30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 6

Darrell Spencer on François Camoin's WHY MEN ARE AFRAID OF WOMEN

Could I, I'd tap dance this appreciation of François Camoin's Why Men Are Afraid of Women. Or I could provide one of those charts that chart the footprints for the tango or the fox trot or even a waltz. The ones that say this is simple, but we know it ain't. I'm looking for the image--the sound, the precise and exacting picture, the acoustical event that is a Camoin story. In his memoir, Some of These Days You'll Miss Me, Honey. Camoin tells us he is not a world-historical man. Never has been. Won't ever be. What his fiction is about is the particular, the idiosyncratic; what his fiction is, in the jargon of our time, is the incoming of the wooly other. We experience this invasion in the stories as accounts of contemporary life. "Miami," the book's first story, opens with the narrator's wife Marge insisting that he touch her belly; she is pregnant, and her belly is "tight as a beach ball": "'Touch it,' she says." The narrator resists; he gets all rhetorical and insists on his self:

What was God thinking when he made us like this? She's a good person, but all this love, all this touching we seem to need. I've got on a new white suit I bought yesterday, and I feel like a fool. I'm not rational this morning, and it's getting worse by the minute. I don't know how to tell her.

The stories throughout the collection enact the event we have learned to theorize but rarely experience until we experience a Camoin story; Caputo tells us that the incoming of the other (Marge in "Miami"; Loveman/Rachel in "La Vida"; Elder/Estrellita/Jamie in "Home is the Blue Moon Cafe"), that "excess or breach that exceeds and shocks our expectation," is, of course, the impossible act that breeds life. We tack, we zig, we zag, we tap dance, we fox trot, we waltz; we read a Camoin story, and there is, if we are reading well at all, an intrusion; we are overtaken, and we overtake in some form of daily and eternal strife.

But content is only part of the man's art. I suppose we have always admired storytelling (or claimed to), but it is in the last twenty or thirty years that, I think, writers like François Camoin have written stories that insist on narrativity itself. This is and is not a matter of prose. My image here is Dustin Hoffman as Ratzo Rizzo, slapping the hood of that cab, announcing, "I'm walking here." It's voice; it isn't voice. It's description; it isn't description. It's not craft; it is a living breathing critter. It is the writing. It's the writer declaring he or she is the writer. It's Lawrence Oliver explaining what acting is all about: "Me. Me. Me." Or even Miles Davis--that is, Listen; here's the give-and-get of human dialogue from "Diehl: The Wandering Years":

"You took your time," she said.

"Troubles on the road."

"For three months."

"Is he all right?" Diehl said.

"He's been worrying about you."

We have salsa, and exchange--the footwork--is loaded, content and sound and rhythm and syntax. And there is the description; here is the opening of "A Hunk of Burning Love":

Gene is already there when I come through the door of the New Deal Cafe and Bar. There's a sausage speared on the end of his fork and he's waving it in Rita's face. Gene's a fat man but a long way from jolly; he can in fact be mean as a snake if you give him half a chance. His hat is on the stool beside him, upside down with his work gloves folded in it. This morning we'll be digging postholes for a new fence in old man Hazzard's pasture.

A lot of writers can nail words to the page, but there is a precision and an eactness in Camoin's fiction that bears down on a reader. Again, I've gone after the analogies: (forgive me a sports one but) the prose is like the golf swing: open the window (the club face), close the window (club face): instruction that belies the complexity of the act. Or it's like riding an elevator with your savvy NY, NY uncle, the one who beautifully returns badly prepared food and tips big, the one who spins the world on one finger and leaves it hanging in the air.

From the last story in the collection, "Sometimes the Wrong Thing is the Right Thing":

I am nervous and as far as I can tell by looking across the table at him Charlie is dazed, puzzled, hopeful. Maybe more than a little sad too. I think he suspects that he and Stella are coming to an end of the road, and there is not much left in life to replace being married, unless you count playing stud poker Friday nights with his buddies from the body sho, and once a year taking a week off to go fly-fishing on a little river in Idaho.

There is a story here, and there are characters, and it all comes together nicely so that we confront what I see as the central loss of anything metaphysical beyond the wet dream that drawing to an inside straight keeps alive; but what matters here is what Miriam Marty Clark identified almost twenty years ago: "[T]he stories I am concerned with hold out not revelation, not a durable or ultimate knowledge, but narrativity itself. The forces that disrupt narrative are met by and converge for a moemnt with the need to tell, the power of telling."

I e-mailed my friend Rob Roberge, and I told him I was going to write a small piece about Why Men Are Afraid of Women. I asked him what he would  say about François writing; he wrote back what is all, I think, that needs to be said: "Hearing François read 'Marty' was the single most influential twenty minutes of my career. And, I thought, if that guy could teach me to write stories anything like that, I'd be happy."

