Today’s Story

I have a new hero. Heroine, I suppose. Her name is Nina Berberova.

An artist friend of mine knows an architect who studied at Princeton. Over lunch together — the three of us — he learned both that I’m a writer and that, some years back, my field of teaching in college had been Russian history. He wondered if I knew Nina, or of her. I said, truthfully, that I’d heard the name but in what connection I couldn’t recall. She had taught Russian at Princeton for many years, he informed me, but had also written some novels, which he felt were quite good.

Six months later, needing to clear my shelves, I carted a load of books over to Housing Works, my local non-profit, second-hand book store. Having discarded, I sought to purchase something new and got as far as “B” in the alphabetical listing when there it was: six short novels by Berberova. (A fine old Vintage International paperback from 1990, translated by Marian Schwarz. The title of the collection is The Tattered Cloak.) It seemed like Kismet, so I bought it.

And was I pleased! Berberova is a master. The novels (actually novellas, or long short stories, ranging from 30 to 70 pages) are set in the Paris to which she and other Russians had suffered exile in the twenties (think Nabokov, Diaghiliev, Tatlin), and they are truly amazing. You sense the surrounding City, you share the same rooms her characters inhabit. You crawl around inside the very souls of these characters, even when it’s not a pleasant fit. She sets things up with a tart economy one moment and, in the next, immerses you in a scene until you drown. She traverses vast steppes of time without any sense that you’ve lost something between one scene and the next.

She can make you smile with a sentence like: “His breath was a blend of strong coffee and Swiss mouthwash.” (from “Astashev in Paris). Or she can bowl you over with an (earned) epiphany like the following:

“I can’t explain how or when it came back. I no longer have my old ability to perceive with the unerring perspicacity of a child, the flair I once had. But I know that in our gloomy life, as I get duller and weaker, I am picking it up once again with a special strength, special fervor. What is it that is being revived in the face of everything (as it was twenty years ago) inside me might – very approximately and clumsily – be called a search for grandeur, a thirst for wisdom, love and truth, although all those words are just part of one infinite thing that I seem to skirt without actually seeing. . . .

“But where will Samoilov be then, and how exactly will he give me the signal?” (The Tattered Cloak.)

Berberova. Check her out.

I don’t read much non-fiction these days, but I can enthusiastically recommend In Harm’s Way, by Doug Stanton. It’s the story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in August, 1945. I sought it out as research, hoping to wrest a few facts I needed for a minor episode in a novel I’m currently at work on. To my surprise, I was soon devouring the whole thing.

The story itself is certainly compelling. The Indianapolis was the naval carrier chosen to ferry the two atomic bombs from San Francisco to the island in the Pacific where they would be loaded onto planes that would drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mission so shrouded in secrecy not even Captain McVay knew what his cargo was. But the real story – certainly from the crew’s point of view – began later, once the ship was ordered to sail from Trinian to Leyte. Although the assigned shipping lane had been haunted by subs, McVay’s request for an escort (he had no sub-fighting equipment) was denied. Five minutes after midnight on July 30, with 1,196 men aboard, the Indianapolis was sliced almost in two by a double-torpedo hit. It sank in 12 minutes.

But here’s the real rub. No one knew! Shoddy communications, expectations gone awry and war-clouded assumptions shrank the sinking into a ghost event. A valiant radio man, acting on the captain’s orders, hammered out an SOS that was picked up in three different locations, but the commanders who were notified chose not to believe these messages, in part not wanting to be hoodwinked by false Japanese distress calls. The ship’s failure to arrive on time was shrugged off because those who noticed figured the ship had simply been reassigned.

So survivors of the torpedoing were left to drift for four days in a cold, unforgiving, shark-crowded ocean. One colony of tied-together rafts drifted 124 miles!

Many of those aboard were killed outright, of course, in the massive double explosions, but 900 men went into the water, some on rafts, most in life jackets, a few of the wounded on floating nets. After four grueling days, rescue came by accident: a plane on a search-and-destroy mission, scouring the shipping lane for subs, spotted a sprinkle of survivors (having no idea where they came from!), and a huge rescue effort was belatedly launched. Until the 317 who remained at the end were rescued, all in wretched condition, they had been burned by the sun, poisoned by the oil slick, many of their buddies eaten by sharks, and some – tortured by thirst – succumbed to the myriad hallucinations brought on by drinking salt water. More than one of these dived down after the ship, searching for the ice cream galley. Some fell to stabbing one another: at least 50 died that way. The sharks ate about 200. Others simply gave up.

