Letters Lost on a Publisher:
(How Not to Seek Publication)
(How Not to Seek Publication)
April 2nd
Ms. Wilbourne:
I was glad enough receiving Ms. O'Herlihy's kind and courteous reply, saying that you are now considering my project in detail—or, more accurately, that you will be in touch once you've done so.
Fair enough.
But I figured I would send along a note just the same.
If you will pardon the indelicate analogy, I have always been told that an editor considering a manuscript is much like a dog with his dinner—you're supposed to leave him (her) alone. But since conventional wisdom has never done me any good, and I was always the kind of guy to go swimming after eating a meal, I figured I would discuss what I think we are both hoping will happen—something like nuclear fission, something like Fatima: I have written a book that I hope will be published and you are looking only to accept manuscripts that the press "will do well with" —a wonderfully vague goal that has been the lynch-pin of a number of rejection slips.
Having completed a master's degree in literature last year, my taste in writers has never been more high-falutin than Hunter S. Thompson, Flann O'Brien, and a wonderful Canadian author, Terry Griggs.
I try to be an avid reader and most of the time I succeed at it. And I am always in bookstores, on the look-out for something to excite me. And when that book is by a writer whose name I have never heard before, all the better. But when I consider the books that make up the better part of most bookshops' inventories, I feel weak and sick and bored. And I think this comes about because the editor/publishers are playing market strategist, and the business-boys are playing editor. So that books which pass-off ambiguities as art, and trendy cynicism as philosophical insight are taking up space on shelves where books of real soul should be standing.
And in speaking about "the one that got away," the name John Kennedy Toole comes to mind. Toole was an instructor/doctoral candidate in New Orleans in the 1960's. He wrote a novel called A Confederacy of Dunces, which he sent to every major publisher in the USA. And was rejected every time. In 1969 Toole committed suicide, unpublished, unknown. Understandably heartbroken, his mother found his novel and took it upon herself to have it published. She laboured for eight years and the book was finally published in 1980. And in 1981 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
I have read the novel. Though it was written in the early 1960's it is somehow not at all "dated." And for a book with such a tragic story behind it, it is the funniest novel I have ever read.
And I guess the preceding 8 pages are leading up to this: I am a well-travelled man and over the course of years and over the course of many miles, I have tried out the stories in my collection on many ears in many pubs and parties and poetry readings, and if I were a scientist proposing to you some new theory that has been as widely tried and tested, I suppose I would do so with an air of confidence that would border on arrogance.
To spare you that I will simply end this note with eight concrete reasons why you should publish "As My Sparks Fly Upward:"
- Best Man
- Grudgingly
- Hadley
- Come Out and Play
- Continental Divide
- Under the Bridge
- As My Sparks Fly Upward
- the next manuscript on which I am currently working, titled, "Tombstone Blues"
Godspeed
April 20th
Dear Ms. Wilbourne:
The biography of my days in Dublin that will never be written would describe my afternoons and evenings as lost to drinking, dreaming and general jacking-off, wandering empty avenues at all hours in an aimless cycle of wasting time. It seems life is devolving into an Otis Redding song, leaving me with no change in my pocket, only the unspendable currency of my own ideas; the calories of my character to sustain me. Leaving me with the length of my shadow, the creak of pub floors beneath my step—leaving me to my biro and paper and blather.
Neither this letter, nor my previous, was written to coax, convince or persuade you toward my work. I am writing to converse—about the politics of poetry, the price of prose; about beer, bologna sandwiches and blowjobs. About real life and real fiction and how one goes about marking a trail toward the light. Toward a sympathetic eye, a willing mind, a soul with some soul in it. Because I am willing to chance casting my pearls before swine (more indelicate analogies!). Because I remember the evening my best friend, Dennis, asked me to be his best man—only a bare few weeks after he had asked my advice on how to break it off with Mira.
And I remember reading a friend's name in the newspaper's obituary—and remember it being an unnerving coincidence. And I still dream about the long hours, the lonesome miles, the empty sky of the Continental Divide. Even saw a backpack lying at the side of the road at 5:45 a.m. But I didn't stop.
I saw Lou Reed live at the Fox Theatre in Detroit in 1992, and was struck by how the evening had more the feeling of a revival meeting, an exorcism of sorts, than a rock concert.
A soda can fell from the Ambassador Bridge late, very late, one night as I drove home from a friend's house. I wasn't crazy enough to get out of the car.
And I had a few final nights with friends before embarking on this fiasco to Dublin.
