by Allen Drury
With the exception of the first three chapters of Advise and Consent—which he nervously rewrote several times before submitting to publishers—Allen Drury wrote everything in one draft. That does not by any means mean he simply ran paper through his machine and typed. In the days before word processors that could copy and paste and delete, it wasn’t unusual for him to x-out and rewrite sentences, paragraphs, or entire scenes several times until he was satisfied. If, as rarely happened, a crucial event on page 342 depended on conditions that had not been established, he would go back and insert a page 167a or 219a&b with the necessary elements. Thus his “first drafts” were made up of sentences, scenes, and pages that had been finely honed.
A God Against the Gods has a special place in my heart. My question to Uncle Al about a short story I was working on led to his telling me about a breakthrough of his own. He’d been confounded by how to convey the grandeur of the Egyptian court, the balance between the Pharaoh and the priesthood, and the complexity of the man who tried to reshape a several thousand-year old culture without presenting great textbook-like lumps of information—information the reader needed to understand what was happening. He had been unable to start his novel—tell this story he very much wanted to tell—until he was struck by the idea of a multiple first person narrative. I don’t remember anything about my short story, but I do remember my uncle explaining how individuals from all levels of society telling their own version of events—each unknown to the other—could both show readers everything they needed to understand and draw them intimately into the story. This was the one and only time he ever discussed his creative process. Everything else I learned from him about writing I learned through observation.
When Allen Drury left Washington behind, he bought a smallish house on Ridge Road, high above Tiburon, California, and the San Francisco Bay. Every room had a view of Angel Island, with the lights of Berkley/Oakland to the left and San Francisco to the right. It was a spectacular view that Uncle Al never looked at when he was working. His home office furniture was utilitarian—filing cabinets, a bookcase, a reading desk supporting an ancient copier, a table where he read and sorted reference materials, and a sturdy desk with typewriter hard against the wall farthest from the window. Items of interest relevant to whatever he was working on—postcards, photos, maps, menus—were tacked to the walls in an ever-changing collage. Books, with pages of interest marked by metal tabs in assorted colors, were arranged in easy reach. Everything within his sight or reach was directly related to the project at hand—no distractions, nothing unnecessary, was allowed within his sphere. He’d rise early, eat a Spartan breakfast, then disappear into his office; from that moment until noon the only evidence of his existence was the sound of his typewriter. Uncle Al did allow himself vacations between novels, and he traveled a great deal when conducting research, but when the time came to write, he put six hours a day, six days a week, of butt-in-chair work into every project. My family lived in Florida and the room across the hall from mine was his bachelor apartment—a large room with its own bath and porch—where he stayed several weeks a year. If he was working on a novel he’d bring his portable typewriter and work at a desk set against the wall farthest from the window. I knew not to make a sound before lunch.
Allen Drury did not believe in any muse. He did not believe in writer’s block. He did not consider what he did to be art. My Uncle Al was a writer who approached his work as work—though he probably would not have disagreed with calling it a craft. He saw his job as telling the best story he could the best way he could. It was a job to which he dedicated his life.
Kenneth A. Killiany
It was five years or more before I stopped reaching for the phone to talk to him.
I had gone out to take care of my Uncle Allen, or Al, during his recovery from open-heart surgery. I stayed for a month, and then just when it reached the end of my time there, he had some still-unexplained neurological attack. I was taking care of him when he passed away, but it was five years or more before I stopped reaching for the phone.
The calls weren’t a “ritual.” It was just what I did. If anything happened that was worth talking about, I would call Uncle Al. I think he called me once or twice when he could hardly contain himself about something, but I don’t remember clearly. Little matter. I was nearly always the one to call. He expected it, and he enjoyed it.
Except when I called during dinner time. Anyone who knew the formal, stately creature of habit that Al normally was would understand. Rather oddly, it was just after I left politics that I started calling, usually when I got back from my new job. I could tell one time that he was impatient, so I asked if he minded my calls. No, he said, but I always called during his dinner. I had forgotten about the time change. Besides, I had no idea when he normally ate, because he never really lived with us when I was older. He hadn’t said anything, I realize now in writing this, because he enjoyed the fact that I called.
Al and I were friends from well before I have any memory of it. When I finally opened his archive at the Hoover Institution, on the Stanford Campus that he loved, I was stunned to find a piece of paper with several letters written in a child’s hand. Random letters, “F r C R,” with a “7” placed carefully under the “r,” signed “KennY” in ever larger letters. My mother had written, “Translated: I want to come see you, Uncle Al—love, Kenny.” She added, “P.S., Kenny says do not throw this note away!” So he didn’t. It’s still in the Hoover Archive.
He flew us out to California twice to spend time in the small community of cabins in the High Sierra where he and his sister, our mother, had lived during the summer with their mother, our grandmother. I believe I was four and seven. He greeted us at the San Francisco airport. One time, we came up an escalator from the gates and he was leaning over the railing at the top. He smiled and waved when he saw us, and laughed at how excited we were. Every time I used that escalator, when I lived in the Bay Area or when I came back to see my family, I remembered that time when we found him leaning over the railing, smiling and waving and laughing at how excited we were.
