New Short Fiction By Maggie Shipstead: "Acknowledgements"
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I haven’t seen Ivy in nearly a decade now and haven’t spoken to her in longer. Really, there was only the briefest window when we were anything akin to friends, back in the first days of graduate school, before I made the surprisingly consequential misjudgment of supposing that because she kissed me once she would again. For some years she crossed my mind only rarely, if at all, though now, as I wile away the final days before the publication of my debut novel — plagued by anxiety, yes, but also aswim in preemptive nostalgia for these last hours of innocence — she flits through my thoughts with increasing regularity. In fact, it might not be unreasonable to posit that Ivy, or at least the version of her that is trapped, Persephone-like, in my psyche, is as intrinsic to the book as its very binding. Sometimes I think I wrote it for her.
The opening line goes like this: “Frankly, I’m only a joke because I decided to be.” I intended to establish tone and voice, of course, but I was also responding to something, possibly the last thing, Ivy said to me, although I am not sure she will recognize it as such, or if she’ll even read the book. I have thought of having my publicist send a copy to her agent and request that it be passed along, but in the end I would rather she find her own way to it. There was, early on, some discussion of asking her to blurb the book, as she has made a success of herself and I was rash enough to let slip that we were acquainted, but I managed (barely), with some vigorous backpedaling, to quell my publisher’s excitement and forestall what would have been some intolerably mortifying and in all likelihood unsuccessful forelock-tugging. In any event, my narrator, the writer D.M. Murphy, both does and does not believe what he says, re: jokes and our universal status as same, since he is (drumroll, please) unreliable. He is also, incidentally, me. But, at the same time, not.
The Canon According to D.M. Murphy, a novel by D.M. Murphy, is to be released this Tuesday — released, finally, from the cardboard ova in which its thousands of incarnations are currently incubating in stockrooms and warehouses around the country, released into the hands and minds of this reading public I’ve heard so much about, let loose to make its own way in the world. It’s a kind of birth, this.
There’s more to be said about Ivy, but as that word, birth, beckons irresistibly toward an origin story, I find I am compelled to digress briefly into the many births, many beginnings of D.M. Murphy. So. In the corporeal sense, I entered the world on April 11, 1980, via C-section, at Hart County General Hospital, up near the tip of Michigan’s bemittened middle finger, not far from where Hemingway spent his boyhood summers. I was Daniel Manitou Murphy on my birth certificate, Danny to my parents, Dan at school. (Yes, I hear the Nabokovian echo.) My middle name is a folly of my mother’s, albeit one I long ago embraced, and has as its referent a pair of islands in Lake Michigan: North and South Manitou, forested oblongs that, according to legend, were the Great Spirit’s memorial to twin bear cubs drowned while swimming after their mother to shore. Why my dear genetrix would bestow on her infant an epithet belonging to another mother’s dead offspring remains something of a mystery, but nonetheless I have always liked the name.
My father was an orthodontist before he retired, and my mother worked as his receptionist until they divorced, though I decided long ago that my literary alter ego should have no mother. She ran off, or possibly died — I left the details murky, but her absence is fundamental to the character.
When, five years ago, I first queried my agent (Fitzy, to friends) and sent him one of my D.M. stories, he wrote back, “The satirical elements of this are sharp and at times quite funny, but right now the story’s self-awareness isn’t developed enough. If you can get there, though, the results might be very interesting.”
This took me by surprise as I hadn’t meant the story to be satirical at all, and I did not pursue the correspondence.
At the time I was living in a part of Brooklyn that serves as a kind of voluntary gulag for writers, where gloating shoptalk is the lingua franca and attendance at dull, squeaky-microphoned barroom readings the nightly obligation, and though I wanted few things more than an agent then, I could not yield to the idea of D.M. as comic foil (nor did I grasp the eminent exploitability of the literary world’s appetite for the subversion of self). The character as I’d envisioned him was an embodiment of artistic struggle. Through him, I would take the boredoms and frustrations of my own life and from them spin the golden floss of literature, which, properly stitched and woven, would seduce my readers into feeling my own emotions as profoundly as I did. I saw myself as conducting an experiment in radical empathy, and to strip D.M. of his dignity and make him into a figure of fun seemed both a failure and, worse, a betrayal.
The character as I'd envisioned him was the embodiment of artistic struggle.
Two years passed, two more trips around the sun while I toiled in obscurity, and then, one blossom-wreathed spring morning, as I waited for my then-girlfriend Elinor’s yoga class to end so we might brunch (I had somewhere entered that phase of bourgeois adulthood in which one uses brunch as a verb), I watched through a studio window while rows of women, legs spread, bent to press their hands to the floor, lifting their spandex-clad asses in my direction. I knew they were not offering themselves to me and, in fact, that I was being a creep, but still I couldn’t help but imagine going from one to the next, pollinating. As they transitioned to Warrior Two, I imagined the consequences that would befall a man careless enough to articulate this passing fancy to his girlfriend. The poor lustful fool would fight to pull the argument from the realm of the emotional to the philosophical; he’d cling too tightly to a rational defense of the harmlessness of fantasy, the value of honesty. A whole narrative fell into my mind, delivered unto me by a dozen or so muses in Lululemon.
