Angst (from the diary of Joseph Kaufman)

March 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It is difficult to describe the degree and nature of tension which aggravates the fault line between being a religious man and writer of fiction. Call it a type of existential strife, a goading and constant friction, a frustrating and at times debilitating clash, which leaves neither of these sides of me alone or unharmed. And as we are trained to lead with our heads—this whole western Judeo-Christian model—let’s suppose that this conflict begins ontologically: whilst the purview and focus of any orthodox man will be to perceive, learn, then be informed by the revealed and the hidden Torah as well as Judaism’s weltanschauung on spiritual, intellectual, and emotional matters of weight—in short, to be involved and utterly engaged with reality-as-is—the purpose of any writer of fiction, somewhat contrarily, is nothing short of the attempt to remake reality convincingly in one’s own image. I say, ‘somewhat’, because great books do get at great truths; and I say, ‘contrarily,’ because Judaism’s version of truth apprehension couldn’t be more distant than that of a novelist’s.

For that remaking is nothing if not a sign of the writer’s unhappiness with the unadorned world, the visceral need for escape. And though a novelist uses the palette of the world for his conceptions—the way things really do feel, taste, smell, sound, and provoke thought—the writer’s love of the quotidian is at best sketchy and, frankly, more akin to the kabbalistic concept of the yearning of the soul to free itself from its bodily shell. And so while writing—nay, all art—is also the desire to conjure, arrange, systematize, concretize, beautify, magnify, highlight, criticize, good writing will paste onto one’s cognition a subtext and ubertext for a way to sense the world. Which is precisely why books change lives. And which leads us toward the most uncomfortable conclusion of all: that it is perhaps this very fault line of tension between warring parts of the psychic whole which produces both a competent sense of reality as well as the means of its stylization which produces the stuff of good writing. The trick, of course, to being a wizard—for isn’t that the goal of all the conjuring?—is to ply your black magic while remaining a healthy citizen, to somehow live with and not at odds with your angst and resist the all-too-present allure of alcohol, women, drugs, debilitating distraction and procrastination.

Insanity is a third type of solution.

The fourth option is, as Flaubert wrote, ‘Faire et se taire,’ which means, roughly, Shut up and get on with it.

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More Memories of Bernard Malamud

February 11, 2010 By 2 Comments

As a senior at Bennington College, I fumbled around for a post-graduation plan which would allow me to write. I observed Mr. Malamud closely then, as if to construct some tableau of sustaining memory of what a real writer looked and acted like before being condemned to real-life writing wilderness: his narrow, almost Arab moustache, his tad-too-large hard-framed glasses that he constantly adjusted on his nose, the way he twirled his hands only halfway in expressing thoughts, a reticent gesture, as if he censured himself in mid-excitement. Yes, the fastidious way he handled sheaves of homework and his comments written in an elegant and exacting hand, like some German scribe in medieval times, the slight, sloughing way he cleared his throat, his baldness, his soft voice mellifluous as a forbearing clarinet teacher. He wore a small hat and plain overcoat in the wintertime, carried a narrow black briefcase. He resembled an insurance salesman, an explainer of survivors’ benefits, who’d worked his way up to a desk job at the home office. All this masked a fierce determination borne of a most humble upbringing in Brooklyn: his father was a grocer, his mother had gone mad. He hardly missed an hour of writing, it was said, never a day.

We strolled the college’s grounds together. He admired trees, clouds, the quality of air, he admired the beauty of various coeds. He lamented the cost of writing as a hermetic closing off from romantic possibility and I could see this bothered him: read his last book, Dubin’s Lives, to find out just how much. Once, he came to my college apartment with an obscure homosexual poet and my parents to eat the lasagna and ratatouille that my roommate and I cooked for them. He took me out to dinner. He asked me if people at the restaurant were looking at him. I glanced around and indeed they were. He’d won the National Book Award; he’d won a Pulitzer; he was a famous man in this small-ish town in southern Vermont. Another time, I drove him from Bennington to his apartment on West End Avenue in the beautiful, trash-strewn City. We spoke about his privation to become a writer, spoke about his kids who were older than me. Many years later, after I’d begun my first book, he wrote me a letter that, “if you work hard enough you might make it.” And a year after the letter, he came to my wedding. He wore the plaid suit jacket of a fashionable golfer and at the celebration dinner he leaned close for a private toast and said that my wife and I were a wonderful pair.
Back at college, our writing class convened at his house for our last session, a group critique of short stories we wrote. And I remember—my romantic memory—how the house shone with light, like a spectrum of his creativity and hard work, and how his mother-in-law, an Italian woman named Mrs. Fidelman who’d become a movie star late in life, sucked on a cigarette with a long ash in his living room. That night, he criticized a girl’s story and made her cry and praised another student’s work who later became a famous seller of books and who decried in The New York Times the writer’s life as a miserable one.

