...One of his (Gordon Lish) dictums was to write the one story you are most afraid or ashamed of. (A variation on this assignment was to write the one story you’d write if you knew you could write only one more in your life.)...
The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes by Rick Bass; Kindle Edition, 289 pages; Published June 5th 2018 by Little, Brown and Company; ASIN: B0763LHF9Y
...I was trailing a stream of heart’s blood wherever I went, but I had to keep moving...I wanted to learn, relearn, how to go after seconds, and then dessert, too: not just to survive, but to feast. And after a long time of not eating, I did begin to eat again...
There is no doubt in my mind that this book is the best writing Rick Bass has ever produced. Not that his previous efforts were at all wasted. Bass is a splendid writer. Important. Relevant. He has a great manner of speaking to his readers. But there are many reasons I believe this is his best writing ever, and for beginners I will list just a few of them:
This is a great adventure tale.
The devastating sadnesses of his divorce are inherently revealed, and his attempts at moving on with his life by dealing with it are met in relative, and not to mention, helpful detail.
Almost every chapter leads to revealing more things about writers I thought I knew and others I have never met.
What it means to be a writer of note, and why.
And finally how important food is, who you share it with, and the love involved in its preparation.
...make the measurements level; be attentive to moisture; refrigerate the dough before rolling it out. Most of all, though, don’t handle it too much, because the heat from your hands can destroy the potential for flakiness; as if there lies buried within you some curse that will ruin anything you try to hold on to for too long…
Traveling to visit his favorite writers, some of them mentors, others associates met along the way, and hauling along frozen wild meat he had harvested in Montana and other delectables in order to cook a meal for the people he appreciates and one they will never forget. The risks involved in this exercise do not remain unacknowledged as cooking in one’s own kitchen is one thing and doing it in an unknown and thus strange environment is purely another. It is a recipe for failure.
...I walk alongside him like a peer but I do not feel like a peer, I feel like a wounded comrade who is hiding his wounds and is not calling out for help. Who is pretending all is well…(I) failed at my marriage. I tried as hard as I could but failed nonetheless. And the fact that the standards were high does not diminish the heart-wrenching feeling of not reaching them.
For any reader to confuse self-pity with devastating sadness is out of touch with their feelings. And most likely fashioned from a life of denial or lack of experience with love, family, and even commitment. Rick Bass carries grief and sadness with him in these journeys that surpasses any degree of misery he may have suffered in the past. His wife of many years has divorced him, and the divorce is obviously something he never wanted and is attempting to come to grips with. Bass does not shirk away from these sad feelings, his shame and guilt for what may have been his own greatest acts of omission, and the loneliness ever present within her every absence along the way. Pretty much every story of each artist visited includes a reflection for what was, and still might have been between them, especially when tales include one of his two children with his beloved Elizabeth. Or when he visits with couples whose marriages have survived their many years together his pain lengthens into the longest days.
...One of his (Gordon Lish) dictums was to write the one story you are most afraid or ashamed of. (A variation on this assignment was to write the one story you’d write if you knew you could write only one more in your life.)...
By reading this book I have learned a few things about some people I thought I knew more, or even enough about. One is Gordon Lish. I had no idea he was ever married to Amy Hempel. That was a surprise. Bass claims Lish was. I did know Lish and Hempel were in a long-term sexual relationship. He often touted his fondness for her promiscuity and adulterous behavior with him while married to another. Through more than twenty years of friendship I understood that Gordon seemed to crave sexual relationships with married women. I came to understand it was a sort of Lish power move, and more about making the man back at home into a cuckold than anything else. Sex was admittedly the driving force behind Lish’s writing and teaching. Everything Lish seemed to be involved with in my over twenty year friendship with him had to basically do with desire, be it sex, writing, food, or drink. Yes, according to Lish, Hempel and he were great friends, but they were lovers too. And then one day he announced to me their relationship was over. According to Bass’s accounting they returned to being friends and a deeper love remains and is shared between them. But who knows what is ever true regarding something Gordon Lish says? He lies a lot in his fiction. But throughout my long relationship with him I never found him to tell me something not true, however far-fetched it might seem. He did at times refrain from sharing too much, but he told me things I bet he never told others, careful to never spill the beans over something he may have still coveted.
