What’s the story with Don Snyder?

The Cliff Walk, by Don J. Snyder, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 265 pages, cloth, $23.95.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that a man needed four things for success: great animal magnetism, money, looks and intelligence. He said he didn’t have the first two, but he did have good looks and intelligence, so he always got the top girl.

Don Snyder, a former Bangor boy, has a few characteristics in common with Fitzgerald: He’s also good looking and intelligent and writes well, though not as well as Fitzgerald. As for the top girl award, Colleen Snyder, Don’s third wife, could certainly be considered tops in several categories. She even gave him the title to his new book, “The Cliff Walk,” a favorite place on Prout’s Neck where they used to hike.

Subtitled “A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found,” the book tells the story of approximately six years in the author’s life when he went from being an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Colgate University to losing his job and becoming a part-time caretaker, carpenter and house painter on the Maine coast.

The book is controversial. Snyder is accused of lying in it.

Throughout the book, Snyder himself makes no bones about what a liar he is. When lecturing about Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” he writes, “I saw myself as the worst kind of phony, standing in front of students, painting a romantic picture of the life of an outsider, a life I knew nothing about.”

Comparing himself with Willy Loman, the quintessential American loser in Miller’s play (though he seems more like Willy’s son Biff, another golden boy), Snyder writes, “… I had been a salesman all my life, selling myself to whomever I thought might make me more of a success.”

From the time he was a kid growing up in Bangor, developing into a top athlete at Bangor High School, Snyder had a great fear of ending up like so many hard-working but poor Maine people, a fate from which he was so desperate to escape. “I was willing to do anything to be accepted inside,” Snyder writes.

In his book, Snyder mentions four of his best friends from Bangor: Jim Robinson, John Woodcock, John Bradford and Jim Wright.

“I had earned my way into their world from the poor side of the city by scoring touchdowns and hitting home runs and being lucky,” Snyder writes, “and once I beheld the splendor of their lives — the maids who cleaned their houses, their kitchen pantries stocked with food, their great open yards for football games, their convertibles and summer camps on the ocean, their lawyer and doctor fathers — I wanted to be a part of it.”

Later in life, middle-aged and out of a job, sitting in Bradford’s driveway on West Broadway, Snyder says to Bradford, now a Bangor surgeon, “I’m still trying to get what you’ve had all your life.”

How he pursued that life was telling.

“… I’d spent so many years as a bullshitter that I got to the point where I could lie about anything,” Snyder writes. “I don’t just mean the harmless lies that we tell each other, I mean the lies we tell ourselves. For me these lies went back to old autumn afternoons when I was a golden boy who came out of the football locker room into the cold light and crossed the parking lot in my spiked shoes, helmet on or cocked under one arm. On my way to the practice field I passed the high school hoods sitting on the steps out behind the wood shop, hunched over their cigarettes, watching me with a bored, superior look. They had nothing but disdain for guys like me, knowing I believed things about myself that they already knew were not true. I looked down on them with their go-to-hell sunglasses and their shit-kicker boots, and I left them behind on my way to an exceptional life.”

In many ways, Snyder’s life has been exceptional. As a high school senior, he won two athletic scholarships to Colby College, where he was the first freshman in Colby history to play varsity football. As a college student working summers in a hotel on Martha’s Vineyard, he rose to assistant manager and then hired his Bangor pals as underlings. He was a good enough baseball player to be chosen to play on an all-star college team in Fenway Park, where he hit a home run. He played a bit in the minor leagues.

In his 20s, he was editor of the Bar Harbor Times. At 35 he won a James Michener Scholarship to study at the Iowa Writers Workshop. By 38, he had published three books: two novels, “Veteran’s Park” (1987) and “From The Point” (1988), and a biography, “A Soldier’s Disgrace” (1987), the story of Ronald Alley of Bar Harbor, who was sent to prison for collaborating with the enemy during the Korean War. Alley’s case to win an honorable discharge became Don Snyder’s cause. He has published articles and stories in many periodicals, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Yankee, Reader’s Digest, and Harper’s. Before Colgate, he taught at Colby and at the University of Maine.

Snyder’s critics are most concerned about statements in “The Cliff Walk” and in the publicity for the book that claim he was fired from Colgate because of downsizing, that “the English Department was already top-heavy with tenured professors.”

In The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 13, 1997), in an article called “Questions Raised About Book by `Downsized’ Academic,” Denise Magner quotes Bruce W. Selleck, a former Colgate dean, who said, “The only letter I wrote to Don Snyder was detailing why he was not renewed. The reasons had nothing to do with the structure of the English Department in terms of age and tenure, and he knows that.” About the book, which Selleck says he has read, he says, “I was surprised to find it under biography as opposed to fiction.”

Snyder writes that he could have kept his job at the University of Maine, but Ulrich Wicks, present chair of the UM English department, says that Snyder’s job in 1988-89 was a one-year appointment only. Snyder’s account in his book is “a distortion,” according to Wicks.

Chapters from “The Cliff Walk” appeared in Harper’s, where an Iowa friend of Snyder’s is an editor, in November 1996; and in The New York Times Magazine (March 2, 1997). After publication of the Times article, a number of pro and con letters to the editor appeared.

Whether “fictionalized memoir” or not, Snyder has written a good read. He describes well family life with four children, especially in the scenes when he and Colleen have to move from Hamilton, N.Y., back to Maine where they live first at a Yarmouth farmhouse, then at a Scarborough summer house for the winter, and then for the summer at a Hancock Point house where Snyder offers to paint the house in trade for free rent. Along the way, he makes insightful observations about academic politics, teaching, class structure, family, life in America past and present, middle age, and life as a construction worker building a huge summer palace for a rich man.

Snyder doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about himself, and he comes very close to whining too much about his situation. Repeatedly rejected for college teaching jobs, the question arises why he never applied for a high school teaching or coaching position. Insurance companies and collection agencies keep knocking at the door. In one of the most dramatic scenes in the book, he burns his college texts and lecture notes at a town dump.

F. Scott Fitzgerald played football in prep school, but not in college. He tried out for the Princeton team and was crushed when he didn’t make it. He was a blond young man who grew up to write stories of American golden boys and what became of them.

In “Invented Lives,” James Mellows writes, “… Fitzgerald developed the idea that writing was a substitution for the real action on the playing fields, a way of experiencing it with the `same intensity.’ With a strange metaphor, he characterized writing as `a back door way out of facing reality.”‘

As a romantic idealist, Don Snyder may not be dealing dead-on with his own reality, but his book makes for very interesting reading and discussion.