The Cloud of Unknowing
Writing is truly a mysterious thing for the author of The Canning Season (this year's National Book Award winner)
By Polly Horvath -- School Library Journal, 2/1/2004
When Meryl Streep was promoting the film Adaptation, she admitted that she was terrified about her role. The interviewer was amazed. She was, after all, Meryl Streep. "You realize that everyone is just eaten up by that feeling," said the actress. "Maybe it's a good thing. I hope it's some sort of breaking down of whatever is familiar to you. Whatever is complacent. Whatever is easy. Whatever you've done before. You're starting over. You're starting with nothing. How do you know how to do anything? Who do you think you are? That's sort of where you have to start in order to start true." This starting with nothing is always daunting for me, but it is where I begin every book. If I don't, I'm in trouble.
I was in trouble when I began writing The Canning Season. I had a very clear agenda. I wanted to write what I kept telling everyone would be, finally, a kids' kid book. When I was eight and began writing, I loved Edward Eager. I wanted to write just like him. He wrote only seven books and I reread all of them countless times. I wrote to him and asked him to write me another book and got a letter back saying he was dead. I guessed he wasn't going to feel like writing an eighth book, although I still thought it would be a positive career move on his part.
Right from the beginning, I discovered that I couldn't write like Edward Eager. I discovered something else, though; I got a whiff of the point vierge. It was almost a physical sensation in the pit of my stomach. There was some kind of wondrous truth there that I could write toward. I wanted to get there. I wanted a closer look. I wanted to get it on paper for the reader. I couldn't quite pull it off, but it was enough to keep me writing. Not until almost 30 years later, when I finished The Trolls, did I know I had finally done what I had set out to do. I had gotten to the point vierge of that particular story. It was so deeply rewarding that I cannot believe that I fudged the very next story that came along.
When I'm finished with a book, I flick it like a wine glass and it either thunks like glass or rings like crystal. I knew from The Trolls what it was to have a story ring. I kept flicking Everything on a Waffle and it kept thunking. I wrote and rewrote it—in first person, in third person. I knew there was something missing, a whole other thread that needed to have been written in, but I was afraid that if I didn't leave the story, I would keep rewriting it forever. Actually, I just wanted to keep myself on a sort of book-every-two-years schedule, so I let it go. I never got to the point vierge. The story almost rings but not quite. Letting it go too soon is one of my great regrets, and I remembered that when I got to the end of The Canning Season and it was still thunking. I hung in and paced and rewrote and called people to rant, and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote until, for the second time in 40 years, I had a story that rang. I didn't know why it rang and I didn't care. It did. As Martha Stewart says, it was a good thing. But it didn't begin well.
As difficult as it is to begin a book with no agenda, it's better than what happens if I come to writing with one. I had just written two emotionally wrenching books when I began The Canning Season, and I was drained. I wanted to return to my childhood ambition and write one fun Edward Eager book. Something that would be light and easy. Something that children would love. When I am beginning a book, it feels like a cloud is hovering around my head. Certain things come through. There were things coming through for The Canning Season but I kept trying to stick them into the context of my agenda. This was going to be my kids' kid book. I was therefore distraught to find that the little girl had some kind of deformity on her shoulder blade. I didn't know what it was or why it was there, only that she had to keep it covered. Everyone in the book referred to it as That Thing. Also, the girl's name was Ratchet. What kind of name was that? In my agenda-laden story, I had Ratchet visiting her aunts in a happy town called Tibbetsville, MA. I imagined a kind of idyllic New England seaside town with old-fashioned gardens and Victorian gingerbread houses but That Thing on Ratchet's shoulder blade didn't fit into my Tibbety town of fun. It was extremely irksome.
Every time I sat down to work on this horrible mix of agenda and cloud I would feel myself falling asleep after about 15 minutes. Even though I start work at around 10 a.m., I'd be yawning and drooping over the keyboard. Finally, I'd give up and nap. I started to call friends and complain that I thought I had narcolepsy. This went on for longer than I care to admit because I kept resisting the idea that maybe I'd better lose the agenda. Finally, when that particular light bulb not only went on but was leaping up and down and throwing things, I reluctantly came to grips with my suspicion that I was trying to write a book that wasn't there. So I lost the agenda, took a deep breath and let 'er rip. What came out—bears, beheadings, profanity, Buddhism, orphans, operations, gardening (I know nothing about gardening; what was that doing there?)—didn't belong in Tibbetsville. And in all this barrage of strange, unkids'-book things, I found myself slowly but inexorably moving toward the point vierge, edging around it, landing, falling off, forgetting, looking for it again. It is why I write. It is why I will never tire of writing.
