Absolute Gentleman

One of my flaws in character, and that sounds a little harsh, but I’m not sure what else to call it, is the way I rebut — the way I disagree with people when I think they’re making an incorrect statement or assessment, or when there’s some kind of action I deem an injustice.

This entry is an exercise in disagreeing like a normal person.

I like to blame this disease on the fact that I was raised on Long Island, a place, along with Florida, that could break away from its tectonic-freaking-plate, float to Greenland, Europe, Africa, whatever, and would not be missed at all.

Of course I’d want most of my family off the Island, but I’d probably leave Billy. Mostly because Billy is delusional, and doesn’t think he needs anybody.

My disagreement is with a writer who posted, on a social networking site, that he was just accepted for publication in a literary magazine. To set the scene clearly, so you don’t have to read my mind, he is also the director of a rather excellent publisher, and this literary magazine is a bit of a third or fourth-tier publication, assuming, as I do, the first tier is Paris Review, Granta, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker; second tier, or first tier A, is something like McSweeney’s, Fence, Tin House, Zoetrope All-Story, Virginia Quarterly Review; and third are magazines like Post Road (awful type, horrible arrangement, terrible layout, good writing) and the 1500 other literary magazines in the Boston area, Ninth Letter (who spend all their grant money on website development, apparently), The Cottahatchie Review or whatever you call it, Florida Review, Georgia Review, Your Mom Review, etcetera.

The one I’m talking about is a third tier.

So this writer/publisher, who I respect a lot (’whom’ I know, but ‘who’ is how I’m saying it), because he does wonderful things for the publishing world, for writers, and for kids, makes it known that he was published in this third-tier magazine. It’s an exciting time, to be sure. How awesome is it when someone acknowledges your diction and syntax and chooses to have it representative of the vision they have for their magazine. I do not disagree with his excitement at all. He deserves to be excited and to let those who admire him know about it.

But then he started saying things like, “I can’t believe they accepted that piece…” “I threw that thing together in, like, one day…” and so on (These are not direct quotes, but are the root of my discomfort.)

This really bothered me for two reasons.

One: On behalf of all of us who (not ‘whom’ but ‘who’ this time) write, and on behalf of all those who work endlessly on their writing with little acknowledgment because their submission ends up on a slush pile that is not even read, I’d like to say that writers do not want to know if a published writer just threw a doodle together and submitted it. They really don’t, even if it’s true. It cheapens the work, makes the writer look like a jerk, despite the fact that he is not, and it reflects poorly on the publication in question (he named the publication in his jottings), even if it is a third-tier literary magazine.

Two: The writer in question publishes books. He publishes very good books. The literary community is about knowing one of the editors or being a famous writer, and it is rarely about being published as an unknown. Every editor and publisher has a backlog of favors to grant to friends that will last him two or three years. My point is that he can’t think, can’t even remotely think, that his thrown-together story/poem was accepted on the merits of its brilliance, that his being an editor didn’t play a significant role in the decision, that this wasn’t the initiation of a not-so-inconspicuous back-scratching exercise, that will be cashed in sometime in the future, when enough time passes that the writer in question wouldn’t suspect such distastefulness.

These literary publishers are the same ones that whine about how The New Yorker only publishes John Updike and Alice Munro, and what they are not realizing is that they are, in essence, doing the same thing and perpetuating the problem by doing so at the ground level, at the seedling stage, where promising young writers are supposed to get their break, where we should be reading the freshest, most innovative material.

My only hope is that he doesn’t reach up to scratch their backs.

Consider the following sentence that I’m considering:

Human beings desire the dramatic.

Then consider

Human beings desire drama.

In the interest of brevity and conciseness, which is something I demand from my students, the latter wins by a nose. However, in the interest in rhythm, the former is the obvious choice. John Gardner discusses this in The Art of Fiction extensively. In demonstrating different rhythmic possibilities, he places accent marks over the syllables in the spots he might tap his foot if he were keeping time. I don’t know if I’m explaining this clearly enough, but anyway. Here’s how the second sentence can be accented, demonstrated by the bold, capitalized letters:

HUman BEings desIre drAma.

He might say that the sentence is too rhythmically stunted, that there isn’t enough play in between the accented marks. The first sentence seems to be stretched out more:

HUman BEings desIre the draMAtic.

Admittedly, there’s a slight variance, but this sentence features words with 2, 2, 3, 1, and 3 syllables, respectively. Since the first sentence contains words with 2, 2, 3, and 2 syllables, there might be too much syllabic repetition (what I’m calling it).

There’s nothing like healthy doses of hate mail, from people you care about, to get the blood flowing. Yeah, the whining I’m doing about life with my father is somewhat pathetic, but in the purest sense of the word. There is a pathos here, and I am allowed to contemplate it, especially during this time in my life. There’s a tricky balance to maintain here: how do I speak the truth and work through memory without hurting people I love?

