114619948 from 6 weeks to 6 years great writers great novels how long it took

7/29/2019 114619948 From 6 Weeks to 6 Years Great Writers Great Novels How Long It Took

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A SPORT AND A PASTIME

By James Salter

SATURDAY, THE SIXTH OF January. The sky is cloudless, blue, cold as ice and yet burning

the eyes. The sun is just weak enough to be felt through the windshield, no more. Its the

coldest day of the year. He takes a curve on the wrong side near Beaune and then, too

late, sees the figure near the edge of the trees, a figure in uniform who casually waves

him down, now it is two of them:gendarmes.Dean has crossed the solid line in the

middle of the road. Its quite serious. In France the agents dont fool around. One doesnt

misbehave. Slowly they walk across to the car. They have the faces of hunters,

unemotional and wise. They ask for his papers. His French vanishes. It crumbles to a few,inept words. He stammers and can answer only with difficulty. The policemen are

patient. They seem to be watching his mouth, as if they might understand him despite

himself. Not more than a glance on their part at Anne-Marie who sits still as a housemaid

while Dean struggles and lies. It seems the ordeal will never end. Finally they deliver a

warning, with gestures, and allow him to go on. Dean thanks them.

He knows hes been a fool. Its made even more clear by her silence, by something

in her face. He behaved like a frightened boy. Worse, he couldnt even find words.

Its lucky I dont speak French that well, he says, forcing a laugh.

Oui,she says.

All the way to Dijon she is somewhat disinterested in him. They ride in an unbroken

silence, the cold leaking in on them, the whole day blue with it, people, objects, the very

light. He pulls up before the Htel de la Cloche.

What do you think of it?

She doesnt reply.

Its only when the door of the room is opened that she suddenly changes.

Ah!she cries, cest trs jolie!

Dean is suspicious. Its ridiculously modern. The corridors they walked along were

built to grand dimensions, suitably gloomy, and now this: loud colors and the bareness of


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new furniture. The floor has been scraped and varnished. The yellow wallpaper is printed

with hundreds of small, colored balls. He wonders if shes being sarcastic, but no, she

begins to unpack happily. She looks into the bathroom. She finds it perfect. Dean is

annoyed. A wave of uncertainty comes over him. The afternoon begins to seem ominous.

It has an emptiness he suddenly cannot think how to fill.

Do we go out? she says.

Jesus, its bitter cold.

Pardon?

Its too cold, he says. Where do you want to go?

She shrugs. To see the stores.

Its freezing, he says.

Non,she complains.

The streets are crowded, cold weather or not. They walk around until six, looking in

windows, and before one good shop stand a long time admiring a black pullover.

Suddenly he decides to buy it for her. They go inside. It costs forty francs. Its more than

he thought. The vendeuse waits, her face expressionless. It seems they are all listening.

The pullover lies limp, a fine label gleaming within its throat. Forty francs. Finally he

nods.

All right, he says. Its like throwing away the oars.

She clings to his arm as they walk along afterwards, and he sees their reflection in

the chilly glass. They look like a working couple. He is thin, tough, no necktie. Its

evening. He imagines he looks like a boxer.

The faint warmth of the hotel room restores him. She begins to strip off her clothes

like a roommate and climb into bed. Dean undresses, too. He takes off his shoes. He

unbuttons his shirt slowly, with the assurance of an athlete.

It is almost dark. Her arms are caught beneath her. He feels her hesitate, then begin

to surrender. In the dusk, her desperate spasms fill him with the deepest, the most

profound joy.


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They have dinner on the rue Michelet, in a restaurant filled with the soft clatter of

plates, a long dinner that seems almost a reminiscence they are so pleased, so content to

eat in silence. They look up to find themselves exchanging smiles. At the end they

become sleepy. They stuff themselves with cheese, poisses, citeaux, specialties of a

region known for its food.

She cannot be satisfied. She will not let him alone. She removes her clothes and calls

to him. Once that night and twice the next morning he complies and in the darkness

between lies awake, the lights of Dijon faint on the ceiling, the boulevards still. Its a

bitter night. Flats of rain are passing. Heavy drops ring in the gutter outside their window,

but they are in a dovecote, they are pigeons beneath the eaves. The rain is falling all

around them. Deep in feathers, breathing softly, they lie. His sperm swims slowly inside

her, oozing out between her legs.

The wine has made him thirsty. At about three in the morning he gets up for water.

She turns her head sleepily and asks for some, too. She rises on one elbow to drink it. His

hand supports her back. Afterwards he opens the window wider. The rain is steady, hard

as pellets. He can hear it falling on the roofs of Dijon, shifting, moving then in a different

direction, across the avenues, down the black streets. He would like to kiss her behind the

knees. At last he sleeps.