And staring down the barrel of my empty pint glass, I remember Hadley. She wasn't deaf and she didn't write poetry but she ignited something rare and ravenous in me—something seismic and aching that set to drilling through my solar plexus. Something no poetry can say and no liquor can allay.
And with the confidence of credibility, I wrote those stories. And with confidence in my spiritual credentials I submit the work to you. But all in all in all—in all my remembrance, in all my bewilderment, I am ultimately consumed by one thought, one fear, embodied in a sentence in a letter I wrote to a friend a few months back: "It sometimes seems that all I share with great men is self-doubt."
But in my days and in my nights and in my writing, I am one thing more.
Very serious.
Ee-I-Ee-I-O,
April 27th
Ms. Wilbourne:
Another achingly clear evening, and I look to the mellow purple horizon and find myself thinking of "Hadley." I have known her by many different names: Hanna, Briana, Caitlin, and even Laura. As the weights and pulleys, the scales and measures of this life work their daily magic of vanishing another day the Hadleys of our lives appear and vanish, though her memory only seems to grow more vivid.
In the Afterword of a newer edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig writes about the ancient Greeks' idea that the future figuratively approaches humanity from behind, and the past recedes before us. An apt image. So, I have kept my eye on the spark of light that was Hadley in my life, see her even tonight. Watching as she hurries toward the horizon.
When Bob Dylan was 20 yrs old he wrote "Tomorrow is a Long Time," in which he says/sings:
There's beauty in that silver singing river.
There's beauty in that rainbow in the sky.
But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty
That I remember in my true love's eyes.
Dylan knew Hadley.
And so had Mark Twain.
After his wife died, Twain wrote two stories titled, "Extracts From Adam's Diary," and "Extracts From Eve's Diary." The stories are not satirical, but funny and imaginative and exquisitely touching. Adam is portrayed as a gruff, linear "typical" male. Eve is lovely and pretty and patient. At first Adam doesn't understand who/what Eve is, finding her more a nuisance than anything else. But he is slowly won over. By the end of the story they have fallen in love, been banished from the Garden, and gone on to live a long life together. And when the dark day of Eve's death comes, Adam buries her and leaves a flat stone marking her grave. On that stone he wrote: "Wherever Eve was, there was Eden."
That's Hadley.
And I miss her. And still dream of her. And somewhere inside me is written: "Wherever Hadley was, there was Eden."
April 29th
Ms. Wilbourne:
The day after Christmas, 1992, I got roaring drunk. Wildly drunk. Damned near comatosed.
Owen Huckley and I had gone to a nightclub; arrived early to have some dinner and settle down to devouring pitchers of beer before the crowds and music took the place over. By eight o'clock I was thoroughly hosed, and returning from the toilet, I ran into old friends and acquaintances near the bar. We exchanged slurring Christmas greetings, and nearly every time I was offered a shot: kamikazes, B-52s, zombies, tequila. And I accepted. Every time. Then returned to the table where Owen and I reminisced about past parties, holidays.
At one point, pausing at the bar, a couple of old schoolmates bought me a shot of tequila and a B-52. In a momentary fit of caveman bravado, I took a shot in each hand and threw them back simultaneously, to the general cringing and warnings of bystanders and onlookers.
By ten p.m. I was clinically pissed. And not thinking straight. Coming back from the toilets, yet again, I bypassed the doorway which led to the area where Owen was sitting, and went looking for my younger brother who I knew would be there that night—I wanted him to take me home: I'd had enough. And with timing so bad as to be described as exquisite, I passed the club's entrance at the precise moment a pack of impatient clubgoers tried to force their way past the doormen (offduty cops in full ridiculous regalia, sans gun). The commotion startled me—
—suddenly a hand grabbed the front of my shirt, and in a Twilight Zone blur, I was violently thrust out the club's door, flung to the pavement out the front. I landed heavily, face down, scraping my hands and breaking my glasses.
Stunned and drunk and cold, I got up to explain the mistake. The offduty cop didn't listen to me. Just spun me around and slammed me to the pavement again.
So the odyssey began.
The rest of the night comes to me only in a riverrun collage of scattered moments: A couple of girls commandeered me, promising warmth, and led me down the sidewalk—my arms around their shoulders—to another club; through which I wandered, bewildered and blind (my broken glasses shoved in my pants pocket), feeling the growing pangs of The Fear. Somehow I had managed to get a bottle of beer from the bar.
