Reading in Bed, Updated Edition

by Brian Doyle

  Catholicism, perhaps more than any other faith, is story — the ocean of Jewish stories that provide context for the Messiah, the riveting stories Jesus told, the stories of Jesus’ life, the stories of the millions of people who have believed in the Son of Light since he walked Judea, the stories we tell every day in the Mass, the stories we teach our children so that they too might yearn for and pursue light in darkness, grace amid brokenness. And Catholicism is paradox; it is the relentless belief, against horrible hourly evidence, that divine love made and sustains and graces the world and will do so unto the end. And Catholicism is rich in ritual and symbol, in characters and miracles and magic. No wonder that the faith lends itself easily to stories — Flannery O’Connor’s fanatic believers, Powers’ calculating priests, Dubus’s open-hearted yet rock-ribbed accounts of sacraments everywhere and in everyone.

  A great American storyteller died in winter, six children lost their father, and Andre’s town was reduced by an inimitable one; and the day that Andre had a heart attack and died on his hill near the Merrimack River, Catholics in this nation lost one of their most articulate and sharp-eyed brothers, a burly bearded man whose smile was nearly as big as his heart. His gifts were many, his courage in pain admirable, his grace an education. May he rest in peace in the palm of the Mercy.

  Novelizing

  Having discovered (late) the peculiar pleasures of writing novels, I have happily been committing novels one after another in recent years. For various foolish reasons I had to take a break recently from the novel I have been utterly absorbed in every morning for months, and when I returned to it finally the other day I discovered the characters were annoyed with me, and were initially recalcitrant to speak, as if they were on strike; finally I realized that they were hurt that I had abandoned them, that I had left them to their own devices. I could not very well explain about contracts and travel delays to them, but after a while things warmed up and we got back to work, with only minor grumbling.

  But this made me stop and think about the odd dynamic of making novels. They take a long time to make, and you do not get paid while making them, which is awkward when the dental and tuition bills come. You do not know quite what you are doing or what is happening while you are making them, and can only hope for the best; in my experience, if you try to command and control the characters, they lose their verve, and become mere puppets, and the whole thing loses its energy and dash and rich mystery. You write a lot of stuff that seems cool and lyrical and amazing and then you have to cut it because it does not serve the story. You wander off on tangents and spend too much time with the wrong characters, just like you did in life when you were young. You leave gnomic hints for yourself in the text and then forget utterly what that was all about. You have the constant urge to suddenly write in Gaelic or blank verse, which you must repress. You have the terrible urge to bury red herrings and private jokes in the text, which you must repress. You have the constant urge to allow buses to speak, and herons to pontificate, and horses to mate with postboxes, which you must repress.

  Finally when the novel is done you must show it to the one reader you trust most in this world, and hope she says o my god rather than that’s nice, and then you must resist the urge to show it to friends, who would only issue advice, and then you must seek out a brilliant soul or sucker to publish the novel, and even if and when it is published, you must keep your dreams real, and not tell everyone Brad Pitt will be starring in the movie, and hope that the book sells more than one copy to one person per week.

  In my limited experience, though, by the time the novel is loose in the world, with a shiny cover and cheerful blurbs and heated marketing rhetoric that I helpfully supply, I am utterly absorbed in another novel, and can only watch those characters from afar, with affection and a sort of reverence; they came to me, they presented themselves, they graced me and my fingertips for a year, and now they are launched on their own, in their papery ship and electric download, and I feel for them as I feel for my children: proud of who they became, thrilled at their independence, and more than a little sad that our time living together is done. But on we go.

  Writing Oregon

  I was at book club recently, as the grinning guest whose novel was the subject of discussion, when I was asked who were the finest writers and books in the long history of Oregon, and yet again fulsome garrulous wholly debatable opinion rose in me like sap, and out poured a headlong speech of such remarkably subjective nature, albeit informed by much reading and a great deal of chat with Oregon readers and writers, that it seems entertaining to reproduce some of it here.

