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ShareKANSAS CITY, Mo. — Clancy Martin has a perfectly normal nose. Nothing remarkable. And as he talks, spinning out tales of his life, it maintains its unremarkable length.
From above and all around, though, in his Philosophy Department office at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, in paintings and puppetry, various Pinocchios with impressive Pinocchio noses look on.
“I’m completely fascinated by the lies we tell one another and the lies we believe from one another,” Martin says, not to mention the lies we tell ourselves.
Martin’s Pinocchio collection isn’t the only extra presence in the room. There’s Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Aristotle, Augustine and Kant.
In life and in his academic work, Martin knows a thing or two about lies and self-deception. He’s an associate professor of philosophy, and his many published works in the field explore the topics of deception and ethics.
But the truth is, if Martin’s writings remained tucked inside academic journals, you wouldn’t be reading about him here right now.
Indeed, there has been a breach. It’s a novel, Martin’s first, titled “How to Sell.”
The plot borrows heavily from his life experiences, pre-doctorate. For now let’s just say Martin learned the finer points of shoplifting at age 6, was kicked out of high school for a drug infraction and spent seven years in the jewelry business, where the issue of ethics apparently didn’t arise much.
Just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book has received early laudatory, even excited, reviews. Critics, in reaching for comparisons, drop such literary names as John Updike and Raymond Carver. A “How to Sell” screenplay is being shopped around Hollywood.
From behind his desk — he became philosophy department chairman last year — Martin looks over his oversized, dark-rimmed professor glasses and seems to be at loss for words, which must not often happen .
“I am nervous about it,” he said, “it” being all of it: the New York publishing parties, author talks, book signings, all about to ramp up as his novel hits bookstore shelves from coast to coast. “I’ve never had fans. As a professor, it’s important students don’t become fans.”
For novel writers, it’s different. Fans are a possibility. Fans are good. Readers connect. They want more.
“And with fiction, especially the book I’ve written, it’s personal,” he said.
Yes. Very personal.
In “How to Sell,” a 16-year-old Canadian named Bobby Clark leaves Calgary to join his older brother in the jewelry business in Fort Worth, Texas. The boys behave badly in terms of drugs and sex. And if making a sale of a high-priced diamond or watch requires lying, even fraud, so be it.
In real life, Martin left Calgary at 16 to work with his older brother in the jewelry business in Fort Worth. He then went to college and pursued his Ph.D., which he interrupted to return to Texas to launch a jewelry business, again with his brother.
So here’s the question Martin will be answering for a long time: Are you Bobby Clark?
The short answer, Martin said, is no. He could have written a memoir but didn’t. The longer answer: Many of Bobby Clark’s struggles are his own.
“Which is why I think I can write about them convincingly,” said Martin, boyish at 41, dimpled and engaging. “You do reveal things about yourself.”
Martin earned his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 and began his academic career at UMKC. By all accounts, it’s an exemplary career. He published a translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and is under contract for a translation of “Beyond Good and Evil.” His courses earn high ratings from students.
As for his personal life, Martin is married to Rebecca, a lawyer, and they have two daughters, 4-year-old Margaret and 2-year-old Portia. They just purchased a house in the Northeast area of Kansas City. Martin has a 14-year-old daughter, Zelly, from a previous marriage.
It all sounds so successful and stable, which pleases Martin. But he knows that’s no characterization of much of the rest of his professional and personal life, starting with his growing-up years in Calgary.
It was his older stepsister Lisa who enlisted him in stealing cigarettes from a grocery store. His role, at age 6, was to create a diversion.
“I just started screaming, ‘Where’s my mommy? Where’s my mommy?’ I attracted all this attention, and she would grab a carton of Du Maurier cigarettes.”
That’s about the time he started smoking. He was in fourth grade when he had his first LSD experience.
“It’s shocking to think of it now,” Martin said. “You could buy LSD on the street when you were 9 years old.”
Martin’s parents divorced when he was 5. His mother remarried soon after, and he and his two brothers moved into the stepfamily’s house, netting seven new older brothers and sisters.
Most of them were trouble, Martin said. In short order, one committed suicide, one was sent to prison and another was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
“I learned a lot of really wacky behaviors when I was young,” he said.
But there would be another dangerous influence: Certain books encountered at too young an age, Martin said.
His older brother encouraged him to read the likes of Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison, which, he said, no doubt influenced his drug experimentation and rule-breaking.
Meanwhile, his New Age-y father pushed him toward such influential works as “Autobiography of a Yogi” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
That played into Martin’s “meaning of life” ruminations and eventually to his passion. He found Kant at age 18 in “Metaphysics of Morals,” then a host of other continental philosophical minds.
