us and
smiled, then closed her eyes, and the room was
quiet. I was beginning to think of Rock Springs in a
way I knew I would always think of it, a lowdown
city full of crimes and whores and disappointments,
a place where a woman left me, instead of a place
where I got things on the straight track once and
for all, a place I saw a gold mine.
"Eat your chicken, Earl," Edna said. "Then we
can go to bed. I'm tired, but I'd like to make love to
you anyway. None of this is a matterof not loving
you, you know that."
Sometime late in the night, after Edna was
asleep, I got up and walked outside into the parking
lot. It could've been anytime because there was still
the light from the interstate frosting the low sky
and the big red Ramada sign humming
motionlessly in the night and no light at all in the
east to indicate it might be morning. The lot was
full of cars all nosed in, a couple of them with
suitcases strapped to their roofs and their trunks
weighed down with belongings the people were
taking someplace, to a new home or a vacation
resort in the mountains. I had laid in bed a long
time after Edna was asleep, watching the Adanta
Braves on television, trying to get my mind off how
I'd feel when I saw that bus pull away the next day,
and how I'd feel when I turned around and there
stood Cheryl and Little Duke and no one to see
about them but me alone, and that the first thing I
had to do was get hold of some automobile and get
the plates switched, then get them some breakfast
and get us all on the road to Florida, all in the space
of probably two hours, since that Mercedes would
certainly look less hid in the daytime tiian the
night, and word travels fast. I've always taken care
of Cheryl myself as long as I've had her with me.

None of the women ever did. Most of them didn't

even seem to like her, though they took care of me
in a way so that I could take care of her. And I knew
that once Edna left, all that was going to get harder.
Though what I wanted most to do was not think
about it just for a little while, try to let my mind go
limp so it could be strong for the rest of what there
was. I thought that the difference between a
successful life and an unsuccessful one, between me
at that moment and all the people who owned the
cars that were nosed into their proper places in the
lot, maybe between me and that woman out in the
trailers by the gold mine, was how well you were
able to put things like this out of your mind and not
be bothered by them, and maybe, too, by how many
troubles like this one you had to face in a lifetime.
Through luck or design they had all faced fewer
troubles, and by their own characters, they forgot
them faster. And that's what I wanted for me.
Fewer troubles, fewer memories of trouble.
I walked over to a car, a Pontiac with Ohio tags,
one of the ones with bundles and suitcases strapped
to the top and a lot more in the trunk, by the way it
was riding. I looked inside the driver's window.
There were maps and paperback books and
sunglasses and the little plastic holders for cans
that hang on the window wells. And in the back
there were kids' toys and some pillows and a cat
box with a cat sitting in it staring up at me like I
was the face of the moon. It all looked familiar to
me, the very same things I would have in my car if I
had a car. Nothing seemed surprising, nothing
different. Though I had a funny sensation at that
moment and turned and looked up at the windows
along the back of the motel. All were dark except
two. Mine and another one. And I wondered,
because it seemed funny, what would you think a
man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the
night looking in the windows of cars in the parking
lot of the Ramada Inn? Would you think he was
trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he
was trying to get ready for a day when trouble
would come down on him? Would you think his
girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had
a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like
you?

97

feckless Democrats) allowed a man of George

Bushs
astonishing
incompetence
and
dishonesty to become the leader of our country
insofar as all these things are true and
occurred at the heart of the 2000 election,
then that set of events can be viewed as a
direct cause of the unthinkable circumstances
in Iraq today, the cause of so much loss of
innocent life, and the cause of Americas nearobliterated role as a potential force for good in
world affairs. Is all this Americas final fate? I
surely hope not. Its the fix were in today. And
I hope we have a better, more wholesome fate
than this. But theres no doubt about what was
the initial event in the chain of events that
landed us in this mess.
Why do you think so many American
novelistssome surprising ones, John
Updike, some less so, Don DeLillohave felt
bound to confront 9/11 so directly in fiction?
They were moved by those events. Its not very
complicated. In the case of DeLillo and
Updike, theyre both supremely accomplished
writers whore unusually confident of their
abilities to make a subject their own. The fact
that I wouldnt do it, didnt do it, probably just
means Im not their equal on either front.
Otherwise Id have surely done it. Right?
Much of Frank Bascombes dislocation and hurt
comes from the death of his son. All of your writing
seems to have some of this atmosphere of loss.
Where do you sense the source of that in your own
life?

An Interview with Richard Ford

Richard Ford in conversation with one of
Americas foremost writers, Tim Adams.

First of all, I dont think that a writer who writes

about loss (if I do) needs to have suffered loss
himself. We can imagine loss. Thats the writers job.
We empathize, we project, we make much of what
might be small experience. Hemingway (as usual,
full of wind) said only write about what you know.
But that cant mean you should only write about
what you yourself have done or experienced. A rule
like that pointlessly straps the imagination, confines
ones curiosity, ones capacity to empathize. After all,
a novel (if it chooses) can cause a reader to
experience sensation, emotion, to recognize
behaviour that reader may never have seen before.
The writerll have to be able to do that, too. Some
subjects just cause what Katherine Anne Porter
called a commotion in the mind. That commotion
may or may not be a response to what we actually
did on earth.

When The Lay of the Land was completed you

suggested you would never write another long
novel. Are you still feeling that way?
I still feel that way, possibly even more that way. The
Lay of the Land was, for me, a big effort and, as
efforts go, entirely singular. And it requires a
commensurate (if not exactly equal) devotion from
its readership. More than I cant imagine myself
writing such a long novel again (and I cant), I
neither can imagine wanting to write anything that
would work on a reader with anything like the same
intense forcelength, complexity, general largeness.
Id like to write another novel, yes. Id like to write
plenty of things. But I cant imagine another such
undertaking as The Lay of the Land. Some things
just dont need to be done twiceespecially since I
feel like I did it right the first time.

That said, I probably experienced loss no more fully

than most people. I was the child of older parents
who I always was fearfully expecting to die on me.
And the old Arkansas aunties and great uncles did
start departing life when I was just a small child.
One of my first vivid memories is of my Aunt Lizzies
funeralin Arkansasand of her lying in her casket.
Vivid, yes; but also rather normal in life. Then my
father died when I was sixteendied in my arms, at

You set that book at the time of the disputed first

Bush presidential election. Do you feel that election
set Americas fate?
It did set Americas fate. No question. Insofar as the
election was stolen by the Republicans, and insofar
as the American electorate was sufficiently
uninspired as to permit such a close race, and
insofar as the two-party system (particularly the
98

home. That could certainly be seen as imprinting.

We were a three-person family, very close and
loving. So I experienced loss when he died; and
probably, as significantly, I experienced the loss my
mother sufferedof her one great love in life. How
we experience what we experience is a complex
business.

Did the stealing have consequencesdid you get

caught?
Were not talking about holding up Brinks trucks,
here, or Manson Family capers; just, oh, stealing the
odd car, some random breaking and enterings, and
many lesser offences. And I did get caught, got
hauled in front of the juvenile judge, put on
probationwhich was sort of awful but also sort of a
badge of honour. It all scared my mother, though,
made her miserable, in fact. And as far as
consequence was concerned, I suppose I saw what
consequence my behaviour had on herwhich was
bad. I was on probation at the time my father
suddenly died; and my mother sat me down and told
me that she wasnt going to be able to look after me
the way she had up to thenbecause she had to go
out and get a joband that Id better not turn up in
jail or juvenile court again because she wouldnt get
me out. That made a big impression of me. I guess
thats consequence of a kind. But I wasnt a very
committed felon. More of a little dickhead.

Did you, or do you, look back on the years before

your father died, when there were the three of you,
as a golden time?
No, not a golden time. Im suspicious of golden
times. I think that right now this minute had better
be the golden time, because its what youve got. I
had a happy childhood because my parents loved me
and took good care of me. But my father had a very
serious heart attack when I was eight and he was
forty-eight. And that coloured a lot of life, because it
scared him silly and he never felt entirely well after
thatprobably wasnt well. And he was gone a lot.
His job as a salesman caused him to travel by car five
days a week, and my mother and I were left at home
together. And we were both of us pretty volatile
personalities. And I never did particularly well in
school; was, as time went by, a kid who tended to get
into troublestealing, getting into fights. I was
dyslexic and never read very well. So, no. Golden it
wasnt. But it was good.

Do you think the dyslexia has shaped how you have

read?
Absolutely. I read slowly, and as a consequence have
definitely not read as many books as I shouldvein
order to be considered properly educated. But what
Ive readbecause Ive read slowly and attentivelyI
seem to have taken in pretty well. And, importantly,
when you read slowly you also become available to
those qualities of language thatre other than the
cognitive qualities. One becomes sensitive to what
you might call the poetic qualitiesrhythms,
repetitions, sonorities, syncopations, the aptness of
particular word choicesthose qualities. Theyre
importantat least they are to me. Thats had a
consequence not only upon my reading but also
upon my aims as a writer of sentences.
Do you always know what a Richard Ford sentence
sounds like?
I dont think theres any signature to my sentences.
Ive heard some people say there is, but thats just a
gesture meant to flatter me. Because Im sure theres
not. A sentences style or manner, or a book full of
sentences with styles or manners, is a response to a
variety of forces operating on a writer: the writers
sensuous, instinctual relation to the material itself;
the accumulated amount of material that precedes
the writing; the writers history with other books that
may or may not have entertained some of the same
subject matter, or books that the writer simply
admires; the daily tidal changes in any persons
mood and energies. And much more. All these things
affect how sentences get writtenhow many words
they hold, how syntactically complex they are, their
diction and all word-choosings, what they undertake
to elucidate. And in the course of any one book these
stylistic characteristics can and often do change or
modulate. Its certainly the case that over the course
of any writers life his or her grasp on sentences will
also changeeither from book to book, subject to

Richard Ford and his hunting dogs.

99

subject, or just as one gets older. I think that The

Lay of the Land has longer, complexer sentences
because my mind (my older mans mind) was just
fuller of things that interested me, and I didnt want
to lose a lot of them. So, I devised sentences to keep
all that stuff and put them in play. You can say that
was ambition, or you could say it was poor judgment
and an inability to discriminate. Id say it was
ambition, because I like the book a lotlike its
thoroughness.
People can get preoccupied by such stylistic matters
as voice: having a consistent voice, a true voice, a
voice of ones own. This conception of voice can
have something to do with a writers purported
signature. But to me this isnt very important. To me
voice is probably just the music of the storys
intelligence, how it sounds when its being smart, or
when its working on the reader. And that music, like
a storys style, can change, and does change. So, a
Richard Ford sentence will usually be differently
made from one piece of writing to the next. Which is
fine with me.
How aware were you of Eudora Welty in Jackson
while you were growing up?
Well, I knew her name. One did, in Jackson. I went
to school with her niece, Elizabeth. But, Eudorad
grown up directly across the street from me on
Congress Street, and I didnt even know that until I
was far along into adulthood. I also didnt read
anything of hers (or anything much at all) until I was
in college and had it presented to me on a syllabus.
Eudora livedon Pinehurst Streetnot so far away
from us when I was growing up. Walking distance.
But it was in another, somewhat better old Jackson
neighbourhood than ours. My mother once pointed
Eudora out to me at the grocery storeI mightve
been eight. She said Richard, thats Eudora Welty,
over there. Shes a writer. I could tell from the tone
of my mothers voice that she thought being a writer
was good.
Did she write anything herself, your mother I
mean?
Interestingto me, anyway. When I was going
through my mothers belongings after shed died, in
1971, I found a notebook that had only one line
written in it, on its first page, and in my mothers
quite elegant hand. It said Les, A life. Now my
grandmother, her mother, was called Lessome
version of her real name, which was Essie. My
mother took care of my grandmother through the
last years of my grandmothers life. And it was not
an easy passage. My grandmother was capable of
great, aggressive nastiness. And I know my mother
got in the way of it a lot. We all did at one time or
other. But it may have seemed to my mother that
some act of writingfictive or otherwisewas the
best way to record or imagine her own experience.
Id guess, too, it was partly because she had a son
who was a novelist that this began to seem possible

to her. But. She never did itwhich is all right. She

didnt want to enough.
Do you think stories are created or discovered?
Thats easy. Stories are created. It isnt as if theyre
out there waiting in some Platonic hyper-space like
unread emails. They arent. Writers make stories up.
It might be that when stories turn out to be good
they then achieve a quality of inevitability, of there
seeming to have been a previously existing and
important space that they perfectly fill. But that isnt
whats true. Im sure of it. A story makes its own
space and then fills it. Writers dont find stories
although some writers might say so. This to me just
means they have a vocabulary thats inadequate at
depicting what they actually do. Theyre like
Hemingwayalways fleeing complexity as if it were
a barn fire.
You have written movingly of New Orleans, in
memory of your feelings for that city, where you
and Kristina have lived and worked; has that
disaster altered your perception of loss?
I dont know that I ever had a previous perception
of loss. But the disaster in New Orleans surely didnt
sponsor a new one. My sense of permanence has
always included the likely demolition of all vestiges
of permanencehouses, street corners, trees
whereon we carved our names in hearts, persons. It
can all go, and will. In America we white people
sentimentalize permanenceor at least we once
could. But Native Americans certainly dont. Blacks
probably dont either. Europeans of a certain age
dont. I dont.
Has faith or church-going ever had any appeal to
you?
Not church-going. But faith, well Theres the
famous line in Hebrews 11: Faith is the evidence of
things unseen. Ive always been attracted to that
line. But for specifically ir-religious reasons. I deem
that line to be a line about the imagination. I could
almost say that, the imagination is the evidence of
things unseen. But again specifically Id say that my
faith lies in the imagination and in the
imaginations power to bring into existence essential
experience that heretofore wasnt known to exist.
That reminds me of Frank Bascombes line: The
unseen exists and has properties. Do you have an
ongoing sense of that unseen, or only at certain
charged moments?

I dont much think about the unseen. For lack of

great erudition, or a great education, I suppose Ive
stored a fair amount of trust in my instinct. But as
soon as I see that written down I start to think that
instinct may just be another word for luck and for
trusting to luckwhich Ive done. A favourite line I
repair to is by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who
said: We have a built-in, very potent, hairtriggered
tendency to find agency in things that are not
100

agents. Im not sure if Dennett approves of that

tendency or not. But certainly thats one of the things
literature doesit ascribes agency where before no
agency was noticed: it says this causes that, this is a
consequence of that, etc. It may be that writing
fiction, imagining agencies, is my most trusted way
into the unseen.
There is a kind of unflinching morality in many of
your stories. Im thinking particularly of the tales of
adultery in A Multitude of Sins. Trangression has
consequences, even if only in pointing up the
emptiness of lives. Does this moral sense grow out
of characters, or does the moral engine come first?
I dont know a specific answer to that. In most of
those stories I didnt start with a character. I usually
dont. I usually start either with a situation (a man
meets his ex-lovers husband in Grand Central
Station; a married couple are on their way to a party,
when the young wife informs her young husband
that shes had an affair with the host of the party
theyre attendingthose are examples). Or else I just
go looking for bits and pieces that I want a story to
contain, and organize the story out of those bits. I
suppose when I put it that way, and in terms of your
question, the moral engine may seem to come first,
be an unspoken force in the choosings. But Im
entirely unaware of its being so. I hold with the
notion that Martin Amis quoted Northrop Frye to
say: that literature is a disinterested use of language;
a writer must have nothing riding on the outcome. I
set up situations and then see what I can have
happen as a consequence, using language. And, at
least in theory, the consequence could pretty much
be anything.
Does that principle of disinterest apply equally in
your novels, is it tough not to be rooting for Frank,
say?
Im always rooting for Frank to do something, or
have something to say thats not expected, but
interesting, given the conventional sort of man the
reader may be imagining him to bea real estate
agent, etc. So, the rule of disinterest still applies. It
should also be said, of course, that Im not bound
strictly by that rule. If by following it I write
something that I dont like, or have Frank or any
character say or do something that seems dumb or
somehow wrong, I can just scratch it out and often
do. I never saw Frank as a human being (although
Id like the reader to think he was pretty close to
being a human being). Rather I saw him as an
agency made of language. So, I wouldnt be rooting
for him the way youd root for the kid with Hodgkins
Disease to see one last game at Yankee Stadium. Its
different. I may be more rooting for myself to come
up with something good.
Do you find your empathy with the weaknesses of
your characters has deepened as you have grown
older?

My empathy with every kind of weakness has

deepened. Is it a matter of age? Maybe. More
probably its just a matter of experience. Graham
Greene wroteand Ive always hated the ideathat
morality comes with old age, with ones curiosity
growing weak. Thats a sourpusss notion of
morality. As something thats moribund. And I dont
buy it. Maybe thats because my curiosity still seems
strong.
In your introduction to The New Granta Book of the
American Short Story you quote Walter Benjamin
suggesting We no longer work at things that cant
be abbreviated, perhaps a factor of waning
curiosity. What is your feeling for Americas
attention span?
That was Benjamin expressing his displeasure with
modern times. Probably an observer could make, or
couldve made, the same claim about the
contemporary attention span at any given time in
history. But as for me, and as for now, I see lots of
people on airplanes reading really long books; I see
the young of my country, as well as their beaverish
parents, spending long, long, long periods of time in
front of computer screens; I see athletes training and
training until they drop. So, I conclude from this
admittedly unscientific survey, that plenty of
Americans have plenty of attention availablefor
something. It may not be for literary fiction. But
then its my job as a purveyor of literary fiction to tap
into that otherwise wasted attention span. But its
there.
You have rarely written of childhood, in the way
that, for instance, Tobias Wolff has; has that
territory never tempted you?
Well, Id say I have written about childhood. Several
of the stories in Rock Springs are narrated by
teenagers, as is all of Wildlife. And in the New Jersey
books there are Franks kids all around especially
in Independence Day. Maybe in your terms a
teenager isnt a child; and maybe thats true. But I
always think Ive written about childrenbecause I
always brag that its a lot easier to write about
children than to have them. And I dont have any.
To what extent do you think your life was shaped
by being an only child among big Southern
families?
Thats one of those questions that asks me to
imagine another life from my own. I suppose I could
a life with brothers and sistersbut its a bit like
asking whether things have been different, do you
suppose, if youd been a girl. Probably would. Being
an only child, however, shaped a great, great deal in
my life. A psychologist could probably give a better
answer than I could, and probably a truer answer,
too. But Ill just propose one thing: that I was almost
always around adults when I was quite young. Adult
life was the important life, the aspired-to life, and I
could eavesdrop on it all the time, hear what adults
thought was important, observe discrepancies in

101

their behaviours and their pronouncements. It

probably also intensified the faith that I had in
parentchild relationships, inasmuch as my parents
seemed to have wanted me, loved me, wanted good
for me. It mightve also caused me to fear loss more
than wouldve been the case had there been others
around. And I think that in myself (and perhaps
evident in what I write) fear of loss and the
corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss
are potent forces.

What did you make of being described as a Dirty

Realist by Granta?

Do you think that instinct to protect yourself

against loss is one of the reasons you chose not to
have children?
Doctor Freud might say so. But I just say that it was
because Kristina and I didnt especially like children,
didnt want to be saddled with the responsibility of
them. We had our ideas about the future, and there
was never room for children in those ideas. It was
really the first important thing we ever agreed on
when we were in our teens together, in Michigan. I
remember the exact moment we first talked about it.
It was great.
There are, youve said, two fixed points in your life:
I always write and I am always married to the
same girl. In what ways does one depend on the
other?

I thoughtwe probably all thoughtthat Dirty

Realism was a wonderful marketing ploy. I dont
think Carver or Toby Wolff or Jayne Anne Phillips or
any of us ever thought it really described anything
especially true or thematically consistent in our
stories. Bill Buford just dreamed it up to sell
magazines in Britain. And it worked very, very well.
Were still talking about it, arent we? At the time
the middle EightiesI had no books in print, and no
readership. This wasnt true for the other writers in
the Dirty Realism issue. But it was true for me. And
Bills scheme helped me find a readership for my
stories. I cant thank him enough.
Did you ever think of giving up at that time?

Ive answered that question enough for one lifetime.

All right; youve also said that you consciously
want your writing to be affirmative of the
possibility of love, closeness in a life, what makes
you hold to that?
Not to keep on quoting famous men, but somewhere
in Wallace Stevens theres a little fragment that says,
we gulp down evil, choke at good. Thats always
meant to me that its more appetizing to decry, and
less appetizing, maybe less simple, to find a
vocabulary for affirmation. And also closeness in a
life and (if you will) love seem immensely
sustaining to me, and worthy of efforts at
articulation. That said, Ive written mostly stories
that would have to be called cautionary tales, and
that a lot of readers would not think of as
conventionally affirming. However, I hold with John
Gardner [the novelist and early supporter of
Raymond Carver] who said that moral literature (by
which I understand him to have meant good
literature, valuable literature) tests values and
arouses trustworthy feelings about the better and
worse in human actions. To me, indeed, great
literature is always affirming, even if its grimif
only because its a gesture by someone for the use of
another in a future thats hoped to come. Sartre said
even the grimmest literature is optimistic since it
proves those things can be thought about.
So literature makes us want to be better men (and
women)?

I dont know about that. I just know it gives a reader

the chance to see life affirmed through literatures
great concern with life. And it gives the reader a
chancein the sheltered environment of a bookto
see the important consequences of events. Making
one want to be better, well thats a private matter. I
have some evidence that that may not be accurate
although wanting to be better and being better are
obviously different things.

I certainly did. I thought that Id had my shot at

being a novelist and it hadnt worked out well
enough. I went over to Sports Illustrated and asked
for a job. But the guy who was running it told me no.
He said I was a novelist (cruel irony), and that I
couldnt be a sportswriter. So I went home and wrote
The Sportswriter. But if hed given me a job Id
almost assuredly have taken it and been very, very
happy. Id be retired now and have a big pension. It
wouldve been a great life.
It seemed to me natural to group you with Carver
and Tobias Wolff as writers to the extent that you
had some kind of shared interest in a sort of lonely
or alienated masculinity. Where do you think that
came from?
I never think about that. At our best (if I have a best
and certainly they do), our stories werent that
much alike. And frankly I cant think about my own
characters in those rather cosseted, conventional
termsalienated, lonely, even masculine. Im not
interested in masculinity. Id be surprised if Ray or
Toby wouldve said much different. But. I do know
that I inherited much of my sense of what a story
could be and be about from my readingfrom Frank
OConnor, from Sherwood Anderson, from Faulkner,
from Isaac Babel, from Flannery OConnoralas,
from Hemingway, who seems influential in only the
most superficial ways. So, thats where my first ideas
came from.
Youve lived longer than your father, do you catch
yourself making his gestures, or have a keener
impression of his life now you have reached and
passed his age?

102

I look like my father. I sometimes feel my facial

features arranging themselves into visages that I
know are like his. The long Irish upper lip lapsing
over the poor lower one in a state of puzzlement; my
tendency to sigh at moments of frustration; the
fierce swarm into anger; the tendency to strike out at
something (or someone) that threatens me. I saw all
this in him when he was in my life. And I accept
them in myselfwhich isnt to say I glory in them.
That said, I have a paler and paler recollection of
him as times gone on. And I feel the poorer for that.
I liked him very much.
Do you think men are born with more ways to fail
than women?
I dont know what that means. But, no. Women and
men seem a lot more alike than theyre given credit
for. A lot of interests, of course, are deeply and
perniciously invested in keeping them apart and
distinct.
You have written about your love of hunting. Does
it inform your writing?
Its certainly informed some storiesthe ones thatre
expressly about hunting: Communist, Great Falls,
Calling. But in general I think its just been a thing I
like to do that hasnt much informed my writing. I
dont like to read hunting stories. Communist I
wrote back in 1984, only because Tom McGuane and
I were out hunting partridge in Montana, and he told
me he knew a guy who was preparing an anthology
of hunting stories and if I ever wrote a hunting story
I should send it to this guy. I never had before. But I
did. And Communist was it. I probably never wrote
a better story than that. Go figure.
Tell me about your relationship with your HarleyDavidson; it feels like an escape clause?
When I got back to owning motorcycles, in the midEighties, I used to say (in my boyish way) that a
fellow needed to have something around that could
kill him. And at heart, once we get past the snapshot
visions of oneself astride the rakish machine, and the
appeal of the sound of the thing, and the wind-inyour-hair imagery, and the hoped-for effect on
womenonce thats all gone by, I guess I still feel the
way I did in the mid-Eighties.
You dont strike me as someone with a selfdestructive urge thoughnot at all?

phone, there in Little Rock. She said a few consoling

things. And then she saidand this woman didnt
know me; she said, Now, Rich-ard. Your mamma
died of cancer. So, hon, youre gonna get it, too.
Dont forget that. Okay, I wont, I said. Thanks.
Just a kind sober thought toward the future to
penetrate ones grief.
What did you learn in writing and in life from
Raymond Carver?
I did learn some things from Ray. Sometimes people
ask me if he was my teacher; but he wasnt. He and I
were close friends, and were colleagues. But he
wasnt that much older than meseven years. We
were pretty much contemporaries. Though it seems
strange that hes been gone now for nearly twenty
years. But. One thing that may seem insignificant,
but wasnt, was that his parents and my parents
came from pretty much the same placewest
Arkansas. His parents had gone out west, and mine
had gone down southfor work. And from that
coincidence, and from admiring Rays early stories
very much, and admiring his own instincts for
writing them, I think I drew some corroborative
strength that my own inherited storage of what was
interesting and what a story could be was, in fact,
valuable and credible. Ray and I enjoyed a kind of
unspoken confidence that we came from the same
stockpossibly rough stock.
Beyond that, his early stories and our friendship
which began as he was writing his second book
definitely encouraged me to try writing stories again
myself. Id quit writing stories in the Seventies
because I just couldnt do it very well. But Rays
stories seemed so natural, almost easy (many people
have thought that to their ruin), that I thought Id try
my hand at it again. And I did. At least a couple of
the stories in Rock Springs bear signs of his stylistic
influence. He always encouraged me to write stories,
although Im sure he felt confident he would always
be better at it than Id be.
He mustve learned things from you as well,
though?
I dont know what he couldve learned from me.
There mightve been something. We were friends, we
talked about work a lot. We had that confidence that
came from our family background. And Im sure I
reenforced his confidence about his work. I also had
opinions about some of the stories in his book What
We Talk About When We Talk About Loveall of
which he showed me in early drafts. But most of
what I didnt like he rejected and later chided me for.
Although there was that story, I think its A Small
Good Thing, that I and others (the poet Donald Hall
and Geoffrey Wolff, probably Toby, too) complained
to him about. Hed shown that story to us in an early,
much more fully developed form. And then he
published it in a rather harshly curtailed form. And
we all told Ray he should restore it to its fuller self
when he collected it in a subsequent volume. And he
did. His work was growing, his sentences getting

I dont think I have a self-destructive urge. But the

prospect of ones eventual end is pretty firmly fixed
in my brain. And Id certainly like to think I held my
fate in my own hands should I be struck by some
withering disease. I remember when my mother died
of breast cancerand Kristina and I were sitting
on her bed, getting dressed for her funeral, the
phone rang. And it was one of my mothers old Arkie
cousins, from up in the sticks. This woman was just
calling up to express her condolences, I guess. I had
no idea who she was, just a scratchy voice on the
103

longer, more complex, his sympathies and

intellectual reach expanding. Tess [Gallagher,
Carvers second wife] had a big influence on him
probably the biggest influence. I think that Iand
again I was just one of a few people he trustedI just
told him work was wonderful, and that was probably
the most of it.
You shared an absolute commitment to the business
of writing stories: have you always had that work
ethic?
No. I havent. I always wished I had itfrom an early
age. But I didnt for a long time. Itthe work ethic
just arrived during the summer of 1963, when I was
nineteen. Im not sure where it came from. I was
working on the Missouri Pacific Railroad as a
switchman, and making lots of money and having a
pretty happy life. I was supposed to go to college in
the autumn, and was giving thought to just staying
working on the railroad. But I ended up going to
school, instead.
Maybe seeing those working guys I spent my days
with made an impression on me; or maybe it was
that I wanted to impress Kristina. I dont really
know. But when I got to school, in Michigan, I was
just a changed boy. Whatever thresholds Id not
ventured to crosswith regard to my studies, for
instanceI just barged across. And its been that way
ever since. But I should sayabout myself and about
a work ethicits pretty boring. Thats why we
associate the ethic with Protestants, whore also
pretty boring. It may lead one on to good, but it
doesnt feel like much of a virtue, frankly.
A work ethic story, though. When I was in college I
lived with a guy named Tom Candee, whos now a
veterinarian not far from where I livedown in
Massachusetts. And every term our grades came out,
and Candee used to laugh at merail at me, really.
He used to say, Look at Ford, he got all As, but had
to worked like a pig to get it. Whereas me, I got all As
and never turned a hand. Im smart. Hes not. We
eventually came to pretty serious blows, Candee and
me, because that used to get under my skin real bad.
But the truth was he was right. I did work like a pig.
He barely lifted a hand. So, to me, a work ethic has
always been a kind of blue-collar trait, something I
have to embrace to do anything thats worthwhile
but spectacularly inferior to being able to waltz
through life. I am, however, glad not to be a
veterinarian.

novels Ill write, or might write. I agree that to get to

write a novel at all is very, very luckyto get to do
ones best, to get to do what Dostoevsky and
Faulkner did, to try to contribute good to the life of
people you dont know. All thats a great privilege.
But every time I finish a novel, or a book (and Ive
only finished nine), I ask myself if this isnt enough
now. Ive given this last effortwhatever it wasmy
very best. Ive held back nothing. Have I not perhaps
gone along this course as far as I can go? Are my
returns not likely to begin to diminish? Could I really
have anything as important as this to write again?
Someday, I assume, my answer will be, Yes, this is
enough. I dont see writing as a profession,
something Im married to forever. I have to reinvent
it every time. And I also see that theres more to life
than writing. I see that portrayed in other peoples
lives all the time. Im as curious about that as I ever
was.
The greatest short story writers it seems to me are
those with the clearest sense of an ending. Do you
always know when you are done?
Yes, I always know when a storys finished. And I
hope that makes me one of the greatest short story
writersif thats what it takes.
Theres a line you once used: Your life is the
blueprint you make after the building is built. How
do you think your own blueprint will look when the
time comes?
Sketchy. Whatever there is of good in it is either
privatesomething I shared with Kristinaor else
its all gone into what Ive written. That seems just
fine.

I remember talking to Kazuo Ishiguro and he said

he imagined the rest of his life in terms of how
many novels he would be lucky enough to complete,
if he spent, as was his habit, five or six years on
each. Do you have a powerful sense of finite time?
Well, the return on Ishs investment is quite
wonderful, isnt it? So his attitude puts a much better
burnish on those working virtues than I can hope to
put. I suppose I do share a sense of finite time, all
right. But I dont measure it in terms of how many
104

Ganta Magazine, no. 99, Autumn 2007

6
Mukherjee Bharati

The Management of Grief

A woman I dont know is boiling tea the Indian way
in my kitchen. There are a lot of women I dont
know in my kitchen, whispering, and moving
tactfully. They open doors, rummage through the
pantry, and try not to ask me where things are kept.
They remind me of when my sons were small, on
Mothers Day or when Vikram and I were tired, and
they would make big, sloppy omelets. I would lie in
bed pretending I didnt hear them.
Dr. Sharma, the treasurer of the Indo-Canada
Society, pulls me into the hallway. He wants to know
if I am worried about money. His wife, who has just
come up from the basement with a tray of empty
cups anti glasses, scolds him. Dont bother Mrs.
Bhave with mundane details. She looks so
monstrously pregnant her baby must be days
overdue. I tell her she shouldnt be carrying heavy
things. Shaila, she says, smiling, this is the fifth.
Then she grabs a teenager by his shirttails. He slips
his Walkman off his head. He has to be one of her
four children, they have the same domed and dented
foreheads.
Whats the official word now? she demands.
The boy slips the headphones back on. Theyre
acting evasive, Ma. Theyre saying it could be an
accident or a terrorist bomb.
All morning, the boys have been muttering, Sikh
Bomb, Sikh Bomb. The men, not using the word,
bow their heads in agreement. Mrs. Sharma touches
her forehead at such a word. At least theyve stopped
talking about space debris and Russian lasers.
Two radios are going in the dining room. They
are tuned to different stations. Someone must have
brought the radios down from my boys bedrooms. I
havent gone into their rooms since Kusum came
running across the front lawn in her bathrobe. She

looked so funny, I was laughing when I opened the

door.
The big TV in the den is being whizzed through
American networks and cable channels.
Damn! some man swears bitterly. How can
these preachers carry on like nothings happened? I
want to tell him were not that important. You look
at the audience, and at the preacher in his blue robe
with his beautiful white hair, the potted palm trees
under a blue sky, and you know they care about
nothing.
The phone rings and rings. Dr. Sharmas taken
charge. Were with her, he keeps saying. Yes, yes,
the doctor has given calming pills. Yes, yes, pills are
having necessary effect. I wonder if pills alone
explain this calm. Not peace, just a deadening quiet.
I was always controlled, but never repressed. Sound
can reach me, but my body is tensed, ready to
scream. I hear their voices all around me. I hear my
boys and Vikram cry, Mommy, Shaila! and their
screams insulate me, like headphones.
The woman boiling water tells her story again
and again. I got the news first. My cousin called
from Halifax before six A.M., can you imagine? Hed
gotten up for prayers and his son was studying for
medical exams and he heard on a rock channel that
something had happened to a plane. They said first it
had disappeared from the radar, like a giant eraser
just reached out. His father called me, so I said to
him, what do you mean, `something bad`? You
mean a hijacking? And he said, behn, there is no
confirmation of anything yet, but check with your
neighbors because a lot of them must be on that
plane. So I called poor Kusum straightaway. I knew
Kusums husband and daughter were booked to go
yesterday.
Kusum lives across the street from me. She and
Satish had moved in less than a month ago. They
said they needed a bigger place. All these people, the
Sharmas and friends from the Indo-Canada Society
had been there for the housewarming. Satish and
Kusum made homemade tandoori on their big gas
grill and even the white neighbors piled their plates
high with that luridly red, charred, juicy chicken.
Their younger daughter had danced, and even our
boys had broken away from the Stanley Cup telecast
to put in a reluctant appearance. Everyone took
pictures for their albums and for the community
newspapers another of our families had made it
big in Toronto and now I wonder how many of
those happy faces are gone, Why does God give us so
much if all along He intends to take it away? Kusum
asks me.
I nod. We sit on carpeted stairs, holding hands
like children. I never once told him that I loved
him, I say. I was too much the well brought up
woman. I was so well brought up I never felt
comfortable calling my husband by his first name.
Its all right, Kusum says. He knew. My
husband knew. They felt it. Modern young girls have
to say it because what they feel is fake.
Kusums daughter, Pam, runs in with an
overnight case. Pams in her McDonads uniform.
Mummy! You have to get dressed! Panic makes her
cranky. `A reporters on his way here.
Why?

105

You want to talk to him in your bathrobe? She

starts to brush her mothers long hair. Shes the
daughter whos always in trouble. She dates
Canadian boys and hangs out in the mall, shopping
for tight sweaters. The younger one, the goodygoody one according to Pam, the one with a voice so
sweet that when she sang bhajans for Ethiopian
relief even a frugal man like my husband wrote out a
hundred dollar check, she was on that plane. She
was going to spend July and August with grandparents because Pam wouldnt go. Pam said shed
rather waitress at McDonalds. If its a choice
between Bombay and Wonderland, Im picking
Wonderland, shed said.
Leave me alone, Kusum yells. You know what I
want to do? If I didnt have to look after you now, Id
hang myself. Pams young face goes blotchy with
pain. Thanks, she says, dont let me stop you.
Hush, pregnant Mrs. Sharma scolds Pam.
Leave your mother alone. Mr. Sharma will tackle
the reporters and fill out the forms. Hell say what
has to be said.
Pam stands her ground. You think I dont know
what Mummys thinking? Why her? thats what.
Thats sick! Mummy wishes my little sister were alive
and I were dead.
Kusums hand in mine is trembly hot. We
continue to sit on the stairs.

whove never handled money or gone on a bus, and

there are old parents who still havent eaten or gone
outside their bedrooms. Some houses and
apartments have been looted. Some wives are still
hysterical. Some husbands are in shock and
profound depression. We want to help, but our
hands are tied in so many ways. We have to
distribute money to some people, and there are legal
documents these things can be done. We have
interpreters, but we dont always have the human
touch, or maybe the right human touch. We dont
want to make mistakes, Mrs. Bhave, and thats why
wed like to ask you to help us.
More mistakes, you mean, I say.
Police matters are not in my hands, she
answers.
Nothing I can do will make any difference, I
say. We must all grieve in our own way.
But you are coping very well. All the people said,
Mrs. Bhave is the strongest person of all. Perhaps if
the others could see you, talk with you, it wou1d help
them.
By the standards of the people you call
hysterical, I am behaving very oddly and very badly,
Miss Templeton. I want to say to her, I wish I could
scream, starve, walk into Lake Ontario, jump from
a bridge. They would not see me as a model. I do
not see myself as a mode1.
I am a freak. No one who has ever known me
would think of me reacting this way. This terrible
calm will not go away.
She asks me if she may call again, after I get back
from a long trip that we all must make. Of course, I
say. Feel free to call, anytime.

She calls before she arrives, wondering if theres

anything I need. Her name is Judith Templeton and
shes an appointee of the provincial government.
Multiculturalism? I ask, and she says, partially,
but that her mandate is bigger. Ive been told you
knew many of the people on the flight, she says.
Perhaps if youd agree to help us reach the
Four days later, I find Kusum squatting on a rock
others...?
overlooking a bay in Ireland. It isnt a big rock, but it
She gives me time at least to put on tea water and juts sharply out over water. This is as close as well
pick up the mess in the front room. I have a few ever get to them. June breezes balloon out her sari
samosas from Kusums housewarming that I could and unpin her knee-length hair. She has the
fry up, but then I think, why prolong this visit?
bewildered look of a sea creature whom the tides
Judith Templeton is much younger than she have stranded. Its been one hundred hours since
sounded. She wears a blue suit with a white blouse Kusum came stumbling and screaming across my
and a polka dot tie. Her blond hair is cut short, her lawn. Waiting around the hospital, weve heard
only jewelry is pearl drop earrings. Her briefcase is many stories. The police, the diplomats, they tell us
new and expensive looking, :L gleaming cordovan things thinking that were strong, that knowledge is
leather. She sits with it across her lap. When she helpful to the grieving, and maybe it is. Some, I
looks out the front windows onto the street, her know, prefer ignorance, or their own versions. The
contact lenses seem to float in front of her light blue plane broke into two, they say. Unconsciousness was
eyes.
instantaneous. No one suffered. My boys must have
What sort of help do you want from me? I ask. just finished their breakfasts. They loved eating on
She has refused the tea, out of politeness, but I planes, they loved the smallness of plates, knives,
insist, along with some slightly stale biscuits. I have and forks. Last year they saved the airline salt and
no experience, she admits. That is, I have an MSW pepper shakers. Half an hour more and they would
and Ive worked in liaison with accident victims, but have made it to Heathrow.
I mean I have no experience with a tragedy of this
Kusum says that we cant escape our fate. She
scale
says that all those people our husbands, my boys,
Who could? I ask.
her girl with the nightingale voice, all those Hindus,
and with the complications of culture, Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Parsis, and atheists on
language, and customs. Someone mentioned that that plane were fated to die together off this
Mrs. Bhave is a pillar because youve taken it more beautiful bay. She learned this from a swami in
calmly.
Toronto.
At this, perhaps, I frown, for she reaches forward,
I have my Valium.
almost to take my hand. I hope you understand my
Six of us relatives two widows and four
meaning, Mrs. Bhave. There are hundreds of people widowers choose to spend the day today by the
in Metro directly affected, like you, and some of waters instead of sitting in a hospital room and
them speak no English. There are some widows scanning photographs of the dead. Thats what they
106

call us now: relatives. Ive looked through twenty- them lecause I couldnt get two weeks off from my
seven photos in two days. Theyre very kind to us, stupid job in June. I process bills for a travel agent.
the Irish are very understanding. Sometimes June is a big travel month.
understanding means freeing a tourist bus for this
Dr. Ranganathan whips the pockets of his suit
trip to the bay, so we can pretend to spy our loved jacket inside out. Squashed roses, in darkening
ones through the glassiness of waves or in sun- shades of pink, float on the water. He tore the roses
speckled cloud shapes.
off creepers in somebodys garden. He didnt ask
I could die here, too, and be content.
anyone if he could pluck the roses, but now theres
What is that, out there? Shes standing and been an article abut it in the local papers. When you
flapping her hands and for a moment I see a head see an Indian person, it says, please give him or her
shape bobbing in the waves. Shes standing in the flowers.
water, I, on the boulder. The tide is low, and a round,
A strong youth of fourteen, he says, can very
black, head-sized rock has just risen from the waves. likely pull to safety a younger one. My sons, though
She returns, her sari end dripping and ruined and four years apart, were very close. Vinod wouldnt let
her face is a twisted remnant of hope, the way mine Mithun drown. Electrical engineering, I think,
was a hundred hours ago, still laughing but inwardly foolishly perhaps: this man knows important secrets
knowing that nothing but the ultimate tragedy could of the universe, things closed to me. Relief spins me
bring two women together at six oclock on a Sunday lightheaded. No wonder my boys photographs
morning. I watch her face sag into blankness.
havent turned up in the gallery of photos of the
That water felt warm, Shaila, she says at length.
recovered dead. Such pretty roses, I say.
You cant, I say. We have to wait for our turn
My wife loved pink roses. Every Friday I had to
to come.
bring a bunch home. I used to say, why? After twenty
I havent eaten in four days, havent brushed my odd years of marriage youre still needing proof
teeth.
positive of my love? He has identified his wife and
I know, she says. I tell myself I have no right to three of his children. Then others from Montreal, the
grieve. They are in a better place than we are. My lucky ones, intact families with no survivors. He
swami says I should be thrilled for them. My swami chuckles as he wades back to shore. Then he swings
says depression is a sign of our selfishness.
around to ask me a question. Mrs. Bhave, you are
Maybe Im selfish. Selfishly I break away from wanting to throw in some roses for your loved ones?
Kusum and run, sandals slapping against stones, to I have two big ones left. But I have other things to
the waters edge. What if my boys arent lying pinned float: Vinods pocket calculator; a half-painted model
under the debris? What if they arent stuck a mile B-52 for my Mithun. Theyd want them on their
below that innocent blue chop? What if, given the island. And for my husband? For him I let fall into
strong currents....
the calm, glassy waters a poem I wrote in the
Now Ive ruined my sari, one of my best. Kusum hospital yesterday. Finally hell know my feelings for
has joined me, knee-deep in water that feels to me him.
like a swimming pool. I could settle in the water, and
Dont tumble, the rocks are slippery, Dr.
my husband would take my hand and the boys would Ranganathan tautions. He holds out a hand for me
slap water in my face just to see me scream.
to grab.
Do you remember what good swimmers my boys
Then its time to get back on the bus, time to rush
were, Kusum?
back to our waiting posts on hospital benches.
I saw the medals, she says.
One of the widowers, Dr. Ranganathan from
Kusurn is one of the lucky ones. The lucky ones
Montreal, walks out to us, carrying his shoes in one flew here, identified in multiplicate their loved ones,
hand. Hes an electrical engineer. Someone at the then will fly to India with the bodies for proper
hotel mentioned his work is famous around the ceremonies. Satish is one of the few males who
world, something about the place where physics and surfaced. The photos of faces we saw on the walls in
electricity come together. He has lost a huge family, an office at Heathrow and here in the hospital are
something indescrif>alAe. With some luck, Dr. mostly of women. Women have more body fat, a nun
Ranganathan suggests to me, a good swimmer said to me matter-of-factly. They float better.
could make it safely to some island. It is quite
May I was stopped by a young sailor on the
possible that there may be many, many microscopic street. He had loaded bodies, hed gone into the
islets scattered around.
water when he checks my face for signs of strength
Youre not just saying that? I tell Dr. when the sharks were first spotted. I dont blush,
Ranganathan about Vinod, my elder son. Last year and he breaks down. Its all right, I say. Thank
he took diving as well.
you. I had heard about the sharks from Dr.
Its a parents duty to hope, he says. It is Ranganathan. In his orderly mind, science brings
foolish to rule out possibilities that have not been understanding, it holds no terror. It is the sharks
tested. I myself have not surrendered hope.
duty. For every deer there is a hunter, for every fish a
Kusum is sobbing once again. Dear lady, he fisherman.
Says, laying his free hand on her arm, and she calms
The Irish are not shy; they rush to me and give
down.
me hugs and some are crying. I cannot imagine
Vinod is how old ? he asks me. Hes very reactions like that on the streets of Toronto. Just
careful, as we all are. Is, not was.
strangers, and I am touched. Some carry flowers
Fourteen. Yesterday he was fourteen. His father with them and give them to any Indian they see.
and uncle were going to take him down to the Taj
After lunch, a policeman I have gotten to know
and give him a big birthday party. I couldnt go with quite well catches hold of me. He says he thinks he
107

has a match for Vinod. I explain what a good

swimmer Vinod is.
You want me with you when you look at
photos? Dr. Ranganathan walks ahead of me into
the picture gallery. In these matters, he is a scientist,
and I am grateful. It is a new perspective. They have
performed miracles, he says. We are indebted to
them.
The first day or two the policemen showed us
relatives only one picture at a time; now theyre in a
hurry, theyre eager to lay out the possibles, and even
the probables.
The face on the photo is of a boy much like
Vinod; the same intelligent eyes, the same thick
brows dipping into a V. But this boys features, even
his cheeks, are puffier, wider, mushier.
No. My gaze is pulled by other pictures. There
are five other boys who look like Vinod.
The nun assigned to console me rubs the first
picture with a fingertip. When theyve been in the
water for a white, love, they look a little heavier.
The bones under the skin are broken, they said on
the first day try to adjust your memories. Its
important.
Its not him. Im his mother. Id know.
I know this one! Dr. I~i~nga1lattla1l cries out
suddenly from the back of the gallery. And this
one! I think he senses that I dont want to find my
boys. They are the Kutty brothers. They were also
from Montreal. I dont mean to be crying. On the
contrary, I am ecstatic. My suitcase in the hotel is
packed heavy with dry clothes for my boys.
The policeman starts to cry. I am so sorry, I am
so sorry, maam. 1 really thought we had a match.
With the nun ahead of us and the policeman behind,
we, the unlucky ones without our childrens bodies,
file out of the makeshift gallery.

Vikram wouldnt have wanted you to give up

things! they protest. They call my husband by the
name he was born with. In Toronto hed changed to
Vik so the men he worked with at his office would
find his name as easy as Rod or Chris. You know;
the dead arent cut off from us!
My grandmother, the spoiled daughter of a rich
zamindar, shaved her head with rusty razor blades
when she was widowed at sixteen. My grandfather
died of childhood diabetes when he was nineteen,
and she saw herself as the harbinger of bad luck. My
mother grew up without parents, raised indifferently
by an uncle, white her true mother slept in a hut
behind the main estate house and took her food with
the servants. She grew up a rationalist. My parents
abhor mindless mortification. The zamindars
daughter kept stubborn faith in Vedic rituals; my
parents rebelled. I am trapped between two modes
of knowledge. At thirty-six, I am too old to start over
and too young to give up. Like my husbands spirit, I
flutter between worlds.
Courting aphasia, we travel. We travel with our
phalanx of servants and poor relatives. To hill
stations and to beach resorts. We play contract
bridge in dusty gymkhana clubs. We ride stubby
ponies up crumbly mountain trails. At tea dances, we
let ourselves be twirled twice round the ballroom.
We hit the holy spots we hadnt made time for
before. In Varanasi, Kalighat, Rishikesh, Hardwar,
astrologers and palmists seek me out and for a fee
offer me cosmic consolations.
Already the widowers among us are being shown
new bride candidates. They cannot resist the call of
custom, the authority of their parents and older
brothers. They must marry; it is the duty of a man to
look after a wife. The new wives will be young
widows with children, destitute but of good family.
They will make loving wives, but the men will shun
From Ireland most of us go on to India. Kusum them. Ive had calls from the men over crackling
and I take the same direct fIight to Bombay, so I can Indian telephone lines. Save me, they say, these
help her clear customs quickly. But we have to argue substantial, educated, successful men of forty. h4y
with a man in uniform. He has large boils on his parents are arranging a marriage for me. In a
face. The boils swell and glow with sweat as we argue month they will have buried one family and returned
with him. He wants Kusum to wait in line and he to Canada with a new bride and partial family.
refuses to take authority because his boss is on a tea
I am comparatively lucky. No one here thinks of
break. But Kusum wont let her coffins out of sight, arranging a husband for an unlucky widow.
and I shant desert her though I know that my
Then, on the third day of the sixth month into
parents, elderly and diabetic, must be waiting in a this odyssey, in an abandoned temple in :1 tiny
stuffy car in a scorching lot.
Himalayan village, as I make nip offering of flowers
You bastard! I scream at the man with the and sweetmeats to the god of a tribe of animists, my
popping boils. Other passengers press closer. You husband descends to me. He is squatting next to a
think were smuggling contraband in those coffins!
scrawny sadhu in moth-eaten robes. Vikram wears
Once upon time we were well brought up women; the vanilla suit he wore the last time I hugged him.
we were dutiful wives who kept our heads veiled, our The sadhu tosses petals on a butter-fed flame,
voices shy and sweet.
reciting Sanskrit mantras and sweeps his face of
flies. My husband takes my hands in his.
In India, 1 become, once again, an only child of
Youre beautiful, he starts. Then, What are you
rich, ailing parents. Old friends of the family come to doing here?
pay their respects. Some are Sikh, and inwardly,
Shall I stay? I ask. He only smiles, but already
involuntarily, I cringe. My parents are progressive the image is fading. You must finish alone what we
people; they do not blame communities for a few started together. No seaweed wreathes his mouth.
individuals.
He speaks too fast just as he used to when we were
In Canada it is a different story now.
an envied family in our pink split-level. He is gone.
Stay longer, my mother pleads. Canada is a
In the windowless altar room, smoky with joss
cold place. Why would you want to be all by sticks and clarified butter lamps, a sweaty hand
yourself? I stay.
gropes for my blouse. I do not shriek. The sadhu
Three months pass. Then another.
arranges his robe. The lamps hiss and sputter out.
108

When we come out of the temple, my mother

says, Did you feel something weird in there?
My mother has no patience with ghosts,
prophetic dreams, holy men, and cults.
No, I lie. Nothing.
But she knows that shes lost me. She knows that
in days I shall be leaving.
Kusums put her house up for de. She wants to
live in an ashram in Hardwar. Moving to Hardwar
was her swamis idea. Her swami runs two ashrams,
the one in Hardwar and another here in Toronto.
Dont run away, I tell her.
Im not running away,` she says. Im pursuing
inner peace. You think you or that Ranganathan
fellow are better off? Pams left for California. She
wants to do some modeling, she says. She says when
she comes into her share of the insurance money
shell open a yoga-cum-aerobics studio in
Hollywood. She sends me postcards so naughty I
darent leave them on the coffee table. Her mother
has withdrawn from her and the world.
The rest of us dont lose touch, thats the point.
Talk is all we have, says Dr. Ranganathan, who has
also resisted his relatives and returned to Montreal
and to his job, alone. He says, whom better to talk
with than other relatives? Weve been melted down
and recast as a new tribe.
He calls me twice a week from Montreal. Every
Wednesday night and every Saturday afternoon. He
is changing jobs, going to Ottawa. But Ottawa is over
a hundred miles away, and he is forced to drive two
hundred and twenty miles a day. He cant bring
himself to sell his house. The house is a temple, he
says; the king-sized bed in the master bedroom is a
shrine. He sleeps on a folding cot. A devotee.

She asks me to help with families she cant reach

at all. An elderly couple in Agincourt whose sons
were killed just weeks after they had brought their
parents over from a village in Punjab. From their
names, I know they are Sikh. Judith Templeton and
a translator have visited them twice with offers of
money for air fare to Ireland, with bank forms,
power-of- attorney forms, but they have refused to
sign, or to leave their tiny apartment. Their sons
money is frozen in the bank. Their sons investment
apartments have been trashed by tenants, the
furnishings sold off. The parents fear that anything
they sign or any money they receive will end the
companys or the countrys obligations to them. They
fear they are selling their sons for two airline tickets
to a place theyve never seen.
The high-rise apartment is a tower of Indians and
West Indians, with a sprinkling of Orientals. The
nearest bus stop kiosk is lined with women in saris.
Boys practice cricket in the parking lot. Inside the
building, even I wince a bit from the ferocity of
onion fumes, the distinctive and immediate
lndianness of frying ghee, but Judith Templeton
maintains a steady flow of information. These poor
old people are in imminent danger of losing their
place and all their services.
I say to her, They are Sikh. They will not open up
to a Hindu woman. And what I want to add is, as
much as I try not to, I stiffen now at the sight of
beards and turbans. I remember a time when we all
trusted each other in this new country, it was only
the new country we worried about.
The two rooms are dark and stuffy. The lights are
off, and an oil lamp sputters on the coffee table. The
bent old lady has let us in, and her husband is
wrapping a white turban over his oiled, hip-length
hair. She immediately goes to the kitchen, and I hear
the most familiar sound of an Indian home, tap
water hitting and filling a teapot.
They have not paid their utility bills, out of fear
and the inability to write a check. The telephone is
gone; electricity and gas and water are soon to
follow. They have told Judith their sons will provide.
They are good boys, and they have always earned
and looked after their parents.
We converse a bit in Hindi. They do not ask about
the crash and I wonder if I should bring it up. If they
think I am here merely as a translator, then they may
feel insulted. There are thousands of Punjabispeakers, Sikhs, in Toronto to do a better job. And so
I say to the old lady, I too have lost my sons, and my
husband, in the crash.
Her eyes immediately fill with tears. The man
mutters a few words which sound like a blessing.
God provides and God takes away, he says.
I want to say, but only men destroy and give back
nothing. My boys and my husband are not coming
back, I say. We have to understand that.
Now the old woman responds. But who is to say?
Man alone does not decide these things. To this her
husband adds his agreement.
Judith asks about the bank papers, the release
forms. With a stroke of the pen, they will have a
provincial trustee to pay their bills, invest their
money, send them a monthly pension.
Do you know this wotnan? I ask them.

***
There are still some hysterical relatives. Judith
Templetons list of those needing help and those
whove accepted is in nearly perfect balance.
Acceptance means you speak of your family in the
past tense and you make active plans for moving
ahead with your life. There are courses at Seneca and
Ryerson we could be taking. Her gleaming leather
briefcase is full of college catalogues and lists of
cultural societies that need our help. She has done
impressive work, I tell her.
In the textbooks on grief management, she
replies I am her confidante, I realize, one of the
few whose grief has not sprung bizarre obsessions
there are stages to pass through: rejection,
depression, acceptance, reconstruction. She has
compiled a chart and finds that six months after the
tragedy, none of us still reject reality, but only a
handful are reconstructing. Depressed Acceptance
is the plateau weve reached. Remarriage is a major
step in reconstruction (though shes a little
surprised, even shocked, over how quickly some of
the men have taken on new families). Selling ones
house and changing jobs and cities is healthy.
How do I tell Judith Templeton that my family
surrounds me, and that like creatures in epics,
theyve changed shapes? She sees me as calm and
accepting but worries that I have no job, no career.
My closest friends are worse off than I. I cannot tell
her my days, even my nights, are thrilling.
109

The man raises his hand from the table, turns it

over and seems to regard each finger separately
before he answers. This young lady is always
coming here, we make tea for her and she leaves
papers for us to sign. His eyes scan a pile of papers
in the corner of the room. Soon we will be out of
tea, then will she go away?
The old lady adds, I have asked my neighbors
and no one else gets angrezi visitors. What have we
done?
Its her job, I try to explain. The government is
worried. Soon you will have no place to stay, no
lights, no gas, no water.
Government will get its money. Tell her not to
worry, we are honorable people.
I try to explain the government wishes to give
money, not take. He raises his hand. Let them
take, he says. We are accustomed to that. That is
no problem.
We are strong people, says the wife. Tell her
that.
Who needs all this machinery? demands the
husband. It is unhealthy, the bright tights, the cold
air on a hot day, the cold food, the four gas rings.
God will provide, not government.
When our boys return, the mother says. Her
husband sucks his teeth. Enough talk, he says.
Judith breaks in. Have you convinced them?
The snaps on her cordovan briefcase go off like
firecrackers in that quiet apartment. She lays the
sheaf of legal papers on the coffee table. If they
cant write their names, an X will do Ive told them
that.
Now the old lady has shuffled to the kitchen and
soon emerges with a pot of tea and two cups. I think
my Madder will go first on a jot) like this, Judith
says to me, smiling. If only there was some way of
reaching them. Please thank her for the tea. Tell her
shes very kind.
I nod in Judiths direction and tell them in Hindi,
She thanks you for the tea. She thinks you are being
very hospitable but she doesnt have the slightest
idea what it meas.
I want to say, humor her. I want to say, my boys
and my husband are with me too, more than ever. I
look in the old mans eyes and I can read his
stubborn, peasants message: I have protected this
woman as best I can. She is the only person I have
left Give to me or take from me what you will, but l
will not sign for it. I will not pretend that I accept.
In the car Judith says, You see what Im up
against? Im sure theyre lovely people, but their
stubbornness and ignorance are driving me crazy.
They think signing a paper is signing their sons
death warrants, dont they?
I am looking out the window. I want to say, in
our culture, it is a parents duty to hope.
Now, Shaila, this next woman is a real mess. She
cries day and night, and she refuses all medical help.
We may have to
Let me out at the subway, I say.
I beg your pardon? I can feet those t)luc eyes
staring at me.
It would not be like her to disobey. She merely
disapproves, and stows at a corner to let me out. Her
voice is plaintive. Is there anything I said? Anything
I did?

