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DEBORAH LEFF, Speaker
Good afternoon and
welcome. I'm Deborah Leff. I'm Director of the John F. Kennedy Library and
Museum. All these lovely people standing are welcome to be seated. Along with
the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Friends of the Hemingway
Collection, PEN New England, the Hemingway
Foundation and Society, The Boston Globe, and the Ucross Foundation,
it is my pleasure to welcome you to the thirtieth annual Hemingway
Foundation/PEN Award and the eleventh annual L. L. Winship/PEN New England
Award ceremony. We're here today because the Kennedy Presidential Library has
the privilege, because of the extraordinary gift of the Hemingway family, to
house and to make available for research the Ernest Hemingway Collection, the
world's most comprehensive archive of Ernest Hemingway's work.
The year 2005 is a very
special year because it marks the 25th anniversary of the opening
of the Hemingway Room at the Kennedy Presidential Library. It was quite a
ceremony, and as you can see, behind Patrick Hemingway here is Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis there with Patrick Hemingway to cut the ribbon. And, Patrick,
you haven't changed a bit. Since that time, hundreds of scholars and
researchers and young writers and students have come to that beautiful room
to read the words written and rewritten and rewritten of the man many
consider to be America's
greatest writer. You can read some delicious letters full of love and
romance, letters full of war and hardship, and letters, frankly, with a bit
of salty language. You can study the manuscripts and see the character
development and alternative endings of Ernest Hemingway's extraordinary
books. And now through its Save America's Treasures Grant that we have been
awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, we are able to preserve
that Collection for years to come. Because of the generosity of Ernest
Hemingway's son Patrick, the Hemingway Room is beautifully maintained and
staffed by our Hemingway curator, Susan Wrynn, and we welcome many students
who are thinking about writing. And we have begun a new literary forum series
where I've seen many of your faces before.
Writing is never easy,
even for the best of writers, as you all know. As Ernest Hemingway noted,
"The hardest thing in the world is to write straight, honest prose on
human beings. First you have to know the subject, then
you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn." Today we
celebrate those who are learning and who are doing pretty well along the way
as we present the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, America's best-known prize
for a distinguished first book of fiction, and the L. L. Winship/PEN New
England Award, honoring a book of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry with a New
England topic or setting or written by a New England author.
Before turning to
today's main event, I want to thank the many people and organizations who
made today's awards and ceremony possible, The Boston Globe, the
Hemingway Foundation and Society, which funds the PEN award, and its
President, James Meredith. And, James, if you could please stand, I really
want to thank you. I want to thank the Friends of the Hemingway Collection.
There is information on all of your chairs, and I encourage you to join. It
is dedicated to commemorating the life and work of Ernest Hemingway and
supports the purchase and preservation of materials for our archives. The
Ucross Foundation, the University of Idaho, PEN New England, including Perri
Klass, the Chair, Helene Atwan, who chairs the PEN Awards Committee, and
Andre Dubus, who heads up the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Awards Committee,
and Karen Wulf, the Executive Director of PEN New England, all of whom did so
much to make today's ceremony happen. At the Kennedy Presidential Library,
Susan Wrynn, our terrific archivist who oversees the Hemingway Collection,
and two other archivists, Megan Desnoyers and James Roth, who have been
deeply dedicated to the Collection for years. I'd also like to thank, really
thank our Forum Coordinator, Amy Macdonald, who did a tremendous job pulling
together everything today, and Carol Ferguson, who has helped with our
audio-visual.
And most of all, let me thank the wonderful Hemingway family. We're so
pleased that so many of them are here with us today. We have Patrick
Hemingway and Carol Hemingway, his wife, their daughter, Mina, in the front
row and her husband, John. And Sean Hemingway, Ernest's grandson, and his
wife, Colette, and Colette's parents. They have given so much, and they've
been visionary supporters of the Collection in every possible way, and their
goal is to support writers and writing.
It gives me great
pleasure now to open the 2005 Presentation of Awards. You will hear first
from Patricia Powell, accompanied by Patrick Hemingway, who will announce the
runners-up and finalists, and then they will announce the winner of the
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Andre Dubus III and John Crawford, who is
Lawrence Winship's grandson, will announce the three winners of the L. L.
Winship/PEN New England Award. And Perri Klass will then introduce our
keynote speaker, Richard Russo. Patrick and Patricia, I turn it over to you.
Thanks.
MS. PATRICIA POWELL,
Speaker
I am Patricia Powell,
and on behalf of my fellow judges this year, Howard Norman, who was not able
to join us, and Suzanne Strempek Shea, who is here, I'd like to announce the
winners of the 2005 Hemingway Award. The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award was
created to honor Ernest Hemingway and to honor new fiction writers. Mary
Hemingway began this award almost 30 years ago, and it has been funded by the
Ernest Hemingway Foundation since 1987. James Meredith, who is with us today,
is the President of the Hemingway Foundation and Society.
For the past 10 years,
Ucross Foundation has awarded residencies to five authors selected by the
judging panel. This year, for the first time, the University of Idaho's
MFA Program in Creative Writing will be offering a residency in their
distinguished Visiting Writers Series to the winner.
Our first finalist is
Samina Ali for Madras
on Rainy Days. Samina isn't with us today. With her feet in both American
and Indian cultures and her heart anywhere but in the upcoming marriage her
family has arranged, Samina Ali's Layla leads the reader into a world of
tradition, belief, and expectations as formidable as the walls that surround
her ancient city of Hyderabad.
Monsoon rains soak the eventual honeymoon and float inescapable truths,
making this one of the more transfixing novels of the year.