He will never awaken, not from this dream, that much I know. He is already too

deep. He has reached the nadir. He cannot move. In the morning, in the clear, holy light

he moves like an affectionate father, drawing her to him and pulling the pillows down.


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THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN

By Christina Stead

Inside the Pollit family the ordinary mitigated, half-appreciative opposition of man

and woman has reached its full growth. Sam and his wife Henny are no longer on

speaking terms; they quarrel directly, but the rest of the time one parent says to a child

what the child repeats to the other parent. They are true opposites: Sams blue-eyed,

white-gold-haired, pale fatness is closer to Hennys haggard saffron-skinned blackness

than his light general spirit is to her dark particular one. The children lean to one side of

the universe or the other and ask for understanding: Sams answers were always to thepoint, full of facts; while the more one heard of Hennys answer, the more intriguing it

was, the less was understood. Beyond Sam stood the physical world, and beyond

Hennywhat?

Like Henny herself are Hennys treasure drawers, a chaos of laces, ribbons, gloves,

flowers, buttons, hairpins, pots of rouge, bits of mascara, foreign coins, medicines

(Hennys own aspirin, phenacetin, and pyramidon); often, as a treat, the children are

allowed to look in the drawers. A musky smell always came from Henriettas room, a

combination of dust, powder, scent, body odors that stirred the childrens blood, deep,

deep. At the center of the web of odors is theirMothering, Moth, Motherbunch, like a

tall crane in the reaches of the river, standing with one leg crooked and listening. She

would look fixedly at her vision and suddenly close her eyes. The child watching (there

was always one) would see nothing but the huge eyeball in its glove of flesh, deep-sunk

in the wrinkled skull-hole, the dark circle round it and the eyebrow far above, as it

seemed, while all her skin, unrelieved by brilliant eye, came out in its real shade, burnt

olive. She looked formidable in such moments, in her intemperate silence, the bitter set of

her discolored mouth with her uneven slender gamblers nose and scornful nostrils,

lengthening her sharp oval face, pulling the dry skinfolds. Then when she opened her

eyes there would shoot out a look of hate, horror, passion, or contempt.


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To the children she is a charming, slatternly witch; everything that she did was

right, right, her right: she claimed this right to do what she wished because of all her

sufferings, and all the children believed in her rights. She falls in a faint on the floor, and

the accustomed children run to get pillows, watch silently the death-like face, drawn and

yellow under its full black hair, the poor naked neck with its gooseflesh. She is

nourished on tea and an aspirin; tea, almost black, with toast and mustard pickles; a

one-man curry of a bit of cold meat, a hard-boiled egg, some currants, and an

onionas her mother says, All her life shes lived on gherkins and chilies and

Worcestershire sauce. She preferred pickled walnuts at school to candy. She sews,

darns, knits, embroiders. School had taught her only three things, to play Chopin (there

would steal through the listening house flights of notes, rounded as doves, wheeling over

housetops in the sleeping afternoon, Chopin or Brahms, escaping from Hennys lingering,

firm fingers), to paint watercolors, and to sew. It is life that has taught her to give it her

famous black look; to run through once again the rhymes, rituals, jokes, sayings,

storiesinestimable stones, unvalued jewelsthat the children beg her for; to drudge at

old tasks daily renewed; to lie and beg and borrow and sink deeper into debt; to deal the

cards out for the game she cheats at and has never won, an elaborate two-decked solitaire

played feverishly, until her mind was a darkness, until all the memories and the ease had

long since drained away leaving her sitting there, with blackened eyes, a yellow skin,

and straining wrinkles. Marriage, that had found Henny a gentle, neurotic creature

wearing silk next to the skin and expecting to have a good time at White House

receptions, has left her a thin, dark scarecrow, a dirty cracked plate, thats just what I

am. In the end, her black hair swiftly graying, she has turned into a dried-up, skinny,

funny old woman who cries out: Im an old woman, your mothers an old woman;

who cries out, Isnt it rotten luck? Isnt every rotten thing in life rotten luck?

All Hennys particularities, peculiarities, sum themselves up into a strange general

representativeness, so that she somehow stands for all women. She shares helplessly the

natural outlawry of womankind, of creatures who, left-handed, sidelong in the right-

handed, upright world of men, try to get around by hook or by crook, by a last weak


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winning sexual smile, the laws men have made for them. Henny was one of those

women who secretly symphathize with all women against all men; life was a rotten deal,

with men holding all the aces. Women, as people say, take everything personallyeven

Hennys generalizations of all existence are personal, and so living. As she does her

microscopic darning, sometimes a small mouse would run past, or even boldly stand

and inquisitively stare at her. Henny would look down at its monstrous pointed little face

calmly and go on with her work. She accepts the sooty little beings as house guests

except when she wakes to smell the musky penetrating odor of their passage; or when

she looks at one and sees that it is a pregnant mother; or when the moralist her husband

says that mice bring germs, and obliges her to kill them. She kills them; nevertheless,

though she despised animals, she felt involuntarily that the little marauder was much like

herself, trying to get by. Henny is an involuntary, hysterical moralist or none; as her

creator says, Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave

none to the foul world. And yet, and so, your heart goes out to her, because she is

miserably what life has made her, and makes her misery her only real claim on existence.

