Alan Cheuse's Blog, page 8
November 25, 2014
On Ron Rash's Selected Stories
Here's a book to keep with you over the holidays, when you can read in short takes...these beautifully composed and powerful stories about life in the mountains and rural places of the South...
Wonderfully made stories by Ron Rash...
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/23/3647933...
Wonderfully made stories by Ron Rash...
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/23/3647933...
November 20, 2014
National Book Award
The Klay stories didn't catch on for me....
Maybe--and maybe crazy to say but--bigger wars seem to make for bigger books. I've just been rereading The Naked and The
Dead and The Thin Red Line, and none of the
current wars have produced anything near those giants--though maybe some years from now that might happen. Fiction, especially novels, seems to demand some time for the writer to mull over, to gestate, to
muse on the subject. Look at Tolstoy, born some sixty years after the big battle in War and Peace.
But then--another voice in my head takes note--Mailer went from the Pacific Theater to Paris and started writing his big book almost immediately.
Maybe--and maybe crazy to say but--bigger wars seem to make for bigger books. I've just been rereading The Naked and The
Dead and The Thin Red Line, and none of the
current wars have produced anything near those giants--though maybe some years from now that might happen. Fiction, especially novels, seems to demand some time for the writer to mull over, to gestate, to
muse on the subject. Look at Tolstoy, born some sixty years after the big battle in War and Peace.
But then--another voice in my head takes note--Mailer went from the Pacific Theater to Paris and started writing his big book almost immediately.
November 19, 2014
Hakodateyama
New short story forthcoming in the next issue of the Catamaran Literary Review.
Here's the opening--
Arrived at port: harbor of Hakodate, largest city
on Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, where
the winds blew cold and smelled of salt and
wood smoke.
Japanese men in uniforms took him from the ship and
sat him down in a small office in a wooden building near
the pier. He showed them his military passport, and they
nodded, and chattered. He understood nothing they said.
Within a few minutes the men departed, leaving Philip with
his thoughts, and a long while passed before they returned,
accompanying a wiry man old enough to be Philip’s father,
who spoke to him in Russian with a Moscow accent.
“Captain, is it?” he said.
“Yes,” Philip said, and stated his credentials, and noticed
that his hand stayed steady as he offered the man his
military passport...
Here's the opening--
Arrived at port: harbor of Hakodate, largest city
on Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, where
the winds blew cold and smelled of salt and
wood smoke.
Japanese men in uniforms took him from the ship and
sat him down in a small office in a wooden building near
the pier. He showed them his military passport, and they
nodded, and chattered. He understood nothing they said.
Within a few minutes the men departed, leaving Philip with
his thoughts, and a long while passed before they returned,
accompanying a wiry man old enough to be Philip’s father,
who spoke to him in Russian with a Moscow accent.
“Captain, is it?” he said.
“Yes,” Philip said, and stated his credentials, and noticed
that his hand stayed steady as he offered the man his
military passport...
Taste
New short story forthcoming in the next
issue of The Chicago Quarterly Review...
Here's the opening...
River. River.
I don’t know what could be Jewish about a river, but when I see that word I think about the Raritan, the broad and sluggish, sometimes salty, sometimes bitter Raritan, and those of us born Jewish to Jews clustered in this New Jersey neighborhood, mostly in small, attached houses that ran west to east from the factory and sewer plant for a number of blocks to where the Arthur Kill, flowing down from New York Bay, bled out into Raritan Bay. South to north streets climbed from the river to the main commercial street called Smith. North of Smith Street lay Catholic country where Hungarian and Polish kids ran in clusters, oblivious to our good qualities and wanting only to fight.
issue of The Chicago Quarterly Review...
Here's the opening...
River. River.
