by Lee Smith
After I said hi to everybody in the wading house I liked to sit under the big tree on the bank and think about a lot of things. There were a lot of things to think about then, and there was nothing to keep from thinking about like there is now. Or sometimes I would sit, like that day, and look at everything very hard so it would stay in my head for always.
What this little narrator is trying very hard not to think about is that her family is breaking up because the mother has run off with a man. This was an entirely fictional plot, of course, but a novel must have conflict; conflict is the single absolutely necessary ingredient of fiction.
As soon as my book was accepted, I was really excited, of course, and sent a copy to my parents. I waited anxiously for their reply, but I heard nothing. Nothing. Finally I called them up on the “long-distance telephone,” as we used to say then.
My mother answered.
“Have you read my book?” I asked.
“Yes, I have,” she said.
“Well, how did you like it?” I asked.
“Not much,” my mother said. “In fact, I have thrown it in the river.”
“What?” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Everybody in this town is going to think I ran off with a man,” my mother said.
“Mama, that’s just crazy,” I said. “Look, you’re still there. You and Daddy have been married for thirty years.”
“It doesn’t matter,” my mother said. “That’s what they’ll think anyway. So I am taking steps to make sure that they are not going to read it, any of them.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What steps?”
“I have told your father that he cannot order the book,” she said—my father’s Ben Franklin dimestore being naturally the only place in town where you could possibly buy a book—“And I have told Lillian Elgin that she cannot order the book either.” Mama’s friend, Lillian Elgin, was the town librarian.
So, that was it! Total censorship! Nobody in town ever read that first book, or the second book either. My mother banned that one because it had sex in it. But that was just as well, I guess, because it was also just awful, as second novels sometimes are if we write them too soon, having used up our entire life so far, all the great traumas and dramas of our youth, in the first one. My second was all about a sensitive English major who keeps having disastrous yet generic romances; luckily, publishing it was exactly like throwing it in the river.
BUT NOW I WAS IN big trouble, as a writer. I had used up my childhood, I had used up my adolescence, and I had nothing more to say. I had used up my whole life! Furthermore I was happily married to the poet James Seay, my first husband, so there was also no conflict, that necessary cauldron of creativity.
But luckily, by then I was a reporter working at The Tuscaloosa News in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where my editor assigned me to cover the all-south majorette contest taking place on the campus of the University of Alabama. This was an enormous contest with categories you might expect—such as “Fire Baton” and “Best Personality”—but also a lot of categories you might not expect, such as “Improvisation to a Previously Unheard Tune,” which I thought was a riot. The winner of the whole thing would be called Miss Fancy Strut. The girls were really sweet, because they were all trying to get Miss Personality, which would give them a lot of extra points, but their mothers were just bitches from hell, very competitive. Anyway, it lasted for days, and then finally all the points from all the categories were tallied up, and the winner turned out to be a beautiful little blonde girl from Opp, Alabama, whom I had to interview.
So I asked, of course, “How does it feel to be Miss Fancy Strut?”
And she said, with tears streaming down her face, “This is the happiest moment of my life!”
I was completely stunned, because I could tell this was true, and I was thinking, Oh honey, it’s going to be a long downhill slide from here. You are so young to peak out like this.
You will not be surprised to learn that my next novel was named Fancy Strut, and it was all about majorettes and their mamas. It was a real breakthrough for me, because nobody in it was anything like me at all. Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap—which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can’t be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer.
No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, “I write because I want more than one life.” Let me repeat that: “I write because I want more than one life.”
And let me tell you, this is the greatest privilege, and the greatest pleasure, in the world. Over the years I have moved away from autobiography to write about housewives and whores, serpent handlers and beauticians, country music singers and evangelists and nineteenth-century schoolteachers—lots of people I will never be, living in times and places I have never been. But somewhere along the way, I have also come to realize that the correspondences between real life and fiction are infinitely more complicated than I would have ever guessed as a younger woman.
Peter Taylor once said, “I write in order to find out what I think.” This is certainly true for me, too, and often I don’t even know what I think until I go back and read what I’ve written. My belief is that we have only one life, that this is all there is. And I refuse to lead an unexamined life. No matter how painful it may be, I want to know what’s going on. So I write fiction the way other people write in their journals.
My husband, Hal, has been heard to bemoan my lack of self-knowledge. He envisions our respective psyches like this: his is a big room in a factory, brightly lit. He’s got uniformed guys in there carrying clipboards and constantly working on all his problems, checking gauges and levels, in day and night shifts. He’s always monitoring their work, reading their reports. He sees my mind, by contrast, as a dark forest with no path, where huge beasts loom up at you suddenly out of the night and then disappear, only to return again and again.
Maybe so. But when I read what I’ve written, I know what they are.
