“Why didn’t you get him to order at least one copy of my book?”
“Because then it wouldn’t have hurt so much,” Norman Berg said. “Hurt is a great teacher. Maybe the greatest of all.”
When Norman dropped me off at my house in Beaufort, he handed me a package roughly wrapped in butcher paper. I did not unwrap the gift until I sat at my writing desk the next morning. Inside, there was a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. Norman had included a brief handwritten note that told me he treasured our time on the road together, that he thought I was on a quest to be a writer that mattered, and that I must read and remember everything. He believed that the writers of the world were ring bearers who bore the weight of the world on their shoulders, but I would understand his meaning only when the ring of power disturbed my art and rose up to trouble my quest. Norman then revealed to me that he didn’t consider any writer educated until they had absorbed the radiant wisdom of The Lord of the Rings. For the next month, I joined the fellowship of souls who followed the hobbit Frodo on his perilous journey into the dark lands of Mordor. I mark the time I spent reading those splendid books among the richest days of my life. The great books are like the elevation of the host to me, their presence transformed, their effect indelible and everlasting. What is the loss of a job, the death of a friend, or a bad review when you’ve followed Gandalf the Grey through the mines of Moria and the march of the Tree-folk on Isengard?
When Norman Berg came to Beaufort for the celebration of the publication of The Water Is Wide, I walked him out onto the second-story veranda of the only house I’d ever written books in.
“Gandalf the Grey,” I said, raising a glass to him. “I finished the trilogy.”
“If you think I’m Gandalf the Grey, you got nothing out of the book.”
“You bought me the book,” I said. “You brought me news of the ring.”
“What’ll you do with it?”
“Ask me on my deathbed.”
“I won’t be here.”
“I sure hope not.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever be a writer,” he said. “I don’t think you’ve got what it takes.”
“But I’ve made some great friends along the way,” I said. “Guys like you.”
He sniggered, but his laugh was as joyless as it was noiseless. His critical powers always overwhelmed his creative ones, and he writhed in his own awareness of this indisputable fact. As we rejoined the party downstairs, I watched as Norman erased himself as he entered into the company of my friends and well-wishers. Later, I would learn that he never introduced himself to my wife or mother or friends. Later, he claimed he loathed parties because it represented time stolen from his priestlike engagement with the great literature of the world. In public, my impenitent good cheer can strike even my closest friends as a bit on the sunny-side-up spectrum of human behavior. Norman considered my affability as an incurable flaw of character that would prove fatal to my pretense of becoming an artist. Without saying good-bye, Norman Berg left town early the next morning.
A year later, I moved my family to Atlanta, where I rented a series of offices in the midtown area that failed to fire the imagination as I began to take a withering look at my brutalized childhood. The betrayal of my father was not an effortless production, and I began a long, quiet nervous breakdown as I described the abysmal sound track of my boyhood. At this critical juncture, Norman Berg invited me out to his farm, which he called Sellanraa.
When I stepped out of the car that day, Norman and his wife, Julie, were working in their vegetable garden. A pack of bird dogs bellowed from their unseen cages in the rear of the great, weathered barn. The Bergs lived on fifteen well-tended acres bordered by a forest of oaks and pines that gave them the illusion of having escaped the land rush that had consumed the Atlanta suburbs. Inside the house was a great room with a flagstone floor, a massive rock fireplace, and a library of five thousand books near the door to Norman’s warren of offices. On this day, Norman removed a book from its shelf. Whenever he presented me with a book, it had a ceremonious feel, as though he were laying a sword on my shoulder inducting me into an ancient brotherhood.
The book was Growth of the Soil by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. The copy he gave me had once belonged to Norma M. Saylor, who lived in Palmyra, New Jersey.
“It’s an essential book. A necessary one,” Norman Berg said in his throaty catechist voice. “It’s the most important book I’ve ever read. I named my farm Sellanraa in honor of Isak, the man who builds his home and raises a family out of nothing.”
“I’ll read it.”
“You don’t just read this book,” Norman said. “You must enter in. Live it. It contains the great truth.”
