I was thirteen and I couldn’t find the Herald-Tribune in Budapest, Hungary. Harmon Killebrew, Frank Howard, and Reggie Jackson were neck and neck in the home run race in the American League. If pressed at that point in my life, I would have admitted I had few thoughts in my head other than the obsessive, repetitive, statistical ones I had about baseball. My family was driving from Stockholm to Nerja, in southern Spain, and then eventually to England, during my father’s sabbatical year in Europe in 1969 and 1970. In Moscow I’d found a Herald-Tribune that was two weeks old, older than the issue I’d read in Helsinki almost a week before, but I bought it anyway to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of the box scores in the pennant race. We were staying on Margitsziget, an island in the middle of the Danube in Budapest. It should have been easier to find the American newspaper that was published in Paris, as we got closer to Austria. My birthday is in late September, and the regular season in major league baseball ends around that time. I told my parents and my brother (but not my ten-year-old sister) that the only present I wanted was a recent edition of the Herald-Tribune. They laughed.
Margitsziget was green and beautiful and full of spas and hotels. The island represented home and continuity as every hotel location did, but it was also foreignness personified for me, the very idea of the exotic and unfamiliar that was the experience of traveling through Europe in 1969. I walked the whole island, by myself, without telling my family where I was going. The one rule I observed was not to cross any of the bridges to the two parts of the city, Buda or Pest. But there was a large hotel just on the other side of the river, a Hilton Hotel, and I had a strong suspicion the Herald-Tribune would be there. It was not. I returned to Margitsziget and walked along the long tree-lined boulevard toward our hotel, and I saw my whole small family coming toward me a hundred yards away. They were angry, but so was I. My father proposed the simple idea of asking the concierge to order the paper for my birthday. That satisfied me, but it did not work. Only after we left the eastern bloc behind us, in Vienna, did I catch up on baseball, after the regular season was over. I understood that my fascination with the sport was largely irrelevant in the midst of all these unusual sights and smells and sounds of Europe in 1969, but I also yearned for a connection with the game I’d just begun to follow and love.
• • •
At the Magdalen College school in Oxford, England in January 1970, my father took my brother and me to meet the headmaster our first day of the school year. We’d missed the first term because we were in Spain until December. I would have been in eighth grade and my brother in ninth that year. I recall the headmaster thinking this was a problem. He said the school year was a continuous thread, and you could not just jump in and find your way. My father told the headmaster he’d tutored my brother and me in Latin and algebra, which was true, although it was easy to slip out of the house and walk down to the beach in Nerja. The headmaster introduced us to the boys who would show my brother and me to our respective classes. Neither boy seemed happy about this duty. When my boy and I rounded the corner of the building on our way to class, I ran into him, because he’d stopped, with his arms over his chest. “Listen, Yank,” he said. “I’m not showing you to your fucking classes. You’re on your own.” He ran away, and I did not follow immediately. I considered going back to the headmaster and asking for a new guide. I could hear my father and the man laughing. I decided to follow the boy at a distance, and when he entered a classroom I did too, going up to the master to see if I was enrolled. This pattern persisted for the rest of the school year. Boys ragged me, and a few wanted to beat me up. They were fortunately ineffective at beatings. Even some of my masters derided me and treated me as no teacher ever had in the U.S.
I had a physics teacher (who they called a master) at Magdalen. Most of the students openly disdained their masters (a novelty for me—in the U.S. we ridiculed our teachers during our non-class hours). Students acted out satires of the physics master’s teaching in front of the class while he lectured. This was because he spoke from a high solid desk that had gas jets on it so he could do experiments. The students performed below him and out of his sight, but he had to know something was going on. The class had a hard time controlling its giggles and outright laughter. When I first met this master I told him I was deaf in one ear and that I should sit in the second row on the left side, if at all possible. I’d only just learned to ask for this sort of dispensation. He looked at his desk for a moment, and then he said, “Sit in the back row, right side of the room.” I was stunned. I probably did not pay much attention to his class, and I badly failed most of the tests. My parents were worried about my low grades generally, and they told me, toward the end of the year, that these grades would not be sent to the U.S. The flimsiness of this argument shouldn’t have mollified me, but it did, and when the physics master told me to return to school a day after the spring term ended to retake my final exam, I was on the verge of great anger toward an adult outside the family for the first time in my life. I walked up to his desk and picked up the exam. I took it to a seat in the second row. He waited until I was seated and beginning to answer the questions on the paper. He cleared his throat, and he said, “Same position as always, Kiteley. Back row, right side.” This was enough for me. I stood up, ripped up the exam, returned to his desk and handed him the pieces, and I said, “Fuck you, sir.” I walked away feeling exultant and confident.
• • •
When we returned to Massachusetts in the summer of 1970, I’d to go out to the Volvo we bought in Sweden and listen to Minnesota Twins’ baseball games on the car radio. I would scroll through the radio stations after dark, when reception was much better (I was born in Minneapolis, which was the technical reason I was a fan of the Twins, but really we were ninety miles from Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, and I felt this nagging irritation with the big city to the east). I could receive Cleveland or Detroit and occasionally Chicago and Minneapolis stations. It was a magical form of travel on my part, alone in this car, listening to announcers I didn’t know well. It was a lonely experience. Even my brother, who also loved baseball, rarely joined me in this pursuit.
