When writers are interviewed, invariably they receive this question: Who is your favorite writer? Or, the variant, which was put to Ron Currie, Jr., just last week at a book party for God is Dead, his new book: Which writers influenced you the most? (Raymond Carver, Currie said first, and, by the by, he got an unusual rave in the Atlanta Constitution-Journal a few days ago.)
The answer changes for me as time passes. There was my Doris Lessing period, a time when I couldn't read enough of May Sarton, the winter when I read all of Edna O'Brien, the year when I got this question from a Boston Globe reporter who was asking "business people" what books they were reading: then, Mr. Chekhov.
After years of switching affections, for the past two my answer has remained steady: Roland Merullo. I've posted about Roland's work before. I didn't know his writing until I attended Solstice Summer Writers, a workshop then in its first year, and which I signed up for at the very last minute (several posts below, including this one). I was working on a novel and needed a little strength training.
As things worked out, I was assigned to Roland's section and found his singular commandment about writing corresponding to my own: There are no rules in writing (decent grammar and proper spelling being the exceptions, Mom -- she was an English teacher). After the workshop ended, I read his In Revere, In Those Days and will likely never forget my mad enthusiasm as I thumbed away a message to him while on a train in Sweden, where I was working at the time. There's a tenderness in this book around the life challenge that has been my companion since a very young age, losing people I love unexpectedly, that sends a message to my tear ducts just thinking about it.
When I got home, I acquired the rest of Roland's books and have read them all, save one, which is about golf, about which I have deficient interest and knowledge. Some I've read more than once. His early work is serious and absorbing; more recently, he's banged out a couple of very funny ones (Golfing with God, no, no, this one is not really about golf, though, Roland, an irrepressible green trotter, manages to work its intricacies in, and the forthcoming Breakfast with Buddha)--and a poignant one that is a gift to the community of those with life-threatening illnesses, A Little Love Story, in this case, cystic fibrosis.
I was finishing the first draft of my novel when a colleague of Roland's suggested that I ask him to edit it. A bit nervously I put out the request and he responded instantly. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made and, as a result, I've gotten the benefit of his expertise, always delivered with directness and clarity, the kind of editing I've never had before, even when I was writing every day for a newspaper. Highly recommended.
I was reminded of Roland's unparalleled deftness at looking evil in the eye--then looking behind it--with his guest column in yesterday's Boston Globe. "A grave lesson from Mussolini" is his latest dispatch, this from Mezzegra, Italy.
Roland's column proves difficult to excerpt as he progresses from a walk down a beautiful hill to the spot where Mussolini was executed to calling out how quickly a country can go from good to evil. You have to read the whole thing. Here, the first two grafs:
FROM THE house on Lake Como where we are staying this summer, we walk past a place called Villa Belmonte on our way down the hill into town. The pale yellow stucco, the manicured grounds -- Villa Belmonte is a pleasant sight, and typical of the hillside homes hereabouts.
But on a low stone wall to the left of the main gates there is a black cross, 2 feet tall, with a simple inscription: "Benito Mussolini, 28 Aprile , 1945." It was here, on this unassuming spot, that the dictator and his mistress were executed by communist partisans, ending what was probably the saddest chapter in Italian history. The next day in Milan, an hour to the south, the bodies were strung up and mutilated by the mobs in Piazzale Loreto...
