Introduction: Author! Author!

Literary Review, Fall, 1998 by Thomas E. Kennedy

As a young reader of fiction, I enthusiastically welcomed Holden Caulfield's statement in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye that certain books, when you finish them, make you wish you could call up and talk to the author.

As a young writer of fiction, I became more specific and urgent in that yearning. I began to read interviews with writers and books on the craft of fiction by writers whose work I admired. By chance then, in a second-hand bookstore in Copenhagen, I came upon an old college text called Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, an excellent book, which if it is not still in print, ought to be. Among its pages is a brief essay by John Cheever entitled "What Happened," in which he discusses how he came to write his wonderful story, "Goodbye, My Brother."

In the essay, Cheever talks about the mix of elements which went into the writing of the story:

   I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw
   together incidents as disparate as a dance in Minneapolis and a backgammon
   game in the mountains so that they relate to one another and confirm that
   feeling that life itself is creative process, that one thing is put
   purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is
   replenished in the next and that we possess some power to make sense of
   what takes place.

He further states, "You can pick and choose from a wide range of memory, picking the smell of roses from a very different place and the ringing of a tennis court roller that you heard years ago," and that when a writer pushes open a fictional door to a fictional kitchen, he may well discover there a cook who had worked for his mother years before.

This, of course, is another way of speaking of what Coleridge called the esemplastic power of the imagination--the capability of forging unity out of diversity.

Cheever's essay was a startling revelation for me. Somehow I had been laboring under the delusion that a fiction writer must make everything up. If I borrowed something from my own life, I feared I was cheating. Worse, if I incorporated something that occurred even as I was writing (as once when my secretary, Alice, interrupted me during a writing session to tell me an anecdote of something that had happened to her son, and when I went back to my writing, I found the anecdote incorporated in my story-in-progress), I felt like a fraud.

Cheever's essay helped free me from that misconception as did at least three other outstanding works of metafiction--Sherwood Anderson's "Death in the Woods," Gordon Weaver's "The Parts of Speech," and Francois Camoin's "Diehl: The Wandering Years"--in each of which the process I am discussing here becomes a surface and thematic element open to view and intrinsically involved in the story.

Some critics and readers discount metafiction as writerly navel-gazing, but in fact, at its best, it is fiction about the processes by which we create our own identities--the fiction of who we are.

Were we to read a story in which a group of people were on a train traveling at increasing speed over an invisible terrain and did not know where they had boarded the train or where they were heading and from which certain characters suddenly disappeared from time to time, many of us would find the story straining credulity even if it is a rather exact metaphor for our lives.

We all know that life is a mystery, yet we conduct our affairs as though it were not, as though we were not going to die, as though we knew where we have come from and where we are going and why. We read fiction to try to make sense of what we do and we write fiction for the same reason: to try to come to terms with these facts that are so unbearable that we fill our brains with whiskey and television and the belief that by hard exercise our bodies can be transformed into supernaturally dazzling things.

Experience flows through us like cheap wine, leaving us high and dry and, for want of alternatives, looking for more. One of the highest functions of fiction is to sharpen the focus--even if that sharpening is upon an uncertainty, an ambiguity: One thing is clear; nothing is clear. And that process is not only the process by which a writer composes a fiction, but also very similar to the process by which a human being composes an identity, "a face to meet the faces that he meets." Or a tale to explain the meaning of where he or she has been.

Last summer, at a conference in Holland, I had lunch one day with Pamela Painter to tell her about my plans for this issue and to invite her to contribute to it. As an example of the kind of material I was looking for, I found myself telling an autobiographical anecdote about an aunt with whom my family used to eat Thanksgiving dinner each year. Her family was better off than ours, affluent, and lived in a tall stately row house filled with ponderously solid furniture and wonderful objects. They had not two, but three bathrooms, the third of which was on the fourth floor and featured jade green fixtures. It was the only private bathroom I had ever seen that featured not only tub-sink-shower, but also bidet and a full-sized magnificent green urinal.