A note about our village here, our beloved village which can always be counted on to come through in time of crisis. Maybe Wilberforce Smith is everybody who makes me angry with self-centered narrow-mindedness and then undoes me utterly by an act of selfless nobility, such as Wilberforce going into the burning house for the little boys. When Senator Joe McCarthy began making his Communist accusations on television, we thought we’d hear a lot of pro-McCarthy talk in the store: but no: the Yankee sense of fair play came to the fore. McCarthy had gone too far. For a long time after his obscenities there were no more accusations around here of Communism.
A village is very much like boarding school (I was in boarding schools for ten years, so I know whereof I talk): let any threat come from outside, and everybody, old and new, Republican and Democrat, white-collar worker or blue, will band together.
Perhaps that is what our divided world needs now: a threat from outside. Certainly, as one good American said, if we do not hang together we will hang separately.
3
Thinking about the Brechsteins, attempting the not-quite possible task of separating fact from fiction in this sketch, teaches me something about the nature of reality. On one level, one might say that the Brechsteins are not real. But they are. It is through the Brechsteins, through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth. The world we live in, the world we are able to know with our intellect, is limited and bounded by our finiteness. We glimpse reality only occasionally, and for me it happens most often when I write, when I start out using all the “real” things which my senses and my mind can know, and then suddenly a world opens before me.
Reality: I can only affirm that the people in my stories have as complete and free a life of their own as do my family and friends; to the extent that they become alive for the reader, the story has succeeded. For me, this says a lot about the nature of reality.
The only inadvertent exceptions I’ve made to my usual unknowing where or from whom my characters spring, are Rob Austin, who simply is our youngest child, and there’s nothing I can do about it; and Canon Tallis, who walked, unexpected, into J.F.K. Airport when Adam Eddington was waiting to fly to Lisbon. If I tried consciously to write about an actual person, I would be limited by that person; the character could not do anything that the person, as far as I understand him, would not do. But an imaginary character is not limited; he does and says all kinds of things I don’t expect, and often don’t want. When a character wants to do one thing and I want him to do another, the character is usually right.
But I don’t suppose it’s possible for a writer to create a wholly imaginary character. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are drawing from every human being we have ever known, have passed casually in the street, sat next to on the subway, stood behind in the check-out line at the supermarket. Perhaps one might say that we draw constantly from our subconscious minds, and undoubtedly this is true, but more important than that is the super-conscious level which comes to our aid in writing—or painting or composing—or teaching, or listening to a friend.
When I was writing The Arm of the Starfish, I had the story thoroughly plotted, and there was no Joshua Archer in it. Nevertheless, when Adam Eddington woke up in the Ritz Hotel in Lisbon, there was a young man sitting in his room, a young man named Joshua Archer, and Joshua was as much of a surprise to me as he was to Adam, and he changed the plot radically. He made me rewrite at least half the book.
But I do have to know, with all five senses, the places in which these unpredictable people move. When I was working on the story of Mariana Alcoforado, the Portuguese nun, I realized that I couldn’t possibly get really deep into it until I had been to Portugal, to Beja, where Mariana’s convent was, until I had touched, tasted, smelled, heard, seen. I had been thinking of Portugal as something like the South of France, which I knew with my senses, but I was aware that this wasn’t good enough. When some movie money came through, Hugh said, “All right, now we’ll go to Portugal.”
We left two days after Christmas, sending our children back here to stay with friends. We were in Portugal ten days, ten intensely profitable days, because I got two books out of it, The Love Letters and The Arm of the Starfish. Our plane, like Adam’s, could not land in Lisbon because of the fog, and went on to Madrid; like Adam, we spent the day in the Prado. We, too, took a bumpy Caravelle back to Lisbon. We stayed in the Ritz for two nights, so I knew what that room where Joshua appeared was like. On our way back from the south of Portugal we stayed at the Avenida Palace, where Adam went after Poly had disappeared from the Caravelle; the room in which Dr. O’Keefe told him to wait was the room in which we stayed.
During those ten days I wrote over two hundred pages of journal.
“Turn out the light,” Hugh would sometimes say, testily.
“I can’t, I haven’t got it all down yet.”
“Write it tomorrow.”
“I can’t, I have to do it now, while it’s still alive.”
He is very good about understanding, and even encouraging, this.
4
An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students. Sometimes this manifold responsibility weighs heavily on me; I want to retreat entirely, lest I do damage. But we have to accept the stark fact that we not only can but inevitably will do damage. It’s that Omaha psychiatrist versus George MacDonald, perhaps?
