More to Say: Essays and Appreciations

Introduction

Being a certain age automatically puts you in the witness protection program, even if you were never that kind of witness. You don’t look the same, you’re not where you’re expected to be, and the shocked neighbors, if they ever discover your true identity, are abashed because they thought you fit right in (though after thirty summers in Maine, I have yet to meet those neighbors).

I’ve had fun sneaking around, moonlighting as a nonfiction writer. My friends hardly ever commented, I assume because they never even saw my nonfiction. One time, my photographer friend Bob Adelman and I were talking to a friend of his, and Bob was recounting, pretty hilariously, a misadventure he’d had while on assignment with a writer. Bob’s life was synonymous with bizarre setbacks. A couple of times I chimed in to clarify a minor point. His friend said, breathlessly, as an afterthought to his own amazement, Who was the writer?

I was, I said.

(Another time, Bob took me to dinner with his old friend Bill Smith. I didn’t realize until the evening ended that I’d been talking to Martin Cruz Smith.)

The great thing about writing nonfiction is that you can select your perspective among things that come to you⁠—I mean, by narrating situations you’ve observed, rather than generated. I was lucky in these essays and appreciations, because often the opportunities were handed to me. I would never otherwise have known anything about Grant Wood, except for being able to conjure his most famous painting. Empathy is one of the buzzwords of the day, but sometimes, in observing or when conducting an interview, I felt the same thing I experience when writing fiction: I’m both the creator and a pretender who can succeed only if I understand and have questions about what I conjure, or, in nonfiction, what comes right at me. As with everything else in life, the easy assignments often turned out to be difficult in some way, whereas the hard ones seemed to simultaneously bring forth a fortuitous circumstance or perfectly imperfect moment that kickstarted me, and then kicked me in the ass if I didn’t stay on course.

Writers make up these metaphors and disclaimers. They vary because writers vary. We do, apparently, need to pretend that someone’s in control, even if we are that someone.

In this book, the focus is on the writing I’ve done about other writers and artists. I’m married to one, Lincoln Perry, but had I not been asked to write a text for his paintings done in Charlottesville, where we lived, and also for his mural in the University of Virginia’s Cabell Hall, I would never have had reason to step back and ask myself some basic questions, or to spend so much time looking at his work. (You can omit the Duh and point and say That’s good to your husband, but not to the reader.) There’s a lot of looking or reading that takes place before I start to write an essay. There’s not a lot of anything that happens before I write fiction: no plot in mind, probably an image, possibly an indescribable feeling I still have trouble understanding after introspection; it’s⁠—please don’t think me only a child of the 1960s⁠—a mood. When I write nonfiction, I’m trying to pick up an external vibe, trying to become informed enough to inhabit someone else’s world fairly.

But enough about that inchoateness. I’m primarily a fiction writer. I’d like to think that in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I enrolled in the only photography class I ever took, I might have stopped writing and started photographing instead⁠—at the time, that was exactly what I wanted⁠—but if I have any motto, it’s (former students may leave the room) Writers will do anything to avoid writing. Still: from the time I first saw Diane Arbus’s work, in the early 1970s, I was in love with black-and-white photographs, and we never really broke up. Now, I wander my upstairs hallway and look at framed photographs by friends such as Georgia Sheron, Curt Richter, John Loengard, and Holly Wright⁠—all discussed in this book. Other photos I bought before I met their creators (if I ever did). I never look at the images and wonder what the story is behind them, or, worse yet, use them as a point of departure for writing my story. They don’t exist to inspire my work, and they’re done in a different medium; essentially, there’s no analogy between writing and photography that matters⁠—at least, to me.

(When my husband and I have given presentations together, we’re inevitably asked what the relationship is between painting and writing. None, would be the short form, though surely something can be said, and from time to time we’ve tried, because, hey, we usually get free lunch.)

I guess the way I feel about all these attempts to elucidate something I find in the work that moves me and (equally appreciated) that escapes me in photography or writing is that now that I’m no longer a student, it’s delightful to be a student.

