A Special Tribute to a Living Legend

There are writers and then there are legends.

Though James Lee Burke is the former, he has most certainly become the latter.

Not only is Mr. Burke one of my favorite writers, but he’s been a huge influence on me, and a great source of inspiration.

Recently, he was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the much-deserved, distinguished Grand Master award. In honor of this occasion, I’ve asked my friend and his daughter, Alafair Burke, to share with us her excellent essay about her dad and my hero. Here it is:

You will never hear James Lee Burke speak at a conference about how to market a novel, how to brand one’s work, or the importance of co-op money to the success of one’s sales. My father talks about writing not as a commercial enterprise, nor even as a craft or as art, but as a destiny.

If one looked only at early and recent years, his career might indeed feel inevitable. He published his first short story when he was nineteen years old and completed his first novel when he was twenty-three. Upon the publication of his debut, Half of Paradise, the New York Times Book Review declared him “a writer to be taken absolutely seriously.” By the time he was thirty-four, he had published two more novels, To the Bright and Shining Sun and Lay Down My Sword and Shield. Now, nearly forty years later, he is the best-selling author of twenty-seven novels and two short-story collections. He is a two-time winner of the Edgar Award. His flawed but noble New Iberia sheriff’s deputy, Dave Robicheaux, has been portrayed on film by two of a generation’s best actors, Alec Baldwin and Tommy Lee Jones.

But to equate writing as a destiny with the inevitability of a career is to ignore the years between the beginning and the recent and to conflate obsession with fate. My father published three novels by my second birthday, but The Lost Get Back Boogie, which was supposed to be his fourth, was rejected more than 100 times over nine years. And, at least as he describes it, the book wasn’t merely rejected. It was trashed. Literally. Mutilated pages would be returned in the mail, marred by whisky rings, cigarette burns, and ballpoint-pen-inflicted stab holes.

But although jobs and habits can be quit, an obsession cannot. My father became convinced he might never see his name on another hardback again, but he continued to write, and he did so without question. When a rejection came in the mail, he gave himself a 36-hour window to get the manuscript back on its way to another editor.

That ten-year period when James Lee Burke was out of print is now legendary inspiration for a new generation of writers, but I witnessed it firsthand. Against all reason, in a house packed with children, he constructed a desk with cinder block legs and a door for a top. After work, he wrote every single day at a manual Royal typewriter. On weekends, my mother would take us to the library and the mall, no-cost time suckers that bought my father some quiet time at home. The rejections kept coming, and new work continued to be produced.

His agent at William Morris was long gone, but he’d found a loyal, hardworking, and similarly unfazed advocate in agent Philip Spitzer, who finally had some good news. The Lost Get Back Boogie was still collecting rejections, but a newer manuscript, Two for Texas, would be published as a paperback original in 1982 My father kept writing. Three years later, LSU Press published a collection of his short stories entitled The Convict. He kept writing. A year later, the seemingly impossible happened: thanks again to LSU Press, The Lost Get Back Boogie wiped off the cigarette ash and whisky stains and became his fifth novel. We were still broke, but my father was in hardback again. And, of course, he kept writing. Then in 1984, on a vacation in Montana, family friend Rick DeMarinis suggested that he write a crime novel. In 1987, with the publication of The Neon Rain, readers finally met Vietnam Vet and recovering alcoholic Dave Robicheaux.

“You write it a day at a time and let God be the measure of its worth,” my father wrote for the New York Times’ Writers on Writing series. “You let the score take care of itself; and most important, you never lose faith in your vision… A real writer is driven both by obsession and a secret vanity, namely that he has a perfect vision of the truth, in the same way that the camera lens can close perfectly on a piece of the external world. If the writer does not convey that vision to someone else, his talent turns to a self-consuming bitterness.”

Readers who have read even a few James Lee Burke stories will recognize his vision on the page. It is a vision of honorable but flawed men challenged by an arbitrary and sometimes cruel fate. It is a vision of a specific but somehow transcendent era and region, a dying way of life in the south that tells a broader story about a decent but imperfect country savaged by mega-corporations, polluters, and a callous government. His vision was clear even in his debut novel, whose themes provoked a comparison from the Times to the works of Hemingway, Sartre, and Camus, where “man is doomed by no fatal flaw of character but by the simple fact of being born.”

