These days, probably more struggling writers, and some successful ones, hole up in Brooklyn where I went to high school, riding 45 minutes every morning and afternoon on the GG subway from Queens, hunched in the rattling seat over Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The House of the Dead, The Insulted and the Injured…

In those days, it took a 15-year-old chick from Poughkeepsie to lure me across the river to the Village. What Dylan a year later would ironically pronounce “Green-wich Village” in “Talkin’ New York Blues.” I was sixteen and it was 1960, and we went into the Café Wha? which, lacking a liquor license, served ice cream sodas, so minors could come in and hear, that winter night, the black Beat poet Ted Joans slapping his palms on the table as if it were a bongo drum, and chanting a lyric that went something like:

Sex:

Good sex

Bad sex

Backseat sex

Backrow sex

Kitchen sex

Bedroom sex

Sofa sex

Outdoor sex

Drunken sex

Ice cream sex…

Ted Joans knew what we were thinking about. The chick from Poughkeepsie was groovin’, and I – a Catholic-high junior – thought the whole scene was weird and funny and bogus and cool. I wore my dark-rimmed Buddy-Holly style shades and a black beret and turtleneck and must have looked like a classic jerk to the incredible, long-haired, long-limbed, beatnik waitresses, their black leotards outlining ecstasy for me.

Back then, it was Manhattan that called to young writers from around the country and across the rivers, when it was still possible to find a cheap garret and hunker down to write through freezing winters and steaming summers.

Today, in the new millennium, it is a hot town, summer in the city, and the New York August heat enough to drive a man mad. Woman, too. Air-conditioners churn full force, dripping on your head as you pass beneath them, but they have yet to concoct an air-conditioner that can cool the streets. Out here, you work up a constant thirst with plenty of cool places to quench it, and I am back to wade the naked, steaming streets in shorts, armless teeshirt plastered to my sweaty back, seeking out places where writers have lived or drunk, as good a structure as any to a one-day visit here, though an impossibly ambitious one. It would no doubt be easier to draft a list of the writers, artists and musicians who didn’t live here at some time or another than those who did.

How many readers, for example, know that Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900-44) wrote The Little Prince here, on the 23rd floor of 240 Central Park South at Columbus Circle, where he lived during the German occupation of France in World War II? He died on a military reconnaisance flight over France in July 1944. It exasperates me that I only have just learned that he lived there, just across from where I worked for several years in the 1960s, on the 12th floor of the now-demolished Coliseum Office Building at 10 Columbus Circle, at the time I first read The Little Prince. And what, you may ask, would it have mattered if I had known? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a good deal. Is it of value to cultivate our awareness of great things that have been accomplished just across the street from where we toil in drudgery? I think it does. I want to know these things. I want to know the geography of it, the housing.

In order to make my search for such knowledge nominally superable, I focus mostly on the Village, but even that is too much. Plot the poetic production of Allen Ginsberg against his residences, for example, and you will find that in the East Village alone he lived in half a dozen apartments between 1952 and 1997. For fellow-obsessives who might want the list, here it is:

206 East 7th Street (1952-53)

170 East 2nd Street (1958-61)

704 East 5th Street (1964-65)

408 East 10th Street (1965-75)

437 East 12th Street (1975-96)

404 East 14th Street (1996-97).

Ginsberg, too, unbeknownst to me, lived around the corner from where I lived in 1966, at 184 East 3rd Street, between Avenues A and B.

Now I wade through 95 degree heat and humidity to revisit my old digs and to acquaint myself with his. On the way, I pass the Hell’s Angels NYC headquarters, which has been considerably spruced up since they were my neighbors 3½ decades ago. Their building displays a flag-bearing patriotic poster: Support the troops…Love It or Leave It – which, in 2007, suggests the mind-set of our current leaders’ policies and of the authors of the Act entitled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” known by its acronym, “The USA Patriot Act.” Who would dare vote against an Act called Patriot in the bruised and bleeding month of October 2001? Practically nobody did. To bristle against the forced bridling with the word “Patriot” in 2001 and 2002 was akin to expressing skepticism about the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In those days, the major fears were of commies and sexual “preversions” and the danger of getting caught in a sex-trap, blackmailed into becoming a traitor to your country. As an 18-year-old soldier in 1962 recruited to work in the White House, I submitted to a top-secret security clearance process that included a polygraph interview in which a middle-aged officer asked me, in dead earnest, whether I’d ever had normal sexual relations with a woman, abnormal sexual relations with a woman, sexual relations with a man, sexual relations with an animal, or belonged to any one of the organizations on a lengthy list that started with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, all tainted red. You had to hand it to those commies, naming their organizations after Abraham Lincoln!

No doubt my experience with that clearance process inspired me in the mid-1960s to gravitate toward the liberation I saw in Village publications entitled Screw and Horseshit and The East Village Other.

Understandably, my own ex-digs at 184 East 3rd Street between Avenues A and B retain no mark of my stay there in 1966-67, during which I wasted my time inhaling, although one night, I commissioned a psychedelic grafitti artist to adorn the walls of my first floor studio with magic marker murals. The apartment became a curiosity amongst the neighbors; strangers would knock on my door to come in and view the array of naked dayglo popes, uncomplimentary effigies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Jedgar Hoover and other caricatures, cartoons and obscenties. My departure in February, 1967 – fleeing west in a buddy’s Ford – was at midnight with forfeiture of my $105 deposit.

Now I chat with the superintendent who is out sweeping the walk, a triple XL God Bless Our Land T-shirt over his breadbasket. With Russian accent, he tells me the rent on the apartment I had is now a thousand a month, ten times the `60s rate. Of course, my salary then, assisting an East Broadway offset printer, was $90 a week without overtime. I walked to work everyday, past the Men’s Welfare Shelter and its reek of human degradation. I was twenty-two and had a passionate crush on my supervisor, a 45-year-old red-haired Italian named Claire who threw a party in the office to celebrate her divorce where, a bit tipsy, she told me I reminded her of a priest and asked if I would give her absolution for her sins. I made the sign of the cross on her forehead, even as I contemplated graphically the sins I longed to share with her

The redneck bar across the street, with its nasty little yapping dog named Susie, is gone – as is, south across Avenue B, the once great Slug’s at 242 East 3rd Street (between Avenues B and C), just around the corner from where Charlie Parker lived from 1950 to 1954 at 151 Avenue B. Slug’s hosted new jazz (Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Saden, Albert Ayler, The Sun Ra Arkestra) from 1965 to 1972 when it was closed after trumpetist Lee Morgan was shot to death there.

