Bear and His Daughter

Bear and His Daughter

by Robert Stone
Bear and His Daughter

Bear and His Daughter

by Robert Stone

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Overview

The stories collected in Bear and His Daughter span nearly thirty years - 1969 to the present - and they explore, acutely and powerfully, the humanity that unites us. In "Miserere," a widowed librarian with an unspeakable secret undertakes an unusual and grisly role in the anti-abortion crusade. "Under the Pitons" is the harrowing story of a reluctant participant in a drug-running scheme and the grim and unexpected consequences of his involvement. The title story is a riveting account of the tangled lines that weave together the relationship of a father and his grown daughter.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780395901342
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 05/14/1998
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 863,191
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

About The Author
ROBERT STONE (1937–2015) was the acclaimed author of eight novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2007.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

MISERERE

MARY URQUHART had just finished story hour at the library when the muted phone rang at the circulation desk. She had been reading the children Prince Caspian.

Camille Innaurato was on the line and as usual she was beside herself.

"Mary, Mary, so listen ..." Camille began. It sounded almost prayerful. Then Camille began to hyperventilate.

"Oh, Camille," Mrs. Urquhart said. "Try to be calm. Are you all right, dear? Do you have your inhaler?"

"I have more!" Camille croaked fiercely at last. The force of the words in her constricted throat made her sound, Mary Urquhart thought, like her counterpart in Traviata.

"More?" Although Mary knew at once what Camille meant, she needed the extra moment of freedom.

"More babies!" Camille shouted. She spoke so loudly that even with the receiver as close to her ear as she could bear, Mary Urquhart thought that everyone around the circulation desk must be able to hear her voice on the phone, its unsound passion.

"My brother, he found them!" cried Camille. "And he took them here. So I got them now."

"I see," said Mary Urquhart.

Outside, Mrs. Carter; the African-American head librarian, was supervising the reuniting of the story-hour children with their mothers. The children were, without exception, black and Hispanic. The mothers of the black children were mostly West Indian domestics; they were the most scrupulous of the story-hour mothers and they loved their children to have English stories, British stories.

"Mary ..." Camille gasped over the phone. "Mary?"

Outside the library windows, in the darkening winter afternoon, the children looked lively and happy and well behaved and Mary was proud of them. The mothers were smiling, and Mrs. Carter too.

"Easy does it," said Mary Urquhart to her friend Camille. For years after Mary had stopped drinking, she had driven around with a bumper sticker to that effect. Embarrassing to consider now.

"You'll come, Mary? You could come today? Soon? And we could do it?"

The previous year Mrs. Urquhart had bought little books of C. S. Lewis tales with her own money for the children to take home. That way at least some might learn to read them. She liked to meet the mothers herself and talk with them. Looking on wistfully, she wished herself out on the sidewalk too, if only to say hello and remind herself of everyone's name. But Mrs. Carter was the chief librarian and preempted the privilege of overseeing the dismissal of story hour.

"Yes, dear," Mary said to Camille. "I'll come as soon as we close."

They closed within the hour because the New Jersey city in which Mary worked had scant funds to spare for libraries. It was largely a city of racial minorities, in the late stages of passing from the control of a corrupt white political machine to that of a corrupt black one. Its schools were warrens of pathology and patronage. Its police, still mainly white, were frequently criminals.

Mary Urquhart looked carefully about her as she went out the door into the library parking lot for the walk to her old station wagon. It was nearly night, though a faint stain of the day persisted. At the western horizon, across the river and over the stacks and gables of the former mills, hung a brilliant patch of clear night sky where Venus blazed. Some of the newer street lights around the library's block were broken, their fixtures torn away by junkies for sale to scrap dealers. There were patchy reefs and banks of soiled frozen snow on the ground. Not much had fallen for a week, but the weather was bitter and the north-facing curbs and margins were still partly covered.

"Thou fair-haired angel of the evening," Mary recited silently to the first star. She could not keep the line from her mind.

Temple Street, the road Mary drove toward the strip that led her home, was one of crumbling wooden houses. In some of them, bare lights glowed behind gypsy-colored bedspreads tacked over the taped windows. About every fifth house was derelict and inside some of these candlelight was already flickering. They were crack houses. Mary had worked as an enumerator in the neighborhood during the last census and, for all its transience, she knew it fairly well. Many of the houses were in worse condition inside than out. The official census description for all of them was "Dilapidated." A few of her story children lived on the street.