He had a Citroen DS, a cutting edge, oddly shaped French car that was popular in San Francisco because, with its unique suspension and brake system, it could handle the hills. I remember driving down curvy Lombard Street—and I remember the hills.
I also remember a culinary delight. He took us on a little walk up at the summer camp, I guess so Mom could relax. There was a little natural wading pool in the stream, and a spring where they had grabbed drinks as children decades before. The water was orange with minerals, but he mixed it with Kool-Aid. Al thought it was just like tap water; all I remember is the minerals. The sugar didn’t help.
Al was somewhat clueless about children.
For my part, I loved the trip so much I started a raffle among family members so one lucky adult could accompany me back out to California. I thought it would cost seven or eight dollars.
To establish residence in Florida and avoid the high taxes of the Golden State, Al had a room with a deck in our house in Florida. He spent exactly six months and one day there every year. The rest of the time he traveled or lived in his tiny house in California, which had the most breathtaking view I have ever seen, encompassing the Golden Gate, most of San Francisco, Angel Island, and parts of East Bay.
One morning I woke up and the fog was so thick you could only see a bit of the shore of Angel Island and the channel. In the channel was a recreation of the Golden Hind, the boat on which Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world, although he missed the Golden Gate, no doubt because of the notorious fog. I imagined that was what it must have been like, hundreds of years ago, sailing in uncharted waters along the magical California coast.
Al bought the house in 1964, and he had just determined to sell it when he passed away in 1998. Typically, he expressed no sentiment about selling it when the time had come for something even smaller and easier to take care of, but he had loved it there. He would often just sit and w
atch the view, after he had done the day’s errands and the day’s writing.
But for six months and one day, he was with us in Florida. And he knew I liked to swim.
One summer, when I was perhaps twelve, Al was on an extended stay with us. Unusually, he was writing a book there. Al always wrote in the morning, and sometime after lunch he would come downstairs and ask me if I wanted to go swimming in the neighbor’s pool. Too young to know any better and not old enough to be impertinent, I broke the unstated rule and asked Al what he was writing. I didn’t know this was any kind of deal at all until everyone expressed surprise when I told them—that he obliged. The book was The Throne of Saturn, about the politics of a manned flight to Mars. I didn’t read it until after he was gone, even though I thought of it as my book. No, because I thought of it as my book. I didn’t want to spoil the memory.
I only recently found out that something similar happened between my brother and Al with his great novels about Ancient Egypt and the Pharaoh Akhenaten. My brother had his own separate times with Al, and so has his own memories.
This was yet one more instance of a big discovery I made when Al lay dying. I went through his Rolodex, calling people to tell them. None of them knew each other. I seemed to be almost only one who had met any of his other friends, and I had not met all of them. My stately, silent uncle had had friends one by one, in singles.
At some point when I was a teenager, our conversations turned to politics. The political genes came from his mother. She had, like many a starchy New England lady before her, thrown herself into education reform, even if life had tossed her far from Western Mass. She eventually rose to be legislative director of the California PTA and served on a commission to write child labor laws for the movie industry. She passed her passion for politics on to her son, and in due course, I developed the family disease.
This kind of discussion brings out the worst in our family, and there are lots of unhappy memories about ferocious rows at the dinner table. The driving force behind those was actually my grandmother, a brilliant but bitter, disappointed woman. It wasn’t just the politics. I remember one long fight about everything.
I won’t engage in those kinds of discussion anymore, and, outside the home, Al gave them up at some point, too. Actually, inside the home as well. When my grandmother really got going, Al would retreat into his head and let the characters in his new book talk while he listened, the way he once told my mother that they did, or just about anything other than what was going on. It drove my mother crazy. “He just sits there, with his mind a million miles away...” But it was understandable. Their mother was something else.
My mom lived with Al in Washington when she was in art school and he was a reporter. They regularly had dinner with Al’s other young reporter friends. After Al, the most famous was Helen Thomas. Helen, who was a very kind person away from a press conference, said they often wondered “how he could stand it, because he was so conservative and we were all so liberal.” He got so excited one night he wadded up his linen napkin and threw it in his plate, to the mortification of his much younger sister. For his part, though he loved Helen dearly, he would not have liked that “so conservative” label. He disliked broad labels, and on domestic issues he could be quite liberal.
One conversation I remember had nothing to do with politics. We had a birthday dinner—his—at an expensive restaurant in Sausalito, and we got going on the virtues of Western Civilization. I was at school, and very full of cultural relativism. He would have none of it. Mom said afterwards he was a little embarrassed at how heated the exchange had gotten.
I remember one moment vividly. I cited the huge temples of Central America as examples of other cultures doing great things. He told me simply I should read the accounts of the first Europeans to meet them. He had, and I know now he wasn’t just talking about how they didn’t have the wheel to move all those big stones.
