“Yes, Léna,” I answer again. I think of Greatie fleeing a burning house as shots spattered the water about the little boat, and years later being rowed down that same river to visit the African princess. I think of Mado, holding a dying Yankee boy in her arms, her love and compassion concentrated wholly on his need, despite her own bereavement. I think of my mother watching her husband cough his lungs out in the cold light of the Alps and of my father setting his name down on the empty page of the diary for the new year. It was not a tranquil world for my grandchildren’s forebears, and it is in the lives of these long-gone men and women that I find the answer to Léna’s question. I must answer it for her, looking down at her serious, upturned face, and I can answer truthfully only if I have my feet planted very firmly on rock.
I think of the warmth of the rock at the brook and that I will never know more than a glimpse of the ousia of the small green frog—or of my mother—or of the two little girls—
and this is all right, too.
“Is it really all right?” Léna persists.
“Yes, Léna, it is all right.”
And the two little girls and I climb into the four-poster bed to sing songs and tell stories.
—
What made those two little girls insist on the affirmation of love and all-rightness just as I was ending my book?
Perhaps the only part I had in it was accepting the discipline of listening or training the ability to recognize something when it is offered.
Sometimes the gift is offered so magnanimously that no training is needed. While I was working on A Ring of Endless Light and having the fun of introducing Vicky Austin (of Meet the Austins, The Moon by Night, The Young Unicorns) to Adam Eddington (of The Arm of the Starfish), it became apparent to me that Vicky was going to have to describe how a dolphin feels, and I knew that I couldn’t write the description until I, myself, had felt a dolphin. There are not many dolphins around the island of Manhattan nor the hills around Crosswicks. Just as I had come to the point where I could no longer put off the scene where Vicky meets a dolphin, I flew out to San Diego to teach at a writers’ conference. And I spent happy hours at Sea World, petting dolphins, at first tentatively patting their heads, then stroking their beautiful bodies, then discovering that they love to have their chests scratched—just what I needed, given me in a great unexpected gift at exactly the moment I needed it.
I don’t pretend to understand any of this in the language of provable fact, but that is the language of works, the language of man’s control, not the language of faith.
I only know that the gifts are given and that I believe in them.
—
H. A. Williams continues, “Justification by faith means that I have nothing else on which to depend except my receptivity to what I can never own or manage. And this very capacity to receive cannot be the result of effort. Faith is something given, not achieved. It is created by God’s word in Christ.”
For the Christian writer, that’s what the creative process is all about.
—
Can one be a Christian artist and not know it?
I think that’s the way it always happens, even when one is constantly struggling to be Christian in daily living. I cannot try, consciously, to write a “Christian” story—even in such a book as Dance in the Desert, which (although it is never overtly stated) is about the holy family’s flight into Egypt. When I am working, I move into an area of faith which is beyond the conscious control of my intellect. I do not mean that I discard my intellect, that I am an anti-intellectual, gung-ho for intuition and intuition only. Like it or not, I am an intellectual. The challenge is to let my intellect work for the creative act, not against it. And this means, first of all, that I must have more faith in the work than I have in myself.
When I start working on a book, which is usually several years and several books before I start to write it, I am somewhat like a French peasant cook. There are several pots on the back of the stove, and as I go by during the day’s work, I drop a carrot in one, an onion in another, a chunk of meat in another. When it comes time to prepare the meal, I take the pot which is most nearly full and bring it to the front of the stove.
So it is with writing. There are several pots on those back burners. An idea for a scene goes into one, a character into another, a description of a tree in the fog into another. When it comes time to write, I bring forward the pot which has the most in it. The dropping in of ideas is sometimes quite conscious; sometimes it happens without my realizing it. I look, and something has been added which is just what I need, but I don’t remember when it was added.
When it is time to start work, I look at everything in the pot, sort, arrange, think about character and story line. Most of this part of the work is done consciously, but then there comes a moment of unself-consciousness, of letting go and serving the work.
—
That statement of H. A. Williams continues to stimulate me: “The me I can thus organize and discipline is no more than the me of which I am aware. And it is precisely the equation of my total self with this one small part of it which is the root cause of all sin.”
Sin, that unpopular word again. The worse things get, the more we try to rationalize and alibi. When we do wrong we try to fool ourselves (and others) that it is because our actions and reactions have been coded into our genetic pattern at the moment of conception. Or our mothers didn’t understand us. Or they understood us too well. Or it is the fault of society. Certainly it is never our fault, and therefore we have not sinned.
And by such dirty devices any shred of free will left in the human being is taken away. If I do wrong I may do it unwittingly, thinking I am doing something for the best; but if it turns out to be wrong, I have done it, and I must bear the responsibility. It is not somebody else’s or something else’s fault. If it is I am less than human.
Like everybody else, I tend to rationalize and alibi before I let myself admit, “Yes, I did this. I am sorry. I will do whatever I can to make reparation.” Our sins defeat us unless we are willing to recognize them, confess them, and so become healed and whole and holy—not qualified, mind you, just holy.
