“The October Man”; or, Why I’m Taking a Break From Blogging

“When Scott Lerner returned from Israel, he stayed in a YMCA.  He did not particularly want to stay in a YMCA, but he had no good alternative. … Once he had friends in this town, but that was three years ago.  In between had come the war, in between had come the oil embargo.  He did not know how many of his friends were still here.  He did not know how many were still his friends.”

I wrote these lines, or something like them–I seem not to be able to locate my original drafts–around the end of 1977 or beginning of 1978.  They were the opening, since discarded, of a novel that has seen several incarnations since I first set to writing it nearly 45 years ago.  This novel is the project to which I intend to devote myself for the next six months–and, consequently, to take a six-month break from my regular bi-weekly blogging on this site.  (Though I may put up a post from time to time, as the spirit moves me.)

The book’s title is The October Man.  And this is its story:

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1977-78 was my second year in Chapel Hill, my second year of teaching in what was then the “Department of Religion” at the University of North Carolina.  My first year had been consumed with finishing my Ph.D. dissertation, which I needed to retain my job, along with taking my first baby steps in learning the difficult art of teaching.  Coming to understand, too, that teaching and writing are not all that an academic career is about, as I’d once innocently imagined.

It had been a marathon.  But now it was over: I was an accredited “Phud,” my senior colleagues were relieved, and I actually had some leisure time to spend doing things I’d long put off.  Like writing fiction.

Once upon a time I’d loved to do imaginative writing.  I’d even expected, in my adolescent naivete, to be able to list “writer” as my profession when I grew up.  I’d taken a few undergraduate creative writing courses.  But with graduate school, all that was relegated to the realm of “childish things” that a grownup needed to put away.  For the next several years I devoted myself to preparing to be a scholar and teacher of Judaic studies.

Now, with doctorate in hand and a three-year position that looked like it was going to become tenure-track (it did), my long-neglected itch to be a storyteller might possibly be revisited and revived?

So I signed up for a once-a-week evening class in creative writing, taught by an elderly writer named Mena Webb.

Or at least she seemed elderly back then.  I now learn from Googling that she was 62, twelve years younger than I am now.  She died ten years ago, at the age of 97.  Reading her obituary, I feel a pang of regret that I lost touch with her, even though for decades she and I were almost neighbors.  She was a wonderful lady.

(We were to give each other only constructive criticism on our writing, she informed her dozen or so students at our first class meeting.  “I don’t think destructive criticism ever helps anyone, do you?” she asked us in her heavy Southern accent.  And we all responded dutifully: “No ma’am!”)

It was under Mena’s tutelage that I began to write The October Man.

The novel was autobiographical.  It told of a man, a young Bible scholar, who’d gone to Israel to research and write his Ph.D. dissertation, and two months after arriving there found his life upended by a war that devastated the society around him, that shattered the world of golden prosperity he’d taken for granted.  This was the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, with the Arab oil embargo and the global energy crisis following fast upon its heels.

From the perspective of 1977 or 1978–how many of you out there can remember the gasoline shortages that intermittently crippled our much-prized mobility during those years?–it seemed like Yom Kippur 1973 was the great watershed of recent history, the gateway to a darker and more dismal world.  A world in which Newsweek magazine might have a cover story titled RUNNING OUT OF EVERYTHING and showing a dejected Uncle Sam, stovepipe hat patched and icicles hanging from his nose, staring into an empty horn of plenty.  A world in which, according to rumor, bumper stickers had been spotted in America reading WE NEED OIL NOT JEWS.

(No wonder Lerner, freshly returned to the U.S., wonders how many of his old friends are still his friends.)

In the pages I wrote for Mena’s class, I tried to convey that sense of post-apocalypse, writing around the war rather than confronting it directly, which I still didn’t feel ready to do.  But all too soon the semester, and the class with it, came to an end.  Several of us wanted to continue, and asked Mena if that could be arranged.  No, she said, she had too many commitments.  But she did know a writer who might be willing to work with us … a lovely young woman named Lee Smith.