Her husband wants to be given credit for everything, even his mistakesespecially his

mistakes, which are always well-meaning, right-minded ones that in a better world would

be unmistaken. Henny is an honest liar; even Sams truths are ways to get his own way.


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THE GOOD EARTH

By Pearl S. Buck

IT WAS WANG LUNGS marriage day. At first, opening his eyes in the blackness of the

curtains about his bed, he could not think why the dawn seemed different from any other.

The house was still except for the faint, gasping cough of his old father, whose room was

opposite to his own across the middle room. Every morning the old mans cough was the

first sound to be heard. Wang Lung usually lay listening to it and moved only when he

heard it approaching nearer and when he heard the door of his fathers room squeak upon

its wooden hinges.

But this morning he did not wait. He sprang up and pushed aside the curtains of his

bed. It was a dark, ruddy dawn, and through a small square hole of a window, where the

tattered paper fluttered, a glimpse of bronze sky gleamed. He went to the hole and tore

the paper away.

It is spring and I do not need this, he muttered.

He was ashamed to say aloud that he wished the house to look neat on this day. The

hole was barely large enough to admit his hand and he thrust it out to feel of the air. A

small soft wind blew gently from the east, a wind mild and murmurous and full of rain. It

was a good omen. The fields needed rain for fruition. There would be no rain this day,

but within a few days, if this wind continued, there would be water. It was good.

Yesterday he had said to his father that if this brazen, glittering sunshine continued, the

wheat could not fill in the ear. Now it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him

well. Earth would bear fruit.

He hurried out into the middle room, drawing on his blue outer trousers as he went,

and knotting about the fullness at his waist his girdle of blue cotton cloth. He left his

upper body bare until he had heated water to bathe himself. He went into the shed which

was the kitchen, leaning against the house, and out of its dusk an ox twisted its head from


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behind the corner next the door and lowed at him deeply. The kitchen was made of

earthen bricks as the house was, great squares of earth dug from their own fields, and

thatched with straw from their own wheat. Out of their own earth had his grandfather in

his youth fashioned also the oven, baked and black with many years of meal preparing.

On top of this earthen structure stood a deep, round, iron cauldron.

This cauldron he filled partly full of water, dipping it with a half gourd from an

earthen jar that stood near, but he dipped cautiously, for water was precious. Then, after a

hesitation, he suddenly lifted the jar and emptied all the water into the cauldron. This day

he would bathe his whole body. Not since he was a child upon his mothers knee had

anyone looked upon his body. Today one would, and he would have it clean.

He went around the oven to the rear, and selecting a handful of the dry grass and

stalks standing in the corner of the kitchen, he arranged it delicately in the mouth of the

oven, making the most of every leaf. Then from an old flint and iron he caught a flame

and thrust it into the straw and there was a blaze.

This was the last morning he would have to light the fire. He had lit it every morning

since his mother died six years before. He had lit the fire, boiled water, and poured the

water into a bowl and taken it into the room where his father sat upon his bed, coughing

and fumbling for his shoes upon the floor. Every morning for these six years the old man

had waited for his son to bring in hot water to ease him of his morning coughing. Now

father and son could rest. There was a woman coming to the house. Never again would

Wang Lung have to rise summer and winter at dawn to light the fire. He could lie in his

bed and wait, and he also would have a bowl of water brought to him, and if the earth

were fruitful there would be tea leaves in the water. Once in some years it was so.

And if the woman wearied, there would be her children to light the fire, the many

children she would bear to Wang Lung. Wang Lung stopped, struck by the thought of

children running in and out of their three rooms. Three rooms had always seemed much

to them, a house half empty since his mother died. They were always having to resist

relatives who were more crowdedhis uncle, with his endless brood of children,

coaxing.


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Now, how can two lone men need so much room? Cannot father and son sleep

together? The warmth of the young ones body will comfort the old ones cough.

But the father always replied, I am saving my bed for my grandson. He will warm

my bones in my age.

