Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  “But the Giver of Dreams does not like to wear a harness. Rilke fell into a period of real despair. Years later when he wrote the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, the way in which poems came to him had utterly changed. ‘All in a few days,’ he said to his friends, ‘there was a nameless storm, a hurricane in my mind.… everything in the way of fiber and web in me split—eating was not to be thought of, God knows who fed me.’ When the hurricane comes you must be ready to write. Many a story has been lost because the writer did not answer the call.”

  “The call is not always convenient,” I said.

  The Guardian nodded.

  “That is true of most things in our world that get born. It is not convenient to make time for writing. For you are asked not just to make time for the Giver of Dreams but to give her the sense that she has all the time in the world. The germ of the story arrives, it ripens and grows, you are ready to harvest it. You need time without interruption. How my good friend Charles Dickens chafed at demands made on his time by those who didn’t understand it wasn’t quality but continuity he needed. ‘It is only half an hour—it is only an afternoon—it is only an evening.…’ he mused, adding, ‘they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes—or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.’”

  “And sometimes you have the time but not the story,” I added. “What do you do when the well runs dry?”

  “The well never runs dry,” said the Guardian. “It may get blocked, but it never runs dry. Writers have various ways of making themselves remember this. I knew a man who always kept one story unwritten. He had a clear notion of the plot, the characters, and the way in which he would tell the story, but he took care never to write it down. Thus when he finished a piece of work, he could always say to himself, ‘There’s more where that came from. I have yet another story to tell.’ That unwritten story was his savings in the bank, his reserve.

  “Another writer, to keep his momentum through a long work, writes until he feels that everything is coming together for him, the words are flowing, he can write for hours, he is face to face with the Giver of Dreams, at the brink of great things—and then he rises from his desk, like a hungry man in a restaurant who waits hours to be served and leaves the table when the meal arrives. By the next day he is so eager to return to his work that he can scarcely wait to begin. Beginning—that is the difficult thing. Let me give you a trick for getting tsarted when you think you have no more stories in the well. Take any collection of stories. I have here a collection of fairy tales. Let me read you a few beginnings:

  A king had a daughter who was beautiful beyond all measure but so proud and haughty withal that no suitor was good enough for her. She sent away one after the other, and ridiculed them as well.

  (King Thrushbeard)

  A long time ago there were a king and queen who said every day: “Ah, if only we had a child!” but they never had one. But it happened that once when the queen was bathing, a frog crept out of the water on to the land, and said to her: “Your wish shall be fulfilled; before a year has gone by, you shall have a daughter.”

  (Little Briar-Rose)

  There was once upon a time a king who had a wife with golden hair, and she was so beautiful that her equal was not to be found on earth. It came to pass that she lay ill, and as she felt that she must soon die, she called the king and said: “If you wish to marry again after my death, take no one who is not quite as beautiful as I am, and who has not just such golden hair as I have: this you must promise me.” And after the king had promised her this she closed her eyes and died.2

  (Allerleirauh)

  The Guardian closed his book.

  “Well, which of them do you like?”

  “None of them. I don’t care much for kings and queens.”

  “Try this one, then,” said the Guardian. “There was once a lass who went out at the cry of dawn to seek her fortune, and she never came home again.”

  “That sounds like a good one,” I told him.

  “It is. Now tell me the rest of the story.”

  “But I don’t know it.”

  “You don’t have to know it. There are a thousand different ways of telling that story. At first you will say, ‘I can’t tell you the story, I know nothing about the girl.’ You will be afraid of failing. Then you will find yourself thinking about the girl—Why did she want to leave? And who was she leaving? A husband? A mother and father? Where did she come from? The country? The city? And where was she going? And why at dawn? And the cry of dawn—What does that sound like? When you find yourself more interested in the girl’s story than what you can make of it, a great change will come over me. I will go to sleep. Like Argos, I will shut my eyes, which judge and scrutinize. Suddenly the water will wake in the well, and the Giver of Dreams will speak to you.”

  “What if the story turns out badly?”

  “Then you will have learned something about failure. For a writer, what does failure mean? I once worked for a man who kept all his failed stories in a big box, which he labeled FAILURES. He did not throw them away. He kept them in a corner of his study, because he found himself going to that box in search of a phrase, a name, a conversation that would be useful to him in the stories he did not consider failures. One day he made a new label for the box. WRONG TURNINGS, he wrote on it, because it occurred to him that a lifetime of writing is like a journey, full of detours, alas, but a detour is not a failure. Writers take detours because they are afraid to walk on the main road. They are afraid they will not succeed. Fear is the greatest impediment to the telling of any story.”

  “And what overcomes fear?” I asked.

