The Inventors Read online

  Praise for Peter Selgin

  The Inventors

  •Finalist: Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize

  •Finalist: Graywolf Press Prize for Nonfiction

  •Finalist: AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction

  In The Inventors, Peter Selgin unrolls the blueprint of his life, investigating how two men – his father and a charismatic middle-school teacher – helped create the man he is today. Lyrical, honest and (dare I say?) inventive, The Inventors is a deeply compelling meditation on how we make and remake ourselves throughout our lives – choice by choice, action by action, word by glorious, slippery word.

  GAYLE BRANDEIS, author of The Book of Dead Birds

  The Inventors is a philosophical memoir that grapples with some of the questions regarding how we invent ourselves and how we in turn are invented by others, particularly by our mentors. Thanks to Selgin’s autobiographical candor and the vivid details of his telling, these puzzles of identity seem as fresh, engaging, and befuddling as they were when they first bubbled to the surface of our thinking. A smart, tender, compelling book.

  BILLY COLLINS, author of Aimless Love

  Peter Selgin writes brilliantly about our mindfulness and forgetting – the necessary inventions and reinventions that help us live. The lies of his father and his eighth-grade teacher inevitably enter into this intricate portrait of inner and outer selves. As he inhabits their action, talk, and thought, he teaches and fathers himself. In language most rare for its transparency, Mr. Selgin reminds his readers of the difference between artifice and the genuine. In these remarkable pages, he has become one of the truest of our writers.

  CAROL FROST, author of Honeycomb

  Peter Selgin’s The Inventors is brilliant, brave, compelling, and inventive all at once. This is an intimately intimate rendering not just of Selgin’s coming-of-age, but indeed of his rebirth into a new life of cognitive thought, of making sense of a perplexing world, of inventing out of blood and abstract ideas and hidden histories who, exactly, he is. This is an intelligent and moving book, a gorgeous book, an important book.

  BRET LOTT, author of Dead Low Tide

  Peter Selgin’s The Inventors is a remarkable study in remembering, in empathy, and most of all in reckoning.

  KYLE MINOR, author of Praying Drunk

  Peter Selgin’s intricately woven memoir, The Inventors, offers a unique, engaging, and occasionally startling examination of how childhood influences bend and shape us into being. Selgin’s candor and intimacy bring to vivid life the Zen koan of how we become the people we become and how we somehow never really know who we are.

  DINTY W. MOORE, author of Between Panic & Desire

  I have never read anything like The Inventors, Peter Selgin’s incomparable, brilliant, and achingly human memoir. With this deceptively simple story of the author’s relationships with two self-invented figures – his father and an influential teacher – and with his own younger self – Selgin has produced a deep-core sample of the human condition. Like William Blake, he finds a whole world in a few grains of sand. He has shown, in language remarkably beautiful and accessible, how we are invented, by the people who profess to love and care for us and by our complicit selves. I was profoundly moved reading this book, by its deep intelligence, its constantly sweet, knowing humor, and the recognition in it of myself and everyone I have ever loved.

  PETER NICHOLS, author of The Rocks and A Voyage for Madmen

  Only a writer as gifted and insightful as Peter Selgin could have produced this deeply compelling story of two brilliant but extraordinarily deceitful men and the complicated relationships he shared with them. A superb work of memory that unfolds like a great suspense novel.

  SIGRID NUNEZ, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag

  This story is about what we make and how we make it. Selves, lives, love stories, life stories, death stories. It is also the story of how creation and destruction are always the other side of each other. And like the lyrical language so gorgeously invented in this book that it nearly killed me, its meanings are endlessly in us. Writers live within language, and so in some ways, you might say we are at the epicenter.

  LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of The Chronology of Water and The Small Backs of Children

  Drowning Lessons

  •Winner, 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

  •Finalist: Iowa Short Fiction Award

  •Finalist: Jefferson Press Prize

  •Finalist: Ohio State University Press Prize

  Thank goodness for Peter Selgin, who shares with us the mysteries of the human heart in this electric, revealing collection.

  BENJAMIN PERCY, author of Refresh, Refresh

  A stellar collection deserving recognition.

  MELISSA PRITCHARD, author of Late Bloomer

  Drowning Lessons is a book that deserves serious attention from all lovers of American short fiction.

  JESS ROW, author of The Train to Lo Wu

  Drowning Lessons is an extraordinary book; Selgin’s writing creates a current that will carry readers farther than they would ever have expected and leave them on a new shore.

  HANNAH TINTI, author of Animal Crackers

  Life Goes to the Movies

  •Finalist: AWP Award Series for the Novel

  •Finalist: James Jones First Novel Fellowship

  An utterly absorbing novel. A wonderful read.

  MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The House on Fortune Street

  From beginning to end, I kept imagining the funnels of smoke that surely must have risen from his keyboard as he wrote this potent, superbly crafted, and wonderfully ambitious novel.

