by Brian Doyle
On Dining with the Wonderful Writer Gavan Daws
This was on a beach, on an island so deep in the Pacific that if you set off in a boat from the beach where we ate dinner you could sail south for thousands of miles before you hit a land populated by enormous seals, one of which recently ate a biologist, or conversely you could sail straight north for thousands of miles until you encountered a land where there are enormous bears, one of which recently ate a teenager, but the teenager had been using foul and vituperative language, so you can hardly blame the bear. This was in the same place where another bear wandered into the Royal Canadian Legion Hall and a man who used to be a sergeant told the bear that it would have to leave because it wasn’t a member, so it did.
There were a remarkable number of boats moored in the bay where we had dinner, Gavan Daws and me, all sorts of boats, catamarans and outrigger canoes, mostly, but also sloops, and a yacht, and what appeared to be a racing boat, and two rowboats, and a police boat, and a battered green fishing boat with a cabin so tiny you wondered how tiny the actual fisherman, or fisherwoman, was, and I resolved to stay at the table until dawn to see the tiny fisherman, or fisherwoman, but then the wine arrived, and my resolution got distracted, not for the first time. You’d be surprised how easy it is to distract a resolution. You pitch your resolution on a good piece of land, above the water, with a good view of the ocean, and you peg down the corners, and sweep out any and all insects despite their tinny protestations, and kneel your ancient carcass down there in the sand by the door to say your prayers, and then a girl swirls by as supple as a river, or a frigatebird floats over like a gull on steroids, or there’s a bottle of wine on the table where there wasn’t a hint of a bottle a second ago, and suddenly your resolution is scuffling along in bad shoes and mumbling incoherently and looking for beer cans to recycle.
The menu for dinner at the restaurant on the beach offered several thousand choices of fish, there were endless dense pages of fish, the menu was a veritable book of fish, so very many kinds of fish that I lost track of the excellent conversation, which seemed to be about swimming pools and ancient warriors, and I became absorbed by the music of the names of the fish, which included ahi, aku, au, awa, aweoweo, kala, kumu, moano, moilii, oio, ono, uhu, uku, and uu. And then the waiter, who told me he was from Atiu, which means the Island of Birds, explained that many of the fish also had names in my language, names like milkfish and moonfish and goatfish and threadfish and surgeonfish and soldierfish, and this news sent the conversation off the cliff altogether. I made a concerted effort after a while to get back into the game but just then another bottle of wine appeared right in front of me, gleaming like a moonfish, and the waiter mentioned that the special was a fish called simply big-eyed fish, a fish that looked exactly like his late uncle, isn’t it eerie how that sort of thing happens all the time, and he personally, the waiter, would recommend the special with alacrity and enthusiasm except that it would feel weird to serve up his uncle broiled with a lovely mango sauce, so if we were in agreement he would perhaps point us gently toward some of the many other highlights on the menu, and we agreed to this, as I am sure you would, so that is why Gavan Daws had the moonfish, and so did I.
