Tinkers
George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house.
He had built the house himself—poured the foundation, raised the frame, joined the pipes, run the wires, plastered the walls, and painted the rooms. Lightning struck once when he was in the open foundation, soldering the last joint of the hot-water tank. It threw him to the opposite wall. He got up and finished the joint. Cracks in his plaster did not stay cracks; clogged pipes got routed; peeling clapboard got scraped and slathered with a new coat of paint.
Get some plaster, he said, propped up in the bed, which looked odd and institutional among the Persian rugs and Colonial furniture and dozens of antique clocks. Get some plaster. Jesus, some plaster and some wires and a couple of hooks. You’d be all set for about five bucks.
Yes, Gramp, they said.
Yes, Dad. A breeze blew through the open window behind him and cleared exhausted heads. Bocce balls clicked out on the lawn.
Noon found him momentarily alone, while the family prepared lunch in the kitchen. The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment, the floor was going to give. His useless stomach would jump in his chest as if he were on a ride at the Topsfield Fair and with a spine-snapping jolt he and the bed would land in the basement, on top of the crushed ruins of his workshop. George imagined what he would see, as if the collapse had, in fact, already happened: the living room ceiling, now two stories high, a ragged funnel of splintered floorboards, bent copper pipes, and electrical wires that looked like severed veins bordering the walls and pointing towards him in the center of all of that sudden ruin. Voices murmured out in the kitchen.
George turned his head, hoping someone might be sitting just out of view, with a paper plate of potato salad and rolled slices of roast beef on her lap and a plastic cup of ginger ale in her hand. But the ruin persisted. He thought he called out, but the women’s voices in the kitchen and the men’s voices in the yard hummed uninterrupted. He lay on his heap of wreckage, looking up.
The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing (the capped pipes never joined to the sink and toilet he had once intended to install) and racks of old coats and boxes of forgotten board games and puzzles and broken toys and bags of family pictures—some so old they were exposed on tin plates—all of it came crashing down into the cellar, he unable to even raise a hand to protect his face.
But he was nearly a ghost, almost made of nothing, and so the wood and metal and sheaves of brightly printed cardboard and paper (MOVE FORWARD SIX SPACES TO EASY STREET!), which otherwise would have crushed his bones, dropped on him and fell away like movie props, he or they facsimiles of former, actual things.
There he lay among the graduation photos and old wool jackets and rusted tools and newspaper clippings about his promotion to head of the mechanical-drawing department at the local high school, and then about his appointment as director of guidance, and then about his retirement and subsequent life as a trader and repairer of antique clocks. The mangled brass works of the clocks he had been repairing were strewn among the mess. He looked up three stories to the exposed support beams of the roof and the plump silver-backed batts of insulation that ran between them. One grandson or another (which?) had stapled the insulation into place years ago and now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues.
The roof collapsed, sending down a fresh avalanche of wood and nails, tarpaper and shingles and insulation. There was the sky, filled with flat-topped clouds, cruising like a fleet of anvils across the blue. George had the watery, raw feeling of being outdoors when you are sick. The clouds halted, paused for an instant, arid plummeted onto his head.
The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.
Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors. There were drawers with shoe shine and boot strings, broom handles and mop heads. There was a secret drawer where he kept four bottles of gin. Mostly, back roads were his route, dirt tracks that ran into the deep woods to hidden clearings where a log cabin sat among sawdust and tree stumps and a woman in a plain dress and hair pulled back so tight that she looked as if she were smiling (which she was not) stood in a crooked doorway with a cocked squirrel gun. Oh, its you, Howard. Well, I guess I need one of your tin buckets. In the summer, he sniffed heather and sang someone’s rocking my dreamboat and watched the monarch butterflies (butter fires, flutter flames; he imagined himself somewhat of a poet) up from Mexico. Spring and fall were his most prosperous times, fall because the backwoods people stocked up for the winter (he piled goods from the cart onto blazing maple leaves), spring because they had been out of supplies often for weeks before the roads were passable for his first rounds. Then they came to the wagon like sleepwalkers: bright-eyed and ravenous. Sometimes he came out of the woods with orders for coffins—a child, a wife wrapped up in burlap and stiff in the woodshed.
