So I turned to my son’s drawing of the Fantastic Four to consider the blank spot on the far side of the Thing. And I gave up the art lesson for the day.
“I like your Invisible Woman,” I told him, tapping the paper with the snake-oil panache of Hans Christian Andersen’s tailor, hoping this line would not sail over his head. “Nice job.”
“Oh!” said the little one, and for an instant, just before he grinned, he looked heartbreakingly confused. “I get it. Do you get it, Dad?”
I told him that I did. So sue me.
Twenty-odd years and nine books after receiving my MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine—and seventy years after the founding of the original MFA program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—I still get questions about writing programs, as if my having come through one were a fluky detour like doing a hitch in a Goofy suit at Disneyland, and the institution itself a compound of rumor and scam. Journalists, critics, would-be students, regular people—they all have their doubts. Do writing workshops have any real value? Are they helpful to young writers? Do they perhaps unwittingly impose standards of style and subject matter on their graduates? And sometimes with a prosecutorial wink: Can anybody really be taught how to write? I have answers for these people. Put briefly: Yes; yes; I don’t believe so but maybe; and yes. I wrote my first novel at Irvine, and one of my teachers there sent it to his agent, who found a publisher for the book. I’m kind of a poster boy for the more tangible benefits that a good writing program can bestow. And I have written elsewhere about the help and hard reading I received from my teachers and fellow students at UCI. But the most important thing that happened to me as a graduate student in creative writing had little directly to do with writing or publishing or agents or subject matter or style. When I started the program in 1985, I was a little shit; by the time I left Irvine, I was not just a published novelist, I was something that had begun, inwardly, to resemble a man.
This is not going to be an argument for some universal advantage conferred by the institution of the writing program; I am sure that graduate fiction workshops regularly turn out little shits by the dozens. I’m just going to try to figure out what might have happened to me while I was there.
Henry Miller, I think I should begin, was my great literary hero from the age of sixteen to about nineteen, and on the assumption that you haven’t recently dipped into Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn or Black Spring or the three volumes that make up The Rosy Crucifixion, I will summarize the work—and undersell it—according to my purpose here: It’s basically one long novel about the exaltation and despair, in New York and Paris, of a little shit named Henry Miller. The Henry Miller presented in the fiction is a drunk, a cad, a loser, an angry, misogynistic fuckup with delusions of grandeur, oceanic ambition, lamentable habits of personal grooming, and the profound detestation of money and the material world that only the born cadger can maintain. “‘All I ask of life,’” as the narrator of Tropic of Cancer approvingly quotes his friend the novelist Van Norden, “‘is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.’” For a few crucial years that was my own secret little-shit motto—or so, at least, I told myself. I curated a personal pantheon of shit-heels—of musicians, actors, painters, writers, and directors from Charles Mingus to Pablo Picasso to Marlon Brando to Jean-Luc Godard—whose work or biography seemed replete with examples of the kind of giddily antisocial, why-the-fuck-not?, mock-Napoleonic self-involvement and hound-doggishness I thought I admired. The Miller hero—my hero—does what he wants, when he wants to, whether it makes any sense or not, even when doing so may hurt or bring sorrow to another. He is not merely contradictory like the rest of us but stubbornly, programmatically so. He is both a clown—a cuckold, capable of lacerating self-mockery—and a pompous bastard, self-important and “big-souled.” He has the capacity for soaring transports of fellow feeling and the most petty acts of impotent revenge. Most of all, he treats the people around him—friends, enemies, lovers—with a cheerful, even lyric, contempt. They are the matter of his work, the furnishings of his dreams and nightmares, the objects of his fixations, the characters in the tawdry circus-cum-back-alley-opera of his life. If they are women, they are his cunts.
It’s this last element, so crucial to the work of Henry Miller, that gives away the game. When I was twenty years old, the following statement would have at once outraged me and made sense to me: You know nothing about women. It’s just a sappy and worthless generalization to me now, empty of meaning. But at the time I thought women was a category, a field, like post-Parker jazz or the varieties of marijuana, that you could study and master and “know something about.” If you are a callow young man at twenty—and I think the man of twenty pretty much defines the term—then your callowness consists almost entirely in this type of belief, that life is made up of mastering the particulars, memorizing the lineups, accumulating the trivia and lore, in knowing how to trace the career of drummer Aynsley Dunbar or get a girl to go to bed with you and your best friend, as an expression of your existential freedom and complete disregard for the fact that she is a person, and she likes you or him, and you’re actually kind of breaking her heart.
Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the mid-sixties and the late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age. Because I was bright and a would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzsche. But it was just—and I don’t mean to excuse it with that adverb—garden-variety late-teenage, homosocial misogyny as practiced by young men all over the world. It certainly didn’t constitute any kind of philosophical program or postmodern structure of morality. It was a phase, a plankton bloom in the brain, a developmental stage, albeit one that found ample reinforcement, if not glorification, in culture both popular and highbrow, in the Rolling Stones’s “Stupid Girl” and Woody Allen’s best movies, in Jorge Luis Borges, in William Shakespeare.
