OCR Text |
Show up for the verdict. But in a moment I was to hearit: “T think it’s lousy,” my father said. I couldn’t look up. I was ashamed of my eyes getting wet. “Ben, sometimes I don’t understand you,” my mother was saying. “This is just a little boy. You’re not in your studio now. These are the first lines of poetry he’s ever writ‘ten. He needs encouragement.” “J don’t know why,” my father held his ground. “Isn’t there enough lousy poetry in the world already? I don’t know any law that says Buddy has to becomea poet.” ~ I forget what my mother said. I wasn’t hearing so well because it is hard to hear clearly when your head is making its own sounds of crying. On myleft, she was saying soothing things to me. and critical things of my father. But I clearly remember his self-defense : “Look, I pay my best writers $2,000 a week. All afternoon I’ve been tearing apart their stuff. I only pay Buddy 50 cents a week. And you’re trying to tell me I don’t have a right to tear apart his stuff if I think it’s lousy!” That expressive vernacular adjec- tive hit me over the heart like a hard fist. I couldn’t stand it another second, Leaving untouched the choco- late soufflé, my favorite dessert, I ran from the dining room~bawling. I staggered up to my room and threw myself on the bed and sobbed. When I had cried the worst of the disap- pointment out of me, I could hear my parents still quarreling over my first poem at the dinner table. W. C. Martin of Skokie. Page 4: Eastfoto. Page 5: Wide World. Z Page 10: San Francisco Examines. “What is this?” Father glowered as he picked up my poem from his plate. But it wasn’t until I was at work on myfirst novel, a dozen years later, HAT MAYhavebeen the end of the EEsetaetek not of its significance for me. Inevitably the family wounds began to knit. My mother began talking to my father again. My father asked me whether I would like to go to a prize fight. This was his favorite recreation, and I learned at a tender age to value the prowess of our California champions, I even began committing poetry again, though of course I dared not expose it to my father. A few years later I took a second look at that first poem, and reluctantly I had to agree with my father’s harsh judgment. It was a pretty lousy poem. After a while, I worked up the courage to show him something new, a primitive short story written in what I fancied to be. the dark Russian manner. My father thought it was overwritten but not | hopeless. I was learning to rewrite. And my mother was learning that she could criticize me without crushing. me. You might say we were all learning. I was going on 12. ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MIKOS that the true meaning of that painful “first poem” experience dawned — on me. I had written a first chapter, but I didn’t think it was good enough. I wanted to do it over. My editor, a wise hand who had counseled O’Neill and Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner, told me not to worry, to keep on going, the first in fact all of us in life, needs that mother force, the loving force from which all creation flows; and yet the mother force alone is incomplete, even misleading, finally destructive, without the father force to caution, “Watch. Listen. Review. Improve.” Sometimes you find these opposing forces personified in your editors, your associates, your friends, your loved ones. But finally you must chapter was fine. Keep writing, just let it flow, it’s wonderful, he encour- counterpoise these opposites within yourself: first, the confidence to go aged me. Only when it was all fin- forward, to do, to become; second, to temper rampant self-approval with hardheaded, realistic self-appraisal, the father discipline that ished and I was in a triumphant glow of achievement did he take me down a peg. “That chapter may be a little weak at that. If. I-were you, I'd look at it again.” Now, on the crest of having written a novel, I could absorb a sharp critical blow. As I worked my way into other books and plays and films, it became barges into your ivory tower and with a painful truth jars your reverie of creative self-glorification. Those conflicting but complimen- tary voices of my childhood echo down through the years—wonderful, clearer and clearer to me how fortunate I had been to have had a mother who said, “Buddy, did you lousy, really write this—I think it’s won- so as not to capsize before either. Be- derful!” and a father who shook his head no and drove meto tears with tween the two poles of affirmation and doubt, both in the nameof love, I try to follow my true course. his, “I think it’s lousy.” A writer, DOES Gertine : wonderful, lousy—like two powerful, opposing winds buffeting me. I try to navigate my little craft Family Weekly, October 11, 1964 CUay OVERNIGHT! |