Scribbling Furiously

[mallorys_camera]

The deer were back again this morning. Santa's helpers checkin' out the nabe?

Sunday was a lot like Friday. Monday was even worst. Plus there was fog, thick, grey, impenetrable. B and I had a huge fight over money. I spent the day writing sprightly barbecue sauce copy for the website and pondering the question: what if you try and try and try and try just as hard as you possibly can and it's still not good enough?

Not a rhetorical question, sadly.

Took the dogs to the beach. Thought about Anne Rice, Joanne Rowling, Edith Bland, my own Annie.

What do these four women have in common?

Well, they were all writers.

And they all turned it around.

Anne Rice reportedly wrote Interview With the Vampire in five weeks. Her seven-year-old daughter had just died of leukemia. Certainly no one would ever dream that this hitherto unpublished MFA candidate from a second-rate university was about to score a literary bank shot. I use the word "literary" advisedly here – Interview With the Vampire works as literature, for me at least; it is infused with that "formal feeling" that Emily Dickinson writes about so brilliantly in the poem, After Great Pain.

But what were her reasons for writing it?

I can't imagine any desolation greater than that of loosing a child. With that one small attrition, the world becomes a crazy place, malign, jumbled, hopelessly chaotic. I picture Anne Rice then – a pudgy woman with a heart-shaped face; long, lank, lusterless hair, parted down the middle – sitting cross-legged on a mattress someone had pushed into the corner of a dark room, scribbling furiously away on a yellow legal pad. There's a cheap muslin Indian bedspread blocking the light from the room's one window, another Indian thing on the mattress.

Why was she writing? She had nothing left to lose – quite literally. But everything to gain as it turned out except the one thing a grieving parent would want most.

I thought Interview was very powerful. But had no inclination to read anything else by her ever again. As a pop culture icon though – she invented Goths, after all – Rice interests me greatly, and so I read about her recent conversion to born-again Christianity with some fascination. Does she view the fabulous success of Interview now as some kind of deal with the Devil? Did that pudgy young woman with the heart-shaped face stare at herself in the mirror one morning and whisper, "I'd give anything… anything…"

Magic always extracts a price.

The Joanne Rowling creation myth is a more happy-making story. A welfare mother! For some reason taking the train from Manchester to London one afternoon. The train gets stuck! They spend hours on the track. While the people around her are mumbling and cursing, Joanne whips out a stenographer's pad from her shoulder bag – I picture its handles coming loose, one of its zippers won't zip – and begins (here it comes again) scribbling furiously.

Of course it took her more than five weeks to finish Harry Potter (a book, by the way, I don't care for much.) But the seed moment was on that train. And again I wonder, why was she writing? When a train I was on last summer stalled for two hours between Marseille and Berne, writing was the last thing on my mind. I was hot, sweaty, peevish. My traveling companion was an infantile boor. Writing requires focus, concentration. An interrupted journey encourages neither.

Edith Bland is my favorite children's book writer. She wrote under the name E. Nesbit. There's not a whole lot of biographical material available on her – one biography by Noel Streatfield, the author of the "Shoes" books, and one essay by (of all people!) Gore Vidal, a rare example of Vidal-ian hagiography. The Streatfield book is mostly a deconstruction of Nesbit's books but it does provide a little background: Edith was a Fabian, had a crush on H.G. Wells, married – disastrously – a feckless journalist named Herbert Bland, bore five children in rapid succession. Had no money. Could not pay the rent.

The moment must be inferred. There's no record of it. Yet I have no doubt it happened. An afternoon, perhaps, when the housekeeper returned from the fishmonger's – no matter how cash-poor you were, if you spoke the King's English back then instead of some East End dialect, you had servants! – curtsied nervously, and told Edith, "I'm sorry m'am. 'e won't gib us no more till the bill is reckoned with."

It wouldn't be the first time the children had had to make do with bread, milk and weak tea for supper, of course. When Edith had been a child, secretly she'd preferred such meals. Possibly they did too. It would give them the opportunity to discuss their adventures without adult supervision…

I picture her sitting at an old roll-top oaken desk, falling into a reverie. Abruptly she snaps out of it, reaches for a pen, some foolscap. Begins (altogether now!) scribbling furiously…

I actually used to sit next to Annie when she scribbled furiously. I remember feeling miffed: how can she ignore me like this? I was 17, in college. I had problems, lots of problems. She was supposed to solve them.

Every few days I would show up at the apartment Annie shared with her husband Rik and their daughter Alicia. She'd smile weakly. "Oh hi, Patty! Let's go to the playground."

We'd walk to Live Oak Park. Little Alicia – who'd inherited Rik's butterscotch coloring but Annie's strangely slanted Mongol eyes – would dash between swings and slide. After a few feeble, "That's too bad, dear"s and "Yes, that does sound hard"s, Annie would frown. "Patty, I'm sorry, but I have to…" And she'd reach into her purse, pull out a pencil and a notebook. Soon she'd be deep into the writing, chewing her lower lip, occasionally mouthing silent words.

You look like a homeless person, I'd sneer to myself. You look like an idiot.

But I'd never leave because the process – then as now – was endlessly fascinating to me.

As it turned out, Annie was writing a novel, her first. But I don't think she knew that as we sat there together in Live Oak Park. Rik had fallen in love with another woman. He and Annie had an open marriage – this was the late sixties after all, they lived in Berkeley – but falling in love broke all the rules. She was scribbling furiously as a way to channel the pain.

The novel ended up being called The Healthy Season by the way. Every once in a while a copy turns up on Amazon. It's slight but charming and very, very moving in parts – I'd say that even if I wasn't related to its author.

Scribbling furiously, I thought yesterday on that cold, dead beach, would seem to be the answer.

But what question would the universe have to ask to get me to make that response?