I don’t know how much of this Millerite misogyny was reflected in my writing at the time—a fair amount, I suppose. You can see clear traces of it in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. And I don’t know if I would have emerged from this stage on my own in time. People have argued more or less persuasively that our culture (okay, our entire civilization) is founded on misogyny, or that in its current state it represents a collective case of arrested adolescent development, and I guess even a man who outgrows the little shit never leaves him entirely behind. But when I showed up at Irvine to start my first year as the youngest member of the MFA fiction workshop, I was not ready for what I found there: a roomful of grown-ups, over half of them women. Some of these women were married; one of them had a grown child. Without taking themselves half as seriously as I did, they were all twice as serious about what they were doing. They were better read, more disciplined, more widely traveled, and far less impressed with me than I was. If they were feminists—and I am sure that each of them was—they were practiced and experienced feminists, versed in theory and tested if not hardened by the real world. And most of these women, even those who were not much older than I was, were finished—long since finished—with the charms, real or imagined, of little shits.
I want to stress that what followed was not just some rude awakening or shakedown cruise where I tried to get these women to sleep with me and one by one they shot me down. Okay, so there was some of that, but the fact of the matter is that I had been on a losing streak with women for a long time—at least it felt like a long time—and had already begun to see reflected, in the eyes of some of the girls I had gotten nowhere with, a certain weariness with, or distrust of, or even distaste for, my displays of Miller-esque big-souled callowness. What happened at Irvine was that I found myself for three hours once a week in a room where my traditional enterprise—the great Van Norden dream—was entirely and thrillingly beside the point. We had work to do, and we wer
e lucky enough to have been granted a couple of years of freedom and time to do it. The people in the workshop, but especially the women, and especially the women who were in the full middle of their lives, knew—they could testify to—how rare and marvelous such a gift was. They had left real jobs, made real sacrifices, to come to Irvine. They had mortgages and health problems, troubled marriages, debts, and obligations. And so I was obliged, or at least I felt I was, to rise to the standard they set: in their writing, for the treatment of human emotion and relationships; in their lives, for seizing this chance to learn and share and get immersed in the work; and in the workshop itself, women and men, for undertaking that collective work with respect, with charity, with tolerance, and above all—most frightening to me at the time—with no patience for the pretense and callowness and trite antisocial pose of some little shit. In the end, I think that’s the only cure for the little shit: regular exposure to the healing rays of healthy disillusion, in particular the hard-earned skepticism of grown women. Call it the Yoko Ono effect.
We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that “our most precious resource is our children.” But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. You bring your little story to the workshop, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t; and then you’re gone, and it’s time for somebody else to have the floor.
We were lying on the beach, reading our novels, surrounded by other parents reading their novels, all of us vaguely aware of our children’s whereabouts and happy with that vagueness. The paramount amenity at this resort on the Kona Coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, with its two modest swimming pools, its picturesquely turbid lagoon, its unremarkable dive shack stocked with snorkel gear and surf and boogie boards, its half-dozen sea kayaks, its quaint old badminton lawn and shuffleboard court—no TV, no phones, no arcade, no Eurofascist Club Med mass eurythmics, no swim-up bar, no waterslides, tightrope, parasailing, or Jet Skis—was a careful allowance for parental carelessness. Our little ones were nearby, audible, in sight if you looked up from your book but not underfoot, digging in the sand or eating it, flirting on sandpiper legs with the edges of the surf.
But the big ones—we had no idea. They were off together somewhere. Gangs of boys, gangs of girls, mixed groups and shifting constellations of duos and triads, solitary wanderers haunting the fringes, our children spent their days largely out of our sight, monitored deftly but loosely by the parental collective, reporting only for meals or to put on a rash guard, dwelling for one magic week in a near-simulacrum of the kind of world, populated, legislated, enchanted, and tormented by kids, in which we ourselves had spent our entire childhoods. The price in dollars for this brief taste of the freedom we otherwise routinely denied the children broke my heart almost as much as the alacrity with which they took to it. At some point my oldest daughter showed up to get more sunscreen or dump her goggles, and to tell us that some boys out at the farthest extreme of the lagoon had been amusing themselves by catching fish and then ripping them apart at the gills.
My wife was properly horrified and disgusted by this report, as I was; she was also shocked and outraged, reactions I did not share.
“What’s not to believe?” I said. “Boys. Animals. Cruelty.” I remarked that in the filing cabinet of my childhood, that was the label on one very long drawer.
“You go tell those boys, the next time you see them doing anything like that, honey,” my wife told our daughter, “you tell them hurting animals is how psychopaths get their start. Serial killers.”
