Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  Now why choose such a character for the subject of a story? Because the story begins at the point when such a character meets someone or something that brings him out of his shell. When the man’s friends conspire to marry him off, what do you think he does? I will not spoil your pleasure in reading the story by giving away the ending.

  I once tried to write a story about a man ruled by a passion for telling lies. I called it “The Tailor Who Told the Truth,” because in the last scene, he was cured of his passion for lying, and why hold a penitent man’s past failings against him forever? Descriptions of stories are always awkward, so let me quote the opening paragraph:

  In Germantown, New York, on Cherry Street, there lived a tailor named Morgon Axel who, out of long habit, could not tell the truth. As a child he told small lies to put a bright surface on a drab life; as a young man he told bigger lies to get what he wanted. He got what he wanted and went on lying until now when he talked about himself, he did not know the truth from what he wanted the truth to be. The stories he told were often more plausible to him than his own life.

  I found the process of writing this story very different from writing about my own experience or my immediate observation of someone else’s. In the first place, the tailor was born with a peculiar autonomy, a sort of arrogance, as if I hadn’t created him at all. He had already selected the details about himself he wished me to know, and I found myself describing places and situations quite foreign to me. The first half of the story is set in Germany before World War I, up to World War II. I have not visited Germany for at least twenty-five years, and my impressions of Germany between these wars come primarily from the old photograph albums kept by my parents, who lived there briefly during the twenties.

  My ignorance did not deter the tailor, however. One night I dreamed that the tailor and I, his creator, had an awful row about the direction I wanted the story to go. I told him the plot, the action as I saw it. He told me that I had my story all wrong, it hadn’t happened that way at all, and why did I insist on changing the truth?

  Well, he won and I wrote the story his way. Let me remind you that “The Tailor Who Told the Truth” is a written story; that is, I did not tell it out loud to a listener and write it down afterward. Though for me there is a close connection between telling and writing, they are, in the end, two different processes. But I believe that the more you tell stories, and the more you listen to stories, the more it will affect the way you write stories.

  How?

  First, you find yourself creating characters who are not just individuals but also types. I do not mean stereotypes, those unrealized abstractions on which so many stories have foundered. I mean types of people. The misanthrope. The miser. The martyr. The woman who wants a child. The man who lives in a shell. A character who is both an individual and a type is larger than life. Let us call him an archetype; he is some facet of ourselves that we have in common with the rest of humanity.

  Second, you find you are not dealing with individual situations but with the forces that created them. I call these forces good and evil, though I would not name them as such in a story. Stories that develop archetypal situations have the truth and the authority of proverbs, no matter how fantastic the particular events they describe.

  Third, you find yourself using fewer adjectives and more verbs, because verbs make the story move. You don’t develop your character by describing the kind of man he is—a bad man, a good man, an indifferent man; you develop him by showing what he does. It’s up to the reader to pass judgment.

  Fourth, you the writer, become less important than the story you have to tell. And thank heaven for that. Which of us doesn’t enjoy telling tall tales where we can lie outrageously without having to justify ourselves?

  So far, so good. But we are readers and writers, not storytellers sitting around a fire, spinning tales out of a common heritage. I suppose it’s the desire to bring the two together that leads some writers to put a story into the mouth of a narrator, at one remove from the writer himself. In “The Man in the Shell,” from which I quoted earlier, Chekhov uses a narrator, so that we have a story within a story.

  Let me suggest two reasons for using a narrator to tell your story. First, you may want a limited point of view rather than an omniscient point of view. Second, you may want the economy that a story has when it is told rather than written. Isaac Bashevis Singer once explained to an interviewer why he so often puts his story into the mouth of an old village woman instead of narrating it himself. He says:

  Why I like narrators? There is a good reason for that: because when I write a story without a narrator I have to describe things, while if the narrator is a woman she can tell you many things almost in one sentence. Because in life when you sit down to tell a story you don’t act like a writer. You don’t describe too much. You jump, you digress and this gives to the story speed and drama … it comes out especially good when you let an old woman tell a story. In a moment she’s here, and a moment she’s there. And because of this you feel almost that a human being is talking to you, and you don’t need the kind of description which you expect when the writer himself is telling the story.5

  To illustrate Singer’s point, I want to quote from the opening paragraph of one of his stories. It is called “Passions.”

  “When a man persists he can do things which one might think can never be done,” Zalman the glazier said. “In our village, Radoszyce, there was a simple man, a village peddler, Lieb Belkes. He used to go from village to village, selling the peasant women kerchiefs, glass beads, perfume, all kinds of gilded jewelry. And he would buy from them a measure of buckwheat, a wreath of garlic, a pot of honey, a sack of flax. He never went farther than the hamlet of Byszcz, five miles from Radoszyce. He got the merchandise from a Lublin salesman, and the same man bought his wares from him. This Lieb Belkes was a common man but pious. On the Sabbath he read his wife’s Yiddish Bible. He loved most to read about the land of Israel. Sometimes he would stop the cheder boys and ask, ‘Which is deeper—the Jordan or the Red Sea?’ ‘Do apples grow in the Holy Land?’ ‘What language is spoken by the natives there?’ The boys used to laugh at him. He looked like someone from the Holy Land himself—black eyes, a pitch-black beard, and his face was also swarthy.”6

  Singer’s story is a long way from “The Juniper Tree,” but a number of things in that paragraph will show you that their roots grow in the same place, the archetypal obsessions of man. The opening sentence directs me to the point of the story, which, like a fable, demonstrates a simple proverb: the man who persists can do the impossible. The man who wants to go to the Holy Land will find a way to get there.