It was my good luck to know personally so many of the people I’ve written about. (Oh, for one more ride down Duval Street in Key West late at night, windows open, with Harry Mathews in the passenger seat, asking Lincoln to turn up the volume on Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping: I get knocked down, but I get up again). Some of the writers in this collection I met coincidentally, though maybe that’s not the way to put it: Peter Taylor was instrumental in getting me my first real teaching job, at the University of Virginia (I’d read only a few of his stories before that); I’d never have met David Markson if not for a mutual friend. I met Craig Nova because my dear friend, the late photographer Tom Victor, who had no driver’s license, flew me with him from New York to Vermont (People Express was still flying at cut-rate prices) so I could drive him in a rental car to photograph Craig⁠—whose wife, after I sat waiting in the parked car for a long while, came out and asked the driver in for coffee. And though I’d seen her read, I would never have met Alice Munro had she not been waiting for our shared editor, the wonderful Ann Close, who for reasons I no longer remember visited me the semester I taught at Northwestern, and Alice, who was traveling with Ann, got tired of waiting in the car. Can you even imagine what it was like to look up and see Alice Munro, in a hat, walking right toward me in Evanston, Illinois?

So, yes, there were good times on the road (Quiz: Who remembers expense accounts?), some flattering, even startling invitations to work with, or to write about, artists I admired. It was great to have opportunities that required my stopping and staring, moments that helpfully defamiliarized the world. Now, Josh Bodwell, at Godine, has given me the chance to publish some of my long-ago writing, as well as some more-recent work⁠—essays that might have stayed hiding in plain sight forever, because they always pretty much did. How I wish I could now reveal, like many others, that all this time I’ve been writing mysteries under a pseudonym, but alas, no. In approaching my subjects, I’ve been given the advantage of forgetting myself (as in: Up to that old writing trick again, Beattie?), at the same time that my subjects took chances by letting me into their homes and studios, making themselves vulnerable, as we always do, when we talk to others. Some of the writers who’ve died⁠—Peter Taylor, Nancy Hale⁠—simply, initially, took a chance by befriending me.

It was an odd experience, locating the pieces to include in this collection, because they were written when I knew more (or less) than I do now, and also because I don’t look at past work. I admit that there were happy surprises. I think I was correct when I wrote about Lincoln: He’s doing what he does [painting] not to get an answer . . . but to pose a question, which, by implication, makes the audience better able to articulate their own uncertainty. In so doing, they enter the world of the paintings. This, I think, is what artists want to do: find a way to lure the reader or viewer into an alternate realm, to overcome the audience’s resistance to being taken away from their own lives and interests and priorities.

When you use words, you have to come up with something as irresistible as a carrot is to a horse. Of course, this also applies to me (I’m much better suited to offering carrots than to being a horse, take my word for it), and whether they were requested by an editor or self-generated, one thing these assignments did was present me with a given, and a guarantee that whatever I came up with could never be entirely mine.

Don’t we all love to be tantalized? And doesn’t everybody love to play hooky? Apparently my father spent his youth skipping school, pursued by truant officers. My mother did not, though sometimes, when I was young, she’d lay out a lunch of six candy bars for each of us, washed down with Coke (No need to tell Dad). Maybe it’s sort of ridiculous that in journalistic writing, I was working in order to avoid work, but it was, and remains, a motivating factor. Fiction gave me some recognizability. It’s the reason I was given assignments or indulged when I came up with ideas. But nonfiction always gave me a thrill, even if it provided only an illusion of freedom. Freedom and flexibility⁠—for me, those are the conditions under which imagination sparks. Not that I didn’t want to write well in both genres, not that I didn’t want to benefit by articulating interesting new things to myself, just that the writing collected here had nothing to do with my self-consciousness about Ann-the-Writer, which was always inhibiting. Going out with my old cassette recorder (yup) and my notebook also reminded me to try to be a bit more generous when I was on the other side, being interviewed. My subjects have sometimes told me the more interesting question to ask, and they’ve loaned me books they think will help shape my thinking⁠—if they’re wrong, that can, indeed, also be helpful.

I love being able to enter artist’s spaces, where, for example, their works’ subtexts can simply appear. I won’t let people into my writing room, and turn down requests to photograph it. It’s not that I have anything so private, or so tellingly sentimental. It’s just that once the interloper asks a question and I hear my perfunctory response, the valued artifact, or photograph, or Valentine deflates. I guess the room is something of an echo chamber, a riddle, a time capsule of in-jokes and insects that glow in the dark. But wow! was I ever amazed by Jayne Hinds Bidaut’s loft with the lazing iguana. She was brave to let me in, and I guess I exhibited some bravery myself.