“If you work hard enough you might make it.” —Words which haunt me still.

Am I working hard enough? Do I really have what it takes? —Existential worries. Worries which will never cease. But the great abiding gift he gave me was his personal example of a truly serious artist, my first and, so far, my last. He was a teacher who never spoke about technique but rather, as a secular rabbi, asked questions like, “Who are you and what do you have to say? What is your voice? How deep in yourself can you dig?” Questions which I didn’t understand then but became the very bedrock of my mind. Inchoate questions which nagged at me as I applied to the Peace Corps in Africa—a job where I could legitimately drop out of society and try to write and understand these ciphers of questions Mr. Malamud spit out like mantras. Togo had no writing teachers, no writing seminars, no writing friends. It was Writing Diaspora, a country of lousy agriculture and worse politics where the arts were not part of anyone’s curriculum and never would be. Africa was more than distant and philosophically dark as Canaan before the Israelites, physically unhealthy, a purposeful exile and arid savannah of competing life claims where I’d have to choose, as both aspiring novelist and callow young man, how best to grow up.

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Threes, the Third, at Bennington College

January 25, 2010 By 3 Comments

From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman.

It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting a baseball-large field on three sides. The fourth side had a middle distance view of the White Mountains and which ended at a small rock wall the students labeled “The End of the World”. The school resembled a Vermont village ala Grandma Moses and an atmospheric cross between a David Bowie concert, the Grateful Dead, and a 50′s beatnik hangout in the Village. It had a Black Music department, an extensive modern dance facility, no grades and no exams. Affairs were encouraged between faculty and students. Drugs, drinking, sex, various other forms of exotica, and remarkable hard work were all de rigueur.

Born in Pittsfield, one hour due south on Route 7, I was the only local at the school. The majority of the student body was from New York and Los Angeles, a smattering from Boston and Washington, a pittance from overseas. I was the country mouse to their town mice: I’d never attended private schools as they had, nor traveled, nor dressed, nor read the books nor seen the movies they’d seen. I didn’t even know what a cappuccino was. Yes, a country mouse filled with inchoate aspirations and no real sense of his own talent or predilections, a wildly desirous junior who searched for both transcendence and degradation all at once, a crazy, lusty mix of Henry Miller and the hallucinogenic and warrior ideas of Carlos Casteneda–remember him?

I wanted to live Siddhartha, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Camus, Stendhal’s Frederick Morel all at once. Dig that. The vitality, the great force which sent me to Israel then through Greece and Spain, which kept me up late at night listening to Coltrane and woke me early to my Corona electric typewriter and my first taste of extended hard artistic work–I wrote two short novels, I wrote a book of short stories–this overwrought, wild life, this angst which visited me nightly, like a centuries-wandering dybbuk which finally found its best place to rest–this gorgeous untamed energy which I only ever found one other time in my life when I was first married and found my way to yeshiva, this energy enlivened me, brightened me, the hard work enlightened me, and I had much to speak about with Nick Delbanco who turned me on to Malcolm Lowry’s “Under The Volcano”, and much to speak about with Marc Falcone, who turned me on to Charles Ives.

He was great, Delbanco, with his corduroy pants, bald pate with the long strands pasted cross-wise over it, handsome Sephardi nose, coal black eyes, and a cool and sinuous manner and way of speaking that reminded me of confidence men in grade B movies. He was patient, patient, patient with foolishness–and just how did he do that, I wonder, as I look back. And he always returned papers on time, never late, and always with more remarks and comments and good cheer than even the best of them deserved.

And then there was Falcone, whose brother, Vinny was Frank Sinatra’s band leader. Marc would do an imitation of Sinatra, where he’d pinch my cheek and spit out in this Brooklyn twang, “Love ya, kid, now get outta here.” He was swarthy, moustached, handsome, talented, my first friend who had real taste. We lived together my second year at Bennington, in Helen Frankenthaler’s old studio. He got after me to wash the dishes; he got after me to read Joyce; he did wonderful imitations of golf announcers on television; he let me bum cigarettes; he loved me like a one-year younger brother; and I just sent him my book and I still love him madly back.

