Scribblers (10 page)

But maybe news of my diligent work is spreading and I am finally making a name for myself in the business. Word comes back that I've been chosen by six aspiring authors, the maximum number allowed—wise souls all.

I make the drive to Asheville and wind my way up Sunset Mountain to the great stone inn. I am to be housed in the Vanderbilt Wing, Room 4057, which happens to be the Cyd Charisse Room. My antennae raised to all things
writerly, I note the George Will Room and the Deepak Chopra Room on my way there.

I reread my manuscript samples after settling in. It's difficult to spend a thirty-minute private session critiquing a scant twenty pages of material without schoolmarming the writer about punctuation and grammar. This will be especially true in four of my six cases, since the writers haven't provided synopses and I have no idea where their stories are headed and therefore little to talk about.

One sample is from a murder mystery whose heroine works in the insurance industry and also happens to be a champion golfer. The author has broken her opening scene into two separate chapters for no good reason I can discern.

Another is from a New York novel about two twenty-something, high-aspiring black girls who meet through their dead-end office jobs. Since one of the heroines starts a new position, makes a best friend, goes out with her boyfriend, and begins an involvement with another man all within the span of twenty pages, I'll advise the writer to slow the pace and spend more time establishing her characters and setting.

Another has just the opposite problem. A “grit lit” story of a Southern family dealing with a visiting wayward uncle, it is all personal background and no forward movement.

Another concerns the friendship between a professional woman and a mental patient. It's self-consciously literary and transparently autobiographical.

Another tells of hard times in an enclave of Norwegian immigrants. The author begins her sample with
page 43
, which makes it difficult to pick up on the action.

The best of the samples by far comes from a kind of
retro/techno thriller set on an air-force base in West Germany during the Cold War. The antihero, a decorated American fighter pilot, murders his underage German lover and has to dispose of the body. A conflicted man whose patriotism overlays a family history of suicide, a cigar-chomping enigma in his trademark cucumber-green sunglasses, he makes a promising villain indeed. The writer's cover letter takes pains to explain that, while he understands that his submission is not to exceed twenty pages, he has taken the liberty of including additional pages to close out a chapter.

Apology accepted. I wouldn't have stopped reading anyway.

A keynote presentation by Jan Karon, open-mike readings by conferees, “Three Uses of the Knife: How the Blues Works As a Literary Device,” “Feeding the Ancient Fires: American Indians Writing Their Own Literature,” “Romance Sells!”—all this takes place before my arrival.

My first obligation is a session called “Meet and Greet with Editors and Agents,” in which hopeful writers are set loose en masse upon a small number of publishing professionals. The inn's countless meeting rooms notwithstanding, the event only merits space in a crowded hallway around two tables of crackers and cheese and soft drinks. It is the kind of thing people in the business approach with trepidation—an open-air market of bad ideas, shouted above a din.

I've barely pinned on my nametag before a manuscript sample is thrust at me—some kind of mountain memoir by an instructor at a community college. She says she spoke
to me about it some months previously, though I have no such recollection. I tuck the sample under my arm.

Then comes a nattily dressed black couple, the man in a preacher's collar. They have a fifty-five-page complete manuscript that the woman starts reading to me unbidden; I gather it has to do with Jesus but can't understand much of what she's saying because of the noise. I suggest that they'll need more than fifty-five pages to make a book and tell them how to compile a list of publishers of religious material. The looks on their faces indicate that they've understood me about as well as I have them. I'm starting to sweat.

Rescue comes in an unlikely form. “You're Stephen Kirk,” a sixtyish man with close-cut hair and glasses informs me. “I recognize you from your picture.”

In his arm atop a small pile of papers is a copy of my book, an unlikely sight that pleases me deeply. The placement of his bookmark suggests he has read only about fifty pages, but someone with my track record shouldn't complain. I like this man.

He is Bryan Aleksich, the author of my Cold War thriller.