The odd corner had a bodega in a cinderblock building with a faint neon beer sign in its window. The cold had driven the brown-bagging drinkers away from the little strip mall that housed Mashona's Beauty Shoppe, a cheap lamp store and a takeout ribs joint called Floyd's, which kept erratic hours. All the shops closed at dusk and God knew, she thought, where the alcoholics had gone. Maybe out of the bitter wind into the crack houses. Mary knew a lot of the older alcoholics who hung out there by sight and sometimes, in daytime, she stopped for Floyd's ribs, which were not at all bad. Floyd, who always had a smile for her, kept a sign over his register that read CHRIST IS THE ANSWER.

She had an ongoing dialogue with a few of the men. Those who would speak to a middle-aged white woman like herself called her "Mary" and sometimes, in the case of the beat old-timers from down home, "Miss Mary." She had begun by addressing them all as "sir," but she had soon perceived that this offended them as patronizing and was not appropriate to street banter. So, if she did not know them by name, she addressed them as "guy," which amused them. It was how her upper-class Southern husband had addressed his social equals. He had used it long before one heard it commonly; he had been dead for thirteen years.

"I know your story, guy," she would say to a brown-bagging acquaintance as she carried her paper container of ribs to the car. "I'm a juicehead. I'm a boozer."

"But you gotta enjoy your life, Mary," an old man had said to her once. "You ain't got but one, chere?"

And that had stopped her cold.

"But that's it," she had told the man. "You're so right."

He had shaken his head, telling her really, well, she'd never understand. Her life and his? But she'd persisted.

"That's why I don't have my bottle today as you do. Because there was a time, guy. Yes, you best believe it."

Then he'd heard her vestigial Southernness and cocked his head and said, in a distinctly sarcastic but not altogether unfriendly way, "Do it right, Mary. You say so."

"God bless, guy."

"Be right, Mary."

Poor fellow, she'd thought. Who was he? Who might he have become? She wished him grace.

A short distance before Temple Street doglegged into the strip of Route 4, it passed the dangerous side of a city park in which there was a large lake. The cold weather had frozen the lake to a depth that Mary knew must be many feet. After the cold weeks they'd had, it must be safe for skating. In some towns there would be lights by the lakeside and skating children; not in this one. And for that she could only be grateful, because she did not think she could bear the sight of children skating or lights on the icy surface of a frozen lake. Even after the thirteen years.

Along its last quarter mile, Temple Street acquired an aluminum guardrail and some halogen overhead lights, though on these, too, the metal was torn up, unscrewed, pried loose by the locust-junkies.

At the light that marked the intersection with Route 4 stood a large gas station. It was one of a number owned by an immigrant from India. Once the immigrant himself had worked in it, then he'd bought it, then bought others and real estate to go with them. Now he employed other Indian immigrants who worked long shifts, day and night. In the previous twelve months, according to the county newspaper, no fewer than four of the immigrants had been shot dead in holdups and another four wounded.

Mary waited at the light, and it was really easier to think about the poor slaughtered Gujaratis than about the frozen lake. She prayed for them, in her way, eyes focused on the turn signal. It did not suit her to utter repetitions. Rather the words came to her on all the music she had heard, so many settings, that prayer sung over and over since the beginning of music itself.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Miserere nobis.

Then there was Route 4, the American Strip. And this was New Jersey, where she had ended up, its original home and place of incubation, whence it had been nourished to creep out and girdle the world. It had come in time to her own stately corner of North Carolina, looking absolutely the same.

Since her widowhood and recovery, Mary Urquhart had lived in a modest house in what had once been a suburb of this New Jersey city, only a few blocks beyond its formal border. At the suburban end of her street was a hill from which the towers of Manhattan were visible on the clearer mornings. All day and most of the night, planes on a southward descent for Newark passed overhead and, even after so many years, often woke her.

