In the early 1960’s I was a very young writer, married with children, as they say, and an undergraduate student at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A blue-collar boy from New England, I was unable to locate the sources and techniques for my fiction among the writers who surrounded me then — Reynolds Price at Duke, the ghost of Thomas Wolfe at Chapel Hill, Flannery O’Connor in Georgia, Peter Taylor in Virginia, and the spirit of Faulkner that hung like a solemn miasma everywhere kudzu grew (and it grew everywhere). Walker Percy was intriguing, but too High Church, too cerebral and cool, for me to learn from, and Miz’ Welty seemed sui generis, especially to an angry young man from New Hampshire.
So, like many another lonely insecure isolate before me, I started a literary magazine, Lillabulero, with a fellow isolate from the north, the poet William Matthews, and gathered together a batch of similarly alienated young writers then in Chapel Hill — Newt Smith, David Mallison, and Doug Collins — and imagined that we were a movement, a budding school, a not-so-loyal opposition to the then prevailing theories and practices of writing, which is to say, to the New Critics and their fashionable acolytes. The combination of our presence in North Carolina and operating a magazine and, in time, a small press, inevitably awakened us to the history of the recently deceased Black Mountain College, which in turn alerted us to Black Mountain Review, Jonathan Williams’ Jargon Books, the meistersinger Charles Olson and his round table, at which sat people like Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones, Joel Oppenheimer, and Denise Levertov, among others; and a few younger knights and outriders as well, Fielding Dawson, Paul Metcalf, and also a page our own age named Michael Rumaker, who wrote stories that made us all re-think what a story was supposed to do. And gave us the liberty to try it that way ourselves.
There were only a few of those Rumaker stories available to us-in old copies of Black Mountain Review, in LeRoi Jones’ anthology, The Moderns, and now and then in early issues of Evergreen-Review, until 1967, when Grove Press published an entire collection of them, called Gringos and other stories. These stories we young turks in Chapel Hill passed eagerly on to one another and recommended passionately to our more knowledgeable friends, saying, “Read this guy Rumaker, he’s doing something with narrative, something with American speech, something with America, that nobody else seems to be doing!”
In a surprisingly short time, however, the book was out of print, and new stories by Michael Rumaker were nowhere to be found; we scattered, Lillabulero folded; time passed and fashions changed. But I have never forgotten the excitement those stories brought us, the clarification of possibility and validation of attention they offered me and a few cohorts back then in the mid-Sixties. I am sure that Michael Rumaker had no idea of the existence of this enclave of devotees in the groves of North Carolina academe, but it might have cheered him somewhat if he had, since so few other readers at the time seemed capable of appreciating his work.
Not that it was especially difficult or obscure; quite the opposite — it was frighteningly simple and direct, as accessible as a kick in the shins. Twenty years later, when the literary media discovered “minimalism,” and ”dirty realism,” enshrining in the process excellent writers like Ray Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff, along with a galaxy of considerably lesser lights, I wondered why no one thought to re member the stories of Michael Rumaker, whose techniques and focus points were not all that different and whose stories were driven by the personal to a far greater degree than any of those later-comers, except possibly Carver, Ford, and Wolff. One might have pointed to Fielding Dawson’s stories of the 1960’s and 70’s as well, if one were interested in naming precedents for what has become the dominant mode of contemporary American short story writing.
Voice? Rumaker’s and Dawson’s sometimes seemed to be all voice, in-your-ear lower-middle-class American males, flattened and saddened by disappointment, holding off depression with self-mockery and throw-away jokes. I re-read these Rumaker stories, and I hear the clear tones of a guy who’s an awful lot like those boozey strugglers and stragglers Carver, with such consummate artistry, has ennobled. The furtive friendships and quick pick-me-ups that pass for intimacy in a Rumaker story look oddly familiar to me-when I follow one of Richard Ford’s protagonists around the Montana outback. And the pained inarticulate longing for transcendence that drives Rumaker’s characters into the desert, into lonely bars, out onto the highways of rural America, remind me of Tobias Wolff’s solitary strays.
What’s happening is that the rest of us have finally caught up with a tradition in American story-telling that Michael Rumaker seems to have plugged into thirty or more years ago, a tradition that goes back through Nelson Algren to Sherwood Anderson and before him to Stephen Crane. In Rumaker’s essay “The Use of the Unconscious in Writing,” he says. “The physical can be made to yield psychic responses.” Which may be little more than a useful, perhaps neo-Freudian, variation of William Carlos Williams’ dictum, “No ideas but in things.” But then he goes to work on the physical itself, how one must present it in fiction in order to make it yield those psychic responses: “To get the thing there, in the words, with that same swift heightening, that sharp penetration, which strikes meaning from an object. But that the object remain the object, stated as such, with the same spareness and preciseness which is the heart of intuition. That the object be allowed to yield its meaning but not be despoiled. That is, not used simply for self-expression.” To wit, “The Truck” and “The Pipe” and the phone booth in “Exit 3.”
This, then, is no easy symbolism, no romantic ego-centered displacement of the world for meaning but rather a tender affection for the world that when focused on the objects that fill it, releases psychic force, i.e., emotion, with the clarity, power, and rightness of intuition. In his best stories, and there are half-dozen here, Michael Rumaker shows us the way. Consequently, it’s a humbling pleasure to be able to read them again and to share them with friends who may not have been around Chapel Hill in the 1960’s or weren’t regular readers back then of Black Mountain Review and Evergreen Review. One can only hope now that the existence of this collection will prompt new fiction from Michael Rumaker, who I understand is alive and quite well in Rockland County, New York, and that it encourages a publisher to make a book of it, for him and for us.