In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

PREFACE

Few of the stories one has it in one’s self to speak get spoken, because the heart rarely confesses to intelligence its deeper needs; and few of the stories one has at the top of one’s head to tell get told, because the mind does not always possess the voice for them. Even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor or with love, where is that sensitive, admiring, other pair of ears?

No court commands our entertainments, requires our flattery, needs our loyal enlargements or memorializing lies. Fame is not a whore we can ring up. The public spends its money at the movies. It fills stadia with cheers; dances to organized noise; while books die quietly, and more rapidly than their authors. Mammon has no interest in our service.

Literature once held families together better than quarreling. It carved a common ancestry simply from vibrating air, peopling an often empty and forgotten past with gods, demons, worthy enemies and proper heroes, until it became largely responsible for that pride we sometimes still take in being Athenian or Basque, a follower or fan. Think of the myths we’ve wrapped around Lincoln, that figure we have made a fiction in order to make him immortal. Think of the satisfaction there is in supporting a winning team of any kind. It’s no small gift, this sense of worth which reaches us ahead of any action of our own, like hair at birth, and makes brilliant enterprises possible.

Some of the stories in this book have been alive (such is the brevity of story-life these days — like the photographer’s flash) a long time (no time at all, of course, for Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple is now one hundred years old); no, not long by immortal measure, yet a surprising while, nevertheless, like the landed fish who startles us with a late flop. Now I’m to place a few words in front of them — these tales without plot or people, I’ve been told — and I wonder whether they should serve as muffled drums or slowed steps do: to ready respect before the coming of the hearse.

Perhaps it is the case with many fabrications, but I am struck by how easily they might not have been at all; how really unreasonably provisional their entire existence is. The same for us all, you say? aren’t we accidents of genes and conditions of acidity ourselves, of elemental woove and wovvle? the product of opportunity and inclination, simple negligence and malice? Yes. O. Yes. Of course. But we burgeon as easily as water falls. We grow meanly like a cancer. Wasted acres testify to the undiminished requirements of our needs. Suppose it were otherwise, and a mother had to make her child’s every cell. How many of us, in that case, would reach complete existence?

What of these excruciating passivities of print, then? If I break a dish, physics takes charge of my freedom like a warden, and there’s no finger-smear of mine in the scatter of its bits. My cat’s grassy urps, alas, show more of me than the shavings in my sharpener. However, these — these litters of language — they could not exist without the stubborn sustainment of my will… amazing to contemplate… a commonplace to encounter. So consciously composed, these stories are naturally laden with indebtedness, as though they had been to Hawaii, and encircled by exotic blooms. If my hero’s hair is red as rust, to whom goes the credit — a recessive gene in my grandmother’s unmentionable make-up? And all those authors I have lain with — loved — left — which ones are to blame for my page-long shopping lists, my vulgarized lingo, my tin pan prose? whose blood beats in the baby when none will claim paternity and the mother is unknown?

To be born unencumbered is not the complete advantage one might immediately imagine. Although the struggle to free one’s youthful self of religion, relatives, and region is thereby greatly simplified, since there are no complicated cuffs to be unclasped, no subtle knots to be untied, the self in question is as vague and vaguely messy as a smudged line. I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo. And I was born through a time so unnoteworthy in the locality that public memory starved, though I was scarcely six weeks old when I was floated out of North Dakota like Moses in a wicker basket. Alas… the resemblance was a brief and shallow one, because my basket was placed on the back seat of an old Dodge which tunnelled through twelve hundred miles of gravel dust to surface at the sooty industrial city in Ohio where my father was to teach and eventually to clench his bones together in a painful, accusatory claw.

Obscurely born (rumors circulated secretly like poorly printed money: was I caesarian? a breech? were those forceps marks on the back of my little red neck? was my papa playing baseball when my mother pushed me screaming into being? was I supposed to care that I was born obscurely?) of parents who hardly honored their heritage even by the bother of forcibly forgetting it; and who had many prejudices but few beliefs (the town I grew quickly older in appeared to be full of nigs, micks, wops, spicks, bohunks, polacks, kikes; on the public walks, in the halls of the high school, one could not be too careful of the profaned lips of water fountains); thus while there was much to complain of, just as there is in any family — much to resist — it was all quite particular, palpable, concrete. Good little clerk, my father hated workers, blacks, and Jews, the way he expected women to hate worms. There wasn’t a faith to embrace or an ideology to spurn, unless perhaps it was the general suggestion of something poisonously Republican, or a periodical’s respect for certain Trade Marks. And I remember resolving, while on long walks or during summer reveries or while deep in the night’s bed, not to be like that, when that was whatever was around me: Warren, Ohio — factory smoke, depression, household gloom, resentments, illness, ugliness, despair, etcetera, and littleness, above all, smallness, the encroachment of the lean and meager. I won’t be like that, I said, and naturally I grew in special hidden ways to be more like that than anyone could possibly imagine, or myself admit. Even as a grown man I was still desperately boasting that I’d choose another cunt to come from. Well, Balzac wanted his de, and I wanted my anonymity.