Our second finalist is
Laurie Lynn Drummond for Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You.
And would Laurie please stand? Laurie Lynn Drummond's stories are wonderful
evocations of brave women facing risky life-and-death situations on our mean
streets. The collection is gritty, rich with moral complexity, moving, and
completely absorbing. Drummond writes with such passion and conviction, she
challenges readers to see the world in an entirely different way.
And now I'd like to
invite Patrick to join me at the podium as we congratulate the winner. The
winner of the 2005 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award is Chris Abani for GraceLand. Chris Abani's indispensable
novel GraceLand has a displacing power and beauty because he has
delivered a ghetto in Nigeria
to the center of our consciousness. The life of Elvis Oke is by turns
harrowing, comical, heroic, and in entirely unforeseen ways, redemptive. The
stunning verisimilitude of this story recommends it highly to posterity.
MR. CHRIS ABANI, Award
Recipient
Thank you. I wish I had
a joke to tell right now. I'm really nervous. It's really great for me that
Patricia was among the judges because I've admired her work for so long and
taught it and didn't think we'd end up meeting in such wonderful
circumstances. I'm going to read a short excerpt from GraceLand,
which I actually want to dedicate to Mina Hemingway, who, like me, she's an
African. Don't let the skin color fool you. And for Patricia. But I did want
to mention this is to the PEN organization. And I know I'm probably preaching
to the choir, but PEN is an amazing organization. I used to be a political
prisoner in Nigeria.
I spent three years in jail. And it was the letters that people from … Not
just the letters they write to the government, but the letters that people
write to the prisoners. They make a big difference. So, if you're here today,
you're not a member of PEN, you don't want to be a member of PEN, either way,
reach for your checkbook and write a check for them. They're incredible.
GraceLand is about a Nigerian
Elvis impersonator who, like me, can't sing and can't dance and isn't very
good. But it's about a lot of things. I'm going to read a short piece. Elvis
is 16 and he's been led into a life of crime by his friend Redemption, who is
a bit like the Artful Dodger. And here they're just about to go to kidnap
children to sell to Saudi
Arabia for human organ transplant trades.
But this part here is a lynching in the street they witness, because there's
a lot of casual violence in Nigeria.
"Just then they
heard shouts of Ole! Ole! from the small market to
their left. It was half hidden by a timber merchant's sprawling compound, and
Elvis hadn't noticed it at first. A small crowd chased a man out onto the
dirt road between the market and the line of bookers. Elvis got up to get a
closer look, but Redemption pulled him down. 'Stay out of it,' he hissed. The
crowd had formed an angry semicircle around the man, leaving the timber yard
as the only possible escape. But the mean face workers gathered at the gate
ruled out that option.
"The man didn't
look to be more than 20, though it was hard to tell, partly because his face
was dirty and bloody. A tire hung from his neck like a rubber garland and his
eyes wore the look of a cornered animal. 'I beg. I no thief. I no steal
anything. I beg. I don't want to die.' 'Shut up, thief, Ole.' 'I no thief. I
came to collect my money from that man who owes me,' the accused thief
shouted, pointing at a man in the crowd. 'Which man?' 'That one, Peter.' The
man he was referring to, short, nondescript, shifted uncomfortably. 'Who owes
you, crazed man,' Peter shouted, throwing a stone at the accused thief. It
caught him on the temple, tearing a gash, and fresh blood pumped dark and
thick. 'I no be thief, hey, God help me. My name is Jeremiah. I am a
carpenter. I no be thief.' 'Shut up,' the crowd
shouted. 'My name is Jeremiah. My name is Jeremiah,' the man kept repeating.
"The crowd had
grown silent. The lack of sound, sinister, dropped over the scene like a dark
presence. Jeremiah was spinning around in a circle like a broken sprocket,
pleading with each face, repeating his name over and over. 'My name Jeremiah,
my name Jeremiah.' Instead of loosening the edge of tension by humanizing
him, the mantra of his name with every circle he spun seemed to wind the
threat of violence tighter, drawing the crowd closer in.
"Elvis watched a
young girl no older than 12 pick up a stone and throw it at Jeremiah. It
struck him with a dull thud and though she lacked the strength to break skin,
the blow raised a nasty lump. That single action triggered the others to pick
up and throw stones. The combined sound was sickening, and Jeremiah yelled in
pain. There was something comically Biblical, yet purely animal about the
scene. 'Why doesn't anybody help?' Elvis asked. This was just like that time
the man had jumped into the fire and the time the youths had chased another
thief in Bridge
City. In both
instances, he did nothing. Now, again, he did nothing.
"Elvis turned away
from Redemption and looked out. Outside the crowd had given up throwing
stones and was watching Jeremiah for signs of life. He lay on his side
twitching, the tire necklace still in place. Elvis noticed that Jeremiah's
hands were tied, explaining why he couldn't fight back. A whooping sound went
up through the crowd as a man ran up with a 10-gallon metal jerrican. 'What's
that?' Elvis asked. 'Petrol,' Redemption replied. The crowd parted slightly
to let the man with the jerrican through. He stood in front of the prone
Jeremiah for a while, appearing unsure what to do next. 'Baptize him, baptize
him,' the crowd shouted. Moving quickly, the man unscrewed the can's cap and
doused the prone Jeremiah with petrol. Jeremiah twitched as the gas got into
his open wounds and burned.
"A fat woman
stepped back and Elvis caught his first good look of Jeremiah's face. It was
tired, his features reflecting the struggle against inevitable resignation.
