Scribblers Page 8

  In his arm atop a small pile of papers is a copy of my book, an unlikely sight that pleases me deeply. The placement of his bookmark suggests he has read only about fifty pages, but someone with my track record shouldn’t complain. I like this man.

  He is Bryan Aleksich, the author of my Cold War thriller.

  “I know we’re not supposed to have our session until tomorrow morning,” he says, “but I was hoping we could discuss my sample now. Do you have time?”

  My stack of twenty-page manuscript excerpts is in the Cyd Charisse Room. I’d planned to make notes on the samples later in the evening. But unlike the other submissions, his story has stuck in my mind down to the characters’ names, and I already know what I want to tell him. And meeting with him now will buy me a graceful exit from the “Meet and Greet” session.

  Off the writer-choked hallway is an empty conference room—where the “Meet and Greet” should have been held. We adjourn there.

  I soon understand that Bryan is given to frank speech.

  “I’ve been enjoying your book. I just picked it up last night,” he says. “I wish they’d designed a different cover, though. I’m sorry they used that picture.”

  Bryan tells me he has a degree in graphic arts. He describes how the cover would have been improved by using a pen-and-ink illustration instead of a photograph.

  “I have to say I don’t care for the title either,” he says. “It’s too familiar.”

  I’m not sure how to respond. I’ve always liked the cover, though I’m not so certain just now.

  Bryan smiles thinly. “You were my third choice.”

  I ask what he means.

  “We had to pick three people from the list to review our manuscripts, in case we couldn’t get who we wanted. The editor from Algonquin was my first choice. I was also interested in the woman from St. Martin’s.”

  I can’t argue with his choices. I’d have done the same in his position, though I hope I’d keep the knowledge to myself.

  I don’t take Bryan to be mean-spirited. Apparently, he places a premium on up-front honesty. If so, I can provide him a dose, too. “Let’s talk about your sample,” I say.

  Most of what I tell him is positive. I admire the way Bryan describes the suicide of the antihero’s brother in a single, spare paragraph. I like the couple of details he uses to physically describe the antihero. I find the murder of the German girl downright chilling.

  I can tell he’s flattered.

  “But I wouldn’t try to sell it as an illustrated novel,” I say. In fact, the title page proclaims exactly that: “An Illustrated Novel.” The first page of each chapter carries a drawing of a vintage airplane. “Illustrated novels are for kids. You’re giving publishers an easy reason to reject you. Sell the story first. Then, if you find some interest, you might say you’ve got illustrations they’re welcome to look at. But don’t be surprised if they say no. They’ve got their own illustrators.”

  If I anticipate some resistance to this suggestion, then I underestimate the willingness of struggling writers to seize any ray of hope. Bryan wants success uncommonly badly. He is willing to hold his illustrations in reserve or to do anything else that might help his novel see print. “I don’t even need an advance,” he generously offers.

  Bryan, I learn, is seventy-two—a good ten years older than I guessed. The son of Serbian immigrants, he went to work in the Pittsburgh steel mills at age fifteen during World War II. He later studied graphic arts, then drew for an architectural firm in California, then went to law school at UCLA. More pertinent to his manuscript, he is also a former fighter pilot. He was accepted into pilot training at age twenty-five—just under the cutoff—having overcome an eye problem that required him to get a muscle surgically cut and having somehow passed his physical despite congenital high blood pressure.

  Two days before Christmas 1965, Bryan was flying an Air National Guard nighttime training mission in the Los Angeles area. His two-seat trainer was to serve as a target for a pair of F-102 fighters. Reaching his assigned altitude of forty thousand feet required him to fly his aged jet at 100 percent power for forty-five minutes—fifteen minutes beyond its designed capacity. When he reached altitude and reduced power, the engine blew. Bryan drifted for several minutes until the plane lost enough altitude for him to eject safely. From fourteen thousand feet, he parachuted to the Mojave Desert through heavy cloud cover, fighting nausea as he dropped, unable to see the ground below him. Luckily, he landed on a ridge; a short distance to either side and he would have tumbled down a steep slope. He spotted a line of car lights in the distance that indicated a road. Bryan made himself as comfortable as he could for the evening, hiked to the road upon rising the next morning, hitched a ride to the nearest telephone, and notified the base of his whereabouts.

