Walking with Jack (31 page)

The 2nd hole. A simple 414-yard par-4 if you drive up the left side and avoid the bunker. An open shot at the green from there.

“I graduated from high school in the thick of the draft to Vietnam, and because there was no money for me to go to college, I was preparing to go into the army until I made the First Team All-State in football. I suddenly had offers for scholarships from a dozen colleges. In the spring of my sophomore season there was the tragedy at Kent State. One of the students had been shot in the mouth. It made me so angry that I couldn’t sleep. I just kept thinking about a grown man with a rifle, a member of the National Guard, taking aim at an unarmed kid that way. It made me feel something that I had never felt before. I never played another baseball or football game. Sports just didn’t matter anymore. I began to apply myself to learning about the world. I was so far behind; I didn’t have a day to lose. And I wanted to change the world. I believed with all my heart that writing books was the way to do that.”

The 3rd hole. A 168-yard par-3. A simple hole if you land the left side of this green, where the ground is flat. The right half has a steep slope that will carry a ball off the green.

“I washed dishes in a hotel and worked construction and lived alone for five years after college while I wrote lousy poems. Then on a morning in the winter of 1977, I began writing my first novel. I can’t remember what it was about, but I know that I wrote three pages of dialogue that first morning, and when I read it that night, it felt like the people speaking were not me, and their words belonged to them. It was intoxicating to me. They occupied a world that I did not inhabit, and yet the next morning when I got up to write, that
world was waiting for me to enter it again. Living inside their world was like a drug to me. The way I’ve heard some people describe their introduction to cocaine.”

The 4th hole. A 411-yard par-4. Water up the left side. You must keep the ball right off the tee, or you’re in for big trouble. But if you’re too far right, you’ll be left with a blind shot over tall trees into a small narrow green, protected by four big bunkers.

“Then it was the winter of 1977, and I had moved to a small tourist town way up the coast of Maine. They had a weekly newspaper there, and the editor had quit. I begged for the job and got it. I was sitting at the editor’s desk my second day on the job. There was a blizzard tearing through the town. Every summer store was boarded up. The little light on my desk was the only light on in town. I looked up from the black Royal typewriter, and there was a man walking through the storm, straight to my door. In that moment, I felt my life as a writer begin to turn.

“He was a big man with wide shoulders. He kicked the snow off his boots and asked me if I was the new editor. I said I was. He said he had a story to tell me. He had just sat down when the telephone rang. Someone wanted me to hurry to the dock to take a photograph of the storm tide ripping a restaurant off the pier and carrying it out of the harbor. I asked the man if he could come back and see me the next day. He said he would.

“The next morning on his way to see me he dropped dead of a heart attack. Just fell into the snow. And I ended up writing his obituary that week instead of his story.

“But I met his widow, and she told me he had been a young soldier in the army during the Korean War. They had just had their first baby when he left for the war. Six months after he got there, he was captured by the Chinese army. He was a POW for three years, held in a cave for most of that time. He lost over a hundred pounds and was very sick. For a while the POWs were in the hands of a sadistic
Chinese commander who would pick one American soldier each night to tie to a pole in the freezing cold, torture, and execute. All through the night the man would howl with pain. So this soldier cut a deal with the commander; he said, ‘If I get my men to sign germwarfare confessions, will you stop this torture?’ It worked, and no other prisoners were harmed.

“Three years later the soldier came home to America, and it was the McCarthy era. The United States Army accused the soldier of being a traitor. They court-martialed him. And all the men he kept alive in the cave testified against him. This was just a little man from Maine with no education. He loved the army so much that he told his wife: ‘The army will know that what I did over there in Korea, I did to keep my men alive.’

“Well, the army sent him to prison on a life sentence. They held him for three years, then released him. All his life he claimed he was innocent, and his wife believed him. Now that he was dead, she asked me if I could find the truth. ‘I need to know the truth,’ she said to me.

