The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (21 page)

He began work on
Beyond the Dark Mountain
when he was sixty finishing it almost ten years later. He met with the usual responses when he sent it out: editors did not read it but pretended they had and sent it back, or they did not send it back. Mostly they ignored it. Finally an editor from a local publishing house did read it and liked it and offered Les a contract. The week before they were to begin editing, the entire fiction staff, including Les's editor, was fired. The publisher had decided to cease publishing fiction. Three or four years later, Les told me that he had been disappointed and angry, but he had also felt relieved. Publishing that book, he believed, would have changed his life and he did not want it to change. He continued sending the manuscript around but nothing happened and I think he regarded sending it out as a matter of duty rather than desire. We never talked about publishing it through Black Heron Press, if for no other reason than that it was very long and we could not have afforded it. The novel remains unpublished.

Until he became too ill to write, he worked on another novel, a kind of love story. (One must always qualify the genre with Les:
The Forty Fathom Bank
is a kind of sea story but also it is a tale of greed and the failure of redemption.) I never saw it, and as far as I know, no copy exists. Convinced by a friend that the story was not up to the standard Les set with
The Forty Fathom Bank
and the best of his stories, he destroyed it.

I knew Les for only the last ten years of his life. He wrote well until a year or two before he died, when physical pain and medication confounded that special clarity of mind he needed to write. His last decade, it seems to me, was an itemized giving-up of everything that was important to him, including any attempt to resolve the conflicts that had beset him early on. His writing showed no resolution. (Were he able to read these last sentences, his eyes would
flash and he would turn away in contempt. “Writing is not about resolution,” he would say. “It is about conflict, and conflict is never resolved.”) His late writing showed, instead, wonderment and knowledge. He believed in Nothing as though it were Something. Yet despair was foreign to him. Writing for a few friends, he told me, was enough. Had anyone else said this, I would not have believed him. But Les was so lacking in self-mercy that I took him at his word. He did that, writing for his friends, as long as he was able.

One night the phone rang at half past midnight and I thought immediately of Les. Who else would call at that hour? I did not want to get out of bed, and I let the machine take the call. I listened for a voice and when it didn't come, I was even more certain that it was he, for he hated talking to my machine. I promised myself that I would call him back but I didn't. When I had talked with him a week or two earlier, he had sounded so depressed—he was weak from the dialysis, he said—that I was reluctant to talk with him again so soon. He had asked when I would be coming down from Seattle to San Francisco. I told him I did not think it would be before August or September and he said he did not think he would be alive then. I had never heard him sound so tired. I did not try to joke with him. We talked a little about books and then we hung up.

On Thursday, May 3, 1990, a message from his daughter Lisa was on my machine when I came home from work. Les had died the Sunday before. It was a stroke. He had expected to die from an aortic aneurysm he had been cultivating. Instead, it was a blood clot that had traveled to his brain from his foot.

A final vignette, told to me by a friend of Les. In the late eighties when
The Forty Fathom Bank
had been out for several years, he and Les had gone to dinner at a very good fish
place in San Anselmo, California. It was a weekend evening and the restaurant was packed, the tables pushed so closely together that you could not help but hear your neighbors' conversation. At the table nearest Les was a couple engrossed in talk about fishing and books. They were young, in their earliest twenties, but they knew what they were talking about. Les figured the young man must be a commercial fisherman, and both he and his woman friend knew the best books about the sea. Before either of them could object, Les had joined in their conversation, and in a moment the young man turned to him and said, “Oh, next you'll be telling us you're the author of
The Forty Fathom Bank
!”

I can visualize Les's reaction: his eyes take on a sudden shine, his mouth falls open just a little, in surprise and delight, but in wonder, too, at how the world works. And he says, the lines in his face smoothing into a smile, “Why, yes, I am.”

Having recently reread
The Forty Fathom Bank
, I was impressed again by its classic structure. Each character acts out of personal longing, his desire converging with the desire of the opposing character, both blind to what must happen, so as to create a tragedy. Though the story is told in first person, the reader has the sense that the author is not telling a tale but relating the events leading up to a disaster. Tragedy and individual want were Les's forte. If he had written nothing else, the perfect lines of this small book would be enough to ensure its place in the literature of the English language.

LES GALLOWAY (1912–1990), while still a teenager, shipped out to New Zealand as a seaman; a few years later he dropped out of college to enlist in the Bolivian army. For most of his life he was a commercial fisherman out of San Francisco. His stories were published in
Esquire
and
Prairie Schooner
.

JEROME GOLD is a writer and the publisher of Black Heron Press. He lives in Seattle.

Copyright © 1984, 2004 by Lisa Galloway. Afterword copyright © 2004 by Jerome Gold. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Some of the stories in this collection have previously appeared in the following magazines: “The Caspar” in
The Arizona Quarterly;
“The Albacore Fisherman” (a shorter version) in
Esquire;
and “Where No Flowers Bloom” in
Prairie Schooner
.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. ISBN 978-1-4521-2714-9

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