TheWriter’sWriterLITERARY FICTION HAS BROUGHTACCLAIM—BUT NOT FAME—TONORMAN RUSH ’56By Paul Wachter ’97Illustrations by Nancy HarrisonIn one of Norman Rush’s earlier publishedstories, the protagonist—like Rush, anantiquarian book dealer—reflects on thevicissitudes of literary reputations. “O yes, at forty he was one thingin the culture, at fifty he discovers he’s considered an ancillary forceor name or an associated force or force tributary to other names inhis generation: so no matter what future works he looks forward todoing it has to fall into a secondary category.” At which point, one“could write the greatest individual poem since ‘Dover Beach’ butwho would notice it?”When this story, “In Late Youth,” was published in 1970, Rushhad no literary reputation to speak of. He had published very littlesince graduating from Swarthmore in 1956. “My writing wasabstract and experimental,” Rush says. “It wasn’t satisfactory to meor to anyone else.” The story—and several others published in thenext few years—marked a return to conventional storytelling (albeitof a uniquely lyrical and cerebral kind) and the first inklings of literaryrecognition. (“In Late Youth” was included in the Best AmericanShort Stories anthology of 1971.) Still, no publishing houses acceptedhis novel Equals, which took 5 years to write.Today, some 30 years later, it is safe to say that Rush has not goneunnoticed. Beginning with Whites (1986), a short story collectionthat was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Rush has published three highlyacclaimed books—each set in Botswana, where he and his wife, ElsaScheidt Rush ’57, spent 5 years as Peace Corps co-directors. His firstpublished novel, Mating (1991), won the National Book Award andrecently received multiple votes when The New York Times askedprominent writers and critics to identify the best work of Americanfiction in the last 25 years. Mortals (2003) did not garner the samehosannas but in many ways was a more ambitious and richer effort.For Rush, this recognition came as an “immense surprise.” Butfor many others, Rush’s works compare favorably to those of his better-knownand more prolific contemporaries—Roth, Updike, DeLillo,Pynchon—and he still has not gotten his critical due. Or asLorin Stein, an editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, put it, “Rushgets my vote for America’s most underrated writer.”Rush was born in Oakland, Calif., in 1933. His arrival prompted hisfather, a trade union organizer and California state secretary of theSocialist Party, to find a more remunerative line of work and becomea salesman. He was also an amateur writer. Rush’s mother was atrained but unsuccessful opera singer. It was a bookish childhood.His father had self-published a poetry journal, and young Rush putout a small newspaper, the Town Crier, an outlet for his pirate anddetective stories, which he hawked around the neighborhood.Not long after he enrolled at the Telluride Association, an experimentalcollege in Los Angeles, FBI agents hauled Rush off to prisonas a war resister. “I was a pacifist but a nonreligious pacifist, andthere was no category for that in the law,” Rush says. For refusing toserve in the Korean War, Rush spent 9 months in an Arizona jail.While working in the prison’s boiler room, he wrote a novel on smallsquares of onionskin paper that he smuggled out inside Christmascards. Despite the effort, when Rush re-read his novel back in Oakland,he found it derivative and threw it out.His friend Philip Green ’54 advised Rush to apply to Swarthmoreand join him there. Given the school’s Quaker, pacifist roots, admis-30 : swarthmore college bulletin
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