Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  When he found out that Proust was thought by the French uniquely the master of the imperfect and the past definite, he marvelled and marvels still at the notion of a society which honours a man for his command of a tense. Suppose there were a North American writer who possessed a great and unique mastery of, let’s say, the present progressive. What decorations would he receive from a grateful civil authority, what honours reap from literate society?

  Imagine a literary hostess: “I want you to meet Mr. Jones, the master of the present progressive.” Imagine the response!

  Sometimes Joe’s friends would ask him, “Why do you go to see Wallace? There’s nothing for you there, the guy’s written out and has been since the Spanish Civil War.” Cozy Walker said it to him first, and the nasty imputation made Joe stiffen his spine against the padding in the booth.

  “That doesn’t happen to the good ones.”

  “Sure it does,” said Cozy, who had just magisterially completed a doctoral dissertation on the public life of Matthew Prior, “it happens to everybody on this continent. They all start off very brave and big, and in fifteen years they’re done, because they’ve worked through themselves and they never, but never my hopeful little friend, get on to anything else.”

  “Not true!” said Joe, muddling his Manhattan vortically.

  “David Wallace is no good for you, Joe. You can’t learn a thing from him, he’s a primitive. He never had the least idea how to write, he’s a transcriber.”

  Joe looked fiercely at Cozy. “I read your thesis, Buster, and if that doesn’t shut you up, nothing will.”

  “I don’t profess to be a writer.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “But you do.”

  “Yes,” said Joe, “and that’s my affair. Why don’t you drop it, since you don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  “I’ve never in my life found that a deterrent,” said Cozy cheerfully, signalling for another drink.

  “Just remember, nobody’s ever written out. That’s a term used by the ignorant, like you.”

  “So, O.K. We’re all ignorant about something.”

  “But we don’t all talk about it.”

  He never used to go to David’s house for his “local” literary education, not wanting to talk to him about tenses, or the management of relative clauses, but mostly to learn how the literary life was lived, where the stories came from and how they grew, why it was that peoples’ careers took this or that shape, why some guys couldn’t do anything after forty and some could do nothing before, though these were rare. And on this last point there was always a certain constraint because David had written nothing so good as his first half-dozen books for ten years and was just then trying to work around the difficulty with every atom of craft, technique, ingenuity, he could command.

  When Joe asked him about it, he couldn’t tell. “They just came,” he said, “and neither Helen nor I knew how lucky we were. I just wrote them up and sent them out and they sold, like that.”

  “I remember,” said Helen from the depths of her armchair, “one time David and I were in Chicago, I don’t recall what for. But that day Scribner’s Magazine published two stories by David. There was a little belt of paper around each copy with his name on it. ‘Two new stories by David Wallace.’ And we just took it for granted.”

  “They came so easy,” said David, smiling affectionately at Helen, “but they don’t anymore. There was one story that I simply transcribed from a magistrate’s court record. The whole story was in the re-arrangement of course; the trick was to see the story there.”

  “Edward O’Brien loved that story,” said Helen reminiscently.

  “Sure. He sent me a four-page letter about it. How do you see the story in the facts? Where does it come from? I used to see them all the time, clear as crystal, and now I have to jockey around, weigh this fact against that, and try to guess which are the right ones.”

  “It’s a question of maturity,” said Helen, with her queerly passive certainty, “because to write the story you have to think it important. When we’re young, we think every little perception we have is fundamental. But in middle age we’re more critical. You simply don’t write so hastily nowadays, because you’ve seen more of the world, and you know that a lot of the moving little occurrences that you witness are not important. Twenty years ago you’d write them up immediately and therefore some of those early stories are naive. But this new novel — it won’t come easily and it won’t be naive.”

  “Well, Joe’s a young man. How about it, Joe, do you have second thoughts about your story ideas?”

  “No. The editors have to do that for me, and they do. When I’ve had ten rejections on a story I figure that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea at that. I don’t know. I still can’t tell the authentic ones from the fake or the dull. I wish to God I could.”

