Why I Write (updated)

A while ago I waxed philosophical and autobiographical on why I've chosen to be a writer. Something about solitude and community, I think, and something else about the relationship between creativity and economic reality. All quite valid for when I wrote it, I'm sure, and it will no doubt all seem relevant again. But now I'm going to tell you why I'm a writer today.

     The oven light went out. It's a new oven, and I was annoyed that the light died so quickly. So I went to fix it but, probably because I was annoyed, I jerked the glass cover off the bulb instead of detaching it gently—the result being that the light bulb snapped off at the base. So now an extremely simple bulb change was turning into a chore, which had me more annoyed, at the bulb, at Frigidaire, but mostly at me. I've done this plenty of times before, though, taking a broken light bulb out of a socket by turning the glass rod in the middle. I shut off the electricity, gripped the rod, and turned. Except this time it snapped off in my hand. Probably because I was so annoyed.

     So I went to my next recourse, which I've also succeeded at several times over the years: twisting the bulb out of the socket by grabbing the edge of the metal base with a pair of pliers. I grabbed. I twisted. A sliver of metal tore off. I grabbed elsewhere, twisted again. It tore again. 
     The base was frozen into the socket, and gripping little bits of brass with the tip of my needle-nose pliers was getting me nowhere. Clearly what I needed to do was hold more of the base with a bigger pair of pliers. So I got a flat-head screwdriver, jammed it between the base and the socket, and bent it inward. Then I grabbed a whole hunk of brass with my vice-grip pliers and twisted with all my might. The ceramic ring holding the socket against the back of the oven shattered.

     I saw the good side to that, though: now I might be able to pull the socket through the hole toward me and get a better grip on the whole thing. So I brought the pliers up against the edge one more time—and the socket dropped behind the back wall of the oven. Now it's sitting in there, an open electrical socket leaning against a metal wall, useless and dangerous and unreachable without taking the whole appliance apart. So I can't use my oven until Friday when the repairman comes and charges me a fortune to get me right back to where I was this morning, ready to replace a 69¢ bulb.

    There have been many reasons in my life to make a career of writing: some practical, some daring, some wise, and some reckless. Today I write because I can't fucking do anything else.

Naked Men and the Scientific Utopia

This is the last excerpt I'll be blogging from the rough draft of The Undressing of America, because it's time to forget everything else except getting the thing done and onto the shelves.  

The muscle-building movement that swept up Bernard McFadden in the 1880s poured largely from a surge of Prussian nationalism seven decades before. Humiliated by Napoleon’s armies and wanting to regain their momentum as the rising power of central Europe, Prussia’s leaders embraced a system of physical education for their upper-class schools, their gymnasia, a rigorous individual development of muscles and agility that they called Turnverein but that the English-speaking world would come to call gymnastics.

       It was a more mythological than practical gesture, for just as the practice of combat was being taken from the nobility and mercenaries and assigned to masses of conscripted commoners, as industry replaced human physical labor, as men’s lives grew steadily more room-bound and sedentary, the nation gave itself to the creation of an ideal citizen modeled on the warriors of classical Greece. But the ideal rang deeply in the hearts of the European, and soon physical fitness became part of the education of every young man of the dominant classes.

       By mid-century the interest in building muscles had spread to men of the middle class, although in a far more individualized and less romantic form. Strength was a way to press back against the unhealthiness of industrial life and a compensation for the obscurity and impotence of the new urban society. But as ever, the alternative to industrialization followed industrial logic itself: repetitive motion, rigid control, valorized tedium, the mastery of physical power through planning and discipline. Weight training became especially popular in England, the most industrialized and urbanized of nations. Soon after, it jumped to America, where it took on a particular edge of competitive individualism, as well as a romantic primitivism, as images of Indian braves with naked torsos and the strong men of a pre-mechanical democracy—the village smithy with arms like iron bands—still stood for perfect manhood in the national imagination.

       Mass print carried the new fascination from nation to nation and from city to small town to farmhouse. Books and pamphlets on self-improvement had become a mainstay of cheap publishing, as the culture of progress, competition, and the conquest of nature stirred vast numbers of young men to lift themselves by their mental, professional, and physical bootstraps. Fitness books enabled them to become men of robust power like the heroes of the popular novels on sale at the same newsstands. Improvements in the cheap reproduction of artwork in the final few decades of the century served physical fitness instruction especially well by enabling positions and exercises to be clearly demonstrated. By the end of the 1880s authors were promoting competing fitness systems and selling their own dumbbells and Indian clubs from ads in the backs of their books.

       Then Prussia once again brought a new twist to the relationship of man and his muscles. The boy was born just a year before Bernard McFadden, although not in a land laid low by civil war but in an ascendant nation just uniting Germany and poised to avenge itself on France; to grow up in Prussia in the 1870s and 1880s was to grow up believing that the world was one’s future spoils. Like McFadden, he discovered weight training early and made it the great passion of his life. His dedication was so great that by his early twenties he was touring international stages as a strong man, whereupon he abandoned the name Friedrich Müller—as common a name as a German could have—and billed himself, with an echo of Polish exoticism, as Eugen Sandow. (The fallen kingdom of Poland embodied a lost nobility in the imaginations of men on the eastern edge of the German Empire then; a young scholar named Friedrich Nietzsche, also consumed with visions of the superior man, made spurious claims to Polish descent.)

       Strong-man exhibitions were popular enough all over Europe, but by the late 1880s they’d become especially popular in England. Sandow stood out among them all: he broke chains and bent metal rods with the best of them, but most compelling about him was his sculptural perfection. Sandow more than any of his predecessors cared about the appearance of his naked body, and his particular system of weight lifting and resistance training created sharply delineated muscles of a sort that men concerned only with power could not provide. The crowds cheered when he swelled his chest and sent a snapped chain flying; but, as clever promoters would observe, they gasped when he flexed his arms. The previous champion strong man of England—whom Sandow defeated in the public competition that made him famous—called himself Charles Sampson and sought to evoke a Biblical awe. Sandow was immediately compared by the popular press to Greek and Roman statues.

