“Or,” I said, “if it met with your approval, I could transfer into John Thomas next month.”
“I despise these new slangy names,” she said. “I’ll take it under advisement. Now, if you’ll leave, I’m already late for my Saluji afternoon.”
“I was admiring your batons,” I said. “Very handsome.”
When I crossed into John Thomas, Heriberto not only recommended me to my new mentor—who, I must admit, had already heard of me—he gave a statement on my behalf to Sarah Peabody, which was very decent of him. But then I’d found him a good man.
He said, “He came well recommended to me. Now I find I have nothing more to teach him. I must pass him along to another pair of hands.”
I took two Shiphoppers along with me into John Thomas. Sarah Peabody stops no one from leaving, and John Thomas isn’t as sifty about newcomers. One of the Shiphoppers was Joe Don Simms. About a week after we had made the change he came to me in complaint. He claimed that things were neither as exciting nor as heart-lifting as I had described them. As for me, I was feeling pretty good.
“What am I to do?” he asked.
“Swim,” I said.
I only have one thing left to settle. I still haven’t decided whether I am to be Shakespeare or Napoleon.
9
How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?
In the final analysis civilization can be saved only if we are willing to change our ways of life. We have to invent utopias not necessarily to make them reality but to help us formulate worthwhile human goals.
—RENE DUBOS
1
ENDINGS OF stories come easy. It is the beginnings, when anything is still possible, that come hard.
To think yourself into somewhere strange and someone new, and then to live it, takes the nerve of a revolutionary or a bride. If writers had that kind of nerve, they wouldn’t be writers. They would be starting revolutions and getting married, like everyone else. As it is, we tend to cultivate our gardens and mull a lot.
When the beginnings come harder than usual and when the only news that penetrates the Pennsylvania outback is of lost causes and rumors of lost causes, I give a call to Rob to grab whoever he can find between Springfield, Massachusetts and here and come on down for the weekend. The people around here are good people, but all they know is what they hear on the evening news. And they can’t talk shop. Rob talks good shop, and he has a completely unique set of rumors. His news is no better, but it isn’t the common line.
It does him good to come, too. Springfield is no place to live. In a sense I feel responsible for Rob. Springfield was founded by William Pynchon, who was an ancestor of mine. He wrote a book in Greek called The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, which was burned on Boston Common in 1650 as religiously unsound, and he went back to England. He stayed long enough to found Springfield and a branch of my mother’s family, and make me responsible for Rob.
If I ever meet Thomas Pynchon, who wrote V., I intend to ask him how he feels about Springfield, Mass. In the meantime Rob has some leeway with me, which he takes advantage of on occasion.
I was expecting Rob and Leigh, but when we picked them up on Friday morning at the lunch-counter bus stop across the river in New Jersey, they had a kid with them. Leigh is in her thirties, good silent strong plain people. She writes westerns. Rob had collected her in New York. Where he’d gotten the kid I didn’t know.
“This is Juanito,” Rob said.
The kid was blond as Maytime, dressed in worn blue jeans and a serape. He was wishing for a beard. I didn’t know him, but he looked like a member of the tribe.
“I’m Alex and this is Cory,” I said, and he nodded. Then the five of us headed for our 1951 Plymouth, our slow beast.
“I’m just as glad to get out of here,” Rob said, looking back as we headed onto the bridge to Pennsylvania, “It reminds me of Springfield.”
It is a depressing battered little town. A good place to leave behind.
Cory said, “And you know, there are people who commute to work in New York from here every day. Two hours each way.”
“It’s a long way to come for flaking paint and tumbledown houses,” Rob said. “But I suppose if that’s the way you like to live…”
He turned to look at the brighter prospect of the Pennsylvania hills. “Well,” he said, “let’s get going. Bring on your sheep and geese and cats.”
I said, “There are a couple of ducks now, and Gemma had three kittens.”
The only part of the livestock that belongs to us is two of the cats. There are two stray tomcats on the place and some independent bullfrogs. The sheep and their lambs are the farmer’s. The rest belongs to our landlady up in the big house.
Leigh said, “How old are the kittens?”
Cory turned and said over the seat back, “They haven’t even got their eyes open.”
Across the Delaware in Pennsylvania we passed a broad field full of dead auto bodies rusting into the land, crossed the shortest covered bridge in the county, and headed up into the hills.
“Well,” said Rob. “How badly are you stuck?”
“Stuck,” I said. “I’m doing a story based on an idea of Isaac Asimov for an anthology of new stories.”
“You’re a hack,” said Rob. “You work for money.”
“Right,” I said. “I work to live, and live to work. No, my problem is that I want to respect Asimov’s idea without following it to the letter. I guess the problem is that I can’t see any way to get from our now to his future. When I listen to the news, I wonder about any future at all. So I sit in front of the typewriter, but I don’t write. I’ll find the story, I’ll see the way, but right now I’m still trying to find my beginning.”
“Don’t brood about it,” said Leigh. “Sit down and write it the simplest way.” Kind advice, because in spite of what Leigh may sometimes say about her own work, that’s not the way she writes.
“Seen any movies lately?” Rob asked. Not an idle question.