  To answer the first question: In no order, Ken Kesey, Ursula Le Guin, Barry Lopez, Beverly Cleary, and Stewart Holbrook — the last of whom was the funniest and most headlong and colorful of them all, and is now almost forgotten, which is a shame, because his Holy Old Mackinaw (a cheerful history of American logging) is a masterpiece.

  To answer the second question: Kesey’s two masterpieces, Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — the latter arguably the better, more coherent book, but the former a sprawling epic thing that all Oregon writers, I notice, agree is the best Oregon novel of all. The Lathe of Heaven, by LeGuin. The Brothers K and My Story as Told by Water by the terrific David James Duncan. The Country Boy, by Homer Davenport, a hilarious memoir entertainingly illustrated by himself. Lopez’s Winter Count. Sallie Tisdale’s Stepping Westward. Hole in the Sky, by William Kittredge, a searing memoir of his youth on the high dry side of Oregon. True Believer, by Virginia Euwer Wolff, and Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Cleary. The Nez Perce and the Opening of the Northwest, by Alvin Josephy, a brilliant historian who earned a Bronze Star as a Marine in World War II. Voyage of a Summer Sun by Robin Cody, who canoed from the source of the Columbia River to its mouth, which took him one whole summer. Fire at Eden’s Gate: Tom McCall and the Oregon Story, by Brent Walth, a great biography of our best governor. The Jump-Off Creek, by Molly Gloss, the best novelist in the state today. Riverwalking, by Kathleen Dean Moore, the best essayist in the state today. Every War Has Two Losers, by William Stafford, who was not only Oregon’s poet laureate but America’s, and not only wrote some 60 books of poems but was a brilliant asker of questions about the foul calculus of war; for all that we sing and celebrate the poet this year, his centennial, it’s the question-asker I most admire, and would inflict on every citizen in the state, if I could; not to mention this sweet wild silly glorious selfish violent brave nation of ours.

  On Renaming Almost Everything in the Known Universe

  Here’s an idea: how about if all the cars and trucks and sports teams we name for fleet and powerful animals and cosmic energies and cool-sounding things that don’t actually exist or mean anything (Integra! Camry!) are, effective immediately, renamed for literary characters and authors? Wouldn’t that be cool? So instead of the Escalade we have the Evangeline, instead of the El Dorado we have the Elmer Gantry, instead of the Hummer we have the massive gleaming Huckleberry Finn. And it’s even more fun with sports teams — the Portland Trail Babbitts! The Detroit Twains! Imagine the logo possibilities — the Twains with a bushy-haired Samuel Langhorn Clemens peering cheerfully over the bill of their ball caps, the University of Georgia’s Fighting Flannery O’Connors with that wise bespectacled young soul on their broad chests, the mind doth reel.

  And this allows us to beautifully sidestep the contentious problem of sports teams being named for people with skin slightly darker than most of the people playing and following that team — Redskins, Braves, Chiefs, Indians, it’s a particularly dopey custom, and we are easily rid of it when we find ourselves rooting for the Cleveland Icaruses and the Kansas City Chinos (with the overture from West Side Story blaring from every speaker in the stadium).

  For once city council and corporate board meetings would be riveting, wouldn’t they, as Los Angeles teams vie to see who can snag the names Marlowe and Chandler, and who will be the Los Angeles Easy Rawlins? The New Orleans Moviegoers,
the Boston Dennis Lehanes, the Harvard University Fighting Henry Adamses…

  Just the loss of so many utterly weird and puzzling car names would be a great gift to the known world. Achieva, Cabrio, Elantra, Galant, Impreza, Passat, Reatta, Vandura, all gone and unmourned, and in their places we find the Deerslayer, the Scarlet Letter, and the Augie March — although there are some current cars that could and should keep their names: the Somerset and the Swift, for two, not to mention Stanzas and Dashers and Darts.

