All the Same . . .
(entry for 12/11/2024)
In January, 1959, the prestigious magazine Atlantic Monthly published a story by famed actor and author Peter Ustinov called ‘The Man Who Took it Easy.’ It was the third of a series of short stories and novellas commissioned by the magazine’s editor in chief, Edward A. Weeks, and written out in longhand by the actor/playwright. (A photo of Ustinov is at the head of this post.)
The plot involves the roller coaster career of a Hungarian violinist and composer who hates the Russian composer Stravinsky, because the latter is more successful than he is, with no discernible reason for the difference, so far as the story’s ‘hero’ can tell. The last line of the tale, when the protagonist has hit bottom, is: “All the same, . . . curse Stravinsky.”
I was an English major at PUC at the time, and our major professor, J. Paul Stauffer, made the Ustinov stories required reading for one of the classes I was in. So, rather than fight other students over the library’s only copy, I subscribed, and the January issue was the first one I received. I found the story to be both humorous and troubling. Humorous because the author’s jaundiced view of his protagonist was handled deftly and with some mild and smiling sympathy. Troubling, because I saw myself as someone who ‘took it easy’ and was thus doomed (according to the story) to being always, at best, second-rate.
The closing phrase of the story swept the campus (and probably other campuses as well). It was just too well said to ignore. We tried to come up with other examples. An also-ran architect could say, “All the same, curse Frank Lloyd Wright.” A failing playwright could say it of Tennessee Williams. A doomed poet could say, “All the same, curse Robert Frost.” Or “. . . curse Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
As a Sophomore English major, part of my duty, along with grading the Freshman English Composition creations, was writing short stories of my own. I had become an English major at the urging of Dr. Stauffer himself, because a very short story I had written as a Freshman had become quite celebrated, and also a bit controversial, because no one could believe it had been written by a mere Freshman and it must therefore have been plagiarized. (It wasn’t.) I had started out as a Chemistry major for some long-forgotten reason, and at the end of the first quarter of the ‘57-’58 school year I had switched to English, partly because I couldn’t stand all the complicated math involved in chemistry, and partly because Stauffer seemed to think I would be ‘missing my calling’ if I didn’t switch.
Dr. Stauffer
With that kind of beginning, I had no choice but to give it my best shot. Which wasn’t great. That first effort remained my ‘magnum opus’ through all four years of college. Some attempts were better than others. Two of them got published in the school magazine. Several of them got ‘A’s from Stauffer. (Some of them also got ‘C’s.)
Some of them fell flat on their faces.
The problem was, I had no idea where I was going with all this. I loved good writing. I loved great fiction. I was good at grammar and sentence construction. I was almost good at spelling. I understood the mechanics of plot and character development, and I could use them for brief periods of time. Just as I could emulate the Faulkners and Hemingways of the world, for a paragraph or two. But I had no ‘voice’ of my own. I could sound like rural southern writers now and then, to the point that the first words my future first wife ever said to me, on the occasion of my meeting her, were, “I hear you’re another Jesse Stuart.” (I had no idea who Jesse Stuart was!) But nothing ever ‘took off.’ I even sent stories to the Atlantic, figuring if they could publish an actor, they could publish a student just as well.
Fat chance.
I tried to go back to the style and approach I had employed in ‘The Three-Eyed God,’ that first piece I had done, way back when, in the fall of ‘57, that got all the acclaim (and suspicion). Without success. For one thing, that earlier work had been inspired by a strong emotional reaction to things I was learning in other classes, and for another thing, it had been written in the depths of a flu-bug attack. And I wasn’t about to get sick deliberately just to write better!
I was floundering. Stauffer took to shaking his head over some of my efforts. So I turned to my second-favorite professor, Alice Babcock, who always seemed to have a soft spot in her heart for me. I got permission to visit her at home, something students were generally discouraged from doing.
It was a dark home, full of heavy fabrics and dim light, which was surprising to me because she had always seemed so light-hearted in class. I had taken both 15th century and 18th century English Lit classes from her, and in the former of those had written a very long poem in Beowulf style, called “The Last Anglo-Saxon.” This epic bemoaned both the loss of Old English as a language and the conversion of the culture of Teutonic Britain into that of the England of the Norman Conquest. It was a heartfelt lament, and that’s probably why it worked. Real emotion was what had been lacking in all the other stuff I had tried. (There was plenty of faked emotion, but the real thing was absent.)
So I asked her, there in her living room on her heavily stuffed sofa, “Why did the poem work and the short stories don’t?”
She heaved a deep sigh that was almost as heavy as the sofa. “This is a hard thing to say, so I hope you’ll be patient with me while I try to say it.”
I nodded.
“You try too hard,” she said. “Your stories literally scream that you want and need positive reaction. You want people to fawn over you. To praise you to the skies. To make up for whatever feelings of inadequacy plague you. You have to let all that go. You must have no care for what other people think. Including me. Including all your teachers. You have to write what you need to write, not what you think other people think you need to write.”
What she said made no sense to me at the time. My whole purpose in life right then was to please my teachers, and hopefully also my fellow students. I had no idea what ‘letting go’ would consist of. I shook my head and left her house. My next few stories were just as bad as the last few.
I do understand now, finally, sixty-three years later.
But back at that time, not a clue. Finally, in desperation, my senior year, about two months before graduation, I got up the nerve to ask Dr. Stauffer what the problem was.
His answer turned my heart to stone and took me years to recover from: “I think back when you were a Freshman, and I urged you to switch majors, largely because of your story about the three-eyed god, I think, possibly, I may have over-reacted. I think that that story was perhaps not as good as I thought it was, at the time.”
Egads! I had spent the last four years pursuing a degree in a field that I was in because someone had over-reacted?
My reaction, then and now, is: “All the same, curse Ustinov.”
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