Patchwork: Essays and Criticism

By Paul Reidinger

A polymathic collection of essays -- personal, political, literary and sensual -- from America's most underrated writer.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Reidinger
• Release date: Sep 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452433530

Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

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Introduction

Like many writers, I have had occasion to write miscellany over the years, and, like snowflakes piling up on a windowsill during a blizzard, these occasional pieces stealthily accumulated. But unlike snowflakes, they didn't just melt away or get shoveled into a mound at the foot of the driveway, so at some point one began to wonder what to do with them, if anything.

Since the pieces that make up this collection weren't conceived or written with an eye to being bound together at some later point in time -- maybe herded would be a better word -- they are pretty loosely confederated. Hence the title. Some are about personal or intimate subjects, others bigger or more sweeping ones, still others about food. Some I was invited to write (whether to a suggested idea or one of my own), others I was asked (meaning, more or less obliged) to write, and the Marginala columns (which make up the last part of the collection) were the brief essays, originally modeled on Lewis Lapham's wonderful Notebook column in Harper's Magazine, I offered each month during my tenure as editor of Lit., the San Francisco Bay Guardian's literary supplement. I wrote about what, and the way, I wanted to in Marginalia, without interference of any kind (except, at times, a gentle query from the copy desk), and in that sense the columns represent an unusual freedom of movement and expression for the writer.

The Marginalia columns are presented here in the order they were written, from the late summer of 2002 until the end of 2007, when Lit. came to an end. As a sequence, in other words, they run from fairly early in the presidential administration of George W. Bush until fairly nearly its end. That administration, with its endless wars and other follies, was an enduring and vexed subject for the columnist, as the repeated fulminations about it attest. The columns, read in retrospect, serve now as a kind of fever chart of their author's state of mind -- which, I can say with some authority, was … well, agitated, if not exactly feverish.

Reading them in this dense formation, long after the news of the day has become other news of other days, gives at times an uncomfortable sense of a point being made over and over in some verbal equivalent of time-lapse photography. The proverbial dead horse is whipped and whipped yet again, without visible effect. In defense of the columnist, I know he thought then, and thinks still, that it was incumbent on writers with a platform to speak out about the government's policies and actions, to point out the violence to the constitutional mechanism, and to truth and transparency, being done by officials sworn to serve the public good, and to make themselves heard as they were able, even at the risk of being obvious or repetitive. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, as the political philosopher Edmund Burke once put it, is for good men to do nothing -- and for writers, maybe, to say nothing. To the extent that those sometimes hectoring or shrill qualities mar the essays for latter-day readers, they do reflect something of the temper of those times. For that very reason, I have let them stand as they were written, on the ground that their grating moments represent a response to a much larger insult we ought not let ourselves forget.

At the end of the summer of 2010, the American combat mission in Iraq was declared to be over, and the so-called surge, which began in 2007, was widely claimed by those on the political right to have succeeded. It did succeed, at least, in enabling the U.S. to declare victory and go home, without having to define victory; it provided political cover, in other words, for a withdrawal from a bloody and bank-busting stalemate.

But a controlled draw-down of the American expeditionary force in Iraq doesn't mean that the war was anything but a terrible mistake. It diverted resources and attention away from a truly pressing problem in Afghanistan -- a neglected mess now spreading into nuclear-armed Pakistan, where it promises to become a much graver mess -- and because it involved an attempt by a power perceived as Christian to impose a set of alien political ideals and institutions on an occupied Muslim land, it will not be surprising if that imposition is rejected once the intruding force is relaxed.

There have been many comparisons drawn between Iraq and Vietnam in recent years, but a more useful comparison might be with Germany in 1919, where, in the wake of World War I, the people failed to believe in a weak democracy, the Weimar Republic (born in the political convulsions that shook Germany at the end of the war), that had agreed to the harsh and punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles and was widely seen as being a stooge of the victorious Allies. As the history of the 1930s and 1940s would show, the failure of the Weimar Republic to establish legitimacy, and the undue influence exercised by the victorious Allies in and over a defeated and exhausted Germany, would have fateful consequences.