He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the winkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer.
George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.
The stubbornness of some of the country women with whom Howard came into contact on his daily rounds cultivated in him, he believed, or would have believed, had he ever consciously thought about the matter, an unshakable, reasoning patience. When the soap company discontinued its old detergent for a new formula and changed the design on the box the soap came in, Howard had to endure debates he would have quickly conceded, were his adversaries not paying customers.
Where's the soap?
This is the soap.
The box is different.
Yes, they changed it.
What was wrong with the old box?
Nothing.
Why’d they change it?
Because the soap is better.
The soap is different?
Better.
Nothing wrong with the old soap.
Of course not, but this is better.
Nothing wrong with the old soap. How can it be better?
Well, it cleans better.
Cleaned fine before.
This cleans better—and faster.
Well, I'll just take a box of the normal soap.
This is the normal soap now.
I can’t get my normal soap?
This is the normal soap; I guarantee it.
Well, I don’t like to try a new soap.
It's not new.
Just as you say, Mr. Crosby. Just as you say.
Well, ma'am, I need another penny.
Another penny? For what?
The soap is a penny more, now that it’s better.
I have to pay a penny more for different soap in a blue box? I’ll just take a box of my normal soap.
George bought a broken clock at a tag sale. The owner gave him a reprint of an eighteenth-century repair manual for free. He began to poke around the guts of old clocks. As a machinist, he knew gear ratios, pistons and pinions, physics, the strength of materials. As a Yankee in North Shore horse country, he knew where the old money lay, dozing, dreaming of wool mills and slate quarries, ticker tape and foxhunts. He found that bankers paid well to keep their balky heirlooms telling time. He could replace the worn tooth on a strike wheel by hand. Lay the clock facedown. Unscrew the screws; maybe just pull them from the cedar or walnut case, the threads long since turned to wood dust dusted from mantels. Lift off the back of the clock like the lid of a treasure chest. Bring the long-armed jeweler’s lamp closer, to just over your shoulder. Examine the dark brass. See the pinions gummed up with dirt and oil. Look at the blue and green and purple ripples of metal hammered, bent, torched. Poke your finger into the clock; fiddle the escape wheel (every part perfectly named—escape: the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time). Stick your nose closer; the metal smells tannic. Read the names etched onto the works: Ezra Bloxham–1794; Geo. E. Tiggs–1832; Thos. Flatchbart–1912. Lift the darkened works from the case. Lower them into ammonia. Lift them out, nose burning, eyes watering, and see them shine and star through your tears. File the teeth. Punch the bushings. Load the springs. Fix the clock. Add your name.
Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets. There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy. His wife, Kathleen, formerly Kathleen Black, of the Quebec Blacks but from a reduced and stern branch of the family, cleared aside chairs and tables and led him to the middle of the kitchen floor. She wrapped a stick of pine in a napkin for him to bite so he would not swallow or chew off his tongue. If the fit came fast, she crammed the bare stick between his teeth and he would wake to a mouthful of splintered wood and the taste of sap, his head feeling like a glass jar full of old keys and rusty screws.
© Paul Harding 2009
This story is an excerpt from the novel Tinkers by Paul Harding, Bellevue Literary Press 2009.
George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house.
He had built the house himself—poured the foundation, raised the frame, joined the pipes, run the wires, plastered the walls, and painted the rooms. Lightning struck once when he was in the open foundation, soldering the last joint of the hot-water tank. It threw him to the opposite wall. He got up and finished the joint. Cracks in his plaster did not stay cracks; clogged pipes got routed; peeling clapboard got scraped and slathered with a new coat of paint.
