ONCE UPON A TIME I received an advertisement in the mail for the complete stories of Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett. The advertisement informed me that I would receive the first volume free, to get me hooked, and one volume every three months for three years, at the end of which I would own the complete Chekhov. Over seven hundred stories.
Seven hundred stories! I thought. Chekhov was a doctor. Any writer juggling the demands of a job, a novel-in-progress, and a family will probably ask, “How did he find the time to write seven hundred stories?” After I asked the question, I realized that how Chekhov found time for writing was less important to me than how I could find it. Looking for answers, I began to keep track of how I spent my time as a writer.
I took out my notes for a new story. Mostly notes on characters. I feel as nervous starting out as if I were going to a party where I don’t know anybody. Will I like these characters? Will they like me? Will they tell me their secrets?
I could make an outline of the story I want to tell, but my characters don’t like outlines. If I let them unfold in the writing itself, they’ll reveal themselves in more interesting ways than my outline could ever have imagined for them. Getting to know your characters is like throwing a block party; you start with a few people, and suddenly the whole neighborhood shows up.
I’ve started the story with a conversation between the two main characters, by way of introducing them.
Today I met with my old friend and former editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Barbara Lucas, to discuss The Firebrat, a fantasy novel I’ve almost finished. It was inspired by a painting of David Weisner’s, in which a boy and a girl emerge from the New York subway to find themselves in a kingdom where fish swim through the air and houses grow on trees. The character I call the Firebrat has nothing to do with David’s painting. He’s a six-foot scorpion and as pleasant as poison ivy.
Barbara liked the fantasy sections of the book but felt the scenes in the subway were vague. When my writing is vague, it’s because I don’t know enough about my subject. I need more concrete details. She also felt the character of the magician needs more work.
“What does he look like?” she asked. “All you’ve given your reader is dialogue.”
I’m determined to spend an entire day riding the New York subway.
Dinner last night with Alice and Martin Provensen. Throughout the meal a golden retriever sat by Martin’s chair and rested its head on his knee, the very image of canine devotion. The Provensens’ farm is my idea of what the peaceable kingdom looks like. Horses in a field, a boisterous rooster, any number of cats, a tribe of hens whom Martin has nicknamed the Thurbers, and a crotchety goose named Evil Murdoch. Martin told us that one fine fall day when the wild geese were flying and calling high overhead, Evil Murdoch was seen walking down the turnpike headed south.
At dinner we talked about plans for their daughter Karen’s wedding, we talked about the naming of animals, we talked about everything except the one subject I was dying to bring up: the illustrations for the new book we’re doing together, The Voyage of the Ludgate Hill. Though I’d love to see some sketches, Alice and Martin are as secretive as alchemists about what they’re working on, especially toward the author. “If you showed in your face that you didn’t like what we were doing, we would find it hard to go back to the drawing board in the same spirit we left it,” Martin told me once.
It seems ages ago that they sent me a small volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters, asking if I could write a poem for them to illustrate based on a letter he wrote to Henry James in 1887. In that letter, Stevenson describes his voyage from London to New York on the good ship Ludgate Hill.
I … enjoyed myself more than I could have hoped on board our strange floating menagerie: stallions and monkeys and matches made up our cargo; and the vast continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotized by the motion, looking through the ports at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at each other in cages …; and the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of my clothing … and the other passengers, where they were not sick, looked on and laughed. Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our stateroom, and you have the voyage of the Ludgate Hill.” (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sir Sidney Colvin, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915, p. 7)
While browsing in a secondhand shop, I came across a garden magazine intended for an audience of gardeners richer than I. Such wonderful articles telling you how to landscape your fifty acres with fountains, walls, terraces, etc. In the middle of an article on the Hellbrun palace in Salzburg, something took hold of me, some odd twist of association, and I heard one of my characters talking to herself. The most important thing for me, at this stage, is to get the voice right. The voice of whoever is telling the story.
I haven’t a clue as to how my story will end. But that’s all right. When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, you don’t conclude that the road has vanished. And how else could we discover the stars?