It is the height of American naivete, or self-delusion, to suppose that the years of violence, destruction and death we have visited on the unhappy land of Iraq will produce anything but violence, death and destruction there in the future. War is failure, and it is also self-propagating. As World War I showed, it quickly establishes its own reality beyond human control. The fact that Saddam Hussein was a dreadful tyrant should not have lead to some ineluctable conclusion that bombing and invading his country to get rid of him was a wise thing to do -- certainly not when containing and diminishing him was well within our means. The fact that a war can be justified does not mean that waging it is wise.

And the persistent argument on the right that Saddam's Iraq, if left undisturbed, was likely at some point to become a nuclear threat overlooks the reality that Saddam's chief concern was the hostile regime in Iran, in whose eyes he could not afford to seem weak or vulnerable. Hence all his posturing and evasiveness about unconventional weaponry. He wanted the Iranians to wonder what war tools he had, without attracting too much scrutiny from the U.S. This was a fine balance to draw, and in the end he couldn't draw it.

By destroying Saddam, interestingly, we destroyed one of our own bulwarks against the radical-Islamist regime that took power in Tehran in 1979. Saddam, a secular Arab nationalist, had been helpful to us in containing Iranian religious fanaticism; that was why we quietly encouraged and supported his eight-year war against Iran -- we all remember the grip-and-grin photo of Saddam with once and future defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld taken in December 1983 -- and that is why the Bush minions' whispering campaign that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots was always ludicrous on its face. We acted as if we'd had no hand in the making of Saddam, when the truth was that he could never have become what he became without American succor.

If there is a winner of the Iraq war, it is Iran, which, without lifting a finger, saw its nearby nemesis, Saddam Hussein, overthrown by its faraway nemesis, the U.S., at a crippling cost to the latter in blood, treasure and moral capital. Wartime victories can't come much sweeter than that.

•••

Almost all the other pieces here, excepting the epicurean, deal with books in one way or another, and so most of them might be considered literary criticism in some form, although cultural criticism is probably the better term, since the effort generally involved an attempt to examine the connections between literary work and the surrounding culture. Literature, like any other art, is meaningless without reference to the culture in which it is created and published, and that culture itself, meanwhile, can't be properly understood without reference to the literature being written in it.

I will confess to a weakness for literary criticism written by imaginative writers. There is a place for academic critics, no doubt -- they are an overwhelming, well-funded reality, often with tenure and always with footnotes -- as well as for journalists, who provide an important public service through newspaper, magazine and now Internet reviews. But there is nothing like comment on creative work by a fellow creator, who is also inside the belly of the beast and who must be a critic if only because imaginative writers must be the first and best critics of their own work. An academic or a journalist can't see what a creator sees; they are outsiders, looking in. A fellow imaginative writer, acting as critic of another writer's work, is both an insider and outsider, looking out and in simultaneously, capable of an astringent but real sympathy no academic or journalist could ever match -- and generally a superior stylist, too.

These pieces, then, were written as journalism by a writer who was at some pains not to consider himself a journalist. Despite the time and space constraints that are always dimensions of journalism, the pieces were meant to be written to a higher, a literary, standard -- to have style, we might say. Style begins in wit and wordplay, in expression that is fresh, original, unexpected and exact, but at its deeper levels it is the spirit of the writer working itself into the patterns of the words, where it becomes a part of the meaning. Style and substance are like body and soul, separate but inseparable and, ideally, greater than the sum of their parts. Style can make a piece worth reading even when its immediate moment appears to have passed and its substance no longer seems urgent.