I don’t know what could be Jewish about a river, but when I see that word I think about the Raritan, the broad and sluggish, sometimes salty, sometimes bitter Raritan, and those of us born Jewish to Jews clustered in this New Jersey neighborhood, mostly in small, attached houses that ran west to east from the factory and sewer plant for a number of blocks to where the Arthur Kill, flowing down from New York Bay, bled out into Raritan Bay. South to north streets climbed from the river to the main commercial street called Smith. North of Smith Street lay Catholic country where Hungarian and Polish kids ran in clusters, oblivious to our good qualities and wanting only to fight.
November 18, 2014
Starting Late
In memory of the stupendously best-selling late bloomer James A. Michener, the Center for Writers at the University of Texas gives a $10,000 prize, endowed by Random House, to a writer who, like that Pennsylvania-born world-traveling novelist, published his or her first book after age 40. I recently received a letter soliciting a nomination for that award, which got me thinking about the work and lives of some of my own favorite writers who were late starters.
There's Sherwood Anderson, who in his early 40's managed a paint factory near Cleveland. One day after work he suffered a nervous breakdown, left home and began walking up the railroad tracks toward the big city, where he would eventually rent a room. There, in a week of furious labor, he wrote the masterly story "Hands," which served as the opening of his great story cycle about small-town Midwestern life, "Winesburg, Ohio."
There's Henry Miller, who in his fourth decade quit Brooklyn for Paris, where he would write his way into literary infamy. And Harriet Doerr, who, in her mid-60's and recently widowed, applied to the Stanford writing program and eventually wrote the beautiful, prizewinning novel "Stones for Ibarra." And Michener himself, in his late 30's, ending his career as a military journalist when the war ended, putting together a story collection and moving to New York City, where he served as an editorial assistant by day and a Y.M.C.A. volleyball spotter by night, until the afternoon he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Tales of the South Pacific."
That letter about the prize bearing Michener's name set me to meditating on the benefits and liabilities of starting a writing career, as I did myself, relatively late in life.
Like millions of people, I had always thought I wanted to be a fiction writer. But I didn't do much to make that happen. In college I dabbled at stories. Traveling in Europe after graduation, I kept a notebook, I went to bullfights, I drank the same Spanish brandy as Hemingway and gazed on the same Mediterranean waves as Byron. After returning home I spent a couple of years working at various jobs, such as caseworker in a Manhattan social-services unit and assistant fur-page editor at Women's Wear Daily. But I produced nothing resembling serious fiction.
"Keats had done his best work and died before he was the age that you are now," my first wife chided me.
She's got a point, I thought. My chance for becoming a prodigy had passed, and I was still doing nothing about what I once thought of as my greatest passion. I was in my late 20's, surely an adult, I thought, and so I ought to find myself an adult profession. Three years of graduate work later, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature nearly in hand, I took a job at Bennington College, the tiny — and then famously expensive — liberal arts institution in southwestern Vermont.
"You'll like teaching there," my graduate literature professor Francis Fergusson told me; he had founded the drama division at Bennington some decades before coming to Rutgers to teach the likes of me. "It's not a real college."
He was right, and mostly in good ways. At Bennington I was free to create my own courses, and after a few years I noticed that I was teaching a cycle of courses in the history of narrative, beginning with the Gilgamesh epic and continuing on through Homer and Virgil and Chaucer and Dante and Boccaccio and Cervantes and the English novelists and the French and the Russians right on up to the work of the moderns.
My pals were the writers on the faculty — Bernard Malamud, Nicholas Delbanco, John Gardner — rather than the critics. But I wasn't a fiction writer yet, just someone still dreaming about it. So it really stung when one night while at dinner at the Gardner house with a room full of novelists, Joan Gardner went around the table asking about everyone's work in progress and when she got to me said: "That's all right, Alan. Everybody doesn't have to be a writer."
In my eighth year, the college that had nurtured me fired me. But that's another story. The main thing is that after some grieving I found myself elated, prepared to let go of teaching and take a dare I handed myself.
I vowed that I would publish a short story before I turned 40.
I moved to Tennessee, where my second wife took a teaching post at the state university. We made a pact. She would serve as our small family's main breadwinner for five years, and I would have that time to begin writing seriously.
