A MODERN TELEMACHUS: JOHN DARNTON'S SEARCH FOR HIS FATHER

I met John Darnton when we were both fourteen years old, going on fifteen. It was our first year at Andover, a Junior Ivy League boarding school, and we were both assigned to the same small dormitory that housed six boys. Within a few weeks, John and I were roommates, and as our friendship grew (we remained roommates for three years) I learned that we had more in common than just our first names, our age (our birthdays were two days apart), and our ability to quote passages of The Catcher in the Rye as if it were scripture.

For one thing, we were both storytellers. Some of our stories made it to English classes, some were just adolescent fantasies concocted across the room after lights out. John wrote for the school newspaper (presaging a brilliant career in journalism) and was editor of the school’s literary magazine.

I also learned that John Darnton and I had in common two other character-forming glitches. For one thing, we both had never had the pleasure of knowing our fathers. His father, a New York Times correspondent, had been killed in the South Pacific during World War II. Mine had died about the same time, in the U.S.A., the victim of heart disease, which was less dramatic but just as deadly.

The other thing John Darnton and I had in common was our alcoholic mothers. I learned about his mother’s alcoholism by hearing an essay he wrote for English class our sophomore year, which described an AA meeting he and his brother had gone to with their recovering mom. I didn’t share my concern about my own mother’s drinking problem at that time, either because it embarrassed me or because I was still trying to fool myself.

After Andover, John Darnton went on to a distinguished career, toiling in the fields of the Word.  In his father’s footsteps, he worked for The New York Times, rising over  the years from copy boy to metropolitan editor and cultural news editor, by way of covering world-shaking events in Africa (protests in South Africa, the fall of Idi Amin, and other hair-raising adventures) and Europe. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his dare-devil coverage of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, during martial law and a crackdown on the press.

Darnton retired from the Times in 2005, but not before he had established himself as a fiction writer, publishing a sequence of thought-provoking, entertaining, and best-selling novels: Neanderthal, The Experiment, Mind Catcher, and The Darwin Conspiracy. In 2008 he published a satiric mystery, Black and White and Dead All Over, set in the world of the major New York metropolitan daily, which he doesn’t quite name The New York Times.

Meanwhile I had a minor-league literary career of my own, but nothing by comparison with John’s. I will skip over all that, except to touch down on my novel Elephant Lake, published earlier this year on Kindle and Nook, which zeroes in on the tenth summer of a boy whose widowed mother is a depressed alcoholic who’s trying to write a book about her late husband. The boy, Davy, tries to find out from his mother just what sort of person his father was, but she won’t talk to him about that. Curiously—I’d like to think it was unintentional and coincidental, but I’m willing to plead guilty to the kind of identity theft most fiction writers indulge in—my Davy’s father had been a war correspondent, killed during World War II in the South Pacific.

My novel, Elephant Lake, was written and epublished before I had the great pleasure of reading John Darnton’s remarkable book Almost a Family. In his honest, self-baring, and dramatic memoir, John digs, digs, digs through the past, through correspondence and family gossip and newspaper clippings in search of the man who was remembered so fondly by those who still remembered him, as a witty, debonair, kind, adventurous man—as well as a star reporter. What John found was that his father, Barney Darnton, also had his flaws. He was a hard-drinking, hard-smoking ladies’ man. He emerges from the research as a real man, if perhaps a bit larger than life, and a man his son would have enjoyed trading wisecracks with.

John also devotes much of his book to the harrowing tale of his mother’s downward spiral into alcoholism. This was no mere drinking problem, this was a critical disease. It got so that Eleanor Darnton could not hold a job, could barely hold a conversation with her sons, and was reduced to selling her furniture in order to pay the rent, put food on the table, and buy more liquor. Anyone who had an alcoholic parent will relate to this tale, except that John’s experience was more frightening than most. Her recovery, therefore, was a just-in-time act of huge courage and strength.

Almost a Family, then, is a study of childhood without traditional parents, and a search for whatever identity one might have inherited from a father one never knew. It reads like a well-crafted mystery, because Darnton has sprinkled the memoir with clues, and one question after another is answered by a surprise.

Unlike the rave reviews in Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and many others, I will  not tell you the story in enough detail to ruin the surprises. I will say this, though, from personal experience: a boy’s (and a man’s) quest to learn the identity of his father—let’s call it the Telemachus Complex—is a very real concern for many. So is the plight of a boy’s coming to terms with, and coping with, his mother’s alcoholism, a plight that haunts long after the boy has become a man.

John Darnton’s Almost a Family is a bookful of this rich material, written by a skilled reporter and a master storyteller.

Note: For more information about Almost a Family, see John Darnton’s website: http://www.johndarnton.com/index.html.

