Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  He goes straight home, has a thought which he quickly writes on a piece of paper as he walks into the house: “Sometimes things you can never understand destroy you.” Not a bad thought, he thinks, complete and pungent, or one to come out of nowhere like that, if that’s what it did—at least the apparent nowhere—and tries to write another line but nothing follows it. Tries again several times that day, takes a pen and pad to bed with him in case something comes, tries to write a follow-up line the next morning, hoping it’ll lead to many lines, pages, even a book-length manuscript one day, then types the original line, scissors it out of the paper and tapes it on the wall above his typewriter. Then he writes it in inch-high letters and tapes it over the typewritten line. Then writes it in even larger letters using Gwynne’s crayons and tapes it on the refrigerator door. Then writes it in various sizes using different writing implements and tapes them around the house. Then buys poster boards and a poster paint set and starts painting the thought in two-feet-high letters, which he plans to nail to a living room wall, but stops a couple of words through and says “What am I doing now, that’s enough, don’t let it get the better of you as so much of the same thing did before and before and before.” He throws out the poster boards and paints, tears up all the papers around the house he had the thought on except the original handwritten one which he puts in his night table drawer, and goes back to reading novels, poetry, going to concerts, museums and plays, listens to a lot of recorded music while he cooks and eats and reads and rests or just contemplates, most of it for solo voice or all-male or all-female chorus but with no musical instruments and several centuries old, visits his oldest daughters in the cities they’re in, takes long walks, goes for a swim each day, has a coffee and torte now and then at a neighborhood coffeehouse, men and women become companions again, lots of interesting things to do and discuss and go to with them, but he always falls asleep holding his own penis.

  17

  _______

  Frog’s Interview

  I wrote a letter suggesting an interview with him. He wrote back “I’ve been interviewed twice in the last three years and the day after each interview I told the interviewers to erase the tapes and tear up their notes. I’m not articulate or glib or confident enough for one. I also ramble on too much and have little to say about my life and work and the practice of fiction writing. So, wouldn’t want to waste your time, but thanks.”

  I wrote back saying I’d still like interviewing him and gave him several pages of possible questions. “Just write your responses to them. Say anything you want. Let loose and be provocative if need be. It probably was the tape recorder and presence of the interviewer that ruined your last interviews. Since you have been a writer for so long, maybe this is the most natural way for you to be interviewed.”

  He wrote back “I don’t like to be interviewed any old way and I don’t like to read these interviews either. I’m not interested in why writers write or what they have to say other than what I get from their fiction. I’m not interested in just about any nonfiction other than some major poetry and a few readable plays, and also an occasional newspaper article, and that mostly to read with my coffee to start the day and maybe to sit on the toilet with. Listen, I don’t want people knowing where I came from, who my parents are, the effects of being the youngest of seventeen children and the only boy in the family, my wives and kids, my dogs and cats, the two gorillas I had as pets till they tore the mail satchel off our postman’s shoulder, the various jobs I’ve had and continents I’ve lived on, my prison terms, why one leg’s a foot and a half shorter than the other, all the hand-me-down girls’ clothes … but you’ve got it. How my life leaks into my fiction and vice versa and what comes from the real and what from the imagination and what kind of instrument I use to sharpen my typewriters every morning, and so on. I also can’t answer your questions in writing because I’m a writer who only writes fiction. Whose only nonfiction, in fact, since I was a pimp maybe 25 years ago, was an article called ‘Why a Pimp Can’t Write Nonfiction.’ And I only wrote that out of spite because the university quarterly that was devoting half an issue to my work plus a complete bibliography, wouldn’t pay me a cent for the stories it was also publishing in the issue but would give me $200 for a 500-word article. Besides, no understanding of me or my… but enough. I’m easily confused, distracted and tormented and almost nothing does this quicker to me than an interview or prospect of one. So, thanks again for asking.”

