The Writing Life Page 2

  Thirty-eight plays. I would need them all in case a new world happened that contained people who wanted to be writers. They would need to read all thirty-eight to learn that even the greatest writer who ever lived was a novice to begin with, and then got better, and better, and better and better, until he became the best, past, present, and forevermore.

  All writers know that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived. We write in his shadow and most of us are happy to be there. “There are some guys nobody could ever beat, like Mr. Shakespeare,” Hemingway wrote, and I knew that quotation and believed it long before I knew why it was true.

  I was fifty-two years old before I began to really know the works of William Shakespeare. Now I am sixty-six and I have been reading the plays out loud nearly every Sunday afternoon for fourteen years and I’m beginning to feel I almost know these plays. I don’t have to worry that this love affair will end. It will take many more years to really sound the magnificence of them. No one could tire of them. They are not only plays. They are great poetry and they contain novels, essays, stand-up comedy routines, satire, metaphor raised to the tenth power.

  The political insights are so apt that every Sunday I think I’m reading satires on the latest news from Washington, D.C. “Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown” is a recurrent theme. Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton would have been solaced by the plays. I keep hoping Laura Bush is reading them to our president now.

  Here is what happened that brought Shakespeare into my life so deeply. You could do this too. I am going to tell you how.

  In June of 1987 I went over to my friend Margaret Salassi’s house to sit on the porch and watch the afternoon turn into evening. She is a graduate of the writing program here and had been with me in poetry workshops when I was there. She is small and pretty and always ready for a challenge.

  We were joined by Patti Hayes, whose husband is a writer and another friend of mine.

  We were sitting on the swings on a screened-in porch and I said, “I wish we could go to Stratford in England and see some of Shakespeare’s plays.” I had seen plays there the year before and been dazzled by them although I only half understood what I was seeing. I had studied Shakespeare at Vanderbilt and seen the movies made from the plays. WHAT I HAD NOT DONE WAS READ THEM OUT LOUD, WHICH IS THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE.

  “We could get the plays and read them,” Patti said. “We would read them right here in Fayetteville.”

  “We could read King Lear!” I shouted. “Of course we could.”

  “Let’s do it,” Margaret said. “Let’s do it tonight.”

  We got on the phone and started calling people and asking them if they wanted to join us. A poet named David Saunders said he would come. So did a beautiful woman named Kathleen who had studied acting when she was a girl.

  The head of the writing program laughed when I asked him to come. “You must be crazy,” he said. “It takes four and a half hours to read King Lear.”

  “We don’t have anything else to do all summer,” I answered, and wrote him off as a spoilsport.

  At seven that night we met at my house on Mount Sequoyah. We sat around an oblong dining room table and opened our various editions of King Lear and began to read. Seven people were there. Most of us could not pronounce all the words, especially the names of the characters, but we were all educated people who loved literature and between us we figured it out, not being afraid to ask for help or stumble bravely on when we made mistakes.

  It was a Tuesday night. The next Tuesday we were back at our places at the table reading Hamlet. By the second Tuesday we had already begun to have special seats which we keep to this day. Because it was my house I fell into the role of assigning the parts. No one fussed or objected. I would say who would read what and we would press on.

  We read on Tuesday nights for several years and then somehow we changed to Sunday afternoons and we have stayed there ever since. We have read every play at least three times. Last year we read them in the order in which they were written.

  Reading Shakespeare is a humbling experience for a writer. Here is what could be achieved. Reading them in the order in which they were written is especially inspiring. The early plays aren’t very good. They have all the amateur mistakes all writers make. They are derivative and overwritten. But within these plays is the genius that will become Hamlet and Macbeth and Henry IV, parts I and II, and Romeo and Juliet and King Lear and The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Just to type the names of the great plays makes me shiver. Every Sunday afternoon when Paul and Henry and Carolyn and Margaret and Patti and Enid and Molly and Kathleen and I gather around my table to begin reading, a hush falls on the room. This is greatness and when we open the books and begin to read we are part of that greatness and partake of it.

  If you want an entry into this treasure it would be good to read a book called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom. Or just call up some friends and sit down and open a play and begin to read. It’s magic. You will not be sorry that you tried it.

  MARCH 2001

  How Books Still Change Our Lives

  IT IS SNOWING and it is going to snow. The world in which I live is a wonderland. It is Thursday now. On Sunday night two feet of snow fell on Fayetteville, Arkansas, and changed our lives for a while. I live in a house with glass walls. Outside these windows it is too beautiful to describe in words. Every tree and grassblade, every rise and valley and fence and wall is part of a white and blue and brown and charcoal geometry. I have a line of Buddhist prayer flags, now covered in ice crystals, barely moving on the branches of a hickory tree. They are the only color except in the late morning when the brave redbirds or yellow-tipped sparrows or ruffled robins come out to search for food.

  I live on a small mountain overlooking our town. My house is on the top of that hill. To the northwest and far enough below so that the smoke from their chimney comes in my windows on cloudy days live a young couple that I love. He is an elegant New Yorker who shares my passion for tennis. She is one of the most beautiful women in this town and a second-generation painter. She works in oils and sometimes pastels. Her name is Connie Cramer.