School was a dull time in the beginning; I was a slow student, my achievement intermittent and unpredictable as a loose wire. I decorated my days with extravagant, outrageous lies. Yet I was reading Malory, too, and listening to Guinevere bid Launcelot adieu:

For as well as I have loved thee, mine heart will not serve me to see thee; for through thee and me is the flower of kings and knights destroyed. Therefore, Sir Launcelot, go to thy realm, and there take thee a wife, and live with her with joy and bliss, and I pray thee heartily pray for me to our Lord, that I may amend my misliving.

Amend my misliving. And everything in me then said: I want to be like that — like that aching phrase. So oddly, at a time when no one any longer allowed reading or writing to give them face, place, or history, I was forced to form myself from sounds and syllables: not merely my soul, as we used to say, but guts too, a body I knew was mine because, in response to the work which became whatever of me there was, it angrily ulcerated.

I read with the hungry rage of a forest blaze.

I wanted to be a fireman, I recall, but by eight I’d given up that very real cliché for an equally unreal one: I wanted to become a writer.

… a what? Well, a writer wasn’t whatever Warren was. A writer was whatever Malory was when he wrote down his ee’s: mine heart will not serve me to see thee. And that’s what I wanted to be — a string of stresses.

… a what?

The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward. This is not a boast or a complaint. It is a fact. Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. The condition I describe is not extraordinary. Certain scientists, philosophers, historians, and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can. One must be satisfied with that.

Unlike this preface, then, which pretends to the presence of your eye, these stories emerged from my blank insides to die in another darkness. I willed their existence, but I don’t know why. Except that in some dim way I wanted, myself, to have a soul, a special speech, a style. I wanted to feel responsible where I could bear to be responsible, and to make a sheet of steel from a flimsy page — something that would not soon weary itself out of shape as everything else I had known (I thought) always had. They appeared in the world obscurely, too — slow brief bit by bit, through gritted teeth and much despairing; and if any person were to suffer such a birth, we’d see the skull come out on Thursday, skin appear by week’s end, liver later, jaws arrive just after eating. And no one of us, least of all the owner of the opening it inched from, would know what species the creature would eventually contrive to copy and to claim. Because I wrote these stories without imagining there would be readers to sustain them, they exist now as if readerless (strange species indeed, like the flat, pigmentless fish of deep seas, or the blind, transparent shrimp of coastal caves), although a reader now and then lets light fall on them from that other, less real world of common life and pleasant ordinary things.

Occasionally one’s companion, in a rare mood of love, will say: ‘Bill, tell about the time you told off that trucker at the truck stop’; but Bill’s audience knows he’s no emperor of anecdote, like Stanley Elkin, and they will expect at best not to be bored, pallidly amused, not edified or elevated, not cemented or composed; and occasionally one’s children will still want a story told them, improvised on the spot, not merely read or from a flabby memory recited. Then they will beg far better than a dog.

Tell us a story, fawfaw. Tell us a lonely story. Tell us a long and lonely story about the sticky-handed giants who had no homes, because we want to cry. Tell us the story of the overfriendly lions. Tell us the story of the sad and barkless dog. Tell us, fawfaw, tell us, because we want to cry. Tell us of the long bridge and the short wagon and the tall tollkeeper and the tall tollkeeper’s high horse and the tiny brown tail of the tall tollkeeper’s high horse that couldn’t swish away blue flies… because we want to cry. We want to cry.

Well which?… which shall I tell you the story of to make you sad so you will cry?

Oh don’t do that, fawfaw. We want to cry. Don’t make us sad. We merely want to cry. Tell us a lonely story. Tell us about the giants. Tell us about the lions. Tell us about the dog. But do not make us sad, fawfaw, just make us cry.

Well which?… which then shall I tell you if you want to cry?… which, the story of?

Woods.

Woods. I knew it would be woods. I knew it would be woods when you said tell of the giants and the lions and the dog. I knew it would be woods when you said tell me of the long bridge and the short wagon and the thin road running to the bridge which the wagon rode over.

There’s no thin road in the story, fawfaw. No. There’s no thin road.

Oh. Well. Maybe there’s a fat hog? a fat hog squatting on a large log? a large log lying in the thin road running to the bridge which the wagon rolls over.

No, fawfaw, of course not. You know there’s no thin road, and therefore there can scarcely be any large log lying in any thin road, and therefore there can hardly be any fat hog squatting on any large log lying in any thin road. No. There can’t be because there isn’t. And because hogs don’t squat, ever. And on logs, no, never. So.

Oh. Well. Perhaps there’s a thin snake? Perhaps he sunning himself on a wide rock resting by the side of the road that runs to the brook the bridge goes over?

No. You’re hateful and you’re horrid. You know there is no road like that. There never never was. There was always only the long bridge and the short wagon and the tall tollkeeper and the tall toll-keeper’s high horse that couldn’t swish away blue flies. We remember. We remember about that. We want to hear about woods.

Woods. I knew it would be woods. You want to cry.

No. We no longer want to cry. We did but now we don’t, but we still want to hear about woods, so say about the woods now, say about them.

Oh. Well. Woods. Anyway, I knew it would be woods.

Well then tell about them. Tell about woods.

You remember about the woods as well as I. I know about you. You remember about the woods.

