“His voice had once been so musical that when he recited passages like, ‘Before Abraham was, I am,’ it must have been nothing short of the sound of God.” Ben Cohen remembers Reynolds Price.

“One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.” — Jamaica Kincaid, who has a novel excerpt out in Little Star

Kate Christensen has an essay in the latest Elle on writing “In a Man’s Voice.” (She’s an expert on the subject; three of her novels, including the upcoming The Astral, have male narrators.)

All of you — men not exempted — must read it. Here’s an excerpt:
The phrase “dick for a day” used to be bandied about quite a bit by me and many other women I knew, mostly fellow writers, back in the 1980s, when we were young and ambitious but unsuccessful, our tone somewhere between wistful yearning and pugnacious wrath: “If I had a dick for a day, I’d show them” — “them” being overrated male writers, ex-lovers who’d treated us badly, and, frankly, men in general. They had all the luck. We were stuck being women.

I grew up in an all-female family — two sisters and a mostly single mother — and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them. My charismatic, handsome, intelligent, crazy father, a Marxist lawyer, disappeared from our lives (led off by the cops in handcuffs for beating my mother; I was the one who called them) when my little sisters and I were young, three years after my mother had divorced him. After that, my mother struggled to raise us without child support or help, during a time when she was working toward a doctorate in psychology from Arizona State University.

As my family saw them, men were ­untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.

But even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was ­verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the ­surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice. Until I was nine, I was my father’s “son,” the one he could talk to. And after he left, I still felt like the boy — the ­ambitious, hotheaded one. I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically. ­Although part of me yearned for a husband, a house, and kids, most of my brain was ­single-mindedly determined to do whatever it took to be a successful published novelist, and that part of me felt male.

In spite of my family’s attitude toward men, I loved, admired, and identified with them. I envied them, too — their power and autonomy, their freedom to be selfish, to walk away, to start over, to get angry, to speak frankly without appearing to give a damn what anyone thinks. Men were assholes, women were victims; men were ­active, women passive. Given the choice, I would have preferred to be an active ­asshole. Instead, I kept writing.

After a lot of floundering around, post-MFA, with bad relationships and worse jobs, I published my first novel, In the Drink, when I was 36. Its first-person narrator was a woman, but I was writing in a consciously male genre I privately called Loser Lit. I wanted my female narrator, Claudia ­Steiner, to join the ranks of Lucky Jim, ­Gulley Jimson, and Peter Jernigan. Claudia is a hard-drinking ghostwriter who’s in love with her seemingly unattainable male best friend, in debt, hapless, and bleakly, comically gritty. As I wrote the book, I was sure I was breaking new literary ground. ­Reviewers (all of them female) felt otherwise: When it came out, In the Drink was lumped with two other recently published, superficially similar books by women; ours were collectively hailed as the first wave of “chick lit” in America. This didn’t feel like a compliment to any of us. Naively, having expected everyone to somehow magically get what I was up to (“It’s the female Lucky Jim! Hooray!”), I was insulted and flummoxed. How could they not recognize that I was a secret guy? I had never expected to be put into a basket of “chicks.”

I was determined anew to prove myself as a serious writer; writing in a female voice was evidently not the way to achieve this. My second novel, Jeremy Thrane, is narrated by a man who, in the opening passages of the novel, describes his penis, in case anyone is in any doubt as to his sex . . .

I’m interviewing her for The Awl next month, so make sure you’ve read the essay, not to mention the book, by then.

It would probably be funny if I hadn’t grown up in absolute terror of being Left Behind. Okay, it’s kind of funny anyway, as long as I don’t have to be sober.

My latest piece for The Awl is about the convergence of my fortieth birthday and Harold Camping’s predicted May 21 Rapture, but it’s also about a lot more, including fervent agnosticism, existential dread, interesting passions, and how happy I am to be back in touch with my (former preacher) mother.

Photo credit: mementosis.

In the midst of working on something for The Awl, I returned to Twain’s brilliant riff — from Is Shakespeare Dead? — on his boyhood obsession with Satan. Here it is, for the uninitiated.

