The Novel Page 7

  The next day, bundled in warm clothing, the three of us sat down together at a site Zollicoffer reserved for important meetings and reflections, the belvedere overlooking the boulders that dotted the marsh in back of his house.

  ‘I need the advice of you two,’ I said. ‘You’ve both read the manuscript in the past few days and must have formed opinions. I’d like to hear your judgments, but first let me tell you what happened in New York.’ Repeating only the bad news about the three adverse critical reactions and the distressing loss of prepublication sales and orders, I concluded: ‘At a solemn meeting yesterday of all concerned, including Miss Crane, they agreed with the outside critics. The new novel is not as interesting as the former ones that readers liked so well, and they think I should rewrite it to provide more human interest.’

  ‘What did Miss Crane say?’ Emma asked almost angrily.

  ‘Her exact words were: “I must agree with them, Mr. Yoder. I don’t think it came out of your top drawer.” ’

  ‘She ought to have her mouth washed out with soap.’

  ‘The problem is, was she right? Is there something basically wrong with the manuscript?’

  For some moments we sat looking at the ice spots where water had frozen and at the giant boulders, which made us seem so puny, and it was this sense of the power of the land about which I had written that encouraged Zollicoffer to blurt out: ‘Lukas, it’s the best of the lot. At last you write like an honest Dutchman who knows where he’s at and what he is. Don’t change nothin’.’

  Emma was even more forceful: ‘I read it while you were in New York. Couldn’t put it down. It deals with real people facing real problems. The other novels had a sense of history. The Creamery dealt with the 1920s. The Fields could have happened now, but you placed it in the thirties, to catch the depression. But this one is today’s story. It’s our blood and guts, and I agree with Herman. Change nothing.’ As soon as she said this, she chuckled: ‘Oh, edit it—as always. I marked some frightful grammatical errors. But the main thrust? Let it stand. It’s as solid as those rocks out there.’

  I was heartened by these votes of confidence, but I could not completely trust them, for they came from amateur readers. There was, however, one woman in Grenzler whose literary opinion I respected and often sought. She was Martha Benelli, a thirty-five-year-old divorcée who had kicked her hard-drinking husband out of the house and taken a job as the Dresden librarian. A graduate of Penn State with an M.A. in American lit., she had an infectious love of books, especially novels, and had proved invaluable to me as someone who could track down almost any tome I needed, no matter how arcane. Born a Mennonite with the family name of Zigenfusser, she knew Pennsylvania Dutch material better than I and took pleasure in introducing me to old books she enjoyed.

  When I handed her my copy of the manuscript I said: ‘You’ve helped me so much on this, I wondered if I could persuade you to skim it and give me your opinion?’ When she reached for the sheaf of paper as if it were a baby, I faced an embarrassing moment, but I had to forge ahead: ‘I’m asking for a professional opinion, and I’d be honored if you’d accept a fee of two hundred dollars.’ To my delight she did not, out of modesty, beg off: ‘You know I’d do it for nothing, but I could use the money,’ and she must have read late into the nights because two days later she telephoned her report.

  ‘A substantial change in direction, n’est-ce-pas? High time and wonderfully successful.’

  ‘Will readers stay with it?’

  ‘They’ll devour it. Especially those familiar with your work. They’ll see it as a logical progression.’

  ‘Not too cerebral?’

  ‘Mr. Yoder, a large proportion of readers are far more cerebral than most critics think. Schlock does seem to dominate the best-seller lists, but there’s always that reassuring handful of really fine books that finds a place there, too. I know. I circulate the good ones.’

  ‘Could I drop over and talk with you?’

  ‘For your two hundred dollars you’ve earned the right to a whole seminar.’

  I drove directly to the library, which was nestled in a park at the edge of town, and found her waiting for me with my manuscript on her desk, some of its pages flagged with yellow strips containing her recommendations regarding certain passages. Before she could go into her reactions to the novel, I spelled out the negative comments it had received, then asked her opinion.