  A couple of weeks after that, he sat down and started his novel. In the 1950s, he’d served a tour at an air base in West Germany, which would provide his setting. A heavily modified version of his fall from forty thousand feet was to be the climactic scene.

  By 1970, he had a 250,000-word manuscript. He self-published a thousand copies, sold about two hundred of them, then reread the novel and found it dreadful. Bryan took an electric drill and bored a hole through each of the remaining eight hundred copies, to make it less likely they’d be picked up by strangers. Then he took them to the dump.

  But he’d caught the bug. By 1988, the revamped story was down to about half its original length. Bryan inquired with an agent, who indeed wanted to handle the novel. Over the next five years, it was rejected by nearly sixty publishers.

  In 1993, Bryan retired from legal practice and left California for the North Carolina mountains south of Asheville. The following year, he signed up for a basic writing course through Writer’s Digest He next took an advanced program offered by the magazine, then asked if he could pay for an additional six months of instruction. Bryan completed the program with increased confidence, a high level of enthusiasm, and a manuscript that was another ten thousand words leaner.

  So here he was with a novel thirty-some years in the making, never having earned a dime off his writing but still attending conferences, still hoping for a greater editor when he was assigned a lesser one, still enrolling in a seminar in mystery writing here and a class in expository writing there, more clear-headed about his prospects than in years past but still stubbornly hopeful.

  What I want to know is why a man who was a fighter pilot and a lawyer—either one a life’s accomplishment for most people—feels such a need to be a novelist, too.

  Not getting an immediate response from Bryan, I prod. Since it requires nothing, really, beyond pencil, paper, and one’s own experience, is writing the cheapest way to immortality? Though no one is averse to money and recognition, don’t writers want most of all to leave behind something of value?

  He scoffs at this. “Then they ought to spend more time learning their craft.”

  We talk for a while about other things—my family, the house where he lives, the route he traveled to reach the conference.

  Then comes this from Bryan: “You say you enjoyed my sample. I have the complete manuscript in my room. Would you be willing to take it home with you?”

  I’ve been told the food at the Grove Park Inn is mediocre but that the authors who’ll be manning the microphone during meals are first-rate. On the contrary, we all enjoy a fine dinner but endure a dreadful reading that evening.

  The next morning, I meet with the six writers assigned to me. The author of the golf-course murder mystery is a neatly dressed woman in her sixties. The writer of the story about the two black friends in New York is a six-foot, distractingly pretty white girl. The man who wrote of the Southern family and its wayward uncle is painfully shy and wears an earring. The lady with the novel about the professional woman and the mental patient has indeed written from experience. The woman with the story about the ethnic enclave has plans to self-publish her book and direct-market it to Norwegian-interest societ
ies. The final writer, Bryan, brings me his complete manuscript. I talk the full half-hour with each of them.

  All my responsibilities met, I tour the old part of the inn before leaving the conference. Scott Fitzgerald stayed in Room 441 and the adjoining 443. I reach the top of the fourth-floor stairs at the same moment the elevator arrives.

  I must look lost.

  “Can I help you with something?” the elevator operator asks.

  I tell her my purpose.

  “Oh, certainly. Let’s see if it’s empty.” She leads me down the hall.

  One of Fitzgerald’s former rooms is occupied, but the other is being prepared for an afternoon arrival.

  “Go in and take a look. Most of the furnishings in the old part of the inn are original, though I can’t say for sure about his room.”

