The plump librarian gave me an encyclopedia of chemistry. Of alchemy she seemed never to have heard. The thin librarian gave me a book called Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists and warned me not to blow myself up with crazy experiments. The book contained directions for turning base metals into gold. But I found these directions quite impossible to follow. How could anyone set up an experiment from the following passages:
You must so join or mix gold and silver that they may not, by any possible means whatever, be separated. The reader, surely, need not be told that this is not a work of the hands. If you know not how to do this, you know nothing truly in our Art.
Farewell, dilligent reader. In reading these things, invocate the Spirit of Eternal Light; speak little, meditate much, and judge aright.1
Further reading gave me the key to this secret language. What many alchemists took to be the science of turning ordinary metal into gold was really a way of describing the spiritual disciplines that turn ordinary people into heroes and saints.
Now think for a moment what we as writers do. We transmute our personal experiences into works of art, which are impersonal and far more orderly and permanent than the lives that created them. The notebook I found by my father’s bed testified to his faith in the mystery of this process. He went to bed with the broken pieces of a problem in his head. By what alchemy did he wake in the night with the pieces gathered into a neat solution? By what alchemy do our stories, gathered from our experiences at diverse times and distant places, rise up in our imaginations mended and whole?
So often writing teachers tell their students, Write from experience. Write what you know. This is sound advice, but it is often taken to mean, Write about the people you know and the places you’ve visited. I believe the breadth of your experience as a writer depends on how well you can focus on whatever it is that humans of all times and places have in common. The range of your experience is less important than the depth with which you can imagine things. I like to imagine Shakespeare, a young writer, signing up for a class in creative writing at some large university and going for his first conference with his teacher. I like to imagine the teacher shaking his head and saying, “Now Bill, this history stuff is all very well, but why don’t you write from your own experience? You tell me this play is set in Denmark, but I don’t get a very strong sense of place. Why don’t you write about Stratford or London?”
But how to begin? How to include in your own experience the secret lives of angels and alchemists, librarians and wild geese? Take as your starting point a story as fantastic as it is familiar: Perrault’s version of “Cinderella.” Who can forget the scene in which the fairy godmother makes her first appearance?
At last the happy day arrived. Away they went, Cinderella watching them as long as she could keep them in sight. When she could no longer see them she began to cry. Her godmother found her in tears, and asked what was troubling her.
“I should like—I should like—”
She was crying so bitterly that she could not finish the sentence.
Said her godmother, who was a fairy:
“You would like to go to the ball, would you not?”
“Ah, yes,” said Cinderella, sighing.
“Well, well,” said her godmother, “promise to be a good girl and I will arrange for you to go.”
She took Cinderella into her room and said:
“Go into the garden and bring me a pumpkin.”
Cinderella went at once and gathered the finest that she could find. This she brought to her godmother, wondering how a pumpkin could help in taking her to the ball.
Her godmother scooped it out, and when only the rind was left, struck it with her wand. Instantly the pumpkin was changed into a beautiful coach, gilded all over.
Then she went and looked in the mousetrap, where she found six mice all alive. She told Cinderella to lift the door of the mousetrap a little, and as each mouse came out she gave it a tap with her wand, whereupon it was transformed into a fine horse. So that here was a fine team of six dappled mouse-gray horses.
But she was puzzled to know how to provide a coachman.
“I will go and see,” said Cinderella, “if there is not a rat in the rattrap. We could make a coachman of him.”
“Quite right,” said her godmother, “go and see.”
Cinderella brought in the rattrap, which contained three big rats. The fairy chose one specially on account of his elegant whiskers.
As soon as she had touched him he turned into a fat coachman with the finest mustachios that ever were seen.
“Now go into the garden and bring me the six lizards which you will find behind the water-butt.”
No sooner had they been brought than the godmother turned them into six lackeys, who at once climbed up behind the coach in their braided liveries, and hung on there as if they had never done anything else all their lives.2
The storyteller focuses on Cinderella. But suppose we change the focus? Suppose we tell the story from the point of view of a less conspicuous character.
If I were to rewrite “Cinderella,” whose point of view would I choose? Not the fairy godmother’s, for her powers surpass my understanding. Not the wicked stepsisters; I’ve already met them in literature oftener than I care to remember. I would choose the rat at the bottom of the garden, who for three nights running finds himself transformed into a coachman. I knew very well what the bottom of a garden is like, with its compost heap and broken flowerpots. And by letting the rat tell his autobiography, I can show that the story of the animal who becomes human is as true and familiar as the rags-to-riches story of Cinderella herself.
