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David Guy
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Born
in Pittsburgh, PA, The United States
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April 2009
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which in some way still seems like home, though I haven’t lived there for years. I attended Shady Side Academy, graduating in 1966, and enrolled from there in Duke University, where I studied with Reynolds Price and Wallace Fowlie, earning a BA and eventually an MAT. My first job was as an English teacher at Forsyth Country Day School in Winston-Salem. I moved back to Durham in 1976, and have lived here ever since, except for a two-year stay in Cambridge while my wife was in graduate school.
I was eleven years old when I first saw that there was something about language that fascinated me, fifteen when I decided—God help me—that I wanted to be a writer. Though I have worked in libraries and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which in some way still seems like home, though I haven’t lived there for years. I attended Shady Side Academy, graduating in 1966, and enrolled from there in Duke University, where I studied with Reynolds Price and Wallace Fowlie, earning a BA and eventually an MAT. My first job was as an English teacher at Forsyth Country Day School in Winston-Salem. I moved back to Durham in 1976, and have lived here ever since, except for a two-year stay in Cambridge while my wife was in graduate school.
I was eleven years old when I first saw that there was something about language that fascinated me, fifteen when I decided—God help me—that I wanted to be a writer. Though I have worked in libraries and taught at various schools and in different capacities, writing has been my true vocation. I have sometimes thought of it as the work I do, other times as a pastime, but it has always been the activity I most enjoy. In the decade beginning when I was 32, I published four novels, Football Dreams (1980), The Man Who Loved Dirty Books (1983), Second Brother (1985), and The Autobiography of My Body (1990). I also published articles in various publications during those years, and was active as a book reviewer.
In 1991, when my wife dragged me to a class at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, I discovered the spiritual practice that became central to my life, and grew interested in Buddhism. I think of myself as a “householder yogin” (in the words of Reginald Ray, quoting Chogyam Trungpa) and see “the sitting practice of meditation” as my “primary life commitment.” I have practiced in the Vipassana, Tibetan, and Zen traditions, but don’t consider those distinctions important. Since 1995 I have practiced with Josho Pat Phelan at the Chapel Hill Zen Center, with regular forays back to the Insight Meditation Society.
I worked with my first meditation teacher, Larry Rosenberg, on two books, Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation (1994) and Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive (2001). I wrote for various Buddhist publications during those years, and published The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex (1999).
In 2001 I began working at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, teaching in both the MPP and Hart Leadership Programs. I retired in 2014, though I still work part-time for Hart Leadership. Working at Duke freed me to get back to narrative writing, and in 2007 I published Jake Fades: A Novel of Impermanence. I currently live part of the year in Durham and part in Asheville, and spend my time writing, reading, sitting, swimming at various pools, taking long walks, and getting together with friends.
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Jake Fades: A Novel of Impermanence
3.82 avg rating — 128 ratings
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2007
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Autobiography of my Body
3.44 avg rating — 62 ratings
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published
1991
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8 editions
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The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex
3.70 avg rating — 37 ratings
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published
1999
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2 editions
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Football Dreams
3.93 avg rating — 15 ratings
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published
1980
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6 editions
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The Man Who Loved Dirty Books
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1983
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Autopilot Profit Formula: The Complete Step By Step System To Automated Income
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David Guy said:
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I’ve heard the name Jundo Cohen in Zen circles for years, and associated him with his teacher, Gudo Nishijima. Some time ago, I read a book that the two of them co-authored, A Heart to Heart Talk with Zen Master Gudo. Nishijima is a unique teacher, a
I’ve heard the name Jundo Cohen in Zen circles for years, and associated him with his teacher, Gudo Nishijima. Some time ago, I read a book that the two of them co-authored, A Heart to Heart Talk with Zen Master Gudo. Nishijima is a unique teacher, and I agree with some things he says, other things not so much. I knew that Cohen had an online presence with Treeleaf Zendo, intended as a place for people to practice who don’t have access to a nearby Zen Center. But I hadn’t read his writing.He caught my attention with, of all things, a post on Facebook, in which he answered a student’s questions about sex and Zen practice.[1] His response, I thought, was lighthearted, funny, and just about perfect; I didn’t disagree with a thing he said. So many Zen teachers get uptight and moralistic when this subject comes up and begin lecturing from on high with no reference to lives as they’re actually lived. Cohen seemed relaxed and down to earth.
I began nosing around on the internet and found various articles he’s written, including a whole slew on the Tricycle website.[2] Like Nishijima (and Nishijima’s teacher Kodo Sawaki), Cohen is an unabashed proponent of shikantaza, the zen of just sitting. When Dogen came back from China and wrote Bendowa and Fukanzazengi, he stated that zazen was a universal practice, suitable for everyone. His life and the political situation later made him a proponent of monastic practice, but I think he got it right the first time. If laypeople can spend twenty minutes a day chanting the Nembutusu or Myo ho ren ge kyo, they could just as easily sit zazen. It doesn’t require a monastery. It just requires a butt and a place to put it.
Cohen has the same attitude. Though he himself is a priest, the clergy in his lineage don’t make much of all the priest craft, or of the distinction between the priests and others. Sawaki and Uchiyama—teachers of the lineage Nishijima was in—faced the wall for zazen, and their services didn’t include bowing and chanting. They devoted themselves to zazen, where everyone is equal.
As a man who has lived in Japan for many years and works as a Japanese translator, Cohen is not afraid to take on Dogen. He actually makes sense of him. He believes Dogen wrote about Zen the way (hold on to your hats) John Coltrane played the saxophone, that a lot of the time he was doing variations on a theme and not worried about making rational sense. (It’s a good thing, because rational sense he did not make. And pardon me, but I’d rather listen to Coltrane than read Dogen.)
You can see Cohen’s down-to-earth attitude when he speaks of the Buddha’s enlightenment, which most writers make into a mysterious event:
“Long ago, Sakyamuni Buddha tried all kinds of practices and all manner of intense meditations in order to find true peace and wholeness in his heart. He tried deep meditations leading to radically altered states of consciousness. He pursued philosophical and intellectual understanding. He even starved himself, trying to punish his body in order to find freedom. But then one day, after all those many years of effort, the Buddha-to-be sat cross-legged under a tree. He saw the simplicity and completeness of the morning star rising naturally on the distant horizon and gave up all fighting, striving, and resistance. He realized that the star, the world, and himself [sic][3] were just what they were, whole and complete. In that moment, he was freed of the need to fight or to run toward his desires and away from his aversions. He put aside all judgments and accepted the world on its own terms. In doing so, the hard borders and feelings of separation and alienation between him and all his life softened and dropped away. Thus he experienced an abiding wholeness and peace. He remained in this world with all its divisions, complications and troubles, yet also saw through them into wholeness.”
The Dogen fascicles that Cohen translates and comments on in this book are the classic ones, the heart of Dogen’s writing: Fukan Zazengi, Genjo Koan, Zanmai-O-Zanmai, Ikka Myoju (One Bright Pearl), Uji, and Shoji and Zenki. I personally like the first two and the last two, places where Dogen speaks most practically; I inevitably get lost in a piece like Uji, where Dogen presents his view of time and eternity. I’m more interested in the practice than in the discoveries it leads to.
Essentially, Cohen sees the Buddhist path (in the metaphor of the large book, he calls it How to Dance) as twofold:
“The first step is no step, sitting upright and very still. This is zazen, seated Zen, in which we assume a balanced and stable posture, breathe deeply and naturally, and just sit. . . . we let go of tangled thoughts and judgments as best we can. . . . We sit in equanimity, beyond judging good or bad, with a sense that this sitting is the one and only act that needs to be done in this moment.
