Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Suddenly then, at the very end of The Last Kind Words Saloon which has been a chronicle of the follies of men, it appears that a woman, Nellie Courtright, has been the chronicler. Very few men of the era have survived, but Nellie has survived, and is living now in Santa Monica. She travels down the coast to San Pedro to interview Wyatt Earp for a final time, discovering to her horror that he and Jessie are living in squalor: “the famous hero of the O.K. Corral was now a rheumy-eyed old man who spent his days spitting into a coffee can.” Jessie “had always been a large woman, but now she had spread, while Wyatt seemed to have shrunk.” Wyatt doesn’t remember Nellie Courtright, or much of the past, but he does recall that his old friend Doc Holliday has died—“of the T.B., up in Colorado.” Amid the trash in the Earps’ front yard Nellie discovers Warren Earp’s old sign THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON, which she offers to buy, and which Jessie hands over without wanting payment: “So I took the sign, not sure why I wanted it, put it in the back of my convertible, and drove away.”

  When the celebrated gunslingers have died, or have lapsed into the oblivion of age and senility, Larry McMurtry tells us in this coruscating anti-heroic work of fiction, the “legend” may yet endure—a battered sign haphazardly rescued from a dump heap by a tabloid journalist.

  The Last Kind Words Saloon

  By Larry McMurtry

  NOTES

  1.McMurtry has explored the phenomenon of the making of Old West mythology previously, in The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginning of Superstardom in America (2005). In The Last Kind Words Saloon the narrator mentions offhandedly how after Wyatt Earp’s intervention with the Clanton herd of cattle and the subsequent stampede, the subject of chapter fifty, a popular “dime novelist” wrote about the incident in a “dime novel” Ghost Herd of the Animas:

  It sold a million copies. Forty years later tourists thought they saw ghost cattle racing through the sage at dawn. Wyatt and Doc were mentioned, and yet neither of them had fired a shot.

  2.In his early essay collection In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968) Larry McMurtry notes that, for the Texas writer, the passing of the Old West—“the passing of the cowboy”—is an “inescapable subject.” Driving the legendary beef herds to slaughter across the Great Plains, however dangerous, impractical, and short-lived in the history of the American frontier, nonetheless lives on in the literature of heroic nostalgia, and in popular song, as if what is being lamented isn’t just the passing of a way of commercial life but also the romance of life itself:

  I’m going to leave

  Old Texas now,

  They’ve got no use

  For the longhorn cow.

  They’ve plowed and fenced

  My cattle range,

  And the people there

  Are all so strange.

  PAPER LOSSES:

  LORRIE MOORE

  I shall still be here . . . growing my bark

  around the wire fence like a grin.

  —Caroline Squire, “An Apple Tree Spouts Philosophy in an Office Car Park”

  (EPIGRAPH TO BARK)

  Who could have guessed that the terse, rather rude-sounding monosyllable bark might have such resonance? There is the harsh, heart-tripping bark of an excited or angry dog, and there is the equally harsh and heart-tripping bark of a human being speaking in anger; there is the bark of a tree, a sort of tough, calcified skin from which tenderness has vanished; there is the ominous, archaic bark—a fragile vessel to transport us on a river journey, just possibly on the River Styx. There is the embarrassment of barking up the wrong tree—like the self-deluded, aging pop singer of Lorrie Moore’s “Wings”: “She’d spent a decade barking up the wrong tree—as a mouse!” There is the “outer bark of the brain—and it does look like bark”—see Lorrie Moore’s “Thank You for Having Me.” Less obviously, there are disembark and debark with their suggestion of departure tinged with repudiation, as in the mid-life/post-divorce crises of “Debarking,” the first story in Lorrie Moore’s mordantly funny and heartbreaking new collection.