For more information about my novel Elephant Lake, mentioned above, see my website, http://www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/index.html, or home in on http://www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/elephant_lake.html.

Do I Teach Creative Writing?

Easy question, easy answer: Sure I do. The harder question is: Can I teach creative writing? Can creative writing be taught?

I hear the question often. Prospective students—new writers, but also seasoned pros—ask me. I even ask myself in the middle of the night. Can I teach creative writing?

Well, I do have some favorite rules and tools of structure and style. From a lifetime of editing and publishing, I know that some creative writing works (and plays) better than other writing, and there are consistent, time-honored reasons for why this is. I happen to call those reasons “rules.” Such as? Write what you know (but let your imagination soar). Show ’em, don’t tell ’em. The importance of story, which means the importance of choice, change, and consequence; characters, conflict, and climax. These techniques (and many others) work, and I love to spread the word about them.

We can call that teaching, I suppose, but…

In any class I’ve ever taught, much if not most of the real learning doesn’t happen when I’m talking. That’s why I always save at least half of every class period for constructive read-and-critique.

Magic happens when writers read to one another. Writing is, after all, a means of communication, and the creative act isn’t really complete until the writer reaches an audience with his or her words. That’s why writing groups are so important, why swapping stories with other writers is so fulfilling, why so many writers want to publish their work. An audience is what makes all those solitary hours in front of a computer screen or a blank piece of paper pay off.

But it’s not just the pleasure of sharing your own work and hearing your own voice. It’s a way to develop and improve that “voice,” to hone that writing style that is all your own. By hearing honest, supportive feedback from your peers, you’ll learn what’s wonderful in your voice and your imagination, and also you’ll pick up tips and suggestions on how to make your writing even stronger.

There’s more. You’ll learn the fine and magic art of writing by listening to other writers read their words as well. And you’ll learn from the guided discussion that follows every reading, discussion that always centers on what makes the writing good, and what could make it even better.

And that’s not all. You’ll be entertained royally. Writing is all about people, after all, and people are there to move you with laughter and tears, with stories of grabbing suspense or gentle love. You’ll be an active part of every story that’s discussed, whether you join in the discussion or not. The enthusiasm for the craft of writing is infectious. Get ready, because…

It will be fun. You will be inspired. So will your teacher.

So is that teaching? Frankly, I don’t know. I do know that it’s learning. I know it, because I’ve learned something—a lot, in fact—from every creative writing class I’ve ever taught.

BLACK LAMB

I’d like to put in a plug for a monthly print magazine I’ve been subscribing to for a couple of years and have been contributing essays to for the past year. Black Lamb, published monthly from San Leandro, California, has a tabloid format. It’s printed on good offset paper and is elegantly designed. It is illustrated with clip-art and well-chosen photographs. It carries no advertising, but stays alive on the strength of subscriptions. A year’s subscription costs $15, which, given the quality of the writing, may be the best bargain you’ll find these days in print periodical literature.

I was introduced to this fine rag by my friend Toby Tompkins, a highly talented writer. Toby’s essays—wise, witty, peppered with laughs and rants and fine storytelling—are worth the price of the magazine, but he’s only one of a stable of worthy wordsmiths associated with Black Lamb. One regular contributor lives in Milan, one is a mortician, one is a violin player, one or two are novelists, one is a former prison inmate, one is wandering around Turkey, and so on.

Black Lamb is edited by Terry Ross. I’ve never met Terry in person, but I consider him a fount of literary lore. He fills his magazine with literary history, gossip, and plugs. He and I have swapped recommendations for favorite books; from him I learned of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by Gerald Basil Edwards, and The Book of Bebb, by Frederick Buechner, both giant doorstop novels, and both of which I recommend emphatically. Terry is a gentle editor, an encourager of good writing, a genuine, generous man of letters. (I confess that it also gives me pleasure to reflect that I have an editor named Mr. Ross. So did James Thurber and Dorothy Parker, once upon a time.)

Every other issue of Black Lamb is a “theme issue.” Since I’ve been contributing essays to the magazine, I’ve written on subjects I might otherwise have bypassed: Crime, School, Food, Men, Women, Turning Points, Family, and a couple of Book Reviews.

Most of my articles for the magazine are about turning points (in fact most narrative writing, I believe, is about turning points). As a teacher of autobiography and memoir writing, I’ve preached the value of finding the moments of story in our lives, and Terry Ross and Black Lamb have given me a reason to practice what I preach.

Other regular writers provide essays about politics (some of them inflammatory, from both sides of the aisle), humor, food, horseback riding, travel, death (one regular column is titled “All Men are Cremated Equal”), and profiles of past celebrities. There is an annual (summer) issue devoted to book reviews. Regular monthly features include a word puzzle, a literary quiz, a literary sampler, a list of literary giants born in that month, a bridge column, an advice column, and a recipe for lamb.