Once my neighbor across the street came over and knocked on the car window, startling and embarrassing me. I invited her in to the car, and we sat listening to the game for a while. She was a year behind me in school. I’d never paid much attention to girls. She wanted me to speak with my British accent, which I’d developed in response to the brutal harassment by my classmates at my school in Oxford. It pleased me that there was at least one good thing that resulted from the awful time there, but I also could tell that the accent was quickly diminishing as American life interfered with it. I worried that this girl would not want to talk to me when I no longer had that English accent. This turned out to be true. Perhaps she also learned I was interested in very little other than baseball. I don’t remember how I realized it had ended—or that it would never begin—but I do recall lying on my bed one long afternoon sobbing sometimes uncontrollably, sniffling much of the rest of the time, devastated and surprised by this emotional response to something I’d never before even imagined—a girlfriend, a woman in my life, a deep connection to another human being who was not family.
• • •
One of my classmates in ninth grade that year after Europe would improvise hour-long jokes in our world history class. Peter kept his eye on the clock, and he’d slowly start to get to the point before the class bell rang. “This is a joke that Peter told in an hour,” I said to Marina, the eight-year-old daughter of friends who live down the street from us (Marina’s now twice that age). My wife Cynthia and I were having dinner at the house of these friends. “I’m going to tell it to you in two minutes.”
A young school teacher in his twenties goes to Mexico City. Wandering down an alley he finds a little knick-knack shop, which he enters. He looks around for a while. On the top shelf he sees a skull. He asks the proprietor, “What is that skull?” The proprietor says, “It is the skull of Pancho Villa, famous Mexican bandit.” The school-teacher buys it. He’s very happy to own the skull of Pancho Villa.
Years later, after retiring, the school-teacher goes back to Mexico City. One day he happens to wander down that same alley, and he finds the same little shop. He walks in and he sees the same proprietor, aged as much as he has. He looks around and on the top shelf is another skull. He asks the proprietor, “What is that skull?” The proprietor replies, “That is the skull of Pancho Villa, famous Mexican bandit.” The man says, “I was here forty years ago and I bought something you said was the skull of Pancho Villa then.” Without missing a beat, the proprietor replies, “Yes, but that was the skull of Pancho Villa as a young man.”
Everyone groaned when I’d begun this story. The adults had heard the joke before. My wife said I told the story better than I usually did, because I’d cut it to the very bare minimum of detail. This is what she thought constituted a good story: efficiency, density, simplicity.
In Peter’s telling of the joke in ninth grade, we’d get the first skull within ten minutes, and by the time he got back to it, thirty or forty minutes later, we’d have completely forgotten about it, so its reappearance would be shocking and even funnier. Density is one virtue, but reeling out the line, letting the reader forget things, is certainly another.
But my great hobby-horse with fiction is efficiency. I want natural fiction, but with no waste. Models of this kind of efficiency are Isaac Babel, Grace Paley, Gary Lutz, and Diane Williams. The novel I finished a few years ago, The River Gods, has seventy-five chapters. None is more than four pages long. Most are two. Quite a few are what I call postcard stories. These postcard stories are very influenced by the person I send them to. I first started writing them at Yaddo, an artist colony. My girlfriend at that time gave me a handful of blank postcards and said, “Write me every day.” I didn’t know what to write to this woman, so I started sending her little stories. Many of them were about Egypt. I’d just come back from two years there, and I was already forgetting it, so I was writing about Egypt to recapture it for my second novel, I Know Many Songs, but I Cannot Sing.
In New York City in the early 1980s, when I was writing my first novel, I worked for a law book publisher. We had typewriters, but no computers. We did have these tiny, blank memo pads. I was writing Still Life with Insects in that office and I would have to hide it. I sometimes typed, but mostly I wrote by hand. I kept a couple of pieces of copy-work handy, in case my boss popped in. She was tall, so she could see over the cubicle walls well before getting to me. I found myself writing these brief, impulsive things for five minutes here or there. I tried hard to waste as much time as possible at that job.
At first, I wrote without any thought in my head, but eventually I started to direct myself. An image, a phrase, a smell. I’d use a sentence from one source and another sentence from another source, and I’d write one at the top of the postcard and the other at the bottom and then I’d just connect them with my own sentences.
• • •
I used the first-person pronoun as rarely as I could in Still Life with Insects, even though the book was told from a first-person point of view. My grandfather was the model for the main character in the book, and he spoke without much reference to himself in conversations and even in his own stories about himself. This restriction of the first-person pronoun seemed crucial to capturing his persona on paper. The Language poets (who practiced poetry against the model of the confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s) had a horror of the “I.” As beautiful, ground-breaking, and politically and linguistically adventurous as Language poetry was, it sometimes became solipsistic in the opposite way that the great confessional poems by Lowell and Sexton were. The original meaning of solipsism is the theory that the self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing that really exists. No one can deny this, technically, because we are locked in ourselves, and proof of anyone else’s existence is circumstantial. Writing is perhaps the only proof there is of the existence of other minds than our own.