I’ve digressed here because the way I see into things as a fiction writer is different from the way I extrapolate meaning when I’m writing about what’s observable. Touchable. Quite simply, in nonfiction the situation presents itself to me, then⁠—a bit like the way a cat either snubs you or jumps in your lap⁠—there I am in the world of unpredictability, whether or not I want to be. Unlike fiction, you can’t press delete and get rid of Kitty.

In fairness to myself, I wasn’t writing only to avoid other writing, and I wasn’t just playing dress-up, though I had a romantic fantasy that I was. The visual artists and writers in this book are ones I admire, and from whom I’ve learned a lot. I might have spoken their introductions into the microphone, but they’re the stars.

Ann Beattie

2022

more to say:

on writers

A Dream of a Writer:

Peter Taylor

The American Scholar,

2017

Matthew Hillsman Taylor Jr., nicknamed Pete, decided early to become simply Peter Taylor. The name has a certain directness, as well as a hint of elegance. Both qualities are also true of his writing, though his directness was reserved for energizing inanimate objects, as well as for presenting physical details. (His sidelong psychological studies, on the other hand, take time to unfold.) It was also his tendency to situate his characters within precisely rendered historical and social settings. His stories deepen, brushstroke by brushstroke, by gradual layering⁠—by the verbal equivalent of what painters call atmospheric perspective. Their surfaces are no more to be trusted than the first ice on a lake.

Born in Trenton, Tennessee, in 1917, Taylor was a self-proclaimed mama’s boy, though he said his mother never showed favoritism among her children: he had an older brother and two older sisters. She was old-fashioned, even for her day. He adored her, and women were often the focus of attention in his fiction. The women in Taylor’s stories are capable, intelligent, if sometimes unpredictable in their eccentricities as well as in their fierce energies and abilities.

How wonderful that all the stories are now collected in two volumes in the Library of America series (Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories). A reader unfamiliar with Taylor’s work will here become an archaeologist; American history, especially the Upper South’s history of racial divisions and sometimes dubious harmonies, is everywhere on full display. Taylor was raised with servants. The woman who was once his father’s nurse also cared for him. Traditions were handed down, as were silver and obligation. Though he seldom wrote about people determined to overturn the social order, Taylor never flinched when presenting encounters between whites and Blacks⁠—whether affectionate, indifferent, or unkind⁠—and dramatized them forthrightly.

The stories, rooted in daily life, use the quotidian as their point of departure into more complex matters. Writers have little use for the usual. Whenever a writer takes the pose that the events of his story are typical and ordinary, the reader knows that the story would not exist if this day, this moment, were not about to become exceptional. Taylor mobilizes his characters and the plots that they create as if merely observing, as if capably evoking convention and happy to go along with it. To add to this effect, he sometimes creates a character, often a narrator, whom the reader can take for a Peter Taylor stand-in: a child, a college professor, or a young man like Nat, the protagonist of his novella-length The Old Forest, whose thwarted desires and covertness about tempting fate are at odds with what society condones and also with his inexperience. In that particular story, one woman turns the tables and, in the closing lines, another woman⁠—Nat’s fiancée, Caroline⁠—kicks the table right out of the room. It is one of the most amazing endings in modern fiction, with a revelation that rises out of the subtext:

Though it [says Nat, referring to leaving home and rejecting an identity determined by others] clearly meant that we must live on a somewhat more modest scale and live among people of a sort she [Caroline] was not used to, and even meant leaving Memphis forever behind us, the firmness with which she supported my decision, and the look in her eyes whenever I spoke of feeling I must make the change, seemed to say to me that she would dedicate her pride of power to the power of freedom I sought.

The present tense of The Old Forest is the early 1980s, when Nat is in his sixties. The story’s action, however, takes place in a remembered 1937, just before Nat, then a college undergraduate, is to marry Caroline. His wedding plans go awry when, while driving near Overton Park in Memphis with another young woman, he has a minor car accident, after which the woman flees into the ancient woods in the park and disappears. The mystery of her disappearance must be solved before the marriage can take place. Nat, as narrator, has alerted us early on (no doubt so we might forget about it) that the story we’re about to read happened in the Memphis of long ago. It ends in an epiphany we never see play out. The future⁠—the now of the story⁠—is only eloquently suggested. The story of the forty intervening years is barely, glancingly told⁠—shocking as some of the few offered details are. Virginia Woolf’s surprising use of brackets to inform the reader of the death of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse was stunning; Taylor’s narrator, who hurries through his account of family tragedies, is equally shocking, as the information he relays appears to be but a brief aside to the story he wishes to tell.