Because I cannot create what isn't there to begin with, writing is a bit like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where everything is changed in the act of being observed. The story is both wave and particle. The wave becoming the particle in my observation but always remaining the wave. The concept that light can exist as both, not either or, suggests to me that stories can exist before being written as the waves they are, becoming particles as I observe and write them. According to the uncertainty principle, I cannot observe them without changing them, but I think at the point vierge they exist both simultaneously as wave and particle despite my observation or more excitingly because of it. I am not the first person who has found particle physics relevant to writing. Psychotherapist G. Scott Sparrow writes, "Just as the divine might manifest to us in a variety of ways, so on a subatomic level an electron can be in many places at once, as a particle and as a wave. It seems strange but on the subatomic level only potentialities exist for the electron's location—that is until one actually observes what is there. In the act of observation, the potentialities collapse into an actuality and the electron appears in one place only." It explains for me somewhat why things show up in my books that I don't understand, sometimes, until much later.
Once an entire book showed up when I was in the middle of another one. I was not thrilled. When I wrote The Happy Yellow Car, my husband, three-year-old daughter, newborn baby, and I had just moved to Victoria. I was able to write only during newborn Rebecca's nap times and was a little frustrated at how long it took to get the book going. I was up nights and my concentration was shot. So when I finally reached the midpoint of my novel, it felt like a huge accomplishment, and I couldn't wait to finish it and send it to my editor. That's when I started seeing this big, yellow Depression–era car and hearing, "The Happy Yellow Car, The Happy Yellow Car." I knew it was a book title and I wanted it to leave me alone. In truth, the book I was writing was no great shakes, but as far as I was concerned, the important thing was that it was written, 75 or so solid pages, so I ignored the voice and the vision of the car. Much good it did me; it haunted me especially when I was trying to write.
I persevered, ignoring it until I was three-quarters of the way through my novel, and then my husband came in on a bright, sunny day while I was working and muttering, "Shoo! Shoo!" to the voice that kept nattering, "The Happy Yellow Car, The Happy Yellow Car." He suggested we take the baby and the buggy to some part of town we had never seen and go for a walk. Three-year-old Em was at a friend's. We drove to a posh part of town, parked, and walked for a while until we happened to pass a vintage car lot, and there sitting right in front of me was the exact same Depression–era car that was haunting me. Oh swell, I thought, now it's materializing. I stopped to stare, unwilling to tell my husband why it had me transfixed because it sounded so flaky. As I stared at it, a little old lady who was waiting for a bus across the street, signaled me over and said she saw me eyeing that old blue car and asked if I was planning on buying it. I said no and she said pity, her husband had just died and left her a car that she wanted to sell. It was exactly like that old blue one on the lot. Except it was bright yellow. So I went home and threw out my almost-done novel and wrote The Happy Yellow Car. I was afraid that if I didn't, angels would start dropping fenders on my head.
When I tell this story on school visits, kids generally aren't too impressed. They just want to know if I bought the old lady's car. As this is inevitably the question, I wonder if they think the whole thing was a coincidence. Or do they think I'm lying? People often think I make things up or I write about my own life. I don't do either. I simply put down what appears and I try to get it to the place where things ring. I don't know why The Canning Season finally rang, but as I wrote this essay I began to suspect it was the inclusion of Ratchet's husband doing the foot checks in the epilogue. He is a doctor and goes to the logging camps and examines the loggers' feet: "Ratchet knew he would be gone a long time because the loggers didn't like to take off their boots and reveal their sores and wounds and embarrassing fungi. Richard had to spend a lot of time assuring them that their feet were not shameful, there was no such thing as good feet or bad feet, they were just feet. But because he had to go through this process with nearly every logger, Ratchet knew it would be a long day."
It wasn't until I wrote this piece about writing that I understood that The Canning Season, as much as anything, is a book about shame. I realized suddenly why all the seemingly disparate pieces needed to be there: Tilly's drinking, the doctor's freakishly long arm, Hutch, the homosexual boyfriend, Penpen's fat, the beheadings, the word fuck (in a children's book!)—there was potential shame everywhere. And the part that made the story ring was in the final rewrite with the inclusion of the doctor going to the lumber camps to do foot checks, where he says there are no good feet or bad feet. Shame is debilitating because it keeps us from taking off our boots and looking at what is ours to see. And that's where the point vierge is. It's not out there somewhere. It's in our own feet. The Canning Season is the story of a little girl who is so deeply ashamed that she cannot look at That Thing. She keeps it covered up. She can barely speak but she can listen, and she listens to other people's stories and that is what eventually saves her. Sometimes we just need to hear other people's stories.
I didn't understand any of this when I wrote the book, or for a long time afterward. But I looked at what was really there, instead of what I'd liked to be there. And I wrote it down. It confirms for me that my job is to keep the door open for D. H. Lawrence's three strange angels and, like Penpen in The Canning Season, welcome whatever shows up.
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
—D. H. Lawrence From "The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through"
| Author Information |
| Polly Horvath is the author of The Canning Season (2003), winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and Everything on a Waffle (2001, both published by Farrar), a Newbery Honor Book. |
