Opening Paragraph

I first saw him on a Sunday morning in June. He was crossing the bicycle seat factory parking lot, walking with a cane, limping. He wore blue coveralls and had blond, crew-cut short hair and a heavy beard. I watched through my binoculars as he kept walking past the factory, into town and out of sight. The other Back Shop Boys, they saw him, too. They thought he was a communist, or maybe a spy, or both, or a homo, or a beatnik, or maybe an escaped prisoner from the federal penitentiary in Danville, one town over, or a nut case from Willoughby Hills, in Newbury, eight miles to the north. I had my own theories about the Man in Blue, inspired by the heavenly body I’d discovered early that same morning, just in time to see it explode to bits and tumble earthward.

I had been looking through my telescope, the one my stepfather, Edward P. Bigelow, bought me for my thirteenth birthday, a mail-order Edmond Scientific Mt. Palomar-type reflecting model, complete with a finder telescope, a hardwood tripod, and something called an “Equitorial mount” that its thirteen-year-olod owner never did quite figure out how to use. I still remember the advertisement that I, or rather, that Leo, using his mother’s haircutting scissors that he wasn’t supposed to use on paper, carefully clipped from the back pages of Science and Mechanics Magazine (or was it Popular Mechanics?). “See the stars, moons, planets up close!” the ad said. The telescope came with a “free” Star Chart and a 272-page “Handbook of the Heavens.” And though its useful magnification was only 180x—barely powerful enough to resolve Jupiter’s moons—at $49.95 it really was a bargain. Even at that price my stepfather, whose retail hat business was failing badly, could scarcely afford it. But weeks of pleading on my part combined with his desire to win my approval (a desire that I did little to encourage) finally wore the man down.

Like the rest of the country I’d gone “space crazy.” Project Mercury had just sent Colonel John H. Glenn Jr. and three other astronauts spinning around the earth, and all I could think about was outer space. Saturday mornings, with mist still shrouding the yard and dawn just starting to poke through the windows, I’d belly up to Mr. Bigelow’s boxy wooden Zenith in the corner of his den (I still thought of it as his house) and—with the carpet itching my bare flesh—stare at the dartboard-like tuning signal while getting my ears pierced by an endless needle of white noise. Through the Star Spangled Banner, with Old Glory snapping in crisp black and white, I’d kick impatient toes against the floor. Finally, with a blast of three orchestral chords as ominous as the death knock that opens Beethoven’s Fifth, the theme music would begin and Fireball XL-5 would begin. Colonel Steve Zodiac, accompanied by the glamorous Doctor Venus, would board their unambiguously phallic spacecraft, off to save this or that corner of the universe. The show was filmed in “Supermarionation,” meaning the characters were puppets. When they caught the light you could easily see the strings. But there were no strings attached to my feelings: Steve Zodiac was my hero, as Colonel John Glenn and all astronauts were heroes of mine.

My stepfather didn’t share my enthusiasm for outer space. Not that he wasn’t proud of his nation’s achievement. Ed Bigelow was nothing if not patriotic. For the brief period during which my mother and I occupied his stately home on Crown Hill Avenue he flew the American flag proudly day by day from a pole screwed into one of the foursquare columns of his imposing porch. He’d even salute the thing on his way to and from his hat store, gray fedora doffed, right hand over his heart. It wasn’t the space program that my stepfather disapproved of but the man behind it, our thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy. Ed Bigelow hated JFK’s guts, and had hated them ever since the snowy morning of January 20th, 1961, when—on the same boxy Zenith—he watched him take the oath of office “without so much as a wool beanie” on his hairy, handsome, Irish-Catholic head.

The telescope arrived on a Saturday morning. I’d just finished watching Fireball XL-5 when the front doorbell rang and the UPS man stood there in his sewage-colored uniform, holding the long cardboard box. I sat on the living room floor and tore it open. As advertised the telescope was white with black fixtures and a varnished tripod. There had been no forewarning of its requiring assembly, yet it did. I spent the rest of the morning wrestling with parts and instructions, and the afternoon looking at trees, houses, antennas, chimneys and clouds, impatient for darkness, intent on the planets, moons and stars.