I said my own goodbye to the area in 1971 after my girlfriend’s neighbor fired a rifle through her apartment door because her dripping faucet was driving him nuts. He had warned her the day before he would kill her if she didn’t fix it. Although she was standing behind the door, she was not hit, but the sight of the bulletholes caused me to lose interest in the area. She and I fled to Queens the next day.

When I had moved to the East Village, it seemed a place where classes and races mingled in peace – Salt `n Pepper City, one of my friends called it – but in 1967, a hippie named Groovy and his coffee-heiress girlfriend had their skulls smashed with cinder blocks by two black dudes in connection with an amphetamine transaction; the headline in the East Village Other said it all: Groovy is Dead. And the so-called “Summer of Love” was more than over. I recall ominous incidents in Thompkins Square Park -inter alia, a very strange guy who used to shuffle around mouthing a mantric chant of Ever see a naked white woman? Hangin’ by her hair? All covered with blud?

Murder statistics for the city as a whole climbed steadily from 1963 to a peak in 1990 of 2,245. The figure for 2002, at 587, was the lowest since ’63 (though 2001 must have spiked, with the Twin Towers). A recent article in The New York Times reported, as if consolingly, “…on average fewer than two people are murdered in New York City each day.” Nice, for almost everyone.

Since 1972, East 3rd between B and C has been the home of the Nuyorican Poets Café at 236, founded to give voice to Puerto Rican poetry but also having hosted poets like Amiri Baraka, Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others. Their current program can be accessed at www.nuyorican.org. As I come by, the café’s façade is being redecorated by two guys whose English is no better than my Spanish, precluding chit-chat.

Farther down 3rd is the Kenhelbaba Sculpture Garden, which advertises an entrance on East 2nd, though I am unable to find it. What I do find on 2nd is Ginsberg’s pad in the Croton at 170 East 3rd between A and B, now marked by a plaque. Amusing to note that the lobby of this residence of the free-spirited Ginsberg, behind an iron-grilled glass door, is adorned with a notice sporting an enormous NO, forbidding ballplaying, carriages, peddling, sitting in front of the building, or trespassing.

I have plans for lunch with a Penguin-Putnam editor, so I take the crosstown journey beneath the anvil of the sun along the entire river-to-river span of Houston Street (out-of-towners are cautioned that the street’s first syllable is not pronounced like the city in Texas, but like the name of the poet A. E. Housman), a transverse of decrepit marvels too numerous to list, but well worth the walk – among other wonders I pass a bathtub graveyard behind a chainlink fence, an open-air Antique and Props Gallery at 76 East Houston, featuring old coke vendors, and a giant effigy of a rat standing inexplicably in the road. Farther on, I see what I can only describe as metal and concrete shelves of stacked up parked cars. How do they get them up there?

On my way to Hudson Street in the West Village, I learn that the name of Kennedy has joined that of McDonald’s in the world of junkfood chains, as I discover a Kennedy Chicken nuzzled wing-to-nugget with a MmmmmcDonald’s. Interesting accident that McDonald’s chose that arched “m” as its logo. The word for mother in many languages – English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, Russian, all the Scandinavian tongues, even Korean and Swahili and no doubt others – begins with an “m.” An infant makes the sound “mmmm” as his lips go for the red nipple; and we still make the sound to indicate something tastes good. Devilish clever logo, using motherhood to rot our guts.

At 375 Hudson, I meet Jeff Freiert at Penguin, and we lunch on organic hamburgers at Grange Hall – 50 Commerce Street, at Barrow. Alas, at this writing, Grange Hall is no longer whinnying with us, although it made its swan-song appearance in the last episode of Sex and the City as a Paris bistro. Because Jeff has to go back to work, he drinks iced tea; because I don’t, I enjoy a giant “prairie martini.” Afterward, we stroll to nearby St Luke’s Place – a short, leafy, shady row of townhouses that hooks between Hudson and Leroy Streets. Here, across from a playground and the Hudson Park Branch of the New York Public Library, lived Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) at number 16 from 1922-23 while he was starting An American Tragedy, which he completed in a rented office at 201 Park Avenue. Since Penguin recently reissued Dreiser’s 1912 The Financier, I persuade Jeff to pose for a snapshot on the townhouse stoop displaying the volume.

Bill Morgan’s excellent Literary Landmarks of New York (New York: Universe, 2002) tells me that a meeting was held on the parlor floor of Dreiser’s house here in which F Scott FitzGerald, Horace Liveright, H. L. Mencken, and Carl Van Vechten discussed strategies for Dreiser’s work to evade the wrath of the censors who had been plaguing him ever since Sister Carrie (1900) for “too vividly describing the seamier sides of life,” though perhaps also because of his championing of economic democracy; he died a communist in 1945.

Number 14 St Luke’s Place was the home of Marianne Moore (1887-1972); in the early 1920s, her mother shared the basement here with Moore who worked across the street in the library. In 1929 she moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but returned later to the Village, when she lived at 35 W. 9th Street. In 1951 Moore’s Collected Poems won the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize and Bollinger Prize. A little sign on the door lintel of no. 14 proclaims “Peace and Love” in letters of modest size. It always has seemed to me that reading a single poem thoroughly is a job of work, and I recall as a student having been assigned far more poems to read than I had time, strength, or inclination for, finding succor in the first line of Moore’s “On Poetry”:

“I, too, despise it…”

Number 12 St. Luke’s was the home of Sherwood Anderson. Morgan tells of Anderson’s having to work up the nerve to knock on Dresier’s door to introduce himself, only to have it shut in his face after a curt greeting; Dreiser, it seems, was also shy before Anderson, but the two later became friends and Anderson also attended the anti-censor strategy planning session described above. No plaque commemorates Anderson’s residency here. Indeed, the only sign evident advertises the house for sale – information from Jaime Farmer and James Roubul at 212-588-9490. Cell phone in fist, I consider calling to ask the price, but decide against depressing myself.

Jeff returns to work, and I am startled from my leafy, shady, post-martini reveries of famous poets and fictioneers by someone shouting out in the hot yellow sunlight on Hudson. A man is running, yelling, on the pavement across the street while a red-headed man with a camera run backward away from him, filming. Unlike the time I saw a newstand clerk with a hammer and cigar box chasing Dustin Hoffman on Fifth Avenue some 35 years ago (a scene from Ulu Grosbard’s 1971 film, Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying those Horrible Things about Me?), I do realize this is a film in progress and successfully resist the impulse to intervene, other than to join the melee with my own camera. The running man is wearing a costume I can only describe as resembling a six-foot turd.

The camera crew takes five, and I sidle over to ask the costumed man if I might do a portrait. He appears pleased to comply.