I could answer her suddenly in a dozen ways, but

I choose not to. Shaila? Lets talk about it, I hear,
then slam the door.
A wife and mother begins her new life in a new
country, and that life is cut short. Yet her husband
tells her: Complete what we have started. We, who
stayed out of politics and came halfway around the
world to avoid religious and political feuding have
been the first in the New World to die from it. I no
longer know what we started, nor how to complete it.
I write letters to the editors of local papers and to
members of Parliament. Now at least they admit it
was a bomb. One MP answers back, with sympathy,
but with a challenge. You want to make a difference?
Work on a campaign. Work on mine. Politicize the
Indian voter.
My husbands old lawyer helps me set up a trust.
Vikram was a saver and a careful investor. He had
saved the boys boarding school and college fees. I
sell the pink house at four times what we paid for it
and take a small apartment downtown. I am looking
for a charity to support.
We are deep in the Toronto winter, gray skies, icy
pavements. I stay indoors, watching television. I
have tried to assess my situation, how best to live my
life, to complete what we began so many years ago.
Kusum has written me from Hardwar that her life is
now serene. She has seen Satish and has heard her
daughter sing again. Kusum was on a pilgrimage,
passing through a village when she heard a young
girls voice, singing one of her daughters favorite
bhajans. She followed the music through the squalor
of a Himalayan village, to a hut where a young girl,
an exact replica of her daughter, was fanning coals
under the kitchen fire. When she appeared, the girl
cried out, Ma! and ran away. What did I think of
that?
I think I can only envy her.
Pam didnt make it to California, but writes me
from Vancouver. She works in a department store,
giving make-up hints to Indian and Oriental girls.
Dr. Ranganathan has given up his commute, given
up his house and job, and accepted an academic
position in Texas where no one knows his story and
he has vowed not to tell it. He calls me now once a
week.
I wait, I listen, and I pray, but Vikram has not
returned to me. The voices and the shapes and the
nights filled with visions ended abruptly several
weeks ago.
I take it as a sign.
One rare, beautiful, sunny day last week,
returning from a small errand on Yonge Street, I was
walking through the park from the subway to my
apartment. I live equidistant from the Ontario
Houses of Parliament and the university of Toronto.
The day was not cold, but something in the bare
trees caught my attention. I looked up from the
gravel, into the branches and the clear blue sky
beyond. I thought I heard the rustling of larger
forms, and I waited a moment for voices. Nothing.
What? I asked.
Then as I stood in the path looking north to
Queens Park and west to the university, I heard the
voices of my family one last time. Your time has
come, they said. Go, be brave.
110

I do not know where this voyage I have begun will

end. I do not know which direction I will take. I
dropped the package on a park bench and started
walking.

Two ways
to

belong
in America

IOWA CITY This is a tale of two sisters from

Calcutta, Mira and Bharati, who have lived in the
United States for some 35 years, but who find
themselves on different sides in the current debate
over the status of immigrants.
I am an American citizen and she is not. I am moved
that thousands of long-term residents are finally
taking the oath of citizenship. She is not.
Mira arrived in Detroit in 1960 to study child
psychology and pre-school education. I followed her
a year later to study creative writing at the
University of Iowa. When we left India, we were
almost identical in appearance and attitude. We
dressed alike, in saris; we expressed identical views
on politics, social issues, love and marriage in the
same Calcutta convent-school accent. We would
endure our two years in America, secure our degrees,
then return to India to marry the grooms of our
fathers choosing.
Instead, Mira married an Indian student in 1962
who was getting his business administration degree
at Wayne State University. They soon acquired the
labor certifications necessary for the green card of
hassle-free residence and employment.
Mira still lives in Detroit, works in the Southfield,
Mich., school system, and has become nationally
recognized for her contributions in the fields of preschool education and parent-teacher relationships.
After 36 years as a legal immigrant in this country,
she clings passionately to her Indian citizenship and
hopes to go home to India when she retires.
In Iowa City in 1963, I married a fellow student, an
American of Canadian parentage. Because of the
accident of his North Dakota birth, I bypassed laborcertification requirements and the race-related
quota system that favored the applicants country

of origin over his or her merit. I was prepared for

(and even welcomed) the emotional strain that came
with marrying outside my ethnic community. In 33
years of marriage, we have lived in every part of
North America. By choosing a husband who was not
my fathers selection, I was opting for fluidity, selfinvention, blue jeans and T-shirts, and renouncing
3,000 years (at least) of caste-observant, pure
culture marriage in the Mukherjee family. My books
have often been read as unapologetic (and in some
quarters overenthusiastic) texts for cultural and
psychological mongrelization. Its a word I
celebrate.
Mira and I have stayed sisterly close by phone. In
our regular Sunday morning conversations, we are
unguardedly affectionate. I am her only blood
relative on this continent. We expect to see each
other through the looming crises of aging and ill
health without being asked. Long before Vice
President Gores Citizenship U.S.A. drive, wed had
our polite arguments over the ethics of retaining an
overseas citizenship while expecting the permanent
protection and economic benefits that come with
living and working in America.
Like well-raised sisters, we never said what was
really on our minds, but we probably pitied one
another. She, for the lack of structure in my life, the
erasure of Indianness, the absence of an unvarying
daily core. I, for the narrowness of her perspective,
her uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the
superficial pop culture of this society. But, now, with
the scapegoating of aliens (documented or illegal)
on the increase, and the targeting of long-term legal
immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new selfconsciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to
maintain the same polite discretion. We were always
unacknowledged adversaries, and we are now, more
than ever, sisters.
I feel used, Mira raged on the phone the other
night. I feel manipulated and discarded. This is
such an unfair way to treat a person who was invited
to stay and work here because of her talent. My
employer went to the I.N.S. and petitioned for the
labor certification. For over 30 years, Ive invested
my creativity and professional skills into the
improvement of this countrys pre-school system.
Ive obeyed all the rules, Ive paid my taxes, I love my
work, I love my students, I love the friends Ive
made. How dare America now change its rules in
midstream? If America wants to make new rules
curtailing benefits of legal immigrants, they should
apply only to immigrants who arrive after those rules
are already in place. To my ears, it sounded like the
description of a long-enduring, comfortable yet
loveless marriage, without risk or recklessness. Have
we the right to demand, and to expect, that we be
loved? (That, to me, is the subtext of the arguments
by immigration advocates.) My sister is an
expatriate, professionally generous and creative,
socially courteous and gracious, and thats as far as
her Americanization can go. She is here to maintain
an identity, not to transform it.
111

I asked her if she would follow the example of others

who have decided to become citizens because of the
anti-immigration bills in Congress. And here, she
surprised me. If America wants to play the
manipulative game, Ill play it too, she snapped. Ill
become a U.S. citizen for now, then change back to
Indian when Im ready to go home. I feel some kind
of irrational attachment to India that I dont to
America. Until all this hysteria against legal
immigrants, I was totally happy. Having my green
card meant I could visit any place in the world I
wanted to and then come back to a job thats
satisfying and that I do very well.

(September 22, 1996: New York Times)

American
Dreamer

In one family, from two sisters alike as peas in a pod,

there could not be a wider divergence of immigrant
experience. America spoke to me I married it I
embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrat to
immigrant nobody, surrendering those thousands of
years of pure culture, the saris, the delightfully
accented English. She retained them all. Which of us
is the freak?

COMMENTARY:
I am an American, not an
Asian-American.
My
rejection of hyphenation
has been called race treachery, but it is really a
demand that America deliver the promises of its
dream to all its citizens equally.

Miras voice, I realize, is the voice not just of the

immigrant South Asian community but of an
immigrant community of the millions who have
stayed rooted in one job, one city, one house, one
ancestral culture, one cuisine, for the entirety of
their productive years. She speaks for greater
numbers than I possibly can. Only the fluency of her
English and the anger, rather than fear, born of
confidence from her education, differentiate her
from the seamstresses, the domestics, the
technicians, the shop owners, the millions of hardworking but effectively silenced documented
immigrants as well as their less fortunate illegal
brothers and sisters.
Nearly 20 years ago, when I was living in my
husbands ancestral homeland of Canada, I was
always well-employed but never allowed to feel part
of the local Quebec or larger Canadian society. Then,
through a Green Paper that invited a national
referendum on the unwanted side effects of
nontraditional immigration, the Government
officially turned against its immigrant communities,
particularly those from South Asia.
I felt then the same sense of betrayal that Mira feels
now.
I will never forget the pain of that sudden turning,
and the casual racist outbursts the Green Paper
elicited. That sense of betrayal had its desired effect
and drove me, and thousands like me, from the
country.
Mira and I differ, however, in the ways in which we
hope to interact with the country that we have
chosen to live in. She is happier to live in America as
expatriate Indian than as an immigrant American. I
need to feel like a part of the community I have
adopted (as I tried to feel in Canada as well). I need
to put roots down, to vote and make the difference
that I can. The price that the immigrant willingly
pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of selftransformation.

By Bharati Mukherjee
In Mother Jones magazine, Jan./Feb. 1997
The United States exists as a sovereign nation.
America, in contrast, exists as a myth of democracy
and equal opportunity to live by, or as an ideal goal
to reach.
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that,
unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S.
government that I merited citizenship. What I didnt
have to disclose was that I desired America, which
to me is the stage for the drama of selftransformation.
I was born in Calcutta and first came to the
United States to Iowa City, to be precise on a
summer evening in 1961. I flew into a small airport
surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to
carry out the two commands my father had written
out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two
years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers
Workshop, then come back home and marry the
bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and
class.
In traditional Hindu families like ours, men
provided and women were provided for. My father
was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The
neighborhood Id grown up in was homogeneously
Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didnt
expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my
father by setting my own goals and taking charge of
my future.
When I landed in Iowa 35 years ago, I found
myself in a society in which almost everyone was
Christian, white, and moderately well-off. In the
womens dormitory I lived in my first year, apart
from six international graduate students (all of us
were from Asia and considered exotic), the only
non-Christian was Jewish, and the only nonwhite an
African-American from Georgia. I didnt anticipate
then, that over the next 35 years, the Iowa
population would become so diverse that it would

112

have 6,931 children from non-English-speaking

homes registered as students in its schools, nor that
Iowans would be in the grip of a cultural crisis in
which resentment against immigrants, particularly
refugees from Vietnam, Sudan, and Bosnia, as well
as unskilled Spanish-speaking workers, would
become politicized enough to cause the Immigration
and Naturalization Service to open an enforcement
office in Cedar Rapids in October for the tracking
and deporting of undocumented aliens.

The years in Canada were particularly harsh.

Canada is a country that officially, and proudly,
resists cultural fusion. For all its rhetoric about a
cultural mosaic, Canada refuses to renovate its
national self-image to include its changing
complexion. It is a New World country with Old
World concepts of a fixed, exclusivist national
identity. Canadian official rhetoric designated me as
one of the visible minority who, even though I
spoke the Canadian languages of English and
French, was straining the absorptive capacity of
In Calcutta in the 50s, I heard no talk of identity Canada. Canadians of color were routinely treated as
crisis communal or individual. The concept itself not real Canadians. One example: In 1985 a
of a person not knowing who he or she is was terrorist bomb, planted in an Air-India jet on
unimaginable in our hierarchical, classification- Canadian soil, blew up after leaving Montreal, killing
obsessed society. Ones identity was fixed, derived 329 passengers, most of whom were Canadians of
from religion, caste, patrimony, and mother tongue. Indian origin. The prime minister of Canada at the
A Hindu Indians last name announced his or her time, Brian Mulroney, phoned the prime minister of
forefathers caste and place of origin. A Mukherjee India to offer Canadas condolences for Indias loss.
could only be a Brahmin from Bengal. Hindu
Those years of race-related harassments in
tradition
forbade
intercaste,
interlanguage, Canada politicized me and deepened my love of the
interethnic marriages. Bengali tradition even ideals embedded in the American Bill of Rights. I
discouraged emigration: To remove oneself from dont forget that the architects of the Constitution
Bengal was to dilute true culture.
and the Bill of Rights were white males and
Until the age of 8, I lived in a house crowded with slaveholders. But through their declaration, they
40 or 50 relatives. My identity was viscerally provided us with the enthusiasm for human rights,
connected with ancestral soil and genealogy. I was and the initial framework from which other
who I was because I was Dr. Sudhir Lal Mukherjees empowerments could be conceived and enfranchised
daughter, because I was a Hindu Brahmin, because I communities expanded.
was Bengali-speaking, and because my desh the
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen and I take my
Bengali word for homeland was an East Bengal American citizenship very seriously. I am not an
village called Faridpur.
economic refugee, nor am I a seeker of political
The University of Iowa classroom was my first asylum. I am a voluntary immigrant. I became a
experience of coeducation. And after not too long, I citizen by choice, not by simple accident of birth.
fell in love with a fellow student named Clark Blaise,
Yet these days, questions such as who is an
an American of Canadian origin, and impulsively American and what is American culture are being
married him during a lunch break in a lawyers office posed with belligerence, and being answered with
above a coffee shop.
violence. Scapegoating of immigrants has once again
That act cut me off forever from the rules and become the politicians easy remedy for all that ails
ways of upper-middle-class life in Bengal, and the nation. Hate speeches fill auditoriums for
hurled me into a New World life of scary demagogues willing to profit from stirring up racial
improvisations and heady explorations. Until my animosity. An April Gallup poll indicated that half of
lunch-break wedding, I had seen myself as an Indian Americans would like to bar almost all legal
foreign student who intended to return to India to immigration for the next five years.
live. The five-minute ceremony in the lawyers office
The United States, like every sovereign nation,
suddenly changed me into a transient with has a right to formulate its immigration policies. But
conflicting loyalties to two very different cultures.
in this decade of continual, large-scale diasporas, it
The first 10 years into marriage, years spent is imperative that we come to some agreement about
mostly in my husbands native Canada, I thought of who we are, and what our goals are for the nation,
myself as an expatriate Bengali permanently now that our community includes people of many
stranded in North America because of destiny or races, ethnicities, languages, and religions.
desire. My first novel, The Tigers Daughter,
The debate about American culture and
embodies the loneliness I felt but could not American identity has to date been monopolized
acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no largely by Eurocentrists and ethnocentrists whose
mans land between the country of my past and the rhetoric has been flamboyantly divisive, pitting a
continent of my present. Shaped by memory, phantom us against a demonized them.
textured with nostalgia for a class and culture I had
All countries view themselves by their ideals.
abandoned, this novel quite naturally became an Indians idealize the cultural continuum, the inherent
expression of the expatriate consciousness.
value system of India, and are properly incensed
It took me a decade of painful introspection to when foreigners see nothing but poverty,
put nostalgia in perspective and to make the intolerance, strife, and injustice. Americans see
transition from expatriate to immigrant. After a 14- themselves as the embodiments of liberty, openness,
year stay in Canada, I forced my husband and our and individualism, even as the world judges them for
two sons to relocate to the United States. But the drugs, crime, violence, bigotry, militarism, and
transition from foreign student to U.S. citizen, from homelessness. I was in Singapore in 1994 when the
detached onlooker to committed immigrant, has not American teenager Michael Fay was sentenced to
been easy.
caning for having spraypainted some cars. While I
113

saw Fays actions as those of an individual, and his

sentence as too harsh, the overwhelming local
sentiment was that vandalism was an American
crime, and that flogging Fay would deter Singapore
youths from becoming Americanized.
Conversely, in 1994, in Tavares, Florida, the Lake
County School Board announced its policy (since
overturned) requiring middle school teachers to
instruct their students that American culture, by
which the board meant European-American culture,
is inherently superior to other foreign or historic
cultures. The policys misguided implication was
that culture in the United States has not been
affected by the American Indian, African-American,
Latin-American, and Asian-American segments of
the population. The sinister implication was that our
national identity is so fragile that it can absorb
diverse and immigrant cultures only by
recontextualizing them as deficient.
Our nation is unique in human history in that the
founding idea of America was in opposition to the
tenet that a nation is a collection of like-looking,
like-speaking, like-worshiping people. The primary
criterion for nationhood in Europe is homogeneity of
culture, race, and religion which has contributed
to blood-soaked balkanization in the former
Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union.
Americas pioneering European ancestors gave
up the easy homogeneity of their native countries for
a new version of utopia. Now, in the 1990s, we have
the exciting chance to follow that tradition and assist
in the making of a new American culture that differs
from both the enforced assimilation of a melting
pot and the Canadian model of a multicultural
mosaic.
The multicultural mosaic implies a contiguity of
fixed, self-sufficient, utterly distinct cultures.
Multiculturalism, as it has been practiced in the
United States in the past 10 years, implies the
existence of a central culture, ringed by peripheral
cultures. The fallout of official multiculturalism is
the establishment of one culture as the norm and the
rest as aberrations. At the same time, the
multiculturalist emphasis on race- and ethnicitybased group identity leads to a lack of respect for
individual differences within each group, and to
vilification of those individuals who place the good
of the nation above the interests of their particular
racial or ethnic communities.
We must be alert to the dangers of an us vs.
them mentality. In California, this mentality is
manifesting itself as increased violence between
minority, ethnic communities. The attack on
Korean-American merchants in South Central Los
Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King beating trial
is only one recent example of the tragic side effects
of this mentality. On the national level, the
politicization of ethnic identities has encouraged the
scapegoating of legal immigrants, who are blamed
for economic and social problems brought about by
flawed domestic and foreign policies.
We need to discourage the retention of cultural
memory if the aim of that retention is cultural
balkanization. We must think of American culture
and nationhood as a constantly re-forming,
transmogrifying we.

In this age of diasporas, ones biological identity

may not be ones only identity. Erosions and
accretions come with the act of emigration. The
experience of cutting myself off from a biological
homeland and settling in an adopted homeland that
is not always welcoming to its dark-complexioned
citizens has tested me as a person, and made me the
writer I am today.
I choose to describe myself on my own terms, as
an American, rather than as an Asian-American.
Why is it that hyphenation is imposed only on
nonwhite Americans? Rejecting hyphenation is my
refusal to categorize the cultural landscape into a
center and its peripheries; it is to demand that the
American nation deliver the promises of its dream
and its Constitution to all its citizens equally.
My rejection of hyphenation has been
misrepresented as race treachery by some Indiaborn academics on U.S. campuses who have
appointed themselves guardians of the purity of
ethnic cultures. Many of them, though they reside
permanently in the United States and participate in
its economy, consistently denounce American ideals
and institutions. They direct their rage at me
because, by becoming a U.S. citizen and exercising
my voting rights, I have invested in the present and
not the past; because I have committed myself to
help shape the future of my adopted homeland; and
because
I
celebrate
racial
and
cultural
mongrelization.
What excites me is that as a nation we have not
only the chance to retain those values we treasure
from our original cultures but also the chance to
acknowledge that the outer forms of those values are
likely to change. Among Indian immigrants, I see a
great deal of guilt about the inability to hang on to
what they commonly term pure culture. Parents
express rage or despair at their U.S.-born childrens
forgetting of, or indifference to, some aspects of
Indian culture. Of those parents I would ask: What is
it we have lost if our children are acculturating into
the culture in which we are living? Is it so terrible
that our children are discovering or are inventing
homelands for themselves?
Some
first-generation
Indo-Americans,
embittered by racism and by unofficial glass
ceilings, construct a phantom identity, moreIndian-than-Indians-in-India, as a defense against
marginalization. I ask: Why dont you get actively
involved in fighting discrimination? Make your voice
heard. Choose the forum most appropriate for you. If
you are a citizen, let your vote count. Reinvest your
energy and resources into revitalizing your citys
disadvantaged residents and neighborhoods. Know
your constitutional rights, and when they are
violated, use the agencies of redress the Constitution
makes available to you. Expect change, and when it
comes, deal with it!
As a writer, my literary agenda begins by
acknowledging that America has transformed me. It
does not end until I show that I (along with the
hundreds of thousands of immigrants like me) am
minute by minute transforming America. The
transformation is a two-way process: It affects both
the individual and the national-cultural identity.
Others who write stories of migration often talk
of arrival at a new place as a loss, the loss of
114

communal memory and the erosion of an original

culture. I want to talk of arrival as gain.
Bharati Mukherjees books include The Middleman
and Other Stories (which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award in 1988), Jasmine, and The
Holder of the World. This essay is adapted from
Race: An Anthology in the First Person, edited by
Bart Schneider (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1997).
Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise, wrote
about Salman Rushdies travails for Mother Jones
shortly after he was forced into hiding in 1989.

from the University of Baroda in 1961, she came to

the United States of America, where she took
advantage of a scholarship from the University of
Iowa. She planned to study there to earn her
Masters of Fine Arts before returning to India to
marry a bridegroom of her fathers choosing in her
class and caste. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative
Writing in 1963 and her Ph.D. in English and
Comparative Literature in 1969.
While attending the university, she met a Canadian
student from Harvard. She impulsively married
Clark Blaise, a Canadian writer, in a lawyers office
above a coffee shop after only two weeks of
courtship. She received her M.F.A. that same year,
and then she went on to earn her Ph.D. in English
and comparative literature from the University of
Iowa in 1969.

Mukherjee emigrated to Canada with her husband

and became a naturalized citizen in 1972. Her 14
years there were some of the most trying of her life,
as she found herself discriminated against and
treated, as she says, as a member of the visible
minority. She has spoken in many interviews of her
difficult life in Canada, a country that she sees as
hostile to its immigrants and one that opposes the
concept of cultural assimilation. Although those
years were challenging, Mukherjee was able to write
her first two novels, The Tigers Daughter (1971) and
Wife (1975) while working up to professorial status
at McGill University in Montreal. During those
years, she also collected many of the sentiments
found in her first collection of short stories,
Darkness (1985), a collection that in many stories
reflects her mood of cultural separation while living
in Canada.
Biography
Born in Calcutta, India, on July 27, 1940, into an
upper middle-class Hindu Brahmin family
surrounded by servants and bodyguards: IndianAmerican novelist Bharati Mukherjee. The second
of three daughters of Sudhir Lal, a chemist, and Bina
(Banerjee) Mukherjee, she lived with nearly 50
relatives until the age of eight, when she discovered
the beauty and power of Russian novelists such as
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. From an extraordinarily
close-knit and intelligent family, Mukherjee and her
sisters were always given ample academic
opportunities and have all pursued academic
endeavors in their careers. In 1947, Mukherjees
father accepted a job in England, and he brought his
family to live there until 1951, providing Mukherjee
an opportunity to develop her English language
skills.
One night, as her father entertained a group of
American scholars over dinner, he asked, I want
[my] daughter to be a writer, where do I send her?
They told him to send her to the Iowa Writers
Workshop at the University of Iowa. So, after being
graduated with a B.A from the University of Calcutta
and an M.A. in English and Ancient Indian Culture

Tired of her struggle to fit into Canadian life,

Mukherjee and her family moved to the United
States in 1980, where she was sworn in as a
permanent U.S. resident. In 1986, she was awarded
a National Endowment for the Arts grant. After
holding several posts at various colleges and
universities, she eventually settled in 1989 at the
University of California-Berkeley. Because of the
distinctly different experiences she has had
throughout life, she has been described as a writer
who has lived through several phases of life. First, as
a colonial, then as a National subject in India. She
then led a life of exile as a post-colonial Indian in
Canada. Finally, she shifted into a celebratory mode
as an immigrant, then citizen, in the United States.
She now fuses her several lives and backgrounds
together with the intention of creating new
immigrant literature.
Known for her playful and well developed language,
Mukherjee rejects the concept of minimalism, which,
she says, is designed to keep anyone out with too
much story to tell. Instead, she considers her work
a celebration of her emotions and herself a writer of

115

the Indian diaspora who cherishes the melting pot

of America. Her main theme throughout her writing
discusses the condition of Asian immigrants in
North America, with particular attention to the
changes taking place in South Asian women in a new
world.

While the characters in all her works are aware of

the brutalities and violence that surround them and
are often victimized by various forms of social
oppression, she generally draws them as survivors.
Mukherjee has been praised for her understated
prose style and her ironic plot developments and
witty observations. As a writer, she has a sly eye
with which to view the world, and her characters
share that quality. Although she is often racially
categorized by her thematic focus and cultural
origin, she has often said that she strongly opposes
the use of hyphenation when discussing her origin,
in order to avoid otherization and the selfimposed
marginalization
that
comes
with
hyphenation. Rather, she prefers to refer to herself
as an American of Bengali-Indian origin.
Most recently, Mukherjee is the author of The
Holder of the World (1993) and Desirable
Daughters (2002).

Major Themes
Mukherjees works focus on the phenomenon of
migration, the status of new immigrants, and the
feeling of alienation often experienced by
expatriates as well as on Indian women and their
struggle (Alam 7). Her own struggle with identity
first as an exile from India, then an Indian expatriate
in Canada, and finally as a immigrant in the United
States has lead to her current contentment of being
an immigrant in a country of immigrants (Alam 10).
Mukherjees works correspond with biographer
Fakrul Alams catagorization of Mukherjees life into
three phases. Her earlier works, such as the The
Tigers Daughter and parts of Days and Nights in
Calcutta, are her attempts to find her identity in her
Indian heritage.

The second phase of her writing, according to Alam,

encompasses works such as Wife, the short stories in
Darkness, an essay entitled An Invisible Woman,
and The Sorrow and the Terror, a joint effort with
her husband. These works originate in Mukherjees
own experience of racism in Canada, where despite
being a tenured professor, she felt humiliated and on
the edge of being a housebound, fearful, affrieved,
obsessive, and unforgiving queen of bitterness
(Mukherjee, qtd. in Alam 10).
After moving back to the United States, she wrote
about her personal experiences. One of her short
stories entitled Isolated Incidents explores the
biased Canadian view towards immigrants that she
encountered, as well as how government agencies
handled assults on particular races. Another short
story titled The Tenant continues to reflect on her
focus on immigrant Indian women and their
mistreatment. The story is about a divorced Indian
woman studying in the States and her experiences
with interracial relationships. One quotation from
the story hints at Mukherjees views of Indian men
as being too preoccupied to truly care for their wives
and children: All Indian men are wife beaters,
Maya [the narrator] says. She means it and doesnt
mean it.
In Wife, Mukherjee writes about a woman named
Dimple who has been surpressed by such men and
attempts to be the ideal Bengali wife, but out of fear
and personal instability, she murders her husband
and eventually commits suicide. The stories in
Darkness further endeavor to tell similar stories of
immigrants and women.
In her third phase, Mukherjee is described as having
accepted being an immigrant, living in a continent
of immigrants (M. qtd in Alam 9). She describes
herself as American and not the hyphenated IndianAmerican title:
I maintain that I am an American writer of
Indian origin, not because Im ashamed of
my past, not because Im betraying or
distorting my past, but because my whole
adult life has been lived here, and I write
about the people who are immigrants going
through the process of making a home
here... I write in the tradition of immigrant
experience rather than nostalgia and
expatriation. That is very important. I am
saying that the luxury of being a U.S. citizen
for me is that can define myself in terms of
things like my politics, my sexual orientation
or my education. My affiliation with readers
should be on the basis of what they want to
read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my
race. (Mukherjee qtd. in Basbanes)

The Tigers Daughter is a story about a young girl

named Tara who ventures back to India after many
years of being away only to return to poverty and
turmoil. This story parallels Mukherjees own
venture back to India with Clark Blaise in 1973 when
she was deeply affected by the chaos and poverty of
Indian and mistreatment of women in the name of
tradition, What is unforgivable is the lives that have
been sacrificed to notions of propriety and
obedience (Days and Nights... 217). Her husband,
however, became very intrigued by the magic of the Mukherjee continues writing about the immigrant
myth and culture that surrounded every part of experience in most of the stories in The Middle Man
Bengal.; These differences of opinion, her shock and and Other Stories, a collection of short stories which
his awe, are seen in one of their joint publications, won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Best Fiction, Jasmine, and essays. These stories
Days and Nights in Calcutta.
116

explore the meeting of East and West through

immigrant experiences in the U.S. and Canada along
with further describing the idea of the great melting
pot of culture in the United States.

The Holder of the World, Knopf: New York City,

1993.
Leave It to Me, A.A. Knopf: New York City, 1997.

Holders of the Word:

An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee

Jasmine develops this idea of the mixing of the East

and West with a story telling of a young Hindu
woman who leaves India for the U.S. after her
husbands murder, only to be raped and eventually
returned to the position of a caregiver through a
series of jobs (Alam 100). The unity between the
First and Third worlds is shown to be in the
treatment of women as subordinate in both
countries.

By Tina Chen and S.X. Goudie

(University of California, Berkeley)

Her latest works include The Holder of the World,

published in 1993, and Leave It to Me, published in
1997. The Holder of the World is a beautifully
written story about Hannah Easton, a woman born
in Massachusetts who travels to India. She becomes
involved with a few Indian lovers and eventually a
king who gives her a diamond know as the
Emperors Tear. (Alam 120). The story is told
through the detective searching for the diamond and
Hannahs viewpoint. Mukherjees focus continues to
be on immigrant women and their freedom from
relationships to become individuals. She also uses
the female characters to explore the spatiotemporal
(Massachusetts to India) connection between
different cultures. In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee tells
the story of a young woman sociopath named Debby
DiMartino, who seeks revenge on parents who
abandoned her. The story reveals her ungrateful
interaction with kind adoptive parents and a
vengeful search for her real parents (described as a
murderer and a flowerchild). The novel also looks at
the conflict between Eastern and Western worlds
and at mother-daughter relationships through the
political and emotional topics by the main characer
in her quest for revenge. Candia McWilliam of The
London Review of Books describes Mukherjee
appropriately as A writer both tough and
voluptuous in her works.

Copyright (c) 1997 by Tina Chen and S.X. Goudie, all

rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in
accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.
copyright law, and it may be archived and
redistributed in electronic form, provided that the
editors are notified and no fee is charged for access.
Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this
text on other terms, in any medium, requires the
consent of the author and the notification of the
editors.

Works
The Tigers Daughter, Houghton, 1972.
Wife, Houghton, 1975.
Kautilyas Concept of Diplomacy: A New
Interpretation, Minerva, 1976.
(With Blaise) Days and Nights in Calcutta
(nonfiction), Doubleday: Garden City, New York,
1977.
An Invisible Woman, McClelland & Stewart, 1981.
Darkness, Penguin, 1985.
(With Blaise) The Sorrow and the Terror: The
Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, Viking,
1987.
The Middleman and Other Stories, Grove, 1988.
Jasmine, Grove, 1989.
Political Culture and Leadership in India
(nonfiction), South Asia, 1991.
Regionalism in Indian Perspective (nonfiction),
South Asia, 1992.
117

1.

In her epilogue to Days and Nights in

Calcutta , Bharati Mukherjee proclaims the
spirit that motivates her writing: Even
more than other writers, I must learn to
astonish, to shock (299). Bharati
Mukherjee has indeed produced a body of
work that both sustains wonder and evokes
surprise. The author of four novels: The
Tigers Daughter , Wife , Jasmine , and The
Holder of the World ; two short-story
collections, Darkness and The Middleman
and Other Stories ; as well as The Sorrow
and the Terror and Days and Nights in
Calcutta , two works of non-fiction coauthored with her husband Clark Blaise,
Mukherjee has deliberately, sometimes
flamboyantly, fused her many impulses,
backgrounds, and selves to create a new
immigrant literature that embodies her
sense of what it means to be a woman writer
of Bengali-Indian origin who has lived in,
and been indelibly marked by, both Canada
and the United States. In the process, she
has broken boundaries and refused to limit
herself to easy categories. She sees herself as
a pioneerof new territories, experiences,
and literaturesand coextensive with her
mission to explore new worlds is her
intention to disturb what came before.
2. Though adamant about her desire not to be
classified as a postcolonial writer/critic,
Mukherjee nonetheless addresses a network
of issues of great importance to scholars and
writers less violently opposed to being
identified as postcolonial. In addition, her
writing has been the subject of significant
scholarly engagement in recent years: many
of the most recognized figures in
postcolonial studies have addressed, often
vociferously, the goals of Professor
Mukherjees critical and creative project.
Because of their concerns, seasoned and
aspiring scholars alike turn to her work to
engage a wide variety of critical perspectives
and theoretical approaches. Such scholarly

interest suggests that, whatever a critics

point of view, both Professor Mukherjee and
the postcolonial studies community are
vested in proliferating discussion on matters
involving race, class, gender, and nation in
national and transnational contexts. In fact,
despite
the
heretofore
adversarial
relationship between some postcolonial
scholars and Professor Mukherjee, one of
the virtues of this interview, we believe, is
that it points out significant areas of shared
concern between Professor Mukherjee and
her detractors, despite attempts by both
parties to disavow such mutual interest.
3. In interviewing Professor Mukherjee for
Jouvert: a journal of postcolonial studies ,
we utilized an interviewing strategy that
negotiated the intersections of her artistic
vision and the questions and concerns raised
by critics in response to it. Professor
Mukherjee, a writer who also prides herself
on being a scholar and a critic, responded
graciously to the challenges of such a
conversation. Conducted during the summer
of 1996, the interview addresses a
constellation of questions and issues on the
process of writing, reading, and interpreting
fiction. Even as critical sites of possible
alliance between Professor Mukherjee and
the postcolonial studies community dot the
surface of the interview, many of the
disagreements that exist between them are
cast into relief. Together, these locations
map the beginnings of a productive and
exciting literary cartography.
4. The interview opens with a statement
volunteered by Professor Mukherjee,
followed by five discrete sections. The first,
Vision and Voice, originates from
Mukherjees admission that the problem of
voice is the most exciting (Days and Nights
298) and explores her artistic agenda before
addressing what critics and scholars have
had to say about her deployment of this
aesthetic. The next section, The Anxiety of
Influence?,
fleshes
out
Mukherjees
relationships to other writers and asks her to
consider the multiple levels of engagement
between readers, writers, and critics. In the
third section of the interview, The Politics
of New Immigrant Writing, Mukherjee
discusses the ideological contours of the type
of writing she has engaged in. She comments
on several leading postcolonial scholars and
what she perceives to be their relationships
to her work. At times she draws explicit
boundaries between the goals and
orientation of postcolonial studies and her
own mission as a new immigrant writer. In
States of Violence, section IV, we talk
about the crucial space of violence in her
fiction, both on textual and metatextual
levels. Finally, in section V, Writing and
Technology, we examine the critical debate
surrounding Mukherjees most recent novel,
The Holder of the World. Appreciative of
Jouvert s investment in the intersections
118

between information technology and

scholarly practice, we ask a series of
questions about Mukherjees use of virtual
reality as a trope for dislocating and
transforming
literary,
cultural,
and
historical topographies of Mughal India and
colonial, 19th, and 20th-century United
States. Collectively, then, the five sections of
the interview respond to the multiple
demands of literary production and
interpretation. By providing additional
insight into Professor Mukherjees critical
and creative project while simultaneously
affording her a forum in which to critique
postcolonial scholars and critics who have
expressed interest in her work, we offer a
survey of territorial disputes that are all the
more provocative for being still unsettled.
5. M:
Postcolonial
studies
seems
an
inappropriate category in which to place my
works. I dont think of myself as a
postcolonial person stranded on the outer
shores of the collapsed British Empire. I
havent thought of myself as a postcolonial
since I finished co-authoring, with my
husband Clark Blaise, Days and Nights in
Calcutta. Writing my half of that book was
my way of thinking through who I was,
where I was, where Id rather be. If I had
chosen to return to India after writing that
book in 1977, or if, like Salman Rushdie, Id
spent my entire adult life in Britain instead
of in North America, I might have evolved as
a postcolonial whose creative imagination is
fueled primarily by the desire to create a
new mythology of Indian nationhood after
the Rajs brutalization of Indian culture. But
I didnt. I came to the U.S., initially as a
student, because in 1961 the University of
Iowa was the only place in the world offering
a degree in the area I wanted to study, and
because
American
universities
had
scholarships to offer me. When I first
arrived on campus, I thought of myself as a
Bengali rather than as an Indian. You were
who you were because of the language and
dialect you spoke, the location of the village
of your male ancestors, the family and
religion you were born into. I was a Bengali
and proud of it, which meant that I claimed
as heritage a culture distinct from that of a
Bihari or a Punjabi or a Gujarati or a Tamil.
Thats the way we were brought up in
Calcutta in the Fifties. We were encouraged
to set ourselves apart from people of other
Indian states. In Iowa, where I didnt run
into too many Bengalis, I began to see and
feel affinities with rather than hostilities
towards non-Bengali Indian students on
campus.
6. If you insist, on this beautiful May afternoon
in 1996, that I describe myself in terms of
ethno-nationality, Id say Im an American
writer of Bengali-Indian origin. In other
words, the writer/political activist in me is
more obsessed with addressing the issues of
minority discourse in the U.S. and Canada,

the two countries I have lived and worked in

over the last thirty odd years. The national
mythology that my imagination is driven to
create, through fiction, is that of the postVietnam United States. I experience,
simultaneously, the pioneers capacity to be
shocked and surprised by the new culture,
and the immigrants willingness to de-form
and re-form that culture. At this moment,
my Calcutta childhood and adolescence offer
me intriguing, incompletely-comprehended
revelations about my hometown, my family,
my place in that community: the kind of
revelations that fuel the desire to write an
autobiography rather than to mythologize an
Indian national identity.
I. Vision and Voice
1. 7. J: In A Four-Hundred Year Old Woman,
you state that your image of artistic
structure and excellence is the Mughal
miniature
painting
with
its
crazy
foreshortening of vanishing point, its
insistence
that
everything
happens
simultaneously, bound only by shape and
color (38). Would you give an example of
how the Mughal miniature translates into
your writing?
2. 8. M: The best example probably is Courtly
Vision, the last story in the collection
Darkness. I have an obsessive love of
Mughal miniature painting. The miniatures
that speak to me most eloquently were
painted during the reign of Emperor Akbar.
I suppose thats because mine is a writerly
love. Each of the Akbari paintings that Im
mesmerized by is so crowded with narrative,
sub-narratives, sometimes meta-narratives,
so taut with passion and at the same time so
crisp with irony. Every separate story in
the miniature matters, every minor
character has a dramatic function. But all
the strands and details manage to cohere,
thats whats amazing! And each is framed
by an elaborately painted border. The border
shouldnt be dismissed as the artists
excessive love of adumbration. The border
forces you to view the work not primarily as
a source of raw sociological data, but as
sociology metaphorized ; that is, as a
master-artists
observation
on
life/history/national psyche cast in the
aesthetic traditions of the community and
transmuted into art.
The story, Courtly Vision, was inspired by
a number of Akbari paintings, particularly
one that shows the Emperor in battle dress,
leading his massive, battle-ready army out of
his fortressed capital. The painting
anticipates victory, and evokes a celebratory
mood. The mood is historically tenable:
Akbar, wise, tolerant, brave, won his wars.
But what drew the writer in me to the
painting was the contextual irony of such
victory on the battlefield. Akbar built an
119

exquisite capital city in Fatehpur Sikri, but

he had to abandon it because hed sited it in
a drought zone. He was affably curious
about the other, which meant he allowed
in European peddlers, freebooters, Christian
missionaries,
and so unintentionally
facilitated the power grab by the many
European East India Companies, and the
eventual debilitation of the Mughals. When I
started Courtly Vision, I was aiming to
close with that epiphanic contextual irony.
But before I finished the first draft, the
frameconverting verisimilitude into
meta-narrativehad worked itself in. The
frame made the reader witness to a
painters (via authors) re-presentation of
history as evidenced in a slick Sothebys
catalogue, and, through the inclusion of the
cheap estimated price, upped the final irony
into Europes devaluation of Mughal art.
Until recent decades, Eurocentric art
criticism dismissed Mughal miniatures as
unsophisticated, as lacking mastery of
perspective. The point is that Mughal artists
had developed a Mughal aesthetic. They
preferred to work with many points of focus.
I had some idea, while I was writing the
stories for Darkness and The Middleman ,
how much about form and principle I had
absorbed from the 16th- and 17th-century
paintings I so loved. But it was as I drafted
the essay, A Four-Hundred Year Old
Woman, that I thought through, and
articulated, my Mughal-inspired narrative
aesthetic. I like to move narrative by
indirection, to create apparent lumps and
spills along the through-line. This applies
to novels like Jasmine and The Holder of
the World as well as to the short stories.
The zigzag route, one of my characters
confesses, is the shortest. The indirect
narratives are, of course, designed to parallel
or to undermine the main characters story.
The parts, when added up and framed,
should reveal authorial vision. The frame
and voicethe term that we writers
communally use to indicate aesthetic
strategyare what make the sum of the
parts, 2+2+3, not 7 but 10.
3. J: So you work like a bricoleur , parts are
used and reused and shaped and reshaped,
much like the character Jasmines identity.
As with time and space in the novel, things
do seem to recur though with a difference,
even as Jasmine suggests shes given up one
identity and moved on to another. There are
a series of transformations...
4. M: Yeah, Jasmine goes through several
transformations, and I like to think that she
is still open to many more self-inventions.
She lives on, very fully, inside my head. But
when I was talking about indirection , I was
trying to insist that the novel, Jasmine , be
read as more than the story of Jasmines

change. Thats why the novel provided so

many different points of focus: the
experience of dislocation and relocation is
handled by each of the immigrant
characters. As in Akbari miniatures, my
novel compresses the immigration histories
of many minor characters. Professorji, his
wife, his elderly parents, the Caribbean
housekeepers
in
Manhattan,
the
Guatemalans in Florida, Du and his AsianAmerican friend in Iowa: even within an
ethnic group, each minor character has a
distinct response. And white Americans,
including the volunteer for the Sanctuary
Movement, treat these various minor
characters variously. The opposed parallel
that moved me most as I was writing was the
one between Jasmine and Du. Jasmines
very open to new experience and optimistic
about outcome. Her attitude is: Hey, you
cant rape me and get away with it! You
cant push me around! Im here, Im gonna
stay if I want to, and Im gonna conquer
the territory! Du, who has to attend school
in the U.S., probably outwardly dresses
more like U.S.-born Americans than does
Jasmine, and certainly is more familiar with
American colloquialisms and pop culture,
but hes cynical of post-Vietnam America,
hes aware of the limits of the American
Dream and makes his guerrilla attacks on
that Dream. The total picture: thats the
heady part of writing, the creating of all
these...
5. J: little miniature universes within the
frame.
6. M: Right. In a way, I suppose thats being a
Hindu, I mean, this being constantly aware
of the existence of many universes, this
undermining of biography and individual
ego. The cosmology that my characters and I
inhabit derives very much from the Puranic
tales. The Puranas are cycles of tales (think
of them as morality tales, religious fables,
there are thousands of them) that every
Hindu child is told the way that kids in the
U.S. are exposed to fairytales and bedtime
stories. As story, they really work, too!
Conflict, heroes, villains, obstacles, action,
surprise revelation! But the stories
metaphorize the Hindu concepts of
cosmology, time and space. Current
discoveries in astronomy are certainly
pointing up the existence of universes other
than ours. I believe in re-incarnation, which,
too, may be a metaphor for some geobiological phenomenon, why not?
7. J: Has your background as a Hindu enabled
you to create an intimacy with the reader,
from a New World perspective, that is
distinct from other stylistic and narrative
techniques youve encountered in American
writing?
8. M: I dont know if all Hindu-American
writers see the world in the way that I do
and the way that I mix Islam with Hindu art,
because Ive been exposed to both of these,
120

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

really results in a very syncretic narrative

strategy. As such, my incorporation of
Hinduism might be quite opposed to how
some other Hindu writer living in New York
may think of Hinduism or exercise it. I dont
want to lump all Hindus together.
J: Youve identified voice as the prime
aesthetic of your writing. In this context, it
seems particularly interesting that Jasmine
has been critiqued for the inauthenticity of
the protagonists voice; as Liew-Geok Leong
writes, [t]he voice of Jasmine, surprisingly
articulate and assured, is not always
believable, given her background and
circumstances; it is her creators voice that
takes over and speaks for her, the result
perhaps of too close an identification with
the subject (494). Upon reflection, do you
see any validity in this evaluation?
M: Leong would appear to be ignorant of the
craft-related lexicon of contemporary
American writers. Just as terms such as
essentialism, subaltern, agency, and
signifier are accepted by academics as
shorthand for certain conceptual constructs,
so voice is our shorthand for the process of
decision-making regarding tone, diction,
pacing, texture, withholding, etc. in a given
work.
J: In other words, youre suggesting that
your notion of voice is more expansive, that
youre not striving after some sort of
realistic, mimetic voice.
M: I am saying that being a scholar as well
as a writer, I expect myself to do my
homework very, very thoroughly, before I
make public pronouncements. Voice
should not have been confused with tone,
diction, etc. Of course I am not striving after
some sort of realistic, mimetic voice. I leave
that to tape-recorders. Art is about selection,
stylization, and metaphoric revelation.
J: Other writers have been subject to the
same sort of criticism in terms of voice,
right? For example, the African American
writer Charles Johnson has been criticized
severely by some because the protagonist of
his award-winning novel Middle Passage , a
freed slave, speaks in highly philosophical
language, and his narrative voice tends to be
anachronistic.
M: James Alan McPherson gets the same
flak for not using inner city AmericanEnglish exclusively or predominantly. Its
absurd. Its as absurd as saying that because
Gayatri Spivak was born into a Bengali
family and grew up in Calcutta, she has no
right to public expression in non-Bengali
languages, especially not in the languages of
former colonialist nations such as England
or France, nor to derive any theoretical
model from Marx or other European white
males. I believe that if you are literate, all
literature that you expose yourself to is your
heritage to claim or reject.
J: Again, it seems that your major concern
with such critics is that, in the interests of

authenticity, they restrict you from using

the assembly of creative tools in your bag,
that theres a prescribed way in which
voice is supposed to be rendered.
16. M: Its patronizing, elitist, and classist of
such critics to presume that the poor and the
de- privileged do not have sophisticated
thoughts and poetic articulation. They need
to acquaint themselves with scholarship
regarding oral literature. In addition, I am
very bothered by their reduction of art to
sociological statement. Fiction transmits its
message (by which I mean its authors
vision) very differently from essays.
17. J: Given your criticism of V.S. Naipaul 1
along those lines during an interview some
years ago (A Conversation), it must be
particularly painful to be criticized for a
certain failure in voice. In that interview,
you attacked Naipauls notion that the
dispossessed are incapable of articulating, in
sophisticated ways, their pain, desires, etc.
He suggested to you that he feels theyre
incapable of speaking in any complex or
redemptive way due to their psychological,
social, and cultural fragmentation as a result
of colonialism. You are now subject to an
attack that is the flip side of the same coin.
The suggestion is that youre still not
allowing them to think and speak for
themselves. Critics argue that youre just...
18. M: They have taken a Naipaulian position
about me and my writing, from a high moral
ground, and I resent that, and Im saying
that...
19. J:... theyre the ones who want to speak.
That they want to speak for these people and
have you renounce your right to speak in the
ways you wish?
20. M: Right. Thats where my ire is located.
The writer claims only to speak for her
unique, eccentric characters. These critics,
on the other hand, though they locate
themselves in North America and participate
in the North American competitive,
materialist economy, invent or appropriate
the positions of populous, Asia-based
communities, and worse, they reduce the
diversity of those communities positions
into one that fits most neatly into their
favored theory. The Indian graduate
students and junior faculty members I have
1

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Kt. (Knight Bachelor), TC

(The Trinity Cross is the highest national award in Trinidad and
Tobago), born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and
Tobago, better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born
British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in
Wiltshire.
Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990 and awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors
Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni
Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a
former Pakistani journalist.

121

talked to on western Indian campuses in the

last two years have expressed growing
resentment of such usurpation. The theorist
they most often named was Spivak, perhaps
because she is the best-known of the IndoAmerican group.
Some recent publications by serious Indian
literary critics based in India, for instance by
Professors Aijaz Ahmad and Harish Trivedi
of the University of Delhi, indicate an
emerging resentment of the appropriation of
Indianality and postcoloniality by scholars
of Indian origin (or of non-European origin)
who have opted for U.S. citizenship and/or
permanent residence in North America. The
Jouvert community is no doubt well aware
of Ahmads direct attack on Edward Said
and by extension, it would seem, his indirect
attack on Spivakfor internationalizing the
periphery. (Thats Ahmads phrase, not
mine. I myself prefer to reject the
center/periphery template, and so, resist
Eurocentric vocabulary.) Professor Trivedi,
who lectured here at Berkeley a few months
ago on the Eurocentric implications of the
term postcolonial, was more direct in his
attack on the right of Spivak, a U.S. citizen
and long-term U.S. resident, to speak for the
periphery.
21. J: Spivak has cautioned against reading her
as someone who claims to give voice to
those she represents; she has said in The
Postcolonial Critic and Im paraphrasing
that to read her as speaking for the
periphery is to read her, wrongly, as a
Third World informant.
22. M: But then she goes on to, at the same
time, trounce others for providing versions,
portraits that dont coincide with hers so
that she, Im not going to say that shes
lying, but theres this problematic position...
23. J: You dont get the same reception?
24. M: Oh, I get severely attacked by many
Indian critics, but for a very different
reason! Whereas I have heard Spivak being
attacked for appropriation of the so-called
periphery, I have been virulently attacked
for defining myself as an American writer of
Indian origin writing of the diasporic and
immigrant experience. It started with a
response to a journalists question during a
press conference in Delhi in 1990. I was
asked, Wouldnt you, if you had your
rathers, come back to live in India? and,
thinking of my husband and children settled
in the States, answered, Frankly, no. That
no was misinterpreted as a betrayal of my
Indian heritage. But, now that so many
Indian families have relatives settled in the
U.S., my immigrant material is being read
or re-read in fresh ways.
25. J: In this discussion about who gets to speak
and who doesnt, there seems to be an

26.

27.

28.

29.
30.

implicit criticism that your characters are

not authentic.
M: Right, and Im saying that this Leong
should be listening to rap, doing some more
hanging out in inner cities to see how
much poetry there is in ordinary lives. How
can any critic have the audacity to assume
that all members of a group think, feel,
react, and verbalize identically? How do you
explain one brother from a dysfunctional
family becoming a writerIm thinking
obviously of John Edgar Wideman, author
of Philadelphia Fire and his brother
becoming a murderer? So, to assume that
you are identical with everyone else in your
class is to not understand human beings.
J: And when she accuses you of perhaps
identifying too closely with your subject and
writing an inauthentic character as a result
of that identification, would your charge be
no, youre also identifying with the subject
but your identification forecloses the
possibility of the life which I choose to
explore?
M: Well, not only that. I hear Leong saying
that someone from Jasmines background
and circumstances cannot speak the way
that she does. You see, thats very different
from the way youre verbalizing it. I am
saying that to think all people who are born
poor are therefore incapable of thought,
imagination, and speech, is a very elitist and
classist kind of assumption; I need to see
them as individuals rather than types.
J: It seems that you are responding to this
question on at least two different levels.
M: My response to this question is
structured on three different levels. One is
that the critic doesnt understand voice; she
simply is ignorant about how writers use
this term. My second point is that no fine
fiction, no good literature, is anchored in
verisimilitude. Fiction must be metaphor. It
is not transcription of real life but its a
distillation and
pitching at
higher
intensification of life. Its always a
distortion. And then the third point is that
just because Jasmine happens to be poor
doesnt mean she is incapable of
imagination, intelligence, and articulate
speech.

34.

35.

36.

37.

II. Anxiety of Influence?

31. J: Are there Indian writers writing in
English whose work you admire?
32. M: Do you mean Anglophone writers who
are Indian citizens and are residing in India?
R.K. Narayan. I keep nominating him for the
Nobel Prize. Im also very interested in
younger fiction writers and poets like R. Raj
Rao and Ranjit Hoskhote.
33. J: In addition to Naipaul, were wondering
what other Caribbean writers have
influenced you in any way: Wilson Harris
and his AmerIndian aesthetics, Michele
122

38.

Cliff, Edouard Glissant, or Maryse Cond

and their notions of cross-cultural poetics,
etc.
M: None of them have influenced me,
though, of course, I have enjoyed reading
each of them. About Naipaul, I cant say that
he influenced me, but I can say that A House
for Mr. Biswas inspired me when I read it as
a student in the early Sixties. I hadnt read
any fiction about Trinidad Indians before
that. That novel gave me the self-confidence
to claim my own fictional world.
J: If, as with Joseph Conrads Heart of
Darkness , canonical texts exercise an
influence, however disturbing, on the
formerly colonizedand in some instances,
newly immigrated what colonialist texts
have left their mark on you?
M: None, really. By the way, I didnt read
Heart of Darkness until I came to the States.
Of all English literature I was exposed to,
Shakespeares tragedies moved most. I could
recite soliloquies by Macbeth, Hamlet,
Portia, Shylock, King Lear, Cordelia with
great feeling. I think it was the music of the
lines, the sound of the words, that excited
me. Elocution was my most favorite subject
in school. I loved to read poetry out loud.
Tagore and Keats, oh, they were so heady
when I was a schoolgirl in Calcutta. I
responded to the euphony first; then to the
ideas. I didnt know any Buddhists and came
from a staunch Hindu family, but Tagore
made me weep over the persecution of
Buddhist converts in ancient India. Same
with Keats; Id never been to Greece, not
even seen pictures of the country, but I sure
could visualize the friezescapes in the Ode
on a Grecian Urn. There was something
fresh about Keats because he was rebelling
against
the
narrowness
of
British
conventions. Though India was a sovereign
nation when I first encountered Keats, my
convent-school campus remained a very
English spot. You know, we had to sing
Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, that sort
of thing, and we were expected to admire the
logic and orderliness of the British mind.
Keats was resisting those values in his
poems. I suppose loving Keats poems for
me was a quiet form of guerrilla warfare
against my teachers.
J: Before deciding to use it for The Holder
of the World , did Keats or Ode on a
Grecian Urn ever take on a different aura
for you? You have said elsewhere that your
life and work should be divided into three
distinct phasesas a colonial, then national,
subject in India, as a postcolonial Indian in
Canada, and as an immigrant, later a citizen,
of the United States. Did Keats and his ode
accompany
you
through
those
transformations?
M: Im not sure I even thought about Keats
for twenty years after leaving India. When I
sat down to write The Holder , I was a very
different person from the girl who had

39.
40.

41.

