How to hold on to that native genius and also learn the things we need to know to survive. How to hold on to the breadth of genius and still narrow it down enough to concentrate on one piece of work. How not to allow the narrowing to become more important than the whole. These are big problems. I’m thinking about them all the time. How not to let the world de-genius us, our children and our grandchildren and our friends.
Here’s one thing I know for sure — you have to stay flexible. You have to have a lot of possible moves so no one can get you in a position where you think there’s only one way to live or only one way to solve a problem. A Jungian I know used to make me so mad telling me a story over and over about a friend of his who refuses to eat in the same restaurant twice or drive the same route to work in the morning. Oh, I know, I would say when he told me that story. You’ve already told me that, don’t tell me that again. No, he would answer, hear me, you aren’t listening. Then he would tell it to me again. It was a long time before I began to see the wisdom of that story. Every time I would do something like take a different path when I walked downtown, I would say, Oh, my God, this is so silly.
It is silly. That’s the point. It’s divine and silly. It’s the stuff that genius lives on. To constantly sample the riches and variety of life. Watch a child move from one activity to the other, moving around a house, never exhausting the possibilities of any one thing before moving on to the next one. We say of children, they are into everything. We should be into everything. We should get up one morning and take all our books and put them in a pile in the middle of the floor and start playing with them. Euripides and Aeschylus and Hemingway and Thornton Wilder and Margaret Mead. Faulkner and Edna Millay, and oh, yes, The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru which I borrowed years ago from my ex-husband. Maybe I’ll mail them back to him for his birthday.
I AM GEARING UP to go to New York for two weeks to oversee a professional reading of my play. It is a play that I began in New York in February of 1984. I began writing it during the first act of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. I wrote all over my program and my agent’s program. Then I went home through a blinding New York rainstorm and wrote all night in a hotel room. The next day I had lunch with my agent and told him I’d been up all night writing a play.
I told him the story, then I put the play away for three months. In June I had to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to teach for a few weeks so I took the notes with me and there, in a basement apartment near the campus, I hammered out three full acts in less than a week and sent it to a typist.
Since that time the play has undergone four major revisions, elaborating and extending what is there, taking stuff out of the stage directions, which at one time contained a lot of the best material, and putting it back into the play. I am, after all, a fiction writer not a playwright and had to transpose the work from one form to the other.
Now, the American Place Theatre is going to have a professional reading of the play with a fine actress playing the lead. I’m excited and scared, but the day I no longer do anything that frightens me and makes me shy I will know I am finished as a writer. And of course I’m hoping that around eleven o’clock one night they will say, “Oh, Ellen, you have to rewrite the second act,” and I’ll say, “Don’t worry, I’ll do it tonight,” and so forth. I’ll emerge from a hotel room the next morning holding a brilliant revision and everyone will cheer. I keep thinking about a passage from a book by Georges Simenon.
“Why do we read?” he asks, “why do we go to a show? Imagine an entomologist, an observer of insect life, suddenly witnessing the exodus of a quarter of the inhabitants of an anthill, at a time of day when they normally would be sleeping. They are going off to a mysterious appointment. He sees them jostling each other and converging towards a clearing where the soil rises in tiers. In order to enter that enclosure each ant must surrender part of his winter provisions to a sharp-eyed official.
“Why have they left the shelter of the anthill and undertaken this long march? What are they waiting for, motionless and quivering with their gazes turned to a small circle of earth?
“Imagine the shock to our entomologist if he saw five or ten ants, no different in any way from the others, move forward into the light and amidst an almost religious silence, begin to mime a scene from the life of the ants.”
A FRIEND of mine had dinner with the president of a large makeup company the other day. It’s all fear, the president told him. That’s our key word. Keep them afraid that no one will love them and you can sell them anything.
I have pondered this little story. Several years ago I became angry at a friend for questioning a column I wrote for Southern Living magazine. “Puss,” he said, “what’s going on? What’s happened to you?” “Nothing,” I replied, getting really mad at him. “It’s just a magazine article, that’s all.”
The article was about how I’d gone down to Jackson, Mississippi, to visit my mother and as soon as I got off the airplane she told me I looked like Daisy Mae. I was wearing a short denim skirt and leather sandals and a cotton shirt tied around my waist. Actually, I looked just fine. My hair was long and loose, my skin was clear and the color it turns all by itself in the sun. I looked about as good as I can look.
By week’s end I was a different person. Jackson, Mississippi, had done a number on me. I had reverted to type, turned myself back into a frightened sorority girl. I had bought a lot of useless clothes and spent two hundred dollars on makeup and ruined my hair with a permanent.
The magazine article I wrote about all that left the reader with the impression that I thought it was very funny. A lipstick costs eight dollars this year. You have to do a lot of work that someone else thinks up for you to afford that kind of fear.
