To be a writer

Donald Trump, President of the United States of America.  What a surprise!  What an unexpected and unpleasant surprise! 

How did it happen?  Political scientists will be arguing about it for years, but certainly there were factors of racism, misogyny, class rivalries, and dwindling job opportunities that played a factor.  But, above all and tying many of the above together -- in my estimation -- was nostalgia for a mythical past.  A past somewhere between the end of World War II and the height of the Vietnam conflict, a period some consider the Golden Age of America.

I've been considering this Golden Age, because, purely by coincidence, I've been reading Robert R. McCammon's best selling novel of small town Alabama in 1964, Boy's Life.  A lengthy novel, apparently heavily autobiographical, narrated by 12-year-old Cory Mackenson, describing life in fictional Zephyr, Alabama, a wide place in the road southeast of Birmingham.  McCammon is known for his writing of horror stories, and there certainly are fantasy/paranormal aspects to the events related in Boy's Life.  But, in general, McCammon lovingly recreates the actual world of his boyhood, describing it in exquisite detail.

I found myself constantly exclaiming to myself, "yes, I remember that, it was like that exactly," even up here in the Northwest Corner.   And I also was reminded of a little book that I'd picked up one day in my college bookstore for reading during spring break -- Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.  Another book, less dark, about the joys and terrors of being a 12-year-old boy in small town America, a book that also had some mystical aspects but ones that simply enhanced the magical quality of the story.  I wasn't surprised when McCammon listed Bradbury, in his acknowledgments at the end of the book, as one of many influences on his life and writing.

But Cory lived in Alabama, not the Illinois of Dandelion Wine, and in 1964, not 1927.  The relationship between the races isn't the focus of the book, but it's always prominently in the background.  A strong, black woman in her 90s, something of a town shaman, tells Cory:

My great granddaddy pulled a plow by the strength of his back.  He worked from sunup to sundown, heat and cold.  ...  Worked hard, and was sometimes whipped hard.  Sweated blood and kept goin', when he wanted to drop.  Took the brand and answered Yes, massa, when his heart was breakin' and his pride was belly-down..

Cory listens with his heart in his throat.  The blacks were segregated in Zephyr, and often derided, but Cory was a compassionate kid, and his folks were kind and respectful to blacks, within the context of their time and place.

The plot begins with a murder, a vicious killing by an unknown person, of an unknown man who had been severely beaten and who had quickly sunk with his car into the depths of the town's deep lake.  It ends with a solving of the murder, a twist involving international affairs, affairs that feel unlikely -- but not impossible -- to have ended up playing themselves out in a tiny town in Alabama. Between the murder and its resolution, Cory learns about kindness and irrational cruelty, about corruption and bravery, about tolerance and hatred and terrorism.  He learns that even a small town milkman -- like his father -- has it within himself to be a hero. 

This is all a lot for a 12-year-old kid to learn in a summer.  But, as I mentioned, McCammon writes horror stories, and this is a coming of age story, but a coming of age story in the Southern Gothic tradition.  When an author writes horror stories, he asks his readers to suspend disbelief.  And when he does it successfully, they do.  

I did. I was too mesmerized to do otherwise.

Corey also meets a young woman far from town, out in the country, whom he not only develops a crush on, but whom he worships.  Only later does he learn that she works at the local whorehouse.  He learns from this, too.  He learns not to judge others, because he has no way of looking into their hearts and seeing what makes them who they are.

Like Gordie Lachance in the movie Stand By Me, Cory has three close friends with diverse personalities, kids with whom he is inseparable.  Unlike Gordie, Cory learns the sorrow, the incomprehensible sorrow, of losing one of those friends in an accident --  the boy who was perhaps the kindest and most gentle of his friends.  He sits beside the grave, telling his friend about how life up on the surface has been going.  His friend doesn't reply, but Cory never expected him to.

I remember hearing this somewhere: when an old man dies, a library burns down.

As he recalls his friend, and compares his memories with the dry obituary of his friend in the local newspaper, he realizes that it's not only "old men" who are "libraries."  He ponders the hundreds of stories represented by the tombstones in the cemetary.

I wished there was a place you could go, and sit in a room like a movie theater and look through a catalogue of a zillion names and then you could press a button and a face would appear on the screen to tell you about the life that it had been.

Near the beginning of the book, his dad asks him if he wants to be a milkman like his father -- "The world'll always need milkmen," his dad reminds him.  Maybe, Cory replies.

I'd like to be everybody in the world," I said.  "I'd like to live a million times."

Later, his favorite teacher --a teacher who was dying, unknown to him -- gives him her advice:

I have seen plenty of boys grow into men, Cory, and I want to say one word to you.  Remember."
"Remember?  Remember what?"
"Everything," she said.  "And anything.  Don't you go through a day without remembering something of it, and tucking that memory away like a treasure.  Because it is.  And memories are sweet doors, Cory.  They're teachers and friends and disciplinarians.  When you look at something, don't just look.  See it.  Really, really see it.  See it so when you write it down, somebody else can see it, too.  ...  You can live a thousand lifetimes if you want to.  You can talk to people you'll never set eyes on, in lands you'll never visit."  She nodded, watching my face.  "And if you're good and you're lucky and you have something worth saying, then you might have the chance to live on long after --"  she paused, measuring her words.  "Long after," she finished.

We realize, early in the book, that McCammon is showing us not only the world of his boyhood, but the early signs of his vocation as a writer.

We are all nostalgic, nostalgic for our youth.  Nostalgia can be good or bad.  Trump has evoked a nostalgia twisted by a longing for a time when men were men, when blacks lived apart from whites, and when to be a white man was to rule.  McCammon shows us a true picture of that Golden Age in the Alabama of 1964. But he also shows us, through Cory's narration, that -- even in the Alabama of the 1960s -- not everyone surrendered to racial bigotry and hatred. He also shows us that far from all hatred and cruelty in the South was racial in nature.  

Robert McCammon shows us Cory -- he shows us himself, as he remembers himself through the filter of time -- struggling to understand the world he lives in, to know and to appreciate townspeople of all classes and races, to be brave when it would have been easy to run, to be curious and to follow through on that curiosity when it would have been simpler and safer to "leave well enough alone." 

Cory at 12 was already, in other words, developing those traits that led him -- and his alter ego, his creator -- to a journalism degree at the University of Alabama, and later to becoming a best selling author.  And the nostalgia that Boy's Life evokes is the simple nostalgia we all feel for the age when life was new and every day was exciting -- not nostalgia for a time when some folks had unlimited power over others.