  I wrote back saying “I tried, it didn’t work, I respect your reasons for not wanting an interview. But now I’ve something different to ask of you. The letter with all those interview questions was written on a word processor, and before I could save the letter an electric storm wiped it out. I didn’t mention it before because I thought you might think I’d be too incompetent to interview you. If you still have the letter, could you please make a copy of it and send it to me? It took two days to compose those questions—it was, quite frankly, one of the most tedious chores I’ve done and I’d hate to repeat it—and I’d like to use them on another writer I’ve lined up to interview.”

  He wrote back “Listen, I’m a lousy interviewee—how many times must I say it? Interviews make my head ache, stomach sick, nose bleed, and later I’m mean to my family, I knock down clothes in closets, I put washed dishes in the cupboard before they’re dry, I punch walls and then can’t type for days, I begin seeing myself as an imposter as a teacher and an impersonator as a thinker and a masquerader as a writer. I believe that fiction writers…”

  I wrote back “OK, the truth, which I was too embarrassed to tell before. Maybe you didn’t notice—my embarrassment was that you’d think I sent them intentionally, so I could squeeze a comment out of you, which isn’t it at all—but what was also on the last page of that letter of interview questions I sent you were two first drafts of poems I wrote. I composed them on a word processor, forgot to tear them off the bottom of the letter, and only after the storm wiped out the letter and I had canvassed the house for my poems did I realize what must have happened to them and where they might be. I’ve tried recalling them from memory but all I can remember is that they were two of the best first drafts I’ve ever written. Please, if you have that letter, send the poems to me? Tear off and throw away the interview questions, even if that is the only copy there is of them—compared to the poems, I don’t care about them anymore.”

  I called him from Paris several weeks later—heck with the expense. Those poems had definite possibilities and it was killing me that they were lost. His wife answered, I told her why I was calling, and she said it would be futile to try and get him to the phone. “Tell him it’s not for the interview anymore,” I said. “If he’s an artist—a serious writer—whatever he is—just a decent person-excuse me, but you know what I mean—surely he’ll understand why I want my poems back.” “He’s in his room working on the first draft of a new story. It’s the only time he gives me express orders not to disturb him for anything, except if one of the children suddenly gets violently sick or hurt or there’s a fire or something, and even that depends on the size of the blaze. If I think I can put it out without him, he’s said, then leave him be till I hear him stop typing. For you see, two to three hours of agonizing first-draft work gives him two to three months of pleasurable rewriting till the story’s completed, and as a result of it, general well-being for the house and all its occupants during that time.” “Tell him I’ll be in the States and passing through Baltimore in two weeks. If he’s found my letter by then, would he save it for me? And if he hasn’t, would he let me look for it where he might have left it?” “I’m sure he would,” she said, “so long as you don’t touch anything on his desk without his permission.”

  I was in Baltimore two weeks later and called. He answered the phone and I said “Please, I don’t want to waste your time further, but did you find my letter?” “I found, I found,” he said, “so what’s the big fuss?” “The big fuss, sir, are those two poems of mine. A
s for the questions in the letter, I could still use some of them for an interview I’m doing in Washington tomorrow with Rodney Stein.” “Oh, big man, Stein—you’re interviewing the right guy, and you’ll get nothing but cooperation from him. He has a big book coming out, from a big publisher and with big publicity money behind it, so an interview or two will get his name around and help the book sell and maybe jack up the paperback sale price and get it to one of the big clubs, which should eventually interest all the chains to stock it. Believe me, if you want to be a serious writer today who makes a decent living from his books and also get lots of awards, you have to be interviewed in the right places from time to time, if you can’t capitalize on your reclusiveness and indifference to interviews. So what am I saying? Nothing. I’m rambling. Be glad I didn’t grant you that interview.”

  “My letter, sir. Could I come by now? I’ll only be a minute.” “Sure, come, pick it up, make my desk just a little less cluttered, but leave your tape recorder in the train station locker or wherever you are.” “I wouldn’t think of interviewing you, sir. I know how you feel.”

