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Thursday, March 31, 2011

Self-Portrait, 2011

Self-Portrait

2011




Q: If you had to live in just one place – without ever leaving – where would it be?

A: That’s a very tough question. For a goodly portion of my adult life I was all over the map, owing mostly to my being a foreign service employee for a dozen years. That accounts for most, if not quite all, of my foreign travel: western Europe, Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire, European Russia.  But I’ve also lived all over California, in both Washingtons, (state and D.C.) Maryland, Virginia and (very briefly) Nevada. 

My first gut-level answer would be Paris, but I don’t know. Paris is actually a rather small city, at least the interesting part of it, and I think I would get claustrophobia there after a while. Los Angeles has plenty of elbow room, but having grown up in southern California, I feel like I've had enough of it. New York? Forget it. Ironically, "the city that never sleeps" is not the place for a guy who has as much trouble sleeping as I do.

I guess I would have to say that I’d rather be dead than live in one place without ever leaving. That’s subject to change, of course. The older you get, the less inclined you are to wander. Having said that, as of this writing I'm packing for the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Q: What do you plan to do there?
A: Teach English and stare at the mountains.

Q: Do you plan to do any writing while you're over there?
A: As the Mexicans put it, "No se, vamos a ver." I'll make notes of course; I always do that.

Q: Do you prefer animals to people?
A: I like both. But I agree with Truman Capote, who once observed that people who feel more warmly toward dogs, cats and horses than they do toward people are often secretively cruel. Hitler loved dogs.

Q: Are you cruel?
A: I try not to be. I regard cruelty as the most abominable of vices. I can think of nothing that makes me angrier than cruelty of any kind, and one of my problems with the British in general is that so much of their "comedy" is based on cruelty. But sometimes I am cruel with my big mouth, especially when I’m angry. But I always regret it immediately, and either do what I can to make up for it, or, if the victim of my cruelty chooses not to be forgiving, beat up on myself about it. I’m still carrying around past cruelties for which I have not forgiven myself. All I can say is, that’s a strong incentive not to repeat the crime.

Q: Do you have many friends?
A: No. Most of my friends are dead. There are maybe five people I more or less trust.

Q: What qualities do you look for in friends?
A: Well, patience is a big one. I have taxed the patience of everyone I’ve ever loved, and in some cases taxed it beyond endurance. I’m as aware of this as I am of the fact that I’m sometimes cruel, and loathe this tendency in myself just as much as the other, that I lay upon other people the patience which I don’t have. Compassion is important. And intelligence. I have never had a friend who wasn’t intelligent, although once or twice I have been in love with women who, despite great gifts, turned out to be stupid. I’m currently in love with a woman who is smarter than I am, but doesn’t like to read.

Q: Are you often disappointed by a friend?
A: Not really. I’ve had some unpleasant surprises with people I thought to be friends, but not since I was in elementary school has anyone who purported to be my friend ever betrayed me. But friends change as do we all, and sometimes I find that I like the later version of a friend less than the earlier one.

Q: Are you a truthful person?
A: I think so. That’s not to say that I always tell the truth, but I’m a miserably poor liar, so I usually just don’t try it. I wouldn’t have made a good actor, although some people have told me that I should have been an actor. I disagree. If I say something and I don’t mean it, you can tell. It’s easier to lie as a writer of course; no one can see your face when you do it. But I don’t like lying, it makes me uncomfortable and gives me guilt, especially if I’m lying to someone I love.

Q: Do you believe in God?
A: Yes, but I think that question raises more questions than answers. I believe in God, but on the surface of it anyway, I don't really think God and I have much use for each other. "Nonsense," orthodox believers will huff. "God made you. God loves you." Well, I don't know. I once made a water balloon to throw at somebody; that didn't mean I loved it. Anyone who has ever watched a cat play with a mouse has some idea of how I envision my relationship with God. Mark Twain famously considered God to be essentially malign; well, Twain's daughter had died and he was extremely bitter.

Having said all that, I have as much impatience with Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and the rest of that "new atheist" crowd as I have with my landlord's pea-brained neighbor who has a truly nauseating vanity license plate that reads, "IR4GIVN." Isn't that just the most icky-poo cutesy thing you ever heard? I can't STAND religion when it stoops to the bumper-sticker level of discourse, especially when it borrows the sick-making argot of advertising agencies: "Got Jesus?" (That one really makes me want to puke.) But the insidious operative principle, in the case of both atheists and fundamentalists, is "certainty."

