Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Read online

  Carlo Ponti, who wanted to produce the Dostoevsky film, had already made a movie in Russia in the early 1970s called Sunflower starring his wife, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni. Ponti was friendly with Soviet filmmakers and had friends among some members of the political leadership. As a result, Cimino hoped to be able to shoot on location in Russia, including Siberia and other areas normally closed to westerners.

  I was thinking about the script when I asked if the Russians would want to exercise censorship of any sort. Cimino said no, they intended to be cooperative in this matter. In the first place, it was the centennial year of Dostoevsky’s death. (Actually that was 1981.) They were hoping for a big film down the road to celebrate the man and his work. There’d be no censorship. The film wouldn’t even be processed in Russian film laboratories; instead, each day’s “rushes” would be sent out to France.

  At this point Cimino took out the script, a thick manuscript in a black folder, and put it on the table. I picked it up and flipped through some pages, reading a few lines to get an idea of it. Even dipping into it like that, I could tell at once this wasn’t a happy prospect. “Is there a story line here?” I asked. “Does it have a dramatic narrative?” Cimino shook his head. “That’s one of its problems. But I think there’s a spiritual development to it.” He said that and didn’t bat an eye. I was impressed. I could go on that, but what I’d been scanning hardly seemed like English, and it wasn’t just that there were a lot of Russian names. “Maybe after you’ve read it you’ll just want to throw up your hands and forget it,” Cimino said. The script had a strange look to it—dismayingly long passages of narrative occasionally interspersed with dialogue. I’d never seen a film script, but this didn’t even vaguely resemble my idea of such a work. But knowing, as he did, that I’d never seen one before, polished or otherwise (I’d warned him beforehand), Cimino had brought one along for me so that I would have a clear idea of the correct form. (When I looked at the sample screenplay he’d brought along, I had to ask what the letters INT. and EXT. stood for. “Interior” and “exterior,” he explained. V.O. and OS.? “Voice-over” and “offscreen.”) I went back up to Syracuse the next day and began work.

  Spiritual development or not, the work turned out to be inconsistent with everything I knew about Dostoevsky’s life. I was baffled and didn’t know where to start. It did cross my mind that it might be better if I simply “threw up my hands.” Working night and day, with time away from it only long enough to meet my classes, I roughed out a long savage draft which I immediately sent to Tess. Meanwhile, in preparation, she had read all the biographies she could get her hands on, as well as Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The House of the Dead, and The Diary of Polina Suslova. She went to work, adding many new scenes and expanding everywhere. Then she copied the work and sent it back to me. I went to work on it again. It was retyped once more, and again it went back to Tess who did still more work. I remember her telephone calls at odd hours to talk about Dostoevsky. Now and again she read me a scene she had just pulled out of the typewriter. The script came back to me and once more I worked on it. It was typed again and then again. By this time it was late November and the script was 220 pages long—prohibitive, that’s the only word for it. (An average screenplay falls somewhere between 90 and 110 pages; a rough estimate for gauging the length of a film is a page a minute. And Cimino is not one to speed up the process. His screenplay for Heaven’s Gate was 140 pages in length; the resulting film was nearly four hours long.)

  Despite everything that had been going on in our respective lives, Tess and I had been working like crazy on the script during this period. “I wish it had come at any time but this,” she told me during one of our many phone conversations. But she was excited about it, too. “Just imagine,” she said once. “Dostoevsky! We’re making him live again.” Her own father was losing his battle with cancer, and I was aware of the background of daily loss she worked against. “Dostoevsky gives me courage in all this,” she said to me. “And he lets me cry, too.”

  At the end of November, I sent the completed script to Cimino. Would anyone besides Tess and me feel it was as good as we thought? However, Cimino called at once to tell me how pleased and surprised he was with what had happened. Despite its length—he’d never seen a screenplay as long as our Dostoevsky—he was immensely happy with the result.

  I don’t know when or even if the screenplay will ever be turned into a movie. Cimino tells me that Carlo Ponti has moved from Los Angeles, presumably back to Europe, has dropped out of sight and is not making any efforts on behalf of producing the script. Cimino has put the 220-page screenplay aside and moved on to other projects.

  When I was invited to join the “Back-to-Back Series” I thought it might prove interesting if we could extract some material from the screenplay and present it in a coherent fashion. We excerpted material from the early pages of the script as St. Petersburg is torn by revolution and Dostoevsky is visiting a young writer in the mental ward of a hospital. Then we move to the time just after Dostoevsky’s arrest and confinement on charges of treason. Along with several coconspirators, he faced a death sentence. (Interestingly enough, Vladimir Nabokov’s grandfather was one of the judges in the case.) Then we skip and pick up the story just after Dostoevsky’s sentence has been commuted and he’s in prison awaiting deportation to Siberia.

  After the scenes in Siberia, we jump ahead and pick up the narrative ten years later, after Dostoevsky’s return to St. Petersburg and his involvement with Polina Suslova, the woman Dostoevsky drew on to create the heroine for The Gambler.