Meantime, Owen was at our table wondering where I had gone off. After fifteen minutes he went looking for me. Finding me nowhere in the club, his drunken judgment told him to walk back to my house. And though I have only Owen's description with which to create a mental picture of what happened next, I can see it clearly in my mind as though I had been there:
He walks back to my house, knocks on the front door. My father answers the door, surprised to see Owen back from the club so early. Just as my father is about to ask where I am, Owen slurs, "Is Matt here?"
While I tried to find my way out of that second nightclub, Owen and my father went out in the car looking for me. They searched for more than two hours.
Somehow I found my way out of the second nightclub and came across a friend of my brother's outside of the first club. The smiling young Samaritan blessedly/charitably wrapped his jacket around my shivering form. And as I tried to explain the stupid mistake that had begun the whole mess, Owen and my dad and brother suddenly burst out of nowhere, grabbing hold of me, shoving me into my father's car.
They brought me home where I approached the door, feeling all my anger and fear and confusion unravel. Just when I was beginning to feel genuine relief being home again, my mother met me at the door, angry and shouting. This set me off completely. I responded by lunging at her, fists clenched—quickly restrained by my father and brother and Owen.
I shook myself from their hold and stormed into the living room, ranting and raving at the top of my lungs about the mistreatment I had received at the hands the city's police. I railed against their miserable souls, using every arcane combination of profanity and obscenity I could summon. And by the time Owen and my brother carried me up to bed, I wasn't even half finished. But the night's drinks got the best of me and I passed out.
The following afternoon I woke with a monstrous hangover, dimly aware through my haze of nausea and growing shame that it was the day of my parents' annual post-Christmas party, attended by a wide circle of friends and family.
And attended by Briana. Significant only for the fact that we had spent the previous three months apart on the "outs." Four years we had been together and she had gone away to another city for college with little more than a hug and a goodbye. And a couple of postcards. I had done my best to be arrogant and cavalier about the whole thing, but simply sulked my way through the semester, drinking and jogging and writing. I had figured we were finished and felt sick about it.
But Christmas had brought Briana home. I had seen her a couple of times, went to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Eve as "friends." And as I crept through the day of my parents' party, sick and shaken and pale, I briefly saw Briana, vaguely remember saying hello to her; preoccupied with my hangover and jangled pride: my parents were rightfully furious with me, but betrayed none of it in front of their friends.
Following one of my many trips to our upperfloor bathroom to dryheave over the toilet, I was met on the stairs by Briana; she stepped past me and stood on the stair above me. She looked into my eyes. She'd heard about the previous night.
"Your mother's so angry with you," she sighed. Then she hugged me. When we let go she placed her hands on my quivering shoulders and said, "Why do you do this to yourself?"
I shook my head.
That evening, when the guests had all finally begun to leave, I retreated to the basement. As I lay on the couch, still nauseated and exhausted, my hands scraped and aching, Briana had come down the stairs. And she knelt by the couch and looked at me. I closed my eyes and turned my face away.
She gently massaged my hand.
"Darling," I moaned, "I think I'm dying."
"You're not dying, sweetie," she said and kissed my hand. "You're just tired."
May 1st
Ms. Wilbourne:
If I wrote to you about the band on which I based the band in "Under the Bridge," you would surely not believe it. They were called Sawney Beane, after a 10th century Scottish cannibal, who'd had sexual congress with his sister which brought about a dozen, or two, offspring, all of whom shared Sawney's preference in sexual partners. When all was said and done the brood numbered 40, or so, and over the course of 10 years they devoured 1,000 people. When finally hauled out of the cave where they lived—obscured by the Irish Sea at high tide—the entire lot was lynched. Even the infants.
So, my friend Lew and his brother Kenneth, formed a band (formerly called The MacMahones) and took the name Sawney Beane. They all lived in a huge, rundown house, on Prince Road—the site of 4 or 5 spontaneous parties per week. The most prominent feature inside the house was a 6-foot long fibreglass hammerhead shark, which I had named Fiona. I will never forget drinking down the better part of a case of beer one nothing May afternoon and driving over to The House. As I cruised down Peter Str a police car pulled out from a side street, and I followed it all the way to Prince Road. And as the cop car rounded the corner at Prince Road and pulled in front of The House, I looked up and could not believe my eyes. For hanging from a length of rope from the roof of the frontporch, was Fiona, like some misplaced trophy from a Hemingway novel. And the band and about 40 beer drinking merrymakers crowded the frontporch and yard. The band had their instruments out, seemingly ready to play.
