155: This story was conceived ...
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home,” the Preface begins
Preface
To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither)
If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
A chicken ain’t nothing but a bird.
E. B. Wallace, “A Chicken Ain’t Nothing But a Bird”
(recorded in New York, October 14, 1940, by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, including Mario Bauza, Dizzy Gillespie, Lamar Wright, Tyree Glenn, Quentin Jackson, Keg Johnson, Hilton Jefferson, Jerry Blake, Andrew Brown, Chu Berry, Walter Thomas, Benny Payne, Danny Barker, Milt Hinton, and Cozy Cole)
THIS STORY WAS CONCEIVED at Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea one evening when Albertine and I had dropped by for drinks and stayed for dinner. Al always knows what she’s going to have when we go to Corinne’s, and since she doesn’t eat fish, she always has the same thing: chicken. I study the menu, eliminating things one by one, remain undecided until the last minute, and then nearly always wind up ordering clams. During the important visit that led to my writing this story, we had been sitting at our table for a while, and I had eliminated everything on the menu but two things: chicken and clams.
“Are you having chicken?” I asked Al.
If I remember correctly, she said, “Yes.”
“Maybe I’ll have chicken too.” I said.
She said nothing, I think.
“Or maybe I’ll have clams,” I said.
She said something that I couldn’t quite make out. A waitress, Dianne, one of my favorites, arrived. Al ordered. I hesitated. Albertine said—and I’ll be forever in her debt for this—“You have to choose: chicken or clams.”
An electrifying sensation shot through me, at once frightening and exhilarating. What Albertine had said brought back to me a memory from three decades ago, when I was in the fifth grade. My work on “Take the Long Way Home” began then. Over the intervening months, the story has grown and developed in ways that I couldn’t have predicted, but it is still possible to see that it began with the memory that Al’s statement recalled.
Allow me a little of your time to explain what the memory was, how I changed its essentials, and why I altered them.
When I was in the fifth grade, I competed in two memorable contests. One was a contest to name a new elementary school in Babbington. The other was a contest for the affections of Veronica McCall. I lost both.
As I worked on “Take the Long Way Home,” I changed, among other things, the outcome of one of these contests: the name-the-school contest. In the pages that follow, I win. Why did I change the facts? To tell you the truth, I did it just to please myself. I’ve thought for nearly thirty years that I should have won that contest in the first place. Surely this is one of the motives behind any fiction: the desire to correct the errors of the past. It was easy to change the outcome, so I did.
I would have changed the outcome of the other contest if I could have, but I couldn’t. The reasons for my losing Veronica were so deeply rooted in fact, in history, in the social fabric of Babbington, that to deny them, to try to alter them, would have meant trying to create a new social history, and since that seemed like more than I could do, I decided to stick to the facts.
But what were the facts? These things happened to me in the fifth grade; at the time, I thought that the outcome had a simple cause: I had lost Veronica to a boy named Frankie Paretti. What did I know then about the social forces at work in Babbington? Only as I worked on the story did I come to realize that—in the largest sense—I hadn’t lost Veronica to any one boy. If I hadn’t lost her to Frankie, I would have lost her to someone else, because I really lost Veronica to the sweeping force of social change. As I worked, I kept asking myself, “How did it happen? Why was there such an upheaval in the social structure of Babbington that it produced the tsunami that swept Veronica from me?” Weeks passed before I understood that it was all the fault of Stretch Mitgang.
[to be continued on Friday, December 17]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 155, Mark Dorset considers Food: Preferences: Chicken versus Clams; Food: In Popular Culture; and Reality, Real and Fictional from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.