Whiny Writers

Why are we writers such a whiny lot? And it's often the best writers who complain the most. E.B. White kvetched endlessly about having to write his weekly Talk of the Town piece for The New Yorker. He moved to a farm in Maine, where he hoped to be able to write more easily, only to discover that he would much rather farm than write. He lamented that, as he went about slopping the pig or gathering the eggs, he couldn’t “watch the show just for the fun of it,” but had to be constantly thinking how to write about it (see Scott Elledge, E.B. White).

Whenever Flaubert wasn’t writing, he was complaining about it to his friend, George Sand: “You don’t know what it’s like […] to spend an entire day with your head in your hand in order to find the right word[…] I spend my life gnawing at my heart and my brain.”

And here is the great Colette, at her peak, telling an interviewer, “I don’t like to write. Not only do I not like to write, but I especially like not writing […] I am so happy, so happy when I’m not writing, that it’s clear to me that I shouldn’t write…” Asked what she’d like to do instead, she answers: “Anything! Anything except writing! Carpentry, gardening, polishing the furniture …”

Colette in her eighties. Her right pinky was permanently bent from decades of writing.

Like Flaubert, she labored endlessly over every word. The appendices of the Pléiade edition of her works show that for every line of finished text there are often half a dozen lines of false starts, reversals, and erasures. So fond was she of not writing that at the height of her career she opened a cosmetology salon. Fortunately, it was a failure and she was forced to return to writing.

Me, I don’t like not writing, but I love having written. Even if I’m just writing about something cute that the cat has done, after I’ve poured my daily ration of words onto the screen I feel cleansed somehow, purged, at ease. It’s the way I imagine skilled meditators (of whom I am not one) must feel after their daily sitting.

There are times, of course, when I don’t like writing. These occur mostly when I haven’t written for a while. Then I find myself stumbling over prepositions, enmeshed in clauses, entrapped by tenses. The main thing I lose when I have been away from writing is the discipline of the first draft, which for me consists of shaking out whatever is in my head onto the screen, as if I were dumping out a waste basket.

At this point, if I allow myself the slightest backward glance over the piece, I always turn into a pillar of salt. The backward glances are the second stage. But by then I have something to work on. The page is no longer a trackless desert over which I must wander alone. There’s stuff—mostly stupid stuff, but stuff--already there. Now all I have to do is fix it, mostly by the enthusiastic use of the delete key.

When I was a sculptor I would start with a block of Indiana limestone and then make a head, or a cat, or a human figure by slowly chiseling off what didn’t belong. As a writer, I first have to produce the stone itself, by quarrying words out of my brain and hurling them onto the screen. Then I chip away until the mess starts to make sense, and becomes something that someone might want to read.

Arachnicide

Every October, just in time for Halloween, the spiders lay siege to my house.

These are not the charming orb-weavers that E.B. White immortalized.  They are not the wispy critters that swing from the ceiling on a single gossamer thread.  They are big, dark, and fast.  They are wolf spiders.

I would much rather have real wolves at my door--come to think of it, I would love to have wolves at my door.  But instead I have these silent, faceless, scuttling beings intent on joining me indoors.

With the first cool nights they congregate by the door between the sun porch and the garage, and strategize.  The smaller ones squeeze through the chinks between the door and the jamb.  The big ones wait for me to open the door on my way to collect the eggs at night and they rush into where there is light and warmth, and the dogs' water dish, where they refresh themselves.

Last fall the invasion happened one evening when I was alone in the house.  It was sudden and  Hitchcockian, and my only defensive weapon was a spray bottle of water laced with a few drops of dish detergent that works like a charm on the tiny ants that occasionally visit our kitchen.  But the wolf spiders were way bigger and tougher than the ants.  They just shook off the water and kept coming.

Next I tried dousing them with organic apple cider vinegar, but ended up getting most of it on my clothes.  I finally resorted to gross mechanical means:  the fly-swatter and my own feet, clad in sturdy clogs.  When my spouse finally arrived he found me pale and disheveled, sipping weakly at a glass of Cointreau.  I told him I had killed at least a dozen spiders, and his response was, "But why?"

The horror of that night stayed with me all year.  I knew that fall would come again, and with it the wolf spiders.

Then I remembered something from my camel-cricket-fighting days in Maryland.  Camel crickets are big, pale, silent beings that haunt people's basements in the southern latitudes and also are obsessed with coming into the house in the fall.  They will, if the mood strikes them, jump on you.  The only thing to deter them was borax, the white powder that you add to your laundry to make clothes brighter.  I would sprinkle it on the basement steps and when the crickets landed on the stuff they would just sort of wither and die.

