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On the Line
- Rutgers University Press
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56 J. C. HALLMAN When I was sixteen and considering writing as a career, I was told that becoming an author was just about the hardest thing one could try to do. That didn’t bother me, though it should have. My only real concern was whether it would be adventure enough. I grew up in the suburbs of Southern California, so I didn’t know even what I didn’t know, but I could intimate that there was a world out there. I wanted to get into it. Not because I believed writers needed experiences to write about—I just wanted my life to be fun. And while writing struck me as the only appropriate response to life’s central ontological mystery, the actual act seemed kind of dull. It’s probably a mistake to dump writers into categories of any kind, but I’m going to suggest a couple: those whose sensibility is based on experiences they consciously seek, and those who rely on a bed of memories encountered incidentally . Surely this fails in all kinds of ways, but I think it explains the difference between, say, Henry James and George Orwell. Actually, it was James I would need when I dealt with the material of my childhood in fiction. For James, a safe, static, sedentary life in a comfortable society was a problem that required a technical solution. Narrative ambiguity brought drama to scenarios that lacked the tension that could carry a story. Before I read James, my first attempts at writing goofed around with this, and after I found him I emulated it in a kind of auto-apprenticeship. It worked—but part of me was bored. I wanted to be George Orwell, shooting at elephants and fascists. I still do. When I came out of graduate school, my MFA locked and loaded, there were no more dark continents and there were no wars worth fighting. Unless I could make a living as a short story writer—good luck—it looked like I would have to become a teacher. This is the basic predicament of thousands of writers now emerging from MFA programs every year. On the Line CH015.qxd 7/15/09 7:39 AM Page 56 ON THE LINE 57 Which is not to say that it’s new. Melville had a suburban upbringing, too, first on Bleecker Street when Bleecker Street was considered a suburb, and later outside Albany when the family finances dissolved. He taught for a while—hated it—and went on his first voyage as a cabin boy. Back home, he tried teaching again, and might have stayed there forever had his school not folded. After that, he decided to risk it, and what we now know of Melville’s life is best revealed in work that draws mostly on those experiences he had—his venture west, and the whalers—when he decided on a more adventurous course. Somewhere I got the idea that my own adventurous course would be to move to Atlantic City and become a table games dealer. Gambling is probably the coarsest form of risk we have. To me, it’s insidious not because it’s addictive but because it’s a cheap way to battle the ennui attendant to affluence. It’s a waste of time. But that wasn’t what I believed then, and I admit that I thought of the job as a way to pay bills and indulge a side of myself I hadn’t yet rejected. I didn’t intend to write about it, and for the most part I haven’t. The job would be an education, I reasoned, and for this I turned to Dostoevsky for rationale. Dostoevsky was a gambler—he had some system for playing the columns in roulette and thought he had the game beat. He didn’t. On various wellrecorded gambling binges, he lost everything he had. In fact, he wrote The Gambler because he had busted again—he dictated it, married his amanuensis , and then kept gambling. My rationale was inside The Gambler. Dostoevsky claimed that in a casino people behaved in a crowd the way they did when they were alone. The endeavor had an anthropological quality. Much later, working on a book about William James, I found a description of a casino from which tackles the phenomenon from a number of directions. James wrote to his wife: I stopped over a couple hours at Monte Carlo to have a look at...