At a meeting of the Children’s Book Committee of the Authors Guild a couple of winters ago, we had a hot argument about this. The kind of responsibility I’m thinking about is both difficult and dangerous, especially where it affects children. But we’re living in a difficult and dangerous world, and no amount of sticking our heads in the sand is going to make it any easier. Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There’s a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men’s lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings—not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us.
We sat there in the Authors Guild, looking out the windows to a stricken city, paralyzed at that time by a strike of fuel-oil deliverers in the midst of a flu epidemic; people were dying because of this strike, dying for fringe benefits, mostly people in the ghetto parts of the city where landlords don’t care whether the buildings are heated or not. Only a short while behind us—and ahead of us—were other strikes, garbage-collector strikes (we keep having these, and the city gets more and more attractive to rats, rodent and human); student strikes; teacher strikes; phone-company strikes; welfare-recipient strikes; transit strikes; you name it, we’ve had it—or we will have it. I sometimes wonder if the ancient Romans were as aware of their crumbling civilization as we New Yorkers can’t help being of ours; did they, too, sometimes sit around a candlelit dinner table with friends, and wonder how many times they would be able to meet thus; did they, too, draw closer together because of the anger and dark outside?
We, of the Children’s Book Committee, sat in our pleasant skyscraper room and discussed a possible program for the next meeting of the Guild. I suggested that we ask each other, “What is the responsibility of the writer today?”
Someone asked—I think it was Ann Petry or Elizabeth George Speare, two of the writers I most admire: “Do you mean as a person or as a writer?”
I tried to explain that I, for one, was not separable. I can’t, as I think I’ve made plain, be pulled apart like a
jigsaw puzzle that can be dismantled and then put back together again. I am, for better or worse, writer, wife, mother, and all these bits of me are inseparably blended to make up the human being who is—or who is not—responsible.
“But books are a story,” someone else said. “That’s what they have to be: entertainment. They shouldn’t be anything else.”
Well, of course. The story comes, and it is pure story. That’s all I set out to write. But I don’t believe that we can write any kind of story without including, whether we intend to or not, our response to the world around us.
The writing of a book may be a solitary business; it is done alone. The writer sits down with paper and pen, or typewriter, and, withdrawn from the world, tries to set down the story that is crying to be written. We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.
Last summer in England, when I was talking at the college where Alan is teaching, someone said, “But what about the mystery writers? They don’t make any response to the problems of the world in their stories.” And I cried, “Oh, but they do!” and cited some of my favorite writers, Josephine Tey, John Dickson Carr, Dorothy Sayers—I could go on and on—and said, “Think about them. Their mysteries may be nothing but exciting stories on the surface, but there’s a definite moral response to the world in every single one of the really good ones.”
It wasn’t till this summer that it occurred to me that most of my favorite mystery writers are English, and use the language literately; their syntax is not an insult to the reader. Even more important, most of them write out of a belief in a universe created by a God of love.
Something odd and sad: I originally wrote that many of my favorite mystery writers were practicing Christians, and two people whose opinion I respect told me that the word “Christian” would turn people off. This certainly says something about the state of Christianity today. I wouldn’t mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is; I wouldn’t mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities; I wouldn’t mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word “Christian” means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of “how those Christians love one another”?
No wonder our youth is confused and in pain; they long for God, for the transcendent, and are offered, far too often, either piosity or sociology, neither of which meets their needs, and they are introduced to churches which have become buildings that are a safe place to go to escape the awful demands of God.
As for the mystery writers, I stand by what I said: no one whose life is not based on the faith that the universe is in the hands of a responsible God would dare to become so intimately involved with death, and the evil in men’s hearts.
To be responsible means precisely what the word implies: to be capable of giving a response. It isn’t only the Flower Children or Hell’s Angels who are opting out of society. A writer who writes a story which has no response to what is going on in the world is not only copping out himself but helping others to be irresponsible, too. I mentioned that all of us on the Children’s Book Committee do give our response to the world around us in our books, even if only by implication. I brought up several books written by the members of the committee, books which are perfect examples of the kind of responsibility I am talking about, and added, “You’re my friends, and you’ve read The Young Unicorns [it had recently been published]; you know there’s more than just the story. If what I have to say is right, or if it is wrong, I’m responsible for it, and I can’t pretend that I’m not, just because it’s difficult.”
To refuse to respond is in itself a response. Those of us who write are responsible for the effect of our books. Those who teach, who suggest books to either children or adults, are responsible for their choices. Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us or we light a candle to see by.
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We’ve come to the point where it’s irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven’t yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don’t look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.