Mister Burns
At about ten in the morning on my first day as an assistant editor at U.S. Catholic magazine, then housed very nearly under the elevated train tracks in downtown Chicago, I was summoned to the august sanctum of the Executive Editor of the Magazine, one Robert E. Burns, known to one and all as Mister Burns. No one knew what the E. stood for although there was a great deal of headlong speculation. Mister Burns wore a lovely burnished silver-gray suit and had the roundest pleasantest ruddiest Irishest face you ever saw until he opened his mouth and said tersely There are several rules here that you ought to know about from your opening moments with us. We do not begin a sentence with the word hopefully. We do not use pointless words like ongoing. We discourage adverbs. We do not conclude pieces in the magazine with cosmic foolery like ‘it remains to be seen.’ It does not remain to be seen. We do not use such foolery as ‘on the other hand.’ There are no hands in this magazine. We do not edit quotes without that most useful of tools, the ellipsis. We do not respond to lunatic letters with sarcasm or ostensible wit even if they are from John Cardinal Lunatic. The most useful phrase I know is ‘you may be right.’ We respect authorities of every kind but we do not accept their pronouncements at face value and by the word authorities here yes I do mean Our Holy Mother Church. We do not use other languages in the magazine without a very good reason. Anything that can be said in another language can be said better in American English. There is free coffee in the mail room but you are expected to be reasonable in its consumption. The use of pens, pencils, typewriters, fax machines, reams of paper, and books and periodicals from the library is not monitored by employee but you are expected to be reasonable in their consumption and return the books and periodicals. We will assume by the fact of your employment that you are aware of the history and traditions of Catholicism in America but this is not a historical magazine. We are interested in stories that have something to say about Catholic life in America. We are interested in Catholic life elsewhere in the world but not as interested as we are about Catholic life in America. We are interested in religious and spiritual matters of all sorts but a piece about Hindu life in Australia, for example, would have to be a hell of a fine piece to beat a piece about Catholic life in El Paso, Texas. We expect you to learn to at least grapple with photography, assignment letters, negotiating payment for authors, recruiting authors, discovering and sifting ideas, editing authors whether they like it or not, and contributing occasional pieces of every sort to the magazine yourself in time. However this is not a literary salon and you are not employed to become a writer on company time. You are employed to be an editor at a damned fine Catholic magazine in the United States. What editing actually entails you will have to find out for yourself. Inasmuch as I know and esteem your mother and father, I believe you have a genetic leg up on the task but I have been unpleasantly surprised by genetic collapse before and I am sure it will happen again. Let us hope that I am not speaking presciently about you. In the event that you do turn out to be a decent writer, which is all we can safely hope for on this God’s earth, remember that we do not pay extra for contributions to the magazine, and that your contributions to other magazines, which we in general encourage, even for Jesuit magazines, should be composed and polished on your own time and in your own domicile. I believe that covers the general outlines of expectations and responsibilities as you begin with us. I will assume that you have no questions because you are eager to get to your desk and advance the interests of the magazine, an admirable urge. My best wishes on your work. Close the door gently when you leave. If you see an adverb out there kill it. I think that covers everything.
Mr Soisson
The fourth fine editor I worked for — after Mister Burns in Chicago, who taught me that adverbs were lazy and to never start a sentence with the word hopefully, and Floyd Kemske in Boston, who taught me to elevate the reader, and Ben Birnbaum in Boston, who taught me that if you were going to edit a magazine at all you might as well try to edit the best one in the universe — was John Soisson in Oregon, who taught me to stop thinking of editing as copyediting and rewriting, and start thinking of editing as coaching, provocation, ideas, stimulation, suggestion, listening, and giving writers and artists permission to do the thing they secretly wanted to do but did not imagine anyone wanted to see. A lot of good editing has nothing to do with ink or paper or computers, John taught me. A lot of good editing has to do with dreaming rather than honing; the honing is the last step, not the first. A good editor, I learned, is first and foremost a story-catcher, a story-dreamer, a story-stimulator; a good editor jazzes people to think about what would be great for the magazine, and then he or she picks and chooses from among many lovely works, mixing and matching and honing so as to make a product that sings, while gently placating th
e poor souls whose work did not make the team — this issue anyway.
Also John made me realize for the first time that there are lots of kinds of editors, not just one. There are coaches, who suggest and propose but do not assign or dictate. There are machinists and carpenters, who are superb repairmen of broken and clogged prose. There are genius excerpters, who are eerily able to see the shining nuggets amid the bedraggled dross. There are visionaries and charismatics, whose gift is to draw money and attention and goodwill to the enterprise. There are gifted managers, who are able to easily draw the best from those who labor for them without overmuch snarl and shriek. There are meticulomaniacs whose eye for typographical and grammatical errors and muddled captions and missing credit lines and obtuse subheads, outtakes, rubrics, summaries, abstracts, and other minutia verges on the paranormal. There are punctuation junkies and masters of the absolutely brilliant accompanying art that is neither illustration nor stand-alone glory. There are financial wizards and inky souls granted the subtle gift of ably wheedling the finest contributors without a hint of proper recompense for their contributions. There are those who ably negotiate the brambles and thickets of office and corporate politics, defending and protecting their journals against the teeming hordes of penny-pinchers and sales-chipmunks.