Yes. Certainly. We remember about woods. We remember everything about them. We remember them entirely and wholly, absolutely and altogether. Because we do, because of that, we want to hear everything again. We want to hear it through from end to end, fawfaw. Mind. You’re not to leave out. You’re not to put in. We remember wholly about woods, and that is why we want to hear about them right now, and so say about it, and say how it was, and why it was, and all about it.

Woods. Well then. Well then woods. Well…

Rhythmic, repetitious, patterned, built of simple phrases like small square blocks (draw me a clown, build me a castle, fold me a hat, sail my paper plane), with magical and imaginary logic, their facts nailed carefully to clouds, often teasing, these stories were fond possessions which fondly possessed their possessor like our dolls… remember? And the best ones were those which sounded, when you heard them for the first time, as if you had heard them many times before. Of course, the paragraphs I just placed on the page are not the beginning of any such story; they are about the character and quality and construction of such stories, and therefore do not resemble the child’s mind or mortality at all.

After those stories which we once employed to hold the ears of children came those calculated to suspend — not just you or me, but everyone — our souls like white rags in a line of wash; and these were written to manipulate a kind of universal mechanism in our psyches: the Gothic romance played upon passivity, just as nursie stories put girls in their place, while the hard-eyed private eye became a hard and fancy phallus. In my adolescence I forsook Malory to pursue simpleminded empathies. I read of G—8 and his Battle Aces, about Doc Savage and the Shadow. Threats, entanglements, and bloody extrications followed one another with increasing amplitude and gratifying rapidity. Plots lay over my life like a treasure hunter’s map. The solace they contained was as immense as it was deceitful, since there was always a way out. I now wonder whether this glut of blood and mindless action didn’t stamp all story for me as trivial, childish, and cheap. Later I painfully advanced on Thomas Wolfe and like him made the world a Whitman Sampler and a list of sweets. I also ranted against that mysterious enemy, the other sex, because I wasn’t whatever I thought women wanted my own sexuality to be.

If Gertrude Stein understood first principles, and borrowed much of her magical hypnotic beat from children’s tales (everything but woods and witches), Kafka grasped the second ones with an unholy hand. He simply did not specialize in extrications.

He had come from the ship at dawn, eager to see the sights of the city — he had heard there were so many — and perhaps, one never knew, to turn a penny of the honest kind through wine and conversation. Hardly had he crossed the docks and entered one of the narrow streets that lead from the waterfront when nine sergeants of police, running out of doorways, caught him in a plastic net, bobbing their silver epaulets and swaying their silver cords across their chests with the exertion; and he was carried head down over the right shoulder of the largest, a man terribly strong, so that all he saw around him as he bounced against the fellow’s buttocks were nine pairs of superb trousers and the eighteen shining shoes that darted out of them, their silver laces shaking, while on the road he saw patches of brilliantly iridescent oil. He was slung so steeply that his head several times struck the pavement until he cruelly bent his neck. Once he remembered to cry out but a jounce made him bite his tongue and he choked upon saliva. Blood collected above his eyes, making him sick and afraid to speak. In this condition he was brought before a magistrate who questioned him at once.

He tried to answer but the magistrate only stared, his head wagging constantly so that powder drifted from his wig. The questions continued, receiving the same answers as before. But the blood in your cheeks, cried the magistrate, bring me a basin! All he could do was plead. The magistrate rose angrily and hurled his wig at him, clouds of powder rising, forcing him to sneeze. The magistrate produced a portfolio of photographs which he shook one after the other so the images seemed to blur. There! What do you say to that, sir? what do you say to these? At last in terrible vexation he shouted back: you are crazy, crazy, a creature in my nightmare; and one of the sergeants thereupon entered to strike him on the hands and about the face with a watch strap while the magistrate repeated peevishly: he has no dignity, this one, look at his nose.

Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and William Faulkner, André Gide and Joseph Conrad: what could a poor beginner do? And from whose grip was it easier to escape — the graceless hack’s or the artful great’s?

In any case, break loose. Begin. And I began by telling a story to entertain a toothache. To entertain a toothache there has to be lots of incident, some excitement, much menace. When I decided to write the story down, I called it ‘And Slowly Comes the Spring,’ because that fragmentary phrase seemed somehow appropriate and poetic (it wasn’t); but it was some weeks before I began to erase the plot to make a fiction of it, since one can’t count on the ear of an everlasting toothache. I titled it, then, ‘The Pedersen Kid,’ and because I believed it was good for me (it turned out, it was), I tried to formulate a set of requirements for the story as clear and rigorous as those of the sonnet. From the outset, however, I was far too concerned with theme. I hadn’t discovered yet what I would later find was an iron law of composition for me: the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come, and the necessity for continuous revision, so that each work would seem simply the first paragraph rewritten, swollen with sometimes years of scrutiny around that initial verbal wound, one of the sort you hope, as François Mauriac has so beautifully written, ‘the members of a particular race of mortals can never cease to bleed.’

But what do beginners know? too much. It is what they think they know that makes them beginners. Anyway, here are some of the instructions I drew up (or laid down) for myself during that January of its commencement nearly twenty-five — no — nearly thirty years ago.