There’s more to this sad story. The official naval inquiry was followed up by a court martial for the captain! The only time in naval history that a captain was court martialed for a ship sunk in wartime. The two charges in the indictment? McVay wasn’t “zigzagging,” (a maneuver the commander of the Japanese sub which sank the Indianapolis testified would have been useless) and he didn’t give the order to “abandon ship” soon enough. (It sank in twelve minutes!)

Although the trial was a transparent attempt by the Navy brass to cover their behinds, McVay (who later committed suicide) was convicted. This calumny was not reversed by the navy for fifty-six years, and then only through the efforts of survivors who fought to clear the captain’s name. (Since it happened after this book came out, it seems likely that Doug Stanton’s carefully researched account also helped.)

Stanton tells us this story in a masterful way, constructing a vivid background narrative and weaving through this tapestry the individual stories of sailors (and one marine) of all ranks and circumstances, including – very importantly – the ship’s doctor. He has a novelist’s instincts; it’s a great read.

Whether or not you find yourself doing research on World War Two, you might enjoy adding this book to your list.

I’m often late with birthdays, so it should shock no one that I’m tardy in acknowledging the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 “riots” at Columbia University. I have friends who played an active role back then, and who recently spoke at those anniversary ceremonies. I also have a friend who was a TPF officer at the time, who admitted to being part of the shock troops who were unleashed against those “sitting in” at various locations around the campus. This individual, who was white, later found his point of view first scrambled and finally altered 180 degrees by a sociology course he took from another friend, who happened to be black. His brain now scintillating from exposure to a world he was formerly unfamiliar with, he went on to write a book about the plight of black cops in a white society. He earned a PhD in sociology, mustered out of the police force, and became a professor. So much for how things change.

Where was I while all this was going on? In Butler Library, reading. Reading, oddly enough, the works of a Russian philosopher who had also been a political activist in his earlier days (his first arrest being as a young student Marxist passing out literature at Kiev University in the 1890s). But the articles I was reading at the very time that the campus was being turned upside down (except for the oddly tranquil Butler Library) were ones Berdiaev was writing about the revolution of 1905, which was happening in the streets outside his windows. He spoke of the revolutionary fervor and the chaos and the reprisals, and sixty-three years later I’m reading this while fervor flamed and reprisals escalated just outside my own. So much for how things stay the same.

I expressed my reaction to all this, at the time, in a poem. And though it certainly doesn’t put me on track to win the Nobel Prize, I’d like to share it with you anyhow.

THE ISLAND (Columbia University: Spring, 1968)

I have found the only place in Manhattan
To be alone.
It is an island
(A traffic island,
I think they call it)
In the middle of Broadway
Near Columbia.

Here, between the chaos
Of a rioting campus
On the one side,
Where blue-coated bullies
Battle with red-banded rebels
To settle an argument
(the logistic having replaced
the syllogistic as a definition
of knowledge)
And the beer-swilling hordes
At the West End Bar on the other side,
Where construction workers
Driven to drink by the rain
Seem to have reached an uneasy truce
With the unruly advocates of the mind
Sprinkling the opposite side
Of the bar,

Here I sit,
Munching my veal-and-pepper sandwich.

It is a busy day,
But still, it is lonely.
I sit with my arm curled
Over the wide, looped arm rests
Of the weathered bench.
Closer to hand
Than Academicide,
On the one side,
And ale on the other,
My island divides
The Northbound half
Of the Universal Soul
From its Southbound Other.
The traffic seems eternal
Though only direction,
And not destination,
Is revealed here.
But everyone seems in such a hurry
To get wherever it is
That they are going.

