Odd Jobs (152 page)

The torments of Hell, we learn, include the annoyance of not knowing what time it is.

That the clock was needed to regulate the factories and appointment books of industrialism, and that the calendar, with its religious and state holidays, is a prime enforcer of the prevailing culture, I do not doubt, and Rifkin’s details on these matters (and on the remarkable biological clocks of insects and animals) repay the reading of
Time Wars
. But the computer, unlike the calendar and the clock, does not mark (or “keep”) time; it and its programmers seek to minimize time. It is a time-saving device, meant to save clerical labor as its predecessor mechanisms saved physical labor, and as such it is the friend, not the enemy, of the biology-attuned slow-down Rifkin prescribes. He hymns “the new empathetic movements” that are “committed to the establishment of a social time order that is compatible with and complementary to the natural time order” without asking what the natural time order has entailed for most human beings. No workday is longer or harder than that of the agricultural worker, and any who think the hunter-gatherer led the life of Riley should read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s brilliant neolithic novel
Reindeer Moon
. The most ringing quotation in
Time Wars
comes from John Locke: “The negation of Nature is the way toward happiness.” Selective and tactful negation, let’s hope, but there is no turning back, against time’s arrow.

APPENDIX
Literarily Personal

LITERARILY PERSONAL

A
N
A
RTICLE
,
entitled “Writers as Progenitors and Offspring,” written at the request of
Poets & Writers Magazine;
it appeared in the January–February 1987 issue, with a typically benign and evocative account by my son David of his own impressions, which do not contradict mine. I especially treasured this kindly glimpse from our shared past: “And at night, as he [I] sat reading books for review, or going over proofs with the same stubby golf pencil that had recorded his score that afternoon, he gave off an impression of leisure and repose, of doing exactly what he wanted to do
.”

As both the son and father of a writer, I feel doubly qualified for this topic. My mother wrote in the front bedroom, beside a window curtained in dotted swiss. With a small child’s eyes I see her desk, her little Remington with its elite face, and the brown envelopes that carried her patiently tapped-out manuscripts to New York City and then back to Shillington, Pennsylvania. I smell the fresh paper, the damp ink on the ribbon as it jerkily unfurls from spool to spool, the rubber flecks of eraser buried within the slanted bank of springy keys—an alphabet in the wrong order. We used to travel together to Hintz’s stationery store in Reading, and there was beauty and power and opulence in the ceiling-high shelves of fresh reams, of tinted labels and yellow octagonal pencils in numbered degrees of hardness and softness, of tablets and moisteners and even little scales to weigh letters upon. Three cents an ounce it took in those days to send a story to a Manhattan magazine, or to
The Saturday Evening Post
in nearby Philadelphia, and what a wealth of expectation hovered in the air until Mr. Miller, our plodding, joking mailman,
hurled the return envelope through the front-door letter slot! There was a novel, too, that slept in a ream box that had been emptied of blankness, and like a strange baby in the house, a difficult papery sibling, the manuscript was now and then roused out of its little rectangular crib and rewritten and freshly swaddled in hope. My mother’s silence, at her desk, was among the mysteries—her faint aroma of mental sweat, of concentration as if in prayer.

I knew she was trying to reach beyond the street outside, where cars and people moved toward their local destinies as if underwater, toward a world we couldn’t see, where magazines and books came from. That these magazines, with their covers by Norman Rockwell and John Falter, and the books of the world, some of them old and faded like pieces of nature and others shiny new and protected in an extra cellophane wrapper at the drugstore rental library, were written by our kind of people seemed unlikely to me; but now and then she got an encouraging pencilled note scrawled on the rejection slip, and in her fifties, I am happy to say, began to receive acceptances—enough to form her single published book,
Enchantment
.
^*
Though there was much about her enterprise I didn’t understand, I liked the smell of it, the silence, the modest equipment required, and the sly postal traffic with a world beyond; at an early age I enlisted in the enterprise myself.

My son David—what did he see? I wrote, when he was small, in a little upstairs room that, like my mother’s room a generation before, overlooked a small-town street. The room had a door I could close, and he and his siblings used to scratch at the door, and have quarrels outside it. I moved to an office downtown, a half-mile away, and there they would come visit the confusion of papers, the faded Oriental rug, the bulletin board where jotted ideas and urgent requests slowly curled up and turned yellow, the pervasive stink of too many cigarettes and, after I gave those up, of nickel cigarillos. Dirty windows, without curtains of dotted swiss, overlooked the Ipswich River, and the chief wall decoration was a framed drawing that the great James Thurber had been kind enough to send me from Connecticut when I was a boy in Shillington.