The interior of the house defies description. Full of broken furniture, the floor covered with the foam chip carnage of a torn-open couch cushion; instruments and gear strewn about among the vast scattering of pornography, beer bottle caps, scratched and ruined CDs; as well as a host of items stolen from the Catholic secondary school we had all attended. There was a faculty notice board with the hallowed names of the 1971 administration. There was a shallow silver goblet with ornate handles which we used in a sort of ritual of our own. When the Brethren of the Church of the Holy Spook gathered at the House (the usual band of drunks), the goblet would be filled with Scotch and we would kneel, in turn, while the others gathered around, raising their hands in benediction, saying The Prayer:
In the name of the beers
In the name of the whiskeys
In the name of the skills
And in the name of the problems,
Amen.
Then we would slam back the Scotch.
I spent much of my time as a grad student at the House, somehow getting my writing done and teaching an essay writing class 3 times a week at the university.
At one point I had counted over 80 empty beer cases stacked on the backporch and in the dining room.
The walls were strewn with graffiti and posters—the band's sense of irony was exponential: posters of Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson's Thriller album cover, an old Beatles poster, and a poster of Cyndi Lauper, arm raised in rebellion. And some unnamed vandal had circled the dark stubble visible under her arm, with a marker.
When Lew met me in Dublin for Bloom's Day, 1995, we had gone on a 4-day tear which culminated in him swimming across the Liffey near the Tara Street Bridge.
Shane MacGowan was the official patron saint of The House on Prince Road. In late July 1995 I had gone to Detroit to see him in concert with a couple of friends (Lew hadn't come back from Europe by then). And knowing that Lew felt about MacGowan the same way I feel about Bob Dylan or Tom Waits, I wore my MacMahones T-shirt to the show. And after a dozen beers I made my way along the left-hand side of the upper tier of the very small venue, took off my MacMahones shirt to reveal my bestial form. Balled the shirt up and hurled it at the stage, aiming for MacGowan's head. But the aerodynamics of the balled-up shirt were miscalculated—it sailed past MacGowan and struck the neck of the bass player's guitar. The show stopped for about 3 seconds. MacGowan began to reach down for the shirt when a roadie raced onstage and retrieved it.
On any given night there could be 30 people at The House.
The night the couch cushion was torn open, its entrails spread around, I remember a guy hanging by his hands and feet from the door connecting the living room with the dining room. He somehow managed to pull down a wooden sign that read: Scotsville, that had been stolen from some roadside in Nova Scotia. The sign was promptly broken in half and hurled across the crowded room. One half struck Lew squarely in the forehead. And as he bled, he kept saying, "Thank God it hit me in the head and didn't go through the front window!"
Another night a very drunken wrestling match broke out in the unlit living room—a real Battle Royale. At one point I climbed onto the back of the couch, steadying myself with a hand touching the ceiling. When it appeared to be advantageous I dove from my mount, intending to tackle the entire drunken mob in front of me. But the couch was not pushed against the wall, and no one was sitting on it to counterbalance the thrust of my leap. So, the couch tipped entirely backwards, and I fell face-first into the grungy carpeting, missing the mob completely. The sound of my impact was like a bomb going off—the windows all rattling in their frames. It left me with sore ribs, ruptured pride and a lovely embarrassing cut on the bridge of my nose where my glasses frame had cut into me.
The rest of my memories of The House are a riverrun collage of scattered events. Ultimately, as Lew said, something "that organically insane cannot last forever on its own power."
The fellas were evicted and The House was sold. And I am sure the new owners are wakened in the night by the ghostly noise of massive drunken conga-lines, wrestling matches and other assorted madness. My friends and I have scattered to far corners spreading The Word about the righteousness of debauchery and the sanctity of bad craziness.
It was a good time.
I miss Fiona.
Godspeed,
May 4th
Ms. Wilbourne:
The first rock 'n' roll concert I ever saw was Bob Dylan when he toured with Tom Petty, back in 1986. I was 15. My folks had taken me along with a good friend named Joe MacMillan. Many an evening I spent with Joe swimming in his family's backyard pool. And after swimming we'd sit out on the patio on lounge chairs looking at the stars arching above in a clear, late spring sky (there didn't seem to be a single tree in the new subdivision where Joe lived---giving us an immense, unobscured view). And more than a few evenings Joe would just blurt out, "What the hell's all that?" Meaning, the Cosmos, I guess. "It's crazy."
And I suppose it was.
And it was under that sky full of stars that Joe and I (and my goodhearted folks) sat on the grungy hill at Pine Knob, watching Bob Dylan play a full-length acoustic version of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." And under those same stars Joe and I played basketball---on the driveway at my house; at the playground near his house. The games were often cut short because Joe had sore knees. The pain would flare up and that would be it. Growing pains.
