I’m currently re-reading some of my favorite books — the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald.
Here’s a writer I wish I’d had a chance to know. Not “meet.” Meeting isn’t good enough. I’m greedy, I look for connection and relationship with artists whose work I admire, which is why I’ll wait in line for 12 hours to be in the front row of a U2 show, but I won’t hang out for 20 minutes at the stage door hoping that Bono will autograph the back of my hand so that I can squeak Ooh, I’ll never wash it again! (and please, girls, ick, the last tour was over 2 years ago…go wash those hands!). That’s not the kind of relationship I want, the fan yearning for connection and the artist wondering if there’s any roast beef left in the green room.
I love the artists that I love — writers, musicians, actors. They take me places no one else does, sometimes places I’ve longed to go but couldn’t find by myself. They have changed me, shaken me up, rocked my world, made me think, made me cry, made me dance, given me moments of the most piercing joy — but I don’t think they are better people than I am, and I don’t worship.
But I do like to talk (grin), and that’s the relationship I would love to have with my favorite artists — the long evening of food and drink and conversation, the time to roam around inside each other’s heads. To share stories. To connect over how amazing it is to be alive in a culture that has time for art, that makes a space for it.
I think I would have liked MacDonald. He writes smart and funny and deep. He makes small moments big. He tells a great story, And he likes to riff in his writing the way I do, to just go off…
I went out into the bright beautiful October day and walked slowly and thoughtfully back toward midtown. It was just past noon and the offices were beginning to flood the streets with a warm hurrying flow of girls. A burly man, in more of a hurry than I was, bumped into me and thrust me into a tall girl. They both whirled and snarled at me.
New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We’re nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each other’s throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down.
from Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald, 1964
MacDonald does that kind of thing all the time — Travis takes a moment to ruminate on some aspect of life, the universe and everything, and then just goes on about his day. He’s a smart, complex man engaged with his world and yet very separate from it. A thoughtful man, a man of sex and violence, a man who sits still for sunsets and notices the small beauties of the world. A man who wanders through his own interior swamps and doesn’t always like what he finds, but owns it anyway.
The series was written from the early 60’s to the early 80’s, and the early books have the occasional dash of a particular, casual racism, sexism and homophobia that were characteristic of that time in this country. (The racism, sexism and homophobia now are different, it seems to me, in terms of expression at least). I don’t like it, but it doesn’t spoil the books for me. I no longer need purity in my favorite books; I’m not pure either, you know? These days I need emotional truth and growth and the feeling of recognition in both the joys and sorrows.
I wish I had a Travis in my real life. (Although I think it’s arguable that my imaginative life, the life inside my body and mind and heart that only I know, is just as real to me as the outside stuff…) But I wish there was a Travis in both, the way I wish for an Aud and a Crichton and a Morgon.
And there’s all those real live people whose work I so enjoy, that moves me so. People to know someday. I have hope.
Who do you wish for?
At a computer in a public library I muse on your sentences:
“To share stories. To connect over how amazing it is to be alive in a culture that has time for art, that makes space for it.” After driving three hours out of 17 degrees in Flagstaff to 60 plus degrees in Phoenix, I find my old mother asleep in her backyard; she’s slumped in the fat chair my brother has dragged out of the house, gently snorting as she shifts inside of a gentle baking heat. She’s rolled up her pant legs to soak up more, more Phoenix heat. Nearby I see healthy beets reaching with that blue green leaf that holds a skeleton of red; I see primroses doing well, too, that my sister planted at the new year. There in that yard of brown grass and yellow dotted grapefruit tree there intersects evidence of three children trying to let their mother fade away in her own home; I’m the one that won’t wake her, but goes to the library to tend the space for art in my life, knowing when I return with Boston Market dinner later, I’ll find her with another Dick Francis novel in her lap. I don’t know what hero she hungrily reads and re-reads there. (I’ve never read one. A friend who knows the novels and knows me, suspects I’d identify with a detective who is stoic and self contained.) If my mother could name what she relishes, in language I’d recognize, what a feast that might be. Or if some holographic imprint of her wonder would dance over her head: how I would stare and stare. “These days I need emotional truth and growth and the feeling of recognition in both the joys and sorrows.” Oh I do, I do.
Such a picture you have put into my head, Jean, of your mother and the yard in which love grows in flower-shapes. When I am old, I believe that I too will want to lie in warm sun and return to all the places in books where I have been happy.
I love the Dick Francis books; for me, they are about people who do what must be done, and who are brave in ordinary ways as well as, sometimes, extraordinary ones.
It’s hard not to be able to share the wonder of someone we love, or wish to love, or even simply wish to understand better. But what a gift from all of you to her that she can have that wonder.
I don’t have children. No one will give me these gifts in the particular wrapper of “for my mother.” Imagining your mother in her yard is one of the few moments I’ve ever actually been sorry for that.
And Jean, your book is on the way. Thanks for taking a flyer on it. Hope you enjoy.