Six Weeks, No Exit

Madeleine Robins

I’m a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Class of ’81. So perhaps it makes sense that, when offered the opportunity to write an alternate history story about the SF field itself, I went back to my roots…to Clarion. None of this is remotely based on real people or real incidents. Think of it as a kind of Warner Bros. cartoon version of Clarion, the French existentialist movement, and, of course, writing...

It’s hard to explain what we wanted—in some mysterious way we were there, all of us, to become more meaningful. To experience life, unconstrained by our usual habits and surroundings, our jobs, our spouses, our weight- and drug- and drinking problems. I was Ginnie, then. From Hauppauge, New York, with a BA in English literature and a longing deep in my soul to bare my inner truth, bare it lyrically. At the time, of course, I thought I merely wanted to be able to sell to Asimov’s. The program’s administrators did not disillusion me. Soon enough I, we all, would learn the true meaning of Clarion.

Enough has been written about Clarion: how the program works, its history. For the first four weeks the workshop is taught by American luminaries such as Bryant, Ellison, Butler, Carr—the list is, by now, almost legendary. The last two weeks, of course, are always taught by Clarion’s founders, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For me, for most of the class, the first four weeks were only the preamble to our meeting with the true masters.

I barely remember the first week. It may have been the whirl of activity, or the late hours, or the tequila. On the whole I rather think it was the tequila. The first morning we sat waiting for an instructor who never appeared, until it dawned on us that this was our first lesson in the essential futility of art. So we invented ourselves, or at least our workshop, reading each others’stories, ripping them apart with truly professional vitriol, reducing each others’ egos to sodden pulp, anesthetizing it all with Dos Equis. In the cheap pile of the hall carpets you could trace the progress of love affairs to which our painful emptiness drove us: from this bed to that, to another, footprints progressed with deliberate abandon. It was the writers’ life as I had always imagined it must be.

Still, satisfying as our new lives as writers were, all of us knew that the last two weeks of the program would bring the true transformation. Even before the arrival of Sartre and de Beauvoir their presence could be felt. By the end of the first week we were all smoking Gitanes—all except for Frank from New Mexico, who had changed his name to François and was smoking Gauloise. Often he and I would sit up late in a haze of blue smoke, nestling among the empties and talking of truth and writers’ markets.

The second week brought Harlan Ellison; we’d heard the stories, of course. They were all true. He strode the earth like a giant. Each morning he would line us all against the wall, then storm up and down, pointing impatiently to one, then another. “You: when’s the last time you changed that T-shirt? You: nuke the corduroys, for Christ’s sake. You: you dress like a bimbo; you wanna be an artist? See me after class. Ah, hell, I need more coffee,” he would finish, and stalk out.

In the void left by his retreating form François asked—but quietly—”Does it matter what one wears—angora or twill? I mean, what does it matter?” I nearly loved him then; in fact, I did, later that afternoon.

Connie Willis had a passion for detail, detail, detail. “A little more blood in the scene with the axe would be nice,” she said mildly. Or, “I think maybe you need a dead dog in the corner, to give it a little character. That’s just a suggestion, of course. What do you think?” Driven from the workshop each afternoon by her relentless emphasis on nuance, we abandoned ourselves further to empty bacchanalia. Willis refused to participate—or rather, did not so much refuse as sit and watch us each evening, occasionally murmuring “Golly!” as our lives churned on around her.

Then came Budrys, the prelude to our true encounter. I don’t know what we expected, but he was nothing like it: a monument of a man looking over his coffee cup at all of us with an air of truly existential ennui. The first morning he sank into his chair like a man settling himself for a profound seige, and looked around at us all.

“Okay, enough of the crap,” Budrys sighed. “I’m here to talk about plot. You take a violin, you take a golden-haired moppet. Throw in a little jeopardy, up the stakes, add the validation. Any questions?”

François raised his hand. “What about truth?” He cocked an eyebrow and sneered.

Budrys shifted in his chair and fanned the air like a God swatting at a gnat. “Oy. Look: you get a violin, a moppet, up the stakes. Truth will follow. Do you get what I’m saying to you?”

François refused to be cowed. “What about meaning,” he asked. He was beautiful in his rebellion; his shabby black beret drooped over one eye, the Gauloise dangled from his lower lip.

“What about setting?” Budrys countered. “And characterization. And pacing. Style. Humor. Theme.” The bullying was merciless, and it went on and on, as Budrys talked about syntax and dramatic structure and internal coherence.

That afternoon many of us gathered around François as he wept, unashamed, sitting in front of his room. “It doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “When Sartre comes, he’ll understand.”

That week was the hardest, not just on François but on all of us. On Friday someone found a store mannequin of a child, spray-painted the head gold, and brought it in to burn in effigy; but by that time no one had the heart for such rebellion, and the golden-haired moppet simply took its place in the classroom with the rest of us. Budrys, except for a pause as he drank his morning coffee, never seemed to notice the addition.

At last, on a rainy Sunday evening when the dining hall was closed and there was nowhere to get coffee, they arrived. The whole class was there to greet them, sitting expectantly in the dark while they opened the door and fumbled for the light switch. To yell “surprise!” would have been gauche, we knew. So in the end we simply sat there and watched as de Beauvoir and Sartre lugged their sodden suitcases into the room.