At the beginning of this post I made it clear that Black Lamb is a print publication. Thank goodness for that, say I, who still enjoy reading a magazine in an armchair, and on paper. But to learn more about this fine publication, you also can visit its website and get a sample of what it offers: http://www.blacklamb.org/

JOHN'S author home page: www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/index.html

amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KDJZMU

Code Name: Geronimo

Some months ago I established a "Google Alert" for the words "Geronimo's Skull," which informs me when those two words come up on the web. The purpose was to find a way to network and promote my novel, GERONIMO'S SKULL, now that it's available on Kindle and Nook. I got occasional notices, because it's a subject that will never go away (the robbing of Geronimo's grave by a bunch of Yalie pranksters), but there was no great flurry until the past few days. 


Then there was a bonanza. The reason: our hunting party that took out Osama bin Laden was named "Geronimo." The old story about the Skull & Bones gang and their midnight grave-robbing is now all over the place, tying the two events together with flimsy string.


I'm somewhat embarrassed by this surprise publicity. Yes, I admit I'm exploiting the coincidence at this very moment, but I do so with a red face. (Is that a Freudian slip or what?) Native Americans are up in arms about this exploitation of the great Apache warrior's name. And if there's any intent to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden, the Indians have every right to be mad as hell.


But if the use of the word "Geronimo" simply refers to the battle cry that American soldiers have used since WWII and perhaps before that, then it's more acceptable. Maybe that's giving Geronimo some due credit for the bravery he always displayed.


Curiously, there is one legend (or perhaps historical truth) that Geronimo got his name in battle, but it was a band of Mexican soldiers, under attack by the Apaches, who cried out "Geronimo!" because they were terrified and were appealing to their patron saint (also known as St. Jerome).

Remembering Wally

I could drop a number of literary names in my cavalcade of stars. I’ve been fortunate enough to correspond with some heavies, but only for business reasons (mostly because they graciously provided blurbs for some of our books), so I won’t scatter their names on your carpet. But the big name is Wallace Stegner, whom I knew and wish I’d known better. The timing wasn’t good. I was a “Stegner Fellow” in the Stanford writing program in 1967-68, when the campus, like campuses across the country, was erupting in political protest. Wally had been away in Vermont for months, writing Angle of Repose, and when he came back to Stanford he was dismayed by the change, and especially the lack of civility. He was suddenly considered a conservative by the loudest of the students, even though he opposed the war, had always voted Democrat, and was a strong and vocal champion for the conservation of western wilderness. But he hated students the year I was there. Hated hearing words like “fuck” and “shit” said by pipsqueaks in front of their elders. He was old fashioned. 

Over the years this generous and well-mannered teacher and writer had done more for the quality of writing in America, and more for the individual careers of future stars just starting their careers, than any other literary guide of the mid-twentieth century. He just hated incivility, and he had his dukes up about that, having just published All the Little Live Things, in which he threw down the gauntlet for the rude pipsqueaks to pick up.

So let me tell you about the evening Richard Brautigan came to our seminar as a guest, invited by another Stanford writing teacher, Ed McClanahan, a delightful fellow who was a big pal of Ken Kesey (with whom Stegner feuded, and that’s another story). 

Small room, living-room style, on the top floor of the library, set aside for the Stegner Fellows. Evening, with coffee and cookies. A pack of grungy student writers, reading aloud their Barthelme imitations, boring Wally, delighting Brautigan, and the conversations of critique that followed each of the readings, during which Richard and Wally found a way to square off every time: on word choice, appropriate themes, structure, whatever. And the exchange I best remember:

BRAUTIGAN: I don’t know about you people, but me? I get up in the morning, I eat breakfast, I shit, and I write.

STEGNER: Well, um, yes. Yes, I get up in the morning, I eat breakfast and so on, and I write too. But that’s not really the point, is it?

STUDENTS: snicker snicker snicker...

Wally and I got along okay, because I remained a polite listener and not an obstreperous, intolerant asshole (for which I lost a few points among my fellow Fellows). After the fellowship ended, he arranged for me to be offered a job working for American West magazine, which would have rescued me from my deadly job at Stanford University Press. But when I went to lunch with the publisher of American West, he forced me into a position of either disowning my writing colleagues (many of whom were my friends) or condemning Stegner, the magazine publisher’s hero. I wouldn’t take sides, and I was not offered the job.

In later years, Wally was good to our press, providing a blurb or two and always treating me with distant kindness. He deserved the Pulitzer he received for Angle of Repose, and much more glory than he ever got. 