And perhaps no stories tapped into his vision more aggressively than those that emerged from Katrina and its aftermath. When levees failed and the images of dark faces pleading for help on rooftops became salient reminders of an inept and indifferent political administration and broken government, many of us might have paused before allowing those stories to penetrate our fiction. But my father, not stopping to worry about the hate mail that would follow, embraced the role of narrative documentarian. “New Orleans was a poem, man,” a character recalls in his story, Jesus Out to Sea, “a song in your heart that never died. I only got one regret. Nobody ever bothered to explain why nobody ever came for us." Tin Roof Blowdown was not just the next book in the Robicheaux series, but a tribute to a beautiful and forsaken city, “killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature.”

The content and tone of my father’s post-Katrina work are unsurprising given his view of the writing process. He believes that his talent was not earned but was given to him for a specific purpose. He believes that the characters about whom he writes are not created by him, but live within the unconscious, waiting for their discovery. He does not outline and rarely sees beyond the next two scenes as he writes. He wrote about post-Katrina Louisiana because he was meant to.

But commercial success was not inevitable. Without a dogged agent, without LSU Press, without a friend who suggested, What about crime fiction?, without a working wife who also got those batty kids out of the house on the weekends, it might have all been different. We may not have been blown away by the poetry of twenty-seven James Lee Burke novels, losing ourselves in green-gold hazes over the bayou or in the shadows of cottonwoods lining the Bitterroot, or have befriended Dave Robicheaux, Clete Purcell, and Billy Bob Holland. But my father would still be writing.

Dad, none of it has gone unnoticed. Congratulations.

In the Garden of Lost Paradise

As the smoke and ash were still rising from the felled twin towers, reports began to surface that certain of the 9/11 hijackers had visited a strip club in Florida while here training to be pilots.

Just how credible such reports are—or the numerous other terrorist “sightings” that began to flood in during the aftermath of that devastating September day—has oft been debated. Did men claiming to be holy warriors attacking America for, among other things, their ideas of “impurity” and “sin” drink and gamble and get lap dances and attempt to hire prostitutes?

That humans don’t live up to what we claim to stand for, that we are able to justify and rationalize—sometimes to a pathological degree—is the stuff dreams are made of. And what is fiction if not a kind of twilight between waking and sleep where elements from both worlds intertwine and form narrative?

In “The Garden of Last Days” Andre Dubus III dreams of the intersection where a Florida stripper and a 9/11 highjacker meet, exploring them and the people around them in the way only a novelist can.

From the book jacket:

“One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work.

April's usual babysitter, Jean, has had a panic attack that has landed her in the hospital. April doesn't really know anyone else, so she decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children's videos in the office while she works.

April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely. From these elements comes a relentless, searing, page-turning narrative—a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity.”

Why people do the things we do is endlessly fascinating, and fiction is a great place to explore motivation. Like us, characters, particularly the less thoughtful and insightful ones, are often not aware of motives, and even those of us who continually examine what we do and why we do it, never fully understand. People are complex—some far more than others. We rarely realize the degree to which our culture and family and flawed programming and perceptions determine who we are and what we do.

Though “The Garden of Last Days” doesn’t attempt to explain them, it does at least raise the questions: What makes someone rigid? Fundamentalist? Terrorist? What causes someone to become a stripper? What causes people to frequent strip clubs? What causes a man to hit a woman? Why are some people kind, others cruel? Why do some people spread love and goodness, others judgment, discord, pain?

There’s no one answer to any of these questions. Motivation is a mystery. Psychology, theology, sociology, philosophy, biology can only tell us so much.

You and I could be next to each other doing nearly the exact same activity for motivations that are nearly antithetical to each other. No two strippers have the same motivation any more than any two writers or teachers or bartenders or ministers or counselors. Sure, many people are motivated by money—too many and too motivated—but there are always other ways to farm for lettuce, and they’re often easier and more profitable. Why do we choose the ones we do?
As a mom, April is flawed, sure—who isn’t?—but she does far less damage than nearly all the people judging her.

In an interview for “The Garden of Last Days,” Dubus said that when he writes, he suspends all judgment and just seeks to understand his characters, that when he’s writing, he’s a better man than when he’s not writing. What if we all did this all the time? Realized that people are complicated and there’s a context, an explanation for why they do what they do that we can’t understand? What if we loved ourselves in spite of our faults and failures and loved others regardless of theirs? It’s not impossible—this concept of loving God, loving ourselves, and loving others as ourselves. Unconditional love is what we all need—to give and receive. Compassion is what’s called for, empathy, understanding, insight—and reading good books with an open heart and mind is a great way to start.