In the half-finished basement room of a starter house on the outskirts of Knoxville, I set my manual Kmart portable typewriter on a Kmart picnic bench and set that bench under the basement's only window, with a view out under the house's rear deck toward a small ditch and some young red-bud trees that marked the rear line of our property. I sat down and found myself ready to begin.
Time alone hadn't made the difference in me. An actor prepares. So does a writer. But in a different way. With hindsight, I could see that living was not enough. The current spate of memoirs about abuse and divorce and other sorts of misery to the contrary, having bad things happen to you doesn't necessarily make you into a writer. Long life, short life, who hasn't lived through enough awful events to make for potential material? So it wasn't misery, though I had suffered my share by then. It was all the reading that I had done that had prepared me.
Which is not to say that all serious readers automatically become writers, or that studying art appreciation can make you a painter, or listening to Beethoven turn you into a composer. But you can't tap your own greatest potential as a composer without knowing Beethoven's music, and you can't write seriously without reading the greats in that peculiar way that writers read, attentive to the particularities of the language, to the technical turns and twists of scene-making and plot, soaking up numerous narrative strategies and studying various approaches to that cave in the deep woods where the human heart hibernates.
This gift and talent for reading like a writer comes early to many people in the field, so early in some that they don't even know they possess this special awareness. Keats had of course done his best work and died at an age far short of mine before I first sat down at that Tennessee picnic table. But then, for whatever reason, some of us are slow learners. Nearly two decades had passed since I had graduated from college, and it had taken me that long to prepare. But apparently now I was ready.
So I started typing. When I looked up from my work, those red-bud trees had burst into blossom, and I had written a novella too long to publish in any magazine and a short story that after a couple of revisions I sold to The New Yorker, which published it less than a month before my 40th birthday. In a quick succession of years I produced three novels, a memoir and two story collections, writing without stumbling because, as I thought of myself then, I had done plenty of stumbling before I started writing and perhaps I had gotten all of that out of the way.
Not strictly true, as the next decade would show me. I've made a few false starts since then, and unlike a much younger writer, I know that I had better not make too many more or else I'll find myself in deep trouble. But possessing that kind of insight is one of the advantages of starting late. As is one's understanding of Henry James's remark that it's better to have success as a writer in mid-age than in youth because at least then, when you're dropped by a fickle public, you have a life to go back to.
There's Sherwood Anderson, who in his early 40's managed a paint factory near Cleveland. One day after work he suffered a nervous breakdown, left home and began walking up the railroad tracks toward the big city, where he would eventually rent a room. There, in a week of furious labor, he wrote the masterly story "Hands," which served as the opening of his great story cycle about small-town Midwestern life, "Winesburg, Ohio."
There's Henry Miller, who in his fourth decade quit Brooklyn for Paris, where he would write his way into literary infamy. And Harriet Doerr, who, in her mid-60's and recently widowed, applied to the Stanford writing program and eventually wrote the beautiful, prizewinning novel "Stones for Ibarra." And Michener himself, in his late 30's, ending his career as a military journalist when the war ended, putting together a story collection and moving to New York City, where he served as an editorial assistant by day and a Y.M.C.A. volleyball spotter by night, until the afternoon he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Tales of the South Pacific."
That letter about the prize bearing Michener's name set me to meditating on the benefits and liabilities of starting a writing career, as I did myself, relatively late in life.
Like millions of people, I had always thought I wanted to be a fiction writer. But I didn't do much to make that happen. In college I dabbled at stories. Traveling in Europe after graduation, I kept a notebook, I went to bullfights, I drank the same Spanish brandy as Hemingway and gazed on the same Mediterranean waves as Byron. After returning home I spent a couple of years working at various jobs, such as caseworker in a Manhattan social-services unit and assistant fur-page editor at Women's Wear Daily. But I produced nothing resembling serious fiction.
"Keats had done his best work and died before he was the age that you are now," my first wife chided me.