I spent mornings and little more in the office. They were, David and his brother and two sisters, pleasantly aware, I assumed, that I had more free time than most fathers. (Though was I, when with them, entirely
with them? A writer’s working day is a strange diffuse thing that never really ends, and gives him a double focus much of the time.) My children enjoyed, I imagined, the little mild gusts of fame—the visiting photographer and interviewer, the sudden box of new books in the front hall—that my profession brought into our domestic world. And they said little, tactfully, of the odd versions of themselves and their home that appeared now and then in print. They never spoke to me of being writers themselves. So I was taken unawares when all showed distinct artistic bents and the older son, at an age earlier than his father, became published in
The New Yorker
. At the time I gave his Harvard girlfriend, who herself wrote, and Ann Beattie, who had accepted him into her writing course, more credit than any example I had inadvertently set. The writing enterprise seemed to me self-evidently a desperate one, and though my mother and I—both only children—had been desperate enough to undertake it, I thought my children, raised in a gentler, undepressed, gregarious world, would seek out less chancy and more orthodox professions. But I underestimated, it would seem, the appeal of the mise-en-scène, the matrix, that had charmed me—the clean paper, the pregnant silences, the typewriter keyboard with its scrambled alphabet. We are drawn toward our parents’ occupations, I have concluded, because we can see the equipment and size up the effort; it is like a suit of clothes we try on for size and then discover ourselves to have bought and to be wearing for good.

I
N ANSWER
to a question, in 1985, from the French magazine
Libération: “Pourquoi écrivez-vous?”

From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly thirty years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines, is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another. This blithe extension of the usual limitations of space is
compounded by a possible defiance of the limitations of time as well—a hope of being read, of being heard and enjoyed, after death. Writing is surely a delicious craft, and the writer is correctly envied by others, who must slave longer hours and see their labor vanish as they work, in the churning of human needs.

But, it will be said, must there not be some
content
to these books, some message? I suppose that, along with my selfless delight in the play of creativity, there was some selfish wish to express myself, to impose my reality upon others. The saga of my mother and father, the unique tone and color of my native region of Pennsylvania—these were the subject matter of my first books. Then, slowly grasped and formulated, certain scenes of my adopted New England and certain truths, surprising to myself if to no one else, concerning adulthood, family life, and American society. Always, to begin to write, I needed the sensation that I was about to reveal what had never yet been quite revealed—not by Sinclair Lewis or Faulkner or my adroit companions on the pages of
The New Yorker
. Always I have been drawn to dusty and seldom-visited corners—my one effort at historical fiction chose an obscure President, James Buchanan, sneered at in his lifetime and since his death nearly lost in the shadow of his successor, Abraham Lincoln. My one effort at a novel of global realities dealt with a part of the world, the African Sahel, quite remote from the consciousness of most Americans, though with its repeated famines growing less so. Such, at least, has been my notion of the novelist’s duty to society—to publicize the otherwise obscure, and to throw a complex light, from many angles, upon issues that tend to be badly lit, from the right or left, with half the matter left in shadow. Our furtive yet not quite extinguished religious impulses and needs also, I suppose, fall into this category, of human “news” rare enough to be delightfully and flexibly packaged in the form of printed fictions.

A R
EMINISCENCE
,
entitled “I Was a Teen-Age Library User,” written for
Bookends,
the journal of the Friends of the Reading-Berks Public Libraries
.

Reading—the Pennsylvania city, not the activity—seemed a considerable distance from Shillington in the 1940s; you boarded a trolley car in front of Ibach’s Drug Store and for twenty minutes jerked and swayed down Lancaster Avenue through Kenhorst and the Eighteenth Ward, up
over the Bingaman Street Bridge, along Fourth Street. If you wanted to get off north of Penn on Fifth Street, you bucked one-way traffic for a block of Washington Street, with much honking of automobile horns and clanging of the trolley bell. If you were going to the public library, you could get off at Franklin and walk a block to where the stately building, one of sainted Andrew Carnegie’s benefactions, was located along Fifth, with Schofer’s sweet-smelling bakery on one side and the Elks on the other. The Elks had a bronze elk in their front yard. As a boy I was fascinated by the little sharp points that had been placed on the metal animal’s back; the purpose was to prevent bad boys from sitting on the statue, but for a long time I thought they might be part of an elk’s anatomy.

Inside the library, there was a whispering quiet and walls of books. The great central space now occupied by a big box of central shelves was empty, and to my young eyes the ceiling seemed infinitely far away, and the balconies cosmically mysterious. My mother was a keen reader and my early trips there were at her side. An attempt was made to enroll me in the children’s library downstairs, but I found children’s books depressing, with their webby illustrations of historical costumes and crumbling castles, and by the age of twelve, I think, I was allowed to have my own adult card, and to check out whatever books I wanted. Miss Ruth, who had been (I later discovered) a high-school classmate of Wallace Stevens, was the head librarian, and very kind. I used to check out stacks, and she never blinked.