I ask what the film is, and he tells me it is an ad for Dentyne. “You know? The gum? Cleans your teeth?” Ah! Not a turd but a personification of tooth decay, oral bacteria, gingivitis.

Where St. Luke’s meets Seventh Avenue is a short turn north from a cluster of small old-world-style streets crammed with literary history. “The narrowest house in New York,” at 75½ Bedford Street, between Commerce and Morton Streets, bears a plaque commemorating Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) who lived here in 1923-24, the year she won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection The Ballad of the Harp Weaver. Among others who have lived in the house are John Barrymore, Margaret Mead, and Cary Grant. The plaque above the door quotes what are perhaps Millay’s most famous lines, testimony to her relatively short life:

My candle burns at both ends.

It will not last the night.

But oh my foes and oh my friends,

It gives a lovely light.

Beneath the plaque an elegant lamp illuminates the door lintel.

Farther along Bedford Street, at number 86, between Grove and Barrow, is a most remarkable place behind an unmarked door one would be likely to pass without notice unless forewarned – the restaurant, bar, former speakeasy which since 1928 has been frequented by more writers than perhaps any other single bar, or three, in New York, or anywhere: Chumley’s.

Established by Leland Stanford Chumley, an organizer of the International Workers of the World (IWW), a former laborer, soldier of fortune, stagecoach driver, wagon tramp, waiter, artist, newspaper cartoonist and editorial writer, and taken over on his death by his widow, Henriette, from 1935 until her death in 1960. Since then, it has continued under a number of owners and managers without changing character.

What is now the main entrance at 86 Bedford was formerly an escape route during prohibition raids up to 1933 when the Volstead Act was repealed. In those days, the entry was through an archway at 58 Barrow Street, through the Pamela Court backyard to a very speakeasy-looking door within. When the cops came to raid, Chumley would detain them at the door while customers were advised to “86 it” – to take the 86 Bedford Street exit.

Chumley’s has been host to James Agee, Djuna Barnes, Brendan Behan, John Berryman, Humphrey Bogart, Vance Bourjaily, William Burroughs, Willa Cather, John Cheever, Gregory Corso, Malcolm Cowley, e e cummings, Simone de Beauvoir, Floyd Dell, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, Edna Ferber, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, F. Scott FitzGerald, Alan Ginsberg, David Ignatow, Erica Jong, Buster Keaton, John F. Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Ed Koch, Ring Lardner, Jr., Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer, W. Somerset Maughm, Mary McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Edna St Vincent Millay, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore, Anais Nin, Eugene O’Neil, Henry Roth, J D Salinger, Delmore Schwartz, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Dylan Thomas, Lowell Thomas, James Thurber, Edmund Wilson, and that is only a few of them. According to a rumor, furthered by David Yeodon and Roy Lewis, even James Joyce is said to have written a couple of chapters of Ulysses at a corner table here, though of course this is nonsense: Ulysses was completed before Chumley’s ever was Chumley’s, and Joyce was never even made New York City.

In her 1948 book, America Day by Day, Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

In Bedford Street is the only place in New York where you can read and work through the day, and talk through the night, without arousing curiosity or criticism: Chumley’s. There is no music so that conversation is possible. The room is square, absolutely simple, with little tables set against the walls which are decorated with old book jackets. It has that thing rare in America: An atmosphere!

I myself frequented the place in the late `60s and early `70s – when I could find it. Usually I went there with a few under my vest (as the Danes say) and rarely could find my way back again sober. I recall arguing with a girlfriend in the Bedford side alley, behind the door camoflauged as a tall narrow shelf of wooden book facsimiles, painted and carved with intricate verisimilitude. I don’t recall the argument, only that I sulked in the alley for a time singing, for some reason, “Wi-ild ho-orses! Woulden drag me a-way….” While she sulked in Pamela Court, and my friends Jay Horowitz and Barry Brent sat inside looking for Ferlinghetti’s “beautiful dame without mercy picking her nose in Chumley’s.”

Here, too, I ran into Gregory Corso on his 40th birthday when he tried to sell me what he purported to be the first postage stamp ever printed. When I told him it didn’t look like an 1848 British Guiana quarter-penny, he embraced me and whispered, “You’re a smart man.” Still more recently, I recall sitting here one April Sunday afternoon with Walter Cummins, Editor of The Literary Review, having been driven from The White Horse (where Dylan Thomas drank his fatal whiskies) by a visiting New Jersey band of kilted bagpipers in their cups.

Today, I’ve found it after only a single martini and let myself in the unmarked 86 door, excuse myself past a tall man with long grey hair and a beautiful woman with a tall exotic dog. Another man with a broom is sweeping around the bar, and I order a pint of Chumley’s own pilsner. The tall man tells me the place is closed, but because I have been looking reverently at the book jackets on the walls, my order is filled, and he shows me around. His name is James Dipaola, and he seems to be the curator. He shows me the centerpiece jacket, titled The Unknown Book by Unknown Writer; where the author’s photograph should be on the inside French flap is a small mirror – a tribute to all the patrons who have labored to produce books that never saw print. The beautiful woman with the dog – a sleek-coated half English pointer named Maverick — is Gina, a bartender studying at NYU. Jim Dipaola presents me with a pamphlet the size and shape of a bookjacket complete with French flaps, titled Chumley’s, A Historic Narrative by Leland Stanford Chumley.

Jim invites me to send him the jacket of my own most recent book along with a signed photograph of myself, preferably with a dog if I have one, so that he can add it to the collection on the walls. A few weeks later, I do so, and I hereby urge all reading this who visit Chumley’s to investigate whether the jacket of Kerrigan’s Copenhagen, A Love Story and/or Bluett’s Blue Hours by Thomas E. Kennedy have been added to those venerable walls.

Reluctantly, I leave Jim and Gina and Maverick and the comfort of Chumley’s, bound for Grove Court between Bedford and Hudson Streets where O. Henry’s daughter is said to have lived and which is said to have been the inspiration for the setting of O. Henry’s Last Leaf. It is easy to imagine this as the place where Johnsy lay withering and waning in her bed, watching the leaves of an ivy vine on the brick wall outside her window disappear by the day along with her strength and where the unsuccessful abstract artist, Behrman, refurbishes her will to live with a realistic painting of an ivy leaf on the wall – at the cost of his life; he falls from the ladder into the snow and, drunk, unable to rise again, freezes to death. As all of O Henry, melodramatic, sentimental, contrived, moving and unforgettable – it sticks like gum to a shoe. The gate to Grove Court is locked behind a sign that sternly identifies it as private – an elegant place that once was a home for the struggling poor.

