Fit Company for Themselves

In addition to editing “The Pastor’s Kids,” I’ve begun to let the sequel creep into my consciousness. I know what will be in it to some extent, but I haven’t let myself imagine the actual incidents. In a way, this, the “making up” part, is my favorite part of writing. First though, I’m dealing with the title.

For a while the second book has been called “Bound Away” from the American folk song “Shenandoah.” Bruce Springsteen has a version I’ve been listening to:

            “Shenandoah, I love your daughter

            Away, you rolling river

            I’ll take her across the water

            Away, bound away

            Cross the wide Missouri.”

But if you don’t hear it as part of the song, you might think it was a matter of “bounding away” like a rabbit across a meadow. My characters actually make the transition from a 19^th Century to a 20^th Century world view in this second book. But it isn’t without a certain amount of anguish. No one bounds away with delight. It is more a matter of being dragged, taken away.

I toyed with phrases from Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, which show the pain of beginning to be your own person, such as in “Kathy’s Song”:

“And so you see I have come to doubt

All that I once held as true.

I stand alone without beliefs

The only truth I know is you.

And as I watch the drops of rain

Weave their weary paths and die,

I know that I am like the rain

There but for the grace of you go I.”

Or the lightness and attempt to hold the sweetness and irresponsibility of youth in “The 59^th Street Bridge Song” (if you can’t hear the melody as you read these lyrics, look the songs up on YouTube!):

“I've got no deeds to do,

No promises to keep.

I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.

Let the morning time drop all it's petals on me.

Life, I love you,

All is groovy.”

But Line, Marty and Paul just aren’t there yet. In the second book there is still a formality which hasn’t fallen away from their lives. Intellectually they are moving into open space, but tradition holds them. In the second book, Line and Marty go to college and Paul finishes high school. They are full of ideals inherited directly from their European ancestors, and they know no others. The epiphanies that come to them they don’t yet understand.

An English proverb states, “Learning makes people fit company for themselves.” A liberal arts education doesn’t help one earn a living as much as it helps one’s understanding and love of life. Line, Marty and Paul were treated to such an education in the early 1960’s. Thus, I believe the title “Fit Company for Themselves” reflects the cultural story space in which we will find them in the sequel to “The Pastor’s Kids.”

Editing

This is an editing month and it is every bit as engrossing and time-stopping as writing. I find that as it first comes out, I have a dense, rather viscous style. So, the first thing I do to edit each chapter is to search for all the descriptors using “had”, “which he had given her” for instance [thank you, Anna, for this one]. It’s a past perfect tense, but it certainly slows narrative down, and often the phrase isn’t even necessary. I need to be careful of redundancy of any kind, though there is a use for it, like the refrain in a song.

I also am on the lookout for the adverbs “really,” “quite,” “always,” “just” and so on, which qualify statements. It’s “always” hard for me to commit to statements, as I know there are “often” cases in which they are not “quite” true. But in writing fiction, you can afford to be definite.

My sister Naomi’s notes are invaluable in sharpening the memory picture. She is consistently encouraging, but also she sometimes says: “The fishing trip made me uneasy. I kept wanting to know where Dad was in the boat.” We both know that, though she had a slightly different perspective, we experienced the same sensual details. Whether someone outside our family will find the culture described in the book as vivid remains to be seen.

Don’s ideas about writing help me a great deal as I work with my characters. He suggests:

-                     When introducing a character make sure they are indelible, inevitable in the context of the story, and move the story along.

-                     Make sure an action could only have come from that particular character.

-                     Make the character’s feelings clear by gesture. What is the character doing?

-                     What does the character think as they do things?

Don also reminds me of analogies in filmmaking. He likes to the let the actor he is filming wander around in the frame. He feels this gives the character authority to tell his own story. If you follow a character too closely with the camera, it becomes more about the filmmaker using the character to tell the filmmaker’s story. We’ve seen a lot of that lately!

I want to free my characters to tell their own stories, allowing them plenty of context in which to move about, to play. If we are, to some extent, created by the families we live in, by the widening circles of church, school, community, and country, when we look at an individual we are seeing the culture out of which he came. How often, when we learn something about someone’s background do we say, “Oh, of course, now I understand.” Fiction gives me the freedom to build up the thick culture in which my characters live and act. Editing allows you to reframe, heighten contrast and sharpen the picture. Yes, it’s a little like Photoshopping, but with more infinite possibility, since language lets you work with the mind’s eye.

Color Photographs

Color snapshots start appearing in my photograph albums beginning in the early 1960’s. We were still using black and white photos for portraits. Both my high school and college senior pictures are black and white, probably because the annuals they appeared in were in black and white due to cost. But snapshots, taken by small Kodak cameras, begin to show the colors of our dresses, of the decorations at my senior prom, of our lake. (I remember my chagrin when I first saw my husband Don’s toddler photographs. They were in color!)

