TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of all of the sponsors who are listed in your program, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the annual PEN Hemingway Awards ceremony. It’s been said that Ernest Hemingway thought it bad luck to talk about writing. But, fortunately, his son Patrick is not nearly so superstitious. So I feel some assurance that the stage won't collapse on us as I open these proceedings.
Today we present the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards and the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award, America’s best known prize for a distinguished first book of fiction. There is something romantic about the notion of aspiring writers at work on their craft, each with his or her own influences and unique ways of putting off the writing task. “Sometimes, when I was starting a new story and could not get it going,” Hemingway writes, “I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.” The influences of Hemingway were many in those early years in Paris as he worked to write one true sentence. But I’m particularly fond of the line in which he describes Ezra Pound as, “The man who taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people.”
John Updike, who we will pay tribute to here later this spring, describes wiling away hours in his one-room rented office in Ipswich, smoking nickel cigarillos, their little boxes littering his desk. “My main debt at the time,” he writes, “was to Hemingway. It was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.” Updike concludes an introduction to a volume of his early stories, “I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me, to give the mundane its beautiful due.”
Today we give our due to a number of magnificent writers. But before doing so, I want to acknowledge many people and organizations that are here today. First, let me recognize members of the Hemingway family, including Patrick who’s here with me on stage, his wife Carol, and Ernest Hemmingway’s grandson Sean and his wife Colette, who have both been busy working on Hemingway projects this year. Colette has written a book In His Time about Hemingway’s lifelong interest in art and the paintings he collected, a number of which are displayed in the Hemingway Room upstairs. Sean has edited a restored version of A Moveable Feast, as Hemingway had prepared it, with a new preface by Patrick, which will be published on Bastille Day. And perhaps the most important member of the Hemingway family in the room is the newest member of their family, Sean and Colette’s daughter Anook.
I want to thank the individuals and organizations that make this annual awards ceremony possible, the Hemingway Foundation and Society, which funds the PEN Award, and its president James Meredith, who I ask to stand and be recognized. [APPLAUSE] Leah Bailey and the Boston Globe Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the University of Idaho, and PEN New England, including Helen Atwan, Richard Hoffman and Karen Wulf, all of whom do so much to coordinate the judging and orchestration of today’s awards.
My colleagues here at the Library, Amy Macdonald, Susan Wrynn, Nancy McCoy, my predecessor as the Library Director, Deborah Leff, who creatively strengthened our Hemingway enterprise in so many ways, and the Friends of the Hemingway Collection, our membership organization dedicated to commemorating the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, which supports the purchase and preservation of materials for our archives. Brochures are available at the registration table, and I encourage all who have not already done so to join.
Before we begin the presentation of the 2009 awards, Patrick will read a passage of his father’s work. He’ll be followed by Richard Russo, one of this year’s judges, who will announce the finalists of the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award. This will be followed by the presentation to and reading by the 2009 winner.
Richard Hoffman and John Crawford, who is here with his mother Joanna Crawford, daughter of Lawrence Winship, to represent the Winship family, will then make the presentation to the three writers of the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards. And this year we’ll hear from the Winship winner in fiction. Finally, Rebecca Goldstein, a former MacArthur Grant recipient who served recently as a judge for the National Book Awards, will introduce our keynote speaker, Richard Rhodes.
Patrick Hemingway and his wife, Carol, are truly the guiding force for the Hemingway Collection housed here at the Library. They were here officially to open the Hemingway Room in 1980, to commemorate the Hemingway Centennial in 1999, and we’re deeply indebted to them for their generosity and the care and the direction they continue to offer to support us in our work, preserving and providing access to the letters, manuscripts and ephemera stored here, in Patrick’s words, “To get under the skin of literature.”
We turn to him often. For, as you can imagine, Patrick’s knowledge of Hemingway and his works is simply unsurpassed, though he is the one who often prods us to expand our outlook and to promote literature writ large for literature’s sake. Patrick’s insatiable curiosity, his prolific knowledge, generous spirit and infectious laugh make him a delight to be with.
In the past, I’ve introduced him with lines that his father wrote about a fictionalized character based on Patrick as a young boy. But this afternoon, I thought I would leave you with this one true sentence written by Hemingway, not about Patrick directly, but I think the words apply to the man he has become. “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand.” Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Patrick Hemingway. [APPLAUSE]
PATRICK HEMINGWAY: After that introduction, I’m bound to be a disappointment. [He chuckles.] The passage that I picked today was written at the height of the Great Depression, at a time when people really wanted to laugh. And it’s Hemingway in a much less serious mode than people usually read him. And it’s taken from Byline, his work for journalism, specifically for Esquire Magazine in the period 1933 to 1936.
On the old man’s day off or on national holidays visitors will sometimes get into the house itself. Since his home has been listed as an official attraction your correspondent feels that he owes it to the F.E.R.A. to give such visitors their money’s worth. Such a visitor was Mr. Questioner, a prominent businessman and fellow member of the Players Club, who honored us with his visit lately. Your correspondent had just finished a hard day’s work and was feeling rather fatigued when the door opened and looking up he saw Mr. Questioner.
“Why, hello Questioner, old pal,” you say.
“I just dropped in,” said Questioner. “Saw the door was open and noticed you sitting there reading. Not fishing today?”
“No. Been working.”
“Ha. Call that working? What do they pay you for those things?”
“Oh, it varies. Sometimes a dollar a word. Sometimes 75 cents. Sometimes you bid them up to two dollars when you have something on them. Of course the stuff that kids do is a little cheaper.”
“I didn’t know your children wrote.”
“Well, of course, there’s only one of them really writes. That’s the oldest boy, Bumby. The others just dictate.”
“And you sell their stuff as yours?”
“Every word of it. [laughter] Of course you have to touch up the punctuation a bit.”
“It’s a regular business,’ says Questioner, very interested now. “I had no idea that there was that much money in it. What does the little boys’ stuff bring?”
“We get about three for a quarter for the eldest boy. The others are in proportion.” “Even at that, it’s money.”
“Gad yes,” you say. “If you can keep the little bastards at work.” [laughter]
“Is it hard?”
“It’s not easy. When you over-beat them they write such damned sad stuff there’s no market for it until you get down around a dime a word. And I want to keep their standards up.”
“My word, yes,’ said Questioner. “Tell me more about it. I had no idea this writing business was so interesting. What do you mean when you have something on an editor?”
“It’s rather like the old badger game,” you explain. “Of course we have to give quite a cut to the police though. So there’s not the money in it there used to be. Say an editor comes down, a married editor, and we get off to one of those -- well, you know -- or we just surprise him in his room sometime and then of course the price goes up [laughter]. But there’s really no money in that anymore. The N.R.A. has practically put a stop to it.”
“They’ve tried to stop everything,’ said Questioner.
“Johnson cracked down on us about the kids,” you say. “Tried to call it child labor -- and the oldest boy over ten! I had to get to Washington on it. “Listen, Hugh,” I said to him. “It’s no skin off the ants of conscience in my pants what you do to Richberg. But the little boy works, see?” Then I walked out on him. We got the little fellow up to around 10,000 words a day after that but about half of it was sad and we had to take a loss on that.’ [laughter]
“Even at that,’ said Questioner, ‘it’s money.”