Enough said.

Because: the blues, we know, is about mans and womans, and Mr. Camoin, he can sing them.

Darrell Spencer is the author of CAUTION MEN IN TREES (2000). He is also the Stocker Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio State University. He is the author of the novel, One Mile Past Dangerous Curve, and four story collections, the last of which, Bring Your Legs with You, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 5

Wendy Brenner on Mary Hood's HOW FAR SHE WENT

I'm sure it was the racy title that attracted me, in gargantuan white letters on the otherwise plain book jacket. The lack of a cover image suggested subject matter too graphic to be depicted. I carried the book around in college, in Ohio in the 1980s, hoping boys would take notice and draw the correct conclusion about me. It seemed to work. How the first-edition hardback found its way into my hands back then is a mystery, up there in the snowy north. Probably a creative writing professor recommended it, or maybe I stole it from the campus bookstore (a regular activity), thrilled by that title. I had thus far lived all eighteen  years of my life in Chicago, a Jewish agnostic who'd never set foot in Georgia or any other southern state, unless Sanibel Island, Florida, where we went on a few family vacations, counted. Mary Hood might've been writing in a foreign language as far as I was concerned. I thought the Okefenokee swamp was the imaginary creation of Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly, whose comic books my father collected—I didn't know it was a real place until I drove through it on my way to graduate school in Florida.

Like Walt Kelly's artfully mangled southern dialect, like Shakespeare, like a code, Mary Hood's sentences were impossibly complicated or impossibly simple, packed with information and implication I could not understand but which glowed with some sot of power, call it literary radioactivity. Half the time I didn't know what Mary Hood was talking about, and to be honest, I still don't. But I went looking in her stories for girls like me, girls who went too far—and I found them: the title story's defiant, unnamed 15-year-old in her tight cut-offs and "Every Inch A Woman" t-shirt, who appears "defenseless only an instant" when verbally attacked by her grandmother; or Elizabeth in "A Country Girl," escorting the visiting young reporter past the KEEP OUT sign: "she knew a place where the fence was down. They crossed boldly." Or Angelina in "Inexorable Progress," whose eyes were "fixed in bravado," but "behind them, fear, that restless housecat paced." My mother liked to tell a story about me as a small child, how she hit me so hard her own hand hurt, but even then I would grit my teeth so as not to cry, look her right in the eye and say That didn't hurt. Mary Hood's stories did not console, nor did they explain or solve anything. They had sad or maddening or hopeless endings. Yet they felt true in some severe, elusive way that mattered more to me, then and now, than anything. Every word felt true.

I spent considerable time contemplating Mary Hood's author photo on the back of the book. She looked like a normal lady, like a high school teacher or something. I didn't get it. I could not find anything remotely racy, transgressive, or delinquent in her pleasant, intelligent gaze. There would be no point in putting up her photo in my dorm room, not like, say, Karl Bissinger's 1946 noir-ish photo of author Jane Bowles looking murderously stylish or stylishly murderous. Where Mary Hood's scary-beautiful stories came from I could not determine. I didn't understand the parts about God. I didn't understand the language her characters spoke. I might now write those same sentences about the Bible, though that thought would not have occurred to me in 1984. I still own the book, the original first-edition copy I probably stole from Oberlin's campus bookstore, and it has moved with me to Florida, New York, and back south to my current home in North Carolina. I've lived in the south for more than twenty years now, I write books and teach writing, and I am no closer to understanding Mary Hood's stories or how she wrote them<—but I understand when I re-read them why they have endured.

Wendy Brenner is the author of LARGE ANIMALS IN EVERYDAY LIFE (1996), as well as the short story collection Phone Calls from the Dead. Her stories and essays have appeared in Seventeen, Allure, Oxford American, Best American Magazine Writing, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 4

Mary Hood on Daniel Curley’s LIVING WITH SNAKES

“Surviving Divorce and Other Lessons from Living with Snakes”

The New York Times describes Daniel Curley as making “good fiction out of bad marriages.” His Flannery O’Connor Award-winning story collection Living with Snakes proves it. A phrase lifted from his title story, “living arrangements and sex”—as an example of dangerous and unlikely mixtures—is the fuel for all the heat, light and fireworks in this wonderful collection. Curley balances gravity with levity as he portrays all these battered valentines with their cauliflower hearts. Curley does not dwell on the slow and ordinary easements, omissions, oversights and relinquishments, rebukes and corrections that lead to the declaration of spousal war. We see it, though, in details. A wife doesn’t like the way her husband rows, or else she does, but wants to know where he learned. As though that part of his life was treason, although it came before they met. A broken couple in another story seeks refuge in a public aviary and argue about the Latin names of the birds. He notices the obvious and showy, and she is drawn to the hidden and secret. Curley’s writerly duties focus on revealing and mapping survivors in the domestic rubble; rescue is not his work. Curley’s characters are either dazed or exhausted but it is obvious that they—in the process of divorcing or after the papers are signed and years after it is legally over—will never be “free” of each other. In “The Other Two” his divorced narrator reports that “the lawyers delicately peeled us down to our artichoke hearts of spite and venom, our purest humanity,” and adds, “There even had to be a separate court action concerning the tent pegs.”