But Mary was not, that afternoon, on her way home. A mile short of the city line, she pulled off Route 4 onto Imperial Avenue. The avenue led to a neighborhood called Auburn Hill, which had become an Italian enclave in the Spanish-speaking section of the ghetto. Auburn Hill could be relied upon for neat lawns and safe streets, their security reinforced by grim anecdotes of muggers' and housebreakers' summary punishments. Young outlaws nailed to tar rooftops with screwdrivers. Or thrown from an overpass onto the Jersey Central tracks fifty feet below. At Christmastime, the neighborhood sparkled with cheery lights. Mary had come to know it well and, comprehending both the bitter and the sweet of Auburn Hill, was fond of it.

Camille Innaurato's was like the other houses in that end of town. It was a brick, three-bedroom single-story with aluminum siding and a narrow awning of the same. It had a small lawn in front, surrounded by a metal fence, and a garden in the back where Camille grew tomatoes and peppers in season.

When Mary pulled into the driveway, she saw Camille's pale, anxious face at the picture window. Camille was mouthing words, clasping her hands. In a moment she opened the door to the winter wind, as Mary emerged from her car and locked it.

"Oh, Mary. I'm thanking God Almighty you could come. Yeah, I'm thanking him."

Camille was one of those women who had grown older in unquestioning service to her aged parents. She had helped raise her younger brother. Later she had shared with her father the care of her sick mother. Then, when he died, she had assumed it all — her mother the house, everything. Camille worked in a garment-sewing shop that had set itself up on two floors of a former silk mill; she oversaw the Chinese and Salvadoran women employed there.

Her younger brother August, was technically a policeman, though not an actively corrupt one. In fact, he had no particular constabulary duties. The family had had enough political connections to secure him a clerical job with the department. He was a timid, excitable man, married, with grown children, who lived with his domineering wife in an outer suburb. But as a police insider he knew the secrets of the city.

The Innauratos, brother and sister, had inherited nothing from their parents except the house Camille occupied and their sick mother's tireless piety.

Mary Urquhart stepped inside and took Camille by the shoulders and looked at her.

"Now, Camille, dear, are you all right? Can you breathe?"

She inspected Camille and, satisfied with her friend's condition, checked out the house. The living room was neat enough, although the television set was off, a sure sign of Camille's preoccupation.

"I gotta show you, Mary. Oh I gotta show you. Yeah I gotta." She sounded as though she were weeping, but the beautiful dark eyes she fixed on Mary were dry. Eyes out of Alexandrian portraiture, Mary thought, sparkling and shimmering with their infernal vision. For a moment it seemed she had returned from some transport. She gathered Mary to her large, soft, barren breast. "You wanna coffee, Mary honey? You wanna biscote? A little of wine?"

In her excitement, Camille always offered the wine when there were babies, forgetting Mary could not drink it.

"I'll get you a glass of wine," Mary suggested. "And I'll get myself coffee."

Camille looked after Mary anxiously as she swept past her toward the kitchen.

"Sit down, dear," Mary called to her. "Sit down and I'll bring it out."

Slowly, Camille seated herself on the edge of the sofa and stared at the blank television screen.

In the immaculate kitchen, Mary found an open bottle of sangiovese, unsoured, drinkable. She poured out a glass, then served herself a demitasse of fresh-made espresso from Camille's machine. In the cheerless, spotless living room, they drank side by side on the faded floral sofa, among the lace and the pictures of Camille's family and the portrait photograph of the Pope.

"I used to love sangiovese," Mary said, watching her friend sip. "The wine of the Romagna. Bologna. Urbino."

"It's good," Camille said.

"My husband and I and the children once stayed in a villa outside Urbino. It rained. Yes, every day, but the mountains were grand. And the hill towns down in Umbria. We had great fun."

"You saw the Holy Father?"

Mary laughed. "We were all good Protestants then."

Camille looked at her in wonder though she had heard the story of Mary's upbringing many times. Then her face clouded.

"You gotta see the babies, Mary."

"Yes," Mary sighed. "But do finish your wine."

When the wine was done they both went back to look at the fetuses. There were four. Camille had laid them on a tarpaulin, under a churchy purple curtain on the floor of an enclosed, unheated back porch, where it was nearly as cold as the night outside. On top of the curtain she had rested one of her wall crucifixes.

