IN THE OTHER TIME available from my teaching and my efforts at writing, every week or ten days I’d drive the half-hour to Raleigh and eat with Mother and my brother Bill and spend an occasional night. The fact that I could now make a monthly contribution to their ongoing welfare was a great relief to me, especially toward the needs of a brother who’d lost his father at so young an age. When I returned to the States, my brother was seventeen and a high-school junior—the same even-keeled and easy kinsman I’d always enjoyed, sharpened now by the maturity required of him when our father died. Bill and I had always loved good books—the Landmark lives of great American boys had been important in his pre-adolescence for instance—and by the time I was home, he’d begun to show a fascination with American history that would ultimately lead to his distinguished career as an essayist, archivist, student and teacher of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history (for nearly fifteen years he’d direct the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, one of the most respected in the nation).
At that point also, Mother was mainly liking her job at the boys’ clothing store. Her natural warmth and curiosity made her welcome all but the most truculent of her customers; and she’d soon built up a sizable core of devoted mothers who’d shop with no one else when their sons needed anything from a Boy Scout uniform (with knife) to a graduation suit, tie, keychain, and shoes. And in my ongoing slender years, even I was able to fit myself out from her older-boys’ racks—trousers, shirts, underwear, even suits. The only aspect of her work that began to wear her down after a few years—she was in her midfifties—was the need to work till nine two nights each week.
But she liked the man who owned her store, and he well knew he had a gold mine of a saleswoman in Elizabeth Price. Her favorite colleague was a slightly older woman named Vir (to rhyme with fur). Vir was a true West Virginian with the classic “ridge runner” accent and unvarnished mountaineer idioms and tales that Mother would store up to tell us at our next dinner. Once we’d laughed our fill, for example, at Vir’s saying that she’d just bought some gorgeous water glasses that had “itching” on them (that is, etching), Mother would assure us that Vir would do anything on earth for her—a claim that would prove a demonstrable truth a few years later when Mother’s eyesight began to fail mysteriously; and Vir quietly saved her from frequent embarrassments as she miscalculated a customer’s bill, say, or couldn’t read the label on a box of sweaters.
* * *
At least one weekend every six or eight weeks, I’d drive the Beetle five hours north to Washington where Michael Jordan shared an apartment with an English engineer whom he’d recently met. The drive itself would be an adventure. Mainly you had to evade the nationally notorious and rapacious Virginia speed patrolmen, and then you had to literally manhandle your steering wheel as gigantic semis roared past and all but swept your tiny German bargain under lethal wheels. But my safe arrival in green Georgetown—Olive Street—rewarded the effort.
Colin, the housemate, was a droll Cambridge graduate our age who had incomparable success in girlfriends; and soon I was enjoying the small parties the two men would throw in their compacted space. By American-youth standards of the time, the evenings were slightly formal. The “chaps” might dress in summer jackets and white trousers, the American girls in summer dresses, the few English girls in summer “frocks”; and the atmosphere would revive my memory of pleasant English evenings, only with better-quality wine and all of us a little more adult in appearance and deportment.
Among other changes, Michael was expanding his own Merton repertoire of charms for the opposite gender, and more than half the pleasure of my weekends on their narrow sofa was a chance to study his and Colin’s compatible but highly personal modes of seduction. Soon Colin was squiring Berit, a lovely Swedish girl whom he’d met in Stockholm a year or so earlier and who’d come over mainly to visit him, I assumed. So compatible were the two men, however, that soon—somehow—Berit had decided to stay on in America; and she and Michael were keeping company while Colin, once more—and quite agreeably—went on switching his female tracks.
A more significant change for me was the inevitable evolution of my and Michael’s college friendship into something less steadily communicative. I wasn’t entirely glad for the change, but I was far from desolate. We went on seeing each other five or six times a year, always with the same mutual trust and frequent laughter. The relation would always mean things to me that it couldn’t to Michael, especially as we loaded more years onto our backs and Michael acquired a family (it would be nearly twenty years before I realized that the friendship had meant as much to Michael, though in a very different way, as it always had to me).
* * *
Further, I was forging on in my own emotional life. Matyas and I were keeping up a steady transatlantic correspondence in those last days of earnest hard-copy letter writing. And to me at least, there still seemed the possibility of some kind of long-term commitment between us. Even more than love and teaching, however, I’d now launched myself on what I’d so long hoped would be my central sustained work. I’d commenced to write the Rosacoke story that was meant to complete the full volume I’d contracted with Chatto and Random House. With all the pages of notes I’d made since January ’57, I still thought I was at work on a novella when I carved out the first sentence of A Long and Happy Life in October ’58—a sentence that, in eventual reviews and later critical studies, would come to have a life of its own.
When I speak of carving it out, I mean what the metaphor implies. Michelangelo wrote of his own sense that any one of his planned statues lay, pre-existent and awaiting his chisel, within the block of marble he’d chosen. In my own early days of continuous work—and especially in that ambitious beginning—I felt myself literally struggling to see, and then to liberate, an elaborate human action which was pre-existent in my mind, in the lives of imagined (yet quite real) human characters, and finally in the English language, my recalcitrant block of marble.
Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles toward Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and even trying to nod at every sad car in the line, and when he even speeded up and passed the truck (lent for the afternoon by Mr. Isaac Alston and driven by Sammy his man, hauling one pine box and one black boy dressed in all he could borrow, set up in a ladder-back chair with flowers banked round him and a foot on the box to steady it)—when he even passed that, Rosacoke said once into his back “Don’t” and rested in humiliation, not thinking but with her hands on his hips for dear life and her white blouse blown out behind her like a banner in defeat.
