IN ANOTHER COUNTRY
Ely, Elissa
In another country Almost anything (except how to write) can be learned at a writers' conference Elissa Ely Cities offer a writer almost anything except a self-image. Open a closet and thirty...
...he continues...
...To create, one must sit and say, 'I write this, or I die.' " Nods and squeaks from around the room...
...He is at the head of the table, this venerable Big Cheese with beard and belly of generous proportions...
...At the end of the first meal, I spit out my goldfish and borrowed a pen...
...The play touches the other writers on the sofa, and the rest of us on folding chairs...
...Ponderous silence...
...Virginia Woolf, Miss, was an incorrigibly self-indulgent woman...
...To create...
...I didn't mind that he was Negro, or even queer — but to hate Chekhov...
...Neighbor nudges neighbor as the oldest lady in the conference enters the dining room in a walker...
...If you cannot tell a story, you cannot be any kind of writer...
...I'm a social worker, myself...
...He told me, just as I was about to leave for bed, that he hates Chekhov...
...Applause...
...Not long ago, I vaulted the city fence for a New England writer's conference and a shot at the greener pastures...
...We are all women in the room, and several of the older ones laugh and applaud...
...Although the introductory bulletin had led us to believe that both factions had hit the hills for the same reason — Writers, unite...
...Civilized people will resume their other activities, you know, in time...
...The afternoon seminar is held by several editors, with a publisher on either side of the table like two bookends...
...A writer-in-residence introduces the evening speaker with laconic and winey charm...
...The amateurs among us (and who'll admit it...
...It's intimacy, for sure, when two malices turn instinctively upon the same goat...
...Unscrew a streetlamp and the would-be Russell Bakers pasted to the bulb are as charred as the moths...
...Finally, when there is no meatless lasagna left, she makes a grand entrance...
...Bread and potatoes carpet the carpet...
...Today, she appears at her seminar wearing large black sunglasses...
...My dinner partner cleans her plate with the last crust, and says, admiringly, "Isn't she something...
...So there" he says, clearly disagreeing with himself, and the seminar ends...
...eye each other over the main course, and pass our unseasoned credentials along with the salt...
...Not speculation or self-indulgence...
...First is a huge woman in a mound of blue, a pantsuit...
...We didn't learn how to write, and we certainly didn't discover who we were underneath our raccoon coats...
...Open a closet and thirty aspiring Fitzgeralds fall out...
...Even the staff has unwound...
...They say an aspirant can cultivate his own plot up in the country, and nature will turn the produce into Art...
...The conference is over, but its recollection invites a postscript...
...She speaks...
...Fiction...
...One could also eat twenty-four hours a day," he says...
...One of the amateur field mice raises a paw, its tail and whiskers in a fearful frenzy...
...Plot...
...Applause...
...Nothing else...
...Narrative pure and beautiful...
...Severe pause...
...Towards the end of the seminar, he adds, tolerantly, "I realize I represent a terribly antiquated school, when it comes to the sexes...
...When she sits down, in our silence, her hands are shaking so hard that she gives her cigarette over to the man beside her so he can light it for her...
...She is all in orange, swimming inside some sort of ceremonial mumu...
...The resident poet has taken to shirts with alligators swimming across the breast pocket...
...it took little more than the opening banquet to find contradictions between what the staff writers proposed and what they provided, Elissa Ely lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she writes plays, articles, and many query letters to publishers...
...It's a rarefied climate, up in those hills, and a lofty kind of air...
...Others make a line behind her, puckering up...
...She is no vegetarian, this professional, but all the gravy has gotten to her...
...Fiction must be narrative...
...One woman drops the names of Heller and Barth as her personal instructors...
...But why any liberated woman should prefer to act like a man is far beyond my understanding...
...But the playwright, a woman with a British accent from California, has kicked off her shoes altogether, and leads her afternoon seminar barefoot...
...Plot...
...Those amateurs who paid dutifully (and plentifully) for their conference rights seemed to come hoping to learn how to sustain the worlds of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in a wholly different era...
...he begins, sonorously...
...I joined the ranks of indistinguishable scribblers, and for the entire week afterwards I kept my own top-secret, highly public journal...
...he asks, coldly, at last...
...surnames were scratched off the name tags...
...Descent was no easy ending...
...We, the as-yet undiscovered, came wistfully, and wishing for the romanticism of a Writer's Life...
...The first to reach her, with the first kiss, is the famous journalist...
...You cannot be any kind of a writer...
...An accurate assessment: Miss Emphysema sits beside her walker, reaches for an ashtray, and begins to hack over her morning cigarette...
...Did Dr...
...Well, I just had to stay and change his mind...
...Looky," one says, "here comes Miss Emphysema...
...She thinks gently behind her shades, and smooths her skirt over her chair...
...We nod...
...Why, anyone who's ever been a man knows why no one would want to be one...
...She is the essence of delicacy, except for her wrists...
...They hang out the ends of her sleeves and weight her with their thickness and their extra folds of skin...
...So they say...