“Master Dogen’s next lesson is the sacredness of all things and activities. Getting up from the sitting cushion, we return to a life of goals and tasks . . . Master Dogen said we should not separate life and practice, but instead see everything and all moments as sacred practice.”
That, to me, is a simple and effective prescription for how to live one’s life. It isn’t just for medieval Japan, where you poured the water back into he stream after using it and made sure you had enough mud balls before you went to the outhouse. It works just as well right now, when we pour water down the drain and make sure we have toilet paper.
As for Being-Time, that devilishly difficult piece about which whole books have been written (I’ve read one), it comes down to holding two things in the mind at once: seeing each moment as entirely itself, not to be compared with any other (when you are, for instance, and arthritic and sometimes befuddled 76-year-old, don’t compare it to the good old days when you were supposedly happier—you weren’t—but completely accept being 76 and arthritic and befuddled, because that’s the moment you’re in); and realizing, at that same time, that each moment of your life includes every other moment, not only of your own life, but of all human history (people speak of my past lives, but in what way, exactly, is it yours. Your present life isn’t even yours).
Cohen actually takes on Dogen’s more annoying statements, like when he says that not only does time flow from the past to the future, it also flows from the future to the past (when I read that I wanted to say, C’mon, man. Be real). But as Cohen points out, what about a situation where you thought one thing happened, and years later you discover that you had the facts wrong and something completely different happened? The person you thought you were dealing with wasn’t that person at all. Isn’t that the future flowing into the past?
Makes sense to me. Dogen actually makes sense. Can this be?
Jundo Cohen thinks so.
[1] You can see this post here https://www.facebook.com/jundo.cohen by scrolling down to February 15th.
[2] https://tricycle.org/author/jundocohen/
[3] That word should be “he,” but I’ll allow Cohen one grammatical slip. He generally writes well.
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Rachel Kushner is a writer who is so riveting line by line that you forget to step back and ask yourself what you’ve been reading. Then your wife asks and you say, it’s about an art student in New York named Reno (named for the city she’s from). She
Rachel Kushner is a writer who is so riveting line by line that you forget to step back and ask yourself what you’ve been reading. Then your wife asks and you say, it’s about an art student in New York named Reno (named for the city she’s from). She arrives utterly alone and has trouble getting by (it’s the mid-seventies, when New York was more dangerous than it is now), meeting people and finding places to live, but eventually hooks up with an older artist named Sandro Valera, who takes care of her. He’s wealthy because his family owns a motorcycle manufacturing company in Italy (chapters in the present alternate with chapters from the past which show how the business came about, through Sandro’s father), and that’s a lucky coincidence, because not only does Reno love motorcycles and the sheer fact of speed, she wants to go to the salt flats of Utah and try to set a speed record there, then photograph her tracks as an art project. The straight line that her tires will make. Not sure how interesting an art work that will make, but hell, it was the seventies and people were doing a lot of weird things. We see her begin this quest, but she has a horrific crash (quite early in the novel). I, at least, was afraid there wasn’t much left of our protagonist. Crashing a motorcycle at close to 200 miles an hour? But she only sustains a leg injury, and subsequently sets a woman’s speed record for driving in a car, something around 300 mph I believe, though the car itself was designed for a male racer and capable of much more (?). Eventually she makes it back to the city, and Sandro has her crashed cycle put back together so she can make her way around town. Money seems to be no object for the man. It’s only when you’re telling all this to your wife that you realize how wildly unlikely it sounds. When you’re reading it doesn’t seem that way at all. This power couple continues to function in the New York art world, interacting with various patrons and other artists. Sandro is the black sheep of his family because he has abandoned the business to go off and be an artist, and he doesn’t share their conservative politics. We don’t notice—at least I didn’t notice—that there are any number of women in New York who seem friendly with Sandro and seem to know him well. Someone other than Reno might have been suspicious. Eventually Sandro has to return to Italy for a Board meeting, and Reno decides to go along. That was maybe her first mistake, but it was also a path to self-knowledge. Or at least knowledge about Sandro. There was a lot of labor unrest in Italy at the time. In fact, there was about to be a nationwide strike. But the Valera family is oblivious to that, or at least contemptuous of it; they feel they’re protected and don’t give a damn. Sandro’s mother—to whom he feels some loyalty, because his father is dead—is condescending and venomous to Reno, not even a good hostess. Reno endures a number of days with this woman, and the time crawls by. Soon a female cousin shows up, and though she isn’t all that attractive, she is sexy and provocative, and has known Sandro since they were young. The whole family goes to the board meeting and Reno stays back, which seemed like a good move at the time, then she changes her mind and gets a chauffeur to take her to Rome, where the meeting is happening. There, by chance, she sees something she shouldn’t have, and is so disgusted, and furious, that she goes with the chauffeur back to his place, where he is a major part of the labor unrest. It’s dangerous, potentially violent stuff. But those folks are more Reno’s people than the Valera family. If all this happened in chronological time, it might not have worked, but Kushner stages the episodes in such a way that we only discover the background details eventually, finding out that Sandro wasn’t the faithful person Reno had thought he was. By that time she’s back in New York, doing everything she can to inhabit the art world while avoiding Sandro. But as we eventually realize, the real suspense of the novel has to do with something that happened with the chauffeur, a man named Gianni, when Reno went off with him. And the ending of that part of the plot is a desolate one indeed. It makes things that happened in New York look trivial. I don’t know if this sounds like something you want to read, but believe me, it is. Line by line it’s a page turner, however unlikely it all sounds. And in an afterward, Kushner lets us know that her initial impulse was to write a novel about the year 1977, one I remember well[1]. I must say, though, I was oblivious to a lot that was happening in my country and around the world, if this novel is any indication. So who are The Flamethrowers, since we’re on that subject? They were men who, during World War I, could visit death on the enemy in a unique way, by shooting flames at him from a tank they carried on their backs. On the one hand, they were lethal. On the other hand, they were sitting ducks for marksmen with rifles, so they could do a lot of damage if they could get in position, but often they couldn’t. They were the favorite World War I fighters of Sandro’s father, who had a collection of toy soldiers made out of paper. But his older brother, as older brothers will, made fun of his preoccupations, doused the paper soldiers with gasoline, and lit them on fire. The flamethrowers went up in flames. Why did Kusher choose that title for her novel? I’m still trying to figure that out. [1] I had just decided to leave a teaching job that I’d had for six years in order to give myself more time to write. My first novel had not been published, but I was persevering. That second one would be published three years later as Football Dreams. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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The French Lieutenant’s Woman was one of the favorite novels of my friend Levi, who had read it multiple times. In fact, I believe he gave me the copy I have, for my birthday or for Christmas; like most book lovers, he gave his favorite books. I’m al
