Instinct For Survival: Summer Memories, 1992

There is a book on the top shelf of the bookcase in our living room at The Farmhouse called Instinct For Survival. It's one of my favourite books, and one that has influenced me as a nonfiction writer and essayist in ways that I'm only recently discovering. I recommend it to anyone who wants to write essays, or indeed any serious nonfiction.

The author is Pat C. Hoy III, and he's everything I'm not: a straight family man, currently a Professor of English at NYU, retired military, Viet Nam veteran, a graduate of West Point. The photo on the cover of his book shows a quirkily handsome young man with an intelligent face and a crewcut. He's looking at the camera with a young man's wonderful sense of confidence. Although the photo is black and white, and looks like it dates from the late 1960's or early 1970's, the t-shirt is obviously U.S. Army issue, and is likely olive drab.

Pat Hoy was running the summer writing programme at Harvard in 1992 when I was doing the Advanced Fiction Workshop there, studying under novelist Peter Lasalle. Professor Hoy wasn't one of my professors, but he was a ubiquitous and friendly presence on campus, sun-tanned, dressed in khakis and a casual shirt (and even then, crewcut still.) I had the occasion to speak with him once about my course load, and a few other times about life and writing.

In 1992, I was a 29 year old lightly-published magazine journalist. Bluntly, that summer at Harvard, I was a nobody. I had moved into my dorm room at Adams House with my word processer and my notebooks, with the intention of deciding if "being a writer" was what I wanted to do. I went to a barber and had him cut off nearly all my hair. I got a lot of attention from the girls in our residence, and even more attention from the patrons at the Ramrod bar in Boston. However, for me, the symbolic shearing of my hair was a severing of myself from my life in Milton, Ontario, where Brian and I lived then. A temporary severing, of course, but no less effective for its relative brevity. I wanted to exist without reference to anything or anyone I had known before, to strip myself down to my personal and artistic essence in order to see if there was a writer in there, for real. That summer was, for me, in every sense, a vision quest. I bought and devoured books, made friends, and wrote every day, compulsively, addictively.

There was no particular reason for Pat Hoy to take the time to talk to me about life or writing other than the fact that he was a classic southern gentleman to the fingertips, and superbly effective at his job that summer---helping to organize the summer college careers of a few hundred aspiring writers and the like. But he was kind, and he was friendly, and he was a natural teacher: he had the tremendous gift of drawing creative young people out of themselves, into a neutral creative DMZ where the young writers could imagine themselves taken seriously and, in that state, learn a thing or two about writing from the visiting literati who taught them. That was where the learning came from. I was riveted by the fact that this man, who had endured West Point, had served as an officer in Viet Nam, and was now teaching expository writing at Harvard, was willing to talk to me without condescension, and either took me seriously as a writer, or else hid his lack of seriousness with stunning alacrity.

He had published a book of essays called Instinct For Survival. Towards the end of the summer, I purchased a copy of it at a bookstore in Cambridge. As odd as it seems to be in 2006, given the trajectory of my career today, it hadn't really occured to me that a writer's own observations of life---an attempt to marshall the sometimes-dazzling who, what, when, where, and how of life---was a viable literary venue. Pat Hoy's writing was a revelation: elegant, graceful, pellucid, and possessed of a fierce intelligence. Two of the essays in that book, "Soldiering" and "Mosaics of Southern Masculinity," were as beautiful as the best short fiction. The writing was warm, luxurious, accessible. It was as satisfying, ultimately, as one of those magical conversations with a stranger that you never want to end.

Although I was still a little in awe of Pat Hoy, I was able to experience his writing the way the best writing is intended to be experienced: with a sense of shared experience even though there was no actual shared experience.

One afternoon in late August towards the end of my studies, on the golden edge of September, I went to his office and shyly asked him to sign it the book. He did. The inscription is kind and personal, and not for this journal. I can still smell the summer-baked paneling of the walls, the scent of trapped sunlight and dust. And then, with a bright white smile, Pat Hoy handed me the book, and said goodbye and good luck with my writing.