  ‘I can understand why the big chains might draw back from this one. It’s not perfect and perhaps it’s too different from what went before. But it’s a corking good read, with the additional advantage of having a solid content. Obviously people in these parts will gobble it up, but so will readers across the country.’

  I then confided that three quite knowledgeable experts had recommended that I rework the novel to make it more acceptable to the usual customer of the big chains, and she snorted: ‘To hell with that. You’ve felt driven to do something new and wonderfully rich. If they don’t like it now, they will, down the line.’

  She then proceeded to defend her editorial recommendations, and as she lectured me I thought: What a solid, rosy-faced Dutch girl she is! Flaxen braids that would be at home in the Palatinate. And a sharp mind. Dresden does produce good citizens and that’s what this novel is about. If she and Zollicoffer like it, for their different reasons, it can’t be as bad as New York says.

  When I left, my mind was made up. I would call New York to inform them that I would not do the rewriting they had suggested. I was not unhappy with that decision, but the call was delayed, because when I reached home at eleven-thirty Emma told me: ‘Herman was so helpful the other day, and has been through the years, that I invited him and Frieda to lunch with us in town. He said he didn’t want dinner in a public restaurant, but you know Frieda. Always ready for a new meal in a new place, and we’re to pick them up as we drive into town.’

  Our route took us along the back road to Neumunster and the Cut Off, and as we came down the slope leading to the intersection where the Fenstermacher farm lay, we saw to our disgust that a big bulldozer was at work knocking down the very barn from which I had rescued my three hex signs only a few days ago.

  None of us in the car were particularly distressed to see the wooden sections of the old barn go, because generations of improvident Fenstermachers had allowed that part to fall into sad disrepair, but when the bulldozer started to attack that handsome stonework from which the wooden sections arose, Frieda cried: ‘No! No! Save that one yet,’ for with her stolid appreciation of nice, she could visualize the various uses to which the lovely wall with its engaging shadows and rugged protuberances could be put. When the massive machine plowed ahead, crushing the wall, she almost wept: ‘They could have let it stand already.’

  My attention was focused on quite another matter, for from the hidden side of the barn there now emerged a second red bulldozer, smaller than the first but easier to operate. On its seat perched the Fenstermacher boy Applebutter, using his machine to knock down the remaining wooden portions, crunching them beneath the treads of his dozer. As I watched him I thought he represented much of what I had written about in Stone Walls: An oaf like him wouldn’t attack stone. Too difficult. He’d always go for the easier wood. Then suddenly I shouted: ‘No! Stop!’ and leaped from the car because Applebutter’s machine was heading directly toward a fallen section of the wall that contained a splendid red-and-green hex sign of the size best suited to form the central section of one of my paintings. ‘I want that! Applebutter, save that sign!’ He must have heard my cry, for I was close to him when I shouted, and surely he saw me waving my arms, but he headed his dozer right at the fallen hex and pulverized it with his massive treads.

  At lunch I said little, for ideas and images were coursing through my mind, and it seemed to me that this latest example of the humiliation of the land and its buildings was exactly the focus of concern in my manuscript, so I excused myself to telephone Ms. Marmelle in New York: ‘I stayed awake last night, pond
ering our meeting the other day. I think I understand the points you and Mr. MacBain were making, and I assure you I’ve reviewed them painfully. I agree with what you told MacBain: “The story line could be modified with a minimum of trouble. Mr. Yoder and I know exactly what could be done.” You were right. It could be done, but it would be very wrong to try. Insofar as the big ideas are concerned, we’ll let the novel stand as it is,’ and after a few courtesy exchanges I hung up.

  The discussions I’d had in New York, my moody reflections on the trip home, and my decision regarding the sanctity of my manuscript propelled me into an evaluation of my life as a writer, and that evening as I sat in my study facing my typewriter but not using it, I started thinking:

  ‘How strange! My life is kept in a cocoon guarded by three women: Emma, Ms. Marmelle, Miss Crane. I remain here in my study with a typewriter and allow them to make the decisions. So far they’ve protected me admirably, and I have no regrets, but I doubt that a macho man would be content with the arrangement. I am.