And I sit here, writing and listening to Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blue," I can't put my finger on why or when Joe and I began to drift. But we did and soon enough he was just another face in the hall. No falling out. Just the casual drift that happens with some people.
And there came an afternoon fully 2 years later, when I was sitting in my 12th grade English class---inwardly drowsing---and an announcement had come over the P.A. asking that prayers be offered for Joe MacMillan who that morning had been diagnosed with cancer. It was in his knees and had worked its way well into the bone marrow.
And Goddamn me, I thought a hundred times a day to visit him and talked myself out of it every time.
He died on July 21st. I celebrated my 18th birthday on the 22nd. And I set out on the driving holiday depicted in "Continental Divide" on the 23rd, with a good friend named Murph. And I took my guilt along with me, and all my worthless excuses why I hadn't visited Joe.
Three days later Murph and I had pulled into Banff, Alberta. And one night we had gotten very drunk and retired to the hotel room to drink some more beer and sit on the balcony. I had torn down the curtains and worn them over my shoulders like a cape, and after we raised our drinks to Joe MacMillan we broke into a braying, tone-deaf rendition of the Stones', "Ruby Tuesday." And it was likely the beer and the sunset and the long drive just (halfway) completed that me thinking such strange thoughts: I got to imagining Joe in heaven, standing on an observation deck, looking out at the star-vast cosmos, saying to Aristotle or Galileo or Newton (maybe even God Himself), "What the hell's that all about? It's ridiculous."
And I still drink beer, and I still listen to Bob Dylan, and I'm apt to watch a sunset and wonder about things far and near, gone and done. And count the faces I don't see anymore.
Godspeed,
May 11
Ms. Wilbourne:
When I begin to dizzy with calculating the equation of my own life. When I start getting the chills, and feel the pangs of doubt and dread and fear—getting scared that I might be standing on the wrong side of a dream, when I might have recycled all my wishing one too many times. When I get to worrying that I have no emotional fixed address—I tell myself a true story about myself.
The time Peter Sirr, director of the Irish Writers' Centre recommended me to Barra O'Sheaghan, as a temporary instructor at the Academy of English Studies. And among my duties was the mid-afternoon tutorial.
Two beautiful Spanish girls in their early twenties, smiling and shy—strong vocabularies hiding behind thick accents. Conversational English. Just sit and converse with them for sixty minutes: I had been practicing for that assignment for years at bars. And within days I noticed a strangely perfect meshing taking place—their good looks becoming secondary to the ideas I was hearing in discussions about art and politics and poverty and film. The sound of their voices, the raising of eyebrows, graceful gestures of the hand. They laughed at my jokes, my stories of burning dinner, spilling a pint of beer on my electric heater.
Two weeks. And it passed quickly. And as my affection for these girls grew—by the time I recognize it for what it is—all I was left to do was open my mouth to say goodbye.
But one last word, gesture. And for it to mean anything it couldn't be with my own words, because in the last second I knew I would balk.
The final class had nearly passed when I finally got to telling the girls it was my last day. As I searched their lovely faces for a reaction, I pulled a book from my bag: a volume of Pablo Neruda's poetry.
I handed it to the girls. Two poems were marked. English translation on all the right hand pages, mirrored on every left hand page by the original Spanish.
"Please," I said to them. "Read the poems to me in Spanish. I want to hear them in the language Neruda wrote them."
And the girls read, in turn, the poems that had months ago awakened me to the virtuosity of language—volcanic, romantic—even after being sifted through translation. Las Chicas: heirs to such poetry; the words rolled off their tongues like surf over stones: liquid and sensual and elemental.
And with the eventual, inevitable closing of the book came their gazes. Unreadable at first. Eyes wide, seeming to know something, seeming to search my face. And after a moment I could name what I saw in their expressions:
Recognition:
Reading those poems to me in a language I did not understand revealed everything to those two lovelies that I could never say myself.
And I remembered that afternoon in a poem I titled "Las Chicas":
I bought this volume
of Pablo Neruda's poetry
Knowing nothing of the man
& certainly never considering
I might one day hand it to you
& ask that you read passages to me
in the original Spanish, from pages
opposite the translation that
baffled & awakened me, hearing
the music of all that eluded me
strummed beautifully by your tongue.
I sure miss those girls and sure miss that part of myself that handed them that book.
Godspeed,
After holding on to my manuscript As My Sparks Fly Upward for more than a month, Ms. Wilbourne ultimately decided not to publish it.