Robert Root

 

The typescript of my unfinished mystery novel, The Graves of Academe, runs 154 double-spaced pages and 16 short chapters typed on the back of pale dittoed handouts or photocopies of pages from my dissertation—if I reverse the pages, I can read discontinuous excerpts from "The Problematics of Marriage: English Comedy 1688-1710." The mystery's opening three chapters in first person are revised by hand to third; the prologue and 13 more chapters, written years later, are in third person. Eight more chapters were tentatively planned.

 

I vaguely recall starting it in 1976 on highways between Iowa and Michigan. Unemployed after my post-doctoral year, Central Michigan University had turned me down for a composition position, but then abruptly hired me when a senior professor died unexpectedly and I was the only rejectee who could teach his popular course, the Bible as Literature. Thus was my career launched. Driving interstates alone, talking out loud to stay awake, I started to generate a first-person narrative about a recent midwestern-PhD hired precipitously at a Great Lakes university where the death of a senior faculty member—a murder—would require him to teach the victim's Shakespeare class.

 

I wrote those first three chapters but then the demands of preparing new classes and seeking academic standing through conference papers and creating a scholarly book from a dissertation chapter made me set it aside. It wasn't until years later, again making solitary cross-country road trips, that I remembered generating scenes aloud and thought of completing the mystery. Changes in my life over six years altered the manuscript's outlook. Chapters 4 through 16 would now be in third person and take a different perspective. While John Rice, the mystery's protagonist, and I had both left midwestern grad schools for Great Lakes universities, both expecting to move on after three years so our schools could avoid giving us tenure, I at least would receive tenure and stay there a total of 28 years. I had been divorced and lived alone for a few years until eventually marrying again; Rice's bachelor relationships with women had become more complicated and I imagined him taking a trilogy of murder mysteries to work everything out.

 

Recently I read The Graves of Academe typescript again, expecting to clean up typos and copy the text onto the computer, but by the time I reached the end, I felt no impulse to complete its narrative. Much of what's there no doubt displays aspects of who I was when I started it, and especially when I tried to continue it, but I don't identify with John Rice as I once did. My relationship to the plot line and the characters changed and I couldn't imagine reviving commitment.

 

As it turns out, I'd forgotten also later completing a different detective story. "Cruel as the Grave" was submitted to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and very quickly rejected. It's a straight-forward detective story, 49 typescript pages long, in which Lt. Will Dryden investigates and solves the case handily and is spurred by the background of the murder to recognize a need for romance in his own life. Its dialogue and plot conform to the conventions of mysteries I'd read and television episodes I'd viewed and drew on elements of investigation and police procedure I'd witnessed often in programs we'd watched. Except for some of the detective's angst about his earlier divorce, I don't sense much of a personal investment from me in the narrative. That is, it is very much different from The Graves of Academe where I can zero in on the background inspiration for certain characters and situations. Probably the Hitchcock magazine found it formulaic, maybe even predictable. I didn't pursue publication for it after that rejection.

 

What I realize now is how much writing of various kinds I was doing when I flirted with mystery writing. I'd spent a year as a singer-songwriter, been writing around 35 short essays for local public radio annually, and published my first academic book. In addition to a second marriage and a new household and an expanding academic career, enough was happening to make inventing mysteries an unnecessary distraction. I had sound professional reasons for turning to scholarly writing and considerable pleasure in all that other writing—perhaps my critical and creative needs were well satisfied when I stopped writing fiction.

 

That may be what I've learned revisiting the fiction I wrote in the past. The stories that seem to work best are those where some part of me inhabits the central character, where the narrative grows out of issues that nag at me, where the storytelling at least provides some tentative resolution that partly satisfies me, whether it satisfies the character who grew out of me or not. I gain more by writing essays and memoirs.

 

I came into the idea of writing about my early fiction with the expectation that it would be interesting—and possibly amusing—to figure out why I once wrote fiction and—perhaps riskier—to learn what kind of a fiction writer I was. My second effort at confronting an old short story—I might have said "examining" but in this case "confronting" seems more appropriate—tackled "On the Bus." The story centers on the self-absorption and isolation of Mort, a single man working in a department store by day and taking college classes in the evening. Already I've analyzed the story more in this paragraph than I likely did whenever I wrote it.