I’ve been fascinated by the complete reproductions of Life magazine which Google Books has provided us with at http://oldlifemagazines.com/ . You can buy the magazines here, of course, but you can also click on the year your want, and then the particular magazine and, if you scroll down and keep clicking, the entire thing comes up! If you look at Life magazines from the 1950’s you will often find serious coverage of the news by excellent journalists. By 1951 and 1952, the covers of the magazine were beginning to be in color, and the ads (lots of cigarettes and cars!) used color, but the great news photographs and glamour photographs were in black and white.

My early awareness of the larger world is from photographs in National Geographic, which began to use color very early, and the Life magazine, which arrived almost weekly. Dad went to the post office to get the mail in our tiny North Dakota town, but the photographs in these magazines were like ticking time bombs spread out on our coffee tables. No wonder the kids in my story “set the controls for the heart of the sun"! I tried to read the books listed in Life as those kids my age were reading and started a penpal correspondence with someone who had written a letter to the editor at Life.

My earliest television memory is from November, 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary and we watched Sunday afternoon news programs, mesmerized as winter brought the cold that kept us in. Our parents had rented a television to watch that year’s political conventions, and when they were over, could not give it up!

In the March 30, 1962 Life magazine, a huge spread entitled “Jackie Leaves Her Mark on India and Pakistan” is all in intense color, and the ads are all in color, but the other news articles, and seven poems by Robert Frost, are in black and white. I believe that by this time, Life magazine was beginning to cover more soft news, especially in photographs, as they were unable to compete with television for hard news.

By 1963, I was off to college, which effectively ended my Life magazine and television news watching for quite some time, except around the death of President Kennedy. A television in our dorm lounge provided viewing of the continuous coverage of this world tragedy. By this time, however, my arrow was pointed out at the world, on a trajectory that would carry me further than I expected, though not perhaps so far after all.

First Draft

This week I finished a first draft of “The Pastor’s Kids”. It feels rather pedestrian at the moment, quite far from what I hope it will be. But I will wait until September to read it and see what it looks like as a whole. I do feel I have gotten into it most of what I hoped. The editing process will involve paring away the inessential, making it more “visible” to others and sharpening the characters and events.

This means that my musings here will be less about the times and places of the novel, perhaps, and more about narrative prose and writing. I picked up my old friend Hemingway this week, a book which came out recently, his “Africa book” which was cut in half, edited and published by his son Patrick as True at First Light. I loved it! I’m not sure he was always so funny, but reading this book I often found myself laughing!

Hemingway chose a two month period, November and December 1953, a time when his wife Mary was hunting a particular black-maned lion in Kenya. The ceremony of the safari had changed a great deal from his experience of twenty years before in 1933. Much of his amusement comes from looking at these changes in both Africa and himself. Hemingway relished his relationships to the Wakamba, who worked on this safari, and felt as though he were becoming one of them. Though some of them kept up the forms and ceremonies established earlier, when the term “Bwana” was used in 1953, he realized it was sarcastic, a form of abuse! Another source of comedy was his banter with the Brit in charge of Game Control (otherwise known as G.C., or Gin Crazed), who came out from Nairobi to help.

The relationship of fiction to non-fiction in Hemingway’s memoirs was always complex. I’ve heard he regarded A Moveable Feast, which many people take as gospel truth about his years in Paris, as fiction! Neither A Moveable Feast nor True at First Light had been published when he died. But, as he says, “there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In both of these books, Hemingway’s narrative precision is inspiring, as is his reproduction of dialogue with all of the flavor and spice of life.

The Life magazines I pored over in the late 1950’s were full of stories of Hemingway’s life and his writing. I doubt if I read the full text of his essay “The Dangerous Summer” about bull fighting, but his powerful persona as a living writer certainly influenced me.

Civil Rights 1960

In the long fight for civil rights, two events in the spring of 1960 led to a turning of the tide of world opinion against the segregation of black and white people where it was still occurring. On February 1, four black students sat down at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina. According to Connie Curry, “The sit-in movement spread like wildfire during the spring of 1960. … By Easter, more than 70,000 mostly black southern college students were involved in demonstrations.”

March 21 in Sharpeville, a South African township, police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators against the hated passbooks which were used to enforce segregation, killing 69. Life magazine for April 11, 1960 reported on “South Africa Torn by Fury”, and noted that “The United Nations took a hand and white South Africans began to realize how isolated they are at the bar of world opinion.”

In the corner of northeast Iowa where Line, Marty and Paul live, these events didn’t make much of an impact. At that point, they had only met one black person, a black pastor from Madagascar who spoke at their church. But these events did foreshadow the social change that would affect the years in which the kids came of age. The last two chapters of “The Pastor’s Kids” are set in 1960.

Ella Baker

For years now, I’ve been reading memoirs by young people who helped effect this social change. I keep coming across the name of a woman whom everyone speaks of with love and respect, and whom I didn’t even know about. Her name was Ella Baker. She was a bit older than most of the young people she influenced. She had begun her work in New York in the Harlem Renaissance, and worked with the NAACP and the SCLC. But she resisted the messianic leadership which she saw in the black churches, where the pastors were men and the members women. She thought that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” and developed an idea about participatory democracy. Tom Hayden says, in his book Rebel, “Such decentralized and essentially voluntary forms are inevitable whenever movements erupt with the seemingly endless energy as they did during that decade.”

