Call If You Need Me (33 page)

So there are complications. The complications are serious and often ugly. Everybody wants a piece of Sonny. (One of his fellow inmates actually cuts off his ear as a warning.) Add to this the fact that what seems to be a small-scale insurrection is breaking out in the city; and the soldiers and police are responding with a ruthless yet almost indifferent repression. At times there is such pressure it seems impossible that normal life can still be going on in the city. But Sonny’s hope of release, his continued existence, in fact, is seen slipping away ever faster into a maelstrom of events that have gone out of control, so that finally his life seems to become a thing of no importance at all.

The Ultimate Good Luck
is a page-turner of the first order, felicitously rendered in a prose style rare in contemporary fiction. Here is an example of what I’m talking about:

On a deeper level, the book is a meditation on love and comportment between two ordinary but “marginal” people, Rae and Quinn. (Bernhardt believes “Everyone is marginal,” and there is plenty of evidence in the book to support this belief.) They are in their early thirties when they meet at a dog race at a Louisiana track, but both seem to be at the tag end of their lives, “wounded in their sex,” to borrow D. H. Lawrence’s phrase, unable to break through their own self-imposed barriers. They live together for a time in Louisiana, Quinn working seven-on and seven-off as a fitter for a pipe contractor while Rae stays in the trailer and listens to “mellowed-out music” and paints from magazines. They drift to California where Quinn works for a time repossessing new cars. Through a friend, he lands a job as a game warden out in Michigan, a place where he hopes he can find a “clear frame of reference.” But in Michigan, Rae is desperately unhappy with the way things are going. At various points she cries out in frustration: “I couldn’t ever tell what the hell your life was in behalf of.… I don’t like the way you think about things. You look at
everything like it disappears down a hole that nothing ever comes out of.”

“I can take care of me” is Quinn’s answer.

That’s not enough for Rae, and she pulls out on him, and Quinn has a hard time with it. He comes to realize that: “when you
tried
to protect yourself completely and never suffer a loss or a threat, you ended up with nothing. Or worse, you ended up being absorbed right into nothing, into the very luckless thing you were most afraid of.”

At the conclusion of this superb novel Quinn and Rae have come full circle, and the heart slows and then picks up again as they move out and away from the circle. But throughout we have been witness to a significant and I think, finally, transcending arc of human conduct.

Ford is a masterful writer. In its stark vision of utter loss followed by a last-ditch healing redemption,
The Ultimate Good Luck
belongs alongside Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
and Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory
. I can’t give this novel higher marks.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of
Rough Strife
, a novel published in 1980. In that book she chronicles twenty-some years of a marriage between two bright, educated, talented people. For some obscure reason, I don’t know why, I had little interest in reading the book when it appeared. I suppose—terrible confession!—I wondered what on earth this writer could tell me about a relationship between a university mathematics professor (Caroline) whose specialty is knot theory, and a foundation executive (Ivan), that could be of fundamental interest to me. After all—understand I had read some of the reviews—their children did not come along until some years after the marriage; Caroline and Ivan had time and energy and means to pursue their own lives and careers. On the surface of things, it seemed located in a landscape that was all too familiar—and yet totally foreign.

But I’m happy to say I read the novel, and I thought it was stunning. On the evidence of that book alone I’d say Schwartz is one of our better novelists. So what could the author do for an encore, a year after
Rough Strife
, that could measure up to the fierce pleasures of the first novel? Probably nothing.

Let me say that
Balancing Acts
is not a disappointment. But it suffers by the inevitable comparisons to the first book. For me, it does not have the cutting edges of
Rough Strife
, nor the full and scrupulously drawn characters who sometimes act in a willful and even capricious manner and often against their own seeming best interests—just like real people often act. The book does not have the relentless drive and the occasional breath-stopping places of that first novel. It is a good book, but is not a great or even a particularly memorable book. I don’t say this to disparage. Most good novels are just that—“good,” not great, and not always memorable.

Max Fried is a seventy-four-year-old widower recovering from the effects of a massive heart attack who goes to live in a residence that, in the part of the country I come from, we used to call an “old folks home.” But this is not your basic old folks home. This place is more tony, and it’s called Pleasure Knolls Semi-Service Apartments for Senior Citizens. It is located in Westchester County, New York. In his other life, the rich and fulfilling life he had before retirement and old age, Max Fried was a circus acrobat, a high-wire artist who performed with his wife, Susie. Those gone circus days are of course the good old days; and the metaphor of the title has in part to do with Max’s trying to accommodate his grim, semi-invalided present reality with the halcyon times of his youth under the big top. Not surprisingly, the best writing in the book occurs when the author is writing about events and situations that have taken place in that other life.

Now comes Alison Markman, a precocious thirteen-year-old whose life intersects with Max’s at the local junior high school where Max has a temporary-help job coaching would-be acrobats. Alison is an aspiring writer who has journals filled with adolescent adventure stuff and nonsense. She sees gruff old Max as a figure of romance and mystery, and she develops this terrific crush.

I’m not giving anything away when I say the crush she has on him indirectly brings about his demise. Fueled by her association with Max and her dreams of escaping what she feels is a dreary home life, Alison decides to run away and join a circus. There is a pursuit scene to Madison Square Garden and then on to Penn Station. The pursuers include Max and his sweetheart and neighbor at Pleasure Knolls, Lettie; and Alison’s parents, Josh
and Wanda, who, quite understandably, can’t comprehend what in the world is going on with their daughter. Alison is reunited with her parents. But the strain proves too much for Max, and he collapses and dies. But his death does not diminish us in any essential way. It is not unexpected, or tragic, or finally even untimely. He simply falls dead. Lettie has to pick up her own life, and Alison is back home with her parents, where a thirteen-year-old belongs. In the final chapter, Lettie and Alison meet over ice-cream sodas and talk about Max and about things in general.