  The last section deals with Dostoevsky and Anna Grigoryevna, the woman who became his second wife. (His first died of tuberculosis two years after his return from Siberia to St. Petersburg.) Anna went to work for Dostoevsky as a stenographer, fell in love with him, and married him. She saw to it that Dostoevsky’s last years, the period of The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, were years of peace and tranquility.

  On “Bobber” and Other Poems

  Every poem I’ve written has been, for me, an occasion of the first order. So much so, I believe, that I can remember the emotional circumstances that were at work when I wrote the poem, my physical surroundings, even what the weather was like. If pressed, I think I could come close to recalling the day of the week. At least, in most instances, I can remember whether the poems were written during the week or on a weekend. Most certainly I can remember the particular time of day I wrote them—morning, midday, afternoon or, once in a great while, late at night. This kind of recall is not true of the short fiction I write, especially the stories I wrote early in my career. When I look back at my first book of stories, for example, I have to glance over the copyright dates to even get a fix on the year the stories were published, and from that I can guess—give or take a year or two—when they must have been written. It’s only in a few isolated instances that I can recall anything in particular, or out of the ordinary, about when I wrote them, let alone what I was feeling at the time I did so.

  I don’t know why it is that I recall so clearly the time and circumstances surrounding each poem, yet don’t recall much about the composition of these stories. I think partly it has to do with the fact that, in truth, I feel the poems are closer to me, more special, more of a gift received than my other work, even though I know, for sure, that the stories are no less a gift. It could be that I put a more intimate value finally on the poems than I do the stories.

  My poems are of course not literally true—the events didn’t actually happen, or at least the stuff in the poems didn’t happen in the way I say it does. But, like most of my fiction, there is an autobiographical element to the poems. Something resembling what happens in them did happen to me at some time or another, and the memory stayed with me until it found expression. Or often what is being described in the poem was to some degree a reflection of my state of mind at the time of writing it. I suppose in a large way then the poems are more personal than my stories and h
ence more “revealing.”

  In poetry, my own or someone else’s, I like narrative. A poem doesn’t have to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, but for me it has to keep moving, it has to step lively, it has to spark. It may move in any direction at all—back in time, far into the future, or it may veer off onto some overgrown trail. It may even cease to be earthbound and go out seeking habitation with the stars. It might speak in a voice from beyond the grave or travel with salmon, wild geese, or locusts. But it isn’t static. It moves. It moves and though it may have mysterious elements at work in it, its development is intrinsic, one thing suggesting something else. It shines—or at any rate I hope it shines.

  Each of my poems that the editor has seen fit to include in this anthology touches upon a real-life concern or situation that pressed upon my life with some degree of urgency when that particular poem was written. To that degree I suppose the poems could be called narrative or story poems for they are always about something. They have a “subject.” One of the things each one is “about” is what I thought and felt at the time I wrote it. Each poem preserves a specific moment in time; and when I look at one I can see the frame of mind I was in at the time I wrote it. Reading my poems now, I am in a very real sense looking back over a rough, but true map of my past. So in a way they are helping hold together my life, and I like that idea.

  “Bobber,” the oldest poem in the group, was written one fine June morning in a motel room in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on my way from Berkeley to Rock Island, Illinois. A year and a half later, in the fall of 1969, I was living in Ben Lomond, California, a few miles north of Santa Cruz, and it was there I wrote “Prosser.” I woke up one morning thinking about my father. He’d been dead for two years, but had appeared that night in the margins of a dream I’d had. I tried to pin something down from the dream, but couldn’t. But that morning I began to think about him and began to recall some hunting trips we’d made together. Then I clearly remembered the wheat fields we’d hunted over together, and I recalled the town of Prosser, a little place where we often stopped for something to eat in the evening once we’d finished hunting. It was the first town we came to after we left the wheat field country, and I suddenly remembered how the lights would appear to us at night, just as they do in the poem. I wrote it quickly and, seemingly, effortlessly. (This may be one of the reasons I’m especially fond of this poem. But if I were ever asked which is the favorite of any poem I’ve written, this one would be it.) A few days later that same week I wrote the poem “Your Dog Dies.” That one, too, came quickly and didn’t seem to require much revision.

  “Forever” was different. I wrote the poem in 1970, just before Christmas, in a workroom in a garage in Palo Alto; and it was a poem that I must have written fifty or sixty times before I felt I had it right. I remember that when I wrote the first draft it was raining hard outside. I had this worktable set up in the garage, and every now and then I would look out of the little garage window toward the house. It was late at night. Everyone inside the house was asleep. The rain seemed a part of that “Forever” I was approaching in my mind.

  “Looking for Work” was written the following August, in the afternoon, in an apartment house in Sacramento during a confusing and difficult summer. My children and my wife had gone to the park. The temperature was nearly a hundred degrees, and I was barefoot and in swimming trunks. When I walked across the tile floors of the apartment, my feet left tracks.

