5,000 Words on Why I Should Stay the F*** Out of Mr. William Forrester’s Home

(a fictional essay by “Jamal Wallace,” character in the film “Finding Forrester”)

While the purpose of this essay began as a humorous endeavor, the seriousness of its general application and meaning shouldn’t be ignored. When writing about one of the greatest challenges known to humans one must keep the proverbial “straight face.” Solitude, loneliness, abandonment (whether forced or self-imposed) are some of the most painful experiences a person can undergo. Any of these terms, by definition, are often accompanied by a wide variety of individual interpretations. Often time, the definition of experiences such as these takes place within a personal space; say, a prison cell, a workplace office, or even a place of residence. In the case of a self-imposed isolation that occurs in an apartment or home, the given solitude takes on a meaning all of its own. It is impossible for me to understand Mr. William Forrester’s solitude, his self-imposed isolation, and due to the fact that he is a fictional character, I can only approximate a general examination of his personal reasons. Nevertheless, it is the premise of his assignment that rings factual and concrete—a level of respect that should have been obviously present to me but which I found easy to ignore.

Solitude and isolation remain abstract experiences to me. I’ve lived with my mother and my brother all of my life. Mr. Forrester doesn’t share this experience with me. In fact, his experience is the complete opposite of mine. As a result, Mr. Forrester has had the life-long experience (should I say the opportunity) to live out the meaning of those aforementioned abstractions. Year after year, alone in his apartment, Mr. Forrester translates that painful isolation/loneliness into a glorious exhilaration in the silence he occupies. He invented a space where not only his body resides, but also his most menial thoughts; his most common ideas turn into a clamorous presence, all of them standing in line demanding his unequivocal attention. Out of this solitude, Mr. Forrester’s ideas materialize into writing. These he might consider his “visitors,” his accompanists to his personal and lonely song of grief.

Of course I would be the first to admit that I shouldn’t have violated this sacred place by breaking into his apartment. What I didn’t realize while I walked through his dark apartment that night was how wrong I acted, and how with every step I took I stepped into one of Mr. Forrester’s “visitors.” I seemed to have dirtied their pristine shapes, offended their virginal forms. Mr. Forrester’s anger directed at me was not simply justified because of my vulgar act; he has all the right to ask me to write this essay, to force me reflect on what solitude and loneliness and silence really mean.

William Forrester’s novel, Avalon Landing is the story of a man who returns from World War II and finds that the damage done to him makes him utterly incompatible with his former life. In the short months after his return his life spirals out of control—he loses his marriage; is not allowed to see his children; he is unable to hold a job of any kind. He insists in revisiting the places of his youth: his boyhood home, his high school and college, but to no avail. Four months after returning from the unbelievable violence of jungle fighting in the South Pacific, he finds himself living out of his car, the winter months upon him.

The bulk of the novel’s story is told by the protagonist himself in the first person. I am quite certain that Mr. Forrester wanted to achieve some sort of intimacy between the writer and the reader. After all, the story is being told while the protagonist rests on the backseat of his old Dodge, trying hard to keep warm. I can’t think of a better place to accent solitude, loneliness and isolation. The story is episodic in nature. The protagonist, telling his story retrospectively, goes back and forth in the timelines. While he keeps his story about what happened in the war relatively short (the book is only 52,523 words long), the narrator tells the reader about his platoon’s dreadful and tragic end. They had been sent by the high command to fulfill an impossible mission, some type of patrol that took them deep into Japanese occupied territory. At first, the narrator protested and did not want to take his platoon on this particular mission, calling it some “futile madness.” His superiors pressed on and he had no alternative but to lead his platoon right to its inevitable end. He knew that if they ran into trouble, there would be no backup or reinforcements—just him and the last of his men. As predicted, the platoon is slaughtered. Only two men survive. The narrator recalls how he and a Private First Class survived the ambush, tried to retrieve some of the bodies of their comrades, fail to do so and survived four days in the jungle evading Japanese patrols until by some miracle found themselves back to the American lines. The Private First Class’ name was Nicholas D. Avalon.

