My mother closed the door and turned off the light and everyone climbed into bed.
We lay on our cots in the darkness, sweating and staring up at the bottoms of boots and galoshes. The disembodied voice of my Aunt Jessie described the excitement of New York at that hour as clearly as if she were seeing it with a third eye, a magic one, that the rest of us lacked. Now crowds were gathering in Times Square, now Guy Lombardo was playing “Auld Lang Syne.” And here we were in New York City, where the new year touched land first, before it flowed out to the rest of America. In spite of the heat, I shivered.
“What would you most like to do in New York?” asked Aunt Jessie suddenly.
As nobody could see to whom she was speaking, nobody answered. Finally I said, “I want to see ‘Let’s Pretend.’”
The next morning we set out for CBS to watch the program my sister and my cousin and I had faithfully followed for so many years. I do not remember how far we walked, only that I lost all feeling in my hands and feet, and I saw nothing of note except high hummocks of snow under which, my aunt assured me, lay secret Cadillacs and magnificent limousines.
I had never visited a radio station. Certainly I did not expect to see an empty stage and an empty auditorium. The music that opened the program every Saturday suggested an orchestra and the applause promised huge crowds, not these rows of silent seats. I looked around. Suddenly I realized that on this snowy morning our family was the entire audience of “Let’s Pretend.”
Now the actors were gathering around the two microphones standing at either end of the stage, and a man who called himself Uncle Ted was welcoming us to New York and warning us not to whistle as this would unsettle the microphones.
“But when I give you the signal,” he said, “you can clap. Clap as hard as you can. Think of all those kids out there, listening to you. Clap like you were a thousand.”
The story began. It was Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the little mermaid who trades her beautiful voice for the chance to be human. To be human, says the mermaid’s grandmother, means to be immortal. Only humans have souls.
I watched the actors with growing astonishment. The voices I knew so well did not belong to witches and princesses but to men and women. How I had been deceived into believing in a world more splendid and tragic than this one! Even New York City itself, so hidden from my sight by the snow, seemed an outrageous lie. Why, then, did I feel a rising excitement at being here?
A burst of music announced the end of the story. Now Uncle Ted was waving for us to clap. The mermaid had lost her prince hut won her soul. From mermaid to angel. That story. I clapped for the story. I clapped for the lost city, hidden under its shroud of snow, and for my aunt, who made me believe in it anyhow. I clapped till my palms ached for the children all over America who heard the voices and saw the mermaid. I clapped for the actors on their bare stage. In a world of tables and chairs and very human beings, I clapped for the angel, for the supreme illusion that is art.
9
The Well-tempered Falsehood: The Art of Storytelling
When I was a child, my older sister and I had a game that we played on the long summer afternoons when supper was still hours away and we had nothing to do. We sat in our swings, too hot to move, until one of us started the game, and then we would forget the heat, the small yard with its mosquitoes, the impending supper, everything.
The game was simple. It required two people: the teller and the listener. The teller’s task was to describe a place as vividly as possible. The object of the game was to convince the listener she was there. The teller had to carry on the description until the listener said, “Stop. I’m there.”
I do not remember all the places we visited in the course of this game, but I do remember the very last time we played it. I was the teller and the place I wished to evoke was paradise. I did not know then that the damned are generally livelier than the saved, and that even Dante and Milton had wrestled with the problem of making virtue entertaining. Emboldened by ignorance, however, I began.
First of all, I filled paradise with the rich furniture of our own church. I put in the brass angels that held the candles and the stained glass windows in which old men read the Gospel to lions, dragons, and assorted penitent beasts. For how could I make paradise pleasant unless I made it comfortable? And how could I make it comfortable unless I made it familiar?
So I put in the hum of the electric fan behind the pulpit and the smell of peppermint that the head usher gave off instead of sweat. I fear it was a rather tedious description, and if I were to describe paradise for you today, it would be something like spring in San Francisco. And hell would be some bone-melting heat wave in New York City.