Total darkness fell at seven-thirty, but I decided to wait until after The Twilight Zone before trying out the telescope. In that evening’s episode two astronauts traveling in separate spaceships crashland on a strange, beautiful, uninhabited planet. One astronaut is a man, the other a woman. Each has escaped from a world annihilated by nuclear war. His name is Adam, hers is Eve. (You can work out the rest for yourself.)

When the show ended I carried my telescope upstairs to my adoptive bedroom, whose gabled walls my stepfather, in another attempt to win my affection, had painted over with a tromp l’oeil sky and puffy clouds. Against this cloudy backdrop a trio of P-58 Mustangs, two gull-winged Stukas, one P-47 Thunderbolt and a Messerschmitt banked and soared, held up by lengths of fishing line no more invisible than those animating Steve Zodiac, with whirling propeller blades simulated by discs of clear acetate. Painted bullet holes strafed some planes’ fuselages. From one of the Stuka’s two engines a long gouge of cotton, sprayed-painted gray, curled in a smoky loop toward the ceiling. My stepfather, who had acquired such skills in creating his own hat store window displays, made the model planes and painted the cloudy walls. When he proposed this decorating scheme to my mother she opposed it, saying it would give me nightmares. But Ed Bigelow stuck to his guns,claiming that, on the contrary, it would lull me to sleep.

He and my mom were both right. To the implied roars and splutters of airplane engines combined with the tattattattattattatt of wing-mounted machineguns and the presumptive screams of pilots plummeting earthward in burning parachutes, I’d drift off to re-fight the Battle of Britain, only to bail out of a sweat-soaked, tailspinning bed at approximately two o’clock in the morning, night after night.

Now that I had my telescope, though, I was grateful for these rude awakenings. Without them I might have slept through the one astral event that would distinguish my otherwise completely unremarkable career as an astronomer. This happened early in June, twelve days after my birthday, with seventh grade already over and summer vacation started. By then I’d constructed a small, level platform on the pitched roof of the porch onto which my bedroom window opened. Aside from two trees across the street the porch roof offered an unobstructed view of the night sky. It was a clear, cloudless night, perfect for stargazing. I peered through the aperture, my hopes set as ever on discovering an unknown planet or star or even a measly asteroid. Any fool with a $50 telescope could ogle Jupiter’s stormy red eye or count Saturn’s rings. I wanted more; I needed more. Beyond having a dead father nothing special had ever happened to me, and I was afraid that nothing special ever would happen, that I’d end up stuck in Bowler for the rest of my life, working in some factory or store, when I yearned to conquer the stars, like John Glenn.

At the very least I wanted a secret, to know something that everyone else in the world didn’t already know, to be offered some sign that the mysterious heavens were in some way aware of my mystery, of my existence. Even though I didn’t believe in Him, still, I wanted God to notice me.

That distant, puny, insignificant object seen through the wrong end of the telescope? That was me, Leo Joseph Napoli IV.

Shitty First Drafts vs. Long Walks

There is the philosophy of writing that says, "Don't edit as you write. Turn all censors off. Enter your dionysian self and write with abandon. Eventually you will get in the zone. You will see with the third eye." Which may be true. It goes without saying that the hundreds of pages you write along the way should end up in the trash pail. And who's to say that a long walk wouldn't have gotten you to the same place just as fast or faster and without the waste of paper?

My Heroes & Me

I've always had heroes. As far back as I can remember. At less than four years old I owned a special shirt, blue with red and white stripes. It was my Popeye shirt. I wore it to a frazzle, until there was nothing left of it but blue striped rags and threads. Without saying a word my mother threw it in the bin of rags she accumulated for my father, who used them in the Building, the laboratory at the base of our driveway where my Papa invented machines for measuring thickness and color. When I next saw my shirt I hardly recognized it, its fibers soaked with a muddy gray mixture of solvent and metal dust. I might never have spoken to my mother again, except that I needed her to draw those fat triangular S's onto my T-shirts so I could jump off tree limbs and play Superman—another hero of mine.

We're talking early nineteen-sixties here. Kennedy had just been inaugurated, sworn in hatless on a sunny, cold winter's day. Kruschev had already pounded his shoe and threatened to bury us. In school we practiced our "duck and cover" drills, with me as eager to protect Jill B. from nuclear fallout as Wesley Conklin was eager to have me look up her skirt (she sat at the desk in front of mine) and give him a full report, something I refused to do—though I liked Jill's skirts, peacock blue paisleys that were the perfect foil for her flaming strawberry blond curls.

