Call If You Need Me (16 page)

Hemingway and Faulkner were the reigning authors in those days. But altogether I’d probably read at the most two or three books by these fellows. Anyway, they were so well known and so much talked about, they couldn’t be all that good, could they? I remember Gardner telling me, “Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system.”

He introduced us to the “little” or literary periodicals by bringing a box of these magazines to class one day and passing them around so that we could acquaint ourselves with their names, see what they looked like and what they felt like to hold in the hand. He told us that this was where most of the best fiction in the country and just about all of the poetry was appearing. Fiction, poetry, literary essays, book reviews of recent books, criticism of
living
authors
by
living authors. I felt wild with discovery in those days.

For the seven or eight of us who were in his class, he ordered
heavy black binders and told us we should keep our written work in these. He kept his own work in such binders, he said, and of course that settled it for us. We carried our stories in those binders and felt we were special, exclusive, singled out from others. And so we were.

I don’t know how Gardner might have been with other students when it came time to have conferences with them about their work. I suspect he gave everybody a good amount of attention. But it was and still is my impression that during that period he took my stories more seriously, read them closer and more carefully, than I had any right to expect. I was completely unprepared for the kind of criticism I received from him. Before our conference he would have marked up my story, crossing out unacceptable sentences, phrases, individual words, even some of the punctuation; and he gave me to understand that these deletions were not negotiable. In other cases he would bracket sentences, phrases, or individual words, and these were items we’d talk about, these cases were negotiable. And he wouldn’t hesitate to add something to what I’d written—a word here and there, or else a few words, maybe a sentence that would make clear what I was trying to say. We’d discuss commas in my story as if nothing else in the world mattered more at that moment—and, indeed, it did not. He was always looking to find something to praise. When there was a sentence, a line of dialogue, or a narrative passage that he liked, something that he thought “worked” and moved the story along in some pleasant or unexpected way, he’d write “Nice” in the margin, or else “Good!” And seeing these comments, my heart would lift.

It was close, line-by-line criticism he was giving me, and the reasons behind the criticism, why something ought to be this way instead of that; and it was invaluable to me in my development as a writer. After this kind of detailed talk about the text, we’d talk about the larger concerns of the story, the “problem” it was trying to throw light on, the conflict it was trying to grapple with, and how the story might or might not fit into the
grand scheme of story writing. It was his conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author’s insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn’t care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it.

A writer’s values and craft. This is what the man taught and what he stood for, and this is what I’ve kept by me in the years since that brief but all-important time.

Gardner’s
On Becoming a Novelist
, which he completed before his sudden death on 14 September 1982, seems to me to be a wise and honest assessment of what it is like and what is necessary to become a writer and stay a writer. It is informed by common sense, magnanimity, and a set of values that is not negotiable. Anyone reading it must be struck by the absolute and unyielding honesty of the author, as well as by his good humor and high-mindedness. Throughout the book, if you notice, the author keeps saying: “it has been my experience.…” It was his experience—and it has been mine, in my role as a teacher of creative writing—that certain aspects of writing can be taught and handed over to other, usually younger, writers. This idea shouldn’t come as a surprise to any person seriously interested in education and the creative act. Most good or even great conductors, composers, microbiologists, ballerinas, mathematicians, visual artists, astronomers, or fighter pilots learned their business from older and more accomplished practitioners. Taking classes in creative writing, like taking classes in pottery or medicine, won’t in itself make anyone a great writer, potter, or doctor—it may not even make the person
good
at any of these things. But Gardner was convinced that it wouldn’t hurt your chances, either.

One of the dangers in teaching or taking creative writing classes lies—and here I’m speaking from my experience again—in the overencouragement of young writers. But I learned from Gardner
to take that risk rather than err on the other side. He gave and kept giving, even when the vital signs fluctuated wildly, as they do when someone is young and learning. A young writer certainly needs as much, I would even say more, encouragement than young people trying to enter other professions. And it ought to go without saying that the encouragement must always be honest encouragement and never hype. What makes this book particularly fine is the quality of its encouragement.

Failure and dashed hopes are common to us all. The suspicion that we’re taking on water and that things are not working out in our life the way we’d planned hits most of us at some time or another. By the time you’re nineteen you have a pretty good idea of some of the things you’re
not
going to be; but more often, this sense of one’s limitations, the really penetrating understanding, happens in late youth or early middle age. No teacher or any amount of education can make a writer out of someone who is constitutionally incapable of becoming a writer in the first place. But anyone embarking on a career, or pursuing a calling, risks setback and failure. There are failed policemen, politicians, generals, interior decorators, engineers, bus drivers, editors, literary agents, businessmen, basket weavers. There are also failed and disillusioned creative writing teachers and failed and disillusioned writers. John Gardner was neither of these, and the reasons why are to be found in
On Becoming a Novelist
.

