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    Stelmark: A Family Recollection
    Stelmark: A Family Recollection
    Stelmark: A Family Recollection
    Ebook153 pages2 hours

    Stelmark: A Family Recollection

    By Harry Mark Petrakis

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    About this ebook

    When Harry Mark Petrakis' autobiography of his early years, Stelmark, first appeared in print, the New York Times reviewer, Thomas Losk, hailed it as 'pungent and heartwarming, combining concrete particulars with the spiritual values they embody." The book recounts Petrakis' coming of age in Chicago during the Depression, the youngest son in the large family of a Greek Orthodox priest who had emigrated from Crete to America. He finds his identity as a writer among the immigrants of the close-knit Greek community and takes honest measure of his frailties and failings.

    Stelmark: A Family Recollection is a celebration of family life as few of us know it today: joyous, triumphant, often wildly humorous, often starkly dramatic, rich with love, margined by a code of duty and respect. It is an elegy to growing up as Harry Mark Petrakis did — a first-generation American in a tightly knit and colorful community.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarry Mark Petrakis
    Release dateOct 29, 2011
    ISBN9781465963833
    Stelmark: A Family Recollection
    Author

    Harry Mark Petrakis

    Harry Mark Petrakis is the author of twenty-three books, short-stories, and essays, and has been nominated twice for the National Book Award. His books include the 'A Dream of Kings' (1966), set in Chicago, which was a New York Times bestseller. It was published in twelve foreign editions and was made into a motion picture (1969) starring Anthony Quinn. He has won the O. Henry Award, and received awards from Friends of American Writers, Friends of Literature, and the Society of Midland Authors. He was the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair in Modern Greek Studies at San Francisco State University and the McGuffy Visiting Lecturer at Ohio University. In 2004, the American College of Greece in Athens presented him with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree.

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      Book preview

      Stelmark - Harry Mark Petrakis

      STELMARK

      A Family Recollection

      by

      HARRY MARK PETRAKIS

      Copyright 1970 by Harry Mark Petrakis

      All rights reserved

      Smashwords Edition

      Originally published by

      David McKay Company

      New York City

      DEDICATION:

      For my brother Dan, who has met adversity

      with a rare faith and courage

      http://harrymarkpetrakis.com

      Praise for Harry Mark Petrakis...

      Re: Stelmark: Pungent and heartwarming, combining concrete particulars with the spiritual values they embody.

      - Thomas Lask (NY Times)

      In his tales, violence is measured by brotherhood, passionate hate by passionate love. And in the end it is man who, despite his weaknesses and his blindness, has the right to victory.

      - Elie Weisel

      I've often thought what a wonderful basketball team could be formed from Petrakis characters. Everyone of them is at least fourteen feet tall.

      - Kurt Vonnegut

      Harry Mark Petrakis is good news in American literature.

      - Issac Bashevis Singer

      I've always thought Harry Mark Petrakis to be a leading American novelist.

      - John Cheever

      Joy. A strange word when you think of contemporary fiction... or contemporary poetry, or contemporary anything. I am tempted to say that Petrakis is unique in our time because in his stories he can produce it, and he does regularly. It is as if some wonderful secret had been lost, then rediscovered by him.

      - Mark Van Doren

      Petrakis has something more important than skill; a deep and rich humanity.

      - Rex Warner

      TABLE OF CONTENTS:

      NEW FOREWARD (1983)

      PROLOGUE to STELMARK (1970)

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      BIO/HMP

      NEW FOREWARD (1983)

      A little longer than twenty years ago, after suffering for two years as a junior-rank speech writer for a steel company in Pittsburgh, I returned to Chicago with my wife and our three sons. We moved into an old house on the South Side of the city with a plan that I would make my first efforts to live as a freelance writer. The confidence for such a hazardous venture hardly seemed justified on the basis of a couple of short stories and a first novel I had published, but I had grown desperate to prove to others and to myself that it could be done.

      We lived in that house for about a year and a half but we never were the only tenants. Our family shared those quarters with pigeons cooing their reveilles at dawn under our eaves, with ubiquitous squirrels in the attic, and with creatures of indeterminate species in the basement.

      Existing for that first year on the dinners and, sometimes, the loans of family and friends, in that house, late one night with my wife and young sons asleep, I wandered like one of Seneca's prologizing ghosts, pondering my fears. In the labyrinth of darkness that begins at midnight, I wrote a letter to my family summing up my life at the age of thirty-eight. I tried to explain those things I had come to understand about myself and to apologize to them for the tensions and insecurities I had inflicted upon them. The letter began:

      I have chosen this night of wind and unrest to write this letter to you because I hope that if I write from my heart, through the flurry of words, you may see the measure of my longing and my dream. That is all you might ever have from me in place of any legacy of material possessions I would be able to bequeath to you.

      Twenty years and nine books later, a tumultuous period with our nation having endured three dreadful assassinations, a bitter, divisive war and numerous public upheavals, as a foreword for this book I take inventory once more. Not so much for my sons, who are grown men now no longer at the mercy of my fitful dreams, nor for my enduring wife of nearly thirty-seven years, who has probably resigned herself to sharing the capers and capsizings of the writer's life. I am now addressing my friends, old and new readers, and, to an extent, myself. On the thumbscrew of sixty, not old and yet no longer able to claim middle-age, like a portly climber of mountains, I pause here for breath. Perhaps I will be able to gauge the terrain I have ascended and estimate the distance I remain from the elusive peak I understand and accept now I may never reach.

      For these past twenty years I have managed the prodigious achievement of surviving as a free-lance writer on a battlefield strewn with the carcasses of noble and talented scribes. That survival wasn't quite accomplished by writing alone, but also by numerous lectures and readings before colleges and clubs across the country. From my father, who was a Greek Orthodox priest, I inherited a certain resonance of voice and, from my Greek ancestors, some sense of tragic and comic dramatics. These lectures and readings along with the writing provided us an integral means of survival.

