In 2011 and 2012, two new products of this pen – a novel entitled Every Third Thought and an essay collection entitled Final Fridays – are scheduled for publication. Both were completed in 2009, my eightieth year of life and fifty-third as a publishing writer. At the time of their composition I didn’t think of them as my last books, only as the latest. But in the time since, although I’ve still gone to my workroom every weekday morning for the hours between breakfast and lunch, as I’ve done for decades, and faithfully re-enacted my muse-inviting ritual, I find that I’ve written . . . nothing.
That room is divided into three distinct areas: composition (one side of a large worktable, reserved for longhand first drafts of fiction on Mondays through Thursdays and non-fiction on Fridays, with supply drawers and adjacent reference-book shelves), production (computer hutch with desktop word processor and printer for subsequent drafts and revision), and business (other side of worktable, with desk calendar and office files). As for the ritual:
Step One is to seat myself at the Composition table, set down my refilled thermal mug of breakfast coffee and insert the wax earplugs that I got in the habit of using back in the 1950s, when my three children (now in their fifties) were rambunctious toddlers, and that became so associated with my sentence-making that even as a long-time empty-nester in a quiet house, I continue to feel the need for them.
Step Two is to open the stained and battered three-ring loose-leaf binder, now sixty-three years old and held precariously together with strapping tape, that I bought during my freshman orientation week at Johns Hopkins in 1947 and in which I penned all my undergraduate and grad-school class notes, professorial lecture drafts during my decades in academia, and first drafts of the entire corpus of my fiction and non-fiction.
Step Three is to unclip from that binder’s middle ring the British Parker 51 fountain pen bought during my maiden tour of Europe in 1963–4 (in a Volkswagen camper with those same three then small children and their mother) at a Rochester stationer’s alleged to be the original of Mister Pumblechook’s premises in Dickens’s Great Expectations: the pen with which I have penned every subsequent sentence, including this one. (Its predecessor, an also much-valued Sheaffer that saw me through college and my first three published novels, was inadvertently cracked in my shirt pocket a few weeks earlier when I leaned against a battlement in ‘Hamlet’s castle’ in ‘Elsinore’ – Danish Helsingør, near Copenhagen, the northernmost stop of that makeshift Grand Tour – in order to get a better view of Sweden across the water.) I recharge the venerable Parker with jet-black Quink, wipe its well-worn tip with a bit of tissue, fix its cap on to its butt, and proceed to Step Four . . .
Which in happier days meant reviewing and editing either the printouts of yesterday’s first-draft pages (left off when the going was good and thus more readily resumed) or work notes toward some project in gestation, to be followed by Step Five: re-inspiration and the composition of new sentences, paragraphs and pages. Of late, however, Step Four has consisted of staring vainly, pen in hand, at blank ruled pages, or exchanging fountain pen for note-taking ballpoint and perusing for possible suggestions either my spiral-bound Work Notebook #5 (2008–) or my little black six-ring loose-leaf personal notebook/diary, to no avail. That latter has only a few blank leaves remaining, and no room for more. And the workroom’s bookshelves, reserved for one copy of each edition and translation of every book, magazine article and anthology contribution that I’ve perpetrated, are already crowded beyond their capacity, with new editions lying horizontally across older ones and jammed into crannies between bookcase and wall.
That almost-exhausted notebook-space, those overflowing shelves – are they trying to tell me something? I plug my ears; strain not to listen. Like most fiction writers of my acquaintance (perhaps especially those who mainly write novels rather than short stories), I’m accustomed to a well-filling interval of some weeks or even months between book-length projects: an interval not to be confused with ‘writer’s block’. Indeed, I’ve learned to look forward to that bit of respite from sentence-making after a new book has left the shop – bulky typescript both snail-mailed and emailed to agent and thence to publisher – and to busily making notes toward the Next One while final copy-editing and galley proofing its predecessor. This time, however . . .
Well.
Well? A writer-friend from Kansas who knows about water-wells informs me of the important distinction between dry wells and ‘gurglers’, which may cease producing for a time but eventually resume; he encourages me to believe that I am, if no longer a geyser, still a gurgler, not yet a mere geezer. May that prove to be the case – but if in fact the well is dry, I remind myself that as we’ve aged, my wife and I have been obliged to put other much enjoyed pleasures behind us: snow- and waterskiing, tennis, sailboat cruising on the Chesapeake and, yes, even vigorous youthful sex (but certainly not love and intimacy, and as someone once wisely observed, ‘Sex goes; memory goes; but the memory of sex – that never goes’). If my vocation – my ‘calling’! – turns out to have joined that sigh-and-smile list of Once Upon a Times, its memory will be a cherished one indeed.
Time will tell.
Meanwhile, maybe write a little piece about . . . not writing?
Artwork © Kate Gibb / Big Active
