Contented

This morning, after I had finished my writing stint, it came to me how magical it is to create a whole new character. The character I was creating had been mentioned earlier in the novel, but this was the first time she had appeared. The character I set down (or that any writer sets down, for that matter) doesn’t have the complexity of a real person. That would take an unimaginable number of words. I had delight creating her, picturing her sitting on the living room floor, a little jump of my heart. The contentment of writing; nothing like it. I thought back over the characters I had created in the last ten years, not one of whom will be known by anyone but me.

Someone said, I can’t remember who, that a novel is only half-done when the writer finishes it; it needs a reader to complete it. Is that true? Reading it aloud to my two writing groups is probably not as good as it would be to have someone with manuscript in hand, seated in a comfortable chair, with a good reading lamp, deeply immersed in it: the union of teller and told, as the quotation in my blog description has it. I should make more of an effort to publish, I know that, but it is such an awful process, whereas the process of creating a world and the people in it is so satisfying that it makes me serene the rest of the day.

Hoping For a Sudden Floater

When I first started to write in earnest, about 1967, I came under the sway of Viktor Shklovsky, of his novel A Sentimental Journey, and of his formalist writings. Instead of starting off as a sensible person would have, with a traditional novel, I devised complicated forms and schemes. I was not interested in publishing, in fact the possibility terrified me, so I was not constrained by having to write a publishable, a popular novel. My husband was the bread-winner, so I didn’t need a financial reward. What interested me was whether writing could help me make sense of my world, help me make order out of chaos. In A Palpable God, Reynolds Price articulated the reason I wanted to write novels back then and why I continue to write: “the chance that in the very attempt at narrative transaction something new will surface or be revealed, some sudden floater from the dark unconscious, some message from a god which can only arrive or be told as a tale.”

Hope Springs Eternal

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest:
Alexander Pope, The Essay on Man

I was lying awake this morning at 4, thinking about my poor rejected novel. I decided to get up, and in the peace and quiet of an early Sunday morning, go at it again. While I was working on the Anthony section, I was struck by the peculiar diction, awkward, and then remembered that I had written the original draft in the first person. When I changed it to the third person, I thought that because it was from his point of view, in his voice, the diction would be all right. But reading it this morning, I realized that it wasn’t. I dug up the old first person version. That is better.

The rejected novel is much too long for “literary” fiction. No small Canadian publisher could afford to print it. There’s no doubt that the members of our writing group have liked the Anthony section a lot more than they have liked the other sections. Bill suggested I cut everything but the Anthony section, but I hated to give up what after fifeteen years of working on it had become the central structure of the novel – the story of various people in an apartment building, how they become a family, how they interact. This morning I think I have found a way to keep some of that but still make the novel short enough, and still feature the Anthony section. The novel that had been rejected was 111, 000 words. This new version will be about 40, 000 words, more a novella than a novel. I am feeling quite hopeful.

Sherrill Grace has written an interesting book about Malcolm Lowery. She studied his manuscripts of Under the Volcano and describes his method of re-writing. He added phrases, stuck them in the middle of existing sentences. It makes the novel denser. I will go fish out Grace’s book. When I was teaching creative writing, I would often use her description of Lowery’s method. I think that what I need to do with this new version of the novel is just that – add phrases rather than whole sentences.

Mrs. Todd

A long time ago I read Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. I loved it from the first sentence, and I love it still. I wondered what the herbs looked like that Mrs. Todd, the herb lady, grew or collected in the wild, so I started an herb garden and grew those herbs: pennyroyal, elecampane, thoroughwort (also known as boneset), borage, wormwood, southernwood, thyme, balm, sweet mary, mint. Most of them definitely weren’t herbs you could use in cooking. I bought herb books and read up on the lore.

Over a period of twenty five years the garden had to be uprooted four times, and after the fourth, I decided I didn’t have the physical energy to begin again. Many of the herbs, however, were hardy and continue to thrive beside the fence, along the house, or in the top soil pile where they can’t be mowed down.

I used the lore of the herbs in Flora, Write This Down. I became interested in other medicinal herbs as well: tansy, angelica, comfrey, ladies mantle, and I learned to identify many others in the wild, St. Johnswort and yarrow for example.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is by far the best of Jewett’s books. It seems as if it must have been inspired by a higher power.

Off the topic, but not too far

I looked up comic blogs by women recommended by another blogger. I didn’t find them very funny, an age thing perhaps. I usually have the same opinion of women stand-up comedians. Their method seems to be to mention private parts, say the f word, or complain about their mothers. That was funny some time ago, but the shock value has worn off.

Good comedy of any kind is the most difficult genre to write. That’s a vast generalization, but I think it’s true. You apparently can’t force yourself to write it, but you can force yourself to write a novel or a poem. Leo Rosten has an insightful introduction to his second volume of the wonderfully comic Hyman Kaplan stories. He writes that one night when he was in despair, Hyman appeared to him. Rosten wrote the stories when he should have been doing something else. They were a great success, so of course people wanted more. But Hyman disappeared, not to re-surface until twenty-five years later when Rosten was again in despair.

One time long ago, when my husband was worried, he woke me up to read me his first Everett Coogler poem. My reaction was, Oh no, he’s gone round the bend. He wrote quite a few Coogler poems, enough for a slim chapbook, and they were wildly successful. When he performed them at readings, people would howl with laughter. Strangers wrote him fan letters. But alas, Everett disappeared.

I love the Christopher Fry essay, “Comedy”. “…there is an angle of experience where the dark is distilled into light: either here or hereafter, in or out of time: where tragic fate finds itself with perfect pitch, and goes straight to the key which creation was composed in. And comedy senses and reaches out to this experience. It says, in effect, that, groaning as we may be, we move in the figure of a dance, and, so moving, we trace the outline of the mystery.”