Get some plaster, he said, propped up in the bed, which looked odd and institutional among the Persian rugs and Colonial furniture and dozens of antique clocks. Get some plaster. Jesus, some plaster and some wires and a couple of hooks. You’d be all set for about five bucks.
Yes, Gramp, they said.
Yes, Dad. A breeze blew through the open window behind him and cleared exhausted heads. Bocce balls clicked out on the lawn.
Noon found him momentarily alone, while the family prepared lunch in the kitchen. The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment, the floor was going to give. His useless stomach would jump in his chest as if he were on a ride at the Topsfield Fair and with a spine-snapping jolt he and the bed would land in the basement, on top of the crushed ruins of his workshop. George imagined what he would see, as if the collapse had, in fact, already happened: the living room ceiling, now two stories high, a ragged funnel of splintered floorboards, bent copper pipes, and electrical wires that looked like severed veins bordering the walls and pointing towards him in the center of all of that sudden ruin. Voices murmured out in the kitchen.
George turned his head, hoping someone might be sitting just out of view, with a paper plate of potato salad and rolled slices of roast beef on her lap and a plastic cup of ginger ale in her hand. But the ruin persisted. He thought he called out, but the women’s voices in the kitchen and the men’s voices in the yard hummed uninterrupted. He lay on his heap of wreckage, looking up.
The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing (the capped pipes never joined to the sink and toilet he had once intended to install) and racks of old coats and boxes of forgotten board games and puzzles and broken toys and bags of family pictures—some so old they were exposed on tin plates—all of it came crashing down into the cellar, he unable to even raise a hand to protect his face.
But he was nearly a ghost, almost made of nothing, and so the wood and metal and sheaves of brightly printed cardboard and paper (MOVE FORWARD SIX SPACES TO EASY STREET!), which otherwise would have crushed his bones, dropped on him and fell away like movie props, he or they facsimiles of former, actual things.
There he lay among the graduation photos and old wool jackets and rusted tools and newspaper clippings about his promotion to head of the mechanical-drawing department at the local high school, and then about his appointment as director of guidance, and then about his retirement and subsequent life as a trader and repairer of antique clocks. The mangled brass works of the clocks he had been repairing were strewn among the mess. He looked up three stories to the exposed support beams of the roof and the plump silver-backed batts of insulation that ran between them. One grandson or another (which?) had stapled the insulation into place years ago and now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues.
The roof collapsed, sending down a fresh avalanche of wood and nails, tarpaper and shingles and insulation. There was the sky, filled with flat-topped clouds, cruising like a fleet of anvils across the blue. George had the watery, raw feeling of being outdoors when you are sick. The clouds halted, paused for an instant, arid plummeted onto his head.
The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.
Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors. There were drawers with shoe shine and boot strings, broom handles and mop heads. There was a secret drawer where he kept four bottles of gin. Mostly, back roads were his route, dirt tracks that ran into the deep woods to hidden clearings where a log cabin sat among sawdust and tree stumps and a woman in a plain dress and hair pulled back so tight that she looked as if she were smiling (which she was not) stood in a crooked doorway with a cocked squirrel gun. Oh, its you, Howard. Well, I guess I need one of your tin buckets. In the summer, he sniffed heather and sang someone’s rocking my dreamboat and watched the monarch butterflies (butter fires, flutter flames; he imagined himself somewhat of a poet) up from Mexico. Spring and fall were his most prosperous times, fall because the backwoods people stocked up for the winter (he piled goods from the cart onto blazing maple leaves), spring because they had been out of supplies often for weeks before the roads were passable for his first rounds. Then they came to the wagon like sleepwalkers: bright-eyed and ravenous. Sometimes he came out of the woods with orders for coffins—a child, a wife wrapped up in burlap and stiff in the woodshed.
He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the winkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer.
George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.
