Loitering: New and Collected Essays

by Charles D'Ambrosio

  There is in the press that will toward allegory, that tendency to find the model in every situation, to treat the swiftly passing moments of a vivid and specific life as illustrations in a large, stable, highly abstracted story. But what if the case of Letourneau does not apply to you and me in any parabolic sense? What if it’s singular and freakish? What if it’s exceptional, elusive? Where do we turn if we want to fully understand life in this anomalous form?

  “The sympathetic heart is broken,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. “We stink in each other’s nostrils.” Perhaps this harsh assessment of the modern soul is true, but perhaps what’s even truer, today, is that we no longer even smell each other. One Florence Wolfe (affiliated with an outfit called Northwest Treatment Associates) prefaced a televised discussion of “the situation” by claiming she “had no sympathy” for Letourneau. This struck me as a bizarre kind of prophylaxis. She was basically holding her nose. You can hardly explain anything without explaining the explanation and thus risking a regressive freefall, but here goes. “The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification,” P. B. Shelley wrote. “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. . . . The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” Just so I don’t come across as a total poet-loving fruitcake (it’s just that the interests of language were underrepresented in this case, that’s why I keep bringing in these witnesses, these poets and novelists), Adam Smith—a free-market economist!—also helped make central the sympathetic identification that imagination allows us to extend to others. And Keats refined the idea further in his famous letter on negative capability, describing a state in which “man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.”

  (This is not to say that I think we’d be better off if these poets, these drunks, suicides, melancholiacs, queers, and ninnies were heads of state, only that they provide us the best record we have of the shifting sensitivities of language, the changes that in turn most carefully register movement in our evolving consciousness.)

  At any rate, by the eighteenth or nineteenth century, imagination is seen as a pretty important epistemological faculty, and one of its key ingredients happens to be sympathy. This general idea hasn’t entirely disappeared, despite various attacks, most of them non-philosophic-intellectual-academic and instead technological, economic, geographic—whatever, but still, it seems odd that an expert whom presumably we’ve turned to for insight announces as a kind of caveat that sympathy is going to be removed from the equation of her understanding. Other experts did the same thing, e.g., Patrick Gogerty from Childhaven, who was quoted postsentencing in the Post-Intelligencer as saying, “This is pure and simple exploitation of a child,” when quite clearly there was nothing pure or simple about the situation, and the conditions (purity, simplicity) imposed on his point of view were just a framing device used to narrowly focus the idea of “exploitation” by excluding other, wider possibilities. This, I don’t understand. Imagination, Wordsworth said, is amplitude of mind. But maybe sympathy’s just a pain in the ass, maybe a sympathetic understanding would only muddy the works on television when all that’s being asked for is a minute or two of high-cost clarity. Maybe a reasonable person understands you have to sacrifice certain things if you want your face on the small screen. And so in a devil’s pact with the boob tube you unload your ballast of sympathy in order to deliver clarity, maintaining the au fond quality of your expertise, which is the providing of rock-solid and irrefutable and immobile answers. That is, you deliver ideas, insights, opinions, etc., as things. But why should I concede Florence Wolfe authority when it seems to me she’s stated in advance that she plans to use only a limited perspective on the matter? She pulls out a pin and puts a prick in Wordsworth’s amplitude of mind, deflating it just a little, and at that moment disqualifies herself, it seems to me, as someone to take seriously.

  A few in-court observations.

  First, the two psych experts, Dr. Moore for the defense and Dr. Wheeler for the prosecution. What interested me most about their respective turns on the stand were the props they used and how those props differed and perhaps reflected their positions more succinctly than either doctor’s windy recondite testimony. Moore fixed a big paper tablet to an easel and, beginning significantly with a blank page, used a red felt pen to draw a diagram that continued for several flowing pages. The paper was wrinkled and rough and the doctor’s hurried handwriting was illegible. Her diagram forked and forked again with hasty hypomanic enthusiasm and was almost instantly an incomprehensible madly branching maze, but the interesting thing was to watch her make it up, like Harold with his purple crayon, as she moved forward, flipping to new pages, new ideas, new possibilities. You never knew what might happen next.

  Wheeler, by way of contrast, came to court with his chart already decided and drawn up, a one-page rectangular placard preprinted with blocky text and bulleted items. From where I sat in the cheap seats his chart looked like the last line in a doctor’s eye examination and was also unreadable. In fact, I’m guessing no one in the courtroom could read either doctor’s signs. It was kind of absurd. The easel angled away from both the bleacher full of journalists and the judge and was too far away for the rest of us to read and there was no jury that might need a visual aid to keep things straight, so what was the point? Moore’s chaotic and bifurcating diagram captured and reflected her contentions about the bipolar state of Letourneau’s mind and also created an image of liberty with its ever-forking and freely wandering path into the future; Wheeler’s prearranged display offered a clear and orderly image of the future he was advocating for Letourneau, which was a clear sentence, a box, jail. While Moore’s display moved through time, Wheeler’s was static in time; hers evolved, his did not. Sitting there, you kind of wondered to what extent each doctor’s chosen method of image-creation reflected not an understanding of Letourneau but an insight into their (the doctors’) personalities; thus it also raised doubts about the solidity and objectivity of their science and their assessments of the case.

