Angel in the Parlor (22 page)

I am head over heels in debt. I expect to get out of debt by writing, or not at all.…

What advice have I for the potential writer?

I have none, for anybody is a potential writer, and the writer who
is
a writer needs no advice and seeks none.

What about courses in colleges and universities in writing?

Useless, they are entirely useless.
⁶

Fortunately Saroyan's article was followed by one giving a different point of view. It was written by Roy Cow-den, who began teaching at the University of Michigan in 1909 and was director of the Hopwood Awards for twenty years. My mother, who was a student at Michigan while Cowden was on campus but never took a course with him, still speaks of him with awe. “The only way to learn to write,” says Cowden, “is to write and write and write and write and write.… Where there is no caring, there is no real writing.… Great writers are few in the world, but no writer will do as well unless he aims to be among the great ones.”
⁷

Why is it that so many talented students, when they leave the supportive atmosphere of the university, find it easy to put writing aside? Cowden regretfully recalls that the most promising first-year student he ever taught became not a writer but an interior decorator. And of one of his least promising students, he tells this story. The young man wished to take Cowden's class in creative writing and submitted several short narratives. His work was notably undistinguished. But sensing an unusual degree of tension in the student, Cowden turned to him and said, “How much interested are you in becoming a writer?” The student looked him in the eye and answered, “I'll starve for it.” The story has a happy ending. “In the class he wrote a novel that has been published,” says Cowden, “and he is now working on another.”

When I consider the students of mine who have gone on growing as writers after they left school, I realize how much they have in common. First, they write to be read. They write, of course, for the public. But they also write for one or two readers whose judgment they trust. That trusted reader may be an editor or a friend. For a lucky few, it may be a relative. Jane Austen's trusted reader was her sister, Cassandra; Emily Dickinson's—for a limited time—was her sister-in-law, Susan. I haven't forgotten Keats's claim that even if his poems were burned every morning, unread by anyone save himself, he would continue to write them. A disputable claim; he was never put to the test. What my students want when they take a course in creative writing is an intelligent, sensitive reader. What I want for my students when they finish such a course is that they strike out on their own. And I want them to “write and write and write and write.”

To that injunction I should add to read and read and read and read. I don't know a single serious writer who would not include books among the teachers who have influenced him the most. The results of such teaching are entirely different from the results of a workshop. In a workshop the reward is immediate. The poem or story emerges with a new figure and a face-lift. But what you learn from a book may not surface in your writing for years. When I was a graduate student at Stanford, I spent a year putting together an annotated bibliography of the Middle English lyric. While I was working on it, I read everything I could find on that subject in books and scholarly journals. Twenty years later, I have gone back to the forms of those lyrics in some of the poems I want to write now. How useless they seemed to me at the time, and how much I enjoyed reading them!

Remembering my own eclectic education with great pleasure, I hope that Ann Beattie was speaking only for herself and not for her generation when she said in an interview, “I read a lot—mostly modern fiction, nothing before 1960 if I can help it.”
⁸

The reader for all seasons never knows from what quarter instruction and encouragement may come. A former student of mine who recently published her first novel dreamed that she was walking down a busy street when, to her delight and astonishment, she met Charles Dickens striding toward her on a pair of stilts. She has never forgotten the way he smiled at her as if to say,
Writer, welcome to the family.

What the members of that family, the community of serious writers, have in common is not their success but their capacity for dealing with failure. Look in the dark corners of the workroom of a writer who has published a good book and you will find an astonishing number of manuscripts that were rejected either by an editor or by the writer himself. To write and rewrite is to grapple with failure, to make the common language do the uncommon things you demand of it. A well-known novelist, while yet unpublished, sent her only copy of her novel to an editor and discovered later that it had got lost in the mail. She never recovered the novel. But she recovered from the loss of it by sitting down and writing another one. I think the best advice I've heard recently for young writers came from Picasso. A critic asked him, “Of all the works you've created, which is your favorite?” And Picasso replied, “My next one.”

8

Angel in the Parlor: The Reading and Writing of Fantasy

The house where I grew up had squirrels in the attic, mice in the pantry, and an angel in the parlor. I never saw the angel, and I only found out about it by accident. My mother had two sisters, both divorced, who hated to cook and who dropped by our house every Sunday for dinner. They never came alone. They brought their boy-friends. Aunt Jessie brought her daughter. Aunt Nellie brought her son and four Baptist missionaries from Detroit bent on saving our comfortable Presbyterian souls. It was not to them that the angel appeared, however, but to the kindly schoolmaster whom my Aunt Jessie had dated for so long that I called him Uncle Bill and assumed that somewhere in the roots of the tree of life we were related.

I remember the first time the angel appeared. We had just sat down to Sunday dinner when my mother, who had been cooking all morning, counted heads and made a perilous discovery.

“There are thirteen at the table,” she said. “If we sit down with thirteen at the table, one of us will die within the year.”

And she carried her plate to the sideboard. We all knew better than to try to change her mind. So over the clatter of silverware we shouted to her how delicious the chicken tasted, and she shouted back that there were more mashed potatoes in the kitchen, and nobody heard a word.

Then suddenly, for no reason, everyone stopped talking at once. Uncle Bill closed his eyes. Then he glanced at his watch and looked past the dining room into the parlor.

“Ah!” he murmured. “An angel has flown through the room.”

I followed his gaze. I, too, looked into the parlor but saw no angel. I could tell from the astonished faces around me that no one else had seen it either. Why, I wondered, would an angel choose Uncle Bill? Why not me? Or the four Baptist missionaries?

Years later I discovered that the angel that flew through the room on that day was a figure of speech, acknowledging the blessing of silence in a room full of voices.