I’d begun to tell the story less than a month after beginning my effort to learn the other great skill I’d promised myself—the ability to teach. The story would take me more than two years to complete, and by that time I’d begun to feel a good deal more comfortable in the classroom and the conference office. I kept no journal of my progress and setbacks in teaching. The three days each week of entire commitment to my students consumed all the energy I felt I could spare for that large part of my life—even the plentiful energy of a man in his mid-twenties—but I went on making frequent notes for my writing. All those notes, and many more, are gathered now in a volume called Learning a Trade; and they remind me, first, of what a rich pleasure I took in being back on native ground or very near it.
I’ve noted the rural surroundings of my trailer/house, and the notes remind me of further details. Pastures of beef cattle mooed, bellowed, and mounted one another within a few hundred yards of my desk (all the cows seemed to be lesbian, frequently mounting one another in dogged patience, achieving what?). Brightleaf tobacco still grew, regally tall though deadly, on fields within a short walking distance from the page on which I described it; and the mules that still plowed the crop on a few small allotments were visible at rest on the evening hills, side by side in parallel exactitude but never quite touching. At least as welcome was the presence on all sides of woods and fields quite empty of other human beings.
And then there were the neighbors. A number of the men and women I slowly came to know (again, within a quarter-hour of campus) had lived in that corner of Durham and Orange counties for many generations; and they had useful stories to tell me—a gift they offered readily, for the asking, and in an idiom that was virtually indistinguishable from the syntax and rhythm of my story’s protagonists. One of them—Claude Bennett—had been born nearby, the son of a farmer whose family had lived in our neighborhood for more than a century. Claude and his wife Betty worked on the production line at American Tobacco Company downtown; and after his retirement Claude would be the man who drove me, with an almost equine patience, to Duke Hospital for the five weeks of daily radiation treatments awarded to my cancer. Even better through the years, the language of his and Betty’s family (they have two sons) has kept my ear to the local ground.
Henry May, my agreeable landlord, was from Pennsylvania; but he likewise taught me—almost daily—a great deal I hadn’t previously known about the actual land we lived on. He took obvious pleasure in the pond on our west edge, the trees and pastures, all teeming with wildlife. The wildest life I’d seen in Oxford was the occasional bird or feral cat; but soon after moving to Kerley Road, Henry began pointing out the smaller neighbors. Apart from nocturnal prowlers such as possums, raccoons, flying squirrels, and foxes, we had an immense snapping turtle in the pond (who occasionally wrenched a leg off one of Henry’s swimming white ducks); and speaking of larger animals, oddly the epidemic of elegant but car-wrecking deer had yet to engulf us. Birds were Henry’s mania—the usual tireless and endlessly hungry songbirds and a plentiful overhead supply of red-tailed hawks and wide-winged buzzards—and he could tell me about their habits and even their migratory routes which he knew in detail. A fair amount of his animal lore worked its away into my first four books; and of course I was free to roam his land and the many acres of Duke Forest that bounded him.
* * *
On my three no-school days (with Sunday for rest), I’d take my legal pad and climb to a hill above the pond. There I’d chosen a tall straight shagbark hickory on the edge of a wide-based triangular pasture. I’d sit there, lean back on the tree, then watch and listen closely. I’d done—and seen and heard—nothing to match this lone silence since age nine (when Dad sold our country house); and while it was hardly an exotic experience, I entered in my notes a few first reactions to what was clearly a rediscovered world.
A distant rifle and a crow flies into a tree that is already bare and standing white as a nerve. Another shot and every bird is silent, then the crow signals and everybody starts up again. It took them 10 seconds, though.
Some trees are already bare as though to get it over with as soon as possible.
One red leaf twisting through the air straight as a plumb line—with no tree anywhere near.
Air full of shining-new copper wire catching the light from place to place, seeming to float. And a single strand of silk with the spider attached working as though he would weave the whole air full of his shining.
Ducks asleep in the sun, heads under their wings, refusing to look up when I quack.
Meanwhile I pushed on with my long first scene—Rosacoke and Wesley’s opening motorcycle ride to black Mildred’s funeral, then the service itself. By November 4 I noted that I’d written eighteen hundred words and had Rosacoke entering Mount Moriah Church for the funeral. By my very slow Oxford standard, I was moving rapidly enough to feel encouraged, though I noted that I was concerned that neither Rosa nor Wesley yet had sufficient physical presence. That was a prime concern of the scenes, especially after I’d read quantities of D. H. Lawrence in England (Stephen had given me a three-volume edition of Lawrence’s stories; at his best Lawrence’s prose was still so potent I could hardly believe he’d died three years before my birth). I was determined that my young lovers should affect the reader almost as profoundly and erotically as they affected one another—that the reader should be aroused by the reality of the bodies, the odors, the atmospheres of this magnetic young pair. And I labored slowly in that direction as the notes make clear.
A large part of my aim to make the main characters both physically imposing and erotically attractive was a hope that would prove enduring through my whole career (till now at least, fifty-odd years since I started). Two of my early short stories reflect powerful attractions between male characters; but since the characters are pre-adolescent, there’s little or no erotic energy in their relations. And only a small number of my later adult characters lead dedicated homosexual lives. I’ve spent little time exploring the peculiarities of such experience, perhaps because—as I may have shown above—I’ve observed few such lives.
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.