Earlier this year Open Road debuted a new feature on its blog called the Critical Symposium. Our first symposium introduced three essays by critics discussing Stanley Elkin's status as a Jewish American writer. Today marks the 75th year since the birth of Andre Dubus and, as a special tribute, we are initiating a new Critical Symposium about the enduring significance of his work. Our first installment in this series is an essay by the writer Thomas E. Kennedy, who met Dubus in 1983 while earning his MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Kennedy is the author of numerous novels, including the critically acclaimed In the Company of Angels and Falling Sideways. To learn more about his life and work visit his website. We hope you enjoy this moving portrait of Dubus and will stay tuned for future installments by friends of Dubus, which are scheduled to appear tomorrow and Monday right here on the Open Road Blog.
Sweet Fire: Memories of Andre Dubus (1)
Thomas E. Kennedy
At lunchtime on Thursday, February 25, 1999, waiting for a prescription to be filled, I wandered through a record shop in Copenhagen where I live, and one CD caught my eye. Roland Kirk. Sweet Fire. I picked it from the rack and studied the cover photo; there was Kirk, sporting a black beret, dark glasses wrapped around his unseeing eyes, three reed instruments strung around his neck while he blew into a transverse flute. I opened the case and read, “Saxophonist Roland Kirk (1936–1977) became famous in the sixties … blind from the age of two … by the time he was fifteen he was playing professionally as a tenor saxophonist … In 1977, he founded the Vibration School of Music to teach saxophonists ‘black classical music …’"(2)
I should buy this, I thought, and listen to it, just so I can write to Andre and tell him I finally heard Roland Kirk. But I was in a hurry, I had a busy day. I put the CD back, picked up my nose drops, returned to the office. The afternoon was hectic. It was deadline day on a book I was editing, and emails were flying in from all over Europe.
Each email required me to do something—make a change in the book, phone someone, send another email, ask my secretary to do something. It was hectic. In the middle of it all came an email that said, “You don’t know me, but our mutual friend Susan Dodd asked me to let you know that Andre Dubus died last night, February 24th. His death was sudden and unexpected, probably a heart attack. Susan sends her love and best wishes on this sad occasion.”
It was 3:02 p.m. in Copenhagen. On the east coast of the U.S., where Andre had lived, it would have been 9:02 a.m.
Life being what it is—baby needs a new pair of shoes—I had to go on doing what I was doing. So I went on plowing through the cacophony of emails to meet the deadline on the book, but all the while one part of my mind was saying, Andre’s dead, and thinking back to the eighties, before his accident, when I used to travel regularly to and from my home in Denmark to Vermont College to study or teach and would see him a few times a year.
I met Andre by chance. His wife then, the writer Peggy Rambach, was a student in the same mfa program in which I had started in 1983. It was a low-residency program that required our presence on campus in Montpelier two weeks of every six months.
One hot, muggy July evening of my second residency there, I walked down the hill upon which the Vermont College campus sits into Montpelier. I had a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, which was the fee I’d received from a literary journal named Confrontation for my first published story, “The Sins of Generals.”
In town I climbed a flight of stairs to a second floor bar and restaurant called Julio’s. Seated at one of the tables in the cocktail lounge was a man I knew of vaguely, a burly bearded man who was said to be quite a writer. My roommate, Paul Casey, himself burly and red-bearded, was with him. I approached the table, and Paul introduced me to the bearded man, Andre Dubus, and I proposed that the three of us should drink up my first fiction honorarium. It didn’t take long for three thirsty men to put away a double sawbuck. When I told Andre the money was for a story in Confrontation, he looked as though he couldn’t figure out what I was talking about. I thought, damn, here’s a guy who publishes in The New Yorker and Playboy and Esquire, a good many books of fiction to his name. I felt shame, trying to distinguish myself before these veterans, so I shut up about it.
Next day, however, Peggy Rambach sought me out on the campus and introduced herself, her smile big and gentle. “I’m Andre’s wife,” she said and explained that he had finally figured out afterwards what I’d been referring to about Confrontation—that it was a literary journal, not a personal challenge. They were in a house off campus, but he had asked her to borrow the magazine from me so he could read my story. Needless to say, I scurried to my room for a copy of it.
I did not expect anything. I was a beginner, but I did know a little bit about the writing life. I knew that only a fool expects anybody or anything but hard work to make his luck. But Peggy sought me out again the next morning. Peggy’s blue eyes were smiling. She told me they both loved the story, that Andre wanted to send it to his agent and his editor at Godine. He told her to tell me that this didn’t mean they’d take me on, but it did mean I would get a fair read. He had also taken it upon himself to get hold of my workshop story and read it, and said it was powerful. And he asked if I wanted to meet for drinks that night.
