High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [19]
Nice try, but nobody’s really fooled. Because fiction works, if it does, only when we the readers believe every word of it. Grover’s Corners is Our Town, and so is Cannery Row, and Lilliput, and Gotham City, and Winesburg, Ohio, and the dreadful metropolis of 1984. We have all been as canny as Huck Finn, as fractious as Scarlett O’Hara, as fatally flawed as Captain Ahab and Anna Karenina. I, personally, am Jo March, and if her author Louisa May Alcott had a whole new life to live for the sole pursuit of talking me out of it, she could not. A pen may or may not be mightier than the sword, but it is brassier than the telephone. When the writer converses privately with her soul in the long dark night, a thousand neighbors are listening in on the party line, taking it personally.
Nevertheless, I came to decide, on my one big afternoon as Homecoming Queen, that I would go on taking the risk of writing books. Miss Louella and all those football players gave me the rash courage to think I might be forgiven again and again the sin of revelation. I love my hometown as I love the elemental stuff of my own teeth and bones, and that seems to have come through to my hometown, even if I didn’t write it up in its Sunday best.
I used to ask my grandfather how he could pull fish out of a lake all afternoon, one after another, while my line and bobber lay dazed and inert. This was not my Grandfather Henry, but my other grandfather, whose face I connected in childhood with the one that appears on the flip side of a buffalo nickel. Without cracking that face an iota, he was prone to uttering the funniest things I’ve about ever heard. In response to my question regarding the fishing, he would answer gravely, “You have to hold your mouth right.”
I think that is also the secret of writing: attitude. Hope, unyielding faith in the enterprise. If only I hold my mouth right, keep a clear fix on what I believe is true while I make up my stories, surely I will end up saying what I mean. Then, if I offend someone, it won’t be an accidental casualty. More likely, it will be because we actually disagree. I can live with that. The memory of my buffalo-nickel grandfather advises me still, in lonely moments: “If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk”
I learned something else, that November day, that shook down all I thought I knew about my personal, insufferable, nobody’s-blues-can-touch-mine isolation of high school. Before the book signing was over, more than one of my old schoolmates had sidled up and whispered: “That Lou Ann character, the insecure one? I know you based her on me.”
HOW MR. DEWEY DECIMAL SAVED MY LIFE
A librarian named Miss Truman Richey snatched me from the jaws of ruin, and it’s too late now to thank her. I’m not the first person to notice that we rarely get around to thanking those who’ve helped us most. Salvation is such a heady thing the temptation is to dance gasping on the shore, shouting that we are alive, till our forgotten savior has long since gone under. Or else sit quietly, sideswiped and embarrassed, mumbling that we really did know pretty much how to swim. But now that I see the wreck that could have been, without Miss Richey, I’m of a fearsome mind