But however conventional the line I handed my sister, it was a lot more concrete than any account of the kingdom of God I’d heard in Sunday school, where heaven was treated the way my parents treated sex. Yes, it exists. Now don’t ask any more questions.
At the height of my telling, something unforeseen happened. My sister burst into tears.
“Stop!” she cried. “I’m there!”
I looked at her in astonishment. I knew she cried at weddings and funerals. But to cry at a place pieced together out of our common experience and our common language, a place that would vanish the minute I stopped talking! That passed beyond the bounds of the game altogether. I knew I could never equal that performance, and we never played the game again.
The joy of being the teller stayed with me, however, and when people asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “I want to tell stories.”
And the people to whom I said this always remarked, “Oh, you want to work on a newspaper, do you?”
I grew up thinking that if you wanted to tell stories, you had to go through the initiation rite of working on a newspaper, and that all writers had to do this before they could become proper storytellers. When I was ten, I asked my mother, “How do I get a job on a newspaper?”
For it seemed sensible to get past this hurdle as quickly as possible.
“You apply for the job,” said my mother. “But, of course, nobody will hire you without experience.”
“But how can I get experience if I need experience to get a job?”
“You could start your own newspaper,” said my mother. “You could start it this summer.”
In the summer we lived in a small town on the edge of a lake. On the opposite side of the lake stood a gravel pit, which employed nearly all the men in the town. The quality of life in this town did not encourage reading. There was no library and no bookshop. There was not even a Christian Science reading room.
At night people went fishing or fighting. Lying on my stomach at two in the morning, my face pressed to the bedroom window screen, I watched the man across the street drag his wife by the hair down the front steps of his house while her lover fled out the back window. I wondered how these people would like a neighborhood newspaper. I wondered if they would read it. I knew it would have to be free, as nobody in the whole town would be willing to buy it.
But there was an even bigger problem than finding readers. I hadn’t the faintest idea how to gather news. Census takers were badly treated in these parts, and even the Jehovah’s Witnesses had learned to leave us alone.
So I put the idea of a newspaper aside, until one night the lady next door dropped by for a visit. She was a large woman who made it her business to know everybody else’s. She plunked herself down in our best chair to exchange gossip with my mother, who never had any but who knew how to listen to the great events of the day. What were these events? Ray Lomax was out casting for bass and hooked Mrs. Penny’s baby through the ear lobe, John Snyder had been drunk five nights running, Tina O’Brien was pregnant by somebody else’s husband, and so it went. These were the plain facts. Our neighbor’s description of these facts would have done credit to the New York Post.
She paused long enough to smile at my sister and me. We were sitting at the dining-room table
with our paper and crayons, and we smiled back.
“You like to draw?” she asked.
We nodded. She did not know that we had quit drawing the minute she opened her mouth and were transcribing every word she said. Here was news enough for ten newspapers! After she left, my mother censored what could be construed as libel, and my sister copied out the news in that anonymous schoolgirl hand she saved for thank-you notes and party invitations. We ran off our first edition on the wet face of a hectograph press, and we hung twenty-five copies of the Stoney Lake News in the living room to dry. The next day I went forth to deliver it.
We were an instant success. There is nothing people enjoy reading about so much as themselves. To see yourself in print—it gives you a kind of status. You are worthy of notice to someone besides your mother.
When I look over those newspapers now, I see the real news was not the events themselves but the people who lived them and who narrated these events to me. I heard some wild stories and I wrote them as I heard them. And I have all those people to blame for my prejudice toward fiction that is to be heard as well as read. In my mind, writing a story for a reader cannot be separated from telling a story to a listener.
