Long Work, Short Life
...1984, as part of the Ben Belitt Lectureship Series. A longer version of his remarks was printed last year in The Michigan Quarterly.
I Intend to say something about my life as a writer. Since I shan't go into a formal replay of the life, this will read more like a selective short memoir.
The beginning was slow, and perhaps not quite a beginning. Some beginnings promise a start that may take years to induce a commencement. Before the first word strikes the page, or the first decent idea occurs, there is the complicated matter of breaking the silence. Some throw up before they can breathe. Not all can run to the door at the knock of announcement - granted one hears it. Not all know what it means. Simply, not always is the gift of talent given free and clear. Some who are marvelously passionate to write may have to spend half their lives learning what their proper subject matter may be.
I began to write at an early age, yet it took me years actually to begin writing. Much diverted me. As a child I told stories for praise. I went for inspiration to the movies. I remember my mother delivering me, against her will, on a wet Sunday, to a movie house to see Charlie Chaplin, whose comedy haunted my soul. After being at the pictures I recounted their plots to school friends who would listen at dreadfully long length as I retold them. The pleasure, in the beginning, was in retelling the impossible tale.
When I overcontrived or otherwise spoiled a plot, I would substitute another of my own. I could on occasion be a good little liar who sometimes found it a burden to tell the truth. Once my father called me a bluffer, enraging me because I had meant to tell him a simple story, not one that had elaborated itself into a lie.
In grammar school, where I lived in a state of self-enhancing discovery, I turned school assignments into stories. Once I married off...
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