Angel in the Parlor (21 page)

“No.”

“Oh, but I do,” said the Guardian, “because in this place we never throw anything away. It was Ash Wednesday, you were eight years old. The priest's voice lapped at your ears like waves. He was preaching on the Book of Job:

Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in the eldest brother's house:

And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped to tell thee.

“The saints in the glass windows had blackened their faces, the candles had burned down to stumps. Now the priest was intoning the names of the dead. Your mother, feeling chilly, reached over and buttoned your coat. You thought it was time to leave. Suddenly a woman's voice from the darkened choir loft sang out:

Sing, O my soul, the mystery of His body.

“It woke you like a plunge into cold water. You looked at your mother's forehead, marked with a cross of ashes like a tree in the forest marked to be cut down. And everyone around was so marked, this man, that woman, all separate, all alone. And you thought, What a mystery the body is! When this man leaves the earth, the sun will not shine on exactly this body again. When that woman dies, no one will ever again see exactly that face. And the woman singing of mystery; in a hundred years who will be left to praise her voice breaking into the dark?”

The Guardian stopped speaking. His face seemed to fade, as if twilight had found even this place without windows to let in the weather.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It's the time between morning and night. Soon you will wake up.”

“Am I not awake now?”

“Now you are crossing from darkness to morning. The dreams you dream at this hour you will remember, because you do not have to carry them very far.”

In the silence that followed, I heard someone calling my name. Oh, here was the window to my room and the vine over the eaves about to bloom. I climbed on the sill and looked out on oak, hickory, beech, the land as it lay when only animals lived there, elk, moose, possum, bobcat, deer. They moved in a silent circle around the house. The Giver of Dreams is shining in my doorway, the Guardian has fallen asleep.

There was once a lass who went out at the cry of dawn to seek her fortune, and she never came home again.
³
Now I see the woods that hid her, the town on the other side that welcomed her. I hear her singing as she goes, and it's her voice that will make her fortune, I know, and in a house at the edge of the woods I hear her mother and father calling her, for they don't realize she's riding the red-tailed deer at dawn, going to seek her fortune. Oh, she'll never come home again. Not that one.

I take paper and pen and I write her story.

7

Becoming a Writer

I have been asked to give advice to young writers, but I can never endure advice unless it comes disguised as entertainment. So let me begin by telling you a story.

First I should explain that I grew up in Ann Arbor. My father taught chemistry at the university for forty-six years. And while I was growing up, ours was the only family I knew that did not buy its clothes in a department store. Spring and fall, an ancient lady would arrive at our house in a car nearly as weathered as herself. Her name was Ella. She came from Owosso, Michigan, and she stayed for a week. She would set up her portable sewing machine in our sun room and plug in her radio and ask us, What clothes did we want her to make us this season?

My mother and my sister prudently chose ready-made patterns from the big pattern books at Muehlig's. My aunt sent Ella an assortment of dresses she'd bought on sale, with instructions to “fix them so I look like I have a little more on top and a little less in the behind.” I drew pictures of the dresses I wanted, leaning heavily on third-rate Victorian novels illustrated with consumptive young women in long skirts and blouses that ballooned at the shoulder and pinched at the wrist. To my girlfriends, who read
Seventeen
and wore cashmere sweaters and tailored skirts, I must have looked like the victim of a time warp. But Ella's business was to sew, not to criticize. She would study my sketch, draw up a pattern, and send me forth to select the material.

Velvet, wool, muslin, corduroy, heaped on tables and folded on chairs, flooded the sun room with promises of better things to come. One by one the fabrics, ample as flags, submitted to Ella's shears and took shape. She snipped, she basted.

“Try it on,” she said.

Whatever I tried on was always full of pins. Whichever way I turned, the dress hit me, needled me. I stood with my arms straight out, as if directing the invisible traffic of needles and thread, while Ella crept round me on her knees, taking the measure of the hem, her tape measure dangling around her neck like a stole, her mouth so full of pins that she seemed to have grown whiskers. I turned, she pinned, and her radio told us its troubles. We listened to “Portia Faces Life,” “Ma Perkins,” “Stella Dallas, Backstage Wife,” we listened to ads for Oxydol and Rinso, we heard how many boxtops of both you needed to send for your free recipe file and earrings. To this day when I read the story of creation in the book of Genesis, when I hear God commanding the light to come out of hiding and the earth to bring forth grass and creeping things and every beast after its own kind, I see them all falling from Ella's shears, waking to life under her needle. And behind God's voice, I hear the still, small voices of Portia and Stella Dallas and Ma Perkins, who are picking up the pieces of their lives and carrying on.

On the day of Ella's departure, which was always after lunch, she would intone a long blessing over our food, in which she thanked God for my mother's cooking and implored Him to keep her car from breaking down. As she drove away, we could see her sewing machine and her radio and our half-finished garments piled high in the back seat, watching over her. Three weeks later a large box would arrive in which we found all we'd asked for and more. The dresses were folded and pressed. Attached to each were the scraps, rolled neat as a prayer rug. Years of sewing had taught Ella never to throw anything away.