This isn’t the movies. I don’t want to sit in front of my father, him all clueless and rough, and scream at him about how he’s failed me as a father. Then tell him I’m gay. I don’t want any of that drama, but reading over the entries, what is essentially a series of rough drafts, I can see that my first impulse as a writer is to pour things out. All of this is natural.

It’s the balance memoir writers have to negotiate all the time. When I was in graduate school, I helped initiate a change in how writing workshops were done. Initially, the workshop groups were separated into distinct “fiction” and “creative nonfiction” groups. Sitting in an exclusively nonfiction group turned my stomach and made me as resentful as the two students who have been sending me hate mail the past week or so. I didn’t want to hear the other memoir-writer’s problems with man-hating, or coming out, or past abuse, and yes, I thought they were pathetic. I didn’t have enough compassion for them, and it was a mistake.

I wanted to be with the fiction writers, mixed in with people who wrote thinly-veiled nonfiction. The problem was that they didn’t want the likes of me, either. They didn’t want to hear my problems. What I came to realize is that I wanted to be in the fiction workshop group because I could hide there. You can’t hide if you’re in a group that writes exclusively nonfiction.

So the question is: How do memoir writers express themselves without their words sounding overwrought and pathetic? With me, it’s still under negotiation. But I’m not hiding anymore.

I am the eldest of three brothers. I am two years older than one and seven years older than the other. I don’t know how I did as an older brother. No one ever told me.

One year, I think it may have been 1985 or 1986, I gave up on being the eldest brother. I let the middle brother assume the role of the eldest brother. I could feel that he wanted it so badly, and it was obvious my brothers wanted me out of that position.

I think my father made me hate responsibility. I was the best runner on the Cross Country team of Connetquot High School for my sophomore through senior years, yet when it came time to name team captains, I was passed over. I should have been passed over, because I didn’t like to practice — complained about the workouts all the time, regularly engaged in what we called Hostess Runs (instead of running the prescribed distance, we’d run to the Hostess outlet and gorge on Suzy-Q’s and Twinkies at a remote location inside Connetquot State Park.) But when it came time for the meets, I would win — every single time. I was the best and there was nothing anyone could do to take that away from me. They could practice harder, stretch longer, have a beautiful girlfriend — their parents could have more money than mine. None of it mattered. I was always fucking better.

My father made me hate being good at anything. There was always unnecessary pressure associated with being good. I had to get a scholarship, I needed to win awards, I couldn’t be pushed around.

My father made the middle brother and I join an organization called DeMolay. It was some junior organization of the Masons, and my father wanted to create a new chapter of this freak organization at his Masonic chapter in Smithtown, New York. There came a time we had to decide on the first leader of this organization. Since my father, Frank J. Tempone, Jr. initiated this endeavor, it seemed obvious that I, Frank J. Tempone, III would be its first leader. I don’t remember what the title was called, but there was a ceremony where the girls’ equivalent of Demolay — Rainbow, or something — would come in and present the new boys’ leader with a giant stuffed animal, as a token of acknowledgment. It’s one of those things that makes a person think about why he’s actually on this Earth. Are we here to do time-killing shit like this all the time?

When it came time to vote, I not only backed out of the running for Grand Water Buffalo, but I abstained from all voting. My father seethed when I refused to vote, probably asked me why I had to be such a dick, which was especially traumatic coming from your father, but I guess that’s what I wanted all along.

Today my brother, the accountant, continues the role of big brother. The other evening, Big Brother asked me what was going on, like he cared. He told me to stick it out, or something. He told me I had kids to think about. Thanks, Billy, but there’s nothing you can do to help me with this one.

Stop whining about the publishing industry tanking, or laying off a bulk of their editorial staff. Stop giving yourself excuses as to why you haven’t been published. Your book wasn’t published because it wasn’t good enough. If you truly worked diligently and didn’t sit around finding excuses for why your book doesn’t fit today’s market or how your agent isn’t working hard enough for you, you would have written something decent already.

Come back when you decide to work harder — come back when you agree to commit yourself to the work you want to do and stop making excuses. I’m tired of all your whining.

Also: stop being so agreeable. You know what your problem is — you fully recognize your limitations and your shortcomings — but you’re spending all your time saying “I know, I know…I must do better…” When it gets so tiring to listen to such crap. Fix it already.

Sit at the desk and work. If your job or your kids are getting in the way, deal with it. If it’s going to be a crutch for you, quit writing. Just quit and save everyone the hassle of having to hear your mouth anymore.

In fact, just quit. I don’t even trust you at this point. You’ll nod your head when you read this and resolve to do better, because you know I’m on to you. It won’t last, though. You’ll do all right for a day or two, then you’ll start the excuses again. You’ll have to clean the office, or the holidays are here. You’ll start on New Year’s. It’s the perfect time for such things. You’ll start writing seriously, SERIOUSLY this time. You’re at a crossroads and THIS IS IT.

Save it. You’re not doing anything like that. Unless you’re willing to start right now and right where you’re sitting (no coffeeshops, no reserving a quiet room at the library) then just quit. You’re finished.

I don’t want to hear about this again.