Backstory – “The Man Next Door” by Paul Christensen

13 Monday Jul 2015

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backstory, Paul Christensen, Short Fiction, Short Story, The Antioch Review

“The Man Next Door” by Paul Christensen was published in the Summer 2014 issue of the Antioch Review. Below, Christensen reads the first few pages of his story.

The Backstory of “The Man Next Door”
by Paul Christensen

“The Man Next Door” has its origins in the row-house culture I grew up in in Philadelphia in the 1950s, post-war neighborhoods that threw together British war widows, Polish immigrants, orthodox Jews, and returning soldiers starting families in these affordable brick houses. To fit in, everyone observed strict rules of conformity–same lawn furniture on the tiny patio, same Ford or Chevy, same clothes, radio programs. But every neighborhood had its eccentric, a recluse living behind drawn curtains, who couldn’t hide from the prying eyes of neighbors. He seldom went outside, but if he did, he was the news of the day–pulling a wagon to the market, washing his windows, standing in the sun in worn-out pants and shirt, a pair of bedroom slippers, shielding his eyes from the glare. Who knew what he did inside, or how he managed to provide for himself.

I knew of several of these strange figures in my early childhood, and when I read To Kill a Mockingbird a few years later, Boo Radley leapt out as the representative of all of them. Kinder, with a bigger heart than the loonies I knew, Boo turns out to be the moral hero of Maycomb, Alabama. Harry Crome is my version of the eccentric, mysterious loner, cast among strictly conforming busy-bodies and gossips in a suburban neighborhood. I gave him all the characteristics I wish those other loners had possessed – I might have learned from them. Crome does not give in to three-inch blades of grass; he’s not afraid of a black snake in his yard. He doesn’t paint and fix things up.

He is the bane of Bill Hughes, my protagonist in the story, who lives next door to Crome. Bill has never had an original thought in his life; he is the epitome of the shallow, conforming Everyman, who has never written a word he wasn’t ordered to. He lives an ordinary, muddled life with his sensitive wife Margo, who defends the man next door as part of some higher awareness that neither of them understands. It offends poor Bill, whose resentment verges on outright jealousy. But Margo happily befriends the neighbors and bakes a pie for their anniversary, an event that Bill ruefully observes from his kitchen window. It slowly dawns on him that Margo may be right about Crome, that he might indeed represent some utterly foreign thing in his life, a cultivated, successful man, an intellectual.

Bill and Margo represent the common clay from Willy Loman to Archie Bunker; their world is narrow, their lives modest and conventional. Only Margo realizes it and can put into words how they are “as common as pancakes and instant coffee.” Bill reminds me of an older friend I knew some years ago who told me he had never been surprised by anything in his life. He said it with some measure of pride. He had avoided all the slings and arrows of misfortune, apparently, by living within his budget, balancing his checkbook, wearing drip-dry suits in the summer. He was pretty much the opposite of me, and he knew it. He found me reckless, a man eager to plunge off a cliff without checking his parachute first.

By the time the story got to the midpoint, I realized, of course, I was describing the two sides of my own personality. I was obsessive like Crome, neglectful of duties and obligations, eager to submerge into another reality to know more, to live more widely. But I was also Bill Hughes at times, cautious not to plunge too far that I couldn’t find my way back. But I also think everyone has these two contradictory impulses in them.

When my two main characters are reconciled, and Bill is willing to serve Harry Crome in a humble way, you might say I put the two sides of my nature together and found a measure of harmony between them. Perhaps the two men are soul and body, like the lofty, overbearing officer and his humble orderly in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer,” one of the most insightful short stories I have ever read.

***

Paul Christensen‘s story, “How Frank Died,” published in The Antioch Review in the Winter, 2013 issue, was listed as a distinguished mystery story in Best American Mystery Stories of 2013. He shovels snow in central Vermont much of the winter, and relaxes in southern France each summer. paul-christensen.com

© The Antioch Review 2015

The Story Behind the Story – He Remembered His Life by Zane Kotker

29 Friday May 2015

Posted by Grace Curtis in Fiction, The Story Behind the Story

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Antioch Review, Fiction, Short Fiction, Short Story, The Antioch Review, Zane Kotker

In Zane Kotker’s “He Remembered His Life,” in the Spring 2011 issue of The Antioch Review, an old man in a foreign country remembers his life.

“He Remembered His Life” belongs with those stories that cut close to the life of the writer. In 2005 I attended a residency at Fundación Valparaíso, an artists’ colony on the Mediterranean in the dry hills of southeastern Spain. My husband had died a few years before—after twenty-one years of Multiple Sclerosis. During his illness our world narrowed and darkened, as can happen with long-term degenerative conditions. When he died, I remained wrapped in the habits and emotions of care giving.

When you get to an artists’ colony every need is provided for and a congenial group of fellows gathers for conversation at dinner time. Heaven is the word. Unless you have nothing to work on. Though I had begun a novel, The Inner Sea, I’d deliberately set it aside so I could return to it with fresh eyes at the end of the month. But I had to produce something at Valparaíso, didn’t I? Nothing came to mind. I panicked. I started writing paragraphs describing my daily walks around what to me was an exotic landscape: the strange hill behind the colony, the walk through orchards to the white town on the next hill. Eventually I took a few notes on my fellow colonists.

Gradually the grace of Valparaíso fell upon me and I began to let go of my husband’s long illness and to shed the habits it had bred in me. The air became sweeter, the walk to and within the village revealed unexpected new corners, and I was living like people who had not known long illness. Then one night at dinner came the serving of squid and the report of a ghost. In the narrow bed of my handsome tiled suite, the sorrows of the life I had left came back to me. Fear and dread returned, and I heard (an imagined) voice say: She remembered her life. Then came the sense of some other sound, some ghostly sound, out on the roof beyond my window. It was only rain.

The next day I turned myself into a man and morphed the spoken phrase into the opening line of the story: “It was four days before he remembered his life.” My husband’s long illness became the short illness of the imagined man’s wife and I transferred the chronic element into that of his son. I added in what I remembered about group dynamics from my life as a ghost writer for psychiatrists some years ago, disguised my fellow artists, and there you have it.

***

After fourteen years of rejection slips, Zane Kotker was lucky enough to be taken on by the legendary Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. Her novels Bodies in Motion, A Certain Man, and White Rising were published by them. Life intervened and Gottlieb went to The New Yorker, while Zane turned to nonfiction under the name of her grandmother, Maggie Strong. Her fourth novel, Try To Remember, came out through Random House and her fifth, The Inner Sea, A Novel of the Year 100, through Levellers Press. Her short stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sun, and other journals. She won a fiction grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Must Read 2012 Award from the Massachusetts Center for the Book.