  “I am not sure,” said the Guardian, “but I would say that no writer taking that journey should be without a strong sense of mystery. Do you like mysteries?”

  “I used to love mystery stories when I was a kid,” I confessed.

  “Which ones?”

  “Oh, you know—Nancy Drew.”

  The Guardian wrinkled his nose with distaste.

  “Those are not mystery stories. They are puzzles and puzzles can be solved. A real mystery cannot be solved. It can only be celebrated. Real mysteries are personal. What is mysterious to one person may be insignificant to the next. You don’t believe me? Listen, I used to work for a woman who never carried a purse. She carried her house key in her shoe and she never carried money. She owned no credit cards, no driver’s license. All her friends said, ‘My dear, you should carry a purse. You should never be without money or identification.’ Did I say all her friends? No, she had one friend who took a different point of view. He said, ‘What a mystery that you can go through life without carrying a purse! Why do the rest of us need money and identification and not you?’ From his interest in the minor mystery of a human habit sprang a story. Don’t all stories have their dark beginnings in such mysteries? Though you speak with the tongues of angels, if you have not mystery, you have nothing. I am only telling you what you already know. Do you remember the first time you understood the word mystery?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, but I do,” said the Guardian, “because in this place we never throw anything away. It was Ash Wednesday, you were eight years old. The priest’s voice lapped at your ears like waves. He was preaching on the Book of Job:

  Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in the eldest brother’s house:

  And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped to tell thee.

  “The saints in the glass windows had blackened their faces, the candles had burned down to stumps. Now the priest was intoning the names of the dead. Your mother, feeling chilly, reached over and buttoned your coat. You thought it was time to leave. Suddenly a woman’s voice from the darkened choir loft sang out:

  Sing, O my soul, the mystery o
f His body.

  “It woke you like a plunge into cold water. You looked at your mother’s forehead, marked with a cross of ashes like a tree in the forest marked to be cut down. And everyone around was so marked, this man, that woman, all separate, all alone. And you thought, What a mystery the body is! When this man leaves the earth, the sun will not shine on exactly this body again. When that woman dies, no one will ever again see exactly that face. And the woman singing of mystery; in a hundred years who will be left to praise her voice breaking into the dark?”

  The Guardian stopped speaking. His face seemed to fade, as if twilight had found even this place without windows to let in the weather.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s the time between morning and night. Soon you will wake up.”

  “Am I not awake now?”

  “Now you are crossing from darkness to morning. The dreams you dream at this hour you will remember, because you do not have to carry them very far.”

  In the silence that followed, I heard someone calling my name. Oh, here was the window to my room and the vine over the eaves about to bloom. I climbed on the sill and looked out on oak, hickory, beech, the land as it lay when only animals lived there, elk, moose, possum, bobcat, deer. They moved in a silent circle around the house. The Giver of Dreams is shining in my doorway, the Guardian has fallen asleep.

  There was once a lass who went out at the cry of dawn to seek her fortune, and she never came home again.3 Now I see the woods that hid her, the town on the other side that welcomed her. I hear her singing as she goes, and it’s her voice that will make her fortune, I know, and in a house at the edge of the woods I hear her mother and father calling her, for they don’t realize she’s riding the red-tailed deer at dawn, going to seek her fortune. Oh, she’ll never come home again. Not that one.

  I take paper and pen and I write her story.

  7

  Becoming a Writer

  I have been asked to give advice to young writers, but I can never endure advice unless it comes disguised as entertainment. So let me begin by telling you a story.

  First I should explain that I grew up in Ann Arbor. My father taught chemistry at the university for forty-six years. And while I was growing up, ours was the only family I knew that did not buy its clothes in a department store. Spring and fall, an ancient lady would arrive at our house in a car nearly as weathered as herself. Her name was Ella. She came from Owosso, Michigan, and she stayed for a week. She would set up her portable sewing machine in our sun room and plug in her radio and ask us, What clothes did we want her to make us this season?

  My mother and my sister prudently chose ready-made patterns from the big pattern books at Muehlig’s. My aunt sent Ella an assortment of dresses she’d bought on sale, with instructions to “fix them so I look like I have a little more on top and a little less in the behind.” I drew pictures of the dresses I wanted, leaning heavily on third-rate Victorian novels illustrated with consumptive young women in long skirts and blouses that ballooned at the shoulder and pinched at the wrist. To my girlfriends, who read Seventeen and wore cashmere sweaters and tailored skirts, I must have looked like the victim of a time warp. But Ella’s business was to sew, not to criticize. She would study my sketch, draw up a pattern, and send me forth to select the material.

  Velvet, wool, muslin, corduroy, heaped on tables and folded on chairs, flooded the sun room with promises of better things to come. One by one the fabrics, ample as flags, submitted to Ella’s shears and took shape. She snipped, she basted.