  The old rooms are smaller and much more spartan than the ones in the new wings. I’m not sure which of the two rooms is which, but this may be where the great writer, one hot and sleepless night a couple of weeks after breaking his shoulder, tripped and fell while making his way to the bathroom. Unable to get to his feet because of his body cast, he spent forty-five minutes—from four o’clock to nearly five—in crawling to the telephone to summon help. He subsequently developed arthritis in his shoulder and was confined to bed for several weeks. It was during that period, and perhaps in this room, that he twice attempted suicide.

  The cleaning girl is embarrassed, as am I. She busies herself in a corner. I don’t linger long.

  Poet James Seay shares my interest in literary ghosts. He once found Faulkner’s resting place with no more to go on than the memory of a couple of old oak trees he’d seen in a photo of the author’s burial. He’s been as far afield as Moscow, to seek out Boris Pasternak’s grave.

  “I have spent time in out-of-the-way rooms,” Seay has written, “rooms where people whose work I care about came and left something. It’s my theory that gifted people generate a tremendous energy—though it need not always be manifest on the surface—and a residuum of that energy is left behind in places, especially rooms, where the gifted burned up part of their gift.”

  Seay once piled a witch-medium and five of her acolytes into a station wagon and led them up the mountains to Asheville, where they held a seance in one of Fitzgerald’s old rooms at the Grove Park Inn. Seay brought a couple of Fitzgerald objects with him: a brown paper bag containing a copy of the “Crack-Up” articles and a book with photos of the author, tape covering the spine so the witches couldn’t identify it. They were unaware of Fitzgerald’s association with the inn. Indeed, they probably knew little of the man.

  After some heavy sweating and a few guttural utterances around the table, one of the acolytes took a pen and wrote down a psychic transmission coming in from the other realm. It said, simply, “Damn You Love,” which Seay took as a possible manifestation of what Fitzgerald meant when he commented that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Two names also came over the wire: Tony and Gloria. Seay supposed them to refer to Anthony and Gloria Patch of The Beautiful and Damned.

  That’s pretty slim pickings given the trouble he went to in organizing the event, but his results were still better than mine.

  It is nine or ten days after the conference when I receive in the mail a photocopy of my book’s cover, along with a same-sized mock-up of Bryan Aleksich’s proposed redesign. Of course, I have copies of my own book and don’t need a xerox of its cover. I suspect he has sent both covers so I can compare them on equal terms. I also suspect he is the kind of man who will feel indebted to me for reading his manuscript and so is trying to offer something of value in return. Still, the cover is a dead issue for me. Unsure of an appropriate response to Bryan’s gift, I don’t respond at all.

  Four weeks later, I get a call from him asking if he can send replacement pages for a small section of his manuscript he’s reworked. I confess that I’ve been busy with my own writing and have read only to about page 80.

  “Oh, are you finding it tough going?” he asks.

  I assure him not.

  Bryan proposes that I drop him a note when I’m done reading, after which he’ll phone me at home to discuss the manuscript at length.

  His call spurs me, and I finish the novel a week later. Its promising opening notwithstanding, the manuscript has structural problems. Too much space is given the mating dance of the air base’s pilots and love-lorn women. Even the flight scenes, which are Bryan’s special pride—a mock dogfight, a thunderstorm sequence—need a better context so they don’t become ends in themselves. It matters little that Bryan has been writing the story for well over three decades. It still needs another draft.

  I call to tell him all this. I catch him unaware; he wanted to be the one to phone me. I sense that I’m low-bridging him, though my intention is only to talk while the details are still in my mind. He leaves the line briefly to turn down his music; he fumbles for a pencil or his glasses. But he recovers quickly. He listens without argument or bitterness; he queries me on aspects of the story I haven’t brought up; he makes notes throughout; he takes the criticism just as it is meant; he continues to see the possibility of success.

