Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (8 page)

I spent about fifteen years becoming a critic, and I wrote a lot of criticism. I still do. I was a mean critic. I made fun of writers who made mistakes. I said things like, “This book isn’t worth using as a door stop or a boat anchor.” I liked that. It had a “folksy ring” to it.

Then I became a writer myself, and my attitude changed.

###

I didn’t think I would become a writer, and I didn’t call myself a writer until I did. I remembered my friend Ben, and I thought of my “real writer” friends who continued to slave away without success. I had not studied to become a writer. I hadn’t suffered. I hadn’t been rejected. When writers would gather at parties, I would stand off to one side and wonder at them. They would look at me with eyes that said, “He’s a critic. Be careful.” Although, none of them had read my criticism.

But I had children, a wife who worked at night, and I was bored. I couldn’t go to the library to do the research a critic must do, and I found that reading, like hot meals and long showers and naps, isn’t possible when there are diapers to change and feeding times to observe. Writing can be interrupted, though, for a few minutes, and rapid typing keeps daddies awake and alert to cries in the night.

So I started writing. And I became a writer.

Now when I go to parties, the critics stand off and look at me with eyes that say, “He’s a writer. Be careful.” Although, none of them have read my novels.

The biggest problem a writer faces is all the questions he has to answer. Not questions from the media. I like those questions. They give me a chance to answer the critics who don’t like my work. No matter how successful a writer becomes, there are always critics who don’t like his work. Questions from the media are a chance to fight back. Of course, fewer people read interviews than read the critics, but it’s about the only weapon a writer has.

I also like questions from students and people who have read my fiction. Sometimes I learn a great deal when I have to search my mind for answers to questions I’ve never thought of. I am still a critic, and I like to discover things I’ve done that were right, or wrong, or that might elevate my work to consideration as “literature.” I still believe that what the writer says isn’t as important as that which is said about him. I still believe that critics hold all the cards. But I now know that the best critic is a thoughtful reader, even when the reader doesn’t like what he reads.

But some of the questions are impossible to answer. One is, “What’s your book about?” I used to give “cute answers.” I used to say, “Oh, about $14.00,” or, “About four hundred pages long.” It might get a smile, but the question didn’t go away. The only honest response is, “Why don’t you buy a copy and find out?”

There are other nagging questions, too: “What’s it like to be a writer?”, “How can I become a writer?”, or the worst of all, “How much money do you make as a writer?” No one believes that anyone who has published a book isn’t rich and famous. The truth is that most writers haven’t made enough to cover the cost of paper and ribbons and postage; instead of being comfortable, they’re running scared.

The biggest problem a writer faces is what to write about. “Where do you get your ideas?” is the most frequently asked question of a writer and the most annoying. If I knew where I got my ideas, I would put electrified barbed wire up all around it and ring it with mine fields. I would visit it often and regularly. I might even move in and guard it personally with an army of mercenaries. The honest answer is, “I don’t know.” And that makes me sound stupid.

When I started writing my first novel I didn’t intend for it to be a novel. I was just continuing the habit I began in Mrs. McSpadden’s typing class. I was killing time, or so I thought. I wrote about what I thought I knew. I wrote about a small-town boy in a mean little town. He wasn’t I, and it wasn’t my hometown; but it was very like my hometown, especially the mean parts, and he was very like me, especially the small-town boy parts. I continued to write about the little town and the boy for a long time. Eventually, a series of stories came out of it. I put them all together along with some other stories I had written, and I sent it to New York, and the editor I sent it to liked it well enough to publish it. My editor liked my next story even better, and he published it, too. It wasn’t about a small-town boy, but it was about the same small town.

I came to like that town, and I came to hate it as well. The more things I made up about it, the truer it all seemed to me. As I kept writing about it, it didn’t seem so mean anymore, and I found that there were as many good things about it as bad. I wanted to be honest about it, though, so I kept making up things, expanding things here, shrinking things there, altering the facts of reality as I went, all the time drawing on the truth of my memory but weaving that truth into a tapestry of lies that fit my imaginary small town.

