Habits

“It might be dangerous for you to have too much time to write. I mean if you took off a year and had nothing else to do but write and weren’t used to doing it all the time then you might get discouraged.”

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

I want to clarify that I am not taking a year off to write. I have several day jobs that fortunately don’t require me to be in a particular place at a particular time, leaving me with far more freedom that many other writers with day jobs. Still, the daily work has to be done. I write textbooks and newsletters as my bread and butter along with teaching the ins and outs of business law to undergraduate students. Plus, I run a small e-press that includes a literary magazine and work by emerging writers like J. Calvin Pierce, Adrienne Terrell Washington and John Pistelli, among others.

What I will be doing is setting aside the two hours O’Connor could devote to writing every day for the more creative projects - especially my WWI occupation saga based on family stories told during my childhood in post-war Norway. Those hours will be in full swing as soon as the relocation is complete. For now, as we prepare for the move, writing time is about an hour.

The Finding Flannery Project explained

Finding Flannery is an experiment in what Padgett Powell calls drafting in the mind of a genius. Let me be clear - I am no genius. Flannery O’Connor most certainly was. Nonetheless, I am compelled to answer the question Powell posits thus in his brilliant essay Breathing the Same Air as Genius in the May 2003 issue of The Oxford American. He asks:

If you could breath the same air over the same ground, could you draft in the mind of a genius?

Folly perhaps, but in the words of Savannah’s great songwriter, Johnny Mercer, Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Thread.

To Draft in the Mind of a Genius

I just read Padgett Powell’s marvelous essay Breathing the Same Air as Genius in the May 2003 issue of The Oxford American in which he recounts a trip to Andalusia that included spending time with Flannery O’Connor’s cousin and literary executor Louise Florencourt. (http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2013/may/28/issue-47-breathing-same-air-genius/)

Powell describes the bedroom where O’Connor wrote thus:

The desk is not a foot from the bed, about wheelchair-heave distance, that distance you lift yourself from one conveyance to another without walking.

I look around, sitting as I am in my Harrisburg home’s library in a comfortable armchair at a proper ergonomically designed desk and working on a laptop with software that has removed many of the barriers to clean, spell-checked prose and feel shame - shame that I haven’t written more when the tools at my disposal remove every excuse. Not to mention that I am not afflicted with a serious disease such as the one that left O’Connor with only enough energy to write two hours per day. But write she did, from the first floor bedroom.
June approaches and I am, frankly, more than a little shaken. Powell asks why one goes to a writer’s house and answers his question with a quote from Good County People. He answers his question with another - thus -

If you could breath the same air over the same ground, could you draft in the mind of a genius?

Why else indeed?

Today's word count - 167

Research

It’s hard to be omniscient. It takes a hell of a lot of research! Take, for example, the weather on December 12, 1943 outside Oslo (so that I have details framing the printing by Munch of The Kiss in the Field). Cold? Probably. How cold? Snowy? Windy? Sunny? Finding weather history for the US is pretty easy, but for a day in occupied Norway, it’s a challenge. NOAA doesn’t have the date, so one must find other sourcea. I will likely have to rely on newspapers - probably Aftenposten, which has online archives of its papers from the era for a price. I may purchase a month’s access and concentrate my research during that time.
There are other details I also need - I absolutely need to know what play (if any) took place on April 8, 1940 at the National Theatre. I do know it was a Monday, so perhaps no performance.

Word count today - 15

A Munch print inspiration

Today I made my way to the National Gallery in Washington, DC for the Edvard Munch: 150 Anniversary Tribute. The exhibit is small, but includes a number of the master’s best known images included the iconic Scream and the Madonna.
The most striking woodcut print in my mind, however, was an ochre print of a couple kissing, dated 1943. Further research dates the print to Munch’s last birthday - December 12, 1943. Apparently Munch chose his birthday to personally print the image. He died just five weeks later, never seeing his country liberated. The Kiss in the Field is therefore one of the last pieces Munch worked on. The image will find its way into the novel somehow - most likely as part of subplot I’ve temporarily designated as the last muse segments. Tonight - remembering the image - tomorrow a scene inspired by the image.

It Begins

“I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.”

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

I have made progress today. While I am not yet up to the two hours Flannery managed despite her epic battle with Lupus (I have the equivalent of a ‘day job’ writing newsletters and textbooks and teaching business law to undergraduate students), I am working on several “real” writing projects regularly and expect once we are settled in the garden apartment that I will hit Flannery’s mark.