I've re-read the book about every five years just to remind myself of how wonderful writing is supposed to be, how beautiful an essay can be, and how vulnerable and poetic a strong and traditionally masculine man can be in his work if he has the courage to be vulnerable and honest. Perhaps that was an even more important lesson to me as I started out writing seriously, which I did, that fall. I never dodged bullets in Viet Nam, or had to make sense of my life in a macho southern miltary culture. But I've fought my own battles, and can say without blush that I've tried to be vulnerable and honest in my essays.

Although Pat Hoy hasn't been the only writer to show me that, he was certainly the first.

But the most important lesson I've had from meeting him that summer and reading his work is this one: any young person I meet who wants to be a writer is worthy of my respect and worthy of being taken seriously---at least given a chance to be taken seriously.

Sitting in that office at Harvard with Pat C. Hoy III, I never felt small or inconsequential, and it would have been so easy and so unremarkable for someone of his standing to allow me to feel small and inconsequential. We should all be as lucky as I was.

This fall, when my second essay collection, Other Men's Sons, comes out, I will likely read Instinct For Survival again, and silenty thank Pat C. Hoy III for helping me, as a writer, to develop my own.

Instinct For Survival by Pat C. Hoy III (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992)

Friday afternoon on Brokeback Mountain

I decided to take the afternoon off and take in the 4:00 p.m. showing of Brokeback Mountain at the Paramount Theater on Richmond Street in downtown Toronto.

Brokeback, based on a short story by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, is one of those films that, it seems, every other gay man in the world but me has seen. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I knew that whatever I was going to experience from the film, I wanted to experience it in private. I took a seat on the highest row in the theater with no one on either side of me.

In the ninety minutes that followed, my heart and mind were kicked around like footballs.

I'm not going to review the movie, per se, in this journal since my friend and fellow writer, David W. Shelton, has done it wonderfully well on his own blog, which I urge you to visit at www.davidwshelton.blogspot.com, although I think it may warrant an essay by me later on the site, or elsewhere.

That having been said, the overriding afterburn of this powerful, elegant film is the sense of the tragedy of living in a sub-articulate time and place, where the harsh and inviolabe code of the much-fetishized "cowboy" ideal---macho, stoic, silent, and enduring---demands such cruel tribute from the men who live by it, either by choice or circumstance.

I don't know what I expected. There's a part of me, I suppose, that expected to be titillated in some cynical, middle-aged way by the sexy notion of love between rough, handsome young cowboys. The "cowboy thing" has never had particular resonance for me as a fetish, but I'm not immune to the thought of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in a pup tent in Wyoming.

But the tension of the story never let up enough for me forget the fact that even if Jack hadn't died at the end of the film, their love story, forbidden as it was, was already leavened with tragedy by virtue of the fact that it had to remain hidden. The fact that Ennis could literally not imagine a world where two men could live as lovers in ranch country, and in fact didn't have the language available to him to express that tragedy, much less the later tragedy of Jack's murder, broke my heart in a way that was completely free of sentimentality.

Annie Proulx, who has written about her story on her website www.annieproulx.com, has said that the characters of Jack and Ennis came fully from her imagination and were not based on anyone she knew. Who could doubt that from a writer of her consequential talent? If anything, it is a tribute to her gifts that she could create two characters whose lives on the page (and on the screen) so stunningly evoke the truth of what life was like for gay men of that time and background who didn't have words for what they were.

In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a portentously moving meditation, not only on forbidden love, but also on class, region, and era. It's also a searing comment on the fierce cost of masculinity and homophobia, a cost borne most dramatically by the men, but also by the women in whose lives the men are inextricably bound.

