While Drawn From Real Life, Long’s New Book Isn’t Autobiographical

This is how Jessamyn West defined the fiction-writer’s credo: Fiction, the American novelist once wrote, “reveals truths that reality obscures.”

A bit hard to understand, isn’t it? The art of finding truth through make-believe is a difficult concept.

And it’s especially difficult to comprehend when that concept is applied to writers whose works so capture a place or a time or a people that they seem almost necessarily autobiographical.

Was Ernest Hemingway his own protagonist in “Big Two-Hearted River”? Was Charles Dickens’ own childhood the model for “David Copperfield”? Was West’s own study of 19th-century Quaker life, “The Friendly Persuasion,” a recitation of her own pacifist ideals? The answer to all three is: no.

And yes.

The same is true for the stories that comprise David Long’s justpublished fourth collection of short fiction, “Blue Spruce.”

They are indeed drawn from the various sources of his life. But, Long adamantly says, they are not reflections of his life.

“That’s what John Irving would always say,” the Kalispell, Mont., writer said recently during a phone interview. “He’d just get irate with interviewers who would assume that everything is autobiographical. He’d say, ‘If I can’t make anything up better than what happened to me, I’m no writer.”’

Long will make his case for fiction by reading from his new book at 7:30 tonight at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington. He’ll read at 7:30 p.m. Monday at BookPeople in Moscow, and at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at the student bookstore at Washington State University in Pullman.

And the heart of his argument will involve “Blue Spruce.”

This volume of 12 stories is a richly drawn, varied look at late 20thcentury life. In it, Long adopts such disparate voices as teenage girls, middle-age women, 20-something men, young wives, spurned husbands, frustrated children and, in general, characters who have experienced the inherent sadness of their existences and yet, in most cases, discovered how to survive.

Too, there is a distinct feel of Montana about the book. A new Montana, one threatened by the modern world and interlopers with big money.

For example, in “Lightning,” a story about the breakdown of a family’s self-renewing traditions, Long describes a prize, lightningbolt-shaped piece of property thusly:

“But the lower piece, sometimes called The Point - where the hypothetical lightning would come scorching down, a sweet cache of twenty-odd acres, out of the wind, thick with red willow and a few old cedars - had become, lately, the property of an orthodontist from Buena Vista, California. He’d strung electric fence around it, erected an unseemly stone and timber gate at the road, hung a sign reading El Rancho Suzette in a corny woodburnt script.”

Unlike many examples of a type of literature that could be called Montana Mystique, Long’s stories do bear the sting of authenticity. Originally from Massachusetts, having been educated in Michigan and Connecticut, Long moved to Missoula in 1972 to study writing with Richard Hugo and William Kittredge.

His subsequent 23-year residency, most of it in Kalispell, has given him the sensitivity to capture Montana that most Eastern writers, buoyed by a summer’s stay, could never have.

Not that he’s worried about anyone questioning his credentials. “The story of Montana is people coming from other places,” he says of his non-native status. “So it’s perfectly natural. It’s an immigrant culture.”

But he does insist that these stories are, in the best and most definite sense, fiction.

“Eggarine,” a family story that was originally published in GQ magazine, is, he says, “perhaps the most personal story. But I don’t really write very autobiographical stuff.”

Yet the references from his life can’t help but come out. The continued use of spruce trees, for example. In the title story, which tells the tale of two sisters-in-law who alternately care for and torment each other, the resonating sequence involves the removal of a stand of towering blue spruce. Long remembers a similar removal occurring twice in his real life.

The lead story, too, recalls Long’s own life and a roller rink in his Massachusetts hometown. But the climactic scene that occurs in the story’s rink was, Long says, pure fiction.

“The question of autobiography is real interesting,” he says. “I could go through all the stories and the novel that I am writing, and I could point to line after line - this came from this place and this came from that place. It’s not like you totally invent stuff.

“When you sit down to write, all these little details slip into your head from your own reading, from the newspaper, from things you remember.”

The result is a story such as “Cooperstown,” a baseball-themed story that is as unique to the collection as it is to Long’s life.

“I don’t know where that one came from,” he says. “Probably it came from Tony Conigliaro getting beaned when I was younger. I have no idea why I started that story.”

And that’s the truth.