After many years of presenting myself strictly as a non-fiction writer, I had a breakthrough four years ago, completing and publishing two short stories. Two other stories followed, so far unpublished. I had been (without knowing it) in the creative closet, with a long-held secret desire to write fiction. I was now "out."
And so I tentatively began a novel, which over two summers and two winters of revision, finally emerged this year, all 53,000 words of it. Rather than wait years for some publisher to accept it, I decided to follow my wife Lynn's lead and publish it on Kindle.
Thus this week, on my birthday, after much revising and editing, I finally published Friends and Brothers, an elegiac novel of friendship and loss. It deals with two men who meet in high school, get acquainted in college, then stay close as their careers diverge in New York City. There are issues of betrayal, grief, and faith involved in this essentially simple story that some would label as "bromance."
A novel-long structure seemed right because the story takes place over 40 years, from the Sixties to the end of the 20th century, allowing me to indulge a bit of fantasy and have the main characters meet various NYC celebrities, including George Plimpton and members of the Kennedy family, real people who make an appearance in this fictional narrative.
I found myself half-unconsciously imitating Waugh's Brideshead Revisited in structure, with a first-person narrator looking back at his greatest friendship. I was also greatly influenced by other stories of male friendship and from having taught a course on masculinity and literature. One of the topics in that course was the challenge of male friendship since most straight men tend to find their closest emotional connections with women; yet all men yearn for, yet often don't find, real friendship, caring and support with another man.
I learned many things about my own life in writing this novel. In terms of craft, I found, first of all, that if I worked for at least an hour a day for six months, I could compete a first draft of something much longer than a novella or short story, following my rough outline and keeping the plot simple.
The second lesson is that it is good, maybe essential, to put the draft away for a few months, as I did this spring, then return to it with fresh eyes. And I kept learning the hard lesson of "suggestion, not statement": showing, not telling. As a teacher and non-fiction writer, I chiefly explain; in fiction, I must hint, using dialogue to suggest a mood and letting the reader complete the meaning.
This became the focus of my revision just as eliminating wordiness and repetition became the focus on my editing. Even if no one reads Friends and Brothers (available on Amazon's Kindle), I have satisfied my long-held wish to do what seemed to me impossible: write, complete, and publish a novel.
Showing posts with label men's friendships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label men's friendships. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Friendship, Presence and Absence
Friendships in my life--real friendships--have been rare. Many of the people I call my friends are social friends who know, like, and respect me and would help me if I asked for assistance. But most of them are not really friends who know me inside out, who see the real me, the way my wife does.
Every man must have a male friend to share his fears and worries with, the kind of man who knows the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the other and whose love--though they may not use that word--is unbreakable. In fact, I believe that the unconsummated love between heterosexual men can be as powerful as that between a man and woman--and maybe more so.
Clearly I am talking about a deep bond, the kind women also need with at least one other person and are generally better able to negotiate since men tend to shy away from expressing feelings.
The Greeks distinguished several different kinds of love, with different words for the bond between friends, the affection between two lovers, the love of God or humankind, etc. English, despite its usually rich treasury of synonyms, has to make to with the overused single word, love: "I love my new Volvo, I love pizza, I love my wife, I love my dog," etc.....
My loving friendship with John began when we were part of a small men's group about 15 years ago, sharing our fears and concerns about relationships and careers. Since then, John and I have grown even closer than we were in those days. Despite the differences in our backgrounds and vocations, we have much in common at a deep level, at the level where some friends do not go. The problem is that he, as a construction supervisor, is often miles away on projects that consume months of his time so that he is virtually inaccessible by phone, even to most of his family.
When these projects end, and he has time off, we meet fairly regularly to catch up and in between try to communicate via email. But I am rarely satisfied with the time we have together, and during his work periods, I can feel John's absence keenly. At times I grow resentful of the type of all-absorbing job that demands that a man work seven days a week, with no breaks; I find it unhealthy for him and for his relationships.
In one recent email, I wrote to John something I had seen quoted from the philosopher Maurice Blanchot. I paraphrase:
Great friendships, he wrote, are grounded only superficially in proximity; their real element is distance, a kind of separation that becomes relation. This distance foreshadows death. In this way, true friendship encompasses and anticipates loss.
Being a perceptive reader and intelligent writer, John, despite the pressures of having no time for himself, wrote back a brief message:
Why do you doubt that distance is opposed to closeness? My conversations with you abound when you are not near, almost as if you hear me and respond. I find that absence or distance does not diminish my attention but multiplies it. Is not God both absent and fully present at the same time?
Wow, I thought: he's right. He has captured an element of true friendship that does not depend on physical presence. And he has managed, in that final question, to touch on a key element of Christian mysticism: that God, who is everywhere present, can also be perceived as absent and unknowable.
Theological considerations aside, I was glad that I brought up the topic of absence and friendship since his response was reassuring. I don't know if I really share the same ability to converse with him and feel that he is with me when he is miles away. I think of him often and pray for his well being, as I await the possibility of a message, brief and sometimes hurried. But I think my friendship needs the sound of our voices together talking and laughing. I cannot give attention to someone who is not physically present with me, here and now.
