Reading Toni Morrison

I had to read the first page of Toni Morrison's Beloved about four times before I thought I understood it well enough to go on to page two.* I had to read the first three pages about seven times before I let myself go onto to page four. I kept going over her pages, virtually memorizing every word of Beloved's opening because something told me "This is very important," while something else about it, perhaps not just one thing but a set of distraction, was constantly throwing me off balance. I was continually grasping to understand the story, as I read it. And as I read it I was constantly becoming fascinated and distracted by some bright shiny object, a jewel of language or of something else I had not noticed before that suddenly seemed irresistible.

Perhaps as a reader of both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved that's how I would explain why it took me so long to read both works. For example, in the middle of a long paragraph that uses the word "he" more than once I would forget which character the author was referring to. That is typical of what was happening as I read and reread the opening of Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Who is Toni Morrison? She is a Nobel-prize winning American author. What is Beloved? Its Toni Morrison's fifth novel, published in 1987. Beloved is now considered to be one of American's best-loved novels. (It's official place on America's best-loved novels is #60 out of the top one hundred. For more information Google: PBS Great American Read.) Morrison is the only living American Nobel laureate. She is one of those extremely rare authors both critically and popularly acclaimed. Her novels are required reading in high schools and universities across the country. In the edition of Beloved I'm reading, the novel was preceded by three pages of stellar blurbs from publications' reviews from every echelon and region of our country. Without question Beloved is universally beloved. Then why did I struggle, and why do I continue to struggle to appreciate her work?

How about this? I'm stubborn.

By the way, it's not until page five that we learn why the house is haunted: A baby girl was murdered there. Her mother, Sethe, "had forgotten the soul of her baby girl." "Not only did she (Sethe) have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut, but her knees were as wide open as the grave, more pulsing than the baby blood that soaked her (Sethe's) fingers like oil." It's the murdered baby that haunts the house. We don't learn until later why the mother murdered her newborn baby.

 

Don't worry. I won't tell.

There's something else very important I think we all expect to learn or at least have hinted at on page one of any novel, and that is how time passes in that novel. In Beloved the nature of time isn't openly discussed until page 35, but by the way time is handled it's apparent in the opening pages. Characters reported to have died come back to life and continue living. That tripped me up a few times. Then we learn on page 35, in a dialogue between Sethe and Amy (a white lady who is a positive, helping influence in the story):

"I was talking about time. It's so hard or me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there…"

"Can other people see it?" asked Denver.

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes…"

What are we taught about the nature of time in Beloved? The same things keep happening over and over again. They never end. They never go away. And they never stop happening. By the way that is exactly the nature of time in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I love the inventiveness of Morrison's language: "I used to think it was my rememory."

Everything is continually being remembered over and over again; it's being "rememoried."

It's not surprising critics say Toni Morrison's Beloved owes a tremendous debt to Garbriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude we find the flowering of "magical realism." And what is magical realism? Let's put it this way: A house that has it in for its occupants is a perfect example. A house sending some people away while not allowing others to leave? A period of history refusing to ever end? A period of time in a sense keeping those living through it its prisoner? It's not that dissimilar from what we see in Beloved. The idea of the events of history continually repeating themselves? The idea that a person's life can simply live itself out over and over in succeeding generations? That's certainly the plot of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it has that approach to time in common with Beloved.

I'll cut to the chase: Why do Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude fascinate me as much as they do? Because the characters in both novels display and the way both novels are written also happen to display many of the chronic effects that emotional trauma has on people. The feeling that one is enslaved to time is perfect for a novel like Beloved that is attempting to come to terms with the long-term after-effects of slavery in America down through history.

Emotional trauma: Now that's a subject that interests me; it's the subject of my novel, Charging the Jaguar. But more about that later.

Suffice it to say, for now: Don't just sit down to read Beloved (like I did) without preparing yourself to read it. Consider using a reader's guide. Today I purchased one on my Kindle for $2.99: A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Beloved (Novels for Students). Reading it first would have been far easier than memorizing the opening of a novel word for word. But maybe in certain ways I'm better off for having struggled as I did. I'll let you know.