  DONALD RAY POLLOCK, author of Knockemstiff

  Wonderfully innovative and elegantly crafted, Life Goes to the Movies brims with exuberance and wit.

  FREDERICK REIKEN, author of The Lost Legends of New Jersey

  [Life Goes to the Movies is] a riveting story, artfully constructed and told with wit, precision, and sensitivity.

  JOANNA SCOTT, author of Everybody Loves Somebody

  Confessions of a Left-Handed Man

  •Finalist, William Saroyan International Prize

  The quirky, intelligent memoir of an artist and fiction writer … An engaging, original modern-day picaresque.

  KIRKUS

  Tawdry as [his] first love affair with literature may have been, how glad we are that Peter Selgin was tempted into it – and fell head over heels. Without such an addictive beginning, that boy may never have grown up to become a writer of such great substance.

  NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS REVIEW

  Selgin deftly balances humor and tenderness throughout these life-affirming confessions.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW

  Peter Selgin is a born writer, capable of taking any subject and exploring it from a new angle with wit, grace, and erudition. He has a keen eye for the telling detail and a voice that is deeply personal, appealing, and wholly original. Fans of Selgin’s fiction will know they are in for a treat, and those who are new to his work would do well to start with this marvelous memoir in essays, his finest writing yet.

  OLIVER SACKS

  Copyright © 2016 Peter Selgin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Selgin, Peter.

  The inventors: a memoir / by Peter Selgin.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-9893604-8-7

  1. Selgin, Peter – Family. 2. Teacher-student relationships – Bi
ography. 3. Authors, American – 21st century – Biography.

  PS3619.E463 Z46 2016

  813/.6 – dc23

  2015030856

  Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

  3rd Floor

  Portland, Oregon 97212

  hawthornebooks.com

  Set in Paperback

  for Christopher Rowland

  “OPTICAL GAUGE FOR MEASURING THE THICKNESS OF A CONTINUOUS WEB.” From Patent No. 3,518,441

  Contents

  Introduction | Lidia Yuknavitch

  THE INVENTORS

  Prologue

  Exemplary Claims

  Description of the Preferred Embodiment

  The Prior Art

  The Hop Field

  Controlled Burn

  Field and Search

  Background of the Invention

  Afterword | George Selgin

  Introduction

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  A “PROXIMITY FUZE,” AN EVOLUTION OF THE “VARIABLE Time Fuze,” was a fuze that automatically detonated an explosive device when the distance to a target became less than what had been programmed. Proximity fuzes were better than timed fuzes, which could go wrong in a myriad of ways. More precise. Less human error. Clusters of ground forces. Ships at sea. Enemy planes, various missiles, suspected ammunitions factories. Those were most often the targets.

  And hearts.

  At the heart of this book is a proximity fuze in the form of two men who entered and detonated Peter Selgin’s life, leaving him to reconstitute a self from the pieces that were left. When we think about the people who come into and out of our lives, there are only a few – or less – who literally rearranged our DNA. You know what I’m talking about. Those people who, for whatever reason, detonated our realities. For Peter Selgin there were two men, one his father, who helped develop the proximity fuze, the other a teacher, who not only changed his life forever, but who had something in common with Selgin’s father: they lied their way to selves.

  I’ve always hated the word “lie.” It has a bomb in its center. The bomb has a kind of morality trap inside of it. When we point to someone who “lied,” we can more easily condemn them while feeling better about ourselves. And yet everyone I have ever met has lied. Sometime, somewhere. It’s human to be bad at telling the truth. Truth is difficult and painful and often self-incriminating. I prefer the word “fiction.” It allows for the fact that all of our truths – the stories we tell ourselves so that we can bear our own lives – are always already constructed. Our life fictions are compositions made from memory, and memory, as neuroscience now tells us, has no stable origin or pure access route.

  I happen to be an expert on the topic of lies. My mother lied to me. My father lied to me. My family was a lie, my religion was a lie, husbands lied, teachers lied, friends and foes lied, the selves I was meant to step into – girlfriend, wife, mother – were all strange cultural fictions. Writers live within language, and so in some ways, you might say we are at the epicenter.

  Peter Selgin’s father was a brilliant man who participated in the extraordinary inventions but also the death sciences that culminated in the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In order to forge a self he could live with, he fictionalized his own past. And because life is always bringing the same trials back around to us in different forms, later in his life Peter Selgin would meet another man, a teacher whose fictions recreated a self that might rise above the human wrongs he’d committed. Peter writes from within the epicenter of each.

  This story is about what we make and how we make it: selves, lives, love stories, life stories, death stories. It is also the story of how creation and destruction are always the other side of each other, and – like the lyric language so gorgeously invented in this book that it nearly killed me – its meanings are endlessly in us. It’s a book about how we do and do not survive our twin forms of being: the selves we live, and the stories of those selves we endlessly recreate. And there is something at the heart of the story that I did not expect to find.

  Hope.

