As a student at Brown in the mid-1970s, I admired my writing teachers, John Hawkes and R. V. Cassill, but both of them were more than thirty years older than I, so I admired them as father figures, from a distance. I wanted, instead, a teacher who was the older brother I never really had (I didn’t grow up with Joseph and only now, in late middle age, am I getting to know him a little), a cool tutor, a hero to hang out with. Friends at Yale kept telling me about a creative writing teacher named David Milch. He had written speeches for Watergate felon Maurice Stans and songs for the Allman Brothers; he was an alcoholic; he was a compulsive gambler; he had written and discarded three novels of a projected four-book series that R. W. B. Lewis and Robert Penn Warren thought possessed genius; he had been or still was a heroin addict and had served time in a Mexican jail for possession; he was kicked out of Yale Law School for shooting out the lights on a cop car. Who knew how much of it was true? Who cared? I enrolled in Yale’s summer session. I wanted him to show me not only how to write but how to live.
Milch looked like he’d never been released from Rebel Without a Cause: He wore black tennis shoes, blue jeans, a pack of Marlboros rolled into the sleeve of his white T-shirt, and a permanent smirk. The only person I’ve ever known who could convey genuine menace in a classroom, he paced back and forth, chain-smoked, lectured nonstop without notes, rarely allowed anyone to say anything, insisted that we call him “Mr. Milch,” addressed us—with pseudo-politeness—as “Mr.” or “Miss,” and asked questions that somehow were impossible to answer without sounding either feeble-minded or overscrupulous.
When John Cheever visited class, Milch asked me whether I thought Farragut, the protagonist of Cheever’s new novel, Falconer, was “pussy-whipped.”
“Define ‘pussy-whipped,’ ” I said. (I hadn’t the faintest idea.)
Joan Didion gave a talk, and afterward Milch made me perform the duty that he’d been assigned—selling copies of A Book of Common Prayer in the foyer of the auditorium—while he and his sexy fiancée drove away on a motorcycle, reeking of dissipation and glamour.
One student in the class, the son of a famous New Yorker writer, had hilariously bad literary instincts. “Whenever you’re about to say something,” Milch told him in front of everyone, “say the opposite of whatever you’re thinking, because whatever you think is always wrong.”
No one else’s opinion of me and my work had ever seemed so momentous, thrilling, potentially disabling. Although Milch warned us to “never, ever read a review,” when we read Sherwood Anderson’s story “I Want to Know Why,” I looked up what Cleanth Brooks and Warren had said about the story in Understanding Fiction, since Milch had studied with both of them and now assisted them in the preparation of revised editions of some of their textbooks. The “correct” interpretation of “I Want to Know Why” was that it defined loss of innocence as an acceptance of the fact that human beings are not wholly good or wholly evil but a mixture of these qualities. I then rephrased this interpretation so Milch wouldn’t recognize the crib, and got praised.
At my first conference with Milch he said, “You’re a writer.”
I said, “Well, sure, that’s why I’m taking the class.”
He said, “No: you’re a writer.”
To celebrate, I bought and ate twelve chocolate-chip cookies at a Greek deli on Elm Street.
However, I liked nowhere near as much as Milch did the tortuous circumnavigations of the books he taught: Conrad’s Nostromo, Faulkner’s Light in August. One time I pointed out an exceedingly minor inconsistency in Light in August about Joe Christmas, and Milch glumly agreed. When I swooned over Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” Milch quoted Mark Twain’s remark about liking the one James novel he had read but that he wouldn’t read another one if you gave him a farm. Milch, who as a child had been sexually abused by a camp counselor, was a hyper-masculine writer, like Conrad or Faulkner; I, à la James, wasn’t.
Both Milch and I liked to write in the new underground wing of the Cross Campus Library, but I needed the complete isolation of an enclosed cubicle, whereas Milch would work on his stories and plays and screenplays at a table in the center of the room, drinking coffee, overhearing whispered gossip—surrounded by human activity. I allegorized and romanticized this difference: To me, writing was a revenge upon life, upon my life, whereas to Milch writing seemed to be part of life. He was the first intellectual I’d ever met who not only seemed to like life but who reveled in it—who, in Conrad’s famous phrase, “to the destructive element submit[ted].” He was—or wanted to appear to be, or succeeded in appearing to be, or succeeded in appearing to me to be—that purest contradiction: a macho pedant, a Jewish cowboy. He frequently made sure to take me with him to meet his bookie.
