[An excerpt from the novel ‘Whatever it takes’]
And this is an average day.
The smell of cooking is thick in the house when I arrive. I finally realize that this might be the normal. She starts cooking by four. It makes thinking about anything but food almost impossible. But I must. She only eats two meals a day, and by five, I’m in some sort of psycho-physical collapse. On this particular day, it was fried chicken. I would have said before that I liked fried chicken. It’s just fine. Only, I had never had the sort of fried chicken that she makes. It will be difficult to eat fried chicken anywhere else ever again.
I start work right away. This is mostly just retyping on my laptop the words on the sheets that she has typed out earlier that day, as well as parts she has written before I came—while she is right there cooking in the kitchen and answering any of my questions or simply talking to me extempore. The book is entitled, ‘The Plow and Stars.’ It’s over 1000 handwritten pages, now. She does not know how many words that is, but she tells me from previous experience that will amount to about 300 pages when typed. I guess out loud that it will be under ninety thousand. She frowns at me. This is obviously far too much calculation to her taste.
“I have never thought about that. The number of words. Ned was always concerned about that because it might make the book more expensive than the ‘unwritten’ budget all the editors knew was hanging over their heads. But he stood up for me a couple of times. I never had to cut a word. Though, he did tell me once when I came in ‘under budget’ that he had made the case then, to allow for that when I went too long.”
Her answers are ready, and I think she has a need to talk to someone after working in her own head for at least eight hours, especially since her daughters flew the coop—so to speak. Perhaps that’s really my role here. To listen. The exhaust fan is on, and a little loud at first, so she’s talking over that when she speaks, and I get to hear a voice I haven’t heard before. Her usual voice is restrained. Deliberate. Feminine, but controlled in the way that mothers do with children. Though that could be a little irritating if she keeps it up for too long. I don’t mind it when she gets emotional. You can hear that in her work as well. But it seems she hasn’t mastered the art of talking loudly. It sounds as if she is angry. I wonder if that is also from living alone. And does she talk to herself that way?
I asked, “Do you talk to yourself out loud when you write.”
It caught her by surprise. “Of course.”
I got the funny look.
“I only asked because I do that too.”
A couple of dozen pages in, with Julia still standing at the stove, I asked, “Are you intending for Clare to be cynical.”
It was just a thought I had while retyping the words, at that particular moment. Heroines who are cynical are far less appealing. I know, from what she has told me before, that ‘Clare,’ who is to be the protagonist here, is a tough cookie—a woman who has survived the worst.
Julia says, “I think that’s probably her lack of faith. She wants to have faith but can’t find it. Her losses have been too great. I don’t go into all that because it just makes for pathos. I don’t want that reaction. The cynicism keeps her in the right key.”
This cynicism was not all that obvious. I had thought it was just an undertone that had crept in inadvertently. I should accept now that there is nothing inadvertent in Julia’s writing. At least I should have guessed. But by then, I was already fully distracted by the smell of buttermilk and lard. By asking the question, I was actually trying to concentrate.
She says, “Clare lives in what the author William Manchester called, ‘A world lit only by fire.’ It’s worth always remembering that, and I have the hardest time with it myself, because it’s so easy to assume the modern practical prejudices we have because of the comforts of our own lives. For her—the scene you’re working on is just her getting out of bed. Really, just that. It’s the best moment of her day. At least she’s had sleep. The coziness of the bed was perfect—as perfect as she knows. Her dreams are fading, and the gauze of that, hides the glare of hunger, and the pain of her damaged foot which has not yet healed, and the cold. Especially the cold. She will build a peat fire. That is a very unsatisfying heat. Uneven. Small. Her clothes and body smell of the work she did the day before, and the day before that. Later, she’ll eat a coarse hard brown bread that she made several days before. Because of the rain, that’s already getting moldy. But at least the water will be fresh. The rain from the roof has filled the mossy pots, and the sound of the falling of that obscures much else. It’s a small din of sound that hides the morning dark outside, and that allows her to hold her eyes closed and keep a brief grasp on her dream. She will not eat until she’s worked for several hours at her loom…She has no idea if she can sell the fabric. That’s a worry that intrudes on her mind. That’s not a given. The English authorities have forbidden the sale of fabric unless a tax is paid. She has no money for the tax. She is pregnant, so she is feeling queasy in any case. Her mind is just trying to engage her hopes in the dark … How does she do that? How does she keep her hope before her and not slip into the darker maw of dejection. Well, for her, it’s a cynicism that makes fun of everything that confronts her. She laughs at her state. At herself. It is an Irish humor, built upon centuries of abuse. Not out-loud, where it will draw attention, but spoken to herself. She has an internal life that is as real as her dreams. She can hold on to that. She can keep her hopes alive by standing on that ground…And she’s bright, remember. Not smart, because she has never had any general schooling, but she is bright. Very bright. She reads Latin. This is some of what she picked up from her mother as well as the nun at the church—That poor nun at the beginning of the story…You’ve already seen that, but you must see her in that context. Being bright is not a permanent state. It is a shine that must be polished. Her internal dialog does that.”