I didn’t want to sentimentalize the town. There were good people there, and, I discovered when I began to write about them, there were funny people there, too. At the time I was writing, though, I didn’t think I was a writer. I never thought anyone would read my writing. So I was frank and honest and open. It tends to make trouble for me, now. People in small towns that become the models for writers are sensitive about having their secrets—even those that are made up—revealed.

Another question writers hear a lot is, “What are you going to do next?” This is an ironic question, and I know that the inquirer has a compliment in mind when the sentence is formed, that what he really means is that he liked the first book and is looking forward to another one. But it always disturbs a writer to have someone ask “What’s next?” It’s like saying, “What have you done for me lately?”

For most writers, publishing a book,
one
book, is the goal of a lifetime. That quickly gives way to ambition, of course, but in the back of a writer’s mind is always the insecurity, the recollection of feeling that his book will never be published, that he will always write in a personal vacuum. Rejection is part of the business. A book, even a second book, or a third or a fourth, can be rejected by an agent, an editor, the critics, or even the public. Indeed, that sort of thing happens more often than it doesn’t. Most writers think that writing one book, or even two, should be enough. But it’s not. We live in a consumer’s society. People want more of what they like, but they usually want it to be “new and improved,” and when writing is concerned, that’s scary.

###

Personally, I often worry that I might not be able to write about the same small town again. I would like to, but that mysterious place where my ideas come from doesn’t always yield many good ones about the town, and I sometimes can’t seem to think up any new lies to tell about it. At one point, I decided to “go home,” not to my mythical town, but to the real one. I hoped that I would find something to write about there. And I did.

One of the things I found was about the history of the town and its region. I grew up there, spent eighteen years there, and the only historical incident I ever heard of that took place there was that Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured nearby. Sul Ross was up on the Pease River killing Indian women and children one morning when, supposedly, he saw her blue eyes and took her, the wife of a chief and the mother of the “Last Chief of the Comanche,” back to her people from whom she had been captured decades earlier. She died—it’s said, of grief, but another story is that she starved herself to death—quickly after she was restored to the Christian bosom of her loved ones. People from that part of Texas, I’ve learned, even the Comanche, don’t like too much change, and history is something to be trotted out and dusted off on “Western Day.”

But history can also be full of lies. I later learned that both stories about Cynthia Ann were untrue; she most likely died of pneumonia. To this day I haven’t visited the “battle site,” though, not out of perversity, but rather because I never could find it. The historical marker was erected after I left, and I’ve never had the time to search for it. I’m told, however, that the place where they put it is actually several miles from the capture site since the Pease River changed course and the actual location is now in the wrong county.

I was undeterred by such anomalies of history, though. I started writing about the region and its settlement once more. I thought about the kind of people it took to settle an area that Cynthia Ann’s son, Quanah Parker, had said was good for nothing but “scorpions, red ants, and rattlesnakes,” a place where it could be 80 degrees and drizzling in the morning, blowing a dust storm in the afternoon, and snowing by midnight. A place where drought, flood, tornados, and wheat-killing hail, prairie fires and insect plagues vied with mesquite, Johnson grass, and scrub cedar to keep the forces of agriculture and civilization out and away long after the Comanche had given up the chore as a bad job and went to Oklahoma to raise cattle and drill for oil. I was surprised to find that buffalo used to roam all over the area, for the only buffalo I ever saw were in California. I learned that the shortest railroad in the world was once there, the Acme Tap Line. I learned that the only railroad ever owned by an Indian, the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific, was there. It was a shock to me. My father worked for the “Q” for nearly thirty years.

I also found out, again later on, that Quanah Parker never owned a dime’s worth of stock in that railroad. It was another lie.