The man threw the empty can to the ground and it resounded with a metallic
echo. Nobody moved or spoke, not in the crowd, the booker, or at a nearby
police checkpoint. Everybody was waiting for something to happen. Anything.
Peter stepped forward and stood before Jeremiah, who, revived by the harsh
smell of the petrol, was struggling to his knees. 'I beg, Peter. I beg. You
know I no be thief. I beg.'
"Peter calmly
reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter. He flicked it on
and stepped back from Jeremiah, dropping the lighter on the tire necklace.
Elvis followed the lighter's fall. It couldn't have lasted more than two seconds,
though it seemed to take forever. It was hard to tell which came first, the
sheet of flame or the scream."
Thank you.
MR. ANDRE DUBUS,
Speaker
That was a beautiful
and powerful reading, Chris, and congratulations. My name is Andre Dubus III,
and I'm here to award the L. L. Winship prize. Built upon the L. L. Winship
Awards, sponsored by The Boston Globe for over 25 years, the L. L.
Winship/PEN New England Awards are now a joint endeavor of PEN New England
and The Boston
Globe. Named for long-time Boston Globe editor Lawrence L.
Winship, who is John's grandfather, whose love of New England inspired this
award, the award is given annually for a book of fiction, non-fiction, and
poetry with a New England topic or setting by a New
England author.
On a personal note, I
would like to add that my Dad, the great short story writer Andre Dubus, won
the very first one 30 years ago this year. And I'd like to read you an
inscription he wrote in Joanna Crawford's copy of his book Separate
Flights. Joanna Crawford is, of course, the daughter of Lawrence Winship.
My father wrote,
"To Joanna Crawford with much gratitude to her father and to the life he
led, which inspired his colleagues' esteem and this award. All best, Andre
Dubus, 31st of October, 1975."
I'd like to thank the
judges this year. In non-fiction we had Richard Hoffman; in fiction, Monica
Wood; and in poetry, Mary Oliver. Thank you all very much for your hard work.
This year's winner in
fiction in the PEN New England/L. L. Winship Award is Warp & Weft
by Edward J. Delaney. In his novel, Edward J. Delaney tells the story of a
single scorching summer at a Massachusetts
textile mill. Delaney's mill workers, ordinary men with layered lives, could
hardly ask for a more gifted chronicler. He does not romanticize them or
condescend to them. Instead, through their entwined lives he reveals the full
measure of their humanity, their limitations and longings, their integrity
and intolerance, their recklessness and rectitude. Gorgeously written and
brimming with perception, Warp & Weft is inhabited by characters
so genuinely drawn that the artifice of literature vanishes utterly, leaving
the reader helpless with empathy. Congratulations.
MR. EDWARD J. DELANEY,
Award Recipient
Thank you. Thank you
very much. I'm very honored to be here, and my
reading will be very brief. And I'll just give you a little bit of a back
story to it. As Andre said, the book is about really four men and their lives
at the mill. And, of course, they are surrounded by their families and the
people who are affected by the lives they live. And this particular short
passage that I'm going to read involves a woman whose husband is one of the
workers, and they came over from the Azores
years and years before. And she'd always held out hope that they would return
home, to what she considered to be home. But now she's old and her husband is
ill, and, so, she thinks about whether she'll make it back there.
"The kitchen is
clean. The lights are out. The rain rumbles against the windows. Machado is
in the bed asleep when Anna slides under the sheet and settles herself next
to him, close, thinking of far off places, of sunlight, of Azores.
She wants to go but she can't go. She wants to stay but she can't stay. He
landed in this place and stamped out his footprint, and in this somehow she
knew she had lost the better part of her husband. But yet at night, her hands
still move to touch him. He is the last touchable thing that connects her
with what was. And at night she reaches across the bed and caresses his sleeping
shoulder as if a talisman, flesh so marbled with that life she has lost, that
longing then leaps to her fingertips like sparks.
"He is old, he is
tired. He snores with the weight of years squeezing out the air, rattling it
out of him. She waits silent until he pulls in the next breath like the
exhausted sea drawing back its tide, all undertow and foam. When he is gone
there will be nothing left to touch that once touched home. She wants to be
carried, hand on these shoulders, back to what she knows, wants to descend to
the dark soil so real that somehow she can remember its tastes and textures.
"She thinks of
that long ago plane ride neatly cleaving her life, hung between two places,
and how she remains so even now. She is still in the air, pressed up against
sun and sky floating, plucked from solid footing. The island is far behind
her, a sliver sliding over that knife of horizon. The new country always out
in front like something she is chasing, too quick, too close, like the brown
farm cat she chased as a girl. Here she is forever airborne, bound to one
side by her memory and her birth, bound to the other by the hopes, by the
child she has made here. Here she lies in the dark, eyelids pressed together.
Ghosts, wind, sounds, she implores her memory to render all those again, to
paint the colors she so misses, the smells that rose and carried her, the
long gullied roads that always led home on a child's legs, on bare feet, on
small steps. She asks her memory now to bring her to her dreams, the ones
that still swath her in those last tattered shreds of herself."
Thank you.
MR. DUBUS: While victimization
and suffering are all too real a feature of the lives of the women chronicled
in Swanee Hunt's This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace,
the real story is one of struggle and moral courage. Here are women who have
demonstrated for the world how to keep human dignity and compassion alive in
the most hellish circumstances imaginable. Organizing to distribute food,
fuel, and medicine to those in need often across the ethnic lines drawn by
warmongers and demagogues. In This Was Not Our War, Swanee Hunt has
collected and featured the voices of these women, and through her skillful
orchestration she has lodged their stories in our hearts, stories that ask
hard questions and offer real lessons, if we but heed them. Ladies and
gentlemen, Swanee Hunt.
