3 Minutes or Less

THREE MINUTES OR LESS

Life Lessons from America's Greatest Writers

THREE MINUTES

OR LESS

Life Lessons from

America's Greatest Writers

From the Archives of the

PEN/Faulkner Foundation

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright © 2000 by The PEN/Faulkner Foundation

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York and London

Distributed to the trade by St. Martin's Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for

eISBN: 978-1-59691-878-8

10 9 8 7 6

Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the United States of America

by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia

CONTENTS

Introduction

Beginnings

William Kennedy

Robert Stone

Pat Conroy

William Styron

Hortense Calisher

Eudora Welty

Larry McMurtry

Maurice Sendak

Amiri Baraka

Richard Bausch

Annie Dillard

Brendan Gill

Doris Grumbach

Stephen Goodwin

Gloria Naylor

Joyce Carol Oates

Mary Lee Settle

Susan Sontag

Reynolds Price

Susan Richards Shreve

First Love

Pete Hamill

Rita Mae Brown

Christopher Buckley

Allan Gurganus

Thomas Caplan

Reginald McKnight

John Casey

Elena Castedo

Rita Dove

Alice Hoffman

Mona Simpson

Kaye Gibbons

William Kittredge

Lee Smith

Richard Wiley

Cynthia Ozick

Illusions

Grace Paley

Jim Lehrer

Robert Stone

Russell Banks

Susan Richards Shreve

William Least Heat-Moon

Lee Smith

Tobias Wolff

John Edgar Wideman

Elmore Leonard

Gay Talese

Bette Bao Lord

Ward Just

Vasily Aksyonov

Obsession

David Bradley

Robert Olen Butler

Barry Hannah

Jayne Anne Phillips

George Plimpton

Ernest Gaines

Francine Prose

Mary Lee Settle

Ntozake Shange

Elizabeth Spencer

Scott Spencer

Louis Begley

Thomas Flanagan

Maureen Howard

Heroes

Sue Miller

Tim O'Brien

Allan Gurganus

T. Coraghessan Boyle

George Garrett

Gail Godwin

Patricia Browning Griffith

Terry McMillan

Amy Tan

Charles Johnson

Beverly Lowry

James Salter

Journeys

William Kennedy

Jane Smiley

Toby Olson

Michael Chabon

Alan Cheuse

Maxine Clair

Barbara Kingsolver

E. Annie Proulx

Susan Minot

Kate Lehrer

Walter Mosley

Octavia E. Butler

Denise Chavez

A Sense of Place

Eudora Welty

Norman Mailer

Bobbie Ann Mason

John Edgar Wideman

William W. Warner

Blanche McCrary Boyd

Ellen Douglas

Shelby Foote

Marita Golden

Larry L. King

Paule Marshall

Peter Matthiessen

Geoffrey Wolff

A Lesson

Francisco Goldman

Alice Adams

Richard Bausch

Susan Isaacs

Robert MacNeil

Jill McCorkle

E. Ethelbert Miller

Faye Moskowitz

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Deborah Tannen

Christopher Tilghman

William Gass

Mary Gordon

Ward Just

Gish Jen

Confessions

Tony Kushner

Barry Lopez

Kathryn Harrison

David Ignatius

Willie Morris

Howard Norman

Tina McElroy Ansa

Robert Pinsky

Alice McDermott

Madison Smartt Bell

Mary Karr

Amy Tan

Reunion

Allan Gurganus

Larry L. King

John Casey

Thomas Flanagan

Maureen Howard

Kate Lehrer

Willie Morris

Grace Paley

Ntozake Shange

Lee Smith

Denise Chavez

Kaye Gibbons

Endings

Herbert Gold

Jane Hamilton

Oscar Hijuelos

Chang-rae Lee

Claire Messud

Francine Prose

Richard Selzer

Anita Shreve

Calvin Trillin

Edward Albee

Rilla Askew

Judy Blume

Lorene Cary

George Garrett

Introduction

ON OCTOBER 30,1989 the PEN/Faulkner Foundation hosted its first gala at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Twenty-one writers had accepted an invitation to speak for three minutes each on the subject, Beginnings. The host for that inaugural gala was Roger Mudd, for many years a mainstay on CBS News, a man whose profession had taught him to respect precisely the value of time. When the writers were being given their instructions for the evening, Roger was insistent about the time limit. Three minutes, he kept saying, you all have three minutes. Do you know how long three minutes is?