In my first two books, I had dealt with the decline of the area. I talked about the last passenger train, the Zephyr, which came through the year after I left for college; I spoke of burned-out and boarded-up buildings; I wrote of the seamier side of life, the hidden sex, hypocrisy, and fear that gripped a community that looked fruitlessly for hope in a faith that seemed to be as ignorant of them as they were that there was a world outside their region, a world that ignored them as well. What I was learning, though, was of something else. I learned of shootouts on Main Street, of murder in remote pastures, of suicides in gas stations, of socialists who preached on street corners. I learned of a time when hope had promise to bolster it, of a place that survived a dustbowl and depression, two world wars and government farm programs, oilfield blight, used up cotton fields, and poor wheat harvests, that found their heroes in jerseys, pads, and pimples every Friday night in the fall, and that, in spite of the fact that the century-old, fieldstone buildings of downtown were crumbling around them, still believed that where they were was the best place they could be.

I realized, to my surprise, that when I grew up there, I also thought that it was the best place I could be. I hated it, certainly, in the way any youngster hates what is familiar and longs to know what lies beyond the mountains—or, in my case, beyond the Wichita River. I had seen Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. I had dreamed of New York. I wanted to leave worse than anything. I never wanted to come back.

Through my writing, though, I returned. I discovered that there was more substance to the place than I ever thought was there, and even though I have no desire to go back, permanently, I find that I am drawn to it as a prodigal, as one who has seen the outside world and found it wanting. The urban setting may be, as some have asserted, the proper subject for contemporary fiction, but I’ve never found the grimy boulevards of metropolitan Texas to be as interesting as the dust-blown streets of my small town. Human relationships, good ones and bad ones, tend to be magnified there, and the significance of human action tends to be greater. There might be eight million stories in the naked city, but somehow none of them seems as interesting to me as the couple of hundred that can be found in my imaginary small town.

In his wonderful memoir,
Lost in West Texas,
Jim W. Corder calls the region that contains my towns, the real and the imaginary, “lost.” He notes that it lies on a line of demarcation that extends south through Jack County to 1-20, west to just above Abilene, and then north to the Red River and home again. It is an unknown region. Neither Caprock nor grassland, it is pockmarked with cedar breaks and river sloughs, swamps and mysterious caves, sandy, quicksand-filled rivers and badlands, gypsum that lies on the ground like snow and invades the native water to the point that soap won’t lather. Along the state highways that infrequently crisscross the region, small towns sit like starving sentinels of a bygone age, a time within living memory when farmers drove wagons and plowed with mules, and lawyers were the only ones allowed to wear vests, when no one but preachers worked on Sundays, and Saturday night filled Main Street, when salesmen traveled by train, ate in diners, and stayed in fleabag hotels and called such whistle stops “bergs” with a derisive curl of their mustachioed lips, when the only law worth worrying about was the sheriff, and when the biggest scandal anyone knew about or dared to mention was the pint bottles behind the Coke machine in the domino parlor. It was a time when the head cheerleader’s unexpected pregnancy was a cause for shame, and the worst crime a football boy could be accused of was mixing peppermint schnapps with a lime coke. It was an era when the banker was both the worst enemy and the best friend a town could have, when homosexuals were called “old bachelors” and lesbians were called “spinster sisters.” It was a time when a first kiss was a teenager’s greatest ambition—and fear, when dinner was served at noon, ice cream was hand-cranked, and Saturday afternoon meant “western,” a time when “out there” referred to a world no one understood or, truly, wanted much of anything to do with. Now much of that has changed, or has it? That’s what I wanted to come home to, that’s what I wanted to write about.

Towns in that region were “Huck Finn” kinds of places when I grew up. Only we knew of places to hunt more than fish, places to steal a melon instead of a raft. A river, to my generation, was something you could walk across, if you didn’t get stuck in quicksand. A forest was something resembling a plum thicket that had grown up in a CCC shelter-break. The first time I saw the Mississippi, I couldn’t believe it, and I’m still not sure that the Great Southern Forest is natural.