The stubbornness of some of the country women with whom Howard came into contact on his daily rounds cultivated in him, he believed, or would have believed, had he ever consciously thought about the matter, an unshakable, reasoning patience. When the soap company discontinued its old detergent for a new formula and changed the design on the box the soap came in, Howard had to endure debates he would have quickly conceded, were his adversaries not paying customers.
Where's the soap?
This is the soap.
The box is different.
Yes, they changed it.
What was wrong with the old box?
Nothing.
Why’d they change it?
Because the soap is better.
The soap is different?
Better.
Nothing wrong with the old soap.
Of course not, but this is better.
Nothing wrong with the old soap. How can it be better?
Well, it cleans better.
Cleaned fine before.
This cleans better—and faster.
Well, I'll just take a box of the normal soap.
This is the normal soap now.
I can’t get my normal soap?
This is the normal soap; I guarantee it.
Well, I don’t like to try a new soap.
It's not new.
Just as you say, Mr. Crosby. Just as you say.
Well, ma'am, I need another penny.
Another penny? For what?
The soap is a penny more, now that it’s better.
I have to pay a penny more for different soap in a blue box? I’ll just take a box of my normal soap.
George bought a broken clock at a tag sale. The owner gave him a reprint of an eighteenth-century repair manual for free. He began to poke around the guts of old clocks. As a machinist, he knew gear ratios, pistons and pinions, physics, the strength of materials. As a Yankee in North Shore horse country, he knew where the old money lay, dozing, dreaming of wool mills and slate quarries, ticker tape and foxhunts. He found that bankers paid well to keep their balky heirlooms telling time. He could replace the worn tooth on a strike wheel by hand. Lay the clock facedown. Unscrew the screws; maybe just pull them from the cedar or walnut case, the threads long since turned to wood dust dusted from mantels. Lift off the back of the clock like the lid of a treasure chest. Bring the long-armed jeweler’s lamp closer, to just over your shoulder. Examine the dark brass. See the pinions gummed up with dirt and oil. Look at the blue and green and purple ripples of metal hammered, bent, torched. Poke your finger into the clock; fiddle the escape wheel (every part perfectly named—escape: the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time). Stick your nose closer; the metal smells tannic. Read the names etched onto the works: Ezra Bloxham–1794; Geo. E. Tiggs–1832; Thos. Flatchbart–1912. Lift the darkened works from the case. Lower them into ammonia. Lift them out, nose burning, eyes watering, and see them shine and star through your tears. File the teeth. Punch the bushings. Load the springs. Fix the clock. Add your name.
Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets. There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy. His wife, Kathleen, formerly Kathleen Black, of the Quebec Blacks but from a reduced and stern branch of the family, cleared aside chairs and tables and led him to the middle of the kitchen floor. She wrapped a stick of pine in a napkin for him to bite so he would not swallow or chew off his tongue. If the fit came fast, she crammed the bare stick between his teeth and he would wake to a mouthful of splintered wood and the taste of sap, his head feeling like a glass jar full of old keys and rusty screws.
© Paul Harding 2009
This story is an excerpt from the novel Tinkers by Paul Harding, Bellevue Literary Press 2009.
Narrated by Brent Robison
Narrated by Brent Robison
POST RECITAL
TALK
TN: The author of Tinkers, Paul Harding, is joining us by phone from his home in Long Island.
BR: Hello Paul, we’re very glad to have you on The Strange Recital.
PH: It’s a great pleasure to be here and speak with you.
TN: Hi Paul, and a very belated congratulations on winning the Pulitzer!
PH: Yeah thank you. It’s really still quite strange.
TN: I understand what happened was unusual: a first-time novelist from a very small publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. So it’s been a decade now since the book came out. Are you still getting a lot of requests for appearances and such?
PH: Yeah, it’s still a book that people discover by word of mouth and that’s hand-sold in independent book stores, and so there’s this lovely, steady state of people discovering it, and then being asked to do all sorts of interesting things at libraries and podcasts. It’s a community level book so I get asked to do a lot of interesting kinds of readings—you know, kind of outside of the normal “just stand up in front of a podium and do a book store reading.” So yeah it’s great. It’s really wonderful.