And it was John who taught me the lesson I had dimly begun to learn under Ben Birnbaum; that a magazine was an incredible and unique chance to move readers, to actually reach hungrily for their hearts and souls as well as their brains and wallets, and that a magazine that did not try to connect that deeply with its readers was only information, which is in no short supply, and indeed is today a tide. And this: that a magazine that did reach for its readers where they most deeply lived, that did occasionally move them and make them laugh and weep and rage and pray, was a magazine that became indispensable to its readers, that became an Occasion on arrival, that was read instantly and thoroughly; and this was not only good business, drawing money and attention and goodwill to the magazine and whatever its sponsoring entity, but also, in a real sense, was good and substantive and rewarding work that served to, ever so gently, and admittedly mostly infinitesimally, bring people together in rich and subtle ways; which is the most you could ever ask for in a profession, an occupation, a vocation, isn’t that so?
On Noticing a Man Reading My Sprawling Novel on a Train
On the train the other day I saw a man reading my novel — the novel I spent five years writing madly and wildly and hilariously and dreamily, the novel I worked on every morning for one delicious and luxurious hour, the novel that I so wanted to be unlike any novel ever written before by anyone in the whole history of people typing fast. And, gaping at the man reading my novel in seat 3B, I had nine conflicting urges all at once. I wanted to leap up and grab him by the ears and ask him if he loved it. I wanted to call everyone else’s attention to this amazing sight. I wanted to grin and introduce myself as the poor soul who committed the novel like an inky sin. I wanted to kiss his bald spot for having the literary taste and discernment to read me. I wanted to see what page he was on. I wanted to see if he had underlined or highlighted passages and if he had turned down the corners of pages. I wanted to see if he was smiling or weeping or laughing or sneering. I wanted to see if he had scribbled his name on the title page which would be an ever-so-subtle sign that he wished to keep the book rather than shuffle it along to a remote niece or leave it in the seat pocket. I wanted to see if it was perhaps already inscribed by the author, perhaps to his mother, who sold it online for a small profit.
But I also wanted to look away and leave the man to his work, because more and more I am learning that when your book is published, your ship has sailed; your book ceases to be yours the moment it enters a single reader’s head, and what you thought, dreamed, intuited, discovered, and were rattled by, in the making of it, becomes mere opinion, however informed your opinion might be. This is startling but riveting, I find; and I discover that not only do I not mind when people tell me what my book is about — often not at all what I thought it might be about — but I am often deeply moved and touched by its effects on heads and hearts, effects I never envisioned or set out to achieve. This is continuously stunning and mysterious to me.
On the one side, the sheer comedy of readers telling me what my novel is about is refreshing: I have been informed that my book is brooding with death, that it is obsessed with breasts, that is filled with wheelchairs, that it is an elegy to James Joyce, and that it is a metaphor for the United States of America, none of which had occurred to me as I wrote it, or afterwards, for that matter. I have also been informed that the crow at the center of the story is a symbol of death and God, and I was recently told by a reader that the crow was obviously a feathered version of the wise fool in King Lear — this by a woman at a book club who also informed me that each of the other characters in the book was a modern American version of characters from Shakespeare. She showed me the chart she had drawn up with inks of different colors, which was a lovely chart, I have to say. I admired it for a while as she advised me to try to be a little more subtle about borrowing characters from other writers in the future.