O. Henry is of course all over the city, not least in the excellent Pete’s Tavern at 129 East 18th Street that I won’t have time to visit today, though often have in the past, sitting whenever it is vacant at the booth by the front doors where O Henry wrote The Gift of the Magi – another of his unforgettable concoctions. Pete’s Tavern has been in continuous operation since 1851, first as a “grocery and grog,” during prohibition disguised as a flower shop. The kitchen is Italian, the food excellent, the martinis near psychedelic.

I am now headed for Carpo’s. I cross Sheridan Square at West 4th and Christopher, where I stop to marvel at the irony of juxtaposing sculptures of General Sheridan in dark heavy bronze and two life-sized gay couples with white-painted finish by George Segal (1924-2000) commemorating the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement in 1969 when the police tried to bust the Stonewall Bar at 51-53 Christopher Street and found, to their surprise, a gay clientele not willing to lay down and whimper. It took some doing and many years before the city finally allowed this memorial to be christened in 1992.

Across the street at the Village Cigar Shop, I purchase from a dour clerk a fresh, $8.00 Partagas, rolled of “100 percent tobacco” grown on Cuban seeds, which – while across the avenue yuppie types dine on expensive junk in the Gourmet Garage – I smoke at an outdoor table of the Riviera Café, nursing a bottle of Heinekin. I gaze across to the Segal sculpture, considering how at least some aspects of life have improved. On the outdoor table where I sit, a sign informs me that smoking is permitted, though the Surgeon General wishes to remind me it is a nuisance for others and a danger to myself. The Surgeon General makes no comment on the carbon monoxide fumes pumping from the pipes of scores of gasoline-burning automobiles that roll past just below my nose.

The only other customer is a young businessman at a nearby table. He sits over a juicy Riviera burger and speaks into a cell phone: “No no no, Chuck, no. You meet me here, you’ll meet a tonna fuckin’ people, ya know what I’m sayin’? Ya know what I mean? Don’t meet me here.”

From Sheridan Square is a short walk over 4th to 189 Bleecker at Macdougal Street to Carpo’s, formerly San Remo’s, where I order a $5 Heinekin from a sweet-faced waitress and sit at a table out on the narrow strip of Bleecker sidewalk. Here in the free and open air, an endless fleet of yellow cabs excrete carbon monxoide into my air. I deserve it, I think, lighting a Petit Sumatra. The formerly smiling waitress descends upon me with wrath: “You cannot smoke here, sir!”

“Actually,” I explain feebly, “I don’t inhale.”

“Well I do, sir!”

I stub out the lovely, barely-smoked Petit, apologizing. “Have a good monoxide.”

At a table behind me, two attractive women chortle, one blond and the other auburn-haired, the latter wearing high heels and a polka-dotted summer dress that strikes me as 1950s.

“Are you dreaming of San Remo?” I ask. The brightness of their quizzical smiles tells me they are either out-of-towners or hard-core members of the post-911 corps of pleasant New Yorkers. I recently heard someone bemoan the passing of the rude New Yorker: If only someone would growl at me, I’d feel like things were safe again! The first 30 years of my life were spent here, and I know the New York crust covers a blunt but friendly heart; I wonder what the new New York smile might cover.

I explain to the ladies that Carpo’s used to be the San Remo Bar, opened by Joe Santini in 1923, a Bohemian headquarters until well into the `50s where the regulars included people like James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Miles Davis, Norman Mailer, Jackson Pollock, William Styron, Dyan Thomas, and Tennessee Williams. Jack Kerouac was a regular for years, and it served as a model for the café “Mask” in San Francisco in his 1958 novel, The Subterraneans. According to Bill Morgan, the idea for the Living Theater was also born here.

“Oh!” says the polka-dotted young lady, who introduces herself as Shari, “I’m studying acting myself. In San Francisco.” It turns out she is the daughter of the other young woman, from West Virginia, who confides to me she is 40. I had thought they were both around 27, but it seems too feeble a line to pitch. “Why don’t you go knock on the door of the Actors Studio while you’re here?”

“That’s exactly what I told her,” the mother says. “Tell her to do it.”

“Do it, Shari,” I say, though actually I walked past the Studio earlier in the day and the front doors were wide open, but with a chain across them on which hung a sign that read, This is not an entrance. Which I suppose could be interpreted in a number of ways. Considering how to tell about that inspires me to recommend a visit to the Actor’s Playhouse where these ladies might see Naked Boys Singing. “Talk about a show with balls!” as Time Out New York put it, but I am suddenly distracted by shouting on the other side of the street, and a cameraman runs past my table on the sidewalk. His red hair looks familiar. Then I notice a guy yelling and dressed up like tooth decay.

“You guys get around, don’t you?” I call to the cameraman, who flips me a smile, and the West Virginian mother asks if I will introduce her, as she is a photographer herself. “I’ve taken some good pictures,” she says, “some of Shari, too, even where her ankles don’t look so thick.”

But the cameraman and the sprinting decay already are gone, and I finish my beer, bow and take my leave, on to Patchin Place at West 10th between Sixth and Greenwich Avenues. Here, at 4 Patchin Place, lived Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) from 1923 until his death. I recall cummings’ outstanding line, “there is some shit I will not eat,” and wonder if I can boast the same. Among cummings’ houseguests here were Eliot, Pound, Dos Passos and, Bill Morgan notes, “a very drunken Dylan Thomas.”

In the late 1950s, cummings was also once arrested for public urination on the Rue Git-le-Coeur in Paris, described on the French police blotter as “un Américan qui pisse.” Rue Git-le-Coeur 9 is where the so-called Beat Hotel used to be, where Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac and others used to stay. It is still a hotel, though not a Beat one and certainly not at Beat prices. So it goes with all places once Hip or Beat or Bohemian. Commerce moves in like a plague of affluent cockroaches and the native cockroaches move out, taking everyone authentic with them.

Across the narrow way, at 5 Patchin Place, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) lived reclusively for the last 42 years of her life. Her best known novel, however, Nightwood (1936), was written in Paris where she lived until the war forced her home.

Other literary residents of Patchin Place at various times include John Reed (1887-1920), “terror of the industrialists”; John Masefield (1878-1967), in the years before his four decades as poet laureate of England; the Irish writer Padraic Colum (1881-1972) and Jane Bowles (1917-73).