I spent the afternoon riding the New York subway. The train did not break down, an army of muggers did not set upon me with sticks, a fat man did not step on my feet, I did not get stuck in the turnstile, and the hole in my pocket did not send dimes and nickels and subway tokens spinning to the pavement.
This isn’t to say that nothing happened. I have always liked Rilke’s description of what happens when nothing is happening:
Who can name you all, you confederates of inspiration, you who are no more than sounds or bells that cease, or wonderfully new bird-voices in the neglected woods, or shining light thrown by an opening window out into the hovering morning; or cascading water; or air; or glances. Chance glances of passers-by … behold; they beckon here, and the divine line passes over them into the eternal. (“The Young Poet,” Selected Works: Vol. I, Prose, Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, i960, pp. 60–61)
I came away with nothing so grand as a divine line passing over into the eternal, but I did meet an itinerant singer who was so like my idea of the magician in Firebrat that I almost thought I’d conjured him up. A starfish in his lapel, a moustache like the tusks of a walrus, fingers agleam with rings as he picked out “The Golden Vanity” on his guitar.
When I set about rewriting the subway scene in my manuscript, I knew what was missing. I’d mentioned the roar of the subway but not the silence and not the far-off drip drip drip of water seeping through the walls. I’d shown the jumble of graffiti on the cars but not the bleak space across the empty platforms after the train has left.
The magician in this book will look like the itinerant subway singer.
I sent Firebrat to my agent, who called to say she will submit it to Random House.
Back to my story. Worked on it last night and dreamed over it this morning. That twilight state between dreaming and waking is a good time for watching the story work itself out. I say watching, because it really is like watching an animal, tracking it, understanding it, and finally training it.
By the harsh light of day I re-read the two pages of conversation that open the story. Now they seem to me as clumsy as the opening scene in one of those melodramas, in which the maid and the butler meet in the living room and discuss all the circumstances that have led up to the present crisis. The master has been away, the mistress is ill, the mistress’s brother has gambled away the family fortune, etc. Naturally you never meet the maid and the butler again. Why should you? They’re not characters, they’re mouthpieces for conveying information.
I spent the morning groping for a way of dramatizing the information my reader will need to get on with my story. Well, I’m not writing a newspaper article. I don’t need to give all the particulars of who, what, when, and where, in the first paragraph. Isn’t knowing when to withhold information one of the hard-won secrets of writing fiction? Did Stephen Crane worry about giving information when he wrote the opening sentence of “The Open Boat”?
“Nobody knew the color of the sky.”
I want my opening sentence to let the reader know, as unobtrusively as possible, what kind of story he or she is spending time with. Realistic? Fantasy? When D. H. Lawrence opens a story with “There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself,” I know right away that I’m in the presence of an extended parable.
A new building is going up in our neighborhood. The sign in front gives it a working title, “Future Home of Zimmer Brothers’ Jewelry Store.” Since I pass it every morning on my way to buy the paper, I’ve seen the foundation poured, the girders laid, the walls rising. At this stage, it looks like an empty swimming pool. Early one morning, before the regular crew had arrived, I saw a man standing at the bottom, all alone, unrolling a scroll. He was dressed like a workman with one curious exception: instead of a yellow hardhat, he wore a visored cap with silver wings and his glance rested on empty space, as if he were about to perform a miracle. Building Rome in a day.
Two days later a drawing board stood on that very spot. On the drawing board lay the plans for the miracle. I felt as if I were looking at a gigantic metaphor for the way writers construct stories.
I’ve studied the plans for my story—they’re all over my desk—but I haven’t seen a man in a winged cap at the heart of it all. But I’m hoping for one—or maybe a winged lady, a sort of Winged Victory—who can convert my rough draft into a miracle.
