I do not understand why I write fiction when the main things I read are books about science and philosophy. Perhaps I think that by exploring character and event I can create actors to act out the questions I am always asking. I have a character named Nora Jane Whittington who lives in Berkeley, California, and who has so much free will that I can’t even find out from her whether the twin baby girls she is carrying belong to her old boyfriend, Sandy, or her new boyfriend, Freddy Harwood. I can’t finish my new book of stories until Nora Jane agrees to an amniocentesis. She is afraid the needle will penetrate the placenta and frighten the babies.
I created Nora Jane but I have to wait on her to make up her mind before I can finish the title story of my new book. This is a fiction writer’s life. Fortunately, I am going to be in California soon and I will drive up to Berkeley and walk around some of Nora Jane’s old hangouts. By the time I get home maybe I’ll know what to write.
Now I know the answer to the reporter’s question. The effect that studying philosophy has had on my fiction writing is that I know that someday I will get to sit down and write a book about Free Will Versus Determinism and the only character will be me.
IN ORDER to be a writer you must experience and learn to recognize and cope with periods of what Freeman Dyson calls stuckness. In order to do creative work in any of the arts or sciences you must go through long or short spells of not knowing what is going on, of being irritated, and not being able to find the cause, of being willing to work as hard as you can and what happens isn’t valuable enough, isn’t good enough, isn’t what you meant to do, what you meant to say. Then you just have to keep on working. Then, if you can bear it, if you don’t quit and move to Canada or call up Joe and go hiking for two weeks or quit your job or get a divorce or do anything else to relieve the pain, and it is pain, it’s really irritating, it puts you in a bad mood, you are irritable to children and can’t focus on anything and keep changing your mind, if you can put up with it and just go right on sitting down at that desk every day no matter how much it seems to be an absurd and useless and boring thing to do, the good stuff will suddenly happen. It may be twelve o’clock at night when you’re doing something else or are in the bathtub. It will be when you have given up and least expect it. There it will be, the radium, the formula, the good short story, the real poem.
I have the wonderful feeling that I understand this right now, because last night at ten o’clock a two-month stuckness broke and gave me the best new story for my new collection. I had been reading a book called The Sphinx and the Rainbow. A wonderful book about the right and left halves of the brain and the frontal lobes. Very clear stuff about how the mind creates the future. How it marshals its forces and then goes to work at its own speed and in ways we cannot always comprehend until the thing is finished. Very rich stuff. I recommend it for anyone, but especially for anyone who is currently stuck.
MY EDITOR has been here and we put together a book of stories. There are thirteen of them. A very slim volume. Thirteen out of twenty were good enough to keep. There is a story that didn’t make it called “The Green Tent” about a little boy and his grandmother who travel all over the universe in a tent. I’m sorry I had to give that one up. I really liked that story.
Hemingway said one of the great problems for a writer is deciding who his audience will be. Do you write for the reviewers, terrified they will call something cute or sentimental? If they manage to scare you enough you will get to the point where you are afraid to write about anything really human, like passion or love. People are endlessly fascinated by love. They talk about it and laugh about it and desire and hate it. Whenever one of us falls in love our friends watch it as they would the progress of a disease.
So I have written a book of stories called Drunk With Love in which I set out to explore what I know about the subject. I have failed. Not failed as a writer. But I have learned nothing about love and added nothing to our store of understanding.
“All is clouded by desire, like a mirror by smoke.” I thought I was going to penetrate that mystery through my characters. Wrong. All I did was wade deeper and deeper into the mystery. In the end I let the last words of the book be spoken by Nora Jane Whittington’s unborn babies.
“Let’s be quiet,” Tammili said. “Okay,” Lydia replied.
God bless my editor. He let me keep that in.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked, when we had finished our work.
“I think I’ll go fall in love,” I answered.
“Why don’t you just go home and stick your finger in an electric wall socket instead,” he suggested. “It would save you the trouble of getting dressed up.”
He’s right. I’ve changed my mind about going to stick my finger in the electric wall socket of love. I’m going down to New Orleans instead and get my grandchildren and go riding around in my little blue car pretending we are space cadets. I’ll let someone younger and braver than I am sit around the house waiting for the phone to ring.
I RECENTLY SAW a wonderful sight. I was driving back from New Orleans and stopped in Pass Manchac, Louisiana, to see how things looked now that the flood waters had receded. Pass Manchac is a famous place on the Bonnet Carre Spillway across from New Orleans. It is a small fishing village that was several feet underwater in the October floods. I saw it then with water all over the floors of the houses and men walking along the railroad tracks carrying sandbags, still trying to save what could be saved.