“It’s money, yes. But it isn't real money.”
“I’d like to see them working.”
“We work them nights,” you tell him. “It’s not so good for the eyes but they can concentrate better. Then in the morning I can go over their stuff.”
“You don’t mind putting it all out under your name?”
“Of course not. The name is sort of a trademark. The second rate stuff we sell under other names. You’ve probably seen some of it around. There was quite a lot of it around at one time. Now there’s not so much. We marketed it under too many names and it killed the market.”
“Don’t you write any yourself anymore?”
“Just a little to keep it going. The boys are doing fine and I’m proud of the boys. If they live I’m going to turn the business over to them [laughter]. I’ll never forget how proud I was when young Patrick came in with the finished manuscript of Death in the Afternoon [laughter]. He had done the whole thing from a single inspiration. Damned odd story. He saw a negro funeral going by one of the Sons and Daughters of Rewarded Sorrow, a sort of insurance agency that’s quite popular down here, and as it was the afternoon at the time that gave him his title. The little chap went right ahead and dictated the whole thing straight off to his nurse and in less than a week.”
“Damned amazing,” said Questioner. “I’d like to get in on something like that [laughter].”
Well, those were sad times, and I guess people wanted a laugh. [APPLAUSE]
RICHARD RUSSO: Hello. I’m Richard Russo, glad to be here. And my first duty is to say a word of sincere thanks to my fellow judges. I am one of the judges this year of the PEN Hemingway Award in first fiction. And I want to thank Anita Shreve and Stewart O’Nan, who are over here, [applause] who joined me in this task. We each read, I think, about somewhere of 35 books for this award. And I don’t want to speak for the other judges, but I have to tell you, it was excruciating, but not for the reason you would think. There is just a lot of just truly blinding talent out there. And this was a labor of what came to be a labor of joy, that just it’s a snapshot of an entire generation of young writers coming. Publishing may be on hard times, but there’s no shortage of talent out there as I think you're going to discover today.
Now, however, I need my glasses. The first finalist for this year’s Hemingway Foundation PEN Award in Fiction is Sana Krasikov. One More Year by Sana Krasikov is a quietly beguiling collection of short stories of immigrants coming to the bittersweet acceptance of their lot in America, primarily in their relationships and career aspirations. Shining a light on a slice of life that we don’t often encounter, Krasikov’s collection is a masterful one. The language is elegant and spare, the guiding intelligence of the author steady and relentless. Most illuminating of all, Krasikov’s writing is that which disappears, a skill usually reserved for seasoned writers, so that the stories can go directly from the page into the hearts and minds of readers. Sana Krasikov. [APPLAUSE]
A second finalist for the PEN Hemingway this year goes to Ed Park. Ed Park’s Personal Days is a hilarious take on today’s cubicle culture. Its oh- so-savvy narrative gives us sharply delineated characters who are somehow less important than the larger human organism they become part of when they report each day for clueless, paranoid duty, and Park’s seemingly effortless sizzling prose belies the book’s considerable ambitions. Ed Park. [APPLAUSE]
And this year’s winner of the 2009 PEN Hemingway Award is Michael Dahlie for A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living. Arthur Camden has run his family’s venerable import/export business into the ground. Abandoned by his cheating wife, blackballed by the club that he helped to found, Michael Dahlie’s hero is a lost lamb who can’t do anything right. Is it too late for this passive, middle-aged blueblood to find his place in the world? Flawless and dazzling, A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living is a wise and gentle satire that has us rooting for its hero, even as we laugh at him. Michael Dahlie.
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL DAHLIE: I just have a few things to say and then a very short reading. So far, I’ve had pretty good luck with publications. But in the early days of a career, as I imagine everyone knows, it’s almost impossible to make a living writing fiction, especially for someone like me, since I squander every penny before the checks have even cleared. And so, for the past decade, I’ve been something of a so-called Grubb Street writer. And I’ve written endless -- and I really mean endless -- amounts of extremely low-grade work for money. [LAUGHTER] It’s basically how I’ve supported myself over the years and how, for the past seven months, I’ve been feeding my infant son.
But one of my intellectual influences is a guy named Robert Darton. He’s a resident of Boston and teaches history at Harvard. He also runs Harvard’s vast library system. And his historical work is all about hired writers, particularly French ones from the 18th century. His work, both the quality of the research and the strange subjects he writes about, has been something of an inspiration for me, in that it’s given me comfort when I’ve felt pretty alone in my embarrassing poverty and my hand-in-mouth employment. And the lot of the writer, I promise you, has not changed in 300 years. But the reason that Darton’s work is inspiring is his ability to tell stories with an enormous amount of humor and compassion, something unusual in scholarly work, I think. And it’s something I appreciate, because his stories of disgrace and humility seem similar, not just in my professional life, but to what I write about, in particular with the protagonist of my novel.
Disgrace and humiliation and shame, particularly of men, in fact, is all I seem to care about these days, in a literary way. And this doesn’t seem like it’s going to change.
But a man who knows about humiliation and shame also knows something about love and gratitude. The protagonist of my novel does, and I think, hopefully, so do I. The reason that I’m a hack writer for 50% of my life is that the time spent in humiliating situations, being lectured by some freelance editor in Oregon about how much he hates my use of parentheses or how he’s not going to pay my invoice because of my shocking misunderstanding of the important events of the lives of Mandy Moore or Shaquille O’Neal, for all that, I get to spend the other half of my life writing things that I love and believe in. And when something you write that you believe in gets published, and then a few people appreciate it, it makes you feel extremely fortunate and extremely lucky.
And I know this kind of occasion calls for me to say something erudite and sophisticated. The feeling of gratitude I have, now, trumps any sort of sophisticated speculations I have about the nature of literature. I feel rather as I did the day that I got a call from W.W. Norton saying that they wanted to publish my book, that is, not as a distinguished man of letters but something more like a weeping mother who’s just been handed a child that’s been rescued from a burning building. [LAUGHTER]
So to everyone involved with PEN, PEN New England, the judges, the Hemingway family, the Hemingway Foundation, Ucross, University of Idaho and the JFK Library, I’m very, very grateful.
And now, I have a short reading. I don’t actually need to set it up too much, because Richard Russo did such a good job. But it’s from near the beginning of the book, and it’s a flashback. Arthur is fishing in the Catskills and contemplating just how badly his life has turned out. And it’s from when he was ten.
When he was ten, Arthur’s family took a weekend trip to the Equinox in Vermont, joined by another family which included a girl named Alice, near in age to Arthur’s sister, and a boy named Kip, who was about Arthur’s age. The plan was for the males to spend the weekend fishing on the Battenkill while the females rode horses. The trip started off well but in the end added up to a certain kind of personal catastrophe for Arthur. That is, Arthur observed in fairly vivid and compelling detail just how capable he was of completely exasperating his father, leading the elder Camden into wild and colorful expressions of frustration coupled with halting and failed attempts to rein himself in. Of course, Arthur had seen this in small glimpses before, but never to this extent and never in such repetition of fluidity. Especially disturbing (Arthur concluded as he slowly moved up the stream above Maidenhead) was that all of it was so clearly his own fault.