Because of its episodic structure, the narrator elaborates throughout the novel on different stages of his life in what appears a non-chronological line. I am not quite sure what Mr. Forrester intended by structuring his novel in this way; perhaps it was some effort at breaking the fictional standard expected of the post-War public. He speaks of his marriage before and after the war, the particularly distressing set of circumstances that drove him to call his automobile “home,” his college days before and after December 7^th, the birth of his children. The reader might be disappointed in finding that after both the narrator and Nicholas D. Avalon arrive home from the war, they quickly lose contact with each other. As the narrative finds the present tense, the narrator becomes obsessed with finding the whereabouts of Nicholas D. Avalon. This jump to the present takes place between chapter eight and chapter nine, and in the course of this time, six years evolved with a quick pass of the page. After a few false leads, he does indeed find Nicholas D. Avalon very much alive. Nicholas had gone on to college on the G.I. Bill, found love with one of the homely co-eds on campus, became an English teacher in the local high school of the town where he now made his residence. Wife, children, job and fulfillment—Nicholas had it all. The conversation between the men might leave some readers yearning for more, reaching out and trying to listen in to what these men said to each other. But again, Mr. Forrester’s mastery of plot eliminates much of the conversation that serves as the catalyst for the narrator’s return to normalcy. Nicholas D. Avalon does indeed save the narrator’s life. Merely his example about how to live life after the disastrous experience of war is enough for the narrator to find a new path in his life.

Despite the fact that the narrator doesn’t relate much about living in his car through the cold winter months, I became aware that a deep sense of solitude must have overwhelmed him into his elaborate narrative style. I am not here to debate the meaning of Mr. Forrester’s novel (God knows he hated that) but it is certainly safe to say that a deep yearning for solitude—the solitude a writer must work with—was at hand. While the meaning of Avalon Landing is not exactly a “soup question,” I have tried for eight years to make sense of William’s voice within the written page. That is not to say that I associate the author directly to the narrator simply because he was a personal friend of mine. I spent countless hours with him. Knowing an author personally can indeed tarnish the reader’s interpretation of the novel, but in the case of William, the only part of him that spoke with his voice was the narrator’s desire for the solitude of his car. The backseat of the narrator’s car became William’s own allegory of a safe place, the symbolic cocoon he struggled to keep for himself and that I violated when I broke into his apartment that night.

Perhaps I am making this essay more about William than me. And I suppose this essay should be, in fact, about me. Why should I stay out of Mr. William Forrester’s apartment? Why would the only open door I knew in all of my life be now forever closed to me? William wrote in his book: “[T]he rest of those who came before us cannot steady the unrest of those who follow.” It is up to me to explain what coming to his apartment every day meant to me, how it shaped my life in so many ways. Learning about William’s own solitude helped me make my own solitude in college more passable. The hours I spent alone in my single dorm room were initially dreadful indeed. I missed all my friends, my mother, my brother. I missed William’s apartment. In those days, my memories of spending time in William’s apartment were my only succor. What I realize now that I didn’t realize then is the fact that my selfishness in wanting to be close to William literally killed his dreamful solitude. And later in college, when people knocked on my door in my little room and interrupted my reading and writing, I would return to my absolute ignorance of how William might have viewed my constant interruptions. He could’ve been working, reading or just simply sitting—the truth is I’ll never know. Paul Auster wrote about his father in The Invention of Solitude: “For fifteen years he had lived alone. Doggerly, opaquely, as if immune to the world. He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the form of a man. The world bounced off of him, shattered against him, at times adhered to him—but never got through. For fifteen years he haunted an enormous house, all by himself, and it was in that house that he died.” (ADD)

Unlike William Forrester, I still can’t figure out where the meaning of my solitude resides. Perhaps it is within the many layers of my personality, resting there like a loyal dog—a dog loyal to an undeserving master. There’s a good chance that the solitude I yearn is trapped under those layers. Preparation and hard work have not yielded space for all of those things that replaced others; the memories are simply stacked away on top of another, and another. It never occurred to me think of it this way until I examined William’s solitude.