Mary lifted the curtain and looked at the little dead things on the floor. They had lobster-claw, unseparated fingers, and one had a face. Its face looked like a Florida manatee's, Mary thought. It was the only living resemblance she could bring to bear — a manatee, bovine, slope-browed. One was still enveloped in some kind of fibrous membrane that suggested bat wings.

"So sweet," Camille sobbed. "So sad. Who could do such a thing? A murderer!" She bit her thumb. "A murderer the degenerate fuck, his eyes should be plucked out!" She made the sign of the cross, to ask forgiveness for her outburst.

"Little lamb, who made thee?" Mary Urquhart asked wearily. The things were so disgusting. "Well, to work then."

Camille's brother August had discovered that the scavenger company that handled the county's medical waste also serviced its abortion clinics, which had no incinerators of their own. The fetuses were stored for disposal along with everything else. August had fixed it with the scavengers to report specimens and set them aside. He would pass on the discovery to Camille. Then Camille and a friend — most often Mary — would get to work.

Mary knew a priest named Father Hooke, the pastor of a parish in a wealthy community in the Ramapos. They had known each other for years. Hooke had been, in a somewhat superficial way, Mary's spiritual counselor. He was much more cultivated than most priests and could be wickedly witty, too. Their conversations about contemporary absurdities, Scripture and the vagaries of the Canon, history and literature had helped her through the last stage of her regained abstinence. She knew of Julian of Norwich through his instruction. He had received her into the Catholic Church and she had been a friend to him. Lately, though, there had been tension between them. She used Camille's telephone to alert him.

"Frank," she said to the priest, "we have some children."

He gave her silence in return.

"Hello, Frank," she said again. "Did you hear me, Father? I said we have some children."

"Yes," said Hooke, in what Mary was coming to think of as his affected tone, "I certainly heard you the first time. Tonight is ... difficult."

"Yes, it surely is," Mary said. "Difficult and then some. When will you expect us?"

"I've been meaning," Hooke said, "to talk about this before now."

He had quoted Dame Julian to her. "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Those were lines he liked.

"Have you?" she inquired politely. "I see. We can talk after the interment."

"You know, Mary," Father Hooke said with a nervous laugh, "the bishop, that pillar of intellect, our spiritual prince, has been hearing things that trouble him."

Mary Urquhart blushed to hear the priest's lie.

"The bishop," she told him, "is not a problem in any way. You are."

"Me?" He laughed then, genuinely and bitterly. "I'm a problem? Oh, sorry. There are also a few laws ..."

"What time, Father? Camille works for a living. So do I."

"The thing is," Father Hooke said, "you ought not to come tonight."

"Oh, Frank," Mary said. "Really, really. Don't be a little boy on me. Take up your cross, guy."

"I suppose," Hooke said, "I can't persuade you to pass on this one?"

"Shame on you, Frank Hooke," she said.

(Continues…)



Excerpted from "Bear And His Daughter"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Robert Stone.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
MISERERE,
ABSENCE OF MERCY,
PORQUE NO TIENE, PORQUE LE FALTA,
HELPING,
UNDER THE PITONS,
AQUARIUS OBSCURED,
BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Masterful and wrenching." Boston Globe

"A volume of short stories that belongs alongside those of Raymond Carver . . . Brilliant, moving, often gloriously funny and triumphant." The San Francisco Chronicle

"As interesting a group of stories as can be found in contempory literature." The Miami Herald

Interviews

On Wednesday, July 9, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Robert Stone, author of BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER.


Moderator: On July 9, 1997, the barnesandnoble.com Live Events Auditorium welcomed novelist Robert Stone, who discussed BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER, his collection of short stories spanning nearly 30 years of his career.



Jain from NYC: I read OUTERBRIDGE REACH several years back and loved it. I'm curious, do you have a boat of your own? If so, what's her name, and have you done many solo sails?

Robert Stone: I no longer have a boat. I owned a boat together with a friend of mine, and when he died, it was really more boat than I could take care of, so I sold it. I haven't had a boat in years. I have never sailed single-handed any distance. I used to crew for some friends of mine, and I've done a lot of blue-water sailing, but I've never sailed long distances by myself.