The problem is to present evil as a visitation — sudden, mysterious, violent, inexplicable. All should be subordinated to that end. The physical representation must be spare and staccato; the mental representation must be flowing and a bit repetitious; the dialogue realistic but musical. A ritual effect is needed. It falls, I think, into three parts, each part dividing itself into three. The first part is composed of the discovery of the boy, the discovery of what the boy has seen, the discovery (worst of all) that they will have to do something. The second part is composed of efforts — the effort made to reach the farm; the effort needed to build a tunnel; the effort made to gain the house from the barn. The point here is that the trio, who have come this far only through the social pressure of each other, and in shaky bravado, must go on, knowing that they are ignorant of causes — of the force itself — (‘He ain’t there’). But the shooting leaves Jorge alone in the house. The pressure which had moved him this far is removed, and the pressure of fear — the threat of death — substituted. The third part contains Jorge’s attempt to escape and his unwilling stalk through the house, his wait through the blizzard and the night, and his rescue in the morning. The force has gone as it came. The Pedersens are missing and the great moral effort of the Jorgensens, compelled at every step as it was, is wasted and for nothing.

Though I dropped the rescue, I did not so much depart from this conception as complicate it, covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt. In any case, during the actual writing, the management of monosyllables, the alternation of short and long sentences, the emotional integrity of the paragraph, the elevation of the most ordinary diction into some semblance of poetry, became my fanatical concern.

Working through the summer, I finished the story in September, and it was seven or eight years after that — and you can imagine how many editorial rejections (it seemed like hundreds; I can still hear the flat slap of the ms. on the front step, the sting of shame in my cheeks, my humiliation, doubts, confusion; I heard the laughter of thousands); and you can imagine how many well-meant sympathies, mailed like cards at Christmas, how many broken chairs and bitter bottles and household quarrels, black thoughts and stubborn resolutions, intervened — before John Gardner generously published it in his magazine, MSS.

One must begin, but one must know how to end. It is a knowledge I have altogether lost. ‘The Pedersen Kid’ had an end I could aim at. Like death, I knew it would come. Like death, I did not know how I would face it. That the rest of these stories are short; that Omensetter’s Luck is long and The Tunnel, as it is turning out, under endless excavation: these are things I had no inkling of when I began. I realize, too, that each one was written with full knowledge of the public failure of the others; hence written with worsening nerves. I explored this, tried that, but like an ignorant and careless gardener, I never knew what sort of seed I had sown, so I was surprised by the height of its growth, the character of its bloom.

Writing and reading, like male and female, pain and pleasure, are close but divergent. Although writing itself may be a partial substitute for sexual expression (during adolescence, at any rate), sexual curiosity propelled my reading like a rocket. Over how many dry pages did I pass in search of water? Beyond the next paragraph, around the turn of the page, an oasis of sensuality would materialize, fuzzy in the desert light at first, but then clear, precise, and detailed as a dirty drawing. My sexual puzzles would undo like bras, mysteries would fall away like underpants passing the knees. Alas! such a hot breath blew upon the page that every oasis withered. What did I learn from Pierre Louÿs? Balzac? Jules Romain?… their puzzles and their mysteries, their confusions and their lies. I didn’t understand. I didn’t realize. I wanted dirt or purity, innocence or cynicism, never the muddy mix, the flat balance, the even tones of truth. I carried a critic with me everywhere who rose to applaud the passionate passages with a shameless lack of discrimination, and during the throbbing din it made I couldn’t honestly feel or sharply sense or clearly think. Of course, sexual curiosity remains the third lure of reading, yet what an enormous amount of the body’s beautiful blushing is wasted on the silliest puerilities when writers write for the reasons readers read.

He wondered how her breasts were really formed. Guess, she said. Did the nipple rise like a rainspot on a pond, and were the hollows of her thighs like cups which would contain his kisses? Imagine what will pleasure you, she said. Her clothing always fought him off. His fingers could not construct the rest of what they touched, even when one, slipping beneath the boundary of her underwear, traversed a sacred edge. She would permit him every liberty so long as cloth was wrapped like a bandage between them, but his hands or his lips or his eyes on anything but customary flesh caused her to stiffen, sucking at her breath until it drew like a bubbly straw. He realized he was as much ice water as a wound. One day, indeed, she had taken all her upper garments off but a soft thin blouse of greenish Celanese, and through its yielding threads he had compressed her. His protests were useless. Guess, she always said. And finally when he had with sufficient and extraordinary bitterness complained how hard her teasing was on him, she’d firmly ordered his phallus from its trousers as you might order a dog from a tree. Dear thing, she said; I’ll free you of me. Ultimately, this became their love, like shaking hands, and he had eventually accepted the procedure because, as he explained, it was so like the world. She smiled at this and slowly shook her head: you still have your dream, she said, and I have my surprise.

The material that makes up a story must be placed under terrible compression, but it cannot simply release its meaning like a joke does. It must be epiphanous, yet remain an enigma. Its shortness must have a formal function: the deepening of the understanding, the darkening of the design.

In a sense, ‘Mrs. Mean’ is a story of sexual curiosity translated, again, into the epistemological, although it had its beginning in an observation I never used.