As I eat my meat
And vegetables
I can almost hear
The lamb squeal
And the flowers fall,
The tires hum,
The blood flow thick
From the flagging rioters,
The hearty belch
From Samson and Socrates alike,
And I almost see
The mask-like faces
Of the drivers in their cars.
Except for direction,
I cannot tell the Northbound
From the Southbound Soul.
The same number of Cadillacs,
Or Fords, or trucks,
Go either way.

I came across a quote today by Italo Calvino that is so wonderfully illustrative of the problem writers often face in constructing a story, that I’d like to share it with you. It occurs in a lecture he prepared for delivery at Harvard shortly before his death. (He only wrote five of the six lectures he’d been asked to deliver for, alas, he died before he could complete them.) I encountered this quote in a terrific piece on Calvino by Martha Cooley in the May/Summer issue of the Associated Writing Programs Chronicle. In a lecture he called “Exactitude”, Calvino says:

“This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I set myself. I began by speaking of exactitude . . . I wanted to tell you of my fondness for geometrical forms. For symmetries, for numerical series, for all that is combinatory . . . But perhaps it is precisely this idea of forms that evokes the idea of the endless . . . Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in with what I ought to write . . . This is a devouring and destructive obsession, which is enough to render writing impossible. In order to combat it, I try to limit the field of what I have to say, divide it into still more limited fields, then subdivide these again, and so on and on. Then another kind of vertigo seizes me, that of the detail of the detail of the detail, and I am drawn into the infinitesimal, the infinitely small, just as I was previously lost in the infinitely vast.”

I’ll bet everyone who writes has encountered that problem. But it’s not just a problem; it’s a joy as well.

Why a joy? Well, Pascal said something similar a couple of centuries earlier, but he was talking not about stories and language but about the universe itself and its infinitude in either direction, looking up at the cosmos or down at one’s self: the infinite expandability, the infinite divisibility. And however much I, as a writer, struggle with the question of what to include and what to exclude, that hovering notion of the infinity from which I draw my choices stirs my juices in a very invigorating way. Bewildering, perhaps, but pleasing at the same time.

After all, says Calvino, stories are “enchantments that act on the passing of time, either contracting or dilating it.”

Surely, one can take some pleasure in that.

Here I am, up at 6:15 in the morning, thinking about history. Where’s the justice in that?

Back in the days when I taught Russian History, I used a textbook written by Nicholas Riasanovsky, called simply A History of Russia. I considered it, if you really want to know, a “meat-and-potatoes” kind of text, lacking the bold sweep or imaginative vision of a Jesse Clarkson, say, or the prodigious detail of Michael Florinsky. But it ended with a paragraph I have never forgotten. After doing his best to sum up the Soviet Union (this was back in the seventies), and the society its government reflected, Riasanovsky said: “It would thus seem that the Soviet Union is neither a stable nor a happy country. . . . [T]he Soviet system is not likely to last, not likely to change fundamentally by evolution, and not likely to be overthrown by revolution. History . . . has a way of advancing, even when that means leaving historians behind.”

Well, I feel pretty left behind at the moment.

I think about Alexis de Tocqueville, about his predictions that Russia and America seemed destined by history to each hold sway over half the globe. He wouldn’t even have known about Communism, of course, but in the days of the Soviet Union, those words seemed very prophetic. And what about Nicholas Berdiaev, the man I wrote my dissertation on? When he examined the threads and trends of Russian history, he explained the emergence of the Soviet state in Origins of Russian Communism in a way that I find even more convincing now than I did then. So what? you say. Communism has come and gone; there is no more Soviet state. Yet the society he saw as inevitable has returned, in a good many of its features, even though “Communism” has been defeated and forgotten.

What I’m talking about is the continuation of historical patterns, patterns we can’t seem to crawl out of even when we try.

Look at us and Iraq. Is there something ineluctable in all this? I’m interested in the nuts and bolts of history, to be sure, the micro level – how action A led to action B, and so on. But I’m also interested in what you see of the big picture when you step back. We swore we’d never get into another Vietnam and yet look at us! O, then it was a jungle and now it’s a desert, but so what? As big a “quagmire” now as then, and for reasons that make as little sense now as the reasons given then did.