Ralph from Detroit: From what I know about your past, "Absence of Mercy" seems a bit autobiographical. The main character, Mackay, lives in New York City, has a schizophrenic mother, went into the military, etc. Would you care to comment on that? Do you often include autobiographical details in your writing? Thanks, Mr. Stone. I've enjoyed reading you for years.

Robert Stone: My thanks. I very rarely write autobiographical pieces. When I put myself or my experiences in fiction, I usually render them through a prism of fiction -- of deep fiction. But "Absence of Mercy" is an exception. It is one of the most -- probably the most directly autobiographical piece that I've ever done, and it's really very rare that I do that. That piece was in Harper's about five or six years ago.



Georgie from East Northport: Mr. Stone How do you feel about writing short stories as opposed to writing novels? What's the difference for you? Which do you prefer?

Robert Stone: I've always held the short story in awe. The novel gives a writer a degree of freedom that I like to take advantage of. The story is a completely different process -- I have thrown away a great many stories that I have considered unsuccessful. I think a story is like a pitch in baseball. It's a long, continuous, isolated process that begins with the windup and ends, if it's successful, with the thwock of the ball in the catcher's glove. A novel is completely different. It has incidental characters, subplots, foreshadowing. It's a world in a way. To work on a novel is in many ways the same as reading a novel -- you surrender to a world. But a short story is a process where the beginning is visible at the end and the end is constantly imminent at the beginning. It's a different process than a novel.



Claire from Sunset Blvd.: Who or what has been most influential in your writing career?

Robert Stone: It's hard to isolate one person or element. I think I was most influenced by the first generation of American modernists. That is, Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. Of course, my great masters of the past were the authors of the great 19th-century novels that I admiredThomas Hardy, Flaubert, especially Conrad. I think Conrad has been a very influential novelist in the English-speaking world. I think his influence goes on to the present day, and I think I learned a lot about structure -- how a novel should be put together -- from Conrad.



Katie from San Francisco: What is it about man versus nature you find so compelling?

Robert Stone: Well, it's an old and very basic story. And the old, basic stories are the best. Certainly if we're talking about people and the sea, this is a classic match that will probably never end. It goes back before the beginning of history and will go on as long as people go to sea. Then you have in the great sea stories all the elements of life itself reduced to an abstract, so that all the great sea stories are parables in a way. Some of them, like MOBY DICK, can be extremely complex and profound. So man against nature is a naturally compelling theme.



Eddy from Miami: Outside of the online world, what is your favorite bookstore?

Robert Stone: There are a number of bookstores that I am very fond of. Books and Books in Coral Gables is one of them. I like Elliot Bay in Seattle and Powells in Portland. Black Oak in Berkeley and RJ Julia in Madison, Connecticut. There are also two very fine bookstore in Oxford and Jackson, Mississippi.



Bared from Florida: I have read that you were part of the Merry Pranksters. Do you keep in touch with the old group or hear from them often? What about Ken Kesey -- do you and he share tricks of the trade?

Robert Stone: The answer to the first partYes, I do. I'm in touch with my old friends from that era. Many of the people on the bus are still people I see. I get to California usually once a year, and I see my old friends who still live there. Kesey is up in Oregon, and I haven't seen him for two or three years. We don't usually talk about writing when we are together. We talk about people and events.



Kate from Long Island: Hi, Robert. My question is, if you have been collecting these short stories for so long now, and your other works have been so well received, why have you waited to publish them until now? Have you published any short works before in other anthologies, or on their own, or in newsstand publications?

Robert Stone: Almost all those stories but one in BEAR have been published before. Some stories of mine have been anthologized. Three of them have been or will be in the BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES collection. I have one in the BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES anthologies of '70, '87, and '97. "Under the Pitons" was in Esquire and will be included in the '97 BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES anthology.



Eddie from Doral: Who, in your opinion, is the currently living heavyweight champion of literature?

Robert Stone: I don't think there is a heavyweight championship any longer. I think it's a little bit like boxing. Maybe we need a Don King in the literary world. There was a time when Norman Mailer said he was going to hit the longest ball in American letters. There were all these sport metaphors. I don't think anyone has the prestige of a Hemingway or a Thomas Mann or an André Gide. I don't think contemporary figures occupy so large a space. I think there are some excellent writers working, but I don't think we have a heavyweight champion at the moment.



