Jeff Parker
About fifteen years ago I wrote a profile of Padgett Powell for The Gainesville Sun while I was a student in a creative writing workshop he taught at the University of Florida. I managed to dig out the article the other day and was stunned. In what I at the time thought was a shrewd bit of observation, I wrote: “Powell still appears a young man at 44, gray just making its presence known in his long, stringy chest hair.”
The effect produced by the publication of this line, he told us in workshop the next week, was that his neighbors now greeted him across the expanse of woods separating their houses with shouts of “Nice chest hair!”
I recently corresponded with a woman who claimed to have been in that particular class and who didn’t remember much about me. I hoped maybe Powell’s workshops and that episode in particular were only memorable/embarrassing for me. But her primary memory of the class was that someone had written about Powell’s chest hair. Was I, she asked, in the workshop in which someone had written about Powell’s chest hair?
There is a lesson in there somewhere: Don’t write about your teacher’s chest hair. If you do it’s all they’ll remember you by. Sometimes it’s all they’ll remember you by to the exclusion even of remembering you.
Some of the best reading in those classes, beyond William Trevor or Samuel Beckett or Ivan Turgenev or Flannery O’Connor, was Powell’s syllabuses. They were essays in the tradition of Barthelme’s “Not-Knowing,” as much illustrations of the point they were trying to make as they were expositions on those points.
In one—they changed, developed, evolved across all three workshops I took with him—he made two solid points about the “the business at hand”:
1) “The business we are about—writing, be it fiction or even the better kinds of non-fiction—is the business of locating your passions, or obsessions, I don’t know the difference…You do not, I repeat, need know what they are, and probably—no, certainly—should not know what they are. You will see in time, possibly to your surprise, what they are. If you are any good, others will point out for you what they are. The prospect of a man or woman with durable, demonstrable, debatable passions so fascinates that other men and women line up to explicate the passions and biograph the passionate.”
2) “While I’m on this particular theme—the pointlessness of saying many of the things we say in Writing School—this: many even of the craft dictates are not going to have immediate effect either. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but the suggestive approach we use here is not unlike weekly chiropractic: a little violent movement here and there, some momentary relief (best-case scenario; backache worst-case, or paralysis upon the table), but you are told to keep coming back again and again, and, if you do, in the end you have spent a lot of money and have a fused spine.”
As far as I know, these were never published. (It may well be illegal for me to quote from them here.) They were meant for us. And it was all very puzzling to me. I wanted to know how to write. I didn’t get it at all. But I kept coming back.
Now I see that it's some of the most honest talking to a young writer can hope for: Write what you care about with the caveat that you may not know what you care about. And have a strong back.
When I reviewed those syllabuses to nab the quotes above, I was surprised not to find another line there. Because I did not find it, it may well be that it was never there, that it was something he said to us out loud. Wherever it came from I am certain it came from him in some context or another, and I am certain I remember it almost verbatim: “You should read whatever’s written of anyone who purports to teach you to write.” I thought at the time he was trying to get us to buy his books. I thought at the time he was trying only to get us to buy his books. But the point was, you would learn the most from any given writing teacher from examining the space between what he said about writing and what he did about it.
To that end, Powell’s story “Scarliotti and the Sinkhole” has always been instructive for me. It’s about a guy named Rod who imagines himself into a Scarliotti. I think it’s one of his best. Beyond that it signals Powell’s own obsessions/passions and confirms something that’s evident in every single thing he does about writing.
I would submit that the story is in part about the fact that Powell believes either himself or those occupying the world around him—more likely both—to be unfit. He believes humanity to have been softened, to have undergone a full-scale character depletion that has rendered things fucked and rendered us unprepared for its fuckedness. Scarliotti laments, “It was not like the old days.” (It’s up to us to understand that it’s the world as much as the rancher poseurs’ pick-up that has clipped Scarliotti in the head.) This is something not unlike what an old curmudgeonly uncle or grandfather says. But the way Powell says it, he makes it at the same time immediately recognizable and immediately unfamiliar. Powell's particular method of defamiliarization (Shkovsky's term for what art does) employs a two-fold resistance. He refuses a sentence or a phrase or hardly a word in the way it’s expected or in common usage. He refuses a certain pedestrian kind of storytelling—an inoculation administered, he has said, from his own workshop experience with Donald Barthelme.
There were two points of craft which recurred in the various versions of those syllabuses that will out, I’d argue, in “Scarliotti.” One came direct from Barthelme: “Break their hearts.” The other: “All you have to do to write well is repeat yourself well.”
