Coming into the End Zone (22 page)

Heard in the street in Key West: ‘Give me a ring up sometime.'

‘Listen up.'

‘Looky here.'

‘Did you make out with him?'

‘I took it offen him.'

The reply by one lady to everything said by her companion: ‘Isn't it something?'

Beside the pool between swims I am reading a new first novel by a very young woman whose story is anguished, self-pitying, revealing the disturbed state of her mind. I remember Simone de Beauvoir writing: ‘In one way or another, every book is a cry for help.' This one is filled with raw, undigested teenage experience. I think of T. S. Eliot's lines: ‘… the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.' This young novelist has not given herself time for the creative chaos, the wildness, to collect and simmer. She needs to leave the scene of her first experience, take journeys in every direction, return, and then explore the truths of the place she started from.

George Eliot wrote her first novel
(Adam Bede)
when she was forty.

On the plane home from Key West I sit beside a lady who tells me she makes her living as a house painter and wallpaper hanger. I tell her I always thought hanging wallpaper one of the most difficult tasks in the world. She agrees. ‘It is a terrible strain. Especially after I paper bathrooms. For weeks afterwards, every time the phone rings, I think it is an angry customer to say the paper is coming off the wall.'

Washington. Spring comes early here. It is late March, and yet crocuses are up around our elm tree in the front yard, the trees everywhere are in light-green bud, and the air is promising warmth. Even the sun has taken on a new brightness, coloring the customary grey Washington air so that it now looks yellower.

Today I tape five book reviews at National Public Radio, trying to avoid my usual stammering, sibilants and misreadings. But my new producer is a nervous man, a chain smoker, restless, never motionless. I catch his jitters, and read badly. I wish I had studied speech in college. I remember that in grade school the wealthier students used to take ‘elocution lessons.'

One of the books I reviewed was by Brenda Ueland, who died, after 'an active and vital life' (as the blurb to her book on writing says), in 1985 at the age of ninety-three. ‘Vital life' seems rather redundant.

Her book, written fifty years ago, is called
If You Want to Write
and subtitled ‘A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit.' It is full of eccentric, unexpected, unusual, freewheeling advice, always encouraging the ambitious, apprentice young writer to:

‘Write freely, recklessly, in first drafts.'

‘Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.'

‘When discouraged, remember what Van Gogh said: “If you hear a voice within you saying, You are no painter, then paint by all means, lad, and that voice will be silenced, but only by working.”'

About fifteen years ago I made friends with Brenda Ueland. She had written to me at
The New Republic
to cancel her long-held subscription (‘Since the forties,' she wrote) because she was low in funds, and because she thought the writing (‘mostly by men, I notice') was often too ‘fancy.'

I replied, asking her to accept a complimentary subscription, and promising to watch out for the quality of the writing, at least in the back of the book, which I edited. A letter came back at once from her (she lived in Minneapolis). It contained a check and an apology. ‘I've decided, feeling shamed, that I
can
afford it.'

From then on we wrote to each other on occasion. Her letters contained long, detailed advice on how to eat more healthily (bran, no refined sugar or white flour, no caffeine or alcohol), and accounts of her exercise program, which included a yearly climb up Pikes Peak in her seventies, running, swimming, and walking: her suggestion was that I ‘walk a thousand miles this year … [it is] hardly three miles a day.'

When I left
The New Republic
and began to consider writing about Willa Cather, I came upon Ueland's autobiography, called
Me
, published in 1939. I learned that she had known Edith Lewis, Cather's companion for forty years. ‘She [Lewis] was my boss at
Every Week
, Bruce Barton's magazine,' she wrote. Every now and then, Ueland said, she would be invited to dinner at 5 Bank Street, where Cather and Lewis lived in ‘a long, railroad apartment.' She said the food cooked by their French cook, Josephine, was excellent.

In
Me
, Ueland had written that Cather was ‘masculinely intellectual.' What did she mean, exactly? I asked. She responded: ‘Solid, thoughtful, learned, spoke in complete and excellent sentences.… Splendid, grave, vigorous … compact, not at all flabby or abdominal but there was no concave waistline.… Bright red cheeks and bright green eyes. A good nose. Strong teeth.… Not chic, not masculine, but handsome, strong. She might have been a Marchioness.'