Rory from Florida: Hi, Robert. I have three questions for you

  • 1) I am going to start writing a book of commentaries in the coming year (I am going into the eighth grade at the end of August, and I think December would be the perfect time to start writing if I get my commentary Web page up and running so I can practice). Anyway, when I start writing this book, do I think of what commentaries I want to write? Do some research? What should I do?

  • 2)How do you overcome writer's block?

  • 3)How much time do you spend writing each day?
  • Thanks a bunch!!!!!!

    Robert Stone: You should pick half a dozen topics that you think are the most interesting and you have the most to say about. Take them one at a time, spend a lot of time thinking about it. The best thing is to start writing and to see where thoughts take you. As The Red King in ALICE AND WONDERLAND says, "Start at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop." You learn to organize work by writing; you learn by doing it. You can't have it all mapped out beforehand. Write it down, and then organize it, especially if you are writing nonfiction.

    With me it's always getting the work done. I don't run out of ideas, I just sometimes lack the energy and organization to get myself to sit down and work. I'm never blocked. There are just some times I don't feel like working. I've never felt as if there was something impeding me that I couldn't get around. I've always felt that I was goofing off when I wasn't writing.

    Now I'm finishing a novel. I'm in the last week or so of it. I'm working more than eight hours a day. That includes wandering around, idly thumbing through the dictionary, and all sorts of strategies not to work. I'm normally good for about five hours, but I'm under deadline for the book to be published in the spring '98 list. I don't usually work this hard.



    Bethany Chadwick from Amherst College, '96: I read a review of your work some time ago written by Professor Pritchard. How long ago did you teach at Amherst? What classes did you teach, and what literature genre did you cover? What was your favorite hangout in the Pioneer Valley -- was there anywhere special you would hole up and write?

    Robert Stone: It's about a little over 20 years ago -- 22 or 23 years ago -- that I last taught there. My kids grew up in Amherst. I have fond memories of the area. I thought it had a wonderful English department, and it's an excellent school, and I still have a number of close friends on the faculty there. A number of my students there have published. Rand Cooper is one -- he's a novelist that was a student of mine. I taught a film class that Ken Burns, who was a Hampshire College student, took. I did mainly advanced writing workshops, but I also did a course that was called "The Literature of Alienation," and we read Beckett and a variety of writers of different periods. I also taught a film class. There was a bar called Checkers. It probably isn't there anymore. There was a place called Sheehan's in Northampton where I liked to hang out.



    Eddy from Miami: I know DOG SOLDIERS was made into a movie (which I read you weren't too pleased with). With so much in Hollywood being remade and reused (sitcoms, sequels, remakes of good movies and not-so-good movies alike) is there interest to remake DOG SOLDIERS?

    Robert Stone: Not that I'm aware of. Very rarely does that happen. They'll sometimes remake a film from a book that has been filmed, but I think it's very rare. In any case, I don't think there are any moves to remake it.



    Mark Weiss from Westport, CT: Maybe I have read it into your work, but I get Hemingway tingles. You both explore the human condition with such candor and relate it in such expressive dialogue. Are you a fan of his work? If so, what are your favorites? His short fiction? And what other writers do you admire?

    Robert Stone: I certainly was influenced by Hemingway. He is a master of dialogue. He taught us all how to use dialogue and the possibilities of dialogue. For sheer line-for-line excellence, A FAREWELL TO ARMS is my favorite. "Hills Like White Elephants" is also a marvelous story in my mind -- a tour de force. A MOVEABLE FEAST, which he wrote late in life, showed that he never really lost it. He lost his mind before he lost his ability to write.



    Maxwell from New York City: I read a profile of you after the release of OUTERBRIDGE -- and I understand you love to travel. What are you favorite destinations, or types of holiday, and why?

    Robert Stone: I've always really loved Southeast Asia. I love the experience -- the sense of the place. The incense, trees, the impact of that degree of change in culture. That's a place with an intense culture of its own. You feel that you are in a place of great complexity and mystery. I still get a childlike boost in a place that is so exotic to me. Increasingly I like being close to nature. I used to prefer cities and cafés, but as I get older, I find that I like being in the mountains or in the woods. I was always a city person, but I'm learning to enjoy the bush, as it were.