  I can hear you arguing now: isn’t it an act of wild creation itself, to invent ridiculous names for cars, names that sound sort of cool and dashing and fast if you don’t think about it at all, but as soon as you think about it for a second you start laughing so hard your sprain your eye, and then you laugh harder imagining the eager devious souls who had to sell those names to the startled high priests of marketing, who many times incredibly must have said yes! yes! when someone said how about Camargue or Justy or Nubira, chief, which now I have to stop thinking about that moment in Detroit because my eye hurts? And to answer your question, yes.

  Anyway I personally think this is an excellent idea, because it leads to hours of happy dreaming about the University of Massachusetts Moby-Dicks, or the University of Oregon Randall Patrick McMurphys, who play at the aptly named Mac Court, or the Toronto Robertson Davies, on which team every player is asked to sport the enormous glowing beard of the salty soul for whom the team is named. Such speculations, I find, are perfect for wasting the hours that a responsible man would be looking after the laundry and the parakeets, but this line of thinking brings me right to the late William Wharton, who would have smiled widely, I bet, if the Baltimore Orioles renamed themselves the Birdys in his honor, which they haven’t yet. But they might.

  A Bogey Tale

  Jeykll and Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream, in October 1885, on a wind-whipped night by the sea. He’d fallen asleep uneasily, remembered his wife Fanny, and in the night “my husband’s cries caused me to rouse him, much to his indignation. ‘I was dreaming a fine bogey tale,’ he said reproachfully,” and he told her what he had dreamed — the essence of the book he would write twice in the next six days, all the while confined to bed and hardly able to speak for fear of his lungs hemorrhaging.

  He woke at dawn and wrote furiously. At lunchtime he came downstairs “preoccupied,” remembered his stepson Lloyd, “hurried through his meal, and announced that he was having great success with the story, and was not to be interrupted even if the house caught fire.” Two days passed, Stevenson scribbling furiously in bed. On the third day he came downstairs with the manuscript — 30,000 words. He read it aloud to Fanny and Lloyd by the fire.

  Lloyd listened, “spellbound, and waiting for my mother’s burst of enthusiasm,” but it did not come: “Her praise was constrained, the words seemed to come with difficulty; and then all at once she broke out with criticism. He had missed the point, she said; had missed the allegory; had made it merely a story — a magnificent bit of sensationalism — when it should have been a masterpiece.”

  Stevenson was livid, enraged, “his voice bitter and challenging in a fury of resentment,” said Lloyd, 17 years old at the time and frightened to see the stepfather he dearly loved “impassioned and outraged.” Lloyd fled, Stevenson stomped back upstairs, and Fanny stayed by the fire, “pale and desolate.”

  Then Stevenson returned. “You’re right,” he said quietly to Fanny. “I’ve missed the allegory, which is, after all, the whole point of it.” He threw the manuscript in the fire. Fanny and Lloyd shouted and reached for it but Stevenson stayed their hands: “In trying to save some of it, I should have got hopelessly off the track. The only way was to put temptation beyond my reach.”

  He wrote it again, in three days, and then off it went to be published, as a thin book costing a shilling. It soon became one of the fastest-selling books in history. Today millions of copies have been sold in a hundred languages; and from it have been born dozens of plays, movies, even, God help us all, a musical.

  But to me Jeykll and Hyde is far more than tale. I think no truer thing about men and women has even been written, for Stevenson captured the most maddening of human truths: we are capable of leering, squirming, unimaginable evil even as we are capable of astounding and incredible grace. We court and slay, we rape and heal, we lie and confess, we rant and pray, we rage at the Other even as we know, deep in our uttermost bones, that the Other is also us.

  A gaunt Scot dreamed the answer to the final human question long ago: how will we win the war in ourselves? A battle of every hour, in every heart; but the victory begins when we speak the hard truth about the Jeykll in us.