I was chastened. But she was not finished.
Julia says “You see, mankind is, by nature, delusional. How could we get up in the morning and face the day if we were not? Do you think the beauty of a sunrise is sufficient to ignore your arthritis; the delicate design of a snowflake sufficient to ignore the cold? Then you are delusional. The pain of living would be overwhelming if you could not blind yourself to your own demise. Your body may be riven by pain, but you give yourself to love. Those you love are torn from you by disease and pestilence, and you nurse another. We are really wonderfully made, we human beings. We can believe in our gods no matter how they betray us. Our own stink should be sufficient to drive us away from each other, but instead we embrace. We watch ourselves grow old and pretend there is grace to it. We are delusional. I thank God for that defense. Other animals, so trapped by instinct or ignorance, must bear their own slaughter, with brief panic, seemingly unaware of their future as they ruminate. We are given the gift of delusions to endure, and the powers of imagination to distract ourselves. We make up sports to manufacture our own entertainment. We celebrate our kings and write plays to give them honor and renown. We write novels to give color to the mundane. We defend our kidnappers with our own lives and sacrifice our children to the wars of our captors. We murder other human beings and blind ourselves to the inevitable consequence. Thank God we are delusional, else we would stay in bed.”
It was an inverse of philosophy—the meaning of life turned inside out.
Later, she said, “Thinner fabric can be more difficult to handle, more fragile, more liable to tear. A mere tissue of integrity. But gossamer is beautiful to the eye. The beauty of silk, like the woman she imagines herself to be, is magnified by its modest strength—but if it has been rent, it is lost. Old silk can often be beautiful for the character of its flaws I suppose. But the flaws are real, and it is still more delicate.”
She actually said this aloud, to me. Then she suddenly looked away in a look of despair, or perhaps a little shame. “Oh, bosh! Such metaphors are too thin.”
Julia had been explaining her use of a word to me, ‘gossamer,’ in the description of a mysterious gift Clare receives. I had foolishly questioned its use in context.
And still later, “Once, I thought I would be a poet. It was a fever. A sickness. Perhaps the last vestige of my childhood—that I would simply identify the truth with words. Can you conjure such a thing? How did I come to be possessed by the idea that I knew the truth at all, I can’t say. I haven’t the discipline to be a poet. But it was that idea that made me want to be a writer, and I turned to prose instead. and it determined my whole life. It was such a wonderful mistake! My delusion!”
With this, a deeper hunger had come upon me, personally.
About five-thirty she interrupted her wanderings around the room and the house and set the table. She’d found a sturdy chair in one of the bedrooms upstairs and brought that down. We sat across from each other, beneath the side window, but the table is small, maybe three feet around, so we were close. Close enough for me to be a little uncomfortable. She had made biscuits and gravy and buttered carrots. I had died by then and gone to heaven.
She said, “It’s all very difficult to imagine. We are so spoiled. So soft…The chicken is fresh. I picked it up yesterday from my neighbor, Frank. He raises chickens and sells them to the Johnson’s Farm Market over in Nottingham. Organic. You can see them out there in his yard right now. They sound like happy chickens. You must feel sorry for them, though. They’re living their best lives and then, whop! — I can’t eat my own chickens. Only the eggs. But I trade those to Frank for his chicken, and he does the bloody work. I let mine grow old. I become very attached to them and the idea of killing them is impossible. That’s how soft I am. Clare would have simply gone ‘whop,’ or just sold the critter. She wouldn’t have eaten it…She would have saved the money. She had her hope.”
I was relatively speechless with the delight of all this. And because the biscuits and gravy were as good as the chicken.
Julia said, “I don’t mean to spoil the story for you, if you’re following it, but Clare is sleeping with the Lord’s son to get the money for her passage. Her cynicism is warranted. And if I were in her position, I would be cynical too, and bitter, and just as likely immobile. I would never have gotten out of that hovel. I’m writing about someone better than me. I always do…Writing is my moment in bed, in the early morning, holding onto my dream.”
What could I say to that? All I came up with was, “How did the human race survive? … Seriously. How did it happen?”
She shrugs at that. “The dreams. It was the delusions. Those who dreamed the best, survived.”
Trying to make a formula out of the magic, I stupidly said, “So, it’s a sort of natural selection. Over the eons, the smartest ones more often make it.”
She shook her head at me. “No, I’m not so sure. Depends on what you think smart is. The kind of ‘smart’ that most people think of is Einstein. But Einstein is an aberration. A luxury product of our society, you might say. The society that made him possible is the result of dreams. A million dreams.”
“And a little math?”
“No. If you do the math, you just stay at home and guard your turf. The risk of dreams is too great. What makes us human is not math. A crow can do a little math. What makes us human is our dreams. I don’t know what crows dream of, but the ones I see are still pestering the garbage cans.”