Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

by Tom Robbins

Talkers obviously talk, and this one talked so rapidly, so incessantly, that when he died I’m sure they had to beat his tongue to death with a stick.

Today, my voice sounds as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear. While to my mind’s ear, I might sound like an Oxford-educated intellectual, I have only to hear myself on tape to realize that in actuality mine is the voice of a can of cheap dog food -- if a can of cheap dog food could speak. It’s a Skippy voice. Not even that, a generic brand with a plain brown label. Thanks, at least in part, to the jeerers and sneerers of Urbanna, I’m going through life with a voice that might be visualized as something scraped off the kitchen floor of a fast-food restaurant by a pimply teenage dishwasher at closing time on Friday night. Or else that little pile of smashed potato chips left on the rubberized seat cushion of a motorized wheelchair belonging to a 365-pound retired female professional wrestler named Grandma Moses.

His approach to fiction, he has admitted, is that of the nineteenth-century novelists, which implies a verbatim translation of life, but as W. Somerset Maugham once put it, “Realism too often produces novels that are drab and dull,” going on to assert that the fiction that really matters is make-believe, dealing not in truths per se but in effects.

(Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight” is modern bohemia’s national anthem.)

Yet here I was in my early thirties writing critiques instead of literature, which is to say, producing carob instead of chocolate -- or, worse, itch power instead of lubricant. On the other hand, because I’d yet to find my literary voice, my personal style, or my subject, functioning as a critic on a regular basis served to sharpen my wits, deepen my insight, and steel me to face looming deadlines without a twitch or a flinch.

To respond to art in a meaningful way, notions of “taste” must be set aside or tossed out the window.

tortured by rejection, disoriented by success.

My goal was to examine the ramifications of that question, and to incorporate them within a lively narrative constructed of incremental flashes, some which would illuminate and advance the plot, some which (I hoped) would illuminate and advance the reader.

Except perhaps down in the shadowy catacombs of my subconscious, I didn’t know where it was going either. Moreover, I didn’t want to know. Discovery was part of the process, was what enthralled me, made writing an adventure instead of a drudgery, a journey instead of a job. It was V. S. Naipaul who said, “If a writer knows everything that’s going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.”

A philosophy professor from Wright State University delivered a paper at a conference in which she claimed that Cowgirls represented the first work in history in which a female protagonist undertook the classic hero’s journey, passing through all of the stages as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his monumental study, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

It was cool, I can’t deny it, but I also possessed just enough good sense to remind myself that whom the gods would destroy they first make popular.