Pie Social
Some summers, our two weeks in what my wife calls the ancestral sleeping grounds, a family compound adjacent to Lake Superior, overlap with the Pie and Ice Cream Social at the Community Presbyterian Church in Big Bay.
A few years back, I wrote a story called, “Pie Social,” inspired by that event1. Reading it now I see it owes a debt to the opening pages of the William Gaddis’s novel, J R (1975).2 Two debts, actually. First, J R opens with a lawyer trying to talk two elderly sisters into signing a waiver having to do with their brother who died intestate. They discuss the issue, back and forth, digressing with daffy abandon, the lawyer becoming more addled by the moment. Second, the novel’s almost entirely dialog, lacking the usual markers identifying who’s talking, as well as the usual “he scratched behind his ear and gazed back at them dolefully” sort of language. I know, sounds borderline unreadable—except it isn’t, it’s great fun (the trick is to imagine yourself in a dark room with headphones on, hearing it).
So, my story: two elderly sisters talk back and forth while serving pie and ice cream in the basement of the community church, the doors open, a breeze off the lake wafting through. It’s 100 percent speech. In his book of essays, The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo talks about a poem’s two subjects—the one that triggers it, and the true one, the one you discover in the act of writing.3 Not far from the church is the Powell Township Cemetery where some of the aforementioned ancestors lie. The pie social venue has also been the venue for many memorial potlucks, thus I’m unable to imagine myself there without feeling, at least in the background, their presence. So, as the sisters reminisce/tease one another good naturedly/serve up seconds and thirds, they spot, across the room, a few old timers they’ve not seen in a while. This was the discovered thing for me, the idea that some of attendees might be, let’s say, spectral.
I believe in the material world myself, yet ghosts have twice turned up in my fiction4. The first was a story called “Eggarine”—the name my father gave to a Sunday-morning omelet he’d make. I mention it here because—like Hamlet5—a son witnesses the return of his deceased father. If Hamlet’s father wanted his son to enact revenge, I asked myself, what would my own father want? In the story, the son watches the father cook an eggarine, seemingly unaware of his son’s presence. When it’s ready, the son wonders how he can bear to watch his father consume this meal . . . but the father, instead, sets the plate before the son and says, “Jay, come and eat.” In other words, I guessed that what my father would want was to keep doing what he’d always done, take care of his family.
“Pie Social” plays with that idea as well—departed community members come back for the pie and ice cream, the gentle camaraderie. I think I was also working with the idea that the dead aren’t finally dead until the last of the people who remember them are gone.
Anyway . . . here we are at the doorstep of August. Last summer at this time, in lieu of “beach reads,” I posted about Guilty Pleasures.6
This year, I offer a few titles cherry-picked from earlier posts. Some tartness here and there but also whipped cream . . . 7
First serving:
Black Wave, Michelle Tea, 20178
The Young Bride, Alessandro Baricco, 20159
The Waitress Was New, Dominique Fabre (2005)10
This Is Not Novel, David Markson (2001) 11
Nebraska [stories], Ron Hansen (1989)12
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler (1982) 13
The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark (1963)14
Seconds:
Treasure Island!!!, Sara Levine (2011)15
Great Granny Webster, Caroline Blackwood (1977)16
Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino (1965)17
Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry (1963)18
Eleven Blue Men [reportage], Berton Roueché (1953)19
Ask the Dust, John Fante (1939)20
Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth (1800)21
Finally, have a slice of my favorite, key lime.22
“Pie Social”: Roughly 1200 words, on the long side of flash. I’m not going to “publish” it here, but if you’d like to give it a read, I’ll shoot you a copy—use my email:
fallboy52@hotmail.comGaddis: This novel and the ancestral sleeping grounds both appear in a post from last summer, Reading Projects [3]: Big Hard Novels:
Hugo: Here’s an excerpt from a note about Dick from an earlier post:
People came to Montana’s MFA program to study with Dick . . . but I had no awareness of his work when I showed up in Missoula in the fall of 1972. He and Bill Kittredge and Madeline DeFrees soon became my primary mentors.
All through my life as a fiction writer I’ve been influenced by his angles on craft—from workshops and from his book, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (1979). I’ve lived in the Seattle area for the last twenty-some years and feel his presence everywhere—so many of the names I first ran into in his poems. He was Theodore Roethke’s student, which we also revered him for, then we were his, and our students have soaked up his influence through those of us who have taught writing.
He had a phony bluster, ala Jimmy Cagney movies, but he was truly big-hearted. He named the ex-cop in his one detective novel, Death and the Good Life (1981), Al “Mushheart” Barnes. He was a great teacher. In workshop, when we’d said everything worth saying, he’d go, “Well, we’re just picking the flyshit out of the pepper now.”
Ghosts: My third novel, The Inhabited World (2006), began with a note on a scrap of paper where I’d scribbled: Ghost of a suicide. I didn’t remember scribbling it, but I shelved what I’d been writing and ran with this plot. Evan Molloy finds himself confined to the house where he died, watching (immaterially) its new inhabitants. The word “ghost” never appears in the text—I was working with the idea of purgatory, an interim state, and what might lead beyond it.
