Scribblers (14 page)

“After it was announced, of course, it was just great to see Robert get a lot of press.”

It's long afterward when I finally acquire a tape of Oprah's
Gap Creek
book-club installment. Like most people in the industry, I rue the day Jonathan Franzen famously criticized Oprah's low-culture approach and declined to be on her program. Many of her selections brought credit to worthy authors who otherwise would have labored in obscurity their entire careers. And she pumped money into a flagging industry. Everyone in the business reaped benefits from the show, directly or indirectly.

But when I finally sit down to watch the program, I understand Franzen's point. Robert Morgan, the guest of honor, doesn't even make an appearance until it's past the halfway point. Instead, the discussion centers around modern conveniences. Oprah reports the percentages of people who say they couldn't live without tampons, deodorant, panty hose, hair spray, television, and cell phones. To everyone's great delight, one newly married young man pipes up from the audience that it's condoms he would miss most. All of this is far removed from Julie Harmon in her upstate South Carolina cabin. All told, the author gets maybe three minutes of air time. When questions arise concerning Appalachian culture, they're referred not to Morgan, who grew up in the mountains and has spent his entire adult life writing about them, but to a crackerjack hired-gun expert, that
old-time backwoods gal Rory Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy. Her principal contribution is to give the opinion that—surprise!—little has changed in the Appalachians in the last hundred years. It's pretty lightweight stuff.

But you'll never hear it from Morgan, even if he feels that way, which I doubt.

Duncan Murrell tells me of a conversation one of his Algonquin colleagues had with the author. “She was on the phone with him, and she got the impression that he didn't really realize how many copies of the book would be produced. So she said to him, ‘Robert, we're printing two or three hundred thousand copies of this book.' And he had apparently told his wife, when she asked what it meant, ‘Oh, I think maybe it'll be another twenty or thirty thousand copies of the book.' So he was off by an order of ten. And it wasn't one of those things where he was ignorant of Oprah Winfrey or didn't care, it was just that his head was not wrapped up in those numbers. You can find writers out there who could have told you right off the top of their head how many copies being picked by Oprah means, but Robert's not one of them.”

In all languages and editions, there are two million copies of
Gap Creek
in print today. The only downside to the experience, Morgan tells me, is the prospect of sales for his next novel. “Afterward, it's kind of hard going back to selling fifty thousand copies of a book.”

“I remember driving home one day in the month prior to the show airing,” Murrell says. “Once the show airs, then you're no longer the belle of the ball, but for that month, it's just magic.

“So I'm driving home, and I'm listening to NPR, and I forget which of the anchors Robert was talking with, but he was being interviewed on the national show. And I remember the guy asking him something about the money. You know, ‘What's it like, now that you're going to be rich?' or something to that effect.

“And Bob says, I can remember this, he says, ‘I don't know about that. I'm fifty-six years old. I'm pretty set in my ways—you know, my home. And I don't think there's much that I'm going to do special. But I never thought that I would have so many readers.' ”

C
HAPTER
7

Night Sweats/Self-Gratification

My plan is to subscribe to Asheville's daily paper, the
Citizen-Times.
I will begin reading it instead of my local rag, and thereby immerse myself in mountain people, places, issues, and events.

But my order is processed incorrectly, and only the Sunday issues show up in my mailbox. They generally arrive on Thursday. Finding I am more wedded to timely news than I thought, I continue reading my local daily. Examining the Asheville paper thus becomes a supplemental chore. The investment of time proves burdensome.

My solution is to clean out a drawer of my dresser and store the Asheville papers there until I have a chance to read them. When that drawer fills, I take the papers out and pile them on the floor in front of the dresser. A knee-high stack grows, then a second beside it. When my wife complains, I spend a couple of hours stripping the papers
of everything I never intend to read anyway—advertising circulars, coupons, comics, want ads, business page, auto page, real-estate guide—which leaves only the front section, the local section, sports, and arts and entertainment. I then have a single stack of manageable proportions. I transfer it to the master bathroom, which I keep in such deplorable condition that my wife long ago moved into the bath down the hall with our daughters. I empty the hamper and put the papers in there, making a place for my dirty clothes on the floor between the hamper and the bathtub. Watching the unread papers burgeon has by now become a pastime. Though I strip the new papers upon their arrival, the stack climbs the entire height of the hamper, then grows out the top so that the lid stays permanently open. At this point, my wife tells me I'm eccentric.

I eventually cancel the subscription. The papers, still mainly unread, find their way into a twenty-gallon plastic storage container in the crawlspace, and the clothes go back into the hamper.

So it is with all the background material I accumulate. I buy books on Asheville history and titles by writers connected to the area. What I can't find new I track down through rare-book dealers. Not knowing how many John Ehle or Ann B. Ross titles I ought to read—or whether those authors will consent to an interview, or even whether I'll need them in the book at all—I strive to collect their complete works. I completely fill a bookcase; I stop counting at two hundred titles.

Meanwhile, there are magazine articles, free local weeklies, tourist brochures, maps, correspondence, and such.
These go into the dresser drawer where the newspapers once found a home. As for titles too obscure for even the rare-book dealers, I track them down in libraries and photocopy them complete. These, too, go into the dresser. I fill one drawer, then a second, then ultimately a third, culling and consolidating my underwear, socks, and T-shirts to make room.

I haven't a prayer of digesting all this stuff. Every book I read seems to recommend three or four others; the more I do, the farther behind I get. What I really need is to move to Asheville for a year and live the local culture, but that's not going to happen. My opportunities for writing are limited to Saturdays, Sundays, and weeknights after the kids are in bed and the house is tidied up, which is generally around ten.