Several years ago I read an article by Gail Godwin in which she suggested that having a mental picture of one’s muse is very useful for overcoming writer’s block. I tried it and discovered I had not one muse but two. Two sisters, one obsessively shy and the other obsessively tidy. The shy one was unavailable; she was always off walking in the woods. But the tidy one told me about her. Said she likes to sit under a certain pine tree looking for bones. An owl who lives in the tree eats dozens of mice every night, and every night he throws their bones away. A mouse’s bones are no bigger than the gears in a watch. The shy sister makes whistles of them so they’ll sing when she breathes through them. The tidy sister is not fond of bones. The forest is her living room, and she can’t bear to have mouse bones in her living room. She cleans and prunes and edits. Sometimes I want one sister, sometimes the other. But if I have writer’s block, I know it’s because the tidy sister is scolding the trees for growing and the milkweed for blowing, and then I hang out a sign for her. DEAR MADAM: I APPRECIATE YOUR SERVICES BUT PLEASE DO NOT COME TILL YOU ARE CALLED. I can’t have her around in the beginning when my poem or story is feeling its way into leaf and flower.
Finished three pages on my story. It’s about a woman whose husband keeps changing jobs. Her great desire is to live in one place long enough to put down roots.
A day of distractions. The cat has an abscessed tooth, the cold water faucet is broken in the bathroom, the light doesn’t work in the cellar, and I’ve spent the morning on the telephone, pleading with plumbers and electricians. When I look at my manuscript, I feel I’ve lost the thread of the narrative. I have to resist the temptation to pile up page after page, to prove to myself that I am indeed writing. When I stop and ask myself, What is the story? I can’t give myself a straight answer.
There’s only one cure: to put the story on the back burner and turn to something else. I’ve always wanted to write a poem on our local hardware store—it’s such a paragon of order and completeness. Bins of nails, screws, latches for every purpose under heaven. Would that there were such a store for writers. Bins of opening lines, transitions, closing sentences—it’s just a matter of finding the one that fits.
When I tried to start the poem, I discovered I didn’t even know the names of half the things I’d been seeing for years. I spent the afternoon at the hardware store, looking and learning. A careful examination of the commonplace is, for me, one of the best ways of keeping in touch with the man in the winged cap—or the shy sister in the forest.
Maria Modugno, my editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, called to say that she is coming east. She’ll stop at Alice and Martin’s, pick up the illustrations for Ludgate Hill, and stay the night in Poughkeepsie with us.
Eric told me a curious anecdote about an electrical engineer he knows at work, who is taking early retirement so he can devote full time to his writing. He came to writing many years ago with no background in literature at all. “All my life,” he told Eric, “I saw the world so differently from the way my friends saw it that I figured I must be a little crazy.” The difference had something to do with imagination and intuition, though at the time he didn’t use those words to explain it.
One day he picked up a copy of the New Yorker in a doctor’s office and read the first story. “If I’m crazy,” he told himself, “the guy who wrote this story is crazy in the same way I am.”
He read the next story and the next with growing excitement, and on the way home from the doctor’s office, he mailed his subscription to the New Yorker and eagerly awaited the first issue. He read every issue from cover to cover, and one day he sat down to write a story of his own.
The writing went smoothly enough, but having finished his story, he did not know how to submit it. So he called the New Yorker to find out. The receptionist was amused and patient.
“You put the story in an envelope,” she explained, “and you include return postage. And then you wait for an answer.”
He waited. He waited for six months. He waited the way we have all waited. After six months, he called the magazine. The kind receptionist told him a letter was in the mail. Two days later he received the letter. The New Yorker wanted to buy his story. He was ecstatic. How many people sell their first story to the New Yorker?
But his second and third stories did not fare so well. They came back bearing notes from Rachel MacKenzie, an editor known for her candor. “This stinks.”
I can’t help thinking of what a friend of mine said when I congratulated him on the acceptance of his first novel. “Now I’m trying to start the second one. I thought it would be easier. Well, it’s not. I’m right back in square one.”
Maria Modugno arrived yesterday evening, and we arranged the artwork for Ludgate Hill in the living room, on the sofa and along the walls, and then we ooh’d and ah’d. She told me that when she arrived at their studio, Alice and Martin were frowning at the page on which a lively baboon makes its first appearance.
“It needs a little more blue,” said Alice.
Martin picked up his brush and added a single stroke. Turning to Maria, Alice gave Martin a compliment that came from forty-two years of being happily married and making fifty-six books together.
“Nobody paints baboons better than Martin,” said Alice.
