Showing posts with label Philip Roth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philip Roth. Show all posts

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Russo's Elsewhere



Richard Russo's Elsewhere is a painfully honest memoir.  It is lovingly detailed.  It appears that we have some shared family history, his novels focusing on many similar issues particularly his relationship with his mother, the theme of Elsewhere.  He is among the many contemporary American writers I admire most, such as John Updike, Pat Conroy, Anne Tyler, Anita Shrive, John Irving, Richard Yates, Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver (among others, I'm sure I've left someone out). They speak directly to me.  And somewhere in this blog, I've connected these writers to many of my own family issues.

But of all of them, Russo's writings seem to come closest to my own family angst (see my entry on his novel, That Old Cape Magic), and Elsewhere hits my funny bone as well and reveals the roots of his fictional world. Russo had almost a symbiotic relationship with his mother, but it was an approach-avoidance issue, a mother who on the one hand he tried to keep at whatever distance he could (without much success), for the sake of his individuality and for the sake of his family, but, on the other, obligingly (and lovingly), took responsibility for, particularly as she aged. 

When Russo was a young child, his mother worked for GE in Schenectady, living with Russo's grandparents in Gloversville and commuting (after divorcing her ne'er-do-well husband - the kind portrayed in Russo's Nobody's Fool and The Risk Pool), asserting her independence by paying her parents rent.  During WW II, when my father was away at the front, my own mother worked for Atlantic Burners (a local heating oil distribution company) in Queens, NY as a secretary/administrative assistant and for years I would hear about how much she missed being a professional woman.  We too lived with her parents at the time, with my primary care being passed onto my grandmother and great-grandmother, who lived with us as well.
 
Russo details the decline of the leather business, it's impact on his home town, Gloversville, and his family, a story eerily close to Philip Roth's family's leather business, and the decline of Newark, as told in his novel American Pastoral, perhaps one of the best novels of the late 20th century.  These were generations of families in the same business, as mine was in the photography business for more than 100 years, and, that kind of business too changed to such an extent that it eventually just faded away.

I was amused by Russo's statement My mother did love mirrors, often practicing in front of them.  My mother liked to pose and preen in front of mirrors, painstakingly putting on her make-up. In fact, she was very caught up in her appearance and good looks.  She knew she attracted men, something that infuriated my father at times. 
 
But from there, Russo's relationship with his mother, and me with mine, diverge greatly, mostly because, unlike Russo's parents, my parents stayed married (when they should have been divorced) and I was not an only child.  There was my sister in the mix, and that changed the dynamics.  During my troubled teenage years, I made it a point of being out of the house as much as possible as my parents waged war.  And after college I moved further away and by the time of my second marriage, I was hardly speaking to my mother (or vise versa), not that I'm particularly proud of that period, but I had to protect my wife and kids.  She was a rageaholic, perpetually assigning blame for her unhappiness to others. She also was a borderline alcoholic which only fed the flames. Nonetheless, we had some kind of reconciliation before her death, for which I am grateful. 

In later years, my mother turned to art and she was an accomplished painter of still life, portraits, mostly working in oils.  I'll give her credit for seeking a creative outlet, and she was a good artist but sadly, except for this pencil sketch she did of me (a very idealized version of what I looked like at about 12), I have only one of her oil paintings.

But getting back to Elsewhere, Russo had the devotion of a saint toward his mother, who had declared, basically that it was he and she against the world, making him promise (as a child) to always look out for one another, almost as if he were her spouse, not her son.  Even in later years, after Russo had married (his wife, Barbara, another saint as well) and had daughters of his own, she reminded him of their "pledge" to one another:

One of my mother's most cherished convictions was that back on Helwig Street - she and I had pledged an oath, each to the other. She and I would stand together against whatever configuration the world's opposition took-her parents, my father, Gloversville, monetary setbacks. Now, forty-some years later, I was a grown man with a wife and kids, but this original bond, she believed, was still in force. However fond she was of Barbara, however much she loved her granddaughters, none of that altered our original contract, which to her way of thinking made us indivisible. She'd never really considered us two separate people but rather one entity, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common destiny.