Because style tends toward literature, and literature is a distilled product, literature and journalism are in some structural tension. Distillation is time-consuming, and style can't be rushed, but in the eternal present of journalism it always is, along with everything else. Do any of these pieces have style? I hope so, if only because they were meant to. Given the time and space pressures that attended their creation, I have chosen to perform some minor latter-day cosmetic surgeries here and there, mostly to delete clumsy or gratuitous passages or words, and far less often to replace words or phrases with other ones. In this respect several of the pieces vary slightly from the form in which they were first published. But, for better or worse, I have done no rewriting of any of them; I have imposed no wisdom of hindsight. They have been lightly edited for style, years after the fact, and that is all.

Two pieces I haven't touched. Those are the first two, which, not coincidentally, were written for a pair of literary anthologies and accordingly had time for proper gestation. The rest of them appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, on the dates given at the end of each piece, except as otherwise noted.

--Paul Reidinger, San Francisco, September 2010

I. The Intimate

A Moonlit Serenade

At the park one morning, long ago, a man and his dogs met a boy and his dog. The morning: bright but cool, a reminder that San Francisco was and is a marine city, a ship of rock moored at the edge of the foggy, chilly Pacific. The park: of the urban, postage-stamp variety, a narrow sward of lawn flanked on one side by a basketball court and an oft-flooded tennis court while gently descending on the other to a small dell with a sandbox and jungle gym for toddlers. The man: that would be me, and the dogs … dogs were not allowed in the sand, as my own dogs well knew, and although they were young and rambunctious in the summer of 1992, they honored the prohibition, usually.

The boy's dog was older, a genial mixed-breed female, gray and brown like a German shepherd, whose gait had been stiffened by arthritis in the hips: a gift of age. She confined her exertions to the chasing of a grubby old tennis ball that skittered across the empty basketball court. The skitterer of the ball was the boy. He was plainly a teenager, clad in a t-shirt and shorts despite the sea breeze and with the beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip and bristlings of hair on his muscular legs. He was beautiful in that delicate, first-rose-of-spring way, with skin smooth and white as milk, although a certain surliness, an air of the thug, made me wary.

That summer I was thirty-three, l'age du Christ, and a newcomer to a neighborhood I had briefly lived in nearly a decade earlier, just out of college and on the eve of plague and earthquake, a pair of catastrophes that by the early 1990s would leave the city dazed and supine. In the white warmth of those first afternoons of my return, our neighborhood could be as still and quiet as a country town, only occasionally intruded on by the rasp of a passing bus or the faraway wail of an ambulance hurrying some unfortunate to San Francisco General Hospital.

The neighborhood, Noe Valley, had been, in my post-collegiate years, a kind of suburb of the Castro: a haven of quiet rusticity and, yes, funkiness -- of greasy diners serving meatloaf, and knick-knack shops and musty used-book stores, of faded Jaguars with peeling paint and handsome Victorians with original millwork and peeling paint, of crew-cut lesbians in granny glasses and leather jackets bestriding the sidewalks -- separated by one steep little hill from the more festive neighborhood to the north. In the sepia-tinted days of yesteryear, a cable-car line had traversed that hill, carrying its human traffic between the valleys. It must have been like a funicular railway, I supposed, in some vertiginous little Swiss or Italian alpine town.

The cable cars were long gone by 1992, replaced by prosaic trolleys, and an influx of the married-with-children upper middle classes was already becoming apparent, as one long-neglected Victorian after another acquired fresh paint and skylights, but the neighborhood's air of quaint intimacy persisted, from the Main Street USA main street on the floor of the valley to, a few blocks up the hill, the sloping little park. The park, I was discovering, really served as a village green, a place where people met and and exchanged news, where their quotidian routines intersected and they became neighbors and friends. People whose ordinary lives were entwined made up a community rather than just a collection of people who lived next door to one another, and dogs were powerful agents of entwinement. Dog people immediately gravitated to other dog people, and as I was the keeper of two teddy-bearish canines, a matched set of chows, black and red, who resembled Christmas toys come to boisterous life and were irresistible to small children, I often found myself acknowledging others' coos of delight and inquiries as to whether it was safe for this or that toddler to pet them.