Except for one or two teachers when I was an undergraduate years ago, I’d never met any writers before, certainly never sat and drank with them. That evening as we drank and talked, I made a startling discovery. I don’t recall how we came round to it—maybe because we revealed that we both had gone to Christian Brothers boys’ schools—but I found out that Andre Dubus was the author of a story I had read fourteen years before in the Best American Short Stories 1970. I had remembered the story and its title, though not the name of the author.
It is a measure of the power of that story, of the effect it had on me, that it was still fresh and sharp in my memory. It was entitled, “If They Knew Yvonne,” a story about a young man sorting through the sexual confusion of his boyhood to a realization that it is not sexual pleasure that is “sinful” but irresponsible sexual behavior.
I still remember my astonishment, seated amidst a group of faculty and students at a table by the window of Julio’s, looking down over the street-lighted road, making the connection that this man had written that story that had so powerfully affected me, had literally influenced not merely my writing style but my life. I knew it was necessary for me to commemorate this moment, this meeting, in some way. All I could think of was to propose that I conduct an interview with him. He agreed.
I remember that night ended with a handful of us standing out on the avenue in a circle around Andre while he, with great passion and fine voice, sang “Something Cool.” It was a memorable evening, but I woke the next day thinking, Gee, maybe he’ll forget that he agreed to the interview, maybe it was just the charge of the moment.
But he didn’t forget. The interview started that next day, and it stretched out, in person and by post, over that whole winter. I got hold of all his books of stories—some of them he gave me, and when I look at the inscription he wrote in Adultery and Other Choices, I still can see him leaning on the fender of a parked car to write it, and I get a lump in my throat: “For Tom Kennedy, with my thanks and more: affection, new friend, and wishes for much good for you—Andre, 23 July ’84, Montpelier.” And in The Times Are Never So Bad: “For Tom, with near impassioned hope and with confidence—I can’t match verbs with those two nouns—I’m wishing you well with work and life, too—All best, Andre, 1 August 1984.”
Any writer who has ever worked alone for any length of time without any other writer friends, let alone gifted and distinguished ones, will know what that kind of gesture can mean. I read Andre’s books of stories hungrily, jotting down every question that came to mind as I read. They are powerful stories, a powerful body of work, and I wound up with well over a hundred questions, each written on a separate sheet of paper. I figured I could mail the pages to him, and he could roll them into his typewriter one after the other and type out his answers (this was before many of us were working with computers). Or, if he preferred, he could write his answers by hand. This was pretty heady stuff for me, getting such a fine writer to sit down and write out answers to all my questions as a fledgling writer—it was like the most in-depth private tutorial imaginable, all free.
However, he neither typed nor wrote out his answers in longhand. He sat down with my questions and his tape recorder, and he began to respond on tape. The first cassette arrived in late winter. In all there would be six of them, full up, each of them a different brand or color, and these would transcribe to over a hundred forty pages of typescript. Andre Dubus had given me over six full concentrated hours of his time and thought.
What’s more, he did introduce me to his editor and agent; the former politely declined my collection of stories, the latter took it on and was my agent for some time. What came or did not come of this, however, was not the point. For me, the point was the belief that this accomplished, distinguished writer had extended to me, for no reason other than kindness, a wish to help a guy who was a little younger and struggling to learn the craft.
Andre never, not for a second, not on those tapes, not in his company, not over Dos Equis or Stoli, lorded it over you with his success or put himself in a station above you as a writer. He was too big to be small. When you sat and drank and ate with him, he made you feel you were his equal as a writer, that you could be, would be, that you shared the same place where he lived and worked.