  “But they get winnowed out when you send them around?”

  “And how.”

  “I don’t understand that,” said David regretfully, “because it’s an experience I never had. I sold almost everything I wrote for fifteen years, without any effort. Maybe you’re lucky.”

  “But I’ve written forty stories,” said Joe, a little desperately, “which is pretty good for a man my age, and some of them are not too bad. You’ve read them and you know. And I’ve sold exactly two of them. Now how am I different from you?”

  “You might be less talented,” said David candidly, “but not enough to make that much difference.”

  “He’s lucky, he’s lucky. Do you know what I read the other day?” said Helen. “I read an article about some screenwriter. He might not be a real writer at all; few of them are. But he said one very interesting thing. When he was asked how he became a writer he said, ‘Five hundred thousand people started out to be writers the same day I did. All the others stopped. I’m the only one left.’ I think he’s got a point.”

  “If he said that,” said David, “he’s probably pretty good.” “The trick is simply not to stop?”

  “That’s it, that’s it.”

  Joe sighed. “I wish there were a surer way.”

  All at once David crossed the room and turned off the tele­vision which had been glowing, pictureless, for two hours. “Could we have some buns and coffee?” he asked Helen.

  “Yes,” she said, “should we expect Rabbit?”

  “If he isn’t home now, I don’t expect he will be.”

  “He’s at a party,” said Joe. “I was supposed to go.”

  “But you came here instead,” said Helen at the door, “that’s charming.”

  Joe laughed. “I wasn’t trying to make an impression.”

  “I know, sweetie,” she said, “Buns.…” she muttered abstractedly, trailing it out the door. David came and stood beside Joe’s chair and lowered his voice.

  “It’s this damned novel that’s upset her,” he said, “she’s really pulling for me to bring it off. The trouble is, she knows me too well.”

  “I wish there were something I could do,” said Joe, “but …”

  “But there isn’t, is there? I haven’t written a novel since just before the war. I did a full-length juvenile, and a collection of memoirs that ran to novel-length, and a lot of travelling and broadcasting, and maybe twenty stories. But I haven’t kept up. Boy,” he said fervently, “this one better go”

  “It’ll go,” said Joe loyally, “because it’s going to be a great book.”

  “My agent thinks so but then he’s prejudiced and besides he’s anxious to make some money out of me. I haven’t put a dime on his books in ten years.”

  “He isn’t getting tough about it?”

  “Lord, no, he’s a personal friend! I was his second client. But he wants a picture sale or maybe a play out of it and I’m not certain they’re there. It’s a difficult subject.”

  “It
’ll go,” said Joe again. There wasn’t anything else to say. And then Helen came back with cinnamon buns and coffee and they talked for a few minutes about Rabbit, who was beginning to have second thoughts about the legal profession.

  “He has that uneasy look,” said David, “that presages a sudden flight to Paris. I know it well. And I wish I weren’t middle-aged.” He grinned. “My middle period, my transitional phase.” Then all at once he decided to round off the evening with a benediction. “Maybe I can tell you once and for all how it is, Joe, for me, and perhaps for you too. Some idiot once asked me about the myths, and how I used them. Now I don’t know about that. I’m not a man for the technical terms of criticism and I wouldn’t recognize a myth, I guess, if I tripped over one. But I can tell you this: there’s a point where the myth, if you want to call it that, the great story of which you’ve stumbled into a small part, assumes a kind of possession of you. You don’t use it; it uses you. I don’t mean that you’re inspired. But the myth touches you, gets into you and begins to tell the story for you, through you, making the decisions for you. When that happens, and control of the tale passes out of your hands, you almost begin to be in the story yourself. I don’t mean to sound poetic but it’s like a laying-on of hands. You’re touched, you’re possessed, you’re all committed, engaged, and if the story doesn’t please or beguile of itself, you’re lost, because you have to set down what is dictated. You have to live your way into the story. And that’s how it is.” He set down his coffee cup and stretched, and looked embarrassed.

