When Naton Leslie told me he had cancer he reclined and went elsewhere, carried away in a lurch of memory, departing, forgivably, from the coffee-spotted manuscript we were discussing that evening. It was mine, the manuscript, and I knew we would never return to it. I was disappointed, as in those days I knew of no greater affirmation than to hear Nate’s stiff-lipped voice speaking of the things I had written, and so even as his eyes moistened my thoughts lingered, under a growing weight of shame, on the attempt at literature between us.

The tumors were knotted on his lungs and along his spine. His was a cancer that people got from exposure to the wrong chemicals. Nate gathered he had encountered them in his years as a woodworker, or during his stint as a mechanic, or in his idle hours restoring antiques, or laboring alone in his woodshop on one of his innumerable odd jobs (a carpenter in one of his stories “had breathed enough stripper fumes to kill off an entire species of small bird.”)

Nate was, by the time I met him, in his fifties; a tall, sallow man—bedraggled, even, on tired days—with long limbs and a briar of earthen hair. His face was a weathered assortment of angles. There was kiddish mischief in his laugh; the last remnant of youth, I thought, in a man who used to delight in daring his world to hurt him. (In an early poem, an entranced horse rider spots “johnny-thorn” overhead but does “not care to block the branch.”) He grew up in Warren, Ohio, early enough to see the steel mills of that area shuttered and forgotten. Now, he taught fiction and wore tweed jackets and lived in a Victorian in an old town that spiraled around a dead redbrick chocolate factory—the town where I grew up. He never stopped (often to my irritation) writing short stories and poems about ordinary people working in the Rust Belt, the hills of Appalachia, or the decayed mill burgs of New York. Nate’s characters were unremarkable people whose evenings were textured by the clack of billiards and the sticky bathroom floor of the only afterwork dive around. Their stories were animated by quiet grudges, unarticulated desperation, divorce and estranged (sometimes dead) children. They complained of lake-effect weather, long drives, women, men; they drank away small-town boredom one glass at a time.

He was a master of the vocational insight. Nate could appropriate the wisdom of any craft, cutting it to size and shaving its excess until it assumed a shapely metaphor. Heavy with grief for his dead son, a trucker living east of the Southern Tier warns that “when you have a load of logs on the back, the rig has a mind of its own. All of that weight pulls and pushes the truck—you are constantly steering against centrifugal force, the momentum of your own cargo.” A plasterer, prone to gambling, reflects on “the moment he liked best, when the watery, white mass became a regal cornice or multi-faceted set of concentric rings, all in an instant, all with one firm pass of his handmade knife. Like each hand of cards, it was new each time, and either a success or a failure.” The homely genius of his characters was in their capacity to love such unglamorous labor, to feel the movements of their inner lives in thankless work that leaves its mark on the body, in leathery hands, bulging vertebrae and malignancy.

I never told Nate that I disliked his fiction. Its unabashed simplicity, the smallness of its meanings, embarrassed me. In some sense, this was Nate’s fault, for he taught my first fiction class in the low-ceilinged basement of a library, where, over the course of a semester, I decided to jettison the years I had dedicated to physics to be what Nate was: a practitioner of what seemed to me a holy enterprise. And maybe it was my new literary zeal (one so ahead of my capabilities) that inspired him to look after me in the time beyond his class. Or maybe the themes of my fiction had begun to worry him. Like most young meritocrats, my writing was designed to secure approval, but it was also torturously aware of these craven designs. My sentences were jagged mazes, their junctions somewhere between self-contempt and paranoid arrogance (predictably, I revered David Foster Wallace.) My stories were mainly about young solipsists absorbed in intellectual competitions that always seemed to culminate in profound exhaustion, which I ensured the reader felt as well through my insistence on forms of expression at the edge of public acceptability.