SWANEE HUNT, Award
Recipient
I particularly want to
thank Valerie Millholland of Duke University Press for believing in me. And
to give you a little bit of context, I was a diplomat in Vienna from '93 to
'97 and first flew into Bosnia in '94, strapped in a cargo plane in between
sacks of flour, 50,000 pounds of flour. And that's when I first met the women
that I began interviewing for seven years. When the books started coming out
about Bosnia,
I, of course, was the first to go buy them because I had been very involved.
And I discovered they were mostly guys talking about guys and some raped
women. And I thought it was really important. I hadn't thought when I was
interviewing these women that I would write, because I had never written a
book before. But somebody needed to tell their story.
I'm going to begin with
a paragraph of my own and then bring you the words of one of the women. This
is in a section where the women are trying to describe what it takes to have
reconciliation. And it's called "Humanizing the Enemy." First my
words.
"As they spoke of
what they'd experienced, several of the women found themselves beyond the
continuum that runs between good and bad. They'd witnessed evil and they were
haunted by questions. When Milosevic reached into the bowels of Serbia's
prisons to find criminals who would take pleasure in terrorizing the Bosnian
people, what well of psychopathology did he plumb? Is sadism a sickness or
worse, a choice? And who ultimately bears the responsibility? The drunk soldiers laughing as they mutilate an old woman? Or
the political architect of the war lounging in a leather chair, sipping
Slivovitz with visiting diplomats?
"None of the women
I interviewed described themselves to me as having progressed from martyrs to
saints. In fact, given the complexity of morals, values, and loyalties, our
conversations were far from simple as the women I met with struggled with questions
of others' motivations and the extent to which the perpetrators were acting
with free will. Many wanted to give the boys and men who had wreaked havoc in
their lives the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they were misled. Surely they
were duped. In the same situation, maybe I would have done the same. They
were reluctant to judge, even as they recognized the importance of assigning
responsibility for the raging aggression let loose on innocents."
Rada Sesar was the
recipient of such benevolence, and these are her words.
"I was doing a
documentary story. It was 1993 -- a spring of hunger. I went to a
neighborhood at the edge of Sarajevo
where all the houses had been destroyed. The people were mainly Muslims, and
now they were living underground -- in holes only 200 meters away from the
front line. It was a dangerous place with bitter people who didn't want to
set eyes on a Serb. We were a symbol of evil, of crime, and all the horrible
things that had happened.
"I understand
people -- especially country folk like my family -- so I was ready for what
lay ahead. The first five minutes were always crucial. Often people didn't
want to shake my hand when they heard my Serb name, ‘Radmila.’ They’d keep
silent or just walk away. I was met by a group of people in the street. Among
them was a 70-year-old man wearing an old, shabby but clean suit. He stared
at me, then he shook my hand and said, 'When you've finished, please come
visit me. They call me Hadjiya. Where do you come from?' I wanted to say Sarajevo where I live
now. But then I thought twice and imagined someone might tell him otherwise,
so I said, 'I am from Pale, the town that was the Bosnian Serb headquarters.'
He said, 'No problem! You're mine.'
"The cameraman and
I completed our assignment, then went to see him. He
was highly respected; despite his age he had joined the Army with his son to
try to defend their community. Now he was living in a space he had dug out
under his burnt house. He'd even managed to run a phone line into that hole.
When we arrived, he had a fire going. It was Ramadan, when no Muslim eats
during the day, but his wife had made a big plate of pita and sauerkraut.
Sauerkraut! It was unimaginable at that time. My God, that aroma! And the
beauty of the place! It has stayed in my soul. It was difficult; I was the
only one eating. He asked me, 'How do you manage? Do you have a family?' I
told him, 'I have two children and a husband. Nobody is earning money.' I was
being honest; we didn't have any money for five years. Then he said, 'Why
didn't you say so? I have plenty of flour!' I told Hadjija, 'I can't take
anything.' The old man worked in his garden every night with his wife. They
had managed to grow onions and potatoes. They wanted to pack something for me
to bring home. There was nothing in town … not even bread …
not even salt … only hunger; but I left empty-handed. I didn't want to
take anything from him.
"I broadcast the
story on the radio. I polished it as a work of art with all my love. He heard
it and then he called me, saying we had to meet the next day. He told me to
wait outside the studio. He had no transportation, of course, and it was a
long way. He got up at 5:00 that morning to walk two and a half hours. I was
waiting for him outside the building. He was carrying a rucksack on his back.
He was a small man, and the load dug into his shoulders. He told me to take
the rucksack. When I opened it at home, it was full of potatoes and beets,
onions, sauerkraut, and smoked plums. And then I found in a pocket something
more, a box of cigarettes! Cigarettes, they were only a dream during that
time. Unbelievable. And in the packet of cigarettes was a piece of paper
wrapped around some money. A few Deutschmarks. The note read: 'Radmila, this
is from Allah. Don't be offended.'
"I didn't cry,
even when my father died. But at that moment I cried from happiness. We're
still friends. I visit his home as if I'm his child, and that feeling has
kept me going."
So, you see, we're all
much more connected than we might think. And on behalf of 26 courageous Bosnian
women, thank you.
