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.
Did she print the two copies (was it truly only two copies?) because she could not bear the delay between the first and the second draft? Who knows? Perhaps even she doesn’t. Goethe once said: ‘Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.’
With the arrival of one tardy review of End Zone, sent to me by a friend, the critical views of the book have ceased. Its long birthing is over. If it survives for any length of time out there in the world in its maturity, it will be on its own. In some notebook, ah, here it is, I have written down a sentence by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: ‘I regard reviews as a kind of infant’s disease to which newborn books are subjected.’
Why is it that I feel very old when I am living on the Hill in Washington? People here walk briskly. I lag. They chatter to each other in high-pitched, self-assured voices in Provisions, the coffee shop, their shining brown hair and perfect white teeth
lighting up the underground cave where the little tables and chairs are set. Their high heels, their starched white shirts, their lustrous shoes, their leather briefcases stowed away under their chairs: they are all Congressional aides, or Library of Congress trainees or Folger scholars or professors or White House assistants or real estate agents or lobbyists. They shop at the Eastern Market, across from our apartment house. They are oblivious to the high price of asparagus or artichokes or raspberries. They buy large bunches of flowers from the vendors outside. They hold the leash of their well-groomed dogs with one hand, a French bread, newly ground coffee, and roses in the other. They greet each other on the street with happy little cries of recognition and pleasure.
They all seem acquainted, affectionate, part of a coterie alien to me in age and occupation. They live on a heady plain or better, on an upward slope of advancement and success, surrounded by public admiration of their status. Their self-esteem never seems to flag; their ambitions appear to be boundless.
The sight of all these happy settlers makes me homesick for Maine, where others of my generation have come to live, as have I, after the gritty, brash years of striving and pushing ahead and achievement are over. Down East on our peninsula, which I miss so badly, many of us have settled, in the real sense, for being old. Out of the race. Dimmer of wit. Shaky of foot. Over-age in grade.… I remember that in the Middle Ages extreme nostalgia and homesickness were treated as diseases. Clearly I am in need of a doctor.
While I was in New York a few weeks ago I went to a publication party for Joe Caldwell’s new novel, The Uncle from Rome, held at the beautiful East Side building that the American Academy in Rome owns. It was crowded with his friends, noisy with all the polite voices of his admirers. New York, like Washington, has its exclusive groups, literary clans, publishing cadres, arrivistes and clingers-on. Nothing makes me realize how passé, how far out and away I am in my present existence as much as attendance at one of these roundups, where the crowd (herd? no) all know each other and rejoice in their familiarity.
Of course, my ego is not beyond resurrection. Susan, a librarian at the University of Delaware and caretaker of Yaddo’s books every August, shows me a rare-book catalogue in which my first novel is listed for $175, the second for $275. I have a short rush of pride before it is washed away by the usual river of anonymity. I face it: Those books, like me, are old hat; they disappeared almost thirty years ago after a single printing each. Their publisher, Doubleday, in its economic wisdom, trashed the remainders of tiny printings in its Garden City warehouse, thus accounting for their present scarcity.
Bill Henderson calls to say he has received Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, admires it, and wants to republish it. I am delighted. I agree to write an afterword for it. I come away from the telephone feeling the elation of the owner of a stray mutt who will be groomed in order to be shown at the Westminster Dog Show.
Last night we had dinner with our friend and neighbor Luree Miller, a writer on travel, travelers, and women explorers. We talked at length about community matters, and about the Bench.
At the other end of the Eastern Market is a small stone-and-grass area called Turtle Park. It houses a stone turtle on which two- and three-year-olds love to climb, and seats for adults who watch over their endeavors. At the side is a lovely wooden bench given to the park by Luree. Mounted on the bench is a small gold plaque, a testimonial to her husband, Bill Miller, who was born in Alaska, was a dedicated world traveler, served in the State Department, and died in his early sixties of cancer. Theirs was one of those marriages of which it is said, curiously, that they were made in heaven, which I suppose means that it was that rarity, a happy alliance formed on earth. Knowing the Millers made me renege a little on my cynical belief that a happy marriage is one about which one knows very little.
Four years ago, the bench was stolen by some unneighborly yuppies, who wanted it to furnish their living room in a unique way, I suspect. Led by Gary Hortch, the young man who owns Hayden’s, the nearby liquor store (and who voluntarily keeps up the little park), people in the community searched for the bench and finally shamed the anonymous couple into returning it to an alley where it was found. It was promptly restored to its place in the park, this time chained to the ground.
Some late mornings I take my scone from the bakery and my cup of coffee from Bread and Chocolate and sit on the bench, thinking of the good marriage and the good life that this fine, useful seat signifies, and watching the children, oblivious to everything but the mountainous hump on the turtle’s back, make their Everest climbs.
