Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  “Cut it out. Listen, Janet, can’t you just think of him as someone who brought us together?”

  She sniffled a little, then allowed herself to curl up against him, and each knew who the other was thinking of and Nicholas knew it was best to say nothing because he felt that they were lying under one huge shadow, like two creatures curled together in one womb that carried them still. He would not let himself cry until Janet fell asleep. But when his heart showed him that huge man bedded down in the sticks and stones of Potter’s Field, he thought his whole body would burst with grief.

  8 Essays

  6

  The One Who Goes Out at the Cry of Dawn: The Secret Process of Stories

  I wonder how many writers can remember the person or the experience that called them to their craft. If you ask a dozen writers why they started writing, their answers will be as various as their work. One might name a parent who encouraged him, another would name a teacher who loaned her books. Several might mention a creative writing class they took in college. Somebody might say, “I wrote my first sonnet when I fell in love.” Falling in love has made poets out of many who abandoned the calling when they fell out of it.

  It was neither a teacher nor a parent that called me. It was a dream. I was three years old and not yet going to school. As I could not write, I was forced to remember my dreams in greater detail than I do now. I dreamed I was lying awake in the early morning, listening. Or perhaps I was half asleep and half awake. There is a brief span of time when we cross over from one kingdom to another, with darkness on our left hand and morning on our right. The dreams we dream at that hour we often remember, perhaps because we do not have to carry them so long and so far.

  So at that hour when we who live in both places belong to neither, I listened. Someone was calling my name. In my dream I climbed up on the window sill and looked past the broad copper roof that slanted over our sun porch. The patches newly laid on shone like my mother’s brightest teakettle, which stayed bright because she never used it. Over the eaves above my window, the vine that my father said bloomed once every hundred years, and whose flowers I had never seen, wore clusters of orchids, heavy as grapes. Our neighbors’ chimneys, our garage, our forsythia bushes, even our clothesline, had all disappeared. The land had gone back to oak and hickory and beech, the way it must have looked before white men built their homes on it.

  Through that ancient forest marched animals: elk, moose, possum, bobcat, deer. No lions, no tigers, no elephants, only the animals that had played in my yard long before I did. They moved in a silent circle around the house. I knew from the cricle that they came as friends, because the circle was the shape of the games I played with my friends. It was the shape of our kindly kitchen table, where nobody got poked by sharp corners and no one sat higher or lower than anyone else.

  So I did what any of you would have done. I climbed down the vine, clambered up on the back of the red-tailed deer who knelt to receive me, and I rode away with my new family into the forest.

  My story does not end happily. Before I could find out what lay in the forest, my mother called me and I woke up. I have always felt sympathy for Coleridge at the moment he woke from his dream of Kubla Kahn’s stately pleasure dome and was writing at white heat to catch it when the grocery boy arrived and the poem fled, ending itself with these lines:

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  We will never know how the milk of paradise tasted, and I will never find out where my magic animals wanted to take me. The lives of writers are one long tale of mothers calling at inopportune moments, children coming home from school in the middle of a chapter nearly finished, salesmen and grocery boys breaking into our solitude with armloads of lemons and ice cream.

  A few years later, when I learned to write, I set down my dream, feeling greatly relieved that I did not have to carry it around in my head any longer. And since that dream was the first story I ever wanted to write, I have always respected the strong connection between the process of dreaming and the process of writing.

  As a child I did not know where dreams came from. Innocent of Freud, I supposed they came from someone outside myself. To this unknown benefactor I gave the name Giver of Dreams, but by the time I was old enough to name him, he had got mixed up in my mind with the Sandman and with my mother, who also brought dreams, or so I was told in the lullabies my mother sang to me at night:

  Your mother shakes the dreamland tree

  and down fall little dreams on thee.

  Mothers are always trying to convince us they are indispensable. I knew it wasn’t she who brought dreams. They happened, somehow, inside my head, and I had a clear image of what I would find if I could lift off the top of people’s heads, like a coffeepot lid, and peer into their minds. My father’s mind would look like his laboratory. The shelves of crystals and beakers and bright fluids would stretch off into infinity. My mother’s mind was an enormous sugar bowl full of receipts and torn snapshots.

  My mind, of course, did not look like either of theirs. Mine was an office, a round, secret room, located inside the dreamland tree. The walls of the office were lined with shelves, and the shelves were stacked with papers, and the desk was stacked with papers too, but anyone could tell at a glance that the papers were all sham and show. They had lain there undisturbed for years. The yellowed edges rose when the wind fluttered those on top, showing the brighter color of those underneath.