“Which is?”
“Everything of virtue springs from the soil. Civilization always comes along to ruin it. But you can always find the truth if it comes from the earth.”
“It sounds like the most boring book ever written.”
“Read it. Then decide.” He walked me out of the house and led me across a broad greensward that led to the original farmhouse—a simple, two-bedroom house with books and paintings and a working kitchen. It had a fireplace and a cord of wood for burning. There was a writing desk with pens and ink and the yellow legal pads I liked to write on stacked in a neat pile.
“Julie and I would like to offer this as an office to complete your novel. We won’t get in your way.”
“You have to let me pay you some money,” I said, moved by the gesture.
“Complete your novel,” he said, “and that will be payment enough.”
I read the book Growth of the Soil before I began the final sprint of my own novel. An anonymous man appearing in the wilderness and building a life out of nothing except his own strength and ingenuity was a sacred myth of origin to Norman Berg. It described an unattainable life for him, a misplaced horizon that no longer existed without compromise. The book was dense with power and a sense of mystery that literature slings like pollen when some writers turn toward art. Knut Hamsun rose out of the dark forests of snow-haunted Norway the way J. R. R. Tolkien took his malice-haunted journeys in Middle-earth. Norman liked books that permitted no commerce with the age we were living in at the present time. At Sellanraa, his solitude began to make sense to me. He was engaged in a long, obstructionist quarrel with the world. He found most of modern life unbearable and the rest indefensible. It did not take me long to realize that Norman was trying to recruit me in some rearguard action during the long retreat from a sense of invisible order.
In the first month of my residency at Sellanraa, I gained control over the themes that would carry The Great Santini to its conclusion. Writing would always seem like a form of coal mining, with its descent into the black hearts of mountains and the long journey back to the light where fires could flourish in honor of your patient, hardscrabble labors. I wrote myself into a fever pitch as I approached mania, then meltdown.
As I came toward the end of the book, I stayed at the farmhouse for weeks at a time. Each night, Norman would walk down to ask me for dinner. Julie was reading Walker Percy’s book Lancelot, and she spoke about the book with affection and some delight. Norman gave a reader’s report on the books he was reading for the upcoming sales conference, including a book by Paul Theroux and one by a new writer, Henry Bromell. After dinner Julie went to bed and Norman and I sat in two enormous chairs next to his huge stone fireplace in the vast sitting room. The books stared down on us. We sipped glasses of wine, and Norman asked me to read something from the novel. I read a section I’d been working on that week about a Little League coach of mine named Dave Murphy. After showing me great kindness and patience during a memorable summer, Dave died the following year of a terrible cancer. As I read that night, I thought it was the best piece of writing I had ever done. I read it and I read it well. Wordless as usual, Norman stared at the fire and it was several moments before he spoke.
“You’re never going to be a grea
t writer. Not even a good one. You can aspire to mediocrity. Nothing else,” he said to the flames.
“You’ve been clear about that.”
“But you’re going to have moments. Like that one. That was a moment,” he said.
“You liked it?”
“I didn’t say that. But I know a lightning strike when I see it. I can only read. Never write.”
“Ever tried?”
“Of course. But I was born blind and deaf. This is not Sellanraa I’m living in. It’s a tomb and an iron lung.”
“Oh, Mr. Uplift enters the room again.”
“No, the truth teller. The man with nothing.”
I came to the last chapter of The Great Santini and I wrote it in one marathon sitting that took a full twenty-four hours of rough labor. Because he knew I had come to the end, Norman would tap on the back door with great discretion, and I would find a hot meal and a book on the doorstep. He left me The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound, Deliverance by James Dickey, and Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. When I finished killing my fictional father, I staggered down to the main house at Sellanraa for a celebratory meal. He took me to the forest on his land and loaded a shotgun for me to hunt squirrels for dinner. The shotgun was beautifully made and had intricate carvings on its stock of scenes from The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. By then, Norman had told me the sad, desultory tale of his distant love affair with Ms. Rawlings. He admitted to being tyrannical and heartless about her writing, and that he nearly drove her crazy with his disapproval of her last novel, The Sojourner. He had become a nightmare in her life and he now believed she could’ve written several more books if she’d never met him. As he cleaned the squirrels I had shot, he confided in me that Marjorie had been the great love of his life.