Although Milch seemed to have picked up a faint southern accent from his association with Brooks and Warren and his mock-fastidious manners evoked for me lapsed southern gentility, he actually grew up in Buffalo, the son of a surgeon. I grew up in San Francisco, the son of journalist-activists. In Milch’s class, I wrote elliptical but overwrought stories about this childhood: first kiss, first death, first peace march in Golden Gate Park, etc.—heavy on the water imagery. Milch called these stories “tropisms,” which when I looked it up in the dictionary turned out to mean an “involuntary orientation by an organism or one of its parts that involves turning or curving and is a positive or negative response to a source of stimulation.” The source of stimulation was my nonfictional family in its perfect righteousness; my response tended toward the negative.
One afternoon, in his nearly empty office in a baroque building, Milch said that I suffered from the “malaise of your [and, of course, his] race”: an excessive preoccupation with narrowly moral rather than universally human concerns. As a result, he informed me, I had an insufficiently developed eye. Judaism is a faith rather than a race, I reminded him, but I’d recently started wearing glasses and I knew what he meant: I needed to stop judging the world and just see it. Annie Hall was the big movie that summer; Milch hated it. He excoriated all my favorite Jewish writers. They were like the boy in “I Want to Know Why”; they hadn’t yet learned that human nature was something to accept rather than to protest. The only admirable Jewish American writers were Norman Mailer, who “at least has balls,” and Nathanael West, who called Jewish women “bagels.” When Milch played softball, he shouted anti-Semitic obscenities from the outfield. All contemporary Jewish American writing amounted, for Milch, to the climactic scene in Making It, when Norman Podhoretz has to congratulate himself for being able to enjoy a drink on Paradise Island. Drink, drink, Milch was trying to tell me, drink it all in. Instead, I endlessly repeated back to him his criticisms of me, altering the wording slightly each time so that the criticism didn’t sound quite so thoroughgoing and devastating. (Much of Milch’s allure is based on his persona as the first and only Jewish amoralist. This dichotomy between moralizing Jews and manly men shows up in nearly every TV show he’s been associated with: Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Deadwood.)
“You’re classic passive-aggressive,” he finally said.
I fiddled with this observation until he threw me out of his office.
Against Milch’s advice and without benefit of his recommendation, which he refused to send since he said I needed to get out in the world and live, I went to the Iowa Famous Writers School. Milch had gone there a dozen years before, so I looked up his master’s thesis, a work in progress entitled “The Groundlings,” and pored over every line of the two chapters he’d written. The two phrases Milch had used most often in class were “strategy of indirection,” which meant it should take the reader forever to figure out what was happening, since life was difficult, and “content tests form,” which meant that since life was difficult, it should take the reader forever to figure out what was happening. It took me forever to figure out what was happening in “The Groundlings,” but it had an undeniable narcotic pull, probably because there was so much Milch in it: a protagonist named Torch, ruthless intelligence bordering on the sadistic, extreme emotional candor, incessant obscenity as a mantra of seriousness. Milch also had what he accused me of having: perfect pitch for how people talked and next to no interest in how the world looked.
The first chapter took place almost entirely in the men’s room of an airport in upstate New York. The second chapter was replete, for some reason, with references to Catholic liturgy. Mark and Torch, brothers, spoke to each other in a curious mix of neo-Elizabethan diction (“Speak, knave”) and street talk (“Fuck you right in the mouth, Torch”). It contained two crucial passages for me—for me, personally. Torch tried to talk Mark out of blaming himself for his father’s death (Milch’s father committed suicide):
You’ve got this compulsion to have some moral relation to every move that’s made in this vale of tears. I mean you made a move. That’s all you can do. Okay, so now you’ll go back to blaspheming, so everyone will call you a mind-fucker and a shit-bird, and if they don’t, then you’ll call them phonies, because they won’t execute divine judgment. That’s really a small-change operation, Mark. That’s really a shitty game to play. And I mean it’s so cheap. It lets you out of every situation, out of letting your moral position be defined by your response to things, by the way you act. You know, by your rules, you say if I am of two minds on a problem, I am not perfect, and if I am not perfect I am evil, and so you’ve got your position established without ever having to get involved with the problem itself.
Universally human rather than narrowly moral. And at the end of the first chapter, Mark said, “I picked up this guy. And I fucked his mind! He had just, see, killed his father. By indirection. So I catalyzed it. I got him to see the connection.” This was precisely what Milch did for all his students, especially me: catalyzed connections that we knew were there but didn’t (but did) want to see, so we could never stop talking about him.
A few years later, my girlfriend from Iowa, a poet named Rita, and I checked into the Hotel Lincoln in Chicago. Rita’s father was a movie producer, so we didn’t have a TV in our apartment in Iowa City. We were on spring vacation, though. One night a show called Hill Street Blues came on. It wasn’t just that Hill Street seemed better written than most things on television; it also seemed instantly familiar, though I’d never watched it before. Bobby Hill bought Renko a prostitute for his birthday, and the prostitute wasn’t supposed to tell, but she did. The scene was more effective than it had any right to be, and I told Rita the show reminded me of Milch—its mixture of academic and street idioms, its (I couldn’t help it) “strategy of indirection,” its very male existential gloom. The credits rolled at the end of the show, listing Milch as story editor, whatever that was. I bounced up and down on the springy bed.