For what we are doing right at this moment in Iraq strikes me as a kind of containment, like keeping sheep in a pen because you’re afraid they might get out and hurt themselves and others – or – they might hurt and destroy each other if they’re not watched. And that may be true. But what does it have to do with bringing democracy to the Iraqui people? Or making it more likely that Iraqis – now or in the future – will live happier, more fulfilling lives?

Why did we get into Iraq in the first place? Oil? Vengeance? WMD? The fact that we fought a previous war with them should not be overlooked. World War II was a continuation of problems that were excited but not resolved by World War One, and there’s a very strong argument for seeing them both as a continuum. One war with a brief interregnum. One pauses to catch one’s breath. And mightn’t the same hold true here? Remember the Gulf War? Why, here we are again!

If you think about it, the model of the Crusades has a certain appeal. Then we were supposedly bringing Christianity to the Infidels. Now we’re bringing democracy. It’s the same thing. We’re a superior civilization. We know best. And if we can’t convince you, we’ll ram it down your throat. (And if we can carry a few buckets of oil back with us, well, where’s the harm?)

I just finished reading The Great Gatsby. “So what?” you think, or “Don’t you mean, re-reading The Great Gatsby?” Thus I have felt gently chided by a few of my more literate friends. But, for sure, I was reading Gatsby for the first time.

I didn’t have the most auspicious education as a youngster. I was a country kid – all right, a rube – growing up in Oklahoma and California in a family with rather limited resources. (I hesitate to claim real poverty because I saw others in the direst of circumstances all around me, every day.) I attended a rural high school where the most literate teacher they could find, when they decided to divert me into a special reading course, offered the view that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was the very pinnacle of advanced learning.

So, left mostly to my own devices, I read John Steinbeck, books and stories that spoke to me very directly about the world I came from and the people I knew. Mind you, I’m not unhappy at having read Steinbeck at an early age. Cannery Row, as I’ve revealed elsewhere, remains one of my favorites to this day, rivaling only Pnin and Franny and Zooey as my most read books.

Hence most of the American classics got short shrift from me during those formative years. I did read The Old Man and the Sea late at night, all in one sitting, and was enthralled. Very soon, however, I was into college and, probably because I chose to study Russian during my freshman year there, I set off reading Chekhov, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Finding plenty to nourish me there, I didn’t get around to trying Fitzgerald until my early twenties. When I finally picked up a volume of his short stories, I was disappointed. Why? Because they seemed to be all about the glitzy, boring lives of the rich and famous or of the unrich and unfamous who lusted after riches or fame. Or they were about lavish parties where people who weren’t rich and famous tried to drink like the rich and famous. Hell, I thought. I already know how to drink. Why do I need this?

But Gatsby! Now Gatsby is another matter. Gatsby really is a great book. Not that Fitzgerald needs my endorsement. But it really is a very great book. Interestingly enough, unlike many classics I’ve read belatedly that have left me exclaiming, “Wow! How does he do that? I could never do that!” I felt, instead, empowered. I actually remember thinking, at one point: “There’s a sentence I might have written!” (To which I quickly added, if only a key word in that sentence was within my summonable vocabulary, or would have been my choice had I consulted the Thesaurus.)

So, I think you can gather that I am, belatedly, overjoyed to be joining the very large number of people who have felt enriched from the experience of reading The Great Gatsby. During the days I carried the book around with me, I even encountered a Russian-born waitress at a coffee house who exclaimed, “Oh! The Great Gatsby! I read that when I was fifteen! It’s my favorite book!” Young lady, good for you!

About the book itself, I’ll make only one observation. Fitzgerald might have ended his book before that last little segment. Nick’s chance encounter with Tom on the street and his realization of the insufferable but inevitable myopia of people like Tom and Daisy would have been a more than acceptable place to draw it to a close. And it would no doubt have been judged a very good book had he done so. But my, those final paragraphs! Where he rises to epiphanic brilliance with Nick’s speculations about the Dutch sailors’ sighting of Long Island in its pre-development beauty and purity, and all the conclusions that follow about the republic, and the dumb wonder, and the limitations of our vision, and our inability to escape our past. Those paragraphs are what makes Gatsby not just a book for his time but for all times. But the important thing to a writer – to me, anyway – is how completely his epiphany was earned. Others can – and many do – spout grand observations at the drop of the hat, but that doesn’t elevate their works into classics. Fitzgerald’s final words work because of the details of his story and its indelible characters. His choice of the “green light” at the end of Daisy’s dock across the bay as a metaphor arose organically out of his portrayal of his characters, their limitations and their needs. He looked deeply into his own book and found the symbol that would work to bring it all together and say what he finally wanted to say. That’s genius.

