The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of fiction writer Andre Dubus II (books by this author), born in Lake Charles, Louisiana (1936). He grew up in a Cajun-Irish-Catholic family, went to Catholic schools, studied English and journalism, and then joined the military. While he was in the military, he married a woman named Patricia, a Louisiana homecoming queen. He served for six years, and became a captain. He and Patricia had four children.

Dubus left the military to pursue his real passion: writing fiction. He was accepted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and moved his whole family to Iowa City. They had a happy few years there, surrounded by friends, attending parties and discussing literature. He published his first novel, The Lieutenant (1967), and he got a job teaching in New England. The family moved to New Hampshire, then Massachusetts. Dubus was a popular professor, and his books of fiction were well-regarded by other writers like John Updike, Richard Yates, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Even as his professional life took off, his family fell apart — and that is the story that his son, the novelist Andre Dubus III, told in a recent memoir, Townie (2011). Andre Dubus II left his wife and four children for a beautiful young student, and in some ways he never looked back. He remained a dutiful father — he picked up his kids once a week and took them out to eat somewhere, and he showed up for family holidays. But he was teaching at Bradford College, living a much different life than his ex-wife and children. The life of the elder Dubus consisted of working on stories, jogging, drinking, having affairs with students, attending parties and giving readings. Meanwhile, the rest of his family was struggling to make ends meet, living in poverty in a series of Massachusetts mill towns. The young Andre Dubus and his siblings were bullied until Andre spent a year and a half obsessively lifting weights and conditioning himself to be a fighter so that he could stand up for all of them. He began to thrive on violence. His mother worked long hours and was constantly exhausted; the house was disgusting, and there were always drugs around but never enough food. But his mother did her best — Dubus said: "My mother was making $135 a week. But she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner." Through it all, the elder Andre Dubus would show up to take his kids out to eat, but he seemed oblivious to how different his own life was from that of his children.

Late on a summer night in 1986, Andre Dubus II was driving back to campus from Boston, where he had been gathering material for a story. He saw a couple of young people on the side of the highway who had gotten in an accident — they had hit an abandoned motorcycle. Their names were Luis and Luz Santiago, a brother and sister. Dubus pulled over to help them and had just gotten out of his car when another vehicle swerved off the road straight for the three of them. Luis was killed, and Luz survived only because Dubus pushed her out of the way. Dubus was seriously injured, and doctors thought he might not survive. He did, but one leg was amputated and the other never recovered, so he was confined to a wheelchair. His third wife, Peggy, left him within a year of the accident. He lived alone in a rural house built on a steep hill.

By this time, Andre Dubus III was in his 20s. He had started publishing stories, and he and his father had found some things in common — they talked about writing, or about fighting — as an ex-Marine, Andre the Elder was proud of his son's skills. Now, after the accident, with the elder Andre seeming vulnerable for the first time, the father and son were able to truly reconnect. The younger Andre and his brother Jeb built ramps all around their father's house, and Andre taught his father how to lift weights. They traveled and did readings together. In 1999, Andre III said goodbye to his father and headed to the West Coast for a book tour promoting his new novel, the best-selling House of Sand and Fog (1999). Soon after, Andre II died of a heart attack.

Andre Dubus II's books include Adultery and Other Choices (1977), Finding a Girl in America (1980), The Times are Never So Bad (1983), The Last Worthless Evening (1986), and Dancing After Hours (1996). His story "Killings" was adapted into the film In the Bedroom (2001).

Dubus said: "A first book is a treasure, and all these truths and quasi-truths I have written about publishing are finally ephemeral. An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them which becomes a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer's own blood, and with the occasional rush of excitement that empties oneself, so that the self is for minutes or longer in harmony with eternal astonishments and visions of truth, right there on the page on the desk; and when a writer does this work steadily enough to complete a manuscript long enough to be a book, the treasure is on the desk. If the manuscript itself, mailed out to the world where other truths prevail, is never published, the writer will suffer bitterness, sorrow, anger, and, more dangerously, despair, convinced that the work was not worthy, so not worth those days at the desk. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul. If the work is not published, or is published for little money and less public attention, it remains a spiritual, mental, and physical achievement; and if, in public, it is the widow's mite, it is also, like the widow, more blessed."

It's the birthday of poet Louise Bogan (books by this author), born in Livermore Falls, Maine (1897). Her father worked in mills, and the family moved often, to what she called "the incredibly ugly mill towns of my childhood, barely dissociated from the empty, haphazardly cultivated, half-wild, half-deserted countryside around them. Rough stony pastures, rugged woodlots, lit up and darkened by the clearly defined, pale, lonely light and shadow of weather."

Her parents fought constantly; her mother had affairs with other men and sometimes disappeared for weeks at a time. When Louise was 10 years old, she was sent off to boarding school in New Hampshire, where she was a star student but extremely lonely. A few years later, her family moved to Boston, and Louise joined them and was accepted to a good school, Girls' Latin School. She was still lonely, so she turned to poetry. She said: "I began to write verse from about 14 on. The life-saving process then began. By the age of 18 I had a thick pile of manuscript, in a drawer in the dining room — and had learned every essential of my trade."

She was offered a scholarship to attend Radcliffe College, but she left after a year to get married. She had a daughter, but after two years she separated from her husband, and he died two years later, in 1920. She moved to Vienna, where she kept a journal, and then moved back to New York City and published her first book of poems, Body of This Death (1923), and then another, Dark Summer (1929). She was feeling increasingly depressed, and lonely despite a second marriage, and she decided that maybe she hadn't learned every essential of her trade when she was 18. She became critical of her own style of writing; she wrote: "The diary kept in Vienna in 1922 was without any real descriptive power. Then, I could only describe through a set of symbols — poetically, lyrically. Straight rendering completely baffled me; I remember this. So inner, so baffled, so battered even at 24 — that I noticed practically nothing; or if I did notice it, I could not put it down (in prose) with any directness." Bogan tried to teach herself to write all over again. She wrote: "I saw the clear afternoon, casting the shadows of chairs one way in the room, so that the season was as clear within a house as out of doors. The shadows had the time of day written into them, as well as the look of autumn."

She did learn to write directly, and she used that talent as a poetry critic for The New Yorker. She reviewed poetry for The New Yorker for 38 years, from 1931 to 1969. When she decided to quit, she wrote to her friend and editor Ruth Limmer: "After 38 years; and seven years beyond normal retirement age. — I know that you are against such a move; but really, Ruth, I've had it. No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square." She died four months later.

She said, "I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"