3 August ’54. The following tableau at the House of Many Children: father is going to work and is standing by the car talking with his wife. He is tall, thin, dark, heavily bearded so that, though he shaves, he always has a heavy shadow, almost blue, across the sides of his face and chin. She is large, great breasted, fat, pig-eyed, fair. The children annoy father who yells at them in a deep carrying voice, cuffs one hard and shoos the rest away with a vigorous outward motion of his arms (like chickens). The children flee, crying and screaming and carrying on. Then father departs. Mama waves and when he’s gunned the car furiously away (it stalls twice), she turns to the house; the children’s heads pop into place. She makes her voice deep and gruff like his and shouts at them. She swings at one or two (missing widely), and makes his shooing motion with her arms. The children roar delightedly. She goes in and they all troupe gaily behind her.

I was to observe this scene, played with only slight variations, many times, and what interested me about it, finally, was the triangle formed by mother, children, and private-public me; but I didn’t begin to invent a narrative Eye, my journal tells me, until July 12, 1955, when the first words of the story appear in an unwhelped form. Empty of any persuasive detail, the focus wrong, order inept, rhythms lame, these initial early sentences are aimless, toneless, figureless, thin.

We call her Mrs. Mean, my wife and I. Our view of her, as our view of her husband and each of all her children, is a porch view. We can only surmise what her life is like inside her little house, but on warm, close Sunday afternoons, while we try the porch to stay cool and watch her hobbling in the hot sun, stick in hand to beat her children, we think a lot about it.

I notice that by November I have begun writing little encouraging notes to myself: buck up, old boy, and so on. It has become a drab affair, like the writing of all my fictions. Imagine an adultery as full of false starts, procrastination, indecision, poor excuses, impotence, and, above all, plans.

The idea I must keep in mind is how I can (a) tell the story of the public Mr. & Mrs. Mean, as seen by the ‘I’ of the story, (b) make ‘I’ more than a pronoun — rather a pronounced personality, (c) slowly, imperceptibly shift from the factual reporting of it to the imaginative projections of ‘I.’ The problem is as knotty as PK, and as nice. The ending will be, of course, unsatisfactory, as it will end in the imagination, not in the fact, as if the imagination had filled in the gaps between facts with more facts, whereas only fancies are there. All stories ought to end unsatisfactorily.

A month later I had a page, and I completed the piece at some unspecified time in 1957.

I write down these dates, now, and gaze across these temporal gaps with a kind of dumb wonder, because I am compelled to acknowledge again the absurd manner in which my stories have been shovelled together: hodge against podge, like those cathedrals which have Baroque porches, Gothic naves, and Romanesque crypts; since the work on them always went slowly; time passed, then passed again, bishops and princes lost interest; funds ran out; men died; shells shattered their radiant windows; they became victims of theft, fire, priests, architects, wind; and because they were put in service while they were still being built, the pavement was gone, the pillars in a state of lurch, by the time the dome was ready for its gilt or the tower for its tolling bell; so the difficulty for me was plain enough: as an author I naturally desired to change, develop, grow, while each story in its turn wanted the writer who’d begun it to stick around like a faithful father to the end. This dilemma, like drink, nearly destroyed the work of Malcolm Lowry. The absurdity enlarges like the nose of a clown, too, when one realizes that the structure which eventually gets mortared and plastered and hammered together more nearly resembles some maison de convenence than even the most modest church. Still, needs are served as much by the humble and ridiculous as by the lordly and sublime.

In any event, it became necessary (it is always necessary) to rewrite earlier sections of whatever I found myself finally trapped in, according to the standards and style of the part presently underway; because, though time may appear to pass within a story, the story itself must seem to have leaked like a blot from a single shake of the pen.

And when you retrace your steps, even if it’s your intention to change them, the path you’ve already worn down deepens; it is increasingly difficult to escape your first mistakes, really to see a fresh new way of solving some repeating problem; while certain points along the route, like places where you’ve fallen often, threaten your nerve, so that you are inclined to seek trails around the mountain which won’t require you to climb in the cold and cross it.

Meanwhile the mind whispers reasons to the soul which explain why a bad line is a lovely one; how all your strategies have superbly succeeded; why you may march confidently on in cardboard shoes, for no one will notice. My training had stocked me with rationalizations like a pond. I had merely to throw a line in to catch one. The poor phrase, the campy connection, the cheap joke, the trite observation, the cute twist you’ve contrived, the smart aleck attitude, the infantile ideas and innumerable alliterations, the glib topping you’ve just poured on a paragraph: these and other ‘awfuls’ are a part of you; they come from the deepest cave; and they must be sent back like a bad bottle no matter what the label says, or the degree of your humiliation.

There is much fright. It settles like a cloud of acid in the stomach. Doctors prescribe milk. They know there is no calcium in kindness. Although unwell, one tries to stick one’s words together well; but perhaps, as I write this, the sentences these sentences are supposed to front are melting like icicles, and pointedly passing away; so that, reader, when you turn the final pages of this preface, you will be confronted with a pale, pretentious blank; and if that happens, I know which of us will be the greater fool, for your few cents spent on this book are a little loss from a small mistake; think of me and smile: I misspent a life.

