For days, waiting for the spring semester to begin, Lucy was almost at peace with the idea of herself as a writer. She pored over the two stories she had managed to finish during the past year or so, making small changes until it began to seem that any further revision might spoil them. The stories were there; they were adequate, and they were hers.
When you wrote it didn’t matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your “literary voice”) because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.
The morning was unusually mild and clear for February, and it felt grand to be walking down lower Fifth Avenue. This calm and stately neighborhood was where Michael Davenport had always said he wanted to live, “as soon as one of the plays pays off’; one day long ago she had made the mistake of reminding him that they could move here anytime – right away, if they felt like it – and that had brought on one of his fiercely frowning silences as they walked all the way home to Perry Street, letting her know that she’d broken the rules of their old agreement once again.
She had remembered the New School as a dark, Soviet-Union kind of place, and that part of it was still there, but now it was dominated by a new adjacent building, bigger and taller and all made of steel and glass, as bright and greedy-looking as the United States itself.
A silent elevator took her up to the appointed floor and she walked shyly into her classroom: a long conference table with chairs placed around it. Some students were already seated, looking uncertain about whether to smile at one another, and others were gathering. Most of them were women – this was disappointing because Lucy had dimly hoped for a roomful of attractive men – and except for one or two young girls they were all in middle age. She had a quick general impression, possibly mistaken, of housewives whose children were grown and gone, freeing them at last to pursue the ambition of their lives. Of the few men, the most conspicuous was a blunt-faced, truck-driverly fellow wearing a green work shirt with some company’s insignia on its left breast pocket – probably the kind of writer who would want to employ the word “fuck” as often as possible in his clumsy stories – and he had struck up a tentative conversation with the smaller man beside him, who was so pale and bland in his business suit and his pink rimless glasses that Lucy imagined he must be an accountant or a dentist. Farther down the table sat a much older man, with white hair bristling from his scalp and tufting in his nostrils; he had probably come out of retirement to try his hand at this game, and his humorous lips were already moving very slightly as if in rehearsal for his self-appointed role as class comedian.
The last to come in, and to take his place self-consciously at the head of the table, was the teacher. He was tall and thin and looked at first like a boy, though Lucy could tell he was well over thirty by his slump, by the slight tremor of his hands and the heavy shadows under his eyes. “Melancholy” was the first word that occurred to her, and she decided that might not be a bad quality to have in a writing teacher, assuming there’d be livelier qualities too.
“Good morning,” he said. “My name’s Carl Traynor, and I expect it’ll take me a little time to find out who all of you are. Maybe the best way to begin is to call this roll they’ve given me; then if possible – and I don’t want anyone feeling obliged to do this, if you’d rather not – but if possible you might say a few words about yourself and your background when your name is called.” His voice was pleasantly deep and steady, and Lucy could feel herself beginning to trust him.
When he called her name she said “Yes; here. I’m thirty-four. I’m divorced” – and she wondered at once why she’d felt it necessary to say that – “and I live in Putnam County with my daughter. I’ve had very little writing experience except in college, many years ago.”
But at least half of the other students declined to provide personal information, and Lucy knew that if her name had come later in the alphabetical order she would have made that choice too – she should have made it anyway. Reticence was important in a room where any amount of emotional nakedness might soon be on display. She could only wonder now if the odd little blunder of saying “I’m divorced” would make her uncomfortable as long as she stayed in this group.
With the roll call out of the way, Carl Traynor settled down to deliver his opening remarks. “Well,” he began, “I think I could probably tell you everything I know about fiction writing in half an hour – and I’d be happy to give that a try, because there’s nothing I like better than showing off.” Here he waited for a laugh that didn’t come, and his hands began to tremble more noticeably on the table. “But this isn’t a lecture course. The only way any of us can learn this craft is by saturating ourselves in examples of it, in and out of print, and then trying to put the best of what we’ve found into our own work.”
He went on at some length to explain what he considered the value of a “workshop” like this: each manuscript would attain a kind of publication, in that it would be evaluated by fifteen people. Then he talked about the kind of criticism he would expect from this group. Constructive criticism was always to be desired, he said, except when it amounted to a hedging of bets or a pulling of punches; still, “honesty” was a word he had come to distrust because it was too often used as a license for harshness. He hoped they would be able to achieve dispassion without discourtesy.
“We’re all strangers here today,” he said, “but over the next sixteen weeks we’ll come to know each other pretty well. And there’s something volatile in the very nature of a writing class; we’ll have raised voices here sometimes, and hurt feelings, too. So how’s this for a guiding principle: The work is more important than the personalities. Let’s be friends if we can, but let’s not be sweethearts.”
And once again there was silence where he’d expected laughter. He had put both hands out of sight now, dropping one of them to his leg under the table and sinking the other into his coat pocket. Lucy thought she had never seen a teacher so ill at ease. If talking made him nervous, why did he talk so much?