Of Edith Lewis she wrote that she was in awe of so perfect a boss who ‘was also a woman.' I recognized her slight misogyny.

I asked her if she had any notion of the nature of their relationship. She responded indignantly: ‘No. We had not the slightest tincture of a notion about that. Such a thought—a horrible libel and affront to their grandeur, nobility, sense of beauty, seemliness, grace.' She ended a long paragraph of indignation with a somewhat modified if muddled view:

‘I am ninety years old and have had a wonderful, impassioned life, but I am far too polite, too respectful of all others to let myself
imagine
other people's copulations. I censure it out. All love is interesting and worthy of our sympathy.'

Ueland was a remarkable woman. Robert Penn Warren was her friend, she was invited by Warren Beatty to be in his movie
Reds
, because she had known John Reed well, she was responsible for getting Harry Reasoner his first newspaper job. She was knighted by the King of Norway, and, in her eighties, set a swimming record. Just before she died, she was still walking three miles, and attending to her large correspondence. Fifty years after it first appeared, she provided a new introduction to the second edition of her book on writing.

A good comment from an editor on
Camp
, accompanied by the regret that it is too slight to launch a whole publishing program with. I begin to wonder if the novella has any value at all. I feel I am playing a partner in that game I Doubt It, which I used to play with my sister, who is a character in
Camp
.

Do not despair, I tell myself. Years ago at Yaddo, Alice Walker sat down beside me at dinner and said: ‘I'm working on a novel, but something is missing and I don't know what it is.' I think it turned out to be
The Color Purple
.

Lunch, on the deck in a warm mid-March noon. I hear a tapping noise. The boy next door with his ball? Someone typing (or tap-dancing) across the alley? No. I see it now. A woodpecker at work on our elm tree.

I take my tray back into the kitchen and remember the sign someone once tacked up over the pantry at the MacDowell Colony: ‘It is not enough to have talent. You also have to carry in your dishes.'

‘You have a certain panache,' an old acquaintance said to me yesterday. I wonder what he meant. I have a vision of myself wearing a great Mayan headdress, since the Latin means feathers or tassels, and I always thought ‘panache' meant an ornamental plume of feathers.

Last Sunday in March. At the coffee hour in St. James Church, a few of us meet to talk about joining an AIDS aid group to work in Capitol Hill Hospital. The organization, throughout the diocese, already has its own acronym (no group in this capital city survives without one): ECRA, Episcopal Caring Response to AIDS, an awkward formulation, I thought.

One of the participants is a handsome young military officer in civilian clothes. He is a cheerful, spirited fellow full of jokes and good stories. He tells me about his small nephew who watched
Quo Vadis
on television and saw the Romans throw what were called Christians to the lions in the Circus.

‘Whew,' he said, ‘I'm sure glad I'm a Catholic.'

A friend of his was told that the only requirement for his choice of a sponsor at his adult baptism was that the person be a good Christian. His reply: ‘Are you trying to make this difficult for me?'

After the organizational meeting, the major in mufti had another narrative. Seems that Bismarck made very good use of his professed Christianity. During the Siege of Paris in 1871 he instructed his soldiers to shoot any civilian who asked for more food. He added: ‘I attach no great importance to human life because I believe in another world.'

The
Washington Post
reports a high degree of semiliteracy in Washington high schools. Not too different from the state of things everywhere in the country, I think. A sentence is quoted from a student's essay: ‘No man can no all there is to no of life.'

Packing. I stop to read in a volume of Gertrude Stein's. I find, as always in her work, sentences that take me aback, especially as I contemplate my own notebooks: ‘Remarks are not literature.'

A CENTURY OF PROGRESS
the banner across the entrance to one of the Smithsonian buildings reads. Progress: an illusion that persons living only in the present, ignorant of history, possess. To keep the world of Maya fresh in my mind, I have been rereading one of my favorite books. Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, in the introduction to a new edition of John Lloyd Stephens's
Incidents of Travel in Yucatán
, writes about Stephens and his illustrator Charles Catherwood. In 1848 they believed in Manifest Destiny. ‘They didn't know,' writes von Hagen, ‘as we do now, that progress is neither automatic, universal, nor inevitable.'