I have friends who are strippers and friends who are Fundamentalists—both groups to various degrees are being exploited by men, and though I personally like and enjoy the company of the former group much more than the latter, both need and are worthy of love and understanding.

What we’re all in search of is connection—is love and understanding, which is far too rare and difficult to find, and why people turn to the substitutes of Fundamentalism and sexual and social surrogacy. Fundamentalists of every religion (including atheism) are told they can belong to the group and get the acceptance from others and ultimately God if they follow the group’s rules. Sexual and social surrogates give the friend or girlfriend experience for money (among other things—see above people are complicated). But all are poor substitutes for genuine, deep connection, nonjudgmental acceptance, and unconditional love—of course, most of the things in our lives are.

Lonely? Take Two TV Shows and Call Me in the Morning

According to new studies, watching TV can actually make us less lonely and help us deal with feelings of rejection and isolation.

The studies conducted by the University at Buffalo and Miami University of Ohio, and reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggest that watching TV provides viewers with the illusion that their social needs are being met.

And not just TV. The studies also argue that the same can be said of movies, music, video games, and the internet.

“The research provides evidence for the ‘social surrogacy hypothesis,’ which holds that humans can use technologies, like television, to provide the experience of belonging when no real belongingness has been experienced,” Shira Gabriel, one of the study’s authors said.

The first study found that subjects felt less lonely when viewing their favorite TV shows. The second study found that subjects whose “belongingness needs were aroused” wrote longer essays about their favored TV programs. The third study found that thinking about favored TV programs buffered subjects against drops in self-esteem, increases in negative mood and feelings of rejection. And Study four found that subjects verbally expressed fewer feelings of loneliness after writing essays about their preferred TV programs.

This study reminds me of something C.S. Lewis once said—“We read to know that we’re not alone.”

As a solitary, sometimes lonely person, who reads books and watches movies and TV shows then writes about them, I find the study fascinating and true, but I think something far deeper is at work—something the study doesn’t seem to consider.

Far more than mere distraction, stories—whether they are told, written, performed, or filmed—give meaning to our lives. As humans, we need myths, stories, dreams—the hero’s journey to identify with.

The best stories don’t just entertain. They inspire. They instruct. They empathize with our existential angst, and in the process, teach us empathy for others.

Stories are mirrors we hold up to ourselves. They are lamps to our feet and lights to our paths.

When we read or watch, we know we’re not alone, but not because we’re momentarily distracted. We know we’re not alone because another human being is reaching out to us, making contact with us on our most essential human level. The act of writing, of creating stories, is the solitary, often lonely act of attempting to express humanness, to bring order to the chaos, to find meaning in the madness, to truly and profoundly connect to other, often solitary, lonely human beings.

That someone is driven to sit by himself or herself and tell stories, that publishers or craftspeople help bring them to life, that actors will lose themselves in becoming that “fictional” character, lets us know we’re not alone, lets us know that our deep need to hear stories is only exceeded by other human beings’ deeper need to tell them. It’s communal. It’s connection. Yet it’s intimate and personal.

And what of where stories come from? As a storyteller, I can tell you, they come from beyond us, from the ineffable, transcendent, mysterious—from the place where communication can only be story and poetry, myth and metaphor. And this is a big part of why stories make us feel less lonely.

Of course, all stories are not created equal. Much of what is on TV is shallow, sentimental, and, far too often, mind-numbing. The better the story, the more skilled and sophisticated the storyteller, the more beneficial for us the story is.

Myths are how we define and understand ourselves and others—the myths of our religions, philosophies, families, communities, nationalities. Everything we know or think we do comes down to us through the stories we hear and believe.

In common culture, myth is used for something that’s not true, but nothing could be further from the truth. Myths are true—perhaps not factually, actually, literally-happened-just-that-way true, but true at profoundly human and even transcendent levels. Unfortunately, in the West, since the Enlightenment, we’ve over and misapplied logic, reason, and the scientific method to story, and by making did-it-really-happen the sole test for truth, we’re losing our souls (our ability to imagine, explore, empathize, dream, create, transcend—the very best of our humanness).

Every family has myths that are empowering and ones that are imprisoning. Every religion has myths that inspire compassion and ones that ignite hate. Every nation has myths that cultivate civility and ones that cause the cancers of greed and nationalism.