And he was still talking, though she might have stopped listening if he hadn’t brought his talk around to what he called “the procedure.”
“Now, unfortunately,” he said, “the New School doesn’t make mimeograph facilities available to any of these writing courses, so it won’t be possible for me to give out copies of each story to be read for the following week’s class. That would be much the best way, of course, but we’re stuck with things as they are. All we can do here is have the stories read aloud, either by their authors or by me, and base our discussion on what we’ve heard.”
This was bad. Lucy had assumed her manuscripts would be read, like real stories, and that copies of them would then come back to her with written comments by the readers. Having them only listened to would be inadequate and hazardous – a whole sentence might fall out of the listener’s mind before the next sentence began – and besides, it would be too much like working on the stage.
“Several of you sent in stories ahead of time,” Carl Traynor was saying, “so I’ve been able to choose one for this morning’s class. Mrs. Garfield?” and he peered uncertainly down the table. “Would you prefer to read this piece for us yourself, or—”
“No, I’d rather have you read it,” said one of the matronly women. “I like your voice.”
And it wasn’t easy for Carl Traynor to hide his pleasure; this might have been the first nice thing anybody had said to him in months. “Okay, then,” he said. “This is a fifteen-page manuscript, and the title is ‘Renewal.’ ” Then in a voice that seemed overly measured and sonorous, as if to prove itself worthy of Mrs. Garfield’s liking, he began to read.
Spring was la
te that year. Scarcely a crocus had yet emerged from the few patches of earth amid the long, gray spaces of slowly melting snow, and all the trees were bare.
At dawn a stray dog loped down the homely main street of the town, sniffing for signs of life, and from a distance, across the plains, came the lonely, mournful wail of a train whistle.
After what seemed about two pages the author introduced a boarding house in the poorer section of town, meticulously describing both the house and its neighborhood; then she brought the reader inside to discover a twenty-three-year-old man named Arnold in the slow and difficult process of waking up. Arnold was said to have had a bad night of drinking and of “loss.” But the reader, or listener, had to follow him through every step of his morning ritual – rumbling to make coffee on an old hot-plate, sipping it, taking a shower in a rusty tub and putting on the kind of clothes suggesting the lower middle class – before learning what it was that he’d lost. His young wife had left him a month ago, because of his “wild ways,” and gone back to stay with her parents in another town. Now Arnold climbed into his “battered” pickup truck and drove to that town, where he found that both parents were conveniently away from home for the day.
“ ‘Think we could have a talk, Cindy?’ ” he asked the girl, and they had one. It didn’t last long, but it was a “good” talk, because each of them said what the other most wanted to hear, and Mrs. Garfield’s story came to an end with their heartfelt embrace.
“So that’s it,” Carl Traynor said, looking tired. “Any comments?”
“I think it’s a beautiful story,” one of the women said. “The theme of renewal is announced in the title, it’s developed in the nature descriptions – the renewal of the earth with the coming of spring – and it finds its resolution in the renewal of the young people’s marriage. I was deeply moved.”
“Oh, I agree,” another woman said. “And I want to congratulate the author. I have only one question: if she can write as well as this, why does she consider herself a student?”
Then it was the turn of the truck-driverly man, whose name was Mr. Kelly. “I had a lot of trouble with the opening,” he said. “I think it’s much too slow. We gotta get the weather and the town and the dog and the train whistle and God only knows what else before we even get the boarding house, and then even after the boarding house we gotta wait too long before we get the kid. I don’t know why we couldn’t’ve gotten the kid right away and all the other stuff later.
“But my main problem,” he went on, “is with the dialogue at the end. I don’t think hardly anybody ever says exactly what they mean the way these kids do, with one person feeding the next line to the other. In the movies you might get away with lines like that because there’d be all this sweet music coming up on the soundtrack to let people know it’s the end of the show. But this isn’t the movies. All we’ve got here is ink and paper, so the writer’s gonna have to work an awful lot harder to get the dialogue right.
“And even then – even then I’m not sure if talk alone is gonna do the job. I’m not sure if anybody’s life ever got turned around by talk alone. Seems to me we need some kind of a thing in there too. I don’t suppose a crocus’d work because it’d be a little heavily on the symbolic side, and I guess we don’t want the girl telling the boy she’s pregnant because that’d take the whole story away in another direction; but something. An incident; an event; something unexpected that rings true. Well, hell, I guess I’m shooting my mouth off.”
“No you’re not,” said the white-haired man. “You’re making sense.” And he turned to the teacher. “I’m with Mr. Kelly all the way down the line on this one. He’s said everything I wanted to say.”
When most of the other students had been heard from – there were several who abstained from comment – it was time for Mr. Traynor’s summing up. He talked for what seemed twenty minutes in an alternately smooth and hesitant voice, repeatedly glancing at his wristwatch, and all he did was try to appease every difference of opinion in the room. At first it seemed clear that he sided with Mr. Kelly – he reviewed each of Mr. Kelly’s points and suggested that Mrs. Garfield might do well to take note of them – but then he began making concessions to the women who’d been deeply moved. He, too, he said, found it strange that Mrs. Garfield considered herself a student, but he was glad she did because otherwise they might not have the pleasure and the benefit of her presence here.