Despite the vast differences between William’s solitude and mine, I can draw a few parallels. All of the numerous notebooks that I have filled in the last four years of my life can indeed represent my own personal space, where I enjoy a solitude all of my own. Both William and I chose solitude as our backdrop. Or did it choose us instead? One must under that in embracing the writer’s life, the one cherished companion is no companion at all. The writer must embrace that solitude, fight against it, the yearning of others, and resolve to see his work through. Franz Kafka epitomizes the embrace of the writer’s life in his quote: “I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else. A writer's life actually does depend on his desk; if he's to avoid going mad, he should never leave his desk, he must cling to it like grim death... I want to delve into it with all my strength; when not writing I feel myself being pushed out of life by unyielding hands.” Some years ago, a friend of mine tried to problematize Kafka’s sentiment by indicating that the writer who doesn’t leave his desk would, in turn, have absolutely nothing to write about. I beg to differ, really, from the stand point of view that people live their lives at a different pace, and what for one might be adventure (read: Hemingway), for other it might just be the suffocating nearness of depression (or any other kind of mood swing) is enough to write masterpieces (read: F. Scott Fitzgerald). More over, what Kafka refers to is his desk acting as a sanctuary, it is the relationship with that inanimate object that reveals his love for solitude, his bittersweet consolation with silence and isolation. Kafka’s quote evokes the idea that solitude is the absolute and clear definition of writing. Alone, one can work; alone, all the troubles disappear; alone, all of the creativity takes flight. Is there a misconception in this? Where do things happen? Can the world be experienced from the comfort and seclusion of one’s desk? How did William do it? How could a person seclude himself so completely and still be able to write a novel like Sunset? I imagine that William carried with him a universe of experience and that allowed him to view the world for what it really was. And the rest of us are left to survive for ourselves with the knowledge that it can and will be so—if only we could learn to live with ourselves, carry our weight regardless of baggage. We must sit still and learn from our solitude, that’s what Kafka did, and what I suspect William mastered completely. Could writers live any other way? What other forms of living could then exist for people whose very life depends on that bitter cold solitude? One can begin deducting that most writers (to whom the writing process becomes the kind of obsessive search for the perfect solitude) suffer from irreparable inter-personal relationships. The divorce, the abandonment, the child not seen for ten years or more, all of them become the distressing baggage a writer carries. And if this fuels his writing, it is not because he enjoys carrying that pain, but because it helps him connect with the larger human experience. William knew this well—perhaps better than anyone else I’ve ever known. While these topics are, for the most part, not exactly “soup questions,” there was something about the way William Forrester treated e that let me to know and experience that he was in no position to fail, to make me another victim of his lifelong rage. Perhaps I represented that to William—one more opportunity to get it right.

In the action of writing William found a meaning that eludes most of us our entire lives. William wrote with the goal of correcting his life—to right the wrongs that invaded his quiet mind. I wonder what were some of his solitary moments like; how did he navigate the fact that life is not that black and white, and that however deep the pain be carried for his past, his misdeeds, he might have found peace and joy in writing.

Of all the things that I found at the apartment after William’s passing, the one aspect that impressed me the most was that he believed in that insupportable silence as if it were a religion of sorts. He must have heard his voice in all of those pages, neatly catalogued and indexed. It was, in my opinion, one of the most perfect examples of the transcendence of communion with the self. All of those years with nothing but his voice on paper must have given him what he was looking for. His specific instructions as to what print and allowed to be published were as detailed as they were varied. After the publication of the novel Sunset—for which he asked me to write the foreword—phone calls from all types of publishing houses began to inundate the apartment (yes, I did replace the ringer on the telephone). Colleges and universities were extremely interested in securing a safe place for William’s papers. They knew that such a deal might/would include the original draft of Avalon Landing, the greatest American novel of the 20^th Century. One of the leading universities in the West coast even offered to open the “William Forrester Center for Creative Writing” as part of the deal. “There,” they stated in their letter, “Mr. Forrester’s papers would be kept safely, allowing researchers and critics alike an opportunity to examine the genius and his work.” I kindly declined. You may as well imagine why.

“Write from the gut,” was one of William’s favorite sayings. Perhaps he was alluding to what Wordsworth called the feelings that “remain too deep for tears.” The answer to the riddle William left behind might even be solved. Sunset remains as much an enigma as was William’s solitude. I am quite certain that he didn’t mean it that way, but the inarguable fact remains: who William was and how his solitude shaped him was his own mold, his combination to his own personal safe. He knew to keep things inside; in his own words how I needed to keep something back, not to let on too fast or too easily. When the creative yell sounds off, we must heed the call and if what it demands is for us to encapsulate that time and isolate ourselves in a place where the only voice one hears is one’s self, then so be it. It was at that time that I understood that despite the solitude and the silence, the creation of a world that up to that point was not part of my reality was entirely possible. Hemingway, that irreparably misunderstood bastard, wrote that, [f]rom things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.” While this might sound a bit over-romanticized, Hemingway alludes to that channel a writer might be able to tune into, a place where reality is defined by the unreality of the experience. How do we know what is like to fight in the trenches? We read a good book about it, and by doing so appropriate the experience to a large extent. It was not easy for William to navigate his solitude, yet I find comfort in knowing that finding and creating a world from your very mind must be the ultimate feeling of creation. This is what William accomplished with Avalon Landing, and eventually would recapture with Sunset.

