Advise and Consent (103 page)

Memories of Al

Kevin D. Killiany

I first became aware my uncle was a writer in 1961, somewhere around my seventh birthday and shortly after I’d figured out his name was Al and not Owl. Prior to that I’d known him as a giant, the only person I knew taller than my father, who visited our house and always spoke to me as though I were a very short adult. I was a rambunctious child, known for trying the patience of everyone around me, but according to my mother I would often sit next to Uncle Al in companionable silence, drawing or playing with some toy, while he read or reviewed galleys. I have no memory of this.

What I do remember is my mother in 1961 showing me a sketchbook filled with head-and-shoulder portraits she was very excited about. She explained who each person was and the decisions she’d made for depicting them in great detail—certainly more detail than a seven-year-old could take in. But she captured my attention when she explained the pictures were all for Uncle Al’s new book. Being seven, I concluded that pictures for a book meant Uncle Al was making a coloring book and I’m told I made several suggestions. (A few years later I made a similar mistake with his
Three Kids in a Cart
—a collection of his essays and interviews from the 1950s—expecting it to be a book of children’s stories.) My mother, Anne Killiany, was an artist and a journalist who—in keeping with tradition in the 1950s—had put her career on hold to raise my brother and me. She was excitedly showing sketches to her uncomprehending son because doing the cover and interior illustrations of
A Shade of Difference
was her first professional work in eight years. That Uncle Al leveraged Doubleday into offering her the chance—she was not a shoo-in, her work had to be vetted by their art director—had to do with Uncle Al’s character. Not to be confused with nepotism, for there were many non-family examples throughout his life, whenever Al could use his influence to better the prospects of another, he would.

Allen Drury’s character informed his writing. Much was made by contemporary reviewers of his staunch opposition to the Soviet Union—and almost all of them labeled him a conservative as a result; few noticed that Uncle Al’s political views spanned the spectrum. True, he saw the federal government’s role as being one step removed from the lives of individual citizens—enforcing standards or providing resources when needed, but otherwise not directly involved—so he would be considered a proponent of small government. But he thought free education for the young—and job training for the unemployed—made good business sense. He advocated racial equality in the 1950s and defended the rights and dignity of the gay community at a time when the very word “homosexual” was censored. Underlying all of his positions was a belief in the fundamental integrity of human beings. Even the worst villains in his novels are motivated by their sense of what is right; though some of his characters are delusional in their convictions, they always act out of those convictions.

Sometime in my teen years I decided I wanted to be a writer. Given the examples of my mother and uncle, I assumed being a writer meant also being a journalist, and over the years I often asked each about their craft. Uncle Al was much more forthcoming about journalism than writing fiction in those days, and his rules for good journalism were simple: A journalist should report the facts accurately and completely; provide context and background when needed; never leave out things he does not like or disagrees with; and clearly label speculation and opinion
as
speculation and opinion. He saw a dangerous trend in people trusting the media, in accepting what they were told instead of checking the facts. Seeing two minutes of a speech on TV or reading an account of the speech in the paper should not take the place of hearing the entire speech or reading a transcript. He thought people were becoming too complacent in letting the media tell them what they should know and that broadcasters and publishers were abusing that complacency. This is a theme that runs through all of his political novels, and though at the time he was writing the media were overwhelmingly liberal, he would be just as critical of today’s conservative press and TV. He would no doubt be horrified by uncredentialed bloggers with no expertise beyond basic rhetorical skills being accepted as authorities on foreign policy or domestic programs. He believed the journalist was obligated to provide readers with the information they needed to make intelligent decisions and had no business trying to shape public opinion.

Allen Drury’s journalism is showcased in
A Very Strange Society
—his study of apartheid South Africa in 1966. His first-hand accounts and in-depth interviews with leaders on both sides of the issue—some conducted at great personal risk—are set amongst a collage of local news reports, statistical data, and government statements as he let South Africa itself set the context for his report. I read
A Very Strange Society
shortly after the Soweto uprising—nearly a decade after it was released—and asked him why he hadn’t offered any solutions to the social injustice he’d seen. Uncle Al told me that though he’d been criticized at the time for not spelling out what he thought must change in South Africa, it would have been presumptuous for him as an outsider to do so. His purpose as a journalist had been to find out what was happening beneath the public façade and to report on what he discovered.

His training as a journalist shaped how he approached writing a novel. Most of the time Uncle Al invested in writing a novel went to research, tracking down as many primary sources as he could for information on every aspect of his story before he wrote a single word. After he was established as a novelist, he was able to hire a personal assistant to comb libraries in search of information he needed, but when it came to locations, he always went in person. If he described an actual street corner in a real town, it was likely he’d stood there, and if a character ordered a specific dish in a real restaurant, Uncle Al probably had a copy of the menu. Before writing
A God Against the Gods
, he made several trips to Egypt, traversing as closely as possible the paths Akhenaten had trod over three thousand years ago, The last few years he was able to travel saw him in Asia, tracing the Silk Road and getting to know the Mongol people—researching a novel he didn’t get a chance to write. What he discovered in his research often shaped the course of his novel. He did not work from an outline so much as he carefully thought through all of his characters and the world in which they lived—to the point he knew what situations would arise and how his people would respond. When the research was complete and he’d marshaled his resources, Uncle Al wrote the book.

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.