On Writing
When I started my first novel at age nine, I’d already been keeping a family journal for two years, tracking events in the lives of my parents and writing them up in the form of a carefully printed newspaper to be sent to my grandmother in Michigan.
The novel, The City under the Sea, was imitative of Jules Verne, whose Mysterious Island I fell in love with early on. I remember yet the main character, Captain Harding. I remember the balloon trip over water, the contriving of a lift to carry things up the sheer face of the island, the construction of a dwelling, and the discovery of the convict abandoned on the island who’d become a wild man during long years alone. And there was the unforgettable meeting with Captain Nemo, and boarding his submarine in time to escape the volcanic explosion that destroyed the island.
Could anything written nowadays be half so exciting? I read the book over and over, each time frustrated because I didn’t know what the characters did afterward. Finally I wrote my own sequel in which the characters discovered a city under the sea, all made of alabaster, accessible by a moustache cup which inflated and sealed whenever pressure was placed on the moustache shelf.
I’ve done that often, written my own stories because the ones I wanted to read didn’t exist.
I worked on that novel for at least two years. When we moved from Chicago back to Michigan , I somehow lost track of it. Probably my parents didn’t consider it worth shipping. I’m sure the misspellings and bad grammar rendered it not publishable. I hadn’t yet learned to use a dictionary to edit my own work.
In high school I wrote a young adult mystery story—and now my role model was Augusta Huel Seaman, who wrote tales of mysterious lights flashing in old abandoned houses on the Maine coast, usually near a shipwreck from which thieves had managed to steal valuable cargo. I moved the story to the Great Lakes and wrote of the sinking of the Pewabic and the looting of cargo washed ashore. My mother typed this one up and actually sent it out a few times, but it never found a publisher. No doubt it was sophomoric. I was no genius at age sixteen. I couldn’t even manage to win at Monopoly over the boy on the corner. Besides, the Pewabic wasn’t where I put it. It was later discovered by divers—near Alpena, I think.
College was different. Under the tutelage of Prof. Roy Cowden at the University of Michigan , I broke free from my copycat tendencies and wrote a unique story based on a historical event my grandparents first related to me, and I later researched. The City under the Sand told the story of the Michigan town of Singapore , buried under the sand of walking dunes formed when the lumbermen clear-cut the lakeshore.
That one was a potentially important book, foreshadowing, as it did, our future ecological problems. But I was, alas, no prodigy. At age nineteen and twenty, I was not equal to handling so vast a theme as the burial of a city and what it meant to its many residents. Even though Prof. Cowden placed me in his graduate writing class and did his best to help, to the point of introducing me to Harry Maule of Random House, nothing came of it. When I interviewed Maule in his office, he didn’t even comment on my story but merely informed me he was looking for another book like the then popular Whistle Stop by Maritta Wolfe, and if I could write one, he’d consider it.
The wolves, Virginia, Thomas and Maritta, seemed to have literature all sewn up in those mid-century days.
Whistle Stop dealt with brother/sister incest. I couldn’t write about that as I had no experience of it. But I’d had a good friend in college who was gay, and since I was one of the few people who’d listen to his story without shock, he poured it out to me.
As the only child of a single mother whose husband had died in his infancy, he knew his mother lived and breathed for the day she would have grandchildren. He went into analysis and tried his best to change. It didn’t work, of course, and in the end his mother, unable to come to terms with his sexual orientation, cut off all contact. He very nearly committed suicide, as did the young woman, a good friend of mine, who’d tried to help him transition to the straight life, and in the process fell in love with him.
It was a tragedy all around, and by this time I really was experienced enough to be up to writing a beautiful, touching novel. Alas, the publishers of the day wouldn’t touch it. The subject was taboo unless the gay men were characterized as narcissistic and self-centered.
I still have in my files two letters from editors saying that they personally loved the book and would put it at the top of their publishing list if only they might be allowed to do so, but they knew for sure they would not.
Years later, when gay had become acceptable, I would check to see if I might salvage the story, and would find it hopelessly dated. The attitudes of the other characters, and their reactions, were simply not those of today.
I always seemed to be ahead of my time, writing about gays before the revolution in attitudes, writing about blacks before the Civil Rights movement. I collected twice the number of rejection slips a writer is supposed to accumulate before publishing. But finally I hit it right with the story of a friendship between a Jewish and a non-Jewish girl who share a Greenwich Village apartment: The Wind Dies at Sunrise . This one was snatched by a publisher just three weeks after my agent sent it out.
Then I was off and running.