...The best thing about being a writer is the isolation; the hardest thing about being a writer is the isolation…
Writing is a solitary endeavor. Sedentary if you are not careful. Unhealthy in many regards. Selfish for sure. Obsessively compulsive. A balance must be made. Priorities established. Boundaries made clear. Relationships nurtured.
...John (Berger) then—in a sedan outside a restaurant, smoking a cigarette, or on a motorcycle on a county lane in the fall—one understands why he is still as powerful as he is. Such a light can never go completely out...What is the nature of greatness?...
Greatness lies in incorporating all facets of good living into a lifetime of service to a muse or calling. Timeless expressions on the page do help to extend the possibilities for being historically remembered. The revered American author Jim Harrison's ultimate sign of literary recognition was his wish for his literary works to remain always in print, and so far so good. In addition to producing good books, I think also to be historically thought of kindly requires a personality like Harrison’s that is both interesting and attractive.
...Tom (McGuane), who has been sober almost four decades, is without a drink, but possesses what is surely just as much gaiety as was ever present in days of yore, giving the impression that the mirth is surely what has sustained him, and those nearest to him, in the hard times…
I discovered Tom McGuane in 1984 in an article published by the Detroit Free Press in which his newfound sobriety was being profiled along with his latest novel Something to Be Desired. From McGuane I discovered Jim Harrison, both Michigan-born writers (as I am as well) who attended Michigan State University together (which I avoided) and spent a lifetime as friends and fellow cohorts in all types of adventures beginning with the decadent and then moving into more mature indulgences mostly involved with food. Of course, segueing into reading Rick Bass came directly from reading these two icons who were instrumental in promoting the writing of their young protege. This also resulted in my introduction to Gordon Lish who first edited Rick Bass. And for a time after becoming a student of Gordon Lish I abandoned Harrison and McGuane due to Lish’s unfavorable projection of their literary merits. Over the last couple of years however I have rediscovered the importance of both of these fine writers and have rejected the Lish premise wholeheartedly and now consider the premise perhaps resentful and definitely ill-advised.
…Instead of seeing us off, Tom (McGuane) takes us down and shows us his writing space, a stone’s long throw from the main house. It’s a refurbished old homesteader’s cabin made of big logs that are well chinked...pass through the double-paned glass French doors and into a world of books. The one-room cabin is all bookshelves, all of them filled with hardbacks. In the corner closest to the water is an old desk...
I write anywhere, and whenever I can. Occasionally, in some of our remodeled homes, I have had a so-called office or studio, but nothing fancy. When available, just a spare room with a desk and my books. A few paintings on the walls perhaps, or photographs I have taken. Like me, artists such as Patti Smith also write anywhere and whenever they can. No need for the trappings of the writers profiled in this book. Even the author Rick Bass has a writing cabin of his own nestled out in the woods. Not that I wouldn’t appreciate having a defined studio of my own, but I might find it too distracting for the typical work at hand. I have always been a bricoleur at heart, in my homes, my constructions, and in my artistic endeavors. And I intend to stay that way. During a long-ago study of the British painter Francis Bacon it was amusing to me that he basically worked in a long and narrow closet, his paintings trampled as they lay on the floor, paint splatters everywhere, and complete chaos. But Francis Bacon produced some of the greatest art expressions the world has ever known. Monkeying around with a notebook tucked under your arm seems to me the best way to go. I remember reading about Jim Harrison writing his first novel Wolf while in traction recuperating after breaking his back from a great fall. Of course, Harrison eventually got his own studio or writing space and in the end actually died in one, hovered over his desk while writing a poem. Of course, the most famous writer’s den I have ever personally been in was Ernest Hemingway’s nest down in Florida’s Key West. My guess is that even if I were one day a commercial success I would still write as I do, anywhere and whenever I can.
