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  The Hunters was published by Harper and Brothers in late 1956. A section of the book appeared first in Collier’s. Word of it spread immediately. With the rest I sat speculating as to who the writer might be, someone who had served in Korea, with the Fourth Group, probably.

  The reviews were good. I was thirty-two years old, the father of a child, with my wife expecting another. I had been flying fighters for seven years. I decided I had had enough. The childhood urge to write had never died, in fact, it had proven itself. I discussed it with my wife, who, with only a partial understanding of what was involved, did not attempt to change my mind. Upon leaving Europe, I resigned my commission with the aim of becoming a writer.

  It was the most difficult act of my life. Latent in me, I suppose, there was always the belief that writing was greater than other things, or at least would prove to be greater in the end. Call it a delusion if you like, but within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

  Of the actual hard business of writing I knew very little. The first book had been a gift. I missed the active life terribly, and after a long struggle a second book was completed. It was a failure. Jean Stafford, one of the judges for a prize for which it had been routinely submitted, left the manuscript on an airplane. The book made no sense to her, she said. But there was no turning back.

  A Sport and a Pastime was published six years later. It, too, did not sell. A few thousand copies, that was all. It stayed in print, however, and one by one, slowly, foreign publishers bought it. Finally, Modern Library.

  The use of literature, Emerson wrote, is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. Perhaps this is true, but I would claim something broader. Literature is the river of civilization, its Tigris and Nile. Those who follow it, and I am inclined to say those only, pass by the glories.

  Over the years I have been a writer for a succession of reasons. In the beginning, as I have said, I wrote to be admired, even if not known. Once I had decided to be a writer, I wrote hoping for acceptance, approval.

  Gertrude Stein, when asked why she wrote, replied, “For praise.” Lorca said he wrote to be loved. Faulkner said a writer wrote for glory. I may at times have written for those reasons, it’s hard to know. Overall I write because I see the world in a certain way that no dialogue or series of them can begin to describe, that no book can fully render, though the greatest books thrill in their attempt.

  A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve. The rest takes care of itself, and so much praise is given to insignificant things that there is hardly any sense in striving for it.

  In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.

  Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction

  1999

  The Writing Teacher

  Iowa City, along its river, is a beautiful town. There are brick-lined streets in a neighborhood called Goosetown, once Czech, where geese were kept in the deep backyards. Ample old houses remain and huge trees. Downtown there are wide streets, restaurants, shops, and a wonderful bookstore, Prairie Lights, but the chief business is really the University of Iowa, within which, small but renowned, lies its jewel, the Writers’ Workshop. Originally established in 1936, the workshop is the preeminent writing school in the country, although it is almost universally believed that writing cannot be taught, and in fact it is not really taught there; it is practiced. Kurt Vonnegut, one in the long list of famous writers who have been on the workshop’s faculty, liked to say he couldn’t teach people to write but, like an old golf pro, he could go around with them and perhaps take a few strokes off their game.

  There have been numerous old pros at Iowa over the years, many of them former students, and if you were lucky enough to have studied there, you might have sat across from John Cheever or Philip Roth, John Irving, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams or others discussing or demolishing what you or a classmate had written. Afterward you might drink with them at the Old Mill or the Foxhead, tirelessly continuing the talk. You may not have been learning to write, but you were certainly learning something.

  Frank Conroy, tall, unflappable, and urbane, was head of the workshop for eighteen years, from 1987 until a few months ago, and his stamp is firmly on it. He came to Iowa from the directorship of the literary program at the National Endowment for the Arts and a few teaching jobs before that, and more remotely from the literary scene in New York, the bar at Elaine’s, innumerable parties, jazz joints, where he began as a brash outsider but made friends and eventually a name for himself with the publication of Stop-Time, a startlingly fresh, enduring memoir of youth, in 1967.

  Admission to the two-year program at the Writers’ Workshop is made on the basis of an example of submitted writing. As director, to guarantee the quality of students, which translated ultimately into the reputation of the school, Conroy read every submission and made final decisions himself. It was the way the great cities of Europe were built, not by committee but by royal decree. The faculty was assembled the same way. There were permanent members, Frank being one of them, but others were there by invitation for a year or two. The workshop ran like a clock, due also to a chief administrator, Connie Brothers, who looked after all the details Frank could treat somewhat offhandedly and who acted as a kind of foster mother for the students. Between them was the power.

  In a dark wooden booth at the Foxhead one night, the air blue with cigarette smoke and the clatter of pool balls, Frank confided to me that he had just gotten an advance for the novel he was then writing, $250,000. Suddenly I could see that he was no ordinary academic. We sat drinking with Joseph Brodsky another night, the jukebox playing and a bell at the bar being rung every time someone ordered a local beer called Dubuque Star. Brodsky had come to Iowa City to read. He was not the only Nobel laureate to do so. Derek Walcott came and Seamus Heaney, who read to a crowd that overflowed onto half the stage. While it did not rival Stockholm, the invitation to Iowa City was a distinction. Almost every week someone of interest arrived to read, and there were dinners with them beforehand.