When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about him. I began to ask questions, but my class-teacher, Mr. Barclay the stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it seemed to me. I was anxious to be praised for turning my thoughts to serious subjects when there wasn’t another boy in the village who could be hired to do such a thing. I was greatly interested in the incident of Eve and the serpent, and thought Eve’s calmness was perfectly noble. I asked Mr. Barclay if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber. He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension. I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing to tell me the facts of Satan’s history, but he stopped there: he wouldn’t allow any discussion of them.

In the course of time we exhausted the facts. There were only five or six of them, you could set them all down on a visiting-card. I was disappointed. I had been meditating a biography, and was grieved to find that there were no materials. I said as much, with the tears running down. Mr. Barclay’s sympathy and compassion were aroused, for he was a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on the head and cheered me up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of materials! I can still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot through me.

Then he began to bail out that ocean’s riches for my encouragement and joy. Like this: it was “conjectured” — though not established — that Satan was originally an angel in heaven; that he fell; that he rebelled, and brought on a war; that he was defeated, and banished to perdition. Also, “we have reason to believe” that later he did so-and-so; that “we are warranted in supposing” that at a subsequent time he travelled extensively, seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centuries afterward, “as tradition instructs us,” he took up the cruel trade of tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that by-and-by, “as the probabilities seem to indicate,” he may have done certain things, he might have done certain other things, he must have done still other things.

And so on and so on. We set down the five known facts by themselves, on a piece of paper, and numbered it “page 1″; then on fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the “conjectures,” and “suppositions,” and “maybes,” and “perhapses,” and “doubtlesses,” and “rumors,” and “guesses,” and “probabilities,” and “likelihoods,” and “we are permitted to thinks,” and “we are warranted in believings,” and “might have beens,” and “could have beens,” and “must have beens,” and “unquestionablys,” and “without a shadow of doubts” — and behold!

MATERIALS? Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!

Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the history of Satan. Why? Because, as he said, he had suspicions; suspicions that my attitude in this matter was not reverent; and that a person must be reverent when writing about the sacred characters. He said any one who spoke flippantly of Satan would be frowned upon by the religious world and also be brought to account.

I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan, and that my reverence for him equalled, and possibly even exceeded, that of any member of any church. I said it wounded me deeply to perceive by his words that he thought I would make fun of Satan, and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at him: whereas in truth I had never thought of such a thing, but had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and laugh at THEM. “What others?” “Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, the Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters,
the We-are-Warranted-in-Believingers, and all that funny crop of solemn architects who have taken a good solid foundation of five indisputable and unimportant facts and built upon it a Conjectural Satan thirty miles high.”

What did Mr. Barclay do then? Was he disarmed? Was he silenced? No. He was shocked. He was so shocked that he visibly shuddered. He said the Satanic Traditioners and Perhapsers and Conjecturers were THEMSELVES sacred! As sacred as their work. So sacred that whoso ventured to mock them or make fun of their work, could not afterward enter any respectable house, even by the back door.

How true were his words, and how wise! How fortunate it would have been for me if I had heeded them. But I was young, I was but seven years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to attract attention. I wrote the biography, and have never been in a respectable house since.

See also (a sampling) Stop the clocks: How Twain celebrated Thanksgiving; Once more with feeling: Who Is Mark Twain?; and my pitch for Twain’s autobiography.

The first five chapters of Kate Christensen’s forthcoming — and outstanding — The Astral are online at Scribd. (You know how I adore her, and this book is her best yet.)

A heartrending autobiographical essay about the mess Sam Lipsyte made of his life before age twenty-five has echoes in his fiction, Philip Connors says.

“I chose a very short text because I knew that I would read without stopping to breathe, thus very badly.” Amelié Nothomb keeps a culture diary, converses at PEN with Buket Uzuner.

At The Awl today I profile Emma Forrest, author of Your Voice in My Head, a memoir that left me raw, shaken, and hopeful all at once. An excerpt:
If you’ve ever been in therapy and liked, trusted and worried about losing your shrink, Emma Forrest has lived your nightmare. Three years ago, her psychiatrist died of lung cancer she didn’t know he had. This was the man who rushed to her side at St. Vincent’s after she downed a bottle of pills, who sang show tunes—”It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed / he’s psychologically disturbed!”—with her in sessions, and who tried, with no hint of salacious intent, to confiscate a fashion photo she showed him of herself, bleeding from self-inflicted cuts, in her underwear. With Dr. R’s help, she “fell out of love with madness” (as he put it); just months before his death, she published an essay empathizing with Britney Spears’ descent into mania and praising him for saving her from a similar fate. And then he was gone, leaving behind not just a devastated Forrest but a host of bereft and rudderless clients. Discovering the others’ outpourings in the guest book underneath his New York Times obituary was, she writes, “like growing up and realizing that other people have read The Catcher in the Rye, not just you.”