       Yet what Sandow pioneered—what soon came to be called “body building”—was far less a return to Classical aesthetics than a new and very modern vision of the human body. Old-style strong men played carnival side shows; Sandow commanded music-hall stages. Admiration for Sandow was not admiration for native strength but for the work he had brought to making himself a new kind of man. He provided a new dream of perfectibility, of complete reform of the individual body, that resonated with the utopian aspirations then ascendant in the West. But he also promised the mass replicability of that perfection, because everyone in his audience knew that he was no freak of nature but a normal man who had found the way to make himself like that. Sandow promised that with scientific logic and discipline we could all become perfect.

       Such was Sandow’s international reputation that in early 1893 one of New York’s most successful opera and musical theater impressarios, Maurice Grau, brought him across the Atlantic to serve as the crowd-pleasing finale to a very slightly risqué comedy called Adonis; after the final scene, the curtain reopened to reveal Sandow striking poses to show off his contours, then performing feats of strength. Almost immediately, however, the star was stolen by a sharper and younger promoter, a German-American Sandow’s own age, named Florenz Ziegfeld.

        Ziegfeld saw in Sandow what no one else had, because he stood, like so many young Americans, between two worlds. His family in Friesland had been affluent and cultured; his father moved to Chicago to found a music school. Young Flo, however, was of a racy new generation, young men who came of age in swelling American affluence and under the ever-brighter lights of the booming cities. He repeatedly dropped out of school and clashed with his parents, preferring clothes, girls, and gambling to the sedate world of the respectable bourgeoisie. He understood the duality of American taste, its young love of sensation and its nervous pursuit of the “high class,” and he saw how perfectly Eugen Sandow bridged that split. Flo Ziegfeld knew that people liked to look at naked flesh and exceptional bodies. And he knew that the way that the way to ease the self-consciousness of the better class of customer enough that he or she would pay to see it—and the way to quiet the censors—was by dressing that flesh in high-minded artistry.

        He brought Sandow back to Chicago to feature him at the Columbian Exposition, where together they developed a new presentation: living man as classical statue. Sandow dusted his skin with white powder and, clad only in a loincloth, struck the poses of the Discus Thrower, David, Hercules, and others that the crowds would recognize from books and illustrated postcards. Carefully placed spotlights, blacking out while Sandow changed position and clicking back on from new angles, gave him a glow of unreality. When Sandow lifted great weights he did so in static tableaux.

       Then Ziegfeld played his trump: he invited Chicago’s most prominent society ladies and promised that anyone who gave two hundred dollars to charity would be granted a back-stage audience with the great man himself, including a chance to feel his mighty arms. On opening night he snagged the wife of George Pullman, king of railroad sleeping cars and founder of a planned, utopian town bearing his name. Sandow the Magnificent became an instant sensation.

      Sandow wasn’t the only performer at the Chicago fair to bring in huge crowds by exhibiting his body, but he was the one who seemed to dodge the criticism of the defenders of decency. Other attractions on the Midway—most famously Little Egypt, the “hoochie-coochie” dancer—were assailed by church and civic groups and occasionally shut down by the police. Among those who attacked such exhibits most vigorously was Anthony Comstock. After twenty years as the dominant censor in America and then at the zenith of his power, Comstock had been broadening his sights beyond the obscene publications that he had largely driven underground to include larger cultural targets: theaters, art galleries, and world’s fairs. But Sandow he seems never to have remarked on. The ethnographical interest of Little Egypt may not have been enough to deflect his ire, but Sandow’s commitment to health and art apparently was, at least for the moment.

       Bernard McFadden was aware of none of this as he filed into the dimly lit theater and saw the first spotlights go on. He thought nothing about cultural changes or moral battles. He was aware only of the breathtaking sight of Sandow the Magnificent—and of the endless line of people still behind him beyond the theater doors, every one of them eager to lay down his money for a glimpse.

Sonny Rollins, the Bridge, and Me

When he was twenty-eight years old and rocketing to the peak of his fame as a jazz saxophonist, Theodore "Sonny" Rollins decided to take a break. "I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own." For three years he didn't record or play publicly. For three years he just practiced.

     At first he practiced at home, but out of consideration for a neighbor with a baby, he decided to lug his axe instead to the nearest public space and practice there. So was created one of the great romantic images of American music: a lone genius playing to the night on the Williamsburg Bridge.

     When Rollins returned to performing, his work was not as dramatically different as his followers either hoped or dreaded it would be. For a while in live performances he teamed up with some of the architects of the new "free jazz" sound and ventured a ways into new territory, but in the studio he stayed pretty steadily on the hard-bop road that he already knew. He went deeper, though. He made it more his own. He pushed the edges, and he wouldn't stop pushing them for decades to come.

     Now, there are a lot differences between Sonny Rollins and me. For one, I don't play the saxophone. For two, I'm not a genius. And for three, I didn't choose my years-long hiatus from my primary work; it just happened to me. (Okay, and I'm not twenty-eight, either. Fine.)

     Still, I turn to him often for inspiration and reassurance. Because I sold a book idea in 2006 that I thought I would finish within two years, and here I am six years later just pulling together the first polished draft. And there are so many nights when I look back and ask myself what I lost and what I gained in all that time.