But these were also the signs of someone who had blissfully surrendered himself to the therapeutic stage of writing. I fear I will never recover that first exhilarating revelation in which the sum of my experience was made available to the transmutative powers of literature, like the spinster who learns her hoard of kitsch and mementos is a fortune on the market. The tender bruises of young adulthood, not to mention the aching scars of childhood, all now gushed with mystic redemptions. Unbidden ideas and moods gripped me at work or on my long runs, and I was compelled to abruptly stop and find some way of recording them. I wrote compulsively, far more than I ever bothered to read, late into the night, consigning hours to labor on a single paragraph. When I was too tired to continue, I laid in bed dreaming of novels. However erratic, however rudimentary, I felt the beginnings of the artistic possession through which a writer is commanded to render his inner world with tyrannical fidelity. It was nice, at least, to feel guided by something beyond me.

After I graduated from college, Nate and I began meeting at a cafe that split the distance between his house and my apartment (like many of Nate’s characters, I remained anchored to a hometown I wished would burn to the ground). Nate soon became comfortable enough with me to show annoyance with my writing—its punishing density and pretension. He implored me to “learn the rules before you break them.” It remains difficult for me to recall advice that I ignored more flagrantly.

A few months after his diagnosis, Nate’s chemotherapy was showing promise. It looked like he would beat back the scourge. I saw him once walking his basset hound, Melville, in spectral daylight by which he looked bony, starved. But he was elated to share the good news. He invited me to his birthday party—though the cause for celebration was truly his survival—at his house in town. I went alone, and could only think to bring him a book as a present.

The gate door swung onto bollard lights that dimly striped the backyard, guiding a stone path that was crowded on its sides by drooping evergreens and bushes that in the heavy darkness resembled wet tea leaves. Nate’s woodshop could be discerned barely beyond the foliage. The walkway led to a furnished patio full of noise and light and faces I didn't know.

I stayed by Nate’s side for the first hour, trailing like a timid pet as he introduced me to the small-time literati of the boutique colleges within Albany’s greater reach, silver-haired doyens in ugly sweaters who fretted over book galleys and regaled us with practiced anecdotes. Somehow, vaguely, they disappointed me. One writer, a Jewish magical realist, lamented his diminished capacity to enjoy the publication of his own writing: “You are such a joyless fuck,” he told himself.

We grabbed drinks and crowded onto the patio. The summer air was breezy and light. A few partygoers had brought guitars and began jamming—simple 4/4 blues. Susan, Nate’s wife, fetched him a case containing several steel-plated harmonicas. His hand hovering over the case, Nate listened for the key, then delicately selected the right harp. He played, implausibly, with frenetic energy. His head cocked, his shoulders sawing back and forth as he moved his lips along the reeds, sometimes at great speed to render that tinny chirp. Nate squeezed his face to reach the higher notes, as the fingers of the hand cradling the harp rose into the air. The guitarists graciously settled for rhythm as people cheered Nate, who seemed to never take a breath, even between the long sustains as his folded palm fluttered before the comb. Nate finally breathed, and everyone clapped.

Nate once told me his strategy for the writer who feared that speaking about their unfinished work would discharge its inspiration. Whenever asked about the subject of his next poem, story or novel, Nate smiled and said only, “transcendence.” I laughed when he first told me, but within this joke was so much of my joy for his survival. I needed him to show me how to protect what was transcendent from external interest and, above all, applause.

Nate looked at me and surreptitiously mentioned that I had been learning to play the guitar. I don’t know why I accepted the instrument when it was handed to me—it felt gargantuan—but upon its receipt I was wracked with dread, because, as I wilted into the soft cushion beneath me, before the blinking expectant eyes of a dozen merrily drunk people, I realized I had nothing to play for them.

▲

I spent the rest of my twenties seeding disappointments in three cities: Albany, Boston, New York. For a while Nate remained my only liaison to the literary world, and I soon exhausted his professional connections and practical wisdom, most of which was relevant for a publishing industry that no longer existed (one in which an unpublished author could sell a novel merely with a prospectus!). So, I retread the only path to advancement I knew: I sought out the wing of an older writer or editor and, often to their puzzlement, found my way under it. I attended a fiction workshop in a somber library within the Brutalist labyrinth of UAlbany, led by a British novelist, a self-aware and exquisite realist, who led pleasant discussions about Chekov and Kafka with half-a-dozen bitter divorcées, a few middle-aged hobbyists, and me. About writing I learned almost nothing useful from this workshop. After the first session, I attended another.