In 1980, for instance, I wrote a novel named Black Mountain Breakdown, about a girl named Crystal Spangler who is so busy fitting herself into others’ images of her (first fulfilling her mother’s beauty-queen dreams, then altering her image to please the various men in her life) that she loses her own true self and finally ends up paralyzed: “Crystal just lies up there in that room every day, with her bed turned catty-corner so she could look out the window and see Lorene’s climbing rambler rose in full bloom on the trellis if she would turn her head. But she won’t. She won’t lift a finger. She just lies there. Everybody in town takes a fancy to it” . . . feeding her jello, brushing her hair, reading The Reader’s Digest out loud to her. The most terrifying aspect of her condition is that “Crystal is happy . . . as outside her window the seasons come and go and the colors change on the mountain.” When I wrote that, my first marriage should have ended years earlier, something I’d been unable to face or even admit; later, reading those words over, I finally understood how I’d felt during the last part of that marriage. I was able then to deal with its inevitable ending, and move on with my life.
No matter what I may think I am writing about at any given time—majorettes in Alabama, or a gruesome, long-ago murder, or the history of country music—I have come to realize that it is all, finally, about me, often in some complicated way I won’t come to understand until years later. But then it will be there for me to read, and I will understand it, and even if I don’t know who I am now, I will surely have a record of who I was then.
WRITING IS ALSO MY ADDICTION, for the moment when I am writing
fiction is that moment when I am most intensely alive. This “aliveness” does not seem to be mental, or not exactly. I am certainly not thinking while I write. Whatever I’m doing is almost the opposite of thinking. Especially during the pre-writing phase, when I am simply making up the story and imagining its characters, and during those first drafts, I feel a dangerous, exhilarating sense that anything can happen.
It reminds me of a woman in eastern Kentucky I interviewed years ago when I was writing about serpent-handling believers. I had seen her lift a double handful of copperheads high in the air during a religious service. Now we faced each other across a little Formica table in a fast-food restaurant, drinking Cokes and eating fries. I asked the obvious: “Why do you do this, when it’s so dangerous? You could die any time.” She merely smiled at me, a beautiful, generous smile without a trace of irony.
“Honey,” she began, “I do it out of an intense desire for holiness.” She smiled at me again, while that sank in. “And I’ll tell you something else, too. When you’ve held the serpent in your hands, the whole world kind of takes on an edge for you.”
I could see that. Chill bumps arose on my arms as she spoke. For I was once the girl who had embarrassed her mother so much by rededicating my life over and over at various revivals, coming home dripping wet from total immersion in those standup pools from Sears that they set up in the little tents behind the big revival tents, or simply in the fast-flowing creeks that rushed down the mountainsides.
And the feeling I get when I’m writing intensely is much the same.
For me, writing is a physical joy. It is almost sexual—not the moment of fulfillment, but the moment when you open the door to the room where your lover is waiting, and everything else falls away.
It does fall away, too. For the time of the writing, I am nobody. Nobody at all. I am a conduit, nothing but a way for the story to come to the page. Oh, but I am terribly alive then, too, though I say I am no one at all; my every sense is keen and quivering. I can smell the bacon cooking downstairs in my grandmother’s kitchen that winter morning in 1952, I can feel the flowered carpet under my bare feet as I run down the hall, I can see the bright blue squares of the kitchen wallpaper, bunches of cherries alternating with little floral bouquets. Sun shines through the frost on the windowpanes, almost blinding me; my grandaddy’s Lucky Strike cigarette smoke still hangs in the air, lazy blue, though he is already up and gone, he has walked the bridge across the river to the old stone courthouse where he will work all day long as the county treasurer. I love my granddaddy, who always wears a hat and a dark blue suit. I do not love my grandmother so much, who tells me not to be a tomboy and keeps moistening her lips with her tongue in a way I hate. I wish my mother would get out of the hospital so I could go home. I don’t see why I can’t stay with Daddy, anyway. I could make us peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, and cut the crusts off.
See what mean? I am there now, and I want to stay there. I hate to leave that kitchen and come back to this essay.
All my senses are involved when I am writing fiction, but it is hearing that is most acute. This has always been true. I can see everything in the story, of course—I have to see that kitchen in order to walk through it; the icy river, in order to get my grandfather across the bridge. I make a lot of maps before I start writing, Scotch-taping them to the wall. But I am not a visual person in real life. I never know how high to hang pictures, for instance, or where the furniture should go. None of my clothes match. It was words I loved first, words and sentences and music and stories, the voice that comes out of the dark when you’re almost asleep, sitting in somebody’s lap on a porch, trying to keep your eyes open long enough to hear the end of the story.
