Bury Your Enemies
T.C. Boyle used to stroll up to me at parties and offer this
sound advice: “Bury your enemies, John. Bury your enemies,
and bury ‘em deep.”
It was the fall of 1988. Boyle was a Visiting Professor
at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was hard at
work on East is East, and I was his research assistant. My
primary task was to locate as much information as I possibly
could about the pygmy sunfish, a fish for which, I would learn
later, not much information existed.
The theme of vindication threaded our conversations that semester.
When I arrived at the Workshop in the fall of 1987 without
funding, I was told by a second-year student (a student who
is now a bestselling novelist) that I shouldn’t worry,
that everyone got funding their second year—everyone,
she added, except for those who clearly don’t deserve
it. But in the spring, when financial aid was doled out, I
was one of three fiction writers who didn’t get funding.
One of three. Over and over, I asked myself, What the fuck
happened? but the answer was already there, sitting in front
of me, fat and dejected: You, Mr. McNally, are one of the
undeserving! Had I not worked hard enough? Were my stories
shit? Was it because I had gone to Southern Illinois University
instead of Harvard or Johns Hopkins for my undergrad degree?
Who knew? That summer, a visiting editor read my work, liked
what he saw, and spoke to the powers that be, and so by the
fall I had been awarded a skimpy research assistantship. Enter
T. Coraghessan Boyle. Tom to his friends.
Tom liked me in part, I suspect, because he looked at my experiences
at Iowa and saw a reflection of his own. Tom had gone to SUNY-Potsdam;
Jack Leggett, the director of the workshop in Tom’s
day, had gone to Yale. Tom was still a hippie, cranked up
on attitude. Apparently, Jack and Tom did not see eye
to eye. According to Tom, he himself had been left out of
the funding pool, and so anger became his fuel, his motivator.
And maybe this was the best thing that could have happened
to him. As a student, he began publishing in places most writers
only dream about—The Atlantic, Esquire...
“Bury your enemies, John. Bury your enemies, and bury
‘em deep.” We were standing in some student’s
apartment the first time he told me this, crammed in the corner
of a kitchen, drinking beer. Tom shook his head, smiling.
You could see it in his eyes: the sweetness of vindication.
But there was more to that semester than just talk of vindication.
There was the sound of Tom typing; he was always typing.
The typewriter had been a gift from his mother, and whenever
I stopped by his office, I would pause before knocking so
that I could listen to those keys clacking, the bill ringing,
the carriage return slamming. I want to say that it all now
seems like a scene from another century, but it was another
century. Seventeen years ago. A lifetime.
Am I still pissed-off? Sometimes, yeah. Sure. And what about
Tom? All you have to do is count how many books he’s
published since East is East. By my calculations,
as of today, ten. So you tell me.