His dissection of her motives, self defense mechanisms, lack of friendships, dependency on him demonstrates that great writers are great psychologists.  Later he learns that his father's offhand foreboding that "she's crazy" had some grounding in that she was OCD
Still, his mother taught him to persevere (although never understanding why he would want to be a writer with his fine academic credentials that would assuredly lead to a tenured, secure position).  He even chose lower paying positions. teaching less, to pursue his writing objectives, not succeeding at first, sort of like when I decided to go into publishing rather than into a more lucrative insurance underwriting position (at the time), as well as choosing not to go into my father's business...

Long after she returned to Gloversville from Tucson, I began a decade-long academic nomadship during which I jumped from job to job, trying to teach and be a writer at the same time. For a while, after our daughters came along, we were even poorer than we'd been as graduate students. And I was a bad boy. Caring not a whit about tenure and promotion, thumbed my nose at the advice of department chairs about what I needed to do to succeed in the university. I left jobs for other jobs that paid less but offered more time out of the classroom, In the summer, when many of my colleagues taught extra classes, I wrote stories and spent money we didn't have on postage to submit them to magazines. I wrote manically, obsessively, but also, for a time, not very well. I wrote about crime and cities and women and other things I knew very little about in a language very different from my own natural voice, which explained why the editors weren't much interested.

Later in life Russo finds that voice, and a discipline, and has an epiphany one day as he is looking at the books and periodical articles he had published -- that his writing was the result of an obsessive personality, like his mother's ...

The biggest difference between my mother and me, I now saw clearly, had less to do with either nature or nurture than with blind dumb luck, the third and often lethal rail of human destiny. My next obsession might well have been a woman, or a narcotic, a bottle of tequila. Instead I'd stumbled on storytelling and become infected. Halfway through my doctoral dissertation, I'd nearly quit so I could write full-time. Not because I imagined I was particularly gifted or that one day I'd be able to earn a living. I simply had to. It was the game room and the dog track all over again. An unreasoning fit of must. That, no doubt, was what my mother had recognized and abhorred, what had caused her to remind me about my responsibilities as a husband and father.

It didn't take long for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Feeling your way around in the dark, trying to anticipate the Law of Unintended Consequences. Living with and welcoming uncertainty. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter. Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five, or maybe never, without caring much. Putting one foot in front of the other. Taking small bites, chewing thoroughly. Grinding it out Knowing that when you've finally settled everything that can be, you'll immediately seek out more chaos. Rinse and repeat. Somehow, without ever intending to, I'd discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness - character traits that had dogged both my parents, causing them no end of difficulty - to my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother's world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea. Call it whatever you want - except virtue.

It's a writer's astute introspective view of what writing is all about.  And how one's upbringing and genes ebb and flow in his fiction.

His mother passed on a love of reading, and as Russo says, you can't be a writer without first being a reader.  My own childhood was spent bereft of books and I can't remember my parents reading other than the occasional potboiler, Time and Life magazines, and my father's subscription to the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  Essentially, I grew up without books, except, of course, at school, and I think that did damage to me as a writer, in spite of writing this blog, and making half assed attempts at short stories and poetry. I rarely read anything on my own other than Jules Verne.

On the other hand, my father instilled a work ethic in me and my mother taught me typing and encouraged my attempts at music (except for the guitar which she condemned).  I still consider typing 70 WPM (unusual for a young man in the 1960s) to be the basis for a successful career, as silly as that might seem.  That is how I got my job in publishing.  And the piano has blossomed into something central in my retirement, a place where I can go to express myself and be at peace with the world. 

Russo was looking at his mother's book collection during one of her many, many moves, all of which Russo was left the responsibility for engineering, commenting...

She claimed to love anything about Ireland or England or Spain, but in fact she needed books in those settings to be warm and comfy, more like Maeve Binchy than William Trevor. Not surprisingly, given that she'd felt trapped most of her life, she loved books about time travel, but only if the places the characters traveled to were ones she was  interested in. She had exactly no interest in the future or in any past that didn't involve romantic adventure.

