The Imaginary Girlfriend (10 page)

Hendrie often found a means of furthering personal disputes in his fiction, which I accepted as a charming eccentricity. “Barry Kessler posed in the doorway with his hands on his hips,” Hendrie wrote. “He wore running shoes, fresh white socks to his knees, filmy green shorts, and an immaculate T-shirt with the words Oscar Wilde Sucks' in diminutive letters over the breast pocket. A short man, narrow of waist, large of chest, he had the gone-craggy face of a former (and successful) child actor who had kept his confidence and improved upon it with a great deal of strenuous effort.”

Don Hendrie died in March of ‘95, just two days before my son Colin's 30th birthday. Suffering from Parkinson's, Hendrie had lost his fine grasp of the language in a stroke four years earlier; his vocabulary had abandoned him. As a fellow writer, I admired how courageous and uncomplaining he was about losing his
words.
Only a month before he died, we were talking in my house in Vermont, and Hendrie—at a loss for the word he wanted—left the dinner table and walked into the kitchen. There he patiently patted the refrigerator.
“This
thing,” he said, “where the food goes to be cold.”

He had an automobile accident, in Maine, about a week or so later. When he was released from the hospital, he was frail and disoriented; in addition to the debilitation of the Parkinson's, something was wrong with his heart. He spent the night before he died at his ex-mother-in-law's house in Exeter with his elder son; they had breakfast together the next morning, and Hendrie died of a heart attack while walking around the block. He fell over on Front Street, the same street where I had grown up in my grandmother's house. (Hendrie wasn't a native of Exeter; he had attended the academy and married a town girl, but over the years Exeter had become a kind of home to him.)

It was Hendrie I sold my motorcycle to, when I became a father. We were married within a couple of years of each other; I was an usher at his wedding, in Exeter—the wedding-reception was at the Exeter Inn, which is also on Front Street, where he died. (We were divorced within a couple of years of each other, too.)

I miss him. And when I think of him, I see him as a student at Iowa when I was a student, too, and we would read aloud what we'd written to each other, and say things of small importance—such as, “Oscar Wilde sucks”—which, of course, were things we thought were of no small importance then.

I was newly married, and recently a father for the first time; Hendrie was in love, and about to be married—and soon to be a father, too. And, as writers—actually, would-be writers—we were just getting started. We both had jobs in the university library, restacking the returned books. We both had football-season jobs, selling pennants and buttons and stadium cushions and cowhorns and bells at the Iowa home games. We both worked as waiters in a nauseating restaurant out on the Coralville strip. The point is, Hendrie and I saw each other every day, and we were doing a variety of mindless things, but every day we were excited, because we were going to be writers. That's how I want to remember him.

I don't remember my fellow student Tom McHale, the future author of
Farragan's Retreat
and
Principato.
I must have met him in Iowa City, but I never really knew him, nor do I recall McHale's “terrific Belgian girlfriend”; the description is John Casey's—John has expressed his surprise that I fail to remember her. (Tom McHale died, an apparent suicide, in 1982; some say he had a heart attack.)

I do remember Jonathan Penner—tall and particularly striking-looking in profile. I recall him running laps on the indoor track, where I ran every day; in my memory, Penner was a strong and tireless runner—and a lot faster than I was. But my principal attentions at Iowa were given to my developing writing; in writers' memories, real people are often not as clear as our created characters. It wouldn't surprise me if Penner were to ring me up, upon reading this, and tell me that he never ran at all—not one lap. (It would amaze me, however, to hear that Jonathan Penner is a
short
person.)

Of course I could phone Andre Dubus and ask him if it was his chest or Crumley's that was splattered with Boston cream pie; I could call David Plimpton and ask him if he threw the pie, and whose chest he hit. But I believe the gaps and even the errors in my memory are truthfulness of another kind: what we fiction writers forget, or what we get wrong, is part of what a “memoir” means to us. (I do recall that Plimpton caused both envy and indignation by selling a short story to one of those magazines that are routinely concealed from wives and children, and that he spent the money on a shotgun, which prompted one sour fellow student to express the hope that Plimpton would use his new weapon on himself.)