MR. DUBUS: In The Ghost House
Acquainted, a collection of 42 poems, offers something wonderful: a new,
clear, an invitational voice. It is the voice of someone living in this world
every moment with untiring attentiveness and the kind of tenderness that does
not spoil courage. It is a voice that connects joy with holiness and sorrow
with mystery, and all of this in a language as sharp as flint and as
earthborn as the lamb. It is a voice of hard and real work, of stargazing and
praising, of being a part of all things and doing with courtesy the difficult
things, and with boyish melody the glad things. Many of us wonder far too
much about ourselves or about the world but in a way unconnected to our own
lives. Kevin Goodan has accepted and made prayers of all of it, the mystery,
the sorrows, the delight. "I'm polite. Say yes
and yes again for I have so loved this world," he writes. In the
Ghost House Acquainted is extraordinary. Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin
Goodan.
KEVIN GOODAN, Award Recipient
Thank you very much.
There are a lot of people I would like to thank, but I'm kind of speechless
at the moment. So sorry. I'll thank you later. I think I will just, because
I'm very nervous, I think I'll just attempt to read one poem. I live in western
Massachusetts, the other Massachusetts, on a farm that has llamas
and sheep and horses. There used to be ducks, but the fox ate them. So this
poem is for llamas, because I kind of like them.
"If you want to
understand the beauty of llamas, you have to struggle with the dead.
You have to slip your
arms beneath their ribs, lock your hands together and stagger with them
across a concrete floor out into cold wind.
Through thistles, brown
and brittle cheat grass, your head against their collar bone, your face so
close to their face that you breathe for the both of you.
Your breath glistening
in the fine hairs along a cheek as you use your weight against their weight
and skin your knuckles and the bridge of their nose on a pile of rough cut
hemlock boards and catch their elbow on a nail on a post and curse when your
arms get shaky and your lungs burn.
You drop them,
apologize, and leave them lying on the gravel.
Let freezing rain glaze
their awkward lips and back the rusty blue Ford pickup up and let it idle.
Crank the defrost,
scrape the ice from the windshield and drop the tailgate and pick them up
again and lay them down again in crusted snow and baling twine in back.
Their head resting on
the spare and throw a blue tarp on, strap it down with shroud line and throw
a few heavy boards on for weight and rest a while listening to the AM.
It is then that the
llamas come towards you from the back of the field through the snowdrift that
remains, past the lean-to and the barn, past the feeders, and the new brown
salt box and the salt houses, past the round pen for breaking horses.
And they will move
without shadows and you will know the ice and the matted hair and you will
smell them as they smell you, as they lean their necks across the fence.
And they will breathe out
and you will see it.
And they will look at
you with their eyes filled with pastures of another world.
And you not knowing
what it is you are waiting for."
Thank you.
PERRI KLASS, Speaker
Hello, my name is Perri
Klass. I'm the Chair of the Board of PEN New England.
I'm so happy to be here. I would like to echo, I could hardly equal, what
Chris Abani so eloquently said about PEN and invite you to be part of us as a
community of writers and readers and people who care passionately about the
printed word and the people who write it. I would also like, at the beginning
of what I'm going to say, to remember Saul Bellow, who was our keynote
speaker at this event in 1999 in this room, and helped us initiate and
strengthen this tradition of great days celebrating writing, great speakers,
great writers speaking to us, celebrating new writers. We honor his memory
and we will miss his voice.
It's always a pleasure
on this occasion to be back in this room today on a beautiful day when you
could really start to believe in spring. What could be a better metaphor for
celebrating a new voice in fiction? What could be a better frame for
celebrating things New England than spring
actually happening behind us? I am, of course, grateful to the judges for
both awards. Thank you so much. I am, of course, grateful to the Library for
this wonderful collaboration. I'd like to thank Karen Wulf, our Executive
Director at PEN New England. I'd like to
thank everyone who is a partner in this work to make this day happen. And I
am especially grateful right now to Richard Russo, our keynote speaker, whom
it is my great privilege to introduce. I think it's particularly fitting to
have him speaking on a day when we're going to celebrate the possibilities of
fiction, celebrate a first work of fiction, look to the way that lives are
lived with writing and with fiction, and also celebrate the importance of
region, region as point of origin, region as topic, region
as news.
Now, speaking of
beginnings, Richard Russo has said that he himself began writing fiction
"as a kind of an outlet against a strange sense of despair that set in
about halfway through my dissertation." He has written five novels, both the first and the most recent, speaking again of the
importance of place, named for their towns, the town of Mohawk,
New York, and then Empire Falls, Maine.
And his most recent book is a collection of short stories, The Whore's
Child.
Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize
and, by the way, has been adapted by its author, who also writes screenplays,
and filmed by HBO as a miniseries, which you're going to get to see in May
and in which the town of Empire Falls will be peopled by, oh, Ed Harris and
Helen Hunt and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
But let me say a word
about place and region. The towns where Richard Russo sets his novels. He's
been celebrated, and justly so, for the eloquence and sympathy with which he
writes about small towns, often small towns that aren't doing very well. In Mohawk
the tanneries are going out of business but not before poisoning the waters.
In Empire Falls, the mill town in Maine, it's the shirt factory.
The towns, the places,
even the university campus in Straight Man, which may be one of the
greatest academic novels, certainly one of the funniest as well, these places
are not only settings for the story he's telling, they're also the places
which shape people and the local geographies and textures that we carry with
us forever. As the narrator of his novel The Risk Pool, who also comes
from Mohawk, says when he talks about "wandering Americans, so many of
whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not
precisely where so long as it's away. Return we do but only to gain momentum
for our next outward arc, each further than the last until there is no
elasticity left, nothing to draw us home."
These towns are not
curiosities; they're not museums of lovable eccentrics; they're worlds or
pieces of the world which are understood and detailed with love, but dry-eyed
love, and with humor. They are places that we as readers can take up
temporary residence in a way that's part of the great tradition of the novel.