When Brian and I were in Los Angeles this past Christmas, we stayed at the Chateau Marmont, quite naturally as a couple. Outside, there were huge billboards along Sunset Boulevard advertising this film that would later sweep the Golden Globes (as it will likely do to the Oscars later. )

My mind roamed back to the year I moved to Toronto, 1982. I was 19. I remember watching Making Love in a nearly empty theater on Yonge Street, then slinking out as unobtrusively as possible. The film died silently, and almost took the careers of the two actors playing the couple, Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean, along with it in spite of their significant talent and body of work. They both made comebacks, and the film is due to be released on DVD next month, almost 25 years later.

How times change. In films, and in life.

As I write this, it's again snowing outside our house, and Brian is out at the gym. When he comes home, we'll have dinner, watch tv, and share the news of our day like most of the couples on our street. It's 2006, not 1963. And thank God for that.

As gay men especially, we can afford, now and then, to remember our forbears---the Ennises and Jacks who made lives and love for themselves in the face of constant threat and violence. We can honour them silently, and realize that the lives many of us take for granted today would have been, to them, literally unimaginable.

If Brokeback Mountain has another legacy besides standing tall as Ang Lee's finest work yet, let it be that the film has perhaps touched a harsh, smug corner of middle America, and invited it to look at this epic love story, and ask itself if the pain engendered by those times was really the best manifestation of "traditional values," and if that type of values is what it really wants a retun to.

Rainy Wednesday

January is a sad, weird month in Toronto.

In many ways, it's the beginning of a new year, which is marvelous, and has been a source of wonderful inspiration for me since I was very young. I've usually preferred New Year's Day to Christmas, because I'm wedded to the notion of new beginnings. If I go back to diary entries from my late teens, I can see that I have recorded a sense of euphoria and cleanness on the eve of a new year.

Outside my office window at the top of my house, wet snow is falling in patchy, uncomitted sheets. When I walk the Harper the yellow lab with my friend Eric down the ravine path down by the river, I suspect that it will be cold enough to warrant a hat and gloves, but not either refreshing or inspiring.

I've been sleeping very badly for the last week or so, and I rose late today with an Advil headache.

The novel I am writing, "Diving Into Blue," which is due at my kind and patient publishers very soon, has been twisting and turning in my head like a fish just pulled from the ocean, spiny and sinewy, shaking saltwater everywhere, and occasionally cutting me on its sharp scales. Generally I dislike writers whose torturous process they describe in dishonest detail---on one hand pretending to solicit sympathy, while in truth hoping for envy at such exotic travails---but I recently discovered first hand what happens when you take a character down a road for 30 or 40 pages, then realize that you've painted him or her into a dead end.

Also, having attended a private boarding school while trying to write a novel about a private boarding school is replete with its own challenges, especially when you're known as a nonfiction writer to begin with. Accessing my own memories while making sure the story reads like the fiction it is, keeps my imagination on its toes.

I'm looking forward to laying it aside for 6 weeks or so while I write the horror novella for Alyson Books that I signed the contract for when Brian and I came back from Los Angeles. The novella is called "In October," and the short version of the description is that it's about a young and isolated boy in a small town who accidentally summons up the answer to most of his prayers one freezing autumn night, then finds out that there is a terrible cost to it. Believe me, after months at my fictitious boarding school of the imagination, this horror novella and its world of demons, lonliness, and dark witchcraft, is going to be a walk in the park.

Other Men's Sons: A Writer's Journal

My name is Michael Rowe. I am a Canadian author and essayist, and this is my new "blog."

For what it's worth, this is going to be a record of more daily musings about the writing process. My readers and friends have my website, michaelrowe.com, to which they may refer for news about my books and articles. This "blog," on the other hand, is intended as something more immediate, more casual, and weirdly, more personal. The Journal section of my website will be more of a forum for longer pieces, mini-essays and the like. This, on the other hand, is intended to be read more like a diary.

The posts that follow will hopefully offer some insight into the process that goes into my work, and impressions that occur to me on a more spontaneous level, day-to-day level.