There`s a Spanish proverb that says, ” `Take what you want,` said God.
`Take it and pay for it.”` And if you`re willing to pay for it . . . It`s quite expensive. But I`ve done a lot of things I wanted and I`ve paid for them and I`ve enjoyed them.
One of the things you have to do if you decide to be a writer is work. My husband used to say that my friends thought I went to the typewriter and punched a key and out came a long book. That`s not how it goes. I revise and revise and throw out and throw out. Right now on the novel I`m working on, I just finished my second full disk. That includes revisions, revisions, revisions on both of them. I`ll probably do a third disk.
I went to a women`s college (Smith College). I think that was a great advantage. It gave me, first of all, time to grow up. It gave me time to find out who I was. And also, if there was an election, one of us (a woman) won it. If there was a magazine to be started, one of us started it.
So I left college and went to New York on the theory that of course all doors were open to me. That`s a good attitude. If you think doors are going to be open, they`re likely to be open. If you think they`re going to be closed, they`ll shut in your face. So then that was also an advantage. And I knew that you don`t earn your living writing novels to start off with. And I`m a storyteller; I`m not a journalist. It`s a whole different field.
I decided I would work in the theater, because it`s good hours for a writer. And I was very lucky. I got jobs. I worked on Broadway. Things happen, you know? And if you`re there when they happen, that`s fine. I was there when they happened.
I met my husband in ”The Cherry Orchard” and I married him (while touring) in ”The Joyous Season.” Actually, we were married here in Chicago, at St. Chrysostom`s Church. ”The Joyous Season” was Ethel Barrymore`s last
(stage) play. She did movies after that, but no more theater.
You talk about decisions and choices. That was a big decision for me to make-to give up my freedom and my independence and get married and have babies. My two granddaughters, who are in college, are living with me in New York. One night we were having dinner with a group of their friends. Their women`s studies professor had said that day that women who married and who had children and who wrote were martyrs. My granddaughter, Charlotte, said to me, ”Gran, were you a martyr?” I said, ”No, Charlotte. I chose my own conflicts. Believe me, they were conflicts, but I chose them. And if you choose your conflicts, there`s no way you can be a martyr.”
To choose to be a wife and mother was a mighty major decision. I`d had two books published before I was married. I made it very clear to my potential husband that this was not going to stop-that he was going to act and I was going to write and we were going to share the housework and the nurturing of the kids. He was a marvelous man. We did share the housework. We did share the nurturing of the kids. I didn`t realize at the time how amazing he was, particularly in 1946, to go along with that.
We grew up in totally different ways of life. I grew up in New York City with artist parents, and he grew up in Tulsa, Okla., you know, the typical American childhood with a tree-lined street and a white house with a swing on the porch. But we were both artists. He was an actor. I`m a writer. And so our attitude toward art and life was very similar, although we came at it from very different directions. (Also) he was 29 and I was 27, so we`d had time to work for a while and to think things out on our own, rather than just pick up what was the general trend. And I never would have made it in the ordinary kaffeeklatsching suburban-type marriage. It would not have worked for me at all.
I had my first child a year and a half after we were married. I had to fight for the right to nurse this baby. It wasn`t being done in 1947. We were being scientific with bottles. I said, ”Why should I get up in the middle of the night and boil a bottle when I`ve got the equipment right on me?” Then I`d also seen theater wives getting up at six in the morning with their babies, which is what we were supposed to do, and being zonked when their husbands came home. I thought that was crazy.
So Hugh would go to the theater. I would put the baby to bed and go to my typewriter. When he came home, I woke her up and we would have our evening together as a family. Then we`d put her to bed at 2 a.m. when we went to bed and get her up at noon. We`d take her to the pediatrician for her shots and he`d call the other mothers in: ”Look at this baby. Isn`t she gorgeous? Now let me tell you her schedule.” Well, it was a perfectly regular schedule. It`s just that we fitted her hours to ours rather than vice versa.
After we had her and we enjoyed her so much, Hugh felt that it was really not right with two parents in totally precarious professions to bring more kids into the world, so we moved to northwest Connecticut to a dairy farm village where there were more cows than people and we ran a general store. Thank God we did it when we were young enough to come back to the city. We came back to New York when our kids were 7, 10 and 12. We moved back to the island of Manhattan and the world of the theater and I was very grateful.
Country living wasn`t all that easy, of course, because we bought an old house. We had a washing machine that always froze with the diapers in it. I learned a lot. I learned an awful lot. And I was very happy to go back to the wicked world of the city, which is much quieter and more peaceful than the country. In a small village, if you have any talent, it`s picked up. We did school board. We did Sundays schools. We did everything.
I worked in the store from noon to 3 p.m. That gave Hugh a chance to come home and eat and have a nap. On Wednesdays I closed up. And I wrote, I wrote. I always write. And in the spring we always put on a musical comedy. There were two churches in the village, the Catholic church and the Congregational church. That was the first time that the two churches had ever gotten together, that there had been any contact between the two groups. It was a very healing thing.
