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  I only wish my brother had lived to see my first novel in a bookstore window. But he died on June 30, 1982, in his bathtub in Pittsburgh, when he slipped and fell, drowning in less than an inch of water. My first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, was published five years later. For years I had been writing a dreadful first novel called The Betrayal of Sam Pepper, about a woman in her mid-twenties living in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and feuding with a neighbor who has betrayed her boyfriend—in other words, a woman very much like me. How I toiled over that mess, staying up late at night to revise the pages I’d written in hotels on layovers as a TWA flight attendant. Some chapters sounded very much like imitation Hemingway, some like imitation Fitzgerald—

  which is exactly what they were. The plot meandered and grew preposterous, the dialogue was stilted, characters appeared and then vanished from the story, forgotten. Hundreds of handwritten pages.

  The summer that my brother died, I moved home to be with my parents, until one day in August my mother told me to leave, to “go and live your life.” What a gift that was, to free me from their grief. A few weeks later, I boarded an Amtrak train to New York City, my clothes and manuscript in a Hefty trash bag, $1,000 in my front jeans pocket. I moved into a tiny sublet on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village, with a door topped with a piece of foam on a sawhorse for a bed. I had never lived alone and wasn’t actually sure what to do. So I did what I always did—I wrote. Except after what had happened to me that summer, The Betrayal of Sam Pepper seemed banal and facile and dull—which it was. I gathered all those hundreds of pages and threw them in the dumpster in front of my building. Then I sat down at my newly acquired electric typewriter and typed: “To Sparrow her father was a man standing in front of a lime green VW van . . .” The first line of my first published novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine.

  I began writing it the September after Skip died, trying, I see now, to understand what happened to him, to my family. I once heard an interview with the writer Kaye Gibbons in which she said all of her novels are about the death of her mother. Confused, the interviewer notes that none of her novels are about that. Gibbons said, “Oh, yes they are. Every one.” Nowhere in that novel does a character resembling my brother appear, yet to me he is on every page.

  Like many first novels, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine tackled a lot of themes and topics: grief, friendship, love (romantic, parental, first love), cancer, the upheaval of the 1960s, the materialism of the 1980s, and even more. Overly ambitious perhaps, but I wanted those five layers that Steinbeck wrote about. All those years ago, on that Christmas when I sat on my yellow-and-white gingham bedspread and read The Grapes of Wrath, I understood viscerally and intellectually how good books illuminate so much more than the story on the surface, as Paley would say. True, the Joads are “a people in flight,” and the plot follows that flight from Oklahoma to California. But Steinbeck is also writing about the post-Depression urge for mobility and striving, political protests, the American Dream, desperate misery and suffering, disillusionment, and somehow hope. How I knew this as a sixteen-year-old reader, with no one with whom to share my ideas about literature, I cannot say. But I did know it, and I knew too that all I had to do to make my own dream of becoming a writer come true was to write every day, and to read every book I could get my hands on, to spread pages with shining.

  Lesson 6: How to Fall in Love with Language

  • Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows BY ROD MCKUEN •

  “ONOMATOPOEIA,” MY EIGHTH-GRADE ENGLISH TEACHER said. Then she wrote the strange word on the board. “A word that imitates the natural sound of the thing,” she continued.

  I copied the word into my notebook, my mind already excited by this new thing, this word with too many vowels.

  “Whoosh,” she was saying. “Cock-a-doodle-doo. Splash. Bang.”

  Wait. There was a word for that? This was my first introduction to the world of literary devices, and I felt like a door had just opened into a kingdom where I belonged.

  The teacher told us to write down examples of onomatopoeia, and once I began, I couldn’t stop.

  Rat-a-tat-tat. Plop. Slap. Rustle. Cuckoo.

  I filled one lined page and began another. Buzz! Boom! Onomatopoeia!

