Extra Innings (19 page)

As a memento of my beloved Sarah, I took one of these home and kept it at the bottom of my uneven and shaggy stack of poorly folded sheets. I don't seem to have it anymore. I don't know what happened to it. My grandmother would be shocked.

I miss the Cove badly. Early mornings in the apartment I find myself returning to it. I am back reading at the kitchen table in Sargentville. The sun rises, coloring the windows and then the pages of the Book of Common Prayer. I drink coffee and, feeling a welcome jolt of energy, take out my notebook and put down some of what I sometimes refer to, with intentional irony, as immortal prose.

Later this morning I make a third attempt to read Harold Brodkey's
The Runaway Soul
. Of its more than eight hundred pages I have progressed to page 223. Twice I had to start over, feeling like Sisyphus pushing his stone almost to the top of the hill, only to have it roll back against him time after time.

By noon, the sun having risen over Hines Junior High and settled on the roof of the parking garage only a few yards from our living-room window, I know I will never finish the novel. In recent years I have lost my ability to enjoy long, difficult fiction as a scholarly reader would, relishing its problems and complexities, collecting images and seeing their significance, analyzing metaphors and making consistent sense of them, searching the underbrush of the writer's ambiguous language for hidden clues to meaning. This is the job of literary criticism, often a satisfying game, in which the critic loses herself in pursuit of an original ‘insight.' I read
Finnegans Wake
in this way, and Eco's
The Name of the Rose
and Pynchon's
V
and Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
.

But Brodkey: while I have an idea that there may be more to the total design of his book than I will ever persevere to discover, I am going to abandon the old pleasure of making the summit and settle for an easy descent to base camp. This morning, reading Morning Prayer and Mary's prayer, the Magnificat, I was stopped at the line ‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.' I have not a clue to the meaning of this lovely-sounding sentence, but I twist it to explain my attitude toward
The Runaway Soul:
the prideful critic stopped in her tracks by a failure of affection for the writer and his book.

Here in the apartment there are times when my somewhat-but-not-entirely-diminished
Weltschmertz
and Sybil's low spirits occur at the same time. My despair builds on hers. We enter a period of dark distance from each other, filled with silence. It is impossible to know how it starts or who instigated it, but there it is, sitting like a great mountain of anthracite between us.

This must happen to many couples who live together a long time, a natural, downward progress of early vital cheerfulness. We rarely grow used to each other's bleakness, only to our own. Custom erodes the sunny edges of our patience with each other. There is no longer anything unexpected to be expected, not even bad moods.

The sight of the word ‘reception' on an invitation in the city of Washington sends me to the trash basket. Today there is one from the Canadian Embassy to meet the eminent novelist Robertson Davies. My response is very much like my young daughter Barbie's when her kindergarten teacher, Miss Bechman (strange how we never forget the names of kindly teachers, even forty years later), wrote on her report card: ‘Barbie is a bright little girl, but every time I ask the class to come to the circle she walks in the opposite direction.'

There is one characteristic of receptions, meetings, gatherings of any size for which I have acquired a profound distaste. Arriving at the door, you are asked your name and then given a name tag. The worst kind reads: ‘HELLO My Name Is ————' Others are printed with your name in large block letters, some are handwritten, some are intended to be pinned to your blouse or, occasionally, hung around your neck. Sometimes you are asked to write in your own name.

Whatever the location or the method, these are impertinent impositions, suggesting that you wish to have your name attached publicly to your person, to be read by those few who care and many more who do not. It is really a private matter, one's name, especially if, in a small way, it has already become somewhat public.

(I recall Auden's lines: ‘Private faces in public places / Are wiser and kinder than public faces in private places.')

What happens is this: A person approaches, stops, looks hard at the tag on your breast before looking at your face. You can see him wrestling with himself, trying to determine whether or not to bother to speak to you. Finally he does, or turns away and does not. You might have been a signpost or a door, the name is all, the person nothing … or, as the case may be, everything.