The early workers in what everyone called “the Beloved Community” formed by civil rights workers, all knew Ella Baker. Connie Curry recalls her “deep friendship with Ella Baker” and Casey Hayden writes, “Whether Ella Baker was shaping the direction of the civil rights movement by advising the southern student movement to remain independent of adult organizations or listening to the dream of one child, her whole being was concentrated on and dedicated to the struggle of eliminating the barriers and injustice of racism. Being around someone like Ella Baker put me in contact with focused purpose and true greatness.”

The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, also begun in 1960, was the result of Ella Baker trying to get various students she knew who were working on civil rights all over the country together. She thought they should have their own organization. A wonderful article which traces the legacy of this group fifty years later can be found at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/25/860631/-Never-Turn-BackReport-on-SNCCs-50th-Anniversary. "For all of the youthful energy and commitment to challenge and change that erupted in 1960," said Charlie Cobb, a SNCC Field Secretary, "the reason for SNCC's existence comes down to one person - a then-57-year-old woman, Ella Baker, one of the great figures of 20th-century struggle. In a deep political sense, we are her children and our 50th anniversary conference is dedicated to her."

Space Race

In October, 1957, the U.S.S.R. embarrassed the United States by being the first to put an unmanned satellite into orbit around the earth, the Sputnik 1. Although the United States had announced its intention to do the same, they were inhibited by Eisenhower’s fear of being thought a warmonger in the tricky post-war atmosphere, as an orbiting satellite might be considered a violation of another nation’s airspace. During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 several launches established the principal that a nation’s airspace did not extend past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Eisenhower had also prevented the satellite teams from using military missiles as launchers. After World War II, the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. competed to recruit the German engineers who had developed the V2 rocket. Werner von Braun and his team, recruited by the United States, had sent up rockets capable of launching a satellite. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet’s chief engineer who had been brought back from imprisonment in Siberia, was competing with von Braun. For its civilian satellite programs, however, the U.S. was using Vanguard research-only rockets.

After the success of Sputnik, Eisenhower pushed the Vanguard project to an earlier launch. The spectacular failure of this launch on December 6, 1957 in front of a broadcast television audience, was what finally transferred command of the U.S. launching program to von Braun’s Redstone rocket team. Explorer 1 was successfully launched on January 31, 1958.

Explorer 1

The space race precipitated unprecedented spending on education, which we noticed in our science and math classes and our high school library. We followed all of the space missions avidly. I remember the euphoria of Alan Shepard’s manned space flight in May, 1961, even though it was a month later than the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight. I wrote a letter to Alan Shepard and received a handwritten note in response.

John F. Kennedy proposed, in a speech to the United Nations in September 1963, that the United States and the U.S.S.R. cooperate in an effort to put a man on the moon. Khrushchev and Kennedy had achieved a kind of rapport over the years of working together, and it was thought Khrushchev would accept the proposal. When Kennedy was assassinated in November, however, Khrushchev’s trust did not extend to the Johnson administration and the idea was dropped.

The space race is considered to have ended with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, a cooperative human space flight mission which came to symbolize détente. In studying the space race years later, when the participants have no need to keep secrets, the human faces and decisions emerge.

Freedom and Intimacy

Talking to a friend who is thinking of starting a blog, I thought about what I like about blogging. It goes back to what Dr. Charles Harris used to say we all want from relationship: freedom and intimacy.

You there, sitting in an armchair, or even in bed, with your iPad2, I believe you have a feeling of great intimacy with the mind of the person you are reading. If you didn’t, you would be on some other page of the world wide web, reading some other columnist or blogger. Hopefully you don’t read only those you agree with, but nevertheless, you are meeting the writer on some level, finding your way to his inmost, essential thoughts, what he has in mind at a particular moment, usually quite recently in time.

That writer gets to write what is in his mind freely and with great honesty, exactly because you have the freedom to move to another page if you like. The writer writes, knowing that someone, perhaps you, is meeting him in language you both understand in some fundamental way.

Most blogs have a subject around which they turn. I realized you could have a project blog after seeing the artist Leigh Toldi’s [www.toldileigh.blogspot.com]. She writes about her work. In some respects the blog becomes her work, but really it’s like a “making of” documentary, the story of how her drawings and paintings get made. Knowing a little about the artist’s thoughts helps people to understand it. You know the artist intimately, not in a personal way, but because of what she tells you about her work.

This is a “making of” blog. It is a description of some of what I am thinking about as I work on “The Pastor’s Kids”. When you are writing from the inside of a character, you cannot put all the background information in. The narrative flows around what the character is experiencing. Especially for kids, it may be only later that they realize what was going on. But the background is there, nevertheless.

Perhaps you are not interested in the minute particulars of what I am thinking about at this moment. I am free to write them, but you are free to turn to another page!