TWO LETTERS by Dylan Brody |
by Dylan Brody |
|
A moving epistolary family saga
Dave, Is it strange to open an envelope in these e-mailing, blackberrying, IMing days of the far-flung future and find a creased letter? Even without the flying cars, the Pan-Am flights to the Satellite we were promised, the unfolding of letter-headed paper must seem antiquated, archaic. Also, I am typing the letter on a Smith-Corona portable typewriter rather than my computer. Wait. You know this typewriter. This is the same one. The one I had at Northfield in my dorm. I wonder if you remember as clearly as I the clacking of the keys giving up a slightly metallic echo against the close walls of that tiny room in East Gould. You cannot remember the warm, comradely safety that I felt as I typed and you loaded bong hits, a towel carefully stuffed into the crack between the door and the floor boards to keep the smell from escaping into the hallway. In the interest of full disclosure, let it be said here and now (the only time, I suppose, at which it is ever appropriate to say anything) that I did not sit down to write you a letter. I sat down to write a letter to my Mother whose own mother died last weekend. There is a great deal I want to say to her. My mother, that is. Not Grandma who's dead and whose funeral I will be attending in New Jersey this Sunday. The thought of writing that letter is daunting though so I'm starting with this one, an easier letter, to someone whom I love deeply but not with the same layers of confusion and ambivalence I feel toward my mother. This letter to you, you see, is a procrastination, a bit of stalling, a way to keep myself from getting down to the writing of that letter to Mom that seems more lengthy and troubling the less I write it. I am afraid I will be cruel again. Not just in the letter but at the funeral, too. I usually avoid funerals but my sister wanted me to come to this one. I'm not entirely sure why, but she did so I'm going. I probably ought to write her a letter too. Perhaps I never should have brought this typewriter down from the shelf. I brought down the typewriter because I became oddly inspired. I've been reading my wife's favorite book, J.D. Sallinger's Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (a terrific book which, by way of homage, I am tempted to quote here in its entirety) and I find as I read it I can practically hear the clacking of his keys, the raspberry-and-thump of the manual carriage return. Each time he self-consciously comments on his use of italics I am aware of the underlining that must have served in place of those self-same italics before publication. Am I the only man who remembers such things, who is aware of the difference in the rhythms of prose written by pen, by typewriter and by computer? When I listen to the dialogue on television it smacks of cathode rays and I know it to have been borne of a dull blue glow and only to have felt the raw revelation of black text on white paper much later when it was too late for the poor sentences to be rehabilitated into something humans might speak unstiltedly. In any case, an odd thing happened as I was reading the book. Or, rather, two odd things happened, their individual oddnae multiplying one another into one large oddness. About midway through the second part of the book, Buddy the narrator recounts (reprints, actually) a note sent to him by his late brother Seymour in which Seymour gives him advice on his writing and I was shocked to read a fictional man giving his fictional brother advice that was identical to advice I have given many times over the years to other writers who have come to me for advice or instruction. Only now as I write this paragraph does it occur to me that some young writer may later have read the book and felt betrayed, thinking I had stolen this bit of good writing advice from the novella and pawned it off as my own wisdom. When I read it in the book, I had no such thoughts. I had only a strange sense of sentimental and self-indulgent pride that I had independently come upon and offered up the same words of advice that were put in the mouth (or rather, the pen) of this much-loved if utterly fictitious dead man by this much- loved and deeply respected writer, a favorite not only of my wife but also of my father, my mother and a great many other literate and academic folk. That Sallinger and I had both come to the same idea as to how one approaches the start of a project affected me more deeply than I would expect such a coincidence to affect me. With this still in my mind or, to be accurate, in my solar plexus which is really where I tend to register emotional response of any sort, I continued reading and before I'd reached the end of that very page the narrator Buddy mentioned that he needed to stop writing for a time and go to bed, saying that first he would brush his tooth. This is something my wife says almost every night at bed time. I've neither questioned it, nor laughed particularly hard at it but seeing it in print I chuckled, wondering if she knew that she'd gotten it from this, her favorite book. Then I remembered that this was her favorite book in which I had found this piece of advice that I had been giving to writers for years. For the first time, after twelve and a half years of marriage, I was tapped on the shoulder by the sudden certainty that my wife actually loves me, the man I am, the man who thinks my thoughts and writes my words and speaks my advice, not somebody else whom she imagines me to be. This certainty moved me nearly to tears and made me want, very much, to be able to offer my mother the same sort of certainty as she deals with the loss of her own mother, the certainty that she is loved. I had a similar moment a few years ago with my father that – while it feels utterly connected and contiguous -- surely requires or at the very least deserves a brand new shiny paragraph of its own. My father came to Los Angeles on a trip for M.I.T. I think he was asking wealthy people for money to build a theater facility and while he was here he set aside some time to come out to the house and drink wine with me and my wife on the patio where he's allowed to smoke. In a recent e-mail exchange I had told my father in more detail than I ever had about my experiences in England when I was there studying theater, before I had figured out that I was not going to be an actor. In this correspondence (Not this correspondence. The one with my father.) I'd mentioned that while I was in England I'd stumbled onto my own approach to acting that worked very well for me but infuriated my British acting teachers who wanted me to learn their systematic technique which they insisted was the only right way to act well on stage and which was, it seemed to me, entirely antithetical to my newly discovered process. My father asked me for details about my acting style and I explained to him what I had found. I was able to articulate for him my system for reading the script, learning the words organically rather than through rote memorization and turning both rehearsal and performance into tightly scripted improvisation. When I'd finished he stubbed out a cigarette that hissed a little bit in the residual water from where I'd cleaned the ashtray