William showed me the path, but it was entirely up to me whether or not I was to follow it willingly. It was with much trepidation that I began sketching the characters of Dividing Zero, my first full-length literary fiction novel. How I came to the story started when my conflicting interests with the prep school I attended in high school clashed against the principles I was holding myself up to. It isn’t tragic, nor does it manifest as negative, but the remorse and undefined dislike I had for the school materialized on the page before I could have a say about it. It might remain unpublished. There’s one thing William taught me and taught me well: “don’t let the bastards think everything you write is autobiographical. They’ll tear you to pieces.” William was this way against critics because he’d learned the hard way how not to trust anyone who didn’t live for writing. For me, Dividing Zero was a great experience, a way of experimenting with voices and events and all sorts of literary meanings I learned from reading Avalon Landing, and certainly from writing the foreword to Sunset.

I knew from the very start that the fact that I read Sunset before anyone else did, and the fact that I wrote the foreword was bound to follow me. My relationship with William has been called into question many times by people who feel a bitter jealousy towards me. Was William a homosexual, and, by virtue of the fact that he left everything to me, was I his young lover? The rumors were as many as they were varied. Even my friends from the basketball court turned against me when they heard that I now lived in the same apartment from which “the eyes” watched us religiously every day. This, of course, is tragic, and the many people that have benefited from soiling our past will never be held accountable. Is this what literary celebrity means? Was this another aspect of the depraved life William fought so hard to avoid? Was William right in saying that “[i]f you do it for the money, you’ll never know what writing is about.” And as far as women wanting to sleep with me simply because I wrote the foreword to Sunset, and because a few of my stories have been published in “The Paris Review” and “The New Yorker” still remains an experience I have been unduly kept from. What are the real rewards for a life spent this way? The truth—the inarguable fact—is that whatever or wherever that tiny voice comes from to tell you a story you must write, it means nothing to try and define it. The basic recipe for concocting a character or a plot cannot be written, or pass down through the ages—it must be learned singularly, freshly, every single time it takes place. William also knew this, as he knew that writing came from hard work and discipline and dedication. Even then, the outcome was still at question.

The next challenge I embarked upon was another novelistic effort entitled, Into the Abattoir. The topic reached me on March 2003, the very same day “Operation Iraqi Freedom” began. The topic was completely alien to me, yet I found the challenge to be perhaps the highest I could engage in, and I know that from a distance William also shared the same opinion. After completing Dividing Zero, I felt that I needed to write another long piece in order to help myself believe I still could do it. But what do I know about war? What was it about this even that so spoke to me? It goes without saying that despite the opposition to the war today, the build up and the hours leading up to the ground offensive was covered by the media in a fanatical almost manic way. The American media is quick to read the polls in order to determine which way to spin the story, and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was no different. It wasn’t until the war hit a stalemate that the media began to capitalize on negative covering of the war. And this is where the story of Into the Abattoir takes place. The story is that of an American soldier who is sent back for his fourth tour of duty. Deep down inside he resolves to keep the hope of returning home alive, but deep down inside a torment of unresolved issues make him fear every sunrise and every dusk. I did my research. I learned how the Chain of Command operates, and how patrol missions are decided and how an often “faceless high command” makes awful decisions about said patrols. I read several first person accounts of what has gone (and continues to go wrong) with the war.

The narrator, Stephen P. becomes the highest rank of his platoon after an IED kills five of his fellow soldiers on a night patrol. Stephen P. is only a Staff Sergeant, and while the possibility of a field promotion excites him, he realizes that this is not the way he wants it to take place. Later, when the promotion takes place, Stephen P. assumes the responsibility of his fallen comrades; the intensity of his guilt and psychological damage is beyond measure. He then begins to defy order sent from above in order to save what remains of his platoon. The main plot is based on what Stephen P. has to do in order to cover up his insubordination, and still make it seem like he has completed the mission. There are, of course, feelings of guilt about his lack of obedience, but then he discovers that his switching of tactics is actually more effective on the field than the orders coming from above. He knows that they (high command) would never believe him. In fact, they consider Stephen P.’s field promotion the direct result of the improvement with tribal leaders and the security goals being met. There is one final patrol before his company is sent back home for Rest and Relaxation, one final push into the unknown. This time, however, all is different. High command realizes that there are gaps in Stephen D. reports, and the Captain in charge of the company decides to send in a “spotter” equipped with a GPS system which will ensure the mission is completed as ordered.