Consider the rat’s predicament. The first night of his human life, his transformation terrifies and astonishes him. The second night he is less terrified but no less astonished; he can hardly believe the miracle has happened to him again. By the third night he is eager to escape from the rot of the garden to the revelry of the palace; all the next day he reviews the events of the nights before, and by the fourth night he is sitting in the pumpkin patch, waiting to be chosen. Nothing happens, not that night, nor the next, nor the next. Never again will the rat turned coachman hand the lovely girl into her coach. Never again will he wait outside the brilliantly lit palace in the evening, chatting with the coachmen of great families who do not know that only hours before, their acquaintance was one of their oldest enemies. Perhaps they shared a bottle of wine while they waited and exchanged gossip about their employers. Did the fairy godmother give our rat coachman a past? Or did he sit silent and bewildered, wondering why he alone arrived at this place without memories?
Did he come to enjoy these summer nights, beating time with his foot to the music as it drifted out the French doors, propped open to cool the dancers? Did he wait eagerly on the fourth night for the amazing change to come over him? Did he think it would happen to him forever? And after Cinderella married her prince, does he find himself exiled by his strange experiences, condemned to live among creatures that can never understand him? Remember, he has acquired human memories and a taste for human pleasures, and he has spoken the language of men and women who like to make jokes and to tell stories. What happens to one who is born at the bottom of a garden, thrust briefly into a life of splendor, and then expected to return forever to the garbage heap that bred him? In changing the point of view, you also change the plot. “Cinderella” contains as many stories as there are writers to invent them.
It is important for writers to know both the uses and the limits of direct experience. The man who never fought in a war may describe a battle much more vividly than the man who did. I remember as a child the day our neighbor’s son came home from Europe in 1944. He had won a Purple Heart for surviving the war and half a dozen ribbons for doing the right thing at the right time. His parents invited us over to hear the story of his adventures and to see his souvenirs. I did not know then that souvenir means memory, and that memory, to quote from my first alchemy book, is not a work of the hands
.
It was a Sunday afternoon in July. My mother and father and sister led the way. Aunts, cousins, boyfriends, missionaries, and even my grandmother trooped across the yard to the house next door. The hero, a tan young man with short hair, was sitting in a big Morris chair in the middle of his parents’ living room beside the coffee table, which held his trophies. There were two trophies, one boxed, the other wrapped in a white handkerchief.
He waited till we were quiet and then he took the little black box from the table and lifted the lid. There on its bed of white satin lay the Purple Heart. To me it looked like a chicken’s heart; I had imagined something bigger. The hero said, “I won this in the fighting at Normandy. I got a piece of shrapnel in my leg.”
We ooh’d and ah’d. What was shrapnel? I did not know. Before I could ask him, he reached for the second object. Slowly he unwrapped it and held it up for our approval.
“A German Luger,” he explained. “I took it from the body of a dead officer.”
There were murmurs of “Imagine that!” and “Good God!” I admired the pistol politely and waited for him to tell his story. But all he said was, “I got this at Normandy,” and “Yeah, I fought at Normandy.” Nothing of how he felt, of whom he fought beside, of what the battle looked and sounded like. And at last I understood that the Purple Heart and the pistol were substitutes for the story he did not know how to tell. They were his souvenirs, his memories.
The first storyteller who made the faces of war vivid to me was Stephen Crane. At the time of writing The Red Badge of Courage, he had no direct experience of life on the battlefield. Here is Crane himself, writing to a correspondent in England about the reviewers who doubted such a feat was possible:
They all insist … that I am a veteran of the civil war, whereas the fact is, as you know, I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle. I know what the psychologists say, that a fellow can’t comprehend a condition that he has never experienced … of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field, or else fighting is a hereditary instinct, and I wrote intuitively; … I endeavoured to express myself in the simplest and most concise way.3
There are two ways of viewing Crane’s performance, as a kind of deception or a kind of magic. You know by this time which way I choose. For it seems to me that writers have always been the best magicians, the direct descendants of those true alchemists and sages who tried to refine what is transitory into what is eternal. We take for our medium a language, used and abused by everyone, and we make of it something that has a beauty and permanence not found in ordinary lives.
I still remember the journey that first showed me the power of the storyteller to make the world of tables and chairs as vivid and uncommon to me as the angel itself. When I was a child, I heard a great many fairy stories, not at my mother’s knee, but at the cold foot of a large wooden radio. The voices passed through a piece of fine silk covering the speaker, to which I was as attentive as if I were hearing a confession. On Saturday morning my sister and I listened to the fairy stories dramatized for children on a program called “Let’s Pretend.” From the voices we had a clear image of all the characters. There was a witch voice, a princess voice, a queen voice, an old king voice, and the voices of animals, handmaidens, and churls, as required. We knew every corner of the poor man’s hut and the rich man’s palace. We knew all the terrors of the enchanted forest. We knew the commercial for Cream of Wheat, which my mother never bought, and we listened till a man’s voice announced that this was CBS in New York.
Of New York I knew nothing except that according to Aunt Jessie it was bigger than life, like Jerusalem or Babylon in the Bible. She had lived in New York for two years before leaving her husband and taking up with Uncle Bill, the schoolmaster who first saw the angel in our parlor. My mother called her stories “fantastic,” and indeed they were.
