Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2010 Too Much Horse: Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry Andrew Otis Haschemeyer University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Haschemeyer, Andrew Otis, "Too Much Horse: Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2010. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/699 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Andrew Otis Haschemeyer entitled "Too Much Horse: Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael J. Knight, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allen Wier, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Daniel Magilow Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Andrew Otis Haschemeyer entitled “Too Much Horse: Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael Knight, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allen Wier Margaret Lazarus Dean Daniel Magilow Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) TOO MUCH HORSE: FICTION, NONFICTION, PROSE POETRY A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Andrew Otis Haschemeyer May 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Otis Haschemeyer All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee, Michael Knight, Allen Wier, Margaret Lazarus Dean, and Daniel Magilow. Also I’d like to thank Marilyn Kallet, Art Smith, and Ben Lee for their thoughtful encouragement. Some of the works in this collection have appeared in journals and magazines, often in slightly different form. “Old Man Bar,” appeared in TheRumpus.net. “The Fantôme of Fatma” appeared in Missouri Review and was anthologized in Best New American Voices 2009, edited by Mary Gaitskill. “The Storekeeper” appeared in Missouri Review and was anthologized in Best New American Voices 2002 , edited my Joyce Carol Oates . “Isa,” will appear in Southern Indiana Review in 2010. “Those Were the Days We Ate the Knucles from Our Fingers” will appear in Southern Indiana Review in 2010. “The Oxymoron of Liberal Fathers” appeared in TheRumpus.net. “Lil’ Earl” appeared in Southern Indiana Review. “The Soldier as a Boy” appeared in Stumbling and Raging, More Politically Inspired Fiction , edited by Steve Eliott . “The Brave One” appeared in Southern Indiana Review. I would like to thank the editors of those journals and anthologies for including my work. iii ABSTRACT A collection of fiction, nonfiction, and prose poetry that explores imagination through different shapes in form, content, and genre. Includes award winning nonfiction, “The Storekeeper,” and award winning fiction, “The Fantôme of Fatma.” iv TABLE OF CONTENTS I. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION…………………………………….……………. 1 II. FICTION……………………………………………………..……………….… 11 Blue Triangle…………………………………………………….….…..…. 11 The Fantôme of Fatma…………………………………………………..… 35 Lil’ Earl…………………………………………………………………..… 64 Too Much Horse………………………………………………………….... 70 The Soldier as a Boy……………………………………………………..… 95 III. NONFICTION………………………………………………….………….…... 109 Old Man Bar…………………………………………….…………….…… 109 The Brave One……………………………………….…...………….…….. 113 The Storekeeper………………………………………………………..…... 116 Oxymoron of Liberal Fathers ……………………………………….…….. 138 IV. PROSE POETRY……………………………………………………….……... 151 The Poem that Would Save the World………………....………………...... 151 A day of 1000 Stories………………………………………………….…... 152 Isa…………………………………………………………………….…….. 153 “Flu Season”………………………………………………………….…..... 155 Those Where the Days We Ate the Knuckles from Our Fingers………………………………………………….……... 156 VITA…………………………………………………………………………..…… 157 v I. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 101 Shark Attacks My mother, a single mom, had a lab at the Marine Biological Laboratories in town. She worked hard and traveled often. You couldn’t have the kind of career she had—grants to go to the Red Sea, the Galapagos, and Antarctica, summer research at the MBL and teaching and research in New York City—and take care of two boys, or at least give them the kind of emotional support they would need, something my mother, with her systematic mind, wouldn’t have been good at anyway. It isn’t that I don’t believe science and love don’t mix, but they don’t. We had au pairs , young Swedish women who would come and live with us for a year at a time, looking after us in exchange for room and board—they didn’t have a tremendous interest, had no more maternal instinct than our mother, and no sooner than my brother and I become attached to one, she’d fly home and there would be another. They were interchangeable; their blonde hair was our only consistency. But Au pairs had their perks. We showered with one once and my brother soaped her back. Still, we didn’t feel loved, relegated to roles as pawns as numerous young men came around, feigning interest in us to get close to the sexually liberated Swedes. In the winter the au pairs seemed to spend a good deal of time at the Swedish consulate, and in the summer loved nothing more than lying on the beach. Often left alone, my brother and I turned upon each other. It might be interesting to conduct an experiment: how would human children behave if they had rules of conduct 1 but no emotional models? Perhaps we were that experiment. I wanted attention. I’m not sure what my brother wanted. He probably wanted attention too. I wonder now, why shouldn’t a child want attention as it signals that someone, a parent, a sibling, a relative, is looking after the child? Attention is love. Of course making “wanting attention” pejorative is convenient for a parent who doesn't want to be bothered, who puts goals ahead of the child. And, of course, second wave feminism supported my mother’s career aspirations—which, don’t get me wrong, I support. It’s just that you can’t have both fathers and mothers opting out of children’s lives—and for what anyway? From my experience, I remain suspicious of goals: progress, science, civilization, particularly when pursued at the expense of something perhaps not as quantitative but far more fundamental. So I would “bother” my brother, because in my family wanting love—wanting anything—was a bother. He was older—one year and seven months—just old enough to always be stronger than I was. I didn't know how to love him and he didn’t know how to love me. Left to ourselves, I would seek love, and my brother would respond the only way he knew how, by beating me up. Time and time again, I’d pester my brother or he’d bait me, and we’d fight. Daily, twice or thrice daily, we fought. I never ever won. But that was before. The summer I want to talk about there were no au pairs . My brother had attended and been kicked out of Tabor Academy, had recently been “not asked back” to Darrow School in New Lebanon New York. He lived in the basement. I’d be going to boarding school myself the next Fall, having graduated from Wagner Junior High in Manhattan, a place I felt afraid, to a place I fell in love with on my first visit, a place I dreamed about: Buxton, a bucolic heaven of hippy girls and verdant 2 fields—they pressed cider from apples picked from their own trees, for Christ-sake. I didn’t know the word “buxom” at that time, but Buxton evoked a promise close to that, of security and nurture, and that promise inspired something inside me—a just perceptible velocity, a forward lean. Suddenly I was not just living, I wanted to live. So that summer in Woods Hole, I waited for my new life to begin. An independent but emotionally arrested 14 years old boy, I employed sarcasm to belie my sincere desire to be cared for by anyone. As for my brother, I don’t know where he stood or what he was like—running out of choices, I guess, needing to do anything to feel good. He’d come home from boarding school wise to worlds I couldn’t understand. That summer we were deemed old enough to take care of ourselves. ~ Just a few months later, that Fall at Buxton, I wrote my first short story—the longest thing I’d ever written at about 5 pages, penned carefully in my cursive script and skipping lines. This was the same English class where into my second week I’d fallen back in my chair on a steel-finned floor-heater and cut my forearm in six straight incisions, scars I still have, and then simply sat there, too embarrassed to say anything, dripping blood on the floor, hoping I wouldn’t be called on to read a passage of Heart of Darkness . If I’d ever thought of a “short story” before, it was as something etched in stone by dead Gods.