I don’t know how many of you watched the American Masters episode about Harper Lee this past week, but I am deeply bothered by its snide rendering of Truman Capote — to my mind a far smarter and better writer than Lee — and the all-too-common portrayal of the “sad last years” of his life, as if they in any way expunged his literary achievement.

To my mind, Capote is simply one of this country’s finest novelists and essayists, at a time of many first-class writers. He was a keen, comical observer and a meticulous craftsman who produced a lengthy shelf of literary masterpieces: Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, “The Diamond Guitar,” “House of Flowers,” In Cold Blood, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” to say nothing of his sparkling travel essays, interviews, and letters.

When Lee’s older sister trots out the odorous canard that Capote broke with Lee because she won a Pulitzer and he didn’t, I wretched. As if grand old age has now canonized the slight. From all accounts, including his own, Truman’s childhood was a fairly wretched affair, salvaged only by his cousin, Souk Faulk. He rose to literary esteem quickly and was undoubtedly seduced by its accompanying fame, but in no way should that fact be confused with or diminish the beauty and insight of his broad and long bibliography.

It’s almost as if American Masters — and its Capote-belittling commentators — want us to make a choice between Lee and Capote as exemplars, respectively, of “job well done” and “sad decline.” Fine. To Kill a Mockingbird is a good book, but I would sacrifice it in an instant, no question, to keep Capote’s voice in my ears and his books on my shelf.

Well, a grand allusion to an insignificant issue, certainly, and my apologies to Pound and the myriad, but sometimes you arrive at conclusions so very long after being presented with mountains of evidence that you gasp and choke back a kind of disbelief (while all around you shift pencils) and strike the board and cry, “No more!” — bolting up from the table, storming room to room around the house, wondering for how long you have been ill-used and hoping that not too many have grasped it before you (but knowing that they have, mountains of them), until you understand that making stories out of nothing is not nothing and should not be seen as nothing and finally say, “Enough! I will not waste myself on silence!”

My memory is getting worse. In Exit Ghost the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, talks in loving terms about his secluded house in the Berkshires somewhere near Lenox, and describes himself — to himself and others — as a recluse. Among its other benefits, Zuckerman claims that reclusivity is particularly good for listening to willfully difficult music with something like the proper attention; he mentions by way of example (and here is where memory cannot confirm the exact page), a Bartok quartet.

A couple of times a week I go down the mountain into Athena, eight miles away, to shop for groceries, to get my clothes cleaned, occasionally to eat a meal or buy a pair of socks or pick up a bottle of wine or use the Athena College library. Tanglewood isn’t far away, and I drive over to a concert there some ten times during the summer. I don’t give readings or lectures or teach at a college or appear on TV. When my books are published, I keep to myself. I write every day of the week—otherwise I’m silent. I am tempted by the thought of not publishing at all—isn’t work all I need, the work and the working?

The farther along life’s road I am, the more I find myself looking up to the hills, wondering whether the retreat is some kind of — perhaps the only kind of — victory. A place and time when we will finally be able to listen to Bartok’s quartets without the background noise of life, buzzing and hashing and whining its way into our ears.

I remember in an interview a few years back Maurice Sendak mentioning that he was becoming more and more of a recluse, adding that the desire to retreat was increasing as he got older. He said this is a tendency usual to recluses. Several parts of this were comforting. That it’s all right for writers for young people to want to get the heck away from the world. That there are tendencies usual to recluses, as if it is a state that can be . . . studied. We joke, my wife and I, that I am less a recluse than a reclusionist — a practitioner of reclusionism. What’s comforting about this is that practice might make perfect. Or perhaps it’s reclusionisme. The practice does have a vaguely Continental sensibility, an allure of Gallic superiority.

All of this on the eve of a book release. Actually two books. On Tuesday, the first two volumes of a new series, Goofballs, are released, both raucously hilarious and both as far from silent hilltops as I can imagine. I will go out and booster them on streetcorners, at railway stations, in bars and restaurants, because I love the books so.

There’s more to say, but right now I have to practice.

After an execrable showing — one entry these past two months — we’re getting our sea legs once again. The title above refers to a question I was asked just yesterday by a young reader: “ . . . themes in one or more of your adventure stories appear reminiscent of scenic and/or structural elements in the Star Wars films; are you an appreciator?”

I responded that, yes, I am, though I can profess familiarity with only the best of the films, by which I mean the first three, beginning in 1977, when I was twenty-one, with “Episode IV: A New Hope.” I must have seen that movie, oh, three or four times while it was still in the theaters. From the parking lot afterwards, my Plymouth dipped on its squishy tires not unlike the Millennium Falcon, at least until the first traffic light. But the title resonates with any old number of things we envision for the coming year; thus, a new hope on many fronts.