The troubling day began when Arthur mentioned to his father, quite reasonably, as far as he was concerned at the time, that his waders were way too tight and that they were hurting his feet, perhaps dangerously cutting off his circulation. He followed this with several other observations, pointing out that he was extremely cold -- certainly too cold to fish -- that he was entirely exhausted, that he was starving (he had refused to eat the salmon sandwiches they brought for lunch), that his fishing vest pinched him terribly under his arms, and, finally (and this Arthur did realize might be crossing the line) that he would have much preferred to go horseback riding with his sister and mother than fish on that particular day. (All of this set against the foil of Kip, who happily bounded over rocks in his waders, gobbled down his salmon sandwiches with reckless appetite, boldly took off his jacket and sweater midday, and, when Arthur mentioned that he wished he was horseback riding, declared that he recently got into a fight with a kid who went horseback riding because he hated “that kind of crap.”) [LAUGHTER]
Throughout Arthur’s complaints, his father did his best to talk him into being a bit hardier, a bit more accepting of the challenges and the imperfections of life. And had an outsider observed the scene, he probably would have concluded that Arthur’s father was actually doing his best to encourage him to embrace a more virtuous outlook on life and not simply berating the boy. But the truth was that, despite his somewhat sympathetic parenting techniques, it would also have been perfectly obvious to anyone that whatever toleration he was showing was out of some sense of parental obligation and that underneath it was a stunned disbelief that his son could be quite such a complainer. And he did manage to lose his temper a few times, saying things like, “I mean, my god, Arthur, you act like you're in Siberia. It must be fifty-five degrees out. How cold could you be?” and, “You ate a salmon sandwich last time we fished and you loved it. What’s the problem? You're acting like we just deliberately decided to punish you.”
The matter of food, in fact, came up again that evening when the families were out to dinner at the more formal of the Equinox’s dining rooms. Arthur insisted that the only thing he wanted to eat was lobster Newberg. He’d had it before, he said, and it was his favorite food, and, since he had to go without lunch, he’d really like to have something that would make up for it. It costs the same as a steak, he pointed out – the steak was what Kip and the two men were having -- so there wasn’t any financial reason not to. And, after all, lobster was a popular dish and probably very good for you.
Initially, Arthur’s father refused, insisting that he knew Arthur too well for this and that he was positive Arthur was going to hate lobster Newberg.
“But I’ve had it before,” Arthur pleaded, “and I love it. It’s my favorite food and I never get to eat it.”
The debate went on for some time, and at last (and not without precedent as far as this kind of thing went) Arthur’s father relented. And the truth was that he seemed to do so not entirely out of desperation but with at least an attempt at a change of heart, at last declaring that this was supposed to be a happy weekend and that if Arthur was so sure he wanted lobster Newberg, then why not.
Of course, when the lobster Newberg arrived, Arthur was astonished to discover that he had never seen anything like it before [laughter], and that the idea of lobster cooked in such a thick, white, creamy sauce was an even more horrible thing than the salmon sandwiches [laughter]. He knew that the stakes were now very high, and that he’d really better eat it despite how revolting it obviously was. But after he distracted himself by eating three pieces of bread and poking his dinner several times with the end of his knife, his father finally saw what was happening and yelled, “You see! You see! I knew it. I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t like it. Why don’t you ever listen to me?” at which point Arthur burst into tears, realizing that the day had been a total disaster and any attempt to tough anything out now was entirely useless because he was entirely to blame.
His mother tried to make him feel better. And his father did actually look quite remorseful as he saw his son crying. But there was no way out now, and eventually Arthur asked to be excused, and left the table and the families for his room which (almost too awful for Arthur to think about on that solitary Sunday morning at Maidenhead) he was sharing with Kip.
The events of that day came up again when the family arrived back in the city. It was Sunday evening and Arthur found himself in the kitchen with his father, looking out over the deep courtyard behind their Park Avenue apartment as they ate bowls of ice cream together. Arthur’s father brought up the matter of the trip first and said he was sorry he had made his son cry. “You're a great kid, Arthur,” he continued. “In so many ways. But you’ve got to understand that life is full of difficulties. Sometimes our waders don’t fit. Sometimes we’re a bit unhappy with the weather. Sometimes we’re served salmon sandwiches when we don’t want them. But we’ve got to accept what we have and move on. Believe me, Arthur, you're going to face a lot worse than unappetizing sandwiches in your life. And I really think you need to learn to be a bit tougher and embrace the world a bit more.”
Arthur nodded and said he understood. They were eating a brand of butter pecan ice cream that Arthur didn’t particularly like, [laughter] but he decided he might do well to listen to his father at this point in time and keep this to himself. It seemed like a lesson that was probably very important. And the truth was that the lesson lasted longer than just that night. In the years that followed, Arthur did what he could to hide his fears and disappointments whenever it was possible. But he was never very good at it. That was a fact. And there was the other matter that despite his father’s small moments of kindness, Arthur couldn’t help but somehow grasp that he wasn’t very much like his father, and that, perhaps, were it not for the fact that he was his father’s son, his father might not actually like him very much at all. This particular notion, however, though strong, was something that Arthur never quite faced head-on.”
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
RICHARD HOFFMAN: Good afternoon. I’m Richard Hoffman, Chair of PEN New England. And I have the honor and privilege of awarding the L.L. Winship PEN New England Awards in poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Our first winner, selected by judge poet Dennis Nurkse, is Nancy K. Pearson for her collection Two Minutes of Light, published by Perugia Press. The judge’s citation reads “In Two Minutes of Light, Nancy K. Pearson invents visceral, exciting language to enact redemption with stunning clarity. In Pearson’s world, there is no sentimentality to redemption, no fear of the negative. She doesn’t let absolutes do the work. As with Dante, the voice changes as it travels from hell to the scary possibility of happiness. But there’s no urge to create a model, a template for behavior. Pearson works in the moment, with a keen ear and a live, fluid line. I think of the Arab poet who said he would not trade his moment of mortality for God’s omniscience. Two Minutes of Light is a dazzling voyage.” Nancy K. Pearson. [APPLAUSE]
The L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in Nonfiction goes to Patrick Tracey for his book Stalking Irish Madness, published by Bantam Books. The judge’s citation is by Joe Mackall and reads, “Patrick Tracey’s intense and haunting memoir, Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of my Family’s Schizophrenia, tells the story of Tracey’s desire to discover the origins of his family’s schizophrenia, a disease that has overtaken a great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and two of Tracey’s own sisters. While Tracey searches the Ireland of his ancestors for clues, he also struggles with demons of his own in a prose that’s as lyrical as it is honest.” Patrick Tracey.