42.
43.
44.

recited the odes out loud for pleasure, and

the Ode on a Grecian Urn was very much
on my mind because, like Keats, I was
playing with history and imagination. Thats
the marvelous thing about the writing
process: you dont know when and how a
memory, a scrap of conversation overheard,
an allusion or image, is suddenly going to
surface and work itself into your story. That
ode came to me; I didnt seek it out. Thats
the way the creative process works for me. I
knew right away that I would use the Keats
references to control and ironize what my
characters had to say about time, and to
make authorial meta-statements about
writing.
J: Is there a distinction between the way
that Keats sees the Grecian urn and the way
you see a Mughal painting?
M: Thats not the contrast that I would
make. I would make it between virtual
reality and the urn. The urn is still, the
action is frozen, and one can only observe.
Im not so much concerned with what Keats
is saying about these people as I am with
how action has been stuck in time and cant
be redone. The people are always going to
have their hands and feet in one particular
posture,
whereas
with
interactive
technology, youre changing the narrative by
inputting new information according to your
new mood. The ways virtual technology will
be used for therapy, to help autistic children
or to enable people to overcome their fears,
is very close to what Im talking about. The
individual experiencing the image, not
simply the image itselfboth are going to be
transformed by interaction.
J: Weve asked you to discuss your literary
influences but we also wonder what critics
[literary and otherwise] you consider
important to the development of your own
critical project in delineating the future of
American writing?
M: None.
J: Do you find the writer-critic a more
effective, perhaps even more productive,
type of critic than the scholar?
M: For writers and readers, yes. Writers
writing about fiction see the text as process
whereas scholars reduce it to product.
Writer-critics explore the work from inside
out; they divine the aesthetic decisions that
the texts writer has made to best get across
the authorial vision, and then they assess the
effect of those decisions. They let the work
set up the criteria by which it should be
judged instead of imposing their arbitrary
grid on the work; they aim to open up the
work instead of reducing it to a dutifullyfollowed or sloppily-followed set of narrative
rules thought up by a scholar. I think the
best essays on the art of fiction, on
beginnings, endings, etc., to date have been
written by writers. A book of essays on
writing Id recommend is How Stories Mean
, edited by John Metcalf and J.R. Struthers.
123

Contemporary scholars seem to have

deliberately removed themselves from
primary texts, so that not only do they
sometimes get their data wrong (and I mean
titles of works, names of characters), but
they often discard those complexities in the
text that dont fit their theories, and they
devalue those aesthetic innovations that
challenge their particular socio-political
agendas. Scholars seem to just talk to
scholars, using a language of the initiated.
The subaltern critics might wish to speak
for the de-privileged, but they certainly
dont speak to them.
III. The Politics of New Immigrant Writing
45. J: You have remarked that no longer do you
find exilic writers as provocative as they
once were. Yet theyre still quite popular.
Why do you think expatriate writers like
Naipaul continue to enjoy such popularity,
specifically with Western audiences?
46. M: I dont know how popular they are or
what you mean by popularity. I think an
awful lot of minority writers and expatriate
writers complain that their books dont get
into bookstores, that they may get reviews,
or the same few will get reviews, but that
there really isnt any kind of crossfertilization of readers. I think there are two
kinds of writers and Im not saying that its
only about exilic writers or immigrant
writers but all writers: those who reinforce
what the public thinks, the conventional
values, and those who constantly interrogate
the conventional values. An awful lot of the
exilic writers, the expatriate writers, are
providing the kinds of portraits, moods,
positions, and problems with which the
readership, the publishing industry, and the
scholarsor critics anywayare familiar
and comfortable. The few who are
obliterating that particular kind of discourse
between Third World and First World,
margin and center, or minority and
mainstream, have a much harder time being
understood or being recognized. Ive been
writing and publishing since 1971 but its
taken me an awfully long time to get any
attention, largely because I was, for a while,
an Indian citizen living in Canada as a
landed immigrant and writing about people
outside of India. Then I became a Canadian
citizen but writing, let us say, about
immigrants in New York. They didnt know
how to classify me, whether by my passport
or by my material, which was about
immigrants at a time when there was no
such category as immigrant fiction that
wasnt about Europeans coming to North
America during the 19th century. So I dont
know about popularity. Very recently there
was an article I read in the Times on
Spanish-speaking writers in New York
objecting vociferously to the ways in which

47.
48.

49.

50.

they are shut out when they write middleclass fiction about middle-class characters
who speak in perfectly educated, sensitive
English, even though theyre second or third
generation. The stereotype is that if youre
going to write about Hispanics, youd better
make them lettuce-pickers and have a
spiritualist. The kind of criticism from
literary critics and theorists who have
encountered my own work stems from their
belief that if youre India-born, you must
write about India and you must write about
an Indian woman or peasants being
victimized.
J: They want it primitivized in some way.
M: Yes, stereotyped. Its absurd, when you
think that Im writing about the post-1965
immigration-transformed America, and that
the majority of South Asians granted visas
are urban, educated professionals and their
families. The aim of fiction is to break
down stereotypes. Unfortunately, the
publishing and academic industries
seem to profit more from reinforcing
stereotypes. This is what AfricanAmerican intellectuals have to deal with too.
Thats why I feel Im on the same wavelength
with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West,
James Alan McPherson. Why should a
minority person be made to feel guilty
because she believes education leads to both
self-improvement
and
national
enlightenment? To me, class is as divisive as
race.
J: Just as there is a risk of becoming locked
into ones own exilic condition to the point
of pathetic self-absorption, isnt there a
danger of being too celebratory about the
enabling aspects of an immigrants
multicultural point of view?
M: Im going to object to the word
multicultural here because Ive spoken so
vociferously against this whole official
multiculturalism in Canada. Im going to
limit it to an immigrants point of view, all
right? Yes, my work has sometimes been
cited for celebrating too enthusiastically the
swagger of immigration, the energies
released in the process of transformation. It
is as though certain readers cannot see
beyond the color of my characters skin, or
their gender, or their predetermined view of
America,
without
linking
them,
automatically, to the long sad history of New
World exploitation. Yes, they are victims but
they are resilient victims, unviolated in their
core of need and imagination. Rocky, being
white, can pick himself off the canvas, land a
few blows, and be a hero; Rakesh, however,
a laid-off engineer with three kids and no
American certification, opens a dingy spice
store and Hindi video outlet and somehow is
perceived as pathetic. This is the
stereotyping that has to end. My Professorji,
who used to be a doctor in his home country
and is now having to sell human hair for
making wigs or electronic equipment in
124

51.

52.

53.
54.

some basement video store in Queens, is

somehow seen, necessarily, as a pathetic
character rather than as a resilient hero,
who says all right, this didnt work, but
something else will work.
J: By identifying yourself as an immigrant
writer, you resist being classified by
postcolonial scholars as an exilic or
expatriate writer. You also dont seem to
stake out an intellectual position as a
writer/scholar akin to what Abdul R.
JanMohamed has termed the specular
border intellectual, a category for writers
from formerly colonized or enslaved places
who engage in a critique of multiple
locations from a position of homelessnessas-home.
M: Just the fact you bring up JanMohamed
is troubling to me. Were very, very different
kinds of Indians. Simply because of skin
color and South Asian ancestry, the nonSouth Asian is likely to lump us together just
as they have long lumped the Samuel
Selvons and the V.S. Naipauls together as
part of the Indian diaspora. JanMohamed,
having been brought up in Africa according
to a different religion, a different language, a
different
cultural
and
revolutionary
experience, has surely more to say about
minority discourse in Africa and about how
to apply his particular African training and
African experience to being a minority in a
white-dominated world in the U.S. and less
about mainstream India and Indian writing.
The mission of postcolonial studies as a
discipline is to level all of us to our skin color
and ethnic origin whereas as a writer, my job
is to open up, to discover and say we are all
individuals. In fiction we are writing about
individuals; none of them is meant to be a
crude spokesperson for whole groups,
whether those groups are based on gender
or race or class. If the story of one individual
reveals something about the way in which
human nature works, great, if it doesnt,
then it has failed as art.
J: How would you characterize, then, the
relationship
that
exists
between
postcolonialism and your creative project?
M: The mission of postcolonial studies
seems to be to deliberately equate Art
and journalism, to reduce novels to
specimens for the confirming of their
theories. If an imaginative work doesnt fit
the cultural theories they approve of, its
dismissed as defective. The relationship
between the artist and the postcolonial
scholar has become adversarial. It doesnt
have to be, thats whats so sad. Im not
denigrating all scholarship, but only that
particular school of postcolonial criticism
that is hostile to art and aesthetics. All that,
as a writer, I valuepower of word-choice
and placement of punctuation, imagery,
texture, pacingall the strategies that I
employ to articulate my vision as precisely
as I can to the reader, these scholars treat as

55.

56.

57.

58.

debris to be cleared for the exposing of

camouflaged hegemonic agendas in the
narrative.
J: You make some very clear distinctions
between writers and scholars. In the field of
Caribbean postcolonial studies, such
distinctions are not so clear. People like
Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, and
Maryse Cond would all be considered both
important postcolonial scholars and writers.
Isnt there an opportunity for solidarity
between scholar/writers or havent you
reached out to those voices?
M: Oh, Im friends with Maryse Cond, and
am familiar with the work of Harris and
Glissant. Im glad to hear that scholars of
Caribbean studies are not as antiimaginative literature as are the Spivakinfluenced
Indo-American
postcolonial
graduate students who write papers or
dissertation chapters on my work. I find so
many glaring errors in their so-called
scholarship; I mean getting really basic data
wrong, like titles or genre of a text, names of
significant characters. I dont know how
such shoddy work gets past a dissertation
supervisor in any respectable university! I
recently came across a paper by an IndoAmerican woman scholar that accused me,
not my character(s), of being anti-America,
and recommended that I should try to feel
more comfortable living in the United
States, all on the basis of having read one
single story, the title of which she got wrong.
It sometimes appears that all I value as a
writer are being deliberately denigrated or
disregarded by the scholars. What is
important to me is Isaac Babel saying, A
comma placed just right will stab the heart,
whereas for a lot of these scholars, judging
from the papers that Ive read, to worry
about artistic or meter-effective placement
of punctuation is to be sort of right-wing.
J: In his book In Theory , Aijaz Ahmad
critiques the notion of adversarial
internationalization by arguing that while
Said speaks, inexplicably, of intellectual
and scholarly work from the peripheries,
done either by immigrants or by visitors,
both of whom are generally antiimperialist....[t]he
vast
majority
of
immigrants and visitors who go from the
peripheries to the Western center in the
United States either take no part in politics
and scholarly endeavor or turn out to be
right-wing
people
(207-8).
He
characterizes
you
as
the
ultimate
representative of this second type of person.
Have you had a chance to respond to this
assertion in any formal way?
M: Yes, yes I have. I did it for an Indian
publication that is the equivalent, sort of, of
the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
Theyd invited writers to write about the
notion of internationalizing the periphery,
if you like. First of all, I want to know where
Aijaz Ahmad gets his statistics for making
125

this kind of generalization? I didnt find it in

his footnotes and I certainly didnt find it in
the text. And then, has he ever done
research on my voting records? Does he
know that I was a very active member of the
NDP in Canada? The choice I was faced with
in the late 70s just prior to leaving for the
United States in 1980 was to either give up
writing and run for public office as an NDP
candidate, or say to myself, Politics,
someone else will carry on. I live my most
real life through writing.
59. J: These are highly provocative rejoinders to
level at Ahmad, especially considering how
he criticizes Said for not checking his facts
or statistics. Ahmad even goes so far to
suggest that Said hasnt really read your
writing, or the writings of your immigrant
peers, and that Saids classification of you as
anti-imperialist is gleaned from what other
critics have said about immigrant texts
rather than a first-hand reading of them.
60. M: Yeah, well, I dont think that Ahmad has
checked his facts about me or read any of my
essays either, let alone my fiction. And then
I want to know, what does right-wing
mean in the context of his quotation? Does it
mean simply that anyone who is not a
Marxist is right-wing? If right-wing, for
Ahmad, applies to anyone who agrees with
the spirit behind the American Constitution
and the idea of democracy, then I suppose I
am. I do not wish to trivialize democratic
ideals by equating America with blue jeans
and Coca-Cola, which is a very cheap, easy
shot that Europeans as well as many South
Asian intellectuals take. As such, Im placing
my faith in fighting for civil rights and this is
where I talk about my political aesthetics in
this essay. The cause that I have now put a
great deal of my energy into is fighting for
gay rights; for gay rights to be treated as an
extension of civil rights. When I lived in
Canada, it was the gay groups who worked
hardest for us South Asians, in fighting
discrimination. South Asians were at the
bottom of Canadas race-based totem pole.
The feminists let us [people of color] down
as they obtained their goals regarding
womens rights. If the Constitution gives me
a way of forcing Newt Gingrichs feet to the
fire, a way of forcing American politicians to
live up to the letter of the law, then Im going
to do that. And if that means being rightwing by Ahmads standard then too bad. I
find these categories totally, totally useless.
In India, among the intellectuals that I see
once or twice a year while traveling, there is
no agreement about what constitutes rightwing and left-wing. In my hometown,
Calcutta, there are four distinct communist
political parties. For instance Calcuttas
Maoists call the citys Moscow-Marxists
right-wing, so I dont know where Ahmad
is coming from, and he ought to know
better.

61. J: Yet in terms of the American scene,

Ahmad seems to argue that immigrant
writers such as yourself have re-adopted the
notion of America as melting pot. Hes
suggesting that ironically, by using the
melting-pot mode of writing, youre allowing
yourself to be coopted yet again by the
mainstream: to hybridicize in a syncretized
fashion can be a very conservative position
to adopt. While your writing can be seen as
progressive and action-oriented, scholars
such as Kristin Carter-Sanborn argue that
many of your heroines are passive, women
who are changed by, rather than changing,
the American landscape. Despite their
seeming adaptability, the argument is that
you are romanticizing their domestication.
These critics would like to see, ostensibly,
more resistance to the assimilation and
cooptation
of
these
non-traditional
immigrants.
62. M: Jasmine or Hannah Easton arent
passive women, by anyones measure. They
quite literally cross oceans, transform their
worlds, and in the process leave behind a
heap of bruised hearts and bleeding bodies!
I dont think Ahmad has read my works. If
he had read them, he would have known
that I dont use European or Euro-American
models for my narratives. Im having to
invent a whole new structure for American
fiction, a whole new kind of sentence to
express non-traditional immigrant emotions
and psychic texture. Its very hard for critics
in the U.S. and in India to understand who
Jasmine is, or where shes coming from,
because shes not a familiar American or
Indian character. To resist and remain the
way you were in India is to perpetuate, and
more disturbingly, is to valorize, an awful lot
of cultural vices such as sexism, patriarchy,
castism, classism. Would Ahmad consider it
cooptation when an American woman writer
who has emigrated from a clitoridectomyvalorizing Muslim community, lets say from
Togo, chooses to adopt for herself and to
supportthrough her fictionthe U.S.
social/cultural/legal response to ritualized
female mutilation? The immigrant writer
decides what to let go and what to retain. Its
always a two-way transformation. To resist
cultural and ideological mutation simply
because
one
want
to
retain
racial/cultural/religious/caste purity? is,
in my opinion, evil. Im against that kind of
Hitlerian racial and ethnic pride; Im against
the retention of pure culture for the sake of
purity.
I think a very significant, thought probably
unanticipated
consequence
of
the
controversy generated by In Theory has
been the legitimation of immigrant fiction
by writers of Indian origin as a genre quite
distinct from post-Independence fiction by
Indian writers residing in India, and from
126

exilic fiction by India-born writers residing

outside India. The works of IndianCaribbean writers like Roop Lal Monar,
Indian-Caribbean-Canadian writers like
Sam Selvon, Sonny Ladoo, Cyril Dabydeen,
Neil Bissoondath, Indian-African-Canadian
writers like Moyse Vassanji, Goan-African
writers like Violet Diaz Lannoy, IndianBritish writers like Hanif Kureishi, are more
intelligently explored in the context of exile.
For works like Midnights Children , The
Trotter-Nama , The Great Indian Novel ,
however, the most appropriate context is
exilic mythologization (of personal and
national histories). On my more recent
annual trips to India, especially when Ive
taken part in panels with Indian academics
on the literature of the Indian diaspora or
conducted Fiction Workshops on the
University of Baroda campus, Ive noted my
Indian colleagues increased awareness of
the discrete aims of these two genres.
63. J: In Immigrant Writing, you discuss how
America has lost the power to transform
the worlds imagination. You suggest that
no one as yet has spoken for New
Americans from non-traditional immigrant
countries. Why is it the burden, or privilege
depending on how one looks at itof new
American
immigrant
writers
to
reinvigorate not only American writing,
but also the worlds imagination?
64. M: First of all, I dont think that the writer
starts to work on her novel by saying, Im
going to invigorate all of American writing.
Any writer who does so will end up
producing a sterile, agenda-ridden text and
not literature. What I, as immigrant writer,
hope for is to transform as well as be
transformed by the world Im re-imagining
and re-creating through words. Id like to
think that ideas and feelings generated by
my fiction will trickle into other cultures and
literatures through translation, and provoke
re-thinking of what citizenship entails.
Jasmine has been translated into 18
languages. Im very touched and humbled by
the letters I get from immigrant readers who
have read the book in their own language
and have integrated Jasmines adventures
into their own personal/cultural experience.
65. J: Thats an intriguing dialectic, this idea of
immigrant writers and their characters
simultaneously transforming and being
transformed.
Maurice
Merleau-Ponty
defines intersubjectivity in a related way as
the trespassing of ones self on the other and
of the other on ones self... for him, contact
with the other is not all about assimilation.
66. M: Yeah, and Ive written at great length on
that idea, as early as 1990.
67. J: To move beyond Ahmad and his concerns
with your writing, what relationship do you
see in the future between what weve called
immigrationismnot a term you used but

one that seems to capture the spirit of the

project you outline in Immigrant
Writingand postcolonialism? What do
you think keeps the South Asian
postcolonialists with whom youve expressed
dissatisfaction from listening to you in the
way you feel you should be listened to?
68. M: Arrogance. And a lack of sensitivity to
literature. I think that they come to works of
fiction with closed-off, ready-made, perfectly
sealed theories and that theyre not willing
to discover any new ground. Just as in
travelogues, some travelers, like a V.S.
Naipaul, quite often go with preconceived
notions about the country and find only
what they expect to find: reinforcement and
confirmation of their preconceived notions.
There are other travelers, and I hope Im one
of these, who come with a fluid, open mind,
and let the locals speak for themselves; they
experience the place on its own terms. There
are those who confirm social, political
stereotypes and other writers who
interrogate the stereotypes. William Gass
will have a respected small audience, but
hes never going to have a wide, popular
audience because he isnt entertaining and
comforting the average reader by expressing
the ideas and articulating the philosophies
that make you feel good about yourself.
In terms of seeing connections
between
the
South
Asian
postcolonialists and immigrationism,
I see diasporality as a kind of
continuum with immigrants and
immigrationists at one end of the
scale and expatriate or exilic figures
and postcolonialists at the other. Those
who decide, all right, Im going to go on
with my life, the past is going to color my
present and the present is going to color my
future, but here and now, Im a different
person, these people reflect the spirit of
immigrant writing by keeping themselves
open to new experiences and responding
second by second. Theyre changing and
being changed: you are a new person every
second of your life depending on how you
act and whether you are open to bruisings
and dentings. This energy is completely
opposed to the postcolonial who, if he or she
is not within the immediate postcolonial
context, is simply talking about the past and
ignoring or obliterating the present because
its so much safer to talk about a dead
debate.
69. J: Has the marketplace proven itself open to
new experiences and how has that
dynamic affected the reception of your
work?
70. M: In 1985 no U.S. publisher was willing to
publish the manuscript of Darkness because
at that time there was no marketing category
for ethnic immigrant American fiction.
127

71.

72.

73.

74.

The issues facing the South Asian

community of naturalized citizens were
perceived as irrelevant to real Americans,
meaning whites, African-Americans and
dispossessed American Indians. Editors
would say, This collection is incredibly
powerful, even though its so dark in its
outlook, but we cant imagine any American
reader wanting to read about these people.
The book was eventually bought for $3500
Canadian dollars by Penguin Canada, and
came out as a paperback original that was
meant to get lost. In the introduction to the
collection, I talked about seeing myself as a
series of fluid identities. Since then, Ive
found corroboration in the fascinating
published material of psychologists and
academicsAlan Rolands work on the
contextual self and in Robert J. Liftons
work on the protean self. I would have had
an easier time getting published, and being
paid more decent advances, if I had written
in the exilic tradition of nostalgia and loss.
J: What about someone whose fluidity is
forestalled, who is unable to move beyond
the past despite a willingness to engage in
the present? Dimple, in Wife , seems to be
just such a character.
M: Several of my characters fail to move
from expatriate to immigrant in the
diasporality spectrum. Some of the
characters dont try, dont want to. In my
narratives, I want to represent a varied set of
responses to the experience of unhousement. And these characters help to
piece together an unsentimental portrait of
the United States. I certainly know what I
love about the spirit of America, but Ive also
written at great length about the underside
of the American Dream. Hannah, in The
Holder , is an embodiment of the guts,
imagination and assertiveness of that
American spirit, and its undersidethe will
to imperialize.
J: As youve outlined above, much of the
energy which marks good writing stems
from its willingness to engage in the
bruisings and dentings of life. Are writing
programs doing enough to impress upon
young writers the benefits of engaging the
real world political, ethnic, and racial
struggles in American society?
M: The answer is No. All fiction is
political and moral, but very few
works of fiction in this country are
about politics or morality. Novelists
humanize the other, and reveal a
just, generous, ideal world, but they
dont hector nor dictate as do
demagogues and pamphleteers. I
think that minority American writers
are more likely to want toand
attempt
tocreate
national
mythologies through their fiction than
are white Americans, because history
and
memory
are
of
powerful
consequence to them. The original

white settlers dream of rugged

individualism is anti-history.
IV. States of Violence
1. 81. J: Youve commented before that a lot of
your stories are about transfiguration or
psychic transformation, not economic
transformation, and that you consequently
are interested in psychic violence and its
effect on the individual, often female Asian
Americans, rather than group violence and
its effect on the masses. Why do you think
youve concentrated more on psychic
violence inflicted upon the individual and
less on political unrest and labor agitation in
your work, especially as you were subject to
the threats of such violence during your
childhood in Calcutta?
2. 82. M: Good fiction concentrates on the
emotional,
intellectual
and
physical
responses of a small cast of characters when
they are thrust into a situation that is not
routine for them. Politics and history, or
rather political and historical events,
provide the context for the characters
varying reactions. And, by forcing the reader
to live through the particular characters in
their particularized situations, the author
hopes that readers will make an epiphanic
connection to the world of real politics and
issues around them. Remember Cynthia
Ozicks story, The Shawl? In that
extraordinarily moving story, Ozick doesnt
once mention the word, Holocaust; she
focuses on the conflicts of a mother and her
two daughters trying to survive the horrors
of death-camp internment. Thats what good
fiction does, and should do. When I want to
directly address the evil of racism, the
denying of civil rights to gay men and
women, etc., I prefer to do so in essays.
As for providing the larger context of
politics, class and race, Ive done that from
my first novel on. In The Tigers Daughter ,
individual actions are shaped by, and/or
reactions to, the Naxalite revolution in
Calcutta, and the imminence of the
establishment of a Marxist government in
West Bengal state. In Wife , Dimple
experiences racist discrimination in a
Queens shop, gendrist discrimination at
home, and classist discrimination at
meetings with white feminists. I just wish
that scholars would go back to reading the
primary texts before presuming to make
[mis]pronouncements on them!
In terms of psychic violence and female
sexuality, I grew up at a time and in a class
in Calcutta when you couldnt say the word
sex. Id never said the word sex and we
certainly were not allowed to think of it; I
didnt even know how the male anatomy was
constructed. So for me or for my characters
who are coming not from villages but upper128

class, urban Indian settings, sexuality

becomes the mode of resistance or a way to
rebel. After all, if youre coming out of a
society where sex is the unspeakable, the
unutterable, then doing it or acknowledging
your sexuality results not only in individual
rebellion but actually constitutes an attack
on a
whole
patriarchal,
Victorian,
hypocritical society. And why psychic
violence? Ultimately, physical injuries are
less affecting than the wounds inside. You
lose a leg, you get a prosthetic. But what do
you do about the scarred psyche?
3. J: Youve written elsewhere about the need
to make the familiar exotic and the exotic
familiar.
4. M: Yes, to bring out the luminosity in the
most banal moment, and to elicit sympathy
for the least familiar character.
5. J: By privileging psychic as opposed to
physical violence, does your work implicitly
cultivate an aestheticization of violence?
For example, violence appears to be
somewhat benign in its after-effects on
Jasmineshe doesnt seem to bear too many
psychic or physical scars from her traumatic
experiences with Suki and Half-Face.
Similarly, in The Holder , violence seems to
be surprisingly positive in its effects on
Hannah, transforming her in its crucible
from an unfinished, unformed woman into
a goddess-in-the-making. To borrow the
structural trope of The Holder , is the
violence you write about somehow like the
virtual
reality
Beigh
experiences,
transformative and enlightening to be sure,
but somehow less than real?
6. M: First of all, before I get to the idea of
virtual reality and violence, I want you to
come to the kitchen with me. This is
Goddess Kali, the image of the Godhead as
Destroyer. The Godhead as Kali is what I
worship. Most Hindu Bengalis in Calcutta
do. Most Hindu Bengali families have an
altar to Her in their homes. I do; in my
bedroom. You can see for yourself that Kali
isnt one bit passive. She has strung Herself
a garland of severed heads, and Shes hefting
Her blood-stained weapons to decapitate
more evil men. Kali is what Jasmine was
mythologizing herself into when she killed
her rapist, Half-Face. In Christianity,
humans are made in the image of God. But
in
Hinduism,
all
creatures
are
manifestations of the Godhead. Why doesnt
Jasmine agonize more over having killed the
man who brutalized her? Why is her
reaction benign? Her goal is the Hindu
ideal of non-attachment. To allow oneself to
be utterly destroyed by the violence done to
her and done by her would be to fall victim
to maya. Youve read R.K. Narayans The
Guide ; youre familiar with the Hindu
concept of non-attachment. The difficult feat
for the Hindu American writer is to

dramatize the benignity of non-attachment

without making characters appear uncaring
or grimly stoic.
V. Writing and Technology
7.

J: Considering the potential violence of

representation, do you see writingor
virtual technology, in the case of Beigh
becoming Bhagmati in The Holderas a
violent medium?
8. M: I dont know if I think of the medium as
violence. Its certainly a medium that forces
the author and the reader to take enormous
risks, to expose oneself to emotions one
would rather avoid.
9. J: Well, you have talked about the physical
and psychic violence that necessarily
accompanies
transformation
for
the
immigrant. Given the transformative
capability of technological developments in
writing, has your own evolution as a writer
been marked by epistemological violence?
10. M: I have no idea. I started with orality. I
come from a culture where grandmothers
and mothers tell endless stories. There
wasnt a single night that I didnt fall asleep
to my mother telling stories at dinner-time.
We sat on raffia mats on the floor and ate off
brass plates. She mashed rice and fish into
little balls and fed me, quite literally, with
her fingers while she told me stories from
the historical novels or biographies that
shed read. Stories about Marie Antoinette,
Napoleon, Mary Queen of Scots. Bigger than
life characters and adventures. I marvel at it
now: my mother putting food into my mouth
and, simultaneously, putting the wonder of
narrative into my head.
It was by listening that I visualized and was
mesmerized by conflict, by character, by
romance, whatever. I started to read and
write very earlyI was in regular school by
the age of threeand at that time, we used
pens that you dip into an inkwell. I dont
know if that was violence, but you did
immediately start thinking in wholly
different ways and the scratchingI can still
see the blots of ink, the scratching on the
paperslows you down, but also gives you
time to think. Then my relationship to story
again became very different when we
graduated by age nine to fountain pens.
Also, the paper was so different over there;
you could see bugs worked into the fabric, or
big seams... the paper was rough and pocked
with shiny bits. Seeing whether the pen nib
would go over the shiny impurities or not
resulted in a wholly different way of dealing
with orthography and a different mental
process which accompanies the writing of
stories. There wasnt ever a time that I can
remember when I wasnt writing stories and
I remember what a big breakthrough it was
when my father brought back ballpoint pens
129

from Paris. They all melted in the heat but

you could write so much faster! That was
very empowering, and I went straight from
that in the States to typewriter and when I
started thinking on electric typewriter,
again, suddenly my relationship with the
word, and therefore with narrative, became
very, very different, more conscious.
If by technological developments in
writing you mean the availability of
computers, software, data storage and
retrieval
facilities,
information-design
programs, virtual reality, etc., then I have to
confess that technology has been for me a
means of exploring and expanding
knowledge without losing the writerly sense
of wonder. Clark and I were among the very
first batch of American writers to get into
computers.
11. J: Oh, really?
12. M: Yes. In fact, Clark was on a program on
NPR to discuss the ways in which the form
and the process of writing has changed as a
result of his switch to the word-processor.
Technology has broken down linear thought
as well as linear plot-movement. I dont
think of technology as an enemy of Art.
Technology serves the artist.
13. J: That sentiment is consistent with your
writing in The Holder , where technology is
employed throughout as a literary and
thematic device. Nevertheless, the novel
implies that such media are only actualized
through data-gathering by sensitive and
careful human beings like Beigh, people who
have a personal investment in such projects.
For example, Venn, who tries to experience
the past using the interactive computer
program, ends up with nothing more than a
postcard view of modern Madras; he cant
access the experience Beigh can, in large
part because he hasnt cultivated the kind of
sensitivity that she has from tracing
Hannahs life. The technology acts as a
gatekeeper of sorts, which we find very
interesting, especially when considering how
technology structures First and Third World
relationships of power and hierarchy.
14. M: To me, creative imagination is the
gatekeeper. The technician downloads a
statistics-rich experience; the artist, using
the same program, wrests a vision. And each
time you use that program, you learn or dislearn some element because you are made
up of a series of fluid identities. Similarly,
each time you read The Holder , I hope you
come up with new insights.
Im not sure I agree with you that technology
privileges First World over Third. Much
of the information transfer and accounting
for
U.S.
corporations
and
megamultinationals with European headquarters
is done offshore, meaning in areas that you

are designating as Third. Ive done

homework on this. Its class , not geography,
thats providing the hierarchy grid. Urban,
upper-middle classes and professionals in
Bombay, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila,
etc. have all the latest electronics and
communications instruments. But the poor
and the homeless in all areas of the world,
including North America, are increasingly
disempowered by technological advances.
Your question seems to arise from the need
of postcolonial studies scholars to impose
politics as the dominant grid for measuring
art. But for the writer of serious fiction,
politics or race or gender is only one element
of many hundred elements that go into the
making of a character. Novelists aim for
fullness of catharsis, not a political
pamphlet.
15. J: Yet, isnt it difficult to separate the
aesthetic from the political? For example,
two reviews suggest that while the use of
virtual reality is a clever device in The
Holder , the representation of 17th-century
Indiawith its excessive emphasis on
violence and ornamentationironically
reduplicates exoticized representations of
India found in colonialist texts and period
pieces (see Koshy and Parameswaran).
These reviewers argue that any attempt to
alter or deconstruct such representations
through the use of virtual reality is
undermined by your perhaps unconscious
kinship with Orientalists of the past. How do
you respond to such charges, and upon
reflection, do you wish youd used virtual
reality any differently?
16. M: Absolutely not. One, this is not a book
about India, but about the making of
America and American national mythology.
Thats why I used the two women characters,
Hannah the pre-America American, and
Beigh, the post-deEuropeanized American,
to dramatize the need to redefine what it
means to be an American in the 1990s.
Two, Im sure the two reviewers you are
referring to havent done eleven years of
research into mercantilism in 17th-century
India as I have. Crucial new material on
17th-century trade, especially on intra-Asian
trade, has been published in the early 1990s
by Indian and Sri Lankan scholars. So its
simply ignorance of Indian mercantile and
military histories on the part of these two
reviewers. Thats what I find most
frustrating about being a scholar/writer:
that academics and journalists with
insufficient knowledge of the contextual
material have the audacity to make such
public pronouncements! I dont know where
this animus comes from. Why is it so hard
for them to deal with impassioned, wellresearched, provocative fiction by a woman
author?
130

17. J: Part of these critics suggestions, though,

is that despite careful research, your
revisions of colonialist or orientalist
accounts of the seventeenth century are not
substantive enough.
18. M: My suggestion to them is that they bring
greater intelligence and sensitivity to bear
on the act of reading literature, including
The Holder.
19. J: This is a book about the process of history
making, specifically about the American
way of making and re-making history. Yet,
one might argue that the representations of
Native Americans in the early sections of the
novel set in Puritan New England perhaps
unwittingly repeat the imperialist tendencies
of many colonial and nineteenth-century
American
texts.
Specifically,
the
miscegenetic encounter between Rebecca
and her Nipmuc lover recalls similar
encounters
depicted
in
novels
by
nineteenth-century New England women,
including Lydia Childs Hobomok and Maria
Sedgwicks Hope Leslie. In those works,
such encounters are subversive to the extent
that they allow for a female voice to emerge
and suggest possible new alliances
between women and Native Americans. Yet
the Native American never really speaks in
these novels... a romanticized version does,
and thus these amorous encounters serve,
one could argue, merely to empower and
exoticize colonial and nineteenth-century
Anglo-American women at the expense of
Native Americans.
20. M: Well, in my novel, I have Rebeccas biracial children very much alive and present
to recount their own tales when they are
ready to. Rebeccas Nipmuc lover has several
prototypes in history, of course. Ill leave it
to other authors to write the lovers story.
Actually Im very interested in writing King
Philips story from his point of view some
day. An author focuses on a few individual
characters, and hopes that a larger frisson of
emotion and revelation comes across to the
reader. I would be guilty of bad writing if I
insisted on making Rebeccas lover stand for
all Nipmucs let alone for all original
Americans, or Bhagmati all Hindu women.
Margaret Atwood has written: You tell the
story you have to tell; let others tell the story
that they have to tell. My message to these
academics: Read the story that I have told in
The Holder ; dont fabricate a story that I
didnt tell, but that you need to pretend I did
so that you can distort the text into a
convenient target of hate. Ive been quoted
in an article in Harpers as saying these
postcolonial scholars are assassins of the
imagination.
21. J: While we certainly do not intend to
assassinate the imagination, we would
argue that by relegating Rebeccas bi-racial
children to the margins of the text as
unspeaking subjects, their narratives, as is
the case in much colonial American writing,

are endlessly deferred. Nonetheless, we feel

that much of the richness and strength of
the novel derives from the interventions you
make in the captivity narrative tradition and
the canon of 19th-century American
literature.
22. M: Well, perhaps next time you read The
Holder youll have new takes on the
significance of my meta-fictional use of
Sitas, Bhagmatis, and Hannahs captivity
narratives.
23. J: In conclusion, wed like to go back to the
idea of Mughal painting you articulated
earlier as a governing aesthetic in your
writing. Youve said that I will be writing, in
the Mughal style, till I get it right (FourHundred Year Old Woman 38). The Holder
seems to be very much predicated upon
Mughal aesthetics. It seems to be an
excellent example of the complication and
elaboration of Mughal miniature painting
and
reflects
the
sense
of
the
interpenetration of all things which you
have identified as a compelling aspect of
such an aesthetic. Having said all that, have
you finally gotten it right? And if so, where
are you going from here?
24. M: Who knows? The characters surprised
me draft by draft; the structure of the novel
evolved almost in spite of myself. I should
add that my structures are also inspired by
my obsession with chaos theory and fractals.
In fact, a couple of European scholars have
published essays on the operation of chaos
theory in Jasmine. Where am I going? I
dont want to know too far ahead.

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Parameswaran, Uma. Rev. of The Holder of
the World, by Bharati Mukherjee. World
Literature Today 68.3 (1994): 636-7.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Problem
of Cultural Self-Representation. The PostColonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York
and London: Routledge, 1990.

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133

134

7
Lee Smith
Bernard Malamud

Cherry Oxendine is dying now, and everybody knows

it. Everybody in town except maybe her new husband,
Harold Stikes, although Lord knows he ought to, it's as
plain as the nose on your face. And it's not like he
hasn't been told either, by both Dr. Thacker and Dr.
Pinckney and also that hotshot young Jew doctor from
Memphis, Dr. Shapiro, who comes over here once a
week. "Harold just can't take it in," is what the head
nurse in Intensive Care, Lois Hickey, said in the
Beauty Nook last week. Lois ought to know. She's been
right there during the past six weeks while Cherry
Oxendine has been in Intensive Care, writing down
Cherry's blood pressure every hour on the hour,
changing bags on the IV, checking the stomach tube,
moving the bed up and down to prevent bedsores,
monitoring the respiratorand calling in Rodney
Broadbent, the respiratory therapist, more and more
frequently. "Her blood gases is not but twenty-eight,"
Lois said in the Beauty Nook. "If" we was to unhook
that respirator, she'd die in a day."
"I would go on and do it then, it I was Harold." said
Mrs. Hooker, the Presbyterian minister's wife, who
was getting a permanent. "It is the Christian thing."
"You wouldn't either." Lois said, "because she still
knows him. That's the awful part. She still knows him.
In tact she peps right up ever time he comes in, like
they are going on a date or something. It's the saddest
thing. And ever time we open the doors, here comes
Harold, regular as clockwork. Eight o'clock, one
LEE SMITH
o'clock, six o'clock, eight o'clock, why shoot, he'd stay
in there all day and all night if we'd let him. Well, she
opens her mouth and says Hi honey, you can tell what
she's saying even if she can't make a sound. And her
Intensive Care
eyes get real bright and her face looks pretty good too,
that's because of the Lasix, only Harold don't know
.that. He just can't take it all in," Lois said.
LEE SMITH (1944) grew up an only child in
"Oh, I feel so sorry for him," said Mrs. Hooker. Her
Grundy, Virginia (population 2,000), an isolated tace is as round and flat as a dime.
mountain community in the western part of the
"Well, I don't." Dot Mains, owner of the Beauty
state. She attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Nook, started cutting Lois Hickey's hair. Lois wears it
Virginia, where she graduated with a bachelor's too short, in Dot's opinion. "I certainly don't feel sorry
degree. She has been the recipient of many awards for Harold Stikes, after what he did." Dot snipped
and honors, including the Robert Penn Warren decisively at Lois Hickey's frosted hair. Mrs. Hooker
Prize for Fiction (1991), the Sir Walter Raleigh made a sad little sound, half sigh, half words, as Janice
Award (1989), rhe John Dos Passos Award for stuck her under the dryer, while Miss Berry, the oldLiterature (1987), and the North Carolina Award for maid home demonstration agent waiting for her
Fiction (1984). She also won the 1994 Lila Wallace- appointment, snapped the pages of Cosmopolitan
Reader's Digest Writers' Award and rhe fifth annual magazine one by one, blindly, filled with somewhat
John William Corringxon Award for Literary gratuitous rage against the behavior of Harold Stikes.
Excellence. Smith is the author of eight novels, The
Miss Berry is Harold Stikes's ex-wife's cousin. So she
Last Day the Dogbitshes Bloomed, Something in
does not pity him, not one bit. He got what's coming to
the Wind, Fancy Strut, Black Mountain
him, that's all, in Miss Berry's opinion. Most people
Breakdown, Oral History, Family Linen, Fair and
don't. It's a pleasure to see it, but Miss Berry would
Tender Ladies, and The Devil's Dream; and three never say this out loud since Cherry Oxendine is of
story collections, Me and My Baby Vieiu the
course dying. Cherry Oxendine! Like it was yesterday,
Eclipse, Cakewalk, and News of the Spirit. Lee Miss Berry remembers how Cherry Oxendine acted in
Smith lives in North Carolina.
high school, wearing her skirts too tight, popping her
gum.
135

"The doctors can't do a thing," said Lois Hickey.

Silence settled like fog then on the Beauty Nook, on
Miss Berry and her magazine, on Dot Mains cutting
Lois Hickey's hair, on little Janice thinking about her
boyfriend Bruce, and on Mrs. Hooker crying gently
under the dryer. Suddenly, Dot remembered
something her old granny used to say about such
momenrs of sudden absolute quiet: "An angel is
passing over."
After a while, Mrs. Hooker said, "It's all in the
hands ot God, then." She spread out her fingers one by
one on the tray, for Janice to give her a manicure.
And as for Harold Stikes, he's not even considering
God. Oh, he doesn't interfere when Mr. Hooker comes
by the hospital once a day to check on him
Harold was a Presbyterian in his former liteor
even when the Baptist preacher from Cherry's
mama's church shows up and insists that everybody
in the whole waiting room join hands and bow heads
in prayer while he raises his big red face and curly
gray head straight up to heaven and prays in a loud
voice that God will heal these loved ones who walk
through the Valley of Death, and comfort these others
who watch, through their hour ot need. This includes
Mrs. Eunice Sprayberry, whose mother has had a
stroke, John and Paula Ripman, whose infant son is
dying of encephalitis, and different others who drift in
and out of Intensive Care following surgery or wrecks.
Harold is losing track. He closes his eyes and bows his
head, figuring it can't hurt, like taking out insurance.
But deep down inside, he knows that it God is worth
His salt, He is not impressed by the prayer of Harold
Stikes, who knowingly gave up all hope of peace on
earth and heaven hereafter for the love ot Cherry
Oxendine.
Not to mention his family.
He gave them up too.
But this morning when he leaves the hospital alter
his eight-o'clock visit to Cherry, Harold finds himself
turning left out of the lot instead of right toward Food
Lion, his store. Harold finds himself taking 15-501 just
south of town and then driving through those ornate
marble gates that mark the entrance to Camelot Hills,
his old neighborhood. Some lucky instinct makes him
pull into the little park and stop there, beside the
pond. Here comes his ex-wife, Joan, driving the
Honda Accord he paid for last year. Joan looks straight
ahead. She's still wearing her shiny blond hair in the
pageboy she's worn ever since Harold met her at
Mercer College so many years ago. Harold is sure she's
wearing low heels and a shirtwaist dress. He knows
her briefcase is in the backseat, containing lesson
plans for today, yogurt, and a banana. Potassium is
important. Harold has heard this a million times.
Behind her, the beds are all made, the breakfast dishes
stacked in the sink. As a home ec teacher, Joan
believes that breakfast is the most important meal of
the day. The two younger children, Brenda and
Harold Jr., are alreadv on the bus to the Academy.
James rides to the high school with his mother, hair
wet, tace blank, staring straight ahead. They don't see

Harold. Joan brakes at the stop sign before entering

15-501. She always comes to a complere stop, even if
nothing's coming. Always. She looks both ways. Then
she's gone.
Harold drives past well-kepr lawn after well-kept
lawn and lovely house after lovely house, many of
them houses where Harold has attended Cub Scout
meetings, eaten barbecue, watched bowl games. Now
these houses have a blank, closed look to them, like
mean faces. Harold turns left on Oxford, then right on
Shrewsbury. He comes to a stop beside the curb at
1105 Cambridge and just sits rhere with the motor
running, looking ar the house. His house. The Queen
Anne house he and Joan planned so carefully, down to
the last detail, the fish-scale siding. The house he is
still paying for and will be until his dying day, if Joan
has her way about it.
Which she will, of course. Everybody is on her side:
desertion. Harold Stikes deserted his lovely wife and
three children for a redheaded waitress. For a fallen
woman with a checkered past. Harold can hear her
now. "I fail to see why I and the children should lower
our standards of living, Harold, and go to the dogs just
because you have chosen to become insane in midlife." Joan's voice is slow and amiable. It has a downto-earth quality which used to appeal to Harold but
now drives him wild. Harold sits at the curb with the
motor running and looks at his house good. It looks
fine. It looks just like it did when they picked it out of
the pages of Southern Living and wrote off for the
plans. The only difference is, that house was in Stone
Mountain, Georgia, and this house is in Greenwood,
Mississippi. Big deal.
Joan's response to Harold's desertion has been a
surprise to him. He expected tears, recriminations,
fireworks. He did not expect her calm, reasonable
manner, treating Harold the way she treats the
Mormon missionaries who come to the door in their
black suits, for instance, that very calm sweet careful
voice. Joan acts like Harold's desertion is nothing
much. And nothing much appears to have changed for
her except the loss of Harold's actual presence, and
this cannot be a very big deal since everything else has
remained exactly the same.
What the hell. After a while Harold turns off the
motor and walks up the flagstone walk to the front
door. His key still fits. All the furniture is arranged
exactly the way it was arranged four years ago. The
only thing that ever changes here is the display of
magazines on the glass coffee table before the
fireplace, Joan keeps them up to date. Newsweek,
National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, Gourmet.
It's a mostly educational grouping, unlike what Cherrv
readsParade, Coronet, National Enquirer. Now
these magazines litter the floor at the side of the bed
like little souvenirs of Cherry. Harold can't stand to
pick them up.
He sits down heavily on the white sofa and stares at
the coffee table. He remembers the quiz and the day he
found it, four years ago now although it feels like only
yesterday, funny thing though that he can't remember
which magazine it was in. Maybe Reader's Digest. The

136

quiz was titled "How Good Is Your Marriage?" and

Harold noticed that Joan had filled it in carefully. This
did not surprise him. Joan was so law-abiding, such a
goodgirl, that she always filled in such quizzes when
she came across them, as if she had to, before she
could go ahead and finish the magazine. Usually
Harold didn't pay much attention.
This time, he picked the magazine up and started
reading. One of the questions said: "What is your idea
of the perfect vacation? (a) a romantic getaway for you
and your spouse alone; (b) a family trip to the beach;
(c) a business convention; (d) an organized tour of a
foreign land." Joan had wavered on this one. She had
marked and then erased "an organized tour of a
foreign land." Finally she had settled on "a family trip
to the beach." Harold skimmed along. The final
question was: "When you think of the love between
yourself and your spouse, do you think of (a) a great
passion; (b) a warm, meaningful companionship; (c)
an average love; (d) an unsatisfying habit." Joan had
marked "(c) an average love." Harold stared at these
words, knowing they were true. An average love,
norhing great, an average marriage between an
average man and woman. Suddenly, strangely, Harold
was filled with rage.
"It is not enough!" He thought he actually said these
words our loud. Perhaps he did say them out loud,
into the clean hushed air-conditioned air of his
average home. Harold's rage was followed by a brief
period, maybe five minutes, of unbearable longing,
after which he simply closed rhe magazine and put it
back on the table and got up and poured himself a stiff
shot of bourbon. He stood for a while before the
picture window in the living room, looking out at his
even green grass, his clipped hedge, and the impatiens
blooming in its bed, the clematis climbing the mailbox.
The colors of the world fairly leaped at himthe sky so
blue, the grass so green. A passing jogger's shorts
glowed unbearably red. He felt that he had never seen
any of these things before. Yet in another way it all
seemed so familiar as to be an actual part of his body
his throat, his heart, his breath. Harold rook another
drink. Then he went out and played nine holes of golf
at the country club with Bubba Fields, something he
did every Wednesday afternoon. He shot 82.
By the time he came home for dinner he was okay
again. He was very tired and a little lightheaded, all his
muscles tingling. His face was hot. Yet Harold felt
vaguely pleased with himself, as if he had been
through something and come out the other side of it,
as if he had done a creditable job on a difficult
assignment. But right then, during dinner, Harold
could not have told you exactly what had happened to
him that da}', or why he felt this way. Because the
mind will forget what it can't stand to remember, and
anyway the Stikeses had beef Stroganoff that night, a
new recipe that Joan was testing for the Junior League
cookbook, and Harold Jr. had written them a funny
letter from camp, and for once Brenda did not whine..
James, who was twelve that year, actually
condescended to talk to his father, with some degree of
interest, about baseball, and after supper was over he

and Harold went out and pitched to each other until it

grew dark and lightning bugs emerged. This is how it's
supposed to be, Harold rhought, father and son
playing carch in the twilight.
Then he went upstairs and joined Joan in bed to
watch TV, after which they turned out the light and
made love. But Joan had greased herself all over with
Oil of Olay, earlier, and right in the middle of doing it,
Harold got a crazy terrified feeling that he was losing
her, that Joan was slipping, slipping away.
But time passed, as it does, and Harold forgot that
whole weird day, forgot it until right now, in fact, as
he sits on the white sofa in his old house again and
stares at the magazines on the coffee table, those
magazines so familiar except for the date, which is four
years later. Now Harold wonders: If he hadn't picked
up that quiz and read it, would he have even noticed
when Cherry Oxendine spooned out that potato salad
for him six months later, in his own Food Lion deli?
"Would the sight of redheaded Cherry Oxendine, the
Food Lion smock mostly obscuring her dynamite
figure, have hit him like a bolt out of the blue the way
it did?
Cherry herself does not believe there is any such
thing as coincidence. Cherry thinks there is a master
plan for the universe, and what is meant to happen
will. She thinks it's all set in the stars. For the first
time, Harold thinks maybe she's right. He sees part of
a pattern in the works, but dimly, as if he is looking at
a constellation hidden by clouds. Mainly, he sees her
face.
Harold gets up from rhe sofa and goes into the
kitchen, suddenly aware that he isn't supposed to be
here. He could be arrested, probably! He looks back at
the living room but there's not a trace of him left, not
even an imprint on the soft white cushions of the sofa.
Absentmindedly, Harold opens and shuts the
refrigerator door. There's no beer, he notices. He can't
have a Coke. On the kitchen calendar, he reads:
Harold Jr to
dentist, 3:30
p.m. Tues
Change furnace
filter 2/18/88
(James)
So James is changing the furnace filters now, James is
the man of the house. Why not? It's good for him. He's
been given too much, kids these days grow up so fast,
no responsibilities, they get on drugs, you read about it
all the time. But deep down inside, Harold knows that
James is not on drugs and he feels something awful,
feels the way he felt growing up, that sick little flutter
in his stomach that took years to go away.
Harold's dad died of walking pneumonia when he
was only three, so his mother raised him alone. She
called him her "little man." This made Harold feel
proud but also wild, like a boy growing up in a cage.
Does James feel this way now? Harold suddenly
decides to get James a car for his birthday, and take
him hunting.

137

Hunting is something Harold never did as a boy,

but it means a lot to him now. In fact Harold never
owned a gun until he was thirty-one, when he bought a
shotgun in order to accept the invitation of his
regional manager, "Litde Jimmy" Fletcher, to go quail
hunting in Georgia. He had a great time. Now he's
invited back every year, and Little Jimmy is in charge
of the cornpany's whole eastern division. Harold has a
great future with Food Lion too. He owns three stores,
one in downtown Greenwood, one out at the mall, and
one over in Indianola. He owned two of them when his
mother died, and he's pleased to think that she died
proudprotid of the good little boy he'd always been,
and the good man he'd become.
Of course she'd wanted him to make a preacher, but
Harold never got the call, and she gave that up finally
when he was twenty. Harold was not going to pretend
to get the call if he never got it, and he held strong to
this principle. He wanted to see a burning bush, but if
this was not vouchsafed to him, he wasn't going to lie
about it. He would just major in math instead, which
he was good at anyway. Majoring in math at Mercer
College, the small Baptist school his mother had
chosen for him, Harold came upon Joan Berry, a home
ec major from his own hometown who set out singlemindedlv to marry him, which wasn't hard. After
graduation, Harold got a job as management trainee in
the Food Lion store where he had started as a bagboy
at fourteen. Joan produced their three children,
spaced three years apart, and got her tubes tied.
Harold got one promotion, then another. Joan and
Harold prospered. They built rhis house.
Harold looks around and now this house, his house,
strikes him as creepy, a wax museum. He lets himself
out the back door and walks quickly, almost runs, to
his car. It's real cold out, a gray day in February, but
Harold's sweating. He starts his car and roars off
roward the hospital, drivingas Cherry would say
like a bat out of hell.
They're letting Harold sray with her longer now. He
knows it, they know it, but nobody says a word. Lois
Hickey jusr looks the other way when the
announcement "Visiting hours are over" crackles
across the PA. Is this a good sign or a bad sign? Harold
can't tell. He feels slow and confused, like a man
underwater. "I think she looks better, don't you?" he
said last night to Cherry's son Stan, the TV
weatherman, who had driven down from Memphis for
the day. Eyes slick and bright with tears, Stan went
over to Harold and hugged him tight. This scared
Harold to death, he has practically never touched his
own sons, and he doesn't even know Stan, who's been
grown and gone for years. Harold is not used to
hugging anybody, especially men. Harold breathed in
Stan's strong go-get-'em cologne, he buried his face in
Stan's long curly hair. He thinks it is possible that Stan
has a permanent. They'll do anything up in Memphis.
Then Stan stepped back and put one hand on each of
Harold's shoulders, holding him out at arm's length.
Stan has his mother's wide, mobile mouth. The bright
white light of Intensive Care glinted off the gold chain

and the crystal that he wore around his neck. "I'm

afraid we're going to lose her, Pop," he said.
But Harold doesn't think so. Today he thinks Cherry
looks the best she's looked in weeks, with a bright spot
of color in each cheek to match her flaming hair. She's
moving around a lot too, she keeps kicking the sheet
off.
"She's getting back some of that old energy now," he
tells Cherry's daughter, Tammy Lynn Palladino, when
she comes by after school. Tammy Lynn and Harold's
son James are both members of the senior class, but
they aren't friends. Tammy Lynn says James is a
"stuck-up jock," a "preppie," and a "country-clubber."
Harold can't say a word to defend his own son against
these charges, he doesn't even know James anymore.
It might be true, anyway. Tammy Lynn is real smart, a
teenage egghead. She's got a full scholarship to
Millsaps College for next year. She applied for it all by
herself. As Cherry used to say, Tammy Lynn came into
this world with a full deck of cards and an ace or two
up her sleeve. Also she looks out for Number One.
In this regard Tammy Lynn is as different from her
mama as night from day, because Cherry would give
you the shirt off her back and frequently has. That's
gotten her into lots of trouble. With Ed Palladino, for
instance, her second husband and Tammy Lynn's dad.
Just about everybody in this town got took by Ed
Palladino, who came in here wearing a seersucker suit
and talking big about putting in an outlet mall across
the river. A lot of people got burned on that outlet mall
deal. But Ed Palladino had a way about him that made
you want to cast your lot with his, it is true. You
wanted to give Ed Palladino your savings, your timesharing condo, your cousin, your ticket to the Super
Bowl. Cherry gave it all.
She married him and turned over what little
inheritance she had from her daddy's deathand
that's the only time in her life she ever had any money,
mind youand then she just shrugged and smiled her
big crooked smile when he left town under cover of
night. "C'est la vie," Cherry said. She donated the rest
of his clorhes to the Salvation Army. "Que sera, serd,"
Cherry said, quoting a song that was popular when she
was in junior high.
Tammy Lynn sits by her mama's bed and holds
Cherry's thin dry hand. "I brought you a Chick-Fil-A,"
she says to Harold. "It's over there in that bag." She
points to the shelf by the door. Harold nods. Tammy
Lynn works at Chick-Fil-A. Cherry's eyes are wide and
blue and full of meaning as she stares at her daughter.
Her mouth moves, both Harold and Tammy Lynn lean
forward, but then her mouth falls slack and her eyelids
flutter shut. Tammy sits back.
"I think she looks some better today, don't you?"
Harold asks.
"No," Tammy Lynn says. She has a flat little redneck
voice. She sounds just the way she did last summer
when she told Cherry that what she saw in the field
was a cotton picker working at night, and not a UFO
after all. "I wish I did but I don't, Harold. I'm going to
go on home now and heat up some Beanee Weenee for
Mamaw. You come on as soon as you can."