  Singer recognizes that a man’s actions are often inseparable from the objects that make up the fabric of his life. He also knows that we cannot see or touch an abstraction. And so he gives us garlic and perfume to smell, and honey and buckwheat to taste, and jewelry and kerchiefs to please the eye, and speech to please the ear. The speech is what I call essential speech in a story; that is, I could recognize this character by his speech later on, even if Singer chose not to identify him. The opposite of essential speech is small talk, which does not directly express a man or woman’s deepest needs, but which is really a way of avoiding them.

  Now suppose you have resolved to try writing as if you were telling a story. You are ready to simplify your style and to emphasize action and plot more than you may ever wish to do again. But there is one more problem you will have to confront, and I have saved it for the last because it is the most unsettling and, at the same time, the most exhilarating. When you tell a story, you find that without knowing how or why, you cross over easily from the natural to the supernatural as if you felt absolutely no difference between them.

  By supernatural, let me hasten to add, I do not mean ghosts, although ghosts of one kind or another may blow through your story and make themselves at home there. I mean the visible, tangible world released from the laws that, in ordinary experience, separate time f
rom place. You know from your own experience that the supernatural is no farther away than your own dreams at night. I do not think there has ever been or ever will be a writer who does not draw on the healing chaos of dreams for the material of stories. Here is a world of wild and fearful happenings, which mercifully vanish when we open our eyes. But occasionally these happenings shine through our daytime lives and illuminate them.

  When I am writing stories, I forget that many people do not read fiction, because they believe a book that is neither truthful nor instructive is a waste of time. And fiction, they believe, is not truthful but only made up. It is not instructive but only entertaining. Though my father read stories as a child, when he became a man he put away childish things. He died at the age of ninety-two, he was nearly sixty when I was born, and I believe he read his last piece of fiction in freshman English when he was eighteen. All the years of my growing up, he read nothing of mine except an occasional poem I wrote for his birthday when I didn’t have enough money to buy him my standard present of black socks.

  Then one day, in his ninetieth year, he picked up a book of my stories and he started to read it. To his astonishment, he found himself in that book, a character in my stories, and like all characters, a fabricated being and yet a real one. In that book I was still trying to describe paradise, but now it was not a place. It was an experience occurring in time but not bound by it.

  My father sat in his chair and read. He read one page for an hour. He never said a word to me, he never made a sound, and though he never cried in my presence when I was a child, now the tears were running down his face. He never said, “Stop, I’m there,” the way my sister did when we played our game so many years before, but it was the same game nonetheless, and we are all players. It requires two people, the teller and the listener. The teller tells the story he has made out of bits he has seen and pieces he has heard. His telling brings these fragments together, and in that healing synthesis, he gives the wasted hours of our lives an order they don’t have and a radiance that only God and the artist can perceive. We get up, we go to work, we come home dead tired, and sometimes we wonder what we are doing on this planet. And we know that in the great schemelessness of things, our own importance is a lie. Is the object of the game to tell that lie? Yes, to tell the lie. But in the telling, to make it true.

  10

  The Spinning Room: Symbols and Storytellers

  When a friend asked me recently who my ancestors were, I told her they were farmers, clock-makers, aristocrats, and scoundrels. I did not tell the truth. My ancestors were squirrels. How else could the members of my family have acquired such a passion for hiding things? Once my mother forgot where she’d hidden the family silver, as squirrels forget where they have buried their acorns. The loss of a dozen place settings was cause for inconvenience but not for alarm.

  “They’re not lost,” she said. “They’re in the house.”

  The place settings came to light when the piano tuner was summoned to find out why our piano rasped like a snare drum.

  “You can’t imagine the number of people I know who hide their silver in the piano,” the tuner told her. “You’ve got to do better than that.”

  My father hid nothing except his private tube of toothpaste, which he kept under the handkerchiefs in his bureau drawer. After brushing his teeth, he always rolled up the tube, neat as a window shade, for he could not bear to use the tube that the rest of us had squeezed and punched out of shape. But except for his toothpaste, it seemed he had nothing worth hiding. Or so I believed until some years after he died, when I was reading through the pocket diaries he kept for sixty years. Here are some representative entries:

  April 2: Today it rained half an inch.

  April 6: Today I walked downtown and back.

  April 10: Temperature today 65°.

  He was, I knew, a man of few words. No man ever had fewer words to say about his own wedding day than my father, who on that occasion wrote in his diary, “Today I married Marge Sheppard.”

