Falling Through Space Read online

  The one Thanksgiving that I do remember was one in which I created something. At that time my parents lived on a farm in Rankin County, Mississippi, and my brothers and my three sons and my six nieces were there all the time anyway, so coming to Summerwood for Thanksgiving was nothing new. It was a wonderful creative time in my life. My parents were helping take care of my children. I was back in school at Millsaps College. Life was good. The children were still small enough to be manageable and I was writing and studying philosophy.

  That Thanksgiving I decided to turn the day into a family Olympics. We marked off courses and had three-legged races and sprints and throwing contests and a steeplechase that consisted of a long course around the farm, over the dam, through the woods, around a barn, up and down hills, over a fence, and down a gravel road to a tent underneath an oak tree. I had been running quite a bit that fall and I am sure the driving motivation in my mind was that I would surprise and conquer my older brother, who once came in third in the real Junior Olympics. I have forgotten what came of that. I think he refused to race. Or else he raced but didn’t try and infuriated me by letting me win. When we were small, one of my greatest complaints was that he let me win. “YOU LET ME WIN,” I would scream, “YOU LET ME WIN. I HATE YOU.” “Don’t hate anyone,” my mother would whisper.

  Still, it was a wonderful day and we resolved to make the races an annual event. Two of my nieces were moved to write a newsletter about the day, which they copied on the office copying machine and sent around to the participants. That was so long ago. In 1967.

  Recently one of the young editors found a copy and mailed it off to everyone who had been there for the first running of the Summerwood Thanksgiving Olympics. It was full of interesting interviews with the participants.

  “My foot got hurt but I had fun anyway.” Kathleen Gilchrist. “Tremendous success.” Uncle Bob. I am quoted as saying, “Lovely healthy children are the greatest blessing of any year.” And I might add from the perspective of 1986, especially when someone else is taking care of them most of the time.

  I KNOW SO MUCH MORE now than I knew then, except for a very long time ago, when I knew everything. I knew it all, where the barn was and how to ride the mules and where they kept the pound cake and how far to walk into the water without drowning, the smell of coffee and powder, the breasts of Babbie and Dan-Dan and Miss Teddy and Onnie Maud, the cold hands of Nailor. The soft bones of my mother, the bed of Aunt Roberta, how to get all the sugar I wanted, the way to Hannie’s house and where the men had gone and why the women stopped what they were doing when the news came over the radio about the war.

  Later, I would ride in the crop duster and be pulled on a board behind the motorboat and drive the new Buick around the pasture and wear slips that came from Memphis in boxes lined with pale pink tissue paper. I would grow up without noticing it since I had never thought that I was a child or seemed helpless or small to myself in any way.

  I feared water unless they were with me and darkness and underneath the beds. I was afraid I would go rolling down the bayou bank in the car and forget to roll the windows up or down, whichever it was that saved your life. I was afraid I would be turned into a crow for lying, so I told the truth. Some of them regret teaching me that.

  The black children came over in the morning to play with me. We played on the back porch and on the stairs behind the kitchen. We made doll furniture and chattered away in two languages. Their language was full of laughter. Mine was full of bossiness and warnings. I made the furniture and they admired it and ate the pound cake I got from the pantry and when it was gone they left. They wearied of watching me work so hard over nothing on such beautiful mornings with the ground so soft and fragrant beneath our feet. They would thank me very politely for the cake, then disappear. When they were gone I would put on my shoes and walk down the road searching for them. I would go to Ditty’s house and ask her to find them for me. She would give me cornbread and let me watch her make spells. She was very good at making spells. She must have put a spell on me for me to be so lucky all my life. Yes, it must have been Ditty. For love of my mother she must have covered me with spells.

  When we were away from Hopedale, sometimes for many months, I would write letters to them. Mrs. Stewart Floyd Alford, Hopedale Plantation, Grace, Mississippi.

  In my imagination the mailman would drive his car down the gravel road from the Grace post office, past the Indian mounds and on past my godmother’s house, past the shed where the crop dusters were parked and over the Hopedale Bridge and along the pasture where my grandfather’s sheep grazed. He would stop the car and walk up onto the porch and hand the letter to my grandmother.

  Dear Dan-Dan [the letter would say],

  How are you? I am well. Danny died. He was run over and I stayed under the bed all day and would not come out. It is cold in Indiana but we like it here. Daddy has an A gas ration sticker and on Sundays we ride around in the car. We went to see some apple orchards and some goats. I will be there as soon as I can. Make some pound cakes and tell everyone I am coming. Your granddaughter, Ellen.

  Dear Babbie,

  Thanks for the letter with the good advice. I have read so many books there is no room for stars on my chart. I read about four a day and I am writing letters to everyone in Hollywood and everywhere we have been. We are rolling stones now, Daddy says. He says not to worry. Who wants to gather moss but mother wants to. She says it drives her crazy to pack all the time. I don’t care what happens as long as Dooley doesn’t come in my room. He is spoiled rotten. They love him more than they love me, but you like me just as much, don’t you? Granny doesn’t like me at all compared to him. She only likes boys. Yours very truly, Your great-granddaughter, Ellen.