I have a picture of me, back then, astride my horse, Tony.

Or no, it is not my horse, but a borrowed one, a horse I took care of, sheltered, rode and loved. But did not own.

Come to think of it, I realize that I’ve never owned much of anything. I never owned a house; I always rented. I’ve never owned a woman. It wasn’t that I rented, in those cases, but that I chose women who were impossible to own, and more power to them. They didn’t own me, either. Did they rent me, I wonder? A few, maybe.

I did own several cars, in the old days. In 1957, for example, in Los Angeles, I owned a 1939 Chrysler with a 1950 Dodge engine. Really! Later, for about seven hours in 1963, near San Francisco, I owned a 1960 Corvair, the car that made Ralph Nader famous. And was he ever right! “Unsafe at any speed”, it got totaled on a curve I could have negotiated in my dreams with any other car. And then, in the state of Washington, there was a used-car-lot special 1949 Ford (this was, by now, 1964), which barely ran, but didn’t strive to kill me either. And that was about it. After I returned again to New York, I didn’t really need a car, and haven’t owned one since. When I need one, I rent.

The thing is, I think that ownership is overrated. Seriously. Even those things we say we own, we’re actually renting for a very brief time. A very brief time. Fourscore and a few more years, that’s ownership? Forget about it! Even to call it a long-term lease is, to me, a misnomer.

I don’t even own my breath. I rent it, a puff at a time, from a universe I enjoy, and take part in, and seek to live honorably in, as much as I can for as long as it lasts.

My first novel, Wounded by History, is scheduled to come out next month. It’s been a long wait, and even though things seem to be going well at the moment, it’s still a nail-biter. It’s hard to describe my internal emotional state at the moment, but to give you some idea, I thought I would share with you a brief play I wrote one recent morning.

A play, you say? And written in one morning!!?? Well, yes. Keep in mind, it’s only two pages long. Actually, it was written in less than an hour. And it shows. I don’t think Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn are grinding their teeth over the threat of my competition, but it does sort of illustrate my state of mind. So relax and enjoy my anxiety. I call it:

The Play About the Book

(Curtain goes up on bare stage. MAN # 1 walks out to front and center, looks around, as if searching for something. He consults his watch, shrugs his shoulders, faces the audience.)

Man # 1. Well. Nothing to be done, I guess. Okay! Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Evening. The play you are about to see is . . .

Man # 2. (rushing in from wings) Excuse me, excuse me! Is this “Six Characters in Search of an Author?”

MAN # 1. No, it’s not.

Man # 2. It’s not?

MAN # 1. That’s what I said.

Man # 2. Oh. Sorry. (He rushes off.)

Man # 1. (Turning back to audience, he prepares to begin again.) Sorry about that. Now, as I was saying . . .

Man # 3. (rushing onto the stage from the other wing) Excuse me! Is this “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?”

Man # 1. It most certainly is not.

Man # 3. Are you sure?

Man # 1. Do I look like Richard Burton?

Man # 3. I take your point. (He runs off.)

Man # 1. (back to audience). Well. I do apologize. Now, as I was saying . . .

Man # 4. (rushing on stage) Sorry, sorry! I tried to get here on time, but the fucking subway . . . where is everybody? Isn’t this “The Play About the Book”?

Man # 1. Yes, it is, and you’re quite late. But never mind. Which part are you playing?

Man # 4. The Publisher. I play the Publisher.

MAN # 1. (looks him up and down). That part was supposed to be played by Cate Blanchett.

Man # 4. (looks at copy of script in his hand). In the script it says it’s played by a man!

Man # 1. So? Cate Blanchett can play anything. She can play a fucking tree if she wants. I specifically asked for Cate Blanchett.

