I recently heard from someone that a writing mentor of ours passed away last November at the age of 86, shortly following a stroke. He was a local personality who had been a modestly successful author turned literary agent, and in his later years started mentoring and advising beginning writers. It has been many years since I attended, but I still remember his generosity in opening up his home every Friday evening to writers of all ages and skill levels, most of us complete strangers to him, and how he would stop our readings at 10 p.m. to serve tea and cookies. All of us crammed into this man’s living room, reading a few pages of our latest hopeful writing project out loud to everyone and offering comments on what others read to us.
I also can recall his racist comments at times, no matter who was in the room, and how shocked I was that a man of such obvious intelligence could be so openly and freely stereotypic and hurtful on issues of race. But later I made some remarks about him that were printed in a local newspaper profile and, in retrospect, just as ignorant and hurtful.
We never spoke after that, and I never sat in his living room again. But fortunately I also still remember the sign he posted on his front door every Friday evening inviting one and all to come in without ringing the bell, and serving all of us tea and cookies at 10. My memories of those nights are a mixture of warmth and dread — happy to be discussing writing with other writers, dread at what horror would crawl out of our host’s mouth at some random unfortunate moment. And yet, most of us always thanked him when the evening was over. He was hard not to thank.
“I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman wrote, and given examples like my late writing mentor, or you, or me, it’s quite impossible to disagree. We’re the most contradictory and chaotic creatures imaginable. But that shouldn’t really be a problem. The problem comes when we, recalling the blind man in that sly old fable, grasp the tip of the elephant’s trunk and say that elephants are exactly like snakes. And even the most cultured and learned of us are capable of doing that.