As a youngster, I hated memorizing dates. In those days, more than ten years ago seemed lost in the ancient fog. Now the years enchant me, affording a glimpse of how short time really is – a century, a lifetime. At the moment, I am reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which begins in 1805 – nominally a distant time. But having lived more than half a century myself and half of it in the ancient kingdom of Denmark gives another perspective. 1805 is just two years earlier than the year that the Duke of Wellington shelled Copenhagen, killing thousands of civilians and blowing the roof off one of my favorite bars and jazz places – The White Lamb on Copenhagen’s Coal Square. I love to sit there over a pint, contemplating the fact that Søren Kierkegaard in the 1830s lived across the street and that the Duke of Wellington is now dust in his grave and the only duke who blows the roof off that bar now is Duke Ellington.

Looking backward, time is really not so long. When I started college in 1961, the four years to my BA seemed an insufferable length. Since then, I could have taken nearly a dozen BAs. In fact, I like to think – to hope at least – that every unit of four years that I live teaches me as much as four years of college would. Since in total my BA, MFA and PhD took me ten years, could I not now claim to have four PhDs and on my way to a fifth?

In Germany, multiple PhDs are awarded and titled. A German colleague named Link once approached me asking, "I understant you haf a PhD?" I acknowledged that was true, whereupon he smiled as though he had just beat me at ping pong and pronounced, "I haf two PhDs." So he was Dr. Dr. Link. Might I now claim to Dr. Dr. Link to be Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Kennedy? Why not? I once knew a man titulated Professor Dr Dr Sewering. But unfortunately both he and Dr. Dr. Link disappeared some time ago and no one seems to know where. So he is now known as the Missing Link.

Farther north and east at 14 West 10th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, at the beginning of the 20th century lived an author not commonly associated with the Big Apple: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain (1835-1910). In fact, according to my guidebook, it was in New York that Twain first donned the white serge suit that became his trademark.

On East 10th Street at number 18, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) resided, author of the 1883 sonnet The New Colossus, which contains perhaps the most quoted lines of any American poem, inscribed in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shores,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

These days when one enters the country, by flying ship, the poetry of welcome takes the form of questions printed on a green form about whether one suffers from contagious diseases or mental illness, whether one has ever been arrested for a serious crime, engaged in espionage, sabotage or moral turpitude: answer yes or no, please.

Or as Lou Reed puts it in Dirty Boulevard:

Give me your hungry, your tired your poor, I’ll piss on em

That’ what the statue of bigotry says

Your poor huddled masses, let’ club em to death

And get it over with just dump em on the boulevard

At 23 East 10th on University Place, in the Albert Hotel’s room 2220, from 1923 to 1926, Thomas Wolfe (1900-38) stayed while he taught writing at NYU and worked on Look Homeward Angel – “…a stone, a leaf an unfound door…” In his Of Time and the River, The Albert appears as the Hotel Leopold.

Wolfe – and many other writers, artists and musicians – also stayed for a time at the Chelsea Hotel between 7th and 8th Avenues at 222 23rd Street. The Chelsea’s many celebrated guests included Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, O Henry, Edgar Lee Masters, James T Farrell, Mary McCarthy, Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke, Nelson Algren, Nabokov, Yevtushenko, Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and the punk rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols who murdered his girlfriend in Room 100 here before ending his own life, although there have been later assertions that both were murdered by a third person. (Room 100, I am told by the management, no longer exists, having been dismantled and subsumed by two adjoining suites.) Bob Dylan, too, in his song “Sara” on the Desire album, reports having written “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in the Chelsea.

Intriguing to note that a few doors down from the Chelsea is, or was, an SM Restaurant in which one could order an appetizer of soup to be eaten from the floor like a dog and for dessert a paddling on the bum. What an appetite!

Among the fiction of Thomas Wolfe is the extraordinary story “Only the Dead Know Brookyln.” It seems to me only the dead could know the immensity of New York’s literary history. I give up, refrain from visiting Kerouac’s apartment at 454 W 20th between 9th and 10th, or Auden’s at 77 St Mark’s Place between 1st and 2nd or the statue of Washington Irving a Irving Place and 17th Street.

Instead I head back to my hotel, still on foot, wading through the heat of the darkening afternoon up through Hell’s Kitchen and Eighth Avenue again past PeepWorld and the Playpen and a great big American flag beneath a sign that orders God to Bless America. Farther on to the theater district and a large likeness of a smoker hiding between buildings, sneaking a weed.

It is dark by the time I reach the Hotel Carter on 43rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, a family-owned hotel recommended to me by Mike Lee of the Cape Cod Voice.

Once known as The Dixie, the Carter was subject of an April 1986 Village Voice exposé by Laurie Stone entitled Heartbreak Hotels, about the more than 3,000 homeless families temporarily housed in run-down, overpriced hotels. Clearly, the Carter has seen better days as well as worse days, but on the Manhattan hotel market it can hardly be called overpriced today. My room on the 21st floor costs $89 a night (at the time of this writing raised to $99) and has a view, or a scrap of a view out the bathroom window, of the Hudson River. I am in room 2131, which is about 7 by 15 feet with a ten-foot ceiling, a walk-in closet which looks like a basement utility room, deckpainted green. There is a good bathroom, three windows, three good mirrors – one strategically positioned at the foot of the king-sized bed for those who like to watch themselves en embrace. Above the bed hangs a single, faded, framed print that seems to want to simulate Paris, and another view out the windows in the sleeping room down to the traffic on 43rd and Eighth.

At night when the tall narrow neon sign that climbs the outer wall blinks on, the name of the hotel changes to HOTE CAR E, the L, T and terminal R having burnt out a couple of years before. It occurs to me that if the E’s go, one at a time, in succession, the hotel will assume, by turns, the names HOT CAR E and HOT CAR, maybe at some point it will be just HOT.

Hot it is tonight as I greet the night manager, Abdul, seated at a desk and swivel chair in the middle of the broad dim lobby.

“Abdul,” I say. “Are you aware that Joe Buck, played by Jon Voigt, in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy stayed here just after he rode the Greyhound dog in from Texas. If you look quick in the film, you can see part of the long sign on the outside wall.”

“I know Joe Buck,” he says. “He was cowboy. With the cowboy hat and the buckskin fringies. But he smell bad,” Abdul adds, waving his fingers before his nose.

“See him lately?”

“I think he move south. Florida maybe.”

Why not? I think. How much of what we think we know is fictive hearsay? Does it matter? The only hard facts that count belong to bridge-builders or aeronautical engineers or surgeons. Reality otherwise is but a point of view, and if you combine angles, you get a hodge-podge of points of view, signifying little other than something to partially satisfy our ignorance of existence. You get a cubistic consciousness – like a fly’s eye view of the world. A fly can walk on the ceiling. But on cubistic feet you can hardly negotiate a floor.