...I have lost my edge, and the realization not just of how hard it is to go onto the page every morning and make something new in each sentence, but of how hard it is to keep that edge. To view the world always like a hawk…
The loneliness and shame connected with divorce and having your life upended is sometimes too much to bear. Energy is often zapped and reserves spent. Cathartic measures such as this traveling feast can do much to repair the wounded psyche and shake off the dust from standing vacantly still, frozen in time, reliving the past, and feeling the pain poignant in its own revealing. Rick Bass will emerge as all good heroes do, and gallantly get on his horse again.
...When she (Joyce Carol Oates) mentions Richard Ford, I ask if she’s heard of his dead-rabbit-swerve philosophy—of how, if one is to review books, there’s no sense in reviewing a book one doesn’t like. It’s akin to driving down the road and swerving the car in order to run over a rabbit…
Finally something I can wholeheartedly disagree with. Reading a poorly written book, even a bad book, deserves more than silence. If nobody rated any book they did not like every book would have a rating of four or five stars and not be a true analysis of what is and is not good literature. Opinions do matter. And, in fairness, it does not take long to find out which reviewers we do not need to hear from or read their words of wisdom regarding writing. Richard Ford, it is gathered, only wants to read reviews about books people like. This is another reason I haven’t completely read anything by Ford since his last great book The Sportswriter. One negative review of the traveling feast pertains to Bass’s inclusion of his marital failures and feelings, and how it doesn’t seem to go along with what the book was supposedly about. So, as important as his negative review is for people like him, he was obviously wrong on its merits, but that doesn’t mean his opinion does not matter and the negative review should never have been written. The travel feast was about Bass getting his appetite back, saying thanks, observing how others age as they live and get by, and feeling grateful and blessed to have known these people along life’s way.
...“The job of the poet is to remain indignant,” Terry (Tempest Williams) says…
It is also, in contrast I might add, important to review in the affirmative, if worthy, books most people seem to despise and reject. I read a lot of books. I feel it is my obligation as a reviewer to be honest and give examples of what I like and do not like. But I go into every book wanting to love what I read. I am disappointed to the nth degree when the book fails because of its own hype, promising to be much more than it is, and relying on lies from blurbs and publisher’s bullshit in order to sell books to a public that gives way too much credence to these protocols. I remember Richard Ford a few years ago being on the wrong side of history, aligned in the vitriolic camp of Tess Gallagher, bitterly accusing her husband Raymond Carver’s original editor Gordon Lish as being too tyrannical in his cutting, and in some cases rewriting, much of what was instrumental in gaining the great fame afforded to Carver as a minimalist writer of short stories. Subsequently Richard Ford has pretty much zero credibility with me. It is with great care and personal honor that today nobody can truly or negatively affect my own work, my reputation, or my thinking for the simple fact that I don’t need them or their approval.
...As we sit at the edge of the field I do not know that in less than three weeks, the one who started it all for me, Jim Harrison, will die from a heart attack on a Saturday night, seated at his desk, working on a poem. A poet’s death...“Death steals everything except our stories,” Jim once wrote…
There is no way in which to express how much I enjoyed this book. The fact of the primary network of Harrison, McGuane, Lish, and Bass is where I really began my serious literary journey was enough to queue my interest and to eventually get down to the business of reading this book. Bass has a lot of writing left to do, and he certainly knows how to live. My bet is he ages gracefully and becomes what he cherishes most in his eldest peers.
...When you have been away for a long time from a thing you love, it feels good to get back to it...
this is an amazing piece; Bass is up there. Not talked about nearly enough (or at all…)! What's your favorite McGuane? his writing's been calling out, maybe as a more settled alternative to Harrison. Ford, yeah… he shoots himself in the foot too much (I like his early writing tho)
Thank you @paperbird. My favorite McGuane novel has to be The Sporting Club but Ninety-two in the Shade is a close second.