I am not, I gather, a very good storyteller. At least that would be the prognosis of Georgina Kendall. A few years ago, while sifting through the old magazines that inevitably pile up in every doctor’s waiting room, my wife came upon an issue of Good Housekeeping in which there appeared an article by Georgina entitled “Ten Rules the Novice Writer Should Follow.” Being of an accommodating nature, and knowing that, since my retirement from Ford, I had been contemplating writing a book of my own, my wife clipped the article and gave it to me. If she recognized the author’s name, or realized the role that she had played in my life, she didn’t say—though of course not saying so would be just like her.
I didn’t read the article. Instead I put it away in the drawer where I kept all the other ephemera of my European past: the few photographs I had of Julia and the few letters Edward had written to me over the years; my copies of Flight from France and the Legrand novels; the issue of Vogue in which our apartment was featured; and then a miscellany of random objects, buttons and pencils and keys and tie pins, the significance of which I could no longer recall, and that were somehow all the more poignant for their elusiveness. The book I had told my wife I wanted to write was to be an account of those few weeks I’d spent in Lisbon in the summer of 1940. For nearly a year I had been preparing myself to write it. I had virgin pads at the ready, sharpened pencils, a new portable typewriter. Yet until that evening, I hadn’t put down so much as a word. Now I see that it was Georgina’s article—not its contents so much as its sheer talismanic presence—that gave me the impetus to begin. For, starting on the evening that my wife presented it to me, I wrote steadily for six months, until I reached the chapter describing the visit I had made to the castle with Edward. And then I could not go on, though I didn’t know why. I put the manuscript away in the drawer with the old letters and photographs and books and buttons and so on … for six months. And then, just the other day, on impulse, I opened the drawer again and took out—not the manuscript, but the article: “Ten Rules the Novice Writer Should Follow.”
Georgina, I have you to thank for this work. It was the discovery that I had broken every one of your rules that impelled me to complete it.
To wit:
1. Never set scenes of dialogue in cafés. They provide insufficient business for the characters.
(But where did we spend all our time in Lisbon if not cafés?)
2. Never leave loose plot threads.
(But what of the way war tears stories into shreds?)
3. Never introduce a character whom you don’t plan to bring back later.
(I never did learn what became of the Fischbeins.)
4. Keep the competition in mind.
(Following a brief surge of popularity in the mid-forties, Xavier Legrand’s novels lapsed into desuetude.)
5. Remember that an unhappy ending is more likely to lead to big sales than a happy one.
(But my story did have a happy ending.)
6. Make sure that the motive for a character’s action is clear enough that a reader can explain it easily to a friend.
(I still don’t know why Julia killed herself.)
7. Don’t strain credulity.
(The majority of the crew members aboard the Manhattan were German-born, anti-Semitic, and supporters of the Axis. The ship’s newsletter could have been written by Ribbentrop himself.)
8. Never allow a first-person narrator to step outside his range of observation.
(Where does one draw the line between observation and dream?)
9. Don’t rely on coincidence.
(Who would have believed it, Georgina? You really were Aunt Rosalie.)
10. Never let facts get in the way.
(How the facts got in the way—that is the story I am trying to tell.)