Chapter 6

The toughest thing about his pig adventures coming mostly to an end was that he felt more obligated to be strictly a writer again. He searched through his messy desk ceaselessly looking for some notes for the presold novel. He was usually uncanny at remembering details but his idea had come along strangely in a troublesome dream at three thirty in the morning and retained a dreamy elusiveness. He had awoken with a jolt, had a drink from a pint on his desk, coughed convulsively, then dreamed of three cantankerous families that were neighbors down an imagined but very vivid gravel road. Their parked cars and pickups in the landscape were muddy and junky with evidence of many minor collisions. There was one very large barn between them and across the road a very large hay crop recently baled. In the dream all the people in the three narrow houses had a passing resemblance which indicated to him that the families were all related. The dream came with the conviction that they were all evil people except the children who continued being children in the malevolent atmosphere. All of them, especially the men, were profound boozeheads fueled by endless gallons of cheap vodka.

He liked the idea of evil rural families because the whole rural literary tradition in America had become buried in honeysuckle and lilacs, hardworking and noble yokels. He had lived all of his life in the country and knew that this was hopeless bullshit. It wasn’t even fair to the rural people because it denied them their humanity making them comic book cutouts. It was the clear interface of ideology with fiction. Anyway, the whole idea had now dissipated.

He could always call his editor and ask for a copy of his original proposal but the idea was far too embarrassing because he had lied in his sales pitch and claimed to have written “a hundred pages” of notes for this new idea. The trouble with lying was how frequently you had to cover up for it. Sometimes you had to live the lie to prevent discovery that you had told it in the first place. What saved him was late that night he had yet another brief minstrel nightmare. His parents were holding him tightly because he was ill and shivering, but he had a miniature gun in his coat and was carefully shooting all the performers who would howl and drop to their knees with this acute form of a bee sting in the face. This image saved him because he dimly recalled his three farm families were severely alcoholic gun nuts imperiling his hero who lived downriver from them in his trout fishing cabin. Eureka! With guns and booze how could he fail? He had pretty much canceled the idea of France so harsh was the idea of writing the novel after having lost the story, so he was thrilled when his dream success revived it. The idea of him going to France to write had been much talked about for decades. He couldn’t recall who had done the talking but the idea was that looking back at America from France you would see the home place much more lucidly. He could put it off no longer and booked the tickets. Of course the girl who brought him coffee every morning in his inexpensive hotel would be seduced by him within a day or two. How could she resist? A bold American artist getting older but still in the arena.

In the past if he suffered a literary slight he reminded himself that Melville had been forgotten for more than thirty years. Writing like nature was full of unfairness. Hail killed the baby warblers in their nest. Wars were obviously part of nature and killed millions. What struck him about reading Anne Frank was not what everyone knew, that she had died like millions of her relatives, but that she was obviously destined to become a grand writer. The mortality of songbirds hitting windows drove him crazy. You had a lovely life ahead of you and then you struck a window and it was over. The death of his sister at nineteen in an auto crash with his father was still unacceptable fifty years later. It had created its own nodule of permanent rage at the roots of his consciousness. It was ultimately the cause of his becoming a writer. If this can happen to those you love you may as well follow your heart’s wishes in your time on earth. He found it quite comic when he realized that he had never won an award that he had ever heard of before winning it. “Here today, gone tomorrow,” as people said. Ambition grated while humility soothed. This was quite different from ambition for the work itself. All he would allow himself was the wish that his books stay in print. The aim was that when he was walking Mary and Marjorie in the morning he was simply walking a dog and a pig on a lovely morning not brooding about what a reviewer in New York had done to him. Once when he was washing popcorn butter off his hands in a movie theater bathroom there was a dapper young man next to him who was combing his complicated hair with amazing wrist flicks. He had dozens of waves and curls and smiled at himself in the mirror as he did it. He remembered thinking at the time that the guy was fucked for life. He might have a girlfriend who liked or loved his hair but not as much as he himself did. After the movie he saw the guy with a rather homely girl which made sense in that he wouldn’t want to suffer by comparison.