Letters and Life

On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian

Bret Lott

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781433537868
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Literatur & Kunst im Christentum

Writing lays bare the soul. All serious writers know that each word reveals something significant about themselves, granting outsiders a glimpse at their most cherished beliefs and foundational convictions. In this series of intimate reflections on life and writing, critically acclaimed and best-selling novelist Bret Lott explores the author's craft through five letters covering a range of fascinating topics, from exploring the value of literary fiction to discussing the humility of Flannery O'Connor. In the final and longest letter, Lott contemplates the death of his father and his struggle to convey his complicated thoughts and inexplicable emotions in words. Intensely personal and yet universally relatable, this powerful collection of essays will encourage and enrich writers and aspiring writers everywhere.

At Some Point in the Future, What Has Not Happened Will Be in the Past

1

will have had

Three words I write in the margin of a student’s story. He’s an exchange student from Germany, a kid who wears death metal T-shirts to my creative writing class. His name is Achim Partheymueller.

I cannot make this up.

He’s written a story about the end of the world. A funny story, a crazy story, a moving story: the television reports an asteroid is headed for earth and will hit in 112 minutes, and the jaded young people who inhabit this story set out to see what’s happening outside their apartment. In the streets people are partying, rioting, looting, and crying, and the narrator and his friends make their way through the mayhem to a park, where there’s a swing set. At this point the narrator remembers playing on swings just like these when he was a child, and the last sentence of the story cuts off without ending, right in the middle of the narrator’s memory of being a child on a swing. The end has come.

It’s around 9:30 in the evening, and I am in my leather chair in the sitting room of my home here in Hanahan, South Carolina, marking up stories for tomorrow’s class, in this instant correcting a verb tense—the future perfect—a couple paragraphs in. It’s a form Achim hasn’t found or isn’t confident enough to use, I imagine, because English is his second language.

will have had, I scribble.

Then I am hit with it, square in the heart, and I begin, for lack of any better, more elegant, more poetic or sensible or proprietary word I know, to describe what is happening, to cry.

This is another essay about the death of a father.

2

I wrote the above words eleven months ago. April 2008. I haven’t come back to them since.

My father died July 9, 2006, so even those few sentences took nearly two years to get to.

Today is March 2, 2009.

Wilman Sequoia Lott.

My literary hero, Raymond Carver, once wrote, “If the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave.”

Thank you, Raymond Carver, for making me see I must do my best with the writing of this.

And thank you, Achim Partheymueller, for having gotten me to begin writing this down.

3

I am in downtown Denver and walking back to my hotel after having been the keynote speaker at an annual book awards ceremony. It’s a little after 10:00 this Saturday night—July 8, 2006—and a light mist is falling, the thin air out here cooler than I’d thought it would be. My hotel is only a block or so from the venue, and I am alone, and I am talking to myself.

“This is another essay about the death of a father,” I say in rhythm with my steps. I say it again and again and again, my eyes to the sidewalk, to the night skyline, to the darkened windows of the buildings I pass.

He hasn’t died yet. Not yet. But it’s coming, I know. It’s coming. One day I will begin writing down this story, and this will be a sentence I will use.

Yesterday I flew here from Baton Rouge, where I work as the editor of a literary journal, and have spent this entire day inside my room at the hotel. Room service, breakfast and lunch. I sat on the king bed and wrote the whole speech—almost fifteen pages—on my laptop, then printed it out in the business center on the first floor, then went to the dinner and delivered those words.

I may have made some friends with what I said to the celebrants, but I am afraid I may have made more enemies than anything else. The awards are for the best Christian novels published in the prior year, and I fear I was the new son-in-law at his first family reunion who systematically insults every family member he meets. Though I am a Christian, I have never been to one of these gatherings before, because I don’t write what most Christians would call “Christian fiction.” I felt myself the odd man out the whole evening long.

“I am calling for an attitude of reverence and awe for the written word by all parties involved,” I have said in a dining room suitably elegant and festive and jammed with happy authors and publishers and booksellers who are Christians and who all seem to know one another.

“I fear we live in a day when we are feeding on Christian fiction as a child feeds on milk,” I said to them all.

And I said to the gathered, “Unless we create fiction that does more than simply entertain the troops—unless we make room within the Christian writing industrial complex for writers to create worthy work—art—that in its craftsmanship and vision challenges the heart and soul and mind of our readers—then we will be nothing more than happy clowns juggling for one another.”

