On Hiding My Book From My Teen-Aged Children

I'm on a lot of medicine to keep my blood pressure down and I think it might be making my brain even more sluggish than it usually is. In any case I haven't been able to come up with anything that I particularly want to write about. But then last weekend it came out that my older children were aware that I had once written a book, after a fashion; and though neither of them are great readers, the idea of this seemed to interest them, perhaps because they have never seen me engaging much with the world of serious adults, even within my immediate family, and probably are hazy as to what function I am supposed to serve within it. I had a copy of it printed and bound some years back, in two volumes as it was too long for the vanity press I employed to make a single volume of it. A few years after acquiring these copies I grew embarrassed by them and hid them away in a linen closet lest any adults who happened to come to the house should espy them on the shelves and make sport of them; however my wife found them one day while re-arranging the closet and returned them to the shelves, by which time I realized no one besides me who was likely to come to the house ever looked over bookshelves anymore anyway. So when my sons inquired whether the story that I had once written a book was true and asked if they could see it, I took these copies down and showed them to them, having no anticipation what they would make of it.


They were impressed to see my name on an actual printed book, not being able to distinguish it from something published by an esteemed commercial house, and they were amused by the black square on the back of the dust jacket where the author photo was supposed to be, as I neglected to include one, thinking it unlikely to help boost interest in my work. They were very curious about the website link I provided next to the blank picture--which was to this very blog--and I assured them that the site referred to was long inactive. They also opened to some random pages, none of them fortunately among the most potentially embarrassing ones, but they still read examples of my overwrought narrative aloud with great mirth. My second son then expressed an interest in reading the whole thing "someday", though I don't think he will--even my wife was only able to get through a few pages of it--but as I remembered more of the kinds of things that were in it, I felt that I didn't want them, at that time, even taking the book down periodically and reading random pages. Perhaps I won't mind it once they have had some college or are adults, but I don't think they have the background yet to appreciate that many of the more unsettling or depressing aspects that they might come across in it or intended to some extent as jokes, or are referencing other literature. Much of the book concerns a young man who may or may not be like me who is a complete failure at everything--sex, education, work, physical prowess, personality development, who in the end due to his inability to be competitive economically and socially has to move away from his native Mid-Atlantic region to a less strenuous part of the country, though this latter at least is the story of a lot of people in my generation and even more so in the one following. There is supposed to be some ludicrous humor in the idea of a man who nominally has some advantages in life growing up to find himself so utterly inferior and dominated in almost every situation in which he finds himself, but I don't know that teen-agers who haven't read very much will get that. I definitely don't want them yet to read about the various sexual problems of my protagonist, hilarious as I imagined they must be to the generations of brilliant young lovers of literature I regarded as the audience for my writing.




In truth who did I think I was writing for (indeed who do I think I am writing for now?) Doubtless at the time I imagined it would be younger people who would find the travails and longings expressed in the book relatable and who would form a smart and interesting enough group to make it culturally significant. One of my main motivations for trying to write after all was that it seemed one of the few possible avenues open to me to try to win the respect and interest of attractive women (in which case it might be posited that in the annals of human endeavor few have failed more spectacularly in pursuit of a goal, when the time put into it, etc, is factored in). I expected that the Baby Boomer cultural elite, who in my general view never demonstrated great literary sensibility, would not find my writing to their liking and dismiss it, which would have the added effect of cutting off any budding competition for the public's attention I might have hoped to get in on at the knees, but I held out hope that the older generations, who at that time still had a good deal of influence and power, would recognize my book as a necessary work of its era and firmly in the great mainstream American tradition. I spent a ridiculous amount of time arguing with myself whether I should accept a university faculty position if one were offered to me or maintain my artistic respectability by remaining outside of the academy. I thought I would go to a lot more drinking parties and be friends with a lot more alcoholic geniuses than has proven to be the case.


I had an odd, I won't say experience but sensation today that I wanted to write down. As part of my recovery from my heart incident I am taking a rehab/exercise class with people who had similar episodes. I am the youngest person in the class by about 20 years. While at first I took most of these older people for run of the mill lifelong New Hampshirites, and indeed almost all of them have lived here for decades, it seems like about half of them are originally from New York City and grew up there in the 1940s and 50s. One person mentioned having grown up in Brooklyn a few blocks from Ebbetts Field. I was really struck by this. In my childhood Ebbetts Field, which was knocked down around 1960, belonged to a past as mythical and irretrievably lost to my mind as the times of Alexander the Great or Charlemagne. I had also read recently that there are only fifteen men left alive who ever played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which further emphasized the great distance in time we are from that period. So the idea that I was sitting in a room with a person who once walked down the street to attend games there, and with a number of people who passed some of the vital years of their lives in that city known to me mainly from black and white movies and books and stories by dead and fading authors that seem so hopelessly old in the online environment even I largely inhabit now really hit me. I had imagined there could not be that many of such people left, yet apparently they are still all around me.