     I hasten to say that I haven't been idle. In those years I was hired to write two screenplays adapting my own earlier work, a web comic and graphic novel for a lobbying group, and a series of ten kids' books based on a Japanese comic book. I've created and taught several terms of a class at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto on "Finding Your Story," which is evolving into a book of its own. I reunited with my collaborator from my salad days, Will Jacobs, to write a series of short stories that became another series of short stories that became a book that we'll be bringing out sooner or later. There's been a lot going on other than professional work, too: my son's years-long health issues, massive upheavals in my private life, and a transformative journey into twelve-step recovery (no, not substance addiction—I'll fill you in in another blog).

     Some of those were tasks I honestly had to do; some of them, I must confess, were just to avoid writing the book I was supposed to be writing. That book revealed itself, for one thing, as a far more complex project than I ever anticipated. At one point I had to throw it all away and reconceive it because someone else surprised me with a too-similar book. Then the research for the next conception turned out to be nearly impossible because seemingly no one thought to preserve the periodicals I planned to write about. Then I trashed it and reconceived it again, partly because of that research problem but also because I just came up with a way better idea.

     But apart from all that, there were times I just couldn't write it. The fall-back description of the phenomenon is "writer's block," but I don't believe it was anything so monolithic. It was, at times, an inarticulable awareness that I didn't yet have the idea worked out right, and at others an inchoate admission that I hadn't yet brought my chops up to the point that I could pull it off. Sometimes, too, it was what Sonny said: I was taking on too much too soon and I didn't want to let publication schedules push me out there so I could fail. I had to get myself together on my own. Just that Sonny caught on to that quickly and made a decision, where I had to rely on my unconscious—dependably much smarter than my conscious—to drag me there.

     In the end, I am here, where I am. The book will be finished, then it will be edited, then finished again, then published. It won't be as powerful, I'm afraid, as The Bridge, Rollins's comeback album. But it will be who I am now, not who I was when I laid down Men of Tomorrow and cooked up this follow-up idea. It will be me after multiple reconsiderations of the idea and myself, after herculean (or sisyphean) parenting labors, after several competing projects and a few alchemical relationships and twelve tall steps. I don't know if I'll be glad of those four or five years of unexpected delay, but I know I'll see the results of them. I'm curious to learn who I am when I come back from my own long nights on the bridge.

Does Publicity Sell Books?

A few weeks ago an email conversation broke out within the SF Writers Grotto trying to answer that question (in response to a fellow member getting a lot of great TV appearances out of her new book but not seeing sales go up the way she hoped), and I responded with my own experiences. A few people told me that what I wrote was helpful, so I thought I'd share them here.

One thing I've figured out after decades in this screwy game (next month is the 30th anniversary of the sale of my first book) is that actual book sales are only part of the picture. I've gotten a lot of paying gigs talking to colleges and other institutions, and those can keep rolling in long after the shelf-life of the book: Killing Monsters came out in 2002 and I'm still getting interesting speaking jobs out of it, including trips to Brazil, England and other places (I spoke to a conference in Nottingham just a few months ago). And I know that's been helped along by publicity, even when the publicity didn't directly sell books.

     In terms of perceptible Amazon up-ticks, the only broadcast media that ever helped were NPR interviews where I got to talk about the content of the book at some length (Fresh Air helped, but the biggest jump was after Talk of the Nation). Mass-audience radio never did squat, not even Howard Stern in his pre-satellite days, nor did TV. But a speaking agency picked me up and landed me a series of public debates after I appeared on the Today Show, which in turn led to other stuff. I also had a university events programmer tell me he was already interested in bringing me in but didn't really decide until he saw that I'd been on Bill O'Reilly's show.

     I've picked up quite a few article- and editorial-writing gigs off my books, at least some of which were helped along by publicity. A BBC appearance got me an offer from the Guardian to write something, and I think that may be why the Times of London asked me for something soon after. It also just looks better in the pitch for an article if you can list a bunch of high-profile appearances.

     I've found that initial sales usually don't matter that much; publication is just the beginning of a long trudge. But the rewards of the trudge can be a lot greater than you think they might be while you're still processing the realization that you're not going to soar onto the NYT bestseller list (which is an angsty process, I know). And the publicity that seems not to be doing a damned bit of good in the moment can pay off down that road.

     Basically it's all about showing up for opportunities and rolling with the fact that there will be baffling disappointments and unexpected gifts, some of which don't show up until you've forgotten what you even did. Kinda like life, only less real.

Wrestling, Weightlifting and the Birth of a Crusade

Continuing excerpts from The Undressing of America, as our hero flees the brutal farmer to whom he has been indentured and finds himself in the boom town of St. Louis...

Fame and fortune did not come quickly for Barney. The jobs for an adolescent runaway were not many, and he found himself scraping by as a delivery boy and an office boy. Then the print revolution came to his aid. The wave of mass print that had inundated New York and other coastal cities in the middle of the century had flowed more slowly to Missouri, but as the economy rebounded in the wake of the Civil War it began to rise. A penniless immigrant named Joszef Pulitzer rode the rails from New York to St. Louis after the war and by 1883 was making a fortune as the publisher of the city's largest newspaper and was poised to return to his former city as owner of the New York World—the same that fifteen-year-old Bernard McFadden took a job as a printer’s devil at a St. Louis print shop.

       Mass print came to the boy’s aid emotionally as well. His formal education was done, but he read. In his tiny room at a boarding house, with no one who cared much about him, lacking the skills and probably the inclination to make friends, isolated and unhappy, his only companions were cheap books, especially the “nickel libraries” and “dime novels” ground out by the fiction factories in New York. He surely read manly adventure stories, but it seems that his favorites were romance novels—a genre then very different from those later incarnations directed exclusively at female readers. The popular romantic novel of the 1880s, usually telling of a humble but virtuous young man who must conquer the forces of corruption and wealth to win the heart of an equally humble and equally virtuous young woman, often through episodes of fisticuffs and daring rescue, appealed strongly to young males and females alike. Lonely Barney, who seems to have had no girls in his life during those years, no doubt took great solace in seeing himself as such a dashing young man in the making.