Atheists are always talking about how much cruelty and misery religion has caused. I don't see that atheism has a great track record for spreading, peace, love and joy either. I wouldn't want Robespierre, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha or Kim il-Sung coming down my chimney on Christmas Eve.
      
I really don't see a whole lot of difference between Truly Convinced fundamentalists and Truly Convinced Atheists. Both think they have the True Answer, and people who think they have the True Answer often become killers in the name of it.

Q: How do you like to occupy your spare time?
A: I really like to read. I always have. Reading coalesced for me when I was about six, and I’ve never stopped. My favorite authors when I was a child included Madeleine L’Engle and Scott O’Dell, and I loved the Hardy Boys mysteries. As a preadolescent I was crazy about science fiction for a while – Arthur C. Clarke was a favorite. As an adult I have admired Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry Miller and Saul Bellow on the American side of the pond, Joyce, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Proust and Mann from the other side. I wonder if it's a coincidence, by the way, that Philip Roth considers himself a disciple of Kafka, and while admiring Kafka's genius, and Roth's brilliance, I find Kafka and Roth both depressing. Orson Welles thought his film version of The Trial the best movie he ever made. Perhaps it is, but it depressed me almost beyond endurance.

I love movies, although I have not been inside a theater to see a feature film since 2006. I usually rent them from Netflix or watch them on my computer. A list of my favorite films would include Mr. Roberts, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, and believe it or not, Francis Ford Coppola’s little 1987 time-warp fantasy Peggy Sue Got Married. (Memory is the closest thing I have to a fetish, and films about going back in time are one of my weaknesses. Peggy Sue Got Married always makes me cry, as do Somewhere in Time and (in its final moments) Field of Dreams. I had a troubled relationship with my father, but we both loved baseball, and at the end of the film, when Ray Kinsella and his long-dead father begin playing catch, look out: I’ll be crying within moments.

 By the way, have you ever noticed how many of the plots of mainstream American film dramas center around the idea of revenge? Revenge seems to be the nation's pet fantasy, as reliving (and, by implication, correcting) the past is mine.

Q: What are you reading these days?
A: Rilke.

Q: Why especially Rilke?
A: I'm fascinated by him. Can't make head nor tail of him. I think James Merrill said the same thing about him. Hey, if he's good enough to confuse a poet like Merrill, who am I to complain? Merrill said that it was Rilke's sheer eloquence he found so compelling. I would have to agree.

Q: Anything else?
A: I just finished reading Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, and have given a re-read to parts of Henry Miller's wonderful album of California memories, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. As you can see, the motion of my reading can best be described as Brownian. It's a flit-and-dive thing.

Q: Of what are you most afraid?
A: Homelessness. Death, too, of course, but death is something you only have to deal with once. The idea of ending up homeless scares the shit out of me. I see homeless people all the time, as do we all, and try to hand them a couple of bucks when I can. Then I think of the song Eleanor Rigby and my heart sinks into my shoes. There but for the luck of the Irish go I.

Q: You're not Irish. Your last name is French.
A: Uh-huh, but that's on my Dad's side. My father's people were canucks -- they came down from Trois-Riviere, Quebec in the early 20th century and wound up in Massachusetts, where my father was born. My biological grandmother on my mother's side was Irish. Her name was Annie Russell. Her family came from County Meath. That's where Kells is. You know, The Book of Kells? Can't get more Irish than that. My maternal grandfather, Bertram Winrow, met Annie Russell on a steamship bound for Peru in 1914. They were married that same year. She died in July, 1921, when my mother, their only child, was three months old.

Q: What happened to your mother after that?
A: My grandfather brought her to America. Born in 1879 in England, he was in the British merchant marine for a good many years. During his seafaring days he met and became friendly with a family in Pittsburgh, PA named Gray. There he met Edith Gray, who became Edith Gray Winrow in 1924. She and my grandfather went on to have three children of their own, but Edith Gray embraced and raised my mom as one of her own. Edith Winrow was the woman I knew as "Grandma." She died in 1967, when I was 11 years old.

