Message in a Blog-Bottle

 

Mothers can be difficult to impress, even among the literati.  In an April, 1959 letter written to author Cecil Dawkins, Flannery O’Connor wryly remarks the wonderful news that Cecil has been paid $1,000 for a story.  Noting  her own top payment of $425, Flannery goes on to say,

Your sale to the Post ought to impress your mother greatly.  It sure has impressed my mother, who brought the post card home.  The other day she asked me why I didn’t try to write something that people liked instead of the kind of thing I do write.  Do you think, she said, that you are really using the talent God gave you when you don’t write something that a lot, A LOT of people like?  This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc.  All I can ever say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.

I’m no Flannery O’Connor, but I’ve been rendered equally speechless by my own mother.  When she found my first computer happily ensconced on its desk, Mom nosed around it like a wary dog circling a snake.   ”What are you going to do with it?” she asked.   I didn’t know, and said so.   ”Well, how much did it cost?”  I did know that, and despite reservations born of experience I told her.  The disapproving silence thickened until she could stand it no longer.  “You spent all that money for something and don’t even know how you’re going to use it?”  Her perspective on the situation was clear. My computer was the latest version of  hula-hoops or Mr. Potato Head and I was her idiot child, consumed with a child’s breathless longing to possess the same toys as her friends.

Diagnosis: Opus Nauseous

 

 

After two months of struggle, the deed is done.  The Little Essay That Could finally started its engines, cut loose the cars carrying the freight of an idea that didn’t belong, and chugged its way up the hill into publication on another site.  Sitting Shivah for Our Dreams had been bogged down by my own obstinancy, my insistence to myself that ”sitting shivah” and “hiddur mitzvah” needed to remain woven together: two thematic strands in one essay.  Only after deciding to pull them apart, a process I detailed in my entry “Purity of Prose is to Write One Thing”, was I able to begin writing again, and finish the essay.  

As I thought about the process today,  I became curious and did a word count.  Sitting Shivah For Our Dreams contains 2,285 words.  By comparison, Harper Lee’s marvelous To Kill a Mockingbird  contains 100,388.  Even if the count for Ms. Lee’s book isn’t exact, the math isn’t complicated.   In humorous terms, my essay divides into Harper Lee’s novel roughly 44 times.   At the rate it took to complete the essay, that’s 88 months, or 7.3 years of writing if I were to tackle a novel of similar size.

Prior to publication of To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960, Harper Lee moved to New York, took menial jobs to support herself, and did in fact work on her manuscript for about eight years.   After putting it into the hands of an editor, she re-wrote for an additional couple of years. That’s ten years of writing and re-writing: enough struggle to frustrate anyone.

One of the most well-known stories about Ms. Lee and her book comes from the early days of the editing process.  One night in the winter of 1958,  as she sat in her New York apartment surrounded by drifts of paper which mostly were drafts of the same material, she’d suddenly had enough.  Flinging open a window, she tossed her manuscript out into the wind, and watched years of work tumble down into the snow-filled streets.  I ’ve searched, but I  can’t find any report of what Harper Lee  said as she flung her life’s work out that window.  I suspect it was neither well-crafted nor particularly literary.  A phrase like, “There, dammit!” is what comes to mind.

Whether Lee intended to destroy To Kill a Mockingbird  we’ll never know.  Fortunately, she called her editor at Lippincott immediately, and Tay Hohoff sent her outside to gather up the pages.  The cold air and exercise probably did her good, and the gathered pages, which  came together quite nicely in the end, have done all of us good through the years. 

Hearing the story, I was reminded of some wonderful passages in Flannery O’Connor’s letters, collected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published under the title The Habit of Being.   Writing to Ms. Fitzgerald about her novel Wise Blood, she says, “Enclosed is Opus Nauseous No. 1.  I had to read it over after it came from the typist’s and that was like spending the day eating a horse blanket.  It seems mighty sorry to me but better than it was before.”

Later, there were references to Opus Nauseous No. 2, her novel entitled The Violent Bear It Away.  In a letter to Cecil Dawkins dated 17 July 1959 she celebrates in her typically understated way: “ Well, my novel is finished and on its way courtesy the US Postal Service to the publisher.  Catharine Carver’s final verdict was that it is the best thing I’ve done. The most I am willing to say is that it has taken more doing than anything else I’ve done.”

