The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Richard didn’t know what else to do but try another novel—maybe about a guy who’s a sportswriter with a glossy New York sports magazine you have all heard of. That sportswriter became Frank Bascombe, who says at one point, I had written all I was going to write…and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books. Amen to that, but not where Richard’s breakout 1986 novel, The Sportswriter, is concerned. Forget any silliness about Richard being tagged with “neo-Faulknerianism” (an early arrow): Frank Bascombe would evolve into your realtor as Everyman, although Richard doesn’t like that characterization.

  People who knew Richard thought real estate had always been his context. Over the years he often owned several houses at the same time. He could give you sharp details on every house he’d lived in—in fourteen states, plus France and Mexico. The expatriated life—France, specifically—didn’t prove up, although he was sitting in a restaurant in Brittany when he learned that he had won the Pulitzer.

  Richard moved so often not just because he could but because he was married to Kristina Hensley Ford, a striking urban planner with a doctorate from Michigan. Her career took them from Princeton to Missoula to New Orleans, where she was director of city planning until she resigned, before Hurricane Katrina, over what Richard described as “issues of conscience” with Mayor Ray Nagin. Kristina was serious business, and graceful and fun. As a couple they scared the hell out of any literary hostess, from Iowa City to Palo Alto.

  They would hold hands at dinner parties and tell you they didn’t want children because children would interfere with their life as husband and wife. For Esquire, Richard wrote a long piece called “Hunting with My Wife…and Others.” When he filed, he insisted that Kristina get her say in a sidebar we called “Hunting with My Husband…and No One Else.” They were both honest, shrewd pieces, and as thickly mysterious as other people’s sex lives.

  The pieces demanded that you look at what Richard wanted you to look at: Most adults don’t want to learn anything; they only want to seem to want to learn, and be diverted a moment from their usual rounds—which seems no more than normal.

  I thought about these pieces a few years later when I saw Richard on Charlie Rose, quoting Jasper Johns on the New York School of painting. To paraphrase: “There are many things that are known so well they’re never seen.” The directness of that idea was like a spear. The deeper you took it, the sharper and more cogent it became.

  I wrote in a 2006 Vanity Fair “Spotlight” that his third Frank Bascombe novel, The Lay of the Land, was about “the weirdness of the ordinary, the intensity of everyday.” I quoted Richard’s Bascombe character calling his life a “high-wire act of normalcy.” As the kicker to the piece, Richard said, “In the end, I think I’m just too damned normal American.” That’s what he wanted.

  —

  WHEN IT WAS TIME to get an advance on his next novel, Canada, Richard left his longtime editor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, for what was reported to be a $3 million, three-book deal at Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint. He and Gary had worked together going back to the publication of The Sportswriter, by an imprint Gary had created at Random House. They had been tight friends, and both of them said they wouldn’t talk about the split, but they talked about it a little and their friends talked about it all the time.

  Maybe it was simple, just about the money. Maybe it wasn’t. You heard people call Richard an arrogant prick or say Gary and the rest of the people at Knopf were artless, corporate assholes. Everyone who knew both of them felt lousy.

  The irony was that Richard had written so brilliantly about literary friendships in “Good Raymond,” his profile of Ray Carver for the New Yorker (1998). Carver had introduced Richard to Gary, who was Ray’s editor and great friend too, which didn’t help anyone feel any better. Richard’s piece was concise, and heartbreaking. He wrote that such friendships would routinely eventuate in absurd miscalculations, unwinnowable confusions, and deep rivalries often so at odds with amity as never to be set right.

  But it was not like that between Richard and Ray. He said that they avoided hurt feelings…hard lessons about trust and rivalrousness (I am trustworthy; I am not rivalrous) learned the hard way, then learned again down through the list of friends, including the ones who remain my friends to this day.

  As an editor, I worked the fringes of some of those literary friendships, editing many of the writers Richard was referring to on his list. My hard-to-swallow realization was that writers made better friends for writers than editors did. They were competitive and could be very petty, but writers were more trustworthy than editors when it came to both writing and the business of writing. Maybe money and the need for it and who paid whom drove some of that, but while a writer would be an advocate for the work, the writing, the editor would be an advocate for his or her magazine or publishing house.

  I thought about writers everywhere trying to get their heads, as Richard wrote…up out of the foggy ether young writers live in…mostly…just beavering away trying to make isolation and persistence into a virtue, and anonymity your sneak attack on public notice. How could editors understand?

  Richard was also clear in saying that Ray simply wrote the truth of his experience, with all its crazy sadness from the drinking, bad-marriage, repo days, but with kindness shining. It was what Jasper Johns had been talking about, identifying the many things that are known so well they’re never seen, knowing things in a fresh, unblinking way. This was what it took, Richard explained, to re-create the condition of not knowing once experience has made so much known…a phenomenon writers all puzzle about as we try to make made-up experience seem real.

  As an editor, I could understand that and was struck by it. How difficult it was to write well.