One of the greatest weapons of all is laughter, a gift for fun, a sense of play which is sadly missing from the grownup world. When one of our children got isolated by a fit of sulks, my husband would say very seriously, “Look at me. Now, don’t laugh. Whatever you do, don’t laugh.” Nobody could manage to stay long-faced for very long, and communication was reestablished. When Hugh and I are out of sorts with each other, it is always laughter that breaks through the anger and withdrawal.
Paradox again: to take ourselves seriously enough to take ourselves lightly. If every hair of my head is counted, then in the very scheme of the cosmos I matter; I am created by a power who cares about the sparrow, and the rabbit in the snare, and the people on the crowded streets; who calls the stars by name. And you. And me.
When I remember this it is as though pounds were lifted from me. I can take myself lightly, and share in the laughter of the white china Buddha on my desk.
5
A spring ago, on the Sunday which in the calendar of the church is called Pentecost, the young people’s group conducted the worship service. The church stands in the center of the village, a white colonial building with pillars, a proper fire escape, and a tall spire; someone once told me that it is the tallest spire in the state. The interior, alas, was redone during the worst excesses of Victorianism, but it is still a dignified and austere place of worship.
The young people started their service with a pop record about the need for love to conquer hate. As the record played, they danced in the chancel, improvising their steps and movements to what each one felt the record was saying. I was sitting towards the front, but the sense of shock behind me was tangible. I didn’t need to turn around to realize that at least one person was getting up and walking out. When the record was over, one of the girls, a senior in high school, went to the lectern and told us that the Pilgrim Fellowship was not there to shock the congregation but to try to explain what was on their minds, to try to communicate to the grownups what they were feeling. And she talked about the importance of being an individual. She cared passionately.
I had sung with this girl’s mother in choir. I had felt a helpless anguish when the oldest little girl, who should now be in college, died of cancer. What was being said from the lectern by this high-school senior came from everything her growing up had taught her. But someone else left the church.
Then one of the boys came forward. His mother, too, had been in the choir; we had carried our youngest children at the same time. I had watched him learn to walk and talk; our boys have been friends all their lives. What he had to say on this Pentecost was that he was no longer able to believe in the god who is talked about in church and Sunday School. If he was to believe in God, he had to find him in people, and he found him when he walked alone in the woods. Someone else walked out.
Then our nearest neighbor’s boy, our son’s close friend, came forward. He talked about war, and killing, and napalm bombs and burning babies and killing, killing, killing, and more people left.
Then the young people, still trying, came down into the congregation to pass the peace, the old tradition of the early centuries, where each person in the congregation turns to his neighbor, takes his hand, or embraces him, saying, “Peace be with you.”
But by then the abyss between adolescen
t and adult was too great to be bridged.
On the first Pentecost, people of many races and languages were together, and each spoke in his own tongue, and everybody was able to understand everybody else. And here we were on Pentecost two thousand years later and there had been no understanding at all.
Most of the village was as much shocked by the lack in communication as by what some considered irreverence on the part of the young people. For the rest of the spring and summer Quinn held open meetings every other Sunday evening, where the generations could get together to try to communicate. This isn’t always easy, and it isn’t only the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not necessarily an old man in a white beard and nightgown sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult’s god, and therefore he did not believe in God. There were some parents who felt that love of country implies no freedom to criticize the country; I wonder if they also felt that to criticize or attempt to correct their children meant that they did not love them? This isn’t what love means.
But at least people came to these meetings; they tried; and we got enough laughter out of the extremists—who didn’t like being thought amusing—so that the laughter itself helped us knock down walls. And our varied languages were no longer quite so incomprehensible.
6
Last spring I conducted a seminar through the auspices of the P.E.N. and the Cathedral. The seminar was black, Wasp, Jew, Oriental, and this is the way I most like it to be, for this very diversity helps break down prejudice; if I—inevitably—become involved with the members of a seminar, so do they with each other. It wasn’t long before we all knew each other by name, which meant that Una was Una first and black and militant second; that Jock was Jock first and privileged and Wasp second; that he could say, after hearing Una read a tragic story out of her own experience, “Una, I really envy you; that’s awful, all that, but it makes me realize how sheltered I’ve been.” Una, in her turn, for the first time saw some of her experiences as valuable in her understanding of herself and the world around her, saw and felt the extraordinary hope that comes from experience which comes from tribulation. We all asked, “Why is it that we learn from the things which hurt us? Why do we need pain before we can grow?” There aren’t any easy answers to this one, but all artists know the truth of it, and not only artists: it was Jung who said that there is no coming to life without pain.
A Circle of Quiet Page 9
