Falling Through Space Page 9

  There are many wonders outside the egocentric little cave where books are written. I have found out that the Federal Reserve system isn’t part of the federal government and now I’ve been to visit a SAC base. There’s no telling what will happen next.

  WRITERS HATE to be questioned. It’s an almost superstitious feeling that it’s wrong to probe or analyze the muse. And yet, sometimes things come to light from questions.

  In a question-and-answer session at the University of Colorado I found myself articulating something I have been suspecting for a long time.

  How do you create characters? a student asked. How do you keep thinking up new people to tell your stories? I may not be able to anymore, I answered. I’ve been writing for about ten years now and I have created a cast of characters that are like a Fellini troupe. They are always trying to steal the spotlight away from each other.

  It’s gotten to the point where it’s impossible for me to create new characters because the old ones keep grabbing up all the roles. The minute I think up a new dramatic situation, one of my old characters grabs it up and runs with it. Minor characters get up off the page and take the pen out of my hand and start expanding their roles. Scenes that have no business in the stories sprout like mushrooms as Freddy Harwood or Nieman interrupt stories to give themselves daring adventures or heroic moments.

  In a way my characters are right. I can see their point. I have a responsibility to Freddy Harwood to let him tell his side of the story and not just leave him sitting in a hot tub with a broken heart.

  Also, I am beginning to suspect there may be a limited number of characters any one writer can create and perhaps a limited number of stories any writer can tell. Perhaps that’s how we know when to quit and find something else to do for a living. I live in horror that I won’t know when to quit. I don’t want to be one of those writers who run out of things to write and then go around the rest of their lives talking about writing but not really producing anything anyone wants to read. When I’ve told all my stories and created all my characters I want to get off the stage as quickly as I can and with as much grace as possible.

  SOME TIME AGO I had just finished a draft of a novel and left it in my typist’s tennis racket cover and then gone barreling down the highway leading south out of the Ozark Mountains.

  I was driving down the highway eating powdered doughnuts and stopping every now and then to write things down. At the end of that journal entry I realized it was an illusion that the novel was finished and I knew very well it would take several more years and two or three more drafts to finish it.

  Now I am working on it again. The Anabainein, I call this strange creation. A going up, a journey to the interior. It is a novel set in Greece during the Peloponnesian Wars. My pet book, based on a story I made up when I was a child. My mother loved the classics and filled my head with stories of the Greek pantheon and the glories of fifth-century Athens, and I made up a story about a slave girl who is raised by a philosopher and allowed to learn to read and write.

  All these characters, all this research, all these pages and pages and pages. Perhaps it will be the best thing I have ever written. Perhaps the worst. Still, I have to finish it. A poet once told me that the worst thing a writer can do is fail to finish the things he starts. It was a long time before I knew what that meant or why it was true. The mind is trying very hard to tell us things when we write books. The first impulse is as good as the second or the third — any thread if followed long enough will lead out of the labyrinth and into the light. So I believe or choose to believe.

  The work of a writer is to create order out of chaos. Always, the chaos keeps slipping back in. Underneath the created order the fantastic diversity and madness of life goes on, expanding and changing and insisting upon itself. Still, each piece contains the whole. Tell one story truly and with clarity and you have done all anyone is required to do.

  I AM SPENDING the winter thinking about money. About money as a concept, an act of faith, a means of conveyance. Also, I am thinking about plain old money, the kind we are greedy for and think will solve our problems. Maybe it will solve our problems. It gives us the illusion of security. Money in the bank, a nest egg, something to fall back upon. Yes, I am going to ask money to forgive me for all the nasty things I’ve said about it.

  I began my study of money by watching “Wall Street Week.” I started watching it for a joke. It amused me to see how happy and cheerful the people on “Wall Street Week” always are. No underweight actors and actresses begging the audience for love. Not this bunch. These are well-dressed, normal-sized, very confident people. All will be well, “Wall Street Week” assures me. The market goes up and the market comes back down, but after all, it’s only a game. The great broker in the sky smiles benignly down on his happy children.

  Why not? I began to say to myself. Who am I to sneer at all this good clean fun? So I bought some stocks and now I really have a reason to watch “Wall Street Week.” Figures appear on the screen, bulls and bears made their predictions. Bulls and bears. Now I know what that means. Bulls are good things that mean I’m making money. Bears are bad things that mean I’ve made a bad mistake.

  To paraphrase a poet, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rises and falls and thy name, O God, is kept before the public.

  What a wonderful new obsession. At last I understand capitalism. At last my father and I have something to talk about. Once, years ago, my father begged me with tears in his eyes to take a course in the stock market. I agreed and signed up for a class. Alas, at the very first class meeting I fell in love with a redheaded engineer from Kansas and we went off into the night and never found time to come back to the class. Each age has its rewards. Once I had love and romance. Now I have the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the “Wall Street Week in Review.”

  I HAVE BEEN OFF at a writers’ conference in Grand Forks, in the beautiful farmland of northeastern North Dakota. Where a fellow Mississippian named Johnny Little has just staged the seventeenth annual University of North Dakota Writers’ Conference.