Of course, if I apply what I just said to my prayer life, do I not sometimes feel close to God in my isolation? Perhaps my Catholic background demands some physical presence--the sacramental presence of Christ in the Eucharist or in the faces of other people. The presence of God in silence is a spiritual facsimile of this presence, a yearning or longing based mainly on a feeling of absence and separation.
I don't know anything about M. Blanchot, or if he is right that the separation between two people who love each other is ultimately foreshadowing loss and death. But the idea is intriguing. I know that, as Maslow once stated, love and death are always related and that we could not truly love if we knew we would never die.
In any case, instead of bemoaning the long absences of my friend, I should be grateful for him and for the verbal bonds that keep us together.
Every man must have a male friend to share his fears and worries with, the kind of man who knows the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the other and whose love--though they may not use that word--is unbreakable. In fact, I believe that the unconsummated love between heterosexual men can be as powerful as that between a man and woman--and maybe more so.
Clearly I am talking about a deep bond, the kind women also need with at least one other person and are generally better able to negotiate since men tend to shy away from expressing feelings.
The Greeks distinguished several different kinds of love, with different words for the bond between friends, the affection between two lovers, the love of God or humankind, etc. English, despite its usually rich treasury of synonyms, has to make to with the overused single word, love: "I love my new Volvo, I love pizza, I love my wife, I love my dog," etc.....
My loving friendship with John began when we were part of a small men's group about 15 years ago, sharing our fears and concerns about relationships and careers. Since then, John and I have grown even closer than we were in those days. Despite the differences in our backgrounds and vocations, we have much in common at a deep level, at the level where some friends do not go. The problem is that he, as a construction supervisor, is often miles away on projects that consume months of his time so that he is virtually inaccessible by phone, even to most of his family.
When these projects end, and he has time off, we meet fairly regularly to catch up and in between try to communicate via email. But I am rarely satisfied with the time we have together, and during his work periods, I can feel John's absence keenly. At times I grow resentful of the type of all-absorbing job that demands that a man work seven days a week, with no breaks; I find it unhealthy for him and for his relationships.
In one recent email, I wrote to John something I had seen quoted from the philosopher Maurice Blanchot. I paraphrase:
Great friendships, he wrote, are grounded only superficially in proximity; their real element is distance, a kind of separation that becomes relation. This distance foreshadows death. In this way, true friendship encompasses and anticipates loss.
Being a perceptive reader and intelligent writer, John, despite the pressures of having no time for himself, wrote back a brief message:
Why do you doubt that distance is opposed to closeness? My conversations with you abound when you are not near, almost as if you hear me and respond. I find that absence or distance does not diminish my attention but multiplies it. Is not God both absent and fully present at the same time?
Wow, I thought: he's right. He has captured an element of true friendship that does not depend on physical presence. And he has managed, in that final question, to touch on a key element of Christian mysticism: that God, who is everywhere present, can also be perceived as absent and unknowable.
Theological considerations aside, I was glad that I brought up the topic of absence and friendship since his response was reassuring. I don't know if I really share the same ability to converse with him and feel that he is with me when he is miles away. I think of him often and pray for his well being, as I await the possibility of a message, brief and sometimes hurried. But I think my friendship needs the sound of our voices together talking and laughing. I cannot give attention to someone who is not physically present with me, here and now.
Of course, if I apply what I just said to my prayer life, do I not sometimes feel close to God in my isolation? Perhaps my Catholic background demands some physical presence--the sacramental presence of Christ in the Eucharist or in the faces of other people. The presence of God in silence is a spiritual facsimile of this presence, a yearning or longing based mainly on a feeling of absence and separation.
I don't know anything about M. Blanchot, or if he is right that the separation between two people who love each other is ultimately foreshadowing loss and death. But the idea is intriguing. I know that, as Maslow once stated, love and death are always related and that we could not truly love if we knew we would never die.
In any case, instead of bemoaning the long absences of my friend, I should be grateful for him and for the verbal bonds that keep us together.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
The Unspoken
How many major things never get said. How often families live and die with certain facts never explained, certain truths never acknowledged.
It was true in my family and in the culture as a whole in which I grew up. This explains, perhaps, my appreciation of the Tobias Wolff novel
Old School, which takes place at a boys' prep school in the early 1960s. When I put it down, I told myself, the title of this book could be called The Unspoken.
The narrator, a hardly fictionalized version of Wolff himself, comments on the way certain things were taken for granted, never acknowledged, both by the school's culture generally and by his friends in particular. "No acknowledgment of who we really were--of trouble, weakness or doubt--of our worries about the life ahead and the sort of men we were becoming. Never; not a word."
This sums up much of conventional masculine culture in which any admission of fear or the inner life in general is seen as inappropriate (i.e., effeminate or weak). These boys can and do talk about sex, of course, and their teachers' habits, but they rely on a superficial code of masculine behavior that is artificial and coolly detached. Even in the face of tragic news, they are reluctant to confide in one another and would rather be dead than seen weeping.
