I once pursued an unheralded career as a fictionist. I am the
author of a bad untitled novel in manuscript, and thirty or forty
atrocious short stories, two of which that actually saw
publication. The novel was a roman à clef of my experience
working in a mental hospital, a reverse take-off on One Flew
Over the Cuckkoo’s Nest. In my story the orderlies were the
good guys. I dreamed of literary fame as the Anti-Kesey. Today my
novel “lives” in a cardboard box in a closet, and if the house ever
catches fire, there it will stay. Or if my sun ascends maybe it’ll
end up on some futuristic version of the “Antiques Roadshow” in a
century or so.
My massive short story output has left me with two drawers of a
file cabinet crammed with manila envelopes containing manuscripts,
and two shoeboxes in the bottom drawer stuffed with roughly 200
rejection slips (I’ve always been a firm believer in multiple
submissions) from some of America’s most prominent magazines. How
was I to know that The New Yorker received 8,000
submissions per month?
These stories all reflect who I was reading at the time I wrote
them. This is a cautionary tale, of course, because the short story
writer who writes like that has no business writing stories. T.S.
Eliot said: “Bad writers imitate; good writers steal.” The author
of “The Wasteland” proved that plagiarism is the spice of the
literary life. Though reflecting the general decline of Western
Civilization, they don’t make plagiarists like they used to. After
all, who do we now have to compare to Shakespeare hijacking big
chunks of Julius Caesar out of Plutarch? Doris Kearns
Goodwin? But I digress. Back to my honestly executed and extremely
bad short stories.
I had the standard terse Hemingway phase that slowly evolved
into a convoluted Faulkner one, where the sentences seemed to run
all the way to my rejection slip- choked mailbox. I had a Joseph
Conrad-Graham Greene-Robert Stone period, where all my male
characters were alienated, nihilistic Vietnam veterans who dealt
drugs, drank tequila from the bottle, had torrid love affairs with
beautiful, dissipated women, and died violently in exotic locales
like Thailand or Mexico. John Cheever was a temporary enthusiasm as
I tried to apply his American suburban-angst motif to the “New
West” when I moved here over a decade ago, as was Flannery O’Connor
as I attempted to inject a bit of her Southern Gothic outlook into
the life of small town Wyoming. I also wrote poor parodies of Larry
McMurtry and Thomas McGuane, two contemporary Westerners who
actually know the territory.
One “McGuanesque” entitled “And Jack Again” was published in
Caldera, a “little magazine” (now defunct) out of glitzy
Jackson, Wyoming. Little magazines brought out in upscale Rocky
Mountain resort towns differ from their more staid academic
counterparts in that they aren’t publicly supported, are infused
with a narcissistic center-of-the-universe “sense of place,” and
are published by pseudo-creative liberals with trust funds. In
short, tons of private money on hand but no talent. They would
drown in ennui and existential dread if they didn’t have a bad
magazine to put out. I found it paradoxical that these earnest
little rags always had money to “plow back into the magazine,” but
paid their writers nothing but contributor copies.
My Caldera story was about a hard luck New West cowboy
(Jack) who loses the ranch, gets a divorce and a much-hated job
working on an oil rig, and starts to drink too much, the latter
resulting in some slapstick comic adventures. One night while
carefully navigating his pickup truck home from a bar, Jack pulled
over and got sick. This was merely an understated device in the
story to highlight Jack’s personal fortunes and state of mind. I
didn’t describe it in graphic detail. But an illustrator at
Caldera did. There in my first published short story was a
crudely rendered pencil sketch of a slovenly dressed cowboy leaning
on the hood of a pickup with strings of vomit hanging from his
mustache like fangs. I suppose this was Caldera’s way of
dispelling the “Myth of the West,” my puke-spattered cowboy being a
manifestation of editorial policy.
My other published story, “A Fine Day for Business,” showed up
in a western pulp fiction magazine in Montana called Big Sky
Stories. A scholarly look at the 1830s Rocky Mountain Fur
trade, the piece also featured some rather gritty realism: Indian
fighting, scalping, and torture (one poor guy has his arm chopped
off). Rereading it reminds me that this story shows me at the peak
of what I call my Cormac McCarthy-Sam Peckinpah period, with
dismembered body parts used for great symbolic effect. Who knows?
Maybe this obscure gem will someday be the subject of Harvard Ph.D.
dissertation. And the magazine’s editor, a fellow with the unusual
name of Happy Jack Feder, wielded his red pen with a ferocity that
in the end seemed to pay homage to all the bloodshed.
Which brings me to rejection slips; while not lethally bloody,
they do have a poison pill quality about them. There are two kinds:
standard and personalized.
“Standard” is almost self-explanatory: “We are sorry that your
submission does not fit our current needs. Good luck placing it
elsewhere. — The Editors.” “Personalized” treats the author to all
sorts of earnest — but in the end unserious — constructive
criticism aimed at making a better writer. It’s all about character
motivation and dramatic tension and plot resolution, and the writer
is subjected to such clichéd golden oldies as “this story
didn’t take me anywhere,” as if it were plane ticket. The bearers
of these pedantic good tidings are usually graduate student interns
who are themselves unpublished fictionists who write badly but
impart the collected wisdom gleaned from countless graduate
seminars run by people who also write badly and who have published
mannered, contrived and self-indulgent fiction in other little
magazines edited by people who also preside over graduate seminars
and write badly.
I haven’t written fiction in years, thank God. Friends sometime
implore me to return to it. As I shake my head, I can only offer
them the example of Henry James who, after utterly failing as a
playwright on opening night, said that writing for the theater was
not “an art, but a secret.” But I think I have unlocked the mystery
of my own big secret, and have discovered it is simply enough to be
clearly understood.
All that sweat equity was not for naught.
