Essay: To Ms. Foley, With Gratitude
I was casually informed a year after the fact by the editor of Graffitti that my short story
“Herbie” published in that
magazine was listed in Martha Foley’s The
Best American Short Stories of 1975, under “Distinctive Short Stories of
1974.”
Here
I was rubbing literary shoulders with the prolific Joyce Carol Oates (7
citations), Isaac Bashevis Singer (2), and under “Foreign Authors” Milan
Kundera, Heinrich Böll and John Hawkes, and other such luminaries as Donald
Barthelme, Norman Mailer and Andre Dubus. In my naiveté I failed to appreciate
or grasp who these individuals were. Dwelling in my own personal ambition,
blinded, in the beginner’s dreamworld, I was too self-absorbed.
When
I rushed through the pages to discover my listing, I was appalled to find that
my story was cited under another’s name, the poet H.T. Kirby-Smith, who was on
the facing page across my story in Graffitti.
I wrote Martha Foley asking her to rectify the error. She wrote back in a
handwritten note, this grand dame of the 30s, founder of the fabled Story magazine, publisher of Hemingway
and Faulkner, that she was sorry
for the mistake and if I were patient, she would gladly correct the error in
the 1976 edition. Her note was from another era, stately, informal, kind, as if
Lincoln had penned a note to a grieving mother who had lost a son at
Gettysburg. I would endure a rejection note by her hand at any time, so
gracious in spirit.
I
never did hear from her again until I came across her obituary in The New York Times. And so, for a variety of feelings, I never did bother to
have the error corrected. I had been instructed about fate, and I learned that
lesson well. In a fashion it all became rather unimportant to me—credits and
the like. In fact, I remain grateful for that experience. I owe Ms. Foley a
debt. If the editor of Graffitti had
not rejected a second story of mine about a year later, making note on the
rejection slip, “Oh, by the way, did you know. . .,” I would never had known
about my nomination or experienced Ms. Foley’s compassion for a new writer.
When I relate this anecdote to friends with all its pearly meanings for me,
they are upset, inquire if I ever remedied it. Missing the point entirely, they
don’t get it which is all right with me.
At
34 I learned a remarkable truth about a whole lot of things in life, this
Möbius strip of ifs. I could have reached my present age without ever learning
about my distinction, a baby calf amid greater elephants. And it would not have
made a whit of difference. I have continued to write, more emboldened than ever
from what I had learned to the bone. Unknowing, in ignorance, casual random
chance—spiky and spastic, serendipitous discovery, errors made, editor dies,
up and down the slipstream of life, a Duncan yo-yo “sleeping.” And so I made my
literary debut. And what of H.T. Kirby-Smith? What will the poet make of a
stranger’s work appended to his or her literary resume? Did Kirby-Smith write a
letter of different intent to Ms. Foley? (Did she nurture Kirby-Smith as she
did me?) There’s a short story here, of an identity given without permission.
And so it spins off into permutations.
Thirty
years have passed—high school English teacher; psychotherapist; writer
working part time at his craft, a small, amoebic body of work forming.
Rejections never stung after the Foley encounter (I was fed well early on in
the nest) unless they had that tinge of bitchy rancor some editors evince. It
is the grape not the vintner that counts. The most encouraging , the kindest
rejection in those early years, came from The
New Yorker, finding the worth even in a poorly constructed story. The
anonymous editor lauded the effort and so I was again encouraged -- nurtured --
to go on. I knew I had to say my say, with or without recognition, and I went
about doing just that. In 1996 I wrote an intensely felt, graphic novel about a
death camp, i, and it was written in
white heat, “Made it, ma. . .Top of the world.” Finished in two weeks, it was
clearly channeled from my unconscious.
I
self-published the book because I knew another book on the Holocaust was not
“fashionable,” although another manual on Quicken was deemed critical to the
well-being of the homeland. Subsequently I felt encouraged to write more after
the first reviews came in, and i is
part of a tetralogy that I am trying to publish. New York publishers, some 200
or more, my agent queried, lauded the effort, even the writing as exemplary,
but said no—one going so far as to imply that I might have stood a better
chance if I were Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi. But, dear editor, Wiesel was kind
enough to read parts of my book and wrote back that he was “moved.”
I
am now sending queries out west, pestering small presses, the university
presses, and moving north to Canada. Recently the Hungarian Imre Kertesz won
the Nobel Prize for literature, and he published no more than 5,000 copies of Fateless worldwide, in what he now says
was an inadequate translation by Northwestern University Press. If I am
rejected again, I will publish the tetralogy for myself for, in a curious way,
to publish at the hands of others is not to write for oneself. Martha Foley
converted my nascent ambition into internal riches at the very beginning, bless
her. I need not be extolled, given distinctions, just the merry appreciation of
close ones, relatives and children. I have readers. Writing is much like
parenting, one is never done with it. Sweetly rubied as publication can be, I
do not crave the fruit. I chase no chimera, and I am much less striven, much
more reasonably contented with what I can do with the literary tools I own. I
have much less fear about my worth as a writer and who I am, much the same
thing. I publish to share.