Go ahead and read
Balancing Acts
. But if you do, make sure you also read
Rough Strife
, if you haven’t already. And catch Lynne Schwartz’s next novel.

I love the stories and tales in
Winesburg, Ohio
—most of them, at any rate, I love. And I love a handful or so of Sherwood Anderson’s other short stories. I think his best stories are as good as any around.
Winesburg, Ohio
(which was written in a Chicago tenement, based on people he knew there, not in Ohio) is taught in colleges and universities throughout the land, as it should be. One or another of his stories turns up in every anthology of American short fiction. But, beyond this, there isn’t a whole lot else of Anderson’s that is read today. His poems are long gone. His novels, books of essays and articles, the autobiographical writings, the memoirs and the book of plays—everything else seems to have passed into a dimly lighted zone that hardly anyone enters any longer.

After having just finished the
Selected Letters
, I think “S.A.”—as he sometimes signed off on his letters—would be the first person to shrug his shoulders and say, “What did you expect?” He knew he’d written one book, at least, that would have staying power. People said he had written an American classic in
Winesburg
, and he was inclined to go along with that opinion. He made his reputation on that work, published in 1919. But what of the work between then and 1941, when he died? Something happened, and everyone knew it. The change in his work, and in the way the critics treated him (the “deep sea thinkers,” Anderson called them), began as early as 1925, signalled by the young Ernest Hemingway’s patronizing letters and followed up by his ill-natured parody of Anderson,
The Torrents of Spring
. Within a year after the publication of
Dark Laughter
in 1925, Anderson found himself reading his literary obituary in magazines. He said the attacks didn’t bother him. But they did. In a letter to Burton Emmett, a benefactor, he said they made him “sick to my soul.” To John Peale Bishop, one of his critics, he wrote, “your suspicion that my own mind is like one of those gray towns out here is, I am afraid, profoundly true.”

But Anderson had always considered writing a form of therapy, and he kept on writing, despite what the critics had to say. “Writing helped me to live—it still helps me that way,” he wrote to Floyd Dell in 1920. Writing was a cure for the “disease called living.” He’d had one serious nervous collapse when a mail-order business he’d helped start went bankrupt. The date for his breakdown is precisely given as November 28, 1912. But two months later he was back in harness. He went to work for an advertising firm in Chicago to support his wife and three children and wrote stories and novels at night, sometimes falling asleep at the kitchen table. In 1914 some of his work began appearing in the little magazines of the day; and in 1916 he published his first novel,
Windy McPherson’s Son
. In that year he divorced his wife, left his children, remarried, and began what he hoped would be a new life. He was able to give up advertising work. But his finances were such that for much of the next twenty years he worried that he might have to go back into advertising. To supplement his income he took to the lecture platform and, in his last years, appeared at several writers’ conferences. On occasion he found himself having to accept money under humiliating circumstances from a wealthy man, and then from the man’s widow.

Meanwhile, he kept turning out books and had plans for dozens more. Some of the books that, maybe happily, never materialized include a book on the history of the Mississippi, children’s books (the idea of writing a “child book” had appealed
to him as early as 1919 and was to persist until shortly before his death), and books on “modern industry.” From time to time in the letters, Anderson makes mention of one or another of these ideas, and this will be footnoted to the effect that “Anderson did not undertake this project.” Nevertheless, work did pour from his typewriter. He could write eight or ten or twelve thousand words at a stretch. And then lie down and sleep “like a dead man.” And then get up and work some more.

After
Winesburg
he was famous but at best it was a mixed blessing. In 1927 he wrote to his brother, the painter Karl Anderson, that he thought fame was detrimental to the artist. To a schoolteacher from Washington, D.C., who sent Anderson a check for twenty-five dollars with a request that he critique two of her stories, he wrote, “Fame is no good, my dear. Take it from me.” And in 1930, in another letter to Burton Emmett, he said, “I do not want attention centered on me. If I could work the rest of my life unknown, unnoticed by those who make current opinion, I would be happier.”

Like it or not, however, he was famous. But he was in the position of a sitting duck. Everybody who came along, from hack journalist to hack playwright, and assorted magazine writers who weren’t worth a patch on his pants, could take a potshot. He lived in the long shadows thrown by his more glamorous and successful—and, ultimately, more interesting—contemporaries. And he could never forgive them, or himself, for this state of affairs.

He urged Roger Sergel, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh who was asking for advice about writing, to “Keep it loose. Keep it loose.” He felt that most writers fail because “they aren’t at bottom storytellers. They have theories about writing, notions about style, often real writing ability, but they do not tell the story—straight out—bang.” He once threw a novel out of a car window in the Ozarks and another out of a hotel room window in Chicago because the work wasn’t “clear straightforward storytelling.” He distrusted “technique” and what
he called “cleverness” in writers. The truth is, he seemed to be a little put out with most of them, with the exception of Thomas Wolfe. In September 1937, he wrote to Wolfe, “I love your guts, Tom. You are one who is O.K.” But Joyce, a “gloomy Irishman,… makes my bones ache. He’s up the wrong tree or I’m an egg.” Ezra Pound struck Anderson as “an empty man without fire.” He thought it was “very depressing” that Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize. And after the publication of Hemingway’s
Green Hills of Africa
, he wrote to his friend, the actor-director Jasper Deeter, that he thought Hemingway had “got into a kind of romanticizing of the so-called real … a kind of ecstasy over elephant dung, killing, death, etc., etc. And then he talks about writing the perfect sentence—something of that sort. Isn’t that rot?”