He feared, of course, that fiction writers measured time a bit more subjectively, and he was right. On that evening, and in the galas that have followed, many writers have soared effortlessly beyond the three-minute limit. They are fiction writers, after all, and as one of them said, Three minutes — that's a haiku. Nevertheless, the writers have accepted the limit as a poet accepts the limits of a sonnet, and turned the limit to advantage, creating short pieces of marvelous ingenuity and intricacy. You will find that some of the selections are more polished than others, since they have all been transcribed from the taped record of the gala; and some writers adhered exactly to a written script, while others permitted themselves small or large flights of improvisation.

Bear in mind as you read that the gala is a festive occasion, and that the writers - after a brief introduction by Roger Mudd, our first host, or George Plimpton, the incumbent Master of Ceremonies - take the stage of the Folger Shakespeare Theater. It is, every writer would agree, one of the most comfortable and inspiring settings imaginable. The space is intimate, seating only 250 people. The speaking voice carries easily to every corner of the room, and - if you happen to believe that every spoken word creates an endless vibration in the air - the words are added to the great speeches of Hamlet and Lear and Prospero that have been spoken from this stage.

Such a thought might be daunting, especially since three minutes is hardly time for profundity. Most writers have approached the gala as an opportunity to divert, to enchant, to charm, to entertain. Still, the selections show just what kind of light a writer is able to shed on a given subject. Especially in a city like Washington, where abstractions rule and language is mostly institutional, the particularity and strong individuality of each piece is startling and welcome. Here are men and women who are willing to speak for themselves, and only themselves, men and women who do not hide behind abstractions and want no truck with institutions. Their authority comes from a more powerful source.

Year in and year out the audience for the PEN/Faulkner gala tends to be made up of the same people, who count themselves fortunate to have the first claim on the relatively few seats in the theater. We at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation include ourselves among the fortunate few, but we have often wished that a book would make the presentations available to a much broader audience. You are now holding that book in your hands, and we hope that the mood and spirit of the occasions will be conveyed along with the words.

From its inception the gala has been generously sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. The proceeds support the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the largest juried prize for fiction in the United States. Named for William Faulkner, who used his Nobel Prize funds to support and encourage other writers, the PEN/Faulkner is a prize founded by fiction writers, judged by fiction writers, and funded and supported to this day by those writers who continue to give benefit readings of their works. The readings assembled here are expressions of that spirit, which has guaranteed the PEN/Faulkner Award a permanent place in American culture.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation

B E G I N N I N G S

October 30, 1989

William Kennedy

MY FIRST SHORT story I wrote for Collier's Magazine. Collier's didn't know this when I wrote it. It was called Eggs, and it concerned a man who goes into a diner and orders scrambled eggs. The counterman doesn't want to serve him eggs and suggests goulash. The man insists on his eggs, and the counterman reluctantly serves him. The man eats them and leaves. End of story. I was eighteen, the first year of college.

After I wrote Eggs, I showed it to my mother, and, as with everything else I had done in life, she thought it was very good. I also showed it to my banjo teacher. Very good, he also said. He did not say Very, very good, which is what he said when I played well during my banjo lesson. I showed the story to my father, and he read it at the breakfast table while eating eggs of his own. He liked soft-boiled eggs with a teaspoon of sugar on them and tea with three teaspoons of sugar. I never saw him eat scrambled eggs. How could he know about my story? He read it and said, What the hell is this? It's a story, a short story, I said. It's about a guy who goes in and eats eggs, he said. That's right, I said. What the hell kind of story is that? he said. It's a realistic story, I said. "I'm sending it off to Collier's:⁹ They publish stuff like this? Every week, I said. Who the hell wants to read about a guy who goes in and eats eggs? "The whole world reads Collier's:91 said. The whole world eats eggs. Is this what you learned in school? My schooling had cost serious money. I don't want to argue about it, I said. You either like it or you don't. Take a guess, my father said. Well, I'd show him. I sent it off to Collier's that afternoon and I've still got the rejection slip to prove it. I never showed any more stories to my father. This is known as writer's block. However, I reread the story last week for the first time in forty-five years, and my father emerges from that day as a masterful literary critic. A retarded orangutan could write a better story than Eggs. Be that as it may, writing this story was valuable for an assortment of reason. It was the first step of a career; it proved I'd get better because I couldn't get worse; it acquainted me with rejection, and I didn't die from it. I revised Eggs two more times in later years. I called it Counterman on Duty and then just Eat. And the story got better without getting good. Finally I abandoned it and put Herby, the protagonist, in a novel under another name, and there he is at last even though he missed out on Collier's

