Opus in a drawer:
Mitcham, Marylee
OPUS IN A DRAWER ON HAVING WRITTEN AN UNPUBLISHED NOVEL MARYLEE MTTCHAM A lthough I don't know it to be true-Iimag ineitis-I am one of many women with the completed manuscript of an...
...Now I know what she meant...
...I offered, in a small guilty voice...
...I remember counting off the stresses I was under: my mother is dying, my marriage is in crisis, I'm adjusting to my children's adolescence, our house is too small-there's nowhere in it for me to write the novel I really want to write...
...Titled Hannah Wolfe's Blacktime Song, it was begun in my late thirties at a very difficult time in my life...
...By the time I started Hannah in 1979, my only profit from that first attempt was a certain comfort in realizing Kate and Margaret had coalesced into one woman...
...Oh my coffee is too hot so I put some salt in it to cool it down Now my coffee is too salty oh oh oh So I put some sugar in it to take away the salt and now -my coffee is too salty and too sweet oh oh oh So I put some butter in it (margarine will do just fine) to thicken it up and now my coffee is too cold it's too salty and too sweet it's too thick and I wish I'd left it like it was oh oh oh And in the mouth of Hannah I put a song written in my sleep, something I sat up in bed singing loudly...
...And another problem, the husband I created on paper was not only a bigger bully than mine, but clumsily drawn as well, a real stick figure...
...A spiteful inner voice answers "No one," bat forget that voice...
...When she was small, one of my real daughters drew a family and pointed its members out to me...
...This may have exercised my imagination but it certainly cramped my style...
...Who wouldn' t want to remember that...
...He took over family life and I checked into an off-season resort where I hunkered down to write in both pain and bliss...
...I did it...
...I must admit I still love it, though in the six years since it's been finished, a stack of editors and agents have gently said no...
...pleasure, I nod yes to it all...
...Perhaps we are inclined to think of ourselves as failed writers because we lack a large forum for that work, not to mention fame and riches...
...See, I just drew him that way because I can't draw boys...
...But in my stopover cottage I had one and felt too intimidated to call it mine...
...But I am here to report I don't feel failed, which seems like a genuine sign I am not...
...For instance, there's the song I once overheard my child composing...
...I may have been tongue-tied by day, but in the middle of the night I woke up rhyming "cliffs of Tuscany" with "your sub-lim-ity...
...And definitely limited my future as a novelist...
...Still, that first draft demanded most...
...There's the little girl, there's the teenager girl, there's the mommy, and that's the daddy...
...I have captured pieces of the past that were too small to have survived on their own...
...I was mortified to see an Egyptian coffin standing upright in place of the father...
...Exactly...
...It is flawed, but strangely complete, so I read it without embarrassment or the urge to apologize for its defects...
...So gracias a Dios for the Muse and her song, for harmony in all its forms, for the words packed away in my trunk, for the ones printed here, and for the eloquence of sheer existence beyond all words...
...Then you ask, not spitefully I'm sure, why don't you write another novel...
...I sat on the bed as usual and began the first of forty pages that later I filed away as unsuitable...
...My first, and up until that time, only attempt to write a novel had been years earlier as a senior in college...
...I made her a mother, but her small daughter had been born out of wedlock...
...As a family document alone, it was worth the effort...
...Maybe now I had it in me to finish what I started, in spite of the fact that my circumstances were more difficult than before...
...One of my complaints had been that I didn't even have a desk, for God's sake...
...to write this article, I pulled out the manuscript...
...I discovered I was no good at making men come to life, a fact that meant whenever I created one, I had to use a lot of tricks...
...As with other past accomplishments, mat knowledge still offers strength for the present journey...
...I guess the father's dead...
...This might have been fine if that's what I wanted to write about, but I didn't...
...I enjoyed Hannah Wolfe'sBlacktime Song...
...Yet it is all-of-a-piece, and therein lies my pleasure...
...Listening with pleasure, I nod yes to it all...
...It took me six months to complete a first draft of ISO pages, but three years to do the rewrite...
...OPUS IN A DRAWER ON HAVING WRITTEN AN UNPUBLISHED NOVEL MARYLEE MTTCHAM A lthough I don't know it to be true-Iimagineitis-I am one of many women with the completed manuscript of an unpublished novel packed away someplace getting older and older after the fashion of all created things...
...I thought it described perfectly how sometimes things and people in life seem so askew and mysterious and strange until you adjust how you're viewing them, and then suddenly things are clear and focused...
...To give him credit, I owe the actual start of that story to my husband because it would not have occurred to me to extend, by three or four days, an out-of-state visit to my mother...
...and her daughter, Meadow) became preternaturally reftliome...
...I vaguely remember Kate cutting her toenails in front of company and using four-letter words with the abandon I could not...
...I feel it still...
...I had a hazy idea of where I was going, but inevitably the day's writing produced something new to take into account...
...But perhaps I won't...
...But all too soon the story sprawled past my technical and emotional limits...
...We became friends...
...Not only were small important tilings preserved, they were given the comeliness of greater order...
...The work, though praised, is apparently "not quite a novel...
...I think Hannah and I were both searching for God, if you will-she in the exigencies of plot and I in the right to the use of power...
...My reply" is based on well-digested past experience: I could, and I may...
...He's not dead," she replied...
...It called for a time and I answered, but I don't really hear it anymore...
...It didn't take long to decide Hannah was single...
...Last April another daughter, now grown, asked me if she could read the well-worn manuscript Here is part of what she said in a letter afterwards...
...I thumb the pages and think: here I have a net or a sieve...
...I finished sixty pages of a story, whose title I forget, about two women, one a conscientious graduate student named Margaret and the other a 1960s hippie named Kate...
...I suspect that fiction is not my calling...
...I had given Hannah a husband, unwittingly setting in motion a compulsive re-creation of my own marital discord...
...We worked the story out together, making it as beautiful, funny, and intrepid as we could the second time through...
...On the contrary, finishing a novel to one's own satisfaction is quite an accomplishment...
...It made me feel very peaceful somehow at the end...
...It was given to Meadow...
...I wanted something larger...
...That was probably 1964.1 calculate it was ten years later when I fed it to the flames in self-defeat, conscious of the drama of burning my past, but ignorant of the damage...
Vol. 116 • May 1986 • No. 10
