“…And
please give Teacher the grace to be alert to the real questions being asked
here, which are usually silent and in the eyes...”
—Brian
Doyle, “Room Eight”
One month ago, Brian Doyle, whom I consider the
greatest personal essayist ever, living or dead, ceased to be among the living.
I preached his stuff to friends, told them that he had the unique gift of not
only changing you with his writing, but often doing so within a single page or
so. How many writers were both that striking and succinct? Few but the greatest
personal essayist ever, living or dead. I was thinking of essays like “How We
Wrestle Is Who We Are,” “Leap,” “Pea by Pea,” and “Original Skin” as I preached
the wisdom of reading his stuff, though I also believed the slightly longer
ones (in the whopping 2-3 page range) are equally worthwhile, stories like “Joyas
Voladores” and “Rec League.” Not all of those essays were created equal, but
all in at least one moment struck me in a way that made the day I read it a day
worth having lived.
One time, as a creative writing MFA
student at BYU, I got the chance to introduce Brian at the school’s English
Reading Series, and I took the opportunity to preach to people there too.
Generally, authors were introduced with a list of accolades, but as I thought
of Brian’s work I felt like the implications of accolades fell far short of his
real value. Accolades weren’t why I planned to give him my full attention. The
spirit I felt in his stuff was, the life. So I wanted to give the audience
that, the real reason I thought they ought to listen to him. Despite believing
this was the best way to actually introduce him, I still might not have had the
guts to do it though—after all, I’d never heard of simply skipping the
accolades in an author’s introduction—but as I reflected on the idea, I
remembered a tip he’d given writers: “Follow the energy.” I didn’t think he’d
mind me taking his words seriously. I explained some of that to the audience as
I introduced Brian, setting them up for a sample of what they had coming:
“Great writing is an arrow,” I
quoted Brian, “shot into the hearts of others.” And then I riffed, following
the energy.
“Brian’s metaphor makes writing
sound dangerous, even fatal,” I said, “which I like, because there are parts of
me I want to die—a whole version of me in fact. His phrase gives me hope that
the right story could kill my inner demons and make me a new man.” I claimed
then and claim still that Doyle has a bevy of such arrows in his quiver, and
that thus we ought to listen to him, because one of those stories might be that
arrow with our name on it, might be the thing that hits us dead on and kills
off our darkness for good.
In other words, I agreed with another
of Brian’s great lines: “If we told the right story, we could change the
world.”
Because I was already introducing
him for the English Reading Series, I was also given the chance to drive Brian
from Provo to Salt Lake City where he’d do another reading. That might sound a
bit like the school pulled a Tom Sawyer on a gullible grad student, convincing
me I was lucky to handle the logistics of their Reading Series (“Does a boy get
a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” asks Tom), and maybe sometimes
schools do that, but in my case I was more than lucky. This was the greatest
essayist ever, living or dead, and I had an hour alone with him for a handful
of dollars in gas.
I picked him up at his hotel in
Provo and we went north to SLC, talking more about life than writing. I was
happy we did that at the time, but I feel especially glad we did now. It was right,
considering we were on “the brief sunlit road between great dark wildernesses,”
that we talk about what mattered most. Brian didn’t just write words. He
offered companionship to others on the road.
I saw Brian for the last time in
2015 in Flagstaff, AZ. He was keynote speaking at NonfictioNOW, a writing
conference, which was taking place in one wing of a fancy hotel. A long
corridor served as the heart of the conference, pulsing with people. Booths
advertising books and MFA programs lined it on one side, backlit by tall
pleasant windows, while doors to capacious conference rooms stood on the other.
Brian wasn’t always around, but when he popped in, he’d trigger mild heart
attacks, cause people to clot around him listening to whatever he was saying, even
answers he gave to other people’s questions. I was always part of the clot. Despite
feeling like a fan boy, I wasn’t willing to miss out on what Brian might say. I
suspect others felt the same.
As people fighting to pass by
compressed the circle around him more tightly, at one point, he glanced up and
noticed me. We hadn’t talked in five years.
“Bentley! It’s great to see you
here! Do you wanna catch up in a bit?”
“Definitely!” I responded,
obviously.
A little while later, he told the
people around him “I need to talk to Bentley for a minute” (as if anyone had a
clue who I was), nodded kindly to me and gestured towards a conference room. A
conference organizer approached him with some keynote speaker stuff on our way
to go talk. I didn’t hear what he said, but apparently he took a rain check. Soon,
I found myself alone with him in a conference room meant for 300. We might has
well have been in that car headed to Salt Lake when we began to talk.
In the conference room of
NonfictioNOW’s hotel, Brian asked me about life and I expressed some angst
typical of MFA grads—“I don’t really know what I’m doing. I thought about going
on for a PhD, or maybe teaching high school. (Frankly, I wish I could go back
to my MFA and keep whitewashing fences.)”
My typical answers had a twist
though, although it didn’t come out in my words—I didn’t know how to put it
into them. It wasn’t just a crossroads that concerned me. It was a deeper
struggle which had left me revolving head over heels in the several years since
I’d graduated. I didn’t know how to explain it, and certainly knew that even if
he wanted to, he didn’t have time for it, so I simply tried to ask about its
application—where I might ought to go with my life to enjoy what really
mattered. He gave me some predictably Romantic answers—principled, “follow the
energy” type stuff, “consequences be hanged.”