The French Lieutenant’s Woman was one of the favorite novels of my friend Levi, who had read it multiple times. In fact, I believe he gave me the copy I have, for my birthday or for Christmas; like most book lovers, he gave his favorite books. I’m always four or five books behind on my to-read list, which keeps expanding, and it somehow never included this novel, which has sat on my shelf at least since Levi’s death in 2017. I’ve now finally read it. I should have started it the day he gave it to me. It’s a great book. It is essentially a 19th century novel written by an author with a 20th century sensibility. Weirdly, and disconcertingly, that author sometimes steps into the story and comments on it. He even once sits on the train in which the protagonist is traveling, the way Hitchcock appeared in his own movies. I would say also that the novel is about a 20th century woman—one of the most intriguing women in English literature—trapped in a 19th century world, and situation. Most of the people around her, with their quaint Victorian prejudices, seem mildly nuts. She seems the sane one. The story is simple. Sarah Woodruff, while living in Lyme Regis, Dorset, is seduced and abandoned by a man who had been shipwrecked there, the French Lieutenant of the title. He told her that, after returning to France, he would come back to get her, but he never did, and she later found out he was married and never intended to return. It’s the old sad story, of an unprincipled man and a common woman who has no recourse once she has been used in that way. As the novel opens, she haunts the seacoast and stares out to sea, as if expecting his return any minute. At least that’s the story the townspeople tell each other. She is discovered there by a man named Charles Smithson, who is in a carriage with his fiancé, a young woman named Ernestina Freeman who has heard the story the townspeople tell. Charles is worried that Sarah is in peril and goes to help her; she rebuffs him with a gaze that goes right through him, and tells him she doesn’t need his, or anyone else’s help. That stands in contrast to most young woman in Victorian England. He is intrigued. Charles is a landowner and aristocrat who has not exactly fallen on hard times, but who has limited capital. Ernestina is the daughter of an extremely successful merchant, and will bring a large dowry and eventually inherit all that her father has. In that sense Charles is marrying beneath himself, perhaps with an eye on his bank account. But he genuinely loves Ernestina, and after having spent his early adulthood traveling all over the continent and having various adventures, he’s ready to settle down. But he can’t get Sarah out of his mind. He also can’t get her out of his life, because on his various expeditions around the countryside—he has a strong interest in archaeology—he keeps running into her, and her intensely mournful countenance. Eventually he consults a local physician, Dr. Grogan, about the matter, and he says Sarah is suffering from melancholia. He believes it might help to tell her story to a sympathetic listener. Sarah has suggested as much to Charles, and sympathetic listeners aren’t readily available, in Dorset or anywhere else. The doctor does begin to suspect that Charles’ interest in the woman isn’t just therapeutic and warns him to be cautious for that reason. Charles ignores that part of his advice. The reader has long since realized, maybe even since that first chapter, that Sarah is the woman for him. The way all these things come about involves a complicated and suspenseful plot that has us on the edge of our seat at the same time that we want to read slowly because of the beauty and power of the prose. One stunning moment comes when—in contrast to what the townspeople believe—Sarah says that the French Lieutenant didn’t take advantage of her. “I gave myself to him.” She also seems amused by a romance that is going on between Charles’ servant Sam and a woman who waits on Ernestina. She seems to approve, in a society that says she should frown on it. This reads like a truly great Victorian novel—with the occasional unsettling intrusion of our 20th century narrator—and winds up in a place that suddenly does seem modern. It’s not a happy ending, but our characters have made a huge leap in self-awareness. Sarah still stands as an enigma but also as her own woman, who will live the way she wants to. It seems at times to be a novel about Charles. But in the end it’s Sarah who stays with us. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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I am constantly amazed by Anthony Burgess. Using the evidence of the surviving poetry, especially the sonnets, and what is known about the chronology of the plays, Burgess has spun an utterly credible narrative of Shakespeare’s early life. More astou
I am constantly amazed by Anthony Burgess. Using the evidence of the surviving poetry, especially the sonnets, and what is known about the chronology of the plays, Burgess has spun an utterly credible narrative of Shakespeare’s early life. More astounding to me is the way he recreates the atmosphere of England in the sixteenth century; the story teems with detail. And then there’s the language. The man who did studies of both Shakespeare and Joyce really cut loose with the words in this novel; I guess he figured that if they could do it, he could do it. The result is an intoxicating mix of rich language, historical detail, and small bits about the poems and plays. It’s not a quick or easy read. But it’s worth the effort we put into it. Take the opening of the fourth chapter: “It was this sonnet, then, copied in a good hand with no blot, that nestled snug in his breast that warm evening of May as, with S. Brailes, Ned Thorpe and Dick Quiney, he walked or slued (a skinful of ale to enthrone boldness) westward to Shottery. These were good brown laughing fellows who knew little of bookish learning or of poesy either, but they dearly loved a jest, especially if it entailed sore hurt for others, as for example, skull-cracking, jibing, making skip the rheumy ancientry, thieving, wenching and the like.” They almost sound like the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, in Elizabethan England. When I took a class in linguistics in grad school, our professor told us that Joyce had the third largest vocabulary of any writer in English, Milton the second, and Shakespeare the first.[1] I honestly wonder where Burgess would rank. You could say he’s not at the same level as those writers in terms of talent, and I wouldn’t dispute that. But for sheer variety of style, he ranks with almost anyone. A number of his early novels (like One Hand Clapping) employ utterly simple diction. But this book, along with A Clockwork Orange, explodes. The novel is divided into two parts, the first covering late adolescence and early adulthood, until 1587, the second from 1592-99, by which time Shakespeare had written a number of famous plays but not his greatest tragedies, which scholars date after 1600. The young Shakespeare that Burgess portrays is not an aspiring writer, especially. He does feel constrained by provincial life in Stratford, longing for something larger, and has an overwhelming wish to be a gentleman. His father is a glover, but his mother came originally from a prominent family. Shakespeare works for his father for a time, learning the trade, but also making connections. It is while he apprentices with another man that he first encounters a prostitute named Fatimah, who will become the Dark Lady of the sonnets, but he can’t get involved with her then, as much as he wanted to; he doesn’t have the money. Young WS—as Burgess refers to him—does have an eye for the ladies, and isn’t terribly particular. One early affair was with an older woman named Anne Hathaway, the most experienced and ardent lover he’d come across. Unfortunately, he gets her pregnant—an occupational hazard for a young rake—and her family forces him to marry her. I thought she was a catch at the time, level-headed and more experienced, very much in love with the young man. She moves in with his family in Stratford—his father, mother, and two brothers—and somehow there is a strain from the start. I honestly didn’t understand what the problem was. I think it was more provincial life than Anne herself who bothered him. He longed to get away. He begins composing verse in a desultory way, sonnets and also longer narrative poems (it’s hard to see Venus and Adonis as a casual pastime). One way for a young man to get ahead was to find a royal patron, and he discovers that Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, has a love for language and verse similar to his. The man is wildly enthusiastic, happy to become Shakespeare’s patron, and eventually the men become lovers. Wriothesley is good-looking, slightly feminine, and quite sensual. Soon WS was consorting with theater people and beginning to compose plays, which enabled him to live in London and support the family back in Stratford. Burgess by that time is in full-bore speculative mode, finding ways for the known plays of that time to correspond with moments in WS’s life, also his various interests. Eventually Fatimah comes back into his life—she is seen as a rare beauty among the aristocrats—and Wriothesley grows interested in her too. WS contracts syphilis from the woman—another hazard of the day—and Burgess seems to suggest that the mental changes the illness brings about account for the more imaginative later plays. I don’t know if I buy that, but Burgess details the progress of the disease in painful detail. My writing mentor, Reynolds Price, once told us in class that Tolstoy knew as he was writing his great novels that he was one of the great writers in world history. Milton knew. Wordsworth knew. I wondered about that. The William Shakespeare that Burgess portrays has no idea if his early narrative poems have any worth at all; he isn’t sure if his dedication to Wriothesley might be presumptuous. And the older Shakespeare just works assiduously, trying to make a living, with no particular understanding that Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV Part I are among the finest things ever penned in English. There’s also the question of where it all came from. How did this son of a glover, who never attended university, have such a gift of language and knowledge of humanity? Of that, I’m afraid, Burgess doesn’t have clue. But how could he? It’s inexplicable. Just as inexplicable as his own vast talent. [1] Modern estimates dispute that. They put Joyce first and Shakespeare second. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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Dec 15, 2025 08:21AM