Is it ego that keeps me from wearing my name tag? Am I saying, by refusing to put it on, if you don't know who I am, too bad? I am not going to bother informing you by means of a tag. And if, without the ugly little cardboard designation, you do know me, is it a victory over obscurity? If I attend another gathering where this odious requirement is in use, I might be tempted to write
HETTY
GREEN
or
EMMA
GOLDMAN
or
LEONA HELMSLEY
or
MOLLY IVINS
in large block letters, and then wait to see if someone approaches, looks, lights up with pleasure, and then talks to me for the duration of the meeting.

I decide to decline the invitation to the Canadian Embassy.

In September of 1912, Houghton Mifflin published
Autobiography of an Elderly Woman
, anonymously. Sybil rescued an old copy from a barn full of books in Southwest Harbor, thinking it might be interesting to me.

It was. It is a very well written account of the life of a seventy-five-year-old widow who lives with one of her daughters and reflects upon the indignities and well-meant concerns inflicted upon an aging woman. I was entirely convinced by the old lady's voice, wry, ironic, self-deprecating, clear-eyed. But today I visited the Library of Congress, where I discovered once again how deceptive the most persuasive autobiography can be.

Autobiography of an Elderly Woman
is a novel, and, what is more, it was written by thirty-two-year-old Mary Heaton Vorse, who, I surmise, did not put her name on the book because by then she was well known as a young journalist. It would seem that she wanted it to be accepted as a fictional autobiography. The narrator whose convincing voice I so much admired was the age of Vorse's mother.

What is astonishing is the contemporary sound of this old lady's observations, so close to my experience that I feel the urge to see if I can interest someone in reprinting the book. I call Bill Henderson of Pushcart Press and leave a message on his answering machine, suggesting I send him the book for his opinion.

Sybil is working late. It is my turn to cook. I have never been able to overcome a dislike of the kitchen, despite my recognition of the fact that my feeling runs counter to the expectations for my sex. Looking back, and in the light of avid reading of such entertainments as M.F.K. Fisher's
The Art of Eating
, Margaret Visser's
Much Depends on Dinner
, and
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
, I realize what a poor cook I've always been. This opinion is amply supported by my grown children. Now, even hunger no longer propels me into the kitchen, a room I regard as useful for storage of the advanced equipment I rarely use, and the regular boiling of water for coffee.

Sadly, after twenty years of living with me, Sybil, once a good and interested cook, has arrived at the same stage of disinclination. Often, six o'clock in the evening having arrived, we come into the living room from our separate occupations, both tired, both silently determined to wait for dinner to be cooked by the other, both hungry but not stirred to do anything at all about it.

I suggest to Sybil we adopt a schedule of some sort, two days on mess detail (to use my old naval jargon), two days off, but Sybil says no, she is opposed to a rigid schedule.

Tonight this happens: No one moves from her chair. Then I put on a tape. Then we listen to the national news on the television. Finally, with the same indolent intent, we drift into the kitchen. In the refrigerator I find three small containers of leftover vegetables and two somewhat desiccated red potatoes. She concocts a bowl of cold cereal and milk, strawberries and a banana. We bring these dishes to the dining-room table (a euphemism for the small oval structure in the living room) and eat, listening contentedly to Joan Sutherland's extraordinary coloratura arias.

No one has won this unspoken contest of wills; no one has lost. I suppose this may be the ideal way to settle domestic impasses that seem to arise more and more frequently after the first five years of selflessness and generosity are over.

Yiddish proverb: ‘Make sure to send a lazy man for the Angel of Death.'

Observation in the club car of the Metroliner from Washington to New York: I sit down beside a businessman reading the
Wall Street Journal
and drinking coffee. It is clearly too hot; he blows on it and I think: I have not seen anyone blowing on a hot drink to cool it for many years.