“None,” I said. The movies they’ve been bringing around here haven’t been the ones I’m planning to catch. Not Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman in a love story for the ages. Besides, I couldn’t take the chance of getting that far from the typewriter. Not with the birth of a story imminent.
“I know you’ve stopped answering your mail,” he said.
“Do I owe you a letter?”
“Of course.”
“It must have gotten lost in the mail strike,” I said, though in fact I hadn’t written. “Our mail hasn’t yet gotten back to normal. I’m keeping a list of things that haven’t come, starting with a check from Henry.” Henry is the agent of all of us. Henry is the agent of half the writers I know.
“Hey, you had a sale?” Automatic question.
“My first this year, and just in time, too. We need the money. They were supposed to pay at the end of last month, and today is already the tenth.”
“What about letters?” Rob asked. “Have you really been answering your mail?”
“Letters? I’m busy. All my time goes to writing—that is, not writing.”
“Travel? Have you been anyplace recently?”
The size of a mental block can be fairly estimated by the writer’s list of austerities. It is less a matter of income than an inability to put anything ahead of writing—that is, not writing. If a writer does nothing whatsoever but sit very very still and pretend to think, you know he is up the creek without a paddle.
Cory answered that one. “Not since Christmas,” she said.
“Fine,” said Rob, like any doctor in possession of a juicy symptom. “Are you able to read?”
“I never stop reading,” I said. “I’ve never been that petrified.”
“Name a good novel you read recently.”
“Does it have to be good?”
“Name a novel,” Rob said. “It doesn’t have to be good.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m not reading fiction. Creative Mythology, the fourth volume of T
he Masks of God.”
“Is that as heavy as it sounds?”
Cory said, “I lost momentum half through it.”
“That one is for inspiration,” I said. “Then Personal Knowledge, by Polanyi. That’s food for thought. And Heroes and Heretics: A Social History of Dissent. That’s for the times. I pick one or the other up in the morning, read a paragraph or a page, and then I think about the Asimov story.”
“Oh, you lucky writers,” Leigh said. “Your time is your own.”
Rob finally let me off the hook. “Let me see what Asimov wrote when we get to your place. Maybe we can talk it out.”
A deer suddenly flashed onto the road ahead of us, showed tail, and bounded off through the wooded hillside. Only Cory and I in the front and Juanito in the back got a good look. Leigh caught just a glimpse, and Rob missed it entirely. I try to bring people by the scenic route, but they have to be prepared to look at things fast. Rob never bothers.
“Nice,” said Leigh.
“We sat at sunset over on Geigel Hill Road the other week and watched a whole herd—twelve or more, and even more down in the draw—cross the road and stream up the long open hillside,” I said. “And when our landlady’s daughter was here for Easter from England, she said there was a herd in the woods on the State Park land just behind the farm.”
“Just behind the farm?” Leigh said. “How far would it be?”
Cory said, “Not far. A ten-minute walk. We could go this afternoon and look.”
Rob said, “Not me. I’ve been up for thirty hours. I need sack time.”
“I’ll go,” said Juanito.
This Pennsylvania countryside offers you just about anything you want. We’ve been here the better part of a year and still discover surprises within five miles, and even within one, or within three hundred yards: wild onion, wild strawberries, poison ivy. In the space of a mile on a single road you can find high-speed intersection, three-hundred-year-old farmstead, random suburbia, crossroad community, and woodland, in any order and combination you like, strung across little valleys, hidden in hollows, up and over hills. There are even pockets of industry.
“What is that?” Juanito asked.
It’s part of the scenery, but you have to be particularly quick to see it. If you could see more of it, perhaps it would have been closed down sooner.
I stopped our old Plymouth tank and backed up the hill to the curve. In early April, with the trees still bare or only barely budding, you can see it from one vantage on the road. Tinny prefab buildings and the half a dozen chemical lagoons perched overlooking the creek, with blue and yellow gullies staining the hillside.
“Every time it rains there’s overflow,” I said. “That’s the Revere Chemicals dump. It was put in in 1965, and the State Health people said at the time that it was going to do this, and it took them five years to close it down. Now it just sits there and leaks. The manager is trying to start a new operation in the next township.”
“I hope the deer doesn’t drink from that stream,” Leigh said.
“He has to take his chances the same as the rest of us,” Rob said. Growing up in Springfield has left Rob with more than a little sourness.
When we got to the farm, I stopped the car at the head of the long gravel drive. “Somebody hop out and check the mailbox,” I said.
Rob made no move. I said, “Rob, it’s your side.”
“I’ve been up for thirty hours,” he said.
Juanito said, “I’ll look.”
He dropped the door on the big white mailbox with the blue and red hex sign matching the white hexes on the barn. I could see that it was empty—and the mail truck not in sight yet.
Juanito hesitated in order to let a semi pass, the wind by-blow whipping his hair and his serape, and then he came back to the car. He had a nonreturnable beer bottle in his hand, one of the little squat ones. It had been on the roadside long enough for the label to wash free, but then it has been a wet spring.
“What about this?” he said.
I was irritated. I had expected the mail to be there when we got back from the run to Frenchtown.
