Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (71 page)

In retrospect, I consider this to be one of my lowest moments, a dismal chapter in my career as a human being, and I am not at all proud of how I acted. But I was broke, and I had done the work, and I deserved to be paid. To prove how hard up I was during those years, I will mention just one appalling fact. I never made a copy of the manuscript. I couldn’t afford to xerox the translation, and since I assumed it was in safe hands, the only copy in the world was the original typescript sitting in the publisher’s office. This fact, this stupid oversight, this poverty-stricken way of doing business would come back to haunt me. It was entirely my fault, and it turned a small misfortune into a full-blown disaster.

For the time being, however, we seemed to be back on track. Once the unpleasantness about my fee was settled, the publisher behaved as if he had every intention of bringing out the book. The manuscript was sent to a typesetter, I corrected the proofs and returned them to the publisher—again neglecting to make a copy. It hardly seemed important, after all, since production was well under way by now. The book had been announced in the catalogue, and publication was set for the winter of 1977–1978.

Then, just months before
Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
was supposed to appear, news came that Pierre Clastres had been killed in a car accident. According to the story I was told, he had been driving somewhere in France when he lost control of the wheel and skidded over the edge of a mountain. We had never met. Given that he was only forty-three when he died, I had assumed there would be ample opportunities in the future. We had written a number of warm letters to each other, had become friends through our correspondence, and were looking forward to the time when we would at last be able to sit down together and talk. The strangeness and unpredictability of the world prevented that conversation from taking place. Even now, all these years later, I still feel it as a great loss.

Nineteen seventy-eight came and went, and
Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
did not appear. Another year slipped by, and then another year, and still there was no book.

By 1981, the publishing company was on its last legs. The editor I had originally worked with was long gone, and it was difficult for me to find out any information. That year, or perhaps the year after that, or perhaps even the year after that (it all blurs in my mind now), the company finally went under. Someone called to tell me that the rights to the book had been sold to another publisher. I called the publisher, and they told me yes, they were planning to bring out the book. Another year went by, and nothing happened. I called again, and the person I had talked to the previous year no longer worked for the company. I talked to someone else, and that person told me that the company had no plans to publish
Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
. I asked for the manuscript back, but no one could find it. No one had even heard of it. For all intents and purposes, it was as if the translation had never existed.

For the next dozen years, that was where the matter stood. Pierre Clastres was dead, my translation had disappeared, and the entire project had collapsed into a black hole of oblivion. This past summer (1996), I finished writing a book entitled
Hand to Mouth
, an autobiographical essay about money. I was planning to include this story in the narrative (because of my failure to make a copy of the manuscript, because of the scene with the publisher in his office), but when the moment came to tell it, I lost heart and couldn’t bring myself to put the words down on paper. It was all too sad, I felt, and I couldn’t see any purpose in recounting such a bleak, miserable saga.

Then, two or three months after I finished my book, something extraordinary happened. About a year before, I had accepted an invitation to go to San Francisco to appear in the City Arts and Lectures Series at the Herbst Theatre. The event was scheduled for October 1996, and when the moment came, I climbed onto a plane and flew to San Francisco as promised. After my business onstage was finished, I was supposed to sit in the lobby and sign copies of my books. The Herbst is a large theater with many seats, and the line in the lobby was therefore quite long. Among all those people waiting for the dubious privilege of having me write my name in one of my novels, there was someone I recognized—a young man I had met once before, the friend of a friend. This young man happens to be a passionate collector of books, a bloodhound for first editions and rare, out-of-the-way items, the kind of bibliographic detective who will think nothing of spending an afternoon in a dusty cellar sifting through boxes of discarded books in the hope of finding one small treasure. He smiled, shook my hand, and then thrust a set of bound galleys at me. It had a red paper cover, and until that moment, I had never seen a copy of it before. “What’s this?” he said. “I never heard of it.” And there it was, suddenly sitting in my hands: the uncorrected proofs of my long-lost translation. In the big scheme of things, this probably wasn’t such an astonishing event. For me, however, in my own little scheme of things, it was overwhelming. My hands started to tremble as I held the book. I was so stunned, so confused, that I was scarcely able to speak.

The proofs had been found in a remainder bin at a secondhand bookstore, and the young man had paid five dollars for them. As I look at them now, I note with a certain grim fascination that the pub date announced on the cover is April 1981. For a translation completed in 1976 or 1977, it was, truly, an agonizingly slow ordeal.

If Pierre Clastres were alive today, the discovery of this lost book would be a perfect happy ending. But he isn’t alive, and the brief surge of joy and incredulity I experienced in the atrium of the Herbst Theatre has by now dissipated into a deep, mournful ache. How rotten that the world should pull such tricks on us. How rotten that a person with so much to offer the world should die so young.

Here, then, is my translation of Pierre Clastres’s book,
Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
. No matter that the world described in it has long since vanished, that the tiny group of people the author lived with in 1963 and 1964 has disappeared from the face of the earth. No matter that the author has vanished as well. The book he wrote is still with us, and the fact that you are holding that book in your hands now, dear reader, is nothing less than a victory, a small triumph against the crushing odds of fate. At least there is that to be thankful for. At least there is consolation in the thought that Pierre Clastres’s book has survived.

1997

The National Story Project

I never intended to do this. The
National Story Project
came about by accident, and if not for a remark my wife made at the dinner table sixteen months ago, most of the pieces in this book never would have been written. It was May 1999, perhaps June, and earlier that day I had been interviewed on National Public Radio about my most recent novel. After we finished our conversation, Daniel Zwerdling, the host of
Weekend
All Things Considered
, had asked me if I would be interested in becoming a regular contributor to the program. I couldn’t even see his face when he asked the question. I was in the NPR studio on Second Avenue in New York, and he was in Washington, D.C., and for the past twenty or thirty minutes we had been talking to each other through microphones and headsets, aided by a technological marvel known as fiber optics. I asked him what he had in mind, and he said that he wasn’t sure. Maybe I could come on the air every month or so and tell stories.