In New York, said my aunt, everything is better. She bought the New York Times on Sunday, yearned over the advertisements, and wrote away for bath towels and dresses. She told stories about climbing up a skinny stairway right into the Statue of Liberty’s stomach. The streets of New York, she said, had more taxis and more people than any other city in the world. And the department stores! You could live in Macy’s for six months and want for nothing.
When I was five, Aunt Jessie won a hundred dollars on a radio program called “Name That Tune.” A few days before the New Year, she dropped in to announce her good fortune. As the holiday approached, the house filled up with relatives. The night before New Year’s Eve, I heard Aunt Jessie telling my mother about the wonders of Times Square. She was very persuasive. When my mother woke my sister Kirsten and me the next morning, we saw two suitcases in the hall.
“Eat fast,” said Mother. “We’re taking the train to New York.”
The train left at six. Mother had risen at four and turned on the electric heater in our room and brought up our breakfast on a tray so we could dress and eat at the same time. All over the house we heard the muffled commotion of aunts and cousins thumping out of bed, running water, flushing toilets, and exhorting each other to hurry. It was understood that my father would stay at home, for he preferred to travel alone. The rest of us traveled in a flock that included all able-bodied relatives, even my grandmother, though she was senile and could not always remember where she was.
The taxi that morning crept down icy streets to the train station. Snow had nearly erased it from the landscape.
In the waiting room the stationmaster was building a fire, parrying it with a poker. Kirsten and I stood as close as we dared and stretched out our hands. Grandmother asked my mother why Grandfather was not coming with us, and my mother reminded her that he had died two years before. A few old men and one elderly couple dozed on the benches, as patiently as if they were sitting in a doctor’s office.
Suddenly the old men stood up.
“Train coming!” shrieked my cousin John. He was younger than I but he could yell louder.
Everyone rushed outside to the platform.
“When the train comes—” shouted my mother over the mounting roar, but the hissing of the train swept her words away. The conductor swung through a cloud of steam, threw down the steps for the car nearest us, and helped us inside.
How dark, how quiet everything looked! In the first four cars we passed dozens of soldiers, huddled together or sprawled across the seats. The windows wept steam, the light from the tracks touched a knee here, an elbow there. My mother led the way to the civilian cars, where we found seats but not together.
Because of the darkness, I slept. Day never broke at all. The snow lightened the air outside, but no one could assign it a time or call it afternoon. My cousins and my sister and I played “Old Maid” while Aunt Jessie cheered us with stories of the Automat, where you could choose your own lunch from behind hundreds of glass doors. And Chinatown, where you couldn’t read the newspapers, but you could eat your breakfast with chopsticks. And the throngs of people and cars on the streets—ah, she assured us, then you’ll know you’re in a real city.
At ten that night, the train arrived at Grand Central Station. The main lobby was dark save for one ticket window and the clock over the information booth. Aunt Jessie herded us to the exit, where she reminded us that hundreds of taxis would be swarming like a salmon run. As we stepped outside, she gave a sharp cry of amazement.
Not a single car passed us. Not a person either. Between walls of snow the streets shone like a glacial tunnel. Aunt Jessie asked the ticket seller where she could call a taxi. Behind silver bars he shook his head.
“No taxis, lady, on account of the storm. You got to walk.”
It was at this moment we discovered that nobody had remembered to make hotel reservations.
“I know a good hotel in Gramercy Park,” said Aunt Jessie. “Let’s go.”
We walked briskly down the middle of the empty street. My mother and Aunt Jessie skillfully propelled Grandmother
between them. The snowbanks on both sides of us seemed to exhale a ghastly breath that numbed my face and hands. We walked to the hotel without meeting another soul and found ourselves in a deserted lobby. Aunt Jessie left us to collapse into the overstuffed chairs and stepped up to the desk and rang for the clerk, who appeared at last, rubbing his eyes. After a brief, inaudible discussion, she returned to us, frowning.
“All the rooms are taken on account of the convention.”
“What convention?” asked my mother, bewildered.
“The convention being held here,” explained Aunt Jessie. “Of chefs,” she added.
The desk clerk, seeing our distress, came forward.
“I can offer you one room, if you’re really desperate.”
We all felt better at once.
“A storeroom in the basement is empty now, and I could have cots brought in.”
The storeroom had no windows, only chunks of glass in the ceiling, which formed part of the sidewalk overhead; sometimes the shadows of a lone passer-by’s feet darkened them, clicking closer and closer, then farther and farther away. Two bellhops rolled in eight cots. There was no other furniture, save a large cardboard Santa Claus holding a bottle of Coca-Cola, leaning against one wall. Mother inquired about the bathroom, and the bellhops pointed into the vast darkness beyond our door.
“If you walk to the end of the boiler room, lady,” said one, “you can use the janitor’s toilet.”
We pattered down the dark corridor in our nightgowns, through a place that fitted almost perfectly my primitive idea of hell. Men sat by roaring furnaces, stoking them and watching us sullenly. Waiting.
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