  In the frequently anthologized “How to Become a Writer” from Self-Help (1985), a favorite among creative writing students, writer and reader are forcibly yoked together in the ambiguous pronoun “you.” The young, hopeful writer is urged to first “try to be something, anything else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the world. Fail miserably.” The writer is urged to major in child psychology; she takes writing seminars that give her no hope; she is said to be “self-mutilating and losing weight” but she continues to write, living for those “untested moments of exhilaration when you know that you are a genius.” A tour de force of low-keyed irony, “How to Become a Writer” progresses in brief, ironic vignettes that comprise a number of years in the quasi-writer’s life, but it is only in the interstices of her comical self-absorption that we learn that she has an older brother fighting in Vietnam, and that her father is evidently an adulterer; later, we learn offhandedly that the brother has returned from Vietnam a “cripple” and that her parents’ marriage has ended in divorce. The fledgling writer has a gift for sardonic observations if for little else. The humor of “How to Become a Writer” is this very myopia: the writer looks in vain for inspiration, concocts absurdly melodramatic stories about subjects of which she has not a clue, while her true subject is in front of her, unheeded: the tragically disabled brother, the broken marriage and its effect upon her mother. Asked by a boyfriend “with a face as blank as a sheet of paper” if writers become discouraged, she is compelled to give a snappy reply: “Sometimes they do, and sometimes they do. Say it’s a lot like having polio.” Self-pity conjoined with a lack of self-awareness suggests a portrait of the non-artist: the young Lorrie Moore imagining a worst-case scenario of the failed writing life. (The wounded soldier-brother reappears in Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs [2009], as the object of the benumbed narrator’s long-deflected grief; what is deflected in “How to Become a Writer” is poignantly evoked in A Gate at the Stairs, as if the writer has grown up and is strong enough now to confront her painful subject matter.)

  As Coleridge famously remarked of Wordsworth that one might recognize his poetry anywhere, so readers of Lorrie Moore are likely to recognize her prose instantaneously: a unique combination of wit, caustic insight, sympathy for the pathos of her characters’ lives, and that peculiar sort of melancholy attributable to time too long spent in the northern Midwest where late-afternoon snow acquires a spectral blue tinge. Over the years Lorrie Moore’s characters appear to be keeping pace with her: as the women and men of Self-Help were appealingly young and naïve, in their twenties, the women and men of Bark have become middle-aged, burnt-out and disillusioned, yet retaining some measure of feckless naïveté; they are likely to be divorced and in ambiguous relationships with individuals of the opposite sex, in awkward relationships with children, and in guilt-wracked relationships with the foreign, abstract victims of American bellicosity: “And then he said the name [of the American prison in Baghdad], but it sounded like nonsense to her, and perhaps it was, though her terrible ear for languages made everything that was not English sound very, well, mimsy, as if plucked from ‘Jabberwocky.’” (“Subject to Search”). Of the eight stories of Bark, the longest, aptly titled “Wings,” takes us on a rare flight of self-transcendence; the others are rueful journeys of self-discovery in which epiphanies bring jolts like electric shocks.

  THE HAPLESS PROTAGONIST of “Debarking” is a recently divorced man named Ira who, unhinged by the breakup of his fifteen-year marriage, becomes infatuated with a divorcée yet more unhinged than he is: “[Zora] howled with laughter, and when her face wasn’t blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a scissors (in which Ira recognized as postdivorce hysteria; “How long have you been divorced?” Ira asked her. “Eleven years,” she replied), Ira could see that she was very beautiful.” Zora is, somewhat improbably, a pediatrician;
she is eccentric, flamboyant, vulgar, ludicrously infatuated with her adolescent son Bruno. She says of divorce: “It’s like a trick. It’s like somebody puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, ‘Stand there.’ And so you do. Then boom.”

  As their relationship develops erratically Ira thinks of Zora that she was “either stupid or crazy,” yet can’t seem to resist her sexually; he complains to a friend “she might not be all that mentally well.” Ira is humiliated by Zora’s tactlessness as by her obsession with her son yet

  I can’t let go of hope, of the illusion of something coming out of this romance, I’m sorry. Divorce is a trauma. . . . Its pain is a national secret! But that’s not it. I can’t let go of love. I can’t live without love in my life.

