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Roger Burke Dooley
AS I WRITE, MY FOURTH NOVEL,
GONE TOMORROW, has just been published. At such a time,
of course, no writer can help feeling proud, excited, and well
disposed toward all the world-but in this particular instance
my own personal satisfaction goes far deeper than ever before.
What makes this the unique milestone of my writing career so
far is that it marks the ultimate realization of the boyhood
dream that has been closest to my heart ever since I was fourteen,
a sophomore in high school.
It was then that I first vaguely
conceived the grand ambition of trying to record in fiction the
world in which I was growing up, the whole complex network of
families, most of them Irish, known to each other for generations,
since their early years in Buffalo's colorful old First Ward.
At first, these over-confident plans got no further along than
long, penciled synposes (some of which I still have), apparently
setting down everything that I had ever heard of happening not
only to all my own relatives but to every one else they knew.
(And indeed, some novels do appear to have been written that
way!) The results, needless to say, read like utter chaos--an
endless jumble of uncharacterized names and totally undeveloped
narrative elements. Only the raw material was there.
By college years (at Canisius),
the synposes, now typed, had grown noticeably simpler, as the
realization gradually dawned that just because things happened
in a certain way in real life, they did not necessarily make
good fiction; in fact, usually quite the reverse is true. I began
to see that a number of roughly similar people whose actual lives
offered perhaps only one phase of interest to me might far better
merge into one character more significant and typical than any
one of the original prototypesa new person, in some ways like
all of them, yet different from any individual. (One unpredictable
consequence of this process has been the eagerness with which
Buffalo readers who recognize, or think they do, some real incident
or idiosyncrasy, promptly jump to the conclusion that the whole
character must be quite literally "taken from" this
or that person-though any writer of fiction could tell them that
it is never that simple.)
By the same method of trial
and error, I also learned that events unrelated in life can be
brought together in fiction but only by a carefully linked chain
of cause and effect firmly grounded in character and environment-never
by chance, accident, coincidence or other heavyhanded contrivance.
Likewise, the more bizarre, striking or obviously dramatic an
incident (the very kind that had at first attracted me), the
less usable it is in realistic fiction, which must always be
more consistent and probable than life to maintain its illusion.
Thus, by the time I graduated from college, the once unwieldly
mass of material had been molded into the shape that it has essentially
retained ever since. Perhaps a better metaphor would be to say
that it had "crystallized," for, of course, much of
the process of elimination and selection is subconscious. By
some sure intuition, I knew when I had arrived at the master
plan which would serve me from then on. My various fictitious
families had taken on the relationships, even the names, that
they still bear. Thus I may quite truthfully say that I have
known these particular people for more than twenty years; by
now, they are far more real to me than their halfforgotten sources
or even than some of the people I see every day. All the more
mature reflections and observations that have naturally occurred
in the intervening decades have inevitably accumulated around
them, for they are my fictional epitome of the only world I feel
I know well enough to try to portray. Writing the novels, then,
has been a matter of exploring the full significance of material
long familiar, of bringing to life an interwoven imaginary detail
events I had always seen in outline-and also, of course, knowing
just when I was ready to undertake each part.
Meanwhile, an independent story,
much simpler, had occurred to me while in college and virtually
wrote itself during a few months while I was getting my Master's
degree at the Catholic University of America. This became my
first novel, Less Than the Angels (Bruce, 1946). Its critical
and popular success immediately encouraged me to start turning
my more ambitious project into reality. Though I had always visualized
the whole thing as one long novel, experience soon proved that
for proper development of all the incidents and story lines,
complete with period atmosphere and psychological development,
not one but several novels would be required. Thus it has become
a trilogy: Days Beyond Recall (Bruce, 1949) which took
the Shanahan family and their connections from the turn of the
century through World War I, The House of Shanahan (Doubleday,
1952), which carried them to the heights of the Roaring '20's,
and now at last, Gone Tomorrow (Bruce, 1960), which follows
them from 1929 through 1932. (But since I still have folders
of unused equally firsthand material covering the earlier generations
from the 1870's through the 1890's, the trilogy may yet turn
into a tetrology.)
In college, I turned out a
good deal of well-received material for the newspaper, magazine,
and yearbook, but anyone who has taught college knows how common
are such youthful displays of apparent talent, and how little
they mean in terms of a professional future. The uncritical admiration
of non-writing friends can scarcely be taken as real encouragement,
for to them, as Dr. Johnson said in likening a woman preacher
to a talking dog, the wonder is not that it was done well but
that it was done at all. Until the reception of Less Than
the Angels, I had no way of knowing whether I was on the
right literary track, or on any at all. Though I occasionally
used to read books on fictional technique (which generally only
confirmed what I had already figured out for myself), I never
took any writing courses, and I have also refused to teach any,
convinced as I am that any real writer will eventually learn
to solve his own problems in his own way. I have certainly never
tried to follow the style or methods of any other writer, but
I have always found myself most drawn to novelists like Jane
Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Proust, and Marquand-all ironic
observers of recognizable social milieux, rather than to Joyce,
Hemingway, Faulkner, and other literary gods of my generation,
who have created their own subjective worlds (often with such
stylistic magic that one almost forgets how much of life has
been left out).