I read a nifty bit in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature that I want to share. It’s in his introduction to discussion of Bleak House, which comes in the book as it must have come in his lecture sequence, just after his analysis of Mansfield Park, about whose author he has just admitted, “I am sure that some readers have a better ear for Miss Austen than I have.” He is much more in his element with Dickens. “In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.”

This is not the quote I want to share, but it’s probably good to pause here and reflect for a moment on the writer’s approach to literature, because it is very much summed up in the structural imagery he gives us. There is a physical delight, a geographical reality to the joy, that great literature gives us. There is the comfort of our haunches remaining in the chairs about the table where Mr. Dickens sits, telling us his story. Nabokov famously dismissed “great ideas” from his analysis of great novels. Ideas come and go, are timebound, anachronistic, ephemeral, inelegantly voiced by even the best artist. What remains when you take the nonsense away is the artistry of structure, the structure of artistry. And that is a physiological truth, as he explains in the bit I do want to share.

“All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger.”

We often approach Nabokov, and certainly we do as students when we first are introduced to him, as cryptographers, bloodlessly connecting the dots of his plots and characters in order to “understand” the text. This was his game, to craft a surface shiny and exotic, a well-built box, which all too often as students we might decide was all there was to be discovered. He was a master at that. And may have been as cold a man himself as a box would be, though a box resounding with great humor.

But here, in his appreciation of writers’ masterworks, he folds himself into a burnished chair at the old table. He listens, objects, stares, laughs, and passes the port, hour upon hour, as his spine tingles with every imperishable line. For myself, when I read something extraordinary, a line that, say, knocks the top of my head off, the physical sense is foremost — chills, a kind of breathlessness, a desire to pace around, sit, read it again, and, maybe above all, to collar someone and read the whole thing out to him. With the helpless exclamation: “Do you see?”

Let’s not forget, while we’re at it, to send a rousing birthday cheer to Mr. Dickens, 200 and never stronger.

This is the week that Fall 2011 evaluations of my MFA students’ work are due, and three of the four have been written and dispatched. It’s also the week teachers receive manuscripts to be workshopped at the residency that kicks off the Spring 2012 semester. Breathe out, breathe in. The “dip” between semesters, after one ends and before the next begins, has amounted to little more than an hour or two, and that’s fine. You wouldn’t want too much time to lapse between semesters, students, and teaching, even given all the other stuff that’s got to be attended to.

But this hour of peace — in the season of peace — does prompt me to look at the end of my first year of teaching and question and wonder.

Do I like teaching? I love teaching. There’s so much that satisfies. . . .

The ongoing task of gathering what I’ve learned — and what I feel — about language and writing. I find it makes me accountable to my own knowledge of craft. It’s a constant test and question of myself.

There’s the reading of so many texts, a focused, deeper reading than I may have attended to before, all in the service of helping to shape craft knowledge into a form deliverable to someone else.

There’s that flutter in the chest when I come across something really fine in a student’s work; you know what it is: it makes you want to jump up and walk around the room before sitting down to read more

No small part of teaching is the talk that surrounds and extends and argues it.

There’s the talk about work as if work is the only thing there is.

Am I good at teaching? Ffft! Not yet. I feel like a diviner in a room of scientists. Good writing too often seems to me to be unexplainable, a fact I notice when I try to explain it. It’s like describing air. The best teaching that I can do is probably to simply point at someone’s story and say, “There. Do you see it?”

In a seminar I gave last semester there was the embarrassing moment when I read a piece of Agee to the class and my commentary was a stifled choke. What good is that to a student? Still, I’m likely to do the same thing this time. I’m a rube in the city of learning but I do love it, and I can’t wait for it all to start up.

Why can’t I ever read one book at a time? Start, read, finish, and put away? Is it like this for everyone? On my desk are at some thirty-five new books that I am at least two chapters in to, some far more, but I do not seem to want to finish any of them. Somehow, knowing that they are undone keeps them alive and still in the process of deep communion. Once the cover is closed and all the words have been read, there is a death.

I’m reminded that John Irving’s intense passion for Dickens includes an unread book. I don’t know if it’s still true, but I recall him saying that he’s saving Our Mutual Friend, the last completed novel, until his deathbed. Irving wants Dickens to ever be an ongoing pleasure, one that’s never quite finished, a hunger never completely satisfied.

I’ve recently gotten the new Van Gogh: The Life, along with the Penguin edition of his letters. After recently visiting the house north of Paris where he died, I couldn’t resist the gargantuan and acclaimed study. And, well, his letters are among his prized leavings.

I collect short books, but they are apparently no easier to finish. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Brooklyn Is by James Agee, both beautiful little hardcover volumes of 116 and 50 pages, respectively, have been sampled, more than sampled, yet I know that when I finish them and so would be free to remove them from the pile of the “living” to a shelf behind me, a loss will inhabit the desk. So I refuse to do it, and have learned to read books paragraph by paragraph while the piles get taller.

