The Writing Life

by Ellen Gilchrist

  I can barely remember the parties. All I can remember for sure is a black satin evening suit with a white satin vest I ordered after I saw it on the cover of Vogue. And crystal glasses filled with cold, sweet, Beefeater gin and new worlds opening up around me like the petals of cape jasmine or magnolia.

  We had lured a great director from New York City to come and live among us. He had spent several years at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, and he was vibrant and exciting and at the height of his powers. I was too shy to act in the plays. I collected props and costume jewelry and gave New Stage all the money I could get from my father and adulation without end. The director was charmed by me, probably because I didn’t want any roles. He offered one time to let me be the corpse who is taken from the set in the first scene but I declined. He had said I must promise to stay sober for every rehearsal and two weeks of performance and I didn’t think it was worth that, even though the corpse did get to wear a stunning nurse’s uniform from the 1920s.

  Needless to say my marriage was falling apart. It was falling apart before I met the theatre people but now the process was accelerated. My husband refused to go to parties with people whose vocabularies included lesbian and gay so we looked at our failing marriage and decided to let it fail. He got into the station wagon my father had given us and drove home to Georgia to find a life he wanted to live. I called my brother and he brought me a new car and I got into it and drove down to the theatre to see what was going on.

  Jane Petty was the guiding light of New Stage. She had studied with Uta Hagen. She had lured the director to Jackson. She kept the rest of us inspired. She was a great actress.

  She was also, hands down, the single most powerful person I have ever known in my life. She had been in psychotherapy. She said critical things about her own mother and the family in general and she laughed when she said these things and then would raise her eyebrows and look at me and ask, don’t you think so? She laughed a lot when she said shocking things and used the plays we were producing to illustrate what she meant by traps and pitfalls and scapegoats and Procrustean beds.

  I loved her. I threw myself at her feet. I ran errands for her. I learned from her. She never laughed at my ignorance of things she took for granted. She taught me about the theatre and in return I gave her books of poetry to read, as that was the art I knew most about.

  Luckily for me I was taking a course in Greek drama at this time or I would not have been able to understand much of what Jane was teaching me: that theatre is religion, that its roots spring from the sacred, which is why we must dress up for performances and make everything as perfect as we can and present our plays, even the comedies, in “the holy hush of sacrifice.”

  It was easy for me to believe that theatre was religion because I thought poetry was the bread of life and the plays we were doing were poetry. I was reading Aristotle and I believed him when he said that art must break open and release the audience, must change the audience and challenge them. I was twenty-six years old. I wanted to be challenged and changed and taught.

  Years later when I became friends with a woman who had been the producer of Playhouse 90, which produced the first great television dramas, she said to me that when she graduated from Vassar she had thought she would get married and raise children. “Then I changed my mind,” she added. “I met Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi and went to Europe with them. I cast my lot with the gypsies.”

  That is what I was doing when I drove every night down to the black neighborhood where we were rehearsing plays and photographing actors and hammering and nailing and painting walls and sets and recushioning pews and screwing lights into the ceiling. These people had so much energy they could have done anything. Also, they had imaginations which were as wild as my own.

  Ivan Rider—that was the director’s name—began to cast black people in the plays. We invited black people to the performances. Jane had dinner parties for visiting black professors at Tougaloo College. I was dazzled and scared.

  I was living with my parents on their estate outside of Jackson in Rankin County. On a neighboring farm the Ku Klux Klan had meetings and built fires. Driving home from New Stage Theatre to my parents’ home was like going from one century to another. I was scared of what we were doing at New Stage but I would not have stopped doing it for anything in the world. It was the most exciting thing I had ever known. I was being challenged and changed and broken open and filled with new ideas. The idea of justice became very important to me. I was majoring in philosophy at Millsaps College, where I had enrolled full-time after taking Eudora’s class there. Only philosophy and history and poetry could save me now.

  I began to publish the poetry I was writing. I was being fed great literature at the college and I was being fed language at its most intense as I sat in the pews and listened to rehearsals of Tiny Alice and Everything in the Garden and The Skin of Our Teeth. Sometimes I think I learned to write comedy from watching twenty or thirty rehearsals and performances of The Skin of Our Teeth. No wonder my poetry was getting good enough to be published. I was listening to language that insisted on irony and metaphor and truth.

  Several times crosses were burned in front of our theatre. They were also being burned in the front yards of some of our patrons. A woman named Patricia Derian took her cross inside her house and built a pond around it. I don’t know what happened to the crosses that were burned at our church. I half understood what was happening and the other half was in denial. I have been completely sober for more than thirty years. I wish everyone was completely sober from the cradle to the grave. Still, I know that gin and wine were part of what was happening to me in those years. I don’t think I would have driven so gaily down to that black neighborhood if I hadn’t been half tight most afternoons after six o’clock. Perhaps I would have been brave enough cold sober but I doubt it. I was sober when I marched in the civil rights protests, when the theatre people told me that was where they were going and I went along. I was scared to death and sober.