If I had to say just one thing that I got from Al, it would be a certain cast of mind. If you are going to have an opinion about something, read about it. Get the facts first. Don’t rely on opinion journalism. Find out what the actors themselves are saying in any situation. Understand above all that whatever is going on, human beings are doing it. Whatever their passions, they aren’t yours. Understand them, and you will understand the situation. He took such study seriously. He knew a great deal about China, Japan, and India. He knew European history. He knew the Soviets. Above all, he knew British and American history, the roots of the culture in which we live.
After the Cold War, Al saw that the center of the world’s attention had moved south. People had moved on to new fights. He sent me a book he thought I should read, which I never got around to reading.
After the 9/11 attacks, I did what I thought any educated person should do. I went to the library. I looked up books on the Middle East, its culture and its history. Not recent history; ancient history—the kind that Al so firmly believed comes back. I was, without consciously thinking about it, doing what Al would have done. What I found was unsettling.
What I heard in U.S. public policy debate was even more unsettling. There was a marvelous thing called a “light footprint,” by which our military would use technology to eliminate the “Fog of War.”
Didn’t everyone remember the lesson Al learned when he looked into our military? Given free rein to study “the Building” through his contacts in the upper reaches of the Reagan Administration, he had concluded that our military was like all human institutions. Particularly, inter-service rivalry would make effective action against a direct threat impossible. That gave him the material for his last best-seller, Pentagon. Why did any human being think that would all go away just because our bombs had GPS?
To be fair, our troops had more than GPS. They had a complex communication system that would provide commanders on the ground with live information from satellites so that they had “Total Situational Awareness,” giving them an unrivaled advantage over Sadam Hussein’s pathetically backwards forces. Except that, when we marched through the desert, the conditions overwhelmed the system and it broke down completely. The same old human institution of the armed forces was left fighting a war the same old way. If anyone had read Pentagon, they would have just assumed that would happen.
I also thought everyone understood human culture enough to know that the peoples of the area would simply use us to get their enemies out of the way, and then continue doing what they themselves wanted to do. Which is exactly what they did. “Atavistic” is a word I learned from Al, when we were talking about the Afrikaner, whom he had studied and reported on. He thought every human culture was atavistic.
Sometime after things had completely bogged down, there came reports that commanders on the ground were reading the kind of books I had gone to the library to read. A friend with connections in academia told me that everyone was trying to lay their hands on one book in particular, about attempts by the Great Powers to control Central Asia in the 19th Century.
I had a copy, the one Al had given me and I had never gotten around to reading.
It seemed only natural that I would try to go into politics, but it never worked. I came to Washington at 24, and had left politics by 30. My family did not understand it, because I loved studying it and talking about it so much. The fact is, I was simply not cut out for it. For four years, while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do, I worked in fine dining as a waiter. Mom and Al apparently thought I would become the maître d’ at some restaurant where all the famous people of Washington would come and depend on my discretion. Rather, Mom fantasized about that and Al went along to humor her.
There is a famous passage in Advise and Consent where Al describes how people are captured by Washington. They say they are going to leave, but they never do. I did the opposite: I lived in DC, but I left Washington completely. DC was a great place to be a Bohemian in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that’s what I was. Al had that streak in him and so indulged me. I let my passio
n for music grow, and was prone to excited discussions of some act I had seen at the “legendary 9:30 Club,” after CBGB in New York perhaps the most famous punk/New Wave club on the East Coast. For old timers, I am talking about the “real” one, a hole in the wall painted all black, now gone, not its successor which is very nice but not glorious, the way the old one was. One time Al made a serious suggestion that I take him. There might be a story there. I am sorry I never figured out a way to pull that one off. It would have been something to see.
In fact, Al and I ended up in somewhat similar places. He left Washington after he became successful, because, he said, “After 20 years, I found myself going to the same parties with the same people talking about the same things.” I just left—like Al during family arguments, physically there but with my mind a million miles away. We both retained our fascination with that world, from a distance. We talked about it for hours and hours, for years and years.
I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge to go sit with Al as he slipped away from this world. One of his best friends was taking turns with me keeping vigil. Or maybe it was after he passed away and I had to go back to the hospital and sign something. The drive across the Golden Gate Bridge was gorgeous. I struggled to get my mind around the suddenness of it. The easily predicted always comes as the unexpected. What was I to think? I am as religious as Al was not, and I prayed for some understanding. How was I to handle this ultimate complication that came like a wave so suddenly?
One should be grateful for the small things that make our burdens light. From that difficult month, I remember the only rock station I have ever known that played strictly the kind of music I like to relax with, indie rock. I even listen to the station online now, and the ads, the local news, and traffic mixed in with the contemporary music on Alice 97.3 take me back to a life long ago. I had that station on during that gorgeous drive across the Bridge. A song by a favorite singer came on, about gratitude for major things. “I want to thank you for so many gifts, you gave with love and tenderness.”