*Read for yourself what we have on the first page of Toni Morrison's Beloved. I copied it verbatim below:

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Seth and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old, as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Sugs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

"Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realized that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road."

Okay. That's page one.

Do we encounter a setting here? Yes, we do. I guess. It's a house in Cincinnati, Ohio, located at 124 Bluestone Road in 1873 although the address wasn't officially established until much later.

Do we encounter characters? Not in the conventional sense, but we're told about the existence of Baby Suggs, the grandmother; Sethe, her daughter, and Denver who is Sethe's daughter. We're told about two "boys" Howard and Buglar. But they're not really characters; they're just names on a page. We're told they're so spooked by weird goings on in the house that they leave.

Do we encounter a scene? I supposed we do: A scene of two sons being driven out from what is obviously a haunted house. By the way, no explanation is given as to why Baby Suggs and her daughter, Sethe, remain in the haunted house, or why Baby Suggs wasn't wondering why it took Sethe much longer than the two boys to realize the house was haunted, and to leave. It looks like the rules boys and men are expected to follow in this world Toni Morrison is describing to us are very different from the rules girls and women are expected to follow. In that respect, it's not that dissimilar from real life, I suppose.

Do we encounter the evanescent beginnings of a story? Yes, in a rudimentary sense.

I would argue that the haunted house itself triples as the setting, the scene and the only real character on page one of Beloved. The house is spiteful. It has a personality. The people are characters in name only. They only react in that they leave or don't leave depending on whether they're males or females.

 

Everything described happens inside the house; the setting is obviously the house. The scene, for example, of the two boys leaving the house, also is the house; the house drives them out.

Why am I going through this textual analysis? Am I looking for sympathy because I chose to read page one so many times before going on to page two? No.

I felt it necessary to read the opening of this novel so many times because I've had horrible results in the past when I would just go on and read more of a work before I truly understood the opening. And I wanted to understand it inside out and outside in. It's that important to me.

Creating Stillness in Literature. Why It's Important. How to Do It.

From time to time I've reviewed individual chapters from Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter, which I believe to be an inspired critical work. One of his chapters is devoted to "stillness" in literature.

For many of us stillness may be something we rarely encounter. When we're out in nature perhaps we notice an animal who upon seeing us becomes frozen in fear. Whether this scene strikes us as elegiac, spiritual, or transcendent, we instinctively know it's special. Out of respect for this living soul standing so deathly still, we make ourselves still, or attempt to, so as not to exacerbate its tremulous state or its racing heart. Everything is still. Everything is brimming with potential.

Perhaps one summer day we come upon a meadow in late afternoon. As a breeze rustles a tree's leaves, we're struck with the thought that everything we're seeing is intensely alive, full of potential. Stillness is like that, a moment born of portent when nothing much happens. If you want to get technical, plenty happens but when we become aware of stillness we overlook that, we decide to believe nothing happens. We might be in touch with the potential for healing and wholeness or we might sense we're on the cusp of breaking through to something fresh, something we've never experienced before.

I intuitively seek out stillness. I find it life enhancing. We sometimes find it in films when no one speaks and all we hear is the sound wind makes; sometimes we see it happen in plays when silence reigns on stage. Can moments of stillness happen in novels where everything depends on words flowing at a steady rate one after another? Can there be silence even while words on the page continue to flow? There can be. Stillness, an artificial stillness, can be created out of words. And these moments can be as moving as when we encounter stillness in nature.

Here's Baxter making a cultural point about how we as a society don't hold silence and stillness in high regard. Quite the opposite: "What's remarkable is the degree to which Americans have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness. In this country, silence is often associated with madness, mooncalfing [meaning "simplemindedness"], woolgathering [meaning "indulging in idle daydreaming"], laziness, hostility and stupidity. Silence is… associated with death.