138

"Well," Harold says. He feels like things have gotten

all turned around here some way, he feels like he's the
kid and Tammy Lynn has turned into a freaky little
grown-up. He says, "I'll be along directly."
But they both know he won't leave until Lois Hickey
throws him out. And speaking of Lois, as soon as
Tammy Lynn takes off, here she comes again, checking
something on the respirator, making a little clucking
sound with her mouth, then whirling to leave. When
Lois walks, her panty girdle goes swish, swish, sivish
at the top of her legs. She comes right back with the
young black man named Rodney Broadbent,
Respiratory Therapist. It says so on his badge. Rodney
wheels a complicated-looking cart ahead of himself.
He's all built up, like a weightlifter.
"How you doing tonight, Mr. Stipe?" Rodney says.
"I think she's some better," Harold says.
Lois Hickey and Rodney look at him.
"Well, lessee here," Rodney says. He unhooks the
respirator tube at Cherry's throat, sticks the tube from
his own machine down the opening, and switches on
the machine.
It makes a whirring sound. It looks like an electric
ice cream mixer. Rodney Broadbent looks at Lois
Hickey in a significant way as she turns to leave the
room.
They don't have to tell him, Harold knows. Cherry is
worse, not better. Harold gets the Chick-Fil-A,
unwraps it, eats it, and then goes over to stand by the
window. It's already getting dark. The big mercury arc
light glows in the hospital parking lot. A little wind
blows some trash around on the concrete. He has had
Cherry for three years, that's all. One trip to Disney
World, two vacations at Gulf Shores, Alabama,
hundreds of nights in the old metal bed out at the farm
with Cherry sleeping naked beside him, her arm
thrown over his stomach. They had a million laughs.
"Alrightee," Rodney Broadbent nearly sings,
unhooking his machine. Harold rurns to look at him.
Rodney Broadbent certainly looks more like a middle
linebacker than a respiratory therapist. But Harold
likes him.
"Well, Rodney?" Harold says.
Rodney Starrs shadow-boxing in the middle of the
room. "Tough times," he says finally. "These is tough
times, Mr. Stipe." Harold stares at him. Rodney is light
on his feet as can be.
Harold sits down in the chair by the respirator.
"What do you mean?" he asks.
"I mean she is drowning, Mr. Stipe," Rodney says.
He throws a punch which lands real close to Harold's
left ear. "What I'm doing here, see, is suctioning. I'm
pulling all the fluid up our of her lungs. But now looka
here, Mr. Stipe, they is just too damn much of it. See
this little doohickey here I'm measuring it with? This
here is the danger zone, man. Now Mrs. Stipe, she has
been in the clanger zone for some time. They is just
too much damn fluid in there. What she got, anyway?
Cancer and pneumonia both, am I right? What can I
tell you, man? She is drowning." Rodney gives Harold
a short affectionate punch in the ribs, men wheels his
cart away. From the door, apparently struck by some

misgivings, he says, "Well, man, if it was me, I'd want

to know what the story is, you follow me, man? If it
was me, what I'm saying. Harold can't see Rodney
anymore, only hear his voice from the open door.
"Thank you, Rodney," Harold says. He sits in the
chair. In a way he has known this already, for quite
some time. In a way, Rodney's news is no news, to
Harold. He just hopes he will be man enough to bear
it, to do what will have to be done. Harold has always
been scared that he is not man enough for Cherry
Oxendine, anyway. This is his worst secret fear. He
looks around the little Intensive Care room, searching
for a sign, some sign, anything, that he will be man
enough. Nothing happens. Cherry lies strapped to the
bed, flanked by so many machines that it looks like
she's in the cockpit of a jet. Her eyes are closed, eyelids
fluttering, red spots on her freckled cheeks. Her chest
rises and falls as the respirator pushes air in and out
through the tube in her neck. He doesn't see how she
can sleep in the bright white light of Intensive Care,
where it is always noon. And does she dream? Cherry
used to tell him her dreams, which were wild, long
Technicolor dreams, like movies. Cherry played
different parts in them. If you dream in color, it means
you're intelligent, Cherry said. She used to tease him
all the time. She thought Harold's own dreams were a
stitch, dreams more boring than his life, dreams in
which he'd drive to Jackson, say, or be washing his car.
"Harold?" It's Ray Muncey, manager of the Food
Lion at the mall.
"Why, what are you doing over here, Ray?" Harold
asks, and then in a flash he knows, Lois Hickey must
have called him, to make Harold go on home.
"I was just driving by and I thought, Hey, maybe
Harold and me might run by the Holiday Inn, get a
bite to eat." Ray shifts from foot to foot in the doorway. He doesn't come inside, he's not supposed to,
nobody but immediate family is allowed in Intensive
Care, and Harold's gladCherry would just die if
people she barely knows, like Ray Muncey, got to see
her looking so bad.
"No, Ray, you go on and eat," Harold says. "I
already ate. I'm leaving right now, anyway."
"Well, how's the missus doing?" Ray is a big man,
afflicted with big, heavy manners.
"She's drowning," Harold says abruptly. Suddenly
he remembers Cherry in a water ballet at the town
pool, it must have been the summer of junior year,
Fourth of July, Cherry and the other girls floating in a
circle on their backs to form a giant flowerlegs high,
toes pointed. Harold doesn'r know it when Ray
Muncey leaves. Out the window, the parking lot light
glows like a big full moon. Lois Hickey comes in.
"You've got to go home now, Harold," she says. "I'll
call if there's any change." He remembers Cherry at
Glass Lake, on the senior class picnic. Cherry's getting
real agitated now, she tosses her head back and forth,
moves her arms. She'd pull out the tubes if she could.
She kicks off the sheet. Her legs are still good, great
legs in fact, the legs of a beautiful young woman.

139

Harold at seventeen was tall and skinny, brown hair in

a soft flat crew cut, glasses with heavy black frames.
His jeans were too short. He carried a pen-and-pencil
set in a clear plastic case in his breast pocket. Harold
and his best friend, Ben Hill, looked so much alike that
people had trouble telling them apart. The}' did
everyrhing together. They built model rockets, they
read ever}' science fiction book they could get their
hands on, they collected Lionel train parts and Marvel
comics. They loved superheroes with special powers,
enormous beings who leaped across rivers and oceans.
Harold's friendship with Ben Hill kept the awful
loneliness of the only child at bay, and it also kept him
from having to talk to girls. You couldn't talk to those
two, not seriously. They were giggling and bumping
into each other all the time. They were immature.
So it was in Ben's company that Harold experienced
the most private, the most personal memory he has of
Cherry Oxendine in high school. Oh, he also has those
other memories you'd expect, the big public memories
of Cherry being crowned Miss Greenwood High (for
her talent; she surprised everybody by reciting "Abou
Ben Adhem" in such a stirring way that there wasn't a
dry eye in the whole auditorium when she got
through), or running out onto the field ahead of the
team with the other cheerleaders, red curls flying,
green and white skirt whirling out around her hips like
a beach umbrella when she turned a cartwheel. Harold
noticed her then, of course. He noticed her when she
moved through the crowded halls of the high school
with her walk rhat was almost a prance, she put a little
something extra into it, all righr. Flarold noticed
Cherry Oxendine then in the way that he noticed
Sandra Dee on the cover of a magazine, or Annette
Funicello on American Bandstand.
But such girls were not for the likes of Harold, and
Harold knew it. Girls like Cherry always had
boyfriends like Lamar Peebles, who was hersa doctor's son with a baby-blue convertible and plenty of
money. They used to drive around town in his car,
smoking cigarettes. Harold saw them, as he carried
out grocery bags. He did not envy Lamar Peebles, or
wish he had a girl like Cherry Oxendine. Only
something about them made him stand where he was
in rhe Food Lion lot, watching, until they had passed
from sight.
So Harold's close-up encounter with Cherry was
unexpected. It took place at the senior class picnic,
where Harold and Ben had been drinking beer all
afternoon. No alcohol was allowed at the senior class
picnic, but some of the more enterprising boys had
brought out kegs the night before and hidden them in
the woods. Anybody could go back there and pay some
money and get some beer. The chaperones didn't
know, or appeared not to know. In any case, the
chaperones all left at six o'clock, when the picnic was
officially over. Some of the class members left then
too. Then some of them came back with more beer,
more blankets. It was a free lake. Nobody could make
you go home. Normally, Harold and Ben would have
been among the first to leave, but because they had
had four beers apiece, and because this was the first

time they had ever had any beer ever, at all, they were
still down by the water, skipping rocks and waiting to
sober up so that they would not wreck Harold's
mother's green Gremlin on the way home. All the cool
kids were on the other side of the lake, listening to
transisror radios. The sun went down. Bullfrogs
started up. A mist came out all around the sides of the
lake. It was a cloudy, humid day anyway, not a great
day for a picnic.
"If God is really God, how come He let Himself get
crucified, is what I want to know," Ben said. Ben's
daddy was a Holiness preacher, out in the county.
But Harold heard something. "Hush, Ben," he said.
"If I was God I would go around and really kick
some ass," Ben said.
Harold heard it again. It was almost too dark to see.
"Damn." It was a girl's voice, followed by a splash.
All of a sudden, Harold felt sober. "Who's there?" he
asked. He stepped forward, right up to the water's
edge. Somebody was in the water. Harold was wearing
his swim trunks under his jeans, but he had not gone
in the water himself. He couldn't stand to show
himself in front of people. He thought he was too
skinny.
"Well, do something." It was the voice of Cherry
Oxendine, almost wailing. She stumbled up the bank.
Harold reached out and grabbed her arm. Close up,
she was a mess, wet and muddy, with her hair all over
her head. But the thing that got Harold, of course, was
that she didn't have any top on. She didn't even try to
cover them up either, just stomped her little foot on
the bank and said, "I am going to kill Lamar Peebles
when I get ahold of him." Harold had never even
imagined so much skin.
"What's going on?" asked Ben, from up the bank.
Harold took off his own shirt as fast as he could and
handed it over to Cherry Oxendine. "Cover yourself,"
he said.
"Why, thank you." Cherry didn't bat an eye. She
took his shirt and put it on, tying it stylishly at the
waist. Harold couldn't believe it. Close up, Cherry was
a lot smaller than she looked on the stage or the
football field. She looked up at Harold through her
dripping hair and gave him her crooked grin.
"Thanks, hey?" she said.
And then she was gone, vanished into the mist and
trees before Harold could say another word. He
opened his mouth and closed it. Mist obscured his
view. From the other side of the lake he could hear
"Ramblin Rose" playing on somebody's radio. He
heard a girl's high-pirched giggle, a boy's whooping
laugh.
"What's going on?" asked Ben.
"Nothing," Harold said. It was the first time he had
ever lied to Ben. Harold never told anybody what had
happened that night, not ever. He felt that it was up to
him to protect Cherry Oxendine's honor. Later, much
later, when he and Cherry were lovers, he was
astonished to learn that she couldn't remember any of
this, not who she was with or what had happened or
what she was doing in the lake like that with her top

140

off, or Harold giving her his shirt. "I think that was
sweet, though," Cherry told him.
When Harold and Ben finally got home that night at
nine or ten o'clock, Harold's mother was frantic.
"You've been drinking," she shrilled at him under the
hanging porch light. "And where's your shirt?" It was a
new madras shirt which Harold had gotten for
graduation. Now Harold's mother is out at the
Hillandale Rest Home. Ben died in Vietnam, and
Cherry is drowning. This time, and Harold knows it
now, he can't help her.
Oh, Cherry! Would she have been so wild if she hadn't
been so cute? And what if her parents had been
younger when she was bornnormal-age parents
couldn't they have controlled her better? As it was, the
Oxendines were sober, solid people living in a
farmhouse out near the county line, and Cherry lit up
their lives like a rocket. Her dad, Martin "Buddy"
Oxendine, went to sleep in his chair every night right
after supper, woke back up for the eleven-o'clock
news, and then went to bed for good. Buddy was an
elder in the Baptist church. Cherry's mom, Gladys
Oxendine, made drapes for people. She assumed she
would never have children at all because of her spastic
colitis. Gladys and Buddy had started raising
cockapoos when they gave up on children. Imagine
Gladys's surprise, then, to find herself pregnant at
thirty-eight, when she was already old! They say she
didn't even know it when she went to the doctor. She
thought she had a tumor.
But then she got so excited, that old farm woman,
when Dr. Grimwood told her what was what, and she
wouldn't even consider an abortion when he
mentioned the chances of a mongoloid. People didn't
use to have babies so old then as they do now, so
Gladys Oxendine's pregnancy was the talk of the
county. Neighbors crocheted little jackets and made
receiving blankets. Buddy built a baby room onto the
house and made a cradle by hand. During the last two
months of the pregnancy, when Gladvs had to stay in
bed because of toxemia, people brought over
casseroles and boiled cusrard, everything good.
Gladys's pregnancy was the only time in her whole life
that she was ever pretty, and she loved it, and she
loved the attention, neighbors in and our of the house.
When the baby was finally born on November 1, 1944,
no parents were ever more ready than Gladys and
Buddy Oxendine. And the baby was everything they
hoped for too, which is not usually the casethe
prettiest baby in the world, a baby like a little flower.
They named her Doris Christine which is who she
was until eighth grade, when she made junior varsity
cheerleader and announced that she was changing her
name to Cherry. Cherry! Even her parents had to
admit it suited her better than Doris Christine. As a
little girl, Doris Christine was redheaded, bouncy, and
busyshe was always into something, usually
something you'd never thought to tell her not to do.
She started talking early and never shut up. Her old
dad, old Buddy Oxendine, was so crazy about Doris
Christine diat he took her everywhere with him in his

red pickup truck. You got used to seeing the two of

them, Buddy and his curly-headed little daughter,
riding the country roads together, going to the seedand-feed together, sharing a shake at the Dairy Queen.
Gladys made all of Doris Christine's clothes, the most
beautiful little dresses in the world, with handsmocking and French seams. They gave Doris
Christine everything they could think ofwhat she
asked for, what she didn't. "That child is going to get
spoiled," people started to say. And of course she did
get spoiled, she couldn't have helped that, but she was
never spoiled rotten as so many are. She stayed sweet
in spite of it all.
Then along about ninth grade, soon after she
changed her name to Cherry and got interested in
boys, things changed between Cherry and the old
Oxendines. Stuff happened. Instead of being the light
of their lives, Cherry became the bane of their
existence, the curse of their old age. She wanted to
wear makeup, she wanted to have car dates. You can't
blame hershe was old enough, sixteen. Everybody
else did it. But you can't blame Gladys and Buddy
eitherthey were old people by then, all worn out.
They were not up to such a daughter. Cherry sneaked
out. She wrecked a car. She ran away to Pensacola with
a soldier. Finally, Gladys and Buddy just gave up.
When Cherry eloped with the disc jockey, Don Westall,
right after graduation, they threw up their hands. They
did not do a thing about it. They had done the best
they could, and everybody knew it. They went back to
raising cockapoos.
Cherry, living up in Nashville, Tennessee, had a
baby, Stan, the one that's in his twenties now. Cherry
sent baby pictures back to Gladys and Buddy, and
wrote that she was going to be a singer. Six years later,
she came home. She said nothing against Don Westall,
who was still a disc jockey on WKLX, Nashville. You
could hear him on the radio every night after ten P.M.
Cherry said the breakup was all her fault. She said she
had made some mistakes, but she didn't say what they
were. She was thin and noble. Her kid was cute. She
did not go back out to the farm then. She rented an
apartment over the hardware store, down by the river,
and got a job downtown working in Ginger's Boutique.
After a year or so, she started acting more like herself
again, although not quite like herself, she had grown
up somehow in Nashville, and quit being spoiled. She
put Stan, her kid, first. And if she did run around a
little bit, or if she was the life of the party sometimes
out at the country club, so what? Stan didn't want for
a thing. By then the Oxendines were failing and she
had to take care of them too, she had to drive her
daddy up to Grenada for dialysis twice a week. It was
not an easy life for Cherry, but if it ever got her down,
you couldn't tell it. She was still cute. When her daddy
finally died and left her a little money, everybody was
real glad. Oh now, they said, Cherry Oxendine can quit
working so hard and put her mama in a home or
something and have a decent life. She can go on a
cruise. But then along came Ed Palladino, and the rest
is history.

141

Cherry Oxendine was left with no husband, no

money, a little girl, and a mean old mama to take care
of. At least by this time Stan was in the Navy-Cherry
never complained, though. She moved back out to the
farm. When Ginger retired from business and closed
her boutique, Cherry got another job, as a receptionist
at Wallace, Wallace and Peebles. This was her
undoing. Because Lamar Peebles had just moved back
to town with his family, to join his father's firm. Lamar
had two little girls. He had been married to a tobacco
heiress since college. All this time he had run around
on her. He was not on the up-and-up. And when he
encountered redheaded Cherry Oxendine again after
the passage of so many years, all those old fireworks
went off again. They got to be a scandal, then a
disgrace. Lamar said he was going to marry her, and
Cherry believed him. After six months of it, Mrs.
Lamar Peebles checked herself into a mental hospital
in Silver Hill, Connecticut. First, she called her
lawyers.
And then it was all over, not even a year after it
began. Mr. and Mrs. Lamar Peebles were reconciled
and moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, her
hometown. Cherry Oxendine lost her job at Wallace,
Wallace and Peebles, and was reduced to working in
the deli at Food Lion. Why did she do it? Why did she
lose all the goodwill she'd built up in this community
over so many years? It is because she doesn't know
how to look out for Number One. Her own daughter,
Tammy Lynn Palladino, is aware of this.
"You have got a fatal flaw, Mama," Tammy said
after learning about fatal flaws in English class. "You
believe everything everybody tells you."
Still, Tammy loves her mother. Sometimes she
writes her mother's whole name, Cherry Oxendine
Westall Palladino Stikes, over and over in her Blue
Horse notebook. Tammy Lynn will never be half the
woman her mother is, and she's so smart she knows it.
She gets a kick out of her morher's wild ideas.
"When you gee too old to be cute, honey, you get to
be eccentric," Cherry told Tammy one time. It's the
truest thing she ever said.
It seems to Tammy that the main thing about her
mother is, Cherry always has to have something going
on. If it isn't a man it's something else, such as having
her palm read by thar woman over in French Camp, or
astrology, or the grapefruit diet. Cherry believes in the
Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Atlantis, and ghosts. It
kills her that she's not psychic. The UFO Club was just
the latest in a long string of interests although it has
lasted the longest, starting back before Cherry's
marriage to Harold Sdkes. And then Cherry got cancer,
and she kind of forgot about it. But Tammy still
remembers the night her mama first got so turned on
to UFOs.
Rhonda Ramey, Cherry's best friend, joined the UFO
Club first. Rhonda and Cherry are a lot alike, although
it's hard to see this at first. While Cherry is short and
peppy, Rhonda is tall, thin, and listless. She looks like
Cher. Rhonda doesn't have any children. She's crazy
about her husband, Bill, but he's a workaholic who

runs a string of video rental stores all over northern

Mississippi, so he's gone a lot, and Rhonda gets bored.
She works out at the spa, but it isn't enough. Maybe
this is why she got so interested when the UFO landed
at a farm outside her mother's hometown of Como. It
was first spotted by sixteen-year-old Donnie Johnson
just at sunset, as he was finishing his chores on his
parents' farm. He heard a loud rumbling sound "in the
direction of the hog house," it said in the paper.
Looking up, he suddenly saw a "brilliantly lit
mushroom-shaped object" hovering about two feet
above the ground, with a shaft of white light below and
glowing all over with an intensely bright multicolored
light, "like the light of a welder's arc."
Donnie said it sounded like a jet. He was
temporarily blinded and paralyzed. He fell down on
the ground. When he came back to his senses again, it
was gone. Donnie staggered into the kitchen where his
parents, Durel, fifty-four, and Erma, forty-nine, were
eating supper, and told them what had happened.
They all ran back outside to the field, where they found
four large imprints and four small imprinrs in the
muddy ground, and a nearby clump of sage grass on
fire. The hogs were acting funny, bunching up, looking
dazed. Immediately, Durel jumped in his truck and
went to get the sheriff, who came right back with two
deputies. All in all, six people viewed the site while the
bush continued to burn, and who knows how many
peoplehalf of Comosaw the imprints the next day.
Rhonda saw them too. She drove out to the Johnson
farm with her mother, as soon as she heard about it.
It was a close encounter of the second kind,
according to Civil Air Patrol head Glenn Raines, who
appeared on TV to discuss it, because the UFO
"interacted with its surroundings in a significant way."
A close encounter of the first kind is simplv a closerange sighting, while a close encounter of the third
kind is something like the most famous example, of
Betty and Barney Hill of Exeter, New Hampshire, who
were actually kidnapped by a UFO while they were
driving along on a trip. Betty and Barney Hill were
taken aboard the alien ship and given physical exams
by intelligent humanoid beings. Two hours and thirtyfive minutes were missing from their trip, and
afterward, Betty had to be treated for acute anxiety.
Glenn Raines, wearing his brown Civil Air Patrol
uniform, said all this on TV.
His appearance, plus what had happened at the
Johnson farm, sparked a rash of sightings all across
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas for the next two
years. Metal disk-like objects were seen, and luminous
objects appearing as lights at night. In Levelland,
Texas, fifteen people called the police to report an eggshaped UFO appearing over State Road 1173. Overall,
the UFOs seemed to show a preference for soybean
fields and teenage girl viewers. But a pretty good
photograph of a UFO flying over the Gulf was taken by
a retired man from Pascagoula, so you can't generalize.
Clubs sprang up all over the place. The one that
Rhonda and Cherry went to had seventeen members
and met once a month at the junior high school.

142

Tammy recalls exactly how her mama and Rhonda

acted the night they came home from Cherry's first
meeting. Cherry's eyes sparkled in her face like Brenda
Starr's eyes in the comics. She started right in telling
Tammy all about it, beginning with the Johnsons from
Como and Betty and Barney Hill.
Tammy was not impressed. "I don't believe it," she
said. She was president of the Science Club at the
junior high school.
"You are the most irritating child!" Cherry said. "
What don't you believe?"
"Well, any of it," Tammy said then. "All of it," and
this has remained her attitude ever since.
"Listen, honey, jimmy Carter saw one," Cherry said
triumphantly. "In nineteen seventy-one, at the
Executive Mansion in Georgia. He turned in an official
report on it."
"How come nobody knows about it, then?" Tammy
asked. She was a tough customer.
"Because the government covered it up!" said
Rhonda, just dying to tell this part. "People see UFOs
all the time, it's common knowledge, they are trying to
make contact with us right now, honey, but the
government doesn't want the average citizen to know
about it. There's a big cover-up going on."
"It's just like Watergate." Cherry opened a beer and
handed it over to Rhonda.
"That's right," Rhonda said, "and every time there's
a major incident, you know what happens? These men
from the government show up at your front door
dressed all in black. After they get through with you,
you'll wish you never heard the word 'saucer.' You turn
pale and get real sick. You can't get anything to stay on
your stomach."
Tammy cracked up. Bur Rhonda and Cherry went
on and on. They had official-looking gray notebooks to
log their sightings in. At their meetings, they reported
these sightings to each other, and studied up on the
subject in general. Somebody in the club was
responsible for the educational part of each meeting,
and somebody else broughr the refreshments.
Tammy Lynn learned to keep her mouth shut. It
was less embarrassing than belly dancing; she had a
friend whose mother took belly dancing at the YMCA.
Tammy did not tell her mama about all the rational
explanations for UFOs that she found in the school
library. They included: (1) hoaxes; (2) natural
phenomena, such as fungus causing the so-called fairy
rings sometimes found after a landing; (3) real
airplanes flying off course; and Tammv's favorite, (4)
the Fata Morgana, described as a "rare and beautiful
type of mirage, constantly changing, the result of
unstable layers of warm and cold air. The Fata
Morgana takes its name from fairy lore and is said to
evoke in the viewer a profound sense of longing," the
book went on to say. Tammy's biology teacher, Mr.
Owens, said he thought that the weather patterns in
Mississippi might be especially conducive to this
phenomenon. But Tammy kept her mouth shut. And
after a while, when nobody in the UFO Club saw
anything, its membership declined sharply. Then her
mama met Harold Stikes, then Harold Stikes left his

wife and children and moved out to the farm with

them, and sometimes Cherry forgot to attend the
meetings, she was so happy with Harold Stikes.
Tammy couldn't see tuhy, initially. In her opinion,
Harold Stikes was about as interesting as a telephone
pole. "But he's so nice!" Cherry tried to explain it to
Tammy Lynn. Finally Tammy decided that there is
nothing in the world that makes somebody as
attractive as if they really love you. And Harold Stikes
really did love her mama, there was no question. That
old manwhat a crazy old Romeo! Why, he proposed
to Cherry when she was still in the hospital after she
had her breast removed (this was back when they
thought that was it, that the doctors had gotten it all).
"Listen, Cherry," he said solemnly, gripping a dozen
red roses. "I want you to marry me."
"What?" Cherry said. She was still groggy.
"I want you to marry me," Harold said. He knelt
down heavily beside her bed.
"Harold! Get up from there!" Cherry said.
"Somebody will see you."
"Say yes," said Harold.
"I just had my breast removed."
"Say yes," he said again.
" Yes, yes, yes!" Cherry said.
And as soon as she got out of the hospital, they were
married out in the orchard, on a beautiful April day, by
Lew Uggams, a JP from out of town. They couldn't
find a local preacher to do it. The sky was bright blue,
not a cloud in sight. Nobody was invited except Stan,
Tammy, Rhonda and Bill, and Cherry's mother, who
wore her dress inside out. Cherry wore a new pink lace
dress, the color of cherry blossoms. Tough little
Tammy cried and cried. It's the most beautiful
wedding she's ever seen, and now she's completely
devoted to Harold Stikes.
So Tammy leaves the lights on for Harold when she
finally goes to bed that night. She tried to wait up for
him, but she has to go to school in the morning, she's
got a chemistry test. Her mamaw is sound asleep in
the little added-on baby room that Buddy Oxendine
built for Cherry. Gladys acts like a baby now, a spoiled
baby at that. The only thing she'll drink is Sprite out of
a can. She talks mean. She doesn't like anything in the
world except George and Tammy, the two remaining
cockapoos.
They bark up a storm when Harold finally gets back
out to the farm, at one-thirty. The cockapoos are
barking, Cherry's mom is snoring like a chain saw.
Harold doesn't see how Tammy Lynn can sleep
through all of this, but she always does. Teenagers can
sleep through anything. Harold himself has started
waking up several times a night, his heart pounding.
He wonders if he's going to have a heart attack. He
almost mentioned his symptoms to Lois Hickey last
week, in fact, but then thought, What the hell. His
heart is broken. Of course it's going to act up some.
And everything, not only his heart, is out of whack.
Sometimes he'll break into a sweat for no reason.
Often he forgets really crucial things, such as filing his
estimated income tax on January 15. Harold is not the

143

kind to forget something this important. He has

strange aches that float from joint to joint. He has
headaches. He's lost twelve pounds. Sometimes he has
no appetite at all. Other times, like right now, he's just
starving.
Harold goes in the kitchen and finds a flat
rectangular casserole, carefully wrapped in tinfoil, on
the counter, along with aTupperware cake carrier. He
lifts off the top of the cake carrier and finds a pina
colada cake, his favorite. Then he pulls back the tinfoil
on the casserole. Lasagna! Plenty is left over. Harold
sticks it in the microwave. He knows that the cake and
the lasagna were left here by his ex-wife. Ever since
Cherry has been in Intensive Care, Joan has been
bringing food out to the farm. She comes when
Harold's at work or at the hospital, and leaves it with
Gladys or Tammy. She probably figures that Harold
would refuse it, if she caught him at home, which he
would. She's a grear cook, though. Harold takes the
lasagna out of the microwave, opens a beer, and sits
down at the kitchen table. He loves Joan's lasagna.
Cherry's idea of a terrific meal is one she doesn't have
to cook. Harold remembers eating in bed with Cherry,
tacos from Taco Bell, sour-cream-and-onion chips,
beer. He gets some more lasagna and a big wedge of
pina colada cake.
Now it's two-thirty, but for some reason Harold is
not a bit sleepy. His mind whirls with thoughts of
Cherry. He snaps off all the lights and stands in the
darkened house. His heart is racing. Moonlight comes
in the windows, it falls on the old patterned rug.
Outside, it's as bright as day. He puts his coat on and
goes out, with the cockapoos scampering along beside
him. They are not even surprised. They think it's a fine
time for a walk. Harold goes past the mailbox, down
the dirt road between the fields. Out here in the
country, the sky is both bigger and closer than it is in
town. Harold feels like he's in a huge bowl turned
upside down, with tiny little pinpoints of light shining
through. And everything is silvered by the moonlight
the old fenceposts, the corn stubble in the flat long
fields, a distant barn, the highway at the end of the dirt
road, his own strange hand when he holds it out to
look at it.
He remembers when she waited on him in the Food
Lion deli, three years ago. He had asked for a roast
beef sandwich, which come prepackaged. Cherry put it
on his plate. Then she paused, and cocked her hip, and
looked at him. "Can I give you some potato salad to go
with that?" she asked. "Some slaw?"
Harold looked at her. Some red curls had escaped
the required net. "Nothing else," he said.
But Cherry spooned a generous helping of potato salad
onto his plate. "Thank you so much," he said. They
looked at each other. "I know I know you," Cherry
said.
It came to him then. "Cherry Oxendine," said
Harold. "I remember you from high school."
"Lord, you've got a great memory, then!" Cherry had
an easy laugh. "That was a hundred years ago."
"Doesn't seem like it." Harold knew he was holding
up the line.

"Depends on who you're talking to," Cherry said.

Later that day, Harold found an excuse to go back
over to the deli for coffee and apple pie, then he found
an excuse to look through the personnel files. He
started eating lunch at the deli every day, without
making any conscious decision to do so. In the
afternoons, when he went back for coffee, Cherry
would take her break and sit at a table with him.
Harold and Cherry talked and talked. They talked
about their families, their kids, high school. Cherry
told him everything that had happended to her. She
was tough and funny, not bitter or self-pitying. They
talked and talked. In his whole life, Harold had never
had so much to say. During this period, which lasted
for several weeks, his whole life took on a heightened
aspect. Everything that happened to him seemed
significant, a little incident to tell Cherry about. Every
song he liked on the radio he remembered, so he could
ask Cherry if she liked it too. Then there came the day
when they were having coffee and she mentioned she'd
left her car at Al's Garage that morning to get a new
clutch.
"I'll give you a ride over there to pick it up," said
Harold instantly. In his mind he immediately canceled
the sales meeting he had scheduled for four o'clock.
"Oh, that's too much trouble," Cherry said.
"But I insist." In his conversations with Cherry,
Harold had developed a brand-new gallant manner he
had never had before.
"Well, if you're sure it's not any trouble ..." Cherry
grinned at him like she knew he really wanted to do it,
and that afternoon when he grabbed her hand
suddenly before letting her out at Al's Garage, she did
not pull it away.
The next weekend Harold took her up to Memphis
and they stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where Cherry
got the biggest kick out of the ducks in the lobby, and
ordering from room service.
"You're a fool," Harold's friends told him later,
when the shit hit the fan.
But Harold didn't think so. He doesn't think so now,
walking the old dirt road on the Oxendine farm in the
moonlight. He loves his wife. He feels that he has been
ennobled and enlarged, by knowing Cherry Oxendine.
He feels like he has been specially selected among
men, to receive a precious gift. He stepped out of his
average life for her, he gave up being a good man, but
the rewards have been extraordinary. He's glad he did
it. He'd do it all over again.
Still walking, Harold suddenly knows that
something is going to happen. But he doesn't stop
walking. Only, the whole world around him seems to
waver a bit, and intensify. The moonlight shines
whiter than ever. A little wind whips up out of
nowhere. The stars are twinkling so brightly that they r
seem to dance, actually dance, in the sky. And then,
while Harold watches, one of them detaches itself from
the rest of the skv and grows larger, moves closer, until
it's clear that it is actually moving across the sky, at an
angle to the earth. A falling star, perhaps? A comet?
Harold stops walking. The star moves faster and
taster, with an erratic pattern. It's getting real close

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now. It's no star. Harold hears a high whining noise,

like a blender. The cockapoos huddle against his
ankles. They don't bark. Now he can see the blinking
red lights on the top of it, and the beam of white light
shooting out the bottom. His coat is blown straight out
behind him by the wind. He feels like he's going blind.
He shields his eyes. At first it's as big as a barn, then a
tobacco warehouse. It covers the field. Although
Harold can't say exactly how it communicates to him
or even if it does, suddenly his soul is filled to bursting.
The ineffable occurs. And then, more quickly than it
came, it's gone, off toward Carrollton, rising inro the
night, leaving the field, the farm, the road. Harold
turns back.
It will take Cherry Oxendine two more weeks to die.
She's tough. And even when there's nothing left of her
bur heart, she will fight all the way. She will go out
turious, squeezing Harold's hand at the very moment
of death, clinging last to every minute of this bright,
hard life. And although at first he won't want to,
Harold will go on living. He will buy another store.
Gladys will die. Tammy Lynn will make Phi Beta
Kappa. Harold will start attending the Presbyterian
church again. Eventually Harold may even go back to
his family, but he will love Cherry Oxendine until the
day he dies, and he will never, ever, tell anybody what
he saw.

Grundy into her novels. Last year, at the beginning of

her ninth novel, Saving Grace (Putnam, 1996), she
quoted these lines from T. S. Eliots Little Giddings:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

During the writing of her fourth novel, Oral
History (Putnam, 1983), another revelation occurred.
Smith discovered that the device of using first-person
narrative gave her characters dignity and removed
stiffness from the dialogue. Now she had place, story,
and voice, the voice that had been in her head, in her
ears, on the tip of her tongue, for years. The rhythms
of the native dialect came naturally to her.
Even in the novels she had read as a child, Smith
had fallen in love with the Southern literary voice. Of
course, she says, it was impossible not to be
influenced by Faulkner, and it was from novels like
The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying that she
got the idea of multiple narrators, even though
Faulkners Deep South settings, with their Spanish
moss, ruined columns, and crumbling old mansions,
were a world apart from Grundys dark hills and
Lee Smith at Home in Appalachia
poverty-ridden hollows. There were no black people in
Grundy, either. For Smith, Faulkners world was so
by Jeanne McDonald
alien, it might as well have been a foreign country. The
voices of Grundy that already existed in her head were
As they say in the South, Lee Smith has never met a reinforced by the characters in Eudora Weltys Shower
stranger. Five minutes after you meet her, you are of Gold and Flannery OConnors Everything That
exchanging intimate secrets and discussing weighty Rises Must Converge. Although Smith is often
things-metaphysical issues, humanity, the really compared to both these Southern writers, her own
important stuff. Smith demonstrates an empathy and reading taste is broad and eclectic. She lists Virginia
involvement with the concerns of others that are so Woolfs To the Lighthouse as the perfect novel, is an
sincere, you realize immediately that she herself has avid reader of poetry, and, with tongue in cheek, calls
been on the same emotional plateau at one time or Shakespeare real good. Smith could never be labeled
another. Her lively blue eyes are as friendly and as a grit-lit writer who reduces poor white
approachable as a cool lake you can wade into, and her Southerners to generic caricatures. She brings to her
smile and expressions seem completely implicated characters a decency and dignity that makes them as
with everything you are telling her. No wonder her credible as any memorable character in English
characters are so real, her subjects so genuine. Lee literature. Some people, however, equate Southern
Smith understands. She listens. And after her dialects with ignorance-in both characters and
discovery of James Still, Smith began listening even authors. Smith recounts an episode that occurred early
more intently to the stories told in Grundy, taping in her career, when she gave a reading at Columbia
them and writing them down. She coaxed her mother University. As soon as she began to speak, several
to retell tales from the past that she might have people got up and walked out of the auditorium, put
forgotten, talked to her father about ghost stories and off, she assumed, by her thick Southern accent. Others
legends of the region, and prompted her Aunt Kate to call her accent lilting, charming, and Newsweek
tell her version of the truth.
summed up the impact of her work in a review of her
Writing comes out of a life lived, James Still said fifth novel, Fair and Tender Ladies (Putnam, 1988):
once in an interview (Knoxville News-Sentinel, May Her work is about the moment when, as you look at or
16, 1993). For me, ideas are hanging from limbs like listen to a work of nave art, it stops being a curiosity
pears, from fences like gourds. They rise up like birds and starts to speak to you in a human voice.
from cover. So it was for Lee Smith, who began to
Lee Smith made a giant leap into the mainstream
incorporate all those true tales and anecdotes from when Oral History was published. With that novel,
145

she became the titular queen of the new Southern

regional movement, which Peter Guralnick, writing in
the Los Angeles Times Magazine (May 21, 1995),
defined as a simultaneous embrace of past and
present, this insistent chronicling of the small, heroic
battles of the human spirit, a recognition of the dignity
and absurdity of the commonplace. Guralnick
includes among the movements members Larry
Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Cormac McCarthy, Jill
McCorkle, Jayne Anne Phillips, Anne Tyler, and James
Wilcox. Though they may have varied literary styles,
all these authors, like Smith, write stories with an
exceptionally strong sense of place.
In the South, Smith says, sense of place implies
who you are and what your family did. Its not just
literally the physical surroundings, what stuff looks
like. Its a whole sense of the past. Even if I write a
short story, I have to make diagrams of what the
characters house looks like and where the house is in
relation to the town. In fact, Putnam recently returned
to her a map she drew when she wrote Oral History,
depicting not only the physical setting for the novel,
but also the geographical relationship of all the
characters.
Oral History is the virtual prototype of the modern
Appalachian novel, but it is also the book that broke
Lee Smith out of the regional mold. Lee Smith, says
Guralnick, is the latest in a long line of Southerners
who transform the regions voices and visions into
quintessentially American novels. Other novels by
Smith that celebrate the small, heroic battles of the
human spirit followed soon after: Family Linen
(Putnam, 1985), Fair and Tender Ladies, The Devils
Dream (Putnam, 1992), and, in 1996, Saving Grace.
Smiths first novel came out of her senior thesis at
Hollins College under the tutelage of Louis Rubin, who
later founded Algonquin Press. The Last Day the
Dogbushes Bloomed, published by Harper and Row in
1968, was an impressive beginning for such a young
writer, but there was a period early in her career when
the initial momentum broke down. Harper and Row
had published my second and third novels [Something
in the Wind, 1971, and Fancy Strut, 1973], when my
wonderful editor, Cass Canfield, retired. I was young,
living in Alabama, and my books had lost money for
the publishers. I had been published in Best Writing
From American Colleges, had won a Book-of-theMonth Club Writing Fellowship, and I had a good
agent, Perry Knowlton. But nobody would take my
new novel, Black Mountain Breakdown. Not even my
agent believed in it.
To further complicate matters, Smith realized that
her marriage to her first husband, poet James Seay,
was disintegrating, and she had two young sons to care
for. From 1973 to 1981 she taught high school English
and a variety of other courses and had actually
enrolled in graduate school for training as a special
education teacher when her friend Roy Blount, Jr.,
helped her find the New York agent who still
represents her work-Liz Darhanshoff-and her literary
career took off again. Faith Sale at Putnam became my
editor and remains my editor after all these years,

says Smith, and that ended the nonpublishing streak.

She handled the temporary defeat as cheerfully as she
handles all obstacles: I have never had writers block,
she says wryly, but I have definitely had publishers
block.
Meanwhile, back in Grundy, nobody had ever
doubted that Lee Smith would grow up to be a famous
storyteller, especially not Smith herself, who says she
had been romantically dedicated to the grand idea of
being a writer ever since she could remember. Like
Karen, the teen-aged narrator in her story Tongues of
Fire in the short story collection Me and My Baby
View the Eclipse, Putnam, 1990) who Smith says is
closest to her autobiographical double, she often
pictured herself poised at the foggy edge of a cliff
someplace in the south of France, wearing a cape,
drawing furiously on a long cigarette, hollow-cheeked
and haunted.
As soon as she was able to spell, Smith started
writing stories. I loved it, she said, because
everything happened just the way I wanted it to.
Writing stories gave me a special power. Her first
novel, written on her mothers stationery when Smith
was eight years old, had as its main characters her two
favorite people at the time-Adlai Stevenson and Jane
Russell. The plot involved their falling in love, heading
west in a covered wagon, and converting to
Mormonism.
At the age of 11, Smith and her best friend, Martha
Sue Owens, published a neighborhood newspaper, The
Small Review, which they laboriously hand-copied for
12 neighbors. Articles from the newspaper show
evidence of Smiths budding talent for detailed
observation as well as her curiosity about peoples
idiosyncrasies. Her controversial editorial, George
McGuire Is Too Grumpy, exacted an apology to the
neighbor across the street, but it was indicative of
Smiths dedication to truth in writing. For example, in
the short story Fancy Strut in the collection Me and
My Baby View the Eclipse, she writes, Bob and
Frances Pitt stayed in a bridal suite in the Ocean-Aire
Autel at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on their
honeymoon, and had a perfectly all right time; but do
you know what Johnny B. and Sandy DuBois did?
They went to the Southern 500 at Darlington, South
Carolina, and sat out in the weather on those old hard
benches for three entire days, watching the cars go
around and around. In another story, Life on the
Moon (in Me and My Baby View the Eclipse), she
writes: Lonnie took the rug and the E-Z Boy and his
clothes and six pieces of Tupperware, thats all, and
moved in with a nurse from the hospital, Sharon
Ledbetter, into her one-bedroom apartment at Colony
Courts.
It is these particulars of life that are splendidly
observed, said reviewer Caroline Thompson, writing
in the Los Angeles Times at the publication of Black
Mountain Breakdown (Putnam, 1981): They would
make a Carson McCullers of a Flannery OConnor
proud. Smith already knows her characters intimately
before she sits down to write the first word of a story.
In order to keep her work spontaneous, she rarely

146

revises, which is lucky, because she still writes first

drafts in longhand. But she knows exactly what her
characters are going to do because, she says, they tell
her. In fact, she describes herself as the medium
through which those characters speak. For her, voices
are easy to do. Theres always a human voice thats
telling me the story. It is easy for us as readers to
accept her declaration that she is merely the vehicle
for her characters stories when we see how accurately
she gives voice to those poverty-stricken daughters,
wives, and mothers who live in the mountain hollers
she knew when she was growing up in Grundy. Her
empathy and her innate ability to recreate the events
of their lives and the cadence of their voices are factors
that help the reader understand-even love-those
women who marry young, are weighed down by
poverty and children while they are mere children
themselves, and who usually die never having seen the
world beyond the shadowy mountains where the sun
rarely shows itself before noon. Most of Smiths novels
deal with women whom Publishers Weekly (May 1995)
called spirited women of humble background who are
destined to endure difficult and often tragic times. She
draws her women so thoroughly-Crystal Spangler in
Black Mountain Breakdown, Florida Grace Shepherd
in Saving Grace, Ivy Rowe in Fair and Tender Ladiesthat by the time you have finished her novels, you feel
as if you have made two new friends-the character and
Lee Smith herself.
Until Smith began to write novels, most southern
heroines, like Scarlett OHara, were from privileged
families. Poor white women remained in the
background, unexamined and unworthy of star billing.
But Smith changed all that by exploring their hearts
and minds and resurrecting the dignity of Appalachian
women. Saving Grace is the perfect example of a story
and voice that Smith says possessed her, much as Ivy
Rowes had in Fair and Tender Ladies. In fact, she was
so involved with Ivy, a character she says helped her
deal with the death of her own mother, that she was
reluctant to give up the manuscript when her editor
declared the book finished. Grace had already been
speaking to Smith for a while when she went to the
annual Flannery OConnor Festival in Milledgeville,
Georgia. She returned home to Chapel Hill, reread all
the OConnor works she could find, submerged herself
in a torrent of writing, and delivered the manuscript to
Putnam two years early. I got taken over by Grace,
she says. It was the most compelling narrative that
had ever come my way. But even when it was finished
and I went to the post office to mail the manuscript to
the publisher, I still hadnt thought of a name for the
book. While I was waiting in line, the wife of the local
pediatrician came in. Whats the book about? she
asked me. And whats the characters name?
Grace, I told her, recounts Smith.
Well, theres your title, Lee, she said. Call it
Saving Grace. And I did.
One reason so many Southern fans identify with
Lee Smith is that she tells a story in the same
convoluted way that they themselves do, using
intimate asides, gossipy digressions, and personal

references, just as any friend would tell a story in

ordinary conversation. The way Southerners tell a
story is really specific to the South, Smith says. Its a
whole narrative strategy, its an approach. Every kind
of information is imparted in the form of a story. Ask
for directions in the South? She laughs. Its not just
turn left. Its I remember the time my cousin went up
there and got bit by a mad dog. Its a whole different
approach to interactions between people and to
transmitting information.
There is a fine line between the exaggerations and
embellishments with which Southerners give details
and what they define as a story. My father was fond of
saying that I would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than
stand on the ground to tell the truth, says Smith. In
fact, in the mountains where I come from, a lie was
often called a story, and well do I remember being
shaken until my teeth rattled and [given] the stern
admonition: Dont you tell me no story, now. But
Smith was a precocious and imaginative child, and her
dramatic views were reinforced by books that gave her
an insight to the outside world that few others in
Grundy were privy to.
Though none of her large extended family ever read
novels, Smith discovered literature early. Not for
entertainment or information, she says, but to feel all
wild and trembly inside. Her favorites were anything
at all about horses and saints. Nobody ever told me
something was too old for me because they didnt
know, see? They hadnt read them. I read stuff that
would have made my mother die-Mandingo, Frank
Yerby, Butterfield 8, lots of John OHara. And
Raintree County put me to bed for two days. I had to
lie down.
Smith gave these same books to Florida Grace
Shepherd to read in Saving Grace, and that is how
Grace, like Smith, learned that there was much more
to explore in the world. Still, it is the people Smith
grew up with who provided most of the material and
background for her characters: the minister and his
wife, her grandmother, her friends who lived in the
hollers, or the women who worked in her fathers dime
store and talked about babies being born with veils
across their faces. Although her characters may be
eccentric or bizarre, they are always believable, and
their dimension emanates from Smiths ability to slip
into other peoples hearts and minds. Even when he
characters are flawed-shallow or evil or crafty-she
gives the reader something to love in each one. Their
weaknesses and vulnerability make them seem real,
and every single one of her characters is the kind of
person you can still meet in southern Appalachia
today. You can still find the Randy Newhouse of
Saving Grace at any roadside tavern in the South; you
can still hear Travis Word preaching at any Southern
fundamentalist country church; and you can see Virgil
Shepherd on religious TV on any day of the week. In
order to make these characters realizable, Smith gives
them dignity. Smith has great empathy for the poor,
said Publishers Weekly in a 1996 review of Saving
Grace, uneducated country people who yearn for a

147

transcendent message to infuse their lives with

spiritual meaning.
A review of Saving Grace in The New York Times
Book Review complained that Smith had made her
characters dangerously close to clich, but anybody
who has grown up in the South recognizes in Smiths
stories his cousin, or an eccentric neighbor, or the man
who runs the grocery store down at the crossroads.
And Lee Smith knows human nature. When she wants
more information for a story, she dives in headfirst.
For background on Family Linen she took a job as a
shampoo girl at a local beauty shop to learn firsthand
how her characters lives would play out.
Nothing is too demanding or exhausting for Smith.
She is a woman who loves her work. In conjunction
with her latest award-a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest
grant, which gives her a generous financial stipend
and a three-year sabbatical-she chose to affiliate with
the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky, where,
ironically, James Still was librarian in 1932. Besides
the connection wit Still, Smith is attracted to the area
because it reminds her of Grundy, and she feels an
affinity to the people there. She has been working with
writing students at Hindmans Adult Learning Center
and at other eastern Kentucky schools.
Smith has also been the recipient of the Robert
Penn Warren Prize for Fiction (1991), the Sir Walter
Raleigh Award (1989), the John Dos Passos Award for
Literature (1987), the North Carolina Award for
Fiction (1984), and a Lyndhurst Prize. She left Hollins
College in 1967 with a bachelors degree in English and
$3,000 from her first major award, the Book-of-theMonth College English Writing Contest Prize, and
embarked on a career that has spanned 30 years.
The affiliation in Kentucky has excited and
energized Smith. Watching people express themselves
in language, she muses, is like watching them fall in
love. She is particularly excited and inspired by the
older participants in her workshops, especially the
ones who have only recently learned to read and write.
For the first time, she says, they are able to express on
paper the scores of stories that have been stored in
their heads for years. And-lucky for them-they have
Lee Smith to help.
I love to work with older writers, says Smith. At
North Carolina State University I have lots of older
graduate students, but its good to get out of the
academic community where people are always
deconstructing texts and talking about symbolism.
This experience in Kentucky puts the emphasis on
communication and how thrilling it is to read and
write.
For both Smith and the adults enrolled in the
literacy program, the ultimate fulfillment is seeing
their words in print for the first time. The publishers
are Lila Wallace, Kinkos, and me, says Smith wit a
laugh. Weve already printed two autobiographies in
batches of 1,000 and were selling out. Some of the
manuscripts are being used by other writing
workshops as models of how writing can be taught in
the community.

Next year Smith will return to teaching at North

Carolina State University in Raleigh. She and her
second husband, Hal Crowther, a syndicated journalist
and columnist for Oxford American magazine, have
recently bought an old house in Hillsborough, North
Carolina, eight miles from their former Chapel Hill
home. Theyve also purchased a cabin in Jefferson,
North Carolina, where Smith grows dahlias and roses
and nourishes 20 apple trees. The cabin and the
surrounding woods remind her of Grundy and her
roots and the people who have been her greatest
source of inspiration.
But while shes living other areas of her life, plots
are still buzzing around in her head, and she rarely
takes a vacation from her stories. Louis Rubin, Smiths
former writing teacher, has said of her: Lees a real
writer. She writes all the time. She writes when shes
down. She writes when shes up-thats just her way of
dealing with the world.
I write fiction the way other people write in their
journals, Smith says. It helps me keep track of time so
I can see what Im up to. Often writing helps her work
through real-life trauma. Its her personal brand of
therapy, the way she deals with whatever emotional
ups and downs she inherited from her beloved manicdepressive parents. She never discussed their illness
while they were alive, but its something she is dealing
with openly and honestly now. Sometimes when I look
back at something Ive written, I remember what was
going on in my life at that time, and I see how I
worked it
out
through
the
writing.
The
deaths of
both her
parents in
recent
years and
their
constant
history of
depression have bee overwhelming, but writing, she
says, has actually helped her to work through and
come to terms with such obstacles. Now, life generally
seems balmy. I want more time with Hal, more years,
Smith says adoringly of her husband. (The two met at
Duke Universitys Evening College, where both were
teaching writing courses.)
Smith never loses her enthusiasm for teaching
classes and workshops. Although she firmly believes
that such programs have given rise to a proliferation of
good writers, The terrible paradox, she says, is that
even though there are more good writers now than
ever before, publishers are publishing less literary
fiction. In fact, almost nobody who is a good literary
writer ever makes it any more. Among those who have
made it, a few of her current favorites are Richard
Bausch, Larry Brown, James Lee Burke, Clyde

148

Edgerton, Ellen Gilchrist, Toni Morrison, Lewis

Nordan, and Anne Tyler.
Smiths project that she calls a stocking stuffer
was published by Algonquin in the fall of 1996.
Although most of her books have been published by
Putnam, she has always wanted to do a project with
Algonquin editor Shannon Ravenel, her old friend
from Hollins. Like Fair and Tender Ladies, which is
an epistolary novel based on actual letters Smith found
at a garage sale, The Christmas Letters is a novella
composed of actual Christmas letters from three
generations of women in the same family. But the
resemblance stops there. The new book also involves
recipes, she says. I guess I could tell my entire life
story through food. You know how we went through
that phase using Cool Whip and cream of mushroom
soup? And then we went on to fondue, then quiche?
Now its salsa. Recently she has also been busy
promoting her newest book, News of the Spirit, a
collection of short stories and novellas released in
September by Putnam, and is working on new stories.
Smith has come full circle, from discovering James
Stills novel and becoming a friend of the author
himself at the Hindman Center in Kentucky, to seeing
her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed,
recently reprinted in paperback by Louisiana State
University Press as part of a series of Southern
reissues. Now she is working on the songs and stories
of Florida Slone, a ballad singer famous around Knott
County, and participating in a workshop for public
school teachers in Kentucky. Meanwhile, she has
donated her fathers former dime store in Grundy to
the town for the use as a teen center. And with all this
boundless energy and enthusiasm for life, Smith
continues to write incessantly and to support the work
of others. She is fascinated by the writing of Lou
Crabtree, a woman in her 80s in Abingdon, Virginia,
who, like everyone else who meets her, has become
Lee Smiths friend. Until LSU recently published her
collection, Stories from Sweet Holler, Lou had been
writing her whole life without any thought of
publication, says Smith, with her usual exuberance.
Once I said to her, Lou, what would you do if
somebody told you that you werent allowed to write
anymore? Well, Lou replied, I reckon Id just have
to sneak off and do it.
So would Lee Smith: shed just sneak off and do it.

In Her Own Words

Although I dont usually write autobiographical
fiction, my main character in one of the short stories
from News and the Spirit sounds suspiciously like the
girl I used to be: More than anything else in the world,
I wanted to be a writer. I didnt want to learn to write,
of course. I just wanted to be a writer, and I often
pictured myself poised at the foggy edge of a cliff
somewhere in the south of France, wearing a cape,
drawing furiously on a long cigarette, hollow-cheeked
and haunted. I had been romantically dedicated to the

grand idea of being a writer ever since I can

remember.
I started telling stories as soon as I could talk true
stories, and made-up stories, too. It has always been
hard for me to tell the difference between them.
My father was fond of saying that I would climb a
tree to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground to tell
the truth. In fact, in the mountains of southwestern
Virginia where I grew up, a lie was often called a story,
and well do I remember being shaken until my teeth
rattled with the stern admonition, Dont you tell me
no story, now!
But he was hardly one to talk. Both my mama and
my father were natural storytellers themselves. My
mama a home ec. teacher from the Eastern shore of
Virginia was one of those Southern women who can
and did make a story out of thin air, out of
anything a trip to the drugstore, something
somebody said to her in the church. My father liked to
drink a little and recite Kipling out loud. He came from
right there, from a big mountain family of storytelling
Democrats who would sit on the porch and place 25
dollar bets on which bird would fly first off a telephone
wire. They were all big talkers.
I got hooked on stories early, and as soon as I could
write, I started writing them down. I wrote my first
novel on my mothers stationery when I was eight. It
featured as main characters my two favorite people at
that time: Adlai Stevenson and Jane Russell. In my
novel, they fell in love and then went west together in a
covered wagon.
Once there, they became inexplicably
Mormons! Even at that age, I was fixed upon glamour
and flight, two themes I returned to again and again as
I wrote my way throughout high school, then college.
Decades later, Im still at it. Narrative is as
necessary to me as breathing, as air. I write for the
reason Ive always done so: simply to survive. To make
sense of my life. I never know what I think until I read
what Ive written. And I refuse to lead an unexamined
life. No matter how painful it is, I intend to know
whats going on. The writing itself is a source of
strength for me, a way to make it through the night.
The story has always served this function, I believe,
from the beginning of time. In the telling of it, we
discover who we are, why we exist, what we should do.
It brings order and delight. Its form is inherently
pleasing, and deeply satisfying to us. Because it has a
beginning, a middle, and an end, it gives a
recognizable shape to the muddle and chaos of our
lives.

Goodbye to the Sunset Man

Lee Smith bids farewell to her son, Josh
BY LEE SMITH
Once again my husband and I line up for sunset
cruise tickets on the tall vintage schooner Western
Union, which sways in its dock here at the end of
William Street, here at the end of America.