    Mandy Divina from Hinsdale, IL: Reading over these stories, were there any that you thought you might like to develop into a novel? Do any of the characters in BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER haunt you so much that you might return to them in the future?

    Robert Stone: Many of them haunt me a great deal. I have never returned to a character yet. I wouldn't rule it out. If I were to return to one, it would be Elliot and his wife Ann in "Helping," but I have no immediate plans to do that.



    Fred Larson from Towson, MD: Religion seems to be mentioned in every one of your stories in BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER. Even the dolphin in "Aquarius Obscured" seems to be spouting a religious doctrine. I'm sure, like many of us, you could go on and on about religion. Are you a religious person? Do you still practice the Catholic faith?

    Robert Stone: I don't practice. I think that my way of perceiving things, my way of approaching the world, is essentially religious. I think I have a kind of love/hate relationship to Christianity and Catholicism. At this time, I'm not practicing.



    Tiger from AOL: The characters in BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER all have unique quirks, ways of speaking, reactions, and feelings -- although they do tend to be druggies. But my question is not about drugs. It's about your characters. Do you base them on people you know? Are their quandaries based on real events? They never fail to become real to me, which is the reason I am a fan of your writing. Thank you.

    Robert Stone: My thanks to you, Tiger. They do seem very real to me, too. I come to think of them as real. They are not life portraits. They are assembled from bits and pieces. Sometimes overheard laughter. Sometimes a gesture that I've seen somewhere. The characters really assemble out of their dialogue. Dialogue is really the principal vehicle of characterization, much more than description. If a character is working for me, I come to believe in them very much. They take on a quality of reality to me.



    Rene from Georgetown: Do you spend time surfing the Web? If so, which are your favorite sites?

    Robert Stone: I don't. I'm not even online at the moment. When I get this next book finished, I'll look into it. That is an unknown world to me, but I hope to make it part of my life in the future.



    Nick from Burlington, VT: Hi, Bob! In the title story and in "Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta," characters are either made fun of or put in a pathetic light because they are writers. Is this self-referential? What do you feel about your profession?

    Robert Stone: Well, I certainly am not ashamed of it. I really feel that writers perform a necessary service. But I do indulge in a degree of self-mockery, and I think, like many people, I like to poke fun at people who are in the same situation that I'm in as a writer. I do kid writers and the writing life because there is a degree of absurdity in it. Basically I take my job seriously.



    Paul from Lansdale, PA: Hi, Robert. I read somewhere that OUTERBRIDGE REACH was based on a true story. Is that true? Which story?

    Robert Stone: Yes. There was an incident in the 1967 Whitbread Cup Race, before the days of transponders, when an English entrant in the race decided to face his position. I remember reading that story and what happened to him with great fascination. I used that situation as the basis of the novel. It is based on an event that actually took place.



    Megan from Williamsburg, VA: Hello, Mr. Stone. When is your next book coming out? Can you let us know what it will be about?

    Robert Stone: It is set in Jerusalem in 1992 and it's about the city, the foreign press who worked there, and the various intrigues taking place around Jerusalem -- all the political and religious elements at play in the early '90s. DAMASCUS GATE will be the title.



    Grace from San Antonio, TX: I hope this is not too personal, but what do you believe in? There seems to be very little hope in the lives of your characters. I adore reading your books, but afterwards I often find myself wondering if Robert Stone as a person is really that cynical. Thank you for taking the time to answer me online!

    Robert Stone: I'm not cynical. There are things in life and in the world that I genuinely value and that I'm not cynical about. I believe in art and the way in which it helps us get through life, the way it edifies and provides insight. I believe in love. I believe in compassion and in tolerance. I'm not cynical about those things. I think that most people have a pretty tough time in life. I think many people are unhappy, and sometimes I wonder how most people -- myself included -- get by. But I'm not cynical.



    Moderator: Thank you, Robert Stone, for joining us this evening here in the barnesandnoble.com Live Events Auditorium. It appears you have some pretty dedicated fans out there! Best of luck with your next release and these last few weeks of hard work. We hope you might join us again.

    Robert Stone: Well, thank you very much. God bless my dedicated fans. I couldn't do what I do without them. I hope they like the work that I am finishing. My love to them all, and thanks very much.


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