[APPLAUSE]
And the winner in fiction, whom we’ll hear from in a moment, is Margot Livesey for her novel The House on Fortune Street, published by HarperCollins. Sandra Scofield judged, and her citation reads, “In Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street, two women friends can't seem to make their way to happiness. The reasons are complex snarls of past betrayals, present choices and the mystery of being human. The novel is structured in four episodes, each with a leitmotif based on a character’s attachment to a literary work. Margot Livesey’s writing is so elegant and clear and intelligent, I fell into her novel and emerged stunned and grateful.” Margot Livesey. [APPLAUSE]
MARGOT LIVESEY: Thank you. I’m honored to be included today in such lustrous company. And I’d like to offer my heartfelt congratulations to Michael Dahlie, Sana Krasikov and Ed Park, and to my fellow L.L. Winship winners, Nancy Pearson and Patrick Tracey.
Many people did an amazing amount of work to make today happen. And I’d like to thank, in particular, Richard Hoffman, Karen Wulf and Helen Atwan, and here, at the Kennedy Library, Tom Putnam and Amy Macdonald. And I’d also like to thank the judges who, from my own experiences I know, spend too precious hours away from their own work to read and debate other people’s. And I'm profoundly grateful to the Winship family and to that great Boston institution, The Boston Globe, not just for my own award, but for their support of writing in general. We’re lucky to have them.
I’m going to read a section from The House on Fortune Street, which is set in rural Scotland, a subject on which I consider myself an expert, and in London in the 1960s. Just in case you missed that vital three letter word in the first sentence, I’m reading in the voice of a middle aged man looking back. And I’ve edited these pages quite vigorously in order to read them almost in my allotted time. So I’m hoping I can smooth over any jagged transitions with my voice.
I always intended to live as an upright man. I remember, when I was 17, telling my friend Davy that I thought it was wrong to eat anything I couldn’t kill myself. “I don’t mean that I have to kill everything I eat,” I explained, “but I want to be sure that I can.” We were taking a break from doing our homework, leaning on the gate of one of his father’s fields, smoking. Davy had been to the barber that morning. And when he turned to look at me, all his features, his light blue eyes, his full red lips, seemed larger and more naked.
“With your bare hands, Cameron?” he asked mockingly. I knew it was just an expression, the ‘bare’ emphasizing the extremity of whatever the hands were doing. But I glanced down at my own hands, rather small for a boy of my age. And I couldn’t imagine them clutching the neck of an animal or bringing a hammer down on a skull. “Of course not,” I said. “With a gun.” I’d never held a gun of any kind, other than a toy pistol. But I’d seen enough films that I could picture myself squinting down the barrel, squeezing the trigger.
“How about one of dad’s pigs?,” Davy said. “If you kill it, I bet he’ll let you have some of the bacon. Or there are the hens, but they’re so easy, they don’t count.” Davy himself killed hens on a regular basis, chopping off their heads with a little axe that the rest of the time was used for kindling. “Come on,” he said, taking a last pull of his cigarette before flicking it into a puddle. “Let’s go and choose your dinner.”
He led me to an adjacent field where the pigs held sway. After the rain, it was even more of a quagmire than usual. “How about Mabel,” said Davy, pointing at a pig with a large black patch on one haunch. “She killed three of her last litter by rolling over on them. I’m sure she’s ready for the great sty in the sky.” [laughter] As Mabel rooted around, searching for acorns, ‘the poor pig’s truffles,’ Davy called them, I made one last effort to explain myself.
“If I’m going to eat meat,” I said, “then it seems immoral to be squeamish about killing animals, but happy to benefit from someone else doing it.” “You eat carrots,” Davy said, “and you don’t grow them. Come on.” He was already heading for the road back to the house. I trailed a few steps behind. At the back door, he told me to wait. When he reappeared a few minutes later, he was carrying a rifle. “Are you allowed to have that thing?” I said. The only answer came from above, as the rain started to fall. Davy was already striding across the farmyard. Once again, I followed, hands in pockets, head down, as if demonstrating my reluctance to him and to myself.
I could never have admitted that somewhere deep inside, I was also excited, swept up by Davy’s passion and wherever it was taking us. Back at the field, he balanced the rifle on the top rung of the metal gate. And just as I had imagined, squinted down the barrel. Mabel had moved closer. “Fifty feet,” Davy said. “A tricky shot for a novice. But it’s easier to aim when you have a support.” “No,” I said.
Davy lifted the rifle off the gate and held it out to me. I backed away. “Do you want people to think you're a coward?” he said, looking me square in the face. “What people? There’s only you and the pigs.” Still looking at me, still holding out the gun, he took a step towards me. “Besides,” I added, “I’m not.” Davy took another step. In the rain, his hair had turned almost black. And his eyes had a flat bright look.
“Come on,” he whispered, his face so close that I felt, rather than heard, his words. The barrel of the gun nudged my chest. People sometimes claim that, at moments of crisis, everything was a blur or, alternatively, crystal-clear. For me, that afternoon in the pig field was both. Davy’s eyes never left mine. The gun pressed against my chest. The pigs grunted and scuffled.
I took the gun, and I imitated Davy. I rested the barrel on the gate, peered along it until it seemed to be pointing roughly in the direction of Mabel’s patchwork rump and pulled the trigger. I had no intention of hurting her. This was all about Davy and me and a certain heat between us. The gun kicked. My head filled with noise, and the sharp smell made my nostrils prickle. Mabel screamed, and the other pigs plunged into confusion.
“Damn!” said Davy. “What have you done?” For the rest of that year, I worked to pay Davy’s father back for Mabel. And during all those months, while I fed the hens and watered the cows, Davy did not speak to me. Several times I tried to explain that I had never in a million years thought I would hit Mabel. But he cut me dead. I soon gave up and followed his example, keeping my head down when our paths crossed.
When classes ended in June, we went our separate ways, he to study French at Aberdeen University, me to do chemistry at Glasgow, without even saying goodbye. After I graduated, I worked in a laboratory in Glasgow for five years before moving to London. A few friends lived there, and I’d been offered a well-paid job developing new colors of paint.
Fiona had started work at the company as a secretary the month before. And she was kind about showing me where to keep my lunch, how to request supplies. She was tall and ungainly with a mobile, expressive face, and a light, girlish voice. One afternoon, when I found her having lunch at her desk, folding an origami crane, she told me that she’d gone to art school and she had thought a job with a paint company might somehow benefit her work. “What an idiot,” she said, holding up a blue paper crane.
That evening, we went for a drink. And from then on, every few weeks, one or the other of us would suggest a trip to the pub. Afterwards, we caught our separate buses home with a casual wave. Then, one day when I had been in London for six or seven months, she asked if I’d like to join her and some friends that weekend for a picnic in the Rose Garden at Regents Park.
Sunday, the 15th of June, 1969 was a perfect summer day, warm with a light breeze, everything still fresh and green, and not yet soiled by the heat. People smiled at me as they passed me walking along, carrying a plate of cucumber sandwiches. I was almost at the garden when I caught sight of Fiona kneeling beside a dark-haired child, a girl of about eight or nine, who was wearing red trousers and a white blouse, patterned with butterflies.