On a more practical level,
of course, I had to face the problem of earning a living. Not
many writers in modern America can hope to live comfortably on
their creative efforts alone, nor have I ever expected to do
so (not even in the first flush of success, when I was twenty-six).
Of the available alternatives (other than temporary grants from
foundations), the two commonest are teaching, usually on a college
or university level, and some sort of commercial writing. To
me, there can be no comparison between the two. I cannot imagine
anything drearier, or more destructive to creative talent, than
having to spend one's time and energy grinding out TV commercials,
advertising slogans or articles of no importance, or tailoring
scripts to suit the sponsor, producer or star. To me, teaching
and writing offer a refreshing change from each other, and I
am equally happy in both.
This brings me to another reason
for my satisfaction in the completion of Gone Tomorrow-I have
succeeded in disproving the popular academic myth that the extensive
scholarly research required for a Ph.D. is bound to stifle or
kill a writer's creative ability. This is sheer nonsense-dangerous
nonsense, at that-spread, I would suspect, largely by those who
have never succeeded in either field. I hope my own experience
may serve to encourage young writers majoring in English not
to be frightened away by this bugbear from graduate work or college
teaching, where the creative-minded are needed more than ever.
During the three years of exhaustive
(and exhausting) work I put into attaining the doctorate the
hard way (one year of residence, two of working on the dissertation
in absentia while teaching in New York), it is true that
I dared not take the time for any extended fictional effort.
In fact, when the Knights of Columbus fellowship which had enabled
me to get my Master's at the Catholic University was renewed
on my application eleven years later, I temporarily put aside
the novel which I had begun, in order to concentrate entirely
on the degree. As my dissertation was on The Catholic in the
Eighteenth Century Novel (CUA Press, 1956) possibly my own
experience as a novelist may have helped me to evaluate, analyze
and trace essential patterns in the many-volumed sagas of suffering
sensibility that supplied the circulating library trade of two
centuries ago; but the austere, impersonal, objective style in
which scholarly conclusions are to be couched is, of course,
the very opposite of the warm, vivid concreteness at which the
creative writer aims.
However, just as I had written
the first draft for Less Than the Angels while
getting my Master's (inspired by the example of Jane Austen,
my thesis subject), so, while struggling toward the doctorate,
I continued to review books and films for various magazines and
also worked on a three-act play, which, even if never produced,
still gave me the creative outlet I needed at the time. Then,
too, throughout these years, new impressions and ideas for the
novel constantly occurred, to be jotted down and filed away for
future reference. When I finally attained the Ph.D. in 1956,
I lost no time in returning to my real love, fiction. By way
of immediate practice, I tried a short story based on a character
from the novels, sold it to a magazine, and was encouraged to
believe what I had felt all along, that I had not lost whatever
ability I had ever had.
Thus the demands of the doctorate
had done me no discernible harm, and in my other profession the
degree, of course, has made all the difference. It brought an
immediate promotion in the graduate school of St. John's University,
Brooklyn, where I was then teaching, and ultimately made possible
my appointment in 1960 as full professor and chairman of the
English department at the new Queensborough Community College,
sponsored by the State and the City of New York. As a by-product
of the dissertation, I came across a decidedly off-beat subject
for a scholarly article, Penelope Aubin: Forgotten Catholic
Novelist, which appeared in Renascence. My researches
also provided material for several more such articles, from which
only more pressing writing projects have kept me.
After getting the degree, it
took me nearly three years more to finish the novel Cone Tomorrow,
but this 1 blame largely on the fact that I was teaching in two
colleges, St. John's and City.
Though I still return to Buffalo
several times a year, to visit my mother and friends there, I
now live alone in an apartment on Manhattan's east side, on what
I think is one of the loveliest streets in New York, East Seventieth,
in a beautifully shaded block lined with Georgian town houses
in varying shades of rosy brick. Of the myriad attractions of
New York, undoubtedly the main one for me is the theatre, which
has been a lifelong interest. My almost equally keen interest
in the screen has enabled me for the past several years to serve
as film critic for Marriage magazine.
I am also president of the
Shakespeare Club of New York, active in the English Graduate
Association of New York University (where I took a second minor
for the doctorate), and just recently, sponsored by biographer
Marchette Chute, I have joined the P.E.N. Club-so perhaps at
last I may get to know some other writers. But no matter how
my acquaintance here may widen through the years, I shall probably
continue to convey my fictional observations in terms of people
like those with whom I grew up. As Willa Cather observed, a writer
does not choose his material, he adjusts himself to it, since
it was basically absorbed before he was ten. But then, too, as
Miss Cather herself was advised by Sarah Orne Jewett, "How
well you must know the world before you can begin to write about
the parish!"
Originally
published in The Book of Catholic Authors, Walter Romig,
Sixth Series, 1960.
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