  ‘I live in a world that changes so rapidly I can’t keep up. I’d not like to guess how books will be printed or distributed twenty years from now. That was pretty scary, my article for the nature magazine in California. Candace put it on a floppy disk here in Dresden, delivered it by phone to a compatible word processor in Los Angeles, where they made some editorial changes and sent it on, again by phone to a printing firm in Palo Alto, and they set it automatically into type and printed it in the magazine. Amazing.

  ‘On my typewriter I print the symbol m to represent a significant part of the idea I’m playing with. Then my secretary reads my symbol and uses her word processor to implant on her floppy disk not my symbol m but the electrical representation of the concept m-ness. By telephone that electrical representation is lifted across the continent to a compatible processor in Southern California, where it is massaged editorially, as they say, and sent by another telephone call to the printer in Northern California.

  ‘Now, what the printer receives is still merely an electrical impulse that says: At this point in the finished product we want some visual representation of m-ness, but we don’t know in what typeface, what size, or what leading between the lines, nor do we know how long the lines will be nor how many to a page. All we know is that it’s a lower-case m, not a capital M, because if we wanted that, the electrical reminder would be entirely different.

  ‘So the Palo Alto printer puts the California version of my floppy disk in his printing machine and cranks in a handful of instructions: what typeface, whether normal, boldface or italic, what size, what leading between lines, etc., and when all the instructions have been entered and acknowledged, the machine does the rest. Wherever my original concept of m-ness appears, that miraculous machine translates it into a clear mark on the printed page. I communicate with my readers by electrical impulses.

  ‘If the essence of my manuscript resides in the electrical impulses on that floppy disk, the narrative could be lifted off and distributed in almost any form that has been devised. Indeed, the time may come, and very soon, when there will be no necessity to bother with the intermediate form of a book; the material on the original floppy disk might leapfrog in some mysterious way right into the home of the intended reader. No writer in 1990 can visualize what form his or her book might take by the end of this century.’

  As I leaned back from my silent typewriter I felt as if I knew more about the mystery of writing than ever before: ‘I may not understand technical miracles, but of one thing I’m sure. Regardless of how the industry handles the symbols of the writer when he gets through assembling them, no matter how the book of the future is going to look, it’ll still need women and men who know how to move words about, how to tell a story, how to keep a narrative flowing.’

  My self-esteem had been wounded by the negative news in New York, but as I pushed myself away from my typewriter I had an abiding consolation: The writer will always be needed, to remind others who can’t write what really happened and what it meant. Walls is a powerful statement, and ten years from now, readers will embrace it.

  As Emma and I went to bed I told her: ‘In the discussion with you and Herman at lunch the other day I left out one fact that you ought to know. The reverses in New York mean that you and I are three million dollars poorer than we were last week. How does that shake your apple tree?’ and she said: ‘I can’t feel the difference. But I’m sure of one thing. Readers aren’t stupid. They’re going to love this book.’ And with that reassuring thought, we went to sleep.

  The weeks following my two-day visit to New York would prove the most productive of this exciting year. Each morning I rose at seven, dashed cold water on my face, combed my hair, brushed my teeth, drank a large glass of unsweetened grapefruit juice and went directly to my typewriter, where I worked without interruption until twelve-thirty, by which time I was exhausted.

  I had before me some fifteen to twenty closely typed pages of Ms. Marmelle’s queries and suggestions relating to a hundred-page segment of my manuscript, her questions having been submitted in a format she had devised during her first days at Kinetic. A page of my manuscript as printed out by the word processor invariably contained twenty-six lines, the first thirteen of which she designated by arabic numerals starting at the top. The bottom thirteen she indicated by the numbers 13 down to 1, starting from the middle, but each designated by an asterisk, 13*, at the middle, down to 1*, at the bottom. Her notes for any given page, say 37, thus became:

  37-4 subject and verb do not agree in number

  37-11 cannot find antecedent of pronoun its

  37-11* on page 19 you say twice Marian is blue-eyed, how now brown cow?

