Happy Birthday Andre Dubus

Today is the birthday of the short story writer Andre Dubus. Dubus is the author of numerous collections, many of which have been lauded for his style, compassion and craftsmanship. Dubus is described as a “writer’s writer”, which means that during his lifetime his tremendous gifts often went unnoticed. But his work is much more than a greeting card exchanged between authors. His stories are rich with emotional weight and poetic consequence. They employ impressive dexterity and share with the reader a thorough understanding of love, heartbreak and morality. Currently, Dubus’ work is celebrated across the globe. He is widely considered one of the greatest short story writers of the twentieth century. He died in 1999. Today would have been his 72nd birthday.

Dubus was born in Louisiana. He was a Marine and a teacher at Bard College. He was a devout Roman Catholic, fathered six children and was married three times. He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under Richard Yates and Kurt Vonnegut and received numerous writing awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and the PEN/Malamud Award. Most of his stories are set in towns north of Boston, where he lived. His characters often grapple with relationships, alcohol, violence and morality. In 2008 Joshua Bodwell wrote a piece about Dubus for Poets & Writers. An excerpt follows.

“Though some have found his narratives too dark or brooding, I was startled and impressed by the richness of the characters Dubus sketched. He populated his stories with complex characters that are neither all good nor all evil, neither all right nor all wrong—but none of them seemed completely beyond the possibility of redemption. This touch of kindheartedness amazed me. As I read, his characters became a part of my consciousness and my understanding of humanity: a young boy haunted by the urge to masturbate (“If They Knew Yvonne”); a young girl struggling with her weight (“The Fat Girl”); a wife caught in the moment of accepting and dealing with the consequences of her failed marriage (“Adultery”); a father hypnotized by the false hope promised by revenge (“Killings”); and another father, this one divorced, torn between doing what is “right” and protecting his daughter (“A Father’s Story”). With a delicate touch that many writers lack, Dubus could skim the surface of sentimentality even as he graced his characters with quiet dignity.”

Dubus was dedicated to his writing community. He is often portrayed as an exquisite listener, a man who could pull from a sentence the music that sets it apart. He participated in and was the founder of numerous writing workshops. When he died, members of the community he so influenced contributed dozens of essays and profiles. The following was published in Salon in 1999. Richard Ravin reflects on Dubus the writer and Dubus the listener.

“I always thought Andre’s beauty as a writer was his patience with the line, playing out his sentences longer and longer, note after note like a scat solo by one of the singers he collected, Ella Fitzgerald or June Christie or Betty Carter. I don’t think he’d been bred to patience; maybe he learned it in his wheelchair, where everything is three times slower and three times more difficult, showering and dressing and binding up the better leg in its brace and propping himself into his seat, pushing himself down the hall.”

In 1986, Dubus was on the highway driving home from a writing workshop. He pulled over to help a stranded motorist. Then he was struck by a car, and suffered life-threatening injuries. His left leg was amputated. His remaining days were spent in a wheelchair. Dubus battled depression, divorce and waywardness during his recovery. Soon, though, his circumstances changed. His injuries provided for his writing a new urgency and compassion. Writing from a wheelchair, his senses grew enhanced, his understanding deeper, his command of the short story all the more perfect. He was a religious man. But the accident sharpened his devotion.

An essay from Books and Culture, a Christian Review:

“For Dubus, to mature is to move from yearning for respect to earning it through right action. This theme runs throughout his essays and fiction, whether the characters be male or female, and whether the challenges be physical or spiritual. It was a sensibility he learned from the Marines—the conviction that action and assertiveness are always preferable to passivity. Dubus believed, along with Hemingway, that the world is inevitably filled with brokenness, pain, and accidents. Although the only thing we can control is our response to such events, the assertion of will inherent to an active response is a considerable power indeed. The Marines respect this truth by working to discipline and train soldiers so that action, not talk or thought, becomes the instinctive response. For Dubus, right action arrives at its ultimate perfection when it becomes unselfconscious, an unspoken outgrowth of one’s previously willed and determined commitments.”

Dubus drank life deeply. He smoked non-filters, enjoyed hard liquor, fought in bars. But he also loved his family, was committed to fiction, and supported his community. In 1999 at the age of 62 he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Many times readers unknowingly and serendipitously come across Dubus. Maybe they have not heard his name — this mysterious Da-Byoose — and they pick up one of his titles. Perhaps it’s Dancing After Hours or Finding a Girl in America. They encounter sentences that are concise and broad, sentences that are engrossing and vital, sentences that evoke familiar places, places that are familiar and remote, beautiful and ugly. These are the places of Andre Dubus. They are his world. And today is his birthday.

The first paragraph from “Rose”, a piece included in Selected Stories, is below.

“Sometimes, when I see people like Rose, I imagine them as babies, as young children. I suppose many of us do. We search the aging skin of the face, the unhappy eyes and mouth. Of course I can never imagine their fat little faces at the breast, or their cheeks flushed and eyes brightened from play. I do not think of them after the age of five or six, when they are sent to kindergartens, to school. There, beyond the shadows of their families and neighborhood friends, they enter the world a second time, their eyes blinking in the light of it. They will be loved or liked or disliked, even hated; some will be ignored, others singled out for daily abuse that, with a few adult exceptions, only children have the energy and heart to inflict. Some will be corrupted, many without knowing it, save for that cooling quiver of conscience when they cheat, when they lie to save themselves, when out of fear they side with bullies or teachers, and so forsake loyalty to a friend. Soon they are small men and women, with our sins and virtues, and by the age of thirteen some have our vices too.”