In “Trinity,” a divorced couple is knocked back into each other by terrible circumstances. “And then,” the first sentence explains, starting us deep in, way in, “the Andersons met again at the deathbed of their child.” In their astonished grief, they grapple blindly and bodily, allied against loss and acceptance, making nightly and afternoon assignations into numbing routines, untenderly peeling off each other like torn away adhesive tape, their new pain and need causing them to forget “for a time that they were cursed and didn’t like each other.” Hindsight’s irritating glint off the glass and frame of their dead child’s photograph keeps them moving it and themselves room to room around the perimeter of their struggles, in what used to be their home. Baffled, they tacitly agree they cannot fix, they have nothing to forgive, and there are no rules. All they want is out, and they are desperately seeking relief, as Curley’s couples do, through trial and error.

“When Peter Watts moved into Indiana Price’s house, the ground rules were explicit,” Curley begins his title story, “Living with Snakes.” Indiana’s admirer Peter Watts “would have a room in the house, a Federal house near the village out the river road. He would be a presence in the house for her young son while she was traveling. She traveled a lot. She consulted. She moved and she shook. A son—after all, well, you don’t exactly like to leave him at the vet’s. And there would be no sex. She wanted the arrangement to last. She had theories about that. Statistics bore her out. Her own experience bore her out: there are some things you just don’t try to mix. Living arrangements and sex, for example.”

Thus, in the story “Living with Snakes,” preventative ground rules and healthy assumptions are established from the start. Surely, this couple will make it. The know-it-all woman has met a man who doesn’t mind if she does. This isn’t their first rodeo, either. Nothing so complicated and agonizing as marriage is going to interfere with Peter Watts and Indiana Price’s relationship. Modern times—and Indiana is certainly and thoroughly modern—require modern methods. The problem is that the rules and assumptions are all Indiana Price’s. For Peter Watts’s part, sitting in the bachelor quarters she assigned him, his own rather old-school passion and assumptions leave room for hope. She has built a fire. She is drinking tea, and he is listening to her ratify their social contract on move-in day. He seeks something new from his heart’s archive, to reveal himself in some true and fresh way, nothing he has ever shared with his wife, but something untarnished and deep and all his to offer her, some insight or tribute to honor her. He is like Walter Mitty, Thurber’s unlikely hero, humbly seeking a legend to share. This is that shining and vulnerable moment, Curley reminds us, “before the sediment of doubt and evasion silts it all up.” Not to mention Indiana’s betrayal of all rules by bringing home a house guest/lover and his range of hungry snakes, opening a whole worm-can of “it feels right” assumptions which bring out the hero and the fool in all of them.

Daniel Curley’s short fiction ranks with the finest of his time. These eleven stories stand up to comparison with the work of V.S. Pritchett, Alice Munro, William Trevor, John Cheever and Anne Tyler. As Virginia Woolf wrote of Jane Austen’s characters, “Beauty illumines these fools.” Much of that beauty is the skill of Curley’s process of revelation, his unwavering gaze and his dry wit. We may be appalled, but we are never bored. When his character, adrift from a failed marriage in “The First Baseman” braces himself on the ledge of the snack bar to arm wrestle with the Amazonian sweetheart of his dreams—who, he says proudly “plays very close to the bat”—how can he, or we, lose no matter how it turns out?

Mary Hood is the author of HOW FAR SHE WENT (1984). She is also the author of Familiar Heat. Her work has been published in The Georgia Review, North American Review, and Yankee, among other publications.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 3

Robert Anderson on Bill Roorbach's BIG BEND

"In Lieu of Flowers"

Stonewall Jackson was calling from Baton Rouge. His cordiality was true to its reputation. Within minutes, he had a name and a history. He turned out to be Charles East, 76-years-old, feature writer for the Times-Picayune, and senior editor at the University of Georgia Press. Was I willing to make cuts in my story collection? Would I be available to come to Athens, Georgia in three weeks? Had I ever received an award before?

There were two Flannery O’Connor Award winners that autumn, myself and an Ohio State Creative Writing professor named Bill Roorbach. His wife’s folks lived on Central Park West, and he and I would be booked on the same Georgia-bound flight leaving LaGuardia. The first time I saw Bill and Juliet, they were casting glances around the terminal. It had to be them. They had that chatty air of people going to meet good fortune. He was wearing tan corduroy. He had fading red hair and compensatory mustache, the kind of rig that kids back in Minnesota called “a wally.” He kept pointing at passengers as they came down the airplane aisle. “Anderson? You, Anderson?”