BR: Well, I enjoyed being able to narrate the opening of your book—impersonating you, it could be said. Not that I’m so presumptuous, but… identity is a very malleable thing—perhaps all in the mind, and for me that’s one of the ideas that your book explores… we wonder if the story of Howard, the father, is real or is it all in the mind of the dying man, George? And then later, we see that Howard’s identity is changeable—not to say too much here, because I don’t want to give away the story, but then there’s also always that fuzzy borderline between the author and his characters. So how important were these identity questions as you were writing the book?
PH: I really thought of all of the characters as having their own individual consciousness but then, just aesthetically, the way the book elaborated itself, there ended up being this larger, collective, familial consciousness in which the different characters in the family were co-extensive, I guess you could say—they permeated one another. I read a lot of Hegel and Husserl you know, and the whole idea that people’s absences are as elaborate and precise as their presences and so whenever anybody was experiencing something, whether it was a dream or an hallucination, or whatever—on any level of the narrative I just considered it to be true while it was happening. So it was all very experiential.
TN: Yeah—family, dreams, absences—I’m sure you had it all there from the start, but what inspired you to write this story about men and their families in New England of a bygone era?
PH: It’s one of those great instances where the material presented itself to me, so I didn’t invent it or think it up. The seed, or the germ for it were just these old, apocryphal, fragmentary stories that my maternal grandfather used to tell me and my brother and my cousins, just about his life, having grown up in Maine in the twenties. So my grandfather’s father did have epilepsy and left my grandfather’s family when my grandfather was twelve, and whenever we’d ask my grandfather to elaborate on these stories he would clam up. The consequence of that is that his reluctance of course made those stories all the more irresistible. So I just took all those little premises—you know, just about him being twelve and his father being epileptic, you know like all those little factual seeds—you could maybe fill, like a 3 by 5 index card, and then I’d just write each factual sentence down and imagine the next sentence, and then the next and the next, and just let it elaborate itself that way until the fictional, or imagined versions of the facts ended up achieving their own kind of critical mass.
BR: Yeah, well one thing I find really interesting about Tinkers is that it’s about men, fathers and sons, and it explores their dysfunctions, but it really contains none of what might be called the “toxic masculinity” that’s so prevalent in today’s depictions of the world of males. Now the reading audience, as I understand, is mostly female, and the book’s ongoing popularity suggests that women like it. So what are your thoughts about this?
PH: Well I consider it a great privilege and honor to have so many women love the book. I also think women liked and continue to like the book because it just shows the interior lives of thoughtful characters, who… I mean I think of the men as, you know… their toughness comes from just enduring these difficult lives and there’s a strength in patience and in being thoughtful, and they really tuned in to the landscape in which they are immersed too. So I think there’s just something that in a way, at its best it just becomes non-gendered. We all have five senses and a lot of this “toxic masculinity” is cultural, not necessarily innate. Sometimes I think artists, writers get lured into writing about things that they want to contradict. The danger is that you’ll just end up making a work of art that becomes an instance of that which it means to contradict.
TN: Hmm, exactly. I’ve seen that happen in anti-war films.
PH: Oh my God, they absolutely end up being propaganda for war!
TN: Yes they do…
PH: Exactly. I think that’s right and so… I mean this is something I tell my students a lot. The perils of negative definition, you know. Don’t tell me what you don’t like. Tell me what you do like. For you have an opportunity to put something beautiful into the world. What would it look like? Because then if you succeeded at that, then that book, that work of art will in itself stand as a retort against the things that you don’t want to be in the world.
