Author’s Preface
Many years ago, the British novelist Paul Scott, author of “The Raj Quartet” and The Jewel in the Crown, told me that the only definition of a novel that made any sense to him was that it was “a large collection of consecutively numbered pages, each containing a volume of words, bound on one side and open on the other three and generally contained by a cover.” He noted that if one presented some uninitiated but otherwise intelligent person with a shelf containing Ulysses, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Vanity Fair, The Old Man and the Sea, War and Peace, Breakfast of Champions, The Old Curiosity Shop, Catch-22, and Remembrances of Things Past and averred that they all belonged to the genus of prose fiction we call “the novel,” the most probable reaction would be bewilderment. “It would be roughly the same as trying to explain to some extraterrestrial intelligence how an elephant, a pussy cat, an antelope, a duck-billed platypus, and a whale are manifestly of the same classification,” he said.
Certainly, that leaves any novelist at sea when it comes to envisioning what kind of creature may be emerging from his keyboard. Conformity to preconception leads to banality, often; but the necessary expectation of a reader also dictates the predicate of meeting the minimum criteria in appearance and convention that will usually determine the eventual acceptance or rejection of any effort. Our tendency is to call the extraordinary “experimental” if we don’t like it or can’t understand it, or, if it’s wildly successful, “iconoclastic.” Our opposite tendency is to despair of the formulaic, however popular, especially when it’s so predictable as to be trite. The danger, then, is finding the middle ground between a total misfire and merely meeting the mark. It’s a narrow target that every writer has to shoot for.
With that in mind, I have wrestled for a long time with the notion that what this book represents is in any way shape or form, a novel. It certainly does not offer the typical plot arc that so often characterizes a long and involved piece of fiction with interacting characters woven through a multiplicity of plots building to a unified climax; but it also is not a collection of individual and autonomous stories. There is a link, a common thread, a theme, and I am hopeful that there also is character development and a certain amount of suspense along with irony and, of course, pathos. Whether that will be enough to qualify it as a novel is a matter of hope. I think it is, but I’m only the writer. What do I know?
The volume’s genesis came from a remark that Judy, my wife, made one frigid afternoon when I returned from an errand and related to her the remarkable and, I thought, hilarious and at the same time marginally sad encounter and conversation I had had with a total stranger. She noted that “this kind of thing” seemed to happen to me more often than might be usual to other people. She also accused me of “embellishing” the anecdote slightly, exaggerating details here, trimming excess there, reforming the whole experience in a way that actually converted it from a factual rehearsal of an encounter into a more entertaining fiction, more or less, wherein I was merely the conduit through which a tiny fraction of the human comedy played out for my auditor. I realized that she was quite right about that. There was a level of mendacity involved. I also realized that the emotional response I sought in telling it was derived from my almost unconscious creation of a narrative persona, a role I cast myself in, but one that was, for the most part, a complete invention. For that reason, I wrote out that particular event, molded it into a story, as it were. In the process, I recalled another, dredged it up from my memory and did much the same thing once more. In time, I had a number of them, and over more time, that number grew.
What I came to realize as the work expanded and developed was that there was a commonality among all of them. Although the circumstances and characters of focus changed, the real impact of each of the stories, which I was now coming more and more to regard as chapters, was on the narrator, the almost faceless and usually reluctant witness to the working out of some dilemma or pattern of behavior that was remarkable more for its commonplace and sometimes mundane revelation than for its grandiloquence or dramatic significance. The narrator, sometimes involved, sometimes not, was more than audience for these scenes; his was a constantly changing perspective, a point of view, on whom each incident has a profound effect. And it was in the retelling of the narrative that he came to realize himself, to understand himself, and to identify himself in some unique way. That, I think, is another definition of a novel.
Also, I came to understand as these formed and took on a whole shape, was the greater ebb and flow of the common man and woman proceeding through everyday life, dealing with the bumps and pot-holes of daily existence, unmindful, in a larger sense, of the greater forces of the world, nation, state, or even city and neighborhood that were contesting for primacy in governing the direction of their lives. In more than a literary sense, that’s yet another definition of a novel.
What I also came to realize is that none of the people who emerged from the narrator’s encounters were particularly significant, that is, particularly significant to most anyone else. Their lives were essentially private, were only what they were and would never be the subject for the evening news or a periodical headline. They were born, would grow up, live out their existences fully, perhaps, then die and be forgotten more or less without ever having been known outside their immediate circle of acquaintances, their families, a handful of ephemeral friends and, perhaps, co-workers. They would never do anything important, never make some memorable contribution to the world, even to their own society; but they were, at bottom, honest and upright, absolutely obsessed with the priority of being who they were; mostly, they were sincere. Like most of humankind, they were merely getting through another day, another week, another year, hoping to stay well, hoping to increase their prosperity, hoping to find contentment if not satisfaction before they retired for the night and rose in the morning to do it all over again. I realized that they were the embodiment of the Greek term, hoi polloi.
My mother always misused that term. When I was a child, I would hear her invoke it as a reference to what we might call, today, “the upper crust,” the privileged, our betters, perhaps, or those we perceived to be our betters. She can’t be too harshly corrected for that, though. James Fenimore Cooper made the same mistake, probably because to him—and to my mother—it seems to evoke a homonymic echo of “hoity-toity.” One or two of the literary journal editors I encountered when I sent out a few of these chapters for individual publication misunderstood the term in a different way. They said it was “condescending” or “patronizing.” But they were as incorrect as my mother and James Fenimore Cooper.