People came to me and thanked me once it was over. Many more people stayed away. What I told them all is something I was moved deeply to say, and now that I have said it, I am afraid none of it matters. I am afraid that people will do what they want and to their own ends. I am afraid that the real purpose of writing books, whether Christian or not, is to sell books, and that the way to sell books is to write books that give people what they already know. I fear that the best way to sell a book is to write one that meets a reader’s expectations of what a book ought to be rather than to write something that might challenge and surprise and unseat the reader from his throne seat of Me.

Now I am talking to myself, because I am very much alone on the face of this earth, and because my father is back in the hospital tonight, and because I am afraid he is dying.

He is a diabetic and has been for the last thirty years. He has taken insulin shots for just as long. He has had a toe removed. He is losing his vision. He has had problems with blood circulation in his legs and sores that will not heal in his feet, and he has been hospitalized several times in the last two years.

Last night in my hotel room I got a call from my wife, Melanie, at home in Louisiana telling me he had been brought back to the hospital from the rehabilitation center we’d checked him into just four days before. He’d been taken to the hospital for a scheduled round of dialysis, but when the doctor saw his left leg and the sore there gone hugely bad, he’d decided to amputate it.

My parents live in Sequim, Washington, out on the Olympic Peninsula, having retired there in 2003 after fifty years in Southern California. My dad, in those Los Angeles days of yore and plenty, was first a furniture mover; then a truck driver for Nehi; an RC Cola salesman; then RC supervisor; then RC vice president; then chain salesman for Coca-Cola; a supervisor for Dr. Pepper; and, finally, a food broker for in-house brands.

Melanie and I were there in Sequim only earlier this week, this town to which my parents had retreated once all that work was finished. Lavender had been in bloom everywhere.

The news of an amputation was not a surprise. And not a death sentence. This was a terrible thing, Melanie and I both knew and agreed. But it would be for the best. Then I called my mom, and we talked for a while, and we knew and agreed that this was for the best. “The doctor’s going to do it Monday morning,” she said, “and he says maybe in a week he can go back to the rehab center and get started. The doctor says he’s going to feel so much better after this is over,” she said, and I’d heard in her voice fear and relief at once.

Now, a day later, fifteen pages of words written and delivered, people I don’t know perhaps angry with me, I am walking alone to my hotel in a falling mist.

“This is another essay about the death of a father,” I say again.

I say it because, as the editor of a literary journal and as a teacher of writing, I have read a million stories and essays and poems about the death of a father.

I say it because I know I will write these words one day.

But he hasn’t yet died. I just know it’s coming, as it is for every one of us, and I wonder why I would think the essay I have not written but which I know I one day will might be any different from all those I have read before. Any better. Any more meaningful.

“This is another essay about the death of a father,” I say again, still in rhythm with my steps back to the hotel, where I will try to get to sleep at a decent hour because tomorrow I will be traveling yet again, this time to a place very far away.

Then the next words come to me, the ones that let me know it doesn’t matter how my story will be different, because it will be. Because it is.

“This is another essay about the death of a father,” I say, “but the difference is, this father is mine.”

4

I have lived too much with words. I have spent my life trafficking in them. I have spent too much time working them to an end: a story, a novel, an essay. A critique. A lecture. Abstracts, overviews, synopses, blurbs. Letters, e-mails, text messages. Answers and answers and answers. I am too much with words.

On this day, as I try to write down this story, I know more deeply than I ever have the truth of Ecclesiastes 12:12 (NASB): “But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body.”

I have worked with words too many years.

As I write this, I am seeing there is no way to write this.

But here is a small piece of paper on my desk, always here with me. A quote from John Berryman: “You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise, you’re merely repeating yourself, going nowhere because that’s always easiest.”

Berryman and the Bible. Both true.

There is no way to write this.

5

I keep walking, turn down one street, then another, and I am back at my hotel. I nod at the doorman outside, the bellmen in the lobby, the desk clerk behind the vast marble counter. I ride the elevator up to my floor and walk to my room, zip the card through the lock. Once inside I take off my jacket and tie, sit on the bed, and call Melanie. I tell her the event went well, though I’d felt like an interloper. I ask if she’s heard anything else about my dad. I tell her I love her and that I will miss her the next two weeks and that I will call her before I leave for the airport tomorrow morning.