Stillness is an "intensifier."

society's opinion, Baxter writes, "…silence [in the context of a story] is an intensifier. It strengthens whatever stands on either side of it. Directed in this way, silence takes on different emotions, a different color, for whatever it flows through or flows between."

how can it be that an author can serve up a moment of stillness when a writer's only tools are words. In films it's easy to show silence. In novels, it's not as easily done, but it can be accomplished.

In the opening chapter of my novel, Charging the Jaguar, I portray stillness. The principal protagonist, Jake Lancer, who is an incurable, inveterate daydreamer, is alone in his home one afternoon as a thunderstorm gathers. The only other character in the opening chapter is a housecat named Homer, who provides more than enough action for Jake to play off against.

surrounds Jake. He's trapped by it like a prehistoric fly is trapped in a block of amber. In Jake's case he is overwhelmed by what Jake calls in Spanish soledad, or, in English, solitude or loneliness.

Baxter righty insists that in our society "the daydreaming child, or daydreaming grownup, is usually [thought of as] an object of contempt or therapy." He writes, "Vitality in our culture, by contrast, has everything to do with speed and talk."

In the opening chapter of my novel, I present my readers with Jake Lancer, a Peace Corps Volunteer in his early twenties who is anything but a fast-talking man of action. As Jake looks out his front window in Duodango, Colombia, and watches rain clouds build in the sky, he ruminates on the negative outcomes likely to visit him tonight when his boss arrives and gives him a "promised assessment" of his rooky Peace Corps career. While admittedly it's a risky thing for a writer to pull off, I believe stillness becomes Jake Lancer and his character; that is why I present him in that manner in the opening chapter of my novel.

How does one create silence or stillness in a fictional narrative? 

Baxter quotes Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the opening to Chapter 19, where Baxter so aptly states, "attention flows away from what is supposed to command it…" [instead, action flows] towards "the peripheries: the river the bank, the trash floating down the river, the sound of the cricket. In a moment of stillness, the atmosphere supplants the action…" At this point, Baxter writes, "Twain follows this observation with a sentence of over three hundred words… which is something of a rhapsody, the longest sentence in his book and, I think, one of the most beautiful sentences in American literature." Baxter points out that this "rhapsody" occurs in close proximity to two deaths by firearms in the book; he concludes, "It is as if Americans typically have their moments of stillness when [they] are framed on both sides by violence."

How did Mark Train create stillness in that sentence of three hundred words back in 1884? This is the sentence. See for yourself. I'd say Twain does it by focusing in on exactly what happens when stillness happens, and by describing all that happens in detail. (Once again, I emphasize this: When we notice stillness, we have the impression nothing is happening, but in fact plenty is happening if we wish to look closely. That's part of the trick of stillness; it's a time when we wish to ignore all the little things going on.)

Here is the first half of that rhapsodic sentence: "Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-clattering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking way over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky, then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't so black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could a sweep screaking, or jumbled up voices, it was so still and sounds come so far…"

And that's only the first half of the 300-word sentence. But that's how Twain did it in 1884, and how stillness even today can be delivered up to readers.

Are you feeling good or well?

If someone asks after your health and, assuming you feel okay, do you say, you're feeling good, well or fine?

Good is an adjective. It could relate to one's behavior in relation to an ethical norm or to the degree of skill one has in a specific area or endeavor.

Well is an adverb. It describes how one feels and is the word one usually uses to communicate that one is in good health.

Fine is an adjective that means of superior quality, admirable, consisting of small particles, refined and delicately fashioned. It has other uses, as well. For example, a fine musician is one of high quality. However, a fine musician is  a better musician than a good one.

 

So, when someone asks you how are you, how do you answer?

If you are feeling chipper, the standard answer is "I'm fine," picking up on the superior quality meaning of that word. However, if you want to emphasize that you are in good health, you could say, "I'm well." The answer "I'm good," is not appropriate. If you are a baby sitter you could tell the parents after they return that their children were good as a way of indicating that they were well behaved.

Of course, if you're really feeling great, you could always say, "I'm super."

