Duet. Carol Shields

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СКАЧАТЬ could find at this late date, it gleams like a gem.

      I write a brief note to the Spaldings, a spray of ritual phrases. ‘We often remember the wonderful year we spent in Birmingham. The children have such happy memories. Hope your family is well and that you are having a mild winter, best wishes from the Gills.’

      Richard seals it and affixes the great golden stamp. ‘He’s writing a book,’ he says.

      ‘Who?’ I ask absently.

      ‘Mr Spalding. He’s writing a novel.’ Richard seldom mentions the Spaldings, but when he does, it is abruptly, as though the words lay perpetually spring-loaded on the tip of his tongue.

      ‘I suppose Anita wrote you about it?’ I say inanely.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And is it going well? The novel?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But she says that sometimes he stays up all night typing.’

      ‘Well, I wish him luck,’ I say, thinking of his row of rejected manuscripts.

      Richard makes no reply, and after a minute I ask him, ‘What’s it about? The novel Anita’s father is writing?’

      ‘How should I know?’ he says, suddenly querulous.

      I snap back. ‘I only asked.’

      But I really would like to know what John Spalding is writing about. Maybe he’s incorporating some new material from the year in Cyprus. Or perhaps reworking one of his old plots. He might even have resurrected his one good one.

      I think of him typing through the night in the chilly, gas-smelling flat while the frowsy Isabel snores in a distant bedroom. I imagine his small frame, tense, gnatlike, concentrating on the impossible mass of a novel, and for a moment I see him as almost touchingly valiant.

      Then guilt attacks me; a pain familiar by now, a spurt of heat between my eyes, damn.

      

      The Magic Rocking Horse was the name of the novel I wrote the year we came back from England. I intended, and for a while even believed, that the title would convey a subtle, layered irony – a childlike innocence underlying a theme of enormous worldliness.

      But the novel never materialized on either level. Instead it simply stretched and strained along, scene after scene pitiably stitched together and collapsing in the end for want of flesh. For, unlike biography, where a profusion of material makes it possible and even necessary to be selective, novel writing requires a complex mesh of details which has to be spun out of simple air. No running to the public library for facts, no sleuthing through bibliographies, no borrowing from the neat manila folders at the Archives. That year the most obvious fact about fiction struck me afresh: it all had to be made up.

      And where to begin? For two or three months I did nothing at all but think about how to begin. Dialogue or description? Or a cold plunge into action? Once or twice I actually produced a page or two, but later, reading over what I had written, I found the essential silliness of make-believe disturbing, and I began to wonder whether I really wanted to write a novel at all.

      I discussed it with everyone I knew and got very little support. Roger and Ruthie told me, flatteringly, that it was a waste of my biographical skills. Nancy Krantz, sipping coffee, pursed her lips and pronounced, in a way which was not exactly condemning but almost, that she seldom read novels. Martin said little, but it was obvious that he viewed the whole project as somewhat dilettantish, and the children thought it might be a good idea if I wrote something along the line of Agatha Christie but transferred to a Canadian setting.

      Furlong Eberhardt was the only one who volunteered a halfway friendly ear, and when he suggested one day that I might want to sit in on his creative writing seminar, it seemed like a good idea; a chance to sit down with a circle of other struggling fiction writers, sympathetic listeners upon whom I might test my material and who, in turn, might provide wanted stimulation or, as Furlong put it, might ‘prime the old pump.’

      Looking back, I believe the idea of again being a student appealed to me too. I bought a notebook and a clutch of yellow pencils, and each Wednesday afternoon I dressed carefully for the class which met in an airless little room at the top of the Arts Building; my fawn slacks or my bronze corduroy skirt, a turtleneck, something youthful but never going too far, for what was the point of being grotesque for the sake often undergraduates ranging from eighteen-year-old Arleen whose black paintbrush hair fell to her hips, all the way to Ludwig, aged about twenty-four, horribly pimpled, who stared at me with hatred because I was married (and to a professor at that), because I lived in a house, because I was a friend of Furlong’s, and possibly because my fingernails were clean.

      No, I didn’t fool myself that I was going to be one of them. And how could I since, despite my urging them to call me Judith, they always referred to me as Mrs Gill. And when I read my short weekly contributions, always a quarter the length of theirs, they listened politely, even Ludwig, and never ventured any remarks except perhaps, very deferentially, that my sentences were a bit too structured or that my situations seemed a little, well, conventional and contrived.

      Somewhat to my surprise I found that Furlong ran his creative writing seminar in a highly organized manner, beginning with what he called warming-up exercises. These were specific weekly assignments in which we were to describe such things as the experience of ecstasy or the effect of ennui, a dialogue between lovers one week and enemies the next.

      I sweated through these assignments, typing out the minimum required words and, when my turn came, I read them aloud, feeling like a great overblown girl, red-faced and matronly, who should long since have abandoned such childish games.

      The rest of them were not the least reticent; indeed they were positively eager to celebrate their hallucinations aloud. Arleen dragged us paragraph by paragraph through her thoughts on peace and mankind, and a girl named Lucy Rimer was anxious to split her psyche wide open, inviting us to inspect the tortured labyrinth of her awakening sexuality. Joseph, an African student, disgusted and thrilled us with portraits of his Ghanian grandparents. Someone called George Riorden dramatized his feeling on racial equality by having two characters, Whitey (a Negro) and Mr Black (a white) dialogue over the back fence, reminding us, in case we missed it, of the express irony implied by their names. Ludwig poked with a blunt and dirty finger into the sores of his consciousness, not stopping at his subtle and individual response to orgasm and the nuances of his erect penis. On and on.

      They were relentless, compulsive, unsparing, as though they had waited all their lives for these moments of catharsis, these Wednesday afternoon epiphanies. But looking around, when I dared to look around, I watched them wearing down, week by week exhausting themselves, and I wondered how long it could go on.

      Eventually Furlong, who until then had merely listened and nodded, nodded and listened, called a halt and announced that it was time to begin the term project. Each of us was to write a short novel, about ten chapters he suggested, a chapter a week, which we were to bring to class to be read aloud and discussed. I breathed with relief. This was what I had hoped for, a general to command me into action and an audience who, by its response, might indicate whether I was going in the right direction.

      I began at once on my first chapter, carefully introducing my main characters, providing a generous feeling of setting, and observing all the conventions as I understood them. It was all quite easy, and when my turn came to read, the class listened attentively, and even Furlong beamed approval.

      And then I got stuck. Having СКАЧАТЬ