The Dead Father, by Donald Barthelme

Just for the record, I actually haven’t read this book; this passage is one of the chapter openers that Jon Krakauer used for Into the Wild:

But have you noticed the slight curl at the  end of Sam II’s mouth, when he looks at you? It means that he didn’t want you to name him Sam II, for one thing, and for two other things it means that he has a sawed-off in his left pant leg, and a bailing hook in his right pant leg, and is ready to kill you with either one of them, given the opportunity. The father is taken aback. What he usually says, in such a confrontation, is “I changed your diapers for you, you little snot.” This is not the right thing to say. First, it is not true (mothers change nine diapers out of ten), and second, it instantly reminds Sam II of what he is mad about. He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn’t notice.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

Two passages in this post, for reasons that I hope are obvious. The first concerns Krakauer meeting with Billie McCandless, the mother of Chris McCandless, who died after venturing into the Alaska wild:

A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris’s final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the  fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreperable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow. “I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances,” Billie protests through her tears. “I just don’t understand it at all.”

The second passage, ten pages later in my paperback edition, is from Krakauer recalling his own near-death experience as a young climber in Alaska:

All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen water, yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became. Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your  back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used t rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the  reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

By and by your attention becomes so intensely focussed that you no longer notice  the  raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

Keep the Change, by Thomas McGuane

“I don’t know if I ever told you this, Astrid,” Joe said, turning back toward the bed. “But I used to be a pretty darn good caddy. I was captain of all the caddies when I was sixteen years old. Carried double with those big old leather bags. Nine out of ten of those golfers let me pick up their clubs. I never played myself. I was saving up for college. My father could afford to send me to college but his drinking made him so erratic, I wasn’t sure he would keep it together until I got there. Sure enough, he went tits-up on a land development deal and I was lucky to have my caddy savings. One time, I tried to help him. He was such a good fellow when he was sober that I was sure he had no idea how he was acting when he was drinking. So I bought a tape recorder and spent the evening with him. He went crazier than usual. The next day, while he was still hung over, I brought the tape into his bedroom, set it up on the dresser and turned it on real loud. Well, it should have worked. As a theory it was very much in the ballpark. But the actual sound of his own ranting and raving was much more than he could deal with. He bellowed. He smashes the machine. He kicked me out of the house. Not long afterward, he drank himself to death. Possibly, that is where he was headed. Sometimes I think I murdered my father with his own voice.”

“What got us started on this?”

“I look out at the stars and wonder if my folks are out there.”

“I see.”

“All their troubles gone.”

Old School, Tobias Wolff

Wolff’s book about a young man at a prep school who wants to be a writer, as do all his friends. Starts slow, sneaks up on you. Quite strong. In  this passage the narrator is in his last meeting with fellow seniors who work on the school literary journal, and are arguing about whether to print the submission of one of their fellow students who they have consistently rejected.

There’s something there, Bill said.

Come on, I said.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, run the stupid thing! George said. Who cares? It’s not like the rest of this crap’s about to set the world on fire. When we looked at him hi bristled and said, Well, is it?

Of course the answer was no. Our schoolboy journalwas not going to set the world on fire. But for  the past year we’d been acting on the faith that it might, choosing and shaping every issue with the solemnity of Big Jeff  designing a spaceship. So, the game was over—that’s what George was telling us, the  prick, the  spoiler. He’d somehow lost his innocence and now he couldn’t rest until we too had seen that our sanctum sanctorum was only a storage room, our high purposes not worth a fart in a gale of wind.

But George, of all people—what  had  worked this change in him? What had he been writing up in that airless room, what  vein of acid knowledge had he struck?

Okay, I said. What the hell. Let’s run it.

So we’d come to the end; our last issue was laid to rest, albeit with a bullet in its head. The others fled the  room, leaving me to order and stack the manuscripts and hand them off to the incoming editor, a fifth former who’d been sitting in on the meeting to see how it was done. He  looked pretty disappointed.

Mr. Rice’ll need those first thing tomorrow, I told him.

I know.

Our Story Begins, by Tobias Wolff

Don’t usually read short story collections,  but loved this one. A couple passages in one here. The first is from “Next Door.” The narrator is a husband who cares for his sick wife; they live next door to a couple which fights violently:

All the lights are off next door except the one in their bedroom window. I think about the life they have, and how it goes on and on, until it seems like the life they were meant to live. Everybody always says how great it is that human beings are adaptable, but I don’t know. In Istanbul, a friend of mine saw a man walking down the street with a grand piano on his back. Everyone just moved around him and kept going. It’s awful, what we get used to.

The next is a brief rant from a professor, an  immigrant, on a smoking break, to an adult student of a similar age:

“Americans!” Professor Landsman was fumbling with the buttons of her coat. “Such faith in the future, where all shall be reconciled. Such compassion toward the past, where all shall be forgiven, once understood. Really, you have no comprehension of history. Of how done it is, how historical. One may not redeem a day of it, not a moment of it, with all these empathies and tender discernments. One may visit it only as one visits a graveyard, hat in hand. One may read the inscription on the stones. One may not rewrite them.”

Jackson Pollock, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

The two authors spent ten years working on this biography of Jackson Pollock; after reading it, you wonder how they got it all done so quickly. They get everything. Legislation should be passed requiring that all biographies are prepared with such care and thoroughness.

The depth of their research, and their skill at doling out their information, rather than beating you over the head with it, shows in this climactic scene at a Hamptons dinner party, where Pollock lashes out at Hans Namuth, who made those famous movies of Pollock’s painting process:

…In his rage, he tore a belt of sleigh bells from the living room door and swung it at Namuth. “Jackson, put those back,” Namuth ordered.

It was the wrong thing to say. At the sound of another “direction” from Namuth, Jackson imploded. All the repressed anger and self-hatred—from months of standing in the cold, waiting for the next shot, the next angle, painting on cue; the months of “Where do I stand?” “When do I come in?” and “Should I do it now?”—flooded back. All the phoniness and self-deception seemed suddenly, excruciatingly, obvious. “Maybe those natives who figure they’re being robbed of their souls by having their image taken have something,” Jackson later told a friend. His brothers had been right. His desperate effort to prove them wrong by striking a Faustian bargain with Namuth—celluloid immortality for artistic integrity—by clinging to the image of the great artist, had only confirmed it; he was a fraud. Celebrity had betrayed him, just as his family had.

Jackson fought the recognition with rage. “You’re a phony,” he sputtered at Namuth, pointing his blunted finger. “I’m not a phony, you’re a phony. ” Lee tried to dispel the gathering storm by calling everyone to the table, but Jackson and Namuth brought their argument with them, carried on in ferocious whispers. They sat down, oblivious to the other guests, Jackson at the head of the table, Namuth at his right. The whispering grew more intense. “I’m not a phony, you’re a phony,’ Jackson repeated—they were the “tiresome, awful repetitions of a drunk,” recalls one witness—”You know I’m not a phony, but you’re a phony.” Suddenly, Jackson stood up, breathing heavily and glaring at Namuth. He clutched the end of the table with both hands. “Should I do it now?” he demanded in fierce self-mockery. “Jackson—No!” Namuth commanded. Yet another command. One guest remembered wanting to throw something at Namuth or to shout, “`Shut up Hans.’ He was being so pompous and authoritarian.” Jackson never took his eyes off Namuth. There was a long pause before he repeated, louder this time, “Now?” Immediately Namuth shouted, “Jackson—this you must not do!” One last time, in a roar, Jackson demanded, “Now?” but before Namuth could answer, he heaved the heavy table up in the air.

My favorite biography. Hated to see it end.