She tells me she knows I did a good job with the speech and that the only news about my dad is that my sister Leslie will be flying up tomorrow from Los Angeles to be there with my mom for the surgery on Monday and then for a few days afterward. She tells me she loves me and will miss me too.

Then I go to bed and try to get to sleep, because tomorrow I am flying from Denver to Newark, then on to Tel Aviv, and though the flight out of Newark will be overnight, I sleep very poorly on planes.

I’m going to Israel to teach in a program sponsored by the State Department, a seminar in Jerusalem on southern literature and culture in the 1950s and 60s (I’ll be teaching three stories by Flannery O’Connor) for Israeli teachers of English from around the country. I’ll spend the first week planning the seminar with the other American professor, a poet I haven’t yet met, and with the State Department English teaching officer, and with the Cultural Programs specialist from the American Center in Jerusalem. The second week we’ll spend in ten-hour workdays of seminars and lectures and projects and discussions with the teachers themselves. This will be my second time teaching in the program, and in three months Melanie and I will be moving to Israel for an entire semester, where I will be the visiting writer at a university in Tel Aviv. Part of my job this trip will be to begin looking for an apartment—we want to live in Jerusalem—and to meet somehow with one of the professors from the university.

There is all this to think about as I lie there on a king bed in a dark hotel room in Denver: how much I will miss Melanie, finding a home in Jerusalem, all that work the next two weeks, whether I’ve divorced myself from fellow believers over the matter of books. And my father.

We were with him just five days before, Melanie and I at the end of our vacation out west. I’d taught at a writer’s conference in Salt Lake City, and on the last day Melanie flew out to meet me. The next morning we drove across Utah and Nevada to Incline City on Lake Tahoe to stay with Melanie’s aunt and uncle. We spent two days with them, then three days hiking at Yosemite, then took two days driving up to Sequim, where we stayed at my parents’ duplex apartment. My older brother Brad and his wife, Joan, live in Sequim too—they were the first to relocate there twenty years ago, Brad a carpenter and the town growing fast with retirees—so we visited with them as well. Tim and Bridget, my younger brother and his wife, live in Sumner, just outside Tacoma, and we spent the Fourth of July with them before flying home to Baton Rouge on Wednesday the fifth. Melanie washed clothes while I spent a few hours at work on Thursday, then headed back home to repack for this trip to Denver and the two weeks in Jerusalem.

We knew the morning we’d driven out of Salt Lake that Dad was in the hospital again with his leg problems. He’d been put on prednisone and had had another bout of vasculitis, a sore on his left leg infected and refusing to heal. Mom kept telling us when we called each evening from the road not to worry, that this was all the same old, same old of his diabetes and its problems, that we’d see them soon enough. So we enjoyed our vacation: staying with Dick and Marilyn in their home perched on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, the whole house cantilevered out into its grand view of the lake and the Sierra Nevadas; hiking the six-mile loop up the Merced River from the bottom of the Yosemite Valley past, first, the mist rainbows of Vernal Falls, then on up to the top of Nevada Falls, where the cold and calm river disappears off the cliff edge, dropping 600 feet to the granite rocks below. We’d driven down from the mountains to Modesto, where we climbed on I-5 North, stopping at The Olive Pit in Corning to buy jars of almond- and garlic- and blue cheese–stuffed olives. At dusk we stopped in Roseburg, Oregon, at an Elmer’s Restaurant just over the South Umpqua River and had pancakes for dinner, then headed on in the dark to a hotel in Eugene.

The next morning we got up early, and drove 340 miles straight to the parking lot of Olympic Memorial Hospital in Port Angeles, Washington.

We walked into my dad’s room to see him sitting up on the edge of the bed while a nurse hovered beside him, adjusting him this way and that to help him swing his legs off the edge. My mom was there with him, and when she saw us she hugged us and hugged us. “We’re so happy you made it,” she said, and my dad grunted out, “You made it.”

His legs were wrapped in Ace bandages, dark spots here and there where whatever toxins in him were seeping out. My mom had warned us.

She’d warned us as well that he wasn’t too alert and that he wasn’t talking much. But he seemed better than she’d made out each time ...