  When I return his manuscript a couple of days later, I include a cover letter I hope will soothe any hurt feelings. “You don’t strike me as someone who needs to have things sugar-coated,” it reads in part, “so what you got the other day over the phone was my honest opinion. What I may not have expressed very well is my admiration for what you’ve accomplished. I think you’ve brought the novel most of the way to where it needs to be.”

  It crosses in the mail a gracious two-page letter from Bryan thanking me for my time.

  I still want to understand what writing means to him. Say he continues revising his novel until he grows infirm but never finds a publisher. How will that rank among the disappointments of his life? Is his writing an avocation or a need? Is he near the point of quitting?

  I receive an indirect answer to this last question five days later, when Bryan calls me at work. He says he had written the editor at Algonquin who was his first choice to review his manuscript sample at the conference. He has sent that editor fifty dollars—the same fee he paid for my services—and his first two chapters in the hope that the editor will now provide him a conference-style evaluation like the one he and I had in Asheville.

  He tells me this by way of background. The reason for his call is that, since writing the Algonquin editor, he has received his manuscript back from me and has noted the marks I made regarding grammar, punctuation, word choice, repetition, and the like. He is wondering if he ought to send the editor replacement pages.

  I tell him that what he has requested of the editor is rather unusual and that, no, he shouldn’t send replacement pages. All the same, I have to admire his moxie.

  Sometime during our conversation, I tell Bryan about my Asheville-area writers’ group and invite him to attend. I also describe the book I’m working on and confess my selfish interest in him and his novel.

  CHAPTER 6

  Cornucopia

  Where I live, the spring rains are quickly forgotten. Unless you water heavily, the ground begins to crack around the Fourth of July, and unshaded grass crunches underfoot like dry cereal. The air is humid, and the skies most summer afternoons fill with storm clouds, but any promise of moisture goes unfulfilled nine times out of ten. By late August, it might take you an hour to dig a hole big enough to plant a sapling, if you cared to try.

  But this year is an exception. The previous summer having been so parched that many towns instituted water restrictions, the unusually heavy winter rains are welcome. By early spring, the reservoirs are replenished and the rivers are running at normal levels. By mid-spring, they’re topped off. But spring conditions continue halfway into summer, and flooding results. People who’ve had bone-dry basements for thirty years now have standing water. Mo
ld begins to grow, starting underneath houses and working its way upward. An employee at a local hardware store tells me he’s selling fifty dehumidifiers a week.

  One Saturday, I brave our crawlspace to check for moisture and mold. Low and thick with cobwebs, it’s one of my least favorite places. At times, I’m flat on my belly squeezing under the water pipes, pulling myself along by my fingernails almost. It takes me forty-five minutes to make the circuit. There are puddles in a few places and, yes, what I take to be mold.

  Upon emerging, I’m covered with red-clay mud from top to bottom, front and back. It’s the dirtiest I’ve been since I was a kid—maybe ever. When I step in the back door to the kitchen, I learn the girls are out of sight upstairs, so I strip to my undershorts and throw my clothes out onto the deck, to be dealt with later.

  The phone rings. I’m close to it, but I ask my wife to answer, since I don’t want to touch anything. I can hear that it’s a woman.

  My wife hands me the phone.

  “This is Gail Godwin.”

  I’m better prepared than I was the first time I thought about approaching her. I’ve read several of her books and what print interviews and biographical material I’ve been able to find.

  But you’d never take me for an ace interviewer looking at me now.

  I wrote her a blind letter introducing myself, describing my book project, and asking for fifteen minutes of her time. Not knowing her preference for a means of responding, I gave her my home address, home phone, work phone, and e-mail address. I had no real expectation of hearing from her at all. If I did, I suspected it would be by mail, not by phone at home on a Saturday morning. This is not meant as a complaint by any means, but rather as a token of my surprise.

  I tell her about the rain, the mold, and the crawlspace, my free hand flailing futilely in my attempt to explain why I’m unable to talk just now. I finally calm down and ask if I can call her back a couple of days hence, to which she graciously agrees.