“I’m Anderson,” I said, squirming to extend my hand across the high-backed seats and getting some of Juliet’s chestnut hair mixed in with the handshake. In the corner of my eye, she either winked or winced.

“You were one of the three people we thought you could be,” he said.

That night we visited Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville. A campus library had a roomful of personal effects including her Remington and cookie-cut color snaps of the peacocks that, guides explained, were the ancestors of the flock that still inhabited the family homestead. The planned midnight visit to her gravesite was forestalled by a phone call. Her impossibly still-living mother did not want people milling about in her garden that late at night.

 ****

Bill and Juliet lived in Columbus, of course, but they talked a lot about Maine where they spent their summers. Before Bill’s collection, Big Bend, came out, Charles East, who would sign off letters with the words, “Pray contact if there is anything else I might do,” sent me the book in galleys. I had a girlfriend who had a day job, and we cohabited, disastrously, in a studio apartment. The only place to burn a light when I came home from my restaurant job was the bathroom. I can remember sitting on the rug with the checkerboard tiles swimming around me and the faucet dripping, reading that book. Bill had told me that the quality of sunlight in Maine always seemed to have that crystal texture of the surface of a stream on the clearest, most interminable of July afternoons. It was as pristine as memory, he either said, or more likely I later imagined that he had said. He also said that the residents of Maine had grown too accustomed to the beauty around them. This accounted for a great deal of the locale’s strangeness. Maybe, I thought, it was all like that Bob Dylan line about what paradise was like after awhile, religion, or the lack of religion, always being a matter of aftermath.

So, it didn’t really make much difference when the stories intercut between Manhattan and New Castle, Delaware, or between and among other backdrops too indistinct from the stories’ characters to warrant place names, sitting there on that rug, I knew that I was deep in the land of coves. Small, narrow, shifting bays formed by different varieties of erosion.

Teddy, the luckless painter, for instance, in the story Thanksgiving, paints a mural of his estranged family members on Canson Mi-Teintes paper, dipping into his destitution fund to do it because this is the best of all faces that he can sketch over his perennial inadequacy when he freights it in for the obligatory holiday reunion. He later upends the dinner table and repaints his loved ones with the turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing spread. “We’ll get this picked up in no time,” Dad says, needling in that motif of the regularity, the mundanity of aberration that Bill must have thought best defined our 250-flavor culture. In the rock ‘n roll story, Blues Machine—and I can’t but guess that the comp. professor was mindchecking and in-joking dues ex machina in this instance—Rockin’ Joe Heath collects a hellish dividend on his misspent decades of living onstage offstage when he is forced to hole up with his dead ex-bandmate’s son. The boy, Jesse, son of the real top gun, turns out to be a virtual serigraph print of his reckless father, pressed into an even sharper, more startling image. Richard Milk, in A Job at Henry’s, befriends and even makes a run at criminality with Dewey, trailer troglodyte and yardman, after Dewey has cracked two of his ribs, conferred a facial hematoma, and then dispatched his girlfriend to Richard’s front door with a conciliatory rhubarb pie. “So can he come back to work?” asks the girlfriend.

I thought of Big Bend as the product of a very rarified environment, and it was not long before that environment took a definite shade in my own mind. Yes, I imagined my own Maine-eccentric story about an Androscoggin County mortuary home, a kind of one stop, full stop, last stop service center with a brick exterior, a service star in the window, and flags dangling. When the villagers know that they are terminal, custom in the story mandates that they not sit with loved ones and tombstone designers; no, they get busy and write wry narratives that reflect their individual times on this earth. Then these stories are read at their funeral rites in the parlor with wine, cheese, candles, and cross-commentary that reflects good old Yankee resentment. And that pristine light that defines the region continues to shine. But when the last surviving town resident —the kids have naturally all decamped for the city—no longer survives, NPR, the voice of God through a grant from a foundation, breaks the story anthology nationally, and the book becomes kind of a New Age cult Book of Mormon, without the proselytizing and the addenda with Second Thessalonians. For the faithful, strangeness becomes a sacrament.

I never did find the time to write that story. When I saw Roorbach, years later, at a bar in the Village, he couldn’t remember the name of my only published novel. I told him that it was entitled, Crib Death, and he laughed. He and Juliet live fulltime in Worchester, Massachusetts now, and he has a chair at the College of the Holy Cross. Bill turned out to be one of those people who I thought he could be.

Robert Anderson is the author of ICE AGE (2000) and the novel, Little Fugue. He teaches English at the Hua Ren Academy and lives in New York City.