“Annabelle,” said Fiona, “this is Cameron.” “Hi,” said Annabelle. She had the kind of face we call heart-shaped, wide across the eyes, narrow at the chin. Her teeth were slightly too big for her mouth. “Please,” she said to Fiona, “one more go.” “I’m sorry,” said Fiona. “I have to help with the picnic. Annabelle wants another shot on the swings,” she added to me. Unhesitatingly, I held out my plate of sandwiches to Fiona and bent down. “I’d be happy to give you a go.” “Ca-me-ron,” said Annabelle. She gave my name all three syllables and reached up a hot, sticky hand.
Years later, Fiona told me that that was the moment when she began to fall in love with me, when she saw me walking off, hand-in-hand, with Annabelle towards the swings. What did the two of us talk about at that first meeting? Her hamster, or school, or how her mother was teaching her chess? I have no recollection. I do recall Annabelle’s giddy delight as I pushed her higher and higher. “A woman pushing a much smaller child on the next swing said, “Your daughter’s very fearless.” “Just a friend,” I said. Annabelle and I played until even she had had enough. As we started back to the picnic, she looked up at me from beneath her dark eyelashes and asked if I would carry her. Unthinkingly, I hoisted her up. She wrapped her legs around me with practiced ease and rested her flushed cheek on my shoulder. I felt she had delivered her entire self into my keeping. I would have carried her happily for hours, days. I was 27 years old. And until that moment, I had no idea what my heart was capable of.”
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
REBECCA GOLDSTEIN: Hello. I’m Rebecca Goldstein. And it’s my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker for today. Richard Rhodes is a hard man to do justice to in a short introduction. And this bothers me, because justice, a fierce sense of justice burns at the heart of so much of his writing. I’ll start off with the objective facts. He’s written 22 books as of today. [LAUGHTER] And they span almost the entire spectrum of genres: nonfiction, which he prefers to call verity, which to my mind makes a lot of sense (why designate something by what it’s not?); novels, including the recently reissued extraordinary and chilling Ungodly, about the ill-fated Donner party of 1846, one of my own personal obsessions, taking us to the extremes of suffering and its unloosed demons; essays, biographies, memoir. I’m rather disappointed in him, that he’s never published a book of poetry, but there’s still time. [LAUGHTER]
And these are not thin, little, anorexic books. Consider his much celebrated trilogy on nuclear weapons. The first of these, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is a 900-page tome that not only cleanly and efficiently explains the discoveries that led to the science of nuclear fission, but also provides surgical, sociological analyses, as well as novelistic portraits of the key scientific figures, including my own professors of physics, Hans Bethe and Eugene Wigner. I’ve heard tell that even scientists who had helped build the bomb would go to his book in order to verify what they themselves had done when they were asked by interviewers. [LAUGHTER] But the book doesn’t only deal with the grandeur of the science, the genius of the men and women whose fundamental research led to the unleashing of the atom’s power. It takes us to the rather less than grand end of the story, to what befell the poor souls who happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mr. Rhodes doesn’t spare us the knowledge. The heights of genius, as God-like as anything about us, resulting in ungodly suffering, our human paradox.
This is the hallmark of his writing, that sense of justice of which I spoke, that demands open-eyed knowledge, seeing the story through to its end. It’s hard to do justice to Richard Rhodes, precisely because he himself does full justice to the subjects, to the difficult subjects that he takes on. “To do justice to,” this is a phrase that combines both the epistemic and the ethical, a very platonic idea that marrying morality and knowledge. And it’s at the heart of his work. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, I’m sure much to the chagrin of anyone else who happened to publish a book in 1986. [LAUGHTER] The Making of the Atomic Bomb was followed by Dark Sun, about the making of the hydrogen bomb, and the race between the U.S. and the USSR to build it, and Arsenals of Folly.
Jumping genres, a few years later, Mr. Rhodes published a memoir, A Hole in the World, which tells about the violent rupture in his young life, visited in the form of a criminally unfit stepmother on him and his older brother Stanley, defenseless and vulnerable -- as only children can be defenseless and vulnerable -- in the face of ill-willed madness. It’s an extremely moving book.
On exposure to this sort of catastrophic irrationality, a person might himself become bent on destruction. Mr. Rhodes has explored such roots to violence in his own book Why They Kill. But as his own life and career demonstrate, it is possible to deflect the cruel curve of determinism. Evil, as Mr. Rhodes presents it, is often loud and operatic, an unholy howling. Goodness is quiet. It’s the quiet of sympathy, of empathy, of taking responsibility for the shape of one’s own life, despite hard contingencies. It’s the quiet of accumulating knowledge.
Mr. Rhodes speaks at the end of his memoir of finding comfort in the tentative methodology of science, exposing its certitudes to the incoming evidence. He writes “I’d rather know how things really are than pretend they are otherwise. Wouldn’t you?” Yes, we would, which is why we are always grateful to a writer who dedicates himself to the task of doing justice. Mr. Rhodes. [APPLAUSE]
RICHARD RHODES: Thank you very much. I was so struck in listening to Michael Dahlie talking about the struggles, especially when you're writing fiction, to make a living. I used to have to write ten magazine pieces a year in order to feed my two children and my wife and me. And I learned some great tricks which, if any of you who are starting out haven’t found them, listen up.
The best of all is that if the editor suggests the idea, it’s already sold. [LAUGHTER] Thus, I wrote about psychic dogs, Lawrence Welk, anything -- soybeans, whatever. I always said, “Well sure. I know something about that. Give me a month, and I’ll have a piece for you.” I’ve moved on from that point, happily. But it was great training.
I had a poet friend in Kansas City where I grew up who used to tell me that I should be driving a taxi instead of working, as I was at the beginning of my career as a public relations flap for Hallmark Cards, the preeminent place where artists go to eke out a living in Kansas City, Missouri. And, you know, I decided he was wrong. It would have been nice to drive a taxi. I’m sure I would have learned a lot. But I learned a lot working for a corporation, too.
So I have a novel. It was written so long ago that I looked like this. [LAUGHTER] I used to make the book jacket photograph sort of connected to the novel. So I’m, of course, in a bush jacket here with a Hemingway-esque beard. But it’s called The Last Safari, and it came out of one of those magazine assignments. I had convinced Playboy that they needed a story about the Leakey family and their work in paleontology in East Africa.
And I got over to Kenya, and Richard Leakey, for whatever reason -- he said it was because of Playboy, but I think actually he had a deal with the National Geographic -- he wasn’t going to spend any time with me. So I just hired a Land Rover and a driver and spent those two weeks doing the safari tour. And when I got home I realized that I had at least a piece of a novel.
So this novel, which is called The Last Safari, is set on the Serengeti. And it’s written in a kind of Hemingway-esque Patois, which at least that one friend of mine thought worked very well, and another friend thought was over the top. But it’s so much an homage to Hemingway’s extraordinary gift for writing, wonderful prose, that I decided I had to have him in it at some point.
