John Knowles' A Separate Peace: Bookmarked. Kirby Gann
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the brother, the friend, and lover, and husband; the innocent child and infuriating adolescent and uncertain young man; the musician, the athlete, the reader; the heartbroken and the briefly fulfilled. Mix these many selves with the consistently self-conscious day-dreamer self and perhaps only one identity could bring fragile unity to them all: the writer. The writer is what constructs a cogent narrative from all the other strands. Yet isn’t it peculiar then that this self is the one I’ve struggled most to accept; it’s like I fell into writing through the narrowing options of other avenues. I could have “evolved” into so many different selves than the one, evidently, I seem to have turned out to have become.
“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.”
—A Separate Peace
MORE THAN LIFE EXPERIENCE, MORE THAN INHERENT imagination, books come from other books. A Separate Peace arrived at a time when the power of books was only beginning to take hold of me, their quiet influence literally sustaining my mind and imagination for year, long before the notion of trying to write one, or write anything beyond teenage rock lyrics / ”poems,” reared its intimidating head. I cannot pinpoint precisely what age this happened to be—adolescence, at least; fourteen, fifteen, whatever is the conventional high school age for a freshman or sophomore in English class. At the time I was no more certain about my future as a writer, or what was required “to become” a writer, or even if I honestly enjoyed the act of writing, than I was certain about anything else at that age. Who is? 1982, 1983: there were many selves at work bouncing for attention, many other possible futures available when the county system bussed me downtown to start at Central High School, a morose yellow-brick structure that from outside looked more like a warehouse or factory than a place for learning, located in the center of the city beside the low-income housing of the Village West apartments. There, for a dollar, you could buy joints made mostly of tobacco with some weed mixed in from the older boys who hung out near their Cadillacs and BMWs in sleeveless undershirts across the street from the entrance to the parking lot. Making your way inside, half-asleep and bent under the weight of your book bag, you passed through clouds of acrid cigarette smoke and the heavier scent of pot, head down to insure you didn’t make eye contact with any of those upperclassmen who liked to snag freshman belongings and scatter textbooks across the pavement for a laugh.
Central was not a place that suggested auspicious futures or encouraged long hours of studious contemplation, the honing of young minds. It was a place to keep your head down, stick to your own side of the hallway, and move quickly to reach the relative sanctuary of the classroom.
I loved it. The charge of the atmosphere, the threat of violence either suffered or witnessed, the thrilling noise from multiple hand-held radios vying for prominence between classes, the shoulder-to-shoulder interaction with different races—whites were a minority there, and the school’s ESL program was flush in refugees from southeast Asia and the middle east—excited and intimidated me after a childhood in which the one or two black students in a class had made for a mild curiosity at first, and then became an unremarkable difference. Central, however, was the kind of place where a smart kid kept on the move, no time for stopping and staring for a second without being confronted by someone inevitably larger bellowing, What you looking at?
You can get used to anything once the newness wears off. You learn your place in the hierarchy of things. So long as you stayed there, you were fine. The atmosphere of tension and volatility in the hallways, cafeteria, and parking lot was one in which even a quasi-suburban white kid active in his Episcopal church and raised on poolside summers could come to thrive, once he learned where he belonged.
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I was an impatient and hyperactive kid who ran everywhere anyway, even between rooms at home, lacking the discipline required to sit quiet for long. The patience and stillness required to write has never come naturally; it’s an acquired, self-trained behavior, an essential that in all honesty still fails me from time to time, my body unable to settle, the prospect of sitting down in a chair at my desk for what will be hours unappetizing. There are biographies of triumphant artists where the subject seems born to literature, ambitious with the pen and blooming verse and story even before puberty, indulged and encouraged by a doting mother, usually, and intellectually rapacious at the outset. This would not be me. To be the boy who scribbled away at stories and novels in personal notebooks, or wrote out plays to be performed for the family and neighbors, would have required hours of stillness and willful contemplation that my childhood self did not possess the capacity to undergo. I was impulsive, thoughtless, and often corrected, the kind of child forever being lectured on the necessity of considering the consequences of his actions, to try to think for once before acting.
Hints and intimations can be found, though, in retrospect. But hints found only with the knowledge of a life immersed in literature as an adult, only an eye in search of such roots would identify them as such; otherwise—should my adult self had found his way into another avocation—these same incidents and tendencies would be mere random facts of a childhood. My mother, a former elementary school teacher who for much of her life came dangerously close to being a hoarder, has kept samples of school assignments she found especially charming—or precious, to use her word of choice—from the early years of both her sons. These are rather humiliating to go over now, but something’s there, a preoccupation, let’s say, that implies a particular mind’s becoming. It seems I had a peculiar empathy for inanimate objects. When directed to write a story I must have felt the need to give voice to the voiceless, to the inner lives of appliances such as the washing machine and dryer, and the outdoor furniture, or even the rocks in the drainage ditch that ran between our back yard and the back yards of houses on the other side of the block. A thread runs through these pieces in their self-consciousness and the expression of boisterous anxieties, fears that the speakers couldn’t live up to what all was expected of them, their tasks thankless, exhausting, lonely, and often pointless. Having no memory of writing any of these exercises, what I glean from them is the mind of an unexceptional child stressing already over the threat of failing to meet expectations, coupled with an existential bent. None of these “stories” run more than twenty lines or so, and read as though dashed off—likely written under the demand to finish before being allowed to go outside and play.
Maybe it’s being too generous as well to call these assignments stories; the writing teacher in me now would call them character sketches, or brief monologues. What’s of some interest to me here is the recognition that this form is precisely how I begin work as an adult on any new draft: starting with a voice, a vaguely discerned character, and listening to what she or he has to say, my instincts out to discover their predicament. And these early exercises also display the same weakness that continues to cause me problems when drafting something new in that not a lot happens, it’s a recounting of what preoccupies the speaker without a word of what brought him to this moment or what he plans to do; there’s no arc to the drama, no concrete acts; mostly we read of a consciousness asserting its plight. Wishing to be understood. A washing machine asking the reader to understand the difficulties inherent to being a washing machine. The struggle to get something to happen on the page, evidently, has been my burden from the beginning; often I overcompensate for this shortcoming by making too much happen too quickly, without proper establishment of motivation or clear cause, whenever I’m not droning on about what some character is like, or what she thinks, until it feels like a reader could find more dynamic action in a Beckett novel.
Another early signal: in first grade the school held a poetry contest, with the winning poem to be submitted to compete against every other public elementary school throughout the county. I forget what they gave as a prize, or if they gave anything other than the recognition of having been deemed the best. (I speak of a time before kids received awards for participation; this was the early seventies, when public education wasn’t geared toward encouraging self-esteem. Rather the presumption was that second place or even outright failure were realities everyone needed to come to terms with early on, and if your self-esteem suffered accordingly then you were expected to try harder next time, or else come to accept your place in the implicit hierarchy of the class, the school, the world.)
The teacher passed out the wide-ruled paper that I disliked because of its grayish natural fiber and waxy finish—even then