The Cerebral Catalyst

D.L. goes into a bank branch that looks like a split orange with spangled sunglasses. Because it is the third of the month, D.L. must stand in line with all the senior citizens and welfare mothers who are cashing their government checks.

"Some line," an old man says to D.L.

D.L. just nods.

"What do you do for a living?" the welfare mother in back of D.L. asks him.

"I'm a fiction writer," is what D.L. tells her. "An innovative fiction writer."

The old man in front of D.L. snorts. "This guy thinks he's too big to be called experimental. No, he calls himself innovative. What a crock!"

D.L. gets off the line, crawls under the red velvet rope to get out, slinks silently away. He goes to his study to write an innovative novel.

(For my own story I foresee immediate contempt followed eventually by an even securer status in a future Museum of Literary Culture. D.L. has taught me well.)

Some of his students think that D.L. looks like a psychotic D.H. Lawrence. Others claim he grew the beard only to lessen the effects of his huge nose. If you look at the dust jacket of his first novel, published in 1968 when they would publish anything, you will see D.L. clean-shaven. It is a jarring picture. On the dust jacket some blurber compared him to Malamud. Needless to say, that is never done today.

D.L.'s favorite word of criticism is resonant. Without the word resonant, an innovative fiction writer could not criticize a thing. If one of his students' stories is resonant, that story works. One time I brought in a story called "Resonance," but D.L. didn't like it and said it wasn't the least bit resonant. I sat through the class but I cried in the men's room afterwards.

(I'm not sure I like this story so far. I'm getting off the subject of D.L. Somehow these days most of my stories seem to be the fictional equivalents of all those recordings of "I've Got to Be Me.")

D.L. is not famous, but once an article about John Hawkes in The Village Voice mentioned a quote about Hawkes by D.L. The article did not identify D.L.; it just gave his name. D.L. came into class and said that that was the highest form of recognition. Most people who read the article just said, "Who?" when they read the quote by D.L. Of course half the people who read the article didn't know who John Hawkes was, either. As for myself, I would rather not know.

D.L. has been quoted (by me, in class) as saying, "There are only five American fiction writers worth reading today: John Hawkes, William Gass, Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme."

That is four by my count. Guess who the other one is.

(I don't like to spell things out for the reader. The Trobriand Islanders have no words for "why" or "because"; to those happy people, things just happen. Needless to say, Trobriand Islanders do not read any fiction, innovative or not.)

"Fiction is stranger than truth," D.L. pontificates. "And far more interesting."

"Every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end," D.L. will lecture us. "Preferably not in that order."

"I don't like 'touching' stories," D.L. says with a smirk on his bearded face. He rips my story to pieces — quite literally.

Again he has told me. None of my stories will ever "touch" D.L.

(It's now fashionable to put quotes around any word that might be challenged. Just another way of saying, "Don't hit me, I didn't really 'mean' it!")

D.L. has been married three times. Once he introduced me to the woman who broke up his second marriage. The woman didn't even know she had done it.

D.L.'s son is a little younger than me, and so D.L. asks me what Christmas presents he should give his son. "He lives with my first wife, and I don't know him," is what D.L. tells me. Silently he says: "And I don't want to know him, either." Aloud, to me, D.L. says something else: "He's the only nineteen-year-old in America who likes Robert Bresson movies." D.L. himself writes film criticism for some boring old quarterly.

D.L. is hated passionately by the English Department chairman. D.L. is hated restlessly by his first wife. D.L. is hated cruelly by his oldest son. D.L. is hated demurely by his second wife. D.L. is hated lovingly by his daughter. D.L. is hated casually by his third and present wife, the former Veronica Lape. D.L. is hated incessantly by his two youngest daughters, who are just children, after all. And of course D.L. is hated most of all by me.

"Never use the passive voice," D.L. will say in criticizing a story.

(A friend of mine argues that the single most beautiful line in all of French literature is Racine's "La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë." Not because the genealogy of Phèdre is inherently interesting, but just because the sound of the words themselves is beautiful. It takes all kinds, I suppose.)

D.L. has me go down to the college bookstore to see if they need any more copies of his most recently published book of innovative fiction.

All the copies of the book are still on the counter, all still unsold. I feel a little bad about this and tell D.L. they have sold only one since the last time I checked. He looks sad and I feel even sorrier for him. Being an innovative fiction writer is not an easy life. Of course, D.L. is also a full professor with tenure. He must make tons of money compared to what I make as a student aide.

D.L. and I go out to lunch where we always go, to McDonald's. It costs D.L. less than it costs me because he saves those coupons.

(Look, this story might not be very interesting to read, but then, is your own life really much more interesting? So don't blame me. Blame D.L. if you must blame someone. Because I said so, that's why.)

D.L. is in his study where none of his children can bother him. He rents it out. He is writing one of his stories in which the main characters are named Francis Sinatra, Bobby Mitchum, Hank Kissinger and Ginny Woolf. It is so funny to have characters with these names.

In D.L.'s newest story, the one still in his mind, a character named Freddy Dostoevesky writes a book called Freud and Parricide and is made chairman of the English Department because of it.

D.L. is not interested in writing about good, solid, external events and objects. As he himself has told me on several occasions, "Why should I be when a good, solid, external word like duty has been turned into a vague, uneasy, internal word like guilt?"

And then D.L. says if I don't help him out with the literary conference he is planning ("Can Literature and Publishing Co-Exist?"), I will really be letting him down.

(As Calvin Coolidge once — or maybe twice — said, "In public life it is sometimes necessary in order to appear really natural to be actually artificial." Them's my sentiments exactly.)

So I have got my revenge on D.L. I have made him a character in a story and placed him in the time and place he called America's armpit, Miami Beach in the 1950s — fifties Miami Beach with its uninhibited monuments to lavish and pretentious ignorance.

D.L. is sitting in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel. His most recent wife has divorced him. The Chairman of the English Department has had him dismissed, for good cause. (Having tenure didn't help D.L. one bit.) D.L.'s students are spreading vile rumors about him — all except the Jamaican boy in the class; he is spreading vile rumours.

D.L. is a beaten man. Even I have deserted him.

(And I will end the story there, leaving D.L. trapped in 1950s Miami Beach forever. He will never write another innovative story again. Of course, neither will I. But then I never got the hang of it anyway.)

______________________________________
posted 02.12.07.

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