HOW I BEGAN TO WRITE

IN OUR OLD GEORGIA HOME we used to have two sitting-rooms—a back one and a front one—with folding doors between. These were the family living-rooms and the theatre of my shows. The front sitting-room was the auditorium, the back sitting-room the stage. The sliding doors the curtain. In wintertime the firelight flickered dark and glowing on the walnut doors, and in the last strained moments before the curtain you noticed the ticking of the clock on the mantlepiece, the old tall clock with the glass front of painted swans. In summertime the rooms were stifling until the time for curtain, and the clock was silenced by sounds of yard-boy whistling and distant radios. In winter, frost flowers bloomed on the windowpanes (the winters in Georgia are very cold), and the rooms were drafty, quiet. The open summer lifted the curtains with each breeze, and there were the smells of sun-hot flowers and, toward twilight, watered grass. In winter we had cocoa after the show and in summer orange crush or lemonade. Winter and summer the cakes were always the same. They were made by Lucille, the cook we had in those days, and I have never tasted cakes as good as those cakes we used to have. The secret of their goodness lay, I believe, in the fact that they were always cakes that failed. They were chocolate raisin cupcakes that did not rise, so that there was no proper cupcake cap—the cakes were dank, flat and dense with raisins. The charm of those cakes was alogether accidental.

As the eldest child in our family I was the custodian, the counter of the cakes, the boss of all our shows. The repertory was eclectic, running from hashed-over movies to Shakespeare and shows I made up and sometimes wrote down in my nickel Big Chief notebooks. The cast was everlastingly the same—my younger brother, Baby Sister and myself. The cast was the most serious handicap. Baby Sister was in those days a stomachy ten-year old who was terrible in death scenes, fainting spells and such-like necessary parts. When Baby Sister swooned to a sudden death she would prudently look around beforehand and fall very carefully on sofa or chair. (Once, I remember, such a death fall broke both legs of one of Mama's favorite chairs.)

As director of the shows I could put up with terrible acting, but there was one thing I simply could not stand. Sometimes, after coaching and drilling half the afternoon, the actors would decide to abandon the whole project just before curtain time and wander out into the yard to play. "I struggle and work on a show all afternoon, and now you run out on me," I would yell, past endurance at these times. "You're nothing but children! Children! I've got a good mind to shoot you dead." But they only gulped the drinks and ran out with the cakes.

The props were impromptu, limited only by Mama's modest interdictions. The top drawer of the linen closet was out of bounds and we had to make do with second-best towels and tablecloths and sheets in the plays that called for nurses, nuns and ghosts.

The sitting-room shows ended when first I discovered Eugene O'Neill. It was the summer when I found his books down in the library and put his picture on the mantlepiece in the back sitting-room. By autumn I was writing a three-acter about revenge and incest—the curtain rose on a graveyard and, after scenes of assorted misery, fell on a catafalque. The cast consisted of a blind man, several idiots and a mean old woman of one hundred years. The play was impractical for performance under the old conditions in the sitting rooms. I gave what I called a "reading" to my patient parents and a visiting aunt.

Next, I believe, it was Nietzsche and a play called The Fire of Life. The play had two characters—Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche—and the point I prized about the play was that it was written in verses that rhymed. I gave a reading of this play, too, and afterward the children came in from the yard, and we drank cocoa and ate the fallen, lovely raisin cakes in the back sitting-room by the fire. "Jesus?" my aunt asked when she was told. "Well, religion is a nice subject anyway."

***

By that winter the family rooms, the whole town, seemed to pinch and cramp my adolescent heart. I longed for wanderings. I longed especially for New York. The firelight on the walnut folding doors would sadden me, and the tedious sound of the old swan clock. I dreamed of the distant city of skyscrapers and snow, and New York was the happy mise en scene of that first novel I wrote when I was fifteen years old. The details of the book were queer: ticket collectors on the subway, New York front yards—but by that time it did not matter, for already I had begun another journey. That was the year of Dostoevski, Chekhov and Tolstoy—and there were the intimations of an unsuspected region equidistant from New York. Old Russia and our Georgia rooms, the marvelous solitary region of simple stories and the inward mind.

[Mademoiselle, September 1948]