Me As a 22-Year-Old Would-Be Writer

About a year ago I received an email from a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in maybe 40 years, forwarded to me from a mutual friend who I hadn’t seen in maybe 20 years. In going through the detritus in her attic, she had come upon an envelope I had sent to her some 40 years ago (soon after I had last seen her, visiting her and her husband in Denver) that contained two short stories and a half dozen poems I had written that year (“merely things I had hanging around in zerox [sic] form” is how I put it in the cover letter). Did I want her to send it to me? I hesitated at first. As a teacher of literature and sometimes creative writing for the past 35 years, did I really want to revisit my own writing from that long-forgotten undergraduate past? How embarrassing would it be to find my 22-year-old self to be just as vapid and facile as most of my 22-year-old students? But finally I decided that I should confront this past, if only just to check in and offer whatever consolation I could (“It’s not really going to be as bad as it might look right now . . .”).

Thankfully, reading these stories and poems ended up not being as embarrassing as I had feared, though I can certainly see how only one of the poems made it into publication, and that only in an undergraduate literary magazine at my school. The stories are achingly derivative of Kafka and Barthelme, my two influences at the time:

He had found the secret of life. Or of staying alive. Or rather of not dying. So he said. Few believed him at first. Of course. There are always skeptics in a crowd. Even if that crowd consists of only two. This crowd consisted of more than two – many more. We’re not exactly sure how many were in the crowd, for they had never really gathered together in one place, not even a telephone directory. So we’re still somewhat uncertain as to how many were in the crowd. But we are certain that of this uncertain crowd there were many skeptics, certainly. They didn’t believe him when he came on television one night and said that he had found the secret of life, or of staying alive, or rather of not dying. “I know how to live forever,” is what he said exactly.

Shades of “The Hunger Artist” channeled in a postmodern style? Still, if a student of mine now were to submit this beginning of a story, I’d be pleased – at least there’s a sense of style (however derivative, and derivative is not necessarily a negative at 22; style has to mature out of something; how many writers emerge from the womb as original?) and there’s an interesting conflict suggested between the first person plural narrator and the “he” protagonist.

The poems are occasionally palatable, promising (albeit not publishable):

At the Movies

In the dark rows
their childhood dreams
rise from the screen

In technicolor
merging with the still smoke
and silent kisses

of young lovers
who only dream
with their eyes closed.

Here is fantasy
without shame;
what tension exists

beyond that found
in the image?
Reality is fixed.

Or this:

Circle

We feel
a slight hint of order
and arrangement
within the circle of chairs:
the friends sitting there.

Or this one, probably written as an exercise in a class:

Sonnet

How silent you were this morning
when you left, brushing me only slightly
with the blanket as you rose.
Yes, I was awake, if only for that moment,
long enough to see your face in the early light
as you leaned over to kiss me good-bye.
Somewhere in that conscious-unconscious state
I heard the pigeons outside the window,
calling you. And I saw your body, naked,
outlined on the shade as you stretched, yawning,
pulling your clothes carelessly over your white flesh.
Then you were gone. I lay there asleep and not asleep,
listening to your steps upon the stairs,
your shutting the door, the pigeons in flight.

OK, not Literature with a capital L (or probably even a small l). But there is promise evident for this undergraduate English major, if only in an emerging understanding of the forms and language of literature. I’m glad I went back and met up with him again. Too bad he has more to say to me than I can to him.