...In my mind, though, I see it lean over and take a chunk out of his salty, venerable arm...
...Some people have taken two Deborah Bright seats — one for the writer and another for his or her manila envelope...
...what the "guests" sought and what they received...
...Then his fist cracks the table...
...Her mouth falls open in a reproduction of itself last night...
...Throughout the week, she has pursued the staff writers energetically, tackling a different pro at each meal in debate over some major issue...
...On her way into the dining room, she leans to cootchy-coo a dog and slips, unbalanced by her own weight...
...Today, our first nibble at the major novelist...
...He shifts uncomfortably in his big body...
...A good question: Where is the personal, the human place in serious writing...
...The playwright is a fluttering woman my mother's age who dresses in crinoline and babydoll waists below vast graceful sleeves...
...The rest of us serve ourselves and seat ourselves...
...Wednesday...
...We are all looser today at lunch, bound by common references to last night's private parties and drinking...
...Still, we concede her a special status, and through the rest of lunch we pass her the best of everything — hearts of lettuce, slice of cake with the buttercream rosette, and victory in a coffee cup...
...She steps down...
...Sunday...
...She reads for fifteen minutes from a play about two men and their love for one another in the face of their need for women...
...If fiction is exclusively narrative," it asks, "then what is the difference between a novel and an extended comic strip...
...Has obscenity in films ruined American children...
...Rookie writers shared the mess hall with professionals...
...He certainly behaved like every man / know...
...Honestly, I think he was heterosexual, anyhow...
...H. Cheese wears a bandana in place of a tie, and pauses once in the middle of a statement to bite his nails...
...He waits and peers at us through one of several pairs of glasses...
...Those green hills are one big fertile fraternity, and amidst their abundance no one feels like a small potato...
...None of them shows surprise when the audience showers them with manuscripts instead of questions...
...It's a K.O...
...The journalist is not all that clever, puffing into a cigarette holder, but the woman seems overwhelmed by her every remark, and doubly overwhelmed if they fall in her direction...
...I don't know where my fellows are — back in the closets and twisted into the streetlamps, I suppose...
...On the last day, there is enough of a sense of group comfort to turn, in the meal topic, from writing to cat-tales...
...He tips his chair back in a gesture more ungainly than casual...
...The conference lasted one week by a summer camp calendar...
...In the meantime, I have returned to the city, where I am strengthening my wrists for the phone books once more...
...I am responding adequately to your question...
...I was up for hundreds of hours, talking to a young black homosexual about Chekhov...
...There will be more such elevated conferences to bring them out...
...For the first time since the conference began, the social worker is missing from the head of the dinner line...
...Monday...
...But one forebears...
...Spock ruin American children...
...A mountain the color of sky, she cannot move, and two men have to lift her by her elbows onto her feet...
...She wears plastic flowers around her ears, and has put on lipstick for her farewell...
...In the course of the ages, Miss, plot endures...
...Are public schools ruining American children...
...I'm so horribly sorry," she flutters...
...She shakes her head and then says, "We're in the same line, almost...
...King Jarlsburg peers at us through a well-aged hole...
...Months later, I am still susceptible to the higher altitudes...
...He seems stewed...
...His smell makes me yearn for a Ritz cracker...
...combination, even though she, like us, is not a published (translate real) writer...
...I suspect she will wish to exchange addresses, or at least the names of their respective children...
...Later, at the evening reading, the playwright shows up without her glasses...
...All around him, eager rodents scribble on pads, tissues, and the back cover of his latest book...
...But then there's the country...
...Meals, here, set the scene for camaraderie, but for competition as well...
...She sits next to me and a famous journalist sits next to her, and all through the meal she alternates between wolfing the potatoes and hugging the journalist...
...The journalist suspects this, too, and eventually she leaves without even finishing her chicken, murmuring something about "seeking a bit of sweet...
...Don't mind me," she says, "I'm vegetarian...
...Once, urban telephone booths were stuffed with students...
...The ubiquitous writing notebook was everywhere, and everyone was uniformly (though, in the best style, conspicuously) furtive about its contents...
...The famous journalist, a holdout in khaki, looks like a Lord & Taylor's mannequin in safari suit...
...For our efforts, we received a chance to rub elbows with one practitioner or another...
...Stuffing oneself is also a sensual pleasure...
...Can you believe it...
...She wears necklaces and yards of chains, but no bracelets, not one...
...Neighbor nudges neighbor, and they cackle in inarticulate agreement...
...I think sex is a fad...
...Iam second in line for dinner...
...Friday...
...Now, it's the graduate literati who swallow goldfish and tear directories in two just to be a bit different...
...She carries two plates of bread and mashed potatoes...
...Applause...
...Head Cheese this morning, on the preoccupation of modern writers with sexuality and sex: "I think sex will pass...
...Yes, sir," the mouse says, gnawing on a pencil, doing penance...
...She reads a vignette, and then says it's a shame Americans don't appreciate vignettes...
Vol. 43 • August 1979 • No. 8