Still, illuminating though literary taste can be, the more I thought about it, neither my mother's library nor my own meant quite what I wanted it to. If my books were more serious and literary than hers, that was due more to nurture than nature.  If I didn't read much escapist fiction, it was because I lived a blessed life from which I neither needed nor desired to escape.  I wasn't a superior person, just an educated one, and for that in a large measure I had my mother to thank. Maybe she'd tried to talk me out of becoming a writer, but she was more responsible than
anyone for my being one. Back when we lived on Helwig Street, at the end of her long workdays at GE, after making her scant supper and cleaning up, after doing the laundry (without benefit of a washing machine) and ironing, after making sure I was set for school the next day, she might've collapsed in front of the television, but she didn't. She read. Every night. Her taste, unformed as mine would later be by a score of literature professors, was equally dogmatic; she read her Daphne du Mauriers and Mary Stewarts until their covers fell off and had to be replaced. It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt. You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me

I can't help but think of Pat Conroy's My Reading Life which is also a memoir, and in which his mother plays a central role in Conroy's love of reading and then writing.  There are so many similarities, including their mothers' shared love of the same novel, Gone With the Wind.

I had a dream after I had read Elsewhere, during the early morning hours when I can at least remember a snippet of what I dream.  I was sitting with Richard Russo's son (he has only daughters), and I mentioned to him that I would like to meet his father, something I didn't feel daunted about (as I felt the one time I might have had the opportunity to meet John Updike at a PEN conference, but did not have the courage or the opportunity, I can no longer remember).  That little boy I was talking to in the dream was obviously me, and as I talked to him, I gradually woke up with a sense of sadness overcoming me, for the lost opportunity, wanting to ask my mother one last question: Why, Mom?    

But Russo's childhood was far from "ideal" as well (is there such a childhood?), such a burden -- the "pledge" his mother made him take as a child.  And yet, he is one of our finest storytellers today.  Richard Russo, thank you for sharing your story with us, for your honesty, and for being the writer you've become.  You were a good son.
 

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

It’s a Wrap



Hard to believe our summer on the boat is drawing to a close.  Next week we’ll be on our way to Budapest to begin a river cruise that will take us on the Danube, the Main, and the Rhine, through five countries and many medieval towns and villages.  I’m particularly looking forward to Cologne, the city from which my great grandparents emigrated.  As a boater, a highlight will be the leisurely navigation of the three rivers, through a total of 47 locks.

Our clearing off and packing up signals the end of our boating season here, leaving old friends, the Boat Club we’re active in, and neighborhoods that are ingrained in our sub-consciousness.  Compounding a sense of sadness was our attendance at two funerals this summer to say farewell to old boating friends, both our age.  We also had a rather sad dinner with a boating friend who had a severe stroke over the winter, a once vigorous man who is now disabled.

I’ve mentioned Shorefront Park before, where I usually do my morning power walk.  I love that little neighborhood here in S. Norwalk, so evocative of the neighborhood I grew up in Queens, but with the added luxury dimension of being on the water.  However, this lovely neighborhood suffered the wrath of Super Storm Sandy, and the devastation can still be seen, homes totally ruined, others in stages of reconstruction, even raising one house a full story to elude possible future flooding.  The storm left its mark on this area.  I usually walk early in the morning and already there is a certain late summer stillness the last few mornings foreshadowing the oncoming fall.  Indeed, time to leave once again.

I did not read as much as I would have liked during our relatively brief stay here.   But in addition to The Orphan Master which I described in the previous entry, I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.  It reads like a suspense novel and Wolfe makes you feel as if you are right there.  It mostly covers the original Mercury 7 Astronauts’ training and launches, but against the background of the Cold War of the late 50s and 1960s, a period I remember so well, but never fully realizing the extent to which it drove the space program.  The book begins though with Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier and fittingly ends with Chuck Yeager’s last test flight, the point being that unlike the Mercury 7, Yeager flew a rocket as a pilot. Wolfe’s description of Yeager’s last test flight is unforgettable, and provides a strong incentive for reading the book.
 