And Richard Russo introduces us to all the people we need to know and will
not forget. A. O. Scott, writing in the New York Times about Empire
Falls said this, "By the end of this novel you'll know the town's
geography like a native and its tattered landmarks -- the Empire Grill, the
old Whiting Shirt Factory -- will be as vivid and as charged with metaphor as
Salem's House of Seven Gables or the mansions of East Egg. You will also have
had the good fortune to tour this unremarkable geography in the company of an
amiable, witty raconteur who knows all the gossip and the local history as
well as some pretty good jokes. Only after you've bought him a beer, shaken
his hand and said goodbye will it occur to you that he's also one of the best
novelists around."
Now, you should never
introduce a novelist with the words of a critic, however laudatory. So on the
principle that you should always quote a writer's words against him, I went
looking through some of the stories and chapters I love best in Richard
Russo's work for some inspirational words about writing and fiction. And
there on the third page of the brilliant title story of this wonderful short
story collection The Whore's Child there is the professorial narrator
of the story confronting the elderly Belgian nun, Sister Ursula, who has
turned up uninvited and unregistered in his advanced fiction class and he's
trying to discourage her. And this is what he says to her. "This is a
storytelling class, Sister. We're all liars here. The whole purpose of our
enterprise is to become skilled in making things up, substituting our own
truth for the truth. In this class we actually prefer a well told lie."
Ladies and gentlemen,
Richard Russo.
MR. RICHARD RUSSO,
Keynote Speaker
Thank you, Perri. I
thought actually the other wisdom of one of my characters on the art of
writing comes from Straight Man. I thought, actually, that you might
be quoting that -- which was Hank Devereaux to one of his students, and his
advice to him after reading his story is to always understate necrophilia. I
don't know that much, but I like to share what I do know.
It's wonderful to be
here. PEN is a great organization, and we know some of the reasons why today.
It's a great organization, it's a brave organization. It's also, I think, a
kind organization. And just, for example, they raised the screen that had the
huge Hemingway back there. They didn't make all of us on the stage read in
front of an enlarged Ernest Hemingway, which I think is kindness itself. I
was a little worried.
I was asked what I
might talk about. I could either talk about Hemingway or something else, and
I've chosen to talk about something else. But I was thinking, for some reason
it's been on my mind and you'll partly know why here. I have been thinking
about the beginnings of things lately a good deal. And especially on the day
of the Hemingway Award, which is given to the best first novel, I was set in
motion here to organize some of my thoughts about beginnings, especially an
artist's beginnings. And this talk is called Beginnings.
My daughter Kate and I
are dining this evening in a small London
bistro, just the two of us. Well, not quite. We are joined in spirit by my
maternal grandparents, long deceased, my father, also dead now for going on
two decades, and my mother back in Maine in her 80s now, her traveling days
done.
My grandmother is here
because all of her life she wanted to travel and never got to. She especially
wanted to visit Ireland,
having taught herself to believe that she was Irish, which in part she was,
and not German, which in part she also was. Her desire to travel was so
profound that she actually envied her husband's travels during two world
wars, never mind that from the second of these he returned with malaria, from
which he never totally recovered.
My grandfather himself
wouldn't have envied our being in London
so much as the education that has brought us here. Despite having a curious
mind and a scholarly temperament, he was by trade a glove cutter, and college
was never a possibility for him. In his place, he hoped to send my mother,
who did spend a year at the State Teachers College but then quit to marry my father,
whose primary education was in Europe between 1944 and 1945 where he made the
long journey from Normandy to Berlin by way of the Hurtgen Forest.
Of the four, only my
mother lived to see the publication of my first novel. And everything since
then, the other novels, movies, literary awards, and myriad blessings have
happened in the time it takes for two children to grow into adulthood. That
is, in the blink of an eye. "I just can't take it all in," my
mother sometimes tells me, and I know what she means. And if all of this
weren't enough, astonishing enough, here come her college-educated
granddaughters, both of whom have not just traveled but studied abroad. And
now poised on the brink of dream careers in letters, my oldest daughter,
Emily, is a literary agent and in the arts. If my mother can't quite take it
all in sometimes, she's got company.
Kate and I are in London now so that she can interview with the Slade School, where she hopes to study
painting in the master's program next year. It was, she said, a good
interview that she has just finished. But now over dinner and a bottle of
wine, we are of two minds, she and I. My thinking is
would they bring her all this way if they weren't going to admit her? They
know how much it costs to fly across the Atlantic.
And even if you stay in a Bloomsbury hotel with plumbing that would embarrass
a Motel 6 in rural Georgia,
you're still out serious dough, right? Would they do that? Our only true allies
in the great hostile world, who actually believed with our encouragement that
Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to Western democracy, would they
encourage us to spend this kind of money and then reject my daughter? Well,
they might, now I come to think of it. After all, there were no WMD and maybe
the people at the Slade are sore. I know I am.
Despite the good
interview, Kate is less confident than I, though her misgivings have little
to do with either (inaudible) or politics. She has studied logic and unlike
her father, excelled in it. Her thinking goes like this. There were 400 or
500 applications, she guesses, from all over the world now winnowed to 60
interviewees from which the Slade will select 20. So the odds are still three
to one against.