My own debt is great and can only be touched on in this brief context. I miss him more than I can say. But I consider myself the luckiest of men to have had his criticism and his generous encouragement.

Left to right: Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.

Boy, are these guys having fun! They’re in London, and they’ve just finished giving a reading to a packed house at the National Poetry Centre. For some time now critics and reviewers who write for the British papers and magazines have been calling them “Dirty Realists,” but Ford and Wolff and Carver don’t take this seriously. They joke about it just as they joke about a lot of other things. They don’t feel like part of a group.

It’s true they are friends. It’s also true they share some of the same concerns in their work. And they know many of the same people and sometimes publish in the same magazines. But they don’t see themselves as belonging to, or spearheading, a movement. They are friends and writers having a good time together, counting their blessings. They know luck plays a part in all this, and they know they’re lucky. But they’re as vain as other writers and think they deserve any good fortune that comes their way—though often as not they’re surprised when it happens. Between them they have produced several novels, books of short stories and poems, novellas, essays, articles, screenplays and reviews. But their work, and their personalities, are as different as sea breezes and salt water. It is these differences, along with the similarities, and something else hard to define that make them friends.

The reason they’re in London and having such a big time together and not back home where they belong in Syracuse, New York (Wolff), or Coahoma, Mississippi (Ford), or Port Angeles, Washington (Carver), is that they all have books coming out in England within days of each other. Their books are not that much alike—at least I don’t feel so—but what the work does have in
common, I believe, is that it is uncommonly good and of some importance to the world. And I would go on thinking this even if, God forbid, we should ever cease being friends.

But when I look again at this picture that was taken three years ago in London, after a fiction reading, my heart moves, and I’m nearly fooled into thinking that friendship is a permanent thing. Which it is, up to a point. Now, clearly, the friends in the picture are enjoying themselves and having a good time together. The only serious thing on their minds is that they’re wondering when this photographer will finish his business so that they can leave and go about their business of having more fun together. They’ve made plans for the evening. They don’t want this time to end. They’re not much looking forward to night and fatigue and the gradual—or sudden—slowing down of things. Truth is, they haven’t seen each other for a long time. They’re having such a good time being together and being themselves—being friends, in short—they’d like things to just go on like this. To last. And they will. Up to a point, as I said.

That point is Death. Which, in the picture, is the farthest thing from their minds. But it’s something that’s never that far away from their thinking when they’re alone and not together and having fun, as they were that time in London. Things wind down. Things
do
come to an end. People stop living. Chances are that two of the three friends in this picture will have to gaze upon the remains—the
remains
—of the third friend, when that time comes. The thought is grievous, and terrifying. But the only alternative to burying your friends is that they will have to bury you.

I’m brought to ponder such a dreary matter when I think about friendship, which is, in at least one regard anyway, like marriage—another shared dream—something the participants have to believe in and put their faith in, trusting that it
will
go on forever.

As with a spouse, or a lover, so it is with your friends: you
remember when and where you met. I was introduced to Richard Ford in the lobby of a Hilton Hotel in Dallas where a dozen or so writers and poets were being housed and fed. A mutual friend—there’s a web—the poet Michael Ryan, had invited us to a literary festival at Southern Methodist University. But until the day I got on the plane in San Francisco, I didn’t know if I had the nerve to fly to Dallas. After a destructive six-year alcoholic binge, I was venturing out of my hole for the first time since having stopped drinking a few months before. I was sober but shaky.

Ford, however, emanated confidence. There was an elegance about his bearing, his clothes, even his speech—which was poised and courtly and southern. I looked up to him, I think. Maybe I even wished I could be him since he was so clearly everything I was not! Anyway, I’d just read his novel,
A Piece of My Heart
, and loved it and was glad to be able to tell him so. He expressed enthusiasm for my short stories. We wanted to talk more but the evening was breaking up. We had to go. We shook hands again. But the next morning, early, we met in the hotel dining room and shared a table for breakfast. Richard ordered, I recall, biscuits and country ham along with grits and a side of gravy. He said “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am” and “Thank you, ma’am” to the waitress. I liked the way he talked. He let me taste his grits. We told each other things, talking through breakfast, coming away feeling we’d known each other, as they say, for a long time.

During the next four or five days we spent as much time together as we could. When we said good-bye on the last day, he invited me to visit him and his wife in Princeton. I figured my chances of ever getting to Princeton were, to put it mildly, slim, but I said I looked forward to it. Still, I knew I’d made a friend, and a good friend. The kind of friend you’d go out of your way for.