A brief appreciation of Jean Merrill

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2002, I went to a wedding with Alex. The groom was one of his work colleagues, and he'd waffled about whether we should go or not. In retrospect, we probably shouldn't have, or, at least we should have skipped the reception (more about that later). But the one fabulous thing that came out of that August afternoon is that I got to meet Jean Merrill, the author of one of my favorite childhood books, The Pushcart War.

The ceremony was held in Skinner State Park, at the Summit House on top of Mount Holyoke, and we obediently followed instructions and parked our car part way up the auto road to wait for the shuttle. As cars kept passing us on their way to the top, though, we realized that not many of the other guests had followed the instructions except for one older couple whom we met while we were waiting for the shuttle. Their names were Jean and Ronni, and we chatted with them pleasantly as we waited at the side of the road. They looked to be in their late 70s and had clearly been a couple for many years. Ronni had long white hair and was lovely. Jean's hair was short and her manner matter of fact. When I asked her what she did, she told me she was a writer, that she mostly wrote children's books. I asked what she'd written. She paused and then said, "Well, the most well known one is probably The Pushcart War." I gasped. I gushed. I gaped. "The Pushcart War was one of my favorite books when I was a kid," I told her. And so it had been. I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to meet, by happenstance and not in a more formal setting--a reading, a book signing, a lecture--a person whose book I'd loved as a child. But here I was, and here she was, and I was delighted.

I learned little bits about her over those few hours--how she had gone to summer camp in Vermont with the groom's mother; how she and Ronni had 2 houses in Vermont not very far from each other, their summer house and their winter house; how Ronni was an artist and had illustrated many of Jean's books; how The Pushcart War had never been out of print; and how Tony Kushner, a friend, had attempted to write a movie adaptation of it and failed. (According to the New York Times, "The quirkiness and dense originality of the book — qualities that made Ms. Merrill’s epic tale so compelling — ultimately made adapting it as a film impossible, Mr. Kushner said.") I learned that she too had had a Fulbright Fellowship to India--hers, in 1952 to study folklore in Madras (now Chennai). My Fulbright happened nearly 40 years later, but both had been life changing.

Meeting Jean and Ronni was the best thing that happened that day. I was delighted and, really, genuinely thrilled at the happenstance of it all. And as soon as the library opened a few days later, I went straight to the children's section and took out The Pushcart War, which I hadn't read in probably 25 years. It didn't disappoint. Published in 1964, it's written as a history (in 1986) looking back at the famous Pushcart War of 1976, in which the pushcart vendors of the lower east side of Manhattan strike back against the truckers who are trying, through bullying, malice and dirty tricks, to get them off the streets. The pushcart vendors decide to fight back, first by embarking on the Pea Shooter Campaign, in which they blow tacks into truck tires via peashooters, causing the flat-tired trucks to block the roads, inconveniencing everyone, thus swaying the public to their side. The books is clever, quirky and funny, even if you're not analyzing it for broader social commentary (a la Waggish). It appears, sadly, not to be in print anymore, but I hope that will change.

As for the wedding, well, I'm not proud of what we did next. After the ceremony on the top of Mount Holyoke, we drove to the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst for the reception. The photos of the wedding party were taken, seemingly for hours. The not very expansive hors d'ouevres table was ravaged. We mingled as best we could, growing hungrier by the minute. We found our table and discovered that we were seated--not with Jean and Ronni, not with the bride's cool friends from the Peace Corps, not even with the groom's other friends--but with the minister, the bride's estranged father and a few other random people. We ate the sad salad and made strained conversation with our tablemates. We fidgeted with hunger and boredom.

And, now, I must say it. We had some whispered conversation between us. I left the decision entirely up to Alex, given that the groom was his colleague. He decided. I agreed. And so, dear readers, we left. We each excused ourselves to go to the rest room after the salad course, and we exited via the back door of the Inn. It was possibly the most deliberately rude thing I've ever done, but in the moment, it felt extraordinarily liberating. We ran happily down the street towards the car, breathing in the fresh August air, and then we went out for Chinese food.

That was the end of Alex's friendship with the groom, of course, but he doesn't seem to mind. When I think back to that day, I feel a twinge of remorse--yes, we probably should have been good citizens and at least stuck it out through the rest of dinner before making our escape--but I mostly remember my delight in meeting Jean and Ronni and grateful for the opportunity to have told her how much I'd loved her books. (I was also fond of her book The Toothpaste Millionaire, which I also read multiple times.)

Jean Merrill died, at the age of 89, earlier this month, according to her obituary in the New York Times. Ronni, her partner of more than 50 years, survives her. And in a strange twist, when I was googling Ronni's name, I found a photo of her taken by Jessamyn West, who was in David Foster Wallace's class at Amherst with me and whose remembrance of him I linked in this post. Jessamyn, apparently, was a tenant of Jean and Ronni in one of their Vermont houses. Small world, indeed. You can see some of Ronni's environmental art pieces here.

And in honor of Jean, I'd recommend a trip to the local library, where you should still be able to find The Pushcart War on the shelf. In Jean's honor and her memory, take it out and read about Frank the Flower, General Anna, Morris the Florist and the Pushcart King himself, Maxie Hammerman. You won't regret it.

In Memoriam--David Foster Wallace

I just saw the news that David Foster Wallace killed himself. I'm stunned and shaken and sad, but I can't say that I'm entirely surprised.