Already I have set up the Frieze of Life in Scrivener, a program that nicely allows for the modular way I write. By splitting up the material I already have from my JHU thesis, I now have separate and easily moveable scenes for each completed part. Scenes can be inserted and moved around easily.

Today’s actual output: One new scene - 150 words and one rewritten scene - 25 words. Not much but a start which should pick up now that the framework is in place.

Preemptive Redemption?

Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei would seem a strange choice to introduce a coup - especially one that ushered the Nazis in. But that’s exactly what happened when Vidkun Quisling rushed to the NRK - the official Norwegian radio broadcasting network - to announce that during the turmoil following the German invasion of April 9, 1940 it was he who was in charge. What’s unclear is whether Quisling himself selected the introductory music or whether the station director did. Perhaps it was simply the next record on the phonograph. We may never know.

But a fiction writer can speculate. The Kol Nidrei opens services for the Day of Atonement and essentially allows the repudiation of oaths taken in the past year and into the coming year. Was Quisling - who was a Christian with a good understanding of the Judaism - presume to exempt himself from the oath to German power he would make momentarily? Was this the equivalent of going on the air with his fingers crossed behind his back?

On Epiphanies, Flannery and Redemption

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

The grandmother in Flannery’s classic short story has an epiphany as she faces the Misfit’s gun barrel - a moment of clarity about what it means to be part of the human family when she blurts out "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children !" before the bullet hits.

That has me wondering about a scene in my WWII novel in which, at the end of the occupation, Quisling faces the firing squad for his conviction as a traitor. Since the novel is omniscient, I theoretically can get inside his head and outside his head easily. The question, though, is whether facing those bullets meant a moment of clarity - an epiphany - or not. If it does then ultimately if one adheres to the Catholic and larger Christian point of view, then there is salvation. The temptation is to rob him of humanity and leave him defiant to the end. That might be consistent with what I know of his writings. Yet he professed a form (his own) of Christianity which presumably would include the notion of salvation.

I am torn between my own feelings of vengeance on behalf of family long dead and a personal belief in redemption. I’ll let it fester a bit longer.

The Gnome in the Rear View Mirror

There’s a parable of sorts they tell in my family, though I think most of them get the whole thing wrong. Like all mythical Norwegian farms, the farm in this story is home to not just the farmer and his wife, but also to a nisse. A nisse is a mischievous little creature not unlike the Gnome of Travelocity. Unless our good farmer leaves out porridge and other goodies during the long, hard and cold winters, the resident nisse will wreak havoc with the livestock, the winter reserves and the spring planting.

In the story my family tells, the farmer has had quite enough of his nisse. So he sells the farm, packs up the pots and pans, hitches up the horses to the wagon and heads for greener nisse free pastures. When he arrives at the new farmstead, he goes to the back of the wagon. There, he finds his nisse sitting quietly at the end of the wagon, dangling his feet happily and balancing the belongings he has tied in a bundle on a stick over his shoulder. 

“We’re finally here,” says the nisse with a wink and a smile.

I always found the story charming and reflected on what I thought was the moral of the story - don’t run away from your problems but face them head-on instead. 

But over and over, every time someone else in the family tells this story, the moral is something else entirely. It’s a warning to never, ever leave where you are and head somewhere else. Never. Ever. Leave. No good will come of it. Yes, we have abandonment issues.

And no good has come of moving, by some measures. My mother left Norway the year they discovered oil for San Francisco. She then left San Francisco the year before real estate boomed. And so on. So the message is clear - stay put, don’t ever leave. And I haven’t, for 28 years.

As you may imagine, I’ve been hearing a lot about that pesky nisse lately. I’ll be looking through the rear view mirror for telltale legs dangling into view and praying my interpretation is the right one.

The Books They Carried 2.0

I have added the Pacific Theater to the book list that will accompany us to Savannah. Back When We Were Orphans practically jumped off the shelf as did The Rape of Nanking. What a terrible loss for the narrative nonfiction world when Iris Chang committed suicide. The Last Samurai goes. And Hiroshima of course. Add to that several shelves on opening up the East and a handful of books on the development of the atomic bomb. All suddenly necessary. Plus, Copenhagen - the absolutely brilliant play about atom splitting research. 