And, in a September, 1959 letter to Maryat Lee she adds, “Been working on that book for seven years with time off occasionally to write a story.  The relief of finishing it was extreme, but I haven’t spit up or anything…”

 It’s often said that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but apathy.  If Harper Lee had allowed her manuscript to disappear in her apartment beneath drifts of junk mail, bills, old National Geographics and cheap paperbacks, that would have been one thing.  If Flannery O’Connor had said, “Well, I believe three years is long enough.  We’ll just call this one done and stick it in the mail”, that would have been another.  But both authors were bound to their vision of the truth and the integrity of their work by varying degrees of love, disdain, revulsion and amazement.   If they were given to dramatic gestures and sardonic humor from time to time  - well, so be it.  In the end,  their gritty,  obsessive,  and completely unsentimental view of their life’s work allowed them to persevere.

I know this.  At two a.m., when the coffee’s boiled down and the process of putting words to page is like pulling my cat from under the bed, I want nothing to do with insipid paragraphs about the dignity of the writer’s vocation.  Let me contemplate Flannery O’Connor eating a horseblanket, or Nelle Harper Lee crawling around in the snow on all fours, grabbing her manuscript pages. 

Now, that’s inspiration.

 

 

 

 © Text copyright Linda Leinen 2008

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Blog-Warming: An Old Tradition for a New Time

 

 When readers of my previous posts left an assortment of comments related to a “blogwarming”, I was utterly charmed.  I never had thought of transferring the concept of housewarming to a blog, but I liked it immediately.   It seemed appropriate, and fun.   Even though pieces and paragraphs are still fighting for the best placement and a few boxes of snippets and images refuse to let themselves be unpacked, I didn’t mind surprise guests.  Their greetings nudged some surprising memories into consciousness, and the memories are all pleasant. 

I experienced my first housewarming when my parents built a new home for us on the edge of town, just three blocks from the football stadium and a short stroll to the Iowa cornfields.   I may be mistaken in my recollection that someone wandered away from the party into the cornfields that night and had to be fetched back, but it certainly was quite a party.  The fellows from my Dad’s engineering department were always ready to share a libation or two, and the fact that there was an “occasion” helped get the ladies in the mood.  There was food, drink, gifts and more drink, and great good cheer.

In those days, building a new house was an accomplishment.  For my father, raised in an Iowa coal mining family, surviving the depression and becoming an Industrial Engineer at the Maytag Company on the basis of knowledge and skill rather than degrees, the experience was especially sweet.  He was rightfully proud of his accomplishments, and when the house was built, the community gathered around he and Mom for a night of affectionate celebration.

As the years passed, housewarmings (or dorm room-warmings, or apartment-warmings) became more common.  To one degree or another, each occasion was touched by joy and gratitude, a sense of adventure and the sheer pleasure of new surroundings.

When I think about my parents’ housewarming, I also realize how important the sense of community was for them.  After everything involved in building a house, after so many hours spent in the process – meeting  architects, pulling permits, revising plans, dealing with cost overruns – it was unbelievably meaningful for them to have friends stop by with their gift and their presence and say, “It looks wonderful”.

And now, I am sharing in that experience.  After all the solitary hours at my computer, after all of the revisions and unworkable plans and mysterious obstacles encountered while trying to create something pleasing – it has been wonderful to have someone stop by and say, “I’ll bring the covered dish, a bottle of wine, the cofffee, the cinnamon pinwheels…”

Traditional housewarming or modern blogwarming, the point is the same: life is better in community.  Blogwarmings aren’t likely to overtake housewarmings in popularity  any time soon.   Google shows only 1,230 entries for blogwarmings, but 8,410,000 for housewarmings, so it will be a while  before Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray pick up on the trend and publish recipes or lists of appropriate gifts.

But those who are part of this new world, folks who have seen old traditions revived in new and creative ways and who have helped to sustain the rituals themselves, know the truth.   Human beings are meant to   connect,  laughter and good wishes are an appropriate response to new adventures, and gratitude for what has been  walks hand in hand with joy in new possibilties.  

In the old days, a familiar Irish blessing for housewarmings  was:

May the roof above us never fall in
And may we good companions beneath it never fall out.

For our new day, the old blessing still applies, even for people who have yet to meet.: 

May the hard drive that connects us never crash,
And may we good companions around it never clash.

Comments are welcome.  To leave a comment or respond, please click below.

If You Have to Ask, You’ll Never, Ever Know…

 

In a letter to author Cecil Dawkins written 3 April 1959, Flannery O’Connor not only remarks on the electric typewriter she is using, she has a comment or two about the wonderful news that Cecil has been paid $1,000 for a story.  Noting that the most she ever has been paid is $425, Flannery goes on to say,

“Your sale to the Post  ought to impress your mother greatly.  It sure has impressed my mother who brought the post card home.  The other day she asked me why I didn’t try to write something that people liked instead of the kind of thing I do write.  Do you think, she said, that you are really using the talent God gave you when you don’t write something that a lot, A LOT of people like?  This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc.  All I can ever say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”