Nonetheless, there are several other selections which resonate with me and therefore I include them below.  The first is his description of where the astronauts stayed while at the Cape: Cocoa Beach.  I’ve been there and I can attest that while it has obviously been more developed, Wolfe still captures its essence and the meaning of the place to the Mercury 7:

….Cape Canaveral was not Miami Beach or Palm Beach or even Key West.  Cape Canaveral was Cocoa Beach.  That was the resort town at the Cape.  Cocoa Beach was the resort town for all the Low Rent folk who couldn’t afford the beach towns father south….Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent.  It was about three hundred feet wide at high tide and hard as a brick.  It was so hard that the youth of postwar Florida used to go to the stock car races at Daytona Beach, and then, their brains inflamed with dreams of racing glory, they would head for Cocoa Beach and drive their cars right out on that hardtack strand and race their gourds off, while the poor sods who were vacationing there gathered up their children and their Scotch-plaid picnic coolers, and ran for cover.  At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants – it was hard to say, since you could never see them – rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s  There was no such thing as “first class accommodations” or “red-carpet treatment” in Cocoa Beach.  The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See’um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcraker ground.  And that was one reason the boys loved it!

And then onto Wolfe’s definition of the intangible, “the right stuff” as he so poignantly describes it: ….Next to Gagarin’s orbital flight, Shepard’s little mortar lob to Bermuda, with its mere five minutes of weightlessness, was no great accomplishment.  But that didn’t matter.  The flight had unfolded like a drama, the first drama of single combat in American History.  Shepard had been the tiny underdog, sitting on top of an American rocket – and our rockets always blow up – challenging the omnipotent Soviet Integral.  The fact that the entire thing had been televised, starting a good two hours before the lift-off, had generated the most feverish suspense.  And then he had gone through with it.  He let them light the fuse.  He hadn’t resigned.  He hadn’t even panicked.  He handled himself perfectly.  He was as great a daredevil as Lindbergh, and he was purer: he did it all for his country.  Here was a man..…with the right stuff.  No one spoke the phrase – but every man could feel the rays from that righteous aura and that primal force, the power of physical courage and manly honor.

And how did the geopolitical events influence the space program?  Probably there would have been no program, at least not in the 1960s, without those events:  ….Kennedy was convinced that the entire world was judging the United States and his leadership in terms of the space race with the Soviets.  He was muttering, “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up.  Let’s find somebody – anybody…There’s nothing more important”…Catching up became an obsession.  … Finally Dryden told him that it looked hopeless to try to catch up with the mighty Integral in anything that involved flights in earth orbit.  The one possibility was to start a program to put a man on the moon within the next ten years.  It would require a crash effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project of the Second Work War…..Less than a week later…the Bay of Pigs debacle had occurred, and now his “new frontier” looked more like a retreat on all fronts….And the tremendous public response to Shepard as the patriotic daredevil, challenging the Soviets in the heavens, gave Kennedy an inspiration…They were all absolutely startled when Kennedy said: “I want you to start on the moon program. I’m going to ask Congress for the money.  I’m going to tell them you’re going to put a man on the moon by 1970.”

The program and the book culminate with John Glenn’s first orbital flight.  The adoration of the man knew no bounds and his parade with the other Mercury 7 down Broadway brought even the city of steel and concrete to its knees: ….And what was it that had moved them all so deeply?  It was not a subject you could discuss, but the seven of them knew what it was, and so did most of their wives.  Or they knew about part of it.  They knew it had to do with presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty five years before to Lindbergh – except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War….But what the multitudes showed John Glenn and the rest of them on that day was something else.  They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded….Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was…right! The way it should be!  The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light…Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing!  Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!
 
I also reread Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (merely 50 years since the last time).  It was a very different experience reading the book as a septuagenarian.  I see Roth as a young colt writing this novella, exploring themes that would develop over the next fifty plus years, with clear signs of the literary thoroughbred he would become.  Certainly the work foreshadows my favorite Roth work, American Pastoral.  Nonetheless, it was somewhat painful reading his youthful work, bringing up issues of my own formative years that were submerged long ago, ones I was hardly conscious of when I first read the book, crazy families’ impact on their children, the first real romantic love, and youth’s obliviousness that old age would one day arrive.  And true to Roth, is a very funny work as well.

The title symbolizes the soon-to-be-lost youth of Brenda's brother, as he is about to be married (like me, at an early age), but still a boy, dreaming of his basketball days at Ohio State, listening to an old radio broadcast of the big game which begins: "The place, the banks of the Oentangy."  My friend Bruce and I spent part of the summer at Ohio State University in Columbus as representatives to the National Student Association from our university.  It was a different world from New York, indeed, but we, like the youth of Roth’s first major work, were ready to be swept along into the stream of life as if it were endless.