  “Living under the myth,” said Joe thoughtfully. It sounded like magic to him.

  “In and under it — that’s the trouble with this new book.”

  He heard no more of this curious doctrine from David himself but he saw how it worked when the “middle-period, transitional” novel appeared, was revised with utter incomprehension on every side, was dumped and written-off by its publishers, and early allowed to disappear into the limbo of excellent books that haven’t sold. Wrong myth, he thought to himself, as he saw David become more and more a journalist, getting his living in television and radio and from magazine and newspaper articles. Wrong myth!

  Just as David had prophetically guessed, the design of the “middle period, transitional” book had baffled everyone who read it. With every inner consistency, with marvellous truth to itself, the myth had made him its scapegoat. For not content with dictating a narrative that wouldn’t beguile, the myth, or whatever had composed the book, positively offended people and made them dislike the novel and its writer for affronting them with a narrative that didn’t fit their sense of where a story ought to come from and go. Wrong myth, wrong audience! And David left in the middle, still trying in the middle of all his journalism to work through those late nights into the middle of another book, trying to get from “the period of stagnation and doubt” to “the triumphant later years.”

  When Joe left town, the highest diploma clutched tightly in his hand, David was still trying, still reassuring Helen that he would make it, working on a new book, this one about innocence, crystal clear, no puzzlements, with none of the characters on two sides at the same time, with none of the illogicalities which Joe thought nearly Shakespearian but which the public found idiotic.

  The two men had their struggles, and to some extent shared them, although Joe never wrote directly to David, so much his senior, so much still compelling a filial piety. He wrote instead to Rabbit who had by now given up the law, or been given up by it, and who was operating a feature syndicate, the first in the country, for a Toronto daily that had visions of national influence. Rabbit, Joe knew, was nurturing secret writing inclinations and might at any moment commit a novel. So they corresponded and he heard incidentally, in Evanston or Cambridge, how the new book was going, how slowly and silently it was evolving. And this secret submarine evolution of a new book which cost David five years’ work, and upon which he was risking everything, began to co­incide more and more closely with the gestation of Joe’s own novel, not his first, but the first that looked anywhere near publishable.

  He had gone on turning out stories year by year and by now one-tenth of them sold, an improvement over his earlier ratio of two in forty. Of his newer stories, one in ten was picked up by a quarterly and he banked the rest in a trunk against the day when everybody would know what he was talking about, instead of an occasional perceptive editor, and in the spring of this year he printed his sixth story and began to call himself a writer. He had always told himself that six stories would justify the name and there were times when the slender figure looked unattainable.

  Statistics have nothing to do with composition but it is curious how regular a curve describes the early publications of a new writer. There will be at first the hundred and twenty printed slips which give way in time to printed slips with a word in ink at the bottom. This goes on for a while and Joe studies those inked monosyllables and wonders who wrote them, what the initials stand for, what the reader thought.

  And then there are the letters which say “We are holding the story for further consideration.” These come very late in the day, labourers of the eleventh hour, and now Joe feels the force of the screenwriter’s aphorism. “Five hundred thousand began the same year. All the others stopped. I’m the only one left.” But the stories “held for further consideration” march back one by one and he tells himself comfortingly that someday somebody will buy them. It’ll be slow coming but it’ll come, it’ll come. “All the others stopped. I’m the only one left.”

  But no myth has ever possessed Joe and done the story for him; he builds them up with carpentry, nailing the clumsy pieces together and hoping the nail-holes don’t show, apologizing by the things he can do for the things he can’t, as every writer must.

  “Why don’t you write a bestseller under an alias?” asks Toby Frankel, the fourth time he takes her out; they are sitting in the LaSalle Beverage Room in the heart of downtown Kingston, having an economical date, three dollars worth of draught beer which is a fair amount of beer at that. He looks at her upper arms which are lovely, round but not fat, one might call them plump, perhaps. Anyway they will cover a multitude of sins.