This fall, as soon as the sumac started to redden, I was ready with a box of 20 Mule Team Borax.  I sprinkled it around the edges of the porch floor, and really went crazy in the garage, especially near the door to the house, mounding it until it looked like snow drifts.  I don't know exactly what the stuff does to the heavily armored wolf spiders, but it seems to slow them down as they walk through it, which gives me a chance to whack them with the fly swatter.

And whack them I do.  Every night when I go to collect the eggs I carry the swatter and manage to bag  a couple of spiders.  There don't seem to be as many as last year, and very few have gotten into the house.  So my borax barricade appears to be helping.

I am aware that my spider-killing mania is at odds with most of the principles that I otherwise hold dear.  Spiders, my spouse never tires of reminding me, are beneficial.  I should live and let live.  "Not when they are the size of an egg and crawl inside my barn boots," I counter, swatter in hand.

All this is surely rooted in childhood.  One of my aunts was terrified of spiders, and I must have caught my fear from her.  On the other hand, my mother would literally lose her mind if you showed her even a picture of a mouse, and I did not catch musophobia from her.  In fact, I actually like field mice, with their big babyish heads and bright little eyes, and if they didn't poop so much and carry noxious viruses I would keep one as a pet, as Beatrix Potter did.  None of this makes a shred of sense, I realize.

The annual mouse migration into Vermont basements will probably start tonight, when the first frost is predicted to arrive.  The mice come in hordes, much more numerous than wolf spiders, and, not having a cat, we are reduced to killing them ourselves.  Or rather, my spouse does it, setting traps every night and feeding the dead to the chickens in the morning.  Me, I avert my eyes and wipe away a hypocritical tear.

Lending Books

Some people love to cook for their friends. I like to cook for my friends too, and did so just this morning, in fact. But what I really like to do, is to lend my friends books.

A friend is going to the seashore for two weeks, and asked for a couple of reading suggestions. Not fiction, she specified, and not animal-related. She's a serious animal lover/breeder/husbandrywoman (?) and wants a vacation from all things furry, woolly or cuddly.

Well, I thought, that doesn't leave me with much to work with. Ninety-five percent of what's on my shelves is either fiction, or animal-related. But I looked anyway, and came up with a stack for her to choose from.

There's Scott Elledge's biography of E.B. White (my friend likes E.B. White), and David Lodge's biography of Henry James. (James, to whom nothing much ever happened, must have been a challenging subject.) There's Updike's painfully honest memoir, “Self-Consciousness.” And a couple of How I Survived My Mother autobiographies by women: Jill Ker Conway's “The Road from Coorain,” recounting the path from the Australian outback to the presidency of Smith; and Ruth Reichl's “Not Becoming My Mother”--her mother served moldy food to guests; Ruth grew up to become the editor of Gourmet Magazine.

I pulled out Kathleen Norris's “The Cloister Walk,” about a Protestant woman's discovery of monastic life and spirituality somewhere in the Dakotas, and added it to the pile. And because my friend is a sailor, I picked Steve Callahan's “Adrift,” about being lost at sea (I hope it will make her want to be prudent). I suspect she already knows Anne Morrow Lindbergh's “Gift from the Sea,” but I put that in just in case.

I found crazy, fabulous Anne Lamott's “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith,” another of her accounts of her lurchings through life, writing, and spirituality. What I really wanted for my friend was Lamott's “Traveling Mercies,” the first and best of her spiritual odyssey memoirs. But I couldn't find it anywhere. It was gone.

This is the dark side of my passion for lending out books. Some of them—usually the best ones—don't come back. (Please note that the friend for whom I'm compiling the present stack has promptly returned everything I've ever lent her.) People forget that they borrowed books. I forget I lent them out. This is what happened to my favorite David Lodge book, “Therapy,” and to many others.

But what can I do? The pleasure of lending out books far outweighs the regret of not getting them back—if I'm ever aware of not getting them back. I love pushing books on people as they're walking out my door: “Here's Konrad Lorenz on dogs. And he actually has little drawings on the margins! Here's A.S. Byatt”s “Possession.” Can you believe she's Margaret Drabble's sister? And Barbara Pym? She was popular for a while, then nobody would read her. Then she was rediscovered and was a wild success, and died soon after. Her novels have the smell of damp English wool in them...”

My friend will have to do with Anne Lamott's “Plan B.” But if she comes back from her vacation saying she loves Lamott, or Reichl, or any of the others, I will feel just as good, just as pleased and satisfied as if she'd smacked her lips after a serving of my chocolate mousse.