Though I hold a regular job and haven't missed a day in fifteen years for reasons other than funerals and my kids' illnesses, people often ask my wife if I'm a stay-at-home dad. Perhaps their observation has merit, even if they're wrong on the facts. I live a protracted adolescence for the sake of writing a book that may never see print and may attract few readers even if it does.

And then there's middle age. I develop a scalp condition characterized by angry pimples all over the back of my head that burn like fire. With it comes dandruff so severe that I can shake my head and watch it fall like snow. The dermatologist advises me to start washing my hair with tar-based bar soap. On the way out of his office, I pick up a brochure on my condition. As is the custom in such literature, the picture on the front shows a victim with what must
be the worst case of the disorder in recorded history; he looks a good deal like Norman Mailer but has what appears to be thick white moss growing profusely from his ears. I buy tar-based soap, which costs eight dollars a bar. The good news is that it will last forever, since it won't give up any lather no matter how long and hard it is rubbed. I switch to a popular dandruff shampoo, which corrects the problem within a couple of weeks.

There are other indignities, too. My hair is overtaken by white; my pants strain to popping, as I refuse to go up a waist size; I grow tits. But the worst trouble is my eyes. I do close reading all day at work off a computer screen, then come home and read into the night. Some mornings when I wake, I have pain in one or the other of my eyes so sharp that I can't hold it open. It might be five minutes before I can begin to use the eye, which remains sensitive to touch, light, and any breath of moving air throughout the day. It is more often the right eye than the left but has never been both on the same morning. I assure myself it's muscle cramping, the result of holding a short-distance focus for extended periods, though that's largely a guess. I don't really want to know for sure, not until I get my book written.

The writers' group meeting begins with someone reading a brief communication from Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese, who are wintering in Florida. They have an autographing scheduled for next month, when they'll be back in the mountains.

Next, Terri, the group's president, circulates a magazine article entitled “First Fiction Highlights” and reads an e-mail
from Linda Worth, a poet who has attended only one of our meetings but wants to remain in touch nonetheless. Linda reports that she is a regular at open-mike nights at her favorite chain bookstore, that she's had a poem accepted by a literary magazine at a community college—her first success—and that she is being mentored in her writing by a neighbor who is a retired English teacher. She wants to make it to more of our meetings—
mettings
actually, as I see when I obtain a copy of her missive. Linda hopes we haven't forgotten her.

I am traveling to the writers' group less frequently as time passes. It is hard to motivate myself to get up at six-thirty on a Saturday morning and make a six-hour round-trip drive for the sake of a two-hour meeting. This particular Saturday, I am the scribe of the monthly minutes, which I will take home, type up, and submit for mailing to all the members. Bryan Aleksich has recently joined the group, but he's not present today.

It seems to me that the tone of the proceedings has changed. The husband and wife who ran the meetings when I started coming have together survived a house fire and separately suffered back surgery and an auto accident. They no longer attend. And one of my favorite members, retired professor Gerald Gullickson—a monument to endurance who once published six hundred poems in fly-by-night magazines in the span of two years—has died. We seldom read from our work anymore. And the complaining about agents and editors seems more strident.

Since the members still see me primarily as a representative of the industry, rather than a fellow writer, I am saddled
with a small share of the blame for the state of publishing, or so I feel. This is especially true since my company rejected manuscripts by several members.

“Don't you find that to be the case, Steve?” I might hear, after a discussion of the misspellings rampant in commercial books.

Or “Have you seen any of that at your company, Steve?” following a lament about midlist authors having their contracts dropped by publishers.

I shouldn't overstate the case. But I sense an undercurrent.

After reading the communication from Linda Worth, Terri, the president, tells how she's been working twelve-hour days lately, and so has little time to write. She is awaiting word on a novel submission to a publisher out west.

The lady next to her reports that she has two novels being handled by two different agents. Those agents have supposedly received positive comments from publishers but no offers.

The lady next to her describes the travel articles and the memoir she is writing and passes around a pamphlet about the Kentucky Book Fair.

Next is an elderly gentleman working on a manuscript about a one-eyed Scottish terrier.

Joanne reads what she calls a “bug poem,” which proves to be exactly what it claims. She says parents and kids love them, though she has had no luck getting them published.

Suzanne says she is putting together a song collection. I wasn't aware we did songs.

Caroline is waiting to hear the results of a contest in which she's entered a novel manuscript.

Nancy, one of our guests this day, is writing a memoir in her mother's voice.

Jonathan, our other guest, is working on a novel and some short stories. He says he used to write screenplays and television scripts. He once made a living writing continuity—the bridges between segments—for old television programs like
The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show.

A good portion of the meeting is given over to a discussion of Bill Brooks, a local community-college instructor and author of commercial Westerns.

Cynthia tells how she was recently devastated by Brooks's critique of her work in a writing class of his. The substance of his comments never comes quite clear in the telling, though one of the principal points seems to be Brooks's judgment that her novel needs more “layering.” Cynthia comes back to the word several times.

It is quickly apparent that the man has a reputation. A couple of members hasten to Cynthia's defense.

Steve Brown was skewered in a Bill Brooks class when he turned in a portion of one of his mystery novels.

“Don't ever try to write first-person in a man's voice,” Brooks once scolded longtime member Vickie. “You just can't pull it off.”

Other sympathetic voices join in.

There isn't a thing wrong with Cynthia's writing, someone says.

Cynthia writes simple, straightforward, old-fashioned, good stories.

Just because they're simple on the surface doesn't mean they lack depth.

The consensus seems to be that Bill Brooks is a good writer and an experienced teacher, but that he ought to be more sensitive in his criticism.

There's nothing to be gained by making things personal.