  That year, I was trying not to be the kid who always raised her hand with the right answer, the kid who kept asking questions long after the lesson had ended. My endless curiosity for learning, my hunger to discuss everything with anyone, even sometimes exhausted my teachers. It definitely irritated my classmates. I had vowed to stop. But when the teacher asked for some examples of onomatopoeia, I couldn’t control myself. I stood and read my forty-two examples, so thrilled by the sounds of those words and the fact that there was actually a name for them that when I’d read all the ones I’d written down, I kept talking because more examples of this lovely thing were still popping into my head.

  “Snap, crackle, pop!” I said, delighted.

  My classmates either glared at me or turned their glazed eyes toward the window, where autumn had just started to announce itself with a spattering of red and yellow leaves.

  The teacher thanked me, then asked me to sit down, please.

  The class clown said, “Belch,” and everyone laughed. Except me. I was too busy to join in.

  I GREW UP in a family that spoke Italian. In fact, most of the people in my neighborhood spoke Italian—black-clad women toting handmade baskets full of eggplants and tomatoes they’d grown, mustachioed men sitting at card tables on the sidewalk playing cards and smoking stogies. Our houses held two or three generations, our yards were gardens and orchards and chicken coops (no swing sets or tree houses), shrines to the Virgin Mary sat at the front door, and Italian filled the air. My great-grandmother spoke only Italian, no English. My grandmother spoke broken English. My mother and her siblings moved back and forth between the two languages, even when they were sitting around the kitchen table playing cards or gossiping. Usually they slipped into Italian when they didn’t want us kids to understand what they were saying, perhaps about scoundrel uncles or loose women.

  We were forbidden from learning Italian because these three generations had suffered so much cruelty and prejudice for being immigrants. They were made fun of for the lunches they brought to school, the smell of garlic and onions that emanated from their kitchens, their olive skin and large noses and larger families. They were called “wops” and “guineas”; they were told they were greasy and dirty. No, the older generations decided, we were going to be spared all that. We were going to be American. So Italian floated around me like a pleasant fog, a kind of poetry, I realize now. The older cousins mastered the swearwords, and taught those to us. They felt delicious on my tongue, those foreign dirty words, forbidden.

  Auntie Angie used to sit with me when I was little and read the stories I’d written. There were seven girls and three boys in my mother’s family, and Auntie Angie was the one who never had a daughter. Her son Stephen was the oldest of all the cousins, exactly ten years older than me, so that by the time I was in school he was off to college and then onto his life. Auntie Angie loved all her nieces, exotic birds in ruffled dresses.

  One afternoon, when I was seven or eight, as I sat beside her at the enamel-topped kitchen table, she produced from the depths of her handbag a neatly folded newspaper clipping. She smoothed it out and told me to read it out loud.

  “ ‘I never saw a Purple Cow,’ ” I read. “ ‘I never hope to see one. But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one!’ ”

  Auntie Angie hooted with laughter. “This guy, Ogden Nash, he makes the best rhymes!”

  Why this poem was in the newspaper, or how Auntie Angie had heard of Ogden Nash, I cannot say. What I do know is that reading that nonsense poem out loud, feeling the rhymes slide off my tongue, reaching the delightful ending—I’d rather see than be one!—was an experience that I still can’t describe, like the first time you ride your bike without training wheels or watch television in
color instead of black and white. A world opened up.

  Perhaps seeing my surprised expression, Auntie Angie said, “It’s a poem. It rhymes.”

  Poem. Rhyme. Still a wonderful mystery even as I read it over and over, with Auntie Angie explaining that “cow” and “anyhow” rhyme.

  Finally she went back into that bottomless handbag and retrieved a small lined notebook and Bic pen. “Here,” she said, “you write down some rhymes.”

  I stared at the blank paper until Auntie Angie, muttering, “Jesus, let me start,” made columns with words at the top: “Hair.” “Car.” “Dog.” Not unlike the day years later when I understood onomatopoeia, I began to write, slowly at first and then with wild abandon. Words tumbled from my brain. I was rhyming!

