I immediately wrote a novel, something I’d always wanted to do, a wildly surrealistic manuscript full of every kind of slang I’d ever heard. It took one year. My agent in New York said he thought it might be “a very important book.” He sent it out 16 times. Some of the best editors in the country agonized over it, praised it, even guessed someone might make a lot of money with it. A Trip on the Superchief. Nobody every published it. I took a year off, working as a caseworker for Welfare in New York City. I needed the money and thought a writer ought to know the world. When I’d saved enough I went to tropical Jamaica, and first-drafted another novel. Coyote in Massiveshaft. Then I crewed a sailboat to California and hitchhiked home to Oregon. My novel hadn’t sold, but my life wasn’t suffering because of it. I found another lady in 1970, the year I received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to finish the second novel. My agent hated the manuscript and sent it nowhere. He called it “brilliant from paragraph to paragraph, but. . the navel watching of a pot smoker.” I sent it some places to learn whether it was as disgusting as he thought. Editors who’d loved the first novel hated the second. One man cited “personal reasons.” When I read a few pages now, the first novel embarrasses me, the second seems great fun with a lot of serious comments to make. Later I got pulled into the book about the dead Indians. That was my own fault. Starting a different book entirely and needing a chapter about Indians, I looked up the people who used to live along the Columbia River where I live. They drew me in. They’d been one of the richest, thickest populated, most successful peoples in North America, then winked out in a great malaria epidemic, a 90 percent dieback during the first three weeks of August, 1830. Chinook we called them. Nobody had written a decent book about them. Had I been accustomed to writing nonfiction, I’d have found a publisher before I invested 2'h years in research and writing a book that would fall into the crack between scholarly and popular. Another dead baby. The summer of 1979 my agent rejected Barefoot in Rainy Eden as having no national appeal. Later that month my mother died. While I was in California burying my mother, the woman I’d been living with for 5'E years fell in love with a carpenter. Within a month she moved herself and her two very loveable kids out. Women are so sensitive to a man’s career. She had other reasons as well, no doubt, and love is all-compelling. I’d been working as handyman half-time at Bud Clark’s tavern, but had lost even that job in an altercation with the janitor, who had an ironbound agreement with the boss. I was so deep in my book I just kept writing. Small blows leave only scar tissue; hard knocks can wake you from your trance. I was 44 that summer and hadn’t published anything in 9 years. A woman up the street was trying to have my dog killed too. I put myself back together and finished the Chinook book. I started it around to the publishers and ran away from home again. Frugal years had taught me how to live on little, and when I worked I saved half. With some inheritance money left by my mother, I backpacked around the Pacific Rim, clockwise, eating at street stalls, sleeping in hostels, enjoying and learning for two years. Having no wife, no children, no job or commitment or much to hope for, I was free. Praise failure! When I returned to Portland in 1978 I was not entirely sure I was a writer, but I did like to write. I tried to sell the agent on a book about my travels, but he snorted at what I sent him. Scattered back across the desert, in addition to the two novels and the Indian book, lay the corpses of short stories, essays, film proposals, first drafts of other novels and even a pornograph. At the height of the pornography wave, even my dirty book didn’t sell. Once for a year I didn’t write at all, trying to weasel out of my 20-year contract with misery. I was so clearly a loser by then that it was hard to explain to myself, let alone to people I met, “What do you do for a living?” they asked, and I had no answer. A writer, they knew, is one who publishes. “But what do you do for a living'?" they needed to know. - & I 'I& j _ nO ^0 w ri^fo ie l^ in i®5^ ine c l “ Yet I could never figure out what else I wanted to do. Other occupations seemed tawdry and pointless. A writer, finally, is one who writes, naked as a jaybird in the emptiness of his mind. During those lean years I made my daily peace with failure. A writer is particularly prey to voices incessantly yammering inside his skull. When all the voices talk about the first couple of hours in the morning is failure, the task of getting my mind deep enough into my story to write /I became burdensome. Along the way I came across some quotes to hang before my typewriter. “Perseverance Furthers,” was one. A mystic promise I found hopeful. All I seemed to have going for me was perseverence. Or was I only damn-fool stubborn? Other people seemed to succeed. Only I languished. Were friends watching me with pity? A no-talent guy, in over his head? The best quote above my typewriter was Ho Chi Minh’s: “To be a man you must endure the pestle of misfortune.” I ‘ meditated Ho’s pestle and the getting of manhood a long time. Wisdom through blows, as though the blows themselves were kisses of fortune. Ho stayed on my wall a long time. Writing seemed a good path toward growth and wisdom. It made me examine everything intensely, selecting among building blocks more complex than any stonemason’s. Writing taught revision, which is craft. Concentration. Endurance. When nothing worked, I tried 9*1 harder. I came to see writing as my way of learning, about the world and myself. A true path, one of the meanest there is. It affixes you to words, forces every note to have an exact meaning, is excessively left brain, and sometimes hurts. That pestle pounds substantially hard. In 1979, after 13 years and 3 months, my product began to move again. A friend invited me to recite a Chinook myth at the local arts celebration. A slick regional magazine asked for a couple of articles. A local weekly wondered if I’d write a column about the outdoors. I’d reached the far side of my desert. Let’s assume I broke two mirrors in 1966, then got part of a year off for good behavior. I had published two exceedingly tiny articles in 13 years, and two or three previously published short stories had appeared in anthologies. Successes small as shrubs produced slow increases of courage. Writing requires some faith that your coinage will not ring hollow or leaden in peoples’ ears. After awhile I began offering more ambitious pieces. Those sold too. I was in the scrub trees. The magazine that banned me began to feature my work again. Like other medium-size cities, Puddle City doesn’t believe in its own unless mirrored by success elsewhere. If you’re any good, what are you doing here? we ask each other. I’d have to hurl myself at the big trees again, ignoring the rough bark of rejection, my only fuel a diminished faith in my own correctness. Yet, what pleasure to see my work in print again. I’d known people for 10 years who’d accepted that I was a writer without ever reading a word I’d written. Twenty years into my career I was still trying to get started. Success had certainly eluded me. Yet, what had I lost? Looking back at myself at 27, barely starting to learn and already so eager to succeed, I saw good reasons why success might have proved harmful. Inflated my ego and stiffened my style. Fixed me on whatever made me successful, doomed to try, as do a lot of successful artists, to repeat again and again whatever worked. Made me think myself meritorious through personal greatness, when really only riding a fortuitous breeze that suited time and media. Isn’t a real life breaking free to follow your star wherever it leads? For that twisty path, failure keeps you lean and limber. Or burns you out early. Sure, that’s a risk, but life is a cross-country adventure, not a highway to the bank. And while it must be possible to follow the 20 Clinton St. Quarterly— Spring, 1988
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