Eudora Welty once wrote that a writer should write not about what he knows but what he doesn't know about what he knows. I translate this to mean that the writer should try to understand mystery. And mystery, someone once said, is the basic element of all works of art. The only mystery about Eggs is why I didn't know it was awful. In time I did put some of my own mystery into the places I wrote about, and my fiction improved. I'm sorry my parents didn't get to appreciate what happened to me as a writer. My mother died while I was still trying to get my short stories published, and my father was at the cusp of senility when I finished my first novel. But he bragged about the book down at the State Supreme Court where he worked. He said it was about how 2,000 cows get swept out to sea in Puerto Rico. Actually, the book is set in Albany and doesn't have any cows. But you can see how, with that kind of imagination and critical apparatus in my genes, it was inevitable I'd become a writer.

Robert Stone

MANY THINGS COME together to put you in a situation in which you find yourself a writer. In the house where I was growing up, there were many creepy books, but none of them was more creepy or more ghastly than one I particularly remember that had a great deal of dreadful gothic lettering and extremely frightening illustrations and a text of which I could make no sense at all, though I did puzzle out one particular verse. And as soon as I had puzzled it out, I realized that the book was far more creepy and dreadful than I could ever have imagined. The verse in it went, As one who on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round, doth no more his head, for he know that close behind him a frightful fiend doth tread.

And as soon as I read that, I realized what I was involved with. I took the book, and I hid it where I would never find it, but of course I experienced the first of many guilty urges that I was later to experience and I had to go and dig it out and read that again. And I had to ponder and wonder, Did the writer of these verses actually mean me to feel the way I feel having read them? Having read them, my hair would have stood up on end had it not already been standing up on end because of the crew cuts that we all wore in those days. When I finally understood that I had been meant to experience what I was experiencing as a result of reading those verses, and that unlike all the sensations that I'd experienced listening to the radio or going to the movies, this one seemed to go on and on so that I could never contain it, so that it had no bounds, I wanted to approach that force and take hold of it and to deal, of course, not only with fear but with love and the rest, and I tried to do that, and I'm still trying.

Pat Conroy

MY FATHER, A Marine Corps fighter pilot, 220 pounds, six-two, a blunt instrument: a semiautomatic assault weapon. My father waged war against the Japanese, the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, and his family. My first memory: my mother trying to stab my father with a butcher knife while he was beating her. I knew this was going to be a long and involved life.

My mother - from the hills of Alabama. Her relatives were named this (and I give you the exact names): There was Jasper Catlit, Plumma, Clyde. There was an uncle in the graveyard named Jerrymire Peak. And I said, Where did he come from? and she said, He was named for the prophet, Jer-ry-mire.

These two improbable people got together, had a marriage that produced seven children, six miscarriages. My sister called the miscarriages the lucky ones. In the dance of this particular family, in this horrible dance — you know, when I read Eudora Welty's thing that her mother and father sang to each other from the stairways — not my mother and father. This was martial art. This was a terrible, terrible union, but it was the one that caused me to be a writer.

The worst thing that happened: Dad was stationed at the Pentagon and a fight broke out between my mother and father when my sister had her birthday party, her ninth birthday party. I was eleven. A fight started. My role was to get the other six kids out of harm's way. So I rushed them out of the room. My second job was to get Mom away from Dad. I went roaring in. I was eleven. Dad could eat Ollie North for breakfast. I got between them. I looked over my head and saw the butcher knife I'd seen when I was a child. My mother connected this time. Blood got on me, my sister. Mom took us to Hot Shoppes and said she was going to leave Dad. She did not. What she did instead was wash my shirt and my sister's dress that had the blood of my father on it.

Later, when I asked my sister if it happened, she said no, it didn't happen. I said, why not? She said we didn't write it down. If it's going to be real, you got to write it down. My sister's book of poetry is coming out next year, published by Norton. My father made one mistake. He was raising an American novelist and an American poet and we wrote it down.