This (just like Dividing Zero) is a very young effort, juvenilia if you must. But some thing inside of me tells me William would have approved of the stories. Not because they were “du jour,” or because they were excusable as early efforts of a struggling writer, but because deep down inside I was feeling these emotions, the emotions of characters I had fashioned out of nothing and now I’ve made real.

There are times, of course, when I think all of this is useless—that there might be hundreds or thousands of people writing away, completing drafts, sending them in for publication, thousands of novels being published every day. What chance do I stand against that reality? I mustn’t forget William’s lessons. I have to keep telling myself that it is good to believe, that the challenge doesn’t really come from the birth of the idea, but from pushing through and making that first draft possible. It is when things are really hopeless that one must believe, Hemingway once said. However, despairing about this type of worry is useless to a writer. William spoke of it well when he constantly reminded me of the solitude, the self-imposed challenge of surviving loneliness, and the second guessing that would take place every time I embarked on a new project. “Keep your ideas fresh,” he would say at times, “by forgetting about them.” This appears as a paradox of sorts, but even Hemingway would agree. The mastery over one’s own ideas is the real indication that you are living the writer’s life, and not the writer’s life living you. It often happens that many writers turn to alcohol, drugs, etc., to beat the block, to revamp themselves into believing they can just as simply do it again and again. Norman Mailer’s main preoccupation after finishing a book wasn’t the lack of ideas, but rather the fear that he would never be able to finish another project again. William didn’t have to worry about such trivial matters—not trivial to the writer in general, but to him it was simply a way of manifesting his already acknowledged genius. His novel Avalon Landing continues to sell extremely well, and aside from the royalties and the bestselling status of Sunset there’s no worry that even if William was alive today, he would have difficulty making a living from his writing. That is William’s legacy to the world (and to writers especially): quality, not quantity. This is a lesson that many writers should consider today. The publishing world depends in great part to the formula/beach book type of bestselling authors. This is the reason why it was such a relief to see William’s name at the very top of the lists this past year.

I am often asked why I took William to Yankee Stadium on his birthday. Of course, after being absent from the ballpark, and keeping himself thinly informed about the major events in baseball for the past 40 years or so, William kept his idea about our national pastime pristine. Without reading too much into it, I see a certain amount of paradox when it comes to William’s love of the game. What I think is that despite the fact that he was a staunch critic of the over-romantic interpretation of literature in general, there was still some part of him that wanted to poeticize and romanticize baseball. He wanted to give baseball meaning that in reality was not there (I mean that going by his other interpretations of politics, literature, art and idealism in general). So why devote love to something fabricated? Wasn’t this contradicting every thing else William said and wrote? Baseball has changed, and not for the best. I wasn’t brave enough to tell this to William, as I felt that he would have seen this as a betrayal (not by me) of his beloved symbolism and poetics about the game. Why spoil William’s interpretation of what happened in that green field in the Bronx? Imagine what William would say if he were alive today about issues like PED, and steroids and the closing of Yankee Stadium at the end of the 2008 season. Perhaps nothing would have happened. Perhaps William felt this way about baseball because it was so directly connected with the memories of his brother. He was honest enough to say so himself; those summers that turned into fall were an enjoyment incomparable with the monetary and economic realities of today. It would’ve broken his heart. But then again, his heart was broken when his brother returned from the war, and baseball seasons under the sun were not enough to placate his suffering heart. I like to think that William abandoned baseball because to him it had been so pure, so virginal, that he didn’t want it soiled in any way. He made his absence from baseball part of his solitude, of his isolation. The memories were distinctly connected to his brother, and to keep up with baseball today would have been a betrayal to that purity. William was alone with his thoughts, along with his memories, even if those memories seemed trivial and baseless.

I must now end, and in doing so I can’t help to feel a certain amount of guilt having shared so much of a man’s life with the public he generally wanted to keep away from. The last, well, the inevitable fact remains the same. William wrote for the ages, and that writing took place in the most sacred places of all: his own solitude.