Angel in the Parlor (20 page)

“The real danger of relying on a notebook,” added the Guardian, “is that you may feel compelled to use everything you've written. Writing too much can be as troublesome as writing too little. Thomas Wolfe might have finished
Of Time and the River
a good deal sooner if he had known when he started his book what he knew when he ended it. ‘The whole effect of those five years of incessant writing,' he told me, ‘had been to make me feel not only that everything had to be used, but that everything had to be told, that nothing could be implied.'”

Suddenly the Guardian looked at me severely.

“Put down your pencil. Listen first, write later.”

I laid aside my pencil, but the Guardian would not continue until I had laid aside my notebook also.

“If you reach an impasse in your story,” he went on, “put your story away. This is easier said than done, for many writers feel guilty if they are not writing. Nevertheless, you must put your story to sleep, you must forget about it, let it get dreamed over, out of your reach, and then wait for it to return.”

“How long do I have to wait?” I asked.

“I can't answer that question,” said the Guardian. “All I can tell you is how to keep the door open. Tell me, at what time of day do you write? Or at what hour of the night?”

“I write whenever I can get a babysitter,” I answered.

The Guardian laughed. He is untroubled by economics, editors, or housework.

“Tomorrow morning, get up an hour earlier than usual. Don't speak to anyone, don't brush your teeth, don't read the newspaper. Take up your pen, take up your paper, and write. Write whatever comes into your head. Write until you are tired of writing or until you are interrupted. Do this for two weeks.”

“And what will happen then?” I asked.

“First, you will find that the act of writing becomes easier for you. Second, you will discover that not everything you write is worth keeping, and you will learn to throw away. Third, you will be able to write with no interference from me.”

“But I thought you were helping me,” I said, astonished.

The Guardian took out a nail file and applied it deftly to the nails of his left hand.

“The time has come for me to make an embarrassing confession. As I greatly enjoy your company, it pains me to tell you that I can be a dangerous influence on you. When you are listening to the Giver of Dreams, take great care that you do not listen to me. When she wants to sing, I want to judge. When she wants to dance, I want to criticize. And like the big child that she is, the Giver of Dreams doesn't care to be judged and criticized when she is giving her gifts. Her ways are not my ways, and she will never speak if she feels I am near. You, the writer, are the real guardian of the well. I am only the shaper, I work on what I am given. Only when the Giver of Dreams has finished speaking is it safe to send for me. When she teaches you to believe in your characters, I teach you to manipulate them. Oh, when I was working for Theodore Dreiser, we had many a lively argument over my job, particularly if I came before he called me. I love to make a neat plot and to stick characters into it. I love to take away their freedom. ‘In the great novels,' Dreiser snapped at me one morning, ‘the plot is negligible. The reason for the absence of plot in a great novel is that it interferes with the logical working out of the destinies of the characters.'”

“If I'm to put all my trust in the Giver of Dreams,” I said, “I'd like to know how she works.”

“Do you know the tale of the elves and the shoemaker?” asked the Guardian. “Every night the shoemaker leaves his leather and his tools out on his workbench, and every morning he finds his leather stitched into shoes finer than he himself could ever make. Do you remember how his good fortune came to an end?”

“He stayed up one night to see who was doing him this kindness,” I said. “He hid in the closet and peeked at the elves who came to work for him in secret.”

“Exactly,” said the Guardian. “Writers too have a helper who works for them at night. Anyone who has gone to bed with a problem and awakened with the solution has enjoyed the gift, though he may never have met the giver. Do not ask who the Giver of Dreams is; she does not like to show her face. But observe the conditions under which she comes. When and where do your ideas for stories come to you? Can you remember?”

“Mostly when I'm walking or riding a train.”

The Guardian smiled.