in preparation for the arrival of a smoker in our household and lit a new one before he said in a voice that sounded just a little bit awed, "This is exactly what I've been trying to get across to my students since I started teaching acting." Then we sat there together both knowing in a new way that each of us was actually the person the other one loved and knowing in an only slightly guilty way that our love of each other was more than slightly narcissistic. I suppose some of that infects my love for you as well. I used to think that I loved you because you challenged me, because you not only kept up with my banter but forced me to work harder at it. I thought that I enjoyed you as an athlete enjoys a fellow competitor. The truth, though, is far uglier, I suspect. The pleasure I take in spending time with you probably grows far more from the sheer joy of knowing that there is someone else in the world who is so like me, who thinks so much the way I do, who laughs at the same wordplays and builds conversations around the same references. When I met you in high school, when you beat me out for the role I wanted so badly and then played the role so well, it was the first time I had ever met someone whom I saw neither as a hero to be worshipped nor as a lesser intellect to be dismissed. I had lived lonely in a world where those were all I knew. I think now that it's good that I brought down the typewriter for this letter. It keeps me from distracting myself with internet searches. Years ago, when this typewriter was my primary writing tool, a close friend of mine owned a computer. He proudly showed me the way in which he could write a paragraph for a college paper and then rewrite it without having to retype the whole page or use scotch tape and scissors. I scoffed at the absurdity of spending a thousand dollars for such a machine when retyping was free and scotch tape cheap but secretly I envied him his magical Apple Computer and imagined how productive and prolific I could be with such a machine. Now that I have a computer and a broadband connection and a personal website I find I write almost exactly as much as I did before and spend an embarrassing amount of time searching for and then downloading humiliatingly tame fetish-specific pornography. It makes me worry that, were a muse to appear in my office, draped in gauze and dancing on point, her calf muscles elegantly limned by the window-warped light of the setting sun, her fingers simultaneously poised to perfection and utterly relaxed, I might fail to notice that she brought with her an offer of sublime inspiration and instead blurt out a request for a quick hand job, a missed opportunity which, when recognized only much later, I would fraudulently dismiss as inconsequential with the rationalization that I had gotten a good story out of it anyway. Sallinger talks about the interest some people take in the lurid secrets of those poets and writers whose work they enjoy, and the tendency to enjoy and remember those bits of personal information far more powerfully than the works themselves. He also talks about the tendency of writers and poets and great artists of all sorts to have dark character flaws, obsessions and perverse predilections. I think there's a harder thing here that even he, ruthlessly bashed against the rocks of honesty as he is by his whitewater stream of consciousness, fails to recognize. I suspect that everyone – or, if "everyone" is too broad a generalization then let me just say almost everyone – has dark, hidden flaws, obsessive perversions and shame-laden secrets hidden, if not skeleton-like in closets then very likely in kitchen drawers under keys to locks long changed or misfolded maps of upstate NY that they refuse to throw away for reasons they have never been able to explain to their spouses or in boxes under their beds which hold comic book collections that they laugh easily about and way down at the bottom other magazines that they've not looked at since adolescence but would be able to describe page-by-page were it not for their complete inability to admit even their existence. The fascination with the dark secrets of beloved and admired artists is not, in fact, a demented preoccupation with back- story but rather a relieved appreciation for proof that the audient (the obvious, if newly-minted singular) is not entirely alone in his or her dark secrecy and even, perhaps an enthusiastic response to personal similarity that hints at some unfulfilled but privately cherished artistic potential. So tomorrow I will fly East for this funeral and I will put effort into not being cruel to my mother when in fact what I want is to let her feel entirely loved for who she is which is difficult because her thoughts, her secrets, her dark shame are not enough like mine for me to embrace them as my own. I do not know them all but the near-umbilical connection I know she craves repulses me so much that even as I seek connection to her and she to me, I claw, bloody and merciless in what feels like a bid for sheer survival at the withering cord and then hate myself for being an infant. I am afraid of funerals. It's not the dead people that scare me or the sense of my own mortality. It's the comedy Tourettes. The more emotionally charged a situation is, the more jokes I write. The more somber the people around me become, the more difficulty I have keeping the jokes from spitting out of my mouth. I can feel joke-telling tension forming in my throat even now, tension that years of professional performing have done away with behind the microphone but that return when I am near family, when I am with those who knew me when jokes were not my profession but my defense. In the past four days since my Grandmother's death I have written and performed five new minutes on her Alzheimer's decline and one new particularly caustic joke about my mother, all funny, all work that will probably remain in my act long after this trip, none appropriate for me to have at the forefront of my inconsiderate mind as I fly to see the people who would be least ready to profit from their entertainment value. Would you mind terribly if I call you from time to time this weekend on my cell phone, blurt out some bit of incomprehensible, contextual humor and then hang up before some grieving aunt sees me on the phone and takes umbrage at my inappropriate timing? I suppose that's stupid. Just do me this favor. Over the course of this weekend, please occasionally think of me and imagine me muttering something wry and hilarious about the nature of life and death, the razor thin moment between being spoon-fed Cream of Wheat and all debts being erased, observations about motions that one employs only in departures for Buffalo or to escape a mortal coil. I think I'm braced. I've finished a glass of scotch during the writing of this letter. It is best that I get on to the other one, the hard one now, before the moment is gone and its reception can come only as an insensitive afterthought. Dylan ______________________ Dear Mom, I'm so sorry to hear about your mother. I'll be there. I arrive on the 5:30 flight on American Airlines. Love, Dylan This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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