Page 62 - WTP VOl. XII #1

ON THE INVISIBLE PALM OF GOD: A MEMOIR
Andre Jules Dubus II was at this time hardly known outside of tight, respectful literary circles. He had authored a novel, The Lieutenant, and three collec- tions of stories, Separate Flights, Adultery and Other Choices, and Finding A Girl In America. His short fiction, prior to being collected, had been published in The New Yorker and Playboy, and in numerous liter- ary quarterlies, including Ploughshares and Sewanee Review. Still, the fame that had come to other writers with similar accolades eluded Andre, primarily because he was not one to play political games or “network”—a word he hated—or to acquiesce to an editor’s poor judgment just for publication. He wasn’t a darling of any particular literary set.
He was forty-five when I met him: he was making a thin salary and living in campus faculty housing with his wife, Peggy Rambach, also a writer and Bradford professor, and their infant daughter Cadence. He’d had two previous marriages and was the father of four more children. He taught five classes per semes- ter—an overwhelming amount of work for someone who is engaged, also, in a serious life of art. Andre had been offered a great deal more money, he once told me, to teach at Princeton, where his teaching load would have undoubtedly been more respectful of his fiction—but he’d turned it down because Haver- hill, this old northeastern mill city, was his home now, a place of friends and family that he loved, and it was also where much of his material was born. And Andre was a man who relied on a set routine to steady him, to give him a bedrock for his art and life.
He’d come from Cajun country, born to a Cajun-Irish family in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1936. He grew up in nearby LaFayette and attended a Christian Broth- ers school and then McNeese State College, where he’d graduated in 1958 as a journalism and English major. He married his first wife, Patricia Lowe, soon after, and went into the Marines, rising to the rank
of captain. In the early sixties, with Pat and their children—Nicole, Andre III, Jeb, and Suzanne—he moved from California to Iowa City, IA, to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He wrote in Hollywood for a time—developing, with Burt Lancaster, a screen adaptation of The Lieutenant; the film was never completed. The job at Bradford College came in 1966.
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During these first winter afternoons in 1982 we read 55
An Excerpt
our stories aloud in Seminar D, and this new teacher of mine listened, sitting at the center of the front table, his head tilted back, his hands hanging by his sides, his eyes closed. Often, he got up and stepped quietly around the classroom; one of my first memo- ries is of Andre standing, leaning against one of the cement window-columns, wearing the worn denim jacket, as a student read her story aloud. Andre patted his beard and looked at the light on the iced- over water. His eyes narrowed and he closed them and bowed his head with concentration. He took our work seriously, and because of his interest and concentration we took our writing seriously, also: you always felt, when you workshopped, that the professor’s full attention was with you.
When he was jotting something on the board for us to remember, he held the stick of chalk carefully,
as if a little unfamiliar with it, as if wielding some fine, foreign instrument. As you watched him you quickly understood that, for all his bawdy humor and frequent profanity, he was also deeply sensitive, thoughtful, empathetic. His eyes were green-wet, alive with emotion. A student asked, in one of our first classes together, why fiction stories often had such grim endings. Andre spoke of the false impulse, frequently demonstrated in American storytelling and particularly in American cinema, to come up with a “positive” ending rather than the ending the characters had earned; many times writers surren- dered to the pull of entertainment, he said, instead of following the natural psychological and active progression of their characters. He took up the chalk and wrote on the board: All art is affirmative, because it ensures that we can endure being mortal. He looked at the quote a moment. “That’s me,” he said, quietly, a little distracted by his thoughts. “I said that.”
He could be seriously reflective; he could sometimes explode with joy and laughter. He could be quickly, visibly angry—at concepts, politics, sophistry: his expressive eyes did nothing to hide the tumult of emotions within him. In these first years that I knew him there was a restless undercurrent in him, a kind of separation from the present that he longed for, a need to get back to the internal world he was creating. He was a gifted and enthusiastic conversa- tionalist. He was respectful of others by nature and often seemed in awe of those he met—of anyone, college janitor or college president: he engaged quickly with them, asked intelligent, probing ques-
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