“When I finally hit this group of characters,” he said, “who were taking these questions seriously and trying to explain them not in religious terms or artistic terms or raw-experience terms, but rather in rational terms, it sucked me in.”
After working with his brother for a couple of years, Martin decided to begin his studies in philosophy. He earned his bachelor’s degree and was in Copenhagen working on his dissertation when his brother called from Texas with an idea. At the time, Martin was newly married, and Zelly was on the way.
The two would start their own jewelry business, his brother said, and make loads of money. Martin agreed to try it for a few years and abandoned his dissertation on Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher.
“I had these young father’s concerns about money,” he said. “And my older brother was my best friend. When he asked me to be his partner, the allure was enormous. Now looking back, I realize more than anything it was to be close to him.”
Part of the jewelry store plan was to buy diamonds and other gems directly from manufacturers, or processors. In his late 20s at the time, Martin and his brother traveled to Thailand and Israel, Hong Kong and China. They rode elephants into the mountains of northern Thailand to buy rubies and sapphires.
That was fun. The part he soured on was most of the rest of the business.
“I was working all the time, and the business is full of deceitfulness and trickery,” he said.
As portrayed unforgivingly in “How to Sell,” a jewelry store is a place of frequent deceptions. And in real life?
Martin likens the fine jewelry and watch business to the used-car industry prior to the existence of vehicle titles. Until there’s real and legal certification that documents the history of expensive pieces, Martin said, the business will be prone to fraud.
In fact, he said, it’s tough to be an honest jeweler, because you have to compete with the dishonest ones.
One example: An unscrupulous jeweler will swap diamonds for cheaper ones when jewelry is dropped off to be sized or repaired, he said.
“It happens all the time,” Martin said. “Nobody’s watching.”
When Martin first started in the business as a 16-year-old, the art of tricking customers in word and sometimes deed seemed glamorous, like being a con man, being on the inside.
Later, there was no such allure. In fact, he started writing about those early business experiences, and his own personal failings, as a kind of purging. Those writings eventually became a short story, “The Best Jeweler.”
The story, the precursor to his novel, was published in Noon, a literary journal. It won the prestigious Pushcart Prize, celebrating works published by small presses, in 2008.
Ultimately Martin returned to the University of Texas to complete his Ph.D. His dissertation was an examination of Nietzsche’s theory of deception.
“I was just one of those people who had to learn from his mistakes,” Martin said. “I had to screw up over and over again to realize this was not a good way to be living.”
Deb Olin Unferth, another Pushcart Prize winner and Martin’s “writing buddy” in Lawrence, thinks Martin’s unusual life experiences have helped him foster a generous outlook. And patience.
“That makes him a good friend and a really good writer,” said Unferth, author of the recent avant-garde novel “Vacation.” The two consult frequently over their fiction writing.
“He’s unflinchingly honest and funny. He’s also a brilliant guy who can hold a lot in his head at once.”
Martin has collected a few life lessons, no doubt. Some are far in the past. Drug abuse, for instance, is nothing but a “confusing and dangerous road that leads to despair,” he said.
But one is quite recent. In January, his wife found him in the closet with a bed sheet. He was trying to hang himself.
She saved him, quite literally, at which point he admitted to her — and to himself — that he had been secretly drinking and lying about it for three years.
He had become an alcoholic. Suicidal thoughts had been with him for years. He immediately vowed to stop drinking, and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous has been clean for more than four months.
“When you have children, you cannot engage in the luxury of suicide’s sad logic,” Martin said. “That’s a bad place to be. I hope I never go back there.”
Martin is nothing if not open about what’s going on in his life.
At the start of a recent philosophy class with upperclassmen, he mentioned among other May events his upcoming author’s event for “How to Sell” at Unity Temple on the Plaza.
“That’s also where I go to my AA meetings, so that will be comforting,” he joked.
Open. Fun to be with. Honest. Colleague Henry Frankel, UMKC philosophy professor, admires all of that about Martin.
“He has this amazing record, and he doesn’t build himself up,” Frankel said. “There’s no puffery.”
In “How to Sell,” lying and self-deception are Bobby Clark’s biggest struggles. To Martin, those struggles aren’t black and white.
Nietzsche observed that we are comfortable lying to each other because we are so comfortable lying to ourselves. And, in fact, we must do some of the latter. Complete honesty is untenable. Without a fair bit of self-deception, would we even get up in the morning?
It’s a question Bobby Clark and Clancy Martin, in their own ways, are working on.