There was in the air that we breathed a sense of premonition and doom that was its own kind of nuclear fallout. My friends and I would sit on top of Cheese Hill, a limestone cliff overlooking one of the town's many abandoned or converted hat factories. We called it Cheese Hill because the limestone broke off in pale, crumbly, cheesy chunks—like the parmesan cheese my father would bring home to my mother from New York City. There we'd sit, banging our P. F. Flyers into the limestone, debating how long it would take for us to die, and by what exact means. Wesley C. claimed that we would melt from inside out, our bodies turning to water balloons that would finally burst. Chucky S. said our organs would deep fry inside us like ˆgalumkesˆ or chicken livers. Lenny P. said we'd die in layers, with the dead layers falling off one by one, like the skin of a rotten onion.

Out of this radioactive sense of gloom and doom grew the need for heroes. More than ever we needed Supermen to come to our rescue. But to be rescued wasn't good enough. Being rescued was for sissies and girls. The thing to be was the rescuer. At the local swim hole, a two-acre pond dug out of the landlocked wilderness and trimmed with beach sand (officially called Meckhauer Park but for obvious reasons dubbed Muckhauer), I wished nothing more than for Jill B. to drown so I could save her and in the process save myself from being totally inconsequential to her. True, I wasn't much of a swimmer, but I would rise to the occasion—if only she'd give me a chance. I'd search for her golden hair among the throngs, and keep an eye on her every time she splashed into the water, hoping that at long last she would snag a leg on some algae.

Among the many frustrations of boyhood is a near total lack of heroic opportunities. Either the circumstances don't present themselves, or they have to be manufactured—as was the case with Robin Lee Graham, the boy who, as a sweet sixteenth birthday present to himself, sailed around the world alone in a 24-foot fiberglass sloop, and whose story we all devoured in that summer's National Geographic.

But there we were, stuck on dry land in Bethel, Connecticut, with the chimneys of crumbling hat factories the closest things to lighthouses. For a pubescent boy the only way out was sheer fantasy. So I put on my Popeye shirt. And when that turned into a rag, and as the big 'S' faded from my T-shirt, I turned to other heroes. With television they weren't hard to find. To be a hero you needed the right clothes. A leather jacket let you be Steve McQueen in ˆThe Great Escape,ˆ or Colonel Hogan of ˆHogan's Heroes.ˆ For James West a tight brocade vest and cowboy boots would do.

I remember my first pair of cowboy boots—black and tight and pointy enough to jam into a tailpipe. My parents bought them for me at Buster Brown. The store had a merry-go-round in it. The sides came up to my calves and were filigreed with colored stitches and whirls. The heels cut in at a sharp angle and were high enough to make me feel something like tall. The smell of the leather was itself heroic. I wore the boots under my straight-legged Lee's, with a matching wide black belt hung with brass loops serving no purpose but to hook my thumbs into when I felt like it. Into belted jeans I tucked my denim cowboy shirt, with double pockets and steel buttons. Over the denim shirt I wore one of several brocade vests that I had gotten my mother to sew for me.

Those brocade vests—I have to tell you about those.

Generosity

One out of ten books I find unreadable. This formula bore itself out over the past several days, when I attended Book Expo America as the Javits Center. Like everyone else there I collected my share of free galleys, books that have yet to be officially launched, still in their "uncorrected proof" labeled jackets. Some books were thrust on me, others I chose myself based on a quick sampling of their prose (and—I have to confess—on their appearance; I'm a sucker for the look and feel of books. A poorly designed or overaggressive cover, an ill-chosen typeface, or a book that simply defies comfortable reading due to its bulkiness or awkward dimensons, I'll almost always pass up).