And what of my classmates at Iowa who did
not
become writers? One of them is a high-school English teacher, and one of them is a law-school professor, and another one is a clinical psychologist. (The psychologist is David Plimpton.)

In addition to the many published writers among my students at Iowa, my two best students at Bread Loaf, Patty Dann and Elisabeth Hyde, and my best student at Brandeis, Carol Markson, are working novelists. But what about those Creative Writing students of mine—not only at Iowa but elsewhere—who did
not
go forth to take the literary world by storm? One of them is a highly respected editor in a venerable New York publishing house; another makes a rather good living writing Westerns; a third is the headmaster of a distinguished private school; many are English teachers, at both the high-school and the college level; and last but not least—in fact, this is someone I am particularly proud of—is a champion-class female bodybuilder, Karen Andes, who has written a book about strength conditioning for women. I was not of much help to Karen with her first novel, which remains unpublished, but I was the first person who took her to a gym and put a dumbbell in her hand. Now I am learning from her, for—at my age (I am 53)—a book about strength conditioning for female bodybuilders is considerably above my present capacities.

Yet what I remember best about being a student at Iowa was that sense of myself as being married, and being a father. It separated me from the majority of the other students; they had the time to talk about writing—my impression was that they talked about it endlessly. Except with Hendrie, I had no time for talking; I taught only one undergraduate writing course but I had three part-time jobs. When I wasn't working, I was either looking after my son Colin or I was writing.

We didn't have a television. When there was something of interest on TV, I put Colin in the stroller and walked around the block to the Vonneguts' house. It was in Kurt's house that I watched the Six Day War, holding Colin on my lap. It was on the occasion of another television event, with Colin again on my lap or destroying some household possession of the Vonneguts', that I remember having a conversation with Kurt about what I would
do
to support my writing habit.

Teachers and coaches had been good to me, Kurt included. I presumed I would get a teaching job, and I would coach wrestling. I certainly had no illusions about my writing being self-supporting. I told Kurt that I wasn't going to make myself miserable by even imagining that I would make a living from my
writing.

“You may be surprised,” Vonnegut told me. “I think capitalism is going to treat you okay.”

My first teaching job was at Windham College (now defunct) in Putney, Vermont. Windham was one of those colleges that prospered, briefly, during the time of the Vietnam War; it was richly populated with students who wouldn't have been students if they hadn't been trying to stay out of Vietnam, but some of these nonstudents were the best Creative Writing students I ever had—and one real student among them was my future business manager, Willard Saperston. When the war was over, Windham folded, but by then I had already resigned.

There was no wrestling team at Windham when I came there. I prevailed upon the college to buy a wrestling mat, which I installed in a former storage room of the fieldhouse, where I coached wrestling as a so-called club sport. About a half-dozen former high-school wrestlers, including a couple of Vietnam vets, were the core of the club; compared to every wrestling room I had ever worked out in, it was unsatisfactory, but I had my workout partners—I couldn't complain.

When the college went belly-up and auctioned all of its portable holdings, I went to the auction with the hope that I could buy the wrestling mat. But the mat was sold to a college down South as part of a package of athletic equipment—the whirlpool baths from the training room, and three sets of Universal Gyms, and all the free weights from the weight room. I don't think the buyer even wanted the mat—the college down South didn't offer wrestling as a sport—but I was unable to extricate the mat from the overall package.