“The story got its hooks in me. I quit my job and went after it full-time. I survived again by writing feature stories for newspapers while I did my research. I thought it might take me six months. It ended up taking me six years. I fought the army and the FBI, who lied to me that the soldier’s file had been destroyed in a fire. I eventually found the file with some help from a journalist at the
Washington Post
named Bob Woodward. The truth was in the file. The army had pressured the soldier’s men to testify against him. I tracked them all down—all the prosecution’s witnesses—and they agreed to go on the record for me, to clear the soldier’s name.”

The 5th hole. A 407-yard par-4. A dangerous hole. You have to drive the ball over a lake—a carry of at least 230 yards. You miss this drive and the match is over.

“I spent another two years writing a book about that soldier, but
no one wanted to publish it. Editors kept telling me that no one in America cared about the Korean War.

“During those years someone told me that all serious writers went on to study at a place called the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where you spent two years working with some of the best writers in the country and earning a master of fine arts. I spent the next eight years trying to write something good enough to get in. I wrote three practice novels during that time and lived alone in one room like a monk where I made myself read all the classics. I found that I could read and absorb a five-hundred-page book every twenty-four hours if I really bore down on the words. And the words entered me. I fell in love there with the beautiful sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald and became determined to write those kinds of sentences, no matter what it took, while I supported myself by writing feature stories for Sunday newspapers and for
Reader’s Digest
and the
Saturday Evening Post
. One story in
Reader’s Digest
was a check for almost $3,000, which was enough money to live for ten months easily. I was buying time to write my novels. That was the governing dynamic.”

The 6th hole. A 573-yard par-5. A dangerous S-shaped hole with water winding its way up the left side all the way to the green. If you don’t play smart and well here from tee to green, you could easily make a 10 on the hole.

“Nobody would publish my book about the soldier, but a great young editor at
Yankee
magazine named Mel Allen commissioned me to write a story, and then somehow Paramount Pictures found out about it and bought the rights. Suddenly I was living in the Beverly Wilshire hotel down the hallway from Warren Beatty working on the script. The producer rented me a red convertible to drive around Beverly Hills. A young director named Marty Brest was assigned to the project. He would later go on to make
Scent of a Woman
. Tom Cruise was in discussions with Paramount to play my
role—the young reporter tracking down the truth about the dead soldier. It was wild.”

The 7th hole. A 428-yard par-4. A straight-ahead hole, and a good chance for birdie here if you can land the tree-lined fairway from the tee.

“Finally Iowa accepted me. Your mother and I had met and fallen in love by then, and we drove out there in an old Volvo with no heater. I remember her mom crying when we left and saying, ‘You don’t even own a broom.’ With the wind chill, it was fifty degrees below zero in Illinois, and the seats of the car were frozen as hard as granite. I drove, wrapped up in blankets with your mother pressed against me the whole way. I was writing a novel then, and when I submitted the first fifty pages to the people at Iowa, they loved it, and I was awarded a fellowship that allowed me to study there and earn my degree free. In fact, I made a little money there teaching extra courses in the undergraduate English department. I fell in love with teaching right from the first class. I remember the marvelous feeling when I walked into the classroom and looked at my students’ faces and realized that for the next few hours I could finally forget about myself and my writing and my fears and my doubts and just concentrate on them and their work.”

The 8th hole. A 198-yard par-3. Not an easy par-3. Water off the left side of the fairway and the green, and the right half of the green slopes to bad ground. You have to hit a golf shot here.

“Colleen and I eloped in England at the end of my first semester. We rode a train to Paris, which is where your sister Erin was conceived. We spent Christmas in a tiny village in Austria living like royalty on tips your mother had earned as a waitress while she was doing her student teaching. One morning in Austria I got up and
began writing the first chapter of a baseball novel. A love story really between a local farm girl and a young pitcher playing on the minor-league team in her town. This was my fourth novel. The first three had been lost causes. And right then on that first morning, I had a feeling that this one was going to make it. And that morning, writing in bed beside your mom while she slept, began my routine. I’ve written in bed beside her now for twenty-seven years.”