Indeed it was, I said and hoped, while holding my breath and crossing my fingers. For dogs do not always approve of small children and their erratic movements, of little boys in particular, and the male dog in my charge, though intelligent and friendly in a rather theatrical way, had a streak of high-spiritedness that could be unpredictable, along with a set of spectacularly large, porcelain-white teeth.

The bristly-legged boy was no cooer, as teenage boys tend not to be. Matters of manliness are of desperate importance to them, and the manly man does not coo. Still, I knew the boy was aware of me, just as I was aware of him: I felt his awareness. He barked a pair of shapeless syllables at his dog, and I took these sounds to be the animal's name and, at the same time, an oblique signal to me. I could not make the syllables out and asked the boy for clarification: one dog person casually querying another on a matter of joint interest. This was all exactly as he intended. Without looking at me he barked out the same incoherent two-part cry. I questioningly repeated it, and at last, having gained the upper hand and feigning irritation at my denseness -- or perhaps not feigning irritation, perhaps being genuinely irritated, yet pleased nonetheless to have established control of the situation -- he spoke the dog's name so I could understand. I repeated it, as if learning a difficult phrase in a foreign language, and we were both, suddenly, relieved.

This is the story of a man and a boy in a park, yet it is not one of those stories, even as morning quickly became evening, and soon enough -- by autumn? by the following spring at the latest -- the boy and I were talking long into the night, not every night, but often, once or twice a week, with the clammy wind rustling in the tops of the Monterey pines that stood sentinel at the edges of the park and the occasional brightly lit, empty Muni bus sailing by, like one of those legendary ghost ships plying the lonely seas, the Marie Celeste perhaps. At first I took these after-hours rendezvous to be coincidental, the boy giving his dog her evening trot at the same time I was doing the same with the chows, but at some point it occurred to me that, under cloak of spontaneity, he was turning up in hopes of seeing me, just as I was hoping he would turn up so I could see him.

There was an expansiveness to the night, a romance to conversations under the glitter of stars. I had not had such conversations for years -- not since my own youth, not since I was a freshman in college and was staying up every night until three in the morning, talking and listening, because there was so much to say and to hear -- and the boy's questions, his wishing to know life's secrets, his turning to me for wisdom, made me feel young and old. I was once again a youth talking to another youth about God and meaning and desire, about all those largest questions of life, so easily flooded out or muddied by the rising tide of the mundane, and I was a man too, expected to know something about these high matters -- to have answers, not merely questions, to have lived, not merely anticipated.

There is no answer, of course, to desire, since desire is not a question but a spirit, a presence, a heat that warms the night air between two people and draws them closer. I knew something of desire, the agonies and ecstasies it could bring, its thrilling and often perverse derangement, its oblique but intense contacts with feeling, with love, its wavelike pattern of crescendo, ebb, recurrence, unending, like the swell of a limitless sea. Desire was always heat, not always light -- and even when the flames of desire did cast light, it was light that could distort and mislead as easily as illuminate.

I knew too, what men were like, what they tasted and felt and sounded like, what they acted like, what they could and could not say and what they were apt to do, for better and for worse -- often for worse -- when words failed them. I suspected he knew that I knew these things, for I did not talk about women nor pretend to special knowledge of or passion for them, but he did not ask me directly. Instead we danced in the moonlight, we pirouetted, we thrust and parried, we talked.

Homophobia is not merely name-calling or egg-throwing or worse, although those coarse manifestations are real enough and do lie near its dark heart. Homophobia can be cleaned up and made sophisticated and, in its more elevated, more liberal forms -- and what was San Francisco if not a liberal city, city of the liberals? -- becomes even more insidious and more damaging. It is not automatically true, for instance, that when two men are attracted to each other and the attraction is in part erotic, the attraction is really altogether and only erotic, that the other elements of mutual interest, of intellectual, emotional, psychic, political and spiritual connection, are a complex sham, nothing more than camouflage to mask the shameful flare of eros.