Maria spent the night on our living room sofa. At midnight a huge raccoon tried to batter his way through the cat door. At two in the morning the cat himself began playing the piano by walking up and down on the keys. I fear she will never accept our hospitality again.
I finished the poem on the hardware store.
A Hardware Store as Proof of the Existence of God
I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,
and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,
and bins of hooks glittering into bees,
and a rack of wrenches like the long bones of horses,
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs and walk away laughing.
In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
calk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child may read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware the Dog.
In the right hands, they can work wonders.
Something there is that doesn’t love a word, and it took up residence in the word processor I’m learning—with difficulty—how to use. I had got all the way up to page nineteen of my story when the screen flashed a message, DISK ERROR. Sentences slid into gibberish, words collapsed into cuneiform. The last line I’d written began pulsing like a mad neon sign. I exited, as the expression goes, turned off the machine, and fled downstairs to make a cup of coffee. When I returned to my story, half an hour later, all but three lines were gone. Immediately I put in a new disk and wrote out as much as I could remember of what I’d lost. A few hours later, I sat down at the PC and summoned up my hastily written memories of those lost pages. Gone. I’m unspeakably depressed.
I rose at dawn and wrote out my story for the third time, and for the third time, it vanished. Eric and I spent the day trying to diagnose the problem. If machines were murderable, this one would be dead. I’ve gone back to the 1936 Smith Corona that I bought for twenty-four dollars in a secondhand shop. Like a faithful family retainer, it runs without complaint. Naturally I’m forced to write more slowly. But this has its advantages. When you write slowly, you give the odd associations that hang around the edges of a scene their due. It’s like zipping through the countryside in a limousine that suddenly breaks down. I have to get out and walk, and that’s when I discover the chicory, the wild grapevine, and the ten different species of wild grasses.
To write fast enough and at the same time to write slowly enough—isn’t that the paradox at the heart of the writer’s dilemma about finding time? This afternoon when I was in the library, the title of an article in The Writer’s Digest caught my eye: “How to Write Fast.” I picked up the magazine and leafed through it and found myself diverted by a list of books deemed useful for writers. Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print, How to Write While You Sleep … and Other Surprising Ways to Increase Your Writing Power, How to Stop Snoring, Make Your House Do the Housework, How to Find Another Husband … By Someone Who Did, Writing after Fifty, Waking Up Dry: How to End Bedwetting Forever.
You could buy a laminated walnut writer’s block if you sent fifteen dollars to the right party. A sort of voodoo item, I guess; you could pass it on to the writer who gives you a bad review.
I suppose we all want to write faster. At our backs we hear time’s winged chariot, and when we try to set ourselves schedules for writing, it’s because writing is work, and nobody can do this work for us.
But finding time isn’t enough. It must be the right kind of time, and the right kind of time is as hard to find as truffles or wild orchids. The time by which the man in the winged cap and the shy sister in the forest live—that’s the kind I want. And that kind of time knows nothing about schedules. It’s close to what one scholar of native American art has described as the Indian sense of time.
It teaches the great lesson of patience, and in this it commands respect … Although Indians say nothing about it, the artistic part of their culture is … created in the framework of ceremonial time—slow time … Pueblo clay can only be gathered when conditions are right and after prayers are said … While creating, they are inside time and react to an internal rhythm that cannot be talked about, but which is nevertheless there. Ceremonial time is private time. Many craft workers do not like to be observed while working, and the firing of Pueblo pottery is mostly done in secret. (Ralph T. Coe, Lost and Found Traditions, Native American Art 1965–1985, Seattle: University of Washington Press, in association with the American Federation of Arts, 1986)
My agent called to say that Random House wants to buy Firebrat. Janet Schulman, the editor, wants numerous revisions, and she has offered to come to Poughkeepsie so that we can discuss them. Oh, I hoped she’d think it was perfect. Sometimes I think all I want is to be praised.
I hate to interrupt the story I’m doing now to tinker with a book I let go a month ago. When a book is finished, the connection between me and the characters is broken. In a year or two I’ll have forgotten their names. They become like the people you meet on a trip. You send them Christmas cards till you realize you can’t recall what they look like.