What is Writing all About? (My Paean to Mrs. Rasmussen)

Mrs. Rasmussen was my seventh-grade English teacher at Evergreen Elementary in Plainfield, New Jersey, who taught me some essentials of writing. When she stood in front of our class, she had a way about her. You wanted to hear what she had to say. She had short, blond hair and wore white, button-down shirts and pretty, colorfully patterned skirts. She was a graduate of Cornell University, which seemed like a special place of learning to me because at that time my brother was planning on soon attending Cornell.

Mrs. Rasmussen had us write one theme each week. How many teachers do that now? Back then no other teacher did that. For that reason just being in her class felt special to me. We were being asked to do something very special. Without thinking about it, I inculcated the first and most essential writing lesson: If you want to write, write often. Write every day, if possible. 

She had us fold our theme papers in half along the vertical axis so that when we handed them in they appeared tall and skinny with our name, class period and Mrs. Rasmussen's name in the upper-right hand corner. This folding thing was obviously superficial, but I remember at the time believing it was important. Also special. Did she say that this was the way students folded their papers at Cornell University? I have a vague recollection of that. Perhaps I made it up. To this day I don't know for sure. 

I became very caught up with how foreign yet special the weekly writing and the folding were, and somehow that led me to daydreaming that Mrs. Rasmussen's seventh-grade English class was in fact an undercover university class that only we were being allowed to take. There's a lesson there: Always go into a writing session, if possible, feeling that what you're about to write is special. Very special. This is called "setting your intention." Doing so improves the likelihood that what you'll wind up with will also be special. One can certainly hope for that outcome. After all, it's good to hope. In a way, Mrs. Rasmussen taught me that it's good to hope. I'll always be grateful to her for that. 

One day Mrs. Rasmussen taught us how to write a description. She had us make a list of four or five things, bullet points that we wanted to include in the description. Then she wrote out in her beautiful handwriting on the blackboard (it was a blackboard in those days) the description based on the bullet points. She taught me this programmatic approach to creativity: First come up with the bullet points. Then turn them into nicely crafted sentences. That was the technique I used when composing the description of Mrs. Rasmussen in the first paragraph. Today as I remember Mrs. Rasmussen I also remember the beginnings of my desire to be a writer. All I knew for sure at the time was that when I was writing for Mrs. Rasmussen it felt as special as the way I folded my papers. No wonder my memory of her is so special to me.

 

The Accidental Innovator (lil' ol' me).

As I sat down to write this issue of my ExcitingWriting Advisory, I turned off the "Planet Money" broadcast on Dallas' NPR radio station. The theme of today's show? The best inventions and innovations are accidents.

For a number of days I had been planning to write this Exciting Writing Advisory about how I discovered a narrative method for writing my novel Charging the Jaguar the same way, by accident.

Which narrative method? Third-person omniscient. There's nothing innovative about that. It was the preferred story-telling method of Charles Dickens, and most Nineteenth Century novelists.

An omniscient narrator can tell the reader what's going on inside the head of all principal protagonists in a scene for maximum impact and meaning (if the author so desires). Yet, as effective as this point of view can be, some readers think it's old-fashioned.

(Note: I'm using the terms "point of view" and "narrative method" interchangeably. I struggled with that concept for a number of years but now have accepted and understand that when discussing literature those two terms mean the same thing.)

Richard Russo, in his book of essays entitled The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writers, Writing and Life, in a chapter entitled "What frogs think: In Defense of Omniscience" argues that omniscience is the single most "inclusive and confident" point of view. (My review of Russo's book is below this essay.)

About a month ago during a dinner party at the home of Cynthia and Allen Mondell in Dallas I decided to use an omniscient narrator in my novel quite by accident. Because omniscience is so rarely used today, one could argue that I made an innovative artistic choice.