William Styron

WHEN I WAS twelve and a half I attended a rural school in Tidewater, Virginia, about 150 miles south of here, which boasted a mimeograph newspaper called The Sponge - soaks up all the news. My first literary creation was a contribution to this journal, a short story entitled "Typhoon and the Tore Bay.99 This document has been preserved in my father's doting papers. Joseph Conrad was, of course, the author of a famous story, Typhoon, and that was the inspiration for my own story, which I'm afraid lacked even the originality of a truly fresh title. Tore Bay was the name I christened the doomed ship of my little narrative after I found an English bay by that name in an atlas. Upon rereading "Typhoon and the Tore Bay99 and comparing it with its model, I am relieved to say that while no plagiarism is evident, there is much deja vu. The word derivative is perhaps too generous, counterfeit too harsh. Let us say this work of about 750 words is an unconscious parody and profoundly Con-radian. Here are some brief passages to help render its special flavor:

A sickly green haze hung over the East China Sea. Typhoon brewing, mused Captain Taggart darkly, with an inner shudder gazing at the barometer. 27.20 God save the mark he blurted aloud with another inner shudder.

The diabolical storm lashed the stricken bridge with a murderer's vengeance. The great ship was yawing and heaving every which way like a huge berserk animal. We're bound to founder, Captain Taggart heard the mate say with a despondent shriek. He is a despicable coward, Captain Taggart mused darkly.

There are 400 helpless Chinamen down there in the hold, Captain Taggart cried. We can't let them perish. The mate swore a vile oath. Who cares about a bunch of Chinks. Let them all drown. Captain Taggart saw on the mate's twisted face a look of supreme evil.

At this point, my literary career was overtaken by a long and merciful silence. A diary that I kept faithfully during my fourteenth year reveals a fascinating detail about my intellectual development. It shows that while I went to and appreciated to one degree or another a total of 125 movies, occasionally seeing as many as two films a day, there is no record whatever of my reading a single book. Not even Conrad. Books came later. At age eighteen, I discovered Thomas Wolfe. In a recent notorious essay on Wolfe, a critic, Harold Bloom, wrote (I think I'm quoting exactly) that the novelist had no talent whatsoever. This is a ludicrous misstatement, since Wolfe had prodigious talent, as prodigious as Shakespeare's or Homer's, except for the fact that, unlike Shakespeare's and Homer's, it was a talent that was arrested at age eighteen and, therefore, was the perfect medium for an adolescent like myself to discover the splendor of language and to be provided with the impetus for a desperate falling in love with literature. And so, for the next five years I read. I read passionately, promiscuously, eclectically, critically, and uncritically until my mind was dizzy and intoxicated with a thousand wonderful books. And then having written nothing ambitious since "Typhoon and the Tore Bay" I decided it was time to be a writer, and so, at the age of twenty-two, I sat down and began my first novel, Lie Down in Darkness.

Hortense Calisher

I THINK WE'RE ALL storytellers, and I would like to say just a few words about why I'm talking and you're listening. I'm a mixed American. When I grew up, I grew up in New York. My father came from Richmond, Virginia. He was born during the Civil War. He married a woman much younger than he, and when I was born — I was the first child of, you know, this ancient family - there were all kinds of accents in the house. There was Southern; my mother was German but spoke a very careful English. We had English people in the house, and I was never sure what accent was coming out of my mouth — and I'm not always sure at the same time now. What it meant was a little girl who listened and listened to language, especially the long strophes that Southerners seem to have.

When I came to go to school to be taught to read at five, it was found out that I could read and I don't really remember a time when I couldn't. There must have been a time when I was shaking rattles and so forth. But, I think something about the vocal thing in the house did it. It was a happy childhood — then it disappeared. For a while my mother got sick. My father was away on business. And I had that absolutely necessary thing to create a writer - an evil housekeeper. And she scared me blue, and nobody knew, so that at night I began to dream, half-dream. I was thinking about it the other night. I never was really asleep in those periods, but I dreamed of happier times, and I began to concentrate on language. When I got older, when I went to high school, I began to collect language the way you collect stamps, jewelry or baseball cards. There were books at home, but they were a marvelously dotty collection. I read Dickens and Thackeray in the old Harper's for the Civil War years. But I never got them all because we had lost some of them, so that I never found out about what happened to the Tale of Two Cities until I was a grown woman. We had a strange collection of books. The Memoirs of Ninon de L'Endos was at one end and the war writings of Walt Whitman were at the other. After, when I got to college, there were all those riches, and I knew I was going to be a writer. I had known at seven. I had written a little book of fairy tales in a notebook and my Aunt Mamie came and said, What's that? I showed it to her and she laughed. That was the wrong thing to do. Maybe that's how one becomes a writer. Well, in college there were all the marvels and I read them and I wasn't scared, but it was a company, I think, that I was afraid to join in any way because naturally I wanted to be of some good company.