  Across the street from my driveway, for this is a cul-de-sac at the end of a one-way street, lives another painter. Her name is Mary Jernigan McCormick. When she was painting full-time she sold her canvases for thousands of dollars as fast as she could paint them. Some of them are normal sized paintings and some are very small, miniature, brilliant, amusing portraits of animals or children or objects. If you see one of the small pieces you want to seize it and carry it around with you and show it to everyone you meet.

  Eighteen years ago Mary married a handsome, tall man and gave birth first to William and then to John Tucker McCormick. She continues to paint but it is an occasional thing. Sometimes she has a studio and works as a painter for months, but then she will abandon it and spend huge amounts of time and energy making the costumes and sets for a fifth-grade play or spend an afternoon making a two-by-four-inch bearskin rug for her niece’s dollhouse or spend a week building a playhouse out of boxes in the yard and painting the whole thing blue with murals and sewing curtains for the windows and then will let the rain wash it away without a thought.

  Sometimes she abandons all these activities and plants a dozen trees in her yard or trains the old-fashioned roses on the fence to climb and grow and have a new life.

  The first Christmas she lived across from me she decorated a small pine tree with white lights. It sits on an acre lot with many other taller trees but the lights were only on this one small pine tree. When the sun went down in our neighborhood we would see it and know we were in the hands of an artist.

  Even Connie, who is an equally good painter, bows to Mary’s genius. We just worship her and that is that.

  The night before the snow on Sunday I decided to go out to the bookstore and lay in a supply of toys in case I was housebound. I wasn’t looking for anything sp
ecial. I was just poking around the bookstore. On the bargain rack I found a book of paintings called Impressionists in Winter: Effets de Neige. On the cover was a detail from a painting I had seen five years before at a show in San Francisco and been thinking about ever since. The painting is by Alfred Sisley and is called Snow at Louveciennes. The book was a bound catalog from the show. I took it to a table and began to pore over the plates. Dozens of dazzling impressionist paintings of snow. I couldn’t believe my luck. In case it snowed I would be ready. I went back to the bargain table. There were two more copies of the book. One had a tear on the cover so I left it but I bought the second copy to take to Connie because she has been painting lately and I knew she would love it also. I can lend mine to Mary, I decided. I don’t want to buy three of them to have in one small cul-de-sac neighborhood. That would be excessive.

  I drove home and ran to Connie’s house to give her the book. That night it snowed. The snow was so soft it did not wake me up when it was falling. I woke and opened the drapes and there it was, an impressionist painting made of our yards and swings and trees and walls and skies, all in my favorite colors, white and blue and charcoal black.

  As soon as I thought she was awake I called Mary and told her I had something she had to see. “This is important,” I said. “I know the children are out of school but you have to come over.”

  “As soon as I can, I will,” she answered.

  At four that afternoon she finally made it across the street. I made ginger tea and watched her open the book. I had been having a lovely time all day working on a novel and sitting at the table looking out the windows at the snow and looking at the paintings of the snow and wishing I knew how to paint. Because of the paintings I knew to watch for shadows in the snow and notice how the smallest bird can draw the eye to form a tableau.

  I was playing a CD of Radu Lupu and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Piano Concertos nos. 1 and 2. I stood by a window and watched Mary looking at the Monets and Sisleys and Renoirs and Pissarros and Caillebottes and Gaugins. It is a world to which she belongs. She is a full-fledged and lifetime member, as is my neighbor, Connie Cramer, who had simply opened her book, stretched a canvas and started painting.

  I asked Mary to take the book home with her. I knew it would not be good for her to leave it now that she had started looking at it. It would be like someone taking a book of poems from me when I had not finished reading it.

  The snow let up the next afternoon and I drove down the icy hill and back out to the mall and bought the third copy of Impressionists in Winter. I had been a fool to leave it there that long. I had taken a terrible chance, for there are many writers and painters in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and plenty of them are crazy enough to drive in snow.

  I came home and carried the third copy to Mary’s house and handed it to her. “I stretched a small canvas about an hour ago,” she said. “Thank you so much for getting this for me.”

  “Thanks for living next to me,” I said.

  I didn’t bother to thank her again for shoveling off the path to my house, which she and her sons had done the day before without telling me they were doing it. Stopping painting to bring William and John Tucker into the world was exactly the sort of thing you would expect a really creative person to know to do.

  Not only because William and John Tucker are young and beautiful and we love watching them grow into men but because they can shovel snow and play in the blue playhouse when you build it and in general make the world worth saving and keeping safe.

  I am the luckiest woman in the world to have artists live around me. I am the luckiest woman who ever had two feet of snow fall on her house, after having had the luck to go out to a bookstore the night before it happened. Hooray.