She's got a point, I thought. My chance for becoming a prodigy had passed, and I was still doing nothing about what I once thought of as my greatest passion. I was in my late 20's, surely an adult, I thought, and so I ought to find myself an adult profession. Three years of graduate work later, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature nearly in hand, I took a job at Bennington College, the tiny — and then famously expensive — liberal arts institution in southwestern Vermont.
"You'll like teaching there," my graduate literature professor Francis Fergusson told me; he had founded the drama division at Bennington some decades before coming to Rutgers to teach the likes of me. "It's not a real college."
He was right, and mostly in good ways. At Bennington I was free to create my own courses, and after a few years I noticed that I was teaching a cycle of courses in the history of narrative, beginning with the Gilgamesh epic and continuing on through Homer and Virgil and Chaucer and Dante and Boccaccio and Cervantes and the English novelists and the French and the Russians right on up to the work of the moderns.
My pals were the writers on the faculty — Bernard Malamud, Nicholas Delbanco, John Gardner — rather than the critics. But I wasn't a fiction writer yet, just someone still dreaming about it. So it really stung when one night while at dinner at the Gardner house with a room full of novelists, Joan Gardner went around the table asking about everyone's work in progress and when she got to me said: "That's all right, Alan. Everybody doesn't have to be a writer."
In my eighth year, the college that had nurtured me fired me. But that's another story. The main thing is that after some grieving I found myself elated, prepared to let go of teaching and take a dare I handed myself.
I vowed that I would publish a short story before I turned 40.
I moved to Tennessee, where my second wife took a teaching post at the state university. We made a pact. She would serve as our small family's main breadwinner for five years, and I would have that time to begin writing seriously.
In the half-finished basement room of a starter house on the outskirts of Knoxville, I set my manual Kmart portable typewriter on a Kmart picnic bench and set that bench under the basement's only window, with a view out under the house's rear deck toward a small ditch and some young red-bud trees that marked the rear line of our property. I sat down and found myself ready to begin.
Time alone hadn't made the difference in me. An actor prepares. So does a writer. But in a different way. With hindsight, I could see that living was not enough. The current spate of memoirs about abuse and divorce and other sorts of misery to the contrary, having bad things happen to you doesn't necessarily make you into a writer. Long life, short life, who hasn't lived through enough awful events to make for potential material? So it wasn't misery, though I had suffered my share by then. It was all the reading that I had done that had prepared me.
Which is not to say that all serious readers automatically become writers, or that studying art appreciation can make you a painter, or listening to Beethoven turn you into a composer. But you can't tap your own greatest potential as a composer without knowing Beethoven's music, and you can't write seriously without reading the greats in that peculiar way that writers read, attentive to the particularities of the language, to the technical turns and twists of scene-making and plot, soaking up numerous narrative strategies and studying various approaches to that cave in the deep woods where the human heart hibernates.
This gift and talent for reading like a writer comes early to many people in the field, so early in some that they don't even know they possess this special awareness. Keats had of course done his best work and died at an age far short of mine before I first sat down at that Tennessee picnic table. But then, for whatever reason, some of us are slow learners. Nearly two decades had passed since I had graduated from college, and it had taken me that long to prepare. But apparently now I was ready.
So I started typing. When I looked up from my work, those red-bud trees had burst into blossom, and I had written a novella too long to publish in any magazine and a short story that after a couple of revisions I sold to The New Yorker, which published it less than a month before my 40th birthday. In a quick succession of years I produced three novels, a memoir and two story collections, writing without stumbling because, as I thought of myself then, I had done plenty of stumbling before I started writing and perhaps I had gotten all of that out of the way.
Not strictly true, as the next decade would show me. I've made a few false starts since then, and unlike a much younger writer, I know that I had better not make too many more or else I'll find myself in deep trouble. But possessing that kind of insight is one of the advantages of starting late. As is one's understanding of Henry James's remark that it's better to have success as a writer in mid-age than in youth because at least then, when you're dropped by a fickle public, you have a life to go back to.