I still marvel at how easy it is to tell a story, as opposed to writing a story. Collecting the news in that small town, I met people who could tell stories. Stories that left you breathless with suspense. Stories that made you laugh till your stomach hurt. All my storytellers had one thing in common, however. They would have balked at writing their own words down. They would have found writing stories very nearly impossible. But telling stories was for them as simple as conversation. Many years after the Stoney Lake News went the way of all pulp, I was reading Tristram Shandy and I came across a statement that brought back my brief career as a journalist. “Writing,” says Laurence Sterne, “when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.” And I remembered, ironically, all those men and women who told me stories and who read little and wrote nothing.
The very old and the very young are natural storytellers. When you are very old, you narrate your past and it sounds like fiction. And when you are very young, you invent a past and it sounds like fact. Either way, all it takes is a listener to get you going.
I still envy the ease with which my son, at the age of seven, could tell a story. He would begin with no idea and no rough draft and no plan. But at ten minutes of eight, with bedtime in view, he would start spinning his tale. If he made it very exciting, he could prolong bedtime a whole hour. The problems of dialogue and character and plot did not trouble him. He moved swiftly from one crazy episode to the next. And listening to my son, I remembered the original goal of the storyteller: to entertain.
Let me say right now that there are many ways of entertaining a reader. Kafka and Joyce and Borges and Pynchon show us just how complex and diverse are the entertainments we choose. But I am dealing here with simpler fare, with the process of storytelling in a less subjective form. I am going to start with the first book that kept me up all night because I couldn’t put it down. That book is Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
I still go back to folk tales and fairy tales when I want to lose myself for a few hours and come back to myself refreshed. Always the same thing happens. I read perhaps two stories and resolve to read no more, for I have to do the laundry or scrub the kitchen floor. But I happen to glance at the opening sentence of a third story, and the pull is irresistible:
One day an old man and his wife were sitting in front of their poor hut, resting from their work, when a magnificent carriage drawn by four black stallions came driving up and a richly dressed gentleman stepped out.1
And now I can’t put the story down until I know who the stranger is and why he has come.
Or take another story, which opens not with an unfamiliar guest but with a familiar grief:
It is a long time ago now, as much as two thousand years maybe, that there was a rich man and he had a wife and she was beautiful and good, and they loved each other very much but they had no children even though they wanted some so much, the wife prayed and prayed for one both day and night, and still they did not and they did not get one.2
And with that sentence I am hooked. I know the story will tell me how she did get one. Fairy tales generally start at the point when somebody’s fortunes change, for better or worse. And I know that the woman in this story will not get her child the way most of humanity gets children. Fairy tales deal with exceptional events rather than ordinary ones. And as I read on, I am not disappointed:
In front of their house was a yard and in the yard stood a juniper tree. Once, in wintertime, the woman stood under the tree and peeled herself an apple, and as she was peeling the apple she cut her finger and the blood fell onto the snow. “Ah,” said the woman and sighed a deep sigh, and she looked at the blood before her and her heart ached. “If I only had a child as red as blood and as white as snow.” And as she said it, it made her feel very happy, as if it was really going to happen. And so she went into the house, and a month went by, the snow was gone; and two months, and everything was green; and three months, and the flowers came up out of the ground; and four months, and all the trees in the woods sprouted and the green branches grew dense and tangled with one another and the little birds sang so that the woods echoed, and the blossoms fell from the trees; and so five months were gone, and she stood under the juniper tree and it smelled so sweet her heart leaped and she fell on her knees and was beside herself with happiness; and six months had gone by, the fruit grew round and heavy and she was very still, and seven months, and she snatched the juniper berries and ate them so greedily she became sad and ill; and so the eighth month went by, and she called her husband and cried and said, “When I die, bury me under the juniper.” And she was comforted and felt happy, but when the nine months were gone, she had a child as white as snow and as red as blood and when she saw it she was so happy that she died.
