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Odd Type Writers

Page 6

by Celia Blue Johnson


  William Styron found inspiration on walks with his dog, Aquinnah, in Roxbury, Connecticut. At home, Styron was plagued by trivial matters. But out in the woods, with his loyal companion, he was able to ponder his writing. He observed, “Without a daily walk and the transactions it stimulates in my head, I would face that first page of cold blank paper with pitiful anxiety.”

  Feline muses abound in the literary world. In a humorous letter to his three-year-old grandson, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I am glad you have a cat but I do not believe it is so remarkable a cat as My cat.…” The cat he was referring to was a pet named Jellylorum. This kitty was immortalized in Eliot’s collection of feline poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. She’s also a character in the musical Cats, which was based on Eliot’s book.

  Edgar Allan Poe had a pet cat that inspired him to write an essay, “Instinct vs. Reason—A Black Cat,” which appeared in January 1840 in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger. In this piece, Poe described the antics of his dexterous feline, who would routinely perform a singular trick. She would leap from the floor and secure her paw below the latch on the kitchen door. She had to get the sequence just right: unlocking the latch, pushing it down, and then springing away with enough force for the door to fly open. If she fell, the determined cat jumped up and tried again until she’d completed her mission. Poe’s admiration of the spry feline is evident as he introduces her to the reader, noting, “The writer of this article is the owner of one of the most remarkable black cats in the world—and this is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches.” According to scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, the black cat preceded Catterina, a tabby that would perch on Poe’s shoulder as he wrote (see page 39).

  In the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West, and dozens of polydactyl cats wandered around the grounds of his home. However, he found his favorite feline companion the following decade, when he lived in Cuba. Around sixty cats lived on Hemingway’s Cuban estate, and there was one in particular who rarely ever left his side. It was a black-and-white cat named Boise. He trotted alongside Hemingway on his strolls and kept him company while he worked. Boise, along with a few of the author’s other cats, appears as a character in his posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream.

  Like Boise, many household pets curled up by their owners while they wrote. Raymond Chandler had a black Persian cat named Taki, who kept him company in his workroom for almost twenty years. Chandler called her his secretary. Taki had a habit of plunking down on whichever papers he needed at the time. She was also one of Chandler’s toughest critics. In a letter to Charles Morton, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, Chandler wrote that Taki spent time “just quietly gazing out of the window from a corner of the desk as if to say, ‘The stuff you’re doing is a waste of time, bud.’”

  Though he was reluctant to share his study with a troop of kittens, Charles Dickens had little say in the matter. His cat, Williamina, was determined to care for her newborn kittens in that room. Dickens, on the other hand, was determined not to be disturbed. Twice the kittens were transported out of the study. On the third attempt, Williamina carried each precious kitten in through a window, back into her chosen room. At this point, Dickens gave up, and found a way to work amid the purring, climbing, and playing. He even kept one of the kittens. This kitty, who was simply called “the Master’s cat,” extinguished a candle twice with his paw while Dickens was reading. It was a clever ploy to divert the author’s attention away from work so they could play, and it worked.

  Traffic Jamming

  GERTRUDE STEIN

  1874–1946

  I saw her once, perched high up on the front seat with Alice Toklas beside her, driving down the avenue des Champs-Elysées in this strange vehicle, very distinguished among the rush of quite different, lesser cars, paying no attention to the jokes and laughs of the crowd.

  —Art historian Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, on Gertrude Stein

  Gertrude Stein obtained her first car in 1917. She quickly discovered that the driver’s seat of a Model T Ford was an ideal spot to write. In the privacy of an automobile, she could let her mind wander and jot down a few lines, no matter where she was. Stein was especially productive during errands. She’d sit in the car while her partner, Alice B. Toklas, dashed into a store. While she waited, Stein would pull out a pencil and a scrap of paper. She was particularly inspired by the traffic on busy Parisian streets. Automobiles stopped and started with a rhythm that thrummed right into her poetry and prose.

  Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas details their lives through Toklas’s perspective. In this book, “pictures and automobiles” are described as Stein’s only “two real distractions.” Stein’s love of cars sprung from her volunteer efforts during World War I. Toklas came up with the idea to volunteer while they were walking in Paris. She had spotted a woman driving a car for the American Fund for French Wounded (AFFW) and decided it was the right organization for them. The AFFW was comprised of American women who transported a variety of supplies to hospitals. A car was necessary for traveling around the country. So, before they could begin, Stein and Toklas had to produce a vehicle. Before this time, Stein had never owned—or driven—a car.

  Members of Stein’s family in the United States helped raise funds for the car. Meanwhile, Stein learned how to drive (Toklas preferred to ride along in the passenger seat). Stein’s friend, William Cook, was an artist earning a living as a taxi driver. Cook helped teach her the basics, though she was never confident reversing the car. Instead, she simply found ways to power forward, terrifying passengers and other motorists in the process. Her friend William Rogers recalled, “She regarded a corner as something to cut, and another car as something to pass, and she could scare the daylights out of all concerned.”