November 16, 2014
Nothing--And Everything
The great French writer and cultural historian Andrew Malraux once remarked that a human life is worth everything and nothing. I think the same way about the humanities and social sciences. Poetry? novels? short stories? investigations of the lives of rain forest Indians? What do these amount to? Among the truly unlearned, not much. But even to those who have everything--money, success, achievements beyond the ordinary--life means nothing without great art, the music in your head of great poems, and turning the pages at night under a narrow but bright lamp glow of a novel that takes you in and makes you feel alive in a way that on your own you can never achieve. This is what our ancestors gave to us, this is what we live with, this is what we hope to pass along--this light, this lamp glow in the heavy dark.
Nothing--and everything!
Nothing--and everything!
November 13, 2014
Reading Before Sleep
I wonder how many of you often feel the dilemma I'm caught up in almost every night--the question of what to read before sleep. Nothing worse, the doctors tell us, than staring at the computer (etc.)screen before trying to fall asleep. For me, as a fiction writer, the irony stands out that nothing seems to be better--I'm not saying, really, more conducive--for preparing for sleep than reading a few pages, maybe, if you're lucky, an entire chapter, of a novel, especially a genre book, you know, a thriller or mystery or science-fiction. Feeling sleep about to descend on me (or ascend in me?) always alerts me when to stop reading, and save the clarity of winging through an exciting or explosive chapter for the next day. I wonder if a similar impulse works for writers. Hemingway said he stopped when he knew where to begin the next day. I've always used that as a working principle myself. What do you think it is--the nature of this paradox--that makes a book both exciting and soothing at the same time? What is it about a really terrific book, one of those famous page-turners, that turns us toward sleep?
November 11, 2014
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
We're seeing a lot of "Bests" of the year mentioned in the press just now. My candidate for the finest novel from
anywhere in the world is Richard Flanagan's
"Narrow Road to the Deep North."
I wrote a piece about it, which you can find at http://www.npr.org/2014/08/17/3406723...
This Tasmanian born Australian writer
has made a deeply serious and thrilling book about Australian prisoners of war
in South Asia.
anywhere in the world is Richard Flanagan's
"Narrow Road to the Deep North."
I wrote a piece about it, which you can find at http://www.npr.org/2014/08/17/3406723...
This Tasmanian born Australian writer
has made a deeply serious and thrilling book about Australian prisoners of war
in South Asia.
November 10, 2014
Review of Norah Webster by Colm Toibin
A link to review of a lovely new novel by the Irish writer
Colm Toibin....
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/27/3594034...
Colm Toibin....
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/27/3594034...
November 7, 2014
from the Agony Column by Rick Kleffel on KUSP, Santa Cruz
"...one of the first books I ever wrote was a Bobbsey Twins novel..."
— Alan Cheuse
And alas, that novel is lost in time; Alan claims, at least he did in our live interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz, not to remember the title or the name under which it was written. And that, listeners is why it is always fun to talk to Alan Cheuse. The dean of book reviewing for NPR has a lot more up his sleeve than you would expect, as evidence in 'An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories,' his latest collection.
This conversation starts with Alan reading the full story "Nailed' from his collection. It's hilarious and exactly NOT the sort of story you'd expect him to write.
Alan and I also took some time to talk about new books, giving the listeners a live version of Three Books With Alan Cheuse. You can hear all this and more, including audience questions, by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
www.bookotron.com
— Alan Cheuse
And alas, that novel is lost in time; Alan claims, at least he did in our live interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz, not to remember the title or the name under which it was written. And that, listeners is why it is always fun to talk to Alan Cheuse. The dean of book reviewing for NPR has a lot more up his sleeve than you would expect, as evidence in 'An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories,' his latest collection.
This conversation starts with Alan reading the full story "Nailed' from his collection. It's hilarious and exactly NOT the sort of story you'd expect him to write.
Alan and I also took some time to talk about new books, giving the listeners a live version of Three Books With Alan Cheuse. You can hear all this and more, including audience questions, by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
www.bookotron.com
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