  I was sober on the day we woke to the news that the rabbi’s house and library had been bombed. I spent the morning walking among the rubble that had been his great-grandfather’s books. Perhaps the excitement and charged wisdom and notion of justice and the examples I was being set would have been enough without the gin. I would like to think so but as I said, I doubt it.

  It is fortunate that I was twenty-six and twenty-seven and twenty-eight years old when all this was taking place. It took a lot of energy to have three children and college classes and New Stage Theatre and poetry and philosophy and also drink gin. Even though I had the maids to take care of the children I am dazzled when I look back on those years and think of what was happening to me.

  The culture was being broken open and changed and I was one of the lucky people who got taken along for the ride. I am glad my epiphanies and catharses took place in the darkened mystery of a theatre. I watched almost every rehearsal of every play and would weep when the performances were over. Ephemeral, that was another word I learned. “Plays have to end,” Jane taught me. “Theatre is ephemeral. That is part of the wonder and greatness of it. Every performance is unique. If you miss that moment it is gone forever. If you were lucky to be there it lives in your memory. When everyone who saw a performance dies then it is over for good.”

  “But why can’t we film it,” I would answer, as this was before the advent of personal video cameras. “Bring in some movie cameras. I can’t bear for this play to be over. I can’t stand it when they strike the sets and it is done.”

  Now, so many years later, I’m glad there were no video cameras to record Ivan’s production of The Skin of Our Teeth. My memory of the first performance of that play, of the moment the lights went down and the gels came on and the narrator began to tell us where we were and what was happening, is as clear and as pure as the moment it happened. I wouldn’t want it to be clouded by anything as ephemeral as reality or a film.

  The years I spent in Jackson as par
t of New Stage Theatre were not my final escape from the bourgeoisie but they were the beginning. A wedge had been made into my soul and into the system of belief that had trapped me like Caliban in a tree. I had met people with imagination who acted on what they thought was true and just. Later I would read a poem by Louise Glück that said much of what I felt in those years. It is called “The Undertaking” and this is part of it.

  The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.

  ......................................

  : the light

  looks after you, you feel the waves’ goodwill

  as arms widen over water; Love,

  the key is turned. Extend yourself —

  it is the Nile, the sun is shining,

  everywhere you turn is luck.

  The Consolations of Art

  IN 1997 I AGREED to be part of a literacy fund-raiser sponsored by the New Yorker. I agreed to write a letter to whoever purchased me. My subject was “The consolations of Art.” A woman named Ellen Geneo purchased me. Here is the letter that I wrote to her.

  Dear Ellen Geneo,

  I have been thinking about this letter for some months now as my eighty-eight-year-old father died in the fall and I have had need of the concept as well as the reality. During the month when he was on his deathbed I spent all my spare time in bookstores. Since I was a child I have not spent that much time in a bookstore or library. I was there nearly every day for at least an hour. I was buying five or six books at a time to give to people for Christmas presents and then I was going back and buying copies of the same books for myself. I built a fort of books against myself and my father’s death. Some of the books were actually helpful in finding my way through the maze of denial and emotions I was experiencing. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying; God, A Biography; An Atlas of Human Anatomy; Everyday Zen; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, with the haunting and brilliant poem “Provide, Provide,” which was the main poem that kept occurring to me during those weeks.

  So when I say the consolations of art I mostly mean, for me, the consolations of written books. The heft, the feel, the touch, the mighty consolation they have always been to me in every way. Music, especially Bach, and, this year, Bach played by Christopher Parkening on a classical guitar or the beautiful flute music of Paula Robson, which came in the mail as a gift from the artist on the worst of the days that led to the end of my having a father, have also been an unmeasurable consolation. Music coming down to us through the centuries. From Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven and all the thousands who have followed and played them and the makers of violins and pianos and flutes and the patrons like you who have inspired every artist who ever lived have come the vast exaltations which make us glad to live in the midst of contradictions.

  So I thank you for wanting this letter. Even before you knew you wanted it or I knew who it would be for I was profiting from the thought that it might be wanted. I had this letter and you on my mind as I surrounded myself with music and books in a small house on the coast that is papered with posters from museums and thought that Van Gogh and Vermeer and Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci and Cézanne and Monet were already at the place to which my father now was traveling.

  I never loved painting and music and literature and philosophy as I loved them this year because I had never really needed them before. All my love had been to prepare me to throw myself into their charms when my need became great.

  I hope that your life is filled with these great expressions of man’s hope and glory and praise. For today and every day and so that when you need them they will be there.

  Thrive, flourish, “Dance in the fullness of time.”

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Postscript

  There was one other thing I meant to tell you. After the funeral I flew to Atlanta to the press screening of the four-hour version of Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh. I flew all that way to heal myself, and to hear, writ large on the big screen, that the “common theme is the death of fathers.” I thought of you and this letter as I was traveling and so could not leave it out as I write.