The stereotype -- gay man as predator and recruiter of the young -- I knew too well, and I was determined to resist it. Yet an intimacy had flowered between the boy and me, and I was equally determined to protect that. I did not need to be told that, as an openly homosexual man who could sometimes be seen at the neighborhood park, talking long into the night with a handsome teenager, I was at measurable risk of being seen as a sexual danger, a contagion of deviance, by other adults, by parents and neighbors, most of them well-educated and well-off liberals proud of their politics and their ease with non-hetero people in casual social settings, yet full of anxiety that their own children, if not vigilantly monitored and guided, might somehow stray from the righteous path of heterosexuality.

So I too was anxious: In their eyes, I supposed, my only real interest could be in seducing the boy by using my adult wiles to make him trust me, lull his instinct for self-protection. All roads, no matter how seemingly high, must lead to a lubricious Rome of man-boy love, and in this scenario (slightly to mix my metaphors) I would be the pied piper casting my sordid spell as the boy followed me along the highway into darkness. Or maybe I just generated this unease out of nothing more than a recognition that, yes, I was sexually attracted to the boy, and perhaps I felt guilty about that, as if there was something wrong it, as if a feeling could be wrong -- any more than a feeling could be right -- as if the standard of propriety and morality turned on what I wanted to do or thought about doing rather than what I actually did or didn't do.

What if the boy were attracted to me too? Attraction is so often mutual; we tend to be attracted to those who find us attractive. Of course the law was an issue, though a narrowing one as he approached his eighteenth birthday. A more subtle matter was the possibility that the boy, a varsity letterman at his high school, was drawn to me not because he was homosexual -- for I was quite certain he wasn't; he liked to regale me with his sometimes staggering tales of hetero hijinks -- but because he was curious about me. I was a different sort of man from the usual types who people a teenage boy's life; I wasn't heterosexual or married, I wasn't a father or a teacher or a coach, I was a writer who kept odd hours and used big words, an overeducated skeptic in button-downs and khakis who spoke his mind, a latter-day Puritan who embraced both a Puritan tradition of intelligent dissent and the local (and pagan) grant of sexual license, a believer that love of country, indeed love of any sort, was not undermined but enriched by doubt and the asking of questions.

He liked me perhaps for these reasons and perhaps for others, and because he was an adolescent male for whom the world in its entirety carried an erotic charge, like the haze of humidity that softens summer nights in the green lands east of the Mississippi where I'd grown up -- the old Union, realm of the Puritans and the Yankees -- his liking me might easily include a frisson of desire. I found this idea plausible, it would account for the thickening of suggestion, flirtation and innuendo between us and it simplified the moral calculus for me. I owed a lesser obligation, as I saw it, to a young man who would make his intimate adult life with women; he would not need the knowledge and guidance I could offer, and -- contrary to so much gay mythology, in which seducing straight men is something like finding the Holy Grail -- and slightly to my own surprise -- his putative future as a heterosexual damped my erotic inclination toward him. I had learned my lesson about straight men the hard way in college, and while I might be interested, I couldn't be tempted, not really, at least not unless I fell in love with him, but how could that happen anyway? I was not worried about that, did not even consider it as a possibility, reposed as I was behind a Maginot Line of age and sexual and cultural difference, of rationalizations and certainties.

And if he were homosexual … but of course he wasn't, what could possibly give me that idea? Just because he accused me of thinking he was, then attacked me for having these imputed thoughts? Just because the subject seemed to be brought up in almost every conversation we had, with a quickening intensity and a growing attention to graphic detail as time passed and he grew older and nearer to manhood?

I did wonder, yes, sometimes, toward the end of his senior year of high school. I wondered if he were wondering and I thought: Of course he is wondering, how could