And this story which is told -- which I will read in a moment -- which is told by the lodge owner/former white hunter, Seth Crown, who is American by birth, is about a day when Hemingway decided to bullfight a rhino. The nice thing about doing this reading is that the didactic portion of the talk will be much shorter afterwards. So it’s the evening in a lodge on the Serengeti in Tanzania, about 30 kilometers west of Olduvai Gorge on Lake Ndutu. (There really is such a lodge, and it’s a lovely place to go.) Giant cats are wrestling in the rafters. There’s a fire on the hearth against the evening chill. Joints are being passed around, a mixture of Americans, Germans and Africans seated in the lounge area, listening to the lodge owner and former white hunter, Seth Crown, reminiscing about his experience as a young man with Ernest Hemingway. I hope Patrick enjoys this. I’m sure he will.
“Right,” Crown said, the joint moving on. “Well, we were camped at Fig Tree Camp up in Kenya in the Rift Valley. The camp was on a stream bank in a grove of trees, figs, obviously, among others. Fine place. The stream was clear. It came down out of the Rift wall on the west.” “What was it called?” “The Olibortoto(?), I think, lovely, clear stream. I’d taken to bathing it of a morning. And that morning, I had a rhino chase me out. Rather hairy there. I was naked as the day I was born. And the stream bed was loose rock, hard on the feet. I managed to skin my way up the bank and get out of range. The rhino went on down.”
“For some reason, we didn’t go out that day. By lunch, Papa was hitting the bottle pretty hard.” “You called him Papa?” Cassie asked. “I was asked to.” I was 28, and he was a distinguished older gentleman. And I had called him Mr. Hemingway, but he wasn’t having that. I got used to it, so he’s Papa for me, Papa Mr. Hemingway. He was really a rather boyish man, very quick with his enthusiasms and very quick to anger. He could pout, too, when he didn’t have his way with things.
“Since we’d started out at Philip’s, he’d shot at lions, zebras, a warthog and a baboon, and missed them all. He wasn’t in the best of moods. I suspect that’s why he was hitting the bottle. Anyway, he started telling us about bullfighting, very much about bullfighting. He’d been to literally thousands of bullfights in his time. He had the names of hundreds of bullfighters at his fingertips, and all the terminology-- veronicas and gaoneras and mariposas and farols, and I don’t know what all-- serpentinas. I remember him mentioning serpentinas, something about sighting the bull, which was making him charge, and the bull picking out his terrain, his querencia, and bullfighters who went rabioso when the crowd taunted them, and bullfighters who were cold and scientific, and bullfighters who had cajones, he did go on about it.” Everyone was listening, now. And Abde(?) had come over from the bar.
“Then he had to demonstrate how it was done, how the matador handled the cape. Ms. Mary had shot a tommy for the pot the day before, and we had this fly bone head with the tommy’s straight corkscrewed horns. ‘That’s about the size of the God-damned bulls they fight in Spain these days, Lunk(?),’ Papa said. He called me Lunk.
“Anyway, he went off to his tent and came back with a big plaid blanket he had brought along from Abercrombie and Fitch. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘it ought to be percale. Good cape is percale, percale on one side, raw silk on the other. Stiff, too. And it’s supposed to be colored yellow and cerise, a muleta scarlet serge. Make a good suit, except for the color, fairy color.’ He spread it out on the table, and proceeded to cut it in half. Did something to it with the table knives left over from lunch to weight it. Ms. Mary raised an eyebrow at the cutting, but she knew better than to interfere. Then he took a swig of his drink and winked at me and walked me out to the clearing in front of the tents, set me to running at him with the bloody tommy head. ‘Watch the cape,’ he said. ‘Don’t watch me. Bulls watch the cape.’ I’d run at the cape, and he’d swing it slowly in front of me, standing straight with that big chest stuck out, and holding the cape with both hands and bringing me close, past him, the tommy horn just missing his chest.”
“And I’d watch the cape and come up with it. And then, he’d turn me after I was past. That was to tire the bull. I got rather tired of tiring the bull. Papa was explaining it as he went along, calling out the figures. He was recreating a series of passes he’d seen, he said the best he’d ever seen. ‘I forget who, very decadent,’ he said. He said the killing was the point. The killing was classical, and the cape work was decadent. But, properly executed, it was fine and true. And that was all right.
“We had fun with that. But then he remembered the rhino I’d had to dodge that morning. He remembered the rhino, and he wanted to look it up and fight it.” “Christ almighty,” Kip Gossett said. “Naturally, we all did our best to dissuade him,” Crown went on. “Unfortunately, Philip Perceval wasn’t in camp at the time. And Philip was the only one of us he really listened to. I see, that’s why we stayed in camp, because Philip had gone into Magadi to see to some repairs. I’d forgotten.”
“So Ms. Mary flared up at him, Papa. Little lady told him to bugger all. She said she wasn’t going to stand around watching him knock himself off and stalked off to her tent. It just egged him on. He’d had Ninigi whiskey sodas at that point, too many. We piled into the Land Rover, and away we went, me, his gunbearer Ngui(?), a tiny little man, and Papa.”
“After the rhino chased me out, it had passed downstream. We thought it had laid up on the tall grass a ways down the stream on the other bank. Back from the stream, the grass was shorter. We forded below the rhino’s cover. I wish I could tell it the way he’d tell it. I’m surprised he never told it. It was bloody amazing. He’d brought along his old Springfield that he had been shooting with, and the bottle, and his plaid cut off blanket cape, weighted with the cutlery.”
“We parked the Land Rover and got out. It was hot in the sun. The grass was the color of wheat, and the wall of the Rift rose up wheat-colored behind us but higher up, blue. We were almost under it. It wasn’t exactly sinister, but it was a barricade off in the distance. And the whole landscape changed there and elevated. And the valley was wide enough that the eastern wall looked like low clouds. It was one hell of a Burera.
“Ahead of us, maybe 30 yards, was the tall grass cover. We were pretty sure the rhino was in it. Papa looked over the terrain. ‘I’m giving him one God-damned pass,’ he said. ‘Then we get the hell out of here. Ngui, I want your ass in the Land Rover ready to go.’ ‘This is crazy, Papa,’ I said. ‘That’s your opinion, pal,’ he said. ‘Papa’s inventing a new sport here. Fine thing for Kenya, best thing that ever happened to Kenya. Make up for all the God-damned coffee plantations with the lesser nobility stalking the wild red coffee beans. You’d get all the sportsters out here again, suck in the ‘mericans too. They like to watch the boys bloodied, and they bring in the gentry. What you want is the maomao(?) working rhino. Get the maomao working rhino and you’ve got a damned fine package, Lunk.’
“Then he faced the cover and unfolded the cape. ‘Let’s get down to it,’ he said. ‘Take the Springfield, Lunk, and sight the bastard. Scare him out of there.’ I knew it wasn’t very smart, but I wasn’t very old. And I figured we could all run around behind the Land Rover if we had to. And I couldn’t very well take the man off at gunpoint with his own gun or knock him out. So I fired a round from the Springfield over the tall grass. We heard shuffling in the cover, but the rhino didn’t show. So I fired twice more, lower.
Then we heard him snorting, and then he came out of there slowly, curious, a big, dark bull with that ugly swaybacked head of his, low and swinging from side to side, beady eyes looking around, body like a tank car but armored, and twitching those big ears, and already testing those horns, jabbing the air and then twisting, tearing away at the air, bloody indignant to be disturbed, looking for a victim -- arrogant, really, just damned, bloody arrogant.