  —

  IN THE FALL OF 2011, Richard was in New York on some business to do with both him and Kristina teaching at Columbia, and I got him Yankee tickets at the last minute for a night game with the Red Sox. The seats were good ones but not difficult because of my job. Richard made a big deal out of it anyway. We invited each other to dinner as we always did, and Richard also suggested I join him for quail hunting in Thomasville, Georgia, early the next year.

  We had talked about hunting together since that Esquire piece. There was never a bad year at this place, he told me, and Kristina would shoot, too. We never made the trip because the logistics broke down, as they always did with all of our plans to have dinner with our wives whenever we were within a hundred miles of each other. But I enjoyed our arm’s-length camaraderie, just as I did with many writers I had sought out early in my career but no longer edited—a reality of mine no less sentimental for being so widespread as everyone got older.

  The Sportswriter had begun the unexpected (to Richard) trilogy that he intended to finish with the publication of The Lay of the Land. But it didn’t end there. Frank Bascombe came back in a narrative about an old house on the Jersey Shore destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. The story worked because it had been Frank’s house, where he had lived for years but then sold just before the storm to a guy he knew pretty well. The house was a total loss, a situation intensified by Richard’s sinewy language, which, again, made you look at something in plain sight that you had not explored before with any honesty.

  The first time Richard read the piece to an audience it was at the Kaufman Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y, in New York, that validating venue for writers on the way up and a place of dignity for writers who had arrived. He read with James Salter, who was glowing with the success of his new novel, All That Is. Richard came out first and read his new Frank Bascombe story. He got a big hand when he finished, and again when he returned to the stage after Jim read to lead their conversation—which he did with deference and class.

  Salter said he was pleased that All That Is seemed to be selling. Richard said he was happy just to have new work on his desk. That desk was in East Boothbay, Maine, a settled home base for him and Kristina, still going their own
way, still together—married forty-five years, no children, all eleven of his books dedicated to her and only her.

  The morning after the reading, I e-mailed Richard to say that I had been there and liked his new story and also that I thought he had led the conversation with Jim with grace. I said I was sorry I hadn’t been able to stay to say hello. He wrote back complimenting Salter and repeating what he had said from the stage about being happy to have new work on his desk. He also hoped our paths would cross and said I was always invited to come hunting with him at the small place he kept for bird seasons in Havre on the Montana Hi-Line. Again I was pleased to be invited.

  In the fall of 2014, Richard published Let Me Be Frank with You: A Frank Bascombe Book, four connected novellas that he had started with the story he had read at the 92nd Street Y when he’d said he was happy just to have new work on his desk again. The novellas were all sharp, echoing. It occurred to me that perhaps it is true that for writers nothing ever completely disappears once it has begun. Richard wrote about that in his first novel, Piece of My Heart, and it has stayed with me.

  Now more time has passed and Richard and I have never been hunting together or had a dinner with our wives. That bothered me for years, but not now. For an editor, being friends with the work should be enough.

  −ENDIT−

  Fiction, Nonfiction (594)

  A YOUNG WOMAN IN A BAR asked me if my novel, which she had heard about from the bartender, was fiction or nonfiction. The awesome post-literateness of her question was picked up by most of the fiction writers I worked with as evidence of the precariousness of their place in the culture, and they hurled it back and forth as a kind of crybaby mantra. I was editing Esquire and I told them there would always be a place for fiction in the magazine, but I wondered sometimes if I was lying.

  Esquire was thought of as the most important cradle of New Journalism, if not the actual birthplace. Esquire ran the work of Mailer, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe, among many others who locked into the new form. Those writers have, of course, been claimed by every magazine that ever published their slightest ruminations, but while working primarily for Harold Hayes (at Esquire), Clay Felker (the Herald Tribune, Esquire, the Village Voice, New York) and Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone), they gave journalism a new position of importance above the short story—a status that lingers not as the fifty-year literary hangover still talked about in MFA programs but as a paradigm shift.

  Yet even as journalists were making their reputations by using the techniques of fiction, Esquire, Harper’s and the New Yorker were also publishing short stories by writers who were rooting their work in a grittier reality, even if that reality was imagined. Raymond Carver called it “a bringing of the news from one world to another.”

  What was unfortunate during all of the ping-ponging of techniques between fiction and nonfiction is that very little attention was paid to the fiction side of the game and a most important idea was lost. The best fiction written since Esquire began, in 1933, had almost always answered the who, what, when, where and why questions associated with solid journalism but in ways that made it what John Updike called “the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.” Updike wrote this in his introduction to The Esquire Fiction Reader: Volume II (1986) and went on to explain that fiction “makes sociology look priggish, history problematical, the film media two-dimensional and the National Enquirer as silly as last week’s cereal box.”

  How silly, then, not to recognize that questions of what is imagined and what is observed cannot be answered by simply asking what is true and what is not. This is what Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried) meant when he wrote about “story truth” being “truer sometimes than happening truth.” This is also what Ken Kesey meant when he would say that some things were “true even if they never really happened.”

  That woman in the bar turned out to be plenty smart, and in another context—the one outlined above by Kesey and O’Brien—her question was a good one. And beyond the tricky jujitsu of journalistic ethics, it can be answered in one word: both. Or maybe with something about two plows in the same field.

