Lee K. Abbott: Author, Teacher, Friend
A tribute in two parts
Lee K. Abbott: October 17, 1947 – April 29, 2019
This memorial will appear in two parts: Mine and
— his coming soon.On Blindness: A memoriam
I read this at Lee K. Abbott’s memorial fall 2019 at the Ohio State University faculty club—by invitation from his friend and colleague Lee Martin.
In workshop one day Lee told this personal anecdote: As a small boy in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he grew up, he woke one day blind. The diagnosis: hysterical blindness.
The anecdote was remarkable for its revelation from this extraordinary teacher because he rarely revealed intimacies in the classroom but, I suspect, often did in his brilliant short stories.
I quote him on this last point from an essay he wrote in 2015 for the lit. mag Puerto Del Sol, “All stories are true stories, especially the artful lies we invent to satisfy the wishful thinker in us, for they present to us, in disguise often and at great distance, the way we are or would want to be.”
As memoir has increased in popularity both in books and movies—“A True Story” being the familiar movie tag—I think Lee would argue that fiction, written close to the bone, will likely provide the reader with a deeper look into the life and soul of the writer, but more important, the reader if the story is worth your time.
Here is Lee’s advice: “A good story should cost the writer more than time and ink.”
And since he wrote no memoir, though he did give strikingly sharp interviews, I’ve never forgotten those wise words. I think what Lee posits here is that self-revelation is key to great fiction. He might add, sharper and more eloquently, something like this, Okay, Didion, now that dame can get away with anything. He loved the counter position in any discussion. So, I give him that here. And add that his love of debate made him a devoted and damned good teacher of what many say cannot be taught and what I argue often is not taught. A lot of gabbing around the seminar table and not much instruction.
This was not Lee’s way and all of us who studied with him know this.
In Lee’s workshop and in his office and through the years of friendship with this remarkable man that began when we were both fifty: me, the student-to-be and he, my teacher-to-become. At age fifty, we were both at a pretty good perspective to make assessments of one another.
Lee K. Abbott taught me how to open my eyes, how to see what works, how to study the underbelly of how a story gets made even if I never understand the magic of its hold on my heart and mind.
That makes me think that the reason for his self-revelation about blindness that one day in workshop was stated to make us realize that blindness is key to learning. That’s how he taught and maybe even how he lived and loved:
Take away everything you think you know, read everything you can get your hands on and then search for the not-knowing way to get going on the page and in life.
Be blind so that you can open your eyes and see.
His work in both that classroom, in the privacy of his office where he did many independent studies—one with me over one full semester that stays in my heart—and in his short stories speak to his point about not only sight or the lack of it but the way to get “truth in fiction.”
Hear now his voice from one of his short stories. So many filled with images of a father, a looming figure, boozy and full of anger and advice. From “The End of Grief”:
“We looked at each other, seriously and carefully. He was my father, he expected something of me, and there was a part of me that should know it. From his bent-forward shoulders and his narrowed eyes and the quiver in his cheek, I understood that all this Bataan stuff, the horror stories and the painstaking attention to detail and the grainy, time-worn photographs, had been an expression, unmistakable as slaughter itself, of nothing so much as love and memory and death and my relation among them.”
And here we stand, in grief and memoriam, for this man, who expected something from us, who expected us to go blind in order to see.
José Saramago at end of his novel Blindness, where everyone surreally loses their sight, closes with these words at the start of a run-on sentence, when the crowd is shouting just three words: “I can see, said those who had already recovered their eyesight and those who were just starting to see, I can see, I can see, I can see, the story in which people said, I am blind, truly appears to belong to another world.”
In the darkness of loss here are Lee’s words that come from his world in “Dreams of Distant Lives”:
“The other victim the summer my wife left me was my dreamlife, which like a mirage, dried up completely the closer we came to the absolute end of us. … I had been a ferocious dreamer, drawing all I knew or feared or loved about the waking world into my sleep life.” And later in that story, our narrator says, “I think I sang, or wish I had sung, and now—in the wistful half of me that’s putting this on paper—I hear that singing again, as if I were out on the [golf] course at night, and say to myself, as a stranger, that there is a man singing over yonder, in a scratchy voice that certainly has some liquor and cigarettes in it, and that man is happy.”
I know nothing of eternity and make no assertions on that score in the face of Lee’s death, in the face of the heartbreak of absence. But I do know that Lee K. Abbott sang. He sang on paper in story after story, he sang in classroom after classroom, and his voice resonates and echoes for all of us who have known him.
I loved this man from the first moment I met him when I thought, foolishly, that I was interviewing him in his office before accepting his offer to study in his creative writing department with him and all who stand here with me to honor him.
I close with the closing words from his story “Love is the Crooked Thing,” words spoken as love song to the woman in the story: “Yes, I was holding her just as you would hold your own hope if it had heart and leg and tongue.
“At last, I said I intended to expire in that spot she imagined so completely—that spot, as I comprehended it now, where I am young and beautiful and eternally loved even though I am dead.”
Yes, Lee K. Abbott, you are eternally loved even though you are dead.
Love,
Perhaps later this summer. Living at Kendal is little like living on a Kibbutz - a lot of committee and communal work, but things ease up a bit over the summer.
Lee was teaching at CWRU in the 1970s when I was working on my doctorate there. I never took a course with him, but he clearly was a popular professor with a strong following . Your essay gives me a good sense of why that was so.