“Eggarine” is from Blue Spruce (1995).
Hamlet: Omelet with ham?
Guilty Pleasures:
There’s also:
With the great restraint, I’m suppressing the desire to list My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh (2018), which keeps re-appearing in these pages . . . and is, perhaps, a bit too tart for this post.
Black Wave: Note from “Guilty Pleasures”:
Queer/riot grrrl/sci-fi mashup. I subscribe to a U.K. press called & Other Stories; their edition of Black Wave was the first book I was sent; I took it with me to a teaching residency, holed up in my room devouring it when I was supposed to be, you know, interacting with people. It was subsequently re-issued by Amethyst Editions, founded by Tea.
Young Bride: By the author of Silk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_BariccoWaitress: From “Ship of Fools”: Novels About Communities”:
From Archipelago Books [I’ve included books of theirs in earlier posts—“slender novels” and “literature in translation”]. A little over a hundred pages, modest in scope but absorbing—like the people in Stewart O’Nan’s, Last Night at the Lobster (2007), a veteran waiter must confront the closing of his café.
Markson: Here’s a note on him from Reading Projects [7]: Oddball Novels:
Toward the end of his writing life, Markson wrote four books known as The Notecard Quartet. They consist of snippets of fact and commentary about writers, writers’ deaths, about the project you’re reading, and so on—terse fragments, many to a page. This Is Not a Novel was the first I read and remains my fave—though you could read all four together as a single work. The others: Reader’s Block (1996 ), Vanishing Point (2004), and The Last Novel (2007). These may be an acquired taste, but I love them. I love the way ideas/facts/statements rise and fall and how despite being told that it’s not a novel [this is just a feint, really, homage to Magritte’s painting of a pipe that isn’t a pipe, and, before that, Diderot’s story “Ceci n’est pas un conte”] it succeeds in being a novel, IMHO. Embedded, like an armature, is the Latin phrase, Timor mortis conturbat me, a refrain from medieval poetry, The fear of death disturbs me.
Nebraska: An early collection of Hansen’s. See, especially, “Wickedness” and “Nebraska.” The latter is a portrait of a small town, and contains this homely-but-perfect observation, which delights me beyond reason:
Mrs. Antoinette Heft is at the Home Restaurant, placing frozen meat patties on waxed paper, pausing at times to clamp her fingers under her arms and press the sting from them.
Homesick: An early Anne Tyler novel, a long-time favorite.
Muriel Spark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_of_Slender_Means
Levine: Comic. Unreliable narrator. As we listen to her account of things, we come to realize what a flawed piece of work she is. Includes a parrot. In a deep freeze.
Blackwood: Here’s the note from Sixes [1]:
Saw this novel recommended, read it, loved it. Only later did I learn who Blackwood was: Guinness heiress, famous socialite, wife of painter Lucian Freud, wife of pianist/composer Israel Citkowitz, wife of poet Robert Lowell.
I was so intrigued by all this, and the images of her—photographs by the likes of Walker Evans, paintings and drawings by others including Freud—that I read Nancy Schoenberg’s riveting biography of her, Dangerous Muse (2001).
https://bookshop.org/p/books/dangerous-muse-the-life-of-lady-caroline-blackwood-nancy-schoenberger/16436422?ean=9780306811876
A few other links:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/why-you-should-read-great-granny-webster-by-caroline-blackwood
https://thedecadentreview.com/corpus/caroline-of-clandeboye/
Here’s a reprise of Evans’ photo:
Calvino:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmicomics
McMurtry: Note from Birth Year Project: 1966:
McMurtry was a prolific writer of fiction, nonfiction and screenplays . . . but also an antiquarian bookseller of considerable renown. His son is the rock/Americana musician, James McMurtry. I’ve always admired this early novel, which has a triptych of first-person narrators—each tells a third of the story of a life-long, three-sided love affair.
Eleven Blue Men: Roueché wrote for The New Yorker—he later became known as a travel writer, but first he created the Annals of Medicine Department at the magazine. The title on the spine of this arrested me in the stacks of the Flathead County Library one day as I made my way to the men’s room. He wrote the title piece after tagging along with the Manhattan Medical Examiner as he tried to figure out why these old guys were turning up, cyanotic, at city hospitals. I could give you the answer now, but where’s the fun in that? Lots of other pieces are collected in book form under the title Medical Mysteries.
Ask the Dust: Here’s the note from Birth Year Project: 1939:
A guy at the coffee shop pressed this on me one morning and I made the acquaintance of Fante’s alter ego, Arturo Bandini, struggling writer in Depression-era L.A. This novel represents the birth of my midlife quest to dig out the work of the other writers, the ones we might all have read except for their bad luck—in the machinery of publishing, in health, in being on the wrong side of prevailing prejudices or zeitgeist, etc.—or as they used to call it on that long-ago TV show, Laugh-In, “the flying fickle finger of fate.”
Rackrent:
https://broadviewpress.com/product/castle-rackrent/#tab-description
Watercolor by Lauren Kindle.
[http://www.laurenkindle.com/]
That’s wonderful
I emailed you. Send me that story!