149

How many? The handsome blonde in the ticket

booth looks like she used to be a man.
Three, I say.
Two, Hal says, turning around to look at me.
So how many is it? She drums her long nails on
the wooden counter.
Two, Hal says. He gives her his credit card.
She slides over two tickets for the sunset cruise and
two coupons for free drinks, which we order on the
roof of the Schooner Wharf Bar where we wait until
time to board. This year we are here without my son,
Josh, who died in his sleep this past Oct. 26. The cause
of his death was an acute myocardiopathy, the
collapse of an enlarged heart brought about, in part, I
believe, by all the weight he had gained while taking an
antipsychotic drug. He was 33; he had been sick for
half his life, doing daily heroic battle with the brain
disorder that first struck while he was in a program for
gifted teen musicians at the Berklee College of Music
in Boston, the summer between his junior and senior
years in high school.
Back in Chapel Hill, wed started getting wilder and
wilder phone calls from him about birds flying too
close to the sun, reports of all-night practice sessions
on the piano, strange encounters in the park, and no
sleep no sleep, ever. He flew home in a straight
jacket.
Then the hospitalizations began first a lengthy
stay at Holly Hill in Raleigh followed by a short, heartbreaking try at returning home to normalcy and
Chapel Hill High; then longterm care at Highland
Hospital in Asheville, where he lived for the next four
years, sometimes in the hospital itself, sometimes in
their group home, sometimes in an apartment with
participation in their day program. For a while he was
better, then not. All kinds of fantasies and scenarios
rolled through his head. He moved, talked and dressed
bizarrely; he couldnt remember anything; he couldnt
even read. We brought him back to UNC
Neurosciences Hospital. They referred him to
Dorothea Dixs test program for the new wonder drug
clozapine, just legalized in this country (1992).
Up on that beautiful, windy hill looking out over
the city of Raleigh, Josh started getting truly better for
the first time. He could participate in a real
conversation; he could make a joke. It was literally a
miracle.
He was able to leave the hospital and enter
Caramore Community in Chapel Hill, which offered
vocational rehabilitation, a group home and then a
supervised apartment as well as a lot of camaraderie.
He came in with some great stories as he worked with
the Caramore lawn and housecleaning business ... my
favorite being the time the housecleaning crew dared
one of the gang to jump into the baptismal pool at a
local church they were cleaning and then they all
baptized him on the spot. Before long he graduated
into a real job at Carolina Cleaners. Against all odds,
Josh had become a working man, as he always
referred to himself; his pride in this was enormous.
Though other hospitalizations (tune-ups, he called
them) would be required from time to time, Josh was

on his way. He lived in his own apartment, drove a car,

managed his weekly doctor visits, blood tests,
pharmacy trips and medication. But as the most
important part of his own treatment team, he
steadfastly refused his doctors eventual urging to
switch to one of the newer drugs, such as olanzapine,
risperidol or geodon, in hopes of jump-starting his
metabolism. Clozapine had given him back his life,
and he didnt want to give it up. And in spite of his
weight and smoking, he seemed healthy enough;
physical examinations didnt ring any warning bells.
Josh became a familiar figure in Chapel Hill and
Carrboro, with friends and acquaintances all over town
especially his regular haunts such as Weaver Street
and Caffe Driade, where he went every day. Josh
worked at Akai Hana Japanese Restaurant in Carrboro
for the last seven years of his life, doing everything
from washing dishes to prep work to lunchtime sushi
chef. He was the first one there every morning he
opened up and started preparing the rice. It was his
favorite time of the day, as he often said. He played
piano at Akai Hana every Saturday night: a mix of jazz,
blues and his own compositions.
The live music produced by the Wharf Bars Jimmy
Buffet wannabe band is way too loud, and our drinks,
when they come, are a startling shade of red, with
umbrellas in them. Hal raises his plastic glass high.
Heres to the big guy, he says. We drain them.
Josh considered the schooner trip a requisite for
his annual Key West experience. He loved the ritual of
it all, beginning when the crew invited the evenings
passengers to participate in raising the mainsail. He
always went over to line up and pull, passing the
halyard hand over hand to the next guy. He loved to
stand at the rail as we passed the town dock and
Mallory Square, where all the weird pageantry of the
sunset was already in full swing: the tourists, the guy
with the trained housecats, the flame swallower, the
escape artist tied up in chains, the oddly terrifying
cookie lady. The aging hippie musician on board
invariably cranked up Sloop John Bee as we headed
out to sea while the sun sank lower on the starboard
side. The sun was so bright that I couldnt even face it
without sunglasses, but Josh never wore them. He just
sat there perfectly still, staring straight into the sun, a
little smile playing around his lips.
What thoughts went through his head on that last
voyage?
Perhaps more to the point, what thoughts did not
go through his head, in this later stage of
schizophrenia characterized by blank mind and lack
of affect? Gone the voices, gone the visions, gone the
colored lights, to be replaced by ... what? Maybe
nothing, like the bodhisattva, a person who has
achieved the final apotheosis, beyond desire and self.
Here he sat, an immense man in a black T-shirt and
blue jeans, silent, calm, apparently at peace. He no
longer seemed to know what he had lost. Some call
this a blessing, and some days I am among them; but
most days I am not, remembering instead that wild
boy of 17 who wanted the world all the music; all the

150

friends, BMX bikes and skateboards; all the poetry; all

the girls all the life there ever was.
Now the captain is blowing the conch shell from the
deck of the Western Union. We stand. The sun slants
into our eyes. A breeze is coming up. I pull on my
windbreaker, fingering the little bronze vial of ashes in
my pocket.
Its time.
Last January (2003) Josh and I flew into Key West
together, arriving late on a cool and blustery Tuesday
night around 9 p.m. Wind rattled the palm fronds as
we walked out onto the brightly lit but somehow lonely
looking Duval Street. Only a few people scurried past,
their shoulders hunched against the wind. We passed
the funky Chicken Store, a safe house for the muchmaligned chickens that have overrun Key West. We
passed the Scrub Club, an adult bathhouse that
usually featured its scantily clad ladies blowing
bubbles over the balcony rail, calling out, Hi there!
Feeling dirty? Need a bath? to the amused passersby.
But it was too cool for bubbles that night, and the girls
were all inside behind their red door. The wind
whipped paper trash along the street.
We crossed Duval and went into the friendly
looking Coffee and Tea House, where big trees
overhung an old bungalow with a porch and yard filled
with comfortable, mismatched furniture. Josh was
very tired. He had that out-of-it, blank look he
sometimes gets, almost vegetative, like a big sweet
potato. We walked up the concrete steps and into the
bar with its comforting, helpful smell of coffee
brewing. People clustered at little tables, on sofas, in
armchairs in adjacent rooms, talking and reading the
newspapers strewn everyplace.
The bartenders long, gray hair was pulled back
into a ponytail. He came over to Josh and said, What
can I get for you, sir?
Well, Ill tell you, Josh said in a surprisingly loud
voice (maybe it even surprised him), shaking his head
like a dog coming up from under the water. Ill tell
you, buddy, I dont know what the hell it is I want, and
I dont know where the hell it is I am, and I dont know
what the hell it is Im doing!
Heads along the bar swiveled, and the bartender
burst out laughing. In that case, sir, youve come to
the right island! he announced, as everybody
applauded.
Josh had found his Key West home for the next
week. At bars or beaches, he talked to everybody; you
never knew what he was going to say next.
He told a great version of the Christmas story, too,
conflating the Bible with O. Henry: Once upon a time
there was a young girl who was very sick, and
somehow she got the idea that she would die when all
the leaves fell off the tree that grew just outside her
bedroom window. One by one they dropped. She got
sicker and sicker. Finally there was only one red leaf
left on the tree; she was just about to die. That night
while she was asleep, Jesus flew up to her window.
Jesus was a French artist. He wore a red beret. So he
brought his box of oil paints with him and painted red
leaves all over the window, finishing just as the sun

came up and the last red leaf fluttered down to the

ground. Then he flew away. Then she woke up, and she
was well, and it was Christmas.
Answering the question of whether or not he
believed in Jesus, he said, Well, I dont know. Every
time Im in the hospital, there are at least three people
in there who think theyre Jesus. So sometimes I think,
well, maybe Jesus wasnt Jesus at all maybe he was
just the first schizophrenic.
Joshs eventual diagnosis was schizo-affective,
meaning partly schizophrenic (his mind did not work
logically, his senses were often unreliable, his grip on
reality sometimes tenuous) and partly bipolar
actually a blessing, since the characteristic ups and
downs allowed him more expression and empathy.
But diagnosis is tricky at best. The sudden onset of
these major brain disorders usually occurs in the late
teens or early twenties, and its usually severe. But all
psychosis looks alike at first. Theres no way to
distinguish between the highs of bipolar illness, for
instance, and the florid stage of schizophrenia or
even a garden variety LSD psychosis. Reality had fled
in every case. The best doctors make no claims; Wait
and see, they say.
As far as prognosis goes, medical folklore holds to a
rule of three: About a third of all people with major
psychotic episodes will actually get well, such as Kurt
Vonneguts son, Mark, now a physician who wrote the
memoir Eden Express. The next, larger group will be
in and out of hospitals and programs for the rest of
their lives, with wildly varying degrees of success in
work and life situations; the final group will have
recalcitrant, persistent illnesses which may require
lifelong care or hospitalization though now, I
suspect, the new drugs and community care models
have shrunk this group considerably.
But heres the bottom line: All mental illnesses are
treatable. Often, brain chemistry has to be adjusted
with medication. If symptoms occur, go to the doctor.
Dont downplay it, dont hide it seek treatment
immediately. Mental illness is no more embarrassing
than diabetes. And the earlier we get treatment, the
more effective it will be. I myself could never have
made it through this past year of grief and depression
without both counseling and medication. We are also
lucky to have organizations and support groups in this
area to help us and our families cope. As Josh proved,
very real, valid and full lives can be lived within these
illnesses.
Now my husband and I sit discreetly at the very
back of the Western Union, right behind the captain at
the wheel. He has given the order; the crew has cried
fire in the hole and shot off the cannon. We have
covered our ears. We have gotten our complimentary
wine, our conch chowder. We have listened to our
shipmates talk about how much snow they left behind
in Cleveland, how many grandchildren they have, and
how one guy played hockey for Hopkins on that great
team in 1965. Then we duck as, with a great whoosh of
the jib, we come about. We sit quietly, holding hands,
hard. Now theres a lot of wind. All around us, people
are putting on their jackets.

151

Independent of any of this, the sky puts on its big

show, gearing up for sunset. The sun speeds up as it
sinks lower and lower. The water turns into a sheet of
silver, like a mirror.
Like Hal, Josh was a major sunset man, always
looking for that legendary green flash right after the
sunset, which nobody I know has ever actually seen,
though everybody claims to have known somebody
who has seen it. Here where sunset is a religion, we
never miss the moment. In Key West the sun grows
huge and spreads out when it touches the water, so
that its no longer round at all but a glowing red
beehive shape that plunges down abruptly to the
thunderous applause of the revelers back at Mallory
Square.
Get ready, Hal says in my ear. But look, theres a
cloud bank, its not going to go all the way.
I twist the top of the vial in my windbreaker pocket.
The sun glows neon red, cut off at the bottom by
clouds.
A hush falls over the whole crowd on board the
Western Union. Everybody faces west. Cameras are
raised. It is happening.
Bon voyage, Hal says. Suddenly, the sun is gone.
The crowd cheers. I throw the ashes out on the water
behind us; like a puff of smoke, they disappear
immediately into the wake. I say, Goodbye, baby.
Nobody notices. The water turns into mother of pearl,
shining pink all the way from our schooner to the
horizon. The scalloped edge of the puffy clouds goes
from pink to gold. The crowd goes aah. Goodbye
baby. But no green flash. The crowd stretches, they
move, they mill around on deck. The light fades and
stars come out.
I dont agree with the theory that mental illness
conveys certain gifts. Even if this sometimes seems to
be the case, as in bipolar disorders frequent
association with creativity, those gifts are not worth
the pain and devastating losses the illness also brings
with it. Yet sometimes there are moments....
I am remembering one starry summer night back
in North Carolina, the kind of breathtakingly beautiful
summer night of all our dreams, when Josh and I took
a long walk around our village. Hed been staying with
us for several days because he was too sick to stay in
his own apartment. Hed been deteriorating for
months, and his doctor had arranged his admission to
UNCs Neurosciences Hospital for the next morning.
Josh didnt know this yet. But he was always
compliant, as they call it. We were very lucky in this.
My friends son wouldnt take his medicine and chose
to live on the street; she never knew where he was.
Schizophrenia is like an umbrella diagnosis covering a
whole crowd of very different illnesses; but very few
people with brain disorders actually become violent,
despite the stereotype.
Josh liked the hospital. It was safe, and the world
hed been in that week in North Carolina was not safe,
not at all, a world where strangers were talking about
him and people he used to know inhabited other
peoples bodies and tables turned into spiders and all
the familiar landmarks disappeared so that he couldnt

find his way anywhere. He couldnt sleep, he couldnt

drive, he couldnt think.
Yet on that summer night in Hillsborough, a
wonderful thing happened. We were walking through
the alley between the old Confederate cemetery and
our back yard when we ran into our neighbor Allan.
Hi there, Josh, Allan said.
Instead of replying, Josh sang out a single note of
music.
A flat, he said. It hung in the hot honeysuckle air.
Nice, Allan said, passing on.
The alley ended at Tryon Street, where we stepped
onto the sidewalk. A young girl hurried past.
C sharp, Josh said, then sang it out.
The girl looked at him before she disappeared into
the Presbyterian Church.
We crossed the street and walked past the young
policemen getting out of his car in front of the police
station.
Middle C, Josh said, humming.
Since it was one of Hillsboroughs Last Friday
street fairs, we ran into more and more people as we
headed toward the center of town. For each one, Josh
had a musical note or a chord, for a pair or a group.
Whats up? I finally asked.
Well, you know I have perfect pitch, he said I
nodded, though he did not and everybody we see
has a special musical note, and I can hear every one.
He broke off to sing a high chord for a couple of young
teen girls, then dropped into a lower register for a
retired couple eating ice cream cones.
Hello, another neighbor said, smiling when Josh
hummed back at him.
So it went all over town. Even some of the buildings
had notes, apparently: the old Masonic Hall, the
courthouse, the corner bar. Josh was singing his heart
out. And almost almost it was a song, the
symphony of Hillsborough. We were both exhilarated.
We walked and walked. By the time we got back home,
he was exhausted. Finally he slept. The next day, he
went into the hospital.
Josh loved James Taylor, especially his song Fire
and Rain. But we were too conservative, or
chickenshit, or something, to put it on his tombstone,
the same way we were not cool enough, as Josh put it,
to walk down the aisle to Purple Rain (his idea) while
he played the piano on the day we got married in 1985.
But now I say the words to Hal as the light fades
slowly on the water behind us.
Ive seen fire and Ive seen rain
Ive seen sunny days that I thought would never
end
Ive seen lonely times when I could not find a
friend
But I always thought that Id see you again.
Well, I wont. I know this. But what a privilege it
was to live on this earth with him, what a privilege it
was to be his mother. There will be a lessening of pain,
there will be consolations, I can tell. But as C.S. Lewis
wrote in On Grief: Reality never repeats... . That is
what we should all like, the happy past restored... as it

152

can never be, and maybe never was. Whos got perfect
pitch, anyway?
Yet to have children or simply to experience great
love for any person at all is to throw yourself wide
open to the possibility of pain at any moment. But I
would not choose otherwise. Not now, not ever. Like
every parent with a disabled child, my greatest fear
used to be that I would die first. I cant die, I always
said whenever any risky undertaking was proposed. So
now I can die. But I dont want to. Instead, I want to
live as hard as I can, burning up the days in honor of
his sweet, hard life.
Night falls on the schooner ride back to Key West. I
clutch the bronze vial that held some of Joshs ashes,
tracing its engraved design with my finger. The wind
blows my hair. The young couple in front of us are
making out.
Lets get some oysters at Alonzos, Hal says, and
suddenly I realize that Im starving.
Look, the captain says, pointing up. Venus.
Sure enough. Then we see the Big Dipper, Orion,
Mars. Wheres that French artist with the red beret?
No sign of him, and no green flash, either but stars.
A whole sky full of them by the time we slide into the
dock at the end of William Street.
Lee Smith lives in Hillsborough with her husband,
Hal Crowther. Her latest novel is The Last Girls.
Joshua Field Seay
12/23/69-10/26/03
CHAPEL HILL Joshua Field Seay, 32, died in his sleep early
Sunday, Oct. 26, 2003. Josh was born on Dec. 23, 1969, in
Tuscaloosa, Ala. He moved with his family to Nashville, Tenn., in
1971 and lived there until 1974, when his family came to Chapel Hill.
He is survived by his father, James Seay; his mother, Lee Smith;
James wife, Caroline Seay, and Lees husband, Harold Crowther.
Also surviving are his stepsister, Amity Crowther of Chapel Hill; his
brother, Page Seay, who resides in Nashville, Tenn., with his wife,
Erin, and Joshs beloved niece, Lucy.
Josh attended Chapel Hill public schools and UNC-Asheville.
For the past seven years he was employed at Akai Hana Japanese
Restaurant in Carrboro. Among his duties there were his lively and
popular Saturday evening piano sets, a unique mix of blues and jazz
covers along with his own compositions. He recently assembled a
tape of his compositions which, with signature humor, he entitled
Five Not So Easy Pieces. Josh was beset by mental illness in his
teen years, but he came to regard the amelioration of that illness as
part of his daily work. He was never embittered by what life dealt
him. In the words of a friend, He bore it with quiet bravery and
distinction, at a cost few of the rest of us can begin to calculate. Josh
never wavered in his determination to keep that illness from
defeating him. His absence will leave an immense void in the lives of
his family and friends.

James Seay

153

Angel Levine
Bernard Malamud

To the memory of
Robert Warshow
Manischewitz, a tailor, in his fifty-first year suffered
many reverses and indignities. Previously a man of
comfortable means, he overnight lost all he had when
his establishment caught fire, and, because a meal
container of cleaning fluid exploded, burned to the
ground. Although Manischewitz was insured, damage
suits against him by two customers who had been
seriously hurt in the flames deprived him of every
penny he had collected. At almost the same time, his
son, of much promise, was killed in the war, and his
daughter, without a word of warning, married a
worthless lout and disappeared with him, as if off the
face of the earth. Thereafter Manischewitz became the
victim of incessant excruciating backaches that knifed
him over in pain, and he found himself unable to work
even as a presser the only job available to him for
more than an hour or two daily, because after that the
pain from standing became maddening. His Leah, a
good wife and mother, who had taken in washing
began before his eyes to waste away. Suffering marked
shortness of breath, she at last became seriously ill and
took to her bed. The doctor a former customer of
Manischewitz, who out of pity treated them, at first
had difficulty diagnosing her ailment but later put it
down as hardening of the arteries, at an advanced
stage. He took Manischewitz aside, prescribed
complete rest for her, and in whispers gave him to
know there was little hope.
Throughout his trials Manischewitz had remained
somewhat stoic, almost unbelieving that all this had
descended upon his head, as if it were happening , let
us say, to an acquaintance, or to some distant relative;
it was in sheer quantity of woe incomprehensible. It
was also ridiculous, unjust, and because he had always
been a religious manan affront to God. This,
Manischewitz fanatically believed amid all his
suffering. When, however, his burden had grown too
crushingly heavy to be borne alone, he eased himself
into a chair and with shut hollow eyes prayed: My
dear God, my soul, sweetheart, did I deserve this to
happen to me? But recognizing the worthlessness of

this thought, he compelled himself to put complaint

aside and prayed humbly for assistance: Give to Leah
back her health, and give to me, for myself, that I
should not feel pain in every step I make. Help now, or
tomorrow we are dead. This I dont have to tell you.
And Manischewitz, aching all over and grief-stricken,
wept.
Manischewitzs flat, which he had moved into after
the disastrous fire, was a meagre one, furnished with a
few sticks of chairs, a table, and bed, in one of the
poorer sections of the city. There were three rooms: a
living room, small, poorly papered; an apology for a
kitchen, with a wooden icebox; and the comparatively
large bedroom where Leah lay in a second-hand bed,
panting for breath. The bedroom was the warmest
room of the house and it was here, after his outburst to
God, that Manischewitz, by the light of two small bulbs
overhead, sat reading his Jewish newspaper. He was
not truly reading, because his thoughts were
everywhere but on the print. However the print offered
a convenient resting place for his eyes; and a word or
two, when he permitted himself to comprehend them,
indeed had the effect of aiding him momentarily to
forget his troubles. After a while he discovered, to his
surprise, that he was actively scanning the news,
searching for an item of great interest to him. Exactly
what its contents would be he could not sayuntil he
realized with astonishment that he was expecting to
discover something regarding himself. At that moment
he gazed up with the distinct impression that someone
had entered the apartment, though he could not
remember having heard the sound of the door.
Manischewitz looked around: the room was still, Leah
sleeping peacefully. Half-frightened, he observed her
until he became convinced she was not dead; then, still
disturbed by the thought of an unannounced visitor,
he stumbled into the living room, and there had the
shock of his life, for at the table sat a burly Negro
reading a newspaper he had folded up to fit into one
hand.
What do you want here? Manischewitz cried out
in fright.
The Negro put down the paper and glanced up with
a gentle smile. Good evening. He seemed not to be
sure of himself, as if he had happened into the wrong
house. He was a large man, bonily built, with a heavy
head covered by a hard derby hat, which he made no
attempt to remove. His eyes seemed sad, but his lips,
above which he wore a slight moustache, were on the
verge of laughter; he was not otherwise prepossessing.
The cuffs of his sleeves, Manischewitz noted, were
frayed to the lining, and the dark suit was badly fitted.
He had very large feet. Recovering from his fright,
Manischewitz guessed he was being visited by a case
worker from the Welfare Departmentsome came at
nightfor he had recently applied for relief.
Therefore he lowered himself into a chair opposite
the Negro, returning, as well as he was able, the mans
somewhat troubled although pleasant smile. The
former tailor sat stiffly but patiently at the table,
waiting for the investigator to take out his pad and

154

pencil and begin asking questions; but before long he

became convinced the man intended to do nothing of
the sort.
Who are you? Manischewitz asked uneasily.
If I may, insofar as one is able to, identify myself,
I bear the name of Alexander Levine.
Despite himself, a trace of smile appeared on
Manischewitzs bitter lips.
You said Levine? he politely inquired.
The Negro nodded. That is exactly right.
Carrying the jest a bit further, Manischewitz asked,
You are maybe Jewish?
All my life I was, most willingly.
Manischewitz hesitated. He had heard of black
Jews, but had never met one. It gave an unusual
sensation.
Recognizing in afterthought something strange
about the tense of Levines remark, he said doubtfully,
You aint Jewish any more?
Levine, at this point, removed his hat, but
immediately replaced it. He said quietly, I have
recently been discarnated into an angel. As such I offer
you my humble assistance, if to offer is within my
province and abilityin the best sense. He lowered
his eyes in apology. Which calls for added
explanation: I am what I am granted to be, and at
present the completion is in the future.
What kind of angel is this? Manischewitz gravely
asked.
A bona fide angel of God, within prescribed
limitations, answered Levine, not to be confused
with the members of any sect, order, or organization
here on earth operating under a similar name.
Manischewitz was thoroughly disturbed. He had
been expecting something but not quite this. What sort
of mockery was it ? provided Levine was an angelof a
faithful servant who had from childhood lived in the
synagogues and houses of study, concerned with His
word?
To test Levine he asked, Then where are your
wings?
The Negro blushed as well as he was able.
Manischewitz understood this from his expression.
Under certain circumstances we lose privileges and
prerogatives upon returning to earth no matter for
what purpose, or endeavouring to assist whosoever.
So tell me, Manischewitz said triumphantly,
how did you get here?
I was transmitted.
Still troubled, the tailor said, If you are a Jew, say
the blessing for bread.
Levine recited it in sonorous Hebrew.
Although moved by the familiar words,
Manischewitz still could not believe he was dealing
with an angel.
Somewhat angrily he demanded, If you are an
angel, show me proof.
Levine wet his lips. Frankly, I cannot perform
either miracles or near miracles, due to the fact that I
am in a condition of probation. How long that will
persist or even consist, I admit, depends on the
outcome.

Manischewitz racked his brains for some means of

causing Levine positively to reveal his true identity,
when the Negro spoke again:
It was given me to understand that both you and
your wife require assistance of a salubrious nature?
The tailor could not rid himself of the feeling that
he was the butt of some jokester. Is this what a Jewish
angel looks like? he thought. This I am not convinced.
But he asked one last question. So if God sends to
me an angel, why a black? Why not a white that there
are so many of them?
It was my turn to go next, Levine explained.
Manischewitz could not be convinced. I think you
are a faker.
Levine
slowly
rose..
His
eyes
showed
disappointment and worry. Mr. Manischewitz, he
said tonelessly, if you should desire me to be of
assistance to you any time in the near future, or
possibly before, I can be foundhe cast a quick
glance at his fingernailsin Harlem.
He was by then gone.
The next day Manischewitz felt some relief from
his backache and was able to work four hours at
pressing. The day after, he put in six; and the third day
four again. Leah sat up a little and asked for some
halvah to suck. But on the fourth day the stabbing,
breaking ache returned to his back, and Leah once
again lay supine, breathing with blue-lipped difficulty.
Manischewitz was miserably disappointed at the
return of his active pain, and suffering. He had hoped
for a longer interval of easement, long enough to have
some thought other than of himself and his troubles.
Day by day, hour by hour, minute after minute, he
lived in pain, with pain as his only memory, and
questioned the necessity of it, inveighed against it, and
occasionally though with affection, against God. Why
so much, Gottenyu? If He wanted to teach His servant
a lesson for some reason, some cause the nature of
His natureto teach him, say, for reasons of his
weakness, his neglect of God during his years of
prosperitygive him a little lesson, why then, any one
of the tragedies that had happened to him, any one
would have sufficed to chasten him. But all together
the loss of his means of livelihood, of both his children,
the health of Leah and himself that was too much to
ask one frail-boned man to endure. Who, after all, was
Manischewitz that he had been given so much to
suffer? A tailor. Certainly not a man of talent. Upon
him suffering was largely wasted. It went nowhere,
into nothing: into more pain. His pain did not earn
him bread, nor fill the cracks in the wall, nor lift, in the
middle of the night, the kitchen table; only lay upon
him, sleepless, so sharply oppressively that he could
many times have shrieked yet not heard himself
through all the misery.
In this mood he gave no thought to Mr. Alexander
Levine, but at moments when the pain wavered,
momentarily slightly diminishing, he sometimes
wondered if he had been mistaken to dismiss him. A
black Jew and angel to boothard to believe, but
suppose he had been sent to succour him, and he,

155

Manischewitz, was in his blindness too blind to

comprehend? It was this thought that set him on the
knifepoint of agony.
Therefore the tailor, after much self-questioning
and doubt, decided he would seek the self-styled angel
in Harlem. Of course he had great difficulty, because
he had not asked for specific directions, and all
movement was tedious to him. The subway took him
to 116th Street, and from there he wandered in a dark
world. It was vast and its lights lit nothing.
Everywhere
were
shadows,
often
moving.
Manischewitz hobbled along painfully, with the aid of
a cane; and not knowing where to seek in the
blackened tenement buildings, looked fruitlessly into
store windows. In the stores he saw people and
everybody was black. It was an amazing thing to
observe. When he was too tired, too unhappy to go
farther, Manischewitz stopped in front of a tailors
store. Out of familiarity with the appearance of it, and
with some heartbreak, he entered. The tailor, an old
skinny Negro with a mop of woolly gray hair, was
sitting cross-legged on his workbench, sewing a pair of
full-dress pants that had a razor rent all the way down
the seat.
Youll excuse me, please, gentleman, said
Manischewitz, admiring the tailors deft, thimbled
fingerwork, but you know maybe somebody by the
name of Alexander Levine?
The tailor, who, Manischewitz thought, seemed
somewhat antagonistic to him, scratched his scalp.
Caint say I ever heered dat name.
Alex-ander Lev-ine, Manischewitz pronounced
slowly.
Caint say I heered.
Discouraged, Manischewitz was about to depart
when he remembered to say: He is an angel, maybe.
Oh him, said the tailor, clucking. He hang out in
dat honkytonk down a ways. He pointed with a
skinny finger and returned to the split pants.
Manischewitz crossed the street against a red light
and was almost killed by a taxi. On the block; after the
next, the fourth store from the corner was a cabaret,
and the name in sparkling lights was Bellas. Ashamed
to go in, Manischewitz gazed through the neonlighted
window, and when the dancing couples parted and
drifted away, he discerned, at a table towards the rear,
Levine.
He was sitting by himself, a cigarette butt dangling
from the corner of his mouth, playing solitaire with a
dirty pack of cards, and Manischewitz felt a touch of
pity for him, for Levine had deteriorated in
appearance. His derby hat was dented and had a white
smudge across the top. His ill-fitting suit had grown
shabbier, as if he had been sleeping in it. His shoes
and the bottoms of his trousers were caked with with
mud, and his face covered by an impenetrable stubble
the colour of licorice. Manischewitz, though dreadfully
disappointed, was about to enter anyway, when a fatbreasted Negress in a purple evening gown appeared
before Levines table, and with much laughter through
many white teeth, broke into a vigorous sinuous
shimmy. Levine looked straight at Manischewitz with

a haunted expression, but the tailor was too paralysed

to move or acknowledge it. As Bellas heavy gyrations
continued, Levine rose, his eyes lit in excitement. She
embraced him with vigour, both his hands going
around her big restless buttocks, and they tangoed
together across the floor, loudly applauded by the
other customers. She seemed to have lifted Levine off
his feet and his large shoes hung lifeless as they
danced. They slid past the window where
Manischewitz, white-faced, stood staring in. Levine
winked slyly and the tailor fled home.
Leah lay at deaths door. Through shrunken lips
she muttered concerning her girlhood, the sorrows of
the marriage bed, the loss of her babies, yet wept to
live. Manischewitz tried not to listen, but even without
ears he would have heard her thoughts. It was not a
gift. The doctor panted up the stairs, a broad but
bland, unshaven man (it was Sunday) and shook his
head. A day at most, or two. He left at once, not
without mercy, to spare himself Manischewitzs
multiplied despair; the man who never stopped
hurting. He would someday get him into a public
home.
Manischewitz visited a synagogue and there spoke
to God, but God was strangely absent. The tailor
searched his heart and found no hope. When she died
he would live dead. He considered taking his life
although he knew he never would. Yet it was
something to consider. Considering, you existed in
dregs. He railed against Godshouted his name
without love. Can you love a rock, a broom, an
emptiness? Baring his breast, he smote the naked
bones, cursing himself for having believed.
That afternoon, asleep in a chair, he dreamed of
Levine. He was standing before a faded mirror,
preening small, decaying opalescent wings. This
means, mumbled Manischewitz, as he broke out of
sleep, that it is possible he could be an angel.
Begging a neighbour lady to look in on Leah,
occasionally wet her lips with a drop of water, he drew
on his thin coat, gripped his walking stick, changed
some pennies for a subway token, and rode to Harlem.
He recognized this act as the last desperate one of woe:
to go without belief, seeking a black magician to
restore his wife to invalidism. Yet if there was no
choice, he did at last what was chosen.
He hobbled to Bellas but the place had changed
hands. It was now, as he breathed, a synagogue in a
store. In the front, towards him, were several rows of
empty wooden benches. In the rear stood the Ark, its
portals of rough wood covered with many coloured
sequins; under it a long table on which lay the sacred
scroll unrolled, illuminated by the dim light of a bulb
on a chain overhead. Around the table, as if frozen to it
and the scroll, which they all touched with their
fingers, sat four Negros wearing black skullcaps. Now
as they read the Holy Word, Manischewitz could,
through the plate-glass window, hear the singsong
chant of their voices. One of them was old, with a grey
beard. One was bubble-eyed. One was humpbacked.
The fourth was a boy, no older than thirteen. Their
heads moved in rhythmic swaying. Touched by this

156

sight from his childhood and youth, Manischewitz

entered and stood silent in the rear.
Neshoma, said bubble eyes, pointing to a word
with a stubby finger. Now what dat?
That means soul, said the boy. He wore glasses.
Lets git on wid de commentary, said the old
man.
Aint necessary, said the humpback. Souls is
immaterial substance. Thats all. The soul is derived in
that manner. The immateriality is derived from the
substance, and they both, casually and otherwise,
derived from the soul. There can be no higher.
Thats the highest.
Over de top.
Way, way.
Wait a minute, said bubble eyes. I dont see
what is dat immaterial substance. How come de one
gits hitched to de odder? Speak up, man. He
addressed the humpback.
Ask me something hard. Because it is
substanceless immateriality. It couldnt be closer
together, like the organs of the body under one skin.
Hear now, said the old man.
All you done is switched de words.
It is the primum mobile, the substanceless
substance from which comes all things that were
incepted in the ideayou, me, and everything and
body else.
Now how dat happen? Make it sound simple.
It de speerit, said the old man. On de face of de
water moved de speerit. An dat was good. It say so in
de Book. From de speerit ariz de man.
But now listen here. How come it become
substance, if it all de time a spirit?
God alone done dat.
Holy! Holy! Praise His Name.
But has dis spirit got some kind of a shade or
colour? asked bubble eyes, deadpan.
Man, of course not. It colourless.
Then how come we is coloured? he said, with a
triumphant glare.
Aint got nought to do wid dat.
I still like to know.
God put the spirit in all things, answered the boy.
He put it in the green leaves an the red flowers. He
put it in little gold fishes in the water an in the big
blue sky. Thats how come it came to us.
Amen.
Praise Lawd and utter loud His speechless name.
Blow de bugle till it break de sky.
They fell silent, intent upon the next word.
Manischewitz approached.
Youll excuse me, he said. I am looking for
Alexander Levine. You know him maybe?
Thats the angel, said the boy.
Oh, him, snuffed bubble eyes.
Youll find him at Bellas. Its the establishment
right across the street, the humpback said.
Manischewitz explained that he could not stay,
thanked them all, and limped across the street. It was
already night. The city was dark and he could barely
find his way.

But Bellas was bursting with strains of blues.

Through the window Manischewitz recognized the
dancing crowd and among them sought Levine. He
was sitting loose-lipped at Bellas side table. They were
tippling from an almost empty whiskey fifth. Levine
had shed his old clothes, wore a shiny new checkered
suit, pearl-gray derby, cigar, and big two-tone button
shoes. To the tailors dismay, a drunken gaze had
settled upon Levines formerly dignified face. He
leaned toward Bella, tickled her ear lobe with his
pinky, and whispered words that sent her into gates of
raucous laughter. She fondled his knee.
Manischewitz, girding himself, pushed open the door
and was not well received.
This place reserved.
Beat it, pale puss.
Exit, Yankel, Semitic trash.
He gasped, but moved towards the table where
Levine sat, the crowd breaking before him as he
hobbled forward.
Mr. Levine, he spoke in a trembly voice. Is here
Manischewitz.
Levine glared through bleary eyes.
Speak yo piece, son.
Manischewitz shivered. His back plagued him.
Cold tremors tormented his crooked legs.
Youll excuse me. I would like to talk to you in a
private place. He looked around, but people were
everywhere and all of them listening.
Speak, Ah is a private puson.
Bella laughed piercingly. Stop it, boy, you killin
me.
Manischewitz, no end disturbed, considered
leaving, but Levine addressed him:
What is the pupose of yo communication with
yos truly?
The tailor wet his cracked lips. You are a Jew.
This I am sure.
Levine rose, his nostrils flaring.
Anythin else yo got to say?
Manischewitzs tongue was in torment.
Speak now, or foever hold yo peace.
Tears blinded the tailors eyes. Was ever man so
tried? Should he say he believed a half-drunken Negro
to be an angel?
The silence turned to stone.
Manischewitz was recalling scenes of his youth, as
a wheel in his mind whirred: believe, do not, yes, no,
yes, no. The pointer pointed to yes, to between yes and
no, to no, no it was yes. He sighed. One had still to
make a choice.
I believe you are also an angelfrom God. He
said it simply but in a broken voice. Yet he thought, If
you said it it was said. If you believed it you must say
it. If you believed, you believed.
The hush broke. Everybody talked but the music
commenced and they went on dancing. Bella, grown
bored, picked up the cards and dealt herself a hand.
Levine burst into tears.
How you have humiliated me.
Manischewitz sincerely apologized.

157

Waitll I freshen up. Levine went to the mens

room and returned in his old clothes.
No one said goodbye as they left.
They rode to the flat via subway. As they walked up
the stairs Manischewitz pointed with his cane to his
door.
Thats all been taken care of, Levine said. You
best go in now.
Disappointed that it was all over, yet torn by
curiosity, Manischewitz followed the angel up four
flights of stairs to the roof. When he got there the door
was padlocked.
Luckily he could see through a small broken
window. He heard a strange noise, as though a
vibration of wings, and when he strained for a wider
view, could have sworn he saw a dark figure borne
aloft on strong-pinioned, magnificent black wings. A
feather drifted down. Manischewitz gasped as it
turned white, but it was only snowing. He rushed
downstairs. In the flat, Leah wielded a dust mop under
the bed and upon the cobwebs on the wall.
A wonderful thing, Leyka, Manischewitz said.
There are Jews everywhere.
What has made the Jewish writers conspicuous in
American literature is their sensitivity to the value of
man . . . Personally, I handle the Jew as a symbol of
the tragic experience of man existentially. I try to see
the Jew as a universal man. Everyman is a Jew
though he may not know it. The Jewish drama is a . . .
symbol of the fight for existence in the highest
possible human terms. Jewish history is Gods gift of
drama.
Bernard Malamud, as quoted in The Story
and Its Writer,Ann Charters, ed., (Boston,
1991): 879
1) How does Malamud use irony as a way of universalizing
the main characters experience?
2) How does the storys big city setting accentuate the
authors exploration of the themes of human suffering
and redemption?
3) What message might Malamud be seeking to convey by
his juxtaposition of images of depravity, holiness, and
humor?
4) How does the author play with the theme of Jewish
identity?
5) Does the story suggest the presence of any sense of
community, Jewish or otherwise, within the stark urban
environment in which Manischewitz, the main character,
resides?

158

Tim OBrien is frequently cited by writers and readers

alike as the finest novelist of his generation. He is
almost uniformly regarded as the preeminent voice to
chronicle the American Vietnam experience. Winner
of the National Book Award in 1979 for his novel
Going After Cacciato, OBrien may be best known for
his book The Things They Carried, so legendary a
literary accomplishment that not only was it a finalist
for the Pulitzer and the National Book awards, a
winner of the Paris Prize and the Heartland Prize, it is
a book that critics and scholars seldom know how to
label, varyingly calling it a novel, a short story
collection, or a meta-fiction. OBrien has continued to
craft books stunning in their diverse approaches and
successful in their ability to capture the American
experience, allowing his work to boast regular
appearances on national and international best seller
lists. His most recent novel is July, July.

Tim OBrien

OBriens writing has appeared in The New Yorker,

Ploughshares, Harpers, The Atlantic, and has been
included in several editions of Best American Short
Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been
awarded
fellowships
from
the
Guggenheim
Foundation and the National Foundation for the Arts.
He currently teaches at Southwest Texas State
University in San Marcos, Texas.

Tim OBrien is from small town Minnesota. He was

born in Austin on October 1, 1946, a birth date he
shares with several of his characters, and grew up in
Worthington , Turkey Capital of the World.
He matriculated at Macalester College. Graduation in
1968 found him with a BA in political science and a
draft notice.
OBrien was against the war, but reported for service
and was sent to Vietnam with what has been called the
unlucky Americal division due to its involvement in
the My Lai massacre in 1968, an event which figures
prominently in In the Lake of the Woods.. He was
assigned to 3rd Platoon, A Co., 5th Batt. 46th Inf., as
an infantry foot soldier. OBriens tour of duty was
1969-70.
After Vietnam he became a graduate student at
Harvard. No doubt he was one of very few Vietnam
veterans there at that time, much less Combat Infantry
Badge (CIB) holders. Having the opportunity to do an
internship at the Washington Post, he eventually left
Harvard to become a newspaper reporter. OBriens
career as a reporter gave way to his fiction writing
after publication of his memoir If I Die in a Combat
Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home.
Tim OBrien is now a visiting professor and endowed
chair at Southwest Texas State University where he
teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

Fiction:
July, July (2002)
Tomcat in Love (1998)
In the Lake of the Woods (1994)
The Things They Carried (1990)
Nuclear Age (1985)
Going After Cacciato (1978)
Northern Lights (1975)
Nonfiction:
If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973)

As a story teller and as a person who trusts story, I

think a good story addresses not just the head, but the
whole human body: the tear ducts, the scalp, the back
of your neck and spine, even the stomach.
Tim OBrien Shares Writings and Experiences at
Davidson by Bill Giduz, 2001
Well, I had a desire to write from the time I was a
little kid and then something collided with that desire
namely Vietnamand I had to write about it. It
moved from desire to imperative. I couldnt not write.

159

The What If Game in Atlantic, 2002

The way I look at it is that anything is fair game. I

mean, if youre an artist you cant not write about a
subject for fear of exploiting it. Theres a danger, I
suppose, of exploitation, but youve got to take the risk
and say Im going to write a book that means
something to me and might mean something to other
people.
OBrien, where art thou? by Hillary Schroeder for the
Stanford Daily Cardinal, 2002
Thats how I spend my days for four years in a row.
Im just sitting here in my underwear trying to write a
book.
OBrien Reveals All for Robert Birnbaum &
IdentityTheory, 2002

The Things They Carried

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from

a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian
College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but
Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded
in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late
afternoon, after a days march, he would dig his
foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the
letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and
spend the last hour of fight pretending. He would
imagine romantic camping trips into the White

Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes

taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been
there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love
him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty,
elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was
almost sure. She was an English major at Mount
Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her
professors and roommates and midterm exams, about
her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for
Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she
never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take
care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces. They
were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross
understood that Love was only a way of signing and
did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant.
At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his
rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and
move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at
full dark he would return to his hole and watch the
night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.
The things they carried were largely determined
by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities
were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist
watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum,
candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid,
lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military payment
Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of
water. Together, these items weighed between fifteen
and twenty pounds, depending upon a mans habits or
rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big
man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of
canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave
Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a
toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-size bars of
soap hed stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted
Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until
he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe
in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP,
they all carried steel helmets that weighed five pounds
including the liner aid camouflage cover. They carried
the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few
carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle
boots-2.1 poundsand Dave Jensen carried three
pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholls foot powder as
a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot,
Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium
dope, which for him was 2 necessity. Mitchell Sanders,
the RT0, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a
diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout
Baptist, Carried an illustrated New Testament that had
been presented to him by his father, who taught
Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a
hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried
his grandmothers distrust of the white man, his
grandfathers old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated.
Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was
SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nyloncovered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but
which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you
could die so quickly, each man carried at least one
large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band
for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and

160

because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green

plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or
groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner,
the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was
worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted
Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him
up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him
into the chopper that took him away.
They were called legs or grunts.
To carry something was to hump it, as when
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha
up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive
form, to hump, meant to walk, or to march, but it
implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.
Almost everyone humped photographs. In his
wallet, Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of
Martha. The first was a Kodachrome snapshot signed
Love, though he knew better. She stood against a
brick wall. Her eyes were gray and neutral, her lips
slightly open as she stared straight-on at the camera.
At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who
had taken the picture, because he knew she had
boyfriends, because he loved her so much, and because
he could see the shadow of the picture taker spreading
out against the brick wall. The second photograph had
been clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian
yearbook. It was an action shotwomens volleyball
and Martha was bent horizontal to the floor, reaching,
the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut,
the expression frank and competitive. There was no
visible sweat. She wore white gym shorts. Her legs, he
thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry
and without hair, the left knee cocked and carrying her
entire weight, which was just over one hundred
pounds. Lieutenant Cross remembered touching that
left knee. A dark theater, he remembered, and the
movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a
tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he
touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a
sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but
he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt
and the knee beneath it and the sound of the gunfire
that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how embarrassing it was,
how slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing her
goodnight at the dorm door. Right then, he thought,
he shouldve done something brave. He shouldve
carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to
the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He
shouldve risked it. Whenever he looked at the
photographs, he thought of new things he shouldve
done.
What they carried was partly a function of rank,
partly of field specialty.
As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy
Cross carried a compass, maps, code books,
binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9
pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe fight and the
responsibility for the lives of his men.
As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25
radio, a killer, twenty-six pounds with its battery.

As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel

filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets
and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a
medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad
wounds, for a total weight of nearly twenty pounds.
As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry
Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed twentythree pounds unloaded, but which was almost always
loaded. In addition, Dobbins carried between ten and
fifteen pounds of ammunition draped in belts across
his chest and shoulders.
As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common
grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas-operated
assault rifle. The weapon weighed 75 pounds
unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full twenty-round
magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as
topography and psychology, the riflemen carried
anywhere from twelve to twenty magazines, usually in
cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at
minimum, fourteen pounds at maximum. When it was
available, they also carried M-16 maintenance gear
rods and steel brushes and swabs and tubes of LSA oil
all of which weighed about 2 pound. Among the
grunts, some carried the M-79 grenade launcher, 5.9
pounds unloaded, a reasonably fight weapon except
for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round
weighed ten ounces. The typical load was twenty-five
rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried
thirty-four rounds when he was shot and killed outside
Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional
burden, more than twenty pounds of ammunition,
plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water
and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus
the unweighed fear. He was dead weight. There was no
twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said
it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or
somethingjust boom, then downnot like the
movies where the dead guy rolls around and does
fancy spins and goes ass over teakettlenot like that,
Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom.
Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in midApril. Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed
himself. They stripped off Lavenders canteens and
ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat Kiley said the
obvious, the guys dead, and Mitchell Sanders used his
radio to report one U.S. KIA and to request a chopper.
Then they wrapped Lavender in his poncho. They
carried him out to a dry paddy, established security,
and sat smoking the dead mans dope until the
chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He
pictured Marthas smooth young face, thinking he
loved her more than anything, more than his men, and
now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so
much and could not stop thinking about her. When the
dust-off arrived, they carried Lavender aboard.
Afterward they burned Than Khe. They marched until
dusk, then dug their holes, and that night Kiowa kept
explaining how you had to be them how fast it was,
how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete,
Boom-down, he said. Like cement.

161

In addition to the three standard weapons-the M60, M-16, and M-79-they carried whatever presented
itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of
killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch
can. At various times, in various situations, they
carried M-14s and CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and
grease guns and captured AK-47s and ChiComs and
RPGs and Simonov carbines and black-market Uzis
and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm
LAWs and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and
bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Strunk
carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it.
Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried
his grandfathers feathered hatchet. Every third or
fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine-3.5
pounds with its firing device. They all carried
fragmentation grenades-fourteen ounces each. They
all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade
twenty-four ounces. Some carried CS or tear-gas
grenades. Sonic carried white-phosphorus grenades.
They carried all they could bear, and then some,
including a silent awe for the terrible power of the
things they carried.
In the first week of April, before Lavender died,
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm
from Martha. It was a simple pebble. An ounce at
most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky-white color
with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a
miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha
wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey
shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at
high tide, where things came together but also
separated. It was this separate-but-together quality,
she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble
and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days,
where it seemed weightless, and then to send it
through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest
feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic.
But he wondered what her truest feelings were,
exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together.
He wondered how the tides and waves had come into
play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when
Martha saw the pebble and, bent down to rescue it
from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a
poet, with the poets sensibilities, and her feet would
be brown and bare the toenails unpainted, the eyes
chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though
it was painful, he wondered who had been with her
that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving
along the strip of sand where things came together but
also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but
he couldnt help himself. He loved her so much. On the
march, through the hot days of early April, he carried
the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue,
tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind wandered. He
had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On
occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the
column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would
slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking
barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying

nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves

and gentle winds, all love and lightness.
What they carried varied by mission.
When a mission took them to the mountains,
they carried mosquito netting, machetes, canvas tarps,
and extra bugjuice.
If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it
involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried
everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs,
where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and
Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a twentyeight-pound mine detector. With its headphones and
big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the
lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often
useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they
carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the
illusion of safety.
On ambush, or other night missions, they carried
peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took along
his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence.
Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in
carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he
claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried
brandy and M&Ms. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender
carried the starlight scope, which weighed 63 pounds
with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins
carried his girlfriends panty hose wrapped around his
neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When
dark came, they would move out single file across the
meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates,
where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie
down and spend the night waiting.
Other missions were more complicated and
required special equipment. In mid-April, it was their
mission to search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel
complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai. To
blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of
pentrite high explosives; four blocks to a man, sixtyeight pounds in all. They carried wiring, detonators,
and battery-powered clackers. Dave Jensen carried
earplugs. Most often, before blowing the tunnels, they
were ordered by higher command to search them,
which was considered bad news, but by and large they
just shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a
big man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel
duty. The others would draw numbers. Before
Lavender died there were seventeen men in the
platoon, and whoever drew the number seventeen
would strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst with a
flashlight and Lieutenant Crosss .45-caliber pistol.
The rest of them would fan out as security. They would
sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the
ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts,
whatever was down there-the tunnel walls squeezing
in-how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the
hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest
sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how
you had to wiggle in-ass and elbows-a swallowed-up
feeling-and how you found yourself worrying about
odd thingswill your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry

162

rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound

carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have
the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though
not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself.
Imagination was a killer.
On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number
seventeen, he laughed and muttered something and
went down quickly. The morning was hot and very
still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel
opening, then out across a dry paddy toward the
village of Than Khe. Nothing moved. No clouds or
birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and
drank Kool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy
for Lee Strunk but also feeling the luck of the draw,
You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders,
and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a
tired line and no one laughed.
Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted
Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to pee.
After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to
the tunnel, leaned down, and examined the darkness.
Trouble, he thoughta cave-in maybe. And then
suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about
Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse,
the two of them buried alive under all that weight.
Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole, he
tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the
dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt
paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and
breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to
be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to
know her. Intimate secrets: why poetry? Why so sad?
Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not
lonely, just aloneriding her bike across campus or
sitting off by herself in the cafeteria. Even dancing, she
danced aloneand it was the aloneness that filled him
with love. He remembered telling her that one
evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how,
later, when he kissed her. She received the kiss
without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid,
not a virgins eyes, just flat and uninvolved.
Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was
not there. He was buried with Martha under the white
sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together,
and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was
smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day
was; the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself
to worry about matters of security. He was beyond
that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty
two years old. He couldnt help it.
A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of
the tunnel. He came up grinning, filthy but alive.
Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the
others clapped Strunk on the back and made jokes
about rising from the dead.
Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave.
Fuckin zombie.
The men laughed. They all felt great relief.
Spook City, said Mitchell Sanders.
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of
moaning, yet very happy, and fight then, when Strunk
made that high happy moaning sound, when he went

Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the

head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his
mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a
swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone
was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guys dead. The
guys dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound
the guys dead. I mean really.
The things they carried were determined to some
extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his
good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbits foot.
Norman Bowker, other-wise a very gentle person,
carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a
gift by Mitchell Sanders. The thumb was dark brown,
rubbery to the touch, and weighed four ounces at
most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen
or sixteen. Theyd found him at the bottom of an
irrigation ditch, badly burned, flies in his mouth and
eyes. The boy wore black shorts and sandals. At the
time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice,
a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition.
You want my opinion, Mitchell Sanders said,
theres a definite moral here.
He put his hand oil the dead boys wrist. He was
quiet for a time, as if counting a pulse, then he patted
the stomach, almost affectionately, and used Kiowas
hunting hatchet to remove the thumb.
Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was.
Moral?
You know. Moral.
Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and
handed it across to Norman Bowker. There was no
blood. Smiling, he kicked the boys head, watched the
files scatter, and said, Its like with that old TV show
Paladin. Have gun, will travel.
Henry Dobbins thought about it.
Yeah, well, he finally said. I dont see no moral.
There it is, man.
Fuck off.
They carried USO stationery and pencils and
pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares,
signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing
tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the
sniffing Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and
Stripes, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats,
bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the
resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in
green Mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with
iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water
containers, each with a two gallon capacity. Mitchell
Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for
special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag
insecticide. Dave Jensen carried empty sandbags that
could be filled at night for added protection. Lee
Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they
carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big
PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds
with its battery. They shared the weight of memory.
They took up what others could no longer bear, Often,
they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They
carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs,

163

Vietnamese English dictionaries, insignia of rank,

Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards
imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried
diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They
carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae
and various rots and molds. They carried the land
itselfVietnam, the place, the soda powdery orangered dust that covered their boots and fatigues and
faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere,
they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink
of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They
moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at
night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was
just the endless march, village to village, without
purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the
sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly,
leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood
and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs,
toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and
across the rivers and up again and down, just
humping, one step and then the next and then
another, but no volition, no will, because it was
automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a
matter of posture and carriage, the hump was
everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a
dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and
hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in
their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had
no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the
villages without knowing what to look for, nor caring,
kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men,
blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and
sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the
next village, then other villages, where it would always
be the same. They carried their own lives. The
pressures were enormous. In the heat of early
afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak
jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which
helped ease the strain. They would often discard
things along the route of march. Purely for comfort,
they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores
and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the
resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same,
then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons
and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen
sweatersthe resources were stunningsparklers for
the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easterit was the
great American war chestthe fruits of sciences, the
smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford,
the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast
fields of corn and wheat they carried like freight trains;
they carried it on their backs and shouldersand for
all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and
unknowns, there was at least the single abiding
certainty that they would never be at a loss for things
to carry.
After the chopper took Lavender away,
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of
Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot
chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they
called in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they

marched for several hours through the hot afternoon,

and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how
Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself
trembling.
He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool,
which weighed five pounds, he began digging a hole in
the earth.
He felt shame. He hated himself He had loved
Martha more than his men, and as a consequence
Lavender was now dead, and this was something he
would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the
rest of the war.
All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching
tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate,
and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the
bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long
while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but
mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she
belonged to another world, which was not quite real,
and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian
College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and
uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love
him and never would.
Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I
swear to Godboom-down. Not a word.
Ive heard this, said Norman Bowker.
A pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up.
Zapped while zipping.
All right, fine. Thats enough.
Yeah, but you had to see it, the guy just
I heard, man. Cement. So why not shut the fuck
up?
Kiowa shook his head sadly and glanced over at
the hole where Lieutenant Jimmy Cross sat watching
the night. The air was thick and wet. A warm, dense
fog had settled over the paddies and there was the
stillness that precedes rain.
After a time Kiowa sighed.
One thing for sure, he said. The lieutenants in
some deep hurt. I mean that crying jagthe way he
was carrying onit wasnt fake or anything, it was real
heavy-duty hurt. The man cares.
Sure, Norman Bowker said.
Say what you want, the man does care.
We all got problems.
Not Lavender.
No, I guess not, Bowker said. Do me a favor,
though.
Shut up?
Thats a smart Indian. Shut up.
Shrugging, Kiowa pulled off his boots. He wanted
to say more, just to lighten up his sleep, but instead he
opened his New Testament and arranged it beneath
his head as a pillow. The fog made things seem hollow
and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted
Lavender, but then he was thinking how fast it was, no
drama, down and dead, and how it was hard to feet
anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He
wished he could find some great sadness, or even
anger, but the emotion wasnt there and he couldnt
make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be alive. He

164

liked the smell of the New Testament under his check,

the leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the
chemicals were. He liked hearing the sounds of night.
Even his fatigue, it felt fine, the stiff muscles and the
prickly awareness of his own body, a floating feeling.
He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa
admired Lieutenant Jimmy Crosss capacity for grief.
He wanted to share the mans pain, he wanted to care
as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his
eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he
could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and
the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and
the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.
After a moment Norman Bowker sat up in the
dark.
What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell
it to me.
Forget it.
No, man, go on. One thing I hate, its a silent
Indian.
For the most part they carried themselves with
poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there
were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to
squeal but couldnt. When they twitched and made
moaning sounds and covered their heads and said
Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired
their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and
begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made
stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their
mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. In different
ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the
firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They
would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then quickly
hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if
in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take
on the old logic-absolute silence, then the wind, then
sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive.
Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves,
first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers
again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They
would check for casualties, call in dust-offs, light
cigarettes, try to smile, clear their throats and spit and
begin cleaning their weapons. After a time someone
would shake his head and say, No lie, I almost shit my
pants, and someone else would laugh, which meant it
was bad, yes, but the guy had obviously not shit his
pants, it wasnt that bad, and in any case nobody
would ever do such a thing and then go ahead and talk
about it. They would squint into the dense, oppressive
sunlight. For a few moments, perhaps, they would fall
silent, lighting a joint and tracking its passage from
man to man, inhaling, holding in the humiliation.
Scary stuff, one of them might say. But then someone
else would grin or flick his eyebrows and say, Rogerdodger, almost cut me a new asshole, almost.
There were numerous such poses. Some carried
themselves with a sort of wistful resignation, others
with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor
or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were
even more afraid to show it.
They found jokes to tell.

