When I graduated from college 52 years ago, I thought I would be a poet. As an English major, I had studied what was then the canon and developed a special fondness for Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens. I’d memorized some W. B. Yeats and met a few noted poets who had spoken on campus—W. H. Auden, Denise Levertov, James Tate. I had even actually written a few poems, one of which won a minor award at my college.
But then, in the summer after graduation, 1973, a picture caught my eye that altered my literary aspiration. On the front page of The New York Times Book Review was the photo of a craggy, long-haired writer wearing a blue-jean jacket. His name was Thomas McGuane, and the book under review was Ninety-two in the Shade, a lusty comic novel set in Key West, about a young man’s at-times-violent attempt to create a life for himself. Somehow it was the jacket that grabbed me. Not the book jacket, but the denim one. My 22-year-old face was far from craggy, but I did have long hair and a jacket just like McGuane’s. I would be a novelist.
In what feels like an eye-blink, that pledge is now about to be realized. My first novel will be published this month. It’s called The Love You Take, and for a few reasons, the odds seemed against its appearing in print. Perhaps you’ve read the reports in The New York Times and elsewhere that literary publishers are not much interested in male novelists anymore because so many readers of novels these days are female. Being previously unpublished as a novelist does not help. Being older also does not help. That’s before you get to what the novel is about and whether it is any good or not. So I am elated that a small publisher is taking a chance on it.
Because my novel, like McGuane’s, is about a young man, I’ve been thinking about a quotation from Yeats, which I remember as being, “When I was young, my muse was old; now that I am old, my muse is young.” I’ve always assumed that this was a reference to the subjects of his poems, his early ones often inspired by Irish myths and legends, such as “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” and his late ones by memories of his lusty youth, such as his “dream of a Ledaean body” in “Among School Children.” But with thanks to Google Books, I have learned that the quotation in my mind isn’t accurate. The correct version appears in one of Yeats’s autobiographies, in a passage describing how, after receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1923, he examined the medal the Swedish king had just given him. On one side was the image of a young man and a beautiful, lyre-bearing Muse. Yeats writes, “I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpracticed verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were; and now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young.” Clearly he is talking not about the subjects of his poems, but the quality.
I am no Yeats, it goes without saying (and no Tom McGuane), but I like to think that what I believed the great Irish poet had written, and what he really wrote, both apply to my novel. The story, which I hasten to report is not autobiographical, follows my protagonist as he navigates the bewildering 1970s, falling agonizingly in love with two forceful women at once. I intend the book to be both lusty and funny—qualities I admire in McGuane—and it’s even partly set in Key West. As for whether my muse is young in the way Yeats meant, capable of inspiring work that is not infirm or unpracticed, but vigorous and skillful, a novel enhanced by decades at the keyboard, well, let’s see.
The Love You Take: A Novel will be published on October 23.