Q: England, Ireland, Peru, Pennsylvania. How did you end up in southern California?
A: Grandpa Winrow came west in 1929 to join a friend of his in a business venture, which I understand was to have been regular air cargo freight service from the west coast of the U.S. to South America. But one of my family's curses is its ill-timing (and mine is absolutely the worst.) You can probably guess what happened. 1929. Yes, the stock market crashed, Grandpa Winrow and his buddy were wiped out, and the family was mired in San Diego County. Eighty years on, there are only two of us left here now, myself and my sister Carla. And I'm looking to get out.

Q: Why would anybody want to leave a beautiful place like San Diego?
A: The family's gone, and the family homestead, a house my grandfather bought in 1941, was sold after my father's death in 2005. There's nothing left here for me but memories. If you saw the Woody Allen film Radio Days, you might remember its poignant ending, in which Allen, as voice-over narrator, reminds one and all that memories fade with each passing year. All this played out against Kurt Weill's September Song, to me the saddest song ever written. By the way, the photo at the head of this blog was taken on the front porch of that very same family homestead I just mentioned. It was taken in the spring of 2005. Behind me, in the house, is my father. He has less than six months to live.

Q: Did you know either of your grandfathers?
A: No. Grandpa Winrow died six years before I was born, in the very same room in which my father would die 56 years later. I don't even know what Grandpa Dupuis looked like. My dad probably didn't know, either. My paternal grandfather ran off and deserted his family when my father was a little boy.

Q: What shocks you, if anything?
A: I touched on this above. Deliberate cruelty. Cruelty for its own sake. And any work of art, be it film, book or whatever, that is deliberately mean-spirited or makes light of mean-spiritedness. Very hip people thought the movie Blue Velvet a sophisticated spoof of something. I saw only ugliness. I hated every minute of it.

Q: It’s been three years since you published Three Flies Up, your memoir of you and your dad. Reader reaction to it was surprisingly good, you said. What have you written since?
A: A novel, The Vespers of 1610. It was a disaster. Nobody read it, and those who did, didn’t like it. I had a copy of it sent to the woman I love, and I suspect she threw it away unopened. Good for her.

Q: What went wrong with it?
A: Well, it takes a special kind of dude to make the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk fly, and I’m no Richard Wagner, what can I tell you? Nobody offered to help me with it, so I tried to do the whole thing myself: writing, editing, proofreading.

No one can be their own editor. The book was too long, its story line too amorphous and some of its moments stretched credulity. My oldest lit-crit friend said he couldn’t understand what the point of it was. He went on to say that I tried to “stuff too much into it,” too many ideas, too many concepts. It didn’t work. The best thing about the book was the painting on the cover, which I painted, by the way. Gesamtkunstwerk. Well, I tried.

Q: Do you exercise?
A: Not as much as I used to. I was doing some light weightlifting and leg-lifts every afternoon, but I gave myself a nasty case of tendonitis in my right elbow. I used to be a dedicated jogger, but gave it up. I recently bought a new bicycle, but I can’t seem to find time to ride it. I gave myself a surfboard as a birthday present last fall and I haven’t even taken it to the beach yet – have to figure out a way to strap it to the roof of a taxicab.

Q: Still, I can see that since the last time we saw each other, you’ve lost a lot of weight. What’s your dieting secret?
A: Believe me, you wouldn’t want to go on the Kelley Dupuis Diet. I don’t recommend it to anyone. The first thing you do is, go into a near-suicidal depression. Then you start self-medicating with booze. The liquor turns you into a Jekyll-and-Hyde, and you drive away the only woman who ever gave you perfect, unqualified love, the only woman who ever truly made you happy. After that you get sick. Gut-sick. Throwing-up sick. Then, facing the shambles of your life, you realize that you have two choices: quit drinking or quit living. So you quit drinking. It’s too late to save anything but your own worthless skin, but you do it anyway. Then, your body suddenly deprived of all the sugar that resides in alcohol, your weight begins to drop. The “booze fat” melts.