  The dinners at Frank’s house were best, seven or eight people, often including a visitor, martinis made in a silver shaker that had belonged to Frank’s father. The talk was usually about writing. Objectivity came up more than once and the existence of truth, or God’s truth, as Frank called it. No one could know that, the complete truth. It was too vast and complex. “All we know is what we think we know,” he said; there was really no such thing as truth or fact. He told me he had written that his mother and stepfather had gone to Cuba to buy a piano or something—actually it was for her to have an abortion. But what he wrote was what he thought was true. “For me, it was true,” he said.

  “Who is the Dostoyevsky in American writing today?” Jorie Graham wanted to know.

  Various names were brought up. Mailer, Frank proposed—among other things, he was Frank’s friend. There was argument; voices became louder and louder. The next day I called to apologize for becoming excited. Maggie Conroy answered.

  “Oh, who can imagine anyone getting excited about Norman Mailer,” she said soothingly.

  She had aplomb. She had been an actress and had grown up partly in South America. Her face was filled with even temperament and intelligence. Marguerite, Frank sometimes called her, suggesting her authority. They had no secrets from each other, even things in the pa
st. “When we first got started,” he said, “we just sat down and told each other everything. It took weeks. Everything.”

  “And after that we had nothing to talk about,” she added wryly.

  I taught twice at the Writers’ Workshop, the last time in 1989, but Frank and I became good friends and stayed in touch. Then a letter came, very brief. It looked like it was all over, he said. Colon cancer had been diagnosed. There were four stages and he had the worst, stage four.

  That was two years ago. He underwent surgery and the rest of it. The workshop began to look for a new director, someone who could fill Frank’s shoes and deal equally well with those below and above, the deans, presidents, donors. Eventually Frank was told that his condition seemed stabilized and, though he was not cured, he might go on for a number of years. That didn’t happen. There came the point when he was told that nothing further could be done. He decided to let nature take its course.

  We had lunch in March, Frank and Maggie, my wife and I, in the comfortable, light-filled house that had been bought with the money from the novel. He looked the same, though a little weak. Behind the glasses his eyes were alert. The lick of boyish hair hung over his forehead. He wondered, he said, how it was going to be, whether the pain would be too great, whether he would be able to be himself until the end. He had been hoping to go to Nantucket, where they always spent the summer, but it didn’t look as if he would be able to. Maggie and Tim, their son, would be going without him.

  That was more or less the end. He went upstairs for the weeks that followed and died on April 6. He was sixty-nine. Maggie had lain down beside him for the final hours. There are not many people you would do that with.

  The New York Times Sunday Book Review

  March 8, 2005

  Odessa, Mon Amour

  Isaac Babel was stocky with a broad, kindly face and a forehead creased with horizontal lines. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, like a bookworm or an accountant, and had a soft, high-pitched voice with a slight lisp. For a time, in the 1920s, following the publication of his Red Cavalry stories, he was the most famous writer in Russia, and anything of his that appeared in print attracted great attention. Knopf published the translation of Red Cavalry in 1929, and its combination of startling beauty and great violence, delivered with an unsettling resignation, disturbed readers, including Lionel Trilling, who wrote about the exceptional talent, even genius, that it represented. Babel was a writer of the Revolution, a child of it, in fact, caught up in its idealism and equality, but over time he became disillusioned and less ardent.

  For Babel, writing was an agony. He wrote and rewrote endlessly, often completing only a quarter of a page in a day, and he sometimes rose at night to reread pages. He was constantly searching for the right word or expression, significant, simple, and beautiful, as he said. He believed, among other things, in punctuation, the period, principally. No steel could pierce the human heart, he wrote, as deeply as a period in exactly the right place. The strength came not when you could no longer add a sentence but when you could no longer take one away. He loved Expressionist colors, green stars, blue palms, blood red clay, sunsets thick as jam, and his images explode from the page, as in the celebrated opening lines of “My First Goose”:

  Savitsky, Commander of the VI Division, rose when he saw me, and I wondered at the beauty of his giant’s body. He rose, the purple of his riding breeches and the crimson of his little tilted cap and the decorations on his chest cleaving the hut as a standard cleaves the sky. A smell of scent and the sickly sweet freshness of soap emanated from him. His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots.

  Savitsky, the theatrical, bold commander, flower and iron, Babel writes admiringly, is based on a real figure, Semyon Timoshenko, who rose to become a marshal of the Red Army and to appear on the cover of Time. Other actual figures, Budyonny and Voroshilov, under their own names, are there as well. In his 1920 diary, on which the Red Cavalry stories were based, Babel jotted:

  Divisional Commander Timoshenko at HQ. A colorful figure. A colossus in red half-leather trousers, red cap, well-built, former platoon commander, was at one time a machine gunner, an artillery ensign.

  He had no imagination and couldn’t invent, he had to know everything, down to the last detail, he said, and Ilya Ehrenburg, who was his friend, agreed that Babel hardly changed anything but illuminated it with a kind of wisdom. It was more than that, it was with a unique talent. Beauty, scent, and the sickly sweet freshness of soap were added, and the half-leather trousers were transformed into an erotic image that sends electricity in both directions. He aimed, Babel said, at an intelligent reader with taste, more exactly a very intelligent woman who had absolute taste, just as certain people have absolute pitch.