  Dear Cousin Nell,

  We are all so sorry your husband died. We cried and cried when the letter came. Please come and stay with us. You can sleep in my room. I hate to sleep there by myself. It won’t help much but you have to do something. You can’t stay in Glen Allen and grieve. I love you so much. You are my favorite person in the world. Yours most sincerely, Cousin Ellen.

  I will do anything in the world to make you feel better. I have a new Jantzen bathing suit. It’s two-piece.

  Dear God,

  I will never believe in you again for making Floyd die and Nell’s husband and putting Dooley’s eye out. You can count on this. I will never believe in you again because I didn’t to begin with and I will spit on the floor if they make me go to church and kneel. I hate your guts. Who are you to make people die? I’m not going to. I’m going to be a vampire and live in the basement. If you are real strike me dead for writing this. See, you are a damn hell damn hell damn. Goddamn, Goddamn. It’s going to be my favorite word. Yours very truly, Ellen Louise Gilchrist, September 1943.

  Dear Diary,

  This is the worst summer of my life. Floyd died and Dooley put out his eye and Momma is having a baby and we can’t even go to Hopedale. The good part is the war is about over and the lady next door gave me a dressing table with doors that swing in and out. I am going to cover it with movie star pictures as soon as I get time. There is a gold star on the door across the street and a gold star on Mrs. Mattingly’s house and some of my teeth are coming out. I hope to have better news for you the next time I write. Yours very truly, Ellen Leigh. (I changed my name.)

  Ellen Connell Biggs Martin, Ellen Gilchrist’s great-great-grandmother, for whom she is named

  Margaret Connell Biggs, maternal great-grandmother

  Young Ellen Gilchrist with great-grandmother Biggs and brother Dooley (William Garth Gilchrist III)

  Paternal grandmother, Louise Winchester Clark Gilchrist, of Rosedale, Mississippi, and Natchez

  Paternal grandfather, William Garth Gilchrist, Senior, of Courtland, Alabama

  Nell Biggs Alford, maternal grandmother

  Stewart Floyd Alford, maternal grandfather

  Maternal grandmother and grandfather, Aunt Margaret on running board. Great-grandmother holding mothe
r in back seat, and Onnie Maud

  Ellen Gilchrist’s mother, “Bodie” Alford, listed as “Most Popular Girl”, Ole Miss, 1927

  Mother at Hopedale with Jiggs and Maggie

  Mother at Ole Miss, 1928

  Ellen Gilchrist’s father, pro-baseball infielder Garth Gilchrist, known as “Dooley”

  Father in 1979

  Eli Nailor, baby Ellen, and dogs Old Joe and Bud

  Ellen, Stewart Floyd Alford, Senior, her grandfather, and Jiggs

  Dooley Gilchrist, Roosevelt and Henrietta Neal, and Ellen Gilchrist on Steele’s Bayou, fall of 1936 or 1937

  Little Dooley, Eli Nailor, little Ellen, 1936

  Ellen, brother Dooley

  Eli Nailor holding Dooley, George Healy IV (Bunky), Grandfather Alford, Roberta Alford, Roosevelt Neal, and Old Joe the dog

  Jeanne Finney and Ellen (on right), 1939

  Henrietta Neal, Nancy Crane, Ellen, Eli Nailor

  Fourth of July parade, about eleven in the morning, Mound City, Illinois, 1939

  Influences

  I AM READING the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. I love these letters. They are a perfect match for me at this time in my life. George Sand was a settled grandmother of fifty-seven when she began this correspondence with a despairing Flaubert. She had given up her wild life and gone to live among her family in the French countryside near Nohant. She had a little granddaughter named Aurore whom she adored and she was deeply involved in the lives of her family and friends. She wrote movingly to Flaubert of their illnesses during the long French winters. There is a great charm about these letters. “A hundred times in life,” she declares in one letter, “the good that one does seems to serve no immediate purpose: yet it maintains in one way or another the tradition of well wishing and well doing without which all would perish.”

  I was thinking of that this morning. I was out walking in my new neighborhood watching the early morning mist rising from these streets that were pasturelands when I left Jackson, Mississippi, eighteen years ago. Well wishing and well doing. How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.

  I have done the other thing. I have written bitter and cruel things and even published some of them and I regret them every one. This big brain of ours can think of anything. The job of the civilized man or woman is to choose what to keep and what to throw away. I want to love the world as George Sand did. I don’t want the bitterness and despair of Flaubert. His letters to her are full of sadness. He thinks the world is full of stupidity and cruelty and evil. George Sand also saw the evil of the world, but she did not think it was the ground of being. In a radiant passage she defends her Utopian political ideals. “Everyone must be happy so that the happiness of a few will not be criminal or cursed by God.”

  Over and over in these letters Flaubert despairs, George Sand cheers him up and insists he must love the world. Their letters often cross in the mail.