“You know Joe, then, Abdul?”

“I know Joe a lit-tle,” he says with an amending tone. “Not that well.”

Abdul knows I am writing about New York and invites me to join him in the elevator to visit the ghost floor on 24, peopled now by old laundry wagons full of discarded cables and bedding, old mattresses and other rubble. A sign on the wall still advertises the defunct Circle Bar and Lounge and Terrace Restaurant (Dinner from $3.75, lunch from $1.25), but the stairway to the roof is impassable, blocked with chunks of plaster and refuse.

Just as well. I retire to my Bogart noir room with its battered mismatched furniture, a bed table with a drawer but no pull knob, a plastic chair. Thank god it has functioning A/C. I drink a tepid cocktail of Stolichnaya from a cellophane toothbrush glass and munch a turkey curry sandwich purchased from the 24-hour deli that adjoins the lobby, watching kids skateboard a few floors below on the roof of a building across 43rd.

It occurs to me that the New York of those kids is one I will never know. And perhaps they will know little of the New York I see, certainly of the New York I saw decades ago, in the last century, the last millennium.

William Sidney Porter (1862-1910), aka Oliver Henry, aka O. Henry, wrote his New York tales of The Four Million (1906), and each episode of the 1960s TV series about New York, The Naked City, concluded, with an oblique, updated reference to that: “There are eight-million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

It seems to me now, watching those roof-top skateboarders whom I will never know, that perhaps there are eight-million New Yorks and three-hundred-million Americas.

No one will ever know more than a tiny fraction of them.

N’Yawk, N’Yawk: City Where My Fathers Wrote is a post from: Pif Magazine

A PIF is many things – inter alia, a French comic book hero, an
abbreviation for Process Interchange Format (which, we are told cryptically,
is critical in business process re-engineering or enterprise integration) as
well as for the Pacific Island Forum (representing, we are informed, heads
of government of all independent and self-governing Pacific
Island countries.) Piffing fine with us!

It is also a fragment of a Danish children’s nonsense rhyme that goes
like this (in
transliteration):

Ocker gocker

Gummy clocker

Earla pearla

Pif paf puf !

The Danes also use pif paf puf as their translation of “snap crackle
and pop” to advertise the sound that milk makes as it pours onto a certain
breakfast cereal. Thus, “pif,” in this context, stands for “snap.” And
snappy it is. As well as (s) piffy.

Richard Luck, the founder of PIF Magazine, defines the word by not
putting too fine a point on it: PIF means, he says, whatever you want it
to. An abbreviation of epiphany, a
foreign object that penetrates the brain, or masturbation in Czech (piffing
off perhaps – though certainly not “piffing” off).

Regardless of definition, well-informed citizens of the world will
know PIF as an online literary treasure founded in 1995 and, at this
writing, in its eleventh year – publishing fiction, poetry, art,
interviews, essays, reviews, strong material that might have been lost
without a PIF to house it – though that house has recently found itself on
a razor’s edge between existence and perdition.

Mr. Luck started the enterprise because he wearied of the fact that
what he perceived to be those weakest poems and stories were the ones being
accepted for publication in the mainstream periodicals, while his more
artfully raggedy work was being consistently rejected. He wanted to create
a place where work whose edges were perceived as
being too ragged or too rugged or too sharp for the smooth and purring
mainstream could be lodged and read.

And he did that. And, for reasons best known to Mr. Luck (one rumor
is that it was born of a typo that pleased his eye), he called it PIF.

In the years that followed, PIF has published outstanding work by and
interviews with a series of outstanding writers, many of whom need little or
no introduction: William H. Gass, Rick Moody, Bruce Jay Friedman, Dan
Wakefield, Rene Steinke, Clark Blaise, Thomas
Fleming, Steve Heller, Gordon Weaver, Naomi Shihab Nye. Denise Duhamel, and
most recently Duff Brenna and Gladys Swan.

The above names and half a hundred others are among those who have been
interviewed by one of PIF’s mainstays – a fellow named Derek Alger who
appeared in my life seemingly out of, well, the ether. One day I got an
email from Mr. Alger suggesting that he interview me for an on-line magazine
with the unlikely name PIF. Derek Alger. Immediately I liked that name.
It sounds like a writer’s name. He had been referred to me by a man I count
among my best friends and senior colleagues – Walter Cummins, who edited
The Literary Review for decades. I googled PIF and was impressed with what
I saw. We did the interview and my email association with Alger – now
Derek – continued and deepened. Since I live in Copenhagen we didn’t have
much occasion to meet, but next time I was in New York City, we did get
together for dinner – in fact it was on the eve
of the last great northeast coast blackout; I’m not suggesting that the
electricity of our brainstorming short-circuited the system, but it was a
productive meeting.

Derek had also, at my suggestion, interviewed Gordon Weaver, whose
many volumes of fiction I had just proposed as the subject of a panel
discussion for an Associated Writing Programs annual conference. Since
Derek had, in preparation for his interview, read virtually every word
Weaver had ever written, he seemed a more than qualified candidate for a
spot on the six-man Weaver panel. I invited him, he agreed, and our circle
of mutual literary connections continued to expand. I was in fact in the
process of gathering material for a book of criticism about Weaver’s fiction
– a book which, due to the press of other projects, I needed help with.
Derek was the man, is the man. The book, which I’d had to put aside, was
once again in progress.

Suddenly, Derek Alger and I had common interests, joint projects. An
email acquaintance had quite rapidly become a three-dimensional cooperation
and the single point joining all of these occurrences and connections, was,
to get back to the point, Richard Luck’s outstanding online journal PIF.

Thus it was with alarm and sadness that I learned recently that PIF
was on the threshold of pulling up the virtual stakes of its electronic
foundation and becoming history. And it was with relief and joy that I
learned the very next day that Derek Alger, with Richard Luck’s blessing,
would save the venture from execution, would continue its continuing.

Thus, when an invitation came for me to write a brief introduction to
the new inaugural edition of the newly-saved, re-imagined, re-invented,
re-inaugerated PIF, I accepted the honor with joy and with pleasure.

Which is why I am here: To pay tribute to those who have kept PIF
alive over its first incarnation, and to express thanks to Richard Luck and
Rachel Sage, and, not least, Derek Alger for their selfless efforts to see
to it that PIF did not die, that this first edition of the new PIF is here
for the delectation of the thousands upon thousands of readers and lovers of
literature who have only to key in three small letters on their server: PIF.

And puff! You’re reading great stuff.