But more thrilling than the comedy, more gratifying than the most lovely rave review, are the ways that what I imagined, what I typed, bloom and shiver in readers’ imaginations. I have had people tell me my book gave them hope to go on through difficult times. I have had people tell me my book sang to them when they despaired of ever hearing music again. I have had a young man tell me mine was not only the best book he ever read but the book that made him want to go to college to find out what other sorts of wild shimmering books there might be for him to discover. Your book was a door, sir, he said to me, which is not a sentence I ever heard before, and will be one of the sentences I remember all the rest of my days.
If you are lucky as a writer, and your book achieves a certain popularity and word of mouth, you are asked to do lots of readings, and visit lots of book clubs, and be a visiting writer at colleges and universities, and be the centerpiece of city-reads and even county-reads programs, and this has all happened to me in the last two years. Sure, I am thrilled; I have as healthy an ego as the next guy, and I have kids to feed and cram into college, and after experiencing very little of this sort of inky attention with my first ten books, to be slathered by it now is a kick. But increasingly what I love best about people reading my book isn’t the good that comes to me — the heartfelt compliments, the genuine pleasure in thanking me for the odd experience, the small coin of royalties and fees. It’s what the story does to its readers. In a real sense, it seems to me, the story isn’t mine anymore; when someone reads it, it becomes theirs, and when I visit their local bookstore or library, I am only checking in on a friend, and listening carefully to visions and confessions, not accepting applause for a brainchild.
Sitting on the train, seeing the man across the way reading my novel, I realized again that it isn’t my novel any more, in exactly the same way that your brilliant funny complex idiosyncratic daughter doesn’t belong to you. You helped make her; you poured incredible effort and imagination into shaping her; you fussed endlessly over her substance and details, to give her the very best chance to leap into the world, to be and bring her best self like an arrow against the dark. But when she does leap, when she leaves home and opens herself to the affection and respect and regard and love of others, she becomes her truest self, she becomes a part of those who are entranced by her, who take her into their hearts, who are changed by her music. I keep thinking that I should be a little sad, as my novel and my daughter sail into the hearts of others, necessarily leaving their progenitor behind; but I find that I am not sad at all, but moved so deeply by the sweet wild effect they have on others that I cannot, try as I might, find very good words for what I feel. How ironic; perhaps I should commit a novel on the subject…
Playfulnessness: a Note
Thesis: the essay is the widest fattest most generous open glorious honest endl
essly expandable form of committing prose not only because it cheerfully steals and hones all the other tools and talents of all other forms of art, and not only because it is admirably and brilliantly closest to not only the speaking voice but the maundering shambling shuffling nutty wandering salty singing voices in our heads, but because it is the most playful of forms, liable to hilarity and free association and startlement, without the filters and mannered disguises and stiff dignity of fiction and poetry and journalism, respectively.
Discuss.
Let me give you an example right off the bat. Just riffing for a moment with the typewriter, borrowing a small son and dragooning him into burbling over this way and banging with one finger, we get ffff and rrrrr and bmbmbm, which immediately sound jazzy to me, and send me off thinking about the gleaming glimmering horns in the velvet dark of the jazz club in New York that my sister took me into when I was a teenager, and thinking about the jazzy phonemes my kids started off language with when they were little and spent a lot of time humming consonantal bursts and vowelacious arias, and thinking about how maybe typewriters remember what you type with them, maybe they actually steer you in certain directions for their own devious entertainment, and this sets me thinking about my dad teaching me to type with two furious fingers on his old tall black steel typewriter, and the sheaves of love poems he typed to my mom in blazing dripping afternoons in Manila just before he was sure he was about to die in the invasion of Japan. So here, in the space of two minutes, we have leapt from jazz to jazzy infants to intelligent typewriters to a lanky young sergeant hammering words onto infinitesimally thin sheets of onion-skin paper as parakeets and bulbuls yammered outside in the dense heat, words he thought for sure would be his last, words he desperately wanted to get down before he never saw the girl with the hair to her waist and that irresistible overbite ever again. I mean, there, in two minutes, are a whole bunch of essay starts. Is there any other form that can go so fast and piercingly and honestly and nattily, cutting holes in your heart along the way?