But even after my mother enlightened me about the angel, I still talked about it, still joked about it, and finally, by paying it so much attention, I came to believe in it. That is to say, I came to believe that our house was more than a collection of people, tables, chairs, lost pocketbooks, misplaced spectacles, and back issues of the
National Geographic.
All these things I could see and hear and touch. But there was also an order of life that, like the angel's, was not bound by the laws of the physical universe. And I came to believe that there were two kinds of people in the world, those who believed in tables and those who believed in angels.

In our public library I met representatives of both. There was the plump lady, who worked on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and who gave me books on dinosaurs and Abraham Lincoln. The covers of the books she chose bore the label, “This is a Read-It-Yourself Book.” That meant I knew all the words and did not have to ask my mother what, for example, a hippodrome was. Then there was the thin lady, who worked on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and gave me books about talking animals and giants and countries at the back of the north wind. The books she recommended had more words I didn't know than words I did, but I felt rather privileged carrying them home, as if I'd just checked out the Rosetta stone.

I do not remember what books I was carrying the afternoon I walked home from the library and saw, high in the clear October sky, a flock of geese winging south over the city. It was their plaintive cry that made me turn, startled at the wild sound over the hum of traffic. Thanks to the plump librarian's selection of books on the migration of birds, I knew how long a journey lay before them. I also knew I would never be happy until I too learned to fly as they did.

Monday afternoon I went to the library and asked the plump librarian for a book on flying. She nodded agreeably. She prided herself on filling all requests, be they ever so peculiar. She gave me a handsomely illustrated book on the Wright brothers. Leafing through it, I could see at once that it did not speak to my condition. So I handed it back and said, “Have you any books on how I can make my own wings and fly like a bird?”

The plump librarian looked distressed but not defeated.

“It is not possible for you to fly like a bird,” she answered.

I thanked her and returned to the library on Tuesday. I told the thin librarian I wanted a book on flying but I did not want a book on airplanes. She looked hurt that I should think her capable of so gross a gesture, and after a moment's thought she plucked a small book from the shelving truck. It had only two pictures, neither of them in color. It was the story of Icarus.

I read the story very carefully. I paid special attention to the construction of the wings, but the drawings were not detailed enough to be very useful. I needed a working plan, with measurements. And where on earth could I find so many feathers?

I checked out the book, however, and as the thin librarian was stamping my card I said, “Have you any books that will teach me to fly?”

She considered my question very seriously.

“You want a book on magic,” she answered.

“Have you books on magic?” I asked.

She pointed to a section at the back of the room.

“We have plenty of books on how to do magic tricks. However, there is a great difference between mere sleight-of-hand and real magic.”

And she waved her hand at the whole section, as if conjuring it to disappear, and led me over to a cupboard. In the cupboard behind windowed doors, which were not locked but looked as if they might be, stood the fairy tales. Here I discovered stories of wizards, witches, shamans, soldiers, fools, and saints who flew by means of every imaginable conveyance, including carpets, trunks, horses, ships, and even bathtubs. It showed me that luck, a virtuous life, or both had something to do with one's ability to fly. As I was born under a mischievous star, I would have to count on luck; virtue would get me nowhere.

It was around this time that I made a curious discovery about my father. He was, by profession, a chemist. For him, to see was to believe. One afternoon I discovered on his bedside table two books I had never noticed before. One was the notebook where he wrote down solutions to scientific problems as they occurred to him during the night. The second was an account of an island called Atlantis, located west of Gibraltar and said by Plato to have sunk into the sea. I sat down on my father's bed and started reading the account of Atlantis, written, according to the title page, by an Englishman who claimed that unbeknownst to geographers the lost island had not sunk but had merely become invisible to ordinary sight. The author knew this for a fact; indeed, he had actually visited Atlantis. In his introduction he took pains to assure his readers that he was telling the truth. He was not, he explained, writing science fiction. A photograph of the island, opposite the title page, showed a woman wearing a snake headdress and a sequined tunic. The caption read, “Queen of Atlantis, taken by the author with a Lecia M-1.” I thought she looked like a tired Hedy Lamarr.

This book, I discovered, was part of a secret library my father kept hidden in the springs of his bed, a library that made his mattress so lumpy that no guests ever slept in it and thus no one else except my mother knew about his passion for the fantastic and the occult. In my father's bed-spring library I found numerous books on Atlantis, Shangri-La, flying saucers, and reincarnation. I pored over a book of fuzzy images purported to be the souls of famous men and women photographed during a séance by one Madame Ugo Ugo. These volumes appalled my mother and confused me. They sounded like fairy tales, yet their authors claimed to be telling the truth. Were these books true and my fairy tales false? Were they all false? I knew that the fantasies I read could not be scientifically true. Fantasy, therefore, must be a literature of lies.

I am sure we have all met people who would agree with this view. Fantasy, they will tell you, is a literature of escape from the real world. By the real world they mean the physical world of tables and chairs. A man once asked me if I didn't agree with him that fantasy should be forbidden to children, as it is so difficult for them to unlearn the lies that it teaches. And unlearning, he reminded me, is a painful process, almost as painful as losing one's faith. I thought of my father's books and wondered what this man would make of them. I had long ago decided that my father's books were false because their authors recognized only one kind of truth, the truth of science. Of course, fairy tales are not literally true; their authors make no such claims. But taken as a record of what some call our psychological experience and others call our spiritual history, fantasy at its best is one of the truest forms of fiction we have. Many people have committed the error of taking literally what was meant to be taken metaphorically. Some of the most famous victims of this misunderstanding are those alchemists who tried, several hundred years ago, to turn lead into gold.