Sure enough, I came home with ten books, only one of which I ultimately found readable. By "readable" I mean exactly that, since (more and more as I get older) I can either read books or I can't; there's no in-between. A sampling of an "unreadable" (for me) book:

He wanted to have a party for his birthday, his fiftieth. Given that it was not my own birthday, it was no big deal to me. I can never get excited about other people getting older, but there you are, there is always that distance between them and me. No one can stop my getting old like a hypocrite. I keep no count of the passing years: I just keep looking forward. The only thing that could put me off is death but until further notice, it is not here, it is somewhere else, busy culling other people. I only know it by reputation and I am pretty sure that when we do meet, things will not go well. No chance of sweet-talking it. So I have no intention of sweet-talking up the process.
—The Unforseen, Christian Oster (Other Press)

What makes this unreadable? Part of the answer is of course subjective, and has to do with the character of the narrator, with the kind of person who uses expressions such as "given that" and "there you are." Were this narrative a road, there would be warning signs along it saying, "Pomposity at Work" and "Danger: Pretension Ahead." First-person narratives are always at the mercy of their narrators. One either likes the storyteller (Holden Caufield, The Catcher in the Rye), or finds him/her tantalizingly repulsive (Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier), or dislikes and stops reading.

But the character of the narrator in the above passage is but a symptom, I think, of a deeper problem that rests with the author himself, who must take the blame for slipshod punctuation, non-sequiturs and redundancies, but above all for a passage which at best amounts to weak-tea philosophy (I'm not in a hurry to die but then there's no avoiding it, is there?). The first time I read this passage (I read it for a second time now only to comment on it), I was not even aware of its contents. The passage occurs on page 4 of the book, and by page 2 my eyes had already glazed over. Words and sentences had turned to decorative filigree. Because I enjoy the shapes of paragraphs, it sometimes takes a while for me to realize this disconnect between words and meaning. Then the spell breaks and I put the book down.

Another passage, another book:

All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as if often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.
—Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born (Graywolf)

Granted, this is a translation, and a rather awkward one at that (assuming that the errors in tense owe nothing to the original). Still, the style of the writing here can best be described as "chatty." Though I have nothing against writing in the vernacular, or that's driven by character voice and is therefore casual. But chattiness is another matter. Chatting puts no premium on words or content. It is language for its own sake. But it's worse than that. Gertrude Stein, for better or worse, shoves language in our faces, hammers away at the reader with repetitions like a sculptor chiseling away at his marble to get at the form within it. But here there's no groping after form; there's just talk words like packing noodles occupying the empty space between solid things. I feel about this passage roughly the way I feel about the two inches of foam the barrista's invariably dump on my lattes: can't eat it; can't drink it; what to do with it? Now here's a piece of writing that engages me.

My father wanted to show me something, but he wouldn't say what. He only said I should go get my gun, my thirty-six-aught-six, and follow him. This happened just outside Bend, Oregon, where we lived in a ranch house surrounded by ten acres of woods. I was twelve at the time: old enough to shoot a gun, young enough to fear the dark.
—Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy (Graywolf)

In my writing workshops I'm always preaching against withholding information. This passage shows me why. It is nothing if not generous. Look at the amount of information given. The protagonist is a twelve-year old boy who is afraid of the dark and whose father presumably hunts. The setting: Bend, Oregon. The passage is pure information, pure generosity. I think of that frost poem, Provide, Provide. That's what Percy does here: he provides his readers with information. He communicates; he gives. He wastes none of the reader's time. But he is more than just considerate. He is bountiful; he holds nothing back. There is an urgency behind the words that is of a piece with the author's willingness to share them; the impulse to "give" is also an impulse to "get rid of." So different from the authors above who sit back lazily in their padded chairs chatting us to death while swirling the brandy in their snifters.

To be generous and considerate: that's what I want to teach my students, and what I want to practise in my own writing. To give everything and hold nothing back. To create experience for the reader with as much care as you would cook a meal, knowing that it's meant not just to be looked at, or heard, or even tasted—but ingested as life-giving sustenance, to become part of the reader, to add to and not subtract from the reader's own life experience.

Georges Rouault, Sculptor of Color

With no small joy I learned today from a write up by Michael Kimmelman in Art Review of an exhibit of Rouault works at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery (“Georges Rouault: Judges, Clowns and Whores”). For too long Rouault's ouvre has been all but ignored, or turned into a footnote in the careers of Matisse, Picasso, and other, more easily categorized, less archaically "religious" artists.