Even as I learned of the drab realities of the realist’s own career, I maintained the fantasy that I would be an exception, worthy of notice by figures like him, who would see me, see what I was, whatever that was, and somehow provide for my ascension. (Years later, the realist wrote a book about his stalker, whom he first met as a participant in these same workshops. I was appalled but also not surprised to learn that a desperate writer had convinced herself she was owed the complete attention of her unwitting tutor.) He did recognize what I was, once. Our group was discussing a passage of mine when he realized that I was imitating a writer we both knew well, and he stopped speaking to stare at me with a brief but pulverizing understanding. I wanted to hide under the table.

The search continued in graduate school, where I resolved to make my caliber more easily identifiable. I dropped required classes I felt were beneath me. I touted the fiction of Richard Powers (whom I had never seriously read) to classes on the basics of magazine feature writing. When my professors asked for 3,000 words, I delivered 11,000 (a habit that augured poorly for my early interactions with professional editors). I would commonly request a private audience with my professors (writers who still thought kill fees were standard practice) hoping, I suppose, for special attention. In one such discussion, a professor held up the printed pages of a long thing I had written, waved its heft before my eyes.

She said, “We get it, Trevor. Okay? We get it.”

I crumpled my face, pretending to have not immediately understood her.

When I was offered an internship at a hallowed literary organ of Manhattan, I excused myself from an exam I was proctoring to yelp and surge in the hallway like a Fante character. My scheme had worked. In preparation for my interview, I created a masterpiece of professional engineering: a briskly-navigable twenty-odd page document that contained informally-written answers to every question my interviewers could conceivably ask me, along with premeditated witticisms (it was important that they laugh; and they did), and obscure items from that organ’s history and publication record, so as to portray me as intimately familiar with a magazine I seldom read. I suspected it was the last time I would have to try so hard.

I walked the corridors of the magazine’s dingy office with an invisible crown. I pitched and sold stories with the company logo. I requested private meetings with three senior editors to review my writing, and then I asked them for the email addresses of editors at different magazines (they obliged). I convinced the other interns to lobby for an opportunity to write for the website (granted). I strolled into the publisher’s corner office, past the nervous eyes of his assistant, to ask him inane questions, show him a face he might remember. I befriended an editor who was generous with his time, an affable Emersonian, and eventually got him to take an essay of mine to the editor-in-chief, who imprudently rejected it. I wasn’t, by then, entirely naive; I appreciated that these permissions were extended to me because the unspoken transaction of the unpaid literary internship—free labor for marginal clout—embarrasses any salaried editor with a conscience.

I imagine I was insufferable. But I was not wrong to think that humility went unrewarded in such an environment. The open secret of publishing in the twenty-first century is that, much like Hollywood, it burns on the dreams of its teeming supply of aspirants. Etiquette, custom, procedure—these exist merely to winnow the pool. Nowhere else does this reality become more obvious than in the slush pile, that growing heap of manila that befell us interns to ceremoniously scan and reject. I recall reading submissions while bloated with pizza and beer bought on the magazine’s dime, amazed by the earnestness of the authors’ ambition; their trust that good writing and good writers would, in time, be noticed. After reading a few sentences of each submission I signed a form letter and stuffed it into an S.A.S.E.

A few months after my internship, I began writing for a living. Within a year, I was a desolate husk, already emailing the Emersonian and the realist to tell them I was “close to giving up.” I was warned by Nate and others that the combative arrogance with which I defended my largely unnecessary subversions would throw me against the shoals of the business of writing. But how did a writer cultivate the full scope and strangeness of their literary imagination in such a beleaguered (and thus conservative) industry? The answer, of course, was that he simply didn’t, couldn’t. I felt vaguely guilty, or crass, for my gullibility; if I learned nothing else from Nate’s fiction, it was that the dimensions of most people’s labor, despite their fascination or skill, were simply decided for them, without them. How amusing to think of an upholsterer kvetching before a client about how a job might distort his artistic inclinations. One way or another you become the trimmer they want you to be.