  Johnny is an old colleague of mine from a class Eudora Welty taught at Millsaps College in 1967. He was born in Raleigh, Mississippi, where he was the smartest boy in town. Then Johnny went to Millsaps and got even smarter. Then he went up to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to make a writer, as he calls it. Then off to North Dakota to teach. The winters were long and cold and he got so lonesome he started a southern writers’ conference, which turned into a national, then an international, affair. For seventeen years Johnny has been luring writers from all over the world up to Grand Forks to lend a hand in celebrating the spring thaw.

  Edward Albee, James Dickey, Gregory Corso, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Jim Whitehead, Tom Wolfe, Joseph Brodsky, the list is long and illustrious. The University of North Dakota Annual Spring Thaw Southern and International Writers’ Conference. Not to be confused with the Raleigh, Mississippi, Tobacco Spit and Logrolling Contest, another of Johnny’s pet projects.

  I had a good time being there but I never worked so hard at being a writer. It seemed to me I was being interviewed or questioned every waking moment by some bright young man or woman. I can’t even remember all the advice I gave.

  To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

  One clover, and a bee,

  And revery.

  The revery alone will do,

  If bees are few.

  That poem by Emily Dickinson was supposed to be the theme of the conference but the only time I heard anyone say anything about a prairie was a joke someone told about the flatness of the land around Grand Forks. Nothing to see, and nothing to get in the way of seeing it. I flew home down the course of the Mississippi River and then over to Shreveport, Louisiana, to address the Louisiana Library Association. If you are wondering how I am getting any serious writing done under these circumstances you are not alone. The dour old Scot who rules the roost in my subconscious is very suspicious when I tell him that seeing the world is part of a wri
ter’s work.

  HERE IS a writing lesson. I’m not much good as a regular writing teacher. I only know things as they happen, at the time they happen. If I knew them all the time I could get up every morning and write a masterpiece. The Greeks got up every morning and wrote masterpieces. Euripides wrote eighty-eight plays, of which nineteen survive. His fellow Greeks liked his plays so much that prisoners could gain their freedom by learning to recite them.

  But this is supposed to be a writing lesson. Here is how I write a book. First I get a wonderful idea and I drop everything I’m doing and go and write it down and expand it as much as I can. Then I get very excited and go off and eat some ice cream or something I usually deny myself. Four or five days later I go back and read what I wrote and I decide it’s pretty good, but not as good as I dreamed it would be. A few days later the story or characters I began to create will begin to haunt me; they want another chance to show they are as wonderful as I originally thought they were and I go back into the story and begin to work on it. Work means exactly that. Hard thinking and hard attention and walking around the house with the telephone off the hook and the bed unmade. Trying to remember what happens next. It is more like memory than imagination. The imagination part only happens in bursts of excitement — it happens when it gets ready to happen. Days go by while I work and work and work, and, for some reason, which I have never been able to understand, I am able to put up with this very hard, boring part of writing. Meanwhile I take good care of myself. I sleep at regular hours and eat as intelligently as I can and maybe even clean up the house and buy some flowers for the table. The book is writing itself while these things go on. Then one morning, it was this morning for me for this book, it breaks open, like a flower opening or a storm cloud, and it all makes perfect sense and I know how to write down what I have dreamed or imagined. I know what happens next and what the characters are thinking and how they dance with each other on the page. If it is a short story or a poem two or three of these episodes will do to complete the piece. If it is a novel only Athena knows how long it will take or how many spells of hard, boring, seemingly useless work followed by bursts of illumination must go on before the plot is woven and the book finished.

  A piece of writing is the product of a series of explosions in the mind. It is not the first burst of excitement and its aftermath. It is helpful to me to pretend that writing is like building a house. I like to go out and watch real building projects and study the faces of the carpenters and masons as they add board after board and brick after brick. It reminds me of how hard it is to do anything really worth doing.

  I’M NOT A bad person. If I see a turtle on the road, I stop and pick it up and return it to the grass. I know the universe is one. I know it’s all one reality. So why does it make me so furious, why do I want to kill and kill and kill when the turtles on the pond kill the baby ducks? They killed seven in April and five more in May and they are at it again.

  Edmund Wilson once wrote a great short story on this subject, called “The Man Who Hated Snapping Turtles.” I could have written that story. I wouldn’t have had to invent a character. I could have used myself. One morning I wake up and there are five brand-new beautiful soft fluffy baby ducks following their mother out from behind a grass nest and walking side by side to the water. They enter the water without sound. They glide like angels. The mother looks like my beautiful daughter-in-law Rita. The baby ducks are my grandchildren. A turtle rears its head. Kill, I’m screaming. The neighbors are on their porches. They know what’s going on. We have all been sharing the tragedy of the ducks.

  Kill, I’m screaming. Doesn’t anybody have a gun? I grab an empty Coke bottle and run out onto the pier and throw it at the turtle. Success. It scares him off for the moment. Get those babies back on the land, I’m screaming at the large ducks. Don’t you know what’s good for you? Can’t you protect your young?