Reality and its escape

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

Flannery O’Connor

I have been staring today. The occasion was a memorial service and it has yielded enough material for an outline for a connected short story collection, all orbiting around reality and attempts to escape its pull. The idea, literally and figuratively, begins with the splitting of atoms writ large we call Hiroshima. Hiroshima. Say it and you immediately feel the weight of civilization that crushed Miss. Sasaki in John Hersey’s brilliant 1946 account. 

More on this later as I sketch out the story ideas.

What books to bring?

OK - it’s down to packing. Books mainly. Even after culling the shelves of paperbacks and duplicates, there are still (perhaps literally) tons of books to sift through. It’s obvious that quite a few books will end up in storage for a while. And it’s equally obvious that while I own a Kindle, I don’t much use it. Given a choice between hardback, paperback or pixels, I chose hardback every time.

Obvious choices - anything by and about Flannery O’Connor. Anything by or about other Southern writers. Conrad Aiken’s poetry and short stories. Carson McCullers. Truman Capote. Harper Lee. Tennessee Williams. Maybe even John Grisham.

Other obvious choices - anything and everything about World War II - restricted to the European theater to get the book count down. Especially important are several books inherited from my Great Uncle Kris, including a first hand account by a Norwegian death camp survivor written just a few years after the end of the occupation. And a fascinating little book by Quisling published during the occupation and which bears a dirty boot print on the title page. (To be clear - that one was not part of my family library - but discovered on Ebay a few years ago.)

Anything and everything on Edvard Munch, who died during the last year of occupation and who refused to cooperate with the occupiers but whose corpse was given a grand Nazi funeral procession.

Less obvious choices - a collection of Faberge books and guides - because there’s a Quisling connection. By some accounts, Quisling owned an egg, perhaps purchased during a famine relief trip to Russia in the years before the war. When his widow died in 1984, it was listed in the auction notes for her estate though I haven’t yet been able to track its travels since then.

A read-off

It’s on. A James Baldwin - Flannery O’Connor read-off culminating in viewing Wise Blood and The Price of the Ticket via Netflix. And it looks like our first writerly visitor will be journalist and friend Adrienne Terrell Washington. We will debate race relations as viewed through the eyes of Baldwin and O'Connor and record the event. 

Writing in a writer's house

It’s official - beginning June 1, 2013, I will be living and (more importantly) writing in the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah. My husband and fellow writer and I have been wanting to relocate to Savannah for well over a decade now, but the right opportunity never quite came our way. First we tried to buy an old victorian, only to find that the seller didn't quite have title, having contracted to buy it out of a foreclosure that wasn't quite legitimate. That's right, we had a contract to buy a house from a guy who had a contract to buy the house from a bank that didn't have title. So I had packed up my library (no small feat) for no good reason. Ah, Savannah. 

Facebook to the rescue. About three weeks ago, I saw a notice from the Childhood Home that the garden apartment was available for the first time in ten years. I immediately made contact, shamelessly pitching ourselves as writers who would be perfect tenants. With the help of friends and neighbors willing to vouch for our bona fides, we nabbed the place. And I packed some of the books up again.

My dear thesis advisor, Margaret Myers, once said she would deface my grave if I didn’t finish my novel. Really, she said that. (Margaret - such a Savannah act that would be.) So here’s the plan. Under the watchful eye of Flannery, I will finish the novel I began at JHU. I will re-read her works, her letters, her lectures and comment on them on this blog. Think of it as Julie and Julia meet Southern Gothic. 

Wish me luck. Keep in touch. And if you're down this way, look me up. I'll be easy to find.

Why Flannery?

I have a dear friend who, shall we say, does not share my enthusiasm for all things Flannery. I thought of her when I recently came across a letter between O’Connor and playwright Maryat Lee.

The 1959 letter touches on everything from race relations to cocktail parties, Flannery O’Connor uses friend Brainard Cheney as a foil to explain her view of race relations in the South and in the Northeast - particularly urbane and sophisticated New York City. Mr. Cheney, she says, is trying to write a novel “set in interracial circles in New York,” but after two weeks in Gotham has been “unable to meet one Negro” socially. Cheney, she explains, would probably like to meet James Baldwin.

O’Connor apparently had been asked to see James Baldwin in Georgia but declined to do so because it would cause the “greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion.” She added that she had read one of his stories and “it was a good one.”

She ends the letter by suggesting that if Cheney wants to try again, “I’ll get him to call you and maybe you could scout up a few,” though she thinks he will instead rely on his imagination.