       Work in the printing business took something away from the young McFadden too. During those months of laboring over presses and plates he found himself losing muscle. He began to cough at night, which he feared was an early warning of the tuberculosis that he believed had killed his mother. Years later he would write of wasting away, his arms and legs slimming down, his skin turning pale, his newly won sense of vitality giving way to a familiar pessimism, malaise, and resentment. But like a hero in a cheap novel, mass print arrived to rescue him in the end. In a local gymnasium he found a pamphlet on weight training. 

      Strength and vigor it promised him. In the privacy of his room he could recapture the power that had set him free of Jenkins’s farm. He saved his money for a pair of fifteen-pound weights and devoted himself to daily exercise. Weight lifting became his routine, his passion, his prayer, and his reason to be. 

       McFadden was short but broad-framed, and he carried his muscles well. He’d learned that he enjoyed fighting in his youth, and now, as he built up his strength, he began to take up wrestling. A common feature of the carnivals that roamed the middle of the country in those days was the strong man who doubled as a wrestler: after demonstrating his power by bending steel bars and lifting heavy weights he would challenge any man in the audience to grapple with him in the ring, offering a cash prize to any who could last a full minute, or two or three. Most often the first challenger was a plant, an ally of the strong man who would win the prize and embolden other rubes to follow his example. After that first phony match, the strong man rarely lost. An exception came the first time the seventeen-year-old Barney took the bait. With few moves but with simple strength and brute stubbornness he lasted the three minutes and collected his money. From there, the natural step was to join the carnivals himself.

       Over the next several years his movements are largely unknown, but he seems to have spent a fair amount of his time scrabbling around the Mississippi Valley, fighting in arranged matches, serving as a plant, and gradually, under his full name, Bernard McFadden, becoming a top-billed strong man and wrestler himself. In addition to wrestling moves, he learned the art of the kayfabe: tricking the rubes. Much of his approach to selling and public speaking in the years to come showed the influence of the carnies.

       He also developed his own regimen for health and strength. He may have begun with someone else’s book, but the young McFadden acknowledged no authority, and soon he was working out his own system of muscle-building exercises. For his diet, he drew from the health food movement of the time but ultimately did whatever made him feel strongest: cracked wheat, copious milk, days of fasting. He had a bad reaction to a vaccine in childhood and thereafter declared vaccination a dangerous hoax. He slept on the floor with his windows wide open, wore the loosest of clothing, walked barefoot in order to connect with the magnetic vitality of the earth. His only master was nature, and he believed he was penetrating nature’s secrets on his own.

       Wrestling in the dirt rings of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Iowa was not, however, the stuff of careers. McFadden wanted to be not only strong and full of life and known among other strong men but rich and respected. He wanted to conquer America on all its terms. He tried various money-making schemes, including opening a laundry; it failed quickly, however, and he blamed his lazy employees. He learned the hard way that he was neither a manager of men nor a conventional businessman, that everything he succeeded at was driven by his singular passion for physical fitness.

       He found a way to use that passion in teaching. American schools were beginning to imitate the gymnasium system of Europe and add “physical education” or “physical culture” programs, and qualified teachers were in demand. In 1892, at twenty-four years of age, McFadden took such a spot at Marmaduke Academy, a military school in central Missouri. He surely impressed the students with his physical prowess, and although he was unpolished and socially awkward, he had the charisma of zeal and self-certainty. There he first experienced the satisfaction of influencing others, a heady feeling for a young man who had grown up discarded and ignored.

       In the course of teaching, he found another way to inspire boys to strive for physical fitness: he wrote a novel. He was far from unique among readers of popular novels to try his own hand at them; but in his case, romantic daydreams and hopes of being the next Horatio Alger were not sufficient motivation. He wanted to use the form to spread his personal gospel.

       The Athlete’s Conquest is the story of a robust young woman who enjoys tennis, swimming, other physical pursuits—girls of a new sort, colloquially called “amazons,” who were becoming numerous in those fitness-conscious years—seeking a suitor worthy of her. At first she won’t take our hero seriously because he has no money or “sophistication,” but gradually she sees the hollowness of wealth and sportiness and intellect not founded in physical health, and she realizes that her future happiness (as well as her dream of bearing a large, robust, and happy family) depends on finding a man of strength and vitality. The athlete of the title wins her heart with victory in a footrace, and so happiness and health are assured for both characters and their descendents.

       It was a dreadful novel by any standard, and McFadden failed to interest any publisher in it. But he was determined to get his message to the world, so he paid for the book to be published by the largest of New York’s vanity presses and sold the copies to his students. So far as we can tell, it attracted no other attention and vanished from the face of the earth. McFadden would attempt no more novels, although in the next few years he proved that his confidence in his ability to persuade others through the written word was not much shaken.

       Bernard seems to have finished the school year with no money in his pocket, and he scratched out a bit of income by giving private boxing and wrestling lessons. He was determined, however, not to spend the summer in Missouri. As soon as he could buy the train tickets, he made the trip that every young man in the Midwest was taking that summer of 1893, the trip that showed him his destiny: to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

To be continued...

Mitt Romney and the Meaning of Life

The stories we like to hear reveal who we want to be. Those stories are most interesting (to me, at least) when they fall short of reality, because that's where we see the full context of forces and circumstances against which we flail and within which we define ourselves. Once again I'm especially enjoying the Republican primaries as an example of that, as the gap widens between the front-page story of a closely fought race and the slow, relentless accumulation of evidence that it will all turn out the way we always knew it would.

