Few of my queer friends have had the luck to form long-term partnerships; and those who’ve done so have developed the kinds of relations that are hardly promising as fictional subjects, probably because those relations have not seemed especially subject to the vagaries of chance. So I’ve been more steadily interested in exploring lives involved in complex families with lengthy histories which are endlessly subject to change and fate, and such lives are generally heterosexual. I’ve also observed that few readers are interested, over long stretches, in stories of homosexual life; and I’ve never scorned readers. In short, I’ve pursued the kinds of lives I’ve known best since my birth and have slowly worked my way in and out of—happily, sadly, even tragically.
* * *
I’ve said that it would take me a little more than two years to finish the work, and I won’t recount the gradual progress in any detail. Two things remain indelible in my memory, though, and can be set down for whatever cheer they may give readers who’re in hopes of writing their own fiction. Again it was a long while before I was forced to realize that this narrative was not a long story or a novella but a full-fledged novel. What mattered to me, as I moved ahead, was the realization that I was at regular work on an entirely new thing and that I had no prior experience of making anything remotely like it. Also no one had told me that the single most important rule for successful writing is Frequency and consistency. It’s an iron rule but its force is virtually inescapable in a form as long as the novel.
Assuming that a would-be writer—of almost any form, prose or verse—has a gift for written expression, then his greatest help is likely to come from compelling himself to sit down, at some predictable time, for X number of days per week and then to stay in place till he’s added a respectable piece to his project. From the start of my long story, I aimed for a page a day, some three hundred words. I didn’t know that if no words came easily, or at all, I should have stayed in place (with controlled pauses for coffee, peeing, window-gazing) and written something—of whatever nature or quality. I could even have copied out words from a favorite writer—say a superb stretch of prose like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address or the final few pages of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, anything to give my hand a real sense of the extent to which any good writing is a manual art, a handmade event. Or I might have speculated further, in my notebook, on the lives of my characters—their looks, their favorite games, foods, films, music, their secret sexual practices and fantasies, their most recent dreams. Above all, what I needed was to train my unconscious mind to deliver its creations to me, on time and in order.
I’ve often quoted to my students, and myself, another remark from John Knowles. He said “The unconscious mind is like children and dogs. It loves routine and hates surprises.” He was assuming, as I now do, that creative work—like almost all expressions of the intellect—arises in areas of the brain that lie beneath our immediate awareness. If we want that work to move toward our daytime recognition, then we must learn reliable ways of luring it upward—usually by some highly personal routines of the sort I’ve just mentioned. The profound and lifelong productive novelist Graham Greene said much the same thing.
In the preface to his collected short stories, Greene noted that if he was troubled by some block in his work, he’d read over the troubled passage just before going to sleep. In the morning he’d almost invariably discover that the problem had been solved by what Greene called the “negre in the cellar.” When I first read Greene’s paragraph, I thought he was using the French word for black man as perhaps even an equivalent for our N word. Then I learned that negre, in French, can also mean “ghostwriter,” and I realized that my own experience had duplicated Greene’s. Relying on what Greene, or I or anyone else, believes to be the cellar levels of his own brain implies a strong degree of trust in the possession of order-making unconscious chambers of the mind—chambers that can, and will, yield up imaginative results which are original, orderly, and usable. In late ’58 then I began to learn that eight hours of sleep, a minimum of physical abuse, and a predictable work schedule would tap into my own such chambers more often than not.
* * *
In England, though, and in my first year or so of work on A Long and Happy Life, I didn’t know that simple fact. It was another vital skill I was carving out in sheer need and persistence, a need to live the life I was all but sure I’d been born to lead. So while I’ve been lucky enough for all my writing life to be able to work most days of the week, at whatever time I choose, I try to tell my younger friends that—if they can only write twice a week—they should pick the available days and hours, then find a promising place (the quietest possible), then disconnect the phone or any other distraction and sit till the work arrives. Sooner or later, assuming you’re a writer, it will. The fact that so very few of the gifted students I’ve taught—those who say they yearn to be writers—prove able to spend their lives in a fruitful writing career is very likely owing to their owning all the needed skills but one.
And the fatal lack of that skill is defined in a daunting minimum of words by Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and mystic, in this sentence from his Pensées—“All man’s troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.” For the writing, of fiction and poetry at least, is a solitary business—not as hard as writers often claim (again, if the writer is gifted) but one that’s almost invariably conducted in supreme aloneness, sitting still in an otherwise empty room for long days. My initial trouble—for as much as a year, especially in the wake of my ornery Oxford thesis—came in drawing my story out of its corner and finding the language for its transfer from my inner eye to the reader’s, a stranger whom I’d never met and who might be as alien to my own tastes and morals as the last man on Pluto. I didn’t know my whole story; I was making it up as I wrote, often day by day.