SUMMER IS THE TIME to deal with paradoxes, with questions that have no answers, problems that can only be surrounded, laid siege to. The Castle of Fat is such a problem. The Castle of Fat is surrounded by a moat of self-deception and absurdities. High walls of fantasy surround it. Evil guards of self-hate man the towers. In the square is an everlasting spring of Diet Coke from which the inhabitants draw sustenance.
Some of my friends and I have set out to besiege the castle. First of all we have to decide whether we are fat or not. I was in conference one afternoon recently with a philosopher and a retired United Airlines pilot. We had been for a long walk around the mountain. Afterwards, we were in the philosopher’s kitchen and we were talking about fat.
“I don’t know if I’m fat or not,” I said. “That’s what plagues me. I might not even be fat. I might just think I’m fat.”
“The brain has to have glucose,” the pilot said. “That’s a fact.”
“The part I hate,” the philosopher said, “the part I cannot deal with, is that a grown man would take off his underpants to weigh himself.”
“Correct,” the pilot agreed. We sank our chins deep into our hands to think it over.
“Why do you think you’re fat?” the pilot asked.
“Because I can’t button my skirts,” I replied.
“That sounds fat,” the philosopher said.
“You could get another skirt,” the pilot suggested.
“Stay for dinner,” the philosopher’s wife put in. “We’re having meatloaf and mashed potatoes.”
This issue has reached crisis stage in the United States. I know the way I’m thinking about this problem has been imposed on me from without. I can’t stand to be dumb and brainwashed about the structure and size of my own body. We will be having further meetings about this matter and I will be giving you reports. One of my characters once said, “I think maybe it is my destiny to start a fad for getting fat.”
Then a good-looking carpenter goes by and she decides to wait a few more years before putting her plan into operation.
I’VE BEEN DRIVING along the Natchez Trace, “that old buffalo trail that stretches far into the past.” I‘m in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, near Cane Creek, moving turtles off the road and thinking about wh
ere I‘m going and where I‘ve been.
I‘ve been visiting my son Garth, the one that went off to Alaska when he was eighteen. Now he’s twenty-eight and he lives on a farm with his wife, Jeannie, and two dogs and three cats and twenty-six cows and five gray horses and two brand-new colts and one lonely guinea hen. There were six guinea hens but foxes killed them so Jeannie and Garth are down to one.
I drove all day yesterday to watch Garth with his animals and hide out from a lot of sad confused statements being made about me by Arkansas politicians.
I drove to Mississippi to watch Garth with his animals. All his life he has had a way with animals. He can hold out his hand and anything will come to him.
I needed Garth, to touch him and sleep under his roof. He lives in a trailer underneath six enormous oak trees. From his yard all you can see in four directions are fields and trees and skies. Last night the skies were so wonderful — no man-made lights for miles to dim the stars.
The seventeen-year cicadas hatched here last month. Jeannie says it was so loud no one could sleep at night. The guinea hen and the dogs went wild running around gobbling up cicadas like popcorn.
Back in Arkansas the newspapers are full of simplistic versions of a speech I made to the Arkansas governor’s school for the gifted and talented. The professional breast-beaters are coming out of the trees like locusts. All I did was tell four hundred fifty students that you had to be able to think for yourself to do creative work. I told them that to achieve that they might have to ignore authorities like their parents and teachers. I was in an especially generous mood that morning and I was trying to show them the full force of my creative self, the part of me that writes the books.
The next thing I knew I was headline news. Thank God for a free press. The stories are calming down and the reporters are printing my side, or as much as I can bring myself to say to defend myself against this tempest in a teapot.
For now, as I stop to write this, I am driving along the Natchez Trace saving turtles in honor of my son Garth’s childhood ambition to be the man who builds fences along country roads to save animals from getting run over. I’ve saved five turtles so far. I stopped one time to save a clump of dirt. A good-looking young man in a red sports car stopped to help me save the fifth turtle. If this was a movie I was making and the heroine was twenty years younger, I could have made something out of that.
I WAS TEN YEARS OLD the night the Japanese surrendered. It was night in Seymour, Indiana, although it was morning on board the ship where the emissaries of the emperor were signing the papers.
General MacArthur was there, wearing, I was sure, his soft cap and smoking his pipe. And General Skinny Wainwright, who surrendered on Corregidor and spent the war as a Japanese prisoner. If he was skinny before, now he was emaciated. Admiral Halsey was there, and Percival, the Briton who surrendered Singapore. Also, Englishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Russians, Chinese, and row upon row of American sailors in whites. The talks began. The speeches and translations. It meant my uncle would be coming home. He had flown bombers over Germany. Later, he flew with General Claire Chennault and the Flying Tigers. How strange that the youngest and gentlest of my father’s brothers should have been the one to drop the bombs.
We had worried about him night and day. Now the worrying was over. I was in bed with my mother and my father and the magic eye of the radio was glowing in the dark and we were listening to the Japanese surrender.
There was no dancing in the streets at 504 Calvin Boulevard in Seymour, Indiana. My parents were very quiet and serious. When I said, “Goody, goody, goody, we beat them,” my father said, “Be quiet, war is bad, beginning, middle, and end.”