My journal begins to sputter — gutters out. No more little plans, no more recorded glooms or glorious exhortations, and no more practice paragraphs either, like scales run over in the street. For several years before I began ‘The Pedersen Kid,’ I had practiced them (and single sentences, too, and imaginary words, and sounds I hoped had fallen out of Alice); three of which I have put in this preface like odd bits of fruit in a pudding — just a change of texture and a little action for the teeth — and these exercises were another idiocy, because I knew that words were communities made by the repeated crossing of contexts the way tracks formed towns, and that sentences did not swim indifferently through others like schools of fish of another species, but were like lengths of web within a web, despite one’s sense of the stitch and knot of design inside them.

Once more right about art and wrong about the world, the Idealist philosophers had argued the same way, Leibniz suggesting that every truth was an analytic one, and that all legitimate predicates would eventually be found (by God) embedded like so many weevils in a single subject there wouldn’t be any biscuit; but, then, conversely, was a sentence like that flower in its crannied wall, that speck of sand we might see a world in, and could one observe inside its syntactically small self the shape of a busy populace? would the unity of a well-formed sentence serve as a model for the unity of All or Any? I guess I hoped so.

Hours of insanity and escape… hours inventing expressions like ‘kiss my teeth,’ and then wondering what they meant… hours of insanity and escape… hours spent looking at objects as if they were women, sketching ashtrays, for instance, and noting of a crystal one

… the eyes, the lines of light, the living luster of the glass — the patterns, the ebb and flow — shadows, streaks — the flowing like water in the quiet streams with the sun on it — the foam and bubble of the glass…

and concluding the study grandly (who was I pretending to be? Maupassant tutored by Flaubert? with this command:

Never mention an ashtray unless you can swiftly make it the only one of its kind in the world.

A rule I obeyed by never mentioning an ashtray.

As should be obvious from my collection of words about the ashtray, I could not teach myself to see without, at the same time, teaching myself how to write, for the words, and the observation they comprise, coalesce. If one is not alive and lustrous, neither is the other. Here I had made nothing to snuff a smoking end in — a gathering as burnt out and gray as ash.

Thus, obscurely and fortuitously, chance brought these stories forth from nowhere. Icicles once dripped solidly from my eaves, for instance. I thought them remarkable because they seemed to grow as a consequence of their own grief, and I wondered whether my feelings would freeze to me by the time they had traveled my length, and whether each of us wasn’t just the size of our consciousness solidified; but these fancies scarcely crept into the story which, like ‘Order of Insects,’ and everything I’ve written since, is an exploration of an image. I was impressed not only by their cold, perishable beauty, but by the feeling I had that they were mine, and that, though accident had fixed them to my gutters the way it had hung them everywhere, no one had a right to cause their premature destruction. Yet where may the eye fall now its sight is not bruised by vandals and their victims? No matter. The story merely began from this thought, it did not create itself entirely as an icicle should, so that passions warmed elsewhere would cool as they passed along the text until, at the sharp tip, they became themselves text. That would have been ideal. That would have been something!

Hours of insanity and escape… collecting names in the hope they’d prove jackpotty, and stories would suddenly shower out like dimes…

Horace Bardwell, Ada Hunt Chase, Mary Persis Crofts, Kelsey Flowers, Annie Stilphen, Edna Hoxie, Asher Applegate, Amos Bodge, Enoch Boyce, Jeremiah Bresnan, James G. Burpee, Curtis Chamlet, Decius W. Clark, Revellard Dutcher, Jedediah Felton, Jethro Furber, Pelatiah Hall, George Hatstat, Quartus Graves, Leoammi Kendall, Truxton Orcutt, Plaisted Williams, Francis Plympton, Azariah Shove, Peter Twiss; and in addition the members of the cooking club of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, 1899: Dean Booher, Floy Buxton, Nellie Goorley, Ira Irwin, Bessie Johnson, Clara Kelly, Sadie McCracken, Clara Mozier, Josie Plumb, Sarah Swingle, Maude Smith, Anna, Belle, Deane, and Ivan Talmadge, Roberta Wheeler.

Round, ripe, seedful names like these are seldom found and cannot be invented, though they might be more sweetly arranged. I could not have shaken them from any local tree because I have no locality. I am not a man from Warren. What is it to be from Warren? or weakly half-Protestant, half-Catholic? nondescript in half-wasp white? of German and Scandinavian blood so pale even pure Aryans are disgusted? and with a name made for amusement, and one which, even in German, means ‘alley.’ Though I am, Gassy was not the worst I was called. I am no one’s son, or father, it appears. Not Northern, not American, not a theosophist, not a scholar, not Prufrock, not the Dane. Yet I gathered these names all the same. From a book… books… from the pages that are my streets.