Anyway, the flood was several weeks ago and I stopped by to see how things were going and went into Sykes’ grocery store and talked to the proprietor and had some doughnuts and bought a tablet and a pencil. The tablet was slightly mildewed on the edges. The proprietor told me about filling the sandbags, who all was there and who came to help and we discussed how resilient men and women are. Then she turned around. “Oh, look at this,” she said. A great mountain of a man was coming in the door. A beautiful tanned man with white hair leading or being led by two small children. The proprietor told me that the smallest one had been abused so badly he had to be in a full body cast for six months. “That’s their foster father,” she said. “He’s got them now and they’re okay.”
They were beautiful children. They came into the store and got some candy and went to the back to find life preservers as they were going out on a boat for a Sunday outing.
“Hold me,” the small child said, as soon as he saw me looking at him. I picked him up in my arms and held him there. “We’re getting to adopt them in February,” the big fisherman said. “It’s all set.”
“Oh, that’s great,” the proprietor said, and for a moment I had a sense of sharing the community of Pass Manchac, a fishing village where people know each other and are involved in each other’s lives and stories.
I am haunted by these events. For many miles down the road, I was filled with a sense of elation. The story of mankind is not written in the occasional crazy parent who will harm his own child. The story of mankind is the big fisherman who comes along and sets things right … the physicians and surgeons and nurses in some emergency room who are working the night shift and are there when the broken child arrives and put him back together and the fisherman who gathers the child into his life and goes to work to love him and the proprietor who cleans up the store after the flood and sells me a slightly mildewed tablet at half price to write this on.
I AM COMPELLED to write about this even though it embarrasses me to keep talking about my grandchildren. Still, this is supposed to be a writer’s journal and if there is one thing I’ve learned about writing it is to follow your compulsions.
Here is what I am compelled to write about today.
I have been alone for thirty-eight hours with two small children and no car. I have been locked up in an apartment with a four-year-old boy and a one-and-a-half-year-old girl and I am here to report that taking care of small children is the single most exciting, complicated, difficult, creative, and maddening job on the green earth.
/> Finally, I called for help. That famous seventy-seven-year-old child-worshipper I have told you about, my mother, is only ten blocks away, so I called and invited her to come pick us up and go with us to the mall to buy some winter clothes for the children. She’s always up for a good time so she came right over and got us and we went to the store. I had it in my mind to buy them some socks and jackets and something nice to wear in case we got invited to a party.
Ellen on sleeping porch, Hopedale Plantation
Ellen on Dixie, friends
Ellen and Dooley, 1939
Hopedale Plantation, built around 1905
Ellen and mother, 1939 or 1940
Friend, Dooley, Ellen, Aunt Roberta Alford (Indiana during war)
Ellen and Dooley
Ellen visiting in New Orleans, taken in booth in French Quarter, summer of 1948
Cynthia Jane Hancock (Ellen’s best friend) and Ellen outside Horace Mann School in sixth grade. Early spring, Harrisburg, Illinois
Mother, Ellen, Father, Dooley, 1939
Ellen, 1950
Ellen, seventh grade
Ellen at Columbia Military Academy dance, Columbia, Tennessee, 1951
Ellen at Chi Omega house dance at Vanderbilt or University of Alabama or Southern Seminary
Purple Clarion staff, Hartisbutg High School, 1950. Ellen as feature editor
Mack Harness, Ellen, 1984
Ellen at Mardi Gras, 1976
Ellen’s sons at her fourth wedding
Ellen’s sons: Marshall Walker, Garth Walker, Pierre Walker
Rosalie Davis, to whom In the Land of Dreamy Dreams is dedicated
Two and a half hours later the four of us emerged from the mall and began to search for the car. “I’m too old for this,” the child-worshipper said. “This is one generation too many.”
We had purchased a pair of Superman pajamas with a Velcro cape and a package of T-shirts that might someday fit someone and we had left a children’s department in tatters. Only the unbelievable patience of a saleslady named Laverne had made it possible for us to purchase anything.
The child-worshipper took us home and declined my invitation to come in. Later, I allowed the four-year-old to watch a Care Bears movie four times in a row — and that after all my tirades against children watching television. It was a movie called The Care Bears in the Land without Feelings. By bedtime he had mastered all the parts and had chosen for himself the role of Professor Coldheart. “THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR BEING SO TENDERHEARTED,” he kept telling me. “SO MUCH FOR LOVE AND TENDERNESS AND LITTLE FUZZY WUZZIES.”
The sun fell below the horizon. We had some cereal and milk. We dressed for bed. The child-worshipper called to see how we were getting along.
“How’s it going?” she said.
“How did I do this?” I said. “How did I do this day after day?”
“You weren’t very good at it,” she answered. “It never was your long suit.”
HERE IS my Christmas carol.
The best thing that has happened to me so far this holiday season was a discussion I had at the drugstore with two women who work there. The three of us decided that there was no way we were going into debt for Christmas. No way we were going to wake up on January first with a lot of bills to pay. God bless you, Merry Gentlemen, sell this plastic junk to someone else. You won’t sell it to Libby and Darlene and me.