  37-3* I like this bit very much and recommend you consider restating in later chapter to remind the reader

  Hour after hour I grappled with the problems she had identified, the blatant weaknesses she had spotted in the flow of the narrative; sometimes I agreed with her suggestions, quite often I saw no merit in them, but one type of criticism I attended to without exception:

  49-11* I see what effect you’re trying to achieve in this paragraph, but don’t believe you’ve caught it. Last half sags, drags. Idea good, execution not. I’d redo this, maybe the entire page to catch and maintain the right mood.

  Sometimes as I strained to perfect a troublesome paragraph, recasting and rearranging the five sentences, I would smile and think: I wonder what the young people who say so blandly ‘I want to be a writer’ would say if they saw this pile of her queries, my responses and that growing pile of my attempts to improve what didn’t work?

  This kind of intense work placed such heavy demands upon my mental and nervous systems that by midday I felt thoroughly depleted; I would push myself away from my desk, abandoning the rest of the manuscript, and wander down into the kitchen, shaking my arms and hands as I went. Turning on the radio that Emma kept in the kitchen, I would listen to the twelve o’clock news as I watched her prepare my dinner. In Dutch families the meals are breakfast, dinner, supper—a hangover from the colonial ground-clearing days when men worked with axes and ropes felling trees from dawn till midday and came in famished, expecting a big meal. Even today the Mennonite men, who do their heaviest farm work in the mornings, want not lunch when they stop but a full dinner.

  Emma modified this routine for me, because she had learned that a big noon meal of fried foods, two glasses of milk and a slab of apple pie made me lethargic in the afternoon, and that was counterproductive. She gave me small meals, but when Fenstermacher’s scrapple became available in the winter months, she did make a concession: three days a week she served me two thin slices of the delicacy, nicely browned in butter, with an oversize cruet of molasses on the side. But she refused to serve dessert, no matter how light, at dinner; she saved that for supper.

  When I saw that this day I was to be favored with scrapple, I expressed pleasure: ‘Did a lot of good work this morning, and I’m ready for something good. Smells as if you had it coo
king.’

  She sat with me as I ate, eating her own single slice of scrapple with a taste of ketchup on the side, and asked between bites: ‘What really happened in New York? You’ve told me only the bad part of the story.’

  ‘Ms. Marmelle said …’

  ‘Has she ever been married? Why the Ms.?’

  ‘I don’t know. Many young women in New York offices use it.’

  ‘How old would you say she is?’ On and on went the questions, moving on to business details, until she had a fairly clear understanding of what had transpired in the two meetings, except that I told her nothing about the various bits of good news I’d had about the foreign sales of Stone Walls, the many new editions of my older books, and the financial success of the book here at home, even before the manuscript was completed. I deplored such talk from anybody, so I invited her to telephone the two offices to learn at first hand what was happening. I had learned that such calls placed her in the heart of my career and gave her a strong feeling of participation.

  But one thing I had learned was too good to keep secret: ‘Something did happen that pleased me very much. A motion picture company with an odd partnership but lots of money is taking an option on Shunning. They say they want to make what they call an art film, well cast, with careful attention to detail and a spacious development. I’d like that, so if they telephone, I want to talk with them.’

  I had touched upon one of the few points of friction in our marriage: Emma had such a proprietary interest in both my career and my well-being that she insisted on opening incoming mail and answering phone calls so that she could talk briefly with whoever wanted to speak with me, thus learning for herself what was happening at Kinetic and Miss Crane’s. But in recent years it had become her pleasure to tell whoever was calling: ‘He’s at work now. Call back later.’ This gave her a sense of shared power in my work and also of control. Of course, if I heard her doing it I would lift the phone in the study and interrupt to take the call. This irritated her, and she would growl when the conversation ended: ‘I’m trying to protect you. They can call later,’ and I would ask: ‘Why have them make two calls?’ and her reply would be: ‘You’re busier than they are. Besides, they have a secretary to make the call in the first place.’