     While most headlines after Tuesday's primaries focused on Rick Santorum's victories and Newt Gingrich's declaration that Mitt Romney is "no longer inevitable," this Wall Street Journal article tells the story that matters: as Santorum won Mississippi and Alabama, Romney actually added to his lead in delegates. He now claims 45% of the delegates he needs to win the nomination, with a lot of huge states coming up—Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California—in which he's bound to do well. All Santorum accomplished last night was proving that he, not Newt Gingrich, is this year's leading also-ran, which by Republican tradition makes him the heir apparent for 2016 (place your bets now).

     Something similar, if not as stark in contrast, happened with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008. As the candidates took turns winning primaries, Obama's fifty-state organization quietly harvested delegates from little-watched caucuses and pushed him relentlessly toward a majority. Even in March and April of that year, when Clinton pulled from behind to win Ohio and Texas, then took Pennsylvania by nearly ten points, Obama actually netted more total delegates. Clinton won all the front-page stories as the nomination slipped steadily away.

     We love turning points: for want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, and like that. The idea that there might be one moment when a man might put his hand on the seesaw of history and tip it pleases our desire to believe that we can control our own destinies, that we aren't really already rolling like snowballs down a mountain of circumstances that built up under us before we even stopped to see what was happening. In the case of this year's primaries, the underlying circumstance is that there is a large bloc of Republican voters who prudently, cautiously, and reliably rally around the candidate who is familiar to them as the pragmatic almost-centrist who has been widely declared electable in a national race. It isn't a majority, but it's large enough that when the scary ideologues and self-financed oddballs carve up the rest of the vote—which they always will—that bloc will consistently deliver the most delegates. Mitt Romney was already in that position before the first debate.

     Of course we all have some power over our destinies; quite a bit, really, over what part of the mountain we roll down and what paths we take between rocks and whether we land hard or soft. But mostly, living in this big world is about learning to roll. For nearly as inevitable as Romney's victory in the primaries is his defeat in November. Allan Lichtman, with his Keys to the White House, once again plays the great spoiler of stories ("Rosebud's the name of his sled, by the way") by showing us how the circumstances have already piled high in favor of Obama's reelection. George F. Will has even announced to his fellow Republicans that they may as well give up on the White House and focus on taking the Senate. The Gallup Poll will bounce and shimmy its way onto the front pages many times, but the snowball is rolling.

     I will forget that many times in the next seven and a half months, however. I will forget it almost willfully, because I will want to believe that Obama's chances hang by a thread, that the fate of our nation may turn on a single debate or a deadly gaffe. I will let my alternating panic and soaring confidence drive me in my door-knocking and phone-banking, because I will believe that that one voter whose mind I change may be the nail in the horseshoe. Such stories may not reveal the truth of how life works. But they keep us connected to it.

The Narcissist Way

Continuing The Undressing of America: the coming of age of Bernard "Barney" McFadden. I'm playing here with some quasi-fictional techniques here, still developing the book's voice. I'm also seizing the excuse to post a couple of paintings by Charles Burchfield, whom I'm crazy about.

At the age of twelve, Barney began to grow. Not so much in height—he’d stop at five foot six for the rest of his life—but his shoulders broadened and his torso thickened and he discovered that he could add still more muscular power to what he had. His body was filled with new energies, too. There were stirrings of interest in girls and sex, although those still occupied only a corner of his thoughts, and the world in which he grew up hardly cultivated them. Mostly he became more restless, argumentative, and contrary. He began to question Jenkins’s commands and mock church sermons out loud. Jenkins and his wife became more convinced than ever that Barney was trouble, and sought to break him like a horse.

       In that struggle, soon after he turned thirteen, Barney found his God.

       Riding with the family back from church one Sunday, he asked Jenkins for money he felt was owed him. Jenkins refused. Barney accused him of not paying him what he was supposed to. Jenkins told him that to speak so on Sunday was blasphemous. Had he not heard the sermon just an hour before about the virtue of poverty and the evil of money?

       “I guess you know all about the evil of money!” Barney shouted. “That must be why you’re the cheapest son of a bitch in the county!”

       Jenkins’s wife blanched. Jenkins said he hoped God would strike him right there and then.

       “I’ll believe your God can strike somebody down when I damn well see it happen,” Barney said.

       Instantly, Jenkins tossed the buckboard reins to his wife and went for his whip. Barney vaulted from the wagon, paused to glare blackly back and Jenkins, and ran. He ran not in fear of the whip, he would insist later, but in fear what he might do to Jenkins in his rage. Off the road and down a slope he ran. Through a stone-littered field, vaulting over a neighbor’s fence, across a pasture pocked with gopher holes, down into a hollow at the bottom of a rise. The ground softened under his feet. Water filled his shoes. He plunged into a bog, its shallow water and soft vegetation warm in the afternoon sun.

       As the muck and water reached his knees he thought he should turn back, but he didn’t want to. He liked the warm wetness flowing over his skin, softening the hard, dirty denim of his trousers. He slogged deeper toward the center of the bog, not thinking about how he would get back out, how deep or insistent the mud at the bottom might be, wanting only to feel the water and mud surging up along his thighs. Deeper in, the water grew cooler, cold jets thrilling his inner thighs and groin. The thrill was electric. Energy, he believed, coursed from the earth itself into his limbs. His blood flowed as it never had, a warmth surged from him to mingle with the cool of the bog, the hard, hot swelling in his groin pressed against his trousers with a sweet pain. He had never felt so alive, and that life, he thought, came from the soil and the water and the whole vegetal world beneath his feet.