The best stories don’t just help with loneliness, don’t just entertain or distract. They actually transform us in powerful and lasting ways.
But that’s the best stories.

We should be discriminating about the TV we watch (which would lead to us watch very little). We shouldn’t just read commercial fiction or trite self-help books. We shouldn’t just watch the fraction of films that make it to our local cinema house, the blockbusters made to crassly manipulate the masses. We should each read and watch the best we can find, inhabit good stories, for it’s not just our loneliness, but our very humanity that’s at hazard.

House of Pain

Like most of the best things in my life, I came to “House” because of a woman. And not just any woman, but one of the most beautiful, smart, strong, sexy, attractive actresses on the planet.

I had been hearing great things about the new medical mystery drama “House” for a while, but had never watched it for two reasons—I watch very limited TV and as a rule don’t start a series midway through. Then I heard Sela Ward would be joining the cast for a multi-episode arc, and knew I would gladly add another show to my must-sees, and start in the middle or even the end if I had to. Thankfully, because of TV on DVD, I didn’t have to.

Most people think of “Sisters” when Sela Ward’s name comes up, but it was as Lily Manning on “Once and Again” that I fell in love with her, and, for me, she will always be the sexy, recently-single mother, vulnerable Venus—smart, compassionate, resilient.

As Stacy Warner, Sela Ward, was actually a romantic equal to Hugh Laurie’s Greg House, but alas, nothing lasts. House destroys what he has—or could have had—with Stacy, Sela’s arc ends, Stacy leaves the show.

But I keep watching.

Though I originally tuned in for Sela, I kept tuning in for “House.”

One of the best written and bravest shows on network television, “House” has, for over a hundred episodes now, been consistently good and often great. Each year, as I watch the season finale, I always think, they’ll never be able to top it—and then they do. Year after year after year, they leave me truly grateful for the engaging, enriching, and highly entertaining experiences they give me.

I have a friend who says “House” is too formulaic, and she’s right that the medical mysteries always follow the pattern of a series of misdiagnoseses, failed treatments, and eventually House’s “aha” moment, but watching “House” for the medicine is like reading Shakespeare for the plot.

I watch “House,” like all the shows I watch, the novels I read, the films I watch, for the characters, the struggles and drama of their lives, their interaction with one another.

From the fist moment I watched the show, I thought, Greg House is Sherlock Holmes with a medical degree—a true anti-social, drug-addicted, music-playing, genius operating at a level that leaves mere mortals breathless and bewildered.

Like a fully functioning adult trying to get extremely important tasks completed with a team of impaired children, House lives in a state of perpetual frustration—add to it the physical pain Holmes never had and you have one unpleasant SOB.

Physician heal thyself? I’m not sure he would if he could, but he can’t. None of us can. We have our part to play in the healing process, sure (I’m not advocating passivity), but it’s in letting love in, letting fear and unforgiveness go—things House is unwilling to do.

Like Holmes, House needs constant challenges for his magnificent mind—puzzles, conundrums, mysteries. So much so, that he plays mind games with the lesser planets orbiting the enormous gravitational pull of his imploding star.

Unlike Holmes, who rarely interacted with anyone beyond Watson, House, who avoids patients as much as possible, is forced to work with a team, answer to an administrator, and interact with a friend, which is what makes the show work so well.

Like Paul Weston of “In Treatment,” House is a wounded healer, but unlike Weston, House, who’s in constant pain—and not just from the nerve damage in his leg—inflicts a lot of pain on others. Even those he heals. And unlike Weston, House takes no joy in healing, just hungers for the next mystery to apply his mind to.

Like Irene Adler was to Holmes, Sela Ward’s Stacy Warner will always be for House The Woman. Now that she’s come and gone and come and gone again, House, who never really had even the remotest chance for happiness, is a miserable, broken, mean misanthrope—the most interesting one in the history of TV.

Like House, we’re all in pain. Maybe ours is more intermittent, more manageable, but it’s there—even when we’re too distracted to notice it very much. We have the existential pain of mortality if nothing else (though usually there’s plenty else—including the pain of others our compassion makes us heir to). Even in those rare, perfect moments of our lives when all is right with the world and we are as perfectly happy as we can be, its edges are tinged with the certainty that it can’t last, that the moment will too soon be gone—and so will we. But instead of popping vicodin, we can watch House do it, share in his suffering, share some of our own. That’s the power of story. Stories heal. That’s why for viewers, the House of pain can also be a place of healing.