This is the kind of nourishment that most beginning writers are starving for. I had been working at the craft for many years by then, but that was the first real taste of it I ever had. The writing life, we all know, is not an easy one: no one asked you to do it, and no one much cares if you quit, and only a few are much interested in what you produce. As Dubus put it in my interview with him, “I think most writers quit between the ages of twenty and thirty for various reasons. They are alone then unless they have exceptional parents; even if they have very loving and tolerant parents, they still know in their heart of hearts that their parents wonder about what in the fuck they are doing. Unless they live in a community of writers, like at a graduate school, they don’t have friends who really understand what they are doing. They don’t get published. They work and of course, don’t get money for it. There is no one to set the alarm clock for. There is no one who cares whether they get there to work, no one who can threaten them with firing or reward them with money, and you put all that on one poor young man or woman’s back, and it takes an awful lot of courage, because it comes down to that person believing in him or herself and saying, I will do it. While having a job that supports me. And you finally do publish in something as lovely as Tendril or Ploughshares, for example, and you call your mother or father and tell them, and they say, ‘What’s that?’ I think that is why young writers can be persuaded so easily to change things to be in The New Yorker. Not for the goddamn money. What’s three thousand dollars going to do? You can’t live in Mexico on it and write. Not for long anyway. Won’t change your life. I think they do it because it takes care of those blank faces when you say, ‘Yes, I’ve published,’ and they say, ‘Where?’ and you say, The New Yorker, and they say, ‘Ooh! You must be real!’ "(3)
Andre Dubus knew and cared how it was for those who had not yet come as far as he, and he was always reaching down to lend a hand up. From that enormously generous response he gave me, with his many hours of answering my questions, not only did I learn a great deal about the craft of writing, but I also gathered sufficient material for a book—my first published, hardcover book, as well as material for a third of my doctoral thesis.
Andre came to the reading with which I completed my requirements for graduation from the mfa program in January 1985. I read the story that had introduced us, “The Sins of Generals,” and that he, shortly after my graduation, selected for inclusion in an anthology he edited titled Into the Silence, American Stories (Green Street Press, 1988), where he gave it the honor of standing alongside with stories by writers like Gina Berriault; Mark Costello; Susan Dodd; Leonard Gardner; Philip F. O’Connor; my MFA mentor, Gordon Weaver; Thomas Williams; Tobias Wolff; and a handful of others who were beginners like myself—an acknowledgment that was worth a lot dry season.
So I read that story for my graduation. In it there are several references to vodka martinis, and when I was done, he came over to me and said, “All those vodka martinis made me thirsty. Want to go down to Julio’s?”
That night we drank a lot of vodka, Stolichnaya with peppered ice cubes, and we talked and laughed until morning when we took a cab up the hill again, and he hung out the window laughing as I slipped and slid along the icy path to the door of my dormitory building.
That is how I like to remember him.
A year later was the last time I saw him. He was passing through Montpelier one summer day in 1986, by which time I was teaching there, and a bunch of us went out to breakfast with him. I remember saying goodbye to him. He was behind the wheel of his car. I remember he had the sniffles. I don’t remember what words we exchanged. I remember he and Peggy and their daughter Cadence drove off, and I stood there waving after him with a couple of friends.
Later that year, he was run down by a car. He had been driving home and stopped to offer aid to some accident victims on the highway. A woman was standing in the road bleeding. As he went to help her, another car came zooming down on them. He threw her to safety and got hit himself. He lost one leg from mid-knee and most of the use of the other, and spent a long time in the hospital.
In the ensuing thirteen years, I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times, we exchanged a few letters. His literary reputation and the recognition of the power of his work grew, the prizes accumulated, as did praise from the most distinguished writers of his generation, the generation before, and the generation coming—reviews by John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Hortense Calisher, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, Elmore Leonard. … His Selected Stories were published, his books of essays, his fine last collection, Dancing After Hours, and all along it was clear that he was fighting to come to terms with the fact that he was—as he called it—“crippled.” A man who had been a captain in the United States Marines, who ran, golfed, trained, now in his fifties and sixties, had to face life in a wheelchair. He did what only a great writer would do in this situation; he wrote about it, not with self-pity, but with quiet objectivity, and the spiritual power of his insights, of his presentation of the lives he wrote about, sharpened, focused ever in toward that core of existence that he sought in his art.
Early evening of the day I learned of Andre’s death, I managed to get his son, Andre Dubus III, on the phone. I had known Andre III briefly in Vermont in 1988 after his father’s accident. Andre III was there as a student in one of my workshops, and he was too modest to tell me that his own first collection of stories—a powerful one, The Cagekeeper—was about to come out from E. P. Dutton. (4) Maybe it was not modesty so much as delicacy; he was twenty-eight, I was forty-four, and although I had published a great many stories, it would be another year before my first book of fiction saw print. He and I went out for a night on the town in Montpelier that year, a kind of commemoration of the years before when I had done the same with his father. It was a terrific night—we talked, drank beer, laughed, and I at one point we were at a party, and Andre III was blowing a blues harmonica, and it was great! Although I had seen him only once or twice since, I still felt I knew him when he answered the phone that Friday evening in February to allow me to express my sadness at his father’s death.