I knew him a long time ago, and I didn't know him well. He was my teacher, at Amherst, in the fall of 1987. I was back at school after a year off, a year in which I'd contemplated leaving and transferring to Oberlin. But that spring, when I was trying to figure out what to do, my dad sent me a clip from the Wall Street Journal called something like "Whiz Kid Writes Wacky First Novel," about DFW's first book, The Broom of the System, which he'd originally written as his senior thesis at Amherst. (One of two theses, I later learned. He'd double-majored in English and Philosophy and written honors theses in both departments (basically unheard of), graduating with a double summa cum laude (even more unheard of). ) I didn't decide to go back to Amherst because of him, but when I got back, I found out that he was teaching that semester, a single creative writing class. I immediately applied to get in.

It's been 21 years, and I still remember that class vividly. DFW was about 25. He had long hair and always came to class with a tennis racket and sometimes cookies. He had us take breaks so he could smoke. We loved him. I can pretty safely say that all of the women in the class (and possibly some of the men) had crushes on him. I bonded with someone, who later became a good friend, because she was the only person in the class with a bigger crush on him than me. He was goofy and charming and cute and unlike any other teacher I'd ever had. But that's not why I remember the class so clearly. He was a wonderful teacher, even at 25, even just out of grad school. He was tough in workshop but not mean. He made me look at writers I'd already discovered on my own--like Lorrie Moore--in a new way, and he introduced me to writers I probably never would have discovered on my own, like Lee K. Abbott, whose story, "Living Alone in Iota," remains a life favorite. He had us read a Stephen King story about a possessed laundry machine ("The Mangler") in conjunction with a prize-winning short story told from the point of view of a dead body ("Poor Boy") to illustrate the differences between literary and genre fiction. There were other tangible things. I used to confuse "further" and "farther," and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I'd confused them yet again, and in the margins, he'd written, simply, "I hate you." I've never confused them since. He once left me a note, postponing a meeting, excusing himself by saying, "I'm so hungry I'm going to fall over." While I was irritated that he wasn't there, I immediately adopted that sentence and have been saying it ever since.

Mostly, he was the first person who really made me think I could be a writer. I'd applied to the class with a (clearly autobiographical) short story I'd written the semester before I left for my year off, a story called "At Charlie's House." On the basis of that story, he let me in to the class. But when I wanted to talk to him more about the story, he told me that, in truth, it wasn't actually a very good story. But that I could write that story told him that I could write better stories. "I don't know what's going on with you and that Charlie guy," I remember him saying. He advised me to move on. I can't say I did that entirely where "Charlie" was concerned, but I put the story away, and I tried to write better ones.

It didn't happen all at once, but at some point during the semester, it just clicked. I worked harder for him than I had for any other professor in any other college class. Writing fiction was the only thing I'd ever done that frustrated me that much but that I still wanted to do. It was a revelation. The second story I handed in--about a mother and daughter on a ferry to Alaska--was 20 pages, the longest story anyone had handed in at that point. I was very apologetic about making everyone read 20 pages, but he told me it wasn't long enough. If I really wanted everyone to be on that ferry with me, I needed more detail. I gave him detail. I took the whole thing apart and put it back together again. My revision was 40 pages long, and he kindly agreed to read another draft even after he'd gone. The final version was closer to 60 pages, no longer really a story at all. That story won me a prize at Amherst--which astonished me--and it got my senior creative writing thesis proposal accepted. I can't say that he made me a writer, because I probably would have figured it out some other way, further on in time. But I definitely know it wouldn't have happened the way it happened if it hadn't been for him, if he hadn't been so smart and so tough, if he hadn't challenged me the way he did, if he hadn't pushed me to challenge myself.

We stayed in touch for a few years after that--somewhere, in a box in my basement, are the few postcards and letters I got in those pre-email days. One letter arrived when I was in India for the first time, a letter he wrote mostly to tell me that he'd sent in my letters of recommendation for grad school. He told me other things, though, like that he was in a halfway house for drug rehabilitation. It was a strangely intimate letter from a former teacher to a former student, especially since I hadn't known he had any issues with drugs. He told me that he wasn't much of a traveler, so he was impressed with my bravery about going to India. He signed it Love, but with his full name. Love, David Foster Wallace.

I haven't seen him or talked to him in more than 20 years. I always thought that if he ever came to read at Amherst, I'd go see him, but that never happened. But when I wrote above that I wasn't entirely surprised to hear that he'd killed himself, it goes back that far. I often said, at the time, and since, that he was the smartest person I'd ever met. I think that's probably still true, and it's probably true for a lot of other people--that he was the smartest person they'd ever met. Even at 21, I could tell that it was the kind of smart that made you strange, that it was too much. Even then, we got glimpses of another side of him.

At some point, I stopped reading his fiction. One of his gifts as a teacher was that he kept his own writing separate from our writing (not that, realistically, any of us could have written like him anyway). I read The Broom of the System, I read Girl with Curious Hair. I read his later essays with great delight--I still have fond memories of reading his essay about going to the Illinois State Fair while I was in Delhi in 94-95, and along with everyone else, I adored his cruise ship piece--but Infinite Jest was too much for me, though my brother loved it and gave me a copy, hoping we could talk about it. Still, even as I strayed from him as a reader, I've followed his career from afar. A few years ago, I met his parents at an Amherst reunion, and I told them he'd been my teacher all those years ago. I told them how important he'd been to me.

I don't know anything about the present tense of his life or what drove him to kill himself. I'm sad for his parents and his wife and his sister, for his friends and all of his other students, for everyone else he encouraged with his intensity and with his smartness and his humor. And selfishly, I'm sad for myself. For the past 21 years, since the fall of 1987, I've thought that when the time came that I published my own book, that I'd send him a copy with thanks, that I'd tell him, all these years later, how much he'd influenced me. He was there at the beginning for me, and in addition to all the zillion other reasons I'm sad he's gone, I'm sad that he won't be there anymore along the way.