Since
1998, I have endured personal losses -- my eldest daughter committed suicide at
age 34. Returning to New York from sweltering Alabama with her ashes by my side
in a hard, “convenient” cardboard box, I dispersed them into a lake in Colombia
County in upstate New York. Haunted as I am until I die, of mistakes made, of fatherly
blunders and omissions, it is not guilt that daily lacerates. It is folly. This
is the life now blown up into my face, the scree I experience in everyday
living. The following year I lost my wife in a horrific automobile accident in
which my other daughter suffered grievous bodily injuries, her boyfriend dying
in the carnage as well. Shakespeare said it well, “Oh tragic and insupportable
loss.”
Two more books followed after the deaths of my wife and daughter. Doubtless, on complex levels, my feelings about them imbued my efforts, for a river of being bereft sadly meanders throughout the novels, a pallor of resignation suffuses the atmosphere. A close friend startingly said it best: “Your whole life, as I know it, has been a holocaust.” Indeed, the early death of my mother and the depressed life we lived in our household turned me to writing. Putting on excess pounds, sleeping too much, shaving too little, I took my anguish and the bile it precipitated and metabolized all that into word. I poured my personal agonies into each page.
Two more books followed after the deaths of my wife and daughter. Doubtless, on complex levels, my feelings about them imbued my efforts, for a river of being bereft sadly meanders throughout the novels, a pallor of resignation suffuses the atmosphere. A close friend startingly said it best: “Your whole life, as I know it, has been a holocaust.” Indeed, the early death of my mother and the depressed life we lived in our household turned me to writing. Putting on excess pounds, sleeping too much, shaving too little, I took my anguish and the bile it precipitated and metabolized all that into word. I poured my personal agonies into each page.
And
so I persevere. I go on. Life is propulsive. I continue to write to explain me
to me, hoping in so doing that you will see in that something of you. An irate
person’s twitching tongue, a nagging debt, endless legal litigation, daily
harrassments, I remind myself are detritus compared to what I have endured. I go
on. My very DNA demands that of me. It is liberating to have little fear.
However, and so comically human, I observe, I must continually prod myself to
remember that. Unfortunately it does not become automatic. One need not be a
former teacher or psychotherapist to understand, to really know, that lessons
are never really learned. What I really do know is that fearlessness makes for
authenticity in writing.
As
I reconnoiter the past as I near my end, the decades of learning my craft,
stonewalling of efforts by others, the callousness of an indifferent world –
and marketplace, the limitations of self and others – and the losses along the
way, I am beset by questions, always by questions. Answers are expired
prescriptions.
I
identify with Sisyphus in Camus’ famed essay, who apparently had an Attic smile
on his face while struggling -- it is there, not there, but seems there -- as
he pressed his shoulder laboriously against the boulder for another stiff day
ascending the mountain. Reeling backwards, so close now to the summit,
collapsing underfoot, tumbling down once more, he is condemned by the gods to
suffer this eternal charade, a mythic repetition compulsion. Apparently he
realized throughout the eons that arriving was rather humdrum. The struggle
mundanely to close the Lark suitcase and get to LaGuardia on time for the
probably delayed flight is when mettle engages the cog of character, the
struggle, daintily put.
I
struggle relentlessly to sustain some serious kind of deconditioned self. It is
the writer’s task to be perched outside and away from his society, to translate
the telling societal hum beneath his furred talons as he squats on telephone
wires outside of town. He remains off the grid if at all possible. It is a
variant of the stranger in a strange land, only stranger. Rather, it is an
attained awareness of self that leads to the isolation and cold sweat any truth
reveals. Teiresias agonized over that with Oedipus. I write for self. I seek
knowledge and clarity. I do not necessarily become wiser, that is an
anointment. The windshield is clearer and clearer, I can tell you that, as I
can see better ahead.
As
Krishnamurti so long ago observed, every society is essentially corrupt (any
arguments about that?). I try to cleanse myself as often as I possibly can. It
is in my very anonymity (thank you, Ms. Foley), that I can remain steadfast,
honest, true. It is my destiny alone to sustain my losses, to endure, to wither
or to last—to be gone. What I leave literarily is no more important than the
creases in my pants, as this globe hurtles through space.
In
a graveyard somewhere near the tip of Long Island stands a single cross that
says “James Jones”-- that’s class. It is, at last, all an effort for
self-awareness, as we struggle against a fuzzy fate and a hazy death. We need
only connect, a wise scribbler once said.
*The i Tetralogy was published in 2005.
~~~
This Möbius Strip of Ifs is available on Amazon.com ($10.95 for paperback; $9.99 for Kindle edition) and at Barnes & Noble ($10.95 for paperback; $9.99 for NOOKbook). Visit www.mathiasbfreese.com and check yesterday's guest post from this author.
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