They used a hard vocabulary to contain the

terrible softness. Greased, theyd say. Offed, lit up,
zapped while zipping. It wasnt cruelty, just stage
presence. They were actors and the war came at them
in 3-D. When someone died, it wasnt quite dying,
because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and
because they had their fines mostly memorized, irony
mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other
names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death
itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They
talked grunt lingo. They told stories about Ted
Lavenders supply of tranquilizers, how the poor guy
didnt feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was.
Theres a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders.
They were waiting for Lavenders chopper,
smoking the dead mans dope.
The morals pretty obvious, Sanders said, and
winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, theyll ruin
your day every time.
Cute, said Henry Dobbins.
Mind-blower, get it? Talk about wiggy. Nothing
left, just blood and brains.
They made themselves laugh.
There it is, theyd say, over and over, as if the
repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance
between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without
going. There it is, which meant be cool, let it ride,
because oh yeah, man, you cant change what cant be
changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively
and fucking well is.
They were tough.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men
who might die. Grief, terror, love, longingthese were
intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass
and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They
carried shameful memories. They carried the common
secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to
run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was
the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put
down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.
They carried their reputations. They carried the
soldiers greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing.
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed
not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the
first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or
honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died
so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into
tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire.
Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their
legs move. They endured. They kept humping. They
did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was
simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go
limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles
unwind and not speak and not budge until your
buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper
that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to
the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever
fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not
valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
By and large they carried these things inside,
maintaining the masks of composure. They sneered at
sick call. They spoke bitterly about guys who had

165

found release by shooting off their own toes or fingers.

Pussies, theyd say. Candyasses. It was fierce, mocking
talk, with only a trace of envy or awe, but even so, the
image played itself out behind their eyes.
They imagined the muzzle against flesh. They
imagined the quick, sweet pain, then the evacuation to
Japan, then a hospital with warm beds and cute geisha
nurses.
They dreamed of freedom birds.
At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they
were carried away by jumbo jets. They felt the rush of
takeoff Gone! they yelled. And then velocity, wings and
engines, a smiling stewardess-but it was more than a
plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with
feathers and talons and high screeching. They were
flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear.
They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of
wind and altitude, soaring, thinking Its over, Im
gone!they were naked. They were light and freeit
was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as
light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in
the lungs as they were taken up over the Clouds and
the war, beyond duty, beyond gravity and
mortification anti global entanglementsSin loi! They
yelled, Im sorry, motherfuckers, but Im out of it, Im
goofed, Im on a space cruise, Im gone!and it was a
restful, disencumbered sensation, just riding the fight
waves, sailing; that big silver freedom bird over the
mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms
and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways
and the Golden Arches of McDonalds. It was flight, a
kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and
higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond
the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where
there were no burdens and where everything weighed
exactly nothing. Gone! they screamed, Im sorry but
Im gone! And so at night, not quite dreaming, they
gave themselves over to lightness, they were carried,
they were purely borne.
On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his
foxhole and burned Marthas letters. Then he burned
the two photographs. There was a steady rain falling,
which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and
Sterno to build a small fire, screening it with his body,
holding the photographs over the tight blue flame with
the tips of his fingers.
He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he
thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just stupid.
Lavender was dead. You couldnt burn the blame.
Besides, the letters were in his head. And even
now, without photographs, Lieutenant Cross could see
Martha playing volleyball in her white gym shorts and
yellow T-shirt. He could see her moving in the rain.
When the fire died out, Lieutenant Cross pulled
his poncho over his shoulders and ate breakfast from a
can.
There was no great mystery, he decided.
In those burned letters Martha had never
mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy take care of
yourself. She wasnt involved. She signed the letters

Love, but it wasnt love, and all the fine lines and
technicalities did not matter.
The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything
seemed part of everything else, the fog and Martha
and the deepening rain.
It was a war, after all.
Half smiling, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross took out
his maps. He shook his head hard, as if to clear it, then
bent forward and began planning the days march. In
ten minutes, or maybe twenty, he would rouse the men
and they would pack up and head west, where the
maps showed the country to be green and inviting.
They would do what they had always done. The rain
might add some weight, but otherwise it would be one
more day layered upon all the other days.
He was realistic about it. There was that new
hardness in his stomach.
No more fantasies, he told himself.
Henceforth, when lie thought about Martha, it
would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere.
He would shut down the daydreams. This was not
Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there
were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place
where men died because of carelessness and gross
stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you were
dead, never partly dead.
Briefly, in the rain, Lieutenant Cross saw
Marthas gray eyes gazing back at him.
He understood.
It was very sad, he thought. The things men
carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to
do.
He almost nodded at her, but didnt.
Instead he went back to his maps. He was now
determined to perform his duties firmly and without
negligence. It wouldnt help Lavender, he knew that,
but from this point on he would comport himself as a
soldier. He would dispose of his good-luck pebble.
Swallow it, maybe, or use Lee Strunks slingshot, or
just drop it along the trail. On the march he would
impose strict field discipline. He would be careful to
send out flank security, to prevent straggling or
bunching up, to keep his troops moving at the proper
pace and at the proper interval. He would insist on
clean weapons. He would confiscate the remainder of
Lavenders dope. Later in the day, perhaps, he would
call the men together and speak to them plainly. He
would accept the blame for what had happened to Ted
Lavender. He would be a man about it. He would look
them in the eyes, keeping his chin level, and he would
issue the new SOPs in a calm, impersonal tone of
voice, an officers voice, leaving no room for argument
or discussion. Commencing immediately, hed tell
them, they would no longer abandon equipment along
the route of march. They would police up their acts.
They would get their shit together, and keep it
together, and maintain it neatly and in good working
order.
He would not tolerate laxity. He would show
strength, distancing himself.
Among the men there would be grumbling, of
course, and maybe worse, because their days would

166

seem longer and their loads heavier, but Lieutenant

Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to
be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it
was not now a factor. And if anyone quarreled or
complained, he would simply tighten his lips and
arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture.
He might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He
might just shrug and say Carry on, then they would
saddle up and form into a column and move out
toward the villages west of Than Khe. (1986)
R&R rest and rehabilitation leave; SOP standard
operating procedure; RTO radio and telephone
operator; M&M joking term for medical supplies; KIA
killed in action; AOs areas of operation; Sin loi Sorry

stepped on a boobytrapped artillery round. He was

playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he
was dead. The trees were thick; it took nearly an hour
to cut an LZ for the dustoff.
Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby
VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I dont know
- no farms, no paddies - but we chased it down and,
got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted
village where we set up for the night. After supper Rat
Kiley went over and stroked its nose.
He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but
the baby buffalo wasnt interested.
Rat shrugged.
He stepped back and shot it through the right front
knee.

For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the

old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it
abstracts, because it generalizes, I cant believe it with
my stomach. Nothing turns inside.

The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard,

then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot
off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the
little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It
wasnt to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up
against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody
said much. The whole platoon stood there watching,
feeling all kinds of things, but there wasnt a great deal
of pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was
dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world.
Later in the week Rat would write a long personal
letter to the guys sister, who would not write back, but
for now, it was simply a question of pain. He shot off
the tail. He shot away -chunks of meat below the ribs.
All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth
and greenery, and the evening was humid and very
hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost
casually, quick little spurts in the belly. Then he
reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front
knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up,
but this time it couldnt quite make it. It wobbled and
went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent
forward and whispered something, as if talking to a
pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby
water buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a little
bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very
still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were
enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb.

It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly

told, makes the stomach believe.

Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but

them cradled his rifle and went off by himself.

This one does it for me. Ive told it before - many

times, many versions - but heres what actually
happened.

The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby

buffalo. For a long time no one spoke. We had
witnessed some- thing essential, something brand-new
and profound, a piece of the world so startling there
was not yet a word for it.

How to Tell a True War Story

from The Things They Carried
In a true war story, if theres a moral at all, its like the
thread that makes the cloth. You cant tease it out. You
cant extract the meaning without unraveling the
deeper meaning. And in the end, really, theres
nothing much to say about a true war story, except
maybe Oh. True war stories do not generalize. They
do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

We crossed that river and marched west into the

mountains. On the third day, my friend Curt Lemon

Somebody kicked the baby buffalo.

167

It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes.

Amazing, Dave Jensen said. My whole life, I never
seen anything like it.

must cross the river and go into the mountains and do

terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find
yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel
wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are
filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could
be and always should be, but now is not.

[...] Never? Not hardly. Not once.

Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders picked up the baby
buffalo. They hauled it across the open square, hoisted
it up, and dumped it in the village well.
Afterward, we sat waiting for Rat to get himself
together.
Amazing, Dave Jensen kept saying. A new wrinkle. I
never seen it before.
Mitchell Sanders took out his yo-yo. Well, thats
Nam, he said. Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every
sins ret fresh and original.

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at

least, war has the feel - the spiritual texture - of a great
ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity.
Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding,
the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into
wrong. Order blends into chaos, hate into love,
ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into
savagery. The vapors suck you in. You cant tell where
you are, or why youre there, and the only certainty is
absolute ambiguity.
In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your
sense of truth itself, and therefore its safe to say that
in a true war story nothing is absolutely true.

How do you generalize?

War is hell, but thats not the half of it, because war is
mystery and terror and adventure and courage and
discovery and holiness and pity and despair and
longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is
thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war
makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for
instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also
beauty. For all its horror, you cant help but gape at the
awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer
rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red
ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive
moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the
fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the great
sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship,
the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the
purply orange glow of napalm, the rockets red glare.
Its not pretty, exactly. Its astonishing. It fills the eye.
It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do
not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a
microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery
barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral
indifference - a powerful, implacable beauty - and a
true war story will tell the truth about this, though the
truth is ugly.
To generalize about war is like generalizing about
peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is
true. Though its odd, youre never more alive than
when youre almost dead. You recognize whats
valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love
whats best in yourself and in the world, all that might
be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and
look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the
mountains beyond, and although in the morning you

Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or

else the point doesnt hit you until, say, twenty years
later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your
wife and start telling the story to her, except when you
get to the end youve forgotten the point again. And
then for a long time you lie there watching the story
happen in your head. You listen to your wifes
breathing. The wars over. You close your eyes. You
smile and think, Christ, whats the point?

This one wakes me up.

In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn
sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiley.
Then he took a funny half step, moving from shade
into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped artillery
round blew him into a tree. The parts were just
hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to
shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white
bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and
something wet and yellow. The gore was horrible, and
stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years
later is Dave Jensen singing Lemon Tree as we threw
down the parts.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask.
Somebody tells a story, lets say, and afterward you
ask, Is it true? and if the answer matters, youve got
your answer.

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For example, weve all heard this one. Four guys go

down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it
and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Ill picture Rat Kileys face, his grief, and Ill think, You
dumb cooze.
Because she wasnt listening.

Is it true?
It wasnt a war story. It was a love story.
The answer matters.
Youd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the
grounding reality, its just a trite bit of puffery, pure
Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are
untrue. Yet even if it did happen - and maybe it did,
anythings possible even then you know it cant be
true, because a true war story does not depend upon
that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A
thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may
not happen and be truer than the truth. For example:
Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy
jumps on it and takes the blast, but its a killer grenade
and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though,
one of the dead guys says, The fuck you do that for?
and the jumper says, Story of my life, man, and the
other guy starts to smile but hes dead.
Thats a true story that never happened.

Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Curt

Lemons face. I can see him turning, looking back at
Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half
step from shade into sunlight, his face brown and
shining, and when his foot touched down, in that
instant, he mustve thought it was the sunlight that
was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged
105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how
the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up
and lift him into that tree, if I could somehow recreate
the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the
obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the
last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him mustve
been the final truth. Sunlight was killing him.

Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will

come up to me afterward and say she liked it. Its
always a woman. Usually its an older woman of kindly
temperament and humane politics. Shell explain that
as a rule she hates war stories; she cant understand
why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore.
But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made
her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I
should do, shell say, is put it all behind me.
Find new stories to tell.
I wont say it but Ill think it.

But you cant say that. All you can do is tell it one more
time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a
few things to get at the real truth. No Mitchell Sanders,
you tell her. No Curt Lemon, no Rat Kiley. No baby
buffalo. No trail junction. No baby buffalo. Its all
made up. Beginning to end. Every goddamn detail the mountains and the river and especially that poor
dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it.
And even if it did happen, it didnt happen in the
mountains, it happened in this little village on the
Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and
one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up
screaming with a leech on his tongue. You can tell a
true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the
end, of course, a true war story is never about war. Its
about sunlight. Its about the special way that dawn
spreads out on a river when you know you must cross
that river and march into the mountains and do things
you are afraid to do. Its about love and memory. Its
about sorrow.
Its about sisters who never write back and people who
never listen.
[TIM OBRIEN, The Things They Carried, New York
1990, pp.84-91]

Writing Vietnam
Tim OBrien, Presidents Lecture, 21
April 1999
The Brown University Department of English and
Creative Writing Program hosted a conference on
Writing Vietnam from April 21 to April 23, 1999.
[]
Tim OBrien: Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank
you. Thank you, its a pleasure to be here tonight. Ive
got a really bad cold-both of my ears are stopped up; I
can barely hear my own voice. Ive got people in the
audience kind of going like this and like this (gestures
with hands) to kind of modulate my volume. When I
began preparing this little talk, I was very quickly
reminded that one of the reasons I became a fiction
writer is I dont know anything. I dont mean this in a
falsely humble sense. I mean, quite literally, that I
have very little to offer you in the way of abstraction or
generalization; the sort of thing that can be
communicated in a Presidents Lecture. Im not a
literary historian, Im not a critic, Im not a teacher. I

169

spend my days, and a good many of my nights, writing

stories. And I dont devote a lot of time or a lot of
energy worrying about the hows or the whys of it all,
instead taking a kind of lazy mans conviction in the
belief that stories require no justification; they just
are. Its a conviction, too, I suppose, that abstraction
and generalization are precisely the reverse of what I
do as a storyteller. Abstraction may make your head
believe, but a good story, well told, will also make your
kidneys believe, and your scalp and your tear ducts,
your heart, and your stomach, the whole human being.
In any case, after, I dont know, twenty aborted
attempts to compose a lecture for tonight, I finally
gave it up, and decided to spend my time with you
doing what I do best, which is to tell stories. I did,
however, save a few nuggets from my original efforts
at a lecture. I just want to share them with you; itll
only take about four seconds:
Number one: writing never gets easier, it gets harder.
You cant repeat yourself. Unlike, say, a professional
surgeon, you cannot perform precisely the same
operation with the same protocol in case after case,
and even for a surgeon, this would be risky, if ones
first patient happened to end up in a mortuary.
Number 2: use active verbs. Avoid ridiculous similes.
For example: do not write, her neck was like a swans,
long and graceful. Instead write, she honked. Three:
avoid unintentional puns. Do not write, she came in a
Jeep. Four (I did that in the Atlantic monthly, believe
it or not): Four: avoid alliteration. Do not write, quote,
The red, rollicking river of his tongue rubbed me the
wrong way. Instead write, He kissed me with
conviction, or, perhaps, more simply, He kissed me.
I gagged. Finally, as my last salvageable little jewel, I
thought it might be helpful to begin by stating the
obvious, or what should be obvious, a writer must,
above all, write. Joseph Conrad, in a letter to a friend,
describes his daily routine: I sit down religiously
every morning. I sit down for eight hours every day,
and the sitting down is all. Note Conrad says he sits
down to write every day. Saturdays, Sundays,
religiously, he says. Beyond anything, it seems to me, a
writer performs this sitting-down act primarily in
search of those rare, very intense moments of artistic
pleasure that are as real in their way as the pleasures
that can come from any other sourcethe rush of
endorphins, for instance, that accompanies the
making of a nice little bit of dialogue. And this isnt to
say that writing isnt painfuland it is, most of the
timebut at the same time, there is no pleasure
without the pain. As much as writing hurts, it carries
with it, at times, content, satisfaction, which, in part, I
think, is what Conrad is getting at when he says, The
sitting down is all. In my own case, I get up at about
six-thirty, seven oclock every day, try to be at work by
eight, work until about one oclock in the afternoon,
work out for a couple of hours -. Uh, lifting weights is
my hobby, but even when Im doing that, Im still
writing in my head, going over a bit of dialogue, kind
of mumbling aloud, or trying to come up with just that
right word thats been eluding me during the morning

hours. Take shower, go back to work, and write until

about six oclock at night. I work on Christmas, I work
at New Years, my birthday, my girlfriends birthday
its all I do. And yet, as monotonous as it might sound
to you, it gives me great, great pleasure.
Now, what I thought I -. Thats sort of the end of the
little prepared thing Id done. What I want to do with
you now is to dois to tell you, basically, two stories.
Uh, the pair of stories are kind of wedded together by
the common theme, that I hope will sort of soak
through by osmosis. I grew up, as President [E.
Gordon] Gee said, in a small prairie town in southern
Minnesota, population, what, nine thousand or so? If
you look in a dictionary under the word boring, you
will find a little pen-and-ink illustration of
Worthington, Minnesota, where I grew up. On one
side of town, of the highway coming into town, youll
see soybeans, on the other side of the highway, fields
of corn. Its a place that gives new meaning to the word
flat. The town, for reasons unknown, took pride, and
to this day still takes pride, in calling itself The
Turkey Capital of the World. Uh, why they took pride
in this Im not quite sure. Every September in my
home town, on September fifteenth there is an event
called Turkey Day. And what Turkey Day consists of
is the farmers will put their turkeys in their trucks, uh,
drive them into town, dump them in front of the Esso
gas station on one end of Main Street, and then theyll
herd the turkeys up Main Street, and we, the citizens
of Worthington, will all sit on the curbs and watch the
turkeys go by (laughs). And then wed go home. Thats
our big day! Well, you can imagine what the rest of the
days are like.
Imagine yourself as a nine year old, ten year old kid,
growing up in this godforsaken place; a place, by the
way thats no better and no worse than any town like it
across this country of ours; a town full of chatty
housewives and holier than thou ministers, and the
Kiwanis boys with their, you know, their white belts
and their white shoes, and the country club set, a town
that congratulates itself, day after day, on its own
ignorance of the world: a town that got us into
Vietnam. Uh, the people in that town sent me to that
war, you know, couldnt spell the word Hanoi if you
spotted them three vowels. They couldnt do it. In any
case, they sent mewell, again, imagine yourself as a
nine year old, in my case, boy, growing up in this
place. What do you do to escape it? Well, one way to
escape it, I found, was through books and through
reading, and I spent a great deal of my youth in the
Nobles County Library, on Fourth Street in
Worthington, reading books like, you know,
Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer, but also stuff
that was essentially crap: books like The Hardy Boys,
as an example, for which, you know, the avenue
towards literature really doesnt matter much, as long
as you like reading, I suppose. It matters later. Then it
didnt.

170

I spent most of my summers as a kid playing a crappy

shortstop for the Ben Franklin-store Little League
teamcouldnt field, couldnt hit, couldnt run,
couldnt throwotherwise, a pretty good shortstop. I
remember coming off of Little League practice one
afternoon in July. It probably was nineteen fifty-eight,
a particularly disastrous, even catastrophic day on the,
on the baseball field, and going into the library-it was
one of these little Carnegie libraries that dot smalltown America, a place that, if I were to close my eyes
right now, I couldI would be there. I could see the
ceiling fan spinning as youre walking in, and the smell
of Johnsons paste wax on the floor, and those smells
oflibrary smells, of paper and books and ink and
glue. A kind of, the atmosphere was a kind of place
that, as you enter it, instantly makes your bowels kind
of relax. You know the feeling, dont you? Kind of
peaceful, at-home feeling. Well, on this day, I found a
book calledit was as instrumental in my becoming a
writer as, say, Marquez or Faulknerthe book was
entitled Larry of the Little League. I read this book
in, what, a half an hour or so, but what a half an hour!
This kid Larry could do everything I couldnt do: he
could field, hit, run, and throw. I finished the book,
marched over to the librarian, asked for a pad of paper
and a pen, which she gave to me, went back to my
desk, and over the course of the next hour and a half,
at age nine, possibly ten, composed the first novel of
my life, or what I thought of as a novel. The title was
Timmy of the Little League, essentially a rip-off of
Larry. ItI remember on themy mom and dad, I
think, still have this aborted effortI remember on
page ten or so of thisit was hand-written, in big
handwriting, but on page ten or so, uh, the
Worthington Ben Franklin team won the Worthington,
uh, Little League, you know, championship. And I, in
the character of Timmy, got the game-winning hit. On
page twenty or so, the team went up to MinneapolisSt. Paul Little League championship, where the
Worthington Ben Franklin team defeated a team from
Edina, this kind of ritzy-ditzy, rich peoples suburb
you guys would fit in therea place we really despised,
and again, the game-winning hit was by little Timmy,
and at the end of the book, on page thirty or whatever
it was, when I called it????, the team went to
Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where they defeated
Taiwan, like, eighty to nothing, and again, the gamewinning hit was mine.
Well, I tell you this story for a reason; the reason being
that writers often forget or neglect to talk about those
sources that have very little to do with, you know the
Shakespeares, andall of which is important, I dont
mean to denigrate that for an instant, but of equal
importance in some ways is that experience in
childhood, a source of loneliness and frustration I felt
growing up in this town, escape through books, and a
discovery of writing through a book like Larry of the
Little League. I learned other practical lessons, I
might add, in writing that book, that I dont often talk
about --. I certainly dont talk about them in
interviews, but among them being that I was writing in

that book the story, not of what was, the world I lived
in, but the story of what could have been or should
have been, which is what fiction is all about. And I
could have been a good shortstop, I should have been
I wasnt. But in that book I became another person,
assumed a new identity, and lived in another world,
the world of success, in this case; a world outside of
Worthington, Minnesota, and many years lateruh,
what, twenty or something like thatI wrote a novel
called Going After Cacciato, my sort of first successful
book, that the premise of which was essentially that of
Timmy of the Little League- a book about a soldier
walking away from Vietnam, heading for Paris. Uh, I
didnt do it, but I could have, and more importantly, I
should have, because, you know, I was so opposed to
that war. Whats to stop me in the could-have part?
You know, Ive got the weapon, the water, the rations
the weapon to get more water and rations andit cant
be any more dangerous than Vietnam, just walking
over those mountains, and heading through Thailand,
and ending up in Paris.
As a fiction writer, I do not write just about the world
we live in, but I also write about the world we ought to
live in, and could, which is a world of imagination. I
grew up, I left Worthington, went to college at a place
called Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and
during my four years in college, the Vietnam War
began more and more raising its head. The war was
escalating rapidly, and I spent my four years in
Macalaster doing two things sort of simultaneously,
and they were contradictory things. One was kind of
trying to ignore it all, hoping it would go away, that it
wouldnt capture me as a person. I had kind of a smug
attitude about it all, thinking, well, Im a good
student, and smart, and they wont take me as a
soldier, I really believed that it was impossible. But by
the time I became a senior I began to realize that it
was more and more possible. I rang some doorbells for
Gene McCarthy, running as a peace candidate. Uh, I
was student body president, tried to use that as a, you
know, in a minor kind of way, as a way of showing my
opposition to the war. Stood in peace vigils on campus
I graduated in May of nineteen sixty-eight, which
now seems a lifetime ago, returned to Worthington for
the summer. I remember coming off the golf course in
an afternoon in mid-June and going to the mailbox,
and finding in the mailbox my draft notice. I took it
into the kitchen where my mother and father were
having lunch, and I dropped it on the table. My father
looked at it, and my mom looked at it, and I looked at
it, and there was an absolute silence in that kitchen.
They knew about my feelings toward the war, how
much I despised it, but they also knew I was a child of
Worthington, this place, this Turkey Capital place I
just told you about. My father had been a sailor in
World War Two; my mother was a Wave, you know, a
kind of Navy woman. Uh, there was a tradition of
service to country in my family.

Well, anyway, a long time passed in that kitchen; it

might have been a half an hour, when no one spoke.
171

My mother fiddled at the stove, and my dad would you

know, just sort of ate his soup, and, uh, finally he
looked up at me and said, What are you going to do?
And I said, I dont know. Wait. Which was what I did
for the rest of the summer of nineteen sixty-eight. I
took a job in a meat-packing plant in my hometown,
where I worked on an assembly line eight hours a day,
or more properly, a disassembly line. It was a pig
factory. The hogs were butchered in one part of the
plant, they were strung up by their hind hocks, on a
kind of high conveyer belt, and as they came by, my
job was, I held ait looked like a machine gunit was
a thing that was this big, it weighed maybe eighty
pounds, and it was suspended from the ceiling by a
heavy rubber cord strong enough to actually hold it,
but it had some give to it, you could move this thing
around. And as the hogs came by, the heads had been
cut off, theyd been split open down the belly and pried
open, so the blood had all congealed in the neck cavity
they were upside downand my job was to get rid of
the blood clots, essentially, these kind of big,
grapefruit-sized clots of blood. And to do this, Id take
this machine which had a roller brush on one end and
a trigger on this end, and Id put the roller brush into
the pigs, uh, neck cavity, pull the trigger, the brush
would spin, water would come out, and these clots of
blood would, uh, would dissolve into kind of a fine red
mist. I spent the summer, essentially, breathing pig
blood. Not a nice job. And especially not a nice job
when one has a draft notice tucked away in a back
pocket.
My dreams, obviously, were dreams of slaughter that
summerblood dreams. On top of everything else, I
might add, I smelled like a pork chop. You couldnt get
that pig factory smell out of your skin and your hair.
You know, youd shower at the plant and then again at
home, but you really did smell like bacon or a pork
chop as youd spend your nights, you know, cruising
around this small town in your fathers car, stopping at
the A&W for a root beer, and staring at the town lake,
wondering whats going to become of me when the
summer is over. Well, Ive told this story before, and
Ive written about it in The Things They Carried, as
some of you know, that read it. But parts of the story
are hard to tell, and now Im at one of those points.
Near the end of the summer, something happened to
me that, to this day, I dont fully understand. One day,
at a pig line, as I was pulling this trigger, something
exploded in my stomach. It felt like a water balloon
that popped open inside of me. It was a leaky, gaseous,
watery feelinga feeling of, uh, real despair. I nearly
began crying. I immediately put this gun down, walked
out of the plant without taking a shower, got in my
dads car, drove home, uh, went in the house, and just
stood in that kitchen, the kitchen I told you about,
lookingmy mom and dad werent home, I dont know
where they were that afternoon. Uh, I went down into
the basement where my room was, and I packed a bag,
filled it up with clothingI had a passport from a trip
to Europe the previous summer. I got back in my
moms car, and took off.

For those of you who dont know the geography,

Minnesota is on the Canadian border, and eight hours
later, after a drive I essentially forget, a blurry drive,
just pure velocity, I found myself in a place called
International Falls, Minnesota, up on the MinnesotaCanadian border. I hadnt planned any of this-I had
sort of half-daydreamed about it, but never seriously.
By that time it was close to midnight; I spent the night
in the car, uh, in a-a closed-down gas station-very --. It
was a sleepless night. In the morning, as dawn began
to break, I got-I started the car, and I began driving
east, along the Rainy River, which is a river that
physically separates, uh, Minnesota from Canada. Its
not just a river: its as wide as a lake, in parts. Its a big
river. Um, I was looking for a way across, you know, a
bridge. Within a half an hour or so, I came across a
closed-down, uh, resort along the river, a place called
the Tip-Top Lodge. It wasnt really a lodge: it was a
sort of-ten yellow cabins along the river. Tourist
season was over by then, so the place was abandoned,
but I stopped anyway, thinking, well, Ill think it over
for one last night before I walk away from my own life
and from the world I knew. I went up to the main
building and knocked on the door. A little man came
to the door. He was really a small guy, he was like a
foot tall. I mean he was really a tiny little guy. He was
dressed all in, all in brown, you know, the kind of
north woods lookbrown shirt and brown pants
brown everything. Uh, for the first time in my life I
could actually look down at somebody-I remember
looking down at the guy, and he looking up at me, and
he said, What do you want? And I said, A place to
stay. He introduced himself to me; his name was
Elroy Berdahl. The man is the hero of my life. If, uh,
heroes comecome in small packages, this guy did. He
took one look at me and I know that instantly he knew
that heres a kid in deep trouble. Uh, he was no
dummy. He knew there was a war on, he knew this
was the Canadian border, he could see how old I was,
he could see the terror in my eyes, Im sure. He said,
No problem. He gave me a key, and walked me to
one of his little cabins, and said to me, I hope you like
fish, and I said, Yeah.
Well, I spent the next six days with old Elroy Berdahl
on the Rainy River, trying to decide what to do with
my, you know, my life. On the one hand, I did oppose
the war. It seemed to me that certain blood was being
shed for uncertain reasonsthat is to say, the reasons
for the war were all under dispute. It was a time when
Hawks were at the throats of Doves, when smart
people in pinstripes couldnt make their minds up
about the rectitude of the war. You know, smart people
were saying the war was right; smart people were
saying its dead wrong, and where was the truth in all
this swirling ambiguity? Uh, I opposed it, but on the
other hand, I was a child of Worthington, Minnesota. I
didnt know everything. Uh, I didnt know much about
the history of Vietnam, the politics of it allmaybe I
was mistaken. Beyond that, I felt drawn by America
itself, even by this little shitty town that I told you
about. I felt drawn to it because, as bad it was, it was

172

mine, and I didnt want to leave it, and I didnt want to

leave America. I felt like I was one of those pigs that
had been pried open, pulled two different wayspart
of me being pulled toward the war; part of me being
pulled toward Canada. And I was, hell, I was your age!
And thats a tough thing to do when youre that old, to
decide to walk away from your whole history.
Well, during those six days at the Tip-Top Lodge, what
do I tell you? They were as important as anything that
later happened in Vietnam. They were much more
traumatic than anything that happened in VietnamI
was wounded, and I saw death all around me. But
those six days at the Tip-Top lodge were a lot worse. It
was a poignant decision that I cant, uh, even begin
here to describe for you, except as a storyteller. I
remember old Ellroy watching me all the time during
these six dayshe was a very quiet guy. As I said, he
knew something was wrong, but he was the sort of
person who would never talk about it or ask about it. I
mean, he was the kind of guy who, if you were to walk
into a bar with two heads, and old Ellroys sitting
there, he would talk about everything except that extra
head. Hed talk about the weather, and, you know, and
Lutheranism, but not the extra head. Thats the kind of
Midwestern, even Minnesotan, way of dealing with
things like this. Uh, but he saw some strange behavior
on my part. I remember one afternoon we were out
behind thehis lodge. He was showing me how to split
wood. And I began sweating-I just couldnt shut the
sweat off; I just was like a spigot had been turned on
inside me, just full of it. One night I vomited at his
table. Not out ofit wasnt the fish; it was a spiritual
sickness inside of me. I remember lying awake at
night, full of very peculiar hallucinationsI mean , it
wasnt, it wasnt hallucination, really, but the kind of
thoughts you have when youre suffering from the flu,
or youre really sick. Id imagine being chased through
the Canadian woods by the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, and dogs barking, and spotlights on me
people even in my hometown yelling deserter, sissy,
cowardthings like this.

there. I think he knew what he was doing. He was

bringing me face to face with it all, and wanted to kind
of be there for me the way God is there for us, you
knownot really present, but sort of over our shoulder
somewhere, whatever the stand-in for God might be
for you, like a conscience bearing witness, and just
here. Afternot long, a couple of minutesI started
crying. It wasnt loud, just kind of like the chestchokes, when youre crying, but youre trying not to,
and even then, he said nothing, not a word. After,
what, twenty minutes or so, he reeled his line in, said
Aint bitin. Turned on the engine, and took me back.
Well, after we got back to the Minnesota shore, I went
back to my cabin, and I knew it was all over.
What I was crying about, you see, waswas not selfpity. I was crying with the knowledge that Id be going
to Vietnam, that I was essentially a coward, that I
couldnt do the right thing, I couldnt go to Canada.
Given what I believed, anyway, the right thing would
have been to follow your conscience, and I couldnt do
it. Why, to this day, Im not sure, I can speculate it.
Some of it had to do with raw embarrassment, a fear of
blushing, a fear of some old farmer in my town saying
to another farmer, Did you hear what the OBrien kid
did? The sissy went to Canada. And imagining my
mom and dad sitting in the next booth over,
overhearing this, you know, and imagining their eyes
colliding and bouncing away, and-uh, I was afraid of
embarrassment. Men died in Vietnam, by the way, out
of the same fear-you know, not out of nobility or
patriotism; they were just af-they charged bunkers and
machine gun nests, just because they would be
embarrassed not to, later on, in front of their buddies.
Not a noble motive for human behavior, but I tell you
one thing, one youd better think about in your lives,
that sometimes doing the hard thing is also doing the
embarrassing thing, and when that moment strikes, it
hits you hard. I didnt see Ellroy again. I got up the
next morning, and I went to, you know, his little lodge
thing, and I knocked on the door, and he wasnt there.
I could see right way he was gone, his pickup was
gone. I left a little note for him, saying thank you. Uh, I
got in my-the car, and I drove north-or drove south,
rather, out of the pine forest, down to the prairies of
Southern Minnesota. Within two weeks I was in the
Army, and about four months after that in Vietnam.

Well, near the end of my stay on the sixth and last day
there, Ellroy did a thing that, in a way, made me into a
writer, as much as, you know, Larry of the Little
League. He said to me, uh, Lets get in the boat. Well
go fishing. So we got into this, you know, little twelve
foot boat of his, and we went across to the Canadian Now, what I have told you is, is a war story. War
side, and he stopped the boat, maybe, I dont know, stories arent always about war, per se. They arent
fifteen yards or so, from the Canadian, you know, about bombs and bullets and military maneuvers.
where the wilderness was, and he tossed his line in They arent about tactics, they arent about foxholes
and started fishing. I was in the front of the boat, in and canteens. War stories, like any good story, is
the bow, and he was in the back, where the engine was, finally about the human heart. About the choices we
and I can now, again like that library, I can feel myself make, or fail to make. The forfeitures in our lives.
there, bobbing in that slate-gray water, fifteen yards Stories are to console and to inspire and to help us
from Canada. It was as close to me as the third row heal. Stories are for those late hours in the night when
here, fourth row, I could see the berries on the bushes you cant remember how you got from where you were
and the blackbirds and stones, my coming future. I to where you are. And a good war story, in my opinion,
could have done it, I could have jumped out of that is a story that strikes you as important, not for war
boat, started swimming for my life. So time went by; content, but for its heart content. The second reason I
again, old Ellroy just said nothing, just let me bob told you this story is that none of its true. Or very little
173

of it. Itsinvented. No Ellroy, no Tip-Top Lodge, no

pig factory, Im trying to think of what else. Ive never
been to the Rainy River in my life. Uh, not even close
to it. I havent been within two hundred miles of the
place. No boats. But, although the story I invented, its
still true, which is what fiction is all about. Uh, if I
were to tell you the literal truth of what happened to
me in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight, all I could
tell you was that I played golf, and I worried about
getting drafted. But thats a crappy story. Isnt it? It
doesntit doesnt open any door to what I was feeling
in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight. Thats what
fiction is for. Its for getting at the truth when the truth
isnt sufficient for the truth. The pig factory is there for
those dreams of slaughterthey were quite real inside
of me. And in my own heart, I was certainly on that
rainy river, trying to decide what to do, whether to go
to the war or not go to it, say no or say yes. The story is
still true, even though on one level its not; its made
up.
The point was not to pull a fast one, any more than,
you know, Mark Twain is trying to pull a fast one in
Huckleberry Finn. Stories make you believe, thats
what dialogue is for, thats what plot is for, and
character. Its there to make you believe it as youre
reading it. You dont read Huckleberry Finn saying
This never happened, this never happened, this never
happened, this never happened- I mean, you dont do
that, or go to The Godfather and say, you know, no
horse head. I mean, you dont think that way; you
believe. A verisimilitude and truth in that literal sense,
to me, is ultimately irrelevant. What is relevant is the
human heart.
All right, I want to finish up here with just a little-a
short little snatch from something that is a little more
based on-Im not going to say based on-a little more
out of the real world I lived in, and then Ill take
whatever questions you might have, just for, you
know, a brief time. This little thing, itll only take, like,
two minutes to read this, or five or something. When
she was nine, my daughter Kathleen asked me if Id
ever killed anyone. She knew about the war, she knew
Id been a soldier. You keep writing war stories, she
said, so I guess you mustve killed somebody. It was
a difficult moment but I did what I thought was right,
which was to say, Of course not, and then to take her
onto my lap and hold her for a while. Someday, I hope,
shell ask again But here, now I want to pretend shes a
grown-up. I want to tell her exactly what happened, or
what I remember happening, and then I want to say to
he that as a little girl she was absolutely right. This is
why I keep telling war stories:
He was a short slender young man of about twenty. I
was afraid of him-afraid of something-and as he
passed me on the trail I threw a grenade that exploded
at his feet and killed him.

Shortly after midnight we moved into the ambush site

outside My Khe. The whole platoon was there, spread
out in the dense brush along the trail, and for five
hours nothing at all happened. We were working in
two-man teams-one man on guard while the other
slept, switching off every two hours-and I remember it
was still dark when Kiowa shook me awake for the
final watch. The night was foggy and hot. For the first
few moments I felt lost, not sure about directions,
groping for my helmet and weapon. I reached out and
found three grenades and lined them up in front of
me; the pins had already been straightened for quick
throwing. And then for maybe half an hour I kneeled
there and waited. Very gradually, in tiny slivers, dawn
began to break through the fog, and from my position
in the brush I could see ten or fifteen meters up the
trail. The mosquitoes were fierce. I remember slapping
at them, wondering if I should wake up Kiowa and go
get some repellent, then thinking it was a bad idea,
then looking up and seeing the young man come out of
the morning fog. He wore black clothing and rubber
sandals and a gray ammunition belt. His shoulders
were slightly stooped, his head cocked to the side as if
listening for something. He seemed at ease. He carried
his weapon in one hand, muzzle down, moving
without any hurry up the center of the trail. There was
no sound at allnone that I can remember. In a way, it
seemed, he was part of the morning fog, or my own
imagination, but there was also the reality of what was
happening in my stomach. I had already pulled the pin
on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It was
entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did
not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of
morality or politics or justice. I crouched and kept my
head low. I tried to swallow whatever was rising from
my stomach, which tasted like lemonade, something
fruity and sour. I was terrified. There were no thoughts
about killing. The grenade was to make him go awayjust evaporate-and leaned back and felt my head go
empty and then felt it fill up again. I had already
thrown the grenade before telling myself to throw it. It
was gone. The brush was thick and I had to lob it high,
not aiming, and I remember the grenade seeming to
freeze above me for an instant, as if a camera had
clicked, and I remember ducking down and holding
my breath and seeing little wisps of fog rise from the
earth. The grenade bounced once and rolled across the
trail. I did not hear it, but there mustve been a sound,
because the young man dropped his weapon and
began to run, just two or three quick steps. Then he
looked down at the grenade, turned to his right, and
tried to cover his head but never did. It occurred to me
then that he was about to die. I wanted to warn him.
The grenade made a popping noisenot loud, not
what youd expect. Just a pop, and there was a puff of
dust and smoke and the young man seemed to jerk
upward as if pulled by invisible wires. He fell on his
back. His rubber sandals had been blown off. He lay at
the center of the trail, his right leg bent beneath him,
his one eye shut, his other eye a huge star-shaped hole.

Or to go back:
174

For me, it was not a matter of live or die. There was no

real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have
passed me by. And it will always be that way.
Later, I remember, Kiowa tried to tell me that the man
wouldve died anyway. He told me that it was a good
kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I
should shape up and stop staring, that I should ask
myself what the dead man wouldve done if things
were reversed.
But you see, none of it mattered. The words, or
language, far too complicated. All I could do was gape
at the fact of the young mans body.
Even now, three decades later, I havent finished
sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times
I dont. In the ordinary hours of life I try not to think
about it, but now and then, when Im reading a
newspaper or just sitting alone in a room, Ill look up
and see the young man coming out of the morning fog.
Ill watch him walk toward me, his shoulders slightly
stooped, his head cocked to the side, and hell pass
within a few yards of me and suddenly smile at some
secret thought and then continue up the trail to where
it bends back into the fog.
Thanks.

[...]
About Tim OBrien: A Profile
by Don Lee
The good news is that Tim OBrien is writing fiction
again.
In 1994, after his sixth book, In the Lake of the Woods,
was released, he distressed his many fans by vowing to
stop writing fiction for the foreseeable future. Then,
a few months later, he published a now famous essay
in The New York Times Magazine thatdescribed his
return to Vietnam. With his girlfriend at the time, he
visited My Lai, where on March 16, 1968, a company of
American soldiers massacred an entire village in a
matter of four hourswomen, children, old men,
chickens, dogs. The body count ranged from two to
five hundred.

now that his girlfriend had left him. Chillingly, he

admitted, Last night suicide was on my mind. Not
whether, but how. This time, his fans were not the
only ones concerned. Friends and strangers alike
called him: shrinks to sign him up, clergymen to save
his soul, people who thought he had disclosed way too
much, others who thought he had disclosed too little.
Today, OBrien has no regrets about publishing the
article. He considers it one of the best things he has
ever written. I reread it maybe once every two
months, he says, just to remind myself what
writings for. I dont mean catharsis. I mean
communication. It was a hard thing to do. It saved my
life, but it was a fuck of a thing to print. After taking
nine months off and pulling his life back together,
OBrien started another novel, intrigued enough by the
first page to write a second, propelled, as always, by
his fundamental faith in the power of storytelling.
Born in 1946, OBrien was raised in small-town
Minnesota, his father an insurance salesman, his
mother an elementary school teacher. As a child,
OBrien was lonely, overweight, and a professed
dreamer, and he occupied himself by practicing
magic tricks. For a brief time, he contemplated being a
writer, inspired by some old clippings hed found of his
fatherspersonal accounts about fighting in Iwo Jima
and Okinawa that had been published in The New
York Times during World War II. When OBrien
entered college, however, his aspirations turned
political. He was a political science major at
Macalester, attended peace vigils and war protests,
and planned to join the State Department to reform its
policies. I thought we needed people who were
progressive and had the patience to try diplomacy
instead of dropping bombs on people.
He never imagined he would be drafted upon
graduation and actually sent to Vietnam. I was
walking around in a dream and repressing it all, he
says, thinking something would save my ass. Even
getting on the plane for boot camp, I couldnt believe
any of it was happening to me, someone who hated
Boy Scouts and bugs and rifles. When he received his
classificationnot as a clerk, or a driver, or a cook, but
as an infantrymanhe seriously considered deserting
to Canada. He now thinks it was an act of cowardice
not to, particularly since he was against the war, but in
1969, as a twenty-two-year-old, he had feared the
disapproval of his family and friends, his townspeople
and country. He went to Vietnam and hated every
minute of it, from beginning to end.

From 196970, OBrien had been an infantryman in

the Quang Ngai province, and his platoon had been
stationed in My Lai a year after the massacre. Then
and now, he could feel the evil in the place, the When he came back to the States, he had a Purple
wickedness that soaks into your blood and heats up Heart (he was wounded by shrapnel from a hand
and starts to sizzle. In the Times cover story, OBrien grenade) and several publishing credits. Much like his
elaborated on the complex associations of love and father, he had written personal reports about the war
insanity that can boil over during a war, almost that had made their way into Minnesota newspapers,
inevitably exploding into atrocity. But he went a step and while pursuing a doctorate at the Harvard School
further, drawing parallels between the guilt, of Government, OBrien expanded on the vignettes to
depression, terror, shame that infected both his form a book, If I Die in Combat, Box Me Up and Ship
Vietnam experience and his present life, especially
175

Me Home. He sent it first to Knopf, whose editors had

high praise for the book. Yet they were already
publishing a book about Vietnam, Dispatches by
Michael Herr, and suggested that OBrien try the
editor Seymour Lawrence, who was in Boston. He
called me at my dormitory at Harvard, OBrien
recalls. He said, Well, were taking your book. Why
dont you come over, Ill take you to lunch. It was a
big, drunken lunch at Trader Vics in the old Statler
Hilton, during the course of which we decided to fire
my agent. Sam said, Look, youre not going to get
much money, theres no way, might as well fire the
guy. Why give him ten percent?
If I Die in Combat was published in 1973, just as
OBrien was being hired as a national affairs reporter
for The Washington Post, where hed been an intern
for two summers. I didnt know the first thing about
writing for a newspaper, but I learned fast, says
OBrien, who never took a writing workshop. The job
helped tremendously in terms of discipline, which,
OBrien confesses, was a problem for him until then. I
learned the virtue of tenacity.
After his one-year stint at the Post, OBrien simply
wrote books. In 1975, he published Northern Lights,
about two brothersone a war hero, the other a farm
agent who stayed home in Minnesotawho struggle to
survive during a cross-country ski trip. Going After
Cacciato came out in 1978. In the novel, an
infantryman named Cacciato deserts, deciding to walk
from Southeast Asia to Paris for the peace talks. Paul
Berlin is ordered to capture Cacciato, and narrates an
extended meditation on what might have happened if
Cacciato had made it all the way to Paris. The novel
won the National Book Award over John Irvings The
World According to Garp and John Cheevers Stories.
The Nuclear Age, about a draft dodger turned
uranium speculator who is obsessed with the threat of
nuclear holocaust, was released in 1985, and then, in
1990, came The Things They Carried, which was a
finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Critics Circle Award. The collection of
interrelated stories revolves around the men of Alpha
Company, an infantry platoon in Vietnam. The title
story is a recitation of the soldiers weapons and gear,
the metaphorical mixing with the mundane: they
carried M-60s and C rations and Claymores, and the
common scent of cowardice barely restrained, the
instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects
this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never
be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect
posture. A central motif in the book is the process of
storytelling itself, the way imagination and language
and memory can blur fact, and why story-truth is
truer sometimes than happening-truth.
In his latest novel, In the Lake of the Woods, which is
now in paperback, OBrien takes this question of how
much we can know about an event or a person one
step further. John and Kathy Wade are staying at a

secluded lakeside cottage in northern Minnesota. He

has just lost a senatorial election by a landslide, after
the revelation that he was among the soldiers at My
Lai, a fact he has tried to conceal from everyone
including his wife; even, pathologically, himselffor
twenty years. A week after their arrival at the lake,
Wades wife disappears. Perhaps she drowned,
perhaps she ran away, perhaps Wade murdered her.
The mystery is never solved, and the lack of a
traditional ending has produced surprisingly vocal
reactions from readers.
I get calls from people, OBrien says. They ask
questions, they offer their own opinions about what
happened, they want to know, missing the point of the
novel, that life often does not offer solutions or
resolutions, that it is impossible to know completely
what secrets lurk within people. As the anonymous
narrator, who has conducted a four-year investigation
into the case, comments in a footnote: Its human
nature. We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable
otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by
hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation
those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that
define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
(I love you, someone says, and instantly we begin to
wonderWell, how much?and when the answer
comesWith my whole heartwe then wonder about
the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our
husbands, our wives, our fathers, our godsthey are
all beyond us.
OBrien feels strongly that In the Lake of the Woods is
his best book to date, but it took its toll on him. He is a
meticulous, some would say fanatical, craftsman. In
general, he writes every day, all day. He does
practically nothing else. He lifts weights, watches
baseball, occasionally plays golf, and reads at night,
but rarely ventures from his two-bedroom apartment
near Harvard Square. Hell eke out the words, then
discard them. It took him an entire year to finish nine
pages of The Nuclear Age, although he tossed out
thousands.
Always, it will begin with an image, a picture of a
human being doing something. With Going After
Cacciato, it was the image of a guy walking to Paris: I
could see his back. With The Things They Carried, it
was remembering all this crap I had on me and inside
me, the physical and spiritual burdens. With In the
Lake of the Woods, it was a man and a woman lying on
a porch in the fog along a lake: I didnt know where
the lake was at the time. I knew they were unhappy. I
could feel the unhappiness in the fog. I didnt know
what the unhappiness was about. It required me to
write the next page. A lost election. Why was the
election lost? My Lai. All of this was discovered after
two years of writing.
But when OBrien finished In the Lake of the Woods,
he stopped writing for the first time in over twenty
years. I was burned out, he says. The novel went to

176

the bottom of the well for me. I felt emotionally

drained. I didnt see the point of writing anymore. In
retrospect, the respite was good for him. He likens the
hiatus to Michael Jordans brief leave from basketball:
He may not be a better basketball player when he
comes back, but hes going to be a better person.
Of course, the road back has not been easy,
particularly with the loss of his editor and good friend,
Sam Lawrence, who died in 1993. Through the ups
and downs of any writers career, he was always there,
with a new contract, and optimism. Another of his
virtues was that he didnt push. Sam didnt give a shit
if you missed a deadline. He wanted a good book, no
matter how long it took. For the moment, OBrien has
yet to sign up with another publisher for his novel in
progress, which opens with two boys building an
airplane in their backyard. He prefers to avoid the
pressure. Maybe its Midwestern, he says. When I
sign a contract, I think I owe them X dollars of
literature.
And in defiance of some editors and critics, who
suggest he should move on from Vietnam, he will in all
likelihood continue to write about the war. All writers
revisit terrain. Shakespeare did it with kings, and
Conrad did it with the ocean, and Faulkner did it with
the South. Its an emotional and geographical terrain
thats given to us by life. Vietnam is there the way
childhood is for me. Theres a line from Michael Herr:
Vietnams what we had instead of happy childhoods.
A funny, weird line, but theres some truth in it.
Yet to categorize OBrien as merely a Vietnam War
writer would be ludicrously unfair and simplistic. Any
close examination of his books reveals there is
something much more universal about them. As much
as they are war stories, they are also love stories. That
is why his readers are as apt to be female as male. I
think in every book Ive written, OBrien says, Ive
had the twins of love and evil. They intertwine and
intermix. Theyll separate, sometimes, yet theyre
hooked the way valances are hooked together. The
emotions in war and in our ordinary lives are, if not
identical, damn similar.

Too Embarrassed Not to Kill

by Robert R. Harris
Only a handful of novels and short stories have
managed to clarify, in any lasting way, the meaning of
the war in Vietnam for America and for the soldiers
who served there. With The Things They Carried,
Tim OBrien adds his second title to the short list of
essential fiction about Vietnam. As he did in his novel
Going After Cacciato (1978), which won a National
Book Award, he captures the wars pulsating rhythms
and nerve-racking dangers. But he goes much further.
By moving beyond the horror of the fighting to
examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of
courage and fear, by questioning the role that
imagination plays in helping to form our memories
and our own versions of truth, he places The Things
They Carried high up on the list of best fiction about
any war.
The Things They Carried is a collection of
interrelated stories. A few are unremittingly brutal; a
couple are flawed two-page sketches. The publisher
calls the book a work of fiction, but in no real sense
can it be considered a novel. No matter. The stories
cohere. All deal with a single platoon, one of whose
members is a character named Tim OBrien. Some
stories are about the wartime experiences of this small
group of grunts. Others are about a 43-year-old writer
again, the fictional character Tim OBrien
remembering his platoons experiences and writing
war stories (and remembering writing stories) about
them. This is the kind of writing about writing that
makes Tom Wolfe grumble. It should not stop you
from savoring a stunning performance. The overall
effect of these original tales is devastating.
As might be expected, there is a lot of gore in The
Things They Carriedlike the account of the soldier
who ties a friends puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel
mine and squeezes the firing device. And much of the
powerful language cannot be quoted in a family
newspaper. But let Mr. OBrien explain why he could
not spare squeamish sensibilities: If you dont care
for obscenity, you dont care for the truth; if you dont
care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to
war, they come home talking dirty.
In the title story, Mr. OBrien juxtaposes the mundane
and the deadly items that soldiers carry into battle.
Can openers, pocketknives, wristwatches, mosquito
repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets,
packets of Kool-Aid, matches, sewing kits, C rations
are humped by the G.I.s along with M-16 assault
rifles, M-60 machine guns, M-79 grenade launchers.
But the story is really about the other things the
soldiers carry: grief, terror, love, longing . . .
shameful memories and, what unifies all the stories,
the common secret of cowardice. These young men,
Mr. OBrien tells us, carried the soldiers greatest fear,
which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died,
because they were embarrassed not to.

177

Embarrassment, the author reveals in On the Rainy

River, is why he, or rather the fictional version of
himself, went to Vietnam. He almost went to Canada
instead. What stopped him, ironically, was fear. All
those eyes on me, he writes, and I couldnt risk the
embarrassment. . . . I couldnt endure the mockery, or
the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. . . . I was a
coward. I went to the war.
So just what is courage? What is cowardice? Mr.
OBrien spends much of the book carefully dissecting
every nuance of the two qualities. In several stories, he
writes movingly of the death of Kiowa, the best-loved
member of the platoon. In Speaking of Courage, Mr.
OBrien tells us about Norman Bowker, the platoon
member who blames his own failure of nerve for
Kiowas death. Bowker had been braver than he ever
thought possible, but . . . he had not been so brave as
he wanted to be. In the following story, Notes
(literally notes on the writing of Speaking of
Courage), Mr. OBriens fictional alter ego informs the
reader that Bowker committed suicide after coming
home from the war. This author also admits that he
made up the part about the failure of nerve that
haunted Bowker. But its all made up, of course. And
in The Man I Killed, Mr. OBrien imagines the life of
an enemy soldier at whom the character Tim OBrien
tossed a grenade, only to confess later that it wasnt
Tim OBrien who killed the Vietnamese.
Are these simply tricks in the service of making good
stories? Hardly. Mr. OBrien strives to get beyond
literal descriptions of what these men went through
and what they felt. He makes sense of the unreality of
the warmakes sense of why he has distorted that
unreality even further in his fictionby turning back
to explore the workings of the imagination, by probing
his memory of the terror and fearlessly confronting the
way he has dealt with it as both soldier and fiction
writer. In doing all this, he not only crystallizes the
Vietnam experience for us, he exposes the nature of all
war stories.

or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been

salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been
made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is
no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first
rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story
by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to
obscenity and evil. Mr. OBrien cuts to the heart of
writing about war. And by subjecting his memory and
imagination to such harsh scrutiny, he seems to have
reached a reconciliation, to have made his peaceor to
have made up his peace.
Robert R. Harris is an editor of The Book Review.