“Robert Burns composed at the plough, W. B. Yeats on the Dublin bus, Sherwood Anderson on foot or in bed. ‘Very little of the work of the writer is done at his desk or at the typewriter,' Anderson told me once. ‘It is done as he walks about, as he sits in the room with people, and perhaps most of all as he lies in bed at night.' Those are my nights off. It's the Giver of Dreams they're listening for, not me. And what arrives in those diverse places is often no more than a mood, a phrase, what Henry James calls ‘the mere floating particle in the stream of talk.' You have got hold of the tip of the iceberg, and seeing the part, you believe in the whole. I remember overhearing Mark Twain tell his mother, ‘I am trying to think out a short story. I've got the closing sentence of it all arranged, and it is good and strong, but I haven't got any of the rest of the story yet.' The important thing is to be ready. To keep the door open. Tea?”

“What?” I said, startled.

“I've an old samovar back here, and I keep a pot of tea going all the time. If you don't mind a cracked cup——”

“No, indeed,” I said.

He vanished behind a stack of papers and reappeared holding a little flowered cup, which he handed to me.

“That cup looks familiar,” I said.

“It used to be a great favorite of yours,” said the Guardian. “You got it for your fourth birthday and you broke it the same day. Your mother threw away the pieces. But I didn't. I throw nothing away that might be useful to you in a story.”

We sipped our tea in silence for a few moments.

“I once worked for a man who wrote all sorts of things,” said the Guardian. “First he published a book of poems. Everyone said ‘He is a fine poet.' Then he wrote a play. Everyone said, ‘He is a fine playwright.' Then he wrote a novel. As the novel was very long, not everyone read it, but those who did said, ‘He is a fine novelist.' And those who hadn't read it said to the man, ‘Have you given up poetry? Have you given up playwriting?' ‘I don't know,' said the man. ‘My head is like a hotel. I keep the door open and see what blows in.'”

“Hasn't anyone tried to be master of the Giver of Dreams?”

“Of course,” answered the Guardian. “You've read the poetry of Rilke. And you remember he published a collection called
New Poems.
The poems are about animals, works of art, flowers, things he observed while he was living in Paris, where the poems were written. In Paris, Rilke had a job that many an artist would envy. He was secretary to Auguste Rodin. Every morning Rodin went into his studio to work. And Rilke, watching him, thought, Why must we writers be at the mercy of inspiration? Why can't we too go into our studios every morning and work? He resolved to see if writing under these conditions was possible. He drew up a list of more than a hundred subjects for poems, and he systematically wrote his poems from that list. As he finished each one, he drew a line through the title on his list, like a woman checking off groceries in the supermarket. And then he added the date, just as a painter may date a picture.

“But the Giver of Dreams does not like to wear a harness. Rilke fell into a period of real despair. Years later when he wrote the
Duino Elegies
and the
Sonnets to Orpheus,
the way in which poems came to him had utterly changed. ‘All in a few days,' he said to his friends, ‘there was a nameless storm, a hurricane in my mind.… everything in the way of fiber and web in me split—eating was not to be thought of, God knows who fed me.' When the hurricane comes you must be ready to write. Many a story has been lost because the writer did not answer the call.”

“The call is not always convenient,” I said.

The Guardian nodded.

“That is true of most things in our world that get born. It is not convenient to make time for writing. For you are asked not just to make time for the Giver of Dreams but to give her the sense that she has all the time in the world. The germ of the story arrives, it ripens and grows, you are ready to harvest it. You need time without interruption. How my good friend Charles Dickens chafed at demands made on his time by those who didn't understand it wasn't quality but continuity he needed. ‘It is only half an hour—it is only an afternoon—it is only an evening.…' he mused, adding, ‘they don't know that it is impossible to command one's self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes—or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.'”

“And sometimes you have the time but not the story,” I added. “What do you do when the well runs dry?”

“The well never runs dry,” said the Guardian. “It may get blocked, but it never runs dry. Writers have various ways of making themselves remember this. I knew a man who always kept one story unwritten. He had a clear notion of the plot, the characters, and the way in which he would tell the story, but he took care never to write it down. Thus when he finished a piece of work, he could always say to himself, ‘There's more where that came from. I have yet another story to tell.' That unwritten story was his savings in the bank, his reserve.

