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My Secret Hero
by Richard Greenberg
With what writer have I felt a secret kinship?
This is a hard question for me to answer.
I looked up kinship in the New Oxford American Dictionary (you try to be precise about these things). It means a sharing of characteristics or origins.
The trouble is, except in the broadest ways, I share neither characteristics nor origins with the writer Im bound to choose, and he is certainly no blood relation (the first definition).
Also, though a great writer, hes an uninteresting selection.
I would like, for instance, to be able to say that the writer to whom I feel most deeply bonded is Thomas Bernhard, the late Austrian genius. His novels (hes a playwright as well, but Im more familiar with the novels) are gorgeous, circular, vitriolic rantscultural critiques issued by an unappeasable nature. Theyre staggeringly original and I find reading them invigorating, but Ive been doing it for only a few years, so hes not my choice.
All right, Ill admit it. The writer who is my secret twin (though utterly unlike me in every way) is (this may be a good time for smokers and those with tiny bladders to excuse themselves) F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Sorry.
But heres how it happened:
When I was twelve years old, I was informed, erroneously, that The Great Gatsby was about to be made into a movie that would re-team the beautiful-if-stilted stars of Love Story, Ali McGraw and Ryan ONeal. I took the book out of the East Meadow Public Library, and read it in my bedroom one night in spring, with the window open and the attic fan running, stirring gentle breezes through the room. Some previous borrower had spilled a strong perfume on the books pages that at the time seemed attractive; below my window, people spoke softly on the front porch.
All these insipid details matter. They made the experience.
And that it was an experiencenot just a bookis the crucial fact, I think.
For most of uscertainly for mechildhood is a condition of abeyance: a thing to get through, the time before time starts. What was so important to me about Fitzgerald is that reading him altered realityright then, as you did itin situ. He didnt simply arouse ambition (though he did that, too), or offer a program for escape. In fact, he didnt really offer escape at all. It was something else.
Inscape?
Possibly not. But reading him made life feel deeper, fancier, less mundane. And I didnt get over him for a dozen years. (By get over, I mean exchange an infatuated appreciation for a reasoned one; I still think hes great.)
He was, by the way, a terrible influence. At the college I attended, because it was the college hed attended (I graduated, though), I wrote lucid expository prose on my own and ghastly, woozy fiction under his spell.
It turned out you had to be him to write like him.
Another reason were nothing alike and kinship is the wrong word; but this is the best I can do.
Richard Greenberg is the award-winning author of eight plays, including Three Days of Rain, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1998; Everett Beekin (Lincoln Center Theater, 2001); and The Dazzle, winner of the Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel awards for an outstanding Off Broadway play.
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