Reading on the Road

In the spring of 1988, I got married and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, spent the next four months vagabonding through Europe with my wife, Ann. We were both twenty-three, young by today’s standards to marry, but we were in love and ready for adventure. One of the great things about travelling and flitting about from one place to the next was the time available to read. These were the days before cell phones and texting, before iPods and ear buds, before everyone toted laptops like extra necessary appendages. I am not sure the times were simpler, but you certainly had a kind of freedom and anonymity, a sense of being out there all by yourself, unheard of in the Facebook era.

We flew into Heathrow where an English friend picked us up and whisked us to her flat on the outskirts of London. During our stay, I finished reading On the Road, not the first time I had read the book, but what could be better than reading On the Road while on the road? I fancied myself a European Sal Paradise.

Jayne-Anne, our friend, gave us each a book at the end of our stay—The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Graham Greene’s Brighten Rock. The books came right off her bookcase. Since Ann had already read On the Road and Jayne-Anne hadn’t, we passed on the book to her—and thus began months of reading and trading books with others we met on our travels, all of which I recorded in my daily journal.

While hitchhiking through Ireland, we got stranded in the rain with Christoph, a not yet twenty-year-old German who was tooling about before beginning his mandatory civil service to his country. One night in a Galway pub, we got to talking about literature and Christoph sang the praises of a German author I’d never heard of—Heinrich Boll. We travelled about a week with Christoph, including a few days in Dublin, where we slept on the floor in the flat of Frank O’Rielly, a friend of an American friend of mine. When Ann and I departed for France via ferry, Christoph saw us off and presented us with a pristine copy of Heinrich Boll’s 18 Stories, which I still have.

In Carcassonne, a medieval walled city in France, we befriended an old French street artist named Savigon, who ranted about Rimbaud and Camus and existentialism. He couldn’t say enough about Kafka and Dostoevsky. On the day Ann and I left, we purchased one of Savigon’s line drawings, and in addition to the art, he gave us a tattered copy of Camus’ The Fall (in English!). I’ve since read my way through all of Camus and Dostoevsky and Kafka, and I can’t say that I don’t think of the ranting Savigon whenever I think of those authors.

In Switzerland, I traded The Fall for Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. On a train to Italy, I traded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to an American couple from Seattle for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. All through Europe this kind of exchange went on and I read and read. Dracula. Ironweed. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Sometimes a Great Notion. Breakfast of Champions. It was wondrous. On my twenty-fourth birthday, my wife gave me Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller. In Zagreb, which at the time was in the country of Yugoslavia, I learned of Ivo Andric and purchased a copy of The Pasha’s Concubine and Other Tales in an English bookshop.

Despite the weight they added to my backpack, I kept some of the books from those travels, but the majority I passed along because it was the most economical way to get “new” books and a great way to meet people. I don’t know how many years it would have taken me to discover Boll or Andric, or to realize just how much I enjoy the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. To this day, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock remains one of the most gripping books I’ve ever read.

I am not sure when I’ll get a chance to travel and read the way I did twenty-odd years ago, but when the day comes, I will dust off On the Road and be on my way.

Fabulous Realities

I live in a small town in the country. The sticks according to city friends. The middle of nowhere according to my eleven-year-old daughter. The town has one blinking red traffic light at a “tricky” intersection. There are two corner stores, no restaurants, and one bar—the Red-Neck Lounge. Last year during American Idol, the Red-Neck Lounge held its own weekly talent competition aptly named Red-Neck Idol. As much as I wanted to see what went on inside, I couldn’t muster the courage to check out Red-Neck Idol. Maybe this year.

As a writer, I am always looking for material. When an opportunity knocks, I want to open the door, pen in hand. I tell my students always to have their radar on for potential material, and I live by that advice. What I am looking for is what Ken MacRorie calls fabulous realities—images and talk and situations that are wholly unexpected and unique, yet there they are, knocking at the door.

I encountered a fabulous reality just the other morning at the garage where I took my 1987 Ford pick-up for its annual inspection (it didn’t pass, but that’s another story). I’d been taking my truck to this garage for the past few years and knew the two mechanics by first name, Scott and Donny. On this particular morning, the tiny office was full of people—Scott and Donny, of course, and two others whom I knew immediately were related to Donny. Donny’s a skinny man in his late thirties with thick, tinted glasses that made the whites of his eyes gray. A little red hair grew on the end of his chin, which he rubbed often. He spoke slow and moved slower, but he was a good mechanic and trustworthy.

Because my truck was in the garage often enough that Donny felt he knew me, he introduced me to the other two in the room. “This is my father, Donny,” he said pointing to the older man, “and this is my son, Donny,” he said, pointing to a teenager. He didn’t smile when he said this, so I knew he wasn’t joking, and he might not have even seen the obvious humor in the situation—Donny, Donny, and Donny.

Scott, the owner of the garage, smiled and said, “Confused yet?”

I laughed and immediately thought of the sitcom The Bob Newhart Show, in which two of Bob’s neighbors are brothers named Daryl and Daryl.

“How do you keep it straight?” I asked Donny. My Donny.

Donny nudged up his glasses and said, “Easy. This is Donny senior. I’m Donny junior, and this is Donny junior junior.

I don’t recall what I ended up having to pay to get my truck repaired, but whatever it was, it surely was worth it. I mean, Donny, Donny, and Donny is one thing, but Donny senior, Donny junior, and Donny junior junior is quite another. I couldn’t make something like that up if I wanted to. Which is why it is a fabulous reality.

On Reading

I can still recall, nearly eighteen years ago, a pretty young woman with blue eyes and blonde hair taking my creative writing class who, despite her budding talent as a writer, confessed she did not enjoy reading. “You don’t like to read?” I said. “Then how can you be a writer?” She had stopped me after class and wanted to know my “honest opinion” of her ability. We talked and eventually I asked her what authors she liked to read. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t like to read. All I want to do is write.”

Flash forward almost two decades and her pronouncement still jars me: I don’t like to read.  How can this be? It’s like being a musician yet disliking music. Or being a fish but not liking water. Huh? It’s just not possible. 

Many years ago, I took a fiction writing class with Monica Wood (http://monicawood.com/), who told us that she considered it her job as a writer to read. She said that she read every day without fail. Indeed! Reading—reading carefully—can be incredibly instructive to one’s own writing. A writer’s job should be to read. The careful reader, of course, can learn a lot about writing by reading. I’ve learned from the greats—Chekov, Fitzgerald, and Flannery O’Connor. Tolstoy. I learned the art of stringing along a sentence by reading Faulkner. I learned how to write tight courtesy Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Poe taught me a lot about imagery and atmosphere. The list goes on.

Some books and stories I’ve read over and over again. The Great Gatsby. The Catcher in the Rye. “Hills Like White Elephants.” “Sonny’s Blues.” No matter how many times I read The Great Gatsby, I notice something new. The book continues to surprise me. Such is the nature of great literature.

Over the years, I’ve amassed a good collection of books. Standing in my home office, I am surrounded by books, mostly fiction but also art books and history books and books about writing. Reading has always given me great satisfaction and comfort. It’s been a source of delight and nourishment and inspiration. It’s helped me see my world, perhaps understand it a little better, and it has helped me connect with my craft, with writing, and that has made all the difference in my life.