Man # 4. Well, they sent me. Live with it.

Man # 1. (sighing) All right, all right. Find yourself a seat and wait your turn.

Man # 4. Where are we?

Man # 1. Excuse me?

Man # 4. I said, where are we?

Man # 1. (looking around) We’re on stage. Where do you think we are?

Man # 4. No, no. I mean, in the script?

Man # 1. Where are we? We’re still in the middle of the fucking prologue! And I’d like to finish, do you mind? Just sit down and wait your turn. (He turns back to the audience, shakes his head and gets set to begin again. All this while MAN # 4 is looking around, turning this way and that.) Okay. Sorry about the interruption. Now, as I said, this is a play about the Book.

Man # 4. (interrupting) Where do I sit?

MAN # 1. Beg pardon?

Man # 4. You said sit. Where do you suggest I do that?

Man # 1. (noticing for the first time that there is no furniture.) Shit! So stand a minute. Would it kill you to stand?

Man # 4. Okay. No problem-o.

MAN # 1. (Winces, shakes his head, addresses the audience once more.) Ladies and Gentlemen, I assure you there is a play here. I do apologize for the interruptions. Now, the play about the book . . . .

(A man walks out on stage who looks a lot like Edward Albee.)

ALBEE-LOOKING MAN. Excuse me? Is this “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?”

Man # 1. You’re Edward Albee!

albee-LOOKING MAN. Tell me something I don’t know.

Man # 1. No, but I mean . . . You really are Edward Albee!

ALBEE-LOOKING MAN. This could get boring in a hurry. I’m looking for the set of “Virginia Wolf.”

Man # 1. I think it’s that way. (Points off stage. ALBEE-LOOKING MAN walks off.) Nice to meet you! (He turns to MAN # 4, who has been standing all this time.) That was Edward Albee.

Man # 4. Can we get on with it?

Man # 1. (shrugging, turning back to the audience, whispering) That was Edward Albee! (He shrugs again. Once more, he addresses the audience.) Okay. What I was saying about this Play About the Book . . .

Man # 5. (walks on pushing an armchair) Excuse me! Where do I put this?

Man # 1. What now?!

Man # 5. Is this the set for “The Sandbox?” I’m looking for “The Sandbox.”

Man # 1. No, it’s not the set for “The Sandbox”! But what’s that you’re pushing? Isn’t that an armchair?

Man # 5. Yes, but it’s supposed to represent The Sandbox. Symbolic, you see. It’s not what you’d call a realistic play.

Man # 1. Right. Symbolic. Uh, why don’t you leave it here? If anybody comes looking for it, I’ll take care of it.

Man # 5. Oh, thanks. That would be swell. (He goes off. MAN # 1 turns back to the audience. Man # 5 sticks his head back in.) Has anyone seen Cate Blanchett? I heard she was supposed to be here.

Man # 1. (exasperated) I heard that too, but she’s not! Now, can you leave us? We’re trying to put on a play here!

Man # 5. Oh, sorry. You know, your set is rather bare. What’s happening in this play?

Man # 1. (looks completely exasperated) At the moment, nothing! Nothing at all! (He looks at MAN # 4.) Well, now that you have a chair, why don’t you sit down?

Man # 4. Oh, thank you! I think I will. (He sits, leans back.) Wake me when we get to where the Publisher comes in, okay? (He closes his eyes.)

CURTAIN

And suddenly – in the chill of winter (when are we actually going to get some chill?), as wise men traveled from afar, guided by a shining . . . (woops! wrong story!) lo, there was Jim’s reading!

The next three weeks look to be a very exciting time from where I sit! There’s a good program coming up about authors and agents at the Small Press Center (Jan. 23), there’s the massive, nationwide Associated Writing Programs convention at the end of this month (Jan. 30-Feb. 2), right here in New York, and finally – are you ready for this? – on Tuesday,  February 5, my next reading at the Cornelia Street Café!

Jim reading at the Cornelia Steet Cafe last fall.