That night Cynthia and Allen seated me (quite by accident) next to Andy McCarthy, a friend of theirs. Andy asked me what I did for a living. I told him I write novels. He asked me, "What are you working on now?" I told him it's called Charging the Jaguar, and it takes place in Colombia, South America during the Vietnam War-era. "It's about a Peace Corps Volunteer by the name of Jake Lancer who becomes friendly with a violent, undercover FARC revolutionary soldier by the name of Jesus Ayuduarte. Jesus returns Jake's friendship both because he likes him and because his commander ordered him to. Indeed, Jesus's commander has ordered him to become friendly with the Peace Corps Volunteer to determine if the gringo is an undercover CIA agent, and to assassinate him if he concludes that he is. In the novel, Jesus is operating undercover, disguised as a local businessman."

"That sounds really exciting," said Andy, "because all the time Jake is becoming friends with Jesus, Jesus is deciding whether he's going to murder him. So the reader gets to see what's happening in Jesus' mind as he decides whether to assassinate him or not, while at the same time the reader gets to see what's happening in Jake's mind as he becomes friendly with this undercover FARC soldier who's pretending he's a regular businessman."

I was just a tad embarrassed. You see, it hadn't occurred to me to set up the story that way. It was clear to me that Andy saw more potential in my story in just a minute than I had seen after years of working on it. I had the impression that something very spiritual was was at work here.

"Well, thank you," I said, I went on to tell my tablemate, "I think your idea is way better than what I was thinking.  Setting up the story your way we understand the mission Jesus is on from the very start. The story is filled with tension from beginning to end. Until the very last page the novel has a single through-question: Will Jesus execute the Peace Corps Volunteer?"

Then another scene came to me: Very early on in the story we see Jesus being tasked by his FARC revolutionary commander to seek out Jake Lancer, the Peace Corps Volunteer. His commander orders him to become friendly with Jake, and then "to assassinate him" if he decides he's a CIA agent. That scene is presented in chapter two of Charging. The fact that Andy's insights are reflected in such an early chapter indicates how important they will be in the overall novel once it is complete.

That night I made copious notes about how that chapter could be written. From the get-go I knew I wanted to write it in third-person omniscient voice.

I was glad that by then I had already read Russo's book of essays.

A key point Russo makes in his chapter on omniscience is that every form of narration except for that one must, by definition, leave one or more points of view out of the mix. His thesis is that third-person omniscient narration is the most inclusive and requires an author to be both "generous and confident."

He quotes from a novel entitled Grand Opening written in omniscient third-person by Jon Hassler. It was published about the same time as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby (which is written in first person). Russo says he doesn't wish to compare the quality of the two novels, but after quoting a passage from Grand Opening, he writes, "the first thing to note about Hassler's omniscience is it's immediate, effortless access to the story's information, as a result of which [a character] Dodger Hicks leaps to life." He adds, "Hassler's omniscience is truly a thing of beauty."

Russo notes that "Hassler," in his novel, "knows a lot about trains and train lore, and he's chosen a point of view that allows him to indulge an enthusiasm that predates his invention [of a character]."

"After all, 'omniscience' means 'all knowing' and it favors writers who know things, who are confident of their knowledge and generous enough to want to share it."

As I was reading this, I was thinking, I know a lot about Colombia. And what I don't know intellectually, I know in my heart. And what good is knowledge unless you share it?

Russo writes, "Where does such confidence and generosity comes from? Some writers like Dickens appear to be born with it. To others it comes over time, a side benefit for experience. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that the more confident and generous a writer becomes, the more he will be drawn to omniscience…"

And I'm thinking, Why not give away all your knowledge within the pages of your fiction? No one will be the wiser about what you're up to. And then everyone will be the wiser.

I was now feeling better about the artistic decisions that I had just made. But had I actually made any decisions, or had Andy simply presented an alternative vision, and had I, in a magnanimous gesture, accepted the gifts that he was offering me, gifts that obviously came from a very spiritual place.

So, this is my story: A brief remark made by a total stranger during a chance encounter improved my novel and changed my life (I believe time will tell) fundamentally. Thank you, Andy.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" and me.

About two years after returning home from the coast of Colombia where I served in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s, I began hearing about a Colombian novel recently published in English that was being universally acclaimed for its literary brilliance.