After we ate that night, Norman took a picture of me sitting in a chair in the kitchen of Sellanraa. It became the author photograph on the back of the book jacket of The Great Santini. Norman refused to take credit for the photo, but I treasure it for what it has come to represent to me. When he died, I delivered his eulogy. I held a copy of Growth of the Soil as I delivered the final words to this loneliest of men who became dizzy with his devotion to literature and writers. Though he could not banish that juiceless critic whose judgments were cutting and ruthless, he never uttered again the word “pass” when my books came into the conversation. As I write this, I own the shotgun that Norman had made for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. I don’t know where he is buried, but I hope it is somewhere in Georgia.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MY FIRST WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
When I finished my first novel, The Great Santini, I experienced no cleansing sense of accomplishment or completion. For reasons that have always been unclear to me, the books inside me seem to reach some unanimous agreement about which one of them will go to the head of the line as I open up the next artery that surges out in a tidal fury from the headwaters of my interior. With The Great Santini, I had loosed some unspoken furies from the grottoes pooling beneath my family story. Though I had earned an unmerited reputation for loyalty, my family and many of my friends were about to encounter false effigies of themselves crafted from my sulky, hotheaded imagination. I was about to piss off nearly all of my closest relations and a goodly portion of the best friends I had ever made. I felt like I had put a gun to my family’s head and pulled the trigger. I needed the companionship of other writers and the comfort of other books. A friend of mine who was a poet, Betsy Scott, called me at that perfect moment to say she had signed me up for a writers’ conference that was taking place the following week at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, in Atlanta. Betsy and I had both loved the book Diving into the Wreck, and Betsy told me that we were going to a poetry workshop led by Adrienne Rich. Then Betsy thrilled me even further with a murderers’-row list of writers who would be at the conference, including William Gass, Alice Walker, David Madden, Miller Williams, and Maxine Kumin.
As I look back on that period of my life, I get no sense of myself as being a young and callow man or any sense, mordant or satirical, of time passing. The years can be seen as hourglass-shaped or demon-driven or diamond-backed, but I can recall no sense of alarm at the slipstream passage of time. I could discern time’s easy spillage, its queenly dogwoods in the snowy plumage of late April, and the annual road races that always seemed to end near the azalea banks of Piedmont Park. Though I had published two books, I could not yet get myself fitted with the green jacket that would identify me evermore as a Georgia writer. Since I had not published a work of fiction, I could not yet call myself a writer. When I read the galleys of The Great Santini my claims for myself seemed fraudulent and overblown. I had never hung around with writers of national renown except for the single semester that I sat in the classrooms of James Dickey as he spoke of poetry as the most important thing on earth. From Dickey, I took to heart the lesson that ambition should always serve as the handmaiden to talent. If you possessed any talent at all, you should do anything to nurture and heighten it. He encouraged us to read the great books, to develop the most remorseless and unforgiving critical eyes, and to encounter the great writers and personalities of our time. Because of Dickey’s own outsize personality, he often stalked about our classroom caught in some strange country where a word-crazed lumberjack could raise his own hybrid breeds of hothouse flowers. Though I revered his poetry and marveled at his novel Deliverance, James Dickey provided me with a lifelong distrust of other writers. The world of writers was a snake hole, a circle of hell—a rat’s nest and a whirlpool and a dilemma—not just a world. Dickey was vindictive and combative enough to enjoy the border skirmishes that often broke out among the poets he admired the most, and those he held in unutterable contempt. His example proved fruitful to me. I’ve spent most of my life avoiding the companionship of writers. I try never to be rude, just seldom available. Though I have met some of the great writers of our time, I’ve become good friends with very few of them. The tribe is contentious, the breed dangerous.