The 1984 Paris Review carried a remarkable interview with Roth (hat tip, my son, Jonathan). The interview is a treatise on his process of writing, and I was fascinated by how “fake biography” enters his art, using the analogy of the art of the ventriloquist.  As such, Roth himself is omnipresent in his works: ….Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it—all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life. Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature. They mean it. It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces. Think of the art of the adulterer: under tremendous pressure and against enormous odds, ordinary husbands and wives, who would freeze with self-consciousness up on a stage, yet in the theater of the home, alone before the audience of the betrayed spouse, they act out roles of innocence and fidelity with flawless dramatic skill. Great, great performances, conceived with genius down to the smallest particulars, impeccably meticulous naturalistic acting, and all done by rank amateurs. People beautifully pretending to be “themselves.” Make-believe can take the subtlest forms, you know. Why should a novelist, a pretender by profession, be any less deft or more reliable than a stolid, unimaginative suburban accountant cheating on his wife?

Luckily, before leaving , just this past weekend, all the stars fell into place for us, schedules, weather, etc. and we enjoyed a weekend visit with Jonathan and Chris, yes, both sons!, and Jonathan’s lovely girlfriend, Anna, a really special person, wise beyond her years and with a patient disposition.  We took the boat out to our mooring of some thirty years, between Chimmons and Copps Islands, early in the morning, and had a leisurely breakfast there, Ann, Jonathan, and Anna later playing Scrabble, while Chris and I read.  The day was a “10,” the islands sparkling in the sun and the boat in peak form.  We wish we had had more time with them and better weather in July, but it was not to be.  Nonetheless, we saved the best for last.  And on that note, farewell once again Norwalk, until – hopefully -- next year!












Monday, April 22, 2013

Mentoring and Remembering



I didn't think I'd get around to writing anything for a while, but I can't let this go by.  There is a remarkably beautifully written piece by Philip Roth -- In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor -- in yesterday's New York Times, which one can read on several levels.  It is a eulogy, a profound testament to the power of mentoring, insight into the fine line between literature and non-fiction, and a condemnation of "the scum in power" -- what one could call government at certain stages of American history.  Roth is referring to the McCarthy era when his former high school teacher, mentor and friend, Dr. Bob Lowenstein was "mauled in Congress’s anti-Communist crusade of the 1940s and 1950s."

The main character in Roth's I Married a Communist was shaped by his friend and Roth says "the book is, at bottom, education, tutelage, mentorship, in particular the education of an eager, earnest and impressionable adolescent in how to become — as well as how not to become — a bold and honorable and effective man."  But it is also about that era when his friend and mentor was branded as "political deviant" and lost his job as a teacher for six years: "I refer now not to a boy’s but to an adult’s education: in loss, grief and, that inescapable component of living, betrayal. Bob had iron in him and he resisted the outrage of the injustice with extraordinary courage and bravery, but he was a man, and he felt it as a man, and so he suffered too."

Being a teacher, Bob was in the position of being a mentor to many.  I had had thoughts of going into teaching instead of publishing (actually, I had no thoughts about the latter, I just needed to work when I got out of college -- I think of myself as an "accidental publisher").
 
Good teachers are mentors by design and I have been lucky enough to have two during my impressionable high school and college years, and remarkably we are still in touch and continue to be part of my life, my high school economics and political science teacher, Roger Brickner, and my college English teacher Martin Tucker.

But I've been a mentor too in my career (and have been mentored by others in the publishing world) and although I rarely see them, I am lucky enough to have an email relationship with several former colleagues, some of whom I've known almost from the beginning.  The last entry made an oblique reference to one who contacted me after 44 years, Mary.  Well, hat tip to her for passing on this brilliant piece of satire by Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker, which sort of ties everything up regarding this entry -- a new shameful era in our political history, the Senate having the "the courage and grit to stand up to the overwhelming wishes of the American people."

When President Obama delivered his State of the Union address, he said that the people of Newtown, Connecticut "deserve a vote" on gun control, little did he imagine that a watered down version that focuses mainly on background checks would fail -- a shameful example of NRA's control of our politicians  We got our vote.  Hopefully, all will remember when those Senators are up for reelection.

And to the city of Boston, great sighs of relief to the refrains of Sweet Caroline.....

And when I hurt,
Hurtin' runs off my shoulders