Coincidentally, we both just had stories, side by side, in the latest issue of Glimmer Train (Spring 1999), which had appeared the week before. In the years since, Andre III’s fame as a writer has grown as greatly as his father’s with the critical and popular success of his latest two novels—The House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days—and his memoir, Townie (2010), not to mention the Academy Award bestowed on the film version of the first novel. During the same period, major films (“movies,” a term Andre preferred) were made of his father’s work as well—the short story “Killings,” which was filmed as In the Bedroom, and a couple of his novellas filmed under the title We Don’t Live Here Anymore.
What Andre III said on the phone that evening was that his father had had a very good last day, had had some very good months. He was happy. His death had come quickly. I told Andre how sorry I was that I had no possibility of traveling back to the States for the wake and the funeral, and he told me not to worry. “Look,” he said, “I think he’s still here. He’s over there, too.” He told me about his pleasure at having had a long conversation with his father just the week before he died, and I told him about the Roland Kirk CD, which had caught my eye that afternoon. I hesitated to tell that, for fear he might think I was dishonoring the moment with sentiment, but he seemed to take it in the spirit I meant it.
After we said goodbye, I sat there at my writing desk, looking out at the fading winter light on the lake outside my window. It was just past six, Friday evening. In Copenhagen, the shops close at seven on Fridays. I thought about that Kirk CD. I thought about the fact that I had had the privilege and the pleasure just a few months before to publish a fiction anthology as a special issue of The Literary Review, for which Andre had given me permission to include the story that had so captured me twenty-nine years before, “If They Knew Yvonne,” and for which he had provided an essay explaining the background upon which he had written the story—despite the fact that I had no budget other than copies with which to pay him for the story or the essay; but money had not been his first concern as a writer—this is the man who once had a three-story contract with Penthouse for several thousand dollars, which he canceled when they made unauthorized changes in the first of the three, and who withdrew a story from The New Yorker (“The Winter Father”), when the then-editors wanted him to drop the word “Fuck” from a sentence that he judged required it—forfeiting the three thousand dollars, he sold it to Sewanee Review, and the story was selected by Hortense Calisher for Best American Short Stories that year.
“If They Knew Yvonne,” he explains in the essay in The Literary Review, had been inspired by a priest to whom he had once confessed the sins of a dozen years by opening his heart and explaining what he believed sinful and what not, what he was able to express sorrow for and what not, and for which the penance assigned to him by the priest had been to chant three times Hallelujah.
I hurried down to my bicycle and rode up through the darkening winter evening to that record shop and bought the Roland Kirk CD, Sweet Fire. I biked home again and put it on my stereo and broke out a bottle of Stolichnaya Russian vodka and a bucket full of ice. And while Kirk blew Dizzy Gillespie’s “Groovin’ High,” I lit a cigar and I cracked Andre’s last story collection, Dancing After Hours—a gift from my friend Mike Lee—and opened it to the title story. “Dancing After Hours” is one of the last major stories Andre published before he died—in the literary journal at Cornell University, Epoch, and then in this last collection.
It is an extraordinary achievement, a story that follows the daily lives of half a dozen characters in a bar from sundown one evening to just before sunrise next day. It is a long story, twelve thousand words. Its elegant features include the seemingly very simple surface, the very brief span of time it encompasses, perhaps nine hours, the rich surface of its realistic rendering through the accumulation of simple detail and sensory evocation conveying the quietly profound movement of the emotional lives of the characters depicted.
The entire story is portrayed through a single point of view, that of the 40-year-old Emily Moore, against a background that is at once flawlessly realistic and richly symbolic. The story takes place in a bar without windows, a place where people go to numb with drink and music and company the consciousness of sorrow at their impending mortality and the faltering of their capacities to experience profound human love. The time span—from sundown to just before sunrise—is also symbolic of the emotional states of at least three of the characters—Emily, Rita, and Jeff—who are transported through the story’s quiet events from a state of emotional shut-down to one where real human contact again becomes possible.
The music playing on the bar’s tape deck, too, is the music of the human condition in blue—jazz. As Emily’s consciousness moves from the surface of her life to the depths of her humanity, we hear the sweet fire of blind Roland Kirk’s many reeds where the story’s music melds with its first humanistic epiphany—Emily’s memory of a gifted blind man praising the virtues of blindness, of being unable to perceive the false physical surface of beauty, leading Emily to a recognition of the relative meaninglessness of her obsession with her own sense of not being beautiful as a model or actress, a modern American grief.
On this particular evening, I concentrated on the section that had made me think of Kirk in the first place. In it, Emily, a bartender, is preparing a drink for a customer who is crippled, and she is listening to Roland Kirk on the radio blow a tenor saxophone. No male fiction writer I know of—including Gustave Flaubert—can write from a woman’s point of view like Andre could (although his son Andre III can also).