  I am sleeping well with this book by my side, feeling privileged to be allowed to share the record of this amazing friendship. The edition I am reading is the translation by Aimee McKenzie and it’s hard to find. You will have to go to a library or have the book ordered by a bookstore. Most of the best reading in the world must be searched for in card catalogs or on dusty shelves in the back of stores.

  “A BODY does not experience itself as falling through space.” Einstein called that the happiest thought of his life. It was the basis of the special theory of relativity and his search for a unified field theory.

  A body does not experience itself as falling through space. This does not mean you or me falling from a ladder or the top of a ten-story building, although it can mean that too. It is Monday afternoon. I have been thinking about that concept since Saturday night. I had a debauch Saturday night. You all know what wild lives writers live. It began at four in the afternoon when I made the mistake of going to the bookstore. I left with three books, the New Modern Library edition of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, a book called Darwin for Beginners by Jonathan Howard, and the Abraham Pais biography of Einstein.

  I was excited. I kept stopping on corners and reading. I went on up the mountain, ran into my house, stuck a diet dinner in the oven, and settled down on the couch to read.

  I opened the Pais book on Einstein and began. “There was always about him a wonderful purity, at once childlike and profoundly stubborn. It is no art to be an idealist if one lives in cloud cuckoo land. He, however, was an idealist even though he lived on earth and knew its smell better than almost anyone else.

  “Nothing was more alien to Einstein than to settle any issue by compromise, in his life or in his science. When he spoke on political problems he always steered toward their answer. Were I asked for a one-sentence biography of Einstein I would say he was the freest man I have ever known.”

  Oh, my God, I said. This will take the wide net. I turned off the diet dinner, picked up the phone, ordered a large combination pizza, and settled down — about nine thirty I could take no more. I went on off to bed. As always when I attempt to read about physics I am filled with wonder, a sense of ecstasy, pattern, texture, design. “Subtle is the Lord,” Einstein said, “but he is not malicious.” We are allowed to see what is going on. I went to bed without washing my face or hands. I snuggled deep down into the covers, for it is still winter here. I dreamed of fields of green going out from me in all directions. I was the center of the dream but not of the world. I fit into the plan of the world. I was in the right place and I could move. The fields stretched out — on and on — there was nothing frightening anywhere. Nothing that could not be seen and wondered at and understood. Nowhere I could not go by walking. I was not hungry or tired or scared. There were no snakes behind me in the grass, no insurmountable hills to climb, no unbridled horses coming to ride me down, no cars plummeting down hills toward water, no dragons to slay.

  In the night I woke and opened all the windows so I could hear the wind blowing across the Ozarks. A body does not experience itself as falling through space. Because there is no fall and there is no space.

  I WILL BE fifty years old tomorrow. My fiftieth year to heaven, as Dylan Thomas once wrote. I read that very long poem out loud to myself every year on my birthday.

  This year I am going to spend my birthday with the work of another genius. I don’t know what genius is, but I know that when it breaks forth among us we recognize it and protect and cherish the gifts it leaves us. Bona fide geniuses are almost always very careless about leaving their work around in unprotected places. As if they know someone will take care of it for them. Or, perhaps, they can afford to be careless since they understand it springs from abundance, from an inexhaustible well.

  All men honor genius, in all times, in all cultures, because it shows the rest of us what we can be, what we are made of, this dazzling, complicated creature we call man.

  For my birthday, I am going to visit a house painted by a genius. The whole interior of the house is a mural of such brilliance and light that there is no way to describe its effect upon the mind of the viewer. Looking at that mural is like watching a child dance or a bird in flight. The mural was painted by Walter Inglis Anderson, who lived and worked in a place called Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Here, among his family and his children, protected from the world, he painted hundreds and hundreds of brilliant watercolors. He also carved huge wooden sculptures from fallen tree trunks and made murals and woodcuts and pottery and illustrations for children’s books.

  No one bothered him. No one told him to stop, or to do it another way. So he just got up every morning and did the work of a genius.

  Often he threw a gunnysack full of canned goods into the bottom of a rowbo
at and rowed out into the Gulf of Mexico to a small deserted island that is part of the barrier reef that guards the Mississippi coast. There he painted everything that lives and breathes and moves. Hundreds of perfectly achieved watercolors on one and sometimes two sides of quite ordinary typewriter paper. When Hurricane Camille was on the way, he rowed out to the island and tied himself to a tree to ride out the storm protecting his island from the elements.

  Genius is like a wild thumbprint. You can never look at trees or water or animals or yourself in quite the same way again after you have shared his vision. All he saw was magic and yet there is an orderly and logical intelligence to everything he wrote or painted. Pattern, texture, design, weave and weave and weave. “Wing, wind, wave. Wave, wind, wing.”

  He was in the habit of dashing off notes to himself on scraps of paper. On the backs of drawings or in the logs of his trips to Horn Island. Verses, aphorisms, stories, essays. An overwhelming mass of bits and pieces that fit together to reveal the shape of the quest he was on.

  Here are some of the things he had to say.