Lee Smith’s name is now familiar, as one of the luminaries of contemporary Southern literature.  But back in 1978, when we had the privilege of meeting with her once a week to talk about our drafts–written on typewriters, of course–her career was just starting to take off.  I still treasure the encouragement she gave me for The October Man.  “Why did you cut this?  This is interesting,” she wrote in the margin of a paragraph in my draft that I’d X’ed out, in which Lerner describes to his (wholly fictional, I’m sorry to say) Israeli girlfriend how the city of Jerusalem took on its present shape–and I came to realize that I had a story to tell that might fascinate those unfamiliar with the world in which it’s set.

And I treasure the inscription Lee wrote in my copy of her 1980 novel Black Mountain Breakdown.  “I hope to see more of that novel [The October Man]–which deals with a world, to my mind, as specialized as the world of this novel–which I hope you will enjoy.”

I did enjoy Black Mountain Breakdown.  But The October Man stalled, crowded out by my academic obligations.  Years later I took it up again, and even completed two or three drafts.  But the story never seemed to come out right, and for fifteen years I left the project for dead.

And then COVID hit.

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I wrote a two-part blog post, back in that awful spring of 2020, about my sense of deja vu to Israel in 1973, suddenly vulnerable and reeling from a catastrophe that might have been expected but which came to most as a devastating shock, sprung out of nowhere.

In that time of anxiety and depression, whose end no one could foresee–we still can’t, nearly two years later–I found myself thinking again and again: it’s time to return to The October Man.

For years I’d been part of a writers’ group, led by the amazing novelist Laurel Goldman.  Of course we had to stop meeting.  But we made the decision to keep going by Zoom–a decision that probably saved my sanity.  To these friends and fellow-writers, I owe a debt I can hardly repay.

Sometime that summer, a year and a half ago, I timidly told the group about The October Man, which I’d never mentioned to them before.  They gave me the strongest encouragement to return to it.

From my colleagues’ responses, which I recognized as right on target, I came to realize what was wrong with my earlier drafts: broken promises.

• Scott Lerner leaves for Israel as a secular Jew poised to return to his traditional faith.  He comes back a convinced atheist–yet still profoundly attached to the Bible, and to the God in whom he no longer believes.  I implicitly promised the reader I would explore the spiritual transformation within him, show how it was bound up with his experience of Israel, and of Israel at war.  I broke my promise.  Can I now do better?
• On his very first day in Israel, Lerner meets a Palestinian woman, twenty years older than himself yet fascinating and alluring.  I hinted at mutual sexual attraction, implicitly promised that this would become part of Lerner’s story.  I broke my promise.  Can I now do better?
• Throughout his time in Israel, Lerner carries the torch for his ex-lover, a beautiful young classicist as passionately devoted to Homer and the Odyssey as Lerner is to the prophets of the Bible.  I implicitly promised that, by the end of the story, their love for one another would find a resolution.  I broke my promise.  Can I now do better?
• I implicitly promised that the story would at least probe if not resolve the tensions … between Lerner’s Jewish and American identities … between his bedrock devotion to embattled Israel, and his awareness of the wrongs done to the Palestinians … between his resentment of the possibly anti-Semitic professor on whom his career depends, and his father-and-son attachment to that same professor … between his deeply conservative and devout cast of mind, and his new-found conviction that there is no God.

I didn’t exactly break these promises.  But I didn’t deliver on them as fully as I’d wanted–and that the reader has every right to expect.

Can I now do better?

I’m sure going to try.

After a year and a half of sputtering along with my re-envisioning, my telling once more the story I launched upon nearly a half-century ago, I’m now going gangbusters.  I want to finish it over the next six months, and to devote my full attention and imagination to finishing it.

Which is why, for these six months, I’m taking a hiatus from blogging.

Wish me Godspeed.