The 9th hole. A 453-yard par-4. A long and dangerous par-4. A tough drive with water down the left side and the hole swinging to the left. If you don’t get the drive out far enough to the right, you have to go over the water to get to the green in regulation.

“I’m trying to keep this in order, Jack. And just hit the high points. Your sister was born in the autumn of my second year in Iowa. Five days later my agent called to tell me that my novel had been bought in New York. Mommy and I walked through the leaves to a pizza joint to celebrate with some friends. Erin slept right through it. That night I told Colleen that we could have as many babies as we wanted. Every door was going to swing open for me. I was thirty-four. I’d been writing every day, seven days a week, ten or twelve hours a day, since I was twenty-four. Now it was all paying off.”

The 10th hole. A 444-yard par-4. All you have to do to make this a good hole is hit a perfect drive in the middle of the fairway. Anything right or left leaves a blind shot over tall trees to the green.

“With my first novel coming out in New York in the spring, and with my MFA degree from Iowa, I had five or six job offers. I mean professor jobs for life. But I wasn’t interested in signing on anywhere for more than a one-year gig. I loved teaching, but I was afraid to settle into academic life. Frankly, I always found professors a little too pompous and difficult to bear. Plus, that cosseted life was too easy. It could kill a writer’s dreams of writing important books. So I took a
one-year job at Colby College, where I had gone as an undergrad. It was pretty cool to be back there, in an office just down the hallway from the guys who had been my professors twenty-five years earlier. We had a great winter. I loved my students. Got my first computer, a Mac. Until then, I’d used only my manual Royal typewriter. To get a four-hundred-page novel ready to send to New York with no mistakes would take three months of work, seven days a week. Now with my Mac, I could do the same amount of work in three days. Amazing. More time to spend with Mommy. And so Nell was born in March, the same month my first novel was published in New York. I remember taking her cross-country skiing when she was four days old. The novel got decent reviews but sold poorly. And, lo and behold, a small press published my book about the soldier—
A Soldier’s Disgrace
. It sold pretty well, and the reviews were all outstanding. In fact, a man named C. Michael Curtis, an editor at the
Atlantic Monthly
, offered to write a blurb for the cover—and he said the book deserved to win a Pulitzer Prize. Big stuff for me.”

The 11th hole. A 575-yard par-5. Wide-open driving hole. But terrible second shot. Water and trees blocking your path to the green. It’s a three-shot hole. No chance for eagle.

“So as our year at Colby was ending, I was offered a job teaching at the University of Maine. I think the salary was $26,000, and there was the chance for tenure. I turned it down when I got an advance of $7,000 to write my third book, another novel. And off we went to Ireland because we knew that if we could find a cottage in the countryside, we could survive for a year on seven grand. Your mother and I were so crazy in love we got on the plane out of Boston on a Sunday night with two babies and we were asking the Irish stewardesses if they thought we should get off in Shannon or Dublin. We had no idea where we were even going to spend the first night. We took Dublin. I went for a walk the first morning, and I saw this little necklace in a store window that I knew Colleen would love.
I bought it and the clerk told me about a cottage in county Wicklow, and off we went for the winter. We lived on cabbage and potatoes. All we had for heat was a fireplace, where we burned coal. The cottage was down a country road, five miles from civilization. That’s when I began getting up at four in the morning to write, because that was when the coal fire was dying and I needed to keep it going.”

The 12th hole. A 189-yard par-3. A pretty straightforward hole. Water down the left side.

“After my third book was published, it became clear to me that I was never really going to be a popular writer in America. What I mean is all three books lost money for their publishers. The movie deal in L.A. had vanished. Colleen was pregnant with you, and it was time to settle down. I was thirty-eight. I think I was ready to settle into a life of teaching. I was hired at the University of Maine for one year, and while I was there and we were living in Bangor, I was hired into a tenure-track job at Colgate. We fell in love with the place. You took your first steps there. We were living in a dream until I got fired, and you already know that story. We moved home to Maine. I couldn’t get another teaching job, and it had been five years since my last book was published. I was working hard on a new novel, but because my first three books had lost money in New York, no one there wanted to even read this new novel.