  Stein’s car, the Model T Ford, was shipped all the way from America. It arrived in France in February 1917. The automobile was humorously dubbed Auntie, after Stein’s Aunt Pauline, who “always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most of the time if she was properly flattered” (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). At times Stein found it difficult to flatter the stubborn car. After being forced, again and again, to wind up the unreliable engine, she made empty threats to scrap poor Auntie.

  Stein and Toklas drove around France, making rounds to wherever they were needed, sometimes on perilous, snow-covered roads. Stein was not fond of using a map, though her instinct wasn’t always reliable. So they often followed a long, unpredictable route to reach their destination. AFFW members were forced to maintain and fix their own cars, but Stein only conducted minor repairs herself. She was always able to wangle help whenever she needed to do anything more complicated than changing a spark plug.

  During their travels, Stein and Toklas dined at homes and restaurants all over the country. The most delicious dishes they ate are recounted in Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Between meeting soldiers, braving country roads, and trying new cuisine, Stein squeezed in time to write, often while seated in Auntie.

  After the war, Stein and Toklas were forced to get rid of their dear car. While dining at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, Toklas had been pulled aside by a police officer and informed that trucks were no longer allowed on the roads in the park now the war was over. “So would Madame see that her truck did not appear there again,” he instructed. Meanwhile, after all of that driving around the country, Auntie was only capable of making short trips. Eventually, the car simply stopped working for good, right in the middle of a city street.

  A new car was needed, one that fit within Stein and Toklas’s budget. They ordered another Ford, and to save money, they selected a version that lacked most amenities, such as a cigarette lighter and a clock. When it arrived, Toklas observed that the car, with its bare dashboard, “was nude.” Stein promptly pronounced, “Godiva.” And so their new car was named after a woman who, legend tells, rode horseback naked to protest unfair taxes.

  Stein kept up
her habit of writing in the driver’s seat of the new car. And even when she wasn’t in Godiva, mere proximity to cars could spark her imagination. Stein preferred to keep watch over mechanics while they worked on her cars. On a winter day, while she waited for Godiva to be fixed, Stein settled onto the steps of a nearby dilapidated Ford. From that vantage point, she could guard her precious automobile and write at the same time. By the time the car was ready, Stein had finished an entire essay called “Composition as Explanation.”

  There is also a possibility that a car mechanic was involved when Stein first heard the term “lost generation,” which Hemingway later made famous, using it in an epigram for his novel The Sun Also Rises. According to Stein, she was discussing the younger generation who had served in World War I with a hotel owner, and he said that they were “a lost generation.” However, in two versions of this story, Hemingway placed the historic conversation in a car garage. While Stein didn’t mention a mechanic in her account, her friend Bravig Imbs was at the hotel and he wrote that she also spent a long time talking to a young mechanic there.

  On the Move

  Gertrude Stein isn’t the only the author who found inspiration en route from one destination or another. From the outset of a journey to the point of arrival, there’s a chunk of time that, for many writers, is full of potential. Those hours or minutes don’t have to be spent snoozing or pondering a crossword puzzle. Great works have been scribbled into notepads on cars, trains, and planes. Stein and Vladimir Nabokov (see page 121) both spent time writing in the solitude of their parked cars. When he was a struggling writer, Raymond Carver would also hole up in his car in order to work in peace. However, his first wife, Maryann, pointed out that Carver wasn’t quite as misfortunate as people believed. She noted that whenever they could afford it, he would always rent out a room somewhere just to write.

  Some famous writers composed their novels on the move, whether it was in a vehicle or riding an animal. A car can function as a stationary room, perfect for writing. However, it would be a difficult feat for authors to write while driving. Eudora Welty managed to jot down ideas on the long drive to visit her mother in a nursing home. Somehow she managed to steer and write at the same time (see page 145).

  Sir Walter Scott composed the lines to his poem Marmion on horseback. Rather than pulling over to contemplate the lines, he preferred to write in motion. Much of the piece was written while riding his horse through the hills surrounding the village of Lasswade, near Edinburgh, Scottland. He recalled his writing process during a ride in the same area with his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart. Scott said, “Oh, man, I had many a grand gallop among these braes when I was thinking of ‘Marmion.’”

  However, most writers who composed on the move weren’t in the driver’s seat (or on an animal). As a passenger in a train or a plane, one doesn’t need to pull over to record an idea. And there isn’t the necessity of directing the reins while mentally drafting lines, like Scott. In his late twenties, John le Carré took full advantage of a ninety-minute commute from Buckinghamshire to London. He was working as an M15 officer at England’s foreign office. During his train ride, le Carré penned his debut novel, Call for the Dead (published in 1961). He also squeezed in time to write during his lunch hour. Le Carré directed most of his energy to writing. “I was always very careful to give my country second-best,” he later quipped. Trains are now far more efficient than they were in the 1950s and ’60s, which means commuters do not have to spend as much time traveling. However, increased efficiency isn’t necessarily a good thing. Le Carré observed, “The line has since been electrified, which is a great loss to literature.”