“And I backed away fast enough. But Papa stood his ground. I’ll be damned if he wasn’t staring back at the rhino, and his head was going the same way. They might as well have been wired together. They were both jabbing and twisting, and Papa was jutting up his chin. He had a white beard, and it was a little long in the chin. And he looked a little like one of those Spanish grandes, he liked in El Greco with the long chin. And he was doing a little spastic jut with the chin.
“It was still a great lark for him. He jutted at the rhino, and the poor beast jutted the air. Then his face opened up in that big Clark Gable grin he had, and he flicked the cape like someone shaking out a rug. He called ‘Huh! Huh! Huh!’ calling the rhino like a matador. The rhino heard him and shook its head and looked up and saw the cape flicking and the man behind it, and pawed the grass, pawed the grass, and then it charged.
I can't imagine what Papa was thinking. He’d stood down charging animals before, so he knew how it felt and how to hold himself together for it. But always before, he’d had the business of getting ready to shoot, sighting in, and looking for a shot, and making sure his feet were in place and the butt of the gun well into his shoulder, and his aim true. Now it was nothing more than a sawed off piece of blanket and tons – Christ, bloody tons of rhino coming down on him.
“I thought he’d run, I swear I did. I’d have run. I’d never have done it in the first place. But if I got that far, I’d sure as hell have run. He didn’t run. He stood as still as a stone. It wasn’t that he was drunk, either. He’d stopped being drunk the second the rhino came out. Because it wasn’t the one we’d seen that morning,” Crown said, looking around at the silent, expectant faces. “It was another one, almost twice as big. I don’t know where it came from or where the other one went. But when it charged, it sobered him instantly. He sobered up instantly. And another thing that happened was that he stopped grinning. The big grin disappeared, and his face took on a look of great intelligence. He didn’t actually furrow his brow, but you could almost hear him thinking, almost hear a high pitched hum like a dynamo winding over as he took it all in and ran it through the equipment and realized, suddenly, where he had put himself and what the stakes were and what he’d have to do about it to save face on the one hand and to get out of there in one piece on the other.
“Your average hunter on his first stalk with a lion coming at him couldn’t have looked any more suddenly intelligent or any worse. But he did a lot better than that. The rhino came on and the rhino came on. It all slowed down the way those things always do. I saw things I’d never ordinarily notice. The head was marked off with a network of scratches, like a crude map of a hillside with peasant fields with oddly angled borders. The right ear was torn or possibly marked with a little hooked notch that I could see the sky through. And I swear I could actually count the ticks crawling on the folds of the bastard’s neck as it went by me.
“Papa’s shirt was soaked with sweat. I hadn’t noticed that much sweat before. There were great brown patches spread out all the way to the center of his chest that met in the middle and overlapped. I could see the salt lines overlapping and spreading out and those piercing eyes of his looking straight at the rhino and those big brown hands clutching the cape.
“And then the rhino was into the cape, into the cape, and the horns lifting it, that big, black, tank-car body coming in, the cape caught on the horns and the body passing Papa and the cape and the rhino and Papa making one solid figure, the body of the rhino passing with inches to spare between the wall of the rhino’s side and that barreled chest, the wall clanking on maybe the air rushing in the way it would rush through a narrow high canyon, the wall clanking on, and Papa just let it take the cape. I think he figured we could get away while it had the cape on its horns and that it would probably take out its rage on the cape, the poor, cut-off plaid blanket of a poor cape and the cape going up into the air with the lifting of the head. And that was it.
“There was Papa and the cape and the rhino. And then he was running toward the Land Rover shouting at me to, ‘Get the hell into the car! Let’s get the hell out of here!’ And the rhino was tossing the cape, hooking it, molesting it brutally, trying to gore it, losing it on the ground and finding it and stamping on it and hooking it up again. The rhino hadn’t seen us yet.
“We jumped in and Ngui gunned around with the doors swinging and Papa and I trying to pull them shut against the turning of the car. And Papa was swearing and laughing, ‘That God-damned son of a bitch rhino! That son of a bitch God-damned rhino! Did you see that son of a bitch, Lunk? Did you see him? Did you see him take the cape? Did you see him go by? Did you see old Papa run the bastard, Lunk? Did you see it?’
“That was the nerves talking then, afterward. It really wasn’t quite sane and he knew it. Standing down a rhino with a blanket wasn’t quite sane. [laughter] He was shaken. His hands were shaking and he was holding himself, hugging himself to still his hands and he was shivering. The rhino was chasing the car. Ngui was driving like a mad man, grinding out through the gears. We left the rhino in the dust.
“Papa calmed down. He chug-a-lugged from the whiskey as we drove back. He could hardly get out of the car. We put him down for the afternoon. He looked damned old then, old and worn. But what he’d done, you see,” Crown said looking around him, “was stand stock-still, stand stock-still and execute a perfect pass on the animal, figure out its charge as it came on with no help from picadors or bandaleros, no knock-up in the morning, no study, no harpoons in the neck muscle, no help at all, nakedly shift himself into position, tons of animal coming down on him so that when it went by, he didn’t have to move an inch, just guide it with the cape.
“He had to let go of the cape because the horns weren't bull horns, weren't spread out to the sides, but were rhino horns, parallel on the midline of that ugly little funnel of a head -- not so little, either. But otherwise he did it perfectly. Hell of a show, just a hell of a show.” Crown sat back, then, exhausted. And spontaneously, they started applauding. The party continued late, the lights streaming out from the lodge. And a little after midnight, it began to rain.”
[APPLAUSE] Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Well, that was fun to write. The whole novel was fun to write, in a kind of Hemingway-esque patois that Richard Leakey told me he greatly enjoyed when I sent him a copy of the manuscript, while he was convalescing in London from a kidney transplant, and that my late friend and novelist, Thomas Williams, thought was over the top. Perhaps it was. I learned to write action scenes. Hemingway was very good with action scenes. He also wrote nonfiction, of course. The Green Hills of Africa is a pleasure. But Death in the Afternoon is beyond extraordinary, the verbal counterpart to Picasso’s bullfight drawings and paintings.
Such books as Hemingway’s and many others, including some of my own, led me some years ago to question the inept designation “nonfiction” for a major category of human endeavor, limiting essays, historical narrative, contemporary narrative, autobiography, biography and reportage with an empty negative. It’s derivative from fiction, of course, with no long history. The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from only 1867 and, of all places, in the Annual Report of the Boston Public Library. I didn’t make that up. [LAUGHTER]
We don’t use “nonChristian” to encompass all the rich and various traditions of Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Shinto, Hinduism and the many other religions of the world. And nonfiction hardly does justice to the many kinds of writing it lumps together. I’ve proposed a more descriptive technical term to refer to the literature of fact -- “verity” -- from the Latin veritas, truth. When I write verity, I’m a veritist. Death in the Afternoon is the work of verity, not of fiction.
