Musings

I have written the same doorway more times than I can count. In “Copacetic” it is the doorway of my father’s hospital room, and he is at the window in the blue bathrobe my sister gave him. In Give Them Unquiet Dreams it is a doorway on Winthrop Street in Braintree, and my grandmother is standing in it with the rosary in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. In the Aiden stories I am still writing, it is a doorway I have not yet described but that will arrive when it wants to.

For years I thought I was repeating myself — and worried about it, in the way writers are told to worry about it. I have come, at sixty-three, to understand that I am not repeating anything. I am returning. There is a difference. You repeat what you have exhausted. You return to what you have not yet learned to see.

The grandmother in the doorway is the same grandmother, and she has always been the same grandmother. I am not putting her there each time. She is there, and I am learning to look.

I take it as a small consolation that this is not a new theory. Emerson would have called the doorway a “porch” and said the same. Chekhov would have said nothing at all and gone on writing.

I read this passage from Gilead once a year, sometimes twice. It is the letter of an old minister to his young son, and I know few sentences in modern American fiction that carry as much weight so lightly:

“I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.” — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Five words. The last sentence of the book. What it does is refuse the summing-up that every other closing sentence in the American canon has been reaching for since Fitzgerald’s green light. Robinson trusts the reader to have understood everything. She simply names the two things her narrator is still willing to do: pray, and sleep. In that order.

I sometimes tell students that if they can end a story with two verbs and no explanation, they are already doing something most published writers never manage. Robinson can. Chekhov could. You get there by learning to trust the reader more than you trust your own summary.

People ask me, when I say I write from mercy rather than judgment, what mercy has to do with fiction. Fair question. Mercy sounds like something you extend to the deserving. In a story you have made up yourself, no one is deserving because no one is real. You could summarize a character in a sentence and be done with them. Judgment is the easier thing.

But this is what I mean. When I sit down with a character who has done something I do not admire — the father who is drinking, the mother who is failing her children, the boy who has stolen and then lied about it — I try not to have already decided what they are. I try to sit at the kitchen table with them and let them explain themselves in the way they would explain themselves to a friend at four in the morning. Not to me. To a friend. My job, if I do it well, is to have overheard what they said and set it down as accurately as I can.

Mercy in fiction is not forgiveness. It is the willingness to let a character say what they would actually say, in the words they would actually use, without the writer standing behind them with a red pencil marking them as guilty.

This is not, for the record, moral relativism. It is the opposite. It is the belief that every person, in real life, is too complicated to be reduced — and that the writer’s job is to honor that in the invented person too. If the story is good, the reader will do the judging themselves, and their judgment will be more accurate than mine could have been. I get out of the way.

I learned this, or began to learn it, from Chekhov. I try to teach it every semester. I fail at it, in my own work, all the time.

A passage I keep returning to — from an essay of mine called "Teaching at Fifty-Six." Written near the end of three decades of teaching inner-city kids, and never far from my desk.

It occurs to me that teaching is my salvation. There are wonderful moments, when things move so fluidly, and the pitch of our discussion seems just right — students are smiling, engaged, sharing feelings, excited. A palpable energy moves through all of us — a realness, an in-the-momentness that charges the air and electrifies our conversations. Connections are made. Questions are answered. We learn who we are. If we are fortunate, we intuit an answer to the question Why? Sometimes we discover what is really true. — From "Teaching at Fifty-Six"

People like to imagine that rare and delectable places lurk in some remote part of the universe or some distant epoch from the past, but right now, in my classroom, surrounded by students, I dwell in that delectable place, a most memorable season of any day. I feel intensely awake, most alive — renewed. This is communion, I think, and teaching will be the pond that I bathe in each morning, every new day.

I keep coming back to this passage from Trevor's "The News from Ireland." It is the kind of sentence that teaches you, every time you read it, what the short story is for:

"There is, in his clerical opinion, no part of the world more forsaken by God, no part where charity is more thinly given, kindness more rarely shown." — William Trevor, "The News from Ireland"

What strikes me is the construction. Trevor begins with a tucked-in clause — in his clerical opinion — that identifies the speaker without naming him, and then keeps the sentence moving forward in two parallel halves whose rhythm mimics the very judgment they describe. The sentence becomes the clergyman's mind on the page.

We are taught to admire writers for what they say. We should also admire them for how they hold the reader in a single breath.

I taught Dickinson for years. I am still teaching her, even now, by reading her in the morning before I write. This is the stanza I came back to this week:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise — Emily Dickinson

The instruction is to a poet, but I have come to think it is also an instruction to a novelist. The slant truth is the one the reader can bear; the head-on truth is the one the reader resists. Fiction's whole technology — point of view, scene, dialogue, metaphor, the careful arrangement of what is shown and what is withheld — is in service of telling it slant.

Dickinson knew at thirty what most of us are still working out at sixty.