Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

VI. A Guy in a Metal Suicide-Box

63 VI. A Guy in a Metal Suicide-Box On weekday evenings in December, I began revising the opening pages in hopes of seeing what a finished text might look like, something good enough to show my longtime friend Jack LaZebnik, a playwright and poet and a skilled portraitist who covered his office walls with mural-size drawings of Twain and Faulkner and Hemingway. As he had for several years, Jack was working on a novel, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting something that would never be published. He was sixteen years my senior, a World War II pilot of a B-24, the Liberator, who had feared the war would end before he could get in on it, but his Jewish ancestry gave no special meaning to his bombing runs against Nazi positions in northern Italy and southern Germany. He just loved to fly. To him flak was little more than hail on the roof of an automobile. He considered those missions a greater contribution than four decades of teaching English to college students ; he would say, “I go into class hopeful and come 64 Writing Blue Highways out hopeless.” His Russian-immigrant father ran a junkyard (the university-educated son thought scrap yard too refined a term) in Jackson, Michigan, and Jack became a junkyard dog guarding the English language: Nobody’s solecism escaped his correction—waiters, clerks, friends, children, wife, professors, columnists, the New Yorker, and (twice) surgeons ready to operate on him. Fascinated by Abraham Lincoln and of equal height and angularity, Jack was himself Lincolnesque, and his best plays are Lincoln and Mary and John Brown. His last work, a lively production, was about his parents immigrating to America. From his hundreds of poems, virtually all of them unpublished , here is “The Folding Time”: In those days Ma boiled the sheets in a copper tub on the blue-gas stove, then wrung them damp and hung them long on the white lines across the back yard. And then the folding time: she at one end, I at the other. We folded once and pulled and snapped the sheet to wave a flow from her to me to her and walked together to meet at the middle to take the ends and I to bow at the bottom side and back again we pulled to stretch the cloth and snap like a loud wet kiss to make the wave burst to our laughter in the ritual dance until the surprise of the calm when we touched fingers at the warm white folds upon her uplifted hands. A Guy in a Metal Suicide-Box 65 Jack was dedicated fixedly to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, a classic guide he did not interpret but obeyed as Moses (in whom he believed) did God (in whom he didn’t). Over the years we often debated issues such as whether a pair of concise, independent clauses had to be separated by a period or could get by with a comma (he arguing for the former, I the latter). Despite our sometimes discrepant views, to me his judgment of good writing was supreme. In his editing of my work, Jack never disparaged and never marked a weakness without suggesting a solution. He was unlike a later publisher’s editor whose entire comment on eleven pages of PrairyErth was,“This chapter is rickety.” Always looking for distinctive expression, Jack’s goal was to improve a sentence without imposing on it his own voice. He worked to draw a better phrase out of a weak one, and his primary tool was a pair of penciled parentheses wrapped around a word, a clause, a sentence, and occasionally an entire paragraph. In his hands my manuscript line “I saw better in the light of the rising moon” became “I saw better under the rising moon.” He was a master snipper and clipper, and his parentheses looked like little scissors, appropriately so because in Czech the word for “barber” is lazebnik. Our shared love of language used correctly, evocatively , and boldly led us to concoct “the test,” also called Name the Fame Game. One of us would read aloud the opening paragraph of a novel and then a paragraph or two further in, usually avoiding dialogue; the listener was to appraise the language and guess not author or title but the reputation of the work. Rarely was Jack’s opinion 66 Writing Blue Highways...