  I cabbed over. He was waiting outside for me, waving my letter. He gave me it, introduced his family, invited me in for coffee and cake. It was a small, modest house. Outside: a tiny yard, one tall tree, lots of dead patches of grass, some flowers, bushes, redwood table and cheap chairs, a swing set. Inside: not much furniture and most of it damaged and old, lots of kid stuff on the tables and floors, in the dining room a large cardboard playhouse with piles of children’s books and two small rocking chairs in it, long high bookcases running the entire length, except for the windows, of three living room walls.

  “All those are my wife’s,” he said. “I own about twenty books and they’re all under or beside my side of the bed. I’ll keep it a secret what they are: modern poetry and fiction classics and a volume of one writer’s letters, plus The Odyssey, The Idiot, The Aeneid and Aurelius’s Meditations. I buy a lot of books, and after I’m done with them and if my wife doesn’t want to read them or doesn’t think she can in a couple of years, I give them away or, if they’re awful, throw them out. I don’t like accumulating things. For instance, when I’ve completed a fiction I dump all the drafts of it but the finished one. When the manuscript’s put into book form, out it goes too. Some writers have told me to save the manuscripts for a university library one day, but they haven’t provided me with the storage space for this old junk, nor the confidence that any library would take my work. Besides, it’d be like having my unwashed underpants there for people to study, with all the holes, stains and stretched crotch area and elastic bands. Anyway, all this shows why I don’t like being interviewed.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t catch that,” I said.

  “I’m not a bright guy. Fact is, I’m dense and intellectually dumb. You can see that by what I say and how I say it. I might know my way around a typewriter keyboard when I’m alone with it, and that for sure is arguable, but just about nowhere else. Many times my five-year-old daughter can understand what I’m reading to her—a children’s book—better than I. Probably sometimes because she’s only listening when I read, while I’m speaking, so also concentrating on the delivery. I like to act out all the roles, just as I do when I write, though she prefers I read it straight with no vocal interpretations. Other times my wife and I read the same book and I have to ask her what lots of parts mean. She never does that to me and not because she’s reluctant to. Listen, in my classes I often miss the easiest things. It’s become a joke with my students. We’ll all read a student’s story, though I’ll read it three times to make sure I got it so I don’t embarrass myself. But I’ll still often misconstrue a character or scene or the entire meaning of the piece while few of them will. After I find out where I went wrong I have to slap my head and say ‘God, did it again. Stupid, stupid.’ It always gets a laugh. So why’s the school keep me on?”

  “That’d seem like a good question, no offense meant, of course.”

  “My front gold tooth, full head of ungraying hair that’s always parted on the left side and trimmed, neat appropriate clothing for a teacher my age, ankle bracelet I occasionally wear, my pat-on-the-back personality, mostly, plus my giddy acceptance of more work than two or three men could endure. Don’t ask me. I don’t know. So what am I saying in all this?”

  “Please, I’ve no intention to interview you. As I said—”

  “For instance, what could I say about those questions you sent me—can I have them back a moment?” and I gave him the letter. “They make sense, but for another writer. Stein. He and just about every writer worth his word processor can answer anything and sensibly, intelligibly, cleverly, profoundly, even if they didn’t understand or hear the question. Me? Well I’ll give you an example. ‘What’s going on in American fiction from your point of view?’ Writing, lots of writing. Short stories and novels. Some novellas. Short shorts are in. Cuffs are out again and pleats are back. ‘Is there any significant dialogue going on between writers or schools of thought that will make a significant difference?’ Sure. Yak-yak-yak. It never stops. As for the significant difference, I wouldn’t know, since the minute I hear the yakking… See? Nothing. Let’s take another.”

  “Really, sir, you’ve made your point. May I have my poems back before you smudge them?”

  “‘Is the American novel keeping up with the social, economical, political, religious and technological changes in American life?’ You bet it has. If it doesn’t sell it’s shredded up faster than it ever was. Truth is, I don’t give a shit about any intellectual drip or ideological current or economical river or social ocean or political or technological cesspool.”

  His wife came in and said “You don’t have to get crude.”

