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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307767394 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Sag Harbor, New York, and New York, New YorkDate of Birth:
January 6, 1931Place of Birth:
New York, New YorkEducation:
A.B., Kenyon College, 1952; postgraduate study, Columbia University, 1952-53Read an Excerpt
The Writer in the Family
IN 1955 MY FATHER died with his ancient mother still alive in a nursing home. The old lady was ninety and hadn’t even known he was ill. Thinking the shock might kill her, my aunts told her that he had moved to Arizona for his bronchitis. To the immigrant generation of my grandmother, Arizona was the American equivalent of the Alps, it was where you went for your health. More accurately, it was where you went if you had the money. Since my father had failed in all the business enterprises of his life, this was the aspect of the news my grandmother dwelled on, that he had finally had some success. And so it came about that as we mourned him at home in our stocking feet, my grandmother was bragging to her cronies about her son’s new life in the dry air of the desert.
My aunts had decided on their course of action without consulting us. It meant neither my mother nor my brother nor I could visit Grandma because we were supposed to have moved west too, a family, after all. My brother Harold and I didn’t mind—it was always a nightmare at the old people’s home, where they all sat around staring at us while we tried to make conversation with Grandma. She looked terrible, had numbers of ailments, and her mind wandered. Not seeing her was no disappointment either for my mother, who had never gotten along with the old woman and did not visit when she could have. But what was disturbing was that my aunts had acted in the manner of that side of the family of making government on everyone’s behalf, the true citizens by blood and the lesser citizens by marriage. It was exactly this attitude that had tormented my mother all her married life. She claimed Jack’s family had never accepted her. She had battled them for twenty-five years as an outsider.
A few weeks after the end of our ritual mourning my Aunt Frances phoned us from her home in Larchmont. Aunt Frances was the wealthier of my father’s sisters. Her husband was a lawyer, and both her sons were at Amherst. She had called to say that Grandma was asking why she didn’t hear from Jack. I had answered the phone. “You’re the writer in the family,” my aunt said. “Your father had so much faith in you. Would you mind making up something? Send it to me and I’ll read it to her. She won’t know the difference.”
That evening, at the kitchen table, I pushed my homework aside and composed a letter. I tried to imagine my father’s response to his new life. He had never been west. He had never traveled anywhere. In his generation the great journey was from the working class to the professional class. He hadn’t managed that either. But he loved New York, where he had been born and lived his life, and he was always discovering new things about it. He especially loved the old parts of the city below Canal Street, where he would find ships’ chandlers or firms that wholesaled in spices and teas. He was a salesman for an appliance jobber with accounts all over the city. He liked to bring home rare cheeses or exotic foreign vegetables that were sold only in certain neighborhoods. Once he brought home a barometer, another time an antique ship’s telescope in a wooden case with a brass snap.
“Dear Mama,” I wrote. “Arizona is beautiful. The sun shines all day and the air is warm and I feel better than I have in years. The desert is not as barren as you would expect, but filled with wildflowers and cactus plants and peculiar crooked trees that look like men holding their arms out. You can see great distances in whatever direction you turn and to the west is a range of mountains maybe fifty miles from here, but in the morning with the sun on them you can see the snow on their crests.”
My aunt called some days later and told me it was when she read this letter aloud to the old lady that the full effect of Jack’s death came over her. She had to excuse herself and went out in the parking lot to cry. “I wept so,” she said. “I felt such terrible longing for him. You’re so right, he loved to go places, he loved life, he loved everything.”
WE BEGAN trying to organize our lives. My father had borrowed money against his insurance and there was very little left. Some commissions were still due but it didn’t look as if his firm would honor them. There was a couple of thousand dollars in a savings bank that had to be maintained there until the estate was settled. The lawyer involved was Aunt Frances’ husband and he was very proper. “The estate!” my mother muttered, gesturing as if to pull out her hair. “The estate!” She applied for a job part-time in the admissions office of the hospital where my father’s terminal illness had been diagnosed, and where he had spent some months until they had sent him home to die. She knew a lot of the doctors and staff and she had learned “from bitter experience,” as she told them, about the hospital routine. She was hired.
I hated that hospital, it was dark and grim and full of tortured people. I thought it was masochistic of my mother to seek out a job there, but did not tell her so.
We lived in an apartment on the corner of 175th Street and the Grand Concourse, one flight up. Three rooms. I shared the bedroom with my brother. It was jammed with furniture because when my father had required a hospital bed in the last weeks of his illness we had moved some of the living-room pieces into the bedroom and made over the living room for him. We had to navigate bookcases, beds, a gateleg table, bureaus, a record player and radio console, stacks of 78 albums, my brother’s trombone and music stand, and so on. My mother continued to sleep on the convertible sofa in the living room that had been their bed before his illness. The two rooms were connected by a narrow hall made even narrower by bookcases along the wall. Off the hall were a small kitchen and dinette and a bathroom. There were lots of appliances in the kitchen—broiler, toaster, pressure cooker, counter-top dishwasher, blender—that my father had gotten through his job, at cost. A treasured phrase in our house: at cost. But most of these fixtures went unused because my mother did not care for them. Chromium devices with timers or gauges that required the reading of elaborate instructions were not for her. They were in part responsible for the awful clutter of our lives and now she wanted to get rid of them. “We’re being buried,” she said. “Who needs them!”