  I can’t stand it. Here we are in the sovereign state of Mississippi and we are helpless to prevent those ducks from getting killed. How am I going to travel and see the world? What’s going to happen when I get to Mexico or India? Get back in the bushes, I’m yelling at the ducks. We’ll drain the pond. We’ll kill all the turtles in the world. What am I supposed to do? I can’t stay in the house and never go out on the porch. I can’t keep the drapes closed so I’ll forget the pond is there. It’s there. The baby ducks are on the pond and the turtles are coming to get them.

  STUCK IN THE very heart of summer in the middle of a heat wave and I’m sitting here trying to write this book. Why did I ever start this book? What on earth possessed me to think I could write an historical novel? I remember when I started it. I woke up one beautiful fall morning in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and decided I had missed my calling. I should have been a scholar, I said to myself. I should have kept on learning Greek.

  I will write a novel set in ancient Greece, I told myself. Anyone can do anything, and I am going down the hill and go to the library and take out every book ever written about ancient Greece and read them and then I’m going over to Daniel Levine’s office and borrow all his books and then I’ll sign up for Greek classes and I will spend as many years as it takes. I want to be a great and honored writer, a scholar, a serious and noble person.

  So I put on my hiking shoes and walked down the mountain and on down to Dickson Street and marched into the library and began. That first month was wonderful. No more the unstructured life of a fiction writer. No more ego. No more taking real life and twisting it into character and scenes and devising plots and opening lines. All I had to do now was sit all day in a little cubby at the university library and read and take notes. I was wearing an old tweed skirt and an oxford cloth shirt and brown brogans and knee socks. My horn-rimmed glasses. At exactly eleven o’clock every morning I would walk over to the student union and eat doughnuts and drink coffee. Who cared if I got fat? I was a scholar now. Lost in the stacks.

  Everything was going fine. My time schedule called for me to read and study for five years before I began to write.

  I was covering yellow legal pads with knowledge of the past. Plants and herbs, ancient weapons, walled cities, how to mix mortar, how to make cloth, the clothes people wore, their music and sculpture and plays.

  Then one morning I stayed home and sat at a sunlit table in a dining room overlooking the mountains and began to read the notes. I was in the dining room. I wasn’t in my crowded messy workroom where I am a writer. I was in a sunlit dining room being a scholar. Suddenly an old story I had made up when I was a child began to appear on the page. A story about a young Greek girl who saves an abandoned infant. Suddenly that old unconscious story, about saving, of course, who else, myself, came rising up and I was writing and writing and writing all day.

  I wrote for three or four days. That writing is still the best part of the novel. I may never again write pages as good as those. And here I am, four years later, on the fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh draft of the cursed thing and still writing and still studying and it isn’t finished yet.

  This is what a writer’s life is really like. Calling up my editor and my agent nearly every day to get stroked and reassured. Walking around my house blaming the book on everyone I know and scared to death I can’t finish it and scared to death it isn’t any good. “I would never encourage anyone to be a writer,” Eudora Welty once said to me. “It’s too hard. It’s just too hard to do.”

  THE INGRATE, part one, or, I have had too much of the rich harvest I myself desired. I am sick of being a writer. Not of writing. Not of the wonderful mystical thing I do all alone in a messy little room I call an office. Not the inspiration, the conception, the writing down of poems and essays and stories. Black ink onto yellow paper, magic. But I am sick of answering questions and signing my name and being loved by strangers. “But I am tired of applepicking now, I have had too much of the great harvest I myself desired.”

  Maybe it was that one really nasty irresponsible review. Maybe it is being misunderstood and m
isinterpreted that drives writers crazy and makes them go off to the hills to brood and pout and stop talking to people. Sixth-grade politics. Fourth-grade emotions. Second-grade sensitivity.

  So now I am holed up back in Jackson, Mississippi, with the phone off the hook and the television turned to the wall and I am thinking. I have contracts for three books. I have a wonderful assignment from Southern Magazine to go up to the White River and freeze to death camping out with my boyfriend at Thanksgiving. I have three children and three grandchildren, all in perfect health. My new book is selling well despite the New York Times. I work for the best radio program in the United States of America. I live in the greatest silliest wildest country that ever raised a flag on a flagpole. And I’ll be all right as soon as I get some rest.

  Yesterday I was talking on the phone to a writer, and she asked, “Are you writing anything?” And I said, “Of course not.” And she said, “Well, that’s publication.”

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to be stupid while listening to Bach. There is something about the art of fugue that soothes the brain. I used to make a joke about this and tell my friends they could stop suffering love if they would stop listening to love songs and listen to Bach instead.

  Recently, in the middle of a rainy Sunday afternoon while I was lounging around on the sofa in the middle of a pile of books, worrying about my children and getting my mind in a tangle with this or that imagined catastrophe, I came upon a chapter in a book of Lewis Thomas’s essays in which he explores the proposition that he could go to the scientists of the world and ask them for the answers to three questions.