  Joseph Heller stumbled upon some great ideas while riding the bus. In fact, he noted, “The closing line for Catch-22 came to me on a bus.” For Heller, the bus ride, like other mundane activities during the day, allowed him time to think alone. He put all of his ideas down on index cards and referred to them while working on a novel.

  Sixteen-year-old comedian Woody Allen managed to write during his subway ride to an after-school job at an advertising agency in New York. Unlike le Carré, Allen didn’t have the luxury of a seat. He recalled, “Straphanging, I’d take out a pencil and by the time I’d gotten out I’d have written forty or fifty jokes…fifty jokes a day for years.” So, even while standing, he managed to produce an impressive output during each ride.

  Elie Wiesel has written just about anywhere. In an interview for the Paris Review, he listed off a few places where he was able to write: “On a plane, in a café, while waiting.” After World War II, he spent many years reporting for French and Israeli publications. Wiesel credited his experience in journalism for the flexibility to write in all sorts of places.

  Margaret Atwood has found inspiration while soaring above the clouds. When she was asked by the Guardian to offer some commandments about the art of writing, composing on planes was at the top of her list. She advised, “Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”

  Tunneling by the Thousands

  JACK LONDON

  1876–1916

  Well, well, plenty of dig, and an equal amount of luck may enable me some day to make perhaps a small livelihood out of the pen.

  —Jack London, in a letter to Mabel Applegarth

  When twenty-one-year-old Jack London first attempted to launch his career, he toiled for fifteen hours every day. He lived with his family in San Francisco at the time. The work was mentally and physically exhausting. Food came second to work, and London’s prose grew in direct opposition to his growling stomach. He transcribed stories and articles from longhand with a borrowed typewriter and developed blisters from pounding on the exasperatingly resistant keys. London’s back and shoulders ached from the intensive regimen. He threw himself entirely into the task. Unfortunately, despite his fierce perseverance, the young writer failed at his first attempt to make a living as an author. After receiving a flurry of rejection letters, he was forced to find paying work. London took a menial job in the laundry room at a boys’ preparatory school. He suffered for a few months amid dirty clothes and steam. Then, in July 1897, London took off north to the Klondike in search of gold.

  While in the North, London trekked through the treacherous wilderness. He followed the same path as many other ambitious and adventurous Americans. But only a select few struck it rich during the Klondike gold rush. London returned home virtually empty-handed. Still, the twenty-two-year-old had a glint of determination in his blue eyes. He decided to spin his perilous adventures into literary riches. London believed that he could tunnel his way to publication with sheer will and hard work. “Dig is a wonderful thing, and will move more mountains than faith ever dreamed of,” he proclaimed. So, upon his return, London dug toward his dream, furiously and tirelessly, like the most determined miners in the Klondike.

  Again, London took a seat at his desk. He wrote line after line, racing toward one fixed goal. He had decided to become a professional author, and there was no obstacle great enough to stop him. As he moved from one page to the next, London drew closer to his dream. The aspiring author broke from writing and researching only to sleep. His bedroom lamp glowed until 2 a.m., and he sprung back to action at the sound of his alarm clock at 5 a.m.

  London took great care to learn the art of writing. Each sentence he penned was a study in form. London spent hour upon hour analyzing work by successful contemporary writers. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of literary giants. And, in fact, there were times when he traced the same path as his favorite author, right on the page. London was an avid fan of Rudyard Kipling. He decided that the best way to master Kipling’s prose was to copy it word for word. It was an arduous task, but London didn’t mind hard work, particularly if it might lead to success. He later acknowledged, “I would never have possibly written anywhere near the way I did had Kipling never been.”
r />   London developed a writing maxim based on the need not simply to write, but to make a living as a writer. His stepfather had passed away while he was in the Klondike, and a large share of family responsibility fell to him. So he established a strict rule of writing at least one thousand words per day, hoping that the prolific output would lead to a steady career.

  Sometimes it seemed to London that he might never break into the publishing world. Though he rarely wavered from his goal, he did experience serious bouts of despair. At one point, London even considered suicide. The weight of 650 rejection letters bore down on the poor, struggling author. However, his depression abruptly disappeared when he finally received an acceptance letter. Black Cat magazine made the first financially solid offer for one of his stories, and it saved London, as he observed, “literally, and literarily.”

  After his career took off, London continued to write a thousand words daily, whether on land or the high seas. On a yacht in the Pacific Ocean he still managed to fit in two hours of writing every morning. And on his ranch in California, London kept a steady morning work regimen. He woke promptly at 5 a.m. but didn’t go very far: He liked to work in bed. Note cards were fastened to a string above his head, lingering until they were processed and replaced with fresh ones. Below those frozen thought bubbles, London wrote steadily until he reached that same quota he had established as a young writer.

 

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