Q: So how much weight did you lose?
A: When I left Alexandria, Virginia in July, 2010 I weighed about 200 pounds. The following March I weighed myself at a doctor’s office, and I was down to 172. I was surprised; I didn’t think I’d lost that much weight. My sister, a nurse, advised me strongly not to lose any more weight. Any further weight loss, she hinted, might be unhealthy. I guess. At 55 I weigh only seven pounds more than I weighed in high school.

Q: What’s the most hopeful word in any language?
A: Love.

Q: And the most dangerous?
A: Love.

Q: Have you ever wanted to kill anybody?
A: Yes, but never for more than five minutes. And I’m not a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy, so thus far the casualty count of my homicidal rages is 0. Zero people, that is. Plenty of lamps, chairs, computers, tables, beds, vases, bottles, glasses, typewriters, walls, doorknobs, doorjambs, beverage bottles, windows…and one Xerox machine.

Q: Whose Xerox machine was it?
A: The government’s.

Q: Is there any particular thing you feel that you lack the courage to do, but would do it if you had the courage?
A: Sure. Commit suicide. If I had the guts, I would have killed myself four months ago.

Q: Why?
A: Well, there's never any one reason, is there? It's like you never become depressed for just one reason. It's always a concatenation of things. Suffice it to say that if I had had the courage to do it, I would have killed myself the day Holly Inder told that she didn't love me anymore. I don't find a whole lot that's admirable in Goethe's character Werther, but I do admire him for having the courage to off himself for unrequited love. It was the best career move he ever made.

Q: You're joking of course. About killing yourself.
A: Yeah, probably.

Q: What are your political interests?
A: I have none. As a former journalist, I’ve had my share of contact with elected officials, and I can honestly say that I have never met one, Republican or Democrat, whom I would trust holding the stake for a football pool. I don’t vote anymore, I don’t read newspapers anymore, nor do I watch TV news, listen to news on the radio or follow news on the Internet. When people send me those conservative e-mails bashing Obama or expressing outrage over immigration policy, I delete them. It’s not because I like Obama particularly, it’s just that the news itself depresses me. Outrage is both time-and-energy consuming, and what good does it do anyone in the long run? 

By the way, before I opted to become completely nonpolitical, (one of the best decisions I ever made) I used to be quite conservative. But I haven't become "liberal" in the sense that the media use the word, not by a longshot; you'll never hear me trying to sell the idea that more government is the solution to any problem. Still, I have moments when I wonder what people are thinking. The other day I saw a bumper sticker that said something like "There Are No Hyphenated Americans." I understand the sentiment, but that particular one is unrealistic. "Hyphenated" Americans are the only kind we've ever had, or been. Just look at any account of growing up in say, New York or Chicago a century ago. The wops, spics, kikes, micks, bohunks and whathaveyou were forever chasing each other up and down city streets, looking to bust heads. The discourse may be less brutal now, but we've always been a nation of immigrants, and never, really, a "melting pot."
          
I voted for John McCain in 2008, but not with any particular enthusiasm, and I will never vote again in any election. I'm done with it. I guess you could say that I’m a recovered journalist. I like what Cary Grant said at the beginning of the film Father Goose: “Two years ago I made my peace with the world. If the world can’t keep the peace with itself, that’s not my problem.”

Q: If you could be anything, what would you like to be?
A. Financially independent, same as everyone else. Next, invisible. Imagine the possibilities of that. Finally, it would be SO nice if I were able to simply erase memories selectively, as some people I know seem able to do. I envy them that, Oh God, how I envy that ability.

Q: What are your chief vices? And virtues?
A: Well, I don’t drink anymore, and I never did do drugs. I don’t gamble. You couldn’t pay me to watch TV. I guess the only vice I have left is cigars. And smokeless tobacco, since you can’t smoke in a cab. Virtues? I think my chief virtue is gratitude. Only once did I ever betray someone who was kind to me, and I have never stopped regretting it, out-of-my-head drunk, depressed and angry as I was when I did it. What I did was to hurt — and perhaps even briefly endanger – someone I adored, and it was inexcusable. My gratitude to her remained, and remains, profound, however, along with my gratitude to artists in every medium, poets, composers, playwrights, novelists and painters who have warmed my soul most with their works. I think I understand a lot about writing in particular, and when I read something really good, I’m engulfed in a sense of wonder. That goes double for music. Music is a form of magic for me.