I texted Elinor a rain check on brunch, went home, and banged out a first draft. (I turned down other plans 4 u. Next time more warning plz, she replied, though she was appeased by a marked-down bunch of bodega roses.) Within the week I’d sent the story to a literary journal that had been previously impregnable to my charms. The editor’s acceptance email praised my wit and ruthlessness, and though I felt a twinge at his description of D.M. as a “jackass,” I was generally well pleased. I mailed a paper copy of the issue to Fitzy with a note that began, “I don’t know if you remember the work I sent you two years ago, but...” Insert here a misty montage of phone calls and emails and old-school boozy lunches, and today he resides deservedly at the top of my acknowledgements page. Fitzy of the eagle eyes and hollow leg, you saw D.M.’s potential before I did.
Speaking of acknowledgements, there is one person who does not appear in mine but perhaps should, as I have her to thank for suggesting the notional possibility of my vocation. I mean Miss Giles, my sixth-grade teacher, whose knee-length corduroy skirts and patterned tights dominated my pubescent erotic reveries. In the fall of ’91, she cooked up the idea that our class should, over the course of a school year, write novels. Perched on a stool at the front of the classroom, knees crossed and cheeks fetchingly flushed, she talked earnestly about character and suspense and scene, and every month we each slipped a new chapter between the cardboard covers of our books-in-progress. The other kids never seemed to think about their books except when due dates drew near, but I mulled mine over near constantly: while I rode in the car or played left field or sat in front of the television with my father watching the anodyne sitcoms he favored. I became crabby and secretive — “dreamy,” as my mother put it.
“It must be hormones,” I heard her telling my aunt on the phone. “I thought boys weren’t supposed to be like this.”
I went outside and hit a tennis ball against the garage door again and again, raging at her misapprehension that I was under the thrall of something so common and sordid as hormones and not, as I was, possessed by beings and stories I’d discovered while bushwhacking through the wilds of my own mind and spirit.
My best chapter followed the protagonist, a boy named Buck from Chicago (a place I had visited twice and found both terrifying and thrilling, a decadent and transgressive Cockaigne compared to my small, staid hometown), as he had braces installed by his orthodontist father. I had recently undergone said procedure myself, but whilst I had endured in gape-mouthed silence, Buck went abruptly berserk and bit off his father’s index finger. I was proud of the cliffhanger ending and my rendering of the spurting blood, but what Miss Giles praised were details I’d borrowed from life: the bright, hostile lamp poised on its steel arm above Buck’s face; his father’s hairy, overhanging nostrils and invasive, latex-covered fingers; the maddening winching together of his dentition. Miss Giles liked the chapter so much that she ascended her stool, crossed her knees, and, one heel popping idly in and out of a clog, read the whole thing aloud to the class.
A more nimble writer than I would find a subtle way to mark this moment as formative, even primal, the ur-accomplishment that would forever lie beyond the green light at the end of the dock. But I will say only this, openly and bluntly: The sound of my own words issuing from the mouth of a pretty woman brought me ecstasy such as I had not known life might contain.
“You have a real talent for writing,” Miss Giles told me when she handed back my book. As I turned toward that word — talent — like a sunflower toward Helios, she added, “Maybe you’ll be an author when you grow up.”
“Definitely,” I said. “I definitely want to be.”
“I should probably ask for your autograph now, then.” She smiled and squeezed my shoulder, triggering a puny, childish erection mercifully concealed by the mille-feuilles of wood pulp and laminate that were my desk. At the end of the day — I cringe at the memory — I handed her a sheet of lined paper with my signature carefully inked in the empty middle.
Let us skip that Rabelaisian era known as adolescence and hop jauntily to my twenty-fifth year, when I, Daniel Manitou Murphy, received my acceptance letter to a master of fine arts program in fiction writing. This particular program was not my top choice, nor, frankly, my second or third, but I was offered a nice fellowship and the opportunity to teach undergraduates and an excuse to live for two years in the Rocky Mountains, where I’d never been but where I thought I might become an intriguingly rugged version of myself. The biggest draw, though, of course, and the reason I’d applied in the first place, was that Baker Forge taught there. Baker Forge! Hero of my youth. Stubble-faced, denim-swathed pillar of literary manhood. Author of Onioning and You Only Ever Know What You Already Knew and a staggering abundance of terse but heartbreaking short stories and, of course, the much-lauded Reginald Banksman trilogy. (Though, I will regretfully own, I’ve come to conclude the trilogy is a mite overrated.)
I brooded continually over moving to New York, but at the time I lacked the courage, which made me ashamed.