  “So I’ll say it daintier. I keep up with nothing, not even contemporary writing. No time. I father, son, husband, teacher, writer, semidetached homeowner. The little time I get for myself, I go to my cellar, shut the door. I blank everyone and everything out. I do my pages. One to two to three. They add up, spill over, get in my way, when I leave I sometimes have to kick piles of them aside. Eventually they amount to a manuscript. Small to large. When it’s done I quickly start another. My life down there’s a concatenation of fabulations. Sound good? I can’t stand those things, whatever they’re called.”

  “You’re only interested in amounts?” his wife said.

  “I’m interested solely in going to the cellar and shutting the door, if only for a few minutes. The messages—reasons—cause-explanations—I blow my nose on. ‘How do I fit in?’ it says here. I don’t. There’s no room. The house is overcrowded with writers and the furniture’s painted on the walls. If rooms were added to it, I’d only be told after they were filled. Not that I didn’t once try to get in, but they said I was being pushy, ‘Wait your turn… You’re stepping on my toe…. I’m holding this place for someone…. You’re too noisy and preventing people from sleeping standing up.’ I got out—I’d only made it to the foyer. ‘Ether, ether,’ I cried. But another. ‘Fabulist, minimalist, where are you?’ I’ll take the Crispy Chef’s Shrimp, not too spicy, and start off with cold Szechuan noodles. Look, I belong to no movement. If I did, I’d hold it till it was still, turn it around from me and say ‘See the pretty birdy?’ and run in the opposite direction.”

  His wife said “Come on, people are interested in backdrops. Why not be slightly gracious and even informative for once, and not a hypocrite. For you yourself read the Joyce biography, was involved in the Beckett one till you lost it, and carried Kafka’s when we went to Prague.”

  “Only for the maps,”

  “Try. I might even learn something about what you do.” She took the letter from him and read “In what traditions do you think your work follows?’”

  “My dad’s. He said ‘Every day is labor day’”

  “‘Do you feel like an American writer?’”

  He started waving an imaginary flag, dropped it, picked it up, kissed it, said “Pheu!” and p
retended to spit. “What’re they making these things out of lately? Tastes so artificial.”

  “‘A New York writer?’”

  “Turdy-Gurdy and Merde Avenue. I says, what, what?”

  “‘Explain the phenomenon of being so widely published and yet still kind of struggling for recognition.’”

  “Keeps my weight down, muscles toned, body in fighting condition, so is among the best things to have happened to me.”

  “‘What’s your relation to the New York publishing scene?’”

  “I walk past their buildings sometimes when I’m in New York. They dwarf me.”

  “‘Why do you publish with the small presses and small mags?’”

  “Unlike the biggies, they haven’t learned yet how to avoid me.”

  “‘Where and how did you begin publishing?’”

  “OK, a serious question, so rates a serious response. Hold your pantyhose, folks. Someone sent one of my early stories to a fancy quarterly. They took it and wanted to see me immediately about a few minor changes before they sent the issue to the printer’s. I went to their office. It overlooked the East River, tugboats going past, hamper factory standing still, sunken living room, framed photos of contemptuous lit lights on the grand piano, an opened bar. ‘No thanks,’ I said. I was on my lunch hour from a news job I had and still never touch the stuff till sundown. It ended up where they wanted a total rewrite. I rewrote the story totally and they said they wanted a total rewrite of the rewrite. I rewrote the rewrite totally and they said they wanted a total rewrite of the rewrite of the rewrite. I decided they’d never publish this poor five-page story of a New York merry-go-round and sent them the original draft. Never heard from them again and six months later that draft was published. I learned almost all I needed to know about editors and publishing from it.”

  “‘What about commercialism?’”

  “Never had the chance. But let’s change the subject.” He took the letter from her and read “‘How do you teach?’ I say ‘Hi, my name is, nice to meet ya, now start with those lines or similar introductory or valedictory ones and write a short story of any length.’ Say, that gives me an idea for one, and just when I’ve been looking for it,” and he went downstairs. “My letter,” I said, but he’d already shut the door.