A good friend has just been accepted for a three-week stint at the Virginia Colony of the Arts. Concentration, a gift of time; it does wonders for your writing, he assured me.
I suppose it does. But I’d miss the connection with everyday life—my son coming home at three, telling tales out of school. Like the one about the science teacher who keeps dead mice in his freezer to feed his pet boa constrictor. One day when the snake looked particularly famished, he popped a frozen mouse into the microwave. A small grey explosion followed. There are no oven-cleaning compounds on the market guaranteed to banish entrails of mouse.
Stories, stories. What does a writer do? I like William Carlos Williams’s answer. I listen. This is my entire occupation.
Today Janet Schulman came to Poughkeepsie and we went over the manuscript of Firebrat. Right off, she wanted me to change the title, and I felt like my immigrant relatives from Sweden who lost their good family name somewhere on Ellis Island. “Too many Martinsons here already,” snapped an official. “From now on, your name is Hedlund.”
It seems that Simon and Schuster is coming out with a series of young adult books called The Firebrats, about teenagers after a nuclear disaster.
“How about calling it The Quest for Firebrat?” suggested Janet.
“Quest” is a word I abhor. What if Lewis Carroll had called his book Alice’s Quest for Wonderland? What if L. Frank Baum had called his Dorothy’s Quest for the Emerald City? To me, “Quest” suggests a pale imitation of King Arthur, a pasteboard medieval story.
So my title will have to stay.
Her other suggestions were fine. The skill of a good editor never fails to amaze me—that perfect blend of severity and understanding. Janet reminds me of pleasant-faced Mrs. Bowman, who worked in the AAA office in Ann Arbor. Every summer when I was in high school our family drove from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where my father was teaching summer school. A week before the trip, he’d sit down with Mrs. Bowman, and with much folding and refolding of maps, they would discuss the dangers and possibilities. The cities where it was easy to get lost. The towns where you could see notable attractions. My father did not care for museums, but he was never in such a hurry that he wouldn’t stop to see something advertised—usually on a hand-lettered sign in the middle of the desert—as a notable attraction. The crater left by a falling star. The rattlesnake that killed the mayor’s wife in a town so small you could blink twice and miss it altogether. Never mind that the notable attractions we saw were notable to nobody else. When he left the AAA office, he carried a book of strip maps with our route carefully marked in red.
Years later, sitting in on one of John Gardner’s workshops at Bread Loaf, I thought of those strip maps. John was telling how he kept track of details when he worked on a long novel. Shelf paper, he said. You unwind the roll, you tape it to the four walls of your room. You divide it into chapters, leaving plenty of space between them, because you’ll soon be filling those spaces with notes. You could call it a map to help you navigate the unknown waters of your novel-in-progress. But never forget that you’re in charge of the terrain. After all, you invented it. If that wonderful cleaning woman you so casually introduced in chapter three keeps trying to take over the story, you just might want to change the map.
Janet did have a few misgivings about the character of the magician. “Some of the details you use to describe him don’t connect with anything else in the book,” she remarked.
I started to tell her that it was all true, I’d seen this wonderful itinerant singer in the subway—and then I stopped. Oh, I’ve succumbed to one of the writer’s strongest temptations: the wish to include something because it really happened. How often, when I’ve told a student that a scene is not convincing, do I hear the indignant outcry, “But it really happened!” Whether it happened to you doesn’t matter. Whether the reader believes it happened—that’s what matters.
Why can’t I follow my own advice?
Eric and James and I spent the Christmas holidays zipping between Ann Arbor and Grosse Pointe and Toledo, visiting our mothers and other relatives. Yesterday Eric and James returned home. I’m staying in Ann Arbor over the New Year to take care of Mother. She’s had what the doctor calls a series of “small strokes.” Small to him, maybe, but not to her. At a stroke she’s lost some of her most precious memories, and hoping to find them again, she asks the same questions over and over. Did I have a wedding? Is my sister still alive? How did my mother die?