We are packing our books in the apartment, slowly, getting ready to ship them to Sargentville should we be fortunate enough to sublet the apartment for most of the coming year. Out of one book I decide to keep falls a New Year’s card sent to me a long time ago from New Directions and Anne and James Laughlin. It contains some lines by William Carlos Williams in a poem called ‘January Morning,’ and reminds me of the view from Jane’s hospital room, looking down the Hudson from close to the George Washington Bridge, and across to the Palisades: ‘Who knows the Palisades as I do / knows the river breaks east from them / above the city—but they continue south / —under the sky—to bear a crest of / little peering houses that brighten / with dawn behind the moody / water-loving giants of Manhattan.’
The peering little houses have long since given way to towering condominium buildings and other unsightly developments. Williams would not recognize the Palisades of his time and my childhood.
A letter today from a friend on the West Coast who inquires if (unexpectedly) enough good time has passed so that I no longer am ridden by despair at having grown old. Someone else has sent me a taping of John Leonard’s review in which he says he would like to shake me when he hears (reads) my complaints about entering the end zone. Three elderly ladies in the last month write to tell me I am wrong: their seventies (one is eighty-four) are the best time of their life; one quotes the old Robert Browning saw: ‘Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be.’
Today, seated at the counter at Bread and Chocolate for late-afternoon coffee (theirs is the best on the Hill, in my view), I try to dig deep into the aging shell of myself to find an answer. Have I come to terms with old age? Does the fact that I have survived for five years since first I began to record my anger at aging reassure me that it is all not as bad as then I thought? Did I exaggerate my melancholy? Was I unduly pessimistic?
No. Oddly, there are no changes in me, except perhaps for one: In place of my fury of rebellion I have grown more patient with what is. Privately, I still war against my elderly condition of weakness, frailty, powerlessness, but now I accept its inevitability. Publicly, I am quieter about everything. I’ve abandoned the barricades for the veranda, the foxhole for the hammock.
It is all a matter of disposition, perhaps even of character. I am not happier with what I have than I was but more grateful for what I have left. I continue to mourn my lost youth and my active mature years with all their excitement, energy, and ability to anticipate the future. I miss the pleasures I once felt at waking to an unlimited day and the old contentment of going gentle into a good, long, secure night.
Dinner tonight with Rod MacLeish, who has left his commentary job at National Public Radio and gone on to a better berth at the Christian Science Monitor cable channel. Rod is a writer of fiction, the only one I know who enjoys telling, in detail, the plot of the new novel he is in the process of writing. I am always surprised at his daring, I who am afraid to breathe a word about anything I am doing for fear it will all be jinxed, or that I will lose it in talk and have nothing left for the pen.
Rod is in good spirits tonight. His plot summation is interspersed with assurances that the new book is hilarious. ‘I am really a humorist,’ he tells us, although, to be honest, I have not been able to spot any humor in his abstract.
His daughter Cynthia now lives in Alaska, where she has married an Aleut, and is pregnant with their child. She loves her life
there and expects to settle permanently. She listens patiently to my hymn of praise to life in Sargentville and then tells a story about a Texan who brags to a Maine farmer: ‘My spread down there, well, it takes me a day to drive from one end of it to the other.’
The Maine farmer replies: ‘Ayeer, I had a truck like that once.’
I haven’t heard this before. I notice that as soon as you tell someone you live in Maine, you are told a story of this sort. I can laugh easily at her story, more easily than I could at her father’s novel.
This week the fish stall in the Eastern Market across the street was robbed, at two o’clock in the afternoon. Two teenagers entered through the back door and coolly garnered five thousand dollars, we’re told. Reporters are more horrified at the sum of money the little stall had in it than at the audacity of the well-informed youngsters who knew exactly when to ‘pull off the holdup and how much money there would be there at that time. The two boys were, of course, both armed. I have heard it said that few black youths over the age of twelve now appear on the streets of D.C., or in school, without a gun. I hope this is an exaggeration.
Three weeks ago, we are told by the owner of Clothes Encounters, a used-apparel shop two blocks from our apartment on Seventh Street, that a lady was robbed by a chap who got out of a car, took her handbag, got back on the passenger side of the car, and was driven away.… I am quite ready to leave this city, and it is only February.
Today I spent the morning at a local public radio station on the campus of American University, doing an interview with Diane Rehm. She is an intelligent woman who actually reads the books she talks about, and then asks incisive and original questions. It took an hour, she asked about my life, career, and End Zone. Then she told me she approved of my contrary opinions on photography (I dislike it because I believe most amateurs use it in place of committing persons and places to memory; the view goes from lens to film without passing through the brain of the picture-taker). On the day of her wedding, she said, the hired photographer failed to appear. She was distraught at the time, but now she celebrates his absence, for she is left with her choice memories rather than a set of posed and artificial pictures.
Extra Innings Page 15