I remember snuggling down into the covers, keeping my elation to myself. Goody, goody, goody, I was thinking. Now they can’t come over here and stick bamboo splinters up my fingernails and make me tell everything I know. I had worried myself sick during the war about whether I could stand up under torture. I was afraid they would give me truth serum or the pain would become too great and I would break.
The speeches and translations went on. It was dark in the room but there were stars outside the windows. No more air-raid practices with drawn blinds. Seymour, Indiana, was safe and I could cash in my war bonds. There would never be another war. We had the biggest bomb ever made and no one in the world would ever dare make war on us again. We would divide up the world with Russia and they would run half of it and we would run the other half. Truman and Stalin and Winston Churchill and Ike and General MacArthur would run things and everybody would be happy and have a good time.
The ceremonies ended. “These proceedings are over,” General MacArthur said. My father heaved a sigh. We turned off the radio and the magic eye dimmed and went out.
It was some weeks later that Jody Myerson’s father came home from the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He weighed about a hundred pounds. He looked so terrible I could hardly stand to walk by the house where he was recuperating. “He’ll be better,” my mother said. “In time he’ll be a whole man again.” But I had no faith in it. His eyes stared at me through the walls of the house.
I am marked by that war. To this day when I see a group of Japanese businessmen getting on an elevator in New York City I think of Jody’s father. I wonder what they think of when they see me stare. It is in spite of such knowledge that I dream of peace.
A LOT OF PEOPLE have gotten the idea that what I do for a living is sit around on a mountain writing a journal. I will answer that, although it is not my nature to explain myself or justify my actions. I do what I think is right and let people think what they please about it. I am not in the business of trying to make people understand my complicated and individual life-style.
What I do is write prose fiction, I write it six or seven hours a day, seven days a week, except for the times when I force myself to stop writing in order not to completely lose touch with the real world. It is easy for me to isolate myself and write books — the hard thing is to live in a real world with other people’s needs and desires and dreams. I’m a good receiver — I hear it all.
Anyway, I write for a living. It is an exciting and jealous obsession. One of the ways I fight the obsessive part is by making these journals — they are immediate — out of my immediate experience. Another thing I sometimes reluctantly do is give readings and lectures and very occasionally teach a few days at a college.
But none of this answers the real question. The real question is, How do I have time to write books when other people who wish to be writers don’t have time?
I tell students when I talk to them that the first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all of that, maybe no one will publish it, and, if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth. This is what it means to be a writer. I wanted to earn the name of writer for myself and I went to work and did it. I am often awestruck at that fortunate occurrence.
WHEN LAST I wrote about fat, my friends and I were in the philosopher’s kitchen trying to decide whether it was wise and/or sane to be so irritated at the body’s natural desire to grow larger and to carry stores of food around on top of its muscles and bones. Stores that might come in handy if we lived in a less fortunate country, or if we were survivors of an airplane crash in the Andes or in case the weather should change and no longer favor the great farmlands of the United States of America.
My friends and I have spent many hours this past summer talking very seriously about losing weight. If it is intelligent to give in to the prevailing winds of fashion about how large our bodies should be or become.
How much of our so-called body image is fashion? we asked ourselves. Is it healthy to divest ourselves of pounds? If so, how many? How will we know when to stop?
I am the ringleader of the faction that says, Yes
, we must diet. We must to go bed hungry and fit back into our clothes and never give in to inertia and complacence.
So I dieted all summer and in three months I had gained three pounds. Needless to say I do not think this is funny. I think it is very very cruel and unfair.
I was cheered up last night by being taken to hear a young sports nutritionist. She talked to us about food and how we use it and told us about the new studies in nutrition. Telling us a lot of very sensible things about how to become healthy and beautiful without starving ourselves. She kept stressing the importance of complex carbohydrates and exercise and laying off of sugar. The thing she said that cheered me up was that nutritionists are very leery nowadays of people weighing themselves all the time.
We are diverse and wonderful creatures made of starlight and comet dust. What shape and size our individual bodies take cannot be measured by steel scales and weight charts. We are breathing oxygen created by plants on a planet hurtling through space. We are not a flat image in a mirror or the reflection of a starving model in a fashion magazine. Life is soft and round and generous.
Some of us may be underexercised and over-guilt-ridden but we are not fat. We are wonderful and mysterious and can swim in water.
I WAS TALKING to a reporter the other day and she asked me if I thought my studies in philosophy had affected my writing, shaped the forms I chose to write in. I told her that I didn’t separate knowledge into genres or categories because it seemed to me that all of us were probing the same mystery, coming at it from different angles, calling it different things, but all asking the same questions endlessly. Who am I? Why am I here? What are we doing? Is there free will and, if so, how much, and who has it? The scientist and philosopher René Dubos explores these questions with great intelligence and humor. On free will he quotes Samuel Johnson, who said, “All scientific knowledge is against free will, all common sense for it.”
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