PIF: A Stay of Execution for an Online Literary Treasure is a post from: Pif Magazine

I do not believe there has ever been a successful writer who has not studied writing to learn the craft. Here perhaps we must define terms, to wit “successful” and “studied.” I shall eschew any attempt to define the former lest I find myself vulnerable to charges of having excluded features from the profile of success simply because they are not my own (e.g., an appearance on Oprah Winfrey, publication by a major New York house, front-face displays in airports and Barnes & Noble, rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review, and so forth). Granted, these and other attributes might accompany the highest literary excellence, but these are not the measures of success to which I refer, which I can most simply identify as writing that is in some manner a profound expression of our existential predicament; in the words of another local Scot, from just eight miles down the road in Edinburgh, Robert Louis Stevenson:

The poet . . . is to find some way of speaking about
life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment,
(wo) man’s enduring astonishment at his (her) own
position. And besides having an answer ready, it
is he who shall provoke the question. He must
shake people out of their indifference, and force
them to make some election in this world, instead
of sliding dully forward in a dream . . . He is the
declared enemy of all
living by reflex action, of all the
pleasureless pleasuring and imaginary duties in
which we coin away our hearts and fritter
invaluable years.”

I believe that any writer whose work can be thus described would have had to study writing. Reading and contemplating the work of the masters is the classic manner of doing so. A writer may do this on his or her own, in isolation, and/or by building and judiciously using a network of intelligent colleagues, and/or by pursuing a course of formal study of literature and/or the art of writing.

In brief, one can do it alone, on one’s own or one can do it in community with others. I have tried it both ways and find the latter method far superior to the former.

Some writers — even some who make their living teaching college writing courses — pride themselves on saying, “I never took a course in writing. I never had to.” Others — for example, the extremely gifted fiction writer W.D. Wetherell — never took a writing course or even met another writer until some time into their careers, but do not make a point of honor of this.

Wetherell worked in isolation for some years before joining the faculty of Vermont College’s MFA Program. He likened the moment of being welcomed by fellow faculty member Gordon Weaver his first day there to the historic meeting in the wilderness between H.M. Stanley and David Livingstone (another Scot whose statue stands alongside the enormous monument to Sir Walter Raleigh on Princes Street in Edinburgh):

“Professor Weaver, I presume.”

Writing in isolation, Wetherell had published two books and many stories (and has gone on to publish many more), but had never met another writer before that moment. However, that he had never taken a writing course is not the same as saying he had never studied writing; clearly, he had — he had studied and learned from the masters he most admired; Hawthorne, Melville, Proust, Chekov . . .

I am not certain that all potential writers are capable, given the limited years allotted us, of learning the craft they need on their own just as most people would be hard pressed to build a house without first being taught a few things about brick and timber, shingle and cement, without at least studying how a few sturdy houses have been put together, without examining the way a door is hung, a lintel set in place, windows cast, how to pitch and raise a roof, angle the walls, lay flooring, not to mention seeing to the electricity, plumbing, heat ducts . . .

Never having studied such matters a person might succeed, on superficial observation and surmisal, in constructing some semblance of a house, but not likely one that stands straight and flush, with doors that shut tightly, free of drafts and secure against the weather. A novel written in similar ignorance is more than likely to be subject to similar flaws — a lopsided, insecure structure that offers little shelter and is liable to collapse on your head at any moment.

When I was starting out, I took what undergraduate courses were available to me. My first help was the advice of my freshman college composition professor at C.C.N.Y. to keep a journal in order to loosen up my style and to try to write something in it every day, even if only a single sentence. “And then,” he said, “in a year or two, who knows? You might even have a book.” Good bait for me. I was seventeen, and four years of keeping a journal — sometimes just a sentence or two, sometimes many pages, sometimes with gaps of weeks or even months — did indeed get me in the habit of writing and writing freely. To learn to write freely is important.

Next I took a course with Edward Hoagland which included individual writing conferences, maybe four or five twenty-minute sessions. These brief meetings resulted in major progress. That was after a few years wandering alone in the wilderness, so to speak, hitch hiking around the United States in the mid-sixties as I thought Jack Kerouac would have wanted me to do, scribbling in my journals (which I carried around in an attaché case ultimately stolen from me in San Francisco — I cannot help but pity the poor junky when he discovered the contents of the alluring stolen case, pages of ringbound scribble.)

What Hoagland did in conference was essentially a commented line-editing. I had learned from my journals to write freely; I was helped by him to rein it in, slice away the excess. I sat beside him and watched him run his pen over my lines, crossing out words, phrases, sentences, saying things like, “You are including every fucking detail!” That single statement broke ice for me because I was ready for it. “This is purple prose,” he said another time about a piece I had thought lucious as Dylan Thomas’s fiction. “Horribly overwritten.” Uncomfortable as they sometimes were, those few small lessons were worth gold to me and moved me sufficiently forward to win a three-year writing grant shortly after finishing his course.

Then I dropped out of college for the second time and took a few independent workshops, but I never stayed for long — my experience of them was a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing running off at the mouth under the weak leadership of slightly accomplished writers. Rightly or wrongly, I felt they were offering bad advice that would only confuse my search. Still, I didn’t believe in myself and I didn’t know what to do; the only thing I knew was that I had to write — in any event I kept coming back to it.

I wish that someone at that time had told me to read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a book I urge all of my students to read now. In it, he says things like:

“There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them . . . I learn daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!”

And, “Prose needs to be but like a cathedral: there one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help: on scaffoldings alone with one’s consciousness.”

And, “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness,” and “in one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive,” and “. . . go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.”

If you feel that you could live without writing, he said, then you must not attempt it at all. But even to discover that is a great discovery.

I once taught in a workshop where I tried to convey that message, and the program director called me aside to ask that I refrain from discouraging students. To attend a workshop that fears and attempts to sidestep that solitary query is a waste of time.

“Why,” Rilke asked, “do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?”

You can buy that Rilke book from W.W. Norton in a splendid translation by M.D. Herter Norton for $6.95, and it is worth a thousand dollars worth of workshops — more, far more.

I wish I had had it when I was twenty-five. I did, however, have the good advice of Alexander Blackburn, then editor of Writer’s Forum in Colorado; he said simply, in an open letter to young writers, “If you can quit, probably you should.” Valuable advice to me in my twenties because it helped me recognize I could not quit.

You may ask what help that is if one cannot quit anyway, but recognizing the fact that one cannot quit and going on is not the same as expending spirit on a vain wish to quit that which has irrevocably chosen you. In his epic lament on the death of Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Rexroth bemoans the manner in which the poetic instinct in our society is quashed rather than nourished: “How many, on the advice of their analysts, decided a business career would be best after all?”

