What’s An American Impressionist?

I think it was Faulkner who said that he set out wanting to be a poet, but he wasn’t good enough, so he became a novelist instead.  I could say something similar.  I started out dreaming of being a poet, then tried being a novelist, before ending up as a columnist.  It turns out those little 600- to 700-word stories fit me well.  At this point, I have written several hundred of them, and I hope to continue.

In the fall of 1983, I was taking some writing courses at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. I was two-thirds of the way through a long novel I was writing that was loosely based on the Patty Hearst kidnapping.  It was moving along well, and my instructor, the novelist Warren Eyster, was encouraging me to finish and get it published.   But I had another idea for a short novella, 100 pages tops, that I could finish in a short burst.  So, I put Random Murders aside and began to work on An American Impressionist.

Seven years later and a continent away, I finally completed the last sentence of An American Impressionist, in San Francisco, in a downtown studio apartment looking out toward the Golden Gate.  An American Impressionist was in my imagination for seven years, and I came to love all those great American impressionist painters from the 19th century — Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, Mary Cassatt.

I found a literary agent who liked my novel, and for awhile I was flying high, like Icarus, but we know what happened to him. A few editors liked it, but never enough to publish.   So I put it back in the drawer where it shall likely always remain.

The hero of An American Impressionist is a painter named Carter, who like the hero of most first novels, is a stand-in for the author.  I lived alone in a small apartment looking out on the city, and he did also.  Only his loneliness occurs 100 years earlier and the city is New York , not San Francisco.  Carter has to choose between an ecstatic vision of art and a normal life, something I was thinking about as well at the time.  Maybe it was a false choice; I’m still not really sure. I met someone not long after, got married and had a family, all of whom are now reading in the other room, while I type away in the study.   I continued to try to make art with words, and every now and then I think I’ve succeeded.  And still, An American Impressionist has stayed with me.  Carter and I, we’re both a couple of painters of the American scene, impressionists of our own lives.

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