As if I needed to add anything else to a work table straining under the weight, I picked up at a local bookshop on a recent trip to Ohio, Philip Roth’s Nemesis, his novel about a fictitious polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944. I remember polio victims. There are was a girl in my class in Cleveland when I was growing up a decade after Roth’s story. He is a writer I find extremely easy to read. His narratives flow like rivers, and you find yourself twenty, thirty, sixty pages in before you come up for air. This book I will probably finish, just because he rarely lets you do otherwise.

Recently — why him? why now? — I’ve begun to read Malamud again after decades. His biography by Philp Davis, an excellent work that did something, but apparently not enough, to raise the novelist to his former stature, is riveting and supremely intelligent. Now I find that I can’t help but dredge out the novels and stories I read so long ago. They are dense. No hope to skim them away. They’re now taking up yet more real estate on my desk.

The Civil War, anything on the Civil War! The Great Rebellion, the War Between the States, was far more my war than Korea, under which I was born; I was eight at its centennial, and my brother and I played Civil War in our backyard, in the woods across the road, in our shared bedroom, in our minds. And to truly know the war one must know what led to it, so now . . . The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War 1848-1861 has taken its place in the stack — right between Hemingway’s Boat and Thomas W. Nason: New England Virtues Aged in Wood, a monograph on the woodcut artist by Charles Price, published by the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Ct, a place I was happy to visit a couple of weeks ago.

And it never ends. Which I guess is how I prefer it.

Well.

It was the word under my high school yearbook picture. Well. Because apparently that’s what people remembered me saying a lot. So much so, in fact, that “well” must have become universally recognized as my calling card. I objected to a yearbook writer by saying, “Well, how could you write that? Isn’t there something else about me? Well, isn’t there?”

The editor said, “Not now, Bobby.”

I’m at the tail end of a barnstorming tour of Ohio, having taken in Cleveland, Hudson, Delaware, and Wooster, zigzagging across the state, visiting as many as three cities a day. Gosh, if I only played baseball in 1936. The ostensible purpose of my “tour,” as opposed to a one- or two-day school visit, was to talk about the new book, the one that revolves around a family living in Cleveland. In practice, however, the book didn’t get all that much play because the presentations I did were attended by mostly younger children. I snuck in as much as I could say about it before launching into a survey of my more popular younger writing.

Uh . . . what else? There is now a classroom guide to the book, written by Cliff Wohl. Soon, I’ll be back home, where it looks like we’ll be taking in a second dog as soon as Monday. The book has my initials blind-stamped on the hardcover, the first time that has ever happened. You can’t help but run your thumb over the stamping. I am as proud of that as of anything. Our old, ailing apple tree finally went down in the recent snowstorm. Greg Call painted a lovely cover; someone thought they recognized the bus station, but it’s not a bus station in Ohio, it’s in Atlanta. It’s clear here in Wooster and warm, a day before the outstanding Buckeye Book Fair that takes place all day tomorrow. Hudson Library and Historical Society, where I was last night, has, not that I was able to view it on this trip, an outstanding collection of material relating to John Brown; Brown lived in Hudson from the time he was five to his sixteenth year, when he moved to Massachusetts, then Connecticut, to study for the ministry. I’m deeply happy that I wrote the story and on Wednesday happened to meet a middle school student in Delaware, who presented a school report on it. Houses on either side of my home in Cleveland are empty blank little boxes.

From November 1 – 5, I will be in Ohio (my fair native state), reading and signing LUNCH-BOX DREAM, which appeared from Farrar Straus Giroux this summer. Naturally, I’ll also be talking about other books, but being the setting for the new novel, Ohio has been in my plans for quite a while. I’m happy to be able to visit. Here are the dates:

Tuesday, November 1
Seton Catholic School (Hudson, Ohio), afternoon;
The Hudson Public Library (Hudson), pm.
Books provided at both events by The Learned Owl Book Shop.

Wednesday, November 2
Parkview Elementary School (Wooster), am;
Fundamentals Bookstore (Delaware), 4:30-6pm.

Thursday, November 3
Cleveland Public Library, 10:30 am;
Lincoln Way Elementary (Wooster), 3:30 pm.

Friday, November 4
Wooster Public Library, 10:30 am:

Saturday, November 5
Buckeye Book Fair (Wooster), all day.

The school appearances are usually closed affairs, but the library visits in Cleveland, Hudson, and Wooster are open to the public, as is, of course, the Buckeye Book Fair so . . . I would love to meet  you if you’re able to visit!

Language is not only the atomic level of substance we use to write — the bricks of the building, as it were — but the hugeness of the building and the reason why the building is there in the first place.

