The downside of that move, if any, was that among my new colleagues I found no replacement for my Buffalo jazz-pals. After a year or so I sold my drum-set and, encouraged by my new sister-in-law, began playing baroque and Elizabethan recorder duets with her, a pleasure that we still enjoy. As a wordsmith, I take a special satisfaction both in the differences between the two media — the feelings and ideas that music can express more eloquently than words, and vice-versa — and the pleasures both of solo performance with pen and word-processor and of ensemble (anyhow duet) performance on the recorder. As for “arranging,” I feel blessed to have enjoyed it for so many years and to be doing it still, changes changed, at my desk: My forthcoming novel, for example—Every Third Thought—is among other things a reorchestration both of Shakespeare’s Tempest and of characters from my 2008 story-series The Development.
Q: Shall we take it from the edge? Page one, page two….
The End? On Writing No Further Fiction, Probably
First published in the British journal Granta, February 2012.
IN 2011 AND 2012, two new products of this pen — a novel entitled Every Third Thought and this Final Fridays essay-collection — are scheduled for publication by Counterpoint Press, a non-“trade” publisher in California. Both were completed in 2009, my 80th year of life and 53rd as a publishing writer. At the time of their composition, I didn’t think of them as my last books, only as the latest: my seventeenth volume of fiction and third of non-fiction, respectively. But in the year-and-then-some since, although I’ve still gone to my workroom every weekday morning for the hours between breakfast and lunch, as I’ve done for decades, and re-enacted my muse-inviting ritual, I find that I’ve written. . nothing.
That room is divided into three distinct areas: Composition (one side of a large work-table, reserved for longhand first drafts of fiction on Mondays through Thursdays and nonfiction on Fridays, with supply drawers and adjacent reference-book shelves), Production (computer hutch with desktop word processor and printer for subsequent drafts and revision), and Business (other side of worktable, with desk calendar and office files). As for the rituaclass="underline" Prep-Step One is to seat myself at the Composition table, set down my refilled thermal mug of breakfast coffee, and insert the wax earplugs that I got in the habit of using back in the 1950s, when my three children (now in their fifties) were rambunctious toddlers, and that became so associated with my sentence-making that even as an empty-nester in a quiet house I continue to feel the need for them. Step Two is to open the stained and battered three-ring loose-leaf binder, now 63 years old and held precariously together with strapping tape, that I bought during my freshman orientation-week at Johns Hopkins in 1947 and in which I penned all my undergraduate and grad-school class notes, professorial lecture-drafts during my decades in academia, and first drafts of the entire corpus of my fiction and non-fiction. Step Three is to unclip from that binder’s middle ring the British Parker 51 fountain pen bought during my maiden tour of Europe in 1963/64 (in a Volkswagen camper with those same three then-small children and their mother) at a Rochester stationer’s alleged to be the original of Mister Pumblechook’s Premises in Dickens’s Great Expectations: the pen with which I have penned every subsequent sentence, including this one. (Its predecessor, an also much-valued Schaeffer that saw me through college and my first three published novels, was inadvertently cracked in my shirt pocket a few weeks earlier when I leaned against a battlement in “Hamlet’s castle” in Elsinore — Danish Helsingor, near Copenhagen, the northernmost stop of that makeshift Grand Tour — in order to get a better view of Sweden across the water.) I recharge the venerable Parker with jet-black Quink, wipe its well-worn tip with a bit of tissue, fix its cap onto its butt, and proceed to Step Four….
Which in happier days meant reviewing and editing either the print-outs of yesterday’s first-draft pages (left off when the going was good and thus more readily resumed) or work-notes toward some project in gestation, to be followed by Step Five: re-inspiration and the composition of new sentences, paragraphs, and pages. Of late, however, Step Four has consisted of staring vainly, pen in hand, at blank ruled pages, or exchanging fountain pen for note-taking ballpoint and perusing for possible suggestions either my spiral-bound Work Notebook #5 (2008–) or my little black six-ring loose-leaf personal notebook/diary, to little avail. That latter—The Black Book of not so bright (or sunny) observations & reflections, its title page declares, on which also are the rubber-stamped addresses of its serial residences over the past forty years — has only a few blank leaves remaining, and no room for more. And the workroom’s bookshelves, reserved for one copy of each edition and translation of every book, magazine article, and anthology contribution that I’ve published, are already crowded beyond their capacity, with new editions lying horizontally across older ones and jammed into crannies between bookcase and wall.
That almost-exhausted notebook-space; those overflowing shelves — are they trying to tell me something? I plug my ears; strain not to listen. Like most fiction-writers of my acquaintance (perhaps especially those who mainly write novels rather than short stories), I’m accustomed to a well-filling interval of some weeks or even months between book-length projects: an interval not to be confused with “Writer’s Block.” Indeed, I’ve learned to look forward to that bit of a respite from sentence-making after a new book has left the shop — bulky typescript both snail-mailed and e-mailed to agent and thence to publisher — and to busily making notes toward the Next One while final-copyediting and galley-proofing its predecessor. This time, however. .
Well.
Well? A writer-friend from Kansas who knows about water-wells informs me of the important distinction between dry wells and “gurglers,” which may cease producing for a time but eventually resume; he encourages me to believe that I’m still a Gurgler. I hope that’s the case — but if in fact my well turns out to be dry, I remind myself that as we’ve aged, my wife and I have been obliged to put other much-enjoyed pleasures behind us: snow- and water-skiing, tennis, sailboat-cruising on the Chesapeake, and yes, even vigorous youthful sex (but certainly not love and intimacy, and as someone once wisely observed, “Sex goes, memory goes, but the memory of sex — that never goes”). If my vocation — my “calling”!—has joined that sigh-and-smile list of Once Upon a Times, its memory will be a fond one indeed.