On February 15, a day that Hugo House executive director Lyall Bush
referred to as “Valentine’s Boxing Day,” three authors read at an event
called Love Is the Drug. The intent, Bush explained in his
introduction, was to explore the relationship between love and
pharmaceuticals, but instead it was a showcase for three very
different writers at varying stages of their careers, and each of the
readings inspired its own kind of love.
Monica Drake, whose first novel, Clown Girl, was released
last year, read a story that recalled the giddy, unearthly feeling of
first love. Ostensibly about a man sitting on a toilet, reading a
newspaper article about an old girlfriend who just won elected office,
the story quickly became a hilarious fight between a lovelorn schlub
and a modern bathroom filled with automatic sensors. The protagonist’s
humiliation was raw and pungent, and the story was dazzling, and
you could feel the audience falling in
love with Drake.
Rick Moody, author of Purple America (good),
Demonology (great), and The
Diviners (nigh-unreadable), presented a more middle-aged kind of love, the kind
that suffers from back hair and divorce. “Oh, this is a bad one,” Moody
said, before he started reading. He was right. His story
presented the feminine side of a he-said/she-said, and it was almost
intolerable.
The first segment was the woman, on a first date, describing how
much she hated the man’s badly balding head—describing it as,
among other things, a soccer ball with octagonal patches of flaking
skin, a bad day at the beach, and medical therapy that involves
maggots. The second segment, about the woman and the man now
(inexplicably) living together, was somewhere between 15
minutes and three years long and entirely about toothbrushing. It
featured the kind of thesaurus-atomizing vocabulary that no human
being—save a writer desperately trying to be clever via
over-intellectualizing minutia—would use, and its major point
seemed to be that women hate football and think men are stupid. It was
an embarrassing, shallow, antilove piece of writing completely out of
place with the other works, an arduous journey to nowhere.
Hallelujah, then, for the historical perspective provided by Hugo
House’s writer in residence, poet David Wagoner. Wagoner, who resembles
your favorite high-school science teacher in both his appearance and
the calm, thoughtful timbre of his voice, simply told stories of the
failures that poets had experienced in love. Yeats (“Oh, he made a mess
of it,” Wagoner groaned) unsuccessfully proposed to an actress over 30
times and then wound up proposing
to her daughter, too.
Wagoner read poems by the authors he was discussing, and some of
them, by Thomas Hardy and Charles Harper Webb, seemed renewed and
refreshed by his commentary. His gentle, intelligent manner created a
bond—a deep and abiding love—between the poet and
his adoring audience: No boxing necessary.