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True StoriesWilliam
Eisner: Corporate Chief's
He was always, as he
puts it, “a man tugged in opposing directions.”
A native New Yorker, he graduated from City College of New York (CCNY)
with a BS in Electrical Engineering.
Although he “loved science and math, and always did well,” he
got to feeling that a technical education was inadequate. So he decided to take his savings and go to Paris to explore
the bohemian life, enrolling at the Sorbonne’s Language and Civilization
course. There, he began to
write short stories, discovering for himself “what works and what
doesn’t.” A friend who was
teaching English in Florence invited him to spend the Christmas holidays
there. One morning, roaming
through the Uffizi Gallery, he found himself transfixed by the
“sensitivity and strength” of a Raphael masterpiece, The Madonna of
the Flowers. Later that evening, he would meet a young Italian student who
was “a dead ringer” for the Raphael Madonna and fall instantly in
love. His new friend
offered to show him around and they agreed to meet at the Duomo the next
day. It was a typical cold
dreary winter, and she noticed there was a button missing on his overcoat. When they met again the following day, she had brought
needle and thread to repair the coat.
They were married 18 months later, in Zurich, Switzerland, in a
ceremony witnessed by two maids recruited from their hotel, who “cried
their eyes out.” Determined to start a
family, Eisner fell back on his technical training, working as an engineer
in France, Italy and Germany (for the U.S. Army Signal Corps and other
companies) designing things like communication systems, mobile radars that
detect aircraft and control anti-aircraft guns, computers for
anti-aircraft fire control, and other materials used by NATO throughout
Europe. After six years in
Europe, the Eisners moved back to Los Angeles, where he worked on the
Minuteman missile, the Nautilus class submarine inertial guidance system,
and the F-111 avionics for Rockwell International. He rose to the position
of VP Engineering and after studying nights at UCLA, he obtained a Masters
in Engineering. Later he joined Electronics Corporation of America as
executive vice president and chief operating officer. Although he thrived
in the business environment (even wrote about it), as a writer, he
relishes “the luxury of picking your own hours of work.”
He is as disciplined about his craft as he was about running a
business, writing every day, in longhand in a composition book, from 5-7
a.m., then continuing after breakfast.
He doesn’t wait for inspiration: “The French have a saying:
l”appétit vient en mangeant – the appetite comes with eating – and
in writing, inspiration comes while writing.”
He composes on the right hand pages and uses the left for editing.
The afternoons are devoted to editing or research.
Even before he became
a novelist, writing was always in the back of Eisner’s mind.
He read fiction for more than entertainment, studying how the
writer achieves his effect. His
major influence is French fiction – “the big four, Balzac, Flaubert,
Stendahl, Proust.” While he
and his wife awaited the birth of their first child, they read the first
four volumes of Proust’s masterpiece aloud to each other. “French and American novels are very different,” he said,
“Most Americans prefer the omniscient point of view, whereas 80% of
French novels employ a first person narrative,” a structure he used for THE SÉVIGNÉ LETTERS. William
Eisner's short fiction has been published on the Internet at HotRead.com
and in Witness and The Armchair Aesthete.
He is now completing another novel, a tale of obsession, love and
betrayal set in the world of aerospace. A critic compared THE
SÉVIGNÉ LETTERS to the fiction of Henry James, one of William Eisner’s
“finest moments.” It was
adapted for the stage by Elaine Kendall, the fiction critic of the Los
Angeles Times, and produced by the Lobero Theater Foundation in Santa
Barbara. Eisner is
Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Arthur Metcalf Charitable
Foundation and Vice-Chairman of the United States Strategic Institute,
both based in Boston. He is also a member of the Jonathan Club in Los
Angeles. Getting
Started For
those of us who aspire to write, here’s some advice from William Eisner:
“Creativity doesn't
have to stop upon reaching a certain age. In fact, a writer’s experience
is the working capital he draws from to create his fiction.
So age is of benefit to a writer…We need [people] who are not
ashamed of age, who live and create on their own terms and are not
pathetic imitators of the young." “I find that 70 is
OK, as long as you take care of yourself, get plenty of exercise, watch
your diet. Be proud of what
you are. As long as you have
the energy, you can pursue your dream whatever it is.”
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William
Eisner’s life sounds like a novel you can’t put down.