I’ve written both in poetry and drama too. But when I try to understand what’s different between fiction and verity, the dictionary definitions don’t help very much. You may argue that fiction is made up and verity is not. But that’s a long, philosophical discourse, indeed. In my own experience, considered as a craft from a technical point of view, the writing of fiction and the writing of verity are identical processes, but for one significant difference: we expect the information conveyed in verity to conform to verifiable external references, while the information conveyed in fiction needs be only internally consistent.
Even that distinction dissolves if you increase the magnification. My first lesson in historiography came as a junior at Yale, when Mr. Lewis P. Curtis, professor of history, asked us to go find documents to prove that Charles the First was beheaded in the time of Oliver Cromwell. Mr. Curtis suggested I look in the Annals of Parliament for 1649, the year of the king’s -- pardon the pun -- capitulation. [LAUGHTER]
I found the volume in Sterling Memorial Library, an original edition, bound in parchment, with “f’s” for “s’s” in the old style, as if everyone lisped back then. After much searching, I found a Parliamentary resolution approving the expenditure of some shillings for black paint to robe the executioner’s scaffold. I had it, proof. The class reconvened. Everyone had discovered a fact that proved that the English people had beheaded their Scottish king.
Mr. Curtis listened patiently to our reports. Then he summarily demolished them. An order for paint doesn’t prove a beheading. A conviction of treason and a death sentence don’t prove a beheading. Not even an eyewitness account proves a beheading, as we have stark reason to know in this era of DNA testing. All these pieces of information might be misinformed or mistaken or fraudulent. “History,” Mr. Curtis shocked us by saying, “is past, gone, unrecoverable in its authentic facticity.” And the writing of history is necessarily provisional, a matter of sifting the limited evidence and deducing what is probable and plausible and what is not. No accumulation of documents proves anything in and of itself, which was not to say there weren't standards of evidence on which responsible historians could agree, but not final proof, never final proof.
I understood Mr. Curtis’s point of view well enough when I was 20 years old. I understand it even better, now that I’ve wrestled with documents and written books of history myself. You build history, biography, even memoir and autobiography out of the information that’s available, not out of some abstraction called “the facts.” What you don’t know, you sort of underpaint, rather the way the eye fills in the missing information in the blind spot, the point where the optic nerve exits the retina.
When I set out to write a biography of John James Audubon, the 19th century artist-naturalist who studied and painted birds, I found he had left behind several thousand letters, two journals and a five-volume set of what he called bird biographies, worked up field notes on the birds he painted for his great compendium, The Birds of America. There were also a few contemporary articles about him and a collection of about 100 letters written by his wife Lucy and members of her extended English family.
It was easy to build a depiction of Audubon’s life out of such a wealth of documents. But I could only depict the events they described. And because they were personal letters and public texts, they never answered, among other questions about the man, what did he do for a private life in the three years when he was separated from Lucy by the Atlantic, she teaching piano on a plantation north of New Orleans, he in Edinburgh and London having his hundreds of drawings engraved.
He was a passionate man. Did he have lovers? I had no way of knowing. He certainly fell in love at least once in Liverpool with the daughter of the wealthy Quaker cotton brokers who befriended him there when he first arrived from America in 1826. She was destined for a marriage of wealth, however. And although she returned his affection, I concluded their relationship was never consummated. But that’s an informed guess, at best.
So what am I driving at? Certainly not that fiction and verity are identical, nor – horrors! -- that memoirists should make up stories about themselves. They can if they want, but they shouldn’t call the work product “memoir,” maybe “nonverity.” [LAUGHTER] What I’m driving at is how fragmentary and elusive the phenomena on which we draw for writing actually are.
I like to think of writing, any kind of serious writing -- fiction or verity -- as a craft like pottery or cabinet-making. It’s etherealized, to be sure, since its medium and its tools are abstract notations of sounds that stand for thoughts and feelings. But it’s craftlike to organize those notations at a dozen different levels of meaning simultaneously, so that they not only provide information and/or tell a story, construct a virtual reality, but also invoke emotions, sympathies, identifications, illusions, memories, experiences in such a way that the virtual reality comes alive and moves and breathes and has being. It’s craftlike to find ways to penetrate through the only approximate public meanings and who-knows-what private meanings that words have for individual readers, which we do, by building word-on-word, by surrounding each word with a penumbra of other words that modify it, like those word clouds people are constructing these days from public texts with computer software.
Writing fiction has felt more, to me, like throwing clay, its initial plasticity gradually stiffening as it’s worked and added to, until finally the whole thing sets up and hardens into a hull. Writing verity, particularly historical or biographical verity, has felt more like marketry, assembling the hard little chips of facts doggedly collected from the libraries and archives to make a larger picture. I tell students that writing narrative history is like trying to copy the Sistine Chapel in mosaic tile, lying on your back, with the pope in the form of your publisher down below, shouting at you to hurry up and finish or you won't get paid. [LAUGHTER]
Fiction and verity have their own rules, to be sure. But what I’m always after, what I am sure you're always after, whichever form or forms you work in, is the elusive evanescent reality, so to speak, that emerges when all the pieces are set in place and the stories or events perform themselves.
Somewhere I recall reading of a moment in human history, in the late Medieval, when people stopped moving their lips and reading aloud when they read, truly. An onlooker, who had not himself got the knack yet, came upon someone reading silently, and was dazzled and almost frightened. It looked like a species of ecstasy, that silent intensity, and it was. Our work, for which I would not trade all the retention bonuses in Christendom, is to labor to craft intricate little planetariums out of the myriad pieces of the world, reality and social reality and the real world of human imagination, so that we and others may enjoy and share with popcorn, holding our hands against the darkness, the universe, as our little constructions project onto the walls of Plato’s cave. How very lucky we are to have such holy work, and what a joy it is.
Congratulations to all today’s participants. And thank you. [APPLAUSE]
TOM PUTNAM: Let me first thank Richard Rhodes for his thoughtful talk and Rebecca Goldstein for her lovely introduction, Patrick Hemingway, Michael Dahlie, Margot Livesey for their beautiful readings today, and to all of you for coming. Please join us now for a reception in the Pavilion, sponsored, again, by the Boston Globe Foundation.
On your way down, if you haven’t seen them, we have a couple of document displays. First, in the spirit of the two Karsh exhibits that were here in Boston, we are displaying our three original prints of Karsh photos of Ernest Hemingway and some photos of Hemingway and Karsch together during their photo shoot in Cuba. Second, this year marks the 85th anniversary of the publication of Hemingway’s In Our Time, first collection of short stories and vignettes. So we have a document table about that book and also with a sneak preview of Colette Hemingway’s new book In His Time. I want to thank Hemingway curator Susan Wrynn for overseeing those document displays and our interns, Shanti Freudlich and Sam Smallidge for their work on them.
Lastly, we have a number of the award-winning books on sale in our bookstore. Or if you brought your own, today’s authors will be willing to sign them informally down in the reception. We invite you back later this spring for our tribute to John Updike and our session with Lillian Ross, who interviewed Ernest Hemingway as a young writer for The New Yorker and who will discuss the changes she has seen in American writers in her lifetime.
For many of us, this event is a harbinger of new beginnings. Thank you, again, for coming, and happy spring. [APPLAUSE]
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