  Auntie Angie lit a fresh Pall Mall and checked my list from time to time, but mostly went back to talking with her sisters. Before she left, she turned to a fresh page in the notebook and said, “When I come back, find a rhyme for this word.” And in perfect block letters, she wrote: PURPLE.

  For several agonizing days, I struggled unsuccessfully to find a word that rhymed with “purple.” Maybe she would forget, I hoped. Maybe she wouldn’t come back. Neither of these possibilities were even remotely likely to happen. Auntie Angie never forgot anything. And, like all of my aunts and uncles, she came to visit three or four or even five times a week. Sure enough, one afternoon I came home from school and there she was, Pall Mall dangling between her red-lipsticked lips.

  “Well?” she asked almost immediately.

  I swallowed hard and reluctantly admitted, “No word rhymes with purple.”

  “Ha! That’s not what our friend Ogden Nash says!”

  Years later I would learn that Ogden Nash hadn’t invented that nonsense rhyme. But at that moment, I hated him. And maybe even Auntie Angie.

  “Maple surple rhymes with purple!” Auntie Angie said, and laughed good and hard.

  I frowned. Maple surple wasn’t a thing or a word. But slowly I understood. Words and rhymes were fun. You could play with them, mix them up, turn them around, rearrange letters, make things up. Grinning, I climbed onto Auntie Angie’s lap. She dug into that giant handbag again, pulled out the notebook and pen, and told me to do some rhyming. Yes, I was back in love with Auntie Angie, but I was in love with something else too, something big and strange and thrilling: language.

  FIRST THERE WAS onomatopoeia, and then there was simile—as blue as the sky, as blue as denim, blue like the morning, I wrote—and then metaphor and haiku and sonnets. Suddenly my world of prose was broken up and all I wanted to do was write poetry. We read “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” and “Richard Cory” and “The Road Not Taken.” We got extra credit for memorizing Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village.” How I loved sitting alone in my room, saying that poem aloud: Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, / Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain . . .

  It did not occur to me that somewhere in the library sat volumes of poetry. It seemed to me a precious thing, a poem, and I could not begin to imagine where poems resided. But one night as I played my favorite album, Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, it struck me that its eponymous song was actually a poem. Wasn’t darkness, my old friend personification? And words like silent raindrops fell a simile? The neon God a metaphor? I played the song over and over, a notebook in hand, teasing out its meaning. Then I turned my attention to I am a rock—metaphor! I am an island! When we had to write a paper on our favorite poet, my classmate Nancy wrote hers on Robert Frost and Steven wrote his on Edgar Allan Poe. But me, I wrote mine on Paul Simon.

  ONE SATURDAY WHEN I was in tenth grade, as I made my circuit around the Warwick Mall, a book caught my eye in the window at Waldenbooks. Slim, with an electric-blue cover and yellow and white letters that reminded me of a Peter Max poster, it read Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows in yellow, and above it, in white, the name Rod McKuen. Beside it was another Rod McKuen book, Lonesome Cities. Also slim, with a moody gray cover of clouds and, in the same psychedelic typeface, the title in hot pink. I went inside the bookstore, and picked up Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows.

  “The words within these pages are for music,” the inside flap read. “They sing of love lost and found and lost again. They are hymns to the dying, sonnets to the summer and verses of the joy of being wanted—even for a night.” All of the poems were written by Rod McKuen, the flap said, one of the finest chansonniers in the country. Later, of course, back at home, I went directly to my Reader’s Digest dictionary and looked up the word “chansonnier”: a poet-songwriter, solitary singer, who sang his or her own songs. But standing there with that book in my hand, it only mattered that I was holding a book of poetry, a book that spoke of dying and summer and loneliness, the very things that I paced my room worrying about at night.