When darkness falls, a nameless anxiety overtakes her. Her doctor calls it “the sundown syndrome.” All night long she goes up and down the stairs, checking to see if the doors are locked, peeking into every room in the house. “Who’s staying with me? Whose house is this?” she asks. “Am I alone? Did I sleep here last night?” She dreamed that somebody kidnapped her and held her for ransom.
Sleep is impossible for both of us. She sleeps so lightly. Every ten minutes she comes into my room and turns on the light on the pretext of bringing me something.
At two A.M. she lugged in a huge portrait of my grandfather. At three A.M. she was standing by my bed holding her college diploma.
“Do you know where your diploma is?” she asked.
When she finally went to bed at four, I fell asleep and dreamed that all the cars in Ann Arbor had identical bumperstickers. It’s three A.M. Do you know where your diploma is?
After four nights of not getting to sleep before four in the morning I feel like a zombie. Sunday when I tried to wake Mother up for church, she threatened to call the humane society and report me. I was determined to get her out of the house. We made it to church in time for the closing benediction. Mother turned to me and said, “That’s the shortest service I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Border’s bookshop was open. We stopped to browse. I bought Troyat’s biography of Chekhov to read while Mother is roaming around the house at night. Last night around three A.M. she brought me some literature left by the Jehovah’s Witnesses: a magazine called Awake and a book called How to Get into Paradise.
DEC. 31 / 86
New Year’s Eve. We are watching old Cary Grant movies and the news and the weather. Over and over, the same news, the same weather.
I’ve started reading the Chekhov biography by the flickering light of the TV and feel humbled. The description of his life in Moscow during a typhus epidemic puts my sleepless nights into perspective.
Like all doctors he was constantly on call, and he slept only a few hours a night…. Even when he could grab a bit of time from his patients, he had trouble concentrating on the blank page. An entire floor or the building where he lived was occupied by a caterer, who used it for wedding receptions, funeral dinners, and guild banquets, and the shouting, the blare of music, the tinkle of dishes never seemed to end. To Bilibin he wrote: “There is a wedding orchestra playing over my head at the moment … Some asses are getting married and stomping away like horses”; and to Leikin: “I’ve been so exhausted, frenzied and crazed these past two weeks that my head is spinning…. The flat is constantly full of people, noise, music…. The office is cold…. The patients keep coming….” (Chekhov, Henry Troyat, translated from the French by Michael Henry Heim, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986, pp. 69–70)
Who am I to complain about one ailing mother?
Last night I took the train back to Poughkeepsie. As I stepped up to the ticket window to ask when my train was leaving, I was clutching the Chekhov biography. The ticket-taker looked at it and smiled.
“Chekhov! Hey, you a Star Trek fan?”
Tying up the newspapers for recycling, I fell to reading old Sunday magazine sections of the New York Times. How could I have missed the issue with the photograph of Joan Didion in her study in California? Her window faces the ocean, her desk is so vast she could tapdance on it. A room of her own, full of purpose, and space, and light.
My study, which I share with my son, James, commands a fine view of Craven’s funeral parlor. On a busy day, they do as many as eight funerals over there. The mourners arrive, the hearses gather them up. When the last hearse has vanished, Mrs. Craven runs outside and hangs up her laundry. When the next batch of mourners arrives, she takes it all down again. Sometimes at night an ambulance comes, its lights flashing.
It is nearly midnight. Eric is working in his darkroom, and in the next room, James is reading a new Phil Dick novel; a repetitive tune—I think it’s something from a tape of the “Grateful Dead”— drifts through the closed door. All this coming and going does sharpen one’s sense of time. How it passes.
This afternoon—a warm Sunday, the daffodils are nodding, the tulips are sending up brilliant globes to light the shady beds of violets—this afternoon I got a call from a friend of Alice and Martin Provensen.
“I wanted to tell you this before you read it in the newspaper,” she said. “Martin died of a heart attack on Friday morning.”
I was so stunned that I hardly heard her account of how it happened. He’d stepped outside and raised his hand to hail the man who was picking up fallen brush. Was Martin greeting him? Calling for help? The next moment he collapsed.