“… Emily worked with ice and limes and vodka and gin and grapefruit juice and salt, with club soda and quinine water, and scotch and bottles of beer and clean glasses, listening to Roland Kirk and remembering him twenty years ago in the small club on the highway where she sat with two girlfriends. The place was dark, the tables so close to each other that the waitresses sidled, and everyone sat facing the bandstand and the blind man wearing sunglasses. He had rhythm sections and a percussionist, and sometimes he played two saxophones at once. He grinned; he talked to the crowd, his head moving as if he were looking at them. He said: ‘It’s nice, coming to work, blind. Not seeing who’s fat or skinny. Ugly. Or pretty. Know what I mean?’
Emily knew then, sitting between her friends, and knew now, working in this bar that was nearly as dark as the one where he had played; he was dead, but here he was, his music coming from the two speakers high on the walls, coming softly. Maybe she was the only person in the bar who heard him at this moment, as she poured gin; of course, everyone could hear him, as people heard rain outside their walls. In the bar she never heard rain or cars, or saw snow or dark skies or sunlight. Maybe Jeff [her lover, the cook] was listening to Kirk as he cooked. And only to be kind, to immerse herself in a few seconds of pure tenderness, she took two pilsner glasses from the shelf and opened the ice chest and opened the glasses deep into the ice, for Alvin and Drew [the crippled man and his attendant].
Kirk had walked the earth with people who only saw. So did Emily. But she saw who was fat or ugly, and if they were men, she saw them as if through an upstairs window. Twenty years ago, Kirk’s percussionist stood beside him, playing a tambourine, and Kirk was improvising, playing fast, and Emily was drumming with her hands on the table. Kirk reached to the percussionist and touched his arm and stepped toward the edge of the bandstand. The percussionist stepped off of it and held up his hand; Kirk took it and stepped down and followed the percussionist, followed the sound of the tambourine, playing the saxophone, his body swaying. People stood and pushed their chairs and tables aside, and clapping and exclaiming, followed Kirk. Everyone was standing, and often Kirk reached out and held someone’s waist, and hugged. In the dark they came toward Emily, who was standing with her friends. The percussionist’s hand was fast on his tambourine; he was smiling; he was close; then he passed her, and Kirk was there. His left arm encircled her, his hand pressing her waist; she smelled his sweat as he embraced her so hard that she lost balance and stood on her toes; she could feel the sound of the saxophone in her body. He released her. People were shouting and clapping, and she stepped into the line, held the waist of a man in front of her; her two friends were behind her, one holding her waist. She was making sounds but not words, singing with Kirk’s saxophone. They weaved around tables and chairs, then back to the bandstand, to the drummer and the bass and piano players, and the percussionist stepped up on it and turned to Kirk, and Kirk took his hand and stepped up and faced the clapping, shouting crowd. Then Kirk, bending back, blew one long high note, then lowered his head and played softly, slowly, some old and sweet melody. Emily’s hands, raised and parted to clap, lowered to her sides. She walked backward to her table, watching Kirk. She and her friends quietly pulled their table and chairs into place and sat. Emily quietly sat, and waitresses moved in the dark, bent close to the mouths of people softly ordering drinks. The music was soothing, was loving, and Emily watched Kirk and felt that everything good was possible.
It would be something like that, she thought, now, something ineffable that comes from outside and fills us; something that changes the way we see what we see; something that allows us to see what we don’t …
Something lovely spread in her heart, blood warmed her cheeks, and tears were in her eyes; then they flowed down her face, stopped near her nose, and with the fingers of one hand, she wiped them, and blinked and wiped her eyes, and they were clear. She glanced around the bar; no one had seen. Jeff said, ‘Are you all right?’
'‘I just had a beautiful memory of Roland Kirk.’ ” (5)
And I just had a beautiful memory of Andre Dubus, reading his words and remembering him twenty-some years ago, a man who, like Kirk, left behind a body of enduring work.
(1) This essay consists partially of material which originally appeared in another form in Agni and in Gettysburg Review.
(2) Damsté, Famke. Liner Notes, A Jazz Hour with Roland Kirk. JHR 73579. Recorded live 1970.
(3) Kennedy, Thomas E. Andre Dubus:A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston, New York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1988, pp. 112–113.
(4) Dubus, III, Andre. The Cagekeeper and Other Stories. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989.
(5) Dubus, Andre. Dancing After Hours. New York: Knopf, 1996, pp. xxx–xxx.
Copyright (c) 2011 by Thomas E. Kennedy, published here with permission from the author.
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Read Part II and Part III of our Critical Symposium on Andre Dubus.