I lived then in a rooming house on a canopied avenue of trees, enduring Potsdam’s arctic temperatures, the gales that battered the storm windows and the rain that froze over everything in a glistening sheet so that the world became crystalline and treacherous. Once the temperature hit twenty below, no car would start, even when plied with ether sprayed generously into the steel maw of the carburetor. It wasn’t a problem, or not at first, not until I began to discover romance and the vital significance of the back seat. We lived — variously six, seven or eight of us, males exclusively — in three upstairs rooms of a frame house owned by a widow who had been Potsdam’s homecoming queen in 1911 and referred to us as “my boys.” The rooms were dense with ancient furniture that gave off an odor of times long gone, but they were adequate to the purpose, and it was here that I began my first rudimentary essays into this form — the form of the short story — that would come to dominate my life. That said, I have to admit that I was not a good student or a dutiful one. Still, I read vastly, read what was current rather than what was prescribed, and came away with a spotty education (a double major in history and English, with a junior-year swoop into Krishna Vaid’s creative writing class), but with a real fever for art. What do I remember of that time? A fear of the nausea that Sartre dropped in my lap and a gnawing unformed desire that had me haunting the high steel rafters of the partly constructed library building, alone, in the spectral hours after the bars had closed, trying to taste the future on a sub-zero wind.
I remember Wite-Out, the very acme of technological perfection, made all the more irresistible because of the rumor that Bob Dylan’s mother had invented it. I remember Dylan and the instruction rock and roll gave me, years before I coalesced my musical impulses and fronted a band myself, howling out my rage and bewilderment till my body went rigid and my throat clenched. I remember the feel of the Olivetti portable on which I composed everything I’d ever written — stories, essays, letters, notes — until computers made it redundant. And I can still summon up the satisfaction of typing a clean finished copy of something that seemed to have value, great value, value for me and the world too, on fresh crinkled sheets of Corrasable Bond.
Hippie times came along, and that’s where memory solidifies. I’ve always been single-minded (to a fault, many would say), and I do tend to plunge in with everything I’ve got. I was a hippie’s hippie, so blissed-out and outrageously accoutered that people would stop me on the street and ask if I could sell them acid. Which I couldn’t. And wouldn’t. That would be too… grasping. Music pounded in my brain, the music that was the culture of the time. I lived in various houses with various people, but I settled into a relationship with a graceful and encouraging woman who had her finger on the pulse of the day, my wife through all these years and moves and books and children, and I read hungrily, madly, looking for something I couldn’t define. My fumbling attempts at stories in those times were in the mode then called “experimental,” a playful thrust at parrying the traditional narrative and fracturing it into its discrete elements. It was then that I discovered Robert Coover and his clean, lyrical, ultra-smart and wickedly funny stories, and I saw what I had been blindly striving toward made perfection. Next came Barthelme, Borges, Cortázar, Pynchon, Barth, Calvino, García Márquez, writers of a period in which no one ever said never and there was no form that couldn’t be squeezed and milked and molded.
I published my first story — in the “experimental” mode — in the North American Review in 1972, under the aegis of Robley Wilson Jr., to whom I will forever be grateful. On the strength of that, I applied to Iowa and was accepted and my life as a writer really began to begin. Now I’d been bitten. Now I was an adult. Now I knew what I wanted from my life and I pursued it with devotion and purpose. My professors at the Workshop — Vance Bourjaily, John Irving and John Cheever — gave me exactly what I most needed, a boost of confidence, and my professors in the English Department, where I completed my Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature, gave me the foundation I hadn’t been able to build during my years as a disaffected undergrad. My rationale? I felt if I wanted to be a writer, it might actually be helpful to know something.
And yes, I was well aware that formal study, at least to writers of the generation before mine, was anathema. Cheever, who was unfailingly kind and generous to me, was positively acidic on the subject of my academic pursuits, which he felt had no real place in an artistic repertoire, but I persisted, because, for better or worse, no one and nothing can turn me once I’ve got a notion in my head. And so, on graduating, I went to Los Angeles and founded the creative writing program at USC, where I continued to teach until becoming writer in residence in the fall of 2012. The university turned out to be a blessing. It grounded me, got me out of the house and out of myself, and gave me the precious opportunity of assessing, encouraging and discussing the art of fiction on a regular basis with people, mostly young and still in the formative stages, who were as excited about it as I.
It was Cheever too who gently chastised me for using that bludgeoning term “experimental,” as did Tom Whittaker, who then edited The Iowa Review, where I worked first as assistant fiction editor (to Robert Coover) and then, during my last year, as fiction editor in my own right. Cheever insisted that all good fiction was experimental — and, of course, it is — adducing his own “The Death of Justina” as an example. I took his point. And during the 1980s and into the 1990s I came under the influence of his stories and those of Raymond Carver, who became a friend during the years I was at Iowa. If in the beginning I was more interested in language, design and idea than in character (and this is reflected, I think, in volume one), as I grew as a novelist and came to admire what Carver and Cheever and so many others were accomplishing in a less “experimental” and more traditional vein, I became more at ease with building stories around character as well.
While at Iowa, I kept after the business of sending stories to magazines, big and small, insisting on walking to the post office the very day a story came back to me unloved and unwanted and sending it out to the next prospect on my list, hoping to match story to editor in a way that was by turns futile, masochistic and defiantly optimistic. During the five and a half years I was there, I saw some thirty stories accepted, each acceptance an occasion for the kind of fête that involved a rereading of the story aloud to whomever I could rope into listening and an excursion to some dark watering hole that offered up exotic fare like pizza and beer in exchange for mere money. Exciting times. I became so attuned to the arrival of the mail I could detect the annunciatory squeal of the delivery truck’s brakes from two blocks away. There was plenty of rejection, of course — I taped the rejection letters on poster boards and tacked them to the wall of the bedroom that served as my office till all four walls were covered and I resorted to the more practical but less self-righteous system of secreting them in file folders.
I was fortunate to place stories early on in Esquire, The Paris Review, The Atlantic and Harper’s—and later in The New Yorker and Playboy—and to develop close working relationships with editors like George Plimpton and Lewis Lapham. It meant whole worlds and universes to feel that I wasn’t sending things blind, that there were editors out there who actually looked forward to seeing what I might turn out next. George Plimpton took so many of my stories for The Paris Review in the seventies and eighties that he once joked he was thinking of renaming the magazine The Boyle Review, and his influence and friendship were of incalculable value. He made me feel necessary, not to mention appreciated. On the other hand, the editors of The New Yorker gave me a cold shoulder in those days, finally accepting one of my pieces in the early nineties, but once the magazine changed hands and Tina Brown and her fiction editor, Bill Buford, came to the fore — and now their successors, David Remnick and Deborah Treisman — I have seen the bulk of my stories appear in its pages. So yes, I’ve been very fortunate, but most of all in my editor, Paul Slovak, with whom I’ve worked on the last fourteen books, and my agent, Georges Borchardt, who took me on while I was a student still and has been my advocate, intercessor and salver of wounds ever since. If it weren’t for Georges, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this apologia pro vita sua.