  In the foreground of “Debarking” is Ira’s unraveling post-marital life; in the background is the onset of the Iraqi War (“He turned on the TV news and watched the bombing. Night bombing, so you could not really see”). Ira’s closest friend Mike—(though Moore’s characters are dying of loneliness they seem not to lack the sort of exemplary wise, caring, and witty friends more often found in literature than in life)—tells him, “Sanity’s conjectural.” After Zora confides in Ira about her nervous breakdown and her prescription antidepressants, she goes on to tell him much—too much—about her morbid dependence upon her adolescent son, in effect rejecting him even as, perversely, she has become at last emotionally intimate with him. Ira yearns for love—but not at such a humiliating cost: “He had his limitations.”

  As its title suggests, “The Juniper Tree” is a fairy tale of a distinctly contemporary sort, set in a Midwestern purgatory for women:

  That was how dating among straight middle-aged women seemed to go in this college town: one available man every year or so just made the rounds of us all. . . .

  Every woman I knew here drank—daily. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found.

  The narrator, a musician, is distressed to have failed to visit a friend named Robin Ross, who has died of cancer in the local hospital, and in a vividly rendered dream she and two other women friends make a pilgrimage to Robin’s house to offer the deceased gifts. We learn that the narrator has been jealous of Robin, who has “dated” a man with whom the narrator is currently involved; she resents “sharing” a man with anyone—“I’m not good at it in the least.” She is the only one of her friends, all of them “academic transplants, all soldiers of art stationed on a far-off base,” to whom “something terrible” hasn’t yet happened: a dancer, Isabel, has lost her arm in a car crash; an artist, Pat, has had a massive stroke and has only intermittently recovered.

  In death Robin Ross looks as she’d looked in life except for a white scarf tied around her neck, “the only thing holding my head on.” Robin has the “imperial standoffishness I realized only then that I had always associated with the dead.” At the story’s end the narrator recalls the last time she’d seen Robin Ross before her illness, when an innocently devastating remark of Robin’s forces the narrator to confront the sexual debasement she has been enduring in sharing a man with another woman. Robin tries to beg forgiveness: but the narrator will not forgive.

  The most painful story in Bark is “Paper Losses,” an intimate account of the deterioration of a twenty-year marriage. Narrated from the stunned wife’s perspective, the story moves jaggedly; its structure suggests the rawness of experience before it is fully comprehended and assimilated, like “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babblings in Peed Onk” (1997), Moore’s harrowing account of the cancer diagnosis of an infant from the perspective of the infant’s desperate mother. The wronged wife of “Paper Losses” is a clinical study in denial: she wants to think that her husband is suffering from a brain tumor or “space alien” genes he has inherited from his parents; his crude, cruel behavior to her is utterly inexplicable, as it is inexplicable that their “old, lusty love mutated to rage.” (Of course, the husband is involved with another woman, and it is his guilt that has made him barely civil to the wife; but the wife won’t learn this until much later.) With no preparation the wife is served divorce papers in their home; the husband tactlessly suggests their upcoming wedding anniversary as the divorce date: “Why not complete the symmetry? he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him.” Stricken with sexual humiliation, the wife anticipates a post-marital life when she will go on “chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.” A final family trip to the Caribbean fails to mend the “irretrievably broken” marriage as the wife had naïvely hoped it might, and ends with further humiliation for the spurned wife who has only the consolation, if that is what it is, of contriving a “story” out of the experience.

  In “Foes,” one of Moore’s rare stories in which a husband and wife appear to be evenly, companionably matched, a politically liberal biographer has a confrontation with a conservative “evil lobbyist” at a fund-raiser for a pretentious literary journal in Washington, D.C. After they have exchanged political barbs and thinly veiled insults, the biographer discovers to his horror that the lobbyist, a woman he’d misidentified as Asian, is actually disfigured: “the face that had seemed intriguingly exotic had actually been scarred by fire and only partly repaired.” He feels pity, sympathy, and yet: “How could someone have come so close to death . . . and how could he still want to strangle them?”