When the fateful letter arrived, I was living in Chicago, the siren metropolis of my childhood that, once I began my freshman year at the University of Chicago, had quickly ceased to impress me as anything other than a disappointing gray hive of unfashionable Midwesterners. After graduation I had stuck around out of poverty and baffled inertia, living in a cheap walk-up with a guy named Gerard who’d served with me on the editorial board of our college literary magazine and had since become a paralegal, which I thought of as a woman’s job. I brooded continually over moving to New York, but at the time I lacked the courage, which made me ashamed. I worked in a downtown bookstore. I wore corduroy blazers with pocket squares and tried to the improve the customers via esoteric suggestions. “Try this,” I might say to the matron asking for a good book club book, handing her a copy of Gaddis’s The Recognitions, my arm straining at the weight. “There’s a great deal worth talking about in there.”
If she asked what it was about, I would say, “The elusive nature of truth.”
The night of the acceptance letter, to celebrate, I goaded Gerard into joining me on a bender, starting with shots at our local dive and then moving, at my insistence, in a taxi I paid for, to the lobby bar at the Four Seasons. As the waiter set down a silver tray containing three kinds of bar snacks, I said to Gerard, trying not to slur, “I feel like I’m living that moment in a short story, the one you’re supposed to write toward, after which nothing will ever be the same.”
“I think,” said Gerard, who had also applied to MFA programs but had not been accepted, “that moment is supposed to come when the character realizes something. The realization is what changes things.” He grabbed messily at the wasabi peas. “Epiphanies are internal, not circumstantial.”
“Right,” I said. “Exactly. That’s what I’m saying: I’ve realized nothing will ever be the same. My future’s just like” — I chopped at the air a few inches in front of my face — “right here.”
“Must be nice.” He opened the cocktail menu and made a show of recoiling from the prices.
“It’s on me, man,” I said, and when Gerard didn’t protest, I added, “I insist. Let’s blow some of that sweet fellowship cash. Next year when you get in somewhere, you can return the favor.”
I see now, of course, what a tiresome poseur I was and how little I knew or understood of life and art, but one of my problems has always been that I can never identify and avoid, in the moment, behavior that will come across as dickish or insufferable. I can, however, thanks to my self-critical nature (a volatile witch’s brew of blessing and curse), almost always identify my mistakes in retrospect, sometimes just moments too late, and so I live with the constant feeling that I have been tied to a post on the beach and left to face an endlessly incoming tide of shame. Though I have learned to harness the latent power of such a reliable inflow and channel it productively through the guise of D.M. Murphy, the sensation of self-recrimination remains unpleasant.
For example, I already regret the dedication I chose for my novel — “To Life” — but it has been printed thousands of times and cannot be undone. I regret that my author photo depicts me against a brick wall, eyebrows arched, in a shawl-necked cardigan, not that any of these things — wall, eyebrows, cardigan — are inherently offensive per se, but taken together they render the photo derivative and betray my hopes for consequence. I feel, sometimes, an unease when I am making such a choice, but always my ego overrides it, blinding me to a predictable outcome. This is a process I have tried and failed to subvert and so am forced to dwell with, as though with a less-than-ideal roommate. I regret thanking, in my acknowledgements, the authors who “paved the way for this work,” none of whom I’ve ever met or corresponded with and most of whom are dead. Thank you, Italo Calvino. Thank you, Roberto Bolano. Thank you, Paul Auster. Thank you, Virginia Woolf. (My editor urged me to include a woman, and Woolf is extraordinary.) Thank you, Diderot.
That night in Chicago, I felt smugly certain that Gerard would never get into an MFA and would go on being a paralegal forever. Then the following year he was accepted into the program that had been my first choice. Do I feel a pang of jealousy? I wrote in my congratulatory email. I confess that I do, though also I believe I have wound up in the right place, for me, for now. But, as it happened, he went to law school instead, and from what I can glean from Facebook, he is rich and happy in his Lake Forest mansion with his three small children and blandly beautiful trophy wife. (I present his carefully curated family images — the figures in them, as Barthes says, “anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies” — ostensibly as evidence of his rosy contentment, though I know full well everyone is a flimflam artist on social media. I myself am one. Lately, I’ve been posting every scrap and snippet about The Canon to create an impression of hubbub. I confess I have retweeted compliments. I have described myself, without cause, as “humbled,” though, honestly, what should one say?)
I remember the luxurious heft of my glass at the Four Seasons, how I waved it around as I told Gerard I would quit my job the next day, just walk into the bookstore and say fuck it to everyone and everything, since now I was going to be the one writing the books. I would be the one they put out cheese cubes for and plastic cups of wine. (“I’m really happy for you, man,” Gerard said.) Someday soon I would be staying in hotels like this, paid for by my publisher (ha), and I would sit at the bar nursing a dram after a packed reading or a symposium of some kind, and a beautiful woman would sit next to me, and we’d get to chatting, and when she asked, I would say I’m a novelist, and all women want to have sex with novelists.
"So, you want to be free to fuck your groupies? You think you're going to have groupies?"
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