One finds repetition at every level in this story. “It didn’t matter now if you peed in your pants in your bed. It did not matter now.” One can find it in larger recursive structures. The main plot function of the story is one of a recurring pattern: First the father comes over and breaks his balls. Then the nurse comes over and breaks his balls. Then the checkout girl, who earlier fondled his balls, comes over to seal the deal. One can find it in the duality of the good side of Scarliotti’s head (from which hair has fallen out during exertions with the checkout girl) and the bad side (from which he hopes nothing has also fallen out during those exertions) and the Rod-Scarliotti split that we get in the very first paragraph.
Had I taken the field exam for my literary criticism license I might suggest that echoing these there is a good and bad side to Scarliotti, one that selfishly wants the girl to come with him into the sinkhole and another that hopes nothing groddy falls out of his head onto her; one that has a chance of carrying on in a world that runs him down and one that has no chance whatsoever, only the possibility for internal (crack-up) or external (going postal perhaps) combustion. However you cut it you make meaning of it through the repetition of the duality.
The story probably should, in a sense, end here: “There are ten beers sweating onto a hundred pills beside the bed. The nurse and his father would not be back before the trailer could start ticking in the heat and bending on its own, unless they bent it again themselves with exertions in the bed, but all in all Scarliotti thought it would be a good enough time to have some fun without being bothered by anyone before the trailer found its way down the hole.” The requisite repetitions are here. It’s a happy kind of end.
But the story goes on for two more sections: the first for the purposes of further parallel repetitions (the sinkhole, pert millionaire, free grits), after which it should probably end again, but again does not; the final, the ultimate end, for the purposes of what Powell called, in those syllabuses, “the deliberate perversion of expectation.”
Scarliotti has not uttered a line of more than a couple short sentences. Now he looks out the window and sees a dog licking the turtle, perceiving it to be the checkout girl’s dog, he goes on a rant, culminating in, “That turtle idn’ doing shit but getting licked in the face and taking it.” We have not seen the dog or the turtle in this story before. The only connection we have to this material is the fact that Scarliotti throws his pills out that window. Maybe the dog and the turtle have been taking them. It’s not addressed. We can’t know. Whatever Scarliotti’s fits are, he is probably having one here. Scarliotti may be having the fit triggered by seeing the stoned out dog-turtle combo in part because they have taken the pills and he hasn’t. In the pharmaceutical sense, he may have caused/accelerated his very own breakdown here. There is a kind of clarity in it though. The main offense is the turtle’s taking the licking, that which Scarliotti has been taking all along.
It depends on your predilections I suppose whether any of that business breaks your heart. We may puzzle over how to make sense of it. I don’t have an answer. (It makes me a little sad to think that a story like this should be reduced to a puzzle like that.) It is not the happily-ever-after end that the first possible end would have been. It has reached for something—in its perversion of expectation—as yet unsaid in this conclusion, and it’s taken the story to a new place.
I get a bit too caught up in the spectacle of this last section to tear up. It’s really magnificent in a way, an epic fall, one that leaves me marveling at it more than anything else. This may be the final flaw in Powell’s work, but that is the stylist’s flaw.
But then there’s this: I grew up in Florida and my dogs ran free. We lived in the woods with not so many people around and so they could. They used to bring home lots of dead creatures. One trophy that always impressed me was a turtle shell, licked completely clean of turtle. I can’t even remember how many of those showed up in the backyard during my childhood. I never knew what to do with them. They would be licked so clean even the flies weren’t attracted to them.
When my family first moved to that region outside of Tallahassee, Florida where my dogs ran free tongue-polishing turtles out of their shells (without, somehow, being bitten themselves), there were hardly any other houses and no traffic to speak of. But the city eventually crawled out, and the woods were carved up into developments, and people arrived, and pretty soon both my labs were run over by cars and died in the ditches.
Do you have a turtle-dog memory that puts you in the state of mind that you know what Powell might mean in the end of that story? How does one break a heart? (Knowing what you know of Barthelme’s writing would you say that’s what his stories do? Are you surprised, as I was, that he’s the one who said that?) The prevailing line goes that you create characters, make us care about them, and then kill off their daughters or run them through a pogrom.
I would be giving in to a certain pedestrian storytelling here to justify Powell’s countering this prevailing line (other than to say Powell does counter this prevailing line) or to somehow circle back around to my mention of that long, graying, stringy chest hair. In truth I don’t know how to satisfy either of these particular demands of pedestrian storytelling here. Isn’t the problem of satisfying the demands of pedestrian storytelling what makes it boring to read and write anyway? Better to be like Powell and keep the space narrow between what you say about writing and what you do about it. Better just to go for it.