  The poems themselves were slight, most just two or three short stanzas. But they were so profound, I thought. They weren’t like the few we’d read in school, which though I’d loved their rhythm and rhyme were formal and complicated. These poems by Rod McKuen seemed to speak directly to me, perhaps directly to every teenager in 1970. “Sometimes I think people were meant to be strangers . . .” Why at the tender age of fourteen I felt so lonely and alienated I cannot say. But when Paul Simon sang, “I am a rock, I am an island,” my heart screamed, “I am too!” And when Rod McKuen wrote about not getting close to others to avoid damaging your heart, it sounded like he had read what was in my heart.

  I knew nothing of love, having only kissed a boy once at the Rocky Point amusement park the summer before. But I believed what Rod McKuen wrote: “I know that love is worth all the time it takes to find.” “Think of that,” he said, “when all the world seems made of . . . empty pockets.” I too would be “content to live on the sound your stomach makes,” content to eat “marmalade and oysters for breakfast.” “If you keep the empty heart alive a little longer / love will come. / It always does . . .” he wrote in “Some Thoughts for Benson Green on His 27th Birthday.” Yes! I thought as I read. I could keep my empty heart alive!

  In “Spring Song” he asked: “Where were you when I was growing up and needed somebody?” Standing in that Waldenbooks, I began to weep when I read that line. As much as I’d loved to carefully write the rhyme patterns on poems at school and to ponder their meanings, Rod McKuen’s free-form poems made me feel like he was whispering secrets to me. I memorized the simile that ended “State Beach”—“the rain comes down like tears”—and wrote it in my purple lined notebook with all the other snippets of songs and sentences I collected there.

  I don’t remember how much the book cost, surely no more than six or seven dollars, but whatever it cost was too expensive for me. Instead, every Saturday when I went to the mall, I stood memorizing the poems in Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows, and later in Listen to the Warm and Lonesome Cities. Even now, long after I’ve learned better poems, long after I’ve fallen in love with E. E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, I can still recite Rod McKuen’s poem “Ellen’s Eyes”: “All the space is taken up / remembering Ellen’s eyes.”

  FROM THE DISTANCE of so many decades, I understand the appeal to a yearning, dreamy young girl of a chansonnier who wrote about the beach and the rain, both of which remain important to me. I even understand how all that loneliness spoke to me, a girl who felt alone in the world in which she lived. But I see too how those poems reflected my yearning to leave my familiar world. And in 1970, when teenagers left home, they went to San Francisco. The Summer of Love had been just the year before, and magazines and newspapers printed photographs of hippies every day, long-haired girls with flowers in their hair and blue-jeaned barefoot boys in Haight-Ashbury. Even a group as seemingly benign as the Cowsills sang about loving the flower girl, who sits smiling in the rain with flowers in her hair—Flowers everywhere!

  Part of what seduced me on that long-ago Saturday afternoon at the Warwick Mall was the poetry of Kearny Street and Sausalito, of hills
and fog, of San Francisco. Years later, when I went to San Francisco for the first time, I got a map from the hotel concierge and had him point out Stanyan Street to me. Then I made my way there, to Haight-Ashbury and that street lined with Victorian houses. All of the girls who wore flowers in their hair were long gone by then, and Stanyan Street looked very different from what I’d imagined. Yet when I looked up at the street sign with its name on it, I remembered the poem of that name: “I have total recall of you / and Stanyan Street / because I know it will be important later . . .”

  How could I know all those years ago how important these words and Paul Simon’s and Ogden Nash’s and that afternoon when the world broke open and I learned about onomatopoeia would be? How all of these things, these poems, turned me into a lover of language and its infinite joys. Pop! Boom! In that moment on Stanyan Street, I saw that girl standing in that bookstore in that mall, clutching a slim neon-blue volume of poems that promised someday she would fall in love, be loved, and find herself in San Francisco. Even that young girl knew that such is the power of poetry, a gift that stayed with her the rest of her life.

  Lesson 7: How to Be Curious

  • A Stone for Danny Fisher BY HAROLD ROBBINS •