  FEBRUARY 2OO3

  Casting My Lot with the Gypsies

  THIS IS A STORY about growing up, about learning and becoming influenced. I am telling it in deep retrospect, many years after I began to trust my own ideas and not those of other people. A series of powerful, charismatic people influenced me as I grew to be the person I am now, but none more powerfully and strangely than Jane Reid Petty, the founder, director, and principal lead actress of New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi. Jane is dead now and I miss her. She was the ultimate actress, always on, always posed, always in scene. When I had been with her I played her, sometimes for hours.

  She introduced me to psychotherapy. She was the first person I ever knew who went to a psychotherapist and lay down upon a couch and came to understand how our childhoods influence our later lives.

  She also introduced me to the theatre. There is nothing on earth as much fun as putting on a play. Most art is done by solitary people alone in their lairs. In the theatre people get together to create, to fight and compromise and bargain and plot and sometimes triumph.

  Fortunately I had no desire to act so Jane and I were never in competition in her main arena. She wanted to be a writer also but she wasn’t good at it so she let me have that and used my skills to further her own ideas. She would have made a wonderful corporate executive. She knew how to use other people’s talents to achieve mutual goals and she always gave praise and honor where it was due.

  She talked Eudora Welty into allowing the two of us to turn Eudora’s stories into a play and produce it at New Stage. It was a great success. Later the new public television station filmed it and it won a national award for script writing. We were listed as coauthors, although I actually did the writing and the words were mostly Eudora Welty’s. It was called A Season of Green, a phrase of Eudora’s that had already been used as the title of a book of criticism. I always thought of the play as Eudora’s work and was glad to let Jane share in the writing credits. I had work of my own to do and was busy getting married for the fourth time so I didn’t care who got credit for what.

  It was spring when Eudora agreed to the project and Jane and I took copies of all her books and drove down to the Mississippi coast and stayed in a house at Pass Christian and wrote the play. I would type all day while Jane read and shopped for groceries. By the end of seven days we had a manuscript. We took it back to Jackson and had a meeting in Jane’s living room. Frank Haines, the theatre critic of the Jackson Daily News, was slated to direct the play. He went crazy when he saw what I had written. “It’s too long,” he screamed. “My God, it’s four times too long.”

  Frank took the manuscript home and cut it and shaped it and we had another meeting and read what he had done and then I basically lost interest since I liked it the way that I had done it.

  The night the play opened was exciting. I had a short, pink, formal dress and silver high-heeled sandals and my new boyfriend came up to Jackson from New Orleans and was duly impressed. Later, after I had married him, I came to Jackson alone to watch the filming for the television production. I sat in a sound booth with Eudora and she kept saying the play was mine and Jane’s when of course it wasn’t since most of the words were hers.

  Here then is a short history of how I went from being a bored housewife to a playwright in two short years.

  Don’t try this at home unless you’re ready to put a strain on your normal relationships. Joining New Stage Theatre was synonymous with getting a divorce. Adultery, divorce, smoking, drinking, egomania, selfishness, there was nothing on Broadway that we didn’t have right there in Jackson, Mississippi. We even had a New York director and, of course, he was gay. We had gay men and lesbians but since I was neither I never noticed that any of them were gay. Actually I only sort of half believed they were gay when they told me that they were.

  “IT’S EPHEMERAL, MY DEAR. THAT’S THE GLORY OF IT.” I was twenty-six years old and I had just come home to Jackson, Mississippi, to live among my family and have my mother’s maids take care of my children. I had never meant to be married and have children anyway. I had meant to go off to New York City and be a writer but nature had caught me off guard and for six years I had been struggling good-naturedly to cook and clean
and nurse babies. I liked the babies. I thought they were adorable. I would have killed or died for them but I didn’t like my husband very much. He was too sober, too serious, too left-brained. Anyway, I had struggled as valiantly as possible and now I had a second chance. My husband had agreed to come work for my father and we had a new house in a good neighborhood with a maid coming in every day and enough money to stretch out and rejoin a larger world.

  I began by going back to college. I was admitted into an exclusive writing class being taught by Eudora Welty. It was there that I met the THEATRE PEOPLE. I adored them from the moment I met them. I threw myself into their world. I got money from my daddy and gave it to them for their project, which was starting a theatre in an old church in a black neighborhood and having integrated audiences watch plays Little Theatre wouldn’t let them do.

  This was 1966. A new day was dawning in parts of Jackson, Mississippi, and I had come home just in time to get in on the party. It was exciting. And it was dangerous, which made it more exciting to me. I had a strong husband and a rich daddy and two big brothers. I had nothing to fear. As long as the maids kept showing up so I didn’t miss any of the rehearsals of the plays.

  New words started creeping into my vocabulary. Albee, Pinter, Uta Hagen, lesbian, ménage à trois. The backstage dramas that accompanied the founding of New Stage Theatre of Jackson, Mississippi, far outdid anything being mounted on the circular stage that now took the place of the altar.

  The psychiatrists in Jackson were mad about the theatre. They would come on Wednesday nights and sit with their feet up on the stage. They would laugh out loud at the subtlest jokes and then, on Mondays and Tuesdays, they would listen to their patients among the actors tell them stories about the cast parties. We had cast parties nearly every week and large ones at the end of our two-week runs.