The Vietnam in Me
by Tim OBrien

LZ [landing zone, R.A.] GATOR, VIETNAM,

FEBRUARY 1994Im home, but the house is gone.
The character Tim OBriens daughter asks him why he Not a sandbag, not a nail or a scrap of wire.
continues to be obsessed by the Vietnam War and with
On Gator, we used to say, the wind doesnt blow,
writing about it. By telling stories, he says, you it sucks. Maybe thats what happenedthe wind
objectify your own experience. You separate it from sucked it all away. My life, my virtue.
yourself. You pin down certain truths. In Good
In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a
Form, he writes: I can look at things I never looked young, terrified pfc. on this lonely little hill in Quang
at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and
God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. You imposing and permanent. A forward firebase for the
come away from this book understanding why there Fifth Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry
have been so many novels about the Vietnam War, Brigade, LZ Gator was home to 700 or 800 American
why so many of Mr. OBriens fellow soldiers have soldiers, mostly grunts. I remember a tar helipad, a
turned to narrativereal and imaginedto purge their mess hall, a medical station, mortar and artillery
memories, to appease the ghosts.
emplacements, two volleyball courts, numerous
Is it fair to readers for Mr. OBrien to have blurred his barracks and offices and supply depots and machine
own identity as storyteller-soldier in these stories? A shops and entertainment clubs. Gator was our castle.
true war story is never moral, he writes in How to Not safe, exactly, but far preferable to the bush. No
Tell a True War Story. It does not instruct, nor land mines here. No paddies bubbling with machineencourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human gun fire.
behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men
Maybe once a month, for three or four days at a
have always done. If a story seems moral, do not time, Alpha Company would return to Gator for standbelieve it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, down, where we took our comforts behind a perimeter
178

of bunkers and concertina wire. There were hot

showers and hot meals, ice chests packed with beer,
glossy pinup girls, big, black Sony tape decks booming
We gotta get out of this place at decibels for the deaf.
Thirty or 40 acres of almost-America. With a little
weed and a lot of beer, we would spend the days of
stand-down in flat-out celebration, purely alive, taking
pleasure in our own biology, kidneys and livers and
lungs and legs, all in their proper alignments. We
could breathe here. We could feel our fists uncurl, the
pressures approaching normal. The real war, it
seemed, was in another solar system. By day, wed fill
sandbags or pull bunker guard. In the evenings, there
were outdoor movies and sometimes live floor shows
pretty Korean girls breaking our hearts in their
spangled miniskirts and high leather bootsthen
afterward wed troop back to the Alpha barracks for
some letter writing or boozing or just a good nights
sleep.
So much to remember. The time we filled a nasty
lieutenants canteen with mosquito repellent; the
sounds of choppers and artillery fire; the slow dread
that began building as word spread that in a day or
two wed be heading back to the bush. Pinkville,
maybe. The Batangan Peninsula. Spooky, evil places
where the land itself could kill you.
Now I stand in this patch of weeds, looking down
on what used to be the old Alpha barracks. Amazing,
really, what time can do. Youd think there would be
something left, some faint imprint, but LZ (Landing
Zone) Gator has been utterly and forever erased from
the earth. Nothing here but ghosts and wind.
At the foot of Gator, along Highway 1, the little
hamlet of Nuoc Man is going bonkers over our arrival
here. As we turn and walk down the hill, maybe 200
people trail along, gawking and chattering, the
children reaching out to touch our skin. Through our
interpreter, Mrs. Le Hoai Phuong, Im told that I am
the first American soldier to return to this place in the
24 years since Gator was evacuated in 1970. In a
strange way, the occasion has the feel of a reunion
happy faces, much bowing. Me Wendy, says a
middle-aged woman. Another says, Flower. Wendy
and Flower: G.I. nicknames retrieved from a quartercentury ago.
An elderly woman, perhaps in her late 70s, tugs
at my shirt and says, My name Mama-san.
Dear God. We shouldve bombed these people
with love.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., JUNE 1994Last night
suicide was on my mind. Not whether, but how.
Tonight it will be on my mind again. Now its 4 A.M.,
June the 5th. The sleeping pills have not worked. I sit
in my underwear at this unblinking fool of a computer
and try to wrap words around a few horrid truths.
I returned to Vietnam with a woman whose name
is Kate, whom I adored and have since lost. Shes with
another man, seven blocks away. This I learned
yesterday afternoon. My own fault, Kate would say,
and she would be mostly right. Not entirely. In any
case, these thoughts are probably too intimate, too
awkward and embarrassing for public discussion. But

who knows? Maybe a little blunt human truth will

send you off to church, or to confession, or inside
yourself.
Not that it matters. For me, with one eye on these
smooth yellow pills, the world must be written about
as it is or not written about at all.
Z GATOR, FEBRUARY 1994By chance, Kate
and I have arrived in Nuoc Man on a day of annual
commemoration, a day when the graves of the local
war dead are blessed and repaired and decorated and
wept over.
The village elders invite us to a feast, a picnic of
sorts, where we take seats before a low lacquered table
at an outdoor shrine. Children press up close, all
around. The elders shoo them away, but the shooing
doesnt do much. Im getting nervous. The food on
display seems a bit exotic. Not to my taste. I look at
Kate, Kate looks at me. Number one chop-chop, an
old woman says, a wrinkled, gorgeous, protective,
scarred, welcoming old woman. Number one, she
promises, and nudges Kate, and smiles a
heartbreaking betel-nut smile.
I choose something white. Fish, Im guessing. I
have eaten herring; I have enjoyed herring. This is not
herring.
There are decisions to be made.
The elders bow and execute chewing motions. Do
not forget: our hosts are among the maimed and
widowed and orphaned, the bombed and rebombed,
the recipients of white phosphorus, the tenders of
graves. Chew, they say, and by God I chew.
Kate has the good fortune to find a Kleenex. Shes
a pro. She executes a polite wiping motion and its over
for her. Eddie Keating, the Times photographer whose
pictures accompany this text, tucks his portion
between cheek and gum, where it remains until the
feast concludes. MeI imagine herring. I remember
Sunday afternoons as a boy, the Vikings on TV, my dad
opening up the crackers and creamed herring, passing
it out at halftime. Other flashes too. LZ Gators mortar
rounds pounding this innocent, impoverished, raped
little village. Eight or nine corpses piled not 50 yards
from where we now sit in friendly union. I prepare
myself. Foul, for sure, but things come around. Nuoc
Man swallowed plenty.
THE SONG TRA HOTEL, QUANG NGAI CITY,
FEBRUARY 1994Its late in the evening. The airconditioner is at full Cuban power. Kates eyes sparkle,
shes laughing. Swallowed! she keeps saying.
In 1969, when I went to war, Kate was 3 years
old. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, Bunker,
Rogers, Bundy, Rusk, Abrams, Rostowfor her, these
names are like the listings on a foreign menu. Some
she recognizes not at all, some she recalls from books
or old television clips. But she never tasted the dishes.
She does not know ice cream from Brussels sprouts.
Three years oldhow could she? No more than I could
know the Southern California of her own youth.
Still, it was Kate who insisted we come here. I
was more than reluctantI was petrified, I looked for
excuses. Bad dreams and so on. But Kates enthusiasm

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won me over; she wanted to share in my past, the

shapes of things, the smells and sunlight.
As it turns out, the sharing has gone both ways.
In any other circumstances, I would have returned to
this country almost purely as a veteran, caught up in
memory, but Kates presence has made me pay
attention to the details of here and now, a Vietnam
that exists outside the old perimeter of war. She takes
delight in things alive: a chicken wired to someones
bicycle, an old womans enormous fingernails, an
infant slung casually on the hip of a tiny 7-year-old
girl. Kate has the eyes and spirit of an adventurer,
wide open to the variety of the world, and these
qualities have pushed me toward some modest
adventurism of my own.
Now I watch her fiddle with the air-conditioner.
Swallowed! she keeps saying.
Later in the night, as on many other nights, we
talk about the war. I try to explainineptly, no doubt
that Vietnam was more than terror. For me, at least,
Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each lightyear of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead,
or so it feels, and in such circumstances you cant help
but love. You love your mom and dad, the Vikings,
hamburgers on the grill, your pulse, your future
everything that might be lost or never come to be.
Intimacy with death carries with it a corresponding
new intimacy with life. Jokes are funnier, green is
greener. You love the musty morning air. You love the
miracle of your own enduring capacity for love. You
love your friends in Alpha Companya kid named
Chip, my buddy. He wrote letters to my sister, I wrote
letters to his sister. In the rear, back at Gator, Chip and
I would go our separate ways, by color, both of us
ashamed but knowing it had to be that way. In the
bush, though, nothing kept us apart. Black and
White, we were called. In May of 1969, Chip was
blown high into a hedge of bamboo. Many pieces. I
loved the guy, he loved me. Im alive. Hes dead. An old
story, I guess.
CAMBRIDGE, JUNE 1994Its 5:25 in the
morning, June 7. I have just taken my first drug of the
day, a prescription drug, Oxazepam, which files the
edge off anxiety. Thing is, Im not anxious. Im slop.
This is despair. This is a valance of horror that
Vietnam never approximated. If war is hell, what do
we call hopelessness?
I have not killed myself. That day, this day,
maybe tomorrow. Like Nam, it goes.
For some time, years in fact, I have been treated
for depression, $8,000 or $9,000 worth. Some of it
has worked. Or was working. I had called back to
memorynot to memory, exactly, but to significance
some pretty painful feelings of rejection as a child.
Chubby and friendless and lonely. I had come to
acknowledge, more or less, the dominant principle of
love in my life, how far I would go to get it, how
terrified I was of losing it. I have done bad things for
love, bad things to stay loved. Kate is one case.
Vietnam is another. More than anything, it was this
desperate love craving that propelled me into a war I
considered mistaken, probably evil. In college, I stood

in peace vigils. I rang doorbells for Gene McCarthy,

composed earnest editorials for the school newspaper.
But when the draft notice arrived after graduation, the
old demons went to work almost instantly. I thought
about Canada. I thought about jail. But in the end I
could not bear the prospect of rejection: by my family,
my country, my friends, my hometown. I would risk
conscience and rectitude before risking the loss of
love.
I have written some of this before, but I must
write it again. I was a coward. I went to Vietnam.
MY LAI, QUANG NGAI PROVINCE, FEBRUARY
1994Weird, but I know this place. Ive been here
before. Literally, but also in my nightmares.
One year after the massacre, Alpha Companys
area of operations included the village of My Lai 4, or
so it was called on American military maps. The
Vietnamese call it Thuan Yen, which belongs to a
larger hamlet called Tu Cung, which in turn belongs to
an even larger parent village called Son My. But names
are finally irrelevant. I am just here.
Twenty-five years ago, knowing nothing of the
homicides committed by American troops on the
morning of March 16, 1968, Alpha Company walked
through and around this hamlet on numerous
occasions. Now, standing here with Kate, I cant
recognize much. The place blends in with all the other
poor, scary, beleaguered villes in this area we called
Pinkville. Even so, the feel of the place is as familiar as
the old stucco house of my childhood. The clay trails,
the cow dung, the blank faces, the unknowns and
unknowables. There is the smell of sin here. Smells of
terror, too, and enduring sorrow.
What happened, briefly, was this. At
approximately 7:30 on the morning of March 16, 1968,
a company of roughly 115 American soldiers were
inserted by helicopter just outside the village of My
Lai. They met no resistance. No enemy. No incoming
fire. Still, for the next four hours, Charlie Company
killed whatever could be killed. They killed chickens.
They killed dogs and cattle. They killed people, too.
Lots of people. Women, infants, teen-agers, old men.
The United States Armys Criminal Investigation
Division compiled a list of 343 fatalities and an
independent Army inquiry led by Lieut. Gen. William
R. Peers estimated that the death count may have
exceeded 400. At the Son My Memorial, a large tablet
lists 504 names. According to Col. William Wilson, one
of the original Army investigators, The crimes visited
on the inhabitants of Son My Village included
individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy,
maiming, assault on noncombatants and the
mistreatment and killing of detainees.
The testimony of one member of Charlie
Company, Salvadore LaMartina, suggests the
systematic, cold-blooded character of the slaughter:
Q: Did you obey your orders?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: What were your orders?
A: Kill anything that breathed.
Whether or not such instructions were ever
directly issued is a matter of dispute. Either way, a

180

good many participants would later offer the

explanation that they were obeying orders, a defense
explicitly prohibited by the Nuremberg Principles and
the United States Armys own rules of war. Other
participants would argue that the civilians at My Lai
were themselves Vietcong. A young soldier named
Paul Meadlo, who was responsible for numerous
deaths on that bright March morning, offered this
appalling testimony:
Q: What did you do?
A: I held my M-16 on them.
Q: Why?
A: Because they might attack.
Q: They were children and babies?
A: Yes.
Q: And they might attack? Children and babies?
A: They mightve had a fully loaded grenade on
them. The mothers might have throwed them at us.
Q: Babies?
A: Yes. . . .
Q: Were the babies in their mothers arms?
A: I guess so.
Q: And the babies moved to attack?
A: I expected at any moment they were about to
make a counterbalance.
Eventually, after a cover-up that lasted more than
a year and after the massacre made nationwide
headlines, the Armys Criminal Investigation Division
produced sufficient evidence to charge 30 men with
war crimes. Of these, only a single soldier, First Lieut.
William Laws Calley Jr., was ever convicted or spent
time in prison. Found guilty of the premeditated
murder of not less than 22 civilians, Calley was
sentenced to life at hard labor, but after legal appeals
and sentence reductions, his ultimate jail time
amounted to three days in a stockade and four and a
half months in prison.
In some cases, judicial action was never initiated;
in other cases, charges were quietly dropped. Calley
aside, only a handful of men faced formal courtmartial proceedings, either for war crimes or for
subsequent cover-up activities, with the end result of
five acquittals and four judicially ordered dismissals.
Among those acquitted was Capt. Ernest Medina, who
commanded Charlie Company on the morning of
March 16, 1968.
All this is history. Dead as those dead women and
kids. Even at the time, most Americans seemed to
shrug it off as a cruel, nasty, inevitable consequence of
war. There were numerous excuses, numerous
rationalizations. Upright citizens decried even the
small bit of justice secured by the conviction of
Lieutenant Calley. Now, more than 25 years later, the
villainy of that Saturday morning in 1968 has been
pushed off to the margins of memory. In the colleges
and high schools I sometimes visit, the mention of My
Lai brings on null stares, a sort of puzzlement,
disbelief mixed with utter ignorance.
Evil has no place, it seems, in our national
mythology. We erase it. We use ellipses. We salute
ourselves and take pride in America the White Knight,
America the Lone Ranger, Americas sleek laser-

guided weaponry beating up on Saddam and his legion

of devils.
Its beginning to rain when Kate and I sit down to
talk with two survivors of the slaughter here. Mrs. Ha
Thi Quy is a woman of 69 years. Her face is part stone,
part anguish as she describes through an interpreter
the events of that day. Its hard stuff to hear.
Americans came here twice before, Mrs. Quy says.
Nothing bad happened, they were friendly to us. But
on that day the soldiers jumped out of their helicopters
and immediately began to shoot. I prayed, I pleaded.
As I take notes, Im recalling other prayers, other
pleadings. A woman saying No VC, no VC, while a
young lieutenant pistol-whipped her without the least
expression on his face, without the least sign of
distress or moral uncertainty. Mad Mark, we called
him. But he wasnt mad. He was numb. Hed lost
himself. His gyroscope was gone. He didnt know up
from down, good from bad.
Mrs. Quy is crying now. I can feel Kate crying off
to my side, though I dont dare look.
The Americans took us to a ditch. I saw two
soldiers with red facessunburnedand they pushed
a lot of people into the ditch. I was in the ditch. I fell
down and many fell on top of me. Soldiers were
shooting. I was shot in the hip. The firing went on and
on. It would stop and then start again and then stop.
Now I hear Kate crying, not loud, just a certain
breathiness Ive come to recognize. This will be with us
forever. This well have.
My notes take a turn for the worse. I lay under
the dead in the ditch. Around noon, when I heard no
more gunfire, I came out of the ditch and saw many
more. Brains, pieces of body. My house was burned.
Cattle were shot. I went back to the ditch. Three of my
four children were killed.
Im exhausted when Mrs. Quy finishes. Partly its
the sheer magnitude of horror, partly some hateful
memories of my own.
I can barely wire myself together as Mrs. Truong
Thi Le, another survivor, recounts those four hours of
murder. Out of her family of 10, 9 died that day. I fell
down, Mrs. Le tells us. But I was not shot. I lay with
three other bodies on me, all blood. Did not move at
all. Pretended dead. Saw newborn baby near a woman.
Woman died. Infant still alive. Soldiers came up. Shot
baby.
Outside, the rain has let up. Kate, Eddie and I
take a walk through the hamlet. We stare at
foundations where houses used to stand. We admire a
harsh, angular, defiant, beautiful piece of sculpture, a
monument to the murdered.
Mrs. Quy accompanies us for a while. Shes
smiling, accommodating. Impossible, but she seems to
like us.
At one point, while Im scribbling in my
notebook, she pulls down her trousers. She shows Kate
the scarred-over bullet hole in her hip.
Kate nods and makes sounds of sympathy. What
does one say? Bad day. World of hurt.
ow the rain is back, much harder. Im drenched,
cold and something else. Eddie and I stand at the ditch

181

where maybe 50, maybe 80, maybe 100 innocent

human beings perished. I watch Eddie snap his
pictures.
Heres the something else: Ive got the guilt chills.
Years ago, ignorant of the massacre, I hated this
place, and places much like it. Two miles away, in an
almost identical hamlet, Chip was blown into his
hedge of bamboo. A mile or so east, Roy Arnold was
shot dead, I was slightly wounded. A little farther east,
a kid named McElhaney died. Just north of here, on a
rocky hillside, another kid, named Slocum, lost his
foot to a land mine. It goes on.
I despised everythingthe soil, the tunnels, the
paddies, the poverty and myself. Each step was an act
of the purest self-hatred and self-betrayal, yet, in
truth, because truth matters, my sympathies were
rarely with the Vietnamese. I was mostly terrified. I
was lamenting in advance my own pitiful demise. After
fire fights, after friends died, there was also a great
deal of angerblack, fierce, hurting angerthe kind
you want to take out on whatever presents itself. This
is not to justify what occurred here. Justifications are
empty and outrageous. Rather, its to say that I more
or less understand what happened on that day in
March 1968, how it happened, the wickedness that
soaks into your blood and heats up and starts to sizzle.
I know the boil that precedes butchery. At the same
time, however, the men in Alpha Company did not
commit murder. We did not turn our machine guns on
civilians; we did not cross that conspicuous line
between rage and homicide. I know what occurred
here, yes, but I also feel betrayed by a nation that so
widely shrugs off barbarity, by a military judicial
system that treats murderers and common soldiers as
one and the same. Apparently were all innocent
those who exercise moral restraint and those who do
not, officers who control their troops and officers who
do not. In a way, America has declared itself innocent.
I look away for a time, and then look back.
By most standards, this is not much of a ditch. A
few feet deep, a few feet wide. The rain makes the
greenish brown water bubble like a thousand tiny
mouths.
The guilt has turned to a gray, heavy sadness. I
have to take my leave but dont know how.
After a time, Kate walks up, hooks my arm,
doesnt say anything, doesnt have to, leads me into a
future that I know will hold misery for both of us.
Different hemispheres, different scales of atrocity. I
dont want it to happen. I want to tell her things and
be understood and live happily ever after. I want a
miracle. Thats the final emotion. The terror at this
ditch, the certain doom, the need for Gods
intervention.
CAMBRIDGE, JUNE 1994Ive been trying to
perform good deeds. I bought a Fathers Day card
three days early. I made appointments for a physical
exam, dental work, a smoke-enders program. I go for
walks every day. I work out, draw up lists, call friends,
visit lawyers, buy furniture, discharge promises, keep
my eyes off the sleeping pills. The days are all right.

Now the clock shows 3:55 A.M. I call NERVOUS

and listen to an automated female voice confirm it.
The nights are not all right.
I write these few words, which seem useless, then
get up and pull out an album of photographs from the
Vietnam trip. The album was Kates parting gift. On
the cover she inserted a snapshot thats hard to look at
but harder still to avoid. We stand on China Beach
near Danang. Side by side, happy as happy will ever
be, our fingers laced in a fitted, comfortable, halfconscious way that makes me feel a gust of hope. Its a
gust, though, here and gone.
Numerous times over the past several days, at
least a dozen, this piece has come close to hyperspace.
Twice it lay at the bottom of a wastebasket. Ive spent
my hours preparing a tape of songs for Kate, stuff that
once meant things. Corny songs, some of them. Happy
songs, love-me songs.
Today, scared stiff, I deposited the tape on her
doorstep. Another gust of hope, then a whole lot of
stillness.
THE SONG TRA HOTEL, QUANG NGAI CITY,
FEBRUARY 1994Kates in the shower, Im in history.
I sit with a book propped up against the airconditioner, underlining sentences, sweating out my
own ignorance. Twenty-five years ago, like most other
grunts in Alpha Company, I knew next to nothing
about this placeVietnam in general, Quang Ngai in
particular. Now Im learning. In the years preceding
the murders at My Lai, more than 70 percent of the
villages in this province had been destroyed by air
strikes, artillery fire, Zippo lighters, napalm, white
phosphorus, bulldozers, gunships and other such
means. Roughly 40 percent of the population had lived
in refugee camps, while civilian casualties in the area
were approaching 50,000 a year. These numbers,
reported by the journalist Jonathan Schell in 1967,
were later confirmed as substantially correct by
Government investigators. Not that I need
confirmation. Back in 1969, the wreckage was all
around us, so common it seemed part of the
geography, as natural as any mountain or river.
Wreckage was the rule. Brutality was S.O.P. Scalded
children, pistol-whipped women, burning hootches,
free-fire zones, body counts, indiscriminate bombing
and harassment fire, villages in ash, M-60 machine
guns hosing down dark green tree lines and any
human life behind them.
In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You
close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences
become hit or miss in the most literal sense.
With so few military targets, with an enemy that
was both of and among the population, Alpha
Company began to regard Quang Ngai itself as the true
enemythe physical place, the soil and paddies. What
had started for us as a weird, vicious little war soon
evolved into something far beyond vicious, a hoppedup killer strain of nihilism, waste without want,
aimlessness of deed mixed with aimlessness of spirit.
As Schell wrote after the events at My Lai, There can
be no doubt that such an atrocity was possible only
because a number of other methods of killing civilians

182

and destroying their villages had come to be the rule,

and not the exception, in our conduct of the war.
I look up from my book briefly, listen to Kate
singing in the shower. A doctoral candidate at Harvard
University, smart and sophisticated, but shes also
fluent in joy, attuned to the pleasures and beauty of
the world. She knows the lyrics to Hotel California,
start to finish, while here at the air-conditioner I can
barely pick out the simplest melodies of Vietnam, the
most basic chords of history. Its as if I never heard the
song, as if Id gone to war in some mall or
supermarket. I discover that Quang Ngai Province was
home to one of Vietnams fiercest, most recalcitrant,
most zealous revolutionary movements. Independent
by tradition, hardened by poverty and rural isolation,
the people of Quang Ngai were openly resistant to
French colonialism as far back as the 19th century and
were among the first to rebel against France in the
1930s. The province remained wholly under Vietminh
control throughout the war against France; it
remained under Vietcong control, at least by night,
throughout the years of war against America. Even
now, in the urbane circles of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh
City, the people of Quang Ngai are regarded as a clan
of stubborn country bumpkins, coarse and insular,
willfully independent, sometimes defiant of the very
Government they had struggled to install.
Like a different country, our interpreter told us
after a long, frustrating session with representatives of
the Quang Ngai Peoples Committee. These people I
dont like much, very crude, very difficult. I think you
had horrible bad luck to fight them.
At noon, by appointment, a Vietnamese
journalist named Pham Van Duong knocks on our
door. Its a secret meeting of sorts. Nothing illegala
couple of writers, a couple of beersbut Ive still got
the buzz of some low-level paranoia. Earlier in the day,
our joint request for this interview had been denied by
a stern, rather enigmatic functionary of the Peoples
Committee. Impossible, we were told. Not on the
schedule. The official offered little sympathy for our
interpreters reminder that schedules are man-made,
that blocks of time appeared wide open. Logic went
nowhere. Bureaucratic scowls, stare-into-space
silence. A few minutes later, just outside the provincial
offices, we quietly huddled to make our own
unsanctioned arrangements.
Now, as Mr. Duong sits down and accepts a beer,
Im feeling the vigilant, slightly illicit anxiety of a
midday drug buy. Kate locks the door; I close the
drapes. Ridiculous, or almost ridiculous, but for the
first 10 minutes I sit picturing prison food, listening
for footsteps in the hallway. Our interpreter explains
to Mr. Duong that I will happily guard his identity in
any written account of this conversation.
Mr. Duong snorts at the suggestion. Only a
problem in Quang Ngai, he says. Officials in Hanoi
would be glad for our talking. They wish good relations
with Americagood, new things to happen. Maybe I
get a medal. Sell the medal, buy Marlboros.
We click beer bottles. For the next two hours we
chat about books, careers, memories of war. I ask

about My Lai. Mr. Duong looks at the wall. There is a

short hesitationthe hesitation of tact, I suppose. He
was 8 years old when news of the massacre reached his
village nearby. He recalls great anger among his
relatives and friends, disgust and sadness, but no
feelings of shock or surprise. This kind of news came
often, he says. We did not then know the scale of the
massacre, just that Americans had been killing people.
But killing was everywhere.
Two years later, Mr. Duongs brother joined the
48th Vietcong Battalion. He was killed in 1972.
My mother fainted when she heard this. She was
told that his body had been buried in a mass grave
with seven comrades who died in the same attack. This
made it much worse for my motherno good burial.
After liberation in 1975, she began to look for my
brothers remains. She found the mass grave 20
kilometers south of Quang Ngai City. She wished to
dig, to rebury my brother, but people told her no, dont
dig, and in the beginning she seemed to accept this.
Then the Americans returned to search for their own
missing, and my mother became very angry. Why
them? Not me? So she insisted we dig. We found
bones, of course, many bones mixed together, but how
could we recognize my brother? How could anyone
know? But we took away some bones in a box.
Reburied them near our house. Every day now, my
mother passes by this grave. She feels better, I think.
Better at least to tell herself maybe.
Kate looks up at me. Shes silent, but she knows
what Im thinking. At this instant, a few blocks away,
an American M.I.A. search team is headquartered at
the Quang Ngai Government guesthouse. With
Vietnamese assistance, this team and others like it are
engaged in precisely the work of Mr. Duongs mother,
digging holes, picking through bones, seeking the
couple thousand Americans still listed as missing.
Which is splendid.
And which is also utterly one-sided. A perverse
and outrageous double standard.
What if things were reversed? What if the
Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate
and identify each of their own M.I.A.s? Numbers
alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative
estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my
own sliver of experienceone year at war, one set of
eyesI can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great
many Vietnamese dead. I watched napalm turn
villages into ovens. I watched burials by bulldozer. I
watched bodies being flung into trucks, dumped into
wells, used for target practice, stacked up and burned
like cordwood.
Even in the abstract, I get angry at the stunning,
almost cartoonish narcissism of American policy on
this issue. I get angrier yet at the narcissism of an
American public that embraces and breathes life into
the policyso arrogant, so ignorant, so self-righteous,
so wanting in the most fundamental qualities of
sympathy and fairness and mutuality. Some of this I
express aloud to Mr. Duong, who nods without
comment. We finish off our beers. Neither of us can
find much to say. Maybe were both back in history,

183

snagged in brothers and bones. I feel hollow. So little

has changed, it seems, and so much will always be
missing.
CAMBRIDGE, JUNE 1994June 11, I thinkIm
too tired to find a calendar. Almost 5 A.M. In another
hour itll be 5:01. Im on war time, which is the time
were all on at one point or another: when fathers die,
when husbands ask for divorce, when women you love
are fast asleep beside men you wish were you.
The tape of songs did nothing. Everything will
always do nothing.
Kate hurts, too, Im sure, and did not want it this
way. I didnt want it either. Even so, both of us have to
live in these slow-motion droplets of now, doing what
we do, choosing what we choose, and in different ways
both of us are now responsible for the casualty rotting
in the space between us.
If theres a lesson in this, which there is not, its
very simple. You dont have to be in Nam to be in
Nam.
THE BATANGAN PENINSULA, QUANG NGAI
PROVINCE, FEBRUARY 1994The Graveyard, we
called it. Littered with land mines, almost completely
defoliated, this spit of land jutting eastward into the
South China Sea was a place Alpha Company feared
the way others might fear snakes, or the dark, or the
bogyman. We lost at least three men here; I couldnt
begin to count the arms and legs.
Today our little caravan is accompanied by Mr.
Ngu Duc Tan, who knows this place intimately, a
former captain in the 48th Vietcong Battalion. It was
the 48th that Alpha Company chased from village to
village, paddy to paddy, during my entire tour in
Vietnam. Chased but never found. They found us:
ambushes, sniper fire, nighttime mortar attacks.
Through our interpreter, who passes along
commodious paragraphs in crisp little packets, Mr.
Tan speaks genially of military tactics while we make
the bumpy ride out toward the Batangan. U.S. troops
not hard to see, not hard to fight, he says. Much
noise, much equipment. Big columns. Nice green
uniforms. Sitting ducks, in other words, though Mr.
Tan is too polite to express it this way. He explains
that the United States Army was never a primary
target. We went after Saigon puppet troops, what you
called ARVN. If we beat them, everything collapse, the
U.S. would have nothing more to fight for. You
brought many soldiers, helicopters, bombs, but we
chose not to fight you, except sometimes. America was
not the main objective.
God help us, Im thinking, if we had been. All
those casualties. All that blood and terror. Even at this
moment, more than half a lifetime later, I remember
the feel of a bulls-eye pinned to my shirt, a prickly,
when-will-it-happen sensation, as if I alone had been
the main objective.
Meanwhile, Kate is taking her own notes, now
and then asking questions through the interpreter.
Shes better than I am at human dynamics, more fluid
and spontaneous, and after a time she gets Mr. Tan to
display a few war scarsarms, legs, hands, cheek,
chest, skull. Sixteen wounds altogether. The American

war, he says, was just one phase in his career as a

soldier, which began in 1961 and encompassed combat
against the South Vietnamese, Khmer Rouge and
Chinese.
Talk about bad dreams. One year gave me more
than enough to fill up the nights.
My goal on the Batangan peninsula is to show
Kate one of the prettiest spots on earth. Im looking for
a lagoon, a little fishing village, an impossibly white
beach along the South China Sea.
First, though, Mr. Tan attends to his own agenda.
We park the van in one of the inland hamlets, walk
without invitation into a small house, sit down for
lunch with a man named Vo Van Ba. Instantly, Im
thinking herring. Kate and Eddie have the sense to
decline, to tap their stomachs and say things like Full,
full, thanks, thanks. Cans are opened. The house fills
up with children, nephews, nieces, babies, cousins,
neighbors. There are flies, too. Many, many flies. Many
thousand.
Mr. Tan and Mr. Ba eat lunch with their fingers,
fast and hungry, chatting amiably while our
interpreter does her best to put the gist of it into
English. Im listening hard, chewing hard. I gather that
these two men had been comrades of a sort during the
war. Mr. Ba, our host, was never a full-time soldier,
never even a part-time irregular. As I understand it, he
belonged to what we used to call the VC infrastructure,
offering support and intelligence to Mr. Tan and his
fighting troops.
I lean forward, nod my head. The focus, however,
is on the substance Im swallowing, its remarkable
texture, the flies trying to get at it. For five years, Mr.
Ba explains, he lived entirely underground with a
family of eight. Five years, he repeats. Cooking,
bathing, working, sleeping. He waits for the
translation, waits a bit longer, then looks at me with a
pair of silvery, burned-out, cauterized, half-blind,
underground eyes. You had the daylight, but I had the
earth. Mr. Ba turns to Mr. Tan. After a second he
chuckles. Many times I might reach up and take this
mans leg. Many times. Very easy. I might just pull him
down to where the war was.
Were on foot now. Even at 59, Mr. Tan moves
swiftly, with the grace and authority of a man who
once led soldiers in combat. He does not say much. He
leads us toward the ocean, toward the quaint fishing
village Im hoping to show Kate, but along the way
there is one last item Mr. Tan wishes to show me. We
move down a trail through two or three adjacent
hamlets, seem to circle back for a time, end up in front
of another tiny house.
Mr. Tans voice goes into command tonetwo or
three sharp, snapping words. A pair of boys dart into
the house. No wasted time, they come out fast,
carrying whats left of a man named Nguyen Van Ngu.
They balance this wreckage on a low chair. Both legs
are gone at the upper-upper thigh. We shake hands.
Neither of us knows what to saythere is nothing
worth sayingso for a few minutes we exchange
stupidities in our different languages, no translator

184

available to wash away the helplessness. We pose for

photographs. We try for smiles.
Mr. Tan does not smile. He nods to himself
maybe to me. But I get the point anyway. Here is your
paradise. Here is your pretty little fishing village by the
sea.
Two minutes later, were on the beach. It is
beautiful, even stunning. Kate wades out into the
water. Shes surrounded by kids. They giggle and
splash her, she splashes back, and I stand there like an
idiot, grinning, admiring the view, while Mr. Tan waits
patiently in the shade.
CAMBRIDGE, JULY 1994Outside, its the
Fourth of July. Lovely day, empty streets. Kate is
where Kate is, which is elsewhere, and I am where I
am, which is also elsewhere. Someday, no doubt, Ill
wish happiness for myself, but for now its still war
time, minute to minute. Not quite 11 A.M. Already Ive
been out for two walks, done the laundry, written a few
words, bought groceries, lifted weights, watched the
Fourth of July sunlight slide across my street-side
balcony.
And Kate?
The beach, maybe? A backyard cookout?
The hardest part, by far, is to make the bad
pictures go away. On war time, the world is one long
horror movie, image after image, and if its anything
like Vietnam, Im in for a lifetime of wee-hour creeps.
Meanwhile, I try to plug up the leaks and carry
through on some personal resolutions. For too many
years Ive lived in paralysisguilt, depression, terror,
shameand now its either move or die. Over the past
weeks, at profound cost, Ive taken actions with my life
that are far too painful for any public record. But at
least the limbo has ended. Starting can start.
Theres a point here: Vietnam, Cambridge, Paris,
Neptunethese are states of mind. Minds change.
MY
KHE,
QUANG
NGAI
PROVINCE,
FEBRUARY 1994There is one piece of ground I wish
to revisit above all others in this country. Ive come
prepared with a compass, a military map, grid
coordinates, a stack of after-action reports recovered
from a dusty box in the National Archives.
Were back near Pinkville, a mile or so east of My
Lai. We are utterly lost: the interpreter, the van driver,
the Peoples Committee representative, Eddie, Kate,
me. I unfold the map and place a finger on the spot Im
hoping to find. A group of villagers puzzle over it. They
chatter among themselvesarguing, it seemsthen
one of them points west, another north, most at the
heavens.
Lost, that was the Vietnam of 25 years ago. The
war came at us as a blur, raw confusion, and my fear
now is that I would not recognize the right spot even
while standing on it.
For well over an hour we drive from place to
place. We end up precisely where we started. Once
more, everyone spills out of the van. The thought
occurs to me that this opportunity may never come
again. I find my compass, place it on the map and look
up for a geographical landmark. A low green hill rises
to the westnot much, just a hump on the horizon.

Im no trailblazer, but this works. One eye on the

compass, one eye on some inner rosary, I lead our
exhausted column 200 yards eastward, past a
graveyard and out along a narrow paddy dike, where
suddenly the world shapes itself exactly as it was
shaped a quarter-century agothe curvatures, the tree
lines, the precise angles and proportions. I stop there
and wait for Kate. This I dreamed of giving her. This I
dreamed of sharing.
Our fingers lock, which happens without volition,
and we stand looking out on a wide and very lovely
field of rice. The sunlight gives it some gold and
yellow. There is no wind at all. Before us is how peace
would be defined in a dictionary for the speechless. I
dont cry. I dont know what to do. At one point I hear
myself talking about what happened here so long ago,
motioning out at the rice, describing chaos and horror
beyond anything I would experience until a few
months later. I tell her how Paige lost his lower leg,
how we had to probe for McElhaney in the flooded
paddy, how the gunfire went on and on, how in the
course of two hell-on-earth hours we took 13
casualties.
I doubt Kate remembers a word. Maybe she
shouldnt. But I do hope she remembers the sunlight
striking that field of rice. I hope she remembers the
feel of our fingers. I hope she remembers how I fell
silent after a time, just looking out at the golds and
yellows, joining the peace, and how in those fine sunlit
moments, which were ours, Vietnam took a little
Vietnam out of me.
HO CHI MINH CITY, FEBRUARY 1994We
hate this place.
Even the namesSaigon, Ho Chi Minh City. A
massive identity crisis. Too loud, too quiet. Too alive,
too dead.
For all the discomforts of Quang Ngai Province,
which were considerable, Kate and I had taken
pleasure in those qualities of beauty and equanimity
that must have vanished from Saigon when the first oil
barge steamed into port.
But we give it our best. An hour in the Chinese
market district, which is like an hour in combat. Two
hours at the old presidential palaceas tawdry and
corrupt as its former inhabitants. We risk periodic
excursions into streets where the American dollar
remains more valuable than oxygen, of which there is
precious little. Maybe weve hit some interior wall.
Maybe its the diesel-heat. We visit a war-crimes
museum, the old American Embassy and order lunch
by way of room service. Western pop music blares at
full volume from Government loudspeakers just
outside our hotel. For hours, even with earplugs, we
listen to As Tears Go By and My Way. What
happened to Ho Chi Minh? What happened to
revolution? All weve heard comes from the Beatles.
In midafternoon, the music ceases. We go out for
a short walk, do some shopping, then retreat to the
rooftop swimming pool of the Rex Hotel. It could as
well be Las Vegas. We dont say so, not directly, but
both Kate and I are ready to evacuate, were humming

185

We gotta get out of this place. Pretty soon well be

singing it over loudspeakers.
For now, Kate lounges at the pool. She writes
postcards. She catches me watching. She snaps
pictures to show her children someday. [October 2,
1994]

186

9
Sherman Alexie
Were either portrayed as either the noble savage or
the ignoble savage. In most peoples minds, we only
exist in the nineteenth century.
Nobody ever asked Raymond Carver to speak for
every white guy.
I dont believe in writers block. I think its laziness
and/or fear.
Ive heard it said that Indians shouldnt become
involved in high-stakes gambling because it tarnishes
our noble heritage. Personally, Ive never believed in
the nobility of poverty. Personally, I believe in the
nobility of breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Listen, Victor said. My father just died. I need some

money to get to Phoenix to make arrangements.
Now, Victor, the council said. You know were
having a difficult time financially.
But I thought the council had special funds set aside
for stuff like this.
Now, Victor, we do have some money available for the
proper return of tribal members bodies. But I dont
think we have enough to bring your father all the way
back from Phoenix.
Well, Victor said. It aint going to cost all that much.
He had to be cremated. Things were kind of ugly. He
died of a heart attack in his trailer and nobody found
him for a week. It was really hot, too. You get the
picture.
Now, Victor, were sorry for your loss and the
circumstances. But we can really only afford to give
you one hundred dollars.
Thats not even enough for a plane ticket.
Well, you might consider driving to Phoenix.
I dont have a car. Besides, I was going to drive my
fathers pickup back up here.
Now, Victor, the council said. We;re sure there is
somebody who could drive you to Phoenix. Or is there
somebody who could lend you the rest of the money?
You know there aint nobody around with that kind of
money.
Well, were sorry, Victor, but thats the best we can
do.
Victor accepted the Tribal Councils offer. What else
could he do? So he signed the proper papers, picked
up his check, and walked over to the Trading Post to
cash it.
While Victor stood in line, he watched Thomas Buildsthe-Fire standing near the magazine rack, talking to
himself. Like he always did. Thomas was a storyteller
that nobody wanted to listen to. Thats like being a
dentist in a town where everybody has false teeth.

This Is What It Means to Say

Phoenix, Arizona
Just after Victor lost his job at the BIA, he also found
out that his father had died of a heart attack in
Phoenix, Arizona. Victor hadnt seen his father in a few
years, only talked to him on the telephone once or
twice, but there still was a genetic pain, which was
soon to be pain as real and immediate as a broken
bone.

Victor and Thomas Builds-the-Fire were the same age,

had grown up and played in the dirt together. Ever
since Victor could remember, it was Thomas who
always had something to say.
Once, when they were seven years old, when Victors
father still lived with the family, Thomas closed his
eyes and told Victor this story: Your fathers heart is
weak. He is afraid of his own family. He is afraid of
you. Late at night he sits in the dark. Watches the
television until theres nothing but that white noise.
Sometimes he feels like he wants to buy a motorcycle
and ride away. He wants to run and hide. He doesnt
want to be found.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire had known that Victors father
was going to leave, knew it before anyone. Now Victor
stood in the Trading Post with a one-hundred-dollar
check in his hand, wondering if Thomas knew that
Victors father was dead, if he knew what was going to
happen next. Just then Thomas looked at Victor,
smiled, and walked over to him.
Victor, Im sorry about your father, Thomas said.

Victor didnt have any money. Who does have money

on a reservation, except the cigarette and fireworks
salespeople? His father had a savings account waiting
to be claimed, but Victor needed to find a way to get to
Phoenix. Victors mother was just as poor as he was,
and the rest of his family didnt have any use at all for
him. So Victor called the Tribal Council.
187

How did you know about it? Victor asked.

I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt
it in the sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here
crying.
Oh, Victor said and looked around the Trading Post.
All the other Indians stared, surprised that Victor was
even talking to Thomas. Nobody talked to Thomas
anymore because he told the same damn stories over
and over again. Victor was embarassed, but he thought
that Thomas might be able to help him. Victor felt a
sudden need for tradition.
I can lend you the money you need, Thomas said
suddenly. But you have to take me with you.
I cant take your money, Victor said. I mean, I
havent hardly talked to you in years. Were not really
friends anymore.
I didnt say we were friends. I said you had to take me
with you.
Let me think about it.
Victor went home with his one hundred dollars and sat
at the kitchen table. He held his head in his hands and
thought about Thomas Builds-the-Fire, remembered
little details, tears and scars, the bicycle they shared
for a summer, so many stories.
***
Thomas Builds-the-Fire sat on the bicycle, waited in
Victors yard. He was ten years old and skinny. His
hair was dirty because it was the Fourth of July.
Victor, Thomas yelled. Hurry up. Were going to
miss the fireworks.
After a few minutes, Victor ran out of his house,
jumped the porch railing, and landed gracefully on the
sidewalk.
And the judges award him a 9.95, the highest score of
the summer, Thomas said, clapped, laughed.
That was perfect, cousin, Victor said. And its my
turn to ride the bike.
Thomas gave up the bike and they headed for the fairgrounds. It was nearly dark and the fireworks were
about to start.
You know, Thomas said. Its strange how us Indians
celebrate the Fourth of July. It aint like it was our
independence everybody was fighting for.
You think about things too much, Victor said. Its
just supposed to be fun. Maybe Junior will be there.
Which Junior? Everybody on this reservation is
named Junior.
And they both laughed.
The fireworks were small, hardly more than a few
bottle rockets and a fountain. But it was enough for
two Indian boys. Years later, they would need much
more.
Afterwards, sitting in the dark, fighting off
mosquitoes, Victor turned to Thomas Builds-the-Fire.
Hey, Victor said. Tell me a story.

Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: There

were these two Indian boys who wanted to be
warriors. But it was too late to be warriors in the old
way. All the horsees were gone. So the two Indian boys
stole a car and drove to the city. They parked the
stolen car in front of the police station and then
hitchhiked back home to the reservation. When they
got back, all their friends cheered and their parents
eyes shone with pride. You were very brave,
everybody said to the two Indian boys. Very brave.
Ya-hey, Victor said. Thats a good one. I wish I
could be a warrior.
Me, too, Thomas said.
They went home together in the dark, Thomas on the
bike now, Victor on foot. They walked through
shadows and light from streetlamps.
Weve come a long ways, Thomas said. We have
outdoor lighting.
All I need is the stars, Victor said. And besides, you
still think about things too much.
They separated then, each headed for home, both
laughing all the way.
***
Victor sat at his kitchen table. He counted his one
hundred dollars again and again. He knew he needed
more to make it to Phoenix and back. He knew he
needed Thomas Builds-the-Fire. So he put his money
in his wallet and opened the front door to find Thomas
on the porch.
Ya-hey, Victor, Thomas said. I knew youd call me.
Thomas walked into the living room and sat down on
Victors favorite chair.
Ive got some money saved up, Thomas said. Its
enough to get us down there, but you have to get us
back.
Ive got this hundred dollars, Victor said. And my
dad had a savings account Im going to claim.
How much in your dads account?
Enough. A few hundred.
Sounds good. When we leaving?
***
When they were fifteen and had long stopped being
friends, Victor and Thomas got into a fistfight. That is,
Victor was really drunk and beat Thomas up for no
reason at all. All the other Indian boys stood around
and watched it happen. Junior was there and so were
Lester, Seymour, and a lot of others. The beating
might have gone on until Thomas was dead if Norma
Many Horses hadnt come along and stopped it.
Hey, you boys, Norma yelled and jumped out of her
car. Leave him alone.
If it had been someone else, even another mna, the
Indian boys wouldve just ignored the warnings. But
Norma was a warrior. She was powerful. She could
have picked up any two of the boys and smashed their
skulls together. But worse than that, she would have
dragged them all over to some tipi and made them
listen to some elder tell a dusty old story.

188

The Indian boys scattered, and Norma walked over to

Thomas and picked him up.
Hey, little man, are you okay? she asked.
Thomas gave her a thumbs up.
Why they always picking on you?
Thomas shook his head, closed his eyes, but no stories
came to him, no words or music. He just wanted to go
home, to lie in his bed and let his dreams tell his
stories for him.
***
Thomas Builds-the-Fire and Victor sat next to each
other in the airplane, coach section. A tiny white
woman had the window seat. She was busy twisting
her body into pretzels. She was flexible.
I have to ask, Thomas said, and Victor closed his
eyes in embarassment.
Dont, Victor said.
Excuse me, miss, Thomas asked. Are you a gymnast
or something?
Theres no something about it, she said. I was first
alternate on the 1980 Olympic team.
Really? Thomas asked.
Really.
I mean, you used to be a world-class athlete?
Thomas asked.
My husband still thinks I am.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire smiled. She was a mental
gymnast, too. She pulled her leg straight up against
her body so that she couldve kissed her kneecap.
I wish I could do that, Thomas said.
Victor was ready to jump out of the plane. Thomas,
that crazy Indian storyteller with ratty old braids and
broken teeth, was flirting with a beautiful Olympic
gymnast. Nobody back home on the reservation would
ever believe it.
Well, the gymnast said. Its easy. Try it.
Thomas grabbed at his leg and tried to pull it up into
the same position as the gymnast. He couldnt even
come close, which made Victor and the gymnast laugh.
Hey, she asked. You two are Indian, right?
Full-blood, Victor said.
Not me, Thomas said. Im half magician on my
mothers side and half clown on my fathers.
They all laughed.
What are your names? she asked.
Victor and Thomas.
Mine is Cathy. Pleased to meet you all.
The three of them talked for the duration of the flight.
Cathy the gymnast complained about the government,
how they screwed the 1980 Olympic team by
boycotting.
Sounds like you all got a lot in common with
Indians, Thomas said.
Nobody laughed.
After the plane landed in Phoenix and they had all
found their way to the terminal, Cathy the gymnast
smiled and waved good-bye.
She was really nice, Thomas said.
yeah, but everybody talks to everybody on airplanes,
Victor said. Its too bad we cant always be that way.

You always used to tell me I think too much, Thomas

said. Now it sounds like you do.
Maybe I caught it from you.
Yeah.
Thomas and Victor rode in a taxi to the trailer where
Victors father died.
Listen Victor said as they stopped in front of the
trailer. I never told you I was sorry for beating you up
that time.
Oh, it was nothing. We were just kids and you were
drunk.
Yeah, but Im still sorry.
Thats all right.
Victor paid for the taxi and the two of them stood in
the hot Phoenix summer. They could smell the trailer.
This aint going to be nice, Victor said. You dont
have to go in.
Youre going to need help.
Victor walked to the front door and opened it. The
stink rolled out and made them both gag. Victors
father had lain in that trailer for a week in hundreddegree temperatures before anyone found him. And
the only reason anyone found him was because of the
smell. They needed dental records to identify him.
Thats exactly what the coroner said. They needed
dental records.
Oh, man, Victor said. I dont know if I can do this.
Well, then dont.
But there might be something valuable in there.
I thought his money was in the bank.
It is. I was talking about pictures and letteres and
stuff like that.
Oh, Thomas said as he held his breath and followed
Victor into the trailer.
***
When Victor was twelve, he stepped into an
underground wasp nest. His foot was caught in the
hole, and no matter how hard he struggled, Victor
couldnt pull free. He might have died there, stung a
thousand times, if Thomas Builds-the-Fire had not
come by.
Run, Thomas yelled and pulled Victors foot from the
hole. They ran then, hard as they ever had, faster than
Billy Mills, faster than Jim Thorpe, faster than the
wasps could fly.
Victor and Thomas ran until they couldnt breathe, ran
until it was cold and dark outside, ran until they were
lost and it took hours to find their way home. All the
way back, Victor counted his stings.
Seven, Victor said. My lucky number.
***
Victor didnt find much to keep in the trailer. Only a
photo album and a stereo. Everything else had that
smell stuck in it or was useless anyway.
I guess this is all, Victor said. It aint much.
Better than nothing, Thomas said.
Yeah, and I do have the pickup.

189

Yeah, Thomas said. Its in good shape.

Dad was good about that stuff.
Yeah, I remember your dad.
Really? Victor asked. What do you remember?

One of his dreams came true for just a second, just

enough to make it real.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this

story: I remember when I had this dream that told me
to go to Spokane, to stand by the Falls in the middle of
the city and wait for a sign.. I knew I had to go there
but I didnt have a car. Didnt have a license. I was only
thirteen. So I walked all the way, took me all day, and I
finally made it to the Falls. I stood there for an hour
waiting. Then your dad came walking up. What the
hell are you doing here? he asked me. I said, Waiting
for a vision. Then your father said, All youre going to
get here is mugged. So he drove me over to Dennys,
bought me dinner, and then drove me home to the
reservation. For a long time I was mad because I
thought my dreams had lied to me. But they didnt.
Your dad was my vision. Take care of each other is
what my dreams were saying. Take care of each
other.

Victors father, his ashes, fit in one wooden box with

enough left over to fill a cardboard box.
He was always a big man, Thomas said.
Victor carried part of his father and Thomas carried
the rest out to the pickup. They set him down carefully
behind the seats, put a cowboy hat on the wooden box
and a Dodgers cap on the cardboard box. Thats the
way it was supposed to be.
Ready to head back home, Victor asked.
Its going to be a long drive.
Yeah, take a couple days, maybe.
We can take turns, Thomas said.
Okay, Victor said, but they didnt take turns. Victor
drove for sixteen hours straight north, made it halfway
up Nevada toward home before he finally pulled over.
Hey, Thomas, Victor said. You got to drive for a
while.
Okay.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire slid behind the wheel and
started off down the road. All through Nevada,
Thomas and Victor had been amazed at the lack of
animal life, at the absence of water, of movement.
Where is everything? Victor had asked me more than
once.
Now when Thomas was finally driving they saw the
first animal, maybe the only animal in Nevada. It was
a long-eared jackrabbit.
Look, Victor yelled. Its alive.
Thomas and Victor were busy congratulating
themselves on their discovery when the jackrabbit
darted out into the road and under the wheels of the
pickup.
Stop the goddamn car, Victor yelled, and Thomas
did stop, backed the pickup to the dead jackrabbit.
Oh, man, hes dead, Victor said as he looked at the
squashed animal.
Really dead.
The only thing alive in this whole state and we just
killed it.
I dont know, Thomas said. I think it was suicide.
Victor looked around the desert, sniffed the air, felt the
emptiness and loneliness, and nodded his head.
Yeah, Victor said. It had to be suicide.
I cant believe this, Thomas said. You drive for a
thousand miles aint even any bugs smashed on the
windshield. I drive for ten seconds and kill the only
living thing in Nevada.
Yeah, Victor said. Maybe I should drive.
Maybe you should.

***

Victor was quiet for a long time. He searched his mind

for memories of his father, found the good ones, found
a few bad ones, added it all up, and smiled.
My father never told me about finding you in
Spokane, Victor said.
He said he wouldnt tell anybody. Didnt want me to
get in trouble. But he said I had to watch out for you as
part of the deal.
Really?
Really. Your father said you would need the help. He
was right.
Thats why you came down here with me, isnt it?
Victor asked.
I came because of your father.
Victor and Thomas climbed into the pickup, drove
over to the bank, and claimed the three hundred
dollars in the savings account.
***
Thomas Builds-the-Fire could fly.
Once, he jumped off the roof of the tribal school and
flapped his arms like a crazy eagle. And he flew. For a
second, he hovered, suspended above all the other
Indian boys who were too smart or too scared to jump.
Hes flying, Junior yelled, and Seymour was busy
looking for the trick wires or mirrors. But it was real.
As real as the dirt when Thomas lost altitude and
crashed to the ground.
He broke his arm in two places.
He broke his wing, Victor chanted, and the other
Indian boys joined in, made it a tribal song.
He broke his wing, he broke his wing, he broke his
wing, all the Indian boys chanted as they ran off,
flapping their wings, wishing they could fly, too. They
hated Thomas for his courage, his brief moment as a
bird. Everybody has dreams about flying. Thomas
flew.

***
Victor and Thomas made it back to the reservation just
as the sun was rising. It was the beginning of a new
day on earth, but the same old shit on the reservation.
Good morning. Thomas said.
Good morning.

190

The tribe was waking up, ready for work, eating

breakfast, reading the newspaper, just like everybody
else does. Willene LeBret was out in her garden
wearing a bathrobe. She waved when Thomas and
Victor drove by.
Crazy Indians made it, she said to herself and went
back to her roses.
Victor stopped the pickup in front of Thomas Buildsthe-Fires HUD house. They both yawned, stretched a
little, shook dust from their bodies.
Im tired, Victor said.
Of everything, Thomas added.
They both searched for words to end the journey.
Victor needed to thank Thomas for his help, for the
money, and make the promise to pay it all back.
Dont worry about the money, Thomas said. It dont
make any difference anyhow.
Probably not, enit? Nope.
Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy
storyteller who talked to dogs and cars, who listened to
the wind and pine trees. Victor knew that he couldnt
really be friends with Thomas, even after all that had
happened. It was cruel but it was real. As real as the
ashes, as Victors father, sitting behind the seats.
I know how it is, Thomas said. I know you aint
going to treat me any better than you did before. I
know your friends would give you too much shit about
it.
Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to
the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real
thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken
dreams. He owed Thomas something, anything.
Listen, Victor said and handed Thomas the
cardboard box which contained half of his father. I
want you to have this.
Thomas took the ashes and
smiled, closed his eyes, and
told this story: Im going to
travel to Spokane Falls one
last time and toss these
ashes into the water. And
your father will rise like a
salmon, leap over the
bridge, over me, and find
his way home. It will be
beautiful. His teeth will
shine like silver, like a
rainbow. He will rise,
Victor, he will rise.
Victor smiled.
I was planning on doing
the same thing with my
half, Victor said. But I
didny imagine my father
looking anything like a
salmon. I thought itd be
like cleaning the attic or something. Like lettings
things go after theyve stopped having any use.
Nothing stops, cousin, Thomas said. Nothing
stops.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire got out of the pickup and

walked up his driveway. Victor started the pickup and
he began to drive home.
Wait, Thomas yelled suddenly from his porch. I just
got to ask one favor.
Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and
shouted back. What do you want?
Just one time when Im telling a story somewhere,
why dont you stop and listen? Thomas asked.
Just once?
Just once.
Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the
deal was good. It was a fair trade, and that was all
Victor had ever wanted from his whole life. So Victor
drive his fathers pickup toward home while Thomas
went into his house, closed the door behind him, and
heard a new story come to him in the silence
afterwards.
from American Short Stories Since 1945
edited by John G. Parks
2002 Oxford University Press, New York

http://www.barriolife.com/stories/alexie.ht
ml

191

Where do you want us

to sign? the councilmen
asked and took out the
pens that they all saved
for special occasions.
Sign here. And initial
here and here.
Unable to read the fine
print, I inched closer and
closer - too close, in fact.
What seems to be the
problem? one of the
wiseguys asked as he
grabbed me by the front
of my Atlanta Braves TCoeur d'Alene indians: Left to right: Pliisia
(John Davenport), Hnq'e'w-e'ns (Moses
Brokentooth), T''nt''nmi(Peter Moctelme),
We'ylshu(Peter Wildshoe), Chi'autqn (SolLouis), T'k'umti(Tekomtee

An Essay on Casinos by
Sherman Alexie
Love, hunger, money... and other notso-facetious reasons
why the Spokane Indians want to bet
on casinos
by Sherman Alexie
Ive just returned from the Spokane Tribes casinoand-gambling mecca at the western edge of our
reservation, and I may have to enter the federal
Witness Relocation Program because I have seen and
know too much. I couldnt believe it. I had gone there
expecting to see a few slot machines and some sweaty
small-town gamblers. Instead, there were dozens of
suspicious-looking men in expensive suits shaking
hands with our Spokane tribal councilmen.
Its the Mafia, I whispered into the tape recorder that
I had carefully hidden beneath the bill of my
Washington Redskins baseball hat. Risking life and
limb, I maneuvered closer to the wiseguys and
councilmen. They barely noticed me, of course,
because nobody, neither Indian nor white, ever pays
attention to poets.
The Family really admires what youre doing out
there, one of the wiseguys said to the councilmen. His
diction was perfect. We believe your reservation could
become a lucrative member of our network.
My true identity couldve been discovered at any time.
Confidently, I ordered a Diet Pepsi without ice,
shaken, not stirred.

shirt.
Who is this young man? the head wiseguy asked.
Him? the councilmen asked, and looked at me. Hes
just a poet.
Prove it, the head wiseguy demanded of me.
My love is like a red, red rose, I blurted. I waited for
the response. Had all my years of creative-writing
classes finally paid off? The head wiseguy looked me
over, slapped my face gently, pinched my cheek.
Leave him alone, he said to the wiseguy holding me.
Hes just a poet. Give him a dollar and a free drink.
I took my dollar and voucher for another Pepsi and
went my way. However, I had time to read the fine
print on one of those contracts and it said the terms of
this agreement would be valid as long as the grasses
grow, the winds blow, and the rivers flow.
Help me. Im writing this from a seedy hotel room in
an eastern Washington city. I know too much. I know
that the Mafia is on the Spokane Indian Reservation
and that theyre making treaties. I know the Mafia will
break those treaties and only the United States
Government is allowed to break treaties with Indians.
Im caught in a crossfire. Help me. Im just a poet.
Gambling has always been
about trust and the loss
of trust. Its never been
about money. Gambling is
nothing new for the Indians.
Gambling is traditional
and began when Columbus arrived
in our country. Indians started
to roll the dice every time
we signed another treaty
but weve always been the losers
because the dice were loaded
and the treaties broken
by random design. Now
weve got our own game
of Reservation Roulette
and Id advise the faithful
to always bet on red.
However, I have the distinct feeling that America is
not placing any bets on the survival of Indians.
America will not even allow Indians to become citizens
of the 20th century. Were trapped somewhere
between Custer and Columbus, between the noble and
savage. Ive heard it said that Indians shouldnt

192

become involved in high-stakes gambling because it

tarnishes our noble heritage. Personally, Ive never
believed in the nobility of poverty. Personally, I believe
in the nobility of breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Indians need money.
Forget the discussions about self-hate or cultural
dislocation. Forget the loss of land and language. Most
Indians cannot even begin to think about those kinds
of complicated issues. They dont have the time. They
have to spend most of their time worrying about where
their next meal is coming from. They worry about how
love and hunger can get so mixed up. Most Indians
dont have time or energy enough to listen to me or
you.
As Billie Holiday said, Youve got to have something
to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold
still for anybodys damned sermon.
Indians need
the money, Indians need
the money, the money
because we all need
all of us (meaning
me and you) need
the money. Indians
need it more
because we have less
of everything
except our stories and poems
but you cant buy
a can of Spam
with a metaphor. We need
the money, the money
because money is Americas
religion, because money is
prayer and hymn, because
a dollar bill can fill
our empty stomachs
like a good savior will.
Ive also heard so much talk about the morality of
gambling. How immoral is the Washington State
Lottery? How immoral is Grand Coulee Dam? How
immoral are the beer and tobacco companies?
Those questions have
their answers buried
somewhere deep in the
heart of capitalism, and
the casino on the
Spokane
Indian
Reservation is proof
that the Spokanes have
embraced
capitalism.
There was a demand for
a product (gambling)
and
the
Spokane
Indians have produced
a supply (casino).
Does that frighten me?
Of course. But I think
its more important to
ask the non-Indians
why they are frightened
of it.