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The basic premise of this book is that Albert Einstein’s life’s work stemmed from an essentially religious feeling of awe and wonder at the workings of the universe. Kiernan Fox cites an early moment when one of Einstein’s uncles gave him a compass w
The basic premise of this book is that Albert Einstein’s life’s work stemmed from an essentially religious feeling of awe and wonder at the workings of the universe. Kiernan Fox cites an early moment when one of Einstein’s uncles gave him a compass when he was five, and the young man was amazed that, no matter where he went, the needle always pointed to North. He wanted to understand the force behind a fact like that. Another intriguing fact is that Einstein’s most famous discovery, didn’t originate in a process of thinking, but in another use of the mind altogether. “It is not easy to talk about how I reached the idea of the theory of relativity,” he said. “There were so many hidden complexities to motivate my thought.” He also said, “I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me that my talent for absorbing absolute knowledge.” He referred to his process as “thought experiments,” and Fox tells us that his “best-known vision occurred at just sixteen years old, when he imagined himself traveling through the vacuum of space at the same speed as light itself. He soon forged this thought experiment into a formal theory that revolutionized physics: special relativity.” People spoke about such understanding in religious terms. Even a famous atheist like Bertrand Russell said that, “For all who were inspired by Pythagoras,” mathematics “retained an element of ecstatic revelation.” It seemed to resemble an enlightenment experience, and Einstein spoke of it just that way. “He who finds a thought that lets us penetrate even a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted a great grace.” I had the vague notion in my head that Einstein spent most of his time pondering physics. I got that idea from an anecdote I once read. A friend who was supposed to meet him for lunch somewhere got held up and arrived late. He apologized for keeping Einstein from his work. Einstein said something to the effect of, “I can work here as well as anywhere.” He didn’t need particular surroundings. He was always “working,” by which he meant, I assume, contemplating the universe. Actually, he was a prolific reader, and when he died had a library of 2400 books. Kiernan Fox had access to these books, and pored through them to see what interested the man. One part of his collection centered on Eastern philosophy, including works on Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. He found much of what he read to be in agreement with his view of things, which was that the universe was powered by what he thought of as an “arch-force,” not a personal God but an overwhelming source of creation and destruction. Einstein also traveled all over the world meeting religious figures of all kinds, including Buddhists in Japan and, in India, Rabindranath Tagore, who had several long conversations with him. He was intrigued by the vision of reality of these people but was never persuaded to undertake their kind of spiritual practice. He encountered the vastness of the universe through his work. One name that keeps recurring in this book is Pythagoras, about whom not much is known but who has also acquired a variety of legends around him. He too seemed to believe that the universe could best be explained mathematically and saw its harmony in mathematical terms. He felt that music also expressed the essential harmony of things (Einstein was an amateur musician, and thought that if he hadn’t been a scientist, he might have devoted himself to music), and he did apparently engage in various spiritual practices, perhaps something resembling Buddhist meditation (he lived at roughly the time of the Buddha). Subsequent thinkers had a similar bent. Einstein also had a strong interest in Spinoza, and said on various occasion, when asked if he believe in God, that he believed in the God of Spinoza. Like Pythagoras, Spinoza’s way of explaining things verged on being mathematical, or at least technical, and Einstein seemed to have read his work thoroughly. Another thinker in the same vein was Schopenhauer, who was similarly influenced by Eastern thought and by Spinoza’s view of things. Einstein and the physicists who followed him—especially Wolfgang Pauli—seemed to believe that the universe could somehow be “known” scientifically, that it would be possible to extend human knowledge in such a way that it could take everything in. That seems to me to be the major difference with Eastern thought, at least the Buddhism I’m familiar with, which suggests that you can experience reality but not know it: you can’t see it, but you can be it. In fact, Don’t Know Mind, or Beginner’s Mind, is seen as a possible virtue. The scientific approach is another way altogether. The question is: is it really possible to “know,” that is to understand, the workings of the universe? Einstein toward the end of his life seemed to be having doubts. I think that he saw the theoretical possibility while not really believing in the reality. Though some of his discoveries led to the branch of physics known as Quantum Mechanics (this part of the discussion left me in the dust), he ultimately thought the Quantum physicists were on the wrong track and would have to abandon that perspective to achieve real progress. They thought he was just a (brilliant) old guy who was out of touch. In a way it seems like the way Buddhists talk about “perfect and complete enlightenment” (a phrase which people threw around at the Insight Meditation Society). Is there really such a thing? I used to think. If the universe is infinite, do you really ever get to the end of it?[1] There are those who say that, in some other realm, the Buddha is still practicing. It seems that scientists will be practicing their method forever as well. Both approaches seem equally religious to me. [1] And if it’s infinite, how do you ever know where you are in terms of enlightenment? If there’s no end, there’s no other marker. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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Dec 15, 2025 08:19AM
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In the early seventies, there were three movies that took violence in cinema to a whole new level: The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange. My wife and I saw Straw Dogs, which portrayed Dustin Hoffman as a confirmed pacifist who was dealin
In the early seventies, there were three movies that took violence in cinema to a whole new level: The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange. My wife and I saw Straw Dogs, which portrayed Dustin Hoffman as a confirmed pacifist who was dealing with a home invasion and discovered he had an inner warrior after all. That movie was so extreme, and such an assault on the senses, that we weren’t tempted by the other two. A Clockwork Orange, in particular, had a reputation for shocking and gratuitous violence. I skipped the movie, and though I soon became a Burgess fan (his short early novels were perfect for a new teacher who didn’t have a lot of reading time), I didn’t read this most famous of his novels because of the violence, also because I read somewhere that the thugs in this novel had a secret language all their own, and that the book was slow going. Burgess was, among other things, a startlingly inventive linguist. I would have to say that A Clockwork Orange is a linguistic marvel, a book in which you often don’t know what the words mean, but the syntax lets you know what’s going on. Burgess relates in his second memoir, I Had the Time, that he had begun to study Russian for a trip he and his wife were making, and that language inspired him in inventing the language for this gang of thugs, who call themselves droogsb. The interesting thing is that the language, because it’s all a little vague, has the effect of cushioning the violence; you don’t quite know what it’s saying, or it at least takes you a while to figure it out, so it isn’t as vivid as plain English would be. Almost any paragraph serves as an example. “So we scatted out into the big winter nochy and walked down Marghanita Boulevard and then turned into Boothby Avenue, and there we found what we were pretty well looking for, a malenky jest to start off the evening with. There was a doddery starry schoolmaster type veck, glasses on and his rot open to the cold nochy air. . . . He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us like that . . .” I would have to say, though I was young once, and though I knew a few rough characters, at least by reputation, I don’t get the motivation of these young men, especially in the first two chapters. They seem just to be destroying things for the sake of destruction, beating people nearly to death not for any good reason—not to steal money for instance, though they do that—but just for the sake of doing it. And though I understand the anger of young adolescents—I was angry myself, for various specific reasons—I don’t get this. The first night I read the novel—just two chapters, as I remember—it was total mayhem, and as much as I admired the writing, I wasn’t sure I could continue. I had to read something else for a while before I went to bed. But by the third chapter, our protagonist and narrator, Alex, had gone back home, where he led a half-normal life (though his