       Barney stopped with the bog up to his waist. He looked around himself. The sun glistened on the surface of the water. Small gnats lit by the sun zipped like fragments of lightning in and out of view. A cool breeze came from the hills, and Barney’s flesh rose to meet it in a thrill. He looked out across the fields at a world that he felt for the first time might meant him well. In later years he sought a word for what he felt and found the same one Victoria Woodhull had grown up believing was the essence of life: magnetism. A magnetic god of nature, health, and sexual energy, the earth’s “natural vitality,” ready to course through a man’s body like electricity through a wire. In that moment, in the bog, he had no words for it and no need of words.

       Eventually Barney slogged his way to dry land and hiked back to the Jenkins farm. The muck and water soaking his clothes grew cold, and his muscles tightened in anticipation of trouble with the farmer and his wife, but the memory of ecstasy sustained him. He believed he could overcome anything now. As it turned out, Jenkins contented himself with a few sharp words, a promise not to pay him any cash for a month, and a prediction that a vengeful Lord would punish his pride one day. He may have realized that Barney was no longer a boy to be physically confronted, and perhaps assumed that he would be grateful to be allowed back into the family with no severe punishment.

       He was mistaken. Barney stayed a few more weeks, doing his work in silence, and then he packed a bag and left. Early one morning without a word he finished his breakfast and walked out the door and down the path to the road. He turned west, away from the sun and toward St. Louis. He had no idea what he would do on his own in the city, but he knew he need never again serve anyone else, and he believed that he was capable, somehow, of wresting wealth and respect from the world. How, he had no idea, but he believed in his own unassailable wisdom and infinite possibility. 

       At thirteen, Barney McFadden had found a third way out of the Ozarks, a way that was not the heaven of a cruel church or the hell of the bottle. He had found narcissism.

To be continued...

We know it's just a story, but still...

The basic story for the Republican primaries seems to have agreed upon by nearly every commercial news source: Mitt Romney remains the front runner but only by a slim margin, as he fails to deliver the major victory that would "seal the deal." On Super Tuesday we heard that Romney's razor-thin victory in Ohio kept his rivals at bay but left him still vulnerable. There are horse race analogies ("by a nose") and boxing analogies ("no knock-out") and every other narrative device that presents the primaries as a series of close-fought battles, any one of which might prove to be a turning point, for a prize that might still be snatched from the favorite's grasp.

     That makes for good drama, but the reality is this: the winner will be the guy with the most delegates, and there Romney is so far ahead as to be nearly unassailable. Super Tuesday was an overwhelming victory for him as he picked up 213 delegates to Santorum's 84, leaving him with a total (according to the AP) of 422 to his nearest rival's 181. That's well over half of the 761 delegates allocated so far, which means that if Romney keeps plugging along as he is—or not even as well as he is—he'll still easily capture the majority he needs to win the nomination. By Fox News's estimate, Romney can win by taking only 37% of remaining delegates, while Santorum needs 63%.

     One aspect of the standard story is that Romney still has to "make his case" to the party's leaders with more impressive showings. It's true that in a close race, the votes of those leaders—all uncommitted delegates—might tip the balance. But it's also true that the vast majority of them have already made clear that they see Romney as the only viable choice for the general election. There is no case for him to make. Unless the Romney campaign somehow collapses completely (which it won't), the race is already over. The front runner is uncatchable.

     But we don't want that story, because we're human. We like our drama and our suspense, and we like to experience long, tedious historical processes as a series of battles and crystalline moments. We want to think that one's man blunder or another's heroic overachievement might yet turn the tide that we've seen rising all along. Which, I suppose, is why, in The Undressing of America, I'm telling the story of our transition from a culture of concealment and censorship to a culture of exposure largely in the form of a battle between a pair of willful, truculent bigger-than-life men, Anthony Comstock and Bernarr Macfadden. The great economic, technological, social, and intellectual currents that carried us inevitably along that journey are well worth explicating, and they're the bedrock of the story. But what holds my attention (and will hold yours, I hope) is the small arena of combat through which those currents are turned into human drama.

Why I Write...Today

Every few days, especially when the deadlines come faster than the words, I ask myself why in the hell I ever decided to write for a living. A rhetorical question, of course; except that I recently made the mistake of asking it in front of my therapist, who immediately responded, “Well...why did you?”

      Any simple answer seemed inadequate. That’s the thing about a long career: what drove you to pick it up in the first place may be entirely irrelevant to what keeps you doing it now. A great deal of disenchantment can grow in that gap, especially if it’s unacknowledged. I have to ask myself not just why I made that decision but why I keep making it over and over again, every day that I don’t decide to do something else.

      It was fear that got me started. When I was fourteen my mom pulled me out of school, inspired by one of her alcoholic delusions; I was ashamed to talk to my friends, and pretty soon they forgot about me, leaving me with no companions but my dog and my fantasies. Right before I turned sixteen it dawned on me that sooner or later I'd have to enter the adult world and make my own living, an idea I found horrifying. What did I know how to do but read and make up stories? So I made what I can now pass off as a daring decision but was in fact the only safe one I could think of: I was going to make my living as a writer of fiction.
      Within a few months I was back in school, although not the same school I'd left. I wanted to make friends, but I felt like such a freak that I needed something to hide behind. My new aspirations were perfect for that. To my peers I became that weird kid who was always writing, which was better than being just that weird kid. To my English teachers I was that weird kid who deserved special attention. I was very productive for my age, mostly because I was afraid to stop.