BR: Well that gets at one of the main comments I wanted to make about the book. In some ways it feels to me like the perfect piece for The Strange Recital, it’s both literary and unreal. Using language and the use of nature imagery, you’ve crafted this hallucinatory, dreamlike atmosphere throughout the book, even though it’s also entirely grounded in gritty realism, the difficulties of common lives. So it’s quite an unusual balance that questions the nature of reality through the infusion of mystery everywhere—the mystery of human consciousness.
PH: That was one of the great pleasures of writing the book, which is you know—the material sort of gives you these kind of very literal, concrete premises and then they come along with real practical implications. So this book was going to be essentially a book about an older man lying in bed, imagining his father and that was about it. So I realized it was so metaphysical that, just on this concrete level I said: “Well whatever other qualities the book has, I just have to make it so that anybody scanning through the novel and stopping on a random page and putting his finger down anywhere on the page, will land on a concrete noun or verb.” And so I actually just kept pursuing literalism, I kept just going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into imminent reality, into the fact that we are literally just bodies in time and space. It’s very pastoral and so again, as with the familial consciousness, I just decided to remove the boundaries between consciousness and the so-called outer world. I just made all the landscapes co-extensive with the characters’ consciousness, so that any description of a landscape is actually a description, or a portrait of the character who’s perceiving it.
TN: Yeah, and then there’s the way you deal with time—it’s not only about how you jump around through decades, but also that George becomes a fixer of broken clocks.
BR: Yeah. I love the quotes from an 18th-century clock repair manual, which made me even happier when Google told me that those passages were completely fictional.
PH: Yeah those are really fun parts of the book to work on. The part about George being a repairer of broken clocks was non-negotiable because my grandfather repaired antique clocks and I apprenticed with him, so then the challenge became what potentially more cliché metaphor could you have for time than clocks? So it was interesting to figure out how to use the clocks without being cliché. And the way I basically did it was the novel doesn’t make use of clocks, I have George make use of clocks. Clocks are his subject, he’s our subject—so we watch him pondering clocks. It eventually had to pull its own dramatic weight but it was fun to sort of do that text within a text kind of thing.
BR: Yeah. Well, I enjoyed your second novel, Enon, or “Ennon”—or how do you pronounce that?
PH: Ee-non. It’s the original name of the little town I grew up in on the north shore of Boston.
BR: Well it’s “None” spelled backwards.
PH: (laughs) That’s right. I know a lot of people who noted that, not including me at first.
BR: And in it the Crosby family carries on, closer to current day. But…
TN: I know, I know but if we are talking about the current day, how about Now? Paul, are you writing anything at the moment?
PH: Yeah I am actually. I’m just finishing up a manuscript of a novel that I’m tentatively calling This Other Eden, which is a line from Richard II, about a population… again it’s sort of based on, but not beholden to a true story about an island off the coast of Maine that was the site of a racially integrated community that was kicked off the island in 1912, so I’ve been writing about that and there’s some overlap—some of it takes place in the fictional town of Enon. I have my own little New England, Yoknapatawpha kind of thing going on like Faulkner you know… but you know just that idea—drink the same kind of palette and atmosphere and that sort of subject—so that should be out in the next year.
BR: Great. Well thank you Paul, this has been a really good discussion and we appreciate your time and your contribution to our podcast.
TN: Yes, thank you. And Happy New Year!
PH: Great, Happy New Year to you as well and thanks for the wonderful conversation.
SFX: click of phone hang-up
BR: 2020… I never thought we’d get here.
TN: Yes. Well I have it on good authority that time is accelerating. So watch out. Don’t blink, or everything will pass you by…
TN: The author of Tinkers, Paul Harding, is joining us by phone from his home in Long Island.
BR: Hello Paul, we’re very glad to have you on The Strange Recital.
PH: It’s a great pleasure to be here and speak with you.
TN: Hi Paul, and a very belated congratulations on winning the Pulitzer!
PH: Yeah thank you. It’s really still quite strange.
TN: I understand what happened was unusual: a first-time novelist from a very small publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. So it’s been a decade now since the book came out. Are you still getting a lot of requests for appearances and such?