Sometimes I believe the answer to that question is none. For a poet cannot make that choice; if a poet needs the money, he or she will find room for both — like T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, so many others. And no workshop of any seriousness has any business discouraging its participants from considering the ultimate: Am I really a writer? Must I write?

Akin to Rexroth’s question, though more illuminating I think, is a statement by Saul Bellow: “The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved by effort (ratio) and knowledge received (intellectus) by the listening soul that can hear the essence of things and comes to understand the marvelous. But this calls for unusual strength of soul. The more so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and infects you within its restlessness. It trains you in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances. The true poise, that of contemplation or imagination, sits right on the border of sleeping and dreaming.”

But I am not here to knock the ratio of workshops. I am here to sort through what I know of them and share my knowledge of them, such as it is. And to say that attending an MFA program, when I was ready for it, made all the difference for me as a writer. As an MFA student, I had the opportunity to work and talk with great and dedicated teachers like Gordon Weaver, Gladys Swan, André Dubus, W.D. Wetherell, Jack Myers, and to spend hours upon hours discussing craft and art with fellow seekers. The work in the classroom and workshop sessions and the lectures were important, but the talk that went on afterwards, often into the wee hours of what might otherwise have been a dark night of the soul, was equally so. And I began to find my way, began to find the place I sought and, finally, to achieve that most advantageous place of learning about writing — the place of the writing teacher.

I have taught various forms of workshops from the one-time one-hour session to sessions lasting from a weekend to a month, sessions where the participants live together for a fortnight, immersing themselves in the writing life all the waking hours of the day and night and sessions where people come to class for a few hours and go home until the next day. I’ve taught by writing exercises, one-on-one conferences, group-run as opposed to leader-directed workshops, in junior college, undergraduate, and master’s and PhD degree writing programs, by delivering a series of craft lectures, and in programs independent of any university, attended sometimes by people who have already achieved a considerable level of artistic accomplishment — some who have already published one or more books, but who have run aground and need a shoulder to nudge them back to the water. I have team-taught with brilliant colleagues — Robie Macauley, Gordon Weaver, Alexandra Marshall, Pamela Painter, James Carroll, Askold Melnyczuk, Alexandra Johnson –
and I have had the benefit of brilliant students in my workshops.

What is best?

A lot depends on how much time you have, how much money, how long and successfully you have been writing.

How much time and money you have only you can answer. The question of how successfully you have been writing is more difficult, though not impossible to answer. If you are working with serious commitment, intensely, devoting a reasonable amount of time at least a couple or more times a week to a deep and intense reading of good writing and a deep and intense attempt to ignite the source of language within you, you will find yourself approaching the place where your stories are. And I believe that when you feel yourself near that place is when you will begin to profit most from guidance.

It is rather like hunting for amber on the beach. Sometimes you find pretty little yellow pebbles that you want very much to believe are amber, even though in your heart you know they are not amber, but mere glittery bits of dead stone. But the value of those pretty little yellow stones is that you do learn to know that they are not amber, to know that which is not amber. And then suddenly, as if by chance, you find a real piece of amber, and you have no doubt. You can tell by the way the light strikes and illuminates it, by its elegant lightness in your palm, by its irregular shape and texture (as opposed to the dull smoothness of stone), by the feel of it against your fingertips, by the sound it makes when you tap it against your tooth — not hard and sharp like stones, but the quiet sound of a thing that was once alive, a thing that gives a bit, and when you peer into it, you see its mysterious glow, sometimes even the spectre of ancient fossils trapped within — a chip of ancient
history, or even a fistful of it.

My first three published stories, which came after many pieces of worthless dross (worthless except that I learned a little something from each of them, when I was able to suspend my fear of failure sufficiently to receive the lesson), were like those pretty little yellow pebbles. The fourth one was amber, and I had no doubt — I knew as I wrote it that it was coming from the place in me I had searched so long for, the place where the stories I could write were, the stories that it seems I was meant to write. You know when you are there.

The first time you find and truly begin to know that place, I believe , is when you really are ready to benefit from a good workshop or tutorial. Workshops and courses and lessons and books on craft and the study of masters can help lead you to that moment if you are willing to suspend your fear and self-doubt sufficiently to learn the lessons you can only learn from your failed stories, from stooping on the beach to pick up those pebbles which are not the real thing but which — by scrutinizing them — help prepare you, by a process of elimination, to identify what is the real thing when you find it, that recognizing a flaw in what you are writing is not a failure, but a
success, occasion for joy.

What am I getting at here in more concrete terms, I think — though it is difficult to be concrete about a process as slipperily alive and multifaceted as writing — is what I attempt to teach in my workshops and what the most alert workshop participants are seeking to learn. We walk around and around and around it, this thing that is once so enormous and so infinitesimally minute we fail to see it, or which is so cunningly and richly ordinary we walk right past it.

My aim as a workshop leader is not to help a participant to successfully complete a given piece of writing, but to help her or him find the way into the process. To publish one story, encouraging and pleasant as that may be, is not the key; the key is to find the place in you where the stories are that you can write, want to write, even need to write. The thing is not merely to get there and bring back a single story, not to find a single piece of glowing amber, but to learn to recognize the glow, to study the route to the place of the stories so that you can find your way back there again, even if the walls of the tunnel have caved in behind you on your way out.

It is learning to accept and grasp the imagination as a faculty while at the same time developing your craft so that the skills become second nature and are instantly available to be placed at the disposal of your imagination when it sends for them. Your craft is the tools you need to shore up the tunnel as it caves in, so you can go on.

Thus the question of what sort of workshop or writing course you take is probably less important than your own readiness judiciously to receive that which helps you find the inner path to your own source, judiciously to reject that which does not, and intensely to focus on the lessons of craft available from all the great masters who have come before us.

So: You want to study writing. What should you do? Write. Read the masters. Read the poets. Be patient; time is nothing. Study. Listen. Allow yourself to fail; and to learn the lessons your own failure affords you. Listen to the advice of your peers and of your teachers, but listen judiciously, select that which might be of use, humbly reject that which is not. Attend courses, workshops, lectures, readings. Talk, intoxicate yourself on talk about the craft and the art. As Jack Kerouac suggested, Write long wild letters about it all, read long wild letters about it with an open heart.

Ask yourself if you really must write, and if the answer is yes, receive that blessing and recognize that you have chosen yourself for the study of a lifetime.

Realism & Other Illusions:
Essays on the Craft of Fiction

copyright ©2002

Can You Learn to Write? I Never Had To is a post from: Pif Magazine