Alice had gone into town on an errand, and she returned to see the ambulance pulling out of the road that leads to their farm. She rode with Martin to the hospital. I remembered Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.” What else could she do but go along for the ride, at least as far as the border? When Chekhov lay dying of tuberculosis, the doctor ordered champagne for him instead of oxygen.
There will be no funeral and no memorial service. I think of Hans Christian Andersen’s instructions to the friend who was composing a funeral march for him. “Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps.”
Eric and James and I jumped into the car, and drove to the Provensen farm. Friends had been dropping in all day. We sat around the table in the kitchen; the coffeepot was steaming, and everywhere we saw signs of Martin’s life on earth. His cap and jacket hung on the hook by the door, his heart medicine stood on the kitchen shelf.
Their daughter, Karen, returned from the funeral parlor.
“I saw Dad,” she said. “He was wearing his favorite red-checked shirt. I sat by the coffin and talked and talked. I’m so glad I could say good-bye.”
Alice stood up.
“I should go to the funeral parlor too,” she exclaimed.
Martin’s best friend touched her arm.
“No,” he said. “You said good-bye to him in the ambulance. The real Martin isn’t in the funeral parlor. You know he always said he didn’t believe in the body.”
For artists, for writers, what body is there but the body of work we leave behind?
I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lose someone with whom you had done fifty-six books. Going to work every morning for Alice and Martin did not mean the separation that it does for so many couples—he leaves for one office, she for another. Day after day in the studio, the only voices they heard were each other’s.
When I saw the obituary for Martin in the New York Times, I understood why we need poems. Facts tell us everything and nothing. I happened to mention this paradox to a gentleman who runs one of the two bookshops in our neighborhood, and he told me a story his Irish grandfather told him, a story which may be another way of saying the same thing. The god Lir created the world by speaking the names of everything in it. Because he had only half a tongue, his words were only half understood. Half of creation, therefore, remained unspoken. That’s why we need poets: to sing the hidden side of things.
I’ve set my story aside to write an elegy for Martin. Chekhov, as always, has good advice: “When you … wish to move your readers to pity, try to be colder. It will give a kind of backdrop to … grief, make it stand out more…. Yes, be cold” (Troyat, p. 148).
Worked on the elegy. Literature from Bread Loaf is arriving. Oh, Chekhov would have enjoyed that place. He might have been talking about Bread Loaf and not the Crimea when he confessed to family and friends, “I haven’t written a line …”, “I’m gradually turning into a talking machine. Now that we’ve solved all existing problems, we’ve started in on problems never raised before. We talk and talk and talk; we may die of inflammation of the tongue and vocal cords” (Troyat, 97).
Chekhov could have run a fine workshop, judging from the critiques he gave to writers who sent him manuscripts. How did he find time to answer them all?
You have so many modifiers that the reader has a hard time determining what deserves his attention, and it tires him out. If I write, “A man sat down on the grass,” it is understandable because it is clear … But it would be hard to follow and brain-taxing were I to write, “A tall narrow-chested, red-bearded man of medium height sat down noiselessly, looking around timidly and in fright, on a patch of green grass that had been trampled by pedestrians.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and … fiction ought to be immediately … graspable. (Troyat, 223)
I finished the elegy for Martin.
As I trudged to the post office to mail the poem to the New Yorker, I remembered my favorite rejection letter, written by the editors of a Chinese journal, which appeared in a London paper:
We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity. (The Writer’s Home Companion, James Charlton and Lisbeth Mark, New York: Franklin Watts, 1987, p. 28)
Worked on my story.
A call from Anatole Broyard at the New York Times. Would I review a book on Dvorak in America? The review should be eight hundred words.
Chekhov’s advice to a young writer who felt pressured for time seems to be meant for me.
Stop trying to meet deadlines. I do not know what your income is: if it is small, then starve, as we starved in our youth, but keep your observations for works you … write during the blissful hours of inspiration, not in one go. (Troyat, p. 71)
Broyard described the book he wished to send me: Spillville, by Patricia Hampl. A pilgrimage to the small town in Iowa where Dvorak spent a summer. The more he talked, the more interesting it sounded.
I thought of Chekhov. I asked myself—do I have the time? I want to finish my story, and I’m going to be in Ann Arbor again at the end of May, taking care of my mother.