I dislike logic in
general and this logic, in particular. I can't help it. I have a good feeling
about all of this. That we two are in London,
England seems
to me the salient fact, proof that we have already beaten long odds. I'm
supposed to be discouraged by three to one odds in the same year that the Red
Sox, of all people, won the World Series? Please. Tony Blair would never
allow us to come all this way for nothing, I tell my daughter, knowing how
much she admires Tony Blair. She just raises an eyebrow. Like all those
fluent in the language of logic, my daughter is a realist.
Me, I'm a romantic. At
least in the Wordsworth-Coleridge-romantic-poetry-sense of the word, that is.
Cautiously optimistic about the future of the world and of mankind and about
our finer democratic institutions, which include rather prominently just now
the Slade School of Art. I believe my daughter is a very talented painter,
even though I know, because she's told me, that I could not defend this
belief in a court of law, dumb as I am. I have embarrassed her in the Tate
Modern, the Frick, the Guggenheim, and Boston's MFA and a host of other
museums where I cannot always tell the difference between an object of art,
say, and a box in one room and, to my eye, an identical box in the next room
that serves as a pedestal for another object of art which seems to have been
brought into being for the sole purpose of making me grumpy.
Well, tomorrow is our
free day in London before we return to Maine. And as we
discuss how we will spend it, I can't help but reflect how absolutely
thrilling it is to be at the beginning of something fine, the vaguest
outlines of which are just visible unless you're imagining them in the mist.
The mature artist, painter, writer, composer knows by mid-career who he is
and who he is not and who he is never likely to be. But at the beginning, all
things are possible, including, of course, the possibility that you are
deeply deluding yourself, that the people who have said you are talented have
either been paid to say so, like your college mentor, or are looking at your
talent through the distorting lens of love, like your parents. All of this,
both the thrill and the self-doubt, I remember as if it were yesterday.
Though, believe me, it was not.
When my first novel was
accepted for publication, my wife and I were living in New Haven, Connecticut,
so we took the train into the city to meet my editor. Even now, writing that
sentence, I still feel the thrill of each magical phrase. Took the train into
the city, meet with my editor. So full of Cheever and Fitzgerald and
Hemingway. Not New York City,
the city, my city. Barbara, my wife, who grew up in the Southwest had never
at that point even visited my city, so I wanted to show her around. This
despite the fact that since 1966 I had only been there a couple of times
myself and had seen little more than the inside of convention hotels.
We had lunch at the Top
of the Sixes, the only restaurant I knew of that had the requisite loft for
the occasion. We were given a table at the window with sweeping views of my
city. The people at the next table were speaking rapid French, and the only
word we were able to pick out was Bloomingdales. As our food arrived, I
happened to notice a man come out on the roof a couple of stories below where
he unzipped and arced his yellow stream out into the street below, proving,
as life will, that nothing ever comes to you clean, or, in this case, even
urine-free.
That night after my
meeting, Barbara and I dined at a steakhouse called Gallagher's, which was so
breathtakingly expensive that it cast a whole new light on the advance
against royalties that I was to receive for the sale of my novel. We
concluded that we would just about have enough to cover the check if we
didn't order appetizers or side dishes or anything to drink and if we tipped
15% rather than the 20 demanded, I had heard, by New York waiters. Our sirloins arrive
accompanied with a lonely sprig of parsley. And throughout the dinner I kept
tapping my shirt pocket to reassure myself that our return train tickets were
there where I had put them, because if I had somehow managed to lose them, we
would have to spend the night on the streets of my city. But you know what? I
don't think even that would have dampened my spirits, because my editor had
assured me that I had written a very good first novel. And he seemed to think
that I had others in me. It was all, all of it, to borrow my mother's phrase,
too much to take in.
And so now in London I
consider sharing this story with my daughter, hesitating not so much because
I may have told her the story before, as because I may have told it to her
recently, say, last week or maybe yesterday on the plane. I am a profligate
storyteller. Everything these days reminds me of my favorite stories. The fact
that I've just told a story will sometimes remind me of that story,
especially if I've been drinking. Most of my supposedly true stories exist in
at least two versions, and after a glass of wine or two you will get the
maudlin sentimental one.
So it may be my
daughter's intuition that I am about to slip into story mode that causes her
to tell me a story instead, the threat of which instantly sobers me. Kate is
not a profligate storyteller, at least not to her parents. Indeed, she
purposely withholds all stories from us until she judges we are ready to hear
them. The lag time between the event itself and the recounting of it often
runs into years. Lately, her stories are similarly themed. That is, they
concern all the horrible things that happened to her as a kid -- things that
we, her parents, contrived to be ignorant of.
Recently, for instance,
she told Barbara and me about what happened to her in fourth grade, the year
that we moved to Maine
from the West Coast. The first day of her new school, she was shunned for no
other reason than the fact that she was a new kid. Each time she tried to
strike up a conversation, she was snubbed. At recess, which lasted 20
minutes, she stood in the middle of the playground and sobbed, games going on
all around her, no one inviting her to join in, not one other child concerned
in the least that one of their number was crying, brokenhearted in their
midst.
The story that Kate
wants to tell me now took place, she says, in sixth grade, which sends a
chill up my spine, even though I know, in a sense, how this story ends. After
all, there she sits across the table from me, a lovely, smart, healthy,
buoyant young woman, which means that whatever happened to her in the sixth
grade, she survived it. By definition, it's a story that cannot end with her
dead or crippled or in a coma. Why I should nevertheless be frightened for
the girl that she was back in sixth grade is something that I can't explain,
but I am. Couldn't I just hear the fourth-grade story again? I am almost over
that one, I think. And then at some other date she could tell me about sixth
grade, when her mother is present also to shoulder her fair share of the
guilt that will inevitably ensue. But, no, apparently tonight's the night.