One day my mother reminded me that Ella would not be around forever, and she bought me a sewing machine for Christmas and hired Ella to instruct me in its use. What Ella taught me about sewing has passed into my hands and become as automatic to me as tying my shoe. But more important than what she taught me about sewing was what she taught me about craft. An indifference to fashion. A respect for what is well designed and well made. Save all your scraps. Throw nothing away. If you don't get it right the first time, take it apart and try again. Revise. Anything well done takes patience, experience, and a lot of time. And time is not given, it is made. “Five minutes, ten minutes, can always be found,” says William Carlos Williams in the foreword to his autobiography:

I had my typewriter in my office desk. All I needed to do was to pull up the leaf to which it was fastened and I was ready to go. I worked at top speed. If a patient came in at the door while I was in the middle of a sentence, bang would go the machine—I was a physician.… When the patient left, up would come the machine. Finally, after eleven at night, when the last patient had been put to bed, I could always find the time to bang out ten or twelve pages.
¹

And I think of Jane Austen, as one of her nieces recalled her, how she would sit quietly sewing by the fire in the library “and then would suddenly burst out laughing, jump up and run across the room to a table where pens and paper were lying, write something down, and then come back to the fire and go on quietly working as before.”
²
A nephew adds that his Aunt Jane had

no separate study to retire to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.
³

Learning to write, for me, is so bound up with learning to do other things that I sometimes ask myself, How do writers learn their craft? A few years ago, I was asked to judge a poetry competition. I was given forty manuscripts and told to choose the three whose authors I felt deserved a sizable sum of money. The more manuscripts I read, the more it seemed to me that all the poems had a single author. But nobody, I told myself, would go to such lengths to carry out a practical joke. Had the forty poets all studied with the same teacher? That didn't seem likely, either. But they might have all read the same books. Everypoet—as I named the single voice in these manuscripts—had read his contemporaries. He had taken from them what they had in common, a language close to speech, sometimes indistinguishable from prose. But the variety of experience and influences that resonates in the work of the best writers was absent. Reading Everypoet's work was a little like hearing Bach played on a harmonica. Yet his poems were competent and as succinct as if a good editor had gone over them, taking out and paring down. I could not put my finger on the place where they went wrong. Though his range was small, Everypoet could write.

When I was an undergraduate in Ann Arbor, I took a course called creative writing. I took it every semester. It was in this course that I first read Fitzgerald, Roethke, Bishop, Jarrell. Though the students read and discussed each other's work, we always studied something besides ourselves. Yet if you ask me what I learned, I confess that I remember no precepts and only a few poems. But I do remember the people. The boy who spent the entire semester revising a single poem. The boy who carried three-by-five cards in his shirt pocket where some men carry handkerchiefs, on which—when he had a good audience—he would take copious notes. The girl who was rumored to have written five hundred sonnets over summer vacation. I did a rough calculation and figured she must have been writing them with both hands, simultaneously. And I remember a class, just before Christmas vacation, when our teacher, expecting that only the most serious students would show up, explicated one of his own poems. To this day, I remember how much experience a single line can carry.

When a student brings his writing to a teacher, the teacher usually responds in one of two ways. On the one hand, you have Rilke's response to the young poet who sent him a manuscript and hoped that Rilke would critique it. Rilke was quick to refuse. “I cannot go into the nature of your verses,” he writes, “for all critical intention is too far from me.” But he was willing to give advice of another kind:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now … I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now.… This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night
must
I write? … then build your life according to this necessity …
⁴

On the other hand, you have Jane Austen's advice to her niece, who I suspect was looking more for praise than criticism:

We have been very much amused by your three books, but I have a good many criticisms to make, more than you will like. We are not satisfied with Mrs. Forester settling herself as tenant and near neighbor to such a man as Sir Thomas, without having some other inducement to go there. She ought to have some friend living thereabouts to tempt her.… Remember she
is
very prudent. You must not let her act inconsistently.… Sir Thomas H. you always do very well. I have only taken the liberty of expunging one phrase of his …—“Bless my heart!” It is too familiar and inelegant.… your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left.
⁵

Jane Austen could have run a terrific workshop. I mention workshops a bit shyly, for though I have conducted them, I have never in my life taken one. At their best, they give the student who has written a good deal the careful criticism that an editor gives. At their most mediocre, they produce poems and stories that are carbon copies of the teacher's work. At their worst, they are destructive. Nothing is served by telling a student his work is hopeless. To write well demands confidence and a willingness to fail. As my piano teacher was fond of saying, When you make a mistake, make it good and loud.

Workshops serve another purpose for many writers, one that I think they are scarcely aware of. They offer community. I have one student who has almost managed to make a career for herself moving from one workshop to the next, with teaching fellowships to help bridge the gaps. Most of her friends are writers. I tell her now that she's given up cigarettes she has become addicted to workshops. I wonder when she is going to quit being a student and become a writer. And she tells me how valuable she finds the close critical attention teachers and students bring to her work—and where else can she find that?

Only twenty-five years ago, people still debated whether writers should be educated at the university or at the school of hard knocks. In 1955,
Atlantic Monthly
carried an article by William Saroyan on becoming a writer. To most of my students today, Saroyan would sound like a man from another planet:

I did not earn one dollar by any means other than writing … I have never been subsidized, I have never accepted money connected with a literary prize or award, I have never been endowed, and I have never received a grant or fellowship.…