De Beauvoir turned and regarded us. “Merde,” she said succinctly.

“Oui,” Sartre agreed, and headed for the bathroom.

oOo

A few vital images stand out from those two weeks: Sartre entering the class the first morning with a hand full of superballs, casting them wildly into the room and watching as we ducked and hid behind raised hands. Once the balls had come to a rest, “You see that something, once set in motion, becomes unpredictable, random?” he asked. We nodded as one. “What I mean to say is, who cares?”

While Jean-Paul always watched our waterfights, applauding each time a girl in a T-shirt got drenched (once he even joined in, dropping a bucket of sand on François’s head by mistake), de Beauvoir seemed to spend all her time making notes. Each morning she would appear for the workshop, smoking and drinking coffee, inscrutable in a dark suit, her hair in its chignon the essence of Parisian chic just thirty years too late. In each critique, when her turn came, she would draw deeply on her cigarette, look sidelong at Sartre, then, as if reading something there which was not visible to the rest of us, say in her throaty voice, “Pass.” And in that word we heard experience of ennui driven down the corridor of years at gale force.

From the first we all wanted to please our mentors, but none so much as François. He abandoned my bed and lived on Doritos and instant coffee, composing a story a night, each more cunningly obscure, each more searingly truthful. But somehow they missed the mark. Each morning Sartre would demonstrate with ruthless elegance the essential lack of futility in Francois’s latest fable. Each morning de Beauvoir would drag deeply on her cigarette and say “Pass.”

Not that the cooling of François’s ardor troubled me; I understood what he was striving for. But without him to occupy me; my nights were curiously empty. Empty, that is, until the evening when Sartre asked me to meet with him privately to discuss my work. In a seventh heaven of bliss which I realized only later belied the spirit of existential angst, I met him in an empty classroom. I sat and listened as he talked of the bleak void that my work encompassed, and knew even then that he thought I had that special spark he sought. Finally, matters came to a climax.

“Merde!” he said harshly, and crushed me to his breast. “I must have you!”

“Jean-Paul, this is so sudden,” I said. “What about my stories? And anyway, I thought you once said you preferred croissants to sex?”

“It was brioche.” Behind the thick lenses of his glasses Sartre’s eyes were inscrutable. “And we are in East Lansing, Michigan. There are no croissants. Come here.”

I gave myself up like a moth to the candle, and called it destiny.

oOo

What extraordinary days those were! My pleasure was marred only by the spectacle of François, who was making himself pathetic by trying to ingratiate himself with de Beauvoir. It was embarrassing, when at last de Beauvoir took pity on François and took him as her lover, the rest of us could only shake our heads at the banality of it all.

On the last morning of the workshop, François had submitted one last story for critique. What could any of us say to him? It was rife with detail, plot, setting, characters. The style was engaging, the voice knowing yet compassionate. In it there was not one true moment of ennui or angst. What had happened to the François with whom I had spoken burningly of the bleak void of writers’ markets? In my pity I compromised myself, pursed my lips and said “tres interesante,” before deferring to the next critic. It was Sartre, at last, who broke the spell.

“Merde,”he said coldly. “Tripe. This story is unshaped, it has no essence. You have not revealed yourself.”

François sat mute, glancing at de Beauvoir. She examined the cuff of her tweed jacket coldly; there was no help for him from her.

“Anything else?” François asked at last, low.

Sartre shrugged. “Your prose is meaningless. Also, I’m sleeping with your girlfriend,” he added laconically, and drew upon his pipe.

There was silence in the room. All eyes went to de Beauvoir. After an eternity of silence she said “Pass.” She smiled a smile of perfect complicity at Sartre.

In a moment François had jumped out of his seat. “You bastard, I’ll kill you!” François shrieked, and jumped on Jean-Paul, clubbing him with the arm of the golden-haired moppet, which had unaccountably come detached. Simone sat there, entranced, the smoke from her Gitane curling slowly to the ceiling. After five or six blows we managed to pull François away from Sartre. Jean-Paul straightened up in his chair, took his hands down from around his head, and puffed thoughtfully on his pipe.

“Are you all right?” Simone asked.

“How can it possibly matter?” Jean-Paul said. But he took her hand and they exchanged a look of such exquisite understanding and ennui that I understood, at last truly understood, that I would never be more to him than a momentary abberation. In that moment’s pain, I began to grow up.

It is fifteen years later. Most of us scattered to the four winds. A few of us continued to write. François changed his name back to Frank, and went to work as a columnist for Esquire, where he has won several prizes. I returned to Long Island, living in my parents’ basement and working by day at a series of meaningless jobs in the fast food industry; by night I wrote, as I do to this day. You hold the fruits of that long fifteen years’ labor in your hand. All that I know of truth and of ennui I have put in this book; I only hope that you can feel it as I have done.

And so, this book is for Jean-Paul and Simone, who made my heart break so that I could make the book sing.

Copyright © 1997 Madeleine E. Robins

Originally published in AlternateSkiffy, ed. by Mike Resnick and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Wildside Press.