From Lawrence Naumoff

From Lawrence Naumoff           

I suppose I was one of Max’s first “finds,” because I was there the first semester he came to Carolina, in 1967 maybe, or 1968, and I was a junior who’d been put into the Honors class that he, along with Doris Betts and Jessie Rehder taught together.  There were six or seven students and the three teachers.

            Jessie Rehder had brought him here, then she died the next semester.  He sort of took over the program after that. 

I was afraid of him, afraid to even talk to him, but I’d been good friends with the past writer-in-residence, Leon Rooke(became a famous Canadian writer, and in the U.S, one of Gordon Lish’s writers), and he and Max were old friends, so pretty soon we were there.

He liked my writing, but he liked that I could work on cars just as much, as he had, over the early years I knew him, a succession of junk that needed working on all the time, first a string of very used, slant-six 60s Plymouth Valiant’s and then the newer but very used, models.

One of the happiest times we had, until he gloried in, and made me feel like a million when my first novel was published, was when he’d bought a junked Valiant in a Durham ghetto junk yard, and we drove over in my pickup with my tools.  We dismantled the car, and took the parts, every single piece, except the engine head and block.  We took the doors, the trunk lid, the seats, the visors, windshield wipers, back bumper, air cleaner, radiator, on and on.  The whole time, he was looking around at the group of men who had gathered to watch us strip and haul away the parts, and was saying, Naumoff, they’re going to kill us, they really are, they’re going to kill us on the way out.

Shortly after that day, he asked me to be godfather to one of his sons, which I accepted, but, and I guess I didn’t know what it meant or how to do it, never did do anything like maybe a traditional godfather would do.  Even the word sounds so archaic now.  Do people still have them?

Max, being Max, had two seriously remarkable sides to him---one, the thrilling, worldly, talent, astonishingly intellectual and Paris influenced writer who inspired all of us, and was happy to do so, warm and generous truly wonderful---and the other, one of the most confusingly mean people I’d ever known.  If you didn’t know him as well as I, you didn’t know this.  When he fell out with someone, it was over.  He could put somebody down so hard it was nearly impossible to ever get back up.  He could and would tell a racist or ethnic joke that was so shocking I would have nothing, absolutely nothing to say, I would just stare at him, for which he got some kind of delight at being such a shock to me. Also, when it came to things and money, it was there, as well. 

I was an estate sale and about to buy a blue Chinese carpet(oriental in design) from the late 19^th century, and he happened to be there, and I asked him if it was a good carpet, and worth the money.  He said(I was young, then), you’re a fool to ask me, because if I wanted it, I’d tell you no, and if I didn’t want it, I’d tell you it was, just to teach you not to ask someone a question like that.  (I bought it without his advice,

and years later, broke and waiting for FSG to decide not to buy my third book, Taller Women, I sold it and lived off it.)

A few years earlier(I was even younger, right?), he sold me one of his Valiant’s(we were best friends!) on a Friday, and on Saturday, I took it on a trip, and the radiator boiled over in about 50 miles, and I had to sit for an hour, and then could drive another 20 miles, sit an hour, drive another 20, and so on, until I could get to where I was going and get it fixed, if I could find a mechanic open.

When I got back I called him and in an excited way(like, man, you wouldn’t believe what happened on the trip), and told him, and he said, Naumoff, I wondered how long it would take you to find out. 

I knew him well, and I know things I wouldn’t tell, and he knew things about me he wouldn’t tell.  We got together for breakfast for years, off and on, and I’d report on my latest trouble(I was in a lot of it then), and he’d smile(you can see the smile, right?), and laugh. The worse it got, the more he enjoyed it, and then he’d tell me a story about someone in Paris who got in the same kind of trouble, and in the telling, lift me out of my hell and into the Paris literary world, and he’d tell it with such psychoanalytical brilliance, in such a way that by the end of the story, I’d have learned more about why I did it, and why she did that, and how it came about, learned more than I would have in a year with a psychiatrist.  Truly the most helpful while being hilariously entertaining conversations I have had.

He inspired me to want to write.  His prose was elegant and smart.  Knowing him sustained me and sustained my writing for years.  I miss him.  I have thought about him every week since he fell down those stairs, broke his neck, lay there moaning and calling for help until a neighbor found him, and wished I could have had years and years more talking to him. I held him in awe, no matter what, and to this day, no one has inspired me and been as unique and curious and thrilling to know, as he was. 

 Naumoff