 

As an undergraduate I'd taken a course from Professor Leo Rockas in which we alternately studied, in translation, the short stories of Anton Chekhov and the essays of Friedrich Nietzsche. Over the semester, we were assigned three projects for each writer: a critical assessment, like the kind of lit/crit paper written in other English classes; an imitation or homage, something inspired by each writer's example; and a parody or satire of each writer's style. It was a good class. I didn't much like Nietzsche (Also Sprach Zarathustra; Nietzsche contra Wagner) or agree with his outlook, but my attack on him ("Root contra Nietzsche") was judged by my prof to be the most Nietzschean paper that semester. It alarmed me a little to think I might have been recruited by the German philosopher.

 

Chekhov's influence on me was deeper and more positive. My stories became more grounded, more restrained, more narrowly focused. "The End of Wisdom" probably shows that influence, though the conclusion might be more moralistic than Chekhov would have written. I may have intended "On the Bus" to follow that model. It's essentially a third-person portrayal of a lonely, inhibited, self-conscious college student who fantasizes futilely about a woman he observes in an apartment window and on a bus, is later attracted to a classmate he also restrains himself from connecting with, and in the end considers the possible consequences of his self-imposed remoteness. Realizing that the first woman is in a problematic relationship he imagines he might have rescued her from propels him to connect with the second woman.

 

It's a long story. Certain narrative elements help identify the author. At one point Mort's workplace is mentioned: "On his job he was the only young man in the store, except for two who worked on delivery. The men's clothing department was run by two older men, one near retirement who begrudged Mort's presence all together, and a middle-aged man who was civil but distant. Most of the women in the store were middle-aged except for a clique of girls his age who worked in the notions department and whose witty interchanges frightened him from attempting any closer contact than a nod of hello." During one summer, I had sold men's clothing for my hometown department store, a more positive experience than Mort's but very similar.

 

The sense of isolation the character exhibits was familiar to me, and the short story draws partly on that persistent and long-lived feeling. I'm sure the story was written while I was a master's candidate in the University of Iowa writing program; there are markings on the manuscript, probably by my graduate advisor (he underlined the "begrudged" remark, for example), but no critical comments. I remember him muttering disapprovingly about my writing, "Chekhovian, eh?" (For other, more complicated reasons, by the end of my first semester I stopped pursuing an MFA and earned an MA and then a PhD instead.)

 

The typescript of "On the Bus" was an early draft never revised any further. Reading it now, I'm aware of how much sentence level editing it needs, a question of prose style, but also how contrived that optimistic reversal at the end seems, hinting at a positive future for the main character. By the time I wrote it I was a college graduate, a former high school English teacher, a graduate student, and a husband, in many ways a different person than my main character. I'd like to think I was more accomplished, more mature, more settled than he, but I also recognize how familiar his insecurity, uncertainty, and isolation were to me. At least one family member objected to the focus on lovelorn bachelorhood, which made me wonder how to write a story that didn't draw in any way, no matter how remote, on my own individual psychology and background experiences.

 

None of my MFA classmates seemed to be writing Chekhovian short stories or tales with happy endings. I didn't know how I would become a different kind of writer. I stopped writing short stories once I left the MFA program.

 

 

The first story I read in the folder of my old short stories was titled "The End of Wisdom." I'm not certain when it was written but suspect it's from my undergraduate days. Certain narrative elements made me remember circumstances in my own experience that very likely were only a few years behind me. It was a tale of a boy's observation of parishioners at Catholic mass, contrasting his familiarity with an early Sunday morning service centered on children with his exposure to behaviors of adult attendees at a later service. Until the very end of the story, the reader shares the boy's perspective. Noel wakes on a Sunday morning to learn that his family have overslept; he and his mother have missed the nine o'clock "Children's Mass" and will have to attend the regular 12:00 service at St. Andrew's, a service he has never been to.

 

Noel thinks about the nine o'clock mass, realizing "it wasn't really piety that made him love" it. "It was sitting in special pews right up at the front of the church, next to Harry Seefeldt and Roger Shamus, who had both made their first communion with him. It was listening to Father Hubert talking especially to them, and not so much to the adults. It was singing from the children's hymnbook the songs they had practiced in church school every Wednesday before their First Communion Day." I'm not sure who Noel's friends are based on, though I had Catholic friends as a child, but immediately I conjure up the interior of St. Patrick's church, the one my family (except for my Presbyterian father) attended, and the experience of making my First Communion and regular attendance at the 9:15 Children's mass presided over by Father Roy Chrissy. Clearly, I'm drawing on familiar Sunday morning and Wednesday afternoon activities I experienced until well into my teens. Father Hubert draws strongly on my memories of Father Crissy: "Noel always thought that Father Hubert and God were very much alike; he could tell because Father always understood what they were saying in the Bible and he could always explain it so well to the children. Noel sometimes thought religion was really just being good and church was feeling good."