Like it or not, I'm going to hear about sixth grade.
She sat that year, my
daughter tells me, next to a boy who did not speak, ever, to anyone. Her
being seated next to this boy is no coincidence. Both of my daughters have
told us how their teachers used to routinely use them as buffers between the
school's unfortunates and its snots and bullies, knowing that they would
never ridicule another child because he stank or dressed in thrift-shop
clothes. That this particular boy neither spoke nor was expected to speak was
well and thoroughly understood, she said, by students and teachers alike. He
was never called on in class, in any class. He arrived at school by bus in
the morning and left in the afternoon the same way. Took no part in sports or
extracurricular activities of any kind. He handed in assignments with the
other kids, but no reference was ever made to these, so no one knew whether
he was smart or stupid. He simply sat there at his desk and waited for the
school day to be over and reboarded the bus. Naturally, he was the butt of
considerable ridicule, though it was necessarily vague, so little was known
about him.
That spring the entire
school was engaged in a public speaking contest. Naturally, this boy in
question, who had never uttered a syllable in anyone's presence, was
exempted. But his teacher wanted him to do the writing part of the
assignment, which was a short essay about someone who had some sort of
obstacle to overcome in life. After the essays were composed, the other
writers would then revise and time the piece to fit the three-minute time
slot allowed to each speaker. The day the speeches were given, the silent
boy, no surprise, was not in school. But before herding my daughter's class
into the school auditorium, the teacher said that she wanted to share with
the rest of the class what the silent boy had written.
He lived with his
mother, the boy wrote, just the two of them. She was retarded and he took
care of her. When he was at school, someone from Social Services looked in on
her to make sure that she was okay. What the boy's mother waited for
patiently was her son's return on the yellow school bus, because then he
would take her to the playground a few blocks away so she could slide down
the slide, over and over, until he judged that it was time for them to return
home. This at 11 years old was his life.
According to my
daughter, when the teacher read the boy's essay, no one said anything for a
long time and she let the silence speak for itself. She must have been like
me, an optimist, that teacher, one of those who believe in teaching
opportunities. She probably even hoped that sharing this boy's story would
mean an end to the ridicule that he endured every day at the hands of his
fellow students. If so, she was to be disappointed, because by the following
week the kids who had been ridiculing him were back at it again. And as if
this story weren't terrible enough, there's a postscript.
The winner of the
contest, the speaking contest in my daughter's grade, was a good friend of
hers, the daughter of a college administrator. She spoke about Harriet
Tubman, to whom she had neither emotional,
intellectual, imaginative nor, need I say it, racial connection. Well, it's a
terrible story on its own merits, and even more heartbreaking, I think, because
it's my daughter who has told it to me. I understand now that there's been
another ghost at the table that I was unaware of. My daughter, I realized,
though only in her early 20s, is already haunted.
This truth shouldn't
and, in fact, doesn't surprise me. Was I not similarly haunted at her age?
What does surprise me is that I don't know how to feel about this knowledge.
What parent doesn't try to shield his children from the worst of the world's
cruelties? And how fortunate we are that we fail so dismally. For where does
art come from if not from what haunts us? What bubbles onto the blank page as
words or onto the canvas as paint has to have a source. And it's often not,
I've long known, what therapists like to call our happy place, but rather the
hollow spot where our faith has been undermined.
Though she hasn't meant
it to be, my daughter's story about the silent boy has been a shot across the
bowel of my own optimism, which derives, I freely admit, from my own myriad
blessings: work that I love, a healthy family, enough money to cover our
dinner tonight, plus tuition at the Slade should that be demanded. Everyone
should be so lucky, and everyone isn't.
Her story is about the
fundamental injustice of things, especially, and this is the most unfair part,
at their beginnings. It's a story that should atomize my good spirits, and it
does shake me, I admit. How can it not? I want to know what has become of
that mute boy. And I'm afraid that the weight that he was carrying was too
much for him to bear. And, yet, even as I acknowledge that dread, I also find
it heartening that my daughter would share with me something that haunts her
memory, this night of all nights. Poised as she is, on the brink of something
fine, the vague outlines of which are just barely visible to her. Is this
what causes my doubt to give way to hope? And is that hope romantic or
realistic? The latter, I decide, though it is a tough call.
But consider. In mine
and my daughter's imagination, he's still that same mute boy. Whereas in reality,
he is my daughter's age. And it's unkind and small and maybe even cowardly to
assume that he was broken by the weight that he carried, that he never found
his voice. Was he not halfway there already? He wrote the story, after all,
and in doing so demonstrated courage and patience and resolve. Who can say
how far such strength of character may have carried him? Is it so farfetched
to imagine him now, at 22, slipping a story into an envelope and addressing
it to the Missouri Review, himself on the brink of something fine, the
outlines of which are just barely visible? At what point does hope become
folly? At what point does the absence of hope preclude the kind of moral
imagination that leads to art?
Of one thing I am sure,
cynics don't write poetry. The first line on the blank page, the first
brushstroke on canvas, the beginnings of anything worth doing are inherently
hopeful. They defy the odds, as do the lines and brushstrokes that follow. We
who are haunted are the lucky ones.
Thank you.
MS. LEFF: It is impossible to
listen to the words of Richard Russo without wanting to read more. I am
pleased to say for those of you who want to read the works of our winners
today and of Richard Russo, there are some on sale at our bookstore. We want
to celebrate beginnings with Richard Russo. Downstairs in our pavilion we
have some refreshments and we invite you all to join us.
Thanks so much. This is
just a wonderful occasion. And congratulations to our winners.
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