Nature rarely loops. Nature repeats. This spring is not a former spring rethought, but merely another one, somewhat the same, somewhat not. However, in a fiction, ideas, perceptions, feelings, return like reconsiderations, and the more one sees a piece of imaginative prose as an adventure of the mind, the more the linearities of life will be bent and interrupted. Just as revision itself is made of meditative returns, so the reappearance of any theme constitutes the reseeing of that theme by itself. Otherwise there is no advance. There is stagnation. The quiet spiral of the shell, a gyre, even a whirlwind, a tunnel towering in the air: these are the appropriate forms, the rightful shapes; yet the reader must not succumb to the temptations of simple location, but experience in the rising, turning line the wider view, like a sailplane circling through a thermal, and sense at the same time a corkscrewing descent into the subject, a progressive deepening around the reading eye, a penetration of the particular which is the partial theme of ‘Mrs. Mean’—at once escape and entry, an inside pulled out and an outside pressed in, as also is the case with my single short story, ‘Order of Insects.’

Hours of insanity and escape… in which I write inadequate verse, read, rage… record anecdotes which fade into the page like stains… beat time with my pencil’s business end… nip at the loose skin on the side of my hand with my teeth… cast schemes and tropes like horoscopes… practice catachresis as though it were croquet… grrrowl… kick wastebaskets into corners… realize that when I picture my methods of construction all the images are architectural, but when I dream of the ultimate fiction — that animal entity, the made-up syllabic self — I am trying to energize old, used-up, stolen organs like Dr. Frankenstein… grrrind… throw wet wads of Kleenex from a spring or winter cold into the corner where they mainly miss the basket… O… Ohio: I hear howling from both Os… play ring agroan the rosie… pace… put an angry erection back in my pants… rhyme…

Then occasionally perceive beneath me on the page a few lines which… while I was elsewhere must have… yes, a few lines which have… which have the sound… the true whistle of the spirit. Wait’ll they read that, I say, perhaps even aloud, over the water running in the kitchen sink, over the noise of my writing lamp, coffee growing cold in the cup, the grrowl of my belly. Yet when I raise my right palm from the paper where, in oath, I’ve put it, the whistle in those words is gone, and only the lamp sings. Till I pull its chain like a john.

Thus the idea of an audience returns like an itch between the toes, because now we have words watching words — not surprising: what should Berkeley’s trees do, hidden in their forest, if they learned, if they believed, if they knew that unnoticed they were likely to be nothing? encourage birds? grow eyes and ears and rub remaining leaves like foreign money?

When Henry James, bruised by his failure in the theater, returned to the novel with The Awkward Age, he wrote in the scenery himself; he created his actors and gave them their speeches and gestures. More than that, he filled the spaces around them with sensibility — other observations — the perfect vessel of appreciation — himself, or rather, his roundabout writing. His method has become a model. Now, on the page, though the stage is full, the theater is dark and empty. Red bulbs burn above the exits. And when the theater is empty, and the actors continue to speak into the wings and walk from cupboard to sofa as if in the midst of emotion, to whom are they speaking but to themselves? Suddenly the action is all there is; the made-up words are real; the actors are the parts they play; questions are no longer cues; replies are real replies; there’s no more drama; the conditions of rehearsal have become the conditions of reality, and the light which streams like colored paper from the spots is all there’ll ever be of day.

1. Continue work…

2. Study the masters…

3. Do deliberate exercises…

4. Regularly enter notes… sharpen that peculiar and forgetful eye…

5. Take to sketching… details… exactitude…

6. Become steeped in history…

7… the better word… the better word… the better word…

8. Figure it will be five years before any…

9. Wait…

A former student, who had reached the lower slopes of a national magazine, charitably wrote to ask if I would do a piece on what it was like to live in the Midwest. Without quite knowing whether my answer would be yes or no, I nevertheless began to gather data on that subject, although it became plain soon enough that the magazine was not interested in the logarithmical disorders of my lyricisms. I had always avoided the autobiographical in my work, reasoning that it was one beginner’s trap I’d not fall into (more witless wisdom), and by now I had become suspicious of my own detachment. Could I write close to myself, or would the letter B, which my narrator said he’d sailed to, stand for bathos?

I was living in Brookston, Indiana, then, but I called it B because that’s how people and places were sometimes represented in the old days. Pamela is always pulling Mr. B’s paw out of her bosom. Turgenev’s characters occasionally wait on a low small porch which is fastened like a belt around an inn or posting station, rising like a fresh bump on the road — say — to S, though nothing is in sight yet when we encounter them. Like the reader, they are waiting for the book to begin. (On the other hand, Beckett’s roads are letterless, and his figures are waiting for the text to terminate.) Not only has the narrator come to B in a pun (a poor place), with the initial I also wanted to invoke the golden boughs and singing birds of Yeats’s Byzantium. Further more, I knew that when I’d finished, it wouldn’t be Brookston, Indiana, anymore, but a place as full of dream and fabrication as that fabled city itself. Inside my cautious sentences, as against Yeats’s monumental poetry, B would become an inverted emblem for man’s imagination.