PH: Yeah, it’s still a book that people discover by word of mouth and that’s hand-sold in independent book stores, and so there’s this lovely, steady state of people discovering it, and then being asked to do all sorts of interesting things at libraries and podcasts. It’s a community level book so I get asked to do a lot of interesting kinds of readings—you know, kind of outside of the normal “just stand up in front of a podium and do a book store reading.” So yeah it’s great. It’s really wonderful.
BR: Well, I enjoyed being able to narrate the opening of your book—impersonating you, it could be said. Not that I’m so presumptuous, but… identity is a very malleable thing—perhaps all in the mind, and for me that’s one of the ideas that your book explores… we wonder if the story of Howard, the father, is real or is it all in the mind of the dying man, George? And then later, we see that Howard’s identity is changeable—not to say too much here, because I don’t want to give away the story, but then there’s also always that fuzzy borderline between the author and his characters. So how important were these identity questions as you were writing the book?
PH: I really thought of all of the characters as having their own individual consciousness but then, just aesthetically, the way the book elaborated itself, there ended up being this larger, collective, familial consciousness in which the different characters in the family were co-extensive, I guess you could say—they permeated one another. I read a lot of Hegel and Husserl you know, and the whole idea that people’s absences are as elaborate and precise as their presences and so whenever anybody was experiencing something, whether it was a dream or an hallucination, or whatever—on any level of the narrative I just considered it to be true while it was happening. So it was all very experiential.
TN: Yeah—family, dreams, absences—I’m sure you had it all there from the start, but what inspired you to write this story about men and their families in New England of a bygone era?
PH: It’s one of those great instances where the material presented itself to me, so I didn’t invent it or think it up. The seed, or the germ for it were just these old, apocryphal, fragmentary stories that my maternal grandfather used to tell me and my brother and my cousins, just about his life, having grown up in Maine in the twenties. So my grandfather’s father did have epilepsy and left my grandfather’s family when my grandfather was twelve, and whenever we’d ask my grandfather to elaborate on these stories he would clam up. The consequence of that is that his reluctance of course made those stories all the more irresistible. So I just took all those little premises—you know, just about him being twelve and his father being epileptic, you know like all those little factual seeds—you could maybe fill, like a 3 by 5 index card, and then I’d just write each factual sentence down and imagine the next sentence, and then the next and the next, and just let it elaborate itself that way until the fictional, or imagined versions of the facts ended up achieving their own kind of critical mass.
BR: Yeah, well one thing I find really interesting about Tinkers is that it’s about men, fathers and sons, and it explores their dysfunctions, but it really contains none of what might be called the “toxic masculinity” that’s so prevalent in today’s depictions of the world of males. Now the reading audience, as I understand, is mostly female, and the book’s ongoing popularity suggests that women like it. So what are your thoughts about this?
PH: Well I consider it a great privilege and honor to have so many women love the book. I also think women liked and continue to like the book because it just shows the interior lives of thoughtful characters, who… I mean I think of the men as, you know… their toughness comes from just enduring these difficult lives and there’s a strength in patience and in being thoughtful, and they really tuned in to the landscape in which they are immersed too. So I think there’s just something that in a way, at its best it just becomes non-gendered. We all have five senses and a lot of this “toxic masculinity” is cultural, not necessarily innate. Sometimes I think artists, writers get lured into writing about things that they want to contradict. The danger is that you’ll just end up making a work of art that becomes an instance of that which it means to contradict.
TN: Hmm, exactly. I’ve seen that happen in anti-war films.
PH: Oh my God, they absolutely end up being propaganda for war!
TN: Yes they do…
PH: Exactly. I think that’s right and so… I mean this is something I tell my students a lot. The perils of negative definition, you know. Don’t tell me what you don’t like. Tell me what you do like. For you have an opportunity to put something beautiful into the world. What would it look like? Because then if you succeeded at that, then that book, that work of art will in itself stand as a retort against the things that you don’t want to be in the world.