I can’t believe it’s been half a year since I gave a public reading, and I’m really looking forward to this one! I’d hoped that my novel (Wounded By History) would be available for sale at this reading, but it’s beginning to look now like that’s not going to be the case. With small, independent publishers, who don’t have large staffs and tubs of gold ducats, deadlines are even dicier than with the big houses, which have their own problems and delays. But I’m assured my publishers are once again hard on the case, and my book will enjoy its release soon. Let me assure you, no one will be happier than I when it finally pops out of the womb! (It’s a boy! It’s a girl! No, it’s . . . my God! Matilda! Can it be? IT’S A NOVEL!!!)

I’ll probably be reading a small passage from the forthcoming book three weeks from now, but I’m also inclined to try out some new stuff, so listen for that! And, by the way, just got word that one of the stories I read from at my last reading, “Lydia”, will be published soon (Spring issue) in a journal called The Same. (A new litmag, edited by the fine poet, Phil Miller.) I’ll keep you posted.

Hope to see you all there on February 5!

One evening over thirty years ago I was sitting at my kitchen table, probably tearing my hair out over bills I couldn’t pay, when the phone rang. An unfamiliar woman’s voice asked, “Is this Dr. Story?”

My caller was a Professor of Russian Philosophy at a small Southern college. I knew the name.

She continued, “Is this the Dr. Story who writes about Berdiaev?”

I said yes, but wondered how she knew this. “From where I sit,” I told her, “I can see on my shelves a three-volume collection of Russian philosophy which bears your name. But how do you know mine?”

“From someone who recently returned from the Soviet Union,” she replied.

At the time I had published no scholarly articles, only a handful of poems, and – if memory serves – one book review. There was as yet no internet. So I was a bit startled. But one of the things you were aware of in those days, as a Soviet scholar, was samizdat’, the underground press. The Soviet Union was a large country, but a relative handful of people were a part of this clandestine information system, sustained through typewriters and carbons, mainly. I had visited the USSR one spring and, while in Moscow, consulted, very hush-hush, with people there who were interested in Berdiaev. Obviously, my caller’s informant had talked to the same people.

So who was Nicolai Berdiaev? A Russian philosopher of the early twentieth century (1874-1948), on whom I had written a two-volume dissertation. And the purpose of that late-night phone call was to invite me to deliver a paper at the annual gathering of people in my field. The conference was to take place in Atlanta and would be attended by scholars from all over the country, and the world.

I was flattered. But as I explained to my caller, I was no longer associated with a university, was currently neither teacher nor scholar, and in fact was just scraping by doing low-paying jobs, which were all I could find. She replied that maybe I could get back into the teaching profession on the strength of this paper! This is your chance, she said! Everyone will be there; you never know!

To make a long story short, she kept calling and, eventually, I weakened. I called in sick to my temp job one day, stayed up for 24 hours, producing a twenty-minute paper in one giant exhalation. I took an inexpensive night flight to Atlanta, flopped at a cheap hotel, and the next day managed to evade security in the convention center so I wouldn’t have to pay the registration fee. I delivered my paper with gusto to a packed room. Since I had only one slippery foot in academe and the other foot already sliding toward literature, it didn’t sound much like any other paper at that conference, but I received warm and admiring congratulations from my peers.

As I had expected, however, no job offer emerged. So my paper turned out to be a kind of last hurrah in the groves of academe.

The subject of my talk was “Mysticism and Politics,” a marriage of two ideas that seems, on the face of it, headed for a certain divorce. But that was Berdiaev for you. A brilliant thinker – Christian existentialist, philosophical anarchist and eternal gadfly – whose criticisms were telling, whether or not his solutions held up under scrutiny. And since my paper was never published anywhere else (I never sought that), I’ve now decided to put it up on my website for those who might be curious. About mysticism and politics. Or Berdiaev. Or Russian history. Or anarchism. Or power. Or me. (Click to read Mysticism & Politics: Nicholas Berdiaev and the Revolution of 1905.)

The mysticism of the title is Berdiaev’s, of course, not mine. But what we clearly shared, at that time, was the philosophical anarchism alluded to in the epigram I chose to begin the paper. And there may still be a trace of that feeling in me today, in the form of a deep-breathing skepticism towards all those who voluntarily occupy positions of power, including – on those rare occasions when it’s an issue – myself.