  Second, I have to admit to large amounts of unprofessional rock-butt and boredom, which I was able to alleviate by occasionally shifting in my seat and closing my eyes and listening to the sounds of people’s voices. But with my eyes closed I made a discovery. I heard the prosecuting attorney speak in two distinct voices. She used a sarcastic, dismissive voice while grilling Dr. Moore and another, really irritating voice, hard to describe, but sort of storybook sorrowful, the kind of voice you dip down into to read a tale’s sad parts to a child, when she was giving her summation. Now I come from a pretty much jail-free family and none of us are lawyers and so my courtroom experience, before that morning, was nil. And attorneys I’ve seen in TV shows need to convince me primarily as actors and only secondarily as lawyers—the TV case, in other words, is decided on good or bad drama, not law—so nothing had prepared me for the bad acting, the transparent, awful acting, on the part of the real-life prosecutor, Lisa Johnson. Especially during the summation, her voice tried to offer the aural image of concern, of gravity, of direness, but it was nowhere near the real thing itself. Her voice carried no genuine conviction and came off as sentimental, attempting to force on me, the listener, a feeling that was not there, that wasn’t earned. And while I understand she’s a lawyer, not an actor, still, that day, she played two different characters in court and then a third outside, using three very different voices. There was the Sarcastic and the Sentimental and lastly the Press Conference voice, and I bring this up and think it’s worth noting only because in contrast Letourneau, in all the taped interviews I watched and listened to, in all the stories I read, never feigned emotion, never once took on, even for effect, a false character.

  Third, Letourneau was given a chance to speak, and did rise and say a few words and wanted to say a few more, but the press interrupted and all at once started shooting photos of her. Cameras clicked like locusts, m
aking an amplified chewing sound. It was an unbelievably ugly, swinish, and rude moment, but so far as I know it’s not been mentioned anywhere in the accounts of that day, a little omission about how Letourneau wanted to speak and was literally cut short and silenced by the media.

  The law and the courts said Letourneau’s crime was the rape of a child in the second degree. Shrinks for both the defense and the prosecution argued it was the sequela of a sickness, it was “hypomania” or a flaw in her “decision-making algorithm.” Experts talked of abuse and rationalization and exploitation, pure and simple. Terry McDermott said it was just generically “scary.” No one in or out of court bothered to bring in an ace authority on either love or language, so I’ll do it myself, I’ll swear in Gustave Flaubert, who wrote that “fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

  Anyway, you could see the day of the sentencing, as experts in psychology and sociology and law summed up and asserted their positions, how language was being leveraged, how each fragmented field with its highly specific problem-solving vernacular was in a way carting off pieces of Letourneau, and how in the end there was nothing left of the very thing she had probably hoped would unify her shattered life, this elevated, fanatical, rule-exempt, healing notion of love. The courtroom side of things lasted less than three hours. Afterward there were clustered press conferences on the front lawn of the Regional Justice Center. Experts, specialists, lawyers and whatnot kept insisting—this, that, etc.—but the whole before/after aspect of the sentencing was lost on me because, following the judgment, nobody had anything new to say.

  1 No longer a secret, X = Vili Fualaau

  Doo-Wop Down the Road: Richard Brautigan

  When Richard Brautigan shot himself in Bolinas in 1984, his life was given a loosely emblematic look that had very little to say about the literary value of his books. By then his obituary had been stalking him for some time: he was the broken and alcoholic hippie, the cultural figure of somewhat transient interest, the writer whose reputation rested on the drugged sensibilities of his contemporaries. It was as if the era itself had created a vogue for Brautigan no different from paisley shirts or Frye boots; he was treated as an embarrassing fashion. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is a peculiar sort of shame. People who read Brautigan typically pick him up in high school or college, at a time when the lyrics to rock songs are still compelling, and a similar sensibility—youthful, I suppose—has always energized a reading of, for example, Trout Fishing in America. I don’t really understand why this should be so, but both enthusiasms are hard to sustain past the age of thirty. We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes—who knows, really, but shifts in taste don’t fully account for the phenomenon. At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least in this country’s pop culture, and along the way a somewhat self-hating irony lays waste not only to the work but to the desires it once carried. It’s like we die into adulthood.