I certainly didn’t resort to the letter out of shyness or some belated sense of discretion; but as I got my ‘facts’ straight (clubs, crops, products, prospects, townshape, bar- and barn-size), I remembered how eagerly I’d come to the community, how much I’d needed to feel my mind — just once — run free and openly in peace, in wholesome and unworried amplitude, the way my legs before in Larimore, N.D., had carried me through streets scaled perfectly for childhood; and I slowly realized, while I drew up my lists (jobs, shops, climate), marking social strata like a kid counts layers in a cake, that I was taking down the town in notes so far from sounding anything significant that they would not even let me find a cow; yet I figured my estimates anyway (population changes, transportation, education, housing, love), and I took my polls (of churches and their clientele, of diets and diseases); I made my guesses about the townspeople’s privacy (fun, games, hankie-pankies, high or low finance: pitch or catch, cadge, swap or auction), just as any geographer would, impressed by the seriousness of habit, too, of simple talk or an idle spit or prolonged squat — a reflective shit in a distant field; and as I started to distribute my data gingerly across my manuscript, a steady dissolution of the real began; because the more precisely one walks down a verbal street; indeed, the more precisely trash heap and vagrant shadow, weed stand and wind-feel and walkcrack are rendered; when, in fact, all that can conceivably enter consciousness — like snowlight and horse harness, grain spill and oil odor, hedge and grass growth, the cool tin taste of well-water in a bent tin cup — enters like the member of an orchestra, armed with an instrument (the bee’s hum and the fly’s death, for instance); the more completely, in short, we observe rather than merely note, contemplate rather than perceive, imagine rather than simply ponder; then the more fully, too, must the reader and writer realize, as their sentences foot the page, that they are now in the graciously menacing presence of the Angel of Inwardness, that radiant guardian of Ideas of whom Plato and Rilke spoke so ardently, and Mallarmé and Valéry invoked; since a sense of resonant universality arises in literature whenever some mute and otherwise trivial, though unique, superfluity is experienced with an intensely passionate exactness: through a ring of likeness which defines for each object its land of unlikeness, too (though who says so aside from Schopenhauer, who was also wrong about the world?); and consequently the heart of the country became the heart of the heart with a suddenness which left me uncomforted, in B and not Byzantium, not Brookston, far from the self I thought I might expose, nowhere near a childhood, and with thoughts I kept in paragraphs like small animals caged.

Hours of insanity and escape… tear paper into thread-thin strips — not easy… then to slide lines of words from one side of a page to another, vainly hoping the difference will be agreeable… instead of a passionate particularity, to try for a ringing singularity… cancel, scratch, XXXXX… stop.

The gentle Turgenev (and one of our masters, surely, if we love this arrogantly modest art), writing about Fathers and Children—writing about himself — said: ‘Only the chosen few are able to transmit to posterity not only the content but also the form of their thoughts and views, their personality, which, generally speaking, is of no concern to the masses.’ The form. That is what the long search is for; because form, as Aristotle has instructed us, is the soul itself, the life in any thing, and of any immortal thing the whole. It is the B in being. The chosen few… the happy few… that little band of brothers… Well, the chosen cannot choose themselves, however they connive at it.

And he asked his fellow Russian writers to guard their language. ‘Treat this mighty weapon with respect,’ he begged, ‘in skilled hands it can work miracles.’ But miracles cannot be chosen either. And for those of us who have worked none, respect we can still manage. The folly of a hope sustains us: that next time the skill will be there, and the miracle will ensue.

So I am still the obscure man who wrote these words, and if someone were to ask me once again of the circumstances of my birth, I think I should answer finally that I was born somewhere in the middle of my first book; that life, so far, has not been extensive; that my native state is Anger, a place nowhere on the continent but rather somewhere at the bottom of my belly; that I presently dwell in the Sicily of the soul, the Mexico of the mind, the tower at Duino, the garden house in Rye; and that I shall be happy to rent, sell, or give away these stories, which I would have furnished far more richly if I could have borne the cost, to anyone who might want to visit them, or — hallelujah — reside. In lieu of that unlikelihood, however, I am fashioning a reader for these fictions… of what kind, you ask? well, skilled and generous with attention, for one thing, patient with longeurs, forgiving of every error and the author’s self-indulgence, avid for details… ah, and a lover of lists, a twiddler of lines. Shall this reader be given occasionally to mouthing a word aloud or wanting to read to a companion in a piercing library whisper? yes; and shall this reader be one whose heartbeat alters with the tenses of the verbs? that would be nice; and shall every allusion be caught like a cold? no, eaten like a fish, whole, fins and skin; and shall there be a wide brow wrinkled with wonder at the rhetoric? sharp intakes of breath? and the thoughts found profound and the sentiments felt to be of the best kind? yes, and the patterns applauded… but we won’t need to put hair or nose upon our reader, or any other opening or lure… not a muscle need be imagined… it is a body quite indifferent to time, to diet… it’s only eyes… what? oh, it will be a kind of slowpoke on the page, a sipper of sentences, full of reflective pauses, thus a finger for holding its place should be appointed; a mover of lips, then? just so, yes, large soft moist ones, naturally red, naturally supple, but made only for shaping syllables, you understand, for singing… singing. And shall this reader, as the book is opened, shadow the page like a palm? yes, perhaps that would be best (mind the strain on the spirit, though, no glasses correct that); and shall this reader sink into the paper? become the print? and blossom on the other side with pleasure and sensation… from the touch of mind, and the love that lasts in language? yes. Let’s imagine such a being, then. And begin. And then begin.

St. Louis, Missouri

May 26, 1976

January 26, 1981