 

The adult mass is a troubling experience for Noel. Parishioners are preoccupied and distracted by the people around them: a young couple flirty and silly, an older couple grumpy and argumentative, a fat woman in their row impolite and surly, two teen boys sneaking out of the church before the mass starts, a single woman uncomfortable to find herself sitting in a pew near the only black man in the church. (One sign of the age of this story is that the black man is referred to as a negro, as my mother was adamant that we politely call such people.) The mass is presided over by Father Tiebolt, an older, less congenial, more remote priest than Father Hubert, who conducts the service somewhat disinterestedly. People are rude on the way to take communion and eager to leave before the mass has fully ended.

 

At the end of the story Noel's mother explains to his Catholic father why Noel came home unhappy. She encourages her husband to watch the people at the five o'clock mass and "think about how they look to a child just feeling the full majesty of the church." She remembers Father Hubert a week earlier preaching the line from Psalms: "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" and asks, "What is it when you don't fear, when you don't seem to care? Because that's what he saw." The story ends with the suggestion that mother and son both know "simultaneously and separately that nothing either of them said could bring back everything that had been lost that morning."

 

The story strikes me as rather moralistic or propagandistic, essentially arguing over proper behavior at church service while also suggesting how parishioners might become disenchanted or disengaged from religious practice and possibly from religion itself. I'm not sure when I wrote this, but I did stop attending Catholic services in my teens, later struggled to get involved again after marriage in a Catholic service, but ultimately stepped away from religion altogether. I sense a nostalgia here for the kind of involvement I had with the church in childhood; it influenced my moral and philosophical leanings for much of my early adult life by what it taught, though I would argue that honesty and empathy and compassion and kindness are all things we can practice without being dominated by doctrine.

 

So, I'm left to wonder: is "The End of Wisdom" urging a more considerate, conscientious commitment to practicing religion or is it justifying my own disengagement from it?

 

For the next few years after I graduated from college and married, I lived in an apartment in my hometown and taught 11th and 12th grade English classes in a small town on the Lake Ontario shoreline. Memories of those years flooded back when I started to write about two short stories composed while I taught at that high school and lived in that apartment and, in an earlier draft of this post, much more came out that didn't relate to the stories and had to be deleted. Most of my family still lived in my hometown then and we often visited them and enjoyed their company, but I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life in my hometown. My college had been only 70 miles away, an hour and a half's drive south, and my work now was 16 miles away, a half-hour's drive north. I'd seen little of the world beyond western New York. Actually, it was only because New York State required me to earn more than a bachelor's degree to keep on teaching that we ended up moving to Iowa so I could study writing in graduate school.

 

My first year of high school teaching had sometimes challenged my temperament, but over time, as I attempted to behave more like myself rather than pretending to be an authoritative and commanding figure, I began to feel pretty much at home in the role. My habit of writing often allowed me to step aside from my pedagogical persona. I occasionally published short reviews of television shows for the weekend edition of the Buffalo Evening News and continued to compose short fiction. Material I've unearthed from a folder of old typescripts from that period reveals that I drew on both my working environment and my residential situation for inspiration. Two completed stories I've found both remind me where I was then and what I imagined about my circumstances at the time.

 

"One of the Guys" is set in a men's faculty room in a small-town high school. Reading the opening almost instantaneously makes me envision both the setting that prompted it and the faces of the men I spent free periods with there at the time. The school had two separate faculty lounges, each gender-specific, on opposite wings of the building; rather than go into the faculty room just down the hall from my classroom, I quickly learned, I needed to navigate two long hallways to use the bathroom in the men's lounge. The short story centers on a young English teacher, newly hired, as he tries to connect with other male faculty, some of them military veterans his father's age, one young enough to have been their student who identifies with them completely. The story centers on the new teacher's frustrations with his peers and ends with him giving up on becoming one of the guys and finding community with his wife's elementary faculty friends.

 

"Agnes Dunrose's Hobby" was a completely different story, centered on an older woman's solitary life in a second-floor apartment and her efforts to interpret the lives of the people around her with whom she has no actual social contact. In my real life, the older woman who lived above us only complained about the noise in our apartment once, and we had little interaction with her, partly because we left early in the morning for our jobs in that country school district many miles away and also because we often spent free time elsewhere with my brother and his family or my parents or with friends we eventually made at work. Agnes Dunrose's hobby is spying on neighbors and culminates in her efforts to get a reaction from the newlywed couple downstairs by interfering with the temperature of their shower water. The young husband lurches away from the suddenly overheated flow, loses his balance in the bathtub, and dies when hits his head in the fall. The story ends with Agnes moving out of town to a retirement community where she might not be so isolated as in her apartment and perhaps less inclined to engage herself in a problematic hobby.