On the deck this afternoon I sit in a wedge of sun to read. A small bird (is it young?) crisscrosses rapidly from telephone wire to the elm tree, and back again. A small, restless, unsettled bird, feeling insecure about the anachronistic heat of the day I wonder: As it ages, will it slow down? When it reaches its equivalent of my age, will its wings flap more slowly? Will it have trouble remaining in the air, dipping, falling a little, rising again tiredly, coming down to drink from the petals of the impatiens, eating less having lost its appetite, resting on the deck rail, waiting for a renewal of energy? Has anyone ever seen an aging bird?

For that matter, I have never seen a baby pigeon or a baby sea gull. All members of those species seem about the same size. So perhaps I will never see a shrinking, old bird, losing its powers, declining into old age. How lucky for the species, how heartening to me.

Sybil brings home some good, old books she has bought for the store. We sit in our chairs in the dining room. I watch her inspect each book minutely, its binding, the order and state of the illustrations and pages, the sewing of the signatures. Sometimes she sniffs it for mold. In each one, she reads a little, sometimes aloud to me, remarking on the good places. Often I take notes: Who knows when those words might ‘come in useful,' as my mother used to say.

When the minute physical inspection and rapid scanning of the contents are finished, she puts a tentative price carefully on the right-hand corner of the flyleaf, and her secret code which tells her what she paid for the book. In the short time it has been in her hands, the book is hers, an orphan rescued from abandonment in someone's attic or cellar. Briefly she is its foster parent, giving it temporary shelter and solicitous attention. It is one of the lucky ones with another chance at life.

The life history of a new book is more often tragic than triumphant. Fresh from the press, offset or hand, it arrives at the bookseller's shelf full of hope. It has the unique, clean smell of optimism. In its sparkling, inviting, crisp jacket it appears to be smiling at the world, like a puppy in a pet-store window: ‘Take me home.'

A few, fortunate best-sellers, well-reviewed books, books by respected or well-loved authors, are bought up at once and leave the shelves in a little flurry of triumph, like fortunate orphans chosen from asylum ranks for adoption who are leaving their less fortunate peers behind. The ‘remainders,' as they will now be called, have lived out their shelf life, and are taken from their places of display after a few short weeks to be shipped back to their publishers. The publishers promptly turn them over to jobbers, businessmen who will deal with the crestfallen, disappointed volumes in bulk, offering them, at much lower prices, to retail booksellers and buyers looking for a bargain.

Off the books go again, now displayed on the bargain tables in chain bookstores. Those not purchased at their new half-price will be reduced, and then reduced again, until they all disappear. Where? Into homes where they are read, or simply fill shelves, or are displayed on a table, or lent, or stored and eventually sold when the owner needs more space or moves on or dies, to secondhand-book dealers.

Then the sad descent into oblivion begins. A few will be purchased. The rest will inhabit a used-book store for years in one dusty pile or another. At some point, the author and his work completely forgotten, the dealer despairs and puts them out in front of his store, marked ten cents each. Some might be bought by impecunious students, and the rest? After midnight, on a windy March night, a stinging rainstorm comes up, the books left out under a short canopy (‘all you can fit into a paper bag') are soaked through, tossed into a garbage bin and hauled away to what in Maine is called, euphemistically, a ‘transfer station.' So a saga of great hopes, ambition, even talent, disappears, under the obliterating grey ash of the town dump.

Thursday I flew to Fort Lauderdale for a weekend gathering at the Broward Public Library. Before the plane could depart from Washington National Airport, it sat, fully loaded with passengers, in its landing dock for two hours so that repairs could be made to the hydraulic system. At last we advanced to the runway to find we were fourteenth in line for takeoff. Another stationary hour waiting our turn to fly. Then four hours to Florida. So, for seven hours, 150 people were cribbed and cabined together, occupying their time in a variety of ways.