“I know we're not supposed to have our session until tomorrow morning,” he says, “but I was hoping we could discuss my sample now. Do you have time?”

My stack of twenty-page manuscript excerpts is in the Cyd Charisse Room. I'd planned to make notes on the samples later in the evening. But unlike the other submissions, his story has stuck in my mind down to the characters' names, and I already know what I want to tell him. And meeting with him now will buy me a graceful exit from the “Meet and Greet” session.

Off the writer-choked hallway is an empty conference room—where the “Meet and Greet” should have been held. We adjourn there.

I soon understand that Bryan is given to frank speech.

“I've been enjoying your book. I just picked it up last night,” he says. “I wish they'd designed a different cover, though. I'm sorry they used that picture.”

Bryan tells me he has a degree in graphic arts. He describes how the cover would have been improved by using a pen-and-ink illustration instead of a photograph.

“I have to say I don't care for the title either,” he says. “It's too familiar.”

I'm not sure how to respond. I've always liked the cover, though I'm not so certain just now.

Bryan smiles thinly. “You were my third choice.”

I ask what he means.

“We had to pick three people from the list to review our manuscripts, in case we couldn't get who we wanted. The editor from Algonquin was my first choice. I was also interested in the woman from St. Martin's.”

I can't argue with his choices. I'd have done the same in his position, though I hope I'd keep the knowledge to myself.

I don't take Bryan to be mean-spirited. Apparently, he places a premium on up-front honesty. If so, I can provide him a dose, too. “Let's talk about your sample,” I say.

Most of what I tell him is positive. I admire the way Bryan describes the suicide of the antihero's brother in a single, spare paragraph. I like the couple of details he uses to physically describe the antihero. I find the murder of the German girl downright chilling.

I can tell he's flattered.

“But I wouldn't try to sell it as an illustrated novel,” I say. In fact, the title page proclaims exactly that: “An Illustrated Novel.” The first page of each chapter carries a drawing of a vintage airplane. “Illustrated novels are for kids. You're giving publishers an easy reason to reject you. Sell the story first. Then, if you find some interest, you might say you've got illustrations they're welcome to look at. But don't be surprised if they say no. They've got their own illustrators.”

If I anticipate some resistance to this suggestion, then I underestimate the willingness of struggling writers to seize any ray of hope. Bryan wants success uncommonly badly. He is willing to hold his illustrations in reserve or to do anything else that might help his novel see print. “I don't even need an advance,” he generously offers.

Bryan, I learn, is seventy-two—a good ten years older than I guessed. The son of Serbian immigrants, he went to work in the Pittsburgh steel mills at age fifteen during World War II. He later studied graphic arts, then drew for an architectural firm in California, then went to law school at UCLA. More pertinent to his manuscript, he is also a former fighter pilot. He was accepted into pilot training at age twenty-five—just under the cutoff—having overcome an eye problem that required him to get a muscle surgically cut and having somehow passed his physical despite congenital high blood pressure.

Two days before Christmas 1965, Bryan was flying an Air National Guard nighttime training mission in the Los Angeles area. His two-seat trainer was to serve as a target for
a pair of F-102 fighters. Reaching his assigned altitude of forty thousand feet required him to fly his aged jet at 100 percent power for forty-five minutes—fifteen minutes beyond its designed capacity. When he reached altitude and reduced power, the engine blew. Bryan drifted for several minutes until the plane lost enough altitude for him to eject safely. From fourteen thousand feet, he parachuted to the Mojave Desert through heavy cloud cover, fighting nausea as he dropped, unable to see the ground below him. Luckily, he landed on a ridge; a short distance to either side and he would have tumbled down a steep slope. He spotted a line of car lights in the distance that indicated a road. Bryan made himself as comfortable as he could for the evening, hiked to the road upon rising the next morning, hitched a ride to the nearest telephone, and notified the base of his whereabouts.