“Well, okay,” he said when he was finished – or rather when his watch told him he had fulfilled his day’s obligation to the New School – “I guess that’s all for this week.”
It wasn’t much. It seemed scarcely worth the effort of having come all the way in from Tonapac. But Lucy was willing to believe it might get better; and besides, she had nothing else to do.
The second or third week’s story was by one of the young girls – a slim, pretty girl who frowned and blushed and stared at her clasped hands on the table throughout Mr. Traynor’s reading.
It was a ginger-aley day. As Jennifer wandered among the old campus buildings she had grown to love during the past three years – almost four now, she reminded herself – she couldn’t help feeling it was the kind of day when something wonderful might happen at any moment.
And it did. In the student cafeteria she met a wonderful-looking boy she’d never seen before: he had recently transferred here as a senior from another college. They “had coffee” and spent the afternoon walking and talking, getting along wonderfully well. The boy owned a blue MG that he drove with “admirable” skill, and he took her to a wonderful restaurant in a neighboring town. In the candlelight, over dishes with names that were given in correctly accented French (though Mr. Traynor had trouble pronouncing them anyway), Jennifer found herself thinking “This could be a real relationship.” Back at school they strolled together into the deep shadows behind her residence hall, and there on the grass, for a long time, they made out.
Lucy could remember “making out” as a wartime expression for getting laid; she didn’t know until now, in the context of this story, that for a later generation of girls it had come to mean necking or petting – maybe unfastening your “bra” for a boy and maybe letting his hand stray into your pants, but nothing more.
Jennifer invited the boy up to her room “to have some tea,” and that was where everything went terribly wrong. He was crude. He wanted to go to bed with her right away, without even being nice to her first, and when she declined he “became another person, more maniac than man.” He shouted at her. He called her names too horrible to be recorded, even in memory, and as his violence mounted she cowered in fear, but luckily there was a heavy pair of scissors on her dresser: she snatched it up and held it tight in both hands, aiming the point of it at his face. When he’d left the room at last, slamming the door, she found that all she could do was curl up under the covers and weep. She understood now that this boy was a mentally ill person, seriously disturbed, badly in need of professional help – and that might also explain the strangeness of his having changed colleges in senior year. Sometime toward morning she remembered her father’s wise and gentle voice: “We must always be considerate of those less fortunate than ourselves.” And her last thought, just before sleep, was that a real relationship would have to wait.
Several women around the table offered guarded praise for the economy and swiftness of the writing, and one said she’d enjoyed the restaurant scene, though she added quickly that she couldn’t say why.
Then Mr. Kelly was called on, but he only folded his big arms across his company shirt and said he’d rather not say anything today.
It was left to Mr. Kaplan, the dentist – or accountant-looking man, to do the main part of the job. “It struck me as a very immature piece of work,” he said. “There’s more unintentional silliness revealed all through it – and I mean on the author’s part, not the character’s – than I would have thought possible in anything written by an adult. When something as serious as that is wrong in a story, it seem
s to me that no amount of technical competence is going to help.”
“I’ll go along with all that,” the old man said, “and I’ll tell you something else: I wouldn’t mind hearing the boy’s version of the story. I’d like to know how he felt when she pulled the scissors on him.”
“Well, but she was terrified,” one of the women said. “He was wholly out of control. For all she knew she could have been raped.”
“Ah, raped my ass,” the old man said. “I’m sorry, lady, but this is a story about prick-teasing and that’s all it is. Oh, and another thing: I never saw a ginger-aley day and neither did you.”
Lucy was almost afraid to look at the girl who’d written the thing, but she risked a glance. No longer blushing, the girl’s face was set in a calm shape of disdain now; she had even managed a wan little smile suggesting tolerance and pity for all the fools in this room and in the world.
The girl was okay; she would survive the morning; and Mr. Traynor seemed to know it. He didn’t even chide the old man for unnecessary roughness, though that would have been in keeping with his opening-day stricture against “discourtesy” in criticism; instead, he made a chuckling observation that some kinds of material would always be more controversial than other kinds. Then he told the girl her story probably did need work. “If you can find ways to soften the tone of self-righteousness here,” he said, “or of apparent self-righteousness, you may have a more satisfying – a more satisfying statement.”
The first and lesser of Lucy’s two stories, “Miss Goddard and the World of Art,” was presented the following week. She sat stiff with fear as Traynor read it aloud, though she had to admit he read it well enough; the trouble was that many small mistakes in it, all unrecognized before, were now made clear in the sound of his voice. When it was over she felt weak; she wanted to hide; she could only hope Mr. Kelly wouldn’t choose to remain silent again today.
Young Hearts Crying Page 18