 

"One of the Guys" draws heavily on my own experience; "Agnes Dunrose's Hobby" arises out of imagining a fictional life. As I consider them together now, I discover some familiarity with their themes: individual isolation in different settings, one mostly social, the other mostly psychological, both ending with the main characters altering their environments. I have a strong suspicion that there may have been some kind of link between those main characters' behaviors and the mindset of the newlywed teacher who created them. I don't remember ever attempting to publish either of them. Reading them now, I don't have an urge to try.

 

 

My early fiction tended to draw on familiar circumstances and settings. Rereading it, I persistently identify, sometimes vaguely, sometimes sharply, real life individuals who inspired characters. Usually, I recognize myself in the protagonist who reacts to events and interacts with other characters. "The Albatross," however, breaks away from that routine somewhat. To write it, I had to inhabit the personality of someone I assumed was essentially unlike me.

 

The main character, Dr. Stephen Coleridge Barclay, an aging English professor at a small college, is unhappily married, drinks heavily, and combats loneliness through affairs with co-eds. He's waiting in a hotel room above a bar for his latest lover to arrive and as he thinks about her, he remembers the first one who was his mistress for a long time before she graduated. Their relationship, though transient, was one each of them valued. In flashbacks Barclay fondly remembers their time together, believing her to have been more sincere, more committed, more compassionate than any of those who succeeded her. He struggles to convince himself that this new relationship might evolve like that first one. At the end of the story, as they prepare to have sex, his new mistress asks him to recite a poem, as if that will make the moment more romantic or at least temper his unease.

 

The short story has two literary allusions that try to deepen the sense of what the main character wrestles with. In the final scene of my typescript Barclay starts to recite Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun . . .", which the girl might possibly find romantic but the reader, having learned of Barclay's sense of her physical and intellectual shortcomings compared to his first lover, should find painfully ironic. In the version of the story published in The Experimentalist, our college literary magazine, Shakespeare's sonnet is replaced by Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnet 43, which begins, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," possibly a more direct address. Both sonnets are declarations of love, but the Shakespeare quote internalizes Barclay's misgivings more and Browning's emphasizes his conflicted hypocrisy.

 

Barclay's middle name, Coleridge, links him to the poet best known for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Barclay's students and colleagues sometimes refer to him as that title character and, given not only his age but also his awareness of the dead albatross tied around the mariner's neck, Barclay also identifies with him. In my story, Barclay's albatross is entirely symbolic, a metaphor for his uncontrolled need for a young mistress, even one apparently accommodating but obviously insincere and not as genuinely affectionate as his first mistress. To convince himself to continue the affair, he tells her as he undresses, "You're no albatross. You're a bird of paradise."

 

When I wrote "The Albatross," I was a college student in my early twenties, sexually inexperienced, but somehow aware of a relationship between an older professor and a young woman I'd taken classes with. I'd been in one of his classes and knew his daughter, also a classmate of mine. When I reread the story, I can envision that man, that co-ed, the inn where their assignations take place, the streets of that college town. I'd taken good fiction writing courses there, in one composing fiction in the vein of Anton Chekhov and in both trying to inhabit the motives and the needs of someone other than myself. I must have given thought to the real-life situation of people I knew and wondered what would come of it. The story is essentially an attempt to imagine the psychological aftermath of such an affair on an aging teacher.

 

I published the story in The Experimentalist, probably assuming no one else would make the connection between fiction and real life. Several people did, and a few chided me for publicly exposing a relationship of which they too were aware. So, I was chagrined when my classmate who had been the real professor's lover approached me in the college center to talk about it. She and the professor had both read the story and discussed it together. To my surprise and embarrassed relief, they both felt I'd given a sympathetic and insightful reading of the future they faced. They knew they would break up when she graduated, and the professor dreaded her absence, his future emptied of the companionship she gave him. What would he do without her? Would he end up like Stephen Coleridge Barclay? I was pleased they thought me sympathetic.

 

I don't know what any reader who didn't know the background thought of the story. I know my classmate moved on; I don't know what the professor did. I think it may be the best story I ever wrote.

 

 

Notes: Bob Root, "The Albatross," The Experimentalist. Volume XII (Spring 1966): 39-45.

 

The Literary Magazine Project A Look at Geneseo's History Through Student Publications.