  “You mean a pseudonym,” he says hungrily.

  “I mean an alias,” she says, “I know perfectly well you’d consider it immoral.” She is a practising clinical psychologist, or will be very soon, and her ideas of motivation are not his.

  “I couldn’t do it anyway,” he says, “it requires a special skill that I don’t have. I couldn’t write for a newspaper either without taking the time to learn the technique. And it’s taken me ten years to learn the technique of the short story and I’m not finished yet.” He thinks this over for a minute and is rueful. “I haven’t even started.”

  “I wonder if anything that takes that long can be worth it?” she says with womanly pragmatism. “You can become a heart specialist or a psychoanalyst in twelve years, and a Jesuit, I’m told, in thirteen.”

  She is being subtle, for her. “And a short story writer knows more of the secrets of the heart than all three,” says Joe, “isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?”

  She is engaging. “I set it up for you.”

  “Well, he probably doesn’t — but he knows as much. Thirteen years of study ought to yield something in the way of practised application of one’s knowledge.”

  “If the talent is there.”

  Joe shudders. “My theory,” he says hopefully, “is that the talent is in the application to study. The talent is the diligence.”

  “Then anyone can become an artist of the short story?”

  “No. Not everyone can do the thirteen years’ work.”

  “I see. The empiricist view of talent. The talented are those who last thirteen years.”

  “There’s no other way to measure it,” he sighs, “and I wish you were not studying psychology. I sold a story this morning.”

>   “Joey, you didn’t!”

  “I did and that makes five; one more to go.”

  “To go for what?”

  “Never mind,” he says, “and I’ll get an agent out of this one, because I made some money out of it for a change.” He watches with amusement as her eyes widen.

  “How much?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty.”

  “How long did you take to write it?”

  “Thirteen years.”

  “I mean the actual writing-time.”

  “Counting revisions, about a month.”

  “But on your spare time?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you could do that once a month, over and above your salary, you’d be doing very well, wouldn’t you?”

  He starts to laugh. “I would, but I don’t expect they’ll all bring that good a price.”

  “Oh, but it’s something to think about, and why are we going on this cheap date anyway? We ought to celebrate.” She is already taking that proprietorial tone.

  “And spend the whole seven hundred and fifty?”

  “Just the odd fifty.”

  “It’s these odd fifties that kill you.” He stirs thoughtfully in his chair. “I’ll buy your dinner and we can go someplace after. The important thing is, I may be able to get an agent.”

  “Does it really help?”

  “Not unless you’re selling a lot. Stories are bought on their own merits, by and large, but an agent helps you to get a careful reading and he looks after the paper work, mailing and such. They’re most useful if you’re really in business with both feet.

  “You will be,” she says, with a very friendly gleam.

  “Yeah. An agent might help me place a novel, which is very hard. Come on, I’ll buy you something to eat. Maybe even steak.”

  So small a world is the circle of editors, publishers, writers and agents, that even before his big sale appears in print Joe begins to receive cautious non-committal notes from people who would like, without making any positive declarations, to see what else he can do that may be of use to them. In no other market does word-of-mouth play so important a part. Long long before a new writer’s name is known to the general public, sometimes several years before, the little group centred on New York, with trading posts in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Toronto, knows all about him, what he can do, what his prospects are, whether he is ever likely to be any good. The writers themselves, though not so concentrated geographically, are even more inbred. A youngster who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, who is twenty-six, who has printed three stories, can be certain that fifty of his near contemporaries (who are personally utterly unknown to him) nevertheless know through the channels all that they need to know about him, and how much they need to fear him, perhaps because they have met somebody who was in the same graduate school, or because an editor-acquaintance has read him extensively, or maybe because he once worked for six months in New York and went to the parties. It makes altogether for a good deal of taking in each other’s washing and it is sometimes doubtful whether anybody reads new fiction except the two thousand men who write, edit, and try to market it.