The novel is set in 1960, in the period of my own education in an all-male college prep school, but not a residential one in New England. As I think now of the boys I remember quite vividly from those days, I realize with a certain sadness that I never really knew them. We had an acquaintance and an intimacy that resembled what went on our families, for the most part, where the Big Things were kept hush-hush.
The culture has changed quite a bit, after a generation of talk shows and tell-all books, yet I wonder how much has really changed in the life of young men as they grow up. The ones I encountered in my course on masculinity (as in other courses) were often surprised at the candor of our discussions of conventional male behavior patterns, especially the stoic façade, the "I don't want to talk about it" attitude. Many were reluctant to say much on any topic.
Some of the smart ones, like Wolff, turned to writing; and it's no wonder so many people, men in particular, are drawn to writing: at last they can express what they truly feel.
In the letters from schoolboys in earlier times, especially in the Victorian era, we can hear the yearning to share affection and other feelings with their mates, which they do in passionately romantic terms, saying things they would not be permitted to say aloud.
I have received, and still receive, written messages that nearly move me to tears--some from students, some from close friends who can only tell me of their admiration and love at a remove since when we are together, the discussion, however emotionally real or intimate, cannot quite express the depth of our bond and the gratitude we have for each other. The written word is safer.
I find this topic of men and friendship filled with sadness since so much of life goes unspoken, buried deep in the heart, covered over, sometimes crushed--adding to the stress that causes cardiovascular problems. We all have known, or seen depicted, fathers estranged from their sons, yearning to express their love or admiration, sometimes waiting until it is almost too late.
When men can't even admit their fears and inner feelings to their wives or girl friends, tragedy invariably follows in the form of violence, alcoholism, or abuse.
I would like to think that Wolff's moving look at his high school days has become dated, but I doubt it. Fear holds men back from discussing fear, and from fear comes anger, hatred and violence. The "real man" of strength has the courage to open his heart to others; he has outgrown the stoic code of repression that leads some boys to go so deep within that the only way they can find to validate their existence is to kill innocent strangers and themselves. No one should be surprised that the killer is almost always male.
It was true in my family and in the culture as a whole in which I grew up. This explains, perhaps, my appreciation of the Tobias Wolff novel
Old School, which takes place at a boys' prep school in the early 1960s. When I put it down, I told myself, the title of this book could be called The Unspoken.
The narrator, a hardly fictionalized version of Wolff himself, comments on the way certain things were taken for granted, never acknowledged, both by the school's culture generally and by his friends in particular. "No acknowledgment of who we really were--of trouble, weakness or doubt--of our worries about the life ahead and the sort of men we were becoming. Never; not a word."
This sums up much of conventional masculine culture in which any admission of fear or the inner life in general is seen as inappropriate (i.e., effeminate or weak). These boys can and do talk about sex, of course, and their teachers' habits, but they rely on a superficial code of masculine behavior that is artificial and coolly detached. Even in the face of tragic news, they are reluctant to confide in one another and would rather be dead than seen weeping.
The novel is set in 1960, in the period of my own education in an all-male college prep school, but not a residential one in New England. As I think now of the boys I remember quite vividly from those days, I realize with a certain sadness that I never really knew them. We had an acquaintance and an intimacy that resembled what went on our families, for the most part, where the Big Things were kept hush-hush.
The culture has changed quite a bit, after a generation of talk shows and tell-all books, yet I wonder how much has really changed in the life of young men as they grow up. The ones I encountered in my course on masculinity (as in other courses) were often surprised at the candor of our discussions of conventional male behavior patterns, especially the stoic façade, the "I don't want to talk about it" attitude. Many were reluctant to say much on any topic.
Some of the smart ones, like Wolff, turned to writing; and it's no wonder so many people, men in particular, are drawn to writing: at last they can express what they truly feel.
In the letters from schoolboys in earlier times, especially in the Victorian era, we can hear the yearning to share affection and other feelings with their mates, which they do in passionately romantic terms, saying things they would not be permitted to say aloud.
I have received, and still receive, written messages that nearly move me to tears--some from students, some from close friends who can only tell me of their admiration and love at a remove since when we are together, the discussion, however emotionally real or intimate, cannot quite express the depth of our bond and the gratitude we have for each other. The written word is safer.
I find this topic of men and friendship filled with sadness since so much of life goes unspoken, buried deep in the heart, covered over, sometimes crushed--adding to the stress that causes cardiovascular problems. We all have known, or seen depicted, fathers estranged from their sons, yearning to express their love or admiration, sometimes waiting until it is almost too late.
When men can't even admit their fears and inner feelings to their wives or girl friends, tragedy invariably follows in the form of violence, alcoholism, or abuse.
I would like to think that Wolff's moving look at his high school days has become dated, but I doubt it. Fear holds men back from discussing fear, and from fear comes anger, hatred and violence. The "real man" of strength has the courage to open his heart to others; he has outgrown the stoic code of repression that leads some boys to go so deep within that the only way they can find to validate their existence is to kill innocent strangers and themselves. No one should be surprised that the killer is almost always male.
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