parents often wondered what he was up to) and even spoke the King’s English, which he could do. And not too much further on, he and his buddies did a home invasion—they seemed to be trying to up the ante—and went a little further than they’d intended. The old lady who lived in the house died, and Alex, the only droog left behind, was charged with the killing. The story then takes up the criminal justice and prison system, which seem about as bad and perilous as they are everywhere. Alex manages to hold things together in prison for a couple of years, but he finally gets the opportunity to get out if he will undergo a special kind of conversion therapy. Without especially knowing what that is, he agrees. And that leads us to the novel’s moral heart. I thought they were going to give him a lobotomy, but the book is classified as science fiction, and a doctor has invented a new form of therapy in which he injects the patient with some unknown substance, then forces him to watch scenes of violence, very much like those Alex has been committing. He can’t look away; he’s strapped into a chair, and his eyelids are forced open (?). He undergoes this therapy day after day, for many hours a day, while the doctors test his reaction. In time he is released, and we see how the therapy has worked. The moral question—and it’s a good one—is whether the state has the right to so alter a human’s psyche that he, in effect, no longer has free will. He can’t be violent because it’s too painful. That means he can’t fight back when he’s attacked. It also seems that he feels pain at strong emotions of any kind. Alex becomes a test case, with the two sides arguing the case, and winds up becoming a political football. He also runs into some of the former droogs, who are now involved in, you guessed it, law enforcement. They haven’t really changed; they’re just on the other side of the law. The British version of this novel—as Burgess explains in a forward to this later edition—had 21 chapters, the American just twenty. That 21st chapter, which Burgess considered vital to the story, takes Alex into an adulthood in which he has settled into his new self. That’s the ending that Burgess intended, but the Americans apparently preferred to leave things ambivalent. I agree that the twenty-first chapter is vital. And though Burgess wrote the book in that first year of breathless writing, after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, it is among his best. The man had a stupendous verbal gift. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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Dec 15, 2025 08:16AM
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Though I almost didn’t read it—I’d been disappointed by In My Father’s House, which I found oddly inert—A Gathering Of Old Men might be Ernest J. Gaines’ best novel. It is certainly the most suspenseful; I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, c
Though I almost didn’t read it—I’d been disappointed by In My Father’s House, which I found oddly inert—A Gathering Of Old Men might be Ernest J. Gaines’ best novel. It is certainly the most suspenseful; I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, concerned about what would happen but also blazing with rage at the blatant racism on page after page. It was in this book that I fully understood the section of Louisiana that Gaines hailed from, and how complicated the situation is. It’s a land of sugarcane fields, which stretch around for miles. At one time they were plantations, but now they have been divided into farms, sharecropped by various people and owned by a few wealthy families. Supervising the blacks who do the work are a clan of Cajun men, and while the whole system is blatantly racist, they are most obviously so. They also have a chip on their collective shoulder because they believe that the wealthy families look down on them, which they do. It’s that familiar mix of landed families, poor whites, and blacks, with the poor whites particularly clannish. As the novel opens, a Cajun sharecropper named Beau Boutan has been shot, apparently by an older black man named Mathu. There was bad blood between the two men, who had staged a legendary fist fight some years before, observed by many. The daughter of one of the landed families, Candy Marshall, concocts a plan to round up a passel of older black men and have them all sit in the front yard with twelve-gauge shotguns and one spent number five shell, as if it has just been fired. They, along with Candy, will all swear they committed the murder, and for the same reason: Boutan was beating a black man named Charlie who worked for him. When Charlie retreated to Mathu’s shack and Boutan came after him with a shotgun, Mathu shot him, or so it seems. But all these people will insist that they committed the crime, and that will leave the local sheriff, a man named Mapes, in a fix. The real danger in this situation, which we don’t understand at first, is Cajun vigilantes, whose ringleader, a man named Fix, is Boutan’s father. He has been the unofficial lawmaker in the area, judge, jury, and executioner, and the situation is a set-up for him to ride again. So another reason for all these men to be sitting there with rifles is to confront him, and whoever he brings with him. Candy was thinking fast when she concocted this strategy. As a vehicle for telling a story, it’s brilliant. The fact of the matter is that everyone in this group had a reason for killing Boutan, even Candy. If it wasn’t for something he personally did, it was for something his people did, some act of violent racism from years ago. Everyone has not one reason, but a whole list. And when the Sheriff finally arrives, though he’s highly skeptical and believes he knows who committed the crime, he lets these men—finally—tell their stories. They form a massive saga of racism and injustice, men swallowing their pride and stifling their rage. Suddenly they’re not doing that anymore. A complicating factor is that Beau Boutan’s brother Gil is a fullback for LSU, who is playing Ole Miss the next day in the most important game of the season.[1] He’s Cajun, but he’s moved into a larger world where he understands that vigilantes—like his own father—are a thing of the past, and where his sidekick in the backfield is a black man (the fans call them Salt and Pepper. Racism hasn’t quite been eradicated in this larger world). He comes back to see his family in their grief and anger, and the tension in that scene, the deep feeling, is palpable. We don’t believe the Cajuns should take the law into their own hands. But we understand why they feel beleaguered and misunderstood. The real loose cannons in that scene are a collection of men led by a guy named Luke Will, who are not part of the family but who would be part of whatever posse the group forms, and who are really just looking for trouble. They don’t want to wait and decide. They want to do something now. There’s a scene in a small local bar where these men go for a drink, in the same place as Candy’s Uncle, Jack Marshall, and an unnamed college professor who seems to be drinking too much but who does believe in the rule of law (and who undoubtedly thinks the Cajuns are ignorant vermin). It was in that scene that I really saw the drama playing out. And the black men weren’t even there. I won’t say any more except that there is a surprise ending—it was certainly a surprise to me—and that Gaines doesn’t in any way skirt the conflict. He lets it play out, shotguns and all. I’ve read three of his other books, but it was with this one that I finally understood his little corner of Louisiana, and the way this age-old story played out there (as it is playing out in this country right now). Gaines has a large cast of characters, but he manages them well. Every person is an individual, and we see a wide range of viewpoints. It’s not a pretty sight. [1] As I post this, weirdly enough, LSU is scheduled to play Ole Miss tomorrow. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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Dec 15, 2025 08:13AM
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Anthony Burgess is one of my great literary heroes. Born in 1917—the same year as my father—he was a middle-aged itinerant teacher[1] who had done some writing on the side (he’d actually published four novels; only for Burgess would that be considere