  FEBRUARY 1997

  The Only Constant Is Change, and Yet, I Still Won’t Use a Computer

  I LEARNED TO TYPE when I was twelve years old. When I finished the class my father bought me a Royal portable typewriter with a typewriter table and I set the thing up in the middle of my bedroom and started typing. The next week I redecorated my bedroom to match the typewriter. Down came the beautiful hand-hemmed white lace curtains and off went the beautiful flowered bedspread and dressing table skirt. Down came the reproductions of Gainsborough and William Blake’s illustrations for Pilgrim’s Progress. Up went black and yellow striped awning and a severe white bedspread.

  I had become a writer by the simple act of owning a typewriter and now I was ready to write in earnest. I wrote poetry on the typewriter. I wrote journals and diary entries by hand in leatherbound accounting books I bought at the dime store.

  When I finished a poem I would take it out of the typewriter and edit it by hand with a number-two lead pencil and then retype it with the changes. I kept every draft of every poem in a letter-sized cardboard box. I kept the accounting books in a drawer of a table by my bed. My parents would never have dreamed of coming into my room and reading what I was writing so I would take my writing down to where my parents were and read it to them out loud. In the late afternoons they would be in the living room or out on the porch if it was warm. Neighbors and friends would stop by and have a drink of my father’s expensive scotch whiskey and they would talk and gossip. One afternoon a woman my mother’s age was there. Her name was Betty Milliken and she was an editor at the local newspaper. She liked the poems I showed her and asked me if I would like to write a column for her newspaper and maybe end it with a poem. She was a great fan of Dorothy Parker and liked the short silly poems I was writing. The next week she gave me a collection of Dorothy Parker’s poetry and I went down to the newspaper office and sat down at a typewriter and wrote a thousand-word essay about something that was going on in the small town of Franklin, Kentucky, and ended it with a poem on the subject of the essay.

  I was a sophomore in high school, either fourteen or fifteen years old. They hired me on the spot. I was paid five dollars a week to get out of school on Wednesday afternoons and come to the newspaper and write a column. While I was at the office I also emptied the ashtrays and fed Betty’s small white dog. Both Betty and the male editor were chain smokers so I bought some cigarettes and began to smoke with them. I had tried it several times in the past but it made me sick. Now I smoked happily away and learned all about the teletype machine and how print is set and I met deadlines and had bylines and my photograph in the paper and got my paycheck and spent it on doughnuts and hair curlers and books when I could get to the bookstore in Nashville. There was no bookstore in Franklin and the public library wasn’t very good so I depended on books I borrowed from people. At school I was taking Latin and translating Caesar’s Gallic Wars. At home I was a poet. On Wednesday afternoons I was a columnist for a newspaper.

  A man in Nashville began to read my newspaper columns on the radio every Thursday morning.

  All of this has a great deal to do with why I won’t learn how to use a computer. I have had a lot of happiness and luck with my own system of writing and editing by hand and on a typewriter. A screen and the Internet would come between me and my muse. I like it just as it is. I write first drafts on the typewriter and then I edit them by hand. I save every draft in letter-size cardboard boxes. So far I have almost never had to go back and look at old drafts except when I was writing my first novel but you never can tell. At any moment I may want to revisit the moment when I excised a dangling participle or changed the name of a character so I wouldn’t get sued. I like computers and because of them the papers my students hand in to me have fewer spelling errors and better margins. I am fascinated by the technology that makes computers work but I am not able to wait thirty sec
onds for a piece of machinery to catch up with my imagination. I don’t stand in lines and I don’t wait on computers. I sit down with a legal pad and some number-two lead pencils or I go to my typewriter and I type. If the typewriter breaks I pull the spare one out of the closet and use that. If the electricity goes off I go back to the legal pads.

  I haven’t written any poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn’t inspire me to poetry what will?

  Not to mention that my first great-grandchild is happily growing inside the womb of a beautiful college soccer player and art major named Courtney Hall Walker. My luck is running strong this year and I am grateful for it.

  APRIL 2001

  How I Got Stronger and Smarter Instead of Stupider and Sadder

  AS I APPROACHED THE AGE OF FORTY, four things happened that changed my life dramatically. I went into psychotherapy, I stopped drinking, I ran a marathon, and I started writing again for the first time in seven years.

  Of these four things the most important was that I stopped drinking. Without that the other three might not have been possible.

  You can’t understand how I quit drinking unless you understand how I became a drunk. I never meant to drink too much. I meant to be a beautiful woman raising a glass of wine to my lover, then dancing the night away in a Balenciaga gown. I meant to look like Lauren Bacall and Hemingway’s heroines and talk like Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I didn’t know they were alcoholics any more than later on I knew that I was one. I had not been educated to see the warning signs nor did I feel free to ask for information when I began to think I had a problem.