Because he told me I have the whole month of June to write it, I said yes.
The galleys I’m to review arrived, along with a fat book on Dvorak, which Broyard thought would help, and a note telling me the review is due June 3. Did I mishear the date or did he change it? I’ve started to work on it right away.
“There are two worlds, the post office and nature,” wrote Thoreau in his journal (January 3, 1853). “I know them both.”
Today I got a letter from a child who asked: Are you famous? Are any of your books a movie yet?
I wrote back and said no to both questions. But who knows what tomorrow’s mail will bring? When Random House issued a new edition of The History of Henry Esmond, the editors received a letter from a Hollywood agent addressed to William Makepeace Thackeray. “In the event that you have already made a commitment to some agent for the above book, we nevertheless are impressed with your potential possibilities as a screen writer and would be interested in both your services and future stories.” What a prime candidate for the dead letter office.
Random House replied as follows: “Thank you for your letter…. I am now working on a new novel which I think will be a natural for pictures. I am thinking of calling the new book, Vanity Fair,” (The Writer’s Home Companion, pp. 66–67)
A fit of gardening has thrown my back out of kilter; I can’t even climb out of bed. My review is due at the end of the week. Lying on my back, I tried to write, but the ink in my pen has no imagination and refuses to flow uphill. The bed is a stagnant sea of papers, books, and cats.
Oh, I should have taken Chekhov’s advice.
“A man may write at any time,” said Samuel Johnson, “if he will set himself doggedly to it.”
I crept out of bed and found that by kneeling at the PC, I could write a little. Anyone seeing me would have supposed I was praying for inspiration. Well, why not kneel to write? Writers have practiced their craft and sullen art in all sorts of positions. Hemingway wrote standing up. So did Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll. Proust and Joyce wrote in bed.
Rilke says kneeling is the right spiritual posture for an artist.
He who kneels, who gives himself wholly to kneeling, loses the measure of his surroundings … he … belongs to that world in which height is—depth—and … who could measure the depth? (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vol. II, New York: W. W. Norton Company, Inc., 1948, pp. 238–39)
The review for the Times is done. Mailed it off this morning.
I’m in Ann Arbor taking care of Mother. On the way back from the train station, we stopped to visit the grave of her firstborn son, who died three hours after he was born. Years later, when I was growing up, she still talked about him, calculating his age, wondering what kind of person he’d have become.
“I heard him cry,” she’d tell me. “I heard the doctor say he’d fit in a teacup. The nuns told me they’d baptized him.”
Now he lies under a small headstone in the infant section of the cemetery, in the flock of stone lambs marking the surrounding graves. That boy I was born to replace. Today Mother looks at the grave without interest.
“I can’t remember my wedding,” she says suddenly. “Did I have a wedding?”
“You did,” I say. “You were married at home. You had a luncheon afterwards.”
Silence.
“Was I a good mother? I can’t remember.”
“You were a wonderful mother,” I said. “You still are.”
“Wasn’t I lucky to have you!” she beams. “Think of all the daughters I could have had. My mother was wonderful too,” she adds proudly. Pause. “She was so good at taking away pain.”
I think of Emerson at seventy, stricken with what we now know was Alzheimer’s, fighting his memory loss by sticking labels onto things, describing their use. The names meant nothing to him any more. The sign on his umbrella read: the thing that strangers take away. So he spent the last years of his life living among riddles he made himself. At Longfellow’s funeral he murmured to a friend, “That gentleman had a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name.”
Easy enough to riddle an umbrella. Not so easy to riddle a human life. The sphinx asks, and Oedipus answers. What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?
Last night, Mother was up till four, checking the doors and asking questions. Always the same questions, but sometimes, when the muse is with me, I hear them differently. I listen the way those Irish poets listened who wanted to speak for the dark side of creation.
I have gone to bed in my old room, which still has the luminous stars that my father pasted on the ceiling so many years ago. My mother stands in the hall, her shadow falling into my room. The whole universe sparkles between us.
“Where are we?” she asks. “Who’s with us? Where did we come from? Will we still be here tomorrow?”