My Fascination with the Count

No, not Dracula, or the guy from Sesame Street – my fascination is, and has been – off and on – for about the past 30 years or so, with Count Leo Tolstoy. I was introduced to his work my freshman year at Syracuse, in a World Literature class taught by Tobias Wolff. Toby’s enthusiasm for Tolstoy was overt and infectious. Like all good teachers, he made me want to understand what it was that got him so worked up about this writer.

I don’t remember which was first, but I know we read two of Tolstoy’s works in that class – the novellas, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Master and Man. Both were concerned with the theme of death, in very different ways. My inclination is to re-tell both stories, but I’d need to read them again, in order to do the Count any justice.

Suffice it to say, something in his work, and in the little I’ve been able to learn about the man himself, spoke to me on a profound level. His writing connected me with characters from another century, on the other side of the world. They couldn’t have been more different from me, and yet, we were somehow the same. In their relationships with each other, they were exploring the same things I was trying to puzzle through, like how we do or don’t connect, and what it means to love, and be loved.

As a student of arts and sciences, I was able to hone in on empathy and compassion, and the meaning of being a member of the human race. I got steeped in this at Syracuse, not only in my literature classes, but in my side study of theatre, as well. My stepmother, the late Judy Karnes-Fuchs, was fond of saying the world was split up into poets and politicians, and that my father and I were both poets. I think she said this because she thought of herself as one of the politicians, though I think she was more of a poet than she realized.

At any rate, my mother, the late Carol Runyan Fuchs, too, was a poet (quite literally), and I followed in the footsteps of my parents. My liberalism mirrors theirs pretty closely, in that it is unapologetic and based squarely in a sort of democratic, secular humanism. Put in its simplest terms, I return to the imperfect haiku I wrote as a boy of seven: “A dog is made of/love. And so are/you. And so is a bird.”

Tolstoy’s stories are all about love. I finally took on one of his great novels, Anna Karenina, the summer after coming out of the longest relationship of my life up to that point – about eight years. I did some traveling with some friends to Portugal, the U.K. and Rome. I had the book along and devoured it. The novel changed me as I read it; walking with the characters through their lives, I felt as if I was living with them. When I closed the book, I couldn’t talk for a while. I just had to sit quiet for a time.

I’m sorry to say I can’t explain my reaction any better than this. There’s something that happens when you read something that takes you out of your own reality. My mother compared it to listening to a piece of classical music. Toby Wolff described the first time he’d read Raymond Carver’s short story Cathedral as a feeling of levitating above the couch where he'd just finished reading it. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but reading Anna Karenina did give me a sense of connectedness to the family of man, to the human race, that must be close to what people refer to as “spiritual.”

Someday, after my novels have been translated into many languages, read and loved by the multitudes, I’ll take my trip to Yasnaya Polyana, just outside Moscow, and I’ll walk the trails of the Count’s youth, ending at his gravesite. I’ll place a pebble on the tombstone and thank him, before returning home, to my own Clear Meadow, where I hope to find my wife, two boys and their beautiful families waiting for me with open arms and happy hearts.

In My Mother's Love of Great Writing, A Call to Action

I woke up this morning thinking about a line in one of my mother's letters in which she describes the writing of one of her favorites, John Gardner. She was reflecting on him the day after his death in a motorcycle accident. "You must read at least one of his books, just to find out what beautiful writing is. When I read something by him -- whether paragraphs, pages, or chapters, it's like a person who knows and loves music listening to beautiful music. Heavenly!"

I don't remember how this line made me feel when I received that letter back in September of 1982; I'd imagine it gave me a mixture of encouragement and fear. At age 19, I was expert in the writing of cliches. My mother must have read my stuff the way a piano teacher listens to a child starting lessons, or a monkey banging on the keys.

My writing began to improve when I worked with Tobias Wolff at Syracuse. Not coincidentally, this was around the same time that I was introduced to Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Chekhov, Cheever, Tolstoy and Raymond Carver -- all masters of fiction and the short story -- not to mention my teacher himself.

At that time Toby had not yet reached the level of fame he now enjoys. He was well known in literary circles, having published a celebrated short story collection called In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, his first. I believe his second book, a novella called The Barracks Thief had just been published around the time I first worked with Toby in 1981 or '82.

I don't mean to disparage or diminish the work of my high school English teachers, because I had some good ones -- Bob Button, my journalism teacher at Grosse Pointe South High, who taught me to write concisely and was the first to publish my work in the award-winning school newspaper, The Tower, Mary O'Donnell, Ugo Toppo, and Renee Landau at Harrison High, who all pushed me to do better. But Toby's insistence on making my characters believable and my writing original is what ultimately made me want to be a writer.

My mother's letter reminds me, of course, that she was my first, and arguably most significant, writing teacher. Being a voracious reader, she instilled in me, early on, the importance of reading. Her letters have brought back into stark focus that writing is something I both love and strive to do well.

I know I've told myself over these last few months not to write about writing, but I feel the need to express my intention of creating a work of fiction that is symphonic. I'd like it to be a piece that is worthy of my mother as a reader with an ear for the music of great writing.