      There were many hours of pleasure and satisfaction during these readings and at the writers' conferences where I taught as a writer-teacher. In addition to meeting many comrade novelists and poets, I shared the dreams and aspirations of young men and young women and, often, older men and older women. Having struggled for many years to achieve some skill at my craft, there was a gratification in helping others clear the clutter from their words and articulate their own visions.

      In those early years there were less beneficent aspects of the lecturing. Looking back on them I remember an endless succession of desolate hotels with musty lobbies inhabited by listless loungers who sat staring out upon the forlorn streets an Edward Hopper might have painted. Then there were the drab motels with names like the sections of cemeteries. Sleepy Hollow and Shady Rest. In tiny rooms that contained the aggregate loneliness of men and women who would remain forever unknown to me but who had slept on the same lumpy mattresses smelling of sin and futility, I listened in the unsleeping night to the fitful beating of my heart.

      Yet, each time I came home from my journeys, the lonely travels were forgotten when I returned to my typewriter or when I assembled with my family around our table. Those reunions were times of laughter, love and the warm fragrance of foods. Later, with the house grown dark and quiet, lying beside my wife in our bed, solaced by her closeness, I came to understand how other beds were simply an exile from my own.

      But the lecturing and readings were merely a corollary. My main occupation and source of income continued to be the writing of my stories and, over the years, through fitful starts and stops, I managed to do that. Slowly and arduously learning my craft by writing and revising endless times, I came to understand the onus of delays and adroit evasions the writer must always combat in maintaining discipline. I became crafty as an old wolf in finding ways to avoid the writing that another part of me longed to do. Yet, despite the obstructions, I finished in the first years of the 1960s some stories and books. There were the novels Lion at My Heart and The Odyssey of Kostas Volakis and a collection of short stories, Pericles On 31st Street.

      Any writer who has written and had several books published comes to understand the ephemeral quality of publication. Books are published with some small flurry of activity, a few good and bad notices, some letters from old and new friends, and then the book disappears, driven from bookstore shelves by the need to make room for other new books. The returns in economic terms are insufficient compensation for the effort and time. Having once dreamed of fame and wealth through my books, after several of my books had been published I had to take what consolation I could in believing that many fine writers died poor while waiting for posterity to applaud their contribution to the literature of the ages.

      Perhaps this moderating of my early expectations mollified my tensions, as well. If I wasn't going to become wealthy and famous through my writing, I might as well try to relax and enjoy it. Perhaps the years of traveling, talking, meeting different people had also provided me additional insight into the diversity of human beings. Perhaps the death of my father after a long, debilitating illness and that experience of love, loss and grief had, after a number of years, been absorbed into my spirit, as well. I had begun to see how often the apparently undistinguished life contained the epic of classic destiny. I was finally ready to understand and create a character like the questioning, assertive Leonidas Matsoukas in my novel A Dream of Kings, who had divine as well as human adversaries.

      The writing of that novel provided me, to a greater degree than any writing I had done before, the joy of being attuned to one's work. I felt myself part of some luminous confederacy that encompassed all the good poets and artists who had ever lived, an affiliation linked to some divinity in heaven or on earth. At odd times during the days and nights I worked on the book, words and phrases and scenes flew into my thoughts, seemingly unrelated to characters and scenes in the story. After a while I understood with a feeling of bewilderment and awe that another more profound force than my own was directing my vision. The life of that book became more real for me then, while eating, drinking, walking and talking seemed a ghostly charade. I finally understood the emotion Martin Buber called the holiness of an active relationship with God.

      When A Dream of Kings was published I had the astounding experience of watching it become a commercial as well as a critically successful book. A book club made it an alternate selection, a paperback house bought the reprint rights, and, for twelve weeks it nested in the list of national best sellers, dissolving my younger conviction that such exalted categories belonged to writers who had, in some scornful way, sold out. The book was, finally, also sold for a film and I traveled with my family to California to work on the screen play. For eighteen months, while living in several luxurious houses with fruit orchards and heated pools, we basked in the Hollywood sun like poor heirs bequeathed an unexpected inheritance.

      But that whole experience of the writer in Hollywood, so poignantly and precisely recorded by many other writers who had made the same journey, proved depressing and disappointing. In my relations with studio executives and with one or two stars, I passed from anticipation to futile efforts at accommodation and then resignation. Although I did not understand it at the time, a substantial part of the problem was my own stubborn refusal to accept that the novel and the film were separate arts. As a novelist who felt my own words and scenes were inviolate, I failed to empathize with the actor who must find a way to speak those words and with the director who had to fashion scenes that utilized action or silence.

      So, for all these reasons, I came to understand that while talented artists and technicians might fuse their forces creatively to make films I admired and enjoyed, I preferred the individual art of the novel and the short story.

      I brought my wife and our two younger sons (the oldest boy, Mark, away at college) back to the Middle West. Although our home had always been in Chicago, the spaciousness of California left us with a longing for a less crowded environment. Using the loot acquired from the sales of A Dream of Kings, we purchased a house in northwest Indiana overlooking the sand dunes and Lake Michigan, just across the water from the misted neighborhoods of my childhood in Chicago. Living in that house which was exposed to the sun and sky and wind allowed me to watch and ponder the luminosity of dawn and to experience, as well, ''the fabulous, formless darkness" of Yeats. There was the miracle of spring turning all around us into summer with its jubilant medley of crickets and birds. Within the clasp of autumn and winter I could sit before my fireplace, watching the glowing embers with that nostalgia for youth lost and

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