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Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman

January 14, 2010 By 3 Comments

After Mr. Benson, my 9th grade Marine writing teacher, I had no writing teacher for the rest of high school—there simply were no creative writing classes at Pittsfield High School from 1970-1973. Rather, in English class, we read Dickens and Twain and Hawthorne and wrote ten page papers about their significance—I don’t even think I knew what adultery was when I read the “Scarlet Letter“. At any rate, as I was lectured, I tried to deconstruct symbolism, foreshadowing, characterization, plot structure, point-of-view, my crude sense of archetype, my unformed sense of character-is-destiny, but the effort felt flimsy and wrong-headed, where a nascent critic but not a novelist might begin. And yet I would have been unable to write an essay on what a book truly and personally meant to me since as yet I didn’t have enough core of self to express meaning.

Growing up without much ‘life friction’ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts gave me an attenuated sense of self. I was, truth be told, a bundle of unexpressed and conflicted desires, an amalgam of yearning for degradation and transcendence all at once. And so my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Vermont were experience-seeking years, a restless quest for the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, years of trying to figure out how to think, how to read, how to enjoy, the limits and delineations of my mind, personality, an attempt to create stability and yet excitement, a search for how to live, the greater quest for self. Which included hours and hours of ping pong playing with Ellis Burwick (believe it or not, I was eventually the Vermont state ping pong champion), wandering cafes in Burlington, shooting pool, chasing girls, reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald again and again, listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, even Sun Ra, growing my hair, hitchhiking up and down Route 7, constantly rearranging the furniture in my small dormitory room.

And then amidst this chaos of a life, I met a writing teacher and a friend who was a girl. David Huddle was a southern gentleman, tall and good-looking, with a charming drawl and a gorgeous swirl of auburn hair. He’d been an intelligence officer in Viet Nam and then gotten an MFA at Columbia. He’d written with Peter Taylor, among others, and he would read Flannery O’Connor and Edna O’Brian out loud in class. He liked my writing and spent time talking books with me in his office. Wendy P. was from Concord, just outside Boston, and she had attended private schools. She was blond and pretty and well-educated and despite having a boyfriend, spent many hours educating me about college life, city life, art and art history, the pleasures of perfume, tea, dressing well, eating out, how relationships worked, even lectured me about what women want. We spent a lot of time together, her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind, and she pushed me to write and to read. She was an art history major with ambition and she applied to transfer to Vassar and was accepted.

This was a bombshell to me, losing this good friend, and it gave me the eerie feeling of being left behind, as if Nazis were chasing me and Wendy was racing away in the escape car while I was left on foot. This certainty of becoming once more friendless by losing my sole contact with what felt like higher life, of being consigned once again to what seemed a faceless lower middle class of northern Vermont, kindled within me the urgency to change, grow, escape, to have real ambition for once in my life. It was an urgency which made me imagine writing as something which could be sustaining, as a means for constituting self.

And so I reached further than I ever had, what felt like the edge of risk for me, and I decided that I would try and write for Bernard Malamud. To transfer to Bennington College was then my first real act of will, a first real act of individuation and I applied and, thankfully, was accepted. And it was at Bennington that I began to read and write seriously, to work really hard, where I first asked myself honestly what I thought about things. And it was where I met my future brother-in-law who would make my match with my wife, and where I began to to see through the fog of my too-benevolent upbringing and successive aimless existence to a certain heart of conflict, difficulty, disappointment, and possibility for joy, where I first glimpsed my way into life.

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Memories of Mr. Benson

January 10, 2010 By 1 Comment

My first writing teacher was Mr. Benson, a former Marine, at Theodore Herbert Middle School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Benson had a high forehead and crew-cut hair, plus a good selection of striped, club ties. He wore starched, button-down shirts of various yuppie shades, West Point-creased trousers, and wing-tip shoes. He was linebacker wide and what I would call halfway tall, was a scratch golfer, and wore a clunky class ring. He resembled not so much an English teacher of white, middle class teenagers as a drill instructor forced to dress up for an unwanted business presentation. He read us Hemingway, made us read Hemingway, assigned us to write a one-paragraph pastiche of Hemingway’s style, then made us rewrite that paragraph and rewrite it again before moving on to read and mimic other writers and, eventually, write a short story. A stickler for grammar, a stickler for spelling, a stickler for handing things in on time, he wrote his comments in the margins in feathery, almost unreadably light pencil. He was spare in his criticisms—”Too many adjectives”—and spare in his praise. If you wrote a truly wonderful paragraph, he wrote, “You made your point.” He was demanding, fair, once in a while funny in a corny, parental way The incongruence of a Marine teaching creative writing was not lost on us and added to an allure founded on a legend that he’d once decked a kid who talked back to him. In one of my braver moments, after I’d written a decent paragraph, I asked if the story was true. Mr. Benson sat on the corner of his desk, folded his arms over that well-starched shirt and still-firm chest, gave me one of those macho man looks, how a toreador might regard a bull he didn’t respect, and nodded slightly, that slightness meaning to convey that he’d do it again if he needed to, even to pretty Gina Campoli if she deserved it, a manner which reminded me of what Ahab once said to the crew of the Pequod, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