I don’t know whether Cheney ever met Baldwin or which story of Baldwin’s O’Connor read and found to be “a good one.” It could not have been “Going to Meet the Man,” which was not written until after O’Connor died. Nor did Cheney’s imagination allow him to finish that Northeast interracial novel - all his published works are set in the rural South.

So Adrienne, if you are reading this, I’d like to suggest that, in the parlance of our times, “it’s complicated.” Or not. So let’s talk soon - at Flannery’s.

Nikolas' Ghost

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. Mine was (is) in the hospital, having suffered a “little” heart attack a few days earlier. She’s got her iPad on her lap as she sits propped up in a vinyl recliner. We discuss the latest news from the homeland as she scrolls through Aftenposten online. Inevitably - because it always does - the talk circles round to the ghosts of her childhood (and by extension, mine) - to Nikolas and the war prisoner camp across the street and the parking lot that replaced it and to his final day when he walked out a free man and promptly took his last breath. 

She asks me again whether I ever got an answer from that professor who was supposedly working on cataloging all the camps about this particular camp. I tell her I am still waiting, but no, not yet. Then I suggest Nikolas was better off dying a free man than being repatriated to Russia given the treatment former prisoners of war received. She looks at me blankly as if this were news. And it is in a way. Nobody in Norway wants to talk about what happened after the prisoners went home. I suspect it has something to do with not wanting to come face to face with the reality that it was slave labor that built the roads and railways that the Germans left behind. Nikolas’s labor.

But the ghosts remain, the landscape as haunted as Flannery’s.

Russian war prisoners in Norway

Finding Flannery’s T

I have come to Lafayette Square to see what Flannery saw.

Others may seek out Andalusia, but it is Flannery’s childhood home that draws me. It is here, at 207 E. Charleton Street, that she spent the most important years of her life, from her birth in 1925 to 1938, when she and her family moved to Milledgeville. So it must be from her experiences here that she concluded “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his life.” Children, she told a friend, have nothing to do but observe the world around them and then later transfer those observations into their writing.

I and my two walking companions approach the house slowly, crossing Lafayette Square from the North, passing the Catholic church where Flannery was baptized and worshipped and the Catholic elementary school where Irish nuns taught her to read and write. It is a three story tabby stucco house with a steep stairway to the parlor level and the obligatory historical marker in front.

I know the house is closed for renovation, but that does not deter me. I climb the stairs, hoping to at least peak inside through the stained glass pane in the door. The door swings open. A young workman with missing front teeth greets me. He is wearing dusty jeans and a baseball cap and a great big smile, apparently not the least bit embarrassed at his dental impairment.

“Y’all want to look around?”

Do I ever.

He steps out of the way and we follow him. He apologizes for the “mess” and explains that the renovations are just beginning. Here, in the parlor, he shows how the historic preservationists have begun pealing back the paint and wallpaper, trying to get back to the wall covering as it existed in the late ’20s and the ‘30s. He explains that they are trying to put the building back exactly as it would have been when Flannery lived here, evoking her name as if he personally knows her.

Up the stairs we go, to the main bedroom floor and to the back bedroom that was Flannery’s. He points out her cradle, and some peacock feathers and the view from the window down to the garden level backyard below.  He becomes animated as he explains that this was where she trained the chicken to walk backwards and I love the way he assumes we know the story.

Our impromptu tour done, he escorts us back out.

“Now, don’t be strangers, “he says. “Come back when I’m done.”

My companions drift off down Charleton to look for a lunch place and I tell them to get a table and order for me. I’m not quite ready to leave and plant myself on the top step and look out over Lafayette Square. Big, broad live oaks shade the square, Spanish moss dripping from the branches, the sunlight that makes it through the dense canopy casts golden shadows across the grass. Squirrels frolic. Cicadas buzz. The humid air reeks of magnolia blossoms and decaying leaves. An elderly man sleeps on a bench, adding his snore to the cacophony. A woman in a bright flowered sleeveless dress walks a little white dog. Two teenagers in matching white oxford shirts and plaid skirts toting back packs chatter as they cross the square.

So this is Flannery’s T.

Until this moment I have doubted my right to recount the occupation. It had seemed too audacious. After all, I left Oslo at age nine. Yet here, on this porch, on this square and in this church and at the school just around the corner Flannery learned all she needed to know to understand humanity. Perhaps it is not so audacious after all to think that the hours I spent resting on my grandmother’s lap in a cabin in the Oslo woods listening to the adults describe the defining years of their generation are enough to tell their Truth.