“Another writer, to keep his momentum through a long work, writes until he feels that everything is coming together for him, the words are flowing, he can write for hours, he is face to face with the Giver of Dreams, at the brink of great things—and then he rises from his desk, like a hungry man in a restaurant who waits hours to be served and leaves the table when the meal arrives. By the next day he is so eager to return to his work that he can scarcely wait to begin. Beginning—that is the difficult thing. Let me give you a trick for getting tsarted when you think you have no more stories in the well. Take any collection of stories. I have here a collection of fairy tales. Let me read you a few beginnings:

A king had a daughter who was beautiful beyond all measure but so proud and haughty withal that no suitor was good enough for her. She sent away one after the other, and ridiculed them as well.

(King Thrushbeard)

A long time ago there were a king and queen who said every day: “Ah, if only we had a child!” but they never had one. But it happened that once when the queen was bathing, a frog crept out of the water on to the land, and said to her: “Your wish shall be fulfilled; before a year has gone by, you shall have a daughter.”

(Little Briar-Rose)

There was once upon a time a king who had a wife with golden hair, and she was so beautiful that her equal was not to be found on earth. It came to pass that she lay ill, and as she felt that she must soon die, she called the king and said: “If you wish to marry again after my death, take no one who is not quite as beautiful as I am, and who has not just such golden hair as I have: this you must promise me.” And after the king had promised her this she closed her eyes and died.
²

(Allerleirauh)

The Guardian closed his book.

“Well, which of them do you like?”

“None of them. I don't care much for kings and queens.”

“Try this one, then,” said the Guardian. “There was once a lass who went out at the cry of dawn to seek her fortune, and she never came home again.”

“That sounds like a good one,” I told him.

“It is. Now tell me the rest of the story.”

“But I don't know it.”

“You don't have to know it. There are a thousand different ways of telling that story. At first you will say, ‘I can't tell you the story, I know nothing about the girl.' You will be afraid of failing. Then you will find yourself thinking about the girl—Why did she want to leave? And who was she leaving? A husband? A mother and father? Where did she come from? The country? The city? And where was she going? And why at dawn? And the cry of dawn—What does that sound like? When you find yourself more interested in the girl's story than what you can make of it, a great change will come over me. I will go to sleep. Like Argos, I will shut my eyes, which judge and scrutinize. Suddenly the water will wake in the well, and the Giver of Dreams will speak to you.”

“What if the story turns out badly?”

“Then you will have learned something about failure. For a writer, what does failure mean? I once worked for a man who kept all his failed stories in a big box, which he labeled FAILURES. He did not throw them away. He kept them in a corner of his study, because he found himself going to that box in search of a phrase, a name, a conversation that would be useful to him in the stories he did not consider failures. One day he made a new label for the box. WRONG TURNINGS, he wrote on it, because it occurred to him that a lifetime of writing is like a journey, full of detours, alas, but a detour is not a failure. Writers take detours because they are afraid to walk on the main road. They are afraid they will not succeed. Fear is the greatest impediment to the telling of any story.”

“And what overcomes fear?” I asked.

“I am not sure,” said the Guardian, “but I would say that no writer taking that journey should be without a strong sense of mystery. Do you like mysteries?”

“I used to love mystery stories when I was a kid,” I confessed.

“Which ones?”

“Oh, you know—Nancy Drew.”

The Guardian wrinkled his nose with distaste.

“Those are not mystery stories. They are puzzles and puzzles can be solved. A real mystery cannot be solved. It can only be celebrated. Real mysteries are personal. What is mysterious to one person may be insignificant to the next. You don't believe me? Listen, I used to work for a woman who never carried a purse. She carried her house key in her shoe and she never carried money. She owned no credit cards, no driver's license. All her friends said, ‘My dear, you should carry a purse. You should never be without money or identification.' Did I say all her friends? No, she had one friend who took a different point of view. He said, ‘What a mystery that you can go through life without carrying a purse! Why do the rest of us need money and identification and not you?' From his interest in the minor mystery of a human habit sprang a story. Don't all stories have their dark beginnings in such mysteries? Though you speak with the tongues of angels, if you have not mystery, you have nothing. I am only telling you what you already know. Do you remember the first time you understood the word
mystery?
”