Q: Do you have a particular guiding principle that you live by?
A: Yeah. "If it looks too good to be true," it is.

Q: Suppose you were drowning. What images, in classic tradition, do you envision rolling across your mind?
A: A wintry day around Christmas, 1958. I’m three years old, and sitting in a pile of snow in the backyard of my family’s home in Burlington, Vermont. I’m pretending I’m Santa Claus, and the pile of snow behind me is my sleigh. I look over the rooftop of the house and in the late-afternoon blue sky, see the moon.
           
Summer, 1967. Silver Strand State Beach, Coronado, California. I get caught in a riptide and almost do drown. Fortunately the lifeguard is paying attention to his responsibilities, sees I’m in trouble, and comes to fish me out of the surf. My mother, getting wind of what just happened, drags me all over the beach trying to find this lifeguard so she can “thank” him. Already feeling stupid for having gotten caught in a riptide to begin with, I’m now so completely mortified that I want to crawl off and die.
           
Fall, 1968. Spokane, Washington. I’m thirteen, and come home from the Cinerama Theater, where I’ve just seen 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, so awed by the experience that my younger sister has to come sit by my bed and talk to me for a while before I can get calmed down and go to sleep.
           
February, 1986. Snow-covered Manassas, Virginia. Late on a Saturday night. I’m sitting in the living room of a two-story townhouse owned by the girl of my dreams, whom I met barely two months earlier. We’ve been out for dinner and are back, quietly talking. She’s smoking one cigarette after another. I want terribly to kiss her, but I’m afraid of being rebuffed. Suddenly, in a flash of courage coming from I-don’t-know-where, I pluck from her fingers the cigarette she’s preparing to light and say, “Why don’t you skip this one?” Then I do kiss her. And to my delighted surprise, instead of smacking me in my presumptuous bazoo, she kisses me back. We sit there and kiss for a long time. Then, toward dawn, she takes my hand and we go upstairs to bed. I’m beside myself with lack-of-sleep fatigue, but happier than I can remember being in a very long time.
           
August, 1995. Lloret de Mar, Spain. A person with whom my involvement got me sent home to Washington from the American embassy in Moscow the previous year suddenly appears before my eyes in the lobby of a hotel. She’s talking to another woman, facing the other way, and doesn’t see me come in and put my suitcases down. She is dressed as I had never seen her dressed in Russia, in a sleeveless yellow blouse, dark gray skirt and sandals. She has cropped her hair close since I last saw her. I’m a day late, thanks to mechanical problems with an Air France L-1011 back in Washington. She sees me and throws herself into my arms.
           
October, 2000. I’m sitting in the living room of my one-bedroom apartment in Baltimore, Maryland, watching Richard Gere in The Cotton Club on AMC with my pal from Moscow, Boris Demidov. The telephone rings. It’s my younger sister, sobbing. My mother had a stroke yesterday, and they’ve taken her off life-support. My mother is dead.
           
Now the Polaroids begin to slap down in more rapid succession: My high-school graduation. My initiation into adult sex at an ocean-view resort on the Pacific  in Ventura, California, late summer 1975. Disembarking from a TWA flight from JFK to Frankfurt in March 1986, the first time I set foot on European soil. Another plane memory: looking down at the Russian countryside around Moscow while flying for the first time in Sheremetovo in May, 1993, and thinking that this part of Russia looked a lot like Ohio.
           
Many others. But I’m fading as they fade. As the poet wrote:

It’s not fading, but it’s falling apart,
this artifact from a family Christmas
like all the other family Christmases
of which I knew nothing and was no part.
Why have I kept it with me all these years?
You tell me. The dog in your arms has died,
and you’re an adult now. You weren’t that day.
Your expression makes that winter-dawn clear.
It was not so at all when you gave me
this small gift. We were young – that’s obvious
from the unspoiled arrogance that I see
in those ineffably convinced brown eyes
and parted red lips, awaiting the click.
We’re idiots. Only pictures are wise.

           
Okay, The poet was me. The real-life girl in the Polaroid described by the poem was the dream-girl alluded to above, the chain-smoker whom I impulsively kissed that magic late winter night in 1986.
           
And I do believe that only pictures are wise.
           

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