“Oh, throw it back!” I said. “Unless you mean to pick up all the trash along the frontage. Start with the chrome and the broken headlights up at the second phone pole.”
The kid looked slightly bewildered at my vehemence. I was immediately sorry.
I switched the engine off, set the brake, and hopped out. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “We’ll strike a blow.”
I walked to the back of the car and opened up the humpback trunk. Then I said, “Throw your bottle in there,” and the kid did.
I stepped down into the front field and picked up the black and raddled truck-tire carcass I’d been meaning to police up ever since it was abandoned there. I lugged it up the grade and slung it into the trunk.
“There,” I said.
The geese set up their automatic clank and clatter when we drove into the yard. Phoebe is the goose, Alexander the gander. Alexander is the main squawk of the barnyard, Phoebe just the harmony, but when they trudge around the farm, it is Phoebe who leads and Alexander who walks behind attempting to look impressive.
Fang skirted the geese and came skittering past us, tail briefly raised in acknowledgment, a miniature panther in penguin clothes. We followed her into the house for lunch.
The house was once a carriage house. The original beams, marked with the holes and gouges of the gear used to raise and lower carriages, cross the twelve-foot ceiling of the living room, and a glass chandelier hangs from the lowest beam. The kitchen behind and the bedrooms upstairs in the original building, and the library and study in the addition, are cut to less heroic proportion. It’s a tidy small house with an overwhelming living room. It has all the charms of Frank Lloyd Wright without the dim constricted little hallways Wright insisted on designing.
During lunch Cory took me aside and said, “We’re going to need more bacon and a dozen eggs.”
“I’ll go to the Elephant this afternoon,” I said.
“Get a couple of half-gallons of milk, too.” Then she said, “Who is this boy, Alexei? He keeps looking around, but he doesn’t say much.”
I said, “He seems within the normal range of Rob’s friends.”
“Well, Rob’s strange.”
“True. I don’t suppose I’d want to put this Juanito to a vote of the neighbors.”
Then Cory said, “Alexei, what are we going to do about the taxes if the money doesn’t come?”
I said, “We know it’s coming. If worse comes to worst, I’ll mail our check and we can deposit Henry’s check as soon as it comes. Don’t brood.”
I don’t worry about the money except when I absolutely have to. I juggle without thinking, and the money usually comes from somewhere when it has to be found. If I worried about money I’d be too busy to stare at my typewriter.
After lunch Rob said, “All right. Let me have a look at the Asimov idea before I collapse.”
Cory and Leigh and Juanito went walking back toward the State Park land to look for the deer herd. Two lambs clowning in the plowed lands went ducking urgently under the wire fencing looking for mama at the passage of the people.
Rob and I went back inside the house and into the study. It’s a small room. The people before us used it for a nursery. Now it holds our desks, two small armchairs, three small bookcases of reference books, including our prize, the eleventh-edition Britannica we bought for fifty dollars in Doylestown, and a catbox in the closet to keep us humble.
I scooped Wolf, our lesser cat, out of my easy chair. She’s a tortoiseshell, pine needles and shadow, with an orange nose and a wide black greasepaint moustache. She keeps me company when I write. At five months she is still small enough to curl up to sleep in my typing-paper box like a mouse tucked up for winter inside a Swiss cheese. I sat down with her on my lap.
Rob said, “How’s the collaboration with Cory coming?”
Cory and I have a contract for a fant
asy novel in four books.
I said, “Cory has just been reading the novel I did at eighteen to give herself encouragement. She found it very encouraging.”
“It’s pretty bad?”
“I don’t remember it too well, fortunately. Cory says it’s about an incredibly narrow and suspicious young man whose only distinguishing feature is that he wants a way to leave.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. I made the story up as I went along. I remember that much.”
That wasn’t all, but that’s the way I talk to Rob. I remember there was a galactic empire in the story that did nasty things, and my hero wanted a way to leave it. If I were writing the story now, I suppose he’d try to change it.
“Hmm,” said Rob. He wrote a novel at eighteen, too, making it up as he went along. The difference is that his was published and mine wasn’t, so he has more to regret. “Let me see what Asimov has to say.”
I searched through the clutter on the right-hand corner of my desk. While I was searching, Rob looked through the books on the opposite corner. He came up with Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi and began to thumb it.
“You weren’t kidding about this, were you?” he said. “What do you get out of all of this?” It’s a crabbed book in small type with heavy footnotes.
“I don’t generally recommend it,” I said. “It’s epistemology. The nature and limits of knowledge.”
“What have you gotten out of it?”
“The power of mind to shape the world. The need for responsible belief,” I said. “Not that the idea is new. One of my ancestors…”
“I know. One of your ancestors founded Springfield.” Rob isn’t too sure whether I’m lying in whole or in part about William Pynchon. We do work at misleading each other. I like to tell the truth so that it comes out sounding like a lie for the pure artistic beauty of doing it, and I don’t know how much to make of the stories Rob tells me.
“I was about to say, one of my ancestors was the brother of Hosea Ballou, who founded the Universalists. ‘The Father of American Universalism.’”
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 12