Once upon a time I wanted to be a writer of fiction. I was an
aimless, shiftless jobless college graduate in love with a girl who
lived far, far away. Becoming a rich and famous writer seemed to be
the best solution to all those problems. So I began to write.
It’s easy for me to be flippant about it now. I have since
married the girl, rented an apartment, and advanced in a career.
But at the time I was deadly serious about writing. I disdained the
literary workshops and traveled to Afghanistan because I believed
Hemingway when he said that war was the hardest thing to write
about. And I also really wrote — four or five novels, a bunch of
short stories, many notebooks of quotidian observations.
A year ago, in a nostalgic funk, I reread my short stories and
was surprised at how good they were. At least they were far better
than I remembered them being when I abandoned them. I decided to
see if I could publish them.
The first story was based on my experience interning in the
newsroom of a suburban Washington newspaper. My character, a cub
reporter assigned to obituaries and petty crime, is hounded by the
copy editor, who insists that “every death must have a cause.” It
was, my character noted, “the closest we got to theology in the
newsroom.” A botched assignment to cover a murder scene near Fort
Belvoir and a near car crash while rushing to get the story back to
the newsroom provokes him to meditate briefly on causes of death
and, implicitly, meanings of life.
The rejections fed my greedy mailbox. One of them, though, made
me furious. Appended to a form rejection slip was a hand-written
note from the editor saying that she really liked the story but had
to reject it on the grounds that it was simply not true that
newspapers required a cause of death for every obituary. Even
setting aside that this directly contradicted my experience, I was
bothered that her idea of fiction required fact-checking of such a
picayune order. To my delight, though, a literary journal
(“Sanskrit”) did accept that story and I soon sent out a second
one.
The second story described a trip by two callow college friends
to Atlantic City. One of them is from a rich family that has an
apartment there overlooking the ocean. He wants to meet up with a
group of wealthy high school friends at the casinos and maybe score
with an old high school crush. The poor friend, meanwhile, just
wants to hang out on the balcony, drink Margaritas, watch the ocean
and philosophize. The rich friend prevails on him to go to the
casinos. To avoid the embarrassment of admitting to poverty, he
tells his reluctant friend to explain that he was once addicted to
gambling but bet his tuition check on the blackjack table and since
then swore to never go near the tables. The poor friend does this
suspiciously well, and attracts by this lie the attentions of one
of the rich girls. By the end of the story, while enjoying his
carnal reward, he realizes he has become an inveterate liar.
The rejections came in again and, again, appended to one was a
hand-written note: “Good writing but characters are sleazy,
uninteresting, no real history on either one and no sense of
place.” This is a rejection? I thought. Except for the
“uninteresting” part I would consider it a blurb: sleazy characters
slapped from nothing into consciousness, acting out their brief
parts on the short-story stage. Of course there was no
sense of place: most of the action takes place in a casino — the
most placeless of places. The rejection was actually a perfect
summation of my idea of good fiction.
And I realized that most of my short stories were full of sleazy
characters — poets who fail to kill themselves, drunks who cheat
on their wives, teachers who sleep with their students, men who
learn how to fight because they are cowards, prodigies who are
hopelessly cynical by the time they complete college. I don’t know
why they are so sleazy; I invited them onto the page and that is
how they presented themselves and how they kept my attention.
But if my brief foray into the literary market is any
indication, the guardians of our short fiction these days want
fairy tales described with clinical accuracy. A curious order for
any age, let alone one which doesn’t believe in fairies. But if
it’s fairy tales they want, well, once upon a time, for the love of
a woman, I wanted to be a writer of fiction — or is that just
another sleazy story?
