to something infantile in my own character. As the evening wore on, I found myself increasingly disappointed, then outright irritated, that my son’s first utterance had originated in the imagination of a competing writer. At one point, while Meredith set up our video camera, I knelt down beside young Timmy and whispered to him, “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.”
At that point in my Sewanee lecture, I glanced over at Timmy, who squirmed and fussed in Meredith’s arms. People stared at him. People were laughing. Though the boy was barely a year old, and though his vocabulary was therefore severely cramped, he nonetheless seemed annoyed at the airing of his intimate personal life in a public setting. He emitted what I took to be heckling sounds.
For twenty minutes or so, although now flustered, I did my best—ineptly, I’m sure—to point out that I was making no claims about the literary merit of my little story. In fact, I admitted, it wasn’t even a story, certainly not in the sense of richness or depth. It was a trifling anecdote, nothing more. But even so, I said, it was possible that in certain sympathetic hands, perhaps those of a Donald Barthelme or a Woody Allen or any other writer with a sensibility suited to the comically grotesque, an interesting piece of prose might be forthcoming with the application of much time and imaginative energy. In fact, I myself might one day wish to pick up the tale, adding and subtracting, taking what is now a mere sketch off into the world of a full story. What I surely would not do is play much longer with Shakespeare. I would take the story elsewhere, virtually to any elsewhere. I’d try to surprise myself. I’d seek some new narrative dimension. And while striving to sustain something of the humor, I would also keep an eye peeled for gravitas—a thematic heft, a moral weight—hoping the tale might elevate itself above the eccentric or the entertainingly slight. I would trust these first paragraphs to carry me toward that next dimension.
What if … What if late that same night, Timmy were to cry out in his sleep, “Alas, Babylon”?
Or what if the next morning, perched in his high chair, he were suddenly to bay, “I ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog”?
Or what if, a month later or a year later, on a sunny beach along the ocean, he were to whisper, “Bye-bye, Daddy,” and then toddle off into the water and slip forever beneath the waves?
To trust a story is to trust one’s own story, not someone else’s. To trust a story is to avoid the predictable, the familiar, the wholly logical, the already written, the movie you saw last week, the bestseller you read last month, and even that classic you nearly finished back in college. To trust a story is to trust your own imagination, not the imagination of some literary predecessor.
Also, if I were to go forward with the Timmy story—and now, having thought about it, why not?—I would soon be fretting over issues of craft. For example, there is the whole matter of writers writing about writers, which for me carries with it a self-congratulatory stink. I would probably end up dispensing with the reference to The Things They Carried, although it would be painful to delete one of the anecdote’s funnier lines. (Funny to me, anyway.) No doubt I would tinker, perhaps for hours, with ways to recast or defuse the reference to my own work, but still, at the end of the day, the line would almost certainly have to go.
Beyond all else, I would do nothing to explain how a one-year-old came to declaim a famous phrase from Macbeth. The utterance would simply be, just as Gregor Samsa simply is a bug, or just as Grumpy simply is a dwarf. Granted, a baby reciting a phrase from Shakespeare is on its face pretty far-fetched and mysterious. But it seems to me no more far-fetched or mysterious than, say, the existence of our solar system, or human love, or Mohamed Atta flying an airplane into a Manhattan skyscraper.
At that point, as I concluded my talk, Timmy lay snoozing in his mother’s arms. Yet even that—the fact that I’d now bored him into unconsciousness—had the feel of a rebuke, and for the remainder of the day I was followed by an unsettling cloud of guilt: that I’d exploited my own son for the sake of a few paltry literary observations.
That evening, in the midst of an outdoor cocktail party, I was approached by a middle-aged gentleman dressed in a bow tie, colorful suspenders, and a vintage straw boater of the sort Gatsby might have favored.
“Your fucking kid,” the man said, “never quoted Shakespeare.”
“No,” I said.
“So why did you have to lie?”
“I didn’t have to,” I told him. “I wanted to.”
This comment (wholly defensible) pissed him off. He had been drinking, I realized, but plainly his wrath was genuine.
Over the next many minutes I received the gist of the man’s complaint, which had to do with my failure to acknowledge that Timmy had not spoken, in any form whatsoever, the words I’d claimed he had spoken. It amounted to intentional and gross deception, the man said. It was unfair to the audience. “You made us laugh,” he said, “about a complete lie. You made us feel like fools.”
“I didn’t intend that.”
“Well, my friend,” he said, “I’m here to tell you that I took offense. I still take offense.”
Ordinarily, I would’ve tried to smooth things over. But he had referred to Timmy as my “fucking kid.” He had referred to me as his friend.
I told him he was a monster.
I told him that one day I would write about him.
“In that case,” the man said (and I’m paraphrasing here, omitting two very vulgar words), “according to Shakespeare, that would be a tale told by an idiot—by a lying idiot—which is you.”
I did not hit him.
In fact, much to my karmic credit, I drew a breath and stepped back. Fiction writers always lie, I said—way too gently. They lie for a living. They lie for money. They lie for the fun of it. They invent stuff and try to convince people it actually occurred—that’s the job, that’s the joy. Besides, aren’t the first words of a child always miraculous? Always beyond belief?
“Maybe so,” the man said, “but why not just give us the actual miracle, not some made-up bullshit? Why not give us your kid’s real first words?”
“Because it would’ve been dull—you wouldn’t have felt anything.”
“That’s all you can say?”
“Well, no,” I told him. “I guess nobody would’ve believed me—not Timmy’s actual first words. So why not invent something amusing?”
“It wasn’t in the least amusing,” he muttered. “It was manipulative.”
“You didn’t laugh?”
“Of course I did. That’s what made it manipulative. And by the way, in case you don’t know, your books make my students feel exactly the same way. Totally scammed.”
I nodded. “So you teach?”
“Most definitely, and at a very respectable university.”
“And do you also write fiction?”
“Certainly so. Superb fiction.”
I should’ve ended it there, but I didn’t.
“Well, listen,” I said, “have you considered trying your hand at nonfiction? Maybe a book about automotive repair?”
The man glared. “I take that as a condescending assault on my person. I’ll be reporting you accordingly—you can count on it. Plus, I suppose you’re too much of a liar to tell me what your kid actually said.”
“Does it matter?”
“Ha!” he said. “You’re asking if truth matters?”
“But we’re talking about a story, aren’t we? Wasn’t it clear that the whole thing was—?”