     Then things started to get better: my writing intrigued a cute and only slightly nerdy girl, who became my first girlfriend, and eventually my wife; then it led me to take a job at a used bookstore where wannabe writers were not only approved of but even given a sort of dusty glamor. Another guy at the store, Will Jacobs, talked me into collaborating with him for the hell of it, and we started reading the results to our friends. Pretty soon we were hosting parties just to give readings. Our humorous stuff went over best—I think that’s where my giddy new love of existence came through loudest. By my early twenties, writing had become my greatest source of joy.
       Fortune just kept turning her wheel in my favor. Will and I landed an agent and sold a humor book. It sold well and got us interviews and reviews all over the country. The editor of the National Lampoon called and asked us to write for him. I even quit my day job. Joy and love were rewarded.
      The trouble with Fortune is that she never knows when to stop the goddamn turning. Our second book tanked. We couldn't sell the third. We broke with our agent and couldn't get another one. The Lampoon burned us out. I couldn't even get my old day job back. Writing had become all about frustration and anxiety; but it was also the only way I could imagine to get back to the joy.

    The way back turned out to be, of all things, one of my favorite old escape routes from adolescence: I started writing comic books, and apparently I was pretty good at it. Suddenly writing meant flights to New York for editorial meetings, collaborations with great cartoonists, fans lining up at comic conventions, a strangely sweet power over the fates of my childhood heroes. My comics attracted attention in Hollywood, so now writing also meant flights to L.A. for development meetings, agents buying me breakfast, and more money than I’d ever expected to make. I don’t know if that was quite joy, but it felt good.
       Money's sneaky, though: it wants you to spend it. My wife and I bought a house, she quit work for the first five years of our son's life, then we put him in a private school. When the work slowed a bit, I was hooked like a trout; the writing had to be mainly about money. But I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't write just for money.
       I wish I could claim that at as an ethical stance, but no. I just didn't know how to write well when I didn't care about the work. So the work started to suck, and people stopped hiring me, and finally the answer to "why do I write?" became "desperation." I went kind of crazy with it, actually. I took on writing jobs I felt contempt for. I tried to make up for writing bad things by writing worse things. I discovered old child-of-alcoholic patterns I didn’t know were there. My marriage hit the rocks and so did a lot else.

       Some of us are slow learners: I was in my early forties when I finally realized that the only way to write something good was to write something I believed in. What I believed in most was my son. His mom was now working full time, and for a while not living with me, so I did a lot of hands-on parenting. Watching him deal with the struggles of kindergarten, thinking about my own childhood, I decided I had to write a book about fantasy, growing up, and symbolic conflict. 
      That book came out under the name Killing Monsters, and soon I was giving interviews, engaging in public debates, and writing articles to say things I believed about children and imagination. For the first time, I could answer “why do I write?” with “to say something that matters.”
      I decided to reorganize my life around that answer. The new work wasn't paying all the bills yet, so I kept the least demanding just-for-money work and refinanced the house to pull money out of my equity (there was a time you could do such things). I joined the San Francisco Writers Grotto to build a professional network. I wrote another book I believed in and sold the proposal for a third. I thought that by the age of fifty I might be making all this work.
      Then my son got sick. He’d been suffering from periodic migraines since second grade, but in sixth grade they turned chronic and disabling. He had a few respites over the next couple of years, but in high school the migraines came down like an avalanche, sweeping his whole life away. 
      I let them sweep a lot of me away, too. Yes, there were other issues: marriage again, money as ever, having to rethink the book after someone else published one too much like my original idea. But it was the parenting that carried me over the edge. If I wasn’t trying to help my son get to school or catch up on his work, if I wasn't talking to neurologists and homeopaths and psychologists, then I was worrying obsessively about everything I wasn’t doing. “Why do I write?” became “why can’t I write?” And that, as we all know, becomes a spiral in itself.

       Which is when I learned how much I need other people. A little band of us at the Grotto confessed our productivity issues to each other in a group we called Ass-Kickers Anonymous. I also went to real 12-step meetings for "compulsive underearners." I lined up friends to offer me incentives or threaten me with punishments for getting my work done or not. I started another book with my old friend Will Jacobs to remind myself that writing can be more play than work. I even let another Grotto member talk me into teaching classes, where I was reminded how much writing means to people who are still trying to master it.
       Bit by bit, with a lot of help, I started turning the spiral the other direction. I began to get rough paragraphs down, then rough chapters. Ideas that had once lain strewn across the chaos of my brain began to come together, and every once in a while I'd discover that a graceful sentence had somehow slipped through. Still, though, if you’d asked me why I wrote, the best answer I could have come up with was just that not writing was too frightening an option to contemplate.

      Then, this past fall, near the end of a long, hard draft of the new book, I participated in the Grotto’s group reading at San Francisco’s annual literary block party, LitCrawl. I can’t quite tell you why, but I decided to read a piece from The Beaver Papers, the humor book Will and I wrote thirty years ago that became my first published work. Reading it gave me a sense of the totality of my career, the most joyful times and the most grueling.
      Later, the Grotto gang came together at the LitCrawl after-party. At first I drifted toward a conversational clump, but I kept feeling pulled toward the dance floor. Holly Jones saw me wavering and pulled me out onto the floor. Soon a bunch of us who’d read that night were out there, celebrating our rare moment of glamor and blowing off our tension. We didn’t say a word about writing; we sang crappy pop lyrics and whooped for each other’s more ridiculous moves. But that night I had no questions about why I wrote.
     Like I say, that’s the thing about a long career. I chose writing in the first place so I could avoid other people, but I keep doing it now so I can connect with them. Tomorrow I may finally wake up and realize I have no reason to keep choosing this job. But just for today, I know why I’m here.

Dad in a Bag

Getting ready for my dad’s memorial party—he wasn’t the type to want any kind of memorial service, but a family gathering at his sister Betty’s place to share anecdotes about him would have suited him just fine—I pulled the bag of his ashes out of the particle-board box that the crematorium sold as its lowest-priced “urn” to see if it might fit into something fancier.