  “Wes Hardin” was also written in Sacramento. But it came a few months later, in October, and in a different residence, a house on a dead-end road called, if you can believe it, Lunar Lane. It was early in the morning, eight o’clock or so, and my wife had just left the house to drop the children off at school and go on to her job. I had the day in front of me, a rare day in which to write, but instead of trying to write anything I picked up a book that had come in the mail and began to read about outlaws of the Old West. I came to a photograph of John Wesley Hardin and stopped there. In a little while, I roughed out the poem.

  “Marriage” is the most recent poem in this particular group of poems and was written in a two-room apartment in Iowa City in April 1978. My wife and I had been separated for months. But we had gotten back together on a trial basis for what, as it turned out, would prove to be a very short time. But we were trying once more to see if we could put our marriage back together. Our children, both of them grown now, were someplace in California, pretty much on their own. Still, I was worried about them. I was also worried about myself and my wife and our marriage of twenty-some years that we were making one final effort to preserve. I was alive with apprehensions of all sorts. I wrote the poem in the evening, my wife in one room and I in the other. The fears I was experiencing found a place to go.

  The reconciliation didn’t work out, but that’s another story.

  On “For Tess”

  In its way, this poem is a kind of love letter to my wife, the poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. At the time I wrote the poem, in March 1984, I was spending time by myself in our house in Port Angeles, Washington. Prior to March I’d been in Syracuse, New York, where we live most of the time and where Tess teaches at the university. But in September 1983, my publisher had brought out Cathedral, a book of my short stories. After the book was published, there was such an extended hubbub for a while—a period of time that stretched right on into the new year—that I was thrown off my stride and couldn’t seem to find my way back into my work. And this literary commotion came in addition to the usual social activities we normally engage in when living in Syracuse—dinners with friends, movies, concerts, fiction and poetry readings at the university.

  In many regards, it was a “high” time, a good time, certainly, but frustrating for me as well: I was finding it hard to get back to my work. It was Tess who, seeing my frustration, suggested I go out alone to our house in Port Angeles in hopes of finding the necessary peace and quiet that I felt I needed to begin writing again. I headed west with the intention of writing fiction once I’d arrived. But after I’d settled into the house and been still for a while, I began, much to my surprise, to write poems. (I say “surprise” because I hadn’t written a poem in over two years and didn’t know if I ever would again.)

  Though “For Tess” is not, strictly speaking, “autobiographical”—I hadn’t used a red Daredevil lure to fish with for years and do not carry Tess’s dad’s pocketknife with me; and I didn’t go fishing on the day the poem seems to be taking place; nor was I “followed for a while” by a dog named “Dixie”—all of the things taking place in the poem had happened at one time or another, and I remembered, and I put these details into the poem. But—and this is important—the emotion in the poem, the sentiment (not to be confused, ever, with sentimentality)—the sentiment is true in every line, and it is given in clear and precise language. Further, the details in the poem are lively and specific. And insofar as the narrative or storytelling aspect is concerned, I think the poem is authentic and convincing. (I don’t have much patience with poems that use rhetoric to keep them going, or unengaged abstract pseudopoetic language. I tend to shy away from the abstract and rhetorical in literature, as well as in life.)

  “For Tess” tells a little story and captures a moment. Remember that a poem is not simply an act of self-expression. A poem or a story—any literary work that presumes to call itself art—is an act of communication between the writer and reader. Anyone can express himself, or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate, yes? The need is always to translate one’s thoughts and deepest concerns into language which casts these thoughts and concerns into a form—fictional or poetic—in the hope that a reader might understand and experience those same feelings and concerns. Other understandings and feelings contributed by the reader always accompany a piece of writing. That’s inevitable and even desirable. But if the main cargo of what the writer had to give is left at the depot, then that piece of w
riting, to my way of thinking, has largely failed. I think I’m right in feeling that being understood is a fundamental assumption that every good writer makes or rather a goal that he or she works toward.

  A final note. Not only did I attempt to capture and hold—that is to say, make permanent—a specific moment through a progression of specific details—I realized, halfway through the poem, that what I was writing was nothing less than a love poem. (One of the few love poems I’ve ever written, by the way.) For, not only was I addressing the poem to Tess, the woman who has shared my life for the past ten years, giving her some “news” of my life in Port Angeles—here I’m thinking of Ezra Pound’s remark that “literature is news that stays news”—but I was taking the occasion to say that I was grateful to her for coming into my life when she did, back in 1977. She made an immense difference and helped change my life in profound ways.

  That’s one of the things I was trying to “say” in the poem. And I’m pleased if I reached her and, because of that, touched other readers as well—gave them a little of the real emotion I was feeling when I wrote the poem.

  On “Errand”

  In early 1987 an editor at E. P. Dutton sent me a copy of the newly published Henri Troyat biography, Chekhov. Immediately upon the book’s arrival, I put aside what I was doing and started reading. I seem to recall reading the book pretty much straight through, able, at the time, to devote entire afternoons and evenings to it.