Every writer thinks hard about the best moment for a story to begin and end. Taylor does, too, but his diction⁠—his exquisite and equivocal choice of words⁠—often suggests that beneath the surface action of the story dwells something more, something uncontainable. With pride of power comes the hint that Caroline is fiercely leonine as well as heroically self-sacrificing. This, however, is projected onto her by Nat: it seemed to say to me. In other words, it’s worth noting that an idea has been planted, in both Nat’s mind and the reader’s, yet it is unverifiable; we do not get to read the story of a lifetime that might otherwise inform us or offer a different interpretation of what we’re asked to understand. Elegant prose, calculated to convince, appears at the story’s end⁠—a literary high note, almost one of elation, on which to conclude.

But I wouldn’t be sure. In retrospect, the story tells us a lot about Nat (perhaps that he can be as annoying as a gnat), who intermittently interrupts the narrative to inform us with disquisitions about the historical significance of the old forest. It’s a ploy to distract our attention from all that’s forming below the surface (missing the forest for the trees). Nat, writing from the perspective of maturity, knows himself, yet not entirely; he feels he must do the right thing, but does so only when prodded by Caroline, a strong woman. He is adamant that they must find another way, a new way forward in which something is lost (Memphis, his family, and their expectations of him) but something is also gained (autonomy and the ability to pursue one’s passion). All this leaves the lioness a little on the sidelines, and the present-day reader might be saddened that the Caroline of 1937 understands that her only way forward is to attach herself to Nat, a man⁠—but, at the moment the story concludes, the two characters are united by the writer in their own version of triumph.

With apologies to the New Criticism (originated and practiced by some of Peter Taylor’s most important teachers, including Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren), here is where I conflate the life of the writer with the actions and thoughts of his stand-in character. The tension that arises within the protagonist from a psychological or emotional conflict is a common theme of Taylor’s stories. As is the idea of a trade-off or compromise. As is ambiguity, a feeling of unease that can creep over the reader like a shadow, so slow moving that it’s accepted without question. It’s not until later that one looks for its source, and there is where Taylor always outfoxes the reader. He will purposefully disrupt a story’s forward momentum to delve into the narrator’s past, causing what might seem to be equilibrium, when jammed up against the story’s present moment, to create disequilibrium.

What makes me so admiringly queasy is not this juxtaposition and the discordant tone it sounds but what the methodology evokes more broadly: Peter Taylor, as writer, occupying the role of both Orpheus and Eurydice. He repeatedly creates narrators who guide the reader through the story toward an expected and just resolution but who then hesitate, or momentarily lose their moral focus, and so scuttle that resolution. Taylor’s characters want to come out into the light, but the person who can best guide them, the writer himself, is impelled to make them look over their shoulder and face the omnipresent past, with all its implied demands. The possibility of faltering, the probability of it, is a recurring undertow in his stories. It’s as if, in his worst fears, Taylor, relegated to Eurydice’s powerless and inescapable position, might himself need rescuing. The way out is never easy or clear, even with a narrator’s guidance, and so daunting that one can’t go it alone. Taylor’s main characters always need to bring someone with them; individuals, in Taylor’s fiction, must exist in pairs. After all, his narrators are mortal.

The writer’s use of intrinsic doubt⁠—of aporia as a rhetorical strategy⁠—is also fascinating. Just when we’re almost hypnotized by the narrative abilities of some of his eloquent yet dissembling characters, there comes a shift in tone, really a sotto voce moment, in which the narrator second-guesses himself or the tale he is telling, thereby indicating that everything the reader hears must not be taken at face value. Quite a few of his stories verge on being mysteries (The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, First Heat), though not the conventional kind that pose suspense-filled puzzles that will eventually be solved. Rather, Taylor’s puzzles are articulated so that some potential accommodation, some new way to go on with one’s life, may become apparent. Though the reader may not register it immediately, at the end of a Taylor story some essential riddle remains.

Peter Taylor embodied contradictions. He often explored them in his fiction, though rarely does he leave us with a feeling that things have been comfortably reconciled for himself or his characters. There remains an oscillation, an internal push-pull, as if the mind were a vibrating tuning fork. Currently, in the age of memoir, there’s a lot of self-important talk among writers about writing as a means to self-salvation. To the extent that this applies to Taylor, his characters are