A couple of weeks after that, he sat down and started his novel. In the 1950s, he'd served a tour at an air base in West Germany, which would provide his setting. A heavily modified version of his fall from forty thousand feet was to be the climactic scene.

By 1970, he had a 250,000-word manuscript. He self-published a thousand copies, sold about two hundred of them, then reread the novel and found it dreadful. Bryan took an electric drill and bored a hole through each of the remaining eight hundred copies, to make it less likely they'd be picked up by strangers. Then he took them to the dump.

But he'd caught the bug. By 1988, the revamped story was down to about half its original length. Bryan inquired with an agent, who indeed wanted to handle the novel. Over the next five years, it was rejected by nearly sixty publishers.

In 1993, Bryan retired from legal practice and left California for the North Carolina mountains south of Asheville. The following year, he signed up for a basic writing course through
Writer's Digest
He next took an advanced program offered by the magazine, then asked if he could pay for an additional six months of instruction. Bryan completed the program with increased confidence, a high level of enthusiasm, and a manuscript that was another ten thousand words leaner.

So here he was with a novel thirty-some years in the making, never having earned a dime off his writing but still attending conferences, still hoping for a greater editor when he was assigned a lesser one, still enrolling in a seminar in mystery writing here and a class in expository writing there, more clear-headed about his prospects than in years past but still stubbornly hopeful.

What I want to know is why a man who was a fighter pilot and a lawyer—either one a life's accomplishment for most people—feels such a need to be a novelist, too.

Not getting an immediate response from Bryan, I prod. Since it requires nothing, really, beyond pencil, paper, and one's own experience, is writing the cheapest way to immortality? Though no one is averse to money and recognition, don't writers want most of all to leave behind something of value?

He scoffs at this. “Then they ought to spend more time learning their craft.”

We talk for a while about other things—my family, the house where he lives, the route he traveled to reach the conference.

Then comes this from Bryan: “You say you enjoyed my
sample. I have the complete manuscript in my room. Would you be willing to take it home with you?”

I've been told the food at the Grove Park Inn is mediocre but that the authors who'll be manning the microphone during meals are first-rate. On the contrary, we all enjoy a fine dinner but endure a dreadful reading that evening.

The next morning, I meet with the six writers assigned to me. The author of the golf-course murder mystery is a neatly dressed woman in her sixties. The writer of the story about the two black friends in New York is a six-foot, distractingly pretty white girl. The man who wrote of the Southern family and its wayward uncle is painfully shy and wears an earring. The lady with the novel about the professional woman and the mental patient has indeed written from experience. The woman with the story about the ethnic enclave has plans to self-publish her book and direct-market it to Norwegian-interest societies. The final writer, Bryan, brings me his complete manuscript. I talk the full half-hour with each of them.

All my responsibilities met, I tour the old part of the inn before leaving the conference. Scott Fitzgerald stayed in Room 441 and the adjoining 443. I reach the top of the fourth-floor stairs at the same moment the elevator arrives.

I must look lost.

“Can I help you with something?” the elevator operator asks.

I tell her my purpose.

“Oh, certainly. Let's see if it's empty.” She leads me down the hall.

One of Fitzgerald's former rooms is occupied, but the other is being prepared for an afternoon arrival.

“Go in and take a look. Most of the furnishings in the old part of the inn are original, though I can't say for sure about his room.”

The old rooms are smaller and much more spartan than the ones in the new wings. I'm not sure which of the two rooms is which, but this may be where the great writer, one hot and sleepless night a couple of weeks after breaking his shoulder, tripped and fell while making his way to the bathroom. Unable to get to his feet because of his body cast, he spent forty-five minutes—from four o'clock to nearly five—in crawling to the telephone to summon help. He subsequently developed arthritis in his shoulder and was confined to bed for several weeks. It was during that period, and perhaps in this room, that he twice attempted suicide.

The cleaning girl is embarrassed, as am I. She busies herself in a corner. I don't linger long.