  To my mother he explained that he never put down anything personal. Years later I realized that in his brevity he too was a hider. There are two ways of hiding something in writing. You leave it out, or you disguise it. What is left out is lost. What is disguised is saved, but only for those who can see through the disguise. Nevertheless, disguises themselves can be very attractive. Parables, allegories, satires, and a good many fairy tales are disguises, for they contain ideas more complicated than the surface story that hides them.

  When you hide something, you often return to find more than you hid. I learned this not from literature but from my favorite, all-purpose hiding place in the house where I grew up, my parents’ closet. On the upper shelves over the tops of the hangers I once found five purses, three heating pads, a roll of toilet paper, a foot massager, a framed picture of Jesus calling Lazarus from the tomb, five vacuum cleaner bags, a small Maypole, a humidifier, a box of cough drops, assorted eyeglasses, several cameras that did not work but were too attractive to throw away, and a dozen Mason jars.

  But the only things my mother consciously hid in the closet were Christmas presents. My sister and I found them one year, to our great dismay. The next year I hid my presents there, and my sister, without anyone else’s knowledge, hid hers there as well. So when my mother went to the closet to fetch the presents she’d hidden for us, she found they had multiplied, in a sort of reversal of the parable of the talents. That is often the way with hiding places. What you hide suffers a sea change. What you find is not exactly what you hid.

  I felt very much as my mother must have felt when I finished my last book for children, The Island of the Grass King. It tells of a child who travels to an enchanted island and rescues a king whose kingdom is an earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Because an imaginary island must be real before you can write about it, I took for my model the most enchanted island I knew: the one on which Shakespeare set The Tempest. Here magic and nature are inseparable—a natural abode of witches and magicians.

  So I read Shakespeare and the sources he might have used to invent his island before I tried to invent mine. I wondered if my editor would ask me, Why hide literary allusions in a story for children, who probably won’t recognize them? She did not ask. But if she had, I would have answered that reading Shakespeare helped me to shape my own story and that the snatches of Shakespeare’s songs and speeches are part of the story I want to tell. And although the child reading my book won’t recognize them, I hope they will be obvious to a well-read adult reader. Children’s books should be big enough for children to grow into. When I grew up, I did not put my favorite children’s books away with other childish things. I enjoyed them on a different level. But in spite of the allusions I hid in my book, my purpose in writing was to entertain. I was writing an adventure story, not an allegory. Or so I thought when I sent it off to my editor.

  She wrote back an enthusiastic letter, which included the various interpretations of the book given by her staff. One reader claimed that the trip to the island was a hallucination. The Grass King, of course, was marijuana. Another saw it as an allegory about the political conditions in Cuba. Nobody noticed Shakespeare. I was amazed. How did Cuba and marijuana get into my book? Because someone had found them, were they really there? How much came from craft, how much from inspiration, and how much from pure accident? And how consciously can a writer use symbols without becoming self-conscious and pedantic?

  The first books that made me ask these questions were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll is a hider after my own heart. The house where he grew up had a loose floorboard in the nursery, under which later occupants found the treasures he hid there: a child’s white glove, a thimble, a left shoe, a fragment of a poem scrawled on a piece of wood. Glove, thimble, left shoe, poems—all these things turn up years later in the Alice books, where the author himself hides behind a pseudonym. Behind Lewis Carroll, storyteller, is the Reverend C
harles L. Dodgson, logician and Oxford don.

  Fortunately for us, Dodgson tells us something about how his books came to be written. It is well known that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told during a boating expedition to amuse the three daughters of the dean of Christ Church. “In a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy lore,” says Dodgson, “I … sent my heroine straight down a rabbithole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.”1 His ideas for stories, he claimed, would come of themselves like unlooked-for gifts. When a friend of Dodgson’s who was part of the expedition asked if this was an extemporaneous romance, Dodgson replied, “Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.”2

  Alice Liddell, one of the three little girls, asked him to write the story down for her, and that very evening he returned to his rooms and began to record the adventures as well as he could remember them. Although the story was quickly told, it was not quickly written. Five months after the boating expedition that prompted the story, Dodgson noted in his diary, “Began writing the fairy-tale for Alice, which I told them July 4th going to Godstow—I hope to finish it by Christmas.” This version was called Alice’s Adventures Underground, and he did not finish it until February. “In writing it out,” he said, “I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication.… Sometimes an idea comes at night, when I have had to get up and strike a light to note it down … but whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself …‘Alice’ and the ‘Looking Glass’ are made up almost wholly of bits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves.”3 He did not know when he wrote out the fairy tale for Alice that it would grow from eighteen thousand words to thirty-five thousand words before it was published. Much was added to the final version: the Mad Tea Party, parodies of the popular songs Dodgson had heard Alice and her sisters sing, parodies of the lessons their governess had inflicted on them. When he revised the original version, he cut out most of the private jokes, leaving only those allusions that served the artistic ends of a book intended to please not merely three little girls but readers of all ages.