In New York I see an enormous approximation of an orange housing an orange-juice stand. Somewhere I read that this is called
architecture parlante
, talking architecture, meaning a building that creates an image suggesting its function. In Maine I've seen tepees in which Indian moccasins are sold, although, I suppose, to properly conform to the definition, only tepees should be on sale there. I recall that Lewis Carroll wrote a poem about a mouse and shaped the words on the page to approximate a tail.

All this leads me to wonder, foolishly, about the possibility (for the aliterate who need a road sign with a hand on it to signify
STOP
) of publishing a novel in the shape of its theme:
The Old Man and the Sea
as a marlin;
As I Lay Dying
as a coffin;
The Great Gatsby
as a cocktail shaker (do people still own or use silver cocktail shakers?), and so forth. Perhaps
Mr. Sammler's Planet
in the shape of a fedora? An absurd idea, yet it might be as interesting to depart from the dull, inevitable shape of the book as it is to sell eggs from a counter lodged in the adobe side of a giant chicken.

Tools of the artist's trade are as personal as toothbrushes, as pens and pencils are to writers. In Rosamond Bernier's memoir of her friendships with Matisse, Picasso, and Miró, which I am reading on the train coming back from New York, she says that Miró liked to use ‘old brushes, uneven, flattened out.' Such imperfect instruments, he found, produced ‘accidents' on his canvases. ‘An old brush has vitality … had lived … has had a life of its own.'

The black street artist Bill Traynor preferred to paint or draw on dirty ‘street cardboard,' even though his admirers gave him clean white artists' boards. He liked to draw with stumps of pencils.… It may well be true that the tool, the means, affects the very nature of the product, the artistic end. In the case of prose, advanced technology, like the personal computer, may remove the character, the idiosyncrasy, of word choice and sentences that flow out of pencils, sharpened or stubby, the shape of a paragraph that once emanated from the frequent dippings and scratchy sound of a quill pen.

In the same way, I worry that the presence of thesauruses on most word-processing computer programs will begin to limit the vocabulary of future literature. Instant technology, desktop publishing, has now made it possible to produce a book as first draft in place of a handwritten manuscript, which displayed all the paths not taken, the rejected clauses, the scratched-out word.

Last spring Annie Dillard sent me a first draft of the book she was working on, a 339-page novel,
The Living
. It had been
printed
and bound in full cloth. The accompanying letter assured me that she wanted to hear ‘how best to shore up its faults,' the faults that ‘a real grouch' might find. I took that to mean me, having so often had that appellation bestowed upon me. She went on to say that although she had put it into this format to spare me (and ‘one other friend') the inconvenience of ‘a sliding mound of papers,' ‘I won't hesitate to take the whole thing apart and rewrite it, though—I plan to.'

I spent some time going through the first hundred pages, line by line, taking notes as I proceeded. Then Annie called and told me to forget the first seventy-five pages because she had already put them into another form. This stopped me in my already well-worn tracks, and I put The Book aside to work on my own recalcitrant novel. In August,
Harper's
arrived, and lo! there is a story by Annie Dillard, called ‘A Trip to the Mountains,' the beginning of her new novel,
The Living
. Except for a number of small, verbal changes and some sentences either inserted or deleted, it is just as it was in my almost unique copy of The Book. In the first sentence there
is
an important change: 1873 has been set back to 1872.

I tore up my notes, stowed The Book on an out-of-the-way shelf in my study, together with the copy of the magazine, and tried to decide why Annie had sent it to me in the first place. True, when we met at a Literary Lions gathering in New York, and she told me she was working very hard on a new form, fiction, I offered to read it as she went along, if she wanted me to. But she did not wait for the comments she solicited, did not rewrite, in any real sense, and published the start of the book before I could comment, indeed when I had been warned off commenting until a new version arrived.

My theories about technology's effect on the manuscript may explain what went on. The apparent perfection of the printed-and-bound first draft may be convincing evidence to the writer of the perfection of the rough copy. Even a typescript looks more finished than a handwritten page. A printout is even better-looking. And a book … nothing more appears to need doing. It is at the same time the first draft and the finished copy.