Through Indian Eyes

Why I Like this Story, Edited by Jackson R. Bryer 50’s. I try to describe these books and, though I suppose there is some inevitable judging, my goal is for you to see what this book is like, not what I think it is worth. I usually like the books very much, but if I don’t, maybe you will. I think I will make an exception here and tell you why I love this book, why I think it is a great book. I am bowled over by this book. Writers writing about other writers produces incandescent, nearly transcendent moments. If this book is testimony to anything, it is that writing and life are so intertwined that they might be said to be the very same thing. Breath becomes word. There are forty-eight essays In the book. Each writer selected a short story to reflect on. The first essay I turned to was Frederick Busch on John O’Hara. I knew Fred Busch in college. When he was in an English class, the professor had to take a back seat. The story he talks about here, “How Can I Tell You?” iconcerns a car salesman. In one dazzling paragraph, Busch give us a tour of the salesmen of American literature, from Melville to Carver. Salesmen are so desperately at the mercy of buyers. Busch takes our hand and leads us through the O’Hara story, admiring along the way all that O’Hara holds back from saying. Busch savors the story’s “long look into what cannot be said,” and blasts us with the irony of “the emptiness that threatens to fill us.” While in this life-story nexus mood, I turned to Nicholas Delbanco’s look at a Malamud story, “The Magic Barrel.” Back in the 70’s, I took a summer writing course at Bennington. Delbanco was a teacher (so was Busch, by the way) and Malamud came for a reading. Someone asked him how he came to be a great writer. His answer? “I’m not a great writer, but I have great thoughts on the staircase.” So now here they appear, Delbanco and Malamud, friends from different generations. Interspersed in Delbanco’s reading of “The Magic Barrel” are memories of their time as neighbors before Malamud’s death. Malamud, through his work, continued to give Delbanco lessons. The one he ends with? “So enjoy!” I can’t tell you about all forty-eight though I wish I could. I’ll just mention two more. One is Elliot Ackerman on Andre Debus, and the other is Andre Debus on Hemmingway. A friend gave Debus’s “A Father’s Story” to Ackerman as he was about to become the father of a baby girl. This gift was so thought-provoking on the contrast between fathering a son and a daughter that as his daughter grew up, he passed it along to other new fathers of girls. Should a father protect a girl more, should he restrict her more, should he discourage her from taking chances? Debus’s story looks at these questions from a dark place because the daughter in question has caused a highway death. How surprised I was to discover in Debus on Hemmingway that an accident had dramatically and permanently altered his own life. Debus’s piece begins on a light note. He is at the University of Iowa living next door to Kurt Vonnegut. They both go to the airport to pick up Ralph Ellison, who has come to read at the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. We see that writers are people, having drinks and shooting the breeze. Debus mentions that he teaches Hemmingway’s “In Another Country” and Ellison proceeds to recite the first paragraph from memory. Writers schmoozing – just like this whole book. “In Another Country” is set in a hospital full of soldiers with grave war injuries. Debus asks a friend what he thinks it is about and the friend answers, “the futility of cures.” This story follows Debus through his life as he becomes a college English teacher and has the accident, which puts him in a hospital bed for a year and places him permanently in a wheelchair. Over time, the story’s meaning changed for him and not in a predictable way. He tells us, “A story can always break into pieces while is sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.” After I read Busch’s essay, I xeroxed it and sent it to my college roommate, Mary. She said, “I guess I’ll have to buy the book now.” I said, “Don’t do that. I’ll send it to you when I’ve finished it.” I did not know that this was a book I wanted to keep. When I finally finish reading all the Friends Seminary books – surely the supply will dry up – this book will set me off in new directions. By the way, I sent Mary her own copy of the book.

Where Were You? America Remembers the JFK Assassination, compiled and edited by Gus Russo and Harry Moses circa ’60. One of the grammar points we have to teach in French is the kind of sentence often referred to as “interrupted action.” Most Law and Order episodes begin with an ‘interrupted action:” The old man was walking his dog when he saw the dead body. Was walking – imparfait (the imperfect tense, the background action); he saw – the event, the passé compose. I thought that this book would be a series of interrupted actions. I remember that I was walking into the library at Emory University when the lady who checked our bags said, while weeping and struggling to breathe, “The president was shot.” Indeed, there are quite a few such tales. Jimmy Carter, a forty-year-old congressman from Georgia, was returning from the fields on his tractor. Bill Clinton, age seventeen, was in his high school calculus class. Joe Biden, age twenty-one, was walking through his college campus. He quickly ran to his car to put on the radio. Tom Hanks was drawing a picture in his second-grade art class when the principal came in. Jane Fonda was making a movie in Paris. When she heard, she said that she thought she would never feel safe again. There are about fifty stories, but many of them are not like this. Some knew Oswald, some were Kennedy supporters, other got caught up in conspiracy theories. One touching piece is by Marie Tippet, the widow of the police officer who was also killed that day. She tells of a call from Bobby Kennedy and prints in full a letter she got from Jackie Kennedy. After fifty years of being a widow she says, “There will never be another man for me.” Buell Frazier, Lee Harvey Oswald’s coworker, picked him up to take him to work at the book depository that day. He noted that Oswald had a package with him. He said it was curtain rods. Richard Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin discuss the assassination but also the presidency of JFK. Harry Belafonte considers the presidency through the lens of the Civil Rights movement. We learn about how much was hidden from the public about Kennedy’s health problems. The controversies surrounding the various conspiracy theories are explored through the voices of those who were there. Friends of Clay Shaw, the only person to have been tried because of Jim Garrison’s theory, point to a miscarriage of justice. Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, comes under scrutiny. Through the numerous anecdotes we learn a great deal about the political and social context of the era. The editors have rendered us a service: In compiling this comprehensive look at the assassination, they have frozen a moment like no other in the lives of Americans who were alive at the time. This was truly a moment when everything changed.

Theater, edited by Tom Sellar mid 80’s? This periodical is the journal of Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theater. I arbitrarily chose volume 47, Number 1 and discovered the theme was “Curating Crisis.” The notion that theater would have a curator, which I associate with the visual arts, was news to me. As editor, Tom writes an opening overview. He also conducts four interviews with leading figures in experimental theater. In one of his questions to Florian Malzacher, Tom defines the concept of curation in performance arts. “What’s exciting about curation is the idea. . . .that there could be linkages between individual performances and between artistic projects.” He goes on to talk about the “cultures of curation” (a concept he attributes to Beatrice von Bismarck). “It encompasses the larger linkages and also contemporary linkages, keeping track of what’s been attempted before and what’s being attempted now.” So this edition of Theater takes on how the role of curator plays out in festivals and often non-traditional theater spaces and expresses the hope that this new nomenclature really represents a new way of looking at theater and not just a new name for something old. One concern, expressed in the essay “Identifying the Endgame,” by Thomas F. DeFrantz, and also in Jay Pather’s “Negotiating the Postcolonial Black Body as a Site of Paradox,” is that of redefining and constructing new audiences. Instead of the usual white male productions with a token woman or black offering, De Frantz suggests that the curator begin from the bottom up. Start with the audience. Find out what they are looking for. Pather’s essay indicates that in South Africa this is already happening amid the ferment of a resurgence of racial turmoil. Most impressive in this edition is the world-wide reach of the contributors, their social involvement, and their fearless innovation.