Forrest’s new memoir, Your Voice in My Head, which traces the long history of her depression and evokes her struggles to stay sane without Dr. R, is so intense and compelling, so dark, hilarious and wistful, and so likely to be picked up, highlighted and worried over by every neurotic I know, I almost feel sorry for New York City’s mental health practitioners, who probably should have had some sort of advance warning that it’s coming. It’s a testament to the author’s empathy that she’s able to incorporate other patients’ eulogies into the book without robbing them of their power or giving off the slightest whiff of gimmickry. When I marvel, in an extended email interview, at how naturally their stories and hers coexist, she says, “I think of all us disparate lost souls who sought solace at East 94th Street as a Robert Altman movie, with intersecting lives and sorrows.”

Head over there for the rest, but you might want to pour yourself some wine, water, or coffee first. It’s long.

Nicholson Baker distinguishes between contingent and chronic literary influences: “with Updike, when I disagree with him, there is an element of pain, of emotional rupture.” (See also.)

“It’s always comforting to be reminded that literary whoring — I mean, self-marketing — has been practiced by the greats.” See also the hot young author debate, circa 1882. (*Jinx.)

“What once wasn’t literature is now at the heart of the canon,” Marjorie Garber argues. Christopher Beha agrees but says Garber, like those she criticizes, ultimately wants “literature” to mean only one thing.

BBC Radio 4′s new program library makes it so much easier to find archived interviews, like A.S. Byatt on Possession, Joseph Heller on Catch-22… I’m just scratching the surface. (Via.)

Next Friday night, April 29, I’ll be introducing debut novelist and Jezebel blogger Anna North at Girls Write Now’s Chapters reading at St. John Church. She’ll read from her forthcoming America Pacifica, a dystopian story set at the dawn of a new ice age and narrated by an 18-year-old girl who’s searching for her missing mother and has been addicted to huffing solvent. I know the book will resonate with the girls in our program, who are also reading that night. Join me!

Afterward, I’m rushing off to The Invisible Dog Art Center for One Story’s Literary Debutante Ball, a huge annual party benefiting the excellent and tireless literary magazine. The ball will present five One Story writers who’ve made their debuts in the past year and honor author Dani Shapiro. The host will be Isaiah Sheffer of Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts, and there will be specialty cocktails, music by swing band Lapis Luna, dancing, and a silent art auction.

I’m on the Benefit Committee, as are actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Andrew McCarthy, writers T Cooper, Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes, Leigh Newman, Dolores Rice, George Saunders, and Jim & Karen Shepard, and art world impresarios Mark Hage and Paul Morris. Join me here too!

The auction is curated by the artist David Goodman, and you can see the artwork, including Sarah Aphrodite’s leopards at the top of this post, in the One Story slideshow. You can also support the magazine by bidding remotely.

“Any young dude—and it’s always a young dude—who has a copy of [Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair] should be forced to turn it over until he reaches a responsible age.”

It’s true. The Biblical God is not a feminist. (Via.) But I still contend that Eve is a hero.

Most of us who threaten to flee the city for a shack in the wilderness don’t get any further than making terrariums and insufferably holding forth in bars, but eight years ago Philip Connors actually quit his job at the Wall Street Journal for a fire lookout post in New Mexico. In the intervening years, he’s written some magnificent essays, and now he’s published the book I’ve been waiting for, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.

As his friend Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, recently told the Observer, “Phil only writes about things that are actually of interest, of urgent interest. He’s a very direct writer, and very honest, and free of vanity.” He’s also the kind of writer who forces himself, at every turn, to confront the possibility of failure, and as a result his writing is lean and clean and distinctive: unpretentiously learned, wildly evocative, and often very funny (though not all his jokes go over so well in these parts).