Anthony Burgess is one of my great literary heroes. Born in 1917—the same year as my father—he was a middle-aged itinerant teacher[1] who had done some writing on the side (he’d actually published four novels; only for Burgess would that be considered a sideline) when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and given a year to live. Married to an alcoholic and rather hopeless woman (so the story goes; I suspect other motives[2]), he decided to crank his literary career into overdrive in the hope of providing for her. In that year he wrote five and a half novels, including his most famous title (because it was made into a movie) A Clockwork Orange, only to discover that the doctor had made a false diagnosis. Within a few years, in fact, it was his wife who died. But he went on to a long and active career as a writer and musician, producing a huge variety of work, and died at age 76, still furiously working. It is tempting to look back on a career like that and ask, What is his great, indispensable work? A few months back, in fact, someone did ask a question like that, on Facebook (what is your favorite Burgess novel, aside from A Clockwork Orange? Weirdly for a Burgess fan, I’ve never read that book), and it was tempting to answer with his largest work, Earthly Powers, a huge novel about a Somerset Maugham-esque novelist; I read that book when it came out and enjoyed it immensely. It occurred to me eventually that my favorite work was actually a series, the Enderby novels, about a hapless poet who suffers from severe intestinal distress; there are four in all (though the fourth was a late entry). But with Burgess, the great thing is the whole life’s work, and unlike other prolific people like Simenon and Wodehouse, the books are not all the same; they’re actually wildly different from one another, even those first five (and a half). A number of his books are experiments in language, as A Clockwork Orange apparently was, and he was an obsessive linguist, obsessed in particular with James Joyce. I read recently that at the end of his life he had been hoping to translate Finnegan’s Wake into Italian, just for the fun of it (not my idea of a good time). But he was just such a Mind, with so many interests (including composing music). It seems petty to separate out one thing and say that is the best. Burgess was a particular inspiration to me because, when I was 53 and had taken a job at Duke University because we needed for the money, I thought my writing career might be over; I’d always written in a deliberate plodding way (rapid drafts that I worked over endlessly). I had just read the second volume of his autobiography, in which he talked about his strategy during that fateful year: he would compose 1500-2000 words per day, and work them over as much as he wanted that day, but no longer; the next day he would produce that many again. That seemed impossible when I read about it. Then I thought, what if it’s that or nothing? Also: I’m 53 years old. If I haven’t learned to write a sentence at this point, I might as well quit. Using that method, I was able to compose a shortish book during the course of a summer, and subsequently wrote three novels, followed by a memoir, then another novel. (Only two of the novels have been published, but that’s not my fault.) And now, a year older than Burgess ever got to be, I’m writing about books and movies with the same kind of enthusiasm he brought to it, to his dying day, apparently (he kept asking magazines for assignments). It’s never seemed like work to me. It’s a great way to live. I reviewed The Pianoplayers for USA Today in 1986, the year it came out. I know that because the little card making the assignment is still paper-clipped to the back book jacket. 500 words, due on October 5th. I loved writing for that paper, because it taught me to shrink reviews to their essence (a talent that I have lost since, obviously). It taught me what book reviewing really was. There was another harrowing medical trauma in Burgess’ life, though perhaps not in his memory. In 1918, his whole family was infected by the flu epidemic. His mother and sister died (at one point he, at the age of one, was left alone in the house with the two corpses). His father fortunately did not die, but Burgess believed the man had some resentment of the fact that his son had lived, and not the others. Burgess was raised by an aunt for a while, before reuniting with his father once he had remarried. His father worked in a public house owned by the woman he married and played the piano at the place in the evening. Burgess in this novel goes back to that time, but makes piano playing the father’s only means to make money; he also, in the kind of shift that Burgess (and one of his favorite artists, Shakespeare) does rather casually, makes himself a girl. I suspect that, on the cusp of 70, Burgess wrote this novel in order to reconnect with that period of his life, not just the succession of crummy flats that he lived in, but also the food, which he details endlessly (it’s no wonder that Enderby, and Burgess himself, had intestinal difficulties), and the whole texture of life. Ellen’s father Billy, whose weaknesses are alcohol, bad food, and women, at first plays at silent movies, where he more or less invents the score as he goes along. He gets into various scrapes at work, moving from theater to theater, some far better than others. At one job he teaches his daughter to play, and on one occasion she subs for him (one gets the impression people weren’t there for the music). Eventually, of course, the talkies come along and he’s out of work altogether. Ellen in the meantime, all alone much of the time and trying to make her way as best she can, supplements their living by taking money for sex, with an older man whose wife has recently died. She understands what’s going on when he asks her back to his flat, but she’s curious, and she and her father could really use the money (she wants her own room in the boarding house, because she’s in her early teens). All this seems mildly unlikely as I write it, but not as I read it; the older man who hangs around the girls’ school isn’t all that unusual a figure, and his approach to Ellen wasn’t threatening. She knew she could handle him. And she wanted that room. The apotheosis of Billy’s music career comes when an entrepreneur persuades him to take on the task of a marathon concert, 30 straight days with only two two-hour breaks per day. Whether anyone ever did such a thing I have no idea (sounds like a dance marathon), and—spoiler alert—he doesn’t make it, but people come to pay admission especially as things get difficult for him; they like seeing the man suffer. He took the job because he didn’t have another prospect, also because he was hoping to acquire a nest egg so that he and his daughter could travel to America, where he thought he could sell a system he had invented for teaching children the violin (much like the Suzuki method that later became so successful). He doesn’t get there, but the list of songs he resorts to while he is playing is mammoth and hilarious. Eventually he composes his own opera, also other kinds of music; people who were there at the end said his music had become sublime. But he didn’t make thirty days. He didn’t get particularly close. After that we focus on Ellen’s career, which she mentioned as the novel opened; perhaps because of her early experiences, she becomes a common—actually a rather uncommon—prostitute. At first she works at a house in France that caters to those who want young women, then moves to a place that caters to all kinds of men. She doesn’t go into detail, but seems content with the work. Eventually she decides that men know nothing about making love to a woman—who needs to be played like a sensitive musical instrument, a piano in particular—and starts a School for Love, along with some other former hookers. She moves back to Great Britain for that, and of course it’s right on the edge of being illegal; it’s more like what we think of nowadays as sexual surrogates. That works out well for her, and for the men as well. By the end of the story she has retired to Provence and is living a life of leisure. I do wonder what I made of this novel 39 years ago, with the 500 words I had to devote to it. In the larger oeuvre of a man like Burgess, it’s a diversion, something to keep him writing (he could knock this off in a matter of weeks). It’s largely a feast of language, as all of his books are; the plot is secondary (and doesn’t bear terribly hard scrutiny). But the Burgess shelf is full of books like these, deftly written, highly imagined, with just a little corner of experience from his own life. It’s never a mistake to pick up a Burgess novel. His real name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson. His pen name was a good career move. [1] Many years later, he made his way to my current home state. Back in the nineties, I taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina for a couple of semesters, and a party around that time I mentioned I was doing that to a guy I’d just met. “I took that class,” he said. “I had Anthony Burgess for that class.” I asked how he was. “Great,” he said. “He was drunk, but he was great.” [2] I have a feeling that Burgess’ terminal diagnosis, however little credence he gave it, spurred his creativity and ignited his career. Available Now → www.davidguy.org ...more |
