Falling Through Space (14 page)

I do not understand why I write fiction when the main things I read are books about science and philosophy. Perhaps I think that by exploring character and event I can create actors to act out the questions I am always asking. I have a character named Nora Jane Whittington who lives in Berkeley, California, and who has so much free will that I can't even find out from her whether the twin baby girls she is carrying belong to her old boyfriend, Sandy, or her new boyfriend, Freddy Harwood. I can't finish my new book of stories until Nora Jane agrees to an amniocentesis. She is afraid the needle will penetrate the placenta and frighten the babies.

I created Nora Jane but I have to wait on her to make up her mind before I can finish the title story of my new book. This is a fiction writer's life. Fortunately, I am going to be in California soon and I will drive up to Berkeley and walk around some of Nora Jane's old hangouts. By the time I get home maybe I'll know what to write.

Now I know the answer to the reporter's question. The effect that studying philosophy has had on my fiction writing is that I know that someday I will get to sit down and write a book about Free Will Versus Determinism and the only character will be me.

I
N ORDER
to be a writer you must experience and learn to recognize and cope with periods of what Freeman Dyson calls stuckness. In order to do creative work in any of the arts or sciences you must go through long or short spells of not knowing what is going on, of being irritated, and not being able to find the cause, of being willing to work as hard as you can and what happens isn't valuable enough, isn't good enough, isn't what you meant to do, what you meant to say. Then you just have to keep on working. Then, if you can bear it, if you don't quit and move to Canada or call up Joe and go hiking for two weeks or quit your job or get a divorce or do anything else to relieve the pain, and it is pain, it's really irritating, it puts you in a bad mood, you are irritable to children and can't focus on anything and keep changing your mind, if you can put up with it and just go right on sitting down at that desk every day no matter how much it seems to be an absurd and useless and boring thing to do, the good stuff will suddenly happen. It may be twelve o'clock at night when you're doing something else or are in the bathtub. It will be when you have given up and least expect it. There it will be, the radium, the formula, the good short story, the real poem.

I have the wonderful feeling that I understand this right now, because last night at ten o'clock a two-month stuckness broke and gave me the best new story for my new collection. I had been reading a book called
The Sphinx and the Rainbow
. A wonderful book about the right and left halves of the brain and the frontal lobes. Very clear stuff about how the mind creates the future. How it marshals its forces and then goes to work at its own speed and in ways we cannot always comprehend until the thing is finished. Very rich stuff. I recommend it for anyone, but especially for anyone who is currently stuck.

M
Y EDITOR
has been here and we put together a book of stories. There are thirteen of them. A very slim volume. Thirteen out of twenty were good enough to keep. There is a story that didn't make it called “The Green Tent” about a little boy and his grandmother who travel all over the universe in a tent. I'm sorry I had to give that one up. I really liked that story.

Hemingway said one of the great problems for a writer is deciding who his audience will be. Do you write for the reviewers, terrified they will call something cute or sentimental? If they manage to scare you enough you will get to the point where you are afraid to write about anything really human, like passion or love. People are endlessly fascinated by love. They talk about it and laugh about it and desire and hate it. Whenever one of us falls in love our friends watch it as they would the progress of a disease.

So I have written a book of stories called
Drunk With Love
in which I set out to explore what I know about the subject. I have failed. Not failed as a writer. But I have learned nothing about love and added nothing to our store of understanding.

“All is clouded by desire, like a mirror by smoke.” I thought I was going to penetrate that mystery through my characters. Wrong. All I did was wade deeper and deeper into the mystery. In the end I let the last words of the book be spoken by Nora Jane Whittington's unborn babies.

“Let's be quiet,” Tammili said. “Okay,” Lydia replied.

God bless my editor. He let me keep that in.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked, when we had finished our work.

“I think I'll go fall in love,” I answered.

“Why don't you just go home and stick your finger in an electric wall socket instead,” he suggested. “It would save you the trouble of getting dressed up.”

He's right. I've changed my mind about going to stick my finger in the electric wall socket of love. I'm going down to New Orleans instead and get my grandchildren and go riding around in my little blue car pretending we are space cadets. I'll let someone younger and braver than I am sit around the house waiting for the phone to ring.

I
RECENTLY SAW
a wonderful sight. I was driving back from New Orleans and stopped in Pass Manchac, Louisiana, to see how things looked now that the flood waters had receded. Pass Manchac is a famous place on the Bonnet Carre Spillway across from New Orleans. It is a small fishing village that was several feet underwater in the October floods. I saw it then with water all over the floors of the houses and men walking along the railroad tracks carrying sandbags, still trying to save what could be saved.

Anyway, the flood was several weeks ago and I stopped by to see how things were going and went into Sykes' grocery store and talked to the proprietor and had some doughnuts and bought a tablet and a pencil. The tablet was slightly mildewed on the edges. The proprietor told me about filling the sandbags, who all was there and who came to help and we discussed how resilient men and women are. Then she turned around. “Oh, look at this,” she said. A great mountain of a man was coming in the door. A beautiful tanned man with white hair leading or being led by two small children. The proprietor told me that the smallest one had been abused so badly he had to be in a full body cast for six months. “That's their foster father,” she said. “He's got them now and they're okay.”

They were beautiful children. They came into the store and got some candy and went to the back to find life preservers as they were going out on a boat for a Sunday outing.

“Hold me,” the small child said, as soon as he saw me looking at him. I picked him up in my arms and held him there. “We're getting to adopt them in February,” the big fisherman said. “It's all set.”

“Oh, that's great,” the proprietor said, and for a moment I had a sense of sharing the community of Pass Manchac, a fishing village where people know each other and are involved in each other's lives and stories.

I am haunted by these events. For many miles down the road, I was filled with a sense of elation. The story of mankind is not written in the occasional crazy parent who will harm his own child. The story of mankind is the big fisherman who comes along and sets things right … the physicians and surgeons and nurses in some emergency room who are working the night shift and are there when the broken child arrives and put him back together and the fisherman who gathers the child into his life and goes to work to love him and the proprietor who cleans up the store after the flood and sells me a slightly mildewed tablet at half price to write this on.

I
AM COMPELLED
to write about this even though it embarrasses me to keep talking about my grandchildren. Still, this is supposed to be a writer's journal and if there is one thing I've learned about writing it is to follow your compulsions.

Here is what I am compelled to write about today.

I have been alone for thirty-eight hours with two small children and no car. I have been locked up in an apartment with a four-year-old boy and a one-and-a-half-year-old girl and I am here to report that taking care of small children is the single most exciting, complicated, difficult, creative, and maddening job on the green earth.

Finally, I called for help. That famous seventy-seven-year-old child-worshipper I have told you about, my mother, is only ten blocks away, so I called and invited her to come pick us up and go with us to the mall to buy some winter clothes for the children. She's always up for a good time so she came right over and got us and we went to the store. I had it in my mind to buy them some socks and jackets and something nice to wear in case we got invited to a party.