For me, such Romantic answers were
predictable, since I know Brian and am something of a Romantic myself—at least
in how I think. I think I was on my way to living like a real one too, back
when I met Brian in grad school. I had lost my way though, and lost it badly,
and I still can’t explain how on the page any better than I could tell Brian in
person.
The terrible irony of it all was
that as Brian gave me his lofty, moving thoughts they led me to despair. This
was the right path, I believed, but I didn’t know where I was. It was like
having someone hand you a map to heaven when you can’t see where you are on it.
I wasn’t even sure if where I was was on the
map. It wasn’t that I doubted the destination was breathtaking. So as he
continued giving me Romantic advice for the journey, I brokenly concluded that
not even he knew how to find me. Not even he, an unusual soul
who’d specifically sought me out, could help. There was nothing left to do
but stop troubling him, to let him go back to whoever was waiting in the hall,
to hear him out while I hid my misery at his words, which, though they were
very wise, all told me, “I don’t actually get you.” In “Joyas Voladores,” Brian
himself once said, “We are utterly open with no one in the end”—essentially, we
eventually wind up alone. As he talked, I felt alone already.
Unexpectedly, Brian stopped
talking. He looked at me.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
“Isn’t it?”
I pursed my lips, unsure of what to
say: “Yes, but you tried hard, and it didn’t work, and you’ve got to go anyway,
so why try”; “Yes, but really I don’t know if anyone can help me, so really,
don’t worry about it”; “Yes, but I can’t even tell you where I am—I don’t
know”?
He leaned forward intently. His
whole aspect, so prone to being merry, was now serious and responsive. His
eyebrows furrowed, his blue eyes focused through the small lenses of his
glasses. His skin like leather that had just begun to show age, his dark hair
(plus some gray) more desiccated and subdued than it used to be.
“Tell me. What’s wrong?”
I didn’t know what to say. I really
didn’t know what was wrong, although he was right—something was. I tried to
explain though and he listened and gave me some advice that amounted to just
figure things out for yourself. Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. Find out
the truth for yourself.
What lingers with me though was
that moment, right after Brian leaned in, when he chose to listen, to pry into
the silence. That choice felt substantial to me—literally, like, it was
substance, it had a shape: an orb that stirred somewhere between or throughout
him and me. I’m still chewing on it, on that raw recognition, that genuine
acknowledgement. That moment hits me in the heart as I think about it. And so I
think about it, and maybe I bleed as I do. Maybe the wound is fatal, the way to
find who I want to be. Maybe Brian knew the answer after all. It had something
to do with his priorities, how when everyone wanted to listen to him, he said,
“Nah. I want to listen to this kid.”
A few days after Brian’s passing, I went to the Provo
Temple, a holy place to Mormons. With some trees giving shade, I sat in the
grass to read. I had planned to resume my reading of Anna Karenina, but felt a sort of nudge to read Leaping, by Brian Doyle. I’d brought
that book of his along just because.
I’d read it once before, but had
picked it up a few weeks before to reread it—my favorite of his books—but I’d
only read the intro so far, so when I picked it up, I found my bookmark was at
the book’s first essay, “Room Eight.”
The story relates various
experiences Brian had while teaching Catholic Sunday School to fourteen
seven-year-olds. He ditches the textbook, makes the class Q&A, and tries to
be real with the kids. At one point, he shares a pretty amusing prayer that
shows what I mean by “real”:
“Dear God, please help us not be
mudheads for at least ten minutes, and please let Teacher remember that he said
he would give us a five-minute break in the playground, and please let us not
shout and interrupt and belch loudly so as to make the whole table dissolve
into fits of giggles, and please give
Teacher the grace to be alert to the real questions being asked here, which are
usually silent and in the eyes...”
And suddenly I was tearing up without understanding exactly
why. I was remembering that chat with Brian at NonfictioNOW and realizing, I
think, that he had had other such chats with people, people like these
seven-year-olds (who might actually be older than me by now), that he had long
known that people ask the most important questions without words, and that
answering those questions matters. I was realizing all the more that Brian
really believed this, that this was really who Brian was, and I was glad to
have known him and sad he was gone. He always told writers that the key to
great writing was listening, and I think that he spoke from experience. His
writing hits me in the heart anyway, exactly like his listening. (Maybe somehow,
mystically, they are the same thing.)
So now I’m
going to turn this into a final introduction for Brian, and tell you all,
whoever you are, that if you’d like to be hit in the heart with an arrow (who
doesn’t?), or at least if there are parts of yourself you wish would die—or a
whole version of you even—well, then I know of some writing that’s dangerous,
some stories that might even be fatal. There are a bevy of them quivered in the
works of Brian Doyle. I recommend you read them. I recommend you listen. They
are shot by one who listened first then carefully took aim, so there’s a
sporting chance that they’ll hit you right where you live. They might just take
your life. They might give you something better.
They have
changed my world.
Please
welcome, and give your full attention, to Brian Doyle…
(Here are some links to some of my favorite stories he wrote:)
“Leap”
– about 9/11 – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/questions/leap.html
“Joyas
Voladores” – about hearts and hummingbirds – https://theamericanscholar.org/joyas-volardores/
“How We
Wrestle Is Who We Are” – https://orionmagazine.org/article/how-we-wrestle-is-who-we-are/
Leap: Revelations and
Epiphanies, as I wrote, is my favorite book of his, followed by The Wet Engine: Exploring The Mad Wild
Miracle of the Human Heart
https://www.gofundme.com/doylefamilyfund