I wrote ”Wrinkle” our last year in the country. The rejections (of
”Wrinkle” before it was finally published) were very, very painful. Not just that, but a number of other books got rejected and they hurt. And I thought with ”Wrinkle,” which was my 11th book, I thought it really moved into something that was important and real. You know one of the reasons-one of the many reasons-it was rejected? It was science fiction with a female protagonist. Well, I`m a female. Why would I not have a female protagonist, for heaven`s sakes?
I was discouraged. I lost faith. As a matter of fact, the book was rejected on the Monday before Christmas. We`d moved back to New York, still making the rounds. After Christmas, I called my agent and I said, ”Send it back. Nobody`s going to buy it. It`s too hard on my family. I bleed all over the living room every time it`s rejected.” And he sent it back.
That should have been the end of it. But my mother was with us for Christmas and I had a party for some of her old New York friends. One of them happened to belong to a little writers` group that was held by John Farrar of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and she insisted that I meet him.
I went down bearing this obviously very battered manuscript (in a day before photocopies). John read it and he loved it and he was scared of it. When a publisher is scared of something, they send it to a librarian for assessment. Librarians are a writer`s best friend. But the assessment was: ”I think this is the worst book I have ever read. It reminds me of `The Wizard of Oz.` ”
But Farrar, Straus decided to publish it anyhow. And they said to me,
”Now dear, we don`t want you to be disappointed. This book is not going to sell. Of course, it is too difficult for children. We`re just doing it as a sort of self-indulgence because we love it.” And then it took off like a skyrocket and a couple of months ago it went into its 50th hardcover printing. Five-zero. It`s my Cinderella story. So you have to be stubborn. You have to not give up. You have to hang in there. As I said, it`s expensive. You take it and pay for it.
When we went back to the city, we had a lot of pressure to move to the suburbs. (But) we moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan-which is not the fashionable area-and never regretted it. For one thing, my husband on matinee days could come home between shows, bringing home the people who lived in the suburbs who couldn`t get home (between shows). In a blizzard he would also bring people home. And I thought: I`d rather be the wife having the slumber party than the wife getting the phone call.
Then when our kids, growing up into the `60s, walked to school, they walked past winos and junkies. They saw it. There wasn`t any glamor. They saw the degradation and the ugliness of too much booze and drugs. I think that was also a great help.
My granddaughters came to live with me in the fall of 1987. They were starting college (in New York). Their father had left a tenured chair at a seminary in New York to be the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and they needed a place to live. And we`ve always been very, very close, anyhow, all their lives. I love living with them. I think it`s absolutely marvelous. I don`t know what I`ll do when the nest empties for the second time.
To lose a husband of 40 years is an amputation. You know, you`re never going to be the same again. I miss him terribly. On the other hand, I`m not going to sit down and crawl under the bed and stop life.
I`ve written a book about our marriage (”Two-Part Invention” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.95)) and in it I tell about a friend who does elderhostel weekends. She had sent her people out to bring back something from nature that was a symbol for them of themselves. One of the women came back with an empty nutshell and said, ”My husband died last year. That`s what I am, an empty shell.”
I thought to myself, ”My shell is not empty. My shell is very full.”
And while I would have given anything to have kept my husband for another 10 or 20 years, I still have a very full, good life. I`m doing work I love to do. I have good friends and I have wonderful memories. And I knew that what Hugh would want me to do was keep working.
I`m working on a non-fiction book about the value of story-story being more truthful than fact. Facts are very limited. We know perfectly well that I have to put my glasses down on this table (at which I`m sitting) and they`re not going to fall through. But this table is in fact not solid. It`s a mass of swirling electrons and atoms. If I knew how, I could put my hands right through. But in the world of fact, it`s just a table. Things are all far more complex than they seem.
One of the things I like most about particle physics and also astrophysics is that it reveals a universe of total interdependence. Nothing happens in isolation; everything you do affects the entire universe. According to the physicists, that`s what happens. They have a favorite phrase called
”the butterfly effect,” by which they mean that if a butterfly should fly in here and get hurt, the effect of that accident would be felt in galaxies hundreds of light years away, that the universe is that tightly connected.
And of course in story there are connections. People are connected with people. They break apart, they come back together.
My granddaughters are bringing me up properly. They ensure that I will not get into a rut. I`ll listen to their ideas about what it means to be a woman. We talk very intimately about all kinds of things. They have certainly stretched me. Things that would have shocked me at their age don`t shock me now, because they have trained me into looking at things with the eyes of a woman in the late 20th Century.
This doctor with his suicide machine? We talked about euthanasia. I just say, ”I`d just as soon go out on an ice floe, but it also makes it much too easy to kill old Great Aunt Millie.”
You cannot make a blanket statement. It`s got to be one case at a time, and people don`t like that. There is (sometimes) no right thing to do. So you look at the wrongs and decide which is the least wrong, and you do that hoping that it really is the least wrong. We have to live with the ambiguity of knowing that sometimes there is no right choice.
I have only one criterion, that is: God is love. Is this love or is it not love? If it`s done for anger or resentment, then no, it`s not love.
I hope that young women today will be willing to face that, that we do live with deep and terrible ambiguity.
