Literary Serendipity

A couple of days ago I was at my friend's restaurant in Playas de Tijuana, sitting outside, drinking a cold Tecate draft beer and watching the sunset. I like to make it a point to watch sunsets over the ocean. It gives me some sort of vital energy and inspiration. There was only one other customer there, and he was inside under the palapa roof where it is nice, but there isn't a view. The man looked like a dead ringer for a younger Francis Ford Coppola, with a bushy beard, and mad, creative eyes.

As the sun began to set the man came out by my table and we both were watching the sunset. "Do you mind if I sit here with you?" he asked in a thick Eastern European accent. So we sat in silence and then he said, "Isn't it amazing, isn't it wonderful that we as humans are drawn to the beauty of nature? And that each sunset is unique?"

Marveling at the natural beauty before us we began to chat. I told him I am a writer. "Published?" he asked.
"Yes." And I went on to describe my books, then asked him where he was from.
"Croatia," he replied.
"Oh, there have some good basketball players that come from over there, don't they?" I asked.
"They used to," he replied.
"What is your name?" I asked.
"Roman."

He had lived in Rio de Janeiro and he told me that the women there were beyond the most beautiful women you have ever seen: even better than Cuban beauties. "And they fall in love with you, right away!" About ten minutes into the conversation he said, "I am a writer, and I am published too -- just not in English. This is my problem: I can speak it but I do not know the grammar very well. But I have a screenplay and I am working with the most powerful screenwriter in Hollywood. He is behind many major movie projects."

Roman told me he used to be a millionaire in the computer business in New York City until "they stole it from me" and he ended up homeless. Down and out, he wrote to the noted screenwriter and he replied. Roman ended up scraping up enough to come out to the West Coast and the noted screenwriter critiqued his screenplay, ripping it to shreds.

"He told me to get rid of my main character! I couldn't believe it!" Roman cried.

We talked about how that feels when someone gives you a stinging critique and at first you resent it deeply -- it just pisses you off. It's like someone telling you that your kid is stupid and ugly.

But then, if you really, really think you begin to realize that person did you a great favor, and they were right. And you can start the re-write and make the script much better than before. That's what F. Ray Mouton (Pamplona) did for me last year when I thought I was done with my novel. He did the same thing a few years ago with my "Brando" play, and ultimately, he was dead on and I was spurred to greater heights.

Roman then stopped the conversation and said, "Excuse me, I just want to catch the last of this sunset." Of course, I did too.

So we sat in silence and admired the glorious last rays settle over the expanse of the sea.

Walking home I thought, "It's not every day that you meet a Croatian screenwriter in Mexico."

What Freaked Out Dostoevsky

Some great writers have been driven to their craft with gale force passion due to some extraordinary event. In Dostoevsky's case, it was a near death experience so terrifying it would color his writing throughout his career.

It wasn't his first seizure at the age of nine; it wasn't the death of his mother or his violently alcoholic father two years later, but rather, after he had begun his brilliant literary career Fyodor Dostoevsky and others in the liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle, were imprisoned and then one day everything changed: they were condemned to be shot at seven o'clock in the morning of December 22, 1849.

Dostoevsky was marched out naked in the cold with twenty others and they were read the fatal words, "Sentenced to be shot!" After twenty minutes in the cold he embraced two of his friends in a final farewell. He wrote of his "last" moment, "I kept staring at a church with a gilt dome reflecting the sunbeams and I suddenly felt as if these beams came from the region where I myself was going to be in a few minutes."

But shockingly an officer ran into the square and announced that Tsar Nicholas I "in his infinite mercy" had commuted the death sentence to prison terms in Siberia. So Dostoevsky survived it but his colleagues didn't fare so well, as one became insane, some had frostbite, and others contracted fatal diseases or had nervous breakdowns.

The lives of writers today aren't nearly as challenging or strife-ridden. Most sit at their comfortable desk, in a comfortable chair churning out manufactured tales according to established formulas. This is a loss, a loss for the world, for those who take a risk and venture out to experiment with words or ideas are little appreciated and even snubbed.

Remembering Barber Bancroft

Obama was elected yesterday marking a new dawn for America. And that is a good thing. It not only raises the hopes of all American children, but the entire world.