I left middle school for high school and never ran into a good writing teacher again until my second year in college—and maybe I’ll write about David Huddle next week. But many years later, many many in fact, after I graduated from Bennington College, enlisted in the Peace Corps, did my stint in yeshiva, in my father’s Kay-Bee business, after I was already married, had a couple of kids, and moved to Israel, I was lucky enough to get my first novel published—-and how can you call getting published anything but some name of Providence?—by Walker Company, now a division of Random House. And when that summer following the publication, my parents threw a signing party at the local book store in Lenox, Massachusetts, I looked up Mr. Benson’s number in the Pittsfield phone book. I called him up and invited him to the party. He showed up in golfing cap and clothes, Scottish-looking, like he’d just strode in from the links at St. Andrews. He was trimmer than I remembered him, with a cherubic pink on his cheeks. I autographed a copy of A Good, Protected Life and showed him in the Acknowledgments where I mentioned his name. He shook my hand enthusiastically as I said thanks for the great teaching those many years ago. And I heard from my mother via a friend of hers who was a guidance counselor at the middle school and witnessed this, that Mr. Benson took the book to the teacher’s room and held it up to everyone and said, “Sometimes it’s worth it.”

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Reminiscing about Mr. Malamud

November 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

(by Joseph Kaufman)

From sleeting March rain to the humid, late-May sun, Mr. Malamud taught his one class a year, ten sessions in all. Some years he taught a course in the short story, replete with reading list and papers to write; other years he taught a writing seminar, the semester’s goal of which was to compose one short story of less than twelve double-spaced pages and then to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite it. Like his character Fidelman, Mr. Malamud’s late-in-life, ne’er-do-well painter-turned-glassblower named after his mother-in-law, a large Italian woman and featured Italian movie actress who, at the time that I knew her, had just completed a role of the older wife of a young Mafiosi where she elbows her young husband out of bed in the opening scene and tells him to get to work—like Fidelman, Mr. Malamud seemed intense and academic and fussy. He reminded me of my mother’s brother, an anthropologist, a self-scorched product of searing self-discipline, as if he’d remaindered himself to his own conception of a labor camp. But, that is getting ahead of myself. To be admitted to class, you had to submit a piece of writing—there was only room for ten students. Everyone, of course, applied. The list of who was accepted was pinned to the English department door. I don’t remember what story I submitted but I do remember that I rewrote it and rewrote it—-the fear of literary imperfection, born then, has stayed with me.

We apprentice writers who survived that gauntlet assembled in an old farm building, in a classroom of panel and roof beam. There were six women and four men. It was to be a short story year. The great man walked into class wearing a rain coat over brown khakis, a striped collared shirt, and dark sweater. He was bald on top with still-brown hair clipped short about the sides and graying sideburns, a man in his sixties. A moustache, precisely cut, spread over his generous and slightly quivering lip. He opened his briefcase and handed out copies of a syllabus—Chekhov, Hemingway, among others, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Sherwood Anderson (I think), even one collection of his own. His hands were delicate and mottled with age, the fingers of a man who might play Chopin or paint watercolors. He put on square, blocky glasses, accountant glasses. He read off names from a class list in a calm and measured voice, a raspy tenor’s, a stern grandfather’s voice. We raised our hands. He spoke about the book list, the papers to be written. He was a bit stiff and all business, a formal, elegant man, a man who would tolerate fools, nonsense, and late papers poorly. As Philip Roth once described him, this aging Pulitzer prize winner was a combination of pitilessness and somewhat distant, avuncular concern. And though he seemed to be strictly about business in one form or another—the business of writing, the business of being responsible to job and schedule, the business of dealing equitably with others—I sensed that he was more than the perhaps-interesting sum of his peeves and formalities. For just as his writing projected the awkward and halting and painful attempts toward an unknown and undefined transcendence, the writer, too, seemed full of a high moral seriousness that I’d never encountered.

I realized that what I beheld, charmed already, was a sage of sorts, a secular rabbi, an artist of the most rarefied kind.

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