Is it because of the imagined threat of gangster

influence? The profits from reservation gambling are
small change on a Mafia
scale.
Is it because of the supposed threat to the noble image
of Indians? There isnt much non-Indian complaint
about the Washington Redskins or the fact that Tonto
is still monosyllabic on television every day of the
year.
Is it really because of the immorality of gambling?
Capitalism has always rewarded immorality,
regardless of race, gender or religion.
I think it has more to do with power. As Indians make
money we also gain power. As we gain power we
develop a political voice. We can then use that voice to
demand that treaties be honored.
We can demand that this country be held accountable
for what it did to us and what it continues to do to us.
We can make those demands because well have the
power. We can make those demands because well
have the money. Well have the money that used to
belong to you.
from
High
Country
News
(www.hcn.org), September 19, 1994.
Online
at
www.hcn.org/1994/sep19/dir/essay.h
tml

193

Biography
Sherman J. Alexie, Jr., was born in October 1966. A
Spokane/Coeur dAlene Indian, he grew up on the
Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington,
about 50 miles northwest of Spokane. Approximately
1,100 Spokane Tribal members live there. Alexies
father is a Coeur dAlene Indian, and his mother is a
Spokane Indian.
Born hydrocephalic, with water on the brain, Alexie
underwent a brain operation at the age of 6 months
and was not expected to survive. When he did beat the
odds, doctors predicted he would live with severe
mental retardation. Though he showed no signs of
this, he suffered severe side effects, such as seizures
and uncontrollable bed-wetting, throughout his
childhood. In spite of all this, Alexie learned to read by
age three, and devoured novels, such as John
Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath, by age five. All these
things ostracized him from his peers and he was often
the brunt of other kids jokes on the reservation.
As a teenager, after finding his mothers name written
in a textbook he was assigned at the Wellpinit school,
Alexie made a conscious decision to attend high school
off the reservation in Reardan, WA, where he knew he
would get a better education. At Reardan High he was
the only Indian...except for the school mascot. There
he excelled academically and became a star player on
the basketball team.
He
graduated
from
Reardan High and went
on to attend Gonzaga
University in Spokane
on scholarship in 1985.
After two years at
Gonzaga, he transferred
to Washington State
University (WSU) in
Pullman.
Alexie planned to be a doctor until he fainted three
times in human anatomy class and needed a career
change. That change was fueled when he stumbled
into a poetry workshop at WSU. Encouraged by poetry
teacher Alex Kuo, Alexie excelled at writing and
realized hed found his new career choice. Shortly after
graduating in American Studies from WSU, Alexie
received the Washington State Arts Commission
Poetry Fellowship in 1991 and the National
Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1992.
Not long after receiving his second fellowship, and just
one year after he left WSU, two of his poetry
collections, The Business of Fancydancing and I
Would Steal Horses, were published. Alexie had a

problem with alcohol that began soon after he started

college at Gonzaga, but after learning that Hanging
Loose Press agreed to publish The Business of
Fancydancing, he immediately gave up drinking, at
the age of 23, and has been sober ever since.
Alexie continued to write prolifically and his first
collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and
Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was published by
Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993. For his collection he
received a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book
of Fiction, and was awarded a Lila Wallace-Readers
Digest Writers Award.
Alexie was named one of Grantas Best of Young
American Novelists and won the Before Columbus
Foundations American Book Award and the Murray
Morgan Prize for his first novel, Reservation Blues,
published in 1995 by Atlantic Monthly Press. His
second novel, Indian Killer, published in 1996, also
by Atlantic Monthly Press, was named one of Peoples
Best of Pages and a New York Times Notable Book.
Alexie occasionally does reading and stand-up
performances with musician Jim Boyd, a Colville
Indian. Alexie and Boyd also collaborated to record the
album Reservation Blues, which contains the
songs from the book of the same name. One of the
Reservation Blues songs, Small World, also
appeared on Talking Rain: Spoken Word & Music
from the Pacific Northwest and Honor: A Benefit for
the Honor the Earth Campaign. In 1996 Boyd and
Alexie opened for the Indigo Girls at a concert to
benefit the Honor the Earth Campaign.
In 1997, Alexie embarked on another artistic
collaboration. Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho
Indian, discovered Alexies writing while doing
graduate work at New York Universitys film school.
Through a mutual friend, they agreed to collaborate on
a film project inspired by Alexies work.
The basis for the screenplay was This is What it
Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona, a short story from
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
Shadow Catcher Entertainment produced the film.
Released as Smoke Signals at the Sundance Film
Festival in January 1998, the movie won two awards:
the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy.
After success at Sundance, Smoke Signals found a
distributor, Miramax Films, and was released in New
York and Los Angeles on June 26 and across the
country on July 3. In 1999 the film received a
Christopher Award, an award presented to the
creators of artistic works which affirm the highest
values of the human spirit. Alexie was also nominated
for the Independent Feature Project/West 1999
Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.

194

In the midst of releasing Smoke Signals, Alexie

competed in his first World Heavyweight Poetry
Bout competition in June 1998. He went up against
world champion Jimmy Santiago Baca and won the
Bout, and then went on to win the title again over the
next three years, becoming the first poet to hold the
title for three and four consecutive years.

Alexie has published 16 books to date, including his

most recent collection of short stories, Ten Little
Indians.

Known for his exceptional humor and performance

ability, Alexie made his stand-up debut at the
Foolproof Northwest Comedy Festival in Seattle, WA,
in April 1999, and was the featured performer at the
Vancouver International Comedy Festivals opening
night gala in July 1999.

The toughest Indian writer in the world angles

for a bigger audience.

In 1998, Alexie participated with seven others in the

PBS Lehrer News Hour Dialogue on Race with
President Clinton. The discussion was moderated by
Jim Lehrer and originally aired on PBS on July 9,
1998. Alexie has also been featured on Politically
Incorrect , 60 Minutes II, and NOW with Bill Moyers,
for which he wrote a special segment on insomnia and
his writing process called Up All Night.
In

February

2003,

Alexie

participated in the
Museum of Tolerance project, Finding Our
Families, Finding Ourselves, an exhibit showcasing
the diversity within the personal histories of several
noted Americans, and that celebrates the shared
experiences common to being part of an American
family and encourages visitors to seek out their own
histories, mentors and heroes. This project was
featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Our Big
American Family, which originally aired in January
2003, on which Alexie was a guest.
Alexie was the guest editor for the Winter 2000-01
issue of Ploughshares, a prestigious literary journal.
He was a 1999 O. Henry Award Prize juror, was one of
the judges for the 2000 inagural PEN/Amazon.com
Short Story Award, and a juror for both the Poetry
Society of Americas 2001 Shelley Memorial Award
and the Poets and Writers Writers Exchange 2001
Contest. He currently serves as a mentor in the PEN
Emerging Writers program.
He was a member of the 2000 and 2001 Independent
Spirit Awards Nominating Committees, and has seved
as a creative adviser to the Sundance Institute Writers
Fellowship Program and the Independent Feature
Films West Screenwriters Lab.
Alexie was the commencement speaker for the
University of Washingtons 2003 commencement
ceremony. In October 2003 he received Washington
State Universitys highest honor for alumni, the

Regents Distinguished Alumnus Award.

What It Means to Be Sherman

Alexie

by Russ Spencer
Sherman Alexies second-floor Seattle office is
bordered by redwoods and cedar and has three pieces
of art on the walls. Two of them are what you would
expect. One is the original artwork from his second
short-story collection, First Indian on the Moon. The
other is a signed and framed print of the poem
Thanksgiving at Snake Butte by the pre-eminent
Indian author James Welch, one of Alexies literary
heroes.
Then theres the black-and-white photograph to the
left of his desk. Its a portrait of Kurt Cobain, the
grunge-rock superhero who revitalized the moribund
early-90s pop-culture scene with his band Nirvana
and then, in 1994, killed himself with a shotgun blast
to the head. The photo is a surprise at first, but then
you realize it fits. The sense of being an outsider, the
anger, the motivation. Seattle.
He saved us all, Alexie says. He came and blew
away all that shit that was going on.
Alexie isnt as famous as Cobain, but he wants to be.
He started as what he likes to call a small literary
writer from Seattle, but he was remarkably prolific
and had an appetite for success. His college writing
professor, Alex Kuo, once said that he probably had
ten students with more talent than Alexie. But Alexie,
Kuo said, had a dedication that other students with
perhaps more talent didnt have.
That dedication has paid off. One year after he
graduated from college in 1991, two books of his
poetry were published, I Would Steal Horses and The
Business of Fancydancing, and as the legend goes,
their acceptance prompted him to kick five years of
debilitating drinking in one night. He has since
published five more books of poetry. His first book of
prose, a short-story collection titled The Lone Ranger
and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was published in 1993,
and he followed in 1995 with his first novel,
Reservation Blues. Indian Killer came out a year later
and became a New York Times Notable Book. Then he
devoted his time to producing the 1998 film Smoke
Signals and working on his new collection, The
Toughest Indian in the World. Along the way, he won
awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the

195

Arts, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and many

others. In 1998 and 1999, he was named by both
Granta and The New Yorker as one of the best
American fiction writers under forty. He has been
embraced by Hollywood, as wellhe is now working
on three screen adaptations of novels, including his
own Reservation Blues. And he won both the 1998 and
1999 World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout
at the Taos Poetry Circus in New Mexico.
***
I identify strongly with him, Alexie says of Cobain.
Small-town guy, poor, makes himself into this huge
rock star.
Alexie was born just six months before Cobain, a
couple of hundred scrub-brush miles away from
Cobains tiny hometown of Aberdeen, on the 150,000acre Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern
Washington. Like Cobain, his antipathy toward the
social and racial oppression of mainstream America
drove much of his early work. With Alexies success,
though, he has begun moving beyond his early, angerdriven prose into a kind of mythopoetic writing style,
which has come stridently into focus with The
Toughest Indian in the World.
Concurrently, Alexiethough he describes himself as
an introverthas purposefully developed a fasttalking, highly entertaining onstage comic persona. At
public appearances, he embarks on quick-witted
monologues, taking serious aim at pretty much every
race he can, but reserving a disproportionate amount
of attention for what he calls crazy white people. He
gleefully targets New Age white women who come
floating onto the reservation healing everything in
their path and jokes about white people who expect
him to read coyote stories, speak in a slow monotone
and stare off into the distance as if constantly
receiving visions.
Alexie memorizes his own stories and then acts them
out, improvising new lines along the way, making the
reading into a kind of free-form Beat performance. He
has developed this side of his work, he says,
specifically to further his career and in part because he
was often turned off by writers who appeared live and
read their work, no matter how brilliant, with a
monotone delivery. I care about my writing so much,
and Im so involved in it and so emotionally connected
to it, and I want that passion, that caring, that hatred
of it, that incredible relationship I have with my own
work, I want people to know about that, he says. I
want them to feel it when Im up in front of them
talking about what I do.
Its all undertaken to accomplish one central goal, he
says, and that is to get his books read by twelve-yearold reservation kids, who, like him, grew up either
with heroes who had been created by the white media

or no heroes at all. In order for the Indian kid to read

me, Alexie says, pop culture is where I should be.
Literary fiction is very elitist. The fifteen or twenty
thousand literary-book buyers in this country, Im very
happy for them, and Im happy they buy my books, by
and large. But there is a whole other population out
there I want to reach. And so for me, what kind of art
can I create that gets to them? I dont want to have an
elitist career. Ive won awards, Ive gotten a lot of
attention, Ive been in The New Yorker, Im very happy
with all that. Im very proud. But I would consider
myself a failure if more people didnt read me. Id
rather be accessible than win a MacArthur.
With the success, of course, its become harder and
harder for Sherman Alexie to live up to the image the
public has of him as the toughest Indian writer in the
world. Both whites and Indians come at him with
expectations. He butts up against these expectations
and complains about them vociferously, at the same
time using them to his advantage. There have been few
Indian writers with the kind of mainstream ambitions
as Alexie, and hes the first to admit that he has
worked the Indian angle for all its worth. Its a really
crowded world out there, and everybody is clamoring
for attention and you use what youve got, he says.
And what Ive got that makes me original is that Im a
rez boy.
***
Alexies father is Coeur dAlene Indian, and his mother
is Spokane Indian. One of six siblings, he was born
October 7, 1966, in the tiny reservation town of
Wellpinit. Soon after his birth, he was diagnosed with
hydrocephalus, a condition in which expanding cranial
fluid puts too much pressure on the brain. At six
months old, Alexie underwent drastic surgery. The
doctors told his parents that if he survived at all, which
was doubtful, he would most likely be mentally
handicapped. As a result of the surgery, he dealt with
seizures and uncontrollable bed-wetting late into
childhood, eventually becoming what he describes as a
math geek who played Dungeons and Dragons by
himself in the basement. He was smart and tall,
though, so he went to Reardan, a white high school,
where he played on the basketball team and was the
only real Indian on the Reardan Indians. He went on
to college at Washington State University in Pullman
and, after taking a writing class, gave up his pre-med
plans.
On May 15, Alexie returned to Aunties Bookstore in
Spokane, the place he had gone to buy books and
games as a child. This time he was there to give a
reading, and he read the story Dear John Wayne
from his new book. In the third row sat his mother and
father, two brothers, two sisters and two nieces. There
were people he had known from all periods of his life,
childhood, college and adulthood in Seattle. There was
the woman who worked at the Safeway near his

196

crummy apartment in college, whom he would see

every day when he went to the grocery store, counting
his pennies along the way, to buy something to eat.
Seeing her was a symbolic moment, he says. I had this
big crush on her, and I never told her. Now I can tell
her.
In other words, Alexie has arrived. There were five
hundred people at that reading, and another couple of
hundred had to be turned away. Success kills some
pop stars, but its bringing Alexie to lifein some
ways, making him larger than life.
The success of Smoke Signals certainly helped.
Cobbled together from situations and characters first
developed in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heavenprimarily from the story This is What It
Means to Say Phoenix, Arizonait is a road-trip
movie about Northwest Indians Victor Joseph and
Thomas Builds-A-Fire, who drive to the Southwest to
take possession of the ashes of Victors dead father.
Alexie wrote the screenplay and produced the movie,
which was picked up by Miramax after winning the
Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy at the
1998 Sundance Film Festival. It became the first
Indian-produced, Indian-directed, Indian-written
feature film ever distributed in the United States. And
as Alexie likes to point out, The Indians werent
played by Italians with long hair.
It also showed Alexie the cultural power of film,
something he never experienced with his books, and
that gave him his biggest taste yet of the pop-culture
presence he desires. Thomas Builds-a-Fire, the
character, has become a huge cultural character in the
Indian world, Alexie says. I get photographs of
Indian kids who dressed as him for Halloween. His
lines in the movie have become pop-cultural phrases.
In the Indian world, we just dont have that. Our
heroes have always been guys with guns. And now, to
have this cultural hero who is this androgynous little
storytelling bookworm geekI think thats wonderful.
His fiction has since become bigger, more daring,
more surreal. He now traffics in huge metaphors and
characters that engage in strange, archetypal and at
times wildly desperate bids for intimacy or a sense of
personal context. As such, The Toughest Indian in the
World has elicited wildly divergent appraisals. While
The New Yorker has given it a kind of ueberblessing
by running two of the books stories in the past year,
The New York Times panned it. Publishers Weekly
gave it a starred review, stating Alexies stories
continually surprise, revealing him once again as a
master of his craft. But others have accused him of
fashioning those same surprises just for effect.

that Seymour nicknames Salmon Boy. They kiss in the

front seat of a 1965 Chevrolet Malibu on their way to a
McDonalds in Tucson, Arizona. In Alexies preceding
work, the novel Indian Killer, there was no kissing
going on between Indians and white guys. There
wasnt even any handshaking. An Indian guy was
mutilating white guys with a knife and leaving owl
feathers on their bodies.
Seymour and Salmon Boy meet when Seymour
attempts to rob a pancake house, Pulp Fiction-style.
He takes $42 in change from the customers and then
says he needs someone to go with him to Arizona,
someone who will fall in love with him along the way.
Salmon Boy is the only volunteer.
Are you gay? Seymour asks. Im not gay.
No sir, I am not a homosexual, Salmon Boy says. I
am not a homosexual, but I do believe in the power of
love.
Alexie carries out the story, as he carries out all of the
stories in the book, with his own brand of magic
realism, as if these werent modern short stories at all,
but indigenous folk tales that have been passed down
through the ages. He mixes mythic references to
salmon and constellations with the tragedies and
foibles of real Indian life, with all of its juxtapositions,
misunderstandings and occasional victories. He
weaves in and out of Indian stereotypes, setting them
up, teasing the reader with them, destroying them, and
then being courageous enough to refer back to them
again, as if, within the weave of what is thought to be
true of pre-colonial Indians and what you see of
todays Indians, lies the ultimate truth. Its a trickster
sleight of hand that messes with reality and allows
Alexie to get away with stories that feel purposefully
timeless.
***
Alexie does a lot of his writing at 3 a.m. at the
International House of Pancakes in the university
district of Seattle, close to his office and not too far
from his home, where he lives with his wife, Diane, a
college counselor and Hidatsa Indian, and their fiveyear-old son. He has been an insomniac since he was a
child. In those days, he would play games. Now, when
hes up late, he writes. When hes not traveling, his
Seattle life is quiethe is limited to the writing he does
during the day, at an office shared with an assistant he
has known since college. He spends time with his
family in the evenings and meets up with his buddies
for basketball every Tuesday after work.

He says all of his stories are born out of a central

image that expands as he writes, and the image for
Seymour and Salmon Boy came one night at the IHOP.
An Indian and a white guy walked in together, and
they were obviously great friends, he recalls. They
197

In Toughest Indian, there is a road-trip story, South

by Southwest, similar in many key ways to Smoke
Signals, but Victor and Thomas have been replaced by
a nutty white guy named Seymour and a fat Indian

were laughing and a little intoxicated and not sloppy

or obnoxious, just having a great time. And they
looked so sweet together. They werent lovers, there
was none of that energy, but they seemed so close and
so intimate with each other that it was really
touching.
Homosexuality informs many of the stories in The
Toughest Indian in the World. The title story is about
an Indian journalist who picks up an Indian boxer
hitchhiking. The tired, conflicted writer is in awe of
what he perceives as the fighters mythic purity. Youd
have been a warrior in the old days, enit? the
journalist says. You wouldve been a killer. You
wouldve stole everybodys horses. The story
explodes, though, when they share a hotel room and,
late at night, the fighterwho, it turns out, is gay
climbs into the writers bed and coaxes the journalist
into a new experience.
Im becoming more urban and also spending more
and more time in the art world, which, you know, is
heavily populated by homosexuals, Alexie says. So
simply, my experiences have grown, so the characters
represented in my fiction will grow accordingly. And
one of the things, one of the hatreds that bothers me
the most is homophobia. So in some sense I wanted to
use my fiction as a way of addressing that directly. And
celebrating [homosexuality] in all of its forms. And
including it as just another aspect of love.
Love? From the guy who still talks about his fantasies
of killing the white guys who sat in the back row of his
high-school classes? A couple of the reviews found the
story cynical or a parody. And I meant it to be a very
sweet story, he says. I was trying to do that. It is
certainly difficult for anybody to love anybody, but we
usually do OK. These arent happy stories necessarily.
But I think they are positive stories.
If this isnt the kind of thing one would expect from
Alexie, well, hes fine with that. I always want to be a
moving target, he says.
That quality may stem from a certain sense of personal
protectionism. In the crowd at Aunties Bookstore, a
lot of his old acquaintances from the reservation were
on hand, and some were most decidedly not
supporters of his work. Alexie has been dogged
throughout his career by accusations from those at the
reservation who say that he is selling them up the
river, misrepresenting reservation life for his own
gain, embarrassing them. The word that keeps
coming back is responsibility, Alexie says. They ask
me to represent them, until the point where Im not an
artist. Im a politician, or not even that, a
propagandist. Im supposed to be making publicservice announcements, rather than creating art. And I
hate that. That kind of pressure is terrible.

At one point after his reading, a reservation Indian

woman approached the microphone in the crowd.
Alexie said later he had been estranged from her since
age nine. Old long feuds over old long things, he
said. The woman asked why, instead of shooting
fictional narrative film like Smoke Signals, he didnt
film a documentary about the reservation, so that the
American public could see how it really is.
A few minutes later, a white man approached the mike
and asked, Do you hate white people?
These questions follow Alexie wherever he goes. And
hes not going to escape them, because what they both
spring from informs who he has made himself to be
an Indian writer. It is both his reason to write and
what he battles most strongly against. Every single one
of the stories in his new book is about Indians and
whites trying to overcome the stereotypes of who and
what they are supposed to be. And thats Alexies own
challenge these days.
On his book jackets in the past, Alexie has worn the
same stoic too-cool-for-school Indian mask that he
himself makes fun of. He calls it the ethnic stare. On
his new book, though, we see a man without the mask.
He wears a look of concern, but also of gentleness,
vulnerability and, ultimately, pride. It was taken by
Rex Rystedt, the same Seattle photographer who took
the Cobain portrait on his wall. One looks at the image
and wonders, Is this the introvert? Or the guy who
becomes the Indian Richard Pryor on stage? The
insomniac scratching out verse at 3 a.m. in the Seattle
IHOP? Or the screenwriter who takes lunch at Sunset
Strip cafes? The poor rez boy who enjoys the power
and privilege he once railed against? The guy who
started as a outsider poet? Or the one who now wants
to be a mainstream pop-culture icon? A man who may
not be telling the whole truth about the modern
American Indian but is at least telling his own?
Sherman Alexie defied expectations from his first
breath. Now, he does it for the American literary world
and, increasingly, the American public, as well.
Book Magazine, July/August 2000

On Sherman Alexie
Kenneth Lincoln

With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal

questions out the smokehole (as in resistance to other
modern verse innovators, Whitman, Williams, Sexton,
or the Beats). Parodic antiformalism may account for
some of Alexies mass maverick appeal. This Indian
gadfly jumps through all the hoops, sonnet, to
villanelle, to heroic couplet, all tongue-in-cheeky. Im
sorry, but Ive met thousands of Indians, he told
198

Indian Artist magazine, Spring 1998, and I have yet to

know of anyone who has stood on a mountain waiting
for a sign. A reader enters the land of MTV and
renascent AIM: a cartoon Pocahontas meets Beavis
and Butt-head at the forests edge, Sitting Bull takes on
Arnold Schwarzenegger at Wounded Knee 73. The
Last Real Indian has a few last words.
A stand-up comedian, the Indian improvisator is the
performing text, obviating too close a textual reading:
youngish man, six-foot-two or so, born in 1966 at the
height of hippie nativism, from Wellpinit, Washington,
now living in Seattle and taking the fin de siecle
literary world by storm (an Indian Oscar Wilde?).
After a century of benign neglect, Indian literature has
hit an inflationary spiral with six-figure book deals and
million-dollar movies. New York publishers have been
humping this sassy, talk-back satirist as the last
essentialist hold-out, a commercially successful Crazy
Horse of mass marketing. The most prodigious
Native American writer to date, Alexie told a Chicago
Sun reporter asking about his brassy novel, Indian
Killer, October 1996, to which the reporter queried,
Indian dujour? Our young hero replied, If so, its
been a very long day. How about Indian du decade?
Millennial Indian extraordinaire? The reporter raised
the controversy over Granta naming Alexie one of the
twenty Best Young American Novelists for
Reservation Blues (not a novel), and Sherman
snapped: To say I was on the list because Im an
Indian is ridiculous: Im one of the most critically
respected writers in the country. So the Granta critics .
. . essentially, fuck em (October 31, 1996, New Citys
Literary Supplement). Starting with Native American
writers, Alexies competition includes no less than
Allen, Erdrich, Harjo, Hogan, Momaday, Ortiz, Silko,
TallMountain, Tapahonso, Welch, and Whiteman,
among others (not to mention non-Indians like Toni
Morrison, Norman Mailer, Cormac McCarthy, or Rita
Dove). If most critically respected in a specific
fictional genre of Indian Killer (thriller violence with
racial undertones), his closest rivals are Tony
Hillerman, Gerald Vizenor, Mickey Spillane, and
Stephen King, an acknowledged model, John
Steinbeck and the Brady Bunch tossed in. Hes
young, says my elder brother back home, hell ripen,
given time.
A breed Spokane and Coeur dAlene, not just anybody,
but thirteen-sixteenths blood, according to his poetry:
I write about the kind of Indian I am: kind of mixed
up, kind of odd, not traditional. Im a rez kid whos
gone urban (Indian Artist). What kind of an Indian is
this?a photogenic black mane of hair, dark-framed
bifocal glasses, high-school class president, bookworm
nose broken six times by bullies (he reminisces),
English lit college degree from Eastern Washington
State (after passing out as a pre-med student in his
anatomy class, twice). His work is wizened with poetic
anger, ribald love, and whipsaw humor. The crazyheart bear is dancing comically, riding a wobbly
unicycle, tossing overripe tomatoes at his audience.

This late in the 2Oth century, the poet says in Red

Blues, we still make the unknown ours by destroying
it. His firecat imagination plays tricks on the reader,
for our supposed good, for its own native delight and
survival. You almost / believe every Indian is an
Indian, the poet swears to MarIon Brando.
Sherman: not So much a rhymer in the old sense, as a
circus juggler Who can eat apples, he says, while
juggling. A college graduate who played basketball
sixteen hours a day to keep from boozing with his
cronies: Seymour chugging beer as a poet writes
poetry (up to the last one that kills you) and Lester
dead drunk in the convenience store dumpster.
Alexies sister and brother-in-law, passed out in a
trailer, died by fire when a window curtain blew
against a hot plate.
The boy mimed everyone in his family and still wont
Stop talking. I was a divisive presence on the
reservation when I was seven, he told an LA Times
reporter, December 17, 1996. I was a weird, eccentric,
very arrogant little boy. The writing doesnt change
anybodys opinion of me. Promoting his new movie,
Smoke Signals (coproduced with Cheyenne-Arapaho
director Chris Eyre), the writer describes himself today
as mouthy, opinionated and arrogant, a court jesters
cross of Caliban, Groucho Marx, and Lears Fool, but
underneath, Im a sweetheart (Denver Post, October
20, 1997). Hes the best native example yet of Lewis
Hydes wiley hinge-maker, Trickster, the infant Prince
of Thieves, Hermes stealing into Olympus to claim
legitimacy: Wandering aimlessly, stupider than the
animals, he is at once the bungling host and the agile
parasite; he has no way of his own but he is the Great
Imitator who adopts the many ways of those around
him. Unconstrained by instinct, he is the author of
endlessly creative and novel deceptions, from hidden
hooks to tracks that are impossible to read.
Artistic grist and ironic survival are inseparable in this
verse, tracing a short lifetime of basketball (a team
captain ball hog in high school), beer, TV, rez cars
falling apart, pony dreams, fetal alcohol syndrome
(FAS) babies, and fancy-dancing drunks. You call it
genocide; I call it economics, Custer snorts. A warmup for fiction and the movies, poetics are wrapped up
in the politics of native poverty , torqued metrics, and
ethnic protest: dime store Indin princesses and backalley vision questers, 7-11 heroes and Vietnam vets,
Marlon Brando and Crazy Horse. No insurance CEO or
village doctor, Alexie has the near fatal, comic bravado
of surviving an everyday rez, where every day is a blow
to the stomach and a blaze of understanding. Being
Indian means youre hanging on for dear life, hanging
in there with catastrophic humor, kicking back at
sunset, staggering through the 49 to dawn, laughing
your ass off and on again (the short fiction says), and
accepting that bottom line of your neighbors butt next
to you, misplaced, displaced, re-relocated into the
present Red reality, so real that it hurts. So unreal in
its hurtful beauty, so surreal that it makes you blink

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and smile to see another dawn. How do you explain

the survival of all of us who were never meant to
survive? Its a long walk from Sitting Bull bearing
hard times to Charlie Blackbird surviving. Alexie
takes to Internet chat rooms for essential defenses of
native sovereignty and intercultural access to America
s power structures, particularly publishing and the
movies.
So, from Momadays visionary form, through Welchs
shamanic rhythm, heres a surreal trickster savage in
two-dimensional poetic cartoon. Rather than close
reading or parsing the lines, his work elicits charged
reaction, critical gut response, positive or negative
argument. Reading Alexies work triggers a recoil from
the shock of Indian reality, like looking into the Sun
Dance sun, going blind, and slowly regaining sight,
stars and blackspots and sunbursts floating across the
field of perception, so you know its your perception,
anyway, at last, of reality: whiskey salmon absence,
the poem Citizen Kane ends. Firewater, relocation,
vanishing American. The images, concretely charged
as Pounds Vorticist objects, are loaded in
disconnections: the poison where food swarms,
desperate homing, the absence that starves Indians to
death. Rosebud is not a childs movie sled but a
desperately poor Sioux reservation in the Dakotas.
But, I mean, I really love movies. I always have,
Alexie said in Making Smoke (Aboriginal Voices
May-June 1998). I love movies more than I love
books, and believe me, I love books more than I love
every human being, except the dozen or so people in
my life who love movies and books just as much as I
do. His favorite films are Midnight Cowboy, The
Graduate, and Aliens. The writer goes on, I mean,
screenplays are more like poetry than like fiction.
Screenplays rely on imagery to carry the narrative,
rather than the other way around. And screenplays
have form. Like sonnets, actually. Just as theres [sic]
expectations of form, meter, and rhyme in a sonnet,
there are the same kinds of expectations for
screenplays. There are two dimensions in Alexies
work, screenplay to verse, often no more than two
characters in the short fiction, The Lone Ranger and
Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His work is mostly
minimalist drama, back to the first Greek plays, alazon
to eiron, dreamer to realist, fool to cynic. Toss in
commedia dellarte, Punch and Judy, Laurel and
Hardy, Amos and Andy, Lewis and Martin, Red Ryder
and Little Beaver. The embedded third dimension of
this post-holocaustal comedy is cultural landscape, for
lack of a better term, devastated native homestead. So
a third character might be salvage-surrealist, Old Man
absent and implied, as with Welchs winter-in-theblood Napi. The third- dimensional axis then is Indin
humor, a vanishing point of survival in the canvas of a
hidden spirit world, including Trickster mimics, all
around and behind us. Alexie takes Welchs foxy
shaman a skitter-step forward to tease Mary Austin:
Sweetheart, history / doesnt always look like horses.

Poetry comes on not so much a text as a comic ruse, a

razored one-liner, a readers riff to wake up America.
The world is Indian as a coyote magician who makes
every ordinary day a trick of survival, a vanishing act, a
raw joke. A readers breath catches in the throat and
comes out laughing strange, still . . . a breath it is, of
life. It gets you going, brothers and sisters, a buzzing,
rattling, weeping, yipping imagination. Cry so hard
you begin to laugh: run so fast you lap your shadow:
dream so hard you cant sleep: think so hard you
startle awake like a child. Maia gave birth to a wily
boy, the Homeric hymn begins, flattering and
cunning, a robber and cattle thief, a bringer of dreams,
awake all night, waiting by the gates of the city
Hermes, who was soon to earn himself quite a
reputation among the gods, who do not die. Crossing
Ginsberg with Creeley, Hughess Crow with
Berryrnans Mistah Bones, Alexie brews a homeboy
devils own humor. The voice makes junkyard poetry
out of broke-down reality, vision out of delirium
tremens, prayer out of laughter. When my father first
smiled, the poet recalls, it scared the shit out of
me. . . .
Indin vaudeville, then, stand-up comedy on the edge
of despair; A late-twentieth-century, quasi-visionary
clown tells the truth that hurts and heals in one-liners
cheesy as the Marx Brothers, trenchant as Lenny
Bruce, tricky as Charlie Hills BIA Halloween Trick or
Treaty. The, stand-up poet marvels in dismay,
Imagine Coyote accepts / the Oscar for lifetime
achievement. Theres an old trickster-teacher role
here in a young Indians hands-jokes draw the line, cut
to the quick, sling the bull, open the talk. White Men
Cant Drum, Alexie announced in Esquire Magazine,
October 1992, roasting the new-age mens movement,
all the Wannabe fuss and fustian.
How do you explain the survival of all of us who were
never meant to survive? asks the verse straight man.
There is nothing we cannot survive, the poet swears.
Surviving war is the premise. In The Summer of Black
Widows (1996), Alexies sixth poetry collection in as
many years (composing by computer), Father and
Farther (also performed on the rock cassette,
Reservation Blues) recalls a drunken basketball coach
and a losing team. Listen, his father slurs, I was a
paratrooper in the war.
Which war? the boy-poet asks.
All of them, he said. Quincentennial facts: Native
Americans as a composite are the only in-country
ethnic group that the U.S. has declared war against,
1860-1890. Some existing 560 reservations, 315 in the
lower forty-eight states, are natively seen from inside
as occupied POW camps. Think of it as the delayed
stress of contemporary Indian America: the posttraumatic shock of surviving Columbus to Cotton
Mather, Buffalo Bill Cody to Andy Jackson, Chivington
to Custer. Goddamn, the general says, again and

200

again, saber is a beautiful word, in ironic cut against

Audens penchant for scissors. World War I Indian
volunteers, as cited, gained Native Americans dual
citizenship in 1924. Code Talkers in World War II
made natives national heroes. Korea, Vietnam, and
Desert Storm s chemical poisoning brought tribal
veterans into millennial terror.
In 1993, the UCI.A American Indian Studies Center
published Old Shins & New Skins as no. 9 in the
Native American Poetry Series. Old shirts, not stuffed
new suits: new skins, Redskins reborn, sloughing
old skins. There are always two sides to things,
bicultural ironies to new-age lies, & the blessed
ampersand, hip shorthand to a coded new tongue, the
with-it Indin poet. Theres no text set here as such,
but more a radical riff, something spilled over, a virus,
a toxin released, a metastasizing anger. Its a
reservation of my mind, the poet says. The opening
epithet equates, Anger x Imagination = poetry, in the
amplitude & invention of the angry young Indian. One
shot short of death, Seymour says, drink as you write
free verse, no matter if our failures are spectacular.
Maverick Trixter talks back, makes a different kind of
poetry for people with differences: it was not written
for the white literary establishment, Adrian Louis
says in the foreword to Old Skins & New Shins.
A double buckskin language frays the edges of
bicultural America, questions the multiple meanings
of reservation, red, risk, Cody & Crazy Horse, Marlon
Brando & John Wayne, Christ & Custer, who died for
your sins. The critic is left with notes to bumpersticker poetics, insult & antagonism, the fractious
come-hither. Poetry as disruptive tease, a sideshow of
historical truth & poetic hyperbole. Or, to borrow from
the social sciences, privileged license: tribal teasing
tests boundaries, deepens resilience, insures survival,
bets on renewal. Not without the warrior history of
Old English insults, flytyngs, hurled across a river a
thousand years ago in The Battle ofMaldon. LA
South Central Blacks doin the dozens, Yer granmother
wears combat boots! The Last Poets in Harlem chant,
Niggers like to fuck each other. . . . El Paso Hispanics
drive slow n low riders. Inventories of abuses,
imagined & otherwise: hunger of imagination, poverty
of memory, toxicity of history, all in the face of cultural
genocide and racial misrepresentation and out-right
extermination, to challenge musty stereotypes of
vanishing, savage, stoic, silent, shamanic, stuperous
Indians. Poetry is never bread enough & doesnt pay
the bills, damned from beginning to end, Williams
says. Who could quibble aesthetics in this setting?

marginalized, dispossessed, discriminated, hipster,

homosexual, Jewish, offbeat antihero. Its an old
revolutionary American motif, the lost found, the last
first, the underdog bites back. Sylvia Plaths rage and
exhibitionist daring to die for us as Lady Lazarus: Out
of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like
air. Ted Roethkes lost-son, lyric blues: Thrumthrum, who can be equal to ease? / Ive seen my
fathers face before / Deep in the belly of a thing to be.
John Berrymans brilliant mad comic pain: These
songs were not meant to be understood, you
understand, / They were meant to terrify & comfort. /
Lilac was found in his hand.
A kind of Indian antipoetry breaks form at the
millennial end. Alexie pushes against formalist
assumptions of what poetry ought to be, knocks down
aesthetic barriers set up in xenophobic academic
corridors, and rebounds as cultural performance. He
can play technique with mock sonnet, breezy villanelle,
unheroic couplet, tinkling tercet, quaky quatrain in
any-beat lines. The rhymer trades on surreal images
and throwaway metaphors in a drunken villanelle:
Trail of Tears . . . trail of beers. The rush of his poems
is an energy released, stampeding horses, raging fires,
stomping shoes: the poet as fast & loose sharpster in
accretive repetition. Alexie likes catalogues, anaphoral
first-word repetitions, the accumulative power of oral
traditions. There is something freeing about all this
free to imagine, to improvise, to make things up, to
wonder, to rage on. Sharpening wits on quick wit, his
poetry runs free of restrictive ideas about Indians,
poems, ponies, movies, shoes, dreams, dumpsters,
reservations, angers, losses. His lines break free of
precious art . . . but free for what, that matters? Do we
care? the hard questions come tumbling. Do we
remember, or listen closely, or think carefully, or
wonder fully, or regard deeply enough?
Readers certainly learn about New Rez Indins who
shoot hoop, stroke pool, fancy dance, drink beer, snag
girls, hustle, hitch, rap, joke, cry, rhyme, dream, write
everything down. These Computer Rad Skins write
verse that does not stay contained in formal repose:
does not pull away, or shimmer in the night sky, or
intimidate the common reader, but comes on full as a
poetry that begs visceral response. Often cartoonish, a
gag, a point-of-view gimmick, more like Virtual
lndian. There is no possible way to sell your soul for
poetry, Alexie said in LA (December 17, 1996),
because nobodys offering. The devil doesnt care
about poetry. No one wants to make a movie out of a
poem. This trickster has made one movie, as
mentioned, and cast another from Indian Killer.

money is free if you re poor enough

Are there any connections with canonical American
poetry? Start with Langston Hughess essentialist
pride in the Harlem Renaissance, I, too, sing
America, not just Walt Whitman fingering leaves of
grass, or Carl Sandburg shouldering Chicago. Allen
Ginsberg howled his native place in the 1950s: the

Call it a reactive aesthetics, kinetic pop art, protest

poetics to involve and challenge late-century readers
cajoled, battered, insulted, entertained, humored,
angered to respond. A poetry that gets us up off our
easy chairs. Tribal jive, that is, streetsmart, populist,
ethnocentric, edged, opinionated, disturbed, fired up
as reservation graffiti, a la John Trudells Venice,

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California, rock lyrics, a Cherokee-breed Elvis as Baby

Boom Che. Alexie joins the brash, frontier
braggadocio of westering America, already out west a
long time, ironically, a tradition in itself, shared with
Whitman, Lawrence, Stein, Mailer, Kesey, Kerouac,
Ginsberg, Vonnegut, Bellow, Heinemann, Mamet.
Huckster, con man, carny barker, stand-up comedian,
Will Rogers to Jonathan Winters, Cheech & Chong to
Charlie Hill. The impudence of the anti-poetic Red
Rapster, daring us not to call this poetry. Im not a
rapper, Russell Means crows of his punk album,
Electric Warrior, Im a Rapaho!
Youll almost / believe every Indian is an Indian,
Alexie carries on.
Frybread . . . Snakes . . . Forgiveness
Excerpted from a longer essay, Futuristic Hip Indian:
Alexie. From Sing With the Heart of a Bear: Fusions
of
Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Copyright 2000 by The
Board of Regents of the
University of California.
General Commentary by Sherman Alexie

Alexie on his poetic inspiration

[Alex Kuos poetry workshop] was the first place I
ever
read
contemporary
poems,
especially
contemporary American Indian poems. And I read one
poem in particular that was revolutionary and
revelatory. The line was, Im in the resrvation of my
mind. It was by Adrian Louis, a Paiute Indian poet.
For me, that was like, In the beginning . . . It was ,
Because I could not stop for death, death kindly
stopped for me . . . It was I sing the body electric . . .
It was all that and more. It was the first line I ever read
in any work, any fiction anywhere that ever applied to
something I knew. Literally, it was this flash of
lightning, roll of thunder, Bert Parks parking, Bob
Barker barking, where I understood everything that I
ever wanted to be. At that moment. When I read that
line. It was really like that, like a light switch. And at
that moment I knew I wanted to be a writer.
from Bob Ivry, From the Reservation of His Mind.
Bergen Record 28 June 1998.
http://www.bergen.com/yourtime/ytsmoke19980628
2.htm
Alexie on
Highway]

Poetry

[Interview

with

only class that fit where the human anatomy class had
been was a poetry writing workshop. I always liked
poetry. Id never heard of, or nobodyd ever showed
me, a book written by a First Nations person, ever. I
got into the class, and my professor, Alex K[u]o, gave
me an anthology of contemporary Native American
poetry called Songs From This Earth on Turtles Back.
I opened it up and--oh my gosh--I saw my life in
poems and stories for the very first time.
(T.H.) Who were some of the writers in the book?
(S.A.) Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, James
Welch, Adrian Lewis. There were poems about
reservation life: fry bread, bannock, 49s, fried
baloney, government food and terrible housing. But
there was also joy and happiness. Theres a line by a
Paiute poet named Adrian Lewis that says, Oh, Uncle
Adrian, Im in the reservation of my mind. I thought,
Oh my God, somebody understand me!: At that
moment I realized, I can do this! Thats when I
started writing--in 1989.
(T.H.) The poetry that you would have studied in
American Studies, for instance, the poetry of Wallace
Stevens or e.e. cummings or Emily Dickinson never
influenced you at all?
(S.A.) Of course it did. I loved that stuff. I still love it.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two of my
favorites. Wallace Stevens leaves me kind of dry, but
the other poets, theyre still a primary influence. I
always tell people my literary influences are Stephen
King, John Steinbeck, and my mother, my grandfather
and the Brady Bunch.
(T.H.) Then you moved on to short stories.
(S.A.) Id written a couple of them in college. After my
first book of poems, The Business of Fancy Dancing,
was published by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn,
New York, I got a great New York Times book review.
The review called me one of the major lyric voices of
our time. I was a 25-year old Spokane Indian guy
working as a secretary at a high school exchange
program in Spokane, Washington when my poetry
editor faxed that review to me. I pulled it out of the fax
machine beside my desk and read, ...one of the major
lyric voices of our time. I thought, Great! Where do I
go from here!? After that, the agents started calling
me.
(T.H.) Where did the book of poetry come from?

Thomson

(S.A.) I started writing because I kept fainting in

human anatomy class and needed a career change. The

(S.A.) It was my first semester poetry manuscript. Part

of the assignment was to submit to literary magazines.
The one I liked in the Washington State library was
Hanging Loose magazine. I liked that it started the
same year I was born. The magazine, the press and I
are the same age. Over the next year and a half they
kept taking poems of mine to publish. Then they asked
if I had a manuscript. I said, Yes! and sent it in.

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It was a thousand copies. I figured Id sell a hundred

and fifty to my family. My mom would buy a hundred
herself and that would be about it. But, it took off. I
never expected it. Sometimes I think it would have
been nicer if it had not been as big, because my career
has been a rocket ride. Theres a lot of pressure.
from Thomson Highway, Spokane Words: An
Interview with Sherman Alexie
http://jupiter.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~krkvls/salexie.html

Alexie on Heroes
Ive always been picky about heroes. Like most
American males, Ive always admired athletes,
particularly basketball players. I admired Julius
Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar not only for their
athletic abilities, but for who they seemed to be off the
court. They seemed to be spiritual, compassionate, and
gracious people. Neither has done nor said anything
over the years to contradict my image of them.
Unlike many American males, I always admired
writers as much as I admired athletes. I loved books
and the people who wrote books. John Steinbeck was
one of my earliest heroes because he wrote about the
poor. Stephen King became a hero because he wrote so
well of misfit kids, the nerds and geeks. Growing up on
my reservation, I was a poor geek, so I had obvious
reasons to love Steinbeck and King. I still love their
novels, but I have no idea if they were/are spiritual,
compassionate, and gracious men. There is so much
spirit, compassion, and grace in their work, I want to
assume that Steinbeck and King were/are good people.
I would be terribly disappointed to find out
otherwise. . . .
Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is
rare and underrated. I think my writing is somehow
just about decency. Still, if I was keeping score, and I
like to keep score, I would say the villains in the world
are way ahead of the heroes. I hope my writing can
help even the score.

and brother-in-law. In his most recent collection of

poetry, The Summer of Black Widows (Hanging Loose
Press, 1996), one section is entitles Sister Fire,
Brother Smoke. . . .
When asked why he made the switch from poetry to
prose, from short stories to novels, from writing to
film, Alexie immediately responds with two answers:
sales and access. Novels and film pay the bills better
than poetry, and with the broader sales he can get his
work out to more people, particularly Indian youth. . . .
As I have been working with the film, Alexie says,
Ive come to realize sitting in a movie theater is the
contemporary equivalent of sitting around the fire
listening to a storyteller. . . . And because of this,
Indian peoples, all peoples, will respond more
powerfully to movies than to books. . . .
Another of Alexies concerns is that Indian literatures
are erroneously assumed by non-Indian readers to
represent social and historical realities in ways that
other readers do not. When readers expectations take
an anthropological turn, writers are put in the
awkward position of being expected to represent their
tribes, communities, and Native America. Most of us
[Indian writers] are outcasts, Alexie says. We dont
really fit within the Indian community, so we write to
try to fit in and sound Indian. So its ironic that we
become spokespeople for Indian country, that we are
supposed to be representative of our tribes. . . .
What does Alexie want to see within the ranks of
Indian writers? I want us to write about the way we
live. He wants Indian writers to write from their own
lived experiences, not some nostalgic and
romanticized notion of what it means to be Indian.
When I see words like the Creator, Father Sky,
Mother Earth, Four Legends, I almost feel like were
colonizing ourselves. These words, this is how were
supposed to talkwhat it means to be Indian in white
America. But its not who we really are; its not what it
means to be Navajo or Spokane or Cour dAlene.
from Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez, Fancy Dancer: A
Profile of Sherman Alexie. Poets and Writers
January/February 1999: 54-59.

from Laura Baratto, On Tour: Writers on the Road

with New Books. Hungry Mind Review Summer 1995:
22.
http://www.bookwire.com/hmr/Review/htour.html

Alexie on
the Responsibilities of Native writers

Alexie on Indian Literature

Reflecting oral storytelling traditions, in which
repetition exists not for memorization but to deepen
meaning with each iteration, Alexies writing returns
to certain themes, such as the fire that killed his sister

EK: Would you speak to what you see as our

responsibility is as Native Writers? Do you see that
responsibility restricting/constricting certain avenues
of creativity?
SA: We do have a cultural responsibility above and
beyond what other people do, more than other ethnic

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group, simply because we are so misrepresented and

misunderstood and appropriated. We have a serious
responsibility to tell the truth. And to act as . . . role
models. We are more than just writers. We are
storytellers. We are spokespeople, We are cultural
ambassadors. We are politicians. We are activists. We
are all of these simply by nature of what we do,
without even wanting to be. So were not like these
other writers who can just pick up and choose their
expressions. Theyve chosen for us , and we have to be
aware of that. I also think that we have a responsibility
to live up to our words. As Native writers, we certainly
talk the talk about the things that everybody should
do, but if youre going to write about racism, I dont
think you should be a racist.
If youre going to write about sexism and exploitation,
then I dont think you should be a sleeping around. If
youre going to write about violence and colonialism,
then I dont think you should be doing it to your own
family. So, I think we have a serious responsibility as
Native writers to live traditionally in a contemporary
world. And I dont think that a lot of us do.
EK: What do you think prevents us from doing that?
SA: A lot of it is our own dysfunctions. While we may
have more responsibilities because of what we do, that
does not automatically make us healthy. Part of the
danger in being an artist of whatever color is that you
fall in love with your wrinkles. The danger is that if
you fall in love with your wrinkles then you dont want
to get rid of them. You start to glorify them and
perpetuate them. If you write about pain, you can end
up searching for more pain to write about, that kind of
thing; that self-destructive route. We need to get away
from that. We can write about pain and anger without
having it consume us, and we have to learn how to do
that in our lives as individuals before we can start
doing that as writers.
from E. K. Caldwell, Interview: Sherman Alexie.

Selected Critical Excerpts on

Sherman Alexie

Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez

Alexies poems and stories in First Indian on the Moon
embrace both discursive and conversive styles in a
conjunction
that
is
inevitably
disjunctive,
disconcerting, and effective in communicating his
worlds and words. Alexie . . . writes in a powerful voice
that speaks of the realities of worlds that continually
push each other to the point of discursive and actual
implosion. Whether the results are burning cars, a
trailer fire, alcoholism, domestic or racial violence,
smallpox blankets, broken treaties, or human
alienation, the process is always the same: The clash of
worlds that rarely gives more than temporary (and in
fact illusory) respite from the unfulfilled dreams and
lived pain that is on either side of the divide. . . .
Throughout Alexies writing, he displays a critically
discursive stance against virtually anyone and
anything. This is an equal opportunity anger that
perceives both the weaknesses and failures of both
Indian and white worlds. . . . Alexie lives and writes on
the interstices between the divergent stories of both
worlds, what he refers to as the in-between / between
tipi and HUD house / between magic and loss (43). . .
.
And yet, the interstice is not only a place of pain and
anguish, but also a place in which lives are born and
lived with joy as well as pain. When human lives come
together in the loves and joys of fancydancers,
basketball player, and lovers, then the conversive
magic of human interrelationships transforms the
interstice into the here and now as meaningful as
any. . . . The reservation dreams of fancydancers and
basketball players are the same dreams of all human
beings trapped within the discursive lies of
oppositional relations, relative (in) significance,
subjective power, and objective weakness. . . . The
dreams of treaties that wont be broken, the dreams of
loves that will mend the torn weavings of broken
relationships and families, the dreams of the
conversive power of myth, all these survive even
beyond the pain of loss. . . .
from Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez, Contemporary
American Indian Literatures & the Oral Tradition.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. 190-93.

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verse line with prose sections . . . [so that] poetry and

prose, line and sentence, appear to move toward each
other. . . .

Ron McFarland
There is a combativeness that distinguishes Alexies
often polemical poems, for he is, in a way, at war. In
most of his writing, sooner or later, Alexie is a
polemicist, which is to say, a warrior, and there is
nearly always controversy and argument, implied or
direct, in his poems and stories. . . . Do you ever
worry about anger becoming a negative force? the
Bellante brothers asked [in a Bloomsbury Review
interview]. Citing Gandhi, Alexie answered that anger
could be a positive force: Anger without hope, anger
without love, or anger without compassion are
allconsuming. Thats not my kind of anger. Mine is
very specific and directed. . . .
The Indians in Alexies poems do not speak with raven
spirits or go on vision quests. They are not haunted by
spirit animals . . . and they are not visited by Kachina
spirits. . . . In fact, it is more appropriate to think of
them in psychological rather than spiritual terms.
They have been uprooted from the animistic world. . . .
The power of Alexies poems comes from the world at
hand. . . .
Alexies other collections of poetry are even more
problematic with respect to form (and he is a very
conscious, though only rarely conventional, formalist).
The forty-two items that make up The Business of
Fancydancing (counting the four Indian Boy Love
Songs as one poem, as it is listed in the contents)
comprise twenty-eight poems and fourteen prose
pieces, one of which is a nine-page story and eight of
which run just a paragraph and could be considered
prose poems, though I am inclined to regard them as
sudden fiction. Old Shirts & New Skins consists of fifty
items, as many as forty of which are obviously poems.
But is Snapping the Fringe a prose piece consisting
of about thirteen very short paragraphs, or a poem
consisting of almost thirty lines (depending on the
format) and using indentation in favor of stanza
breaks? Although mixed genres like prose poetry
always leave me feeling a bit uneasy, I am inclined to
think it is his best effort in that mode. Old Shirts &
New Skins, then, including such conventional forms as
the sestina (The Naming of Indian Boys) and the
villanelle (Poem), is the closest Alexie has come so
far [prior to 1996] to a book made up of poems alone. .
..

When he was asked by the interviewers for

Bloomsbury Review if the transition from poet to
writer of fiction was difficult for him, Alexie answered
that it was not difficult, that my poems are stories.
Theres a very strong narrative drive in all my
poetry. . . . As the interviewers noted from the outset,
Alexie is a storyteller [with] an unmistakable poetic
streak. His powers as a poet are primarily narrative,
and after that rhetorical, and with that, perhaps as a
sub-species, polemical. . . .
Alexies is a rhetoric, whether in his poems or in his
fiction, that reflects pain and anger, a rhetoric that
could give way to bitterness. What keeps that from
happening and makes the pain and anger bearable for
the reader . . . is not so much the hope, love, and
compassion to which he refers in the interview, but
humor. Predictably, this humor is rarely gentle or
playful (though it can be that at times), but most often
satirical. . . .
Alexies poems are filled with such moments of painful
or poignant humor which may be described as
serious or dark. . . . The impact is not so much like
the escape or release offered by comedy as the
catharsis provided by tragedy.
from Ron McFarland, Another Kind of Violence:
Sherman Alexies Poems. American Indian Quarterly
21.2 (Spring 1997): 251-64.

In Split Decisions . . . Alexie employs a sort of

round form which he also uses in several stories,
including My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys. In
this form a word or phrase in the last line of one
section or stanza is repeated somewhere in the first
line of the next, and at the end of the poem a key word
or phrase is echoed from the first line so that the effect
is circular. In Split Decisions Alexie blends the free
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