Then the war came, I married, I had children and I still did not write. I had written like crazy in college. I really didn't know why. I think I was still scared. I for a while traveled all over the United States. I didn't realize that I was learning what it was like to be an American. My then husband was an engineer, and the children and I dragged along behind him. I saw small towns. For a New Yorker this was a strange and marvelous thing. I learned to see all kinds of people. For a while I was a social worker and went into houses that I did not believe. I met all kinds of people. Still did not write. When my first child was born, I began, but I never sent it out anywhere, and I finally broke through what seems to me still a plate of glass that was between me and other people - when you know that you think you have a capacity and you haven't done it yet, it's almost a schizoid thing that comes between you and people. That broke, I wrote and I had found my vocation and I haven't stopped writing or talking since.

I think writers lead double lives. We are people who have to, in a sense, indoctrinate ourselves into living by recording as well and somebody asked me once what I felt about writing, and I said — and I still believe - 1 have to write as if my life depends on it, and of course, it does.

Eudora Welty

I 'D LIKE TO read a few little snatches from my writing story called One Writer's Beginnings.

When I was six or seven, I was taken out of school and put to bed for several months for an ailment the doctor described as a fast-beating heart. I felt all right - perhaps I felt too good. It was the feeling of suspense. At any rate I was allowed to occupy all day my parents' double bed in the front upstairs bedroom.

I was supposed to rest, and the little children didn't get to run in and excite me often. Davis School was as close as across the street. I could keep up with it from the window beside me. Hear the principal ring her bells, see which children were tardy, watch my classmates eat together at recess. I knew their sandwiches. I was homesick for school. My mother made time for teaching me arithmetic and hearing my spelling.

An opulence of story books covered my bed. It was the land of counterpane. As I read away, I was Rapunzel, or the Goose Girl, or the Princess Labam in one of the thousand and one nights who mounted the roof in her palace every night and of her own radiance faithfully lighting the whole city. Just by reposing there. And I daydreamed I could light Davis School from across the street.

But I never dreamed I could learn as long as I was away from the schoolroom and that bits of enlightenment far-reaching in my life went on as ever in their own good time. After they told me good night and tucked me in, although I knew that after I'd finally fallen asleep they'd pick me up and carry me away, my parents draped the lampshade with a sheet of the daily paper that was tilted like a hat brim, so that they could sit in their rockers in a lighted part of the room and I could supposedly go to sleep in the protected dark of the bed. They sat talking. What was thus dramatically made a present of to me was a secure sense of the hidden observer. As long as I could make myself keep awake, I was free to listen to every word my parents said between them.

I don't remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn't supposed to. Perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for, but I was present in the room with the chief secret there was - the two of them, father and mother - sitting there as one. I was conscious of this secret and of my fast-beating heart in step together as I lay in the slant-shaded light of the room with a brown pear-shaped scorch newspaper shade where it had become overheated once.

What they talked about, I have no idea, and the subject was not what mattered to me. It was, no doubt, whatever a young married couple spending their first time privately in each other's company in the long, probably harried day would talk about. It was the murmur of their voices, the back and forth, the unnoticed stretching away of time between my bedtime and theirs that made me bask there at my distance. What I felt was not that I was excluded from them but that I was included and because of what I could hear of their voices and what I could see of their faces in the cone of yellow light under the brown-scorched shade.

I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn of mind, the nature of the temperament of a privileged observer. And owing to the way I became so, it turned out that I became the loving kind.

I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me (and as early as I begged for it without keeping me waiting into the knowledge of the word) into reading and spelling by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting to school. I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge.

My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the heads of fairy tales. In Once upon a time an O had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times over, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the words' beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there's never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice or the voice of any person I can identify. Certainly not my own. It is human but inward and