I wasn’t interested. Doing my own work was difficult enough, and taking on a job that would force me to crank out stories on command was the last thing I needed. Just to be polite, however, I said that I would go home and think about it.

It was my wife, Siri, who turned the proposition on its head. That night, when I told her about NPR’s curious offer, she immediately came up with a proposal that reversed the direction of my thoughts. In a matter of thirty seconds, no had become yes.

You don’t have to write the stories yourself, she said. Get people to sit down and write their own stories. They could send them in to you, and then you could read the best ones on the radio. If enough people wrote in, it could turn into something extraordinary.

That was how the
National Story Project
was born. It was Siri’s idea, and then I picked it up and started to run with it.

*

Sometime in late September, Zwerdling came to my house in Brooklyn with Rebecca Davis, one of the producers of
Weekend All Things Considered
, and we launched the idea of the project in the form of another interview. I told the listeners that I was looking for stories. The stories had to be true, and they had to be short, but there would be no restrictions as to subject matter or style. What interested me most, I said, were stories that defied our expectations about the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives, in our family histories, in our minds and bodies, in our souls. In other words, true stories that sounded like fiction. I was talking about big things and small things, tragic things and comic things, any experience that felt important enough to set down on paper. They shouldn’t worry if they had never written a story, I said. Everyone was bound to know some good ones, and if enough people answered the call to participate, we would inevitably begin to learn some surprising things about ourselves and each other. The spirit of the project was entirely democratic. All listeners were welcome to contribute, and I promised to read every story that came in. People would be exploring their own lives and experiences, but at the same time they would be part of a collective effort, something bigger than just themselves. With their help, I said, I was hoping to put together an archive of facts, a museum of American reality.

The interview was broadcast on the first Saturday in October, exactly one year ago today. Since that time, I have received more than four thousand submissions. This number is many times greater than what I had anticipated, and for the past twelve months I have been awash in manuscripts, floating madly in an ever expanding sea of paper. Some of the stories are written by hand; others are typed; still others are printed out from e-mails. Every month, I have scrambled to choose five or six of the best ones and turn them into a twenty-minute segment to be aired on
Weekend All Things Considered
. It has been singularly rewarding work, one of the most inspiring tasks I have ever undertaken. But it has had its difficult moments as well. On several occasions, when I have been particularly swamped with material, I have read sixty or seventy stories at a single sitting, and each time I have done that, I have stood up from the chair feeling pulverized, absolutely drained of energy. So many emotions to contend with, so many strangers camped out in the living room, so many voices coming at me from so many different directions. On those evenings, for the space of two or three hours, I have felt that the entire population of America has walked into my house. I didn’t hear America singing. I heard it telling stories.

Yes, a number of rants and diatribes have been sent in by deranged people, but far fewer than I would have predicted. I have been exposed to groundbreaking revelations about the Kennedy assassination, subjected to several complex exegeses that link current events to verses from Scripture, and made privy to information pertaining to lawsuits against half a dozen corporations and government agencies. Some people have gone out of their way to provoke me and turn my stomach. Just last week, I received a submission from a man who signed his story “Cerberus” and gave his return address as “The Underworld 66666.” In the story, he told about his days in Vietnam as a marine, ending with an account of how he and the other men in his company had roasted a stolen Vietnamese baby and eaten it around a campfire. He made it sound as though he were proud of what he had done. For all I know, the story could be true. But that doesn’t mean I have any interest in presenting it on the radio.

On the other hand, some of the pieces from disturbed people have contained startling and arresting passages. Last fall, when the project was just getting under way, one came in from another Vietnam vet, a man serving a life sentence for murder in a penitentiary somewhere in the Midwest. He enclosed a handwritten affidavit that recounted the muddled story of how he came to commit his crime, and the last sentence of the document read, “I have never been perfect, but I am real.” In some sense, that statement could stand as the credo of the
National Story Project
, the very principle behind this book. We have never been perfect, but we are real.

*

Of the four thousand stories I have read, most have been compelling enough to hold me until the last word. Most have been written with simple, straightforward conviction, and most have done honor to the people who sent them in. We all have inner lives. We all feel that we are part of the world and yet exiled from it. We all burn with the fires of our own existence. Words are needed to express what is in us, and again and again contributors have thanked me for giving them the chance to tell their stories, for “allowing the people to be heard.” What the people have said is often astonishing. More than ever, I have come to appreciate how deeply and passionately most of us live within ourselves. Our attachments are ferocious. Our loves overwhelm us, define us, obliterate the boundaries between ourselves and others. Fully a third of the stories I have read are about families: parents and children, children and parents, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, grandparents. For most of us, those are the people who fill up our world, and in story after story, both the dark ones and the humorous ones, I have been impressed by how clearly and forcefully these connections have been articulated.

A few high-school students sent in stories about hitting home runs and winning medals at track meets, but it was the rare adult who took advantage of the occasion to brag about his accomplishments. Hilarious blunders, wrenching coincidences, brushes with death, miraculous encounters, improbable ironies, premonitions, sorrows, pains, dreams—these were the subjects the contributors chose to write about. I learned that I am not alone in my belief that the more we understand of the world, the more elusive and confounding the world becomes. As one early contributor so eloquently put it, “I am left without an adequate definition of reality.” If you aren’t certain about things, if your mind is still open enough to question what you are seeing, you tend to look at the world with great care, and out of that watchfulness comes the possibility of seeing something that no one else has seen before. You have to be willing to admit that you don’t have all the answers. If you think you do, you will never have anything important to say.