I first met Harry Williams while he was still at Cambridge and before he had become an Anglican monk at the Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire. His Christianity shone from him. I had already read much of his work up until then, and I sat at his feet and learned—about myself and love and the Lord. It was a joy to me, a surging uprush of gratitude, when he, in turn, responded to some of my work. And I still learn from him, in each new book he writes.
I have a hunch that the equation of the total self with that part of the self which can be organized and disciplined is behind all “non-Christian” art (I still don’t like that phrase). It is a frightening thing for many people to let go, to have faith in that which they cannot completely know and control.
But how do we know?
We’ve lost much of the richness of that word. Nowadays, to know means to know with the intellect. But it is a much deeper word than that. Adam knew Eve. To know deeply is far more than to know consciously. In the realm of faith I know far more than I can believe with my finite mind. I know that a loving God will not abandon what he creates. I know that the human calling is cocreation with this power of love. I know that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
But in this limited world we tend to lose this kind of knowing, and this loss has permeated our fiction as well as our prayer. I’ve been privileged several times to speak at the University of Hawaii and have gained much richness from these experiences. In my commonplace book I’ve copied down the words of a Hawaiian Christian, Mother Alice Kaholusuna:
Before the missionaries came, my people used to sit outside their temples for a long time meditating and preparing themselves
before entering. Then they would virtually creep to the altar to offer their petition and afterwards would again sit a long time outside, this time to “breathe life” into their prayers. The Christians, when they came, just got up, uttered a few sentences, said Amen, and were done. For that reason my people called them haoles, “without breath,” or those who failed to breathe life into their prayers.
It is certainly a great witness to the power of the living Lord that Alice Kaholusuna became a Christian despite the haoles—as non-native Hawaiians are still called.
Her description of prayer is a beautiful description of the creative process. Meditation, silence, faith in that which we cannot control or manipulate. And letting go of that dictator self which constantly tries to take over the controls. And listening.
How far listening takes us! I’m often asked about my great scientific background, and I have no scientific background whatsoever. And the discovery of science has been an unexpected door opened for me where hitherto I had seen no break in the wall.
When I was working on The Arm of the Starfish, I began with my own experience. I had gone to Portugal to do research for what was later to be the novel Love Letters. (I don’t like that title; I wanted to call it Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun.) Like Adam, the protagonist of Starfish, my husband and I took off on a Swissair jet to Lisbon; the description of the beauty of the flight is precisely as we saw it. In the morning, just as we expected to begin the descent to Lisbon, the loudspeaker came on and, just as in Starfish, the pilot announced that because of deep fog in Lisbon we were proceeding to Madrid. Looking out the windows of the jet we saw what Adam saw. The airport in Madrid was cold and wet and sinister. We did not have our passports questioned as Adam did, but we took the same bus into Madrid, stayed in the same hotel which looked out into the twentieth-century in front, into the Middle Ages in the rear. Like Adam we went to the Prado, saw that incredible El Greco painting of St. Francis and St. Andrew, ate the same food in the same cafeteria, were ultimately herded by bus to the airport, were fed the same meal, finally boarded the same Caravelle to Lisbon. And then the story began to take over, and Adam became involved in a kidnapping and a plot of international intrigue. It was an exciting plot, and I thought I had the story pretty well under control. I had long and carefully worked out what was going to happen to Adam and the other characters.
Then something unexpected happened. Adam had gone nearly three nights without sleep and was finally allowed to go to bed in Lisbon, in the Ritz hotel (where we spent two luxurious nights). He plunged into that deep and restful sleep which comes to the healthy body. Finally, slept out, he woke up, and there, sitting in a chair and looking at him, was a young man called Joshua. Adam was very surprised to see Joshua. Madeleine was even more surprised to see Joshua. There had been no Joshua in my plot at all.
I had a choice at that moment. I could ignore Joshua, refuse to allow him into my story. Or I could have faith in the creative process and listen to Joshua. This meant a great deal of rewriting—probably 150 or more pages. I cannot now imagine the book without Joshua, and I know that it is a much better book because of him. But where he came from I cannot say. He was a sheer gift of grace.
—
It has been pointed out to me that Joshua is a Christ figure, and of course the name Joshua is a form of Jesus. But if I had consciously thought, I will put a Christ figure into this book, I could not possibly have done it. I knew, deep in my heart, that when Joshua arrived, so named, he was probably going to have to give his life, and so it turned out.
And here is another interesting part of the creative process: I knew that if I felt anything while I was writing about Joshua’s death, the scene would end up in the wastepaper basket. Emotion can come before writing and after writing, but it must not be present during writing.
In one of his letters, Chekov writes, “You may weep and moan over your stories, you may suffer together with your heroes, but I consider one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect.”
I also find helpful an analogy from my husband’s discipline, the theatre. Nothing is easier than to have hysterics on the stage, to rant and rail and weep. Back during my own days in the theatre, one of my favourite roles was that of a vindictive Victorian wife, who ultimately has hysterics at the top of a flight of stairs and falls, screaming, all the way to the bottom. Very flashy but probably not very moving.