“Take it easy,” Rita said. “It’s only TV.”
I moved with Rita to New York that summer and scoured Hill Street Blues every week for the most minuscule revelation about Milch’s psychology. The show was full of what were to me recognizable elements from Milch’s life—gambling, loan sharks, heroin, Belker’s relationship with his mother. One night that fall, Rita and I sat on the floor of our Lilliputian apartment; Milch had been nominated for an Emmy Award, so we watched the ceremony on our nineteen-inch black-and-white box. He won for an episode he’d written called “Trial by Fury,” about Furillo’s Cuomo-like conscience. Accepting the award, Milch stood at the podium as if he were back in class, quoting Stanley Kunitz, “You are all my brothers in the world.” Kunitz was one of Rita’s favorite poets; she knew the reference was to his poem about the Holocaust, “Around Pastor Bonhoeffer,” which contained the question “if you permit/this evil, what is the good/of the good of your life?” We looked up “Around Pastor Bonhoeffer.” The final section was called “The Extermination Camp”:
Through the half-open door of the hut
the camp doctor saw him kneeling,
with his hands quietly folded.
“I was most deeply moved by the way
this lovable man prayed,
so devout and so certain
that God heard his prayer.”
Round-faced, bespectacled, mild,
candid with costly grace,
he walked toward the gallows
and did not falter.
Oh but he knew the Hangman!
Only a few steps more
and he would enter the arcanum
where the Master
would take him by the shoulder,
as He does at each encounter,
and turn him round
to face his brothers in the world.
For anyone ready to catalyze the connections, false modesty turned rapidly into whiplash judgment.
My first novel was published in the winter of 1984. I sent Heroes to Milch, who a year later left a message on my answering machine that he’d liked the book—“a nice novel about a kid growing up,” according to Milch, whereas in actuality it’s about a diffident Iowa sportswriter obsessed with a brilliant and uncouth college basketball player (me and Milch?).
A couple of years later I went to Yaddo to work on a new book—which wasn’t nice, but it was a novel about a kid growing up (a self, stuttering). One afternoon, Milch drove into the parking lot with his wife and daughter. He got out of the car and told me to give them the tour. With the money he’d made from Hill Street, he’d bought a horse and had come to Saratoga Springs to watch it race. Since I hadn’t seen him for ten years, I was surprised, and secretly delighted, that he recognized me immediately. He said that when he’d been here years ago he’d found it “a good place to dry out” but hadn’t written a thing, and the only thing he’d looked forward to every day was reading the paper, because “at least it was a little hit of the real world.” We walked through the ridiculously medieval main mansion. I pointed out that the founder of Yaddo had made his fortune in the railroad business and wound up being killed in a train wreck. “That,” I said, “is known as poetic…something or other.” Milch laughed. This was funny—to be smart enough to know when to pretend you don’t know something. He gave me a phone number to call so we could get together; I called a few times and left messages and he never called back.
The book I had worked on at Yaddo was published in 1989. I sent him a copy, and shortly afterward his assistant called, asking whether Dead Languages had been optioned yet, and I thought, Yes, yes, sweet revenge; Milch likes the book so much he feels compelled to make it into a movie.
He wasn’t interested in making it into a movie and never had been. He was the executive producer of a television show called Capital News and wanted to know whether I wanted to make four hundred thousand dollars a year writing teleplays. He sent me a videotape of the pilot, to which I knew I was supposed to respond by coming up with new scenarios, but the show was dismal—Capital News was like Hill Street Blues on Thorazine—and I couldn’t come up with anything. I pretended I didn’t understand exactly what it was he was looking for from me and mailed him a lengthy, not to say interminable, critique of the pilot. When he never replied, I called him and was put on hold for the longest time. While waiting, I planned my speech about how I hoped he took my response in the spirit in which it was intended: as constructive criticism; how the show had a lot of good moments and plenty of potential and there was nothing about it that couldn’t be fixed if—
He put me on speaker, explained that my critique was moot since the pilot was already in the can, dispatched me in thirty seconds, and started talking on another line before I’d even hung up.
What did I seek so earnestly from this mentor/tormentor, this charming bully, and why did he so steadfastly refuse to give it? Why did he always tease me by positioning himself close enough to view but just out of my grasp? Antagonizing me, he was also showing me in person what he wanted me to do on the page. “Strategy of indirection”: Life is difficult. Describe the difficulty.