I went on keeping notes but my manuscript is not always dated, so it’s no longer possible to be sure when I wrote which pages. I do know that, with few exceptions, I wrote—as I’d always write—in the chronological order of the story itself. I’ve never felt I can write scene C till I’ve written the prior A and B. How can I know what foot to put forward till I know where both my feet are now placed; or to quote the famous little girl in the fable—when told to think before she speaks, she says (very sensibly) “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”
So chronological order was a great help once I’d established a schedule of days and hours, apart from my teaching. The next most powerful aid was the gradual accretion of characters—the detailed human natures of my men and women, major and minor. I’ve mentioned creating, out of whole cloth (and the memory of a few girls I’d known in my grade-school days), the character of Rosacoke Mustian in “A Chain of Love.” That same story had invented the characters of Rosa’s two brothers, her younger sister, her widowed mother, her grandfather, and a petulant sister-in-law.
What remained the hardest such challenge was the creation of Rosa’s reluctant boyfriend Wesley. His hesitation in honoring, with a marriage offer, an attractive young woman’s obvious devotion had to seem at least a credible, nor merely a callous, indifference. And further, he had to have qualities which almost any reader could find magnetic—and magnetic to a woman as intelligent as Rosa. I’ve already noted then that, almost from the start of the job, I’d realized that my central players would need to exert on the susceptible reader a considerable degree of physical attraction—one that came very near to overcoming any grave dislike a reader might feel for people I wished the reader to like (or at least respond to with careful attention). Such an aim, however, meant that I felt an equally strong need to maintain as much control as possible over the amount of erotic magnetism each character exerted.
I was likely still recalling David Cecil’s discussions of Tolstoy’s concern with a novelist’s need for moral relations with his characters. I was also aware of the extremely thin line which D. H. Lawrence walks, given his damaging lack of
a sense of humor, when he makes similar attempts to control his reader’s response to his characters. So often he attempts to incorporate his reader’s erotic sensibilities into the fiction; and given the extreme difficulty of achieving such an incalculable hope, he succeeds an extraordinary number of times (read his astonishing “The Fox” for instance). But so often he collapses into the absurd, even the sadly comic, in his attempts to manage the reader’s intimate relations with his men and women.
In those early days then, Lawrence stood as both a luminous guide and a dire warning. And the remaining pantheon of writers whom I’d chosen in the course of my early reading—Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hardy, and Forster—served me steadily as I wrote onward. In fact an inscribed picture of the wild-eyed, Lear-like elder Tolstoy—which I’d bought from an autograph dealer while I was a sophomore at Duke—hung above my worktable. And with painful slowness, the lines of my story accumulated.
Despite the fact that I was teaching some seventy freshmen and sophomores, hell for leather, three days a week—and greatly enjoying the discovery that those just post-adolescent Americans could be taught the writing of clear and intelligent expository prose—nothing in all my life was now more rousing and rewarding than the realization that I was likewise teaching myself to write a longish, heavily populated, and emotionally intricate stretch of narrative fiction.
In my few short stories, I’d summoned characters who seemed to me alive for intense moments—a few days or hours, a very few minutes of any reader’s life. Now I was making a world, with all a world’s features—wild nature, houses, cultivated fields, families, solitary creatures seen on all sides, stores, schools, churches, towns. All the powers I’d dreamed of winning as a practicing writer seemed to grow in me now, from week to week; and however many hard days I faced when I wondered where next and how to get there, I can’t recall a whole long day when I doubted I’d eventually reach my goal—a substantial account of irresistible human beings who’d hold a wide variety of readers for the time it took to read the words and lodge them in their minds forever after.
4
MY MEMORY OF those working years at home is far less detailed—oddly maybe—than what I’ve recorded of my three years at Oxford. And I wonder why. The only answer I can offer is that Duke, Durham, and Raleigh were (so far) offering me a considerably less complicated world than I’d known abroad, a world marked chiefly by the writing, the teaching, the few pleasant evenings with colleagues, and occasional drives to Washington. Also when it came to travel, I was all but stone-broke still. My take-home pay each month came to some $300 ($2,100 now). From that sum I began to repay money I’d borrowed from a sympathetic bank manager during my Christmas visit home in ’57. Each month I repaid my mother $50 (some $350 now) for her many generosities, and my rent was $45 ($315 now).
Those payments left me with $200 ($1,400 now) for all my other needs and desires—food, rent, heating oil, clothes, a few movies and concerts, gas, and a few dollars saved for an eventual return to Oxford: I was trusting to return at the end of my three-year contract at Duke. Beyond the monthly checks from the university, I had no other income that I can recall, apart from two small checks from Encounter—all the more reason then to hunker in the woods and write. Among the few exceptions are the Washington weekends, a single trip to New York in the summer of ’60, and a ride with Michael to Princeton to attend Peter Heap’s first marriage.
Nonetheless I was far from unhappy. The years in Britain had left me well stocked with memories I continued to process. The final involvement with Matyas had not so much ended, for me at least, as sat merely suspended on what I’d heard as a rising tone—a chord that awaited resolution. Again, no one I knew could afford to telephone England with any regularity. There was no e-mail of course, so letters were the means of communication, and Matyas had the loyal British habit of prompt mail response.