So a story always comes to me in a human voice, speaking not exactly into my ear but somewhere deep inside me. If I am writing from a first-person point of view, it is always the voice of the person who is telling the story. If I am writing from a third-person point of view, it is simply the voice of the story itself. Sometimes this voice is slow and pondering, or tentative and unsure. Sometimes it is flat and reportorial: just the facts, ma’am. Sometimes it’s gossipy, intimate—a tale told over a Coke and a cigarette during a work break at Food City. Sometimes it’s sad, a long, wailing lament, telling and retelling again and again how he done me wrong. It can be furious or vengeful: “I hated him from the moment I first laid eyes on him, hated him instinctively, as if I knew somehow what he would do to our family . . .” It can be a reliable narrator—or an unreliable narrator, sometimes even more interesting. It can be a meditative, authoritative voice, told as if from the distant past or from a great and somehow definitive distance (I confess that ever since we moved into this old house where I work in an upstairs office looking out over the town, this has happened more frequently!)
The most thrilling, of course, is when it is a first-person voice telling a story of real urgency. At these times, all I have to do is keep up; I become a stenographer, a court secretary, a tape recorder. My biggest job is making sure that I have several uninterrupted hours whenever I sit down to write, so this can happen. Whenever a story like this is in progress, it is so exciting that I will do almost anything to get those hours—break appointments, call in sick, tell lies. I become a person on drugs, somebody in the throes of a passionate affair. I’ll do anything to get there, to make it happen again. I know I can’t ignore the voice, or waste it. I may be a fool, but I’m not that kind of a fool.
Since the writing of fiction is such a physical and personal process for me, I have to write in longhand, still. I have to write with a pen or pencil on a legal pad. I can’t have anything mechanical between my body and the page. Later, I’ll type it on a computer in order to revise. I can compose nonfiction directly on the computer, but not fiction. Perhaps it’s because fiction is so messy, like life. Often I jot down three or four words before I hit upon the right one—or I hope it’s the right one. So I mark all the others out, and go on writing, but I want to keep them all, all those words I thought about first and then discarded. I also want to keep that paragraph of description I marked out, and that earlier section about how Ray drowned the dog when he was eleven, and that chapter from the point of view of the mother, because I might change my mind later on and include them. The novel, at this point, is organic, living, changing; anything can still happen, and probably will. This is true up until the very moment when I print the whole thing out and put it into its little coffin, usually an old paper box. Then I hit that SEND button and it’s gone to the publisher. Then it’s dead, they’re all dead, all those people who have been my familiars, who have lived under my skin for weeks and months or years, and I am no longer a writer, but a murderer and mourner, infinitely more alone in the world.
WRITING CAN ALSO GIVE US the chance to express what is present but mute, or unvoiced, in our own personalities . . . because we are all much more complicated and various people than our lives allow.
During the early eighties, the mountains where I came from began to change rapidly. The fast food restaurants went in around the bend of the Levisa River near my parents’ house, for instance, and those satellite TV dishes sprouted like weird mushrooms on every hillside—meaning that the children growing up there wouldn’t sound like I do, or like their grandmothers did, but like Walter Cronkite instead. That’s when I began to tape my relatives and elderly mountain friends, collecting the old stories, songs, and histories in earnest, with the aim of preserving the type of speech—Appalachian English—and the ways of life of a bygone era. But then a very strange thing happened to me. In Oral History, the first novel I wrote using this material exclusively, a voice began speaking who was truly me, in a way in which all these other, more contemporary, and ostensibly autobiographical characters were not—although she (Granny Younger, an old mountain midwife) was certainly more removed from me in time, and place, and circumstance, than any other character I’d ever come up with.
Here is what she says in the first chapter of my novel
Oral History:
. . . I’ll tell it all directly.
I’ll tell it all, but don’t you forget it is Almarine’s story. Almarine’s, and Pricey Jane’s, and Lord yes, it’s that red-headed Emmy’s. Mought be it’s her story moren the rest. Iffen twas my story, I never would tell it at all. There’s tales I’ll tell, and tales I won’t. And iffen twas my story, why I’d be all hemmed in by the facts of it like Hoot Owl Holler is hemmed in by them three mountains. I couldn’t move no way but forward. And often in my traveling over these hills I have seed that what you want the most, you find offen the beaten path. I never find nothing I need on the trace, for an instance. I never find ary a thing. But I am an old, old woman, and I have traveled a lot in these parts. I have seed folks come and I have seed them go. I have cotched more babies than I can name you; I have put the burying quilts around many a soul. I said I know moren you know and mought be I’ll tell you moren you want to hear. I’ll tell you a story that’s truer than true, and nothing so true is so pretty. It’s blood on the moon, as I said. The way I tell a story is the way I want to, and iffen you mislike it, you don’t have to hear.