Making Peace with Uncle Neil

Many years after the death of my uncle, I learned that he had been a grave-robber. Neil Mallon was one of the members of Skull and Bones, from the Yale class of 1917, who broke into Geronimo’s tomb and stole his skull. There’s some question about whether or not that crime really happened, but I’m inclined to believe it did. Who would make up such a story, or forge the letters that document the event?

As any writer might respond, I rubbed my hands together. Aha. More evidence against my Uncle Neil: that at the age of twenty-two he and his gang of over-privileged, Ivy-League rascals pulled off a racist, elitist, disrespectful, despicable, not to mention illegal act of symbolic violence.

It took little time for the idea to sprout. What a novel! A chance to expose those Yalie aristocrats, those future captains of industry and finance, those future politicians and spies, for the scoundrels they were. (One of whom, by the way, was Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of the future Presidents Bush.)

I began my outline.

I had already written and published several stories about Uncle Neil. Most of them were inspired by anger. They could just as easily have been inspired by love, admiration, and gratitude. Uncle Neil gave me a home to grow up in—a fine home, a country estate. He paid for my first-class education, even though I chose not to go to Yale. When I was a small child, he entertained me with magic tricks, and after I graduated from college he gave me a monthly allowance of three hundred dollars for three years, to get me started in life. That was a lot of dough in those days.

But the sixties were rough on my relationship with him. He was a right-wing Republican, a hawk during the Vietnam War. I was a left-wing Democrat, a war protester. He made infuriating statements about the glory of the industrial revolution; he defended planned obsolescence; he scorned environmentalism; he voted for Nixon, Goldwater, and Nixon; and he was a champion of competition in all walks of life. I was a smarty-pants know-it-all, which was in vogue for folks in their twenties during the 1960s.

As a result, over the years following his death in 1983, my stories featuring this uncle (whom I called Uncle Arthur or Uncle Fergus) portrayed him as a charming but enigmatic tycoon, and a cold and calculating manipulator.

Along comes the Geronimo story, by which time I’m a writer with some credits. So I began the novel, with an agenda. But before long the novel, Geronimo’s Skull, began to write itself. That often happens. I found that I was telling the story of a young man I very much admired; and I admired him more and more as I got to know him. As the novel begins, a nine-year-old boy at the Saint Louis World’s Fair, entranced with energy, electricity, machines, and science, meets the Apache Geronimo and learns lessons that will guarantee his rise to the top. Geronimo offers him a kingdom—for a price.

Yes, and this boy, Fergus Powers, grows up to become a Yale man, a member of Skull and Bones; and yes, he and his comrades do rob the Apache warrior’s grave in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. For that crime, Fergus is haunted by Geronimo’s ghost for the rest of his life, until he makes good on a certain promise.

How did it happen that Uncle Neil, known in the novel Geronimo’s Skull as Fergus Powers, became a man of integrity, even if he also became a tycoon in the oil business, and even if he robbed a grave to do that?

I won’t tell you. You’ll have to read the book.

But I will say I now have made my peace with my Uncle Neil. I whole-heartedly thank him for all he gave to me, some of which may have come indirectly from Geronimo the Terrible. I think of him with love, admiration, and gratitude, and I have presumed to forgive him for having been what I still consider wrong about certain things. I have a feeling Uncle Neil has forgiven me, too.

Why do I think that? Geronimo told me so.

Want to learn more about Geronimo’s Skull? Click:

http://www.danielpublishing.com/jmd/geronimo's_skull.html

How Did I Become a Writer?

I decided to write my first story when I was five or six years old. I borrowed a pencil and a piece of paper from my mother and asked her what I should write my story about.

“Write about what you know about,” she advised me.

So I did. The story came out something like this: “Johnny and his mother went to the circus. They saw clowns. They had fun. They came home. The end.”

My mother was proud of me. (Of course. That’s what mothers are for.) But when I showed my story to my brother, Neil, who was nine years older than I, he said, “It’s not a real story. A real story needs conflict.”

That put me in a quandary. At the age of six, I had no conflict in my life, so I couldn’t write a real story if I were to write about what I knew about. That put my writing career off for another ten years or so.

Then I started reading the novels of Richard Bissell, and I thought to myself: I can do this. I tried it, and I found I was right: I could do this. By that time I was a teenager, so of course there was conflict in the life I knew so well; it goes with the territory.

I haven’t turned back since. I haven’t supported myself with my writing (not many writers do), but I’ve never stopped writing, and in the meantime I’ve worked in the written word: as a student, a reader, a bookseller, an editor, a ghostwriter, a fiction writer, a publisher, and a teacher of creative writing.

I owe it to my mother, my brother, and mainly to other writers.