  If you were keeping score, like I had to be, it was the nonfiction that was pulling readers, but maybe the fiction writers were throwing the longest shadows. The best writers could handle the truth either way. I think this is because of a commitment to revealing the shadings and complexities of the human condition. This sounds ambitious and it is, weaving a safety net for the most difficult truths, catching them as they fall through our lives.

  −ENDIT−

  James Salter (2,804)

  AT FIRST YOU HAD to find things out about Jim. He never volunteered, never talked about himself, never. If you asked, he would answer questions, and sometimes tell a story if you pushed. But that’s not what I mean.

  His great confidence had a rightness about it that left him seemingly without vanity. I believe his work gave him that, and so too did the way he lived with his talent. In his “Art of Fiction” interview, he told the Paris Review that there was a right way to live and that some values were untarnishable.

  The immense depth of that was in his descriptions of the intimacies of love and the details of disappointment and loss and regret, and it made reading him an ecstatic experience. You read to see what would happen, sure, but you read every word to savor the meaning and balance of each sentence—it was a way to look at life as it passed.

  Maybe that was one of the reasons critics said he was a writer’s writer, a label that annoyed him and, I suspect, everyone else. Jim’s friend Bruce Jay Friedman told a story about a weekly writers’ lunch he was part of in the Hamptons that included Mario Puzo (The Godfather), Joe Heller (Catch-22) and Mel Brooks (The Producers). The group was looking for a new member to liven things up but decided not to ask Salter to join because, as Puzo put it, Jim was “too good of a writer.”

  If you’re an editor there is no such thing, but the implied problem with being a writer’s writer is that it goes along with semiobscurity and a lack of commercial success. Not that Jim didn’t do fine; it was just so obvious that his talent outweighed his notoriety and his paydays. Of course Jim never talked about any of this. Then, finally, with the novel All That Is, he was poised for the hit his talent had been promising for so many years.

  From the fall of 2012 everyone who knew Jim was optimistic that the momentum was building, and he knew something was happening, too. “Oh, please,” he would say dismissively, but you could tell he was hopeful. There was a lot of press about All That Is, every piece noting that it had been more than thirty years since his last novel, Solo Faces, which Jim had written off of an unproduced screenplay he had done for Robert Redford based on the life of outlaw mountaineer Gary Hemming, who shot himself in Grand Teton National Park in 1969.

  I knew a little about Hemming’s suicide and the climbing culture from editing Outside magazine, and I heard about Solo Faces when it was in galleys. Without reading a word of it, I got Jim’s number from Aspen information and called to ask about the new novel. We made a deal that afternoon on the phone to excerpt it in Rocky Mountain Magazine.

  “Don’t you want to read it first?” Jim said.

  “I don’t have to,” I said, and I’m sure Jim saw right through that. It would be a big deal for me, landing James Salter for a regional start-up, and I had enough literary pretension to think that I could edit him.

  Jim’s novel A Sport and a Pastime was already considered a classic. I had found it years before when I started following the Paris Review, which published books back then. As the story went, Jim’s manuscript had made the rounds and been rejected everywhere when he finally sent it to George Plimpton, who read it and told Jim there was a problem. I think now that George was looking for a way to soften the sex in the book, and Jim probably thought that at the time. What George told Jim was that he didn’t think the novel worked in the first person but that if Jim would rewrite it in the third pers
on, the Paris Review would publish it. Here was Jim’s last chance, but he dug in. He would not rewrite. George suggested that successful novels were never in the first person. Jim mentioned All Quiet on the Western Front.

  “Ah,” George said. “Yes.”

  Jim never talked about that conversation until much later, after it had become a well-known writer-and-editor story because George often told it on himself, explaining that when he had thought about it for a second or two he’d had no choice but to bow to the power of Jim’s language. In its review, the New York Times agreed: “Arching gracefully, like a glorious 4th of July rocket, it illuminates the dark sky of sex. It’s a tour de force in erotic realism, a romantic cliff-hanger, an opaline vision of Americans in France. Fiction survives through minor novels like this one. They assert its power to make us suffer shock, compassion, regret. They bring the private news history never records.”

  Except for the word “minor,” I agreed with every line of that Times review when I called Jim in Aspen about Solo Faces, but I had no idea about his one hundred combat missions as a fighter pilot or his sixteen screenplays or his photographs of Rauschenberg and other artists or the eclectic mix of people he knew and the glamorous rooms he had moved through. I did not know, as he would write later in Burning the Days, his memoir of London in the evening and girls in Rolls-Royces, faces lit by the dash…

  Thinking back, my call seems worse than impertinent, but on the phone that day Jim asked, almost patiently, if I knew anything about climbing. I told him its culture was rich like surfing’s but more intellectual, with more interesting new technology. Plus, I knew about the Vulgarians, radical climbers from the late 1950s and 1960s notorious for raucous partying, rich girlfriends and the occasional nude climb. I had an issue of the short-lived Vulgarian Digest that featured the Snake River (“Obscenic Float Trips”) and the Tetons—where Hemming had killed himself. I went on and, I’m afraid, on…