The estate of Callanwolde had played a bit part in my family saga. Its vast acreage abutted my grandmother’s house on Atlanta’s Rosedale Road, the home my mother brought me to after my birth. Callanwolde was a baronial Tudor mansion occupied by a branch of the Candler family, the mythical race who enriched themselves by putting their faith in the healing powers of a sugar-water called Coca-Cola. In Atlanta, they were a race of kings. My mother and grandmother spoke of them as though they composed the modern-day court of Medicis. During the year my father was away fighting in the Korean War, I attended kindergarten at Sacred Heart School by day and roamed the forests of Callanwolde when I got home. My pretty young mother drew the attention of a seven-foot pervert who would try to break into our house two or three times a week to get to her. Whenever the police were called, we would watch the seven-foot-tall man sprint into the forests of Callanwolde. I would eventually use the story of the giant, whom we called “Callanwolde,” in The Prince of Tides. The place held terrifying associations for me.
Betsy Scott was a lovely young woman from Spartanburg, South Carolina, whom I had met at Emory when she was studying poetry under Michael Mott. She and I entered the writers’ conference together, and saw that my friend Cliff Graubart had saved seats for us near the middle aisle as Dr. John Stone conducted the opening ceremonies. Over one hundred fifty writers had signed up for the conference, billed as the largest convocation of writers ever assembled in Georgia. At that time, I think I was ready for some writer to utter the mysterious words that would open up the portion of my imagination where the great unsayable secrets lay in hiding. I was looking for a companionable guide who would steer me toward the right channels and show me the books that would both whet my ambitions and teach me to regulate the brush fires that could burst loose into whirling infernos of language. My search was clear. I was hunting for a teacher who already had the prestige of arrival and did not fear the role of mentor to a younger, less accomplished writer.
In the firs
t session that afternoon, I was part of a short-story workshop taught by the intimidating William Gass, whose book Omensetter’s Luck I had read in anticipation of his class. He had great bravura and showmanship, but he carried an intellectual freight that seemed to interfere with both his writing and his teaching. He intimidated his class with the brutish authority of his intellect. Ideas seemed to excite him more than his own writing did, and certainly the writing samples the class had given him. He carried more poisonous quills in his vocabulary than a porcupine did on his back, and his assessments were often cruel, even if just. He was neither wishy-washy nor mealy-mouthed, and you could feel the grand deflation in the room as wounded egos began to die. In a final tally, I thought Gass had a grand intellect, but a shoddy heart. At the end of his session, he clashed with a young woman who had written a short story about her lesbian lover. She fought back with much gusto when Gass accused her of writing emotional, hysterical tripe instead of literature. Later, it pleased me immensely when her story won the first prize as best in the show. I found Gass to be dyspeptic and prickly, as though he had not figured out how to wear his fame. Or maybe he thought he had not earned quite enough of it.
When I walked down the long lawn to my car, I ran into Rosemary Daniell and a group of four other women writers. One of them I recognized as the Georgia novelist Alice Walker, based on her photo in the program. I was also carrying a copy of her latest novel, Meridian, which I had liked and wanted her to sign for me.
Rosemary and I kissed and said hello, looking like lovers who’d been separated for years. Rosemary is a wide-eyed voluptuary who is as sexy and flirtatious as any woman I’ve ever met. She is the kind of girl a Southern grande dame hoped her girls wouldn’t grow up to be, but I was raised by a tribe of sexy Southern women who were predatory in their wealth of charms. When I first met Rosemary, she had just read from her first book of poems, A Sexual Tour of the Deep South. She had done a reading in a lecture hall in Callanwolde, sharing the stage with an excellent young poet named Coleman Barks. Later I would come to love the mystical, galvanic poetry of the Sufi dervish Rumi that Coleman translated with inordinate power. By soft light, my friend Bernie Schein and I listened to those two poets, Coleman and Rosemary, spewing words into the Atlanta darkness a block away from where I used to take the bus to kindergarten. In celebration of her own sexuality, Rosemary was a brand-new prototype of the Southern woman, the kind you were sure wouldn’t tolerate the missionary position once she settled beneath the sheets.