My first novel, The Car Thief, was as true to life as I could make it. Stil, I was disappointed when most readers wanted to know little else than if it had really happened. I was offended, too, though I hardly knew why at the time.
Well, yes and no—what do you mean exactly? Was my shaky reply, for I’d given my heart to it, to the language, scenes, shadings of character, to finding just the right word and in merely posing the question there was impiled a diminishing of what I believed to be a work of art separate from, higher than the scrubby author from whence it came.
I’ve decided to believe that was the old bugaboo question says: Your fiction was so true to life for me, so happened as I read it, that I found it to be the essence of life itself, and I just wanted to be sure, in asking, have you know how sympathetic you persuaded me to be to the world you created!
That’s what I’ve decided to believe.
If asked if my novel Harbor Lights really happened, I’m sure I would have the same shaky replay: “Yes and no—what do you mean exactly?” And I’ll certainly offer a Law & Order disclaimer of my story being fiction, which will not be untrue. Something like this did happen hereabouts but it was the plot alone that caught my eye; the persons involved remain unknown to me. I may also mention that a similar story was reported about Henry Hyde, as a powerful politician in Illinois, appropriating another man’s wife as a mistress and setting her up in business, while remaining in his own marriage. That plot, too, struck me as I was struck by the strong plot of Romeo and Juliet the first time I read Shakespeare’s play—another story that found its seed elsewhere, in a popular poem of its time. Infamous plots, that is to say, should not necessarily be confused with the flesh and blood of someone else’s confession. What I found intriguing in a local love triangle was what aroused within me—the conundrum, the truth, the theme of possessing, or failing to possess, another person, even in marriage, and my awareness from certain personal experience that possessiveness is a double-edged sword which may make or break a person’s life…as in all those country songs.
To avoid confusion between newspaper fact and personal fiction, I located my story elsewhere and shaped characters all my own—fashioned my story from my own perspective on the human condition: jealousy, possessiveness, rejection, a damaged psyche; all, I’m sorry to say, have visited your author’s woebegone life.
Here’s the action from the newspaper. Early in 1992, in a tiny coastal town north of Boston, a 57-year-old husband was diagnosed with terminal lung caner. Thereafter, one summer day, he asked his 55-year-old wife to meet him for lunch. She declined, letting him know she would be having lunch with another 57-year-old man, a former state senator and—as it was known to all, including her husband—her lover of more than 30 years, though the powerful ex-senator was likewise married and had a family of his own with whom he continued to live.
From the outset I was interested in the husband as a pathetic man who was, I thought, the person most wronged by the ordeal. His wife had a store and lover, the ex-senator had his residual power plus a family and a mistress, and the husband, living 30 years as a cuckold, had his dismay and terminal lung cancer. The press described the wife as “vivacious,” the senator as a “power broker,” the husband as “reclusive.” I thought it likely that this wasted man, remaining devoted to his wife, had become what is known as netted. All those years he had been unable to either get out or let go. Facing irrevocable meaninglessness at the closing of his life, he could contrive no other psychological option than to do what he did.
*This article is published in its entirety in Fiction Writer, June 2000.