  THE INVENTORS

  a splash quite unnoticed

  this was

  Icarus drowning

  WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  from “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

  Prologue

  THIS BOOK IS ABOUT TWO MEN WHO WERE VERY IMPORTANT to me. The first was there at my conception, the second came along thirteen years later. Each had a profound influence on me. You could say they invented me, such was their influence.

  They invented themselves, too. The first man did so through an act of omission, by denying his past. The second did so through a series of fabrications, by lying about his. The first man was Paul Joseph Selgin, my father – who, it so happens, was an inventor. The second was my eighth-grade English teacher.

  I’ve had other inventors, too: a mother, my twin brother, the places I’ve lived, the people I’ve known. They all helped invent me.

  We’re made of the past. What we remember, or think we remember, or choose to remember, defines us. Like my father and my teacher, each of us, in different ways and to various degrees, constructs a myth about ourselves that we embrace in part to deny contradictory, unpleasant, or inconvenient truths. We inhabit fictional narratives that we come to think of as “our lives.” From memories sifted, sorted, selected, or synthesized – consciously or unconsciously – we assemble the stories that tell us who we are. In that sense, we’re all inventors.

  This book is my invention. I’ve written it to my younger self, but for you. To preserve anonymity, I’ve changed dates, place names, and other identifying details.

  May you fall in sympathy with what follows.

  Exemplary Claims

  “This invention relates to cathode ray tubes and particularly to such tubes for use as signal modulators, amplifiers and the like wherein one or more electron beams are deflected over a target electrode structure.” U.S. Patent # 2,489,329, DEFLECTION MODULATION TUBE, Application January 20, 1947, Serial No. 723,034

  I.

  Danbury, Connecticut, February, 2000

  I BELIEVE IT WAS THE ANCIENT CHINESE WHO CURSED each other by saying, “May you live in interesting times.” I had an interesting father.

  You’ll note that I’m not properly dressed for this occasion. In honor of my father, I’m wearing one of his moth-eaten cardigan sweaters, an affront to good taste, fashion, etiquette – all things my father thumbed his nose at.

  As most of you here probably know, my papa was an iconoclast. He had too many other things on his mind to worry about protocols or conventions. Though he was once the director of a division of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., his social standards were anything but exacting. Chesterton’s “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly” was among his favorite sayings. An electronics engineer and inventor, he disdained all things irrational and considered all forms of tribal ritual and worship barbaric. He loathed – his word – all religions. Nor did Papa care much for parties, parades, sports, movies, concerts, the theater – anything that made him part of a group or audience and divided him from the fertile depths of his own polymath mind. He had no stomach for pomp, ritual, or any form of regimentation or conformity. He hated crowds and large gatherings. Weddings and funerals weren’t his cup of tea. This one, unfortunately, he had to attend.…

  AFTER THE MEMORIAL service, as the respectful file out of the funeral parlor, you gather up the relics that you and your twin brother George assembled for the commemorative altarpiece: your father’s portable Royal typewriter, his oscilloscope, a Color Coder (one of his inventions), his favorite eggcup, the split-spined German dictionary that he kept next to his rocking chair in the living room.

  As you do a stranger approaches you. She’s in her late seventies or early eighties, tall and thin, with a bent nose and short silver hair. She wears frameless octagonal eyeglasses an
d a reindeer-and-snowflake sweater in cheerful primary colors that offset her wintry complexion. As your brother chats with your half-sisters Ann and Clare (your father married three times) a dozen feet away, the woman walks straight up to you.

  I was a friend of Paul’s – of your father’s, she says, taking your hands in hers. We knew each other for over forty years, she says. She has an accent – heavy, German. Her fingers are bony and ice-cold. She holds her winter coat draped over one arm and smells like the winter weather outdoors.

  Nice to meet you, you say. (Forty. You do the math. Since you were in diapers.)

  We knew each other very well, your father and I, she says.

  You smile. You’re certain you’ve never seen her before.

  Very well, she repeats. Then: Did you know your father was Jewish?

  At first her declaration strikes you as no less peculiar than the woman herself, who, for all you know, has come from the neighborhood homeless shelter or from Fairfield Hills, the mental hospital in nearby Newtown. For all you know she drops into memorial services regularly to confront mourners with absurd pronouncements concerning their dearly departed. You’re about to dismiss her claim as ridiculous when a memory comes back to you, that time in Italy back in your early twenties, at a villa in the hilly outskirts of Piacenza, where you’d gone to visit some relatives on your mother’s side of the family, when one of a small army of second and third cousins no sooner set eyes on you than she declared, Ma lei e’ ebreo! (But you are Jewish!). Her judgment had something to do with the downward curve of your nostrils. But you didn’t take it all that seriously, in fact you forgot about it completely, until now.

  All this time you’ve been staring at the old woman, who keeps holding your hands, shaking them.

  Excuse me? you say to her.

  He never told you?

  Who are you?