The term simply means “the folk”, “the common people”, everyday human beings who make up that great “mass of men” that Henry David Thoreau had in mind when he evoked his famous phrase about “quiet desperation.” And, in their own way, most of these are, for all their common identities, quietly desperate. They face crises that are so typical to all of us that, in and of themselves, they become unremarkable. But like an annoying minor injury or sore, like a nasal allergy or a pinching shoe, such problems can take on a greater significance when they occur at the wrong time or in the wrong place in day-to-day routines. So, they feel the need to share them; and by doing so, they share their whole selves with whomever is willing to accept them, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes because there is just no choice but to stand and watch and listen.
In a way, of course, they’re performing, consciously occupying a momentary stage in front of what is often a reluctant audience. But it is through such performance that the human comedy is usually played out, and it is through such performance that we come to understand and assert who we are. We all do it, of course. And we all witness it. But rarely do we become aware of it when it’s happening; more rarely do we connect one performance with another, linking them in a grander and far more capricious plot line, one that can never reach catharsis; that act, that scene has yet to be written.
Sometimes, I look at an old photograph or, maybe, watch an old piece of film—often one made long before I was born. Rather than focus on the subject of the picture—whether it’s a person, a landmark, or an event—I like to pick some anonymous bystander, some curious and unidentified individual who, trapped in focus in the depth of field, might, for the briefest moment, peer into the lens and gape, grin, frown, or simply stare. Usually, he or she is quickly out of the frame, or in the case of a still photo, is only a part of the background. But the image of that face, captured forever on grainy celluloid, fascinates me. I wonder what happened to that person. I wonder about the next few moments after the camera was gone, when he or she turned attention once more to the ordinary routine of life, when he or she retreated back into the obscurity of personal history. I wonder, did he go back to work, stand behind a counter for the rest of the day, or perhaps exchange that jaunty boater for a welder’s helmet, that snazzy suit for a barber’s smock? Did she make that bonnet, and what caused the stain on her apron? Had he ever fired that pistol in his belt or polished those scuffed shoes; did she truly love that child beside her, or did she wish her never born? What did he eat for supper that night? Was she in love that day? Was her shirtwaist too tight, or did his underwear bind? Had she seen a dentist lately, or ever? Did he smoke, drink to excess? Did she attend church regularly, or was she a prostitute off on a respectable lark? Was she contemplating a risky investment, or did he regret a loan he had recently made to a hopeless friend? Did he, at that moment, have a tumor that was quietly killing him? Was she contemplating an abortion? Would she live long enough to vote? When he laughed, did he snort or bray? When she cried, did she sob or quietly weep? Was it hot on the street that day, did sweat run down into his eyes, did he have an odor about him? Was she married? What were his worries, her fears, their joys? Was he generally happy, a good man with a good life? Or did he harbor some deep, sinister secret beneath the mugging grin. Did she perhaps leave the street and murder someone for two dollars and an expired bus pass? What did they see in the distance beyond the camera?
Such questions can be maddening if they become obsessive. But by looking into the smeared countenances and studying the vague details, I can often imagine whole stories, because every life, no matter how common or unknown, is a story. It is the raw material of character, the fountainhead of fiction, the stuff of a novel. And when one moves beyond the static form of the photograph and applies the same amount of wonder and speculation to people one encounters in ordinary people in ordinary locations every day, then one sees that sudden revelation of the human condition in its most unguarded and unadulterated form. One sees why the novel exists and has value; for when it’s properly presented, it exposes mankind as man, naked and unashamed in all his ignorance and his wisdom.
I chose, though, to call this fiction, this collective novel, if that’s a proper phrase, vox populi. That’s Latin, and it means “voice of the people.” Normally, it’s used in a political sense, sometimes linked with the phrase, vox dei, meaning “the voice of God,” implying a tautology. I am not sure that any of these voices are the voice of God, at least not in anything more than an abstract sense; but I do believe that they are the voices of the people, the words of the folk, the expressions of the hoi polloi, the demand to be heard in order to prove existence. It’s an attitude that expands Descartes’ famous dictum: “I speak, therefore I am.”
In their marvelous play, You Can’t Take It With You, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart write the prayer that Grandpa Vanderhof offers as Grace before every meal:
“Well, Sir, we’ve been getting along pretty good for quite a while now, and we’re certainly much obliged. Remember, all we ask is to go along and be happy in our own sort of way. Of course, we want to keep our health, but as far as anything else is concerned, we’ll leave it to You.” [YCTWY, I, i)
This simple, inoffensive supplication seems to me to summarize most of what people truly feel, truly want. Most of us are cautiously grateful for our blessings, timidly anxious about our desires, and are willing, in a way, to go along with whatever Providence provides and dictates, hopeful that, in the end, it will all work out one way or another. Merely being comfortable, pain-free, and reasonably well-fed is, in the end, about all we dare wish for, and most of us realize that we will never be able to influence the ways of the world, and that requires managing our own affairs demands a sufficiency of labor.
These are the characters of this novel. They are pleasant and unpleasant, happy and sad, ignorant and well-informed. Some are determined, and some are uncertain. Some are funny, and some are tragic, and, in a way, all are both. They drift into and out of the narrator’s life with the abandonment of the proverbial straws in the wind, or, to evoke Gerard Manly Hopkins’ phrase, of “ships passing in the night”; and with each encounter, the narrator is shaped anew and each time with a deeper understanding. What they share is a story to tell and a need to tell it, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Their passions and proclivities, their peeves and prejudices, their profundities and predictions are all revealed in what they say, how they say it, and in their demand to be, however momentarily, alive. In a way, it’s a railing against the great existential put-down and a demand that the universe acknowledge them, even for a moment.
So, I do think this is a novel. It’s just not “that kind” of novel. And I offer it as a mapping out of the common person, not a “commoner,” not a nondescript or unimportant individual; on the contrary; each of these is a life, a voice, and personality, and each has a story to tell. Taken together, I think, they form the greatest plot of all, that of the human condition.