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A Lesson Before Dying a novel by Ernest J. Gaines. From Gaines: Four Novels. Library of America. pp. 585-800. ***** I could make various aesthetic quibbles about A Lesson Before Dying; some minor things drove me crazy as I read, and I wished I could h A Lesson Before Dying a novel by Ernest J. Gaines. From Gaines: Four Novels. Library of America. pp. 585-800. ***** I could make various aesthetic quibbles about A Lesson Before Dying; some minor things drove me crazy as I read, and I wished I could have edited the book (I imagine Gaines suffered from the problem other successful novelists had; he was over 60 and quite celebrated by the time he wrote this book, and editors found him intimidating). But the overall power of the novel, particularly in the final 50 pages, is overwhelming. It hit me with an emotional force that few novels have. I sat with the finale of this novel long after I finished it. The story is simple and all too typical. A young intellectually deficient black man named Jefferson is walking in the vicinity of a small town in Louisiana when a couple of guys named Brother and Bear offer him a ride. He takes it, though with some trepidation, and agrees to go have a drink with them, though he has no money. The three of them stop at the liquor store, where the proprietor knows Jefferson and his godmother, Miss Emma, but Brother and Bear don’t have enough money for a bottle, and he refuses them. The men start arguing, both sides have guns, and by the time the whole thing is over, three men are dead and Jefferson doesn’t know what happened. He just knows he’s scared and disoriented. He grabs a liquor bottle and takes a few hits to calm himself, then takes some money from the open cash register, because he never have enough. As he’s walking out, two white men come into the store. There he stands, holding a liquor bottle and some cash with all that carnage around him. He’s arrested and charged with the crime. The trial goes as one would expect with an all-white jury in Louisiana. In trying to defend him, the court-appointed lawyer used the only defense really available to him, mental deficiency. At one point he said, “I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.” Miss Emma, Jefferson’s only family, fixated on that word, as did he. The jury nevertheless found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death. He doesn’t name an execution date. That is to be determined by the local authorities. We hear all of this from the point of view of Grant Winslow, the one semi-successful black man in town. He emerged from the dreadful public school system and made it to college in California, where his parents had moved. He studied education, and has come back to teach, the sole teacher at a school that goes from first grade through high school, and operates for only five and a half months per year; the rest of the time the children are needed in the fields. Since he is the teacher, Jefferson’s godmother, Miss Emma, asks him to visit Jefferson and help him get ready to die, not as a hog, but as a man. Miss Emma is good friends with Winslow’s Tante Lou, with whom he lives. The pressure on him, by these two large and formidable black woman, is considerable. The brilliant thing that Gaines does in this novel is not to idealize Winslow. He seems to have taken this job because it is one he could get, not because he has some grand ideal of saving these children from poverty, and he’s not an especially good teacher or happy man. His happiest moments, in fact, are when he hangs out with his girlfriend Vivian—who teaches at the local Catholic school, is separated from her husband and raising two children—and drinks at a bar called the Rainbow Club in Bayonne. He doesn’t have any idea how to help Jefferson, or if he will be able to. And Jefferson himself is deeply embittered, to the point of wanting to see no one, not Winslow, not his godmother, not Reverend Ambrose, the local preacher. He feels—justifiably—oppressed and ignored. One night over some brandy at the Rainbow Club, Winslow explains to Vivian what his task actually is, in the most powerful single passage in the book up to then. “We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle—which he never does. . . . What [Miss Emma] wants is for him, Jefferson, and me to change everything that has been going on for three hundred years. She wants it to happen so in case she ever gets out of bed again, she can go to that little church in the quarter and say proudly, ‘You see, I told you—I told you he was a man.’ And if she dies an hour after that, all right.” I don’t think it spoils too much to say that Winslow—at least from the standpoint of the reader—accomplishes this task, though he was starting absolutely from scratch, with a bitter young man who is lying on the cot in his cell and won’t even turn to face him or speak to him. He does so in the face of overwhelming and infuriating racism—he has to practically beg the sheriff to let him visit the prisoner—and the pressure from his aunt and Miss Emma and Reverend Ambrose to make Jefferson into a believer, though Winslow is not one himself (he believes in God, but not in the fundamentalist faith that surrounds him). And though Gaines doesn’t show us the execution, he shows the effects of it on other people in the vicinity, even those who don’t know or care about Jefferson. The book is an indictment of capital punishment as much as it is of racial injustice. Gaines apparently based his novel on a real incident, but he made the story into something all his own. This is not an easy book to read, but it’s vital and powerful, Ernest J. Gaines at his best. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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Dec 15, 2025 08:07AM
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I’ve resisted the three political novels at the heart of Thomas Mallon’s recent work, Watergate, Finale, and Landfall, about three presidents whom I’ve always detested, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (the younger). Mallon and I are friends, though we haven’
I’ve resisted the three political novels at the heart of Thomas Mallon’s recent work, Watergate, Finale, and Landfall, about three presidents whom I’ve always detested, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (the younger). Mallon and I are friends, though we haven’t seen each other in years, but I was slightly puzzled that this caring, compassionate, gay man was a Republican, and I was afraid that, if he wrote in favor of these men, it would make me angry, and the books would be hard to read. He drew the line at Trump, withdrawing from the Republican party in 2016, and now he and I are on the same side of the vast political divide, though he might be closer to the precipice. I was struck, however, when I read his recent diaries, that he actually broke down and cried on the day of Nixon’s death, admitting that the man had often let him down. And of course, like any other sane human being, I’d much prefer Nixon—who may have been seriously paranoid but was intelligent—to what we have now. And I will admit that, through the years, I softened on the man a little, as he did the interview with David Frost, and went through various difficulties in his life (I agreed with Ford’s pardon). I would have preferred him to Reagan and Bush as well. And I did admire his détente with China (and his capacity for alcohol at the ceremonies). Despite the fact that I lived through Watergate, and followed it avidly, I know precious little about it. I never read any of the books. Once it was behind me, I was glad to get rid of it. And Mallon admits—in fact insists—that this is a fictionalized version of the situation, that even his historical figures are fictionalized. So I don’t know the truth of the matter, but according to Mallon, the central event that broke the case—the break-in at the Democratic National Committee—was the idea of G. Gordon Liddy, who was an old buddy of E. Howard Hunt and had done other covert operations for him. John Mitchell was aware of the plan, though I wasn’t sure that he authorized it. There’s no suggestion that Nixon knew about it originally, but he did play a part in the coverup, including funneling vast amounts of money to the co-conspirators (who faced vast legal fees in addition to living expenses). The person who insisted on these fees was Hunt’s wife Dorothy (who died tragically in an airplane accident while the whole thing was going on). The person largely in charge of arranging the funds was a rather non-political millionaire from Kentucky named Fred LaRue. And all of Nixon’s henchmen were in on it to some degree. All this to defeat George McGovern in 1972, who won exactly one state in the electoral college.[1] Far more interesting than the political shenanigans is the personal lives of the characters, which are fascinating (and I’m sure Mallon would emphasize, fictional). LaRue was a millionaire from Kentucky who came into money when his father was shot in a hunting accident. There was always some question, even in LaRue’s mind, whether he was the one who had shot the man, and whether it was an accident (both men had been drinking, and they had a difficult relationship). LaRue had wandered into the President’s orbit primarily as a fundraiser, and to help the Committee to re-elect the President. He was on close terms with John Mitchell and his notorious loudmouth wife Martha. Also important in the story, and in this unfolding novel, are Hunt, who was a spy novelist in addition to being a spy, and whom Mallon knew in New York when he was working for GQ; Elliott Richardson, who served in various posts in the administration and who was eventually important, as Attorney General, in bringing Nixon down (he was an unlikable character, however, and had presidential aspirations himself); Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s longtime secretary and advisor, who famously deleted an important portion of the tapes that recorded information in the White House, and who was devoted to her boss beyond all reason; Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Teddy, the elderly woman who served as a canny political advisor to countless people and who is a kind of cynical Greek chorus to the whole proceeding; Pat Nixon, also devoted to Nixon, who opposed his resignation to the end (and who nevertheless had a clandestine lover, and got together with him when she was able to manage it); and of course, the man himself. I have to say that, by the end of this novel, I felt for all of these people, including Nixon. He was paranoid, he was foul-mouthed (so am I), he was politically ruthless and would have done anything to win (though not something so stupid as that half-assed burglary); he was also dedicated to his country and felt that, within the limits of the situation he was given, he was doing a lot of good. By the end of the book, all his dreams are in tatters, and his life is unraveling; only some advice Mrs. Longworth offers finally helps. But the fact that I finally felt for the man means that Mallon is almost a magician as a novelist. And while I’ve admired many of his books, including Henry and Clara, this might be his best novel. It certainly seems to be the most complicated plot. I’ve always remembered something a Quaker said at Friends Meeting once, talking about some political maneuver as ignoring “the fallacious distinction between the ends and the means.” I think of that phrase again and again. People in general, and politicians in particular, are always cutting ethical corners, thinking that their cause makes them right. But more and more as I get older, I feel that, if the means are wrong, the end can’t be right. I’d say that even if the strategy succeeds. Success is a relative term. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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Dec 15, 2025 08:03AM