  Two stories in Bark spring from canonical works of fiction by Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, though each has been entirely retooled as a Lorrie Moore story. James’s The Wings of the Dove, with its labyrinthine plot of conspiring lovers hoping to acquire a fortune from a naïve young heiress, is the model for “Wings,” the longest story in Bark; in Moore’s story, a couple of failed musicians—instrumentalist, singer—befriend a lonely elderly man named Milt with the vague hope of inheriting his money when he dies. KC is an aging girl singer perplexed by the failure of her talent, that had been promising at the outset: “its terribleness eluded her.” How pitiless Moore is, yet how sympathetic, in delineating the bafflement an individual like KC would feel:

  The gardenia in KC’s throat, the flower that was her singing voice—its brown wilt must be painstakingly slowed through the years—had begun its rapid degeneration into simple crocus, then scraggly weed. She’d been given something perfect—youth!—and done imperfect things with it. . . . Sometimes she just chased roughly after a melody—like someone kicking a can down a road.

  There is a fairy-tale element in “Wings” also, in its unexpected denouement, that both mimics and repudiates the starker conclusion of The Wings of the Dove. The reader is catapulted into a future time in which KC is no longer an aging girl but a solitary middle-aged woman whose “tears had thickened her skin the way brine knitted and hardened the rind of a cheese.” Courtesy of the elderly Milt, KC’s life has taken an unexpected turn—she lives now in the service of others, the proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast hotel near a children’s hospital.

  The pathos of “Referential” is evoked clearly at the outset: “Mania. For the third time in three years they talked of what would be a suitable birthday present to bring for her deranged son.” (See Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” which begins: “For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.”) Both stories recount a visit to a mental institution that ends unhappily; both stories involve an impetuous decision, clearly ill-advised, to bring the deranged boy home; both stories conclude with a mysteriously ringing telephone, somehow terrifying in Nabokov, as it is perplexing and ironic in Moore. Both stories focus upon an adolescent boy whose paranoid schizophrenia forces him to see meaning in all things: “veiled references to his existence” (“Referential”) are everywhere. And, “Life was full of spies and preoccupying espionage.” Moore’s story, more emotionally engaging than Nabokov’s, delineates a tr
iangle among mother, deranged son, and mother’s lover Pete, who has been, or has seemed, a kind of “stepfather” to the son, though Pete has never lived with the mother and son, and has ceased to show much interest in doing so. Nabokov’s coolly detached story evokes a surreal poetry to suggest the delusions of paranoid schizophrenia while Moore’s poignant story allows the reader intimate entry to a life with a hopelessly deranged boy:

  A maternal vertigo beset her, the room circled, and the cutting scars on her son’s arms sometimes seemed to spell out Pete’s name in the thin lines there, the loss of fathers etched primitively there in an algebra of skin. . . . Mutilation was a language.

  But the language of derangement isn’t finally intelligible, and isn’t shareable—brought to visit the paranoid boy, Pete is reticent, and clearly ill at ease. The boy, who has loved Pete, senses his distance, and begins to speak excitedly:

  “You have to look for us! We are sort of hidden but sort of not. We can be found. If you look in the obvious places, we can be found. We haven’t disappeared, even if you want us to, we are there to—”

  But the mother interrupts the chattering boy, for the boy is coming too close to making sense. And driving home, the mother sees that Pete, like her, is deeply unhappy, “though the desperations were separate, not joined” and she sees that Pete will not stay the night with her, though she comes very close to asking him. But she has lost Pete, as she has lost her son; she has lost Pete because of her son, whose unhappy life is inextricably bound up with her own, as if identical with her own. A Lorrie Moore heroine is a stoic, and in this case not a wisecracking stoic: “Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope.”