Shuffling

 

Not soon enough, we'll be heading up north for an annual visit. In anticipation, this morning's post is drawn from the well, pretty deep in fact, maybe 2007, fifteen years ago, five years before my last days in the classroom. Isn't that Loon some kind of beautiful?

When I awoke this morning, I stumbled along in the thick darkness of a world without lights here at the cabin, my stiff and sore feet making a sound that suddenly reminded me of the shuffling my grandfather's feet used to make across our kitchen floor when I was a boy, an instant's memory I hadn't thought about since I was six--he died in 1954. The sound of my own slow feet evoked a chilling memory. I've become him; my granddaughter is my age.

It's an odd way to say it, but in my "spare time" up here at the cabin, I've been reading Wallace Stegner, a man I've not read before--The Collected Stories lies here on a coffee table. And while I like him, I can't escape this fatal sense that he is, like all of us, dated. When I read his stories--even though I've never read him before--I read a familiar pattern and approach: his is the kind of writing I've always wanted to do, the kind of writing I guess I do, albeit not nearly as well. 

But I also recognize that it's old-fashioned, as I suppose I am. It's the kind of psychological realism that probes us, each of us. It's nowhere near what a reviewer in the NYTimes called, recently, "Peace Corps fiction," novels about Afghanistan or Niger or Venezuela or anywhere else in the world, just not the American Midwest.

We need wilderness, someplace wild and untamed. When I read Stegner, I read a man who took the outdoors seriously because, in all likelihood, people in the 1940s were still battling it. A car goes off the road in the cold, and danger presents itself vividly. Today, the spaces we don't know are Afghanistan, Niger, or Venezuela. We got where we need to explore, perhaps. But Stegner--and me too--feel there remains a wilderness in all of us that's worth exploring. That's old-fashioned, I guess. At least, it doesn't sell.

I say that because I've received two rejections in the last week, both of them because--or so the editors and my agent says--my writing is too literary and nobody buys literary fiction. Critics and professors love literary fiction but nobody buys it; and book publishing is, first and foremost, a business. There's not much that can be done about that phenomenon, and it's not new. My agent says he's heard that gripe for all of his 25 years in the business. And, at a certain level, those rejections have to be read as rejections; the editors weren't taken with the work. 

Somehow, yesterday I got to a blog that reprinted the President's Column from the summer issue of the Newsletter of the ALSC (Association of Literary Scholars and Critics): Morris Dickstein on "The Critical Landscape Today." The blog belonged to National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors. People who read literary reviews won't be surprised, but upshot of the article was the squeezing being applied to book reviews today in newspapers and magazines. It seems there are simply fewer and fewer column inches to be shared by the literary crowd. You've got to be blind not to see that "the review" is almost exclusively reserved for movies these days, blockbusters, too, no matter how corny or wretched.

Doom and gloom comes easy to a man who just suffered two book rejections and heard the late-in-life sound of his grandfather's feet across the floor when he himself got up to use the john.

And then this. Some young lady--she's holding a darling baby on her Facebook page--decides to name me as a friend, goes to my Facebook page, spots the pictures from a class at Highland, and tells me--the "message" came early this morning--that taking that class was just terrific, a great memory. Just tells me I'm okay.

So here I sit, writing it all out, a whole story, my morning thanks by six o'clock.

Outside the window, the lake and sky are perfectly black. It's our last day up here, and leaving tomorrow won't be fun. But even if, like yesterday, the sky never clears and light rain falls most of the day, I swear I can be happy as a toad, reading what's left of my students' papers, drinking coffee and tea, and reading Wallace Stegner.

Life is good, my grandfather's footfalls notwithstanding.