       It was disorienting, lifting that clear plastic bag full of white, stony chips into the light and trying to realize that these were the last physical remains of my father. He had been so huge in my imagination once, so limitless in strength and knowledge, so frighteningly and reassuringly potent, that it made no sense to think that he could be reduced to this, a bag the size of a head of lettuce and light enough to bounce in the palm of my hand.
       In my earliest memories, my father was a towering figure who could lift me into the air and set me on his shoulders as though I had no weight at all. Looking down from his height, I understood that the world he strode through was far smaller and less frightening than the one that loomed over me, that the mysteries of high shelves and counter tops lay exposed to him and that to him the neighborhood dogs who glared into my eyes were only knee-high pests. Once my mother hinted that he might spank me for something I’d done, and although he’d never once hit me—she was the only one who ever did that—the mere suggestion that he might turn his strength against me made me burst into sobs of terror.

       I learned to hike by following him on the trails of Glacier National Park, and I can still picture him ahead of me on the trail, rising against the sky like the erosion-carved pillars that jutted from the mountains themselves. The more I learned about the larger world, the larger my father seemed. In those years the culture of American boys was filled with recapitulations of World War II—Combat on TV, G. I. Joe under the Christmas tree, Iron Crosses scrawled on homework folders—and the knowledge that my father had fought in that war, that he had manned a giant gun on a Navy cruiser off the shores of Guadalcanal and felt the shudder of Japanese shells exploding against the hull beneath his feet, gave him the magnitude of a mythic hero.
       But somewhere along the way, he and I seem to have stepped in front of a pair of fun-house mirrors, because suddenly he looked much smaller and I looked much bigger. I remember the day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, when he and I were heading home after an impromptu lunch with a family friend and it dawned on him that my mother might have made lunch for us in our absence and would be annoyed if we came home with no appetites; he asked me not to tell her we’d already eaten and to join him in forcing down a second lunch, and it struck me that my father was afraid of my mother, far more afraid than I was. From that moment on, I think, I saw him as smaller than me and in need of my protection.
       During one of our last hikes together in Glacier Park, his fifty-five year old knees gave out and I had to rush ahead to stop the boat docked at the trail head on Two Medicine Lake from leaving before he could limp to it. It was the sort of physical heroism he’d once have exhibited for me. I began to understand his emotional as well as his physical fragility: listening more carefully to his war stories, I could hear that he had been a hero—he saved men’s lives that night off Guadalcanal—but he had also been just a twenty-one year old kid who would never entirely recover from feeling his world being blown apart around him.

       Decades later, as my mother lay dying and my father began to come apart emotionally, cognitively, and finally physically, I would have to become much bigger than he was. I comforted him, took over his finances, sold his home for him, and found him a new place to live. I became his father. He shrank into a wheelchair, so that when we went out I now looked down on the top of his head as he had once looked down on mine. His memory decayed relentlessly, leaving him smaller and smaller as a person. In his last weeks, the only sentence I heard him speak was “Hold my hand.”

       At last he became no more than an unconscious body in a bed, and then not even that. When he died he became smaller still, his chest no longer inflated by breath and the flesh of his face no longer plumped up by blood. I left the hospital room for a while and came back to find that he'd been zipped into a body bag but still not removed to the morgue. Where my father had lived for his last few days there was now a six-foot long, two-foot wide translucent plastic bag, tented here and there by jagged bones. To the very end he had held the firm jaw and closed lips that had always given him an air of strength; but now through the gauzy plastic I could see the dark oval of his open mouth below the peak of his nose, and somehow that made what was left of him look hollow and insubstantial.

       Now my father is in another bag, a bag of little chips that crunches when I squeeze it. I see him beside me, chuckling at the absurdity of it: “You mean that’s me? Son of a gun!”

       But this is how we all shrink, isn’t it? Most dramatically in the eyes of our children but also in our own. My son once saw me as the giant man who could protect him from anything and always knew best, an image I very much wanted to sustain for us both. But in the years he wrestled with his chronic migraines, as each new doctor I brought him to proved unable to help him and nearly every plan of attack I suggested either fell short or backfired, as I encouraged him to keep trying while I failed more and more to keep the frustration and despair out of my own voice, he watched me shrink.

       First Nicky pushed back against my advice with a frustrated anger of his own, but then his attitude shifted to that surest evidence that parent and child are changing places: compassion. He told his therapist that he felt bad for me because I’d become so miserable about my inability to help him, and he asked how he could explain to me, without hurting my feelings, “that it isn’t his responsibility to solve my problems.”

       It’s not just my son’s perspective on me that’s changed, of course, but my own. I felt so capable of soothing his fears and helping him through life’s crises when he was little, and for years I clung to the belief that I could help him through this one too, that his mom and I would eventually find the right medical or nutritional or psychological treatment that would restore him to the life he wanted. Jennie was able to admit much earlier than I that we seemed to be up against something powerful and incomprehensible, that we should think about lowering our expectations and accommodating the illness rather than continuing to try to beat it. I think it’s just that she was more invested in easing his pain than in proving to him that action and determination could win the fight, which had a lot to do with a mom’s willingness to look human and right-sized, while I wanted so much to see myself as powerful and heroic.

       In the end, her wisdom prevailed; now Nicky turns mainly to her for medical advice, and I don’t question his judgment.  There are still areas where he turns to me for guidance—just last night he asked me how to get payments on a PayPal account—but those areas are a lot smaller than they used to be. Just like me.

        It will be a long while before I’ve shrunk away the way my father ultimately did. I’ll still have my moments of bigness. But someday my son will also be handed the bag that contains his father. Someday he will be able to hold me as easily as I hold my father, as easily as I held him when he was little, as easily as my father held me.