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I hate to sound like a name dropper, but I’ve known Tom Mallon for years, though mostly by snail mail and e-mail. My memory is that we met in the early eighties, when our literary agents occupied the same building. We subsequently reviewed books for
I hate to sound like a name dropper, but I’ve known Tom Mallon for years, though mostly by snail mail and e-mail. My memory is that we met in the early eighties, when our literary agents occupied the same building. We subsequently reviewed books for the same newspapers (especially for an editor named Bob Wilson, who was first at the Washington Post, then USA Today) and met several times at the National Book Critics Circle meeting in New York, where I would often hang around Bob to get a free dinner (all the publishers wanted to pay for his food). One time Tom was at that dinner. Years later, he gave me a blurb for a novel that everyone else treated as radioactive, and when I lost my agent—by which time he was the literary editor of GQ—he was tireless in helping me search for a new one, an endless process that anyone else would have given up on long before he did. Through the years I’ve read and enjoyed much of his work, and I reviewed what came to be his breakthrough novel. But it was another review that put that novel over the top. This selection from Mallon’s diaries traces a thrilling story, of a young man not yet tenured at Vassar, who decides to move from Poughkeepsie to a crummy apartment in New York just because he loves the city, has ambitions as a writer, and is gay, and New York is where the action is. It’s also true that he’s moved during the height of the AIDS crisis, and a previous lover—who had been the love of his life—has contracted AIDS and is dying. It’s hard to remember that time and that situation, but no one was certain what behaviors spread the disease (though people had their suspicions), no one knew what the incubation period was for the virus, or if everyone who contracted it would grow ill; people both wanted and didn’t want to know their status. Mallon opted not to get tested, as most people did at the time. So he was throwing himself into New York gay life while trying to be safe, every now and then slipping up a little. Maybe. That was the way things were at the time. Mallon’s first book—the one he’d just sold when I met him in the agent’s office—was, famously, about diaries, A Book of One’s Own. While I’ve kept journals for many years—jottings of self-analysis or, more often, about writing projects (the analysis turned into writing projects)—I’ve never wanted to keep a diary of daily activities. Mallon has done so for years, and these brief excerpts from his diary read like a biography, also a history of the times. Reading them was like looking back at my own life. Mallon’s first book did well and marked him as a nonfiction writer, though his real ambition was as a novelist. He also just wanted a career as a writer, and to get away from dealing with the Vassar undergrads, as smart as they may have been (one student, who was signing up for a class in which she would read Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, asked if there would be a lot of poetry to read). His publisher suggested a book on plagiarism, and he took that project on, eventually became an authority on the subject, though his real interest, at the time, was a novel he had already written a draft of, and which would eventually be published as Arts and Sciences. I had the feeling as I read these entries that the plagiarism book was a kind of albatross in his life; he kept working on it, but his heart wasn’t in it. In the meantime, he was meeting men in a variety of places, often gay bars, which were plentiful in Manhattan. I’ve almost never been part of the dating scene, much less the pick-up-in-a-bar scene, and I was stunned at how easy it was for him to make dates to come back to his place (though he was and is good looking, and a relaxed easy conversationalist; Bob Wilson once called him “the most charming man in New York”). It was once he was in bed that the problems began, trying to be passionate but also safe, figuring out where to draw that line. From the start he was looking for someone to spend his life with, and there were a number of brief infatuations that didn’t work out (it got to a point where I could see the problems coming, and would think, no, Tom, not this guy). But when he did finally find the man to whom this book is dedicated, William Gene Bodenshatz, he didn’t waver, and neither did the man he called Billy. They got together and stayed together, though the whole thing about where to live and work became a problem, as it tends to in New York. Erica Jong once said that a writer’s two occupational hazards are paranoia and insomnia; when a writer is trying to establish a career as a writer, he’s dependent on reviews to an extraordinary degree (and though Mallon generally got good reviews, his first two novels got bad ones in, of all places, the New York Times). My favorite moment in the book is when, after he’d just gotten that first bad Times review, instead of cowering and retreating to Vassar (by that time he’d gotten tenure), he said the hell with it, I’m sick of the office politics, I’m going to resign from Vassar and make a living as a New York writer. It was a bold move, in a place where the rents are high and there are all kinds of people trying to make it. But he did make it. He was actually established long before his breakthrough as a novelist (and probably before he knew it). Those first two novels are among my favorites, both not necessarily autobiographical but at least reflecting his life; Arts and Sciences focuses on a grad student at Harvard who is realizing he’s gay; Aurora 7 concerned the space program, a lifelong interest of Mallon’s and another area where he became a nonfiction authority. But his breakthrough came because of a nonfiction project that didn’t work out. He’d been thinking of a biography of John Wilkes Booth when he heard that another writer was doing one and would probably be out with it before he would. He gradually became interested in another story from the same period, about the young married couple who had been sitting in the box with Lincoln when he was assassinated. To say the least, that moment had a major impact on their lives. Mallon began focusing on them. Sometime during that period, the editor at GQ, where Mallon had done some writing, asked him to suggest someone as its literary editor, and Mallon said, how about me? It was three days of work a week, paid a good salary, and—coincidentally—put him in touch with any number of writers, editors, and agents. That place wound up having its own office politics, of course, but he did an excellent job, eventually writing a monthly column called Doubting Thomas and assigning reviews and other pieces. Most notably, around the fall of ’92, he suggested that they bump Christian Laettner from their next cover and feature Clinton and Gore instead. They would need an important writer for the accompanying article, one unafraid of controversy, and they picked . . . Gore Vidal, the most notable American writer of American historical novels. While working with the man (who seemed reasonable as long as you paid him extravagantly and didn’t make many changes in what he’d written), Mallon asked where Vidal thought he should start his new novel, and the answer Vidal gave is a story I’ve told to many a writer and writer’s class. I won’t give it away, but the point is to begin with a compelling event. (As Reynolds Price once told us, you don’t need to start every story, “’Rape!’ screamed the Duchess,” but find a way to grab the reader’s attention). In terms of these diaries, I knew where Mallon would stop. Bob Wilson had asked me to review this historical novel, Henry and Clara, and said, as he always did, “He’s our friend, and you know he writes for us, but don’t let that influence what you say.” He meant that, but I loved the novel, and could see that it was a major breakthrough, but a slightly more notable reviewer saw that too. John Updike gave the book a major review in the New Yorker, having read all of Mallon’s work, and called him “one of the most important novelists writing in this country today.” It was one of those moments when an artist’s whole life has changed. And it makes a wonderful ending to a book about a young man arriving in New York at age 24 looking for love and a career. He finds both. That having been said, I’d be happy to read the next ten years of diaries. And ten after that. www.davidguy.org ...more |
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Dec 15, 2025 07:39AM
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