I talk with him today at The Paris Review Daily. Head over there for the main event — and then, if you’re curious, some outtakes from our conversation are below.
 

I wonder if writing Fire Season was as complicated and emotional for you in its own way as telling — in an also beautiful, but wrenching, n+1 essay — the story of your brother’s suicide.

This was easier, I think, although in both cases I was dealing with an experience very dear to my heart. For the n+1 essay, I went back over years of notebooks and compiled every single entry that dealt with my brother’s death and my feelings about it. I thought that would help clarify the arc of my grief, and maybe I could write an essay or even a book based on what I found. It turned out those journal entries were the story: the arc was there, the story had already been written, it had just sort of happened over the course of six or eight years without my realizing it. In writing about my lookout experience, my notebook entries turned out to be insufficient on their own. I had kept diaries of each fire season for years. There was interesting stuff in them. There was an arc to each season. But it was sort of the same arc year after year, with slight variations in the details, and so much of what I knew was not to be found there: stories about the history of the landscape, mainly. So while the essay about my brother’s suicide involved paring away material to get at what was essential, Fire Season was more about expanding on what was there in my notebooks, shaping and ordering the stories for pleasing effect. It was a much more joyful experience.

The joy you take in lookout work is never more apparent than when you’re facing a separation from the tower. One summer you leave a new relief lookout (who plainly regards you as “something of a bewhiskered old fogey”) alone for a few days, and the whippersnapper sets off a “Class C clusterfuck.” On your return, he clears out, probably for good. Do lookouts have a name for rookie quitters?

No, but we should, because it happens pretty often and we have slang for so many other things. There have been four or five such cases on my ranger district in the time I’ve been a lookout. It sounds so romantic, living on a mountaintop, watching for smoke all day—the old American dream of self-sufficiency, alone in the woods. But it requires a pretty funky soul to really take a shine to it. Some people try it and discover they can’t live without television, text messages, and the presence of a living human voice. It’s hard to blame them. There are some good shows on television. It’s nice to be instantly in touch with those you love.

On a camping trip, you and a friend hike nine miles up a mountain in a blizzard. “We couldn’t see fifty yards in front of us,” you write, “the snow was falling so hard, and almost every step was fraught with the possibility of disaster — a twisted knee, a sprained ankle.” To what extent is danger part of your attraction to to the wilderness?

I don’t think of the lookout work as particularly dangerous. I’ve got a nice snug cabin to keep me warm and dry, and were anything bad to happen I could call for a helicopter evacuation on my radio. Backpacking trips are a little different. When I backpack with my friend Black Larry, we don’t have any way of calling for help. We’re on our own, far from the nearest road, completely reliant on our own skills and instincts. Our senses are sharper, our awareness is heightened. Modern life coddles us in so many ways that I think it robs us of some of the thrill of being what we are, what we’ve always been: animals. Highly evolved, for sure, but we’re still just creatures of blood and bone. I find it stimulating to be reminded of that from time to time, and a wilderness camping trip is a pretty good way to do it.

You’ve written, in Fire Season and for The Nation, about your admiration for Norman Maclean, who also worked as a lookout.

Norman Maclean has meant a lot to me. The title novella in his book A River Runs Through It, which recounts his relationship with a doomed brother he loved but did not understand, offered me the most meaningful consolation I found in the wake of my own brother’s death. The final story in that book has some great passages about being a fire lookout in the early Forest Service. In his only other book, Young Men and Fire, about a group of smokejumpers who burned to death while fighting a fire in Montana, he wrote what amounts to the only literary masterpiece on the subject of American wildfire. I felt that since I was writing in a vein where others had gone before me, I at least had an obligation to nod to my masters, and he is certainly one of them.

You and your wife, Martha, met while you were both living in New York City, and later moved out west together. At times you worry that your attraction to the lookout life, to solitude and the wilderness, makes her life lonelier than it should be. How much do you think growing up on a farm contributed to your need for time alone?

I’m sure my rural upbringing plays a role in that. I spent many long days of my childhood walking aimlessly along rivers and playing alone in the woods around our farm. When you grow up that way, you not only develop a knack for entertaining yourself, you come to need time alone in order to feel comfortable in your own skin.