“Yes,” I said. “Particularly if you’re trying to inspire more violence to fish.”
“They would love that,” agreed our older son, who had materialized from some corner of the resort, salt-streaked, muddy, shock-headed, and semi-lapsed himself into a state of happy nine-year-old barbarity. “They think serial killers are awesome.”
“You would never do anything like that, would you?” my wife asked him. “You would never hurt animals.”
Our son shook his head, looking offended by the question. He might have been lying, but my knowledge of his belief system, composed of equal parts off-kilter Far Side animal-centrism and a dark Captain Nemoesque contempt for humanity, inclined me to think he was telling the truth. Gigantic fish pulling the limbs from cruel little boys, that might be something you could get him to sign on for.
“Did you ever do stuff like that?” my wife asked me. “Hurt things and kill things when you were a boy?”
I had been anticipating this question, or rather, I had already begun to put it to myself, with an initial certainty that the answer must be no, since no such incident, with its attendant vibration of shame or remorse, came to mind. But now I gave it some proper thought, because I felt that those boys—nice enough kids, it had seemed to me, not sullen or loutish—had called into question not only the great lost freedom of childhood that I have spent so much time lamenting and evoking but, in my own absence of outrage or surprise at the incident, the morality, indeed the sanity, of my gender itself.
I riffled through the deck of my memories of idle afternoons long ago, hours spent in the woods behind our house, in the far reaches of a schoolyard deserted on a Sunday, along the streams and in the basements of Columbia, Maryland. As I shuffled memories, I stopped a moment at every spot of darkness and searched it for the presence of violence to animals. I came up with neighborhood dogs that I had feared or been bitten by—even today I could draw you a map of how to avoid them. A hamster my brother and I had surprised in the act of devouring its young. Something horrible that I came upon one day behind a veterinarian’s office, blind and bloody and unborn. Suicidal zebrafish that had leaped to their deaths behind the credenza in our living room on which their aquarium sat; it was nothing but popeye and ick and bedraggled floaters that came to mind when I thought about that tank. Birds that smashed against our back windows. Our miniature schnauzer gamely dragging himself across the floor, hind legs crushed by the car that had run him over. A dead bat cobwebbed like a dried leaf in a gauzy window curtain. The little red gifts left scattered around by neighborhood cats: half-eaten mice, gnawed moles, the heads of sparrows. It occurred to me that for all my liberty to wander as a child, without animals I would have known nothing of carnage or violent death. This seemed somehow like a strangely mixed blessing.
“I guess I killed innocent bugs,” I said. I was thinking of the cicada summer of 1970, when just walking down the street, you couldn’t help crushing dozens of the stupid things under the soles of your PF Flyers. We fed them to the local dog that would eat them. We braked our bicycles on patches of them, smearing grisly stripes across the sidewalk. We hit them with baseball bats and golf clubs. We burned them with the lenses of magnifying glasses. Now that I thought about it, I had set fire to plenty of grasshoppers that way, too, watching their outraged legs wriggle as a smoking hole dazzled like a gem embedded in their abdomens. “Maybe a lot of bugs. And I knew boys who would do worse.”
There were the boys who used to get together sometimes to fit out fish and frogs with firecrackers and lob those living grenades; there were the boys who went after sparrows and robins with BB guns, wounding far more than they mercifully killed. And laughing as the flustered bird lurched away.
“So you’re saying that kind of thing is normal,” my wife said. “Your attitude is just ‘Boys will be boys.’”
“I’m not saying it’s normal or acceptable. Yes, I do think boys will be boys. I guess I’d just never try to argue that’s a good thing.”
Boys will be boys, and men will be men, and killing fields are killing fields, and Rwanda is Rwanda, and Mountain Meadows is Mountain Meadows, and you gang us up and look the other w
ay and some kind of bad activity might very well occur to us. Or it might not. One thing I never learned in all my years of meandering unsupervised through the world of boys was how to predict what they might do, singly or in groups, what startling kindness or humdrum cruelty they might choose to engage in. But I supposed it never hurt to have somebody around—maybe a bigmouthed bossy girl—to tell them they were a bunch of psycho losers.
I looked at my son, who was getting even less of an opportunity to contemplate this mystery than I had gotten, and then at my wife, who was waiting for me to answer for our crimes. I nodded and turned to my daughter.
“Next time,” I told her, “you just go ahead and get in there and tell those boys whatever you want.”
Some boys were playing in the hallway: eleven, twelve years old, pushing one another around in a wheeled desk chair. Shirttails untucked, yelling, taunting, acting like idiots. Taking turns being the fortunate fool in the chair who goes careening down the linoleum and crashes into the wall and falls out and gets hurt and fakes like he’s okay. They were loud, unruly, locked in to the clatter of the wheels, the delighted scream of the idiot at the moment of impact, the collective enterprise of wasting time with a hint of violence. They were, I believe, happy.