Notwithstanding Windham's collapse, Putney was a good home for my children, and my primary residence for the 18 years of my first marriage; my ex-wife, Shyla, still lives there. The same Windham student who would become my business manager was also handy as a carpenter; on my Putney property, Willard Saperston converted a tool shed—one of the small outbuildings beside the barn—into an office for me. I would write the better part of five novels in that tiny box of a building, which Shyla has now restored to what it originally was: a tool shed. As I've said, Willard Saperston, who created my first office, now “manages” my money. (I sense a kind of symmetry to this story, not unlike my old friend Don Hendrie dying within sight of the inn where he had his wedding reception and the house where I was born.)

And despite Windham's relatively short life, I would keep coming back to Putney. I went away for a year, to Vienna—where my second son, Brendan, was born in 1969—and I was three years away from Putney when I returned to Iowa to teach at the Workshop; there was another year away, when I first taught at Mount Holyoke; and another, when I taught at Brandeis. But in between those times away, I was in Putney, writing in the tool shed.

For the writing of my first four novels
(The World According to Garp
was my fourth) I usually had a full-time job—the two exceptions being an award from the Rockefeller Foundation (they don't give grants to individual writers anymore) and a Guggenheim Fellowship. I had only two years of being a full-time writer between 1967 and 1978; yet, in those 11 years, I wrote and published four novels.

There was one other year when I didn't teach Creative Writing or coach wrestling: that was when I took time off to write a screenplay of my first novel,
Setting Free the Bears.
In that year, I was never once paid at the agreed-upon time—I sent desperate telegrams from Vienna to Los Angeles, begging for the next installment of my screenwriting fee. Worse, I had no time for my day job, which was to write a second novel; and the screenplay, after five drafts, was never made into a film. The point being: this was less of a
writing
year than any year in which I taught and coached full-time.

A footnote: the fellowship I received from the National Endowment for the Arts, to complete my third novel, was not enough money for a family of four, which I was supporting, to live on for a single summer; I spent the “fellowship” to rebuild the only bathroom in the Putney house—and I took a summer job. I'm not complaining about having to get a job,
or
about the NEA—the NEA was only giving me what the NEA could afford.

I've heard many of my fellow writers say that a writer must make it on his own and not lean on the university for assistance; they say that a writer who teaches for his daily bread—so that he's not putting financial burdens on his writing—is not a real writer . . . only hedging his bets. But in my own experience I
wanted
my writing to be free from the pressure to publish it too soon—free from the need to make a living from it. Friends who were constantly interrupting their novels-in-progress to write for magazines, or who published novels badly in need of rewriting because they needed the advances, have suffered the constraints of time and money as, truly, I never did.

Nowadays, nothing angers me as much (from my fellow writers) as to see those fortunate souls who are self-supporting in the writing business make their insensitive pronouncements at various Creative Writing programs across the United States. In the presence of good writers who teach for a living, these best-selling authors are fond of denouncing the university as too-safe a haven; they frequently urge student writers to make it on their own—even, hypocritically, to starve a little. This is
idle
hypocrisy, of course; it is doubly hard to tolerate when the proselytizing author is expensively well-tailored and riding a multibook contract in 25 languages.

Creative Writing courses are an economic necessity for writers in this country; for the writers who teach them, they are essential to their lives
as writers.
And for those few students who truly benefit from them, they are a gift of encouragement and time; writers—young writers, particularly—need more of both.

There is a quandary here, however: not every writer can or should teach Creative Writing. Many of my writer friends are simply too standoffish for the requisite social contact of the job; some are preternaturally uncomfortable in the presence of “young people”—many more are too thin-skinned to endure the nastiness of English Department politics.

I once was a member of an English Department (at Windham) wherein a senior full professor proposed that any department member without a Ph.D. should not be permitted to vote on matters concerning the curriculum. I was the
only
member of that English Department without a Ph.D., and so I sought to defend myself by saying that I agreed; I even flattered my colleagues by telling them that the writing of a Ph.D. thesis was a “massive” accomplishment. I thought it fair to warn them, however, that I was soon going to publish my first novel, which they would surely accept as an undertaking equal to their theses; I would wait to have a vote in the department until my novel was published.