One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Gabriel García Márquez was already a sizzling literary sensation, a worldwide bestseller in every language its translation was published.

As I read One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time, I recognized among its pages certain characteristics of the village of Manaure where I had lived on the Atlantic coast of Colombia for nearly a year.

No, my village never boasted of having a citizen comparable to Remedios the Beauty who, being too beautiful and wise for this world, one afternoon ascended into the sky and was never heard from again.

But perhaps because the natural setting of my little village of Manaure (up in the mountains above Valledupar) made it so picturesque, peaceful and timeless a place, I was tempted to liken it to García Márquez's fictional village of Macando which is actually based on Aracataca, a village where the author lived with his grandparents when he was around fourteen years of age in the early 1940s. (I visited Aracataca one weekend while I lived in Manaure because one of my Peace Corps training buddies was stationed there. It's about a four-hour bus ride from Manaure.)

Sitting in my little apartment on Perry Street in the West Village where I lived after returning from the Peace Corps, it was not difficult to remember back to living in a place very much like Macando where all thoughts about the history of a place and the glory of history were largely illusionary. Where people would lay their best-laid plans but then would subsequently be compelled to live out self-destructive, negative patterns that repeated from generation to generation.

By contrast, we North Americans are such irrepressible optimists, believing, or willing to do anything to make believe we believe that our past remains just that, in the past, untethered to our futures, which we hope and pray are limitless.

And so in One Hundred Years of Solitude, we have six generations of the Buendía family, where the names of the family patriarchs down through the generations are simply variations on one another, and where over the course of the novel, their lives often seem like minor variations on existing themes that only grow worse and then become still worse and then grow worse still. Meanwhile, as one might expect, for the most part the women are the bedrock of each generation, most effective in their attempts to escape entropy, and the powerful downward pull of destiny.

Although as an American I was an outsider in my village of Manaure, I had one thing going for me that enabled me to instantly empathize with people living in a place where nothing happens, where things only get worse, and that often careens towards the edge of forgetfulness. What was that one thing I had going for me? All my life I've been mildly depressed. That's a big plus when you're living in Manaure or reading García Márquez and in your head living in Macando. Sometimes I've managed to overcome it, but as one gets mired down in the generations of Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude one experiences what it's like to be locked in the vice grip of history that won't let you go, that will never let you go.

Gabiel García Márquez taught me by his example that Colombia is not only worth writing about, it rewards one with a myriad of magical, paradoxical and ambiguous possibilities such that I'm still fascinated with events I experienced when I lived there, and probably will be until the day I die.

 

This, too: There is very little difference between mild depression and what Garcia-Marquez means when he uses the word "solitude." Both include being isolated from the larger world. Both include sadness and forgetfulness that can be a cover for selfishness and self-centeredness.

Thus, I find when traveling in Colombia, just as when I am immersed in the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or a novel by another Colombian author, I've learned that writing and reading about Colombia is my passion, my life's work. It will always be so. Although I am now seventy-three years young, I am not that far removed from what I sensed and observed when I was a very young man living in my little village of Manaure.

 

By luck or by fate while serving in the Peace Corps I became acquainted with some Colombian leftist revolutionary soldiers from the same group with whom President Juan Emanuel Santos recently concluded a peace treaty (winning him the Nobel Peace Prize for his effort, by the way). That revolutionary group is called the FARC. Although the FARC has been around since 1964, in 1967-68 when I was in Colombia, some of the soldiers checked me out to see if I was a C.I.A. agent. No doubt they had every intention of assassinating me if, indeed, they decided I was one. I, in turn, took it upon myself to check them out and received one of the greatest gifts one can receive: To see one's enemy as one's friend and one's friend as one's enemy. To love one's neighbor as one would love oneself. Therein is the way out of solitude, self-centeredness, and selfishness, by the way. Love.