Editors receive a steady earful of these complaints—the good ones are sports about it, and may even agree to an extent, though they can do nothing to correct it. Some, though, patrol the boundaries of expression like circling vultures, feeding on the ragged creatures who wander too far out. More than once an editor would commission me (for virtually no pay) for a piece on which I’d spend dozens of hours, then kill it without offering recourse. Once, an editor did this because, she explained, the piece gave her the “impression of trying too hard.” In too many words I told her to fuck herself.

I became the humiliated writer who develops intricate theories on the puerility of literary culture and the blinkered machinations of its industries. I was broke, holding fast to an idea I would later find in Adorno: that the social systems we expect to select for artistic merit had, by way of their clumsiness and insolence, caused “senseless destruction” throughout human history. “That better things will make their way by virtue of their own power is nothing but an edifying gingerbread slogan. ‘Much is lost in the night.’” I still believe this is true, but I also can’t deny that the line makes me think of myself.

Somewhere in these bewildering years, I sometimes forgot, only for a moment, that Nate was dead. I would think to write him…and remember. He hadn’t survived for more than a year after I finished graduate school. I wanted to talk to him about those first intoxicating years of writing, the holy feeling in which they blazed, and to ask how anyone managed to keep the faith.

▲

I was waiting tables and writing amateur book reviews while living in the horse racing city of Saratoga, not far from my hometown. An email exchange I began with Nate to trade stories took a worrying turn, as his every reply seemed to further illustrate that although the chemotherapy had saved his life, it had destroyed his body. July: a broken 7th cervical vertebra (“makes typing difficult”). September: more maladies, a battery of new medical tests (“I’ll know soon enough”). October: Discharged from a month-long hospital stay (“I’ll email when back on my feet”). November: Ruptured gallbladder (“painful… so far it has NOT involved cancer”). December: “Trevor, this is Susan. Nate has had a series of strokes followed by seizures. He has been in a coma for 2 ½ weeks. I am afraid he won't come home this time.”

When Susan saw me standing alone in the funeral parlor, my black coat covered in the spittle of melting snow, she wept. Strangely, I bristled at her sympathy—perhaps because I suddenly felt the eyes of every foreign soul in the foyer offering me the only kind of attention I didn’t want. Shuffling warily through the parlor, I realized I was perhaps Nate’s youngest friend and that I knew all of three people in attendance (I saw the Jewish magical realist and feared meeting his eyes). The rest were grieving strangers, each of their twisted faces attesting to my ignorance of the man; to the scope of his life beyond literature.

I knelt before Nate, studying the waxen pallor of his skin. Nate would have conjured a character by studying the construction of the casket, picturing the blistered hands of the person who built it—a widower named Lilith, say, who spends his lonely workdays imagining the lives of those who would soon occupy the vessels he built. I weaved among the crowded bodies in the parlor and, without saying goodbye, headed into the soft winter storm to walk home.

Saratoga, that pompous old-money circus, its sloping downtown, was now under a beclouded winter sky, not gray but a kind of non-color, a blankness glowing in the sky lamps of the city center, just south of the racetrack. A heavy, silent draft relinquished globs and orbs of snow, falling overwhelmingly, and I felt an unaccountable sense of dissipation, of senseless loss, as though each soundless shape of snow accumulated to the meaning of Nate’s death; they fell unhurried around me, my confusion and regret betraying the absence of the sorrow I had expected, because I always expected to recognize great meanings in the deaths of loved ones, and felt it was my futile duty to collect each particle of meaning as they piled in velveteen sheets that would disappear in tomorrow's sun, or landed on my woolen coat and, by melting, implicated me in some kind of negligence.