  “Try it on,” she said.

  Whatever I tried on was always full of pins. Whichever way I turned, the dress hit me, needled me. I stood with my arms straight out, as if directing the invisible traffic of needles and thread, while Ella crept round me on her knees, taking the measure of the hem, her tape measure dangling around her neck like a stole, her mouth so full of pins that she seemed to have grown whiskers. I turned, she pinned, and her radio told us its troubles. We listened to “Portia Faces Life,” “Ma Perkins,” “Stella Dallas, Backstage Wife,” we listened to ads for Oxydol and Rinso, we heard how many boxtops of both you needed to send for your free recipe file and earrings. To this day when I read the story of creation in the book of Genesis, when I hear God commanding the light to come out of hiding and the earth to bring forth grass and creeping things and every beast after its own kind, I see them all falling from Ella’s shears, waking to life under her needle. And behind God’s voice, I hear the still, small voices of Portia and Stella Dallas and Ma Perkins, who are picking up the pieces of their lives and carrying on.

  On the day of Ella’s departure, which was always after lunch, she would intone a long blessing over our food, in which she thanked God for my mother’s cooking and implored Him to keep her car from breaking down. As she drove away, we could see her sewing machine and her radio and our half-finished garments piled high in the back seat, watching over her. Three weeks later a large box would arrive in which we found all we’d asked for and more. The dresses were folded and pressed. Attached to each were the scraps, rolled neat as a prayer rug. Years of sewing had taught Ella never to throw anything away.

  One day my mother reminded me that Ella would not be around forever, and she bought me a sewing machine for Christmas and hired Ella to instruct me in its use. What Ella taught me about sewing has passed into my hands and become as automatic to me as tying my shoe. But more important than what she taught me about sewing was what she taught me about craft. An indifference to fashion. A respect for what is well designed and well made. Save all your scraps. Throw nothing away. If you don’t get it right the first time, take it apart and try again. Revise. Anything well done takes patience, experience, and a lot of time. And time is not given, it is made. “Five minutes, ten minutes, can always be found,” says William Carlos Williams in the foreword to his autobiography:

  I had my typewriter in my office desk. All I needed to do was to pull up the leaf to which it was fastened and I was ready to go. I worked at top speed. If a patient came in at the door while I was in the middle of a sentence, bang would go the machine—I was a physician.… When the patient left, up would come the machine. Finally, after eleven at night, when the last patient had been put to bed, I could always find the time to bang out ten or twelve pages.1

  And I think of Jane Austen, as one of her nieces recalled her, how she would sit quietly sewing by the fire in the library “and then would suddenly burst out laughing, jump up and run across the room to a table where pens and paper were lying, write something down, and then come back to the fire and go on quietly working as before.”2 A nephew adds that his Aunt Jane had

  no separate study to retire to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.3

  Learning to write, for me, is so bound up with learning to do other things that I sometimes ask myself, How do writers learn their craft? A few years ago, I was asked to judge a poetry competition. I was given forty manuscripts and told to choose the three whose authors I felt deserved a sizable sum of money. The more manuscripts I read, the more it seemed to me that all the poems had a single author. But nobody, I told myself, would go to such lengths to carry out a practical joke. Had the forty poets all studied with the same teacher? That didn’t seem likely, either. But they might have all read the same books. Everypoet—as I named the single voice in these manuscripts—had read his contemporaries. He had taken from them what they had in common, a language close to speech, sometimes indistinguishable from prose. But the variety of ex
perience and influences that resonates in the work of the best writers was absent. Reading Everypoet’s work was a little like hearing Bach played on a harmonica. Yet his poems were competent and as succinct as if a good editor had gone over them, taking out and paring down. I could not put my finger on the place where they went wrong. Though his range was small, Everypoet could write.

  When I was an undergraduate in Ann Arbor, I took a course called creative writing. I took it every semester. It was in this course that I first read Fitzgerald, Roethke, Bishop, Jarrell. Though the students read and discussed each other’s work, we always studied something besides ourselves. Yet if you ask me what I learned, I confess that I remember no precepts and only a few poems. But I do remember the people. The boy who spent the entire semester revising a single poem. The boy who carried three-by-five cards in his shirt pocket where some men carry handkerchiefs, on which—when he had a good audience—he would take copious notes. The girl who was rumored to have written five hundred sonnets over summer vacation. I did a rough calculation and figured she must have been writing them with both hands, simultaneously. And I remember a class, just before Christmas vacation, when our teacher, expecting that only the most serious students would show up, explicated one of his own poems. To this day, I remember how much experience a single line can carry.