Charging the Jaguar, a title which sums up for me the brazen courage one displays when at the age of twenty-one one is convinced of one's immortality. Much of my novel takes place on the coast of Colombia, just south of Valledupar in a fictional village I'm calling Dúodango, which I describe as a "benighted, all-but-forgotten Colombian village."

I can't wait until you get to read it.

A Memorial Day Lesson in What it Means to be Free.

Last August Gina and I boarded the HMS Crown Princess at Southampton, England, and after a week visiting Scandinavian ports, spent three weeks crossing the North Atlantic (with stops in Iceland, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia) before docking in Brooklyn, NY.

By any measure it was the cruise of a lifetime. The ports of call were memorable but what I'll remember until time dissolves my brain cells like an Alka-Seltzer in water were our fellow passengers, predominantly British citizens from England, Wales and Scotland. On the days at sea, and there were many, we shared lunch, high tea, and dinner tables with them. To me they were birds of a feather; and I loved listening to their accents and what they chose to talk about as if they were varieties of songbirds.

"Look what you've done with my language," at various points I wanted to tweet at them, knowing that if I were to, they, speaking closer to the way William Shakespeare spoke in 1500, might warble back, "look what you've done with our language, the language we gave you, by the way."

One of the accents easy for me to spot and (perhaps for you as well) was the upper crust British accent used by many Oxford and Cambridge University graduates. Each time I encountered it among our UK songbirds, hearing its lilt immediately took me back to the fall of 1970 and my first semester at the Iowa Writer's Workshop when I had the pleasure and honor of having the noted English novelist Angus Wilson as my writing instructor.

Those of you who have seen the movie The Imitation Game (2014) starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly are aware of the code-breaking work led by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park outside London during World War II. Turing's group broke the Enigma code, which allowed the Allies to "listen in" on German military communiqués. After that, the Allied victory was only a matter of time, but the shame is that Turing, instead of being canonized as one of the great heroes of World War II, was instead prosecuted (in 1952) "for homosexual acts," and was made to accept "chemical castration treatment" as an alternative to serving time in prison. (Wikipedia, "Alan Turing")

Alan Turing was a graduate of Oxford, as was my instructor Angus Wilson. Not only were they contemporaries (with Alan's birth year being 1912 and Angus's being 1913) but during World War II they both served in the code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park, although Angus Wilson translated Italian Naval codes. If they weren't friends they had to have known each other. In 1970 there was certainly never any doubt among us workshop students that Angus Wilson was a homosexual, an extremely intelligent, dignified and well spoken one, at that.

I now realize how much of Angus Wilson's work can be traced back to the clandestine manner in which as an artist he had to cover his tracks in order to work and be accepted in the highly homophobic society he grew up in. Not for one moment did I believe the United States was any less forbidding a place for homosexuals who wished to express themselves freely, by the way.

And so today when I think about Angus Wilson's novels and the way he wrote them, I'm drawn to his heroic struggle to tell stories in a way that both casts a gossamer veil over his characters and their relationships and at the same time reveals them and uses them as an outlet to express the deeper longings, desires and tensions that he certainly felt but knew he could not express directly. He was under no illusions that there would be ugly consequences if he were to do so. He could land in jail or worse. In that respect Angus's achievement could truly be called "writing as though one's life depended on it," for it did. Not surprising to me was how many of his novels revolved around the theme of needing to treat each other more humanly and refrain from judging our fellow human beings.

I recall one workshop session when the class got into a heated discussion about one of our short stories in which a character who was in the midst of grieving for a loved one performed a horrible act. I don't recall what the character did, but I remember being shocked by it. And I remember Angus Wilson intervening and saying something to the effect that he for one would never judge someone who was in a grieving state for anything he or she might do. I remember him saying, "Who are we to judge?"

I also remember the effect his words had on me. They changed my mind.

If only Angus Wilson's advice could have been applied to judging homosexuals or any other group on a long list of abhorrents drawn up by, for example, the Nazis. Wasn't that why our forebears fought World War II in the first place, so that people like Gina and me could take luxury cruises across the Atlantic at our leisure and write the essays and read the books we wish to?