John Knowles' A Separate Peace: Bookmarked. Kirby Gann
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for my paleontological interests and sewer explorations not to be carried out by the boy I was. Perhaps it’s that even at that early age the parameters of a single life felt too confining; I longed to be elsewhere and else-wise. For this I credit—or blame, depending on how one looks at it—books. We weren’t a family of heavy TV watchers except during the college basketball and pro football seasons, and my narrative tendencies must have come from somewhere, influencing me toward becoming a boyish Emma Bovary or a Don Quixote with a ten-year-old’s interests.
I thought any story or self by its nature required being far different from the story or self I was living. It wasn’t until the novel A Separate Peace that the possibility of a worthwhile story could be made from sources and details near to my own experience occurred to me—belatedly. So much of the intensity of an encounter with a book is wrapped up in the time we meet it, the moment of who we are and what’s going on in our own lives. It would be years before the John Knowles novel would make its way into my hands, but once it did, the impression was as though my entire reading life had been a readying to meet this specific story.
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Books were a constant in our house, a presence in nearly every room, and never intended as mere decoration or furnishing but as active objects for everyone to engage with. Still no one would have described the family as a literary one. Despite the minor accomplishments asserted in the sections above, no one would argue that I’d been groomed to write. The parents would come to encourage and support the idea of having a writer in the family only later, once I’d finished college—a time when they probably felt need to praise ambition of any kind in their youngest, having grown alarmed by the lack of interest exhibited toward pursuit of a career deemed appropriate for any person “armed with a degree,” as they described it. How to make a living was an often-expressed concern as well. Our family presented no precursors to the vocation for comparison; there were no eccentric ink-stained uncles or aunts, no grandfather who spouted drunken verse at holiday gatherings, and we didn’t spend our evenings arrayed around the living room as father read us stories from the Bible or Twain or whatever. I never saw either of my parents write anything beyond a check, a letter (usually outraged) to a teacher, or a hurried note to tuck inside a thank-you card like any good upstanding Episcopalian would be expected to do.
What they did was practice a combination of enthusiastic support and “let them find their own way” over my brother and me throughout our childhoods, provoking us to discover our own interests by providing the opportunities to do so. In particular these opportunities broke down along the lines of arts, particularly music, and athletics: we were competitive swimmers before either of us had reached the age of ten, and although I never grew accustomed to that first cold bone-brittling smack of pool water that started each six a.m. practices, we became adept at the sport; my brother briefly held the city record for the fifty-meter backstroke. In middle school he took up cross-country running whereas I, reaching middle school two years behind him, took up soccer, being too small to make a go at football or basketball.
Our parents were of the type to attend every match or competition in which we engaged. They were vocal in the stands or along the pool, tribally loyal not only to their sons but to the teams they were a part of, our mother proud to have been a cheerleader herself in college. She believed in team spirit. She inspired, embarrassed, and probably even offended other parents who weren’t as gung-ho in their support of their own kids—so much so that she often received an award of her own at the end-of-season banquets for her displays and commitment, these awards she would laugh off as she made a point of congratulating us for the haul of trophies that seemed to come our way at the end of every season. Competitive sports took on a great coordinating force in our house and our parents were happy to encourage it, not only for the structure and socialization it gave but likely for its physically draining effects as well, which led to less violent competition between their two sons at home once the hormones kicked in.
But they did not want to raise empty-headed jocks, either: schoolwork, studies, and at least some exposure to the arts was mandatory. We took to to it naturally, I guess, the way most children do if introduced properly, without demand or pressure, but my brother Jamie set the standard. In fact looking back to this time one could be forgiven for predicting he would be the more likely to follow the line my own life has taken, as he was the more naturally inclined toward passing hours with books, kicked back quietly in his room with his feet up on the desk reading Frank Herbert’s Dune or anything by Tolkien, Bradbury, or Heinlein. Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat series was a particular favorite that he tried to turn me on to, but I could never get past the hokey silliness of so much science fiction—whenever starships and distant, invented planets or galaxies got involved, I lost interest. He was the one who took on the creation of adventures and characters for the role-playing games that were just beginning to become mainstream in adolescent culture, keeping file folders for the storylines to explore in Dungeons & Dragons, Starship Troopers, and the Western-themed Boot Hill. He was the one naturally inclined toward quiet contemplation, whereas I was a child constantly on the move. And even though the dynamic if our differences would change radically as we aged, to the point of having few differences at all beyond degrees of taste, I still think of my brother as having the more unique, interesting, and inventive mind. That he only got to explore and produce a fraction of what he was capable of is one of the great injustices I’ve had the poor fortune to witness, an injustice partially due to his own perfectionism and the ever-growing variety of interests that kept him from focusing on a single project to completion, and due also to the mistaken belief that he had at least an average lifespan over which to pursue those passions. His influence on me, however, in terms of stoking my curiosities, seeking the unfamiliar in order to grasp it, and also as a figure with whom and against whom I came to form my own identity, is irrefutable to my mind and probably a matter for another book.
Still, he never was able to instill in me much fascination for science- or speculative fiction. The only stories of the genre that spoke to me would be, first, the original trilogy of Douglas Adams’ novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which overwhelmed my generation of readers as each installment appeared, these small books passed among friends and quoted from, discussed, and debated in depth; and then later, toward the end of high school, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which struck my young mind as deeply philosophical and only tangentially related to the whole space-trip thing (Valentine, the “stranger” of the title, is a human who was raised on Mars, and is brought to earth, where the rest of the novel stays—a story more involved in cultural critique and our assumptions of the Other than any fantastical speculation that requires bending the space-time continuum). In general, the books found in my own room were detective novels and mysteries and comic books and pop music magazines. My first creative efforts—done in tandem with my brother—included the creation of comic books, stories in which we invented new heroes and illustrated ourselves.
All this seems normal to me, just part of growing up in a family of readers.
To write “a family of readers” makes us sound more serious and scholarly than we were in reality—a common, mistaken presumption that I bemoan in American culture in general: that to read means to be serious, or pursuant of the intellectual life and rarified tastes, the avoidance of the vulgar (TV), when in honest terms reading was just another way of killing time that wouldn’t die, hardly different from going to the movies. Books could be found in any given room. Dad read his thrillers, Le Carré, Ludlum, and “the kind of story where somebody gets killed every few pages,” as he liked to put it. Mom read courtroom dramas and loved the medical thrillers by writers like Sydney Sheldon, and also what she and some of her friends liked to call their “soft-” or “mom-porn,” such as Shirley Conran’s Lace—a novel my twelve-year-old self surreptitiously read in stolen moments while she was at work or, once I’d located “the good parts,” read while she was elsewhere in the house, hypnotized by a narrative that gave me extraordinarily distorted ideas about the sexual world of adults.
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