There are some writers who believe that novels are NOTHING BUT language, and it’s frankly hard to argue with them. Creating, or pretending to create life with words is a pretty cheeky undertaking; it’s perfectly comprehensible to believe that a novel is really nothing more, or less, than a structure built of words. It’s no more real, let’s say, than a piece of sheet music.

But let’s set that consideration aside for now and look at a couple aspects of how language is used in fiction

Richard Yates begins REVOLUTIONARY ROAD this way:

The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.

I’ll pause here. This paragraph, if you read it aloud, uses perfectly familiar, everyday language, with the exception of the single word “raspingly,” and you understand every word of it. It’s visible, palpable, this late-night scene on the stage. You see the group of players, exhausted, you see the director dragging the ladder out from off stage, you watch him climb — halfway — and you “hear” his remarks to the players.

What else? It’s a melancholy scene, isn’t it. “The final dying sounds . . . ” “silent and helpless” . . . “climbed [only] halfway up” “several clearings of his throat” . . . and so forth. All the vocabulary works toward this end, which prefigures the mood of the novel. People caught silent and helpless, blinking before the footlights, a little man telling them what? Nothing all that great.

The director’s clumsy repetition of “group of people” in the last sentence, which you might easily miss because Yates has been using plain language so far, tells us something, doesn’t it? It tells us that the director, the mind behind the production, the great mind behind the Laurel Players’ upcoming performance isn’t great with language. He uses the same phrase twice because he can’t think of another way to say it. This is damning. The one — the only — person the players look to is a short solemn man with a limited ability to speak and lead. Let’s look at the next paragraphs.

“It hasn’t been an easy job,” he said, his glasses glinting soberly around the stage. “We’ve had a lot of problems here, and quite frankly I’d more or less resigned myself not to expect too much. Well, listen. Maybe this sounds corny, but something happened up here tonight. Sitting out there tonight I suddenly knew, deep down, that you were all putting your hearts into your work for the first time.” He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the pocket of his shirt to show what a simple, physical thing the heart was; then he made the same hand into a fist, which he shook slowly and wordlessly in a long dramatic pause, closing one eye and allowing his moist lower lip to curl out in a grimace of triumph and pride. “Do that again tomorrow night,” he said, “and we’ll have one hell of a show.”

They could have wept with relief. Instead, trembling, they cheered and laughed and shook hands and kissed one another, and somebody went out for a case of beer and they all sang songs around the auditorium piano until the time came to agree, unanimously, that they’d better knock it off and get a good night’s sleep.

And what more happens here with language? The director is depicted as a sober, sentimental little man, honorable, but self-serious and limited. He does the language thing again, doesn’t he? “Something happened up here tonight. Sitting out there tonight . . . ” And the forming from splayed fingers of a little fist and shaking it wordlessly with one eye closed — this is almost laughably silly. In this director, we are getting a very quick, but very fresh description of a small-town artist. “A grimace of triumph and pride,” indeed. It’s a beautifully damning characterization, but one that sets the tone for the story to come, and one that in fact, prefigures the false triumph and pride of its two main characters, one of whom is one of the Laurel Players.

Finally, in that last paragraph, take a look at what happens. After two opening paragraphs in which Yates gives us every detail of what might have taken only three or four minutes, he follows with a swiftly stacked description of events that probably occurred over two hours or so: they cheered, laughed, shook hands, kissed, somebody went out for beer, they sang, and on and on . . . UNTIL . . .

. . . UNTIL this last colloquialism — they’d better knock it off and get a good night’s sleep. It’s hard to see this as anything less than brilliant. Yates wraps up the evening with a backslapping, chummy admonishment, not only as if we readers were in the Laurel Players ourselves, but by its being low-brow — knock it off — he deflects the reader from thinking he has been manipulated by his mastery of language at all. Yates is tucking the reader right into his pocket here. He has tugged all the strings he wanted to in the first two paragraphs, and now that he has us, let’s settle down to the story. As if we were sharing a booth in a dim Boston pub.

It’s been a noisy week in . . . here.

Item: The tonnage of stuff to do has fairly collapsed my cheap but lovable desk, and there’s been no time to read much of anything, but a book due this coming Monday has received a gentle extension to the following Monday, so I’m able to forestall the coming heart attack for at least that long. Whew!

Item: My stacks of new books have grown a bit taller. I’m trying hard not to think of these precarious skyscrapers as an example of hoarding but as building a vast library on not much real estate.

Item: I can see light at the end of the tunnel. In the next few weeks, that book will be done, pages for another will have been proofed, we’ll have gone to France for a week, and my daughter will be home for four days then back to college, and I will have something like a month and a half to work on a new novel. It’s all worked out — these coming weeks — with the precision of a railroad timetable, with that singular goal: time to write something new. If one element lags, I’m in trouble. But I try not to think about it, so desperately do I covet that time.

So we use weekends. And write short Friday Book Reports.