BR: Well that gets at one of the main comments I wanted to make about the book. In some ways it feels to me like the perfect piece for The Strange Recital, it’s both literary and unreal. Using language and the use of nature imagery, you’ve crafted this hallucinatory, dreamlike atmosphere throughout the book, even though it’s also entirely grounded in gritty realism, the difficulties of common lives. So it’s quite an unusual balance that questions the nature of reality through the infusion of mystery everywhere—the mystery of human consciousness.
PH: That was one of the great pleasures of writing the book, which is you know—the material sort of gives you these kind of very literal, concrete premises and then they come along with real practical implications. So this book was going to be essentially a book about an older man lying in bed, imagining his father and that was about it. So I realized it was so metaphysical that, just on this concrete level I said: “Well whatever other qualities the book has, I just have to make it so that anybody scanning through the novel and stopping on a random page and putting his finger down anywhere on the page, will land on a concrete noun or verb.” And so I actually just kept pursuing literalism, I kept just going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into imminent reality, into the fact that we are literally just bodies in time and space. It’s very pastoral and so again, as with the familial consciousness, I just decided to remove the boundaries between consciousness and the so-called outer world. I just made all the landscapes co-extensive with the characters’ consciousness, so that any description of a landscape is actually a description, or a portrait of the character who’s perceiving it.
TN: Yeah, and then there’s the way you deal with time—it’s not only about how you jump around through decades, but also that George becomes a fixer of broken clocks.
BR: Yeah. I love the quotes from an 18th-century clock repair manual, which made me even happier when Google told me that those passages were completely fictional.
PH: Yeah those are really fun parts of the book to work on. The part about George being a repairer of broken clocks was non-negotiable because my grandfather repaired antique clocks and I apprenticed with him, so then the challenge became what potentially more cliché metaphor could you have for time than clocks? So it was interesting to figure out how to use the clocks without being cliché. And the way I basically did it was the novel doesn’t make use of clocks, I have George make use of clocks. Clocks are his subject, he’s our subject—so we watch him pondering clocks. It eventually had to pull its own dramatic weight but it was fun to sort of do that text within a text kind of thing.
BR: Yeah. Well, I enjoyed your second novel, Enon, or “Ennon”—or how do you pronounce that?
PH: Ee-non. It’s the original name of the little town I grew up in on the north shore of Boston.
BR: Well it’s “None” spelled backwards.
PH: (laughs) That’s right. I know a lot of people who noted that, not including me at first.
BR: And in it the Crosby family carries on, closer to current day. But…
TN: I know, I know but if we are talking about the current day, how about Now? Paul, are you writing anything at the moment?
PH: Yeah I am actually. I’m just finishing up a manuscript of a novel that I’m tentatively calling This Other Eden, which is a line from Richard II, about a population… again it’s sort of based on, but not beholden to a true story about an island off the coast of Maine that was the site of a racially integrated community that was kicked off the island in 1912, so I’ve been writing about that and there’s some overlap—some of it takes place in the fictional town of Enon. I have my own little New England, Yoknapatawpha kind of thing going on like Faulkner you know… but you know just that idea—drink the same kind of palette and atmosphere and that sort of subject—so that should be out in the next year.
BR: Great. Well thank you Paul, this has been a really good discussion and we appreciate your time and your contribution to our podcast.
TN: Yes, thank you. And Happy New Year!
PH: Great, Happy New Year to you as well and thanks for the wonderful conversation.
SFX: click of phone hang-up
BR: 2020… I never thought we’d get here.
TN: Yes. Well I have it on good authority that time is accelerating. So watch out. Don’t blink, or everything will pass you by…
Music on this episode:
19-String Cello 14: 21: 81 by Jon Rose
License CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US
Crosswire by Blue Dot Dessions
License CC BY-NC 4.0
