Rehearsal
April 2013
SITTING IN ON a rehearsal is a strange experience for the author of the book the play is based on. Words you heard in your mind’s ear forty years ago in a small attic room in the silence of the night are suddenly said aloud by living voices in a bright-lit, chaotic studio. People you thought you’d made up, invented, imagined, are there, not imaginary at all—solid, living, breathing. And they speak to each other. Not to you. Not anymore.
What exists now is the reality those people build up between them, the stage-reality that is as ungraspable and fleeting as all experience, but more charged than most experience with intense presence, with passion… until suddenly it’s over. The scene changes. The play ends.
Or in a rehearsal, the director says, “That was great. Let’s just take it again from where Genly comes in.”
And they do: the reality that vanished appears again, they build it up between them, the doubts, the trust, the misunderstanding, the passion, the pain…
Actors are magicians.
All stage people are magicians, the whole crew, on stage and behind it, working the lights and painting the set and all the rest. They collaborate methodically (ritual must be methodical, because it must be complete) in working magic. And they can do it with remarkably unlikely stuff. No cloaks, no magic wands or eyes of newt or bubbling alembics.
Essentially they do it by limiting space, and moving and speaking within that space to establish and maintain a Secondary Creation.
Watching a rehearsal makes that especially clear. At this point, some weeks before first night, the actors wear jeans and T-shirts. Their ritual space is marked out with strips and bits of tape on the floor. No set; their only props are a couple of ratty benches and plastic bowls. Harsh lights glare steadily down on them. Five feet away from them, people are moving around quietly, eating salad out of a plastic tub, checking a computer screen, scribbling notes. But there, in that limited space, the magic is being worked. It takes place. There another world comes into being. Its name is Winter, or Gethen.
And look! The king is pregnant.
Someone Named Delores
October 2010
A SENTENCE IN a story has been troubling me. The story, by Zadie Smith, was in The New Yorker of October 11. It’s in the first person, but I don’t know whether it’s fiction or memoir. Many people don’t even make the distinction, now that memoir takes the liberties of fiction without taking the imaginative risks, and fiction claims the authority of history without assuming the factual responsibilities. To my mind the I of a memoir or “personal essay” is a very different matter from the I of a story or novel, but I don’t know if Zadie Smith sees it that way. And so I don’t know whether she’s speaking as a character in fiction or as herself when toward the end of her tale of a seemingly unrepaid loan to a friend she says, “The first check came quickly but sat in a pile of unopened mail because these days I hire someone to do that.”
The implacable editor in my hindbrain promptly inquired You hire someone not to open the mail? I silenced the meddling reptile, but the sentence continued to bother me. “These days I hire someone to do that.” What’s wrong with that? Well, I guess it’s the “someone.” Someone is no one. The nameless nobody hired to answer the mail of a somebody with a name.
So at this point I’m beginning to hope that the story is fiction and thus that the narrator is not Zadie Smith, because this doesn’t sound like the voice of a writer highly sensitive to class and color prejudices. It reminded me, in fact, of the dean’s wife, when I was a lowly assistant professor’s wife, who couldn’t leave “my housekeeper” out of her conversation for five minutes, she was in such a state of admiration of herself for having the grand house that required keeping and the housekeeper to keep it. But that was silly, naive, like Mr. Collins continually mentioning “my patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh.” The statement “these days I hire someone to do that” has a harsher ring to it.
And so what? Why shouldn’t a highly successful writer hire help and say so? And what skin is it off my nose?
Envy, of course, in the first place. I am envious of people who hire a servant with perfect assurance of righteousness. I envy self-confidence even as I dislike it. Envy coexists only too easily with righteous disapproval. Indeed perhaps the two nasty creatures live off each other.
And then, annoyance. There’s an “of course” implied in “I hire someone to do that,” and there’s no “of course” about it. But people think there is, and this kind of talk encourages them to think so—which annoys me.
It’s a widespread illusion: a writer (a successful writer, a real writer) doesn’t do her own mail. She has a secretary to do it, as well as helpers, amanuenses, researchers, handlers—lord knows what—maybe an editor’s hole in the east wing, like the priest’s hole in old British houses.
I imagine writers commonly had secretaries a century ago. Henry James did, sure enough. But Henry James was not exactly your average writer, right?
Virginia Woolf didn’t.
Among writers I know personally, only one has a secretary to do mail. To me it seems a perquisite of the extremely successful, and of a magnitude of success that daunts me. Privacy to be with my family and do my work was of the first importance to me. So when I began to need help answering my letters, I found it extremely difficult to convince myself that I needed it badly enough to justify my hiring “someone,” bringing a stranger into my study, setting myself up as a boss.
I always had trouble calling Delores my secretary, it sounded so pompous (echoes of “my housekeeper…”). If I had to speak of her to strangers I said her name, or “my friend who does mail for me.” But I knew that this latter phrase was one of the mildly devious devices by which we handle guilt, the ways we try to reintroduce humanity into the relationship of hirer and hired, which inevitably, to whatever slight a degree, involves inequality, the raising up of one and degradation of the other. Democracy, by strenuously denying the fact of inequality, does enable us, to a surprising extent, to act as if it didn’t exist; but it does exist, and we know it. So our job is to keep the inequity of power as small as possible, and refuse to let our common humanity be reduced, however slightly, even by a careless word, by an assertion of unequal worth. My envy of writers who hire a person to handle their mail and annoyance at people who assume that I have such help are really quite mild, but they are painful now, because I did have “someone,” but I have lost her.
Delores Rooney, later Delores Pander, was my helper and dear friend.
Thirty years ago or so, I finally got up my courage and asked around for a professionally competent and discreet person to give me a hand with my letters, which were getting beyond me. Our mutual friend Martha West, who had worked with Delores as a secretary in an office, recommended her. She was then working as manager-agent for a dance company. We rather nervously gave it a try.
I had never dictated anything to anybody (outside Beginning French courses, where you very slowly and clearly read a dictée in French to the students, who very slowly and inaccurately write it down). Delores had taught herself shorthand and was a whiz at it—a skill now, I suppose, almost entirely lost—and she’d taken lots of dictation from lots of dictators. She coached me in composing a letter orally, and encouraged me with praise; she was an excellent teacher. And also she’d worked and lived with artists, painters, dancers, and was used to artistic temperamental peculiarities, having a few of her own.