  Scribbling & Dribbling: a Note

  In recent years I have become absorbed by the startling basketball pedigrees of many of the Northwest’s finest writers — Sherman Alexie and Robin Cody and Barry Lopez were all high school stars, David Duncan was a springloaded rat-ball forward, and even Ken Kesey, for all his fame as a wrestler, is reputed to have been a decent, if foul-prone, hoop player. Taking this line of thought out for a silly walk, I started wondering where other fine writers would fit on basketball teams — the sturdy and sinewy John Daniel, for example, once a logger, is clearly a rooted center, and the tiny and brilliant Ursula Le Guin, deft and inventive and confident, is clearly a point guard. Molly Gloss, willowy and efficient, looks like a smooth forward to me; the effervescent Marc Acito looks like the fizzy wild-eyed guard you want leaping off the bench and energizing a dull game; Tim Egan, with his all-round skill set, can play three positions; Ivan Doig and Tom Robbins, let’s say, are guards who check into the game together, the disciplined Doig calming the wildly talented but infinitely combustible Robbins…

  The more I did this with Northwest writers for sheer entertainment (Stewart Holbrook distracting the refs and the other team with a string of witty remarks, Beverly Cleary letting dogs romp on the court, Chuck Palahniuk getting into fistfights, Bernard Malamud playing the first quarter and then fleeing to Vermont), the more it seemed to be oddly revelatory of characteristics of their work, and the more I itched to apply the filter to American literature at large. I mean, doesn’t it say something about Barry Lopez’s eerie control of his prose, its cadenced dignity, that he once controlled the ball and the rhythm of the game? Doesn’t it reveal something of Duncan’s soaring imaginative leaps as a writer when you realize he was a wild floating egret of a ballplayer?

  So I see Saul Bellow, un-tall and burly and cocky, as a point guard, a sort of Jewish Deron Williams; and Ernest Hemingway, all muscles and glower and attitude, as a power forward, a kind of literary Maurice Lucas; and Mark Twain, who did everything well, as a literary Oscar Robertson, dominating smoothly without seeming to expend much energy (ah, the art of artlessness). And off we go, dreaming: John Updike as Kobe Bryant, unbelievably great sometimes but somehow just a tad too solipsistic; and Flannery O’Connor dropping one killer dart after another from the corners, a female Sean Elliott; and John Steinbeck toiling quietly and consistently for years, always excellent and hardly ever dramatic, the Tim Duncan of American letters; and Dave Eggers as Chris Paul, talented and generous, and Annie Dillard as LeBron James, great right from the start and maybe one of the best ever…

  We could, of course, play this game endlessly, with writers who were better players than writers, like the late James Carroll, or writers who were good players who later wrote beautifully about the game itself (John McPhee and John Edgar Wideman are probably all alone there), but this line of thinking always depresses me, for basketball, it seems to me, has not produced superb writing, in the way that, say, baseball and golf and cricket and boxing have. You could easily count the classic basketball books on one hand: David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game (which is more about race and money than it is about professional basketball), McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are (a paean to Bill Bradley when he was the best college player in the nation in 1965), Terry Pluto’s hilarious Loose Balls (about the imm
ensely colorful and chaotic American Basketball Association), Darcy Frey’s riveting and chilling The Last Shot, maybe Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, and that’s about it — Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball is hilarious once, but no one will ever reread it, and Bob Ryan’s Forty-Eight Minutes is terrific if you are a Celtics nut, of which there must be a few. After that it’s magazine articles blown up into flimsy books (John Feinstein), self-gratifications (Charles Barkley et al), journals of championship years (an endless parade), spiritual silliness (Phil Jackson), or books that seem to be about basketball but aren’t, really (Larry Colton’s Counting Coup). Where is basketball’s Roger Angell or A. J. Liebling? Where is the sport’s masterpiece of its role in culture, like C.L.R. James did for cricket in Beyond a Boundary? Where is the writer who sings it beautifully for decades, so that after a while it’s one long sweet story about people and commitment and passion and laughter, as Herbert Warren Wind did for golf?

  When younger I daydreamed that that writer might be me, but now I am a cagey veteran, all too aware of the holes in my game. But mark my words: there will come a writer who will make one startling book after another about basketball. It’s the most sinuous, quicksilver, flowing, graceful game there is, the most American in its generosity of scoring and gentle violence, and there will arise a writer to match it, I hope…