And so her husband buried her under the juniper tree and began to cry and cried very bitterly; and then for a time he cried more gently and when he had cried some more he stopped crying and more time passed and he took himself another wife.3
Now consider for a moment what a miracle of economy you have just read. In two paragraphs a year passes but is not glossed over carelessly, one character dies, another is born, and a third remarries, and the storyteller shows all this so simply yet so concretely that I think nobody could wish for more details. There is something about the process of telling a story that forces you to come right to the point. When you are writing a story, how often does the simple action seem insufficient? And how often do you feel you must analyze or explain it? But when you are telling a story, your first impulse is to create your characters through what they do. You, the author, become the invisible medium through which they live.
I am, to be sure, dealing here with a kind of fiction that emphasizes a linear plot. I know there are many kinds of storytellers and many writers who write as if they were talking to us. I have already mentioned Laurence Sterne. I could also have mentioned Mark Twain.
But the great books of these men were written, first of all, to be read, not just heard, and although they can be read aloud magnificently, a clear understanding of their work comes only when you have the books in your hand and can reread some chapters and compare others, and follow themes and characters over many pages. These are the pleasures of long fiction. When I speak of storytelling here, I am talking about the story as it is told to a listener.
I think it is good for writers to have that experience of telling a story. In my writing classes at Vassar, I sometimes try an exercise designed to give students that experience. We make up a story together. It’s rather like making a crazy quilt. You tell your episode, and when your imagination fails, you pass it on to your neighbor, who picks up where you left off. I start by giving my students a list of ten or fifteen characters, which they may use if they are desperate or which they may abandon if they wish to ma
ke up their own. The list might go something like this: man, daughter, son, grandfather, magician, devil, car salesman, banker, angel, thief. I start the story by introducing a character whose strong passion for someone or something is likely to get him into difficulty. I say, “Once upon a time there was a woman who loved cars more than anything else in the world. And one day she—” Then I pinpoint a student with my nearsighted stare and say, “Miss Smith, you take it from there.”
And though Miss Smith looks back at me as if she has just seen the last Judgment, she generally finds she can take it from there. Since the story is a communal affair, she isn’t afraid of failure, which I think is often the underlying cause when writers can’t write. And since the characters are given to her, she doesn’t have that feeling so many of us have when facing a blank page: in the beginning was the void, and darkness was upon the face of the page.
Most important, she has a main character whose ruling passion—in this case, a passion for cars—will create the action of the story. And thereby hangs the tale. I have found the experience of telling a story in this way gives us the rare chance to be objective narrators. For once in our lives we are not talking about ourselves.
Let me go back to the woman who loved cars and remind you that characters with an obsession or a passion for something they don’t have are common enough in folk tales. “The Juniper Tree,” from which I quoted earlier, opens with a woman’s overpowering desire to have a child. I could have picked dozens of other examples.
And we all know writers far more sophisticated than the tellers of folk tales who choose to write of such characters. Take, for example, Chekhov’s story, “The Man in a Shell,” which deals with a character who is obsessed with isolating himself from the world around him. Chekhov describes him as follows:
There are not a few people in the world, temperamentally unsociable, who try to withdraw into a shell like a hermit crab or a snail.… Why, not to go far afield, there was Belikov, a colleague of mine, a teacher of Greek, who died in our town about two months ago. You have heard of him, no doubt. The curious thing about him was that he wore rubbers, and a warm coat with an interlining, and carried an umbrella even in the finest weather. And he kept his umbrella in its cover and his watch in a gray chamois case, and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, his penknife too was in a little case; and his face seemed to be in a case too, because it was always hidden in his turned-up collar. He wore dark spectacles and a sweater, stuffed his ears with cotton-wool, and when he got into a cab always told the driver to put up the hood. In short, the man showed a constant and irrepressible inclination to keep a covering about himself … which would isolate him and protect him from outside influences. Actuality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in a state of continual agitation, and perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the present, he would always laud the past and things that had never existed, and the dead languages that he taught were in effect for him the same rubbers and umbrella in which he sought concealment from real life.4
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