Today we bring you the final installment of our Critical Symposium on the importance of Andre Dubus. In a new essay, Edward J. Delaney, a writer and filmmaker, offers a moving portrait of the great writer in his later years. Delaney produced an award-winning film about Dubus called The Times Were Never So Bad. Click here to see a preview of the film, which is available for purchase through Amazon. Delaney's writing has appeared in The Atlantic and other magazines. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Broken Irish. Learn more about him and his work on his website. We are grateful to Delaney, Thomas Kennedy, and Richard Ravin for helping to make our celebration of Andre Dubus possible.
Andre Dubus: The Later Years
By Edward J. Delaney
In 2005, I embarked on a documentary film project about the author Andre Dubus. I chose the topic after meeting his son, Andre III, at the PEN awards at the Kennedy Library in Boston. Happily, I’d won the L.L. Winship/PEN Award for fiction, the first of which Dubus himself had been awarded 30 years earlier for “Separate Flights.”
In the early 1990s, I’d been a journalist beginning his first efforts at fiction writing, and Dubus had been one of the primary models. It seemed that in his stories, something always happened, which was not the case in much of what I was reading. Dubus’s stories were dramatic but literary, and often hinged on momentous events: a man hit by a car, a college girl turning up dead in the snow, a man seeking to avenge the killing of his son. It was what I’d always thought fiction would be, and I wasn’t finding such stories in The New Yorker.
The film was an exploration of his storytelling and his life. And what I learned was that his life was as calamitous and raw as the stories that came out of it. This was not a sedate, writerly man sitting in a room imagining the events that befall the less circumspect. Interviewing his children; his fellow writers, such as Tobias Wolff and Richard Russo; and his extended family, such as his cousin James Lee Burke, it seemed that this man, to quote a former student, “had a taste for trouble.” And for writing about it.
I’d only met Dubus once, and briefly. In its quaint pre-Google way, the moment speaks toward how the author and his pages can be so distanced. I’d been reading much of Dubus’s fiction at that time, 1991 if memory serves, and I heard he was giving a reading at my university. It was in a refurbished barn that we use as a theater facility, and in that space one spotlight fell from straight above. From the wings, a man in a wheelchair rolled himself from the darkness. One leg was missing. In his lap he had a sheaf of loose pages. He went to one, and began reading. I’d wondered what had happened to him. He was quiet that night, and afterwards I went to him to shake his hand and tell him I admired his work. He mumbled some thanks, and seemed almost shy. Others approached and that was the extent of our conversation.
The jacket bio on his books made no mention of any misfortune, and in his author photos he was Hemingwayesque, upright, his chest thrust forward. The books had been written some time before. Indeed what I soon found is that Dubus had, in essence, become a character in one of his own stories. Returning from a night in Boston, he’d stopped to help some people in a car accident and been hit himself by an oncoming car. That was, to me, the essence of his storytelling—the choices to take action or not, and face consequences or not.
There are so many examples of the way he made this happen in his work, and one that fascinated me was when he heard the tale of a man who was called from his work to a pond where a child was drowning, the child’s foot having become caught in rocks below the water’s surface. No one remembers where Dubus heard this, or how true it had been. But Dubus, who had an epic fear of water, couldn’t let it go. In time, he was telling his friend and editor Dewitt Henry the story, with Dubus himself as the man who tried to save the child. For years afterward, Dubus kept a length of hose in his car, on the one-in-a-million chance he would ever come upon a child trapped underwater. When stories didn’t enter his life, he entered them.
Dewitt spoke of Dubus’s “rehearsals” of his fiction, when he had to “block out” the events of the story. So it wasn’t so much Dubus fictionalizing stories from his life, but making his life create the stories. The night of his accident, he’d been in Boston’s Combat Zone doing exactly that. The late-night tragedy on the highway could not have been that much of a twist.
Dubus was primarily writing at a time when things happening in stories had become frowned upon. The high drama of “The Pretty Girl” or “Adultery” had suddenly fallen out of fashion. But Dubus told those stories because they were the stories he knew, the life he knew.
That’s what made them so real. When my film, “The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus,” played at a film festival near Dubus’s adopted hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts, a man approached me after the lights came up. He mentioned the discussion in the film of “A Father’s Story,” in which a man is hit, and killed, by a car on a back road late at night.
“I go by the scene of that accident every day on the way to work,” he said. “I always think about what happened there.”
Of course no such accident had ever happened; it was just a story. But the fact that Dubus pointed out the exact bend in the road, and a reader was haunted by events of an author’s invention, speaks to the power of his work. It never happened, except it did; fiction, I think, is supposed to be that way.
***
Read Part I and Part II of our Critical Symopsium on Andre Dubus.