If the actor or actress is caught up in emotion during a performance, the audience may admire the acting but seldom feels the emotion because that contrasting background is not there. The place for emotion in the actor is during rehearsal, where he must go through everything his character goes through, feel everything his character feels, weep, laugh, be the character. But in performance the actor must be in charge of his medium; and by that I mean not that he controls the performance, leaving no openings for surprise, but that his technique is perfected.
When you tell a funny story, if you laugh while you’re telling it, the audience won’t. The more effective technique is deadpan. It’s a strange paradox: your technique must be practiced until it is as close to perfect as you can make it, and then, and then only, are you free to let go, to let yourself get out of the way.
When I finally came to the day when I had to write the scene of Joshua’s death, I approached it, I think, somewhat in the way that Mother Alice Kaholusuna describes approaching the temple. I began to write, and by some grace I was got out of the way. I was, somehow, out on the other side of myself. When I had finished the scene I came back to myself, exhausted, sorrowful, and simultaneously strangely joyful.
When I am writing, on the other side of silence, as it were, and I am interrupted, there is an incredible shock as I am shoved through the sound barrier, the light barrier, out of the real world and into what seems, at least for the first few moments, a less real world.
The same thing is true in prayer, in meditation. For the disciplines of the creative process and Christian contemplation are almost identical.
—
I was working on the final chapters of Starfish during the summer, in Crosswicks, and quite often while my mother rested after lunch I would read to her what I had written during the morning. If our ten-year-old son was around, he was likely to sit on the edge of the bed and listen, and he was there the afternoon that I read of Joshua’s death.
He got very excited and upset. “Change it,” he demanded.
“I can’t. That’s what happened.”
“But you’re the writer. You can change it.”
“I can’t. I didn’t want Joshua to get shot either, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t stop it.”
“But you can. You’re the writer!”
But I couldn’t. And at that point in his development, I couldn’t make him understand that I couldn’t. He was so angry with me for allowing Joshua to die that he wouldn’t read anything else I wrote for several years.
Now he has grown up and understands that the artist cannot change the work at whim but can only listen, look, wait, and set down what is revealed.
All that extra work when Joshua appeared in Adam’s hotel room was no small thing. But neither was it unusual, and I wrote two or three times the 150 pages before finishing the book. As with all my books, Starfish was more rewritten than written, and with each subsequent book the need to rewrite becomes more rather than less. As the writer struggles to grow in knowledge of techniques, characterization, theme, more and more work becomes necessary. My beloved English nanny, Mrs. O, was fond of remarking, “Hard work’s not easy.” Of the lazy, she said, “He loves work so much he could lie down beside it.”
If I need a reminder that hard work’s not easy, all I have to do is look at Crosswicks. It’s a plain New England farmhouse, built approximately 225 years ago, when there were no bulldozers, power saws, backhoes, or any of the machinery we take for granted. Everything had to be made by hand, applied by hand. The single majestic roof-tree
is an awesome testimony to corporate strength; surely everyone worked together to build this comfortable home. And they were full of faith: the doors are cross-and-Bible doors; the hardware is HL, Help, Lord. Simple though the house is, it is a work of art and a witness to the fact that the people who built it were not afraid of work but saw work as a way of glorifying God.
The writer, too, should see work in this way and understand that the building of a novel is also corporate work. The writer at the desk is indeed writing in isolation, but (for me, at least) this isolation must be surrounded by community, be it the community of family, village, church, city.
Joshua came to me as a free gift, but the paradox has always been that such a gift is dearly bought.
—
The joyful acceptance that readers create my books along with me and share their creation in their letters, helps me to grow, to be more daring than I would be able to be otherwise. In trying to share what I believe, I am helped to discover what I do, in fact, believe, which is often more than I realize. I am given hope that I will remember how to walk across the water.
I’m still not a great deal more certain what a Christian artist is than when I was first approached to talk about the subject. I am, perhaps, a little more articulate but not much more certain.
A Christian artist sees work as being for the glory of God. Yes.
And a Christian artist cares what the children see. Yes, but I’d let them see lots more than is considered proper. I’d give them the whole Bible, uncut, taking out none of the sex, none of the violence, knowing that the Bible balances itself and that they will do their own automatic deleting.
It strikes me as odd indeed that in this day when the churches, by and large, think they are so freed up about sex, the Episcopal Church still leaves the Song of Songs out of the daily lectionary. I would not take from the children the exuberance of this sheerly erotic love poetry because it will have nothing to say to them till they are at the age of falling in love. And gradually it will say more. To the ancient Hebrew it transcended the sexual love of male and female and spoke of God’s love for his people. To the Christian it is a paean of joy about Christ’s love for his Bride, the church. But it will never become transcendent for us unless we are first of all allowed to take it at its literal level.
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art Page 16