It normally took five days for an airmail letter to cross the Atlantic in either direction. If Matyas got word from me on a Thursday, he was likely to post a reply within forty-eight hours (despite his own heavy teaching load). However welcome Matyas’s responses, I was often a little flummoxed at their speed. Still I labored to keep up my end of the correspondence, however placid my news might be in contrast to his. He sent me interesting accounts of his summer return to Eastern Europe and reunions with his family after a nearly fifteen-year hiatus; then regular and lively accounts of his ongoing Oxford life and work. But eventually he wrote—and mailed—a long and unnerving letter of blame.
* * *
He didn’t cast me as his primary villain—he saw himself as that—yet he certainly saw me as an enthusiastic instigator of a revival, in himself, of queer emotion and practice. In Oxford he’d told me of his fervently Catholic youth, and I knew that his queer energies had brought him essentially no happiness. I thought I’d witnessed a significant amount of proof, however, that our few months together had begun to heal his dread. Once we’d made an initial commitment to intimacy, he’d shown me only generous-hearted affection and a delight in our lovemaking that matched my own (not an easy match). But this bad letter indicated his prior concealment of deep reservations and bitter regret. It certainly suggested that any hope, on my part, of returning to Oxford for a long-term resumption of our affair was gravely misguided. That was hard news to get—and childish, I felt, from a man who by then was near thirty-five. In later letters, however, we each worked to repair his anger and restore at least a postal friendship that was all the stronger for having begun in mutual desire.
Stephen Spender, in California in 1959. Taken by the pioneer American photographer Imogen Cunningham somewhere in the Bay Area while Stephen was teaching at Berkeley, it captures his face better than any other portrait I’ve seen. He’s in the vicinity of fifty years old, with nearly four more decades to go, and is obsessively at work on a book-length poem about his life. His recent poetry has been severely attacked, and he’s hoping to rout his critics with something both new and legitimately strange. Whenever he’d visit me in North Carolina in my trailer or eventual house, he tended to sit up, working on the long poem, well after I’d retired to sleep. Now and then he’d let me see a few pages, always in his legible hand; and I always felt he was on a rewarding track, though one that he revised endlessly. He published one or two brief excerpts in literary magazines, but eventually he either abandoned the large project or set it aside for eventual completion. Then he died. If asked for my opinion, I’d urge the keepers of his estate to find a first-class editor and publish the entire poem, if it survives at all, just as he left it. Surely he wrote no better verse.
* * *
As for any romance, with sexual union, back home—there was none, barring a very occasional one-night stand with friends. In addition to chaste friendships with my teaching colleagues, I had several visitors from England. The stringent pressures on travel money for British subjects were still in force, and any Briton who managed to reach the States was in need of all the hospitality he could find. In my small quarters I welcomed several Merton friends and Julian Mitchell, whom I noted above—an eventual novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. All these friends were making their first trips to the States as they passed my way, and I mostly enjoyed giving them a brief version of the classic tour of upper Dixie—a drive down to exotic Charleston and Savannah or up to Richmond and Warren County with its village world of tobacco, its sixty-five percent black population, and my undaunted and loquaciously amusing aunts with their superb fried chicken, endless fresh vegetables, biscuits, cornbread, and blackberry cobbler. I even moved into the Mays’ house for a few nights and surrendered my trailer bed to John Roberts, my senior Merton friend, and his new (first) wife.
The visits became a little onerous as my writing proceeded, especially since the friends almost always arrived without cars of their own and were dependent on me for local transportation; but I don’t recall ever turning one traveler away (Michael was a regular and always welcome guest). Eventually I became bold enough to
give most of them breakfast and then a walking stick with directions for exploring the woods and fields on all sides of my desk. I’d also provide semi-knowing instructions on the warding-off of bothersome snakes—the very poisonous copperhead was far from scarce nearby. The likelihood of such surprises was in fact slim; but my visitors seemed to enjoy even the barest possibility of cornering a poisonous snake, given that fact that Britain harbored only a single such creature, the adder which rarely bites a human.
* * *
As he’d promised, Stephen Spender often swung through Durham on his frequent lecture tours round America. He plainly relished staying in a caravan (the British word for “trailer”). With his love of country quiet and near-solitude, he’d happily absent himself during my writing hours and patrol the woods or set a chair on the hill above the pond and draw the landscape with my colored chalks or read or continue work on the long autobiographical poem which obsessed him for more than twenty years but which, with the exception of only a few impressive excerpts in magazines, he never published. In the evening we’d cook simple meals for one another on my narrow stove, and he’d unreel the often absurd news from his travels.
There’d be full accounts of the inevitable New York visits with Wystan Auden who was rapidly entering the airless tunnel of demanding eccentricity and hard drink that would make his last decades, however hardworking, so merciless on himself and his friends. And he’d have dined with the mentally unsteady but (to Stephen) always kindly and amusing Robert Lowell, not to mention the numerous lectures at small-college English departments of an often mind-boggling naïveté; and more interesting longer stints at Northwestern, say, or the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He’d even repeat, with laughing approval, Mary McCarthy’s remark after attending one of his lectures—“Stephen, that was hopelessly above the heads of three-fourths of your audience and hopelessly beneath the heads of the other fourth”: he relished telling such jokes on himself.
Ardent Spirits Page 38