Pick Your Poison

The physical world is full of danger, conflict, and the potential for disaster, a fact that I was reminded of recently when I had dinner with a dozen old friends in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where we all grew up. Some of us have known each other since kindergarten. Jim Pryor, who won’t mind my using his name, leaned behind whoever was sitting next to me to say, “You know, we just may be getting old. At this table sit four survivors of cancer, three heart attacks, an inch-from-death case of septic shock, epilepsy, and too many other major illnesses to name. For the moment, though, Speero, we live.”

I told him that given the way we’d behaved growing up, we were lucky to have gotten old enough to have a heart attack.

Every generation has its own brands of foolishness and danger. That group of friends and I—the generation of the early boomers—lived in what might be called the Pre-safety Age. Parents didn’t worry much, at least not in ways that any of us noticed. We had BB-gun and pellet-rifle wars with six or eight to a side, freely pelting each other and only through luck not putting out each other’s eyes. We stole our parents’ cars and drove across the river to Oklahoma to get beer when we were thirteen. At fifteen or sixteen we occasionally hung out in—what euphemism can I use?—questionably hygienic places of paid assignation. Two blocks from where we were eating dinner that night was a very charming and familiar little nineteenth-century hotel that had a historical marker for, youguessed-it. Almost all of us smoked back then and did heavy weekend drinking and driving, had careless infatuations with guns and motorcycles, and so on. I was not unusual in the group for having survived three serious car accidents— two rollovers and one collision with a police car that had just been hit head-on by another car going eighty miles an hour. Two policemen and five soldiers from Fort Chaffee weren’t so lucky.

More interesting and complex than our physically dangerous behavior were our personal flaws because in most cases our flaws were intimately and obviously tied to positive qualities. One of my best old friends had, for a period of his youth, a more serious problem than the rest of us with recklessness. He would fight anybody, get as drunk as he felt like getting and flamboyantly chase girls. At the same time, he was strangely stable, trustworthy, and—an extension of his recklessness—existentially free and open to the moment. During our dinner-table conversation, I mentioned to him that I wanted to go fishing with him sometime, and in his old, free way, he didn’t hesitate: “Let’s go tomorrow.”

And there was the melancholic among us, the one who considered suicide while still in grade school, partly because a very good friend of ours talked about it frequently from childhood on (and eventually did it). In later life, my melancholy friend suffered a marriage that went bad, casting him into a ten-year vortex of confusion and uncertainty. After that delightful decade, he went through about six years in which he claimed that he was seriously considering going gay, since the girls obviously didn’t like him. Yet this same guy is the one who put the party together, who often serves as the unpretentious impresario and who is generous with himself beyond the norm. It’s all part of one package.

Why are flaw and conflict so basic to literature? Literature, like sport, starts by meaningfully enacting conflict and somehow dealing with it. Conflict is basic to literature because it is basic to life. Without it, the airplane usually won’t fly. We are meaning-making creatures with little tolerance for chaos. It’s a platitude but also true that literature, like religion, gives shape and meaning to the struggle of living.

That’s why literature quickly becomes tedious when it holds nothing of the mess, danger and perplexity of human experience. Aristotle believed that...