  Despite his ordinary appearance, women were attracted to him. He had love affairs, a son with a beautiful actress, Tamara Kashirina, a daughter with his wife, who had left Russia in 1925 and was living in Paris, studying art, and a second daughter with a “second wife,” Antonina Pirozhkova, fifteen years younger than Babel and with whom he lived the last four years of his life. There is a rich element of sensuality in Babel’s writing, sometimes implicit, glimpsed, sometimes clear. Prostitutes figure in stories, most notably in “My First Fee,” a masterpiece published only in 1963, long after his death. The story takes a familiar subject, the first introduction to sex, and makes it both comedic and gorgeous. The narrator impulsively lies his way into the affection of a worn, savvy streetwalker, who ends up teaching him the tricks of the trade and calling him “sister.” “Chink,” “The Bathroom Window,” and “An Evening with the Empress” have prostitutes in them, and “Dante Street” has all the aroma of a brothel, or something close to it. In Paris once, Babel stopped in front of a well-known brothel in Montmartre and, looking through the open windows—it was daytime—remarked to his companion that he wondered if they kept books in such a place. It would be fascinating to see them, he said, they could be a wonderful chapter in a novel. His curiosity was endless and intense. He wanted women to show him the contents of their handbags for what they might reveal, and he liked people to tell him the story of their first love. Everything is in terms of people in his writing, and his real interests were love and death. Like Maupassant and Flaubert, whom he revered, he was a realist. The Red Cavalry stories are stark and disturbing, completely out of step with modern sensibilities, and yet they are shot through with a strange kindness. No writer is more realistic and at the same time, even in the same sentence, romantic.

  Babel was born in 1894 in Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea, in a poor neighborhood called the Moldavanka, which he made famous in his stories. Odessa had a large Jewish population, and Babel is a Jewish writer, though not in the way of Isaac Singer or Sholem Aleichem. In the diary he writes of feeling happy among the beset Jews of eastern Poland, who, along with their history, would be almost completely exterminated twenty years later. Enormous faces and black beards. Every house remains in my heart. Clusters of Jews. Their faces—this is the ghetto and we are an ancient people. In a ruined synagogue he sits, almost praying—it has an irresistible effect on him, though he writes as a Russian and a loyal communist much of the time.

  He grew up having witnessed, in 1905, the great pogroms, massacres of Jews, that were sanctioned by the czarist government, although he and his family escaped harm—all brilliantly and almost innocently described in “The Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love.” Babel’s father was a tractor salesman, and Babel studied French, English, and German as a child. His first stories were written in French, perhaps from the influence of Maupassant and Flaubert.

  There were restrictions for Jews, quotas, cities they were prohibited from living in, but the overthrow of the czarist regime broke down doors, if not prejudices. Babel had made his way to St. Petersburg in 1916, the year before the Revolution, and his early stories were published there in Maxim Gorky’s literary magazine, Letopis.
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  Babel became a favorite of Gorky, who recognized his talent and advised him to go out and get some experience of life. Gorky himself had plenty of it, a bitter childhood and years of hard work. His famous play The Lower Depths made his name in 1902, and he became the writer of the Revolution, Babel’s champion, and always a devoted Marxist, until his death in the fateful year of 1936 under somewhat mysterious circumstances. His judgment had been simple: “Babel is the great hope of Russian literature.”

  In 1920, with credentials as a war correspondent and under the assumed, very Russian name of Kiril Lyutov, Babel spent three and a half months, from June into September, with the First Cavalry Army, commanded by a legendary mustached Cossack, Semyon Budyonny. In late May Budyonny had ridden into eastern Poland from the Ukraine in a campaign against the Poles, who had moved forces into the disputed border regions. It was also a first move in the Soviets’ plan to spread communism. Russia was thought to be a less than ideal place for a true workers’ revolution, being too archaic. The new order would take hold better in a more industrialized society: Germany. Russia was only a temporary base for it.

  There were early successes, and then defeats in the fall of 1920 that led to retreat. Amid the chaos, battles, rapes, and massacres, Babel traveled, writing articles for a government newspaper and keeping, in a plain, lined notebook, an intense, hasty diary of which it could be said that, as with other great writers, he threw away a novel on every page. Describe he is continually reminding himself, describe. The fifty-four opening pages have been lost, and with them Babel’s first impressions, but from the beginning there is the muted horror: they are in Zhitomir, the western Ukraine.

  The Poles entered the town, stayed for three days, there was a pogrom, they cut off beards, that’s usual, assembled 45 Jews in the marketplace, led them to the slaughteryard, tortures, cut out tongues, wails heard all over the square. They set fire to 6 houses, I went to look at Koniuchowski’s house on Cathedral Street, they machine-gunned those who tried to rescue people. The yardman, into whose arms a mother dropped a child from a burning window, was bayoneted, the priest put a ladder up against the back wall, they escaped that way.