As for Kimmelman's article, I found it good, though of course it misses the point by (as ever) placing the emphasis on Rouault's subject matter and his own proclaimed piety for the poor and martyred and misunderstood. His genius—and his contribution to art history—lies not with his subjects or themes but with his technique, a rapturously sensual grasp of the most humble materials--paint and knife. Square inch by square inch, he could give Rothko and any of the abstract expressionists a run for their money. But unless they have their faces rubbed in them, critics like Kimmelman tend to be too far-sighted. I submit that Rouault's real subject were those textures and colors that produce their own heavenly raptures in viewers, much as Rothko's canvasses would decades later. If only Rouault had abandoned subject matter completely! But that's not always possible, and he did the next best thing: he simply repeated the same subjects over and over, turning them into armatures for sculpted color.

A Surfeit of Choices

Writing is so hard and yet it really shouldn’t be. The problem comes down to too many choices, and the feeling that each choice eliminates rather than propagates others. It’s as if we feel we have a limited number of words, sentences and paragraphs at our disposal (and we do, but only in the sense that our life expectancies are limited). When I used to paint (seldom now), I’d say to myself, “Go ahead and make this choice and let it stand”—on the assumption that, if I made infinite paintings, sooner or later I would be bound to make that choice anyway, so why not make it now and get it over with? With writing I never feel that sort of reckless self-confidence, and each choice feels like the one that may doom me! But as someone—I forget who—said to me not long ago, it’s not so much the choices that one makes that determine his or her quality as an artist, it’s the willingness to MAKE choices and live with them. After all, “unlimited choices” is a contradiction in terms.

Burning the Fallow Field

I’ve not been writing at all, going through a period of mini-mourning—or letting the field go fallow, or (more aggressively) letting it burn to nitrogenate the soil and encourage future growth. Yesterday I let the flames carry me into the city, where I played hooky (hookie?) all day in advance of attending a Chelsea party to celebrate the publication of Edmund White’s latest novel (CHAOS). First stop, the Sabarsky Café at the Neue (pronounced: Noya) Gallery at 85th and 5th Avenue, a museum dedicated to Germanic arts and artists. For a pretty penny one can get a nice cappucino and apple strudel there, served with white gloves and no background music.

I read submissions to the magazine, then finished my coffee and wandered into the little book shop there, where I found the most beautiful monograph of watercolor studies by Emile Nolde, small works saturated with the most luminous colors, hues as rich as anything God provides for His most extravagant flowers—with brush work and some body color added in just the right measure here and there, with a combination of conviction, abandon, and piety—all very spontaenous, at least in its ultimate affect. Some made my jaw drop. They were done on Japan paper and never meant to be viewed for their own sake, but to serve as guides for oil paintings that never materialized. I’m convinced, though, that had Nolde made those paintings they would not have been a match for their studies; the purety and spontaneity of watercolor can rarely be matched by oil; oil simply doesn’t afford the level of accident and incident, the soaking and spreading, the serendipitous bursts of capillary action, the pocked luminosity where a dry brush has bumped and dragged over the texture of the paper. Turning from drawing to drawing I made little mewling, dry orgasm sounds—they were that beautiful. I thought (peripherally aware of the other shoppers with their eyes on Klimt calendars): here is the answer. This little book of paintings, everything you need to validate existence is in here, in this modest little book. I wanted to turn to the nearest little old lady and shove the book under her wealthy pale and faintly liver-spotted canopener of a society nose and say, “Now THIS is a goddamned painting!”—but that wouldn’t have gone over, I knew. So I kept my feelings to myself. But I did also feel, as I left the museum, that I am infinitely lucky to be so well-equipped to love masterpieces when I see them.

The rest of the day was sunny anticlimax, except for the party, held in a lovely brownstone in the far West 20's with rear balconey overlooking the equivalent of an urban rainforest. A surfeit of handsome gay talented men, all in their mid-thirties, and Edmund White, with his pot belly pushing out a white waiter’s shirt. I tried to flirt with him but it was no go: at fifty, my days of flirting with gay men—even white haired gay men with pot bellies—are, alas, over.

"It [creativity] begins when the individual realizes his boredom and his solutude and has need of action in order to recover his equilibrium."—H. Matisse