“What do you want for Christmas?” I asked Libby as I was leaving. “I want grocery stores and drugstores to stop putting candy by the checkout counter,” she said. “So children scream for it while their mothers wait to pay. What do you all want?”
“I want folks to stop selling dope to kids,” Darlene said. “My doctor at the clinic, he’s got his only son locked up with his brain dead from taking dope. My doctor was crying when he was seeing me. Imagine that.”
The three of us hung our heads over the idea of anyone selling dope to children. We Three Kings of Orient Are. Three wise women at the Katz & Bestoff Drug Store.
Well, this is the saddest time of year and everyone knows it. Adeste Fideles. O come, all ye faithful. Everyone suffers the winter equinox, the death of the year. Everyone knows the sadness of Christmas afternoon after the presents are opened and the dinner eaten and there’s nothing left to do but pretend you had a good time.
One Christmas, I stayed all alone on a mountain and didn’t eat anything all day while Christmas went on below me. I was the Grinch of Christmas and it was one of the best days of my life. I wrote the last chapter of a novel and wouldn’t even answer the phone.
You’ll lose all your fans if you start knocking Christmas, the voice of bah humbug cautions me. Not my readers, I answer. My readers are literate people who can think for themselves. They are people who write me letters I like to read and tell me things I want to know.
So here is a Merry Christmas to all my friends and all the people who have helped me make these essays by doing the things I wrote about, and to all the little children screaming and crying for candy at the checkout stands and to all the parents who give in and to all those who say no.
I WENT TO the inauguration of the Radio Reading Service for the Blind and Print Handicapped Citizens of the state of Mississippi. There was a party at ten o’clock in the morning in the Mississippi Public Broadcasting studios and most of the writers in the state were there to start things off by reading from their books. This is a service that will go out day after day to all those who cannot see or are unable to hold a book or turn a page.
It was a bright January morning and everyone looked grand in winter suits and dress-up dresses. The director and manager of the service were there, looking properly nervous and excited. There was an opening ceremony with members of the legislature and doctors and lawyers and actresses and other volunteer readers. There was fierce competition for those spots. Mississippi is not a state where a chance to be on stage is taken lightly.
After the ceremony we all trooped over to the studios and the recording sessions began. Eudora Welty led off with her haunting and beautiful story “A Worn Path.” The rest of us were in the anteroom listening on a scratchy desk radio. The minute Miss Welty’s soft enchanting voice came on the air things changed in the room and the magic of storytelling was upon us.
“It was December,” she read, “— a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.”
Miss Welty was followed by Willie Morris and Ellen Douglas and Gloria Norris and Richard Ford and Luke Wallin and Charlotte Capers and Carroll Case and Felder Rushing and Patrick Smith, some on tape and some in person. In the midst of this excitement a troop of sighted sixth-graders passed through the room with a string of blind and print-handicapped fifth-graders in tow. They were being led by a wonderful-looking little redhead in a plaid dress. She weaved her way in between Eudora Welty and Ellen Douglas and a pair of senators. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me, please,” and led her charges back to tour the studios which would produce the books they would be hearing.
In a world of television watchers it is nice for a writer to know there is an audience who still needs words unaccompanied by pictures other than the ones they make up in their own minds.
SOME TIME AGO I decided to leave the secluded life where I wrote my books and go out into the world and see what was going on.
I spent two weeks on a reading tour. First I went to Boulder, Colorado, and read a story to the students and had a wonderful time walking around in the snow. Then I flew to Minneapolis-Saint Paul to read a story in the beautiful Walker Art Center. Outside, only a few blocks away, seven hundred volunteer workers were putting the finishing touches on the Ice Palace. In the dead of winter, in one of the coldest citie
s in the world, seven hundred grown men and women have cut blocks of ice out of a frozen lake and built a palace one hundred and twenty-eight feet high.
Minneapolis is always full of wonders for me. The Walker Art Center was showing the fifteen-and-a-half-hour film, Heimat, by the German director Edgar Reitz. It is one of the most beautiful movies I have seen in years. The story of a small German village and its inhabitants from the end of World War One to the present.
On Sunday, I flew home to Jackson, Mississippi, and changed suitcases and drove to Shreveport, Louisiana, to read a story to the officers’ wives at the Barksdale Air Force Base. Headquarters of the Eighth Air Force of the Strategic Air Command. I was taken on a tour of the base by two of the pilots’ wives. We went to see the sheds where uniformed men were standing on ladders working on the engines of the twenty-five-year-old B-52s and I marveled at the design of the KC-135s that fuel them in the air. I spent the day with the wives of the men who are keeping America safe. Their business is peace, they told me, and I believed them and thanked them for it.
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