Falling Through Space (17 page)

On Sunday, I flew home to Jackson, Mississippi, and changed suitcases and drove to Shreveport, Louisiana, to read a story to the officers' wives at the Barksdale Air Force Base. Headquarters of the Eighth Air Force of the Strategic Air Command. I was taken on a tour of the base by two of the pilots' wives. We went to see the sheds where uniformed men were standing on ladders working on the engines of the twenty-five-year-old B-52s and I marveled at the design of the KC-135s that fuel them in the air. I spent the day with the wives of the men who are keeping America safe. Their business is peace, they told me, and I believed them and thanked them for it.

There are many wonders outside the egocentric little cave where books are written. I have found out that the Federal Reserve system isn't part of the federal government and now I've been to visit a SAC base. There's no telling what will happen next.

W
RITERS HATE
to be questioned. It's an almost superstitious feeling that it's wrong to probe or analyze the muse. And yet, sometimes things come to light from questions.

In a question-and-answer session at the University of Colorado I found myself articulating something I have been suspecting for a long time.

How do you create characters? a student asked. How do you keep thinking up new people to tell your stories? I may not be able to anymore, I answered. I've been writing for about ten years now and I have created a cast of characters that are like a Fellini troupe. They are always trying to steal the spotlight away from each other.

It's gotten to the point where it's impossible for me to create new characters because the old ones keep grabbing up all the roles. The minute I think up a new dramatic situation, one of my old characters grabs it up and runs with it. Minor characters get up off the page and take the pen out of my hand and start expanding their roles. Scenes that have no business in the stories sprout like mushrooms as Freddy Harwood or Nieman interrupt stories to give themselves daring adventures or heroic moments.

In a way my characters are right. I can see their point. I have a responsibility to Freddy Harwood to let him tell his side of the story and not just leave him sitting in a hot tub with a broken heart.

Also, I am beginning to suspect there may be a limited number of characters any one writer can create and perhaps a limited number of stories any writer can tell. Perhaps that's how we know when to quit and find something else to do for a living. I live in horror that I won't know when to quit. I don't want to be one of those writers who run out of things to write and then go around the rest of their lives talking about writing but not really producing anything anyone wants to read. When I've told all my stories and created all my characters I want to get off the stage as quickly as I can and with as much grace as possible.

S
OME TIME AGO
I had just finished a draft of a novel and left it in my typist's tennis racket cover and then gone barreling down the highway leading south out of the Ozark Mountains.

I was driving down the highway eating powdered doughnuts and stopping every now and then to write things down. At the end of that journal entry I realized it was an illusion that the novel was finished and I knew very well it would take several more years and two or three more drafts to finish it.

Now I am working on it again. The
Anabainein
, I call this strange creation. A going up, a journey to the interior. It is a novel set in Greece during the Peloponnesian Wars. My pet book, based on a story I made up when I was a child. My mother loved the classics and filled my head with stories of the Greek pantheon and the glories of fifth-century Athens, and I made up a story about a slave girl who is raised by a philosopher and allowed to learn to read and write.

All these characters, all this research, all these pages and pages and pages. Perhaps it will be the best thing I have ever written. Perhaps the worst. Still, I have to finish it. A poet once told me that the worst thing a writer can do is fail to finish the things he starts. It was a long time before I knew what that meant or why it was true. The mind is trying very hard to tell us things when we write books. The first impulse is as good as the second or the third — any thread if followed long enough will lead out of the labyrinth and into the light. So I believe or choose to believe.

The work of a writer is to create order out of chaos. Always, the chaos keeps slipping back in. Underneath the created order the fantastic diversity and madness of life goes on, expanding and changing and insisting upon itself. Still, each piece contains the whole. Tell one story truly and with clarity and you have done all anyone is required to do.

I
AM SPENDING
the winter thinking about money. About money as a concept, an act of faith, a means of conveyance. Also, I am thinking about plain old money, the kind we are greedy for and think will solve our problems. Maybe it will solve our problems. It gives us the illusion of security. Money in the bank, a nest egg, something to fall back upon. Yes, I am going to ask money to forgive me for all the nasty things I've said about it.

I began my study of money by watching “Wall Street Week.” I started watching it for a joke. It amused me to see how happy and cheerful the people on “Wall Street Week” always are. No underweight actors and actresses begging the audience for love. Not this bunch. These are well-dressed, normal-sized, very confident people. All will be well, “Wall Street Week” assures me. The market goes up and the market comes back down, but after all, it's only a game. The great broker in the sky smiles benignly down on his happy children.

Why not? I began to say to myself. Who am I to sneer at all this good clean fun? So I bought some stocks and now I really have a reason to watch “Wall Street Week.” Figures appear on the screen, bulls and bears made their predictions. Bulls and bears. Now I know what that means. Bulls are good things that mean I'm making money. Bears are bad things that mean I've made a bad mistake.

To paraphrase a poet, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rises and falls and thy name, O God, is kept before the public.

What a wonderful new obsession. At last I understand capitalism. At last my father and I have something to talk about. Once, years ago, my father begged me with tears in his eyes to take a course in the stock market. I agreed and signed up for a class. Alas, at the very first class meeting I fell in love with a redheaded engineer from Kansas and we went off into the night and never found time to come back to the class. Each age has its rewards. Once I had love and romance. Now I have the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the “Wall Street Week in Review.”

I
HAVE BEEN OFF
at a writers' conference in Grand Forks, in the beautiful farmland of northeastern North Dakota. Where a fellow Mississippian named Johnny Little has just staged the seventeenth annual University of North Dakota Writers' Conference.

Johnny is an old colleague of mine from a class Eudora Welty taught at Millsaps College in 1967. He was born in Raleigh, Mississippi, where he was the smartest boy in town. Then Johnny went to Millsaps and got even smarter. Then he went up to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to make a writer, as he calls it. Then off to North Dakota to teach. The winters were long and cold and he got so lonesome he started a southern writers' conference, which turned into a national, then an international, affair. For seventeen years Johnny has been luring writers from all over the world up to Grand Forks to lend a hand in celebrating the spring thaw.

Edward Albee, James Dickey, Gregory Corso, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Jim Whitehead, Tom Wolfe, Joseph Brodsky, the list is long and illustrious. The University of North Dakota Annual Spring Thaw Southern and International Writers' Conference. Not to be confused with the Raleigh, Mississippi, Tobacco Spit and Logrolling Contest, another of Johnny's pet projects.

I had a good time being there but I never worked so hard at being a writer. It seemed to me I was being interviewed or questioned every waking moment by some bright young man or woman. I can't even remember all the advice I gave.

That poem by Emily Dickinson was supposed to be the theme of the conference but the only time I heard anyone say anything about a prairie was a joke someone told about the flatness of the land around Grand Forks. Nothing to see, and nothing to get in the way of seeing it. I flew home down the course of the Mississippi River and then over to Shreveport, Louisiana, to address the Louisiana Library Association. If you are wondering how I am getting any serious writing done under these circumstances you are not alone. The dour old Scot who rules the roost in my subconscious is very suspicious when I tell him that seeing the world is part of a writer's work.

H
ERE IS
a writing lesson. I'm not much good as a regular writing teacher. I only know things as they happen, at the time they happen. If I knew them all the time I could get up every morning and write a masterpiece. The Greeks got up every morning and wrote masterpieces. Euripides wrote eighty-eight plays, of which nineteen survive. His fellow Greeks liked his plays so much that prisoners could gain their freedom by learning to recite them.