Peter Straub says writing is a profession that obliges its practitioners to enjoy solitary confinement.

How true! Writing is not a group activity, at least not the kind of writing that moves us. You could argue that working as a wilderness fire lookout is a kind of solitary confinement: you’re alone on a mountain, where you spend most of your days in a tiny room on stilts, up above the tree line. Except I honestly don’t find it confining at all—on the contrary, I love the expansiveness of the views, the long empty hours of no responsibility except keeping watch over beautiful mountains. Writing during the winter is another story. I rent an office above a bar in the little town where I live, and I sometimes wish I were downstairs where the fun is happening.

Do you usually get more writing done in the summer than in the off-season, when you’re tending bar?

For years the only writing I did happened in summertime. I’d write as much as I could and then spend the off-season revising. Tending bar left me pretty devoid of creative energy, but if I approached the process of revising more like a technician than an artist, I found I could take what I’d written at the lookout and spend the winter shaping it into something worthwhile. The loss of my bartending job is about the best thing that ever happened to me. When the owner closed the place and sold the building, I looked around town for any other job I might want and didn’t see one. The only thing I could think to do was write a book proposal. Here’s hoping I’m retired forever from the adult beverage industry.

Cheers to that! (Sorry.) One of the best things about your writing is that you’re so open about your own contradictions. You love the Gila, but you also love New York.

It’s a great walking city. The grid reminds you where you are at all times, so you never get lost, at least not in Manhattan. You can concentrate on the street life, the architecture, the faces of the people you’re passing. There’s a great essay by Vivian Gornick called “On the Street: Nobody Watches, Everyone Performs.” She writes: “The pavements of New York are filled with people escaping the prison sentence of personal history into the promise of an open destiny.” That seems to me spot-on. In the street you can be anybody, you’re free, you’re a flaneur and a wanderer, you can flirt for half a second in a glance and then move on and turn inward again. I spent whole weekend days on foot in the city when I lived there, on the move for hours at a time, not going anywhere in particular, just exploring the textures and moods of different neighborhoods, the emotional weather of street life. It’s the great consolation for being too often shut up in some little urban cave, estranged from your neighbors even as you can hear them cooking dinner or engaging in carnal pursuits. Living alone amid 8 million neighbors can be far more alienating than living alone in the wilderness. In the wilderness you have no expectation of human connection. When you fail at human connection in New York, the pain can be acute. For me, walking was the major form of consolation for that pain.

There’s a brilliant line toward the end of William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow: “New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.”

Yes. That’s so right. I love that line and I love that book. You probably noticed I mention it in Fire Season; it’s the first book I lent to Martha, shortly after we met. I remember reading that sentence and nodding in agreement.

I’d forgotten that, but your shared love for the novel must have been what prompted me to pull it back off the bookshelf a couple months ago. While we’re on the subject of beloved books: you once spent three days in the New York Public Library’s Jack Kerouac archive, copying his fire lookout journal into a notebook with a No. 2 pencil. It delights me to imagine your copy of his notebook — and your own journals — being preserved alongside his.

Bless your heart for saying so! But I doubt that will come to pass. Maybe Western New Mexico University will be interested. I should ask.
 

More: Donovan Hohn’s admiring take in last weekend’s New York Times Book Review; Nina MacLaughlin’s praise at Bookslut; Connors’ talk with Lewis Lapham next Thursday at McNally Jackson, at 7 p.m.; his reflections on trauma, grief, and the great outdoors; his affection for cribbage; his techno-laggard confessions (and the last days of his beloved father-in-law); and, at the top of this post, a video from his mountaintop.

David Orr talks with Laura Miller about his new book, Beautiful and Pointless, and “trying to communicate simultaneously with the Comic Book Guy and Moe the bartender.” He and other critics discuss poetry and the public tonight, 4/11, at Housing Works.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ accent, the history of “dude,” singing in dialect… If you’re obsessed with the way people speak, bookmark actor Ben Trawick-Smith’s Dialect Blog, recently highlighted at Language Hat and Sentence First.

It’s James Salter Month at The Paris Review. Kate Peterson interviews him, and Geoff Dyer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Porochista Khakpour, Ian Crouch, and other writers offer appreciations in the lead-up to the annual Spring Revel, where he’ll be honored.