So we agreed to throw out or sell anything inessential. While I found boxes for the appliances and my brother tied the boxes with twine, my mother opened my father’s closet and took out his clothes. He had several suits because as a salesman he needed to look his best. My mother wanted us to try on his suits to see which of them could be altered and used. My brother refused to try them on. I tried on one jacket which was too large for me. The lining inside the sleeves chilled my arms and the vaguest scent of my father’s being came to me.
“This is way too big,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” my mother said. “I had it cleaned. Would I let you wear it if I hadn’t?”
It was the evening, the end of winter, and snow was coming down on the windowsill and melting as it settled. The ceiling bulb glared on a pile of my father’s suits and trousers on hangers flung across the bed in the shape of a dead man. We refused to try on anything more, and my mother began to cry.
“What are you crying for?” my brother shouted. “You wanted to get rid of things, didn’t you?”
Reading Group Guide
1. Discuss your initial reactions to the stories and novella. What themes does Doctorow explore, and to what effect? How are the various narrators and characters similar or dissimilar?
2. Did you read the stories in order, then the novella? Or did you skip around? How do you think your reading of the book affected your experience? Is there is a right or wrong way to read Lives of the Poets? Do you think you can evaluate the stories and novella individually, or do they need to be considered as a collection?
3. Discuss the significance of Jonathan’s final letter to his grandmother in “The Writer in the Family.” Why did he write it? Why do you think it angered his Aunt Frances so much?
4. “The Water Works” is the shortest, starkest story in the collection. What did you take away from this mysterious story? How does it fit into the collection as a whole?
5. “Willi” is another short, bleak story, in which a young boy is both obsessed and repulsed by his mother’s infidelity. Though he fears for his mother, Willi tells his father about her affair—and then listens, rapt, as his father exacts his revenge. What did you make of this story? What additional meaning does it take on after reading the novella?
6. In “The Hunter,” when discussing her young students, the teacher tells the bus driver, “It is very easy . . . to make them fall in love with you. Boys or girls, it’s very easy” (46). What’s the significance of her statement? Does she try to make the bus driver “fall in love” with her? If so, why does she reject him at the end of the night? And what is the point of the elaborate display she puts on for the photographer at school the next day?
7. In “The Foreign Legation,” Morgan’s wife and children have left him. He goes through the motions of his former life, but doesn’t seem to find any meaning in it. After he watches a couple engage in sexual activities outside of his house, he thinks: “I am the lucky one chosen for my lack of consequence” (58). Why is it “lucky” to be of no consequence? Discuss this sentiment, and how it relates to the other stories in the collection.
8. Doctorow ends “The Foreign Legation” with a violent terrorist attack, which Morgan witnesses. Morgan’s reaction is very strange. What did you make of it?
9. In “The Leather Man,” Doctorow raises far more questions than he answers. Discuss this quote in the context of the stories and novella: “The universe oscillates. . . . If things come apart enough, they will have started to come together” (70).
10. Toward the end of “The Leather Man,” we are privy to a question and answer session with James C. Montgomery, “the astronaut that went bad.” Reflecting on his moon walk, he says, “The truth is I don’t remember. . . . I can see it on television and I don’t feel it, you know what I mean? I can’t believe it happened. I see myself, and I did it, but I don’t remember how it felt, I don’t remember the experience of it” (76). Discuss this statement and what it means for the collection. Have you ever experienced a similar sensation?
11. In “Lives of the Poets,” Jonathan thinks, “What I want for my life now is for it to be simple, without secrets, I want to be who I really am with everyone, all the time” (125). What exactly does he mean? Is this something we can ever achieve? Think about what we read three pages later: “Duplicity in individuals is, of course, the basis of civilization” (128). Do you agree with this idea? Why or why not?
12. Doctorow ties his collection together with his final entry, the novella “Lives of the Poets.” But reading about Jonathan, the boy from “The Writer in the Family,” as an adult, and a successful writer, certainly changes the way we perceive the previous stories.
What does the reappearance of Jonathan do for the collection? Does it change your reading of the stories? How?
13. Do you think the stories in the collection are Jonathan’s writing exercises? Discuss. When Jonathan says of a friend, “I’m willing to forgive him anything because he’s a good poet” (85), are we inclined to forgive Doctorow for his literary tricks because he is such a brilliant writer?
14. At the end of “Lives of the Poets,” Jonathan has engaged in an ill-fated affair, distanced himself from his wife and children, and watched his group of friends and acquaintances suffer private and public traumas. In the very last lines of the collection, he sits with one of the illegal immigrants he has taken in, a boy, letting him type: “Maybe we’ll go to the bottom of the page get my daily quota done come on, kid, you can do three more lousy lines” (145)—and with that, Lives of the Poets concludes. Doctorow doesn’t even end his sentence with a period—it just stops. What did you think of the ending?