Sadly, though, today is the fourth anniversary of the death of my good friend, Barber Bancroft. That morning, November 5th, 2004, he went to teach his eight o'clock English class at Auburn University. In ten minutes, while writing on the blackboard he said, "Oh, my God..." and his students thought he was beginning to recite a poem. Then he slumped on the floor, dead of a massive heart attack at 48.

He had written five novels but had not published any of them. I urged him to concentrate more on the business side of things and he urged me to concentrate more on my writing. We had come from two different worlds but I knew we would always be friends.

Here's what I wrote at the time:

"I met Barber over drinks at Monaghan's Erin Irish Rose pub in the French Quarter (see pic above - that's him smiling across the bar). He was a native Southerner teaching English at Auburn University and would come to New Orleans to get away and work on his novels. We had two things in common: drinking and writing, and we wiled away the hours talking, laughing, arguing and sipping.

The first time I met him he loaned me a book of short stories by Carson McCullers. I read it that night and met him the following day to return it, but he insisted I keep it. We talked about her incredible prose. We argued over Faulkner, Hemingway and the rest. He gave me lists of books to read and movies to see. Then he offered to read and critique a manuscript of mine, telling me it was "very kind" of me to allow him to do so.

Of course, I thought the reverse.

We swapped manuscripts a couple of times over the next two years. Although I'd never had a writing class, he was never condescending. If you wanted to learn, he would teach. And he was just as eager to learn from you. When we weren't discussing serious things, we were laughing most of the time. He was the one who came up with the name for my debut novel, "Jackson Squared."

One of the last things he told me was to read (Russian author) Dostoyevsky. A few weeks later, on another fateful Saturday, his wife called to say he'd collapsed and died doing what he loved most: teaching a class. My heart sunk into my belly and began to ache, as I gazed out over the carefree tourists from my French Quarter balcony.

I am grateful that he came into my life, and I will press on, missing him every day - and the world will too."

Here's what Stacy Jones, one of his students from a writing retreat wrote (on Southern-Drawl.com):

On a Sunday afternoon in June 2004, I arrive at the Hambidge Center, a retreat for artists and writers in the mountains of North Georgia. A small group of people—fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets alike—are gathered at this place to meet other like-minded individuals and to hone their respective crafts in workshops during the week.

After I take a seat near the back for the opening remarks, I notice only a handful of men present. Two of them stand out. Both look to be in their late 30s or early 40s; one black and the other white. The black man sports dreadlocks and the white man has pulled his dark hair into a ponytail that hangs down his back...

The man with the dark ponytail is Barber Bancroft. He teaches English at Auburn University and is a novelist. I come to know him because he is my fiction teacher. He ends up in a classroom with five females: me and two other twenty-somethings, a woman in her 50s, and another woman in her 70s....

After we return to the Hambidge Center, Barber invites the three of us to his studio. We sit talking about writing and life well into the night, listening to Barber's blues CDs...

After I have been accepted into the MFA program in fiction writing at The University of Memphis, I e-mail Barber to let him know, considering how he was so encouraging to me, and I tell him he is one of the best fiction teachers I have ever had.

He writes back to thank and congratulate me. Then he signs off by offering what may well be the most simple but important writing advice I have ever received: "Don't stop thinking about it. Keep filling up the pages."

...I wondered, too, if Barber would be teaching any workshops this summer, so I looked online to find his contact information at Auburn. The first thing I located, however, was an article in the "Auburn Plainsman," the campus newspaper, the headline of which read, "English Teacher Dies at 48."

Accordingly, on the morning of last November 5, Barber had just started teaching his 8 a.m. world literature class. At 8:10, he collapsed, and although his students tried to save him by doing CPR, he was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

I then found his obituary, which began, "William Barber Bancroft, of Auburn, born Aug. 9, 1956, died Nov. 5, 2004. The Lord took him home to be with Him while teaching his World Literature class at Auburn University."

There was no explanation for his death. He evidently went into cardiac arrest and died. When I last saw him, he looked healthy. It was scary to think that anyone, absolutely anyone, could share a similar fate. I'm sure the day seemed to Barber like any other; he didn't know he was going to die when he went to teach that morning.

And in that moment everything felt full circle: here, again, more than ever, surged the lesson of not waiting until it is too late.