Occasionally when I am giving a reading from one of my novels, the audience will laugh. Then I fantasize that I too could write a comic novel. Or maybe a short story.

A New Venture

About 10 years ago, I decided to write a novel that I myself would like to read, not having a possible audience in mind, but hoping that it would be acceptable to others. Alas, it didn’t work out. For one thing, it didn’t have enough narrative thrust – none actually – and when I tried to insert some, it sounded artificial to my ears. I have been tinkering with it for some time now. While I was away in Maine, I had a eureka moment: it might work as a blog. I had written it as journal being kept by a woman who had recently been ordained and, along with her new husband, given a charge, roughly set in a fictionalized Baccaro, Nova Scotia, a spot I dearly love. The title of the novel is A Meditation on Psalm 139. One of the inspirations for the novel was a service I attended in Baccaro, where the woman minister read the psalm. As I studied it, I thought that it could have been composed by a woman. Harold Bloom had suggested in The Book of J that some of the psalms might have been written by a woman, that there were educated women high up in the courts of Solomon and David.

How Do You Fill a God Hole?

Both my brother and I inherited a God hole from my mother’s father. About 1960 my brother received the call to become a minister. He wrote about this call in a poem titled “Softly.” “Softly, almost unnoticed, the spirit of Christ/ Enters and becomes. No hysteric act displays itself/ His coming unto us/…Jesus enters softly.”

I thought that if my beloved Robin was going to devote his life to the church, I should support him if I could. A year or so later, the local Methodist minister came to visit – he was visiting all the people in our apartment complex – and found me reading John Wesley’s biography. Soon I too was involved with the church. I’ve been attending church since then, although there was a period from 1965 until about 1975 when my attendance was sporadic but still faithful.

I can’t say that the church has been much influence on my religious life. Only occasionally do I feel there as if I am in the presence of God. Just once has Communion constituted a religious experience for me, and that was when Robin led a Watch Night service in our village church. Why then do I attend? I don’t know.

I had an intense period of reading religious books, from about 1965 until about 1990. My religious experiences have come often when I am either reading or writing. I was profoundly moved and changed by reading Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. I have led my life under its guidance ever since. Reading W.E. Hockings’ The Meaning of God in Human Experience changed the way I think of the world, of God and especially of what happens after death. I studied the Bible, read Biblical scholarship, and read works by the Mystics. About 1990 one of our ministers, Rod Sykes, led a seminar on the Reign of God, and that became a huge part of my thinking.

All my novels use a religious a structure but not an obvious one. (No one, not even a reviewer, has mentioned such a structure.) Flora used the Book of Revelations for its structure as written about in Farrer’s The Rebirth of Images. Wise-Ears used the Book of Proverbs. The Opening Eye and Samara used the first part of the Book of Acts. The Irrational Doorways used the Book of Acts and others of Paul’s writings. The current, unpublished novel, Temple House, uses what I can grasp of the Reign of God.

more doorways

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.
William James

I have just finished re-reading “The Land of the Wee-Uns,” one of the six stories in The Listen to Me Stories, and if I remember correctly, my favorite. I could almost recapture the feeling I had when I first read it: delight in that hidden world of tiny people living in a mountain under the sea. Why had the story so enthralled me? Was it because I was experiencing another world for the first time and thus could look at my own world with new eyes? The story is about a boy who sets out from the coast of Scotland and is marooned there. He was heartbroken to be separated from his mother and father, and yet he eventually became happy and content. James goes on to write about experiencing in arts the “vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.” One of the great joys I have in writing novels is constructing other worlds. The Wee-Uns are sweeter than we giants are. My constructed worlds are peopled with sweet characters, a flaw perhaps.

In my novel Wise-Ears, the main character writes stories. For one of these stories, to get the right voice and style, I read Granny’s Wonderful Chair out loud. Years ago, on one of his visits my father brought me a chair that looks like the one in the book’s illustration. The chair is of no earthly use, uncomfortable and awkward, but I love it nonetheless.

Irrational Doorways

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.
William James

My father brought us used books from a place in Boston called Morgan Memorial. I remember the name well since it was the source of treasures, but I didn’t know what it was until I looked it up on the internet. It is a place where “unwanted household goods” were made serviceable by people with disabilities. One of these books was my favorite: The Listen to Me Stories by Alicia Aspinwall. Another of my favorites was Granny’s Wonderful Chair by Frances Browne. The inscription in that book is “Nuzzo to Mr. L.” I think Nuzzo was one of my father’s charges in the school where he taught woodworking to boys who had got in trouble with the law, truancy mostly but also petty thefts. I don’t know why Nuzzo gave my father a book.

Alicia is not as well-known as Frances, partly I think, because Granny’s Wonderful Chair contained "The Christmas Cuckoo", widely-anthologized in Christmas story books. Perhaps she was a better storyteller, but she also had a more dramatic biography. She was blind, the result of smallpox in her childhood, and came from a family of 12 in Ireland. I think Alicia was an American, but I can’t find anything more about her. She wrote a moralizing story about the use of the word “please” also anthologized.

Until I started writing this, I hadn’t fully realized that these two books were products of the nineteenth century. The Listen to Me Stories was first published in 1897, but my copy is a 1910 reprint. Granny’s Wonderful Chair was published in 1856.

Both of these books, I also just realized, were told by a recognizable storyteller. In Granny’s Wonderful Chair, the chair tells the stories. “Chair of my grandmother, tell me a story.” That the title of The Listen to Me Stories implied a storyteller, I understood and I even imagined the storyteller.

I thought I could finish this exploration without having to reread the stories, but I realize I can’t. What did I find in these stories that so affected me?