HUMOR

All this time there has been Thomas McGuane. Do you ever discover an author's work and realize in an aching way that how you see the world might have been entirely changed if you had read it earlier? I have known for a long time who McGuane is, of course. I had some sense of his style, of the kind of writing for which he is known and I am a big enough Jimmy Buffett fan to have been familiar with Rancho Deluxe and Captain Berserko. But because I must have seen slapped onto the spine of one of his books somewhere sometime that narrow label, humor, I had dismissed him. You can pretend for my sake that you do not know that I tend to take myself too seriously at times. Which is why I asked such a hyperbolic question. Perhaps reading Thomas McGuane would not have entirely changed the way I see the world, but it surely would have given me a glimpse of other possibilities.

What McGuane is showing me is how a master storyteller operates. Because, when it comes down to it, is that not why we read in the first place? Because we like a good story. It is something all humans share, whether they are readers or not. We relish tales. We wonder how it ends. We live our lives in our heads as a story we are telling to ourselves. It is a thing about our species that stretches itself all the way back across the full history of us. We owe our very survival to telling and listening to stories. Think of that.

It is one thing to tell a story, though, and quite another to craft one as if working in wood or clay or with oils, bringing in all the disparate elements, creating from jumbled bits and pieces a whole thing that is carried up on itself. In writing, I think of it as wordsmithery. It is the way a skilled writer finds the exact places in which to fit the only words that go, maybe a little trimming here and there, but shaping the words into a form that allows them to seem as if they came that way from the very beginning. It is a way of putting something that makes it like nothing anyone else would have said. There are lots of quality writers out there. There are very few true wordsmiths.

I spend time scratching in pencil a line under such a passage as this:

"Visiting my mother's family in Arkansas, they had been passengers on a powerful bass boat that sped through a crowded water baptism on the Ouachita River, scattering and injuring worshippers. Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith. I think their particular kind of Christian longs for punishment, longs to be shriven, the only road to paradise they could picture. In any case, while awaiting trial for criminal endangerment, my mother and father began hitting the bars. Sometimes a Christian will deliberately go down a bad road just to produce eventual suffering. They're crazier than pet coons."

Or finding scattered all through his narrative quick gems like:

"I was in that moronic oblivion that makes the world go round." 

McGuane writes out of a Montana landscape and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. I have written before of Stegner and of Ivan Doig, his literary successor, and also of my penchant for literature set in the west and in Montana. And Wendell Berry, who we know well here, of course, was also a Stegner Fellow. But McGuane's work is decidedly different from that of Stegner and Doig and Berry. Though place and the land are as much a part of the work as any character for all of them, McGuane's writing might be considered the mirror image of that of the others. His carries a sort of cynicism in the face of Doig's and Berry's continual leaning toward hope, though it is a style not without keen observation and a profound understanding of the world and people around us. McGuane points out through his stories the absurdity of our situation as human beings, the irrationality of most of our endeavors, the seeming pointlessness of our day-to-day existence. Berry and Doig, on the other hand, guide us to something outside ourselves.

What I think, though, is that both approaches provide meaning.

When I was in college I took a memorable class called Appalachian Political Economy. One of our first assignments was to spend some time looking at collections of photography focused on the region and to then write about our reactions to it. Already you can imagine in your mind the sorts of pictures we saw, black and white, certainly, and favoring subjects like hardscrabble farms and weather beaten people and dingy towns mourning the loss of great industry, mixed in among vistas of fog shrouded ridges and rusty fences stretching far into the distance. They told a story that I think needs to be told, without a doubt. But I wrote in my response that, even understanding perfectly why the story needed to be told, it also struck me that while I considered myself a child of the region as much as any of the people in the pictures, no one was coming to photograph me as I relaxed in my apartment after a day full of the grudging toil of discussing things like political economy at a private college. I was well-fed, generally well-groomed and well-provisioned and living also in Appalachia. What I was trying to say is that while the photographs were important in documenting the realities of a geographic region distinct in many ways, they did not give the full reality, nor did they do anything to show that the region was also a lot like most other places in America.

What I am getting at is that McGuane is showing me that both sides of the story are important. He has prompted me to consider that while I love and revere the writing of Berry and Doig to the point of even deriving a certain amount of emotional sustenance from it, maybe the idyllic and the pastoral are not the only ways to show respect for a place. While no expert, I have a fairly solid awareness of the literature that comes out of the Appalachian region and I know of no author currently writing out of it that does not do it in the way of old barns and foggy hollows. I do not know any Appalachian writer who is writing literary fiction that tells the story of human experience here without the semi-worship of ridge tops and wise, old Grandma in her rocker on the porch. Another hyperbolic statement, perhaps, but I hope you get my drift. What McGuane writes of the West, particularly in his more recent work, makes the place and the land central, but it is not necessarily the sweeping frontier peopled by proud and rugged immigrants. And it is not the bucolic landscape of Berry's Port William. But it is still brilliant. And just plain funny.