  “Always at the end of the words someone is dead,” Brautigan wrote in one of his short stories, hitting the dark note of fear that haunts all his writing. But the obituaries for Richard Brautigan eulogized an era more than a man or his work. It’s hard to go on admiring, and as a literary mode, the panegyric, drained of praise, is very common today. The web in particular is full of mock elegies that ridicule and are creepy in the way they so blithely break a fundamental promise, that we will take care of our dead. I suppose they are easy to pull off because the position of superiority is built in: there are the living, and then there are the dead, who are somehow at fault for dying, for letting time take them away. The right tone and rhetorical distance are lazily arrived at and almost second nature for someone raised in media culture. For example: Before he shot himself, Brautigan set the lights in his house to run on timers so that it would appear to the outside world as though he were still alive. One imagines him in those numb last hours plugging in lamps and, in a final fiction, re-creating the habits of the living, trying as he set the dials to remember what those rhythms were like. He was a depressive and something of a recluse and apparently his little gimmick worked. His neighbors left him alone. When he was found, weeks later, the manuscript he’d been editing, his last, penciled in blue, was partly eaten by maggots.

  So much for his career.

  Now only the prose remains, the cracked and cloddy prose with its black sad mood and shrugging whatever attitude, its pleonasms and curious grammatical lapses, its loopy metaphors that either strike home or fall so wide of the mark they read as an extremely flat deadpan. He read Faulkner all his life, obsessed with a past that would not pass, but the simple and often clunky sound of Brautigan’s sentences is musically closer to Hemingway. Raymond Carver and Richard Brautigan shared the influences of time and place, as well as alcoholic fathers, rootlessness and poverty, and a love of fishing. They were contemporaries, born several years apart, both from the Northwest, and looking at old pictures of the men it would be easy to mistake them for brothers. In writing, the influences they shared show up most noticeably when you set Brautigan’s work beside the stories Carver wrote in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Even the title of that collection borrows a crudeness from Brautigan, an inarticulate sloppiness, and the stories themselves, in their short inflected sentences, in their often surreal imagery, in their brevity and density and episodic plotting, in their characterizations and settings and dialogue, suggest a close affinity with Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan’s book of stories. Both books are quite voicey, they share a diction, and, even more noticeably, I think, the sentences find their sound and rhythm in speech that is, to my ear, regional.

  Brautigan never wrote elegant prose. The sentences sound broken, physically broken, as if scrawled by a child with a stub of pencil and jabbed through the paper—they sound just slightly illegible, just slightly as though they hadn’t earned a rightful place in the pages of a real book. They aren’t fully enunciated. There’s a loneliness in the sentences, they feel so untutored, so helpless—all of his work has the mood of a solitary child trying to amuse himself. I remember reading years ago a comment by Wallace Stegner, who claimed that Brautigan was illiterate, at least in the cultural sense. I rather doubt it, but a recurring figure in his work is the writer who should not be writing, the writer whose past is unusable and whose gifts are inadequate. “I’m haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary. . . . I’ve been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.”

  By far the best of the stories on this theme is “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” which Carver included in American Short Story Masterpieces, an anthology, edited with Tom Jenks, that in some ways marks a high point for the flexible practice of realism in short fiction. In that story, three people are “going in” on the writing of a novel, and the narrator, who lives “in a cardboard-lined shack of [his] own building,” has been included in the project because he owns a typewriter. A woman on welfare will do the editing because she’s “read a lot of pocketbooks and the Reader’s Digest.” And the novelist is “writing the novel because he wanted to tell a story that had happened to him years before when he was working in the woods.”

  “You’ll type it. I’ll edit it. He’ll write it,” the woman says. They’ll share the royalties, they agree.

  None of the characters are given names, but the region is, acting as a sort of fourth character.

  “I was about seventeen,” the narrator says, “and made lonely and strange by that Pacific Northwest of so many years ago, that dark, rainy land of 1952. I’m thirty-one now and
I still can’t figure out what I meant by living the way I did in those days.”

  Really the antagonist in this story is the region. Brautigan always said he was from the Pacific Northwest, but it was rarely a place on a map. It was something ominous and waiting, a past that would not die off, that followed him everywhere. It was huge, it was vague. It was a weather, it was a sawmill and a pond and unpaved streets and puddles, it was a “ragged toothache sky” and a sad trailer “with a cemetery-like chimney” and children who sit in gutters like “slum sparrows.” There’s a sense throughout Brautigan’s work that his metaphors and similes are reaching, that they’re trying too hard, grasping after an effect in desperation. Often they succeed, but just as often they fail. What interests me is their staunch physicality, the yoking of terms, one abstract, the other concrete, that won’t quite yield a just or decorous relation; they’re like a landscape that won’t give in to writing. Just breezing through some thoughts on the nature of metaphor provides a good way to understand Brautigan. If metaphor is meant to evoke new meanings—meanings not predetermined by either language or experience—then Brautigan’s frequent attempts and failures are a stab at liberation in an already decided world. If metaphor depends on an eye for resemblances, then Brautigan’s failures become fearful, a fear that nothing he knows resembles anything in the outside world, that everything is estranged and forever and obdurately strange. If metaphor is a transaction between words and things, then in Brautigan the deal is often torn up, the transaction called off.