Now the grandsons were coming, grandsons upon grandsons! They would have to

put beds along the walls and in the middle room. The house would be full of beds. The

blaze in the oven died down while Wang Lung thought of all the beds there would be in

the half empty house, and the water began to chill in the cauldron. The shadowy figure of

the old man appeared in the doorway, holding his unbuttoned garments about him. He

was coughing and spitting and he gasped.

How is it that there is not water yet to heat my lungs?

Wang Lung stared and recalled himself and was ashamed.

This fuel is damp, he muttered from behind the stove. The damp wind

The old man continued to cough perseveringly and would not cease until the water

boiled. Wang Lung dipped some into a bowl, and then, after a moment, he opened a

glazed jar that stood upon a ledge of the stove and took from it a dozen or so of the curled

dried leaves and sprinkled them upon the surface of the water. The old mans eyes

opened greedily and immediately he began to complain.

Why are you wasteful? Tea is like eating silver.

It is the day, replied Wang Lung with a short laugh. Eat and be comforted.


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BALTHAZAR

By Lawrence Durrell

PART I

I

Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl

ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert:

prophets tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its

huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to

gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph.

Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the

Harpoon Men Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac.

summer: buff sand, hot marble sky.

autumn: swollen bruise-greys.

winter: freezing snow, cool sand.

clear sky panels, glittering with mica.

washed delta greens.

magnificent starscapes.

And spring? Ah! there is no spring in the Delta, no sense of

refreshment and renewal in things. One is plunged out of winter into: wax

effigy of a summer too hot to breathe. But here, at least, in Alexandria, the

sea-breaths save us from the tideless weight of summer nothingness,

creeping over the bar among the warships, to flutter the striped awnings of


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the cafs upon the Grande Corniche. I would never have The city,

half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our

memory. Why must I return to it night after night, writing here by the fire of

carob-wood while the Aegean wind clutches at this island house, clutching

and releasing it, bending back the cypresses like bows? Have I not said

enough about Alexandria? Am I to be reinfected once more by the dream of

it and the memory of its inhabitants? Dreams I had thought safely locked up

on paper, confided to the strong-rooms of memory! You will think I am

indulging myself. It is not so. A single chance factor has altered everything,

has turned me back upon my tracks. A memory which catches sight of itself

in a mirror.

Justine, Melissa, Clea. There were so few of us really you would

have thought them easily disposed of in a single book, would you not? So

would I, so did I. Dispersed now by time and circumstance, the circuit

broken forever.

I had set myself the task of trying to recover them in words, reinstate

them in memory, allot to each his and her position in my time. Selfishly.

And with that writing complete, I felt that I had turned a key upon the dolls

house of our actions. Indeed, I saw my lovers and friends no longer as living

people but as coloured transfers of the mind; inhabiting my papers now, no

longer the city, like tapestry figures. It was difficult to concede to them any

more common reality than to the words I had used about them. What has

recalled me to myself?

But in order to go on, it is necessary to go back: not that anything I

wrote about them is untrue, far from it. Yet when I wrote, the full facts were


26/28

not at my disposal. The picture I drew was a provisional one like the

picture of a lost civilization deduced from a few fragmented vases, an

inscribed tablet, an amulet, some human bones, a gold smiling death-mask.

***

We live writes Pursewarden somewhere lives based upon selected

fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time

not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of

reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the

whole picture is changed. Something of this order.

And as for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no

such animals. Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing pre-dispositions.

Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion but a

necessary illusion if we are to love!

As for the something that remains constant the shy kiss of Melissa

is predictable, for example (amateurish as an early form of printing), or the

frowns of Justine, which cast a shadow over those blazing dark eyes

orbits of the Sphinx at noon. In the end says Pursewarden everything will

be found to be true of everybody. Saint and Villain are co-sharers. He is

right.

I am making every attempt to be matter-of-fact.

***


27/28

In the last letter which reached me from Balthazar he wrote: I think

of you often and not without a certain grim humour. You have retired to

your island, with, as you think, all the data about us and our lives. No doubt

you are bringing us to judgement on paper in the manner of writers. I wish I

could see the result. It must fall very far short of truth: I mean such truths as

I could tell you about us all even perhaps about yourself. Or the truths

Clea could tell you (she is in Paris on a visit and has stopped writing to me

recently). I picture you, wise one, poring overMoeurs, the diaries of Justine,

Nessim, etc., imagining that the truth is to be found in them. Wrong! Wrong!

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person.

Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at

least, not about love. Do you know whom Justine really loved? You believed

it was yourself, did you not? Confess!

My only answer was to send him the huge bundle of paper which had

grown up so stiffly under my slow pen and to which I had loosely given her

name as a title though Cahiers would have done just as well. Months

passed after this a blessed silence indeed, for it suggested that my critic

had been satisfied, silenced.


28/28

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