  The only cause of wind in that still place was the man who ran the office. The only really useful thing in the office was the old water pump, out of which ran words, dreams, memories broken off from events too dim and distant to see them whole. Lest anyone think it odd that I placed such value on a pump, I should explain that every summer till I was sixteen, I lived in a house that had lots of charm, lots of land, and no plumbing. It was my job to take the bucket from the top of the oven every morning, walk a block down the road to the well, and bring back water for the day. The first person at the well had to wake the water; it was always sluggish before breakfast and took its time coming up.

  So in the office of my mind stood a magical pump. Sometimes you had to wake it. Sometimes it woke by itself. Writing is like that too, and we are all trying to find ways of making our words flow and of letting our ideas for stories come to us abundantly, one after another.

  Education has not erased this image of the office and the pump and the old papers and the middle-aged man that runs the place. I wonder what image each of you has of the way your imagination works. For a writer, this is no frivolous matter. It is useful to have some acquaintance with the one in whose service you are employed.

  Sometimes when a story is not going well, I have a strong desire to visit that office, to see that pump, and to meet that man. In this waking dream, I find myself standing at one side of his desk like a supplicant, facing a man who looks like a harassed journalist. You know the type—shirtsleeves and waistcoat, slacks, green eyeshade. I introduce myself. I am the writer. He introduces himself. He is the Guardian of the Well.

  “I beg your pardon,” I say, “but I thought you were the Giver of Dreams.”

  The Guardian shakes his head.

  “She’s tricky, that one. She’s not reliable like me. I’m here right on time. I keep the place tidy. I do my job. You should see the stuff she sends me. She’s outrageous. Not the faintest notion of good taste. But I take what she sends, I stick it together, I untangle it and shape it, and I send you the results. I hope you’re satisfied?”

  When I assure him that I have not come to register a complaint, he pulls up two swivel chairs. I get out my notebook and pencil.

  “You’ve come to interview me,” he says. He examines my fifty-cent spiral notebook from Kresge’s with great interest.

  “Are you addicted to notebooks?” he asks, almost tenderly.

  I admit that I am
.

  “And what use do you make of your notebooks?” asks the Guardian.

  “I write down the things I want to remember,” I answer.

  “And do you go back and read what you have written?”

  Not until he asks does it occur to me that I almost never reread my notebooks, and suddenly I wonder why on earth I am keeping them. The Guardian does not wait for my answer.

  “Some writers go back to their notebooks, some do not. I used to work for a woman who carried notebooks in her purse. She jotted down ideas for stories, conversations, memories, dreams. She was very scrupulous about jotting things down. But the notebooks, being small, were easily misplaced. The memories and conversations got mixed up with the grocery lists and bus schedules.”

  “She was careless to lose them,” I said.

  “She lost them because she didn’t really need them,” said the Guardian. “That is true of a good many things we lose. Writing an observation in her notebook fixed it in her mind. What she wrote came back to her when she needed it. She did not have to refer to her notebooks when she started a story.”

  “So she threw them all out?” I asked.

  The Guardian smiled and shook his head.

  “There came a day when she found herself in the middle of a story, ready to write a description of a cave. Six months before, she had visited a cave. She had described it minutely in one of her notebooks—but where was the notebook? She wrote very well about her cave from memory and finished the story, but the sense of loss continued to haunt her. So she gave up all her small notebooks and left several large notebooks in strategic places around the house. By the telephone; she was fond of dialogue. In the bedroom; she enjoyed her dreams. It is difficult to misplace a notebook bound in leather that one has paid five dollars for.”

  “But she didn’t need her notebook to write about the cave. Why should she bother to keep them?”

  The Guardian leaned forward.

  “You are a great admirer of Katherine Anne Porter’s stories, are you not? She too faced this question. Fortunately for us, she recorded her answer in her journal:

  I keep notes and journals only because I write a great deal, and the habit of writing helps me to arrange, annotate, stow away conveniently the references I may need later. Yet when I begin a story, I can never work in any of those promising paragraphs, those apt phrases, those small turns of anecdote I had believed would be so valuable. I must know a story “by heart” and I must write from memory. Certain writing friends whose judgments I admire have told me I lack detail, exact observation of the physical world, my people hardly ever have features, or not enough—that they live in empty houses, et cetera. At one time, I was so impressed by this criticism, I used to sit on a camp stool before a landscape and note down literally every object, every color, form, stick and stone before my eyes. But when I remembered that landscape, it was quite simply not in those terms that I remembered it, and it was no good pretending I did, and it was no good attempting to describe it because it got in the way of what I was really trying to tell. I was brought up with horses, I have harnessed, saddled, driven and ridden many a horse, but to this day I do not know the names for the different parts of a harness. I have often thought I would learn them and write them down in a notebook. But to what end? I have two large cabinets full of notes already.1

  “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.