Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
All correspondence answered in the same week received, insofar as possible. No photographs or inclusions.—VB
June 6, 1947
Dear Frida,
Diego’s telegram has terrified me not a little. He seems to believe the doctors nearly killed you, so I fear for all concerned. But for you, above all. I’m determined today to send a cheerful letter, to give you a little picknick from your worries, as you have done often for me. You’ll find in this package your birthday present. Don’t be too disappointed: it’s only another book, which I hope will amuse you. If not, blame yourself, you should have left me a cook.
I am trying to begin a new story that will be about the Mayans, I think, and the fall of civilizations. Everyone wants a happy ending this time, so this should be just the ticket. But the writing proceeds slowly, when life is filled with such thrilling distractions. Only last week I purchased a packet of clothespins, and a new billfold. (The shopgirl informed me it has a secret pouch.) The Roadster and I “Make a Date to Lubricate” every 30 days at the garage on Coxe Avenue. A new appliance shop has opened down the street! And right now I am spying out my study window into the treetops where a gigantic bird is pecking a hole. I wish you could see the creature: its red hair stands straight up, as mine does on Mondays. Goodness, the wood chips fly, this thing is the size of an ox. And you were worried my life was dull.
I never want for company. The neighbor boy Romulus seems to prefer my house to his own, now that summer is here and he is paroled from Grade Six. With hands shoved deep in overall pockets he wanders around the house coveting things, but is not a thief. He asks. He particularly wants the little carved idol from Teotihuacán. I haven’t told him it’s a stolen object. Instead I gave him a fountain pen and an old fedora and he pretends to be Edward Murrow, using a Doomsday voice to interview the
cats. I also offered to give him a cat, the useless black one I call Chisme, but he won’t take it.
My stenographer comes Monday through Friday to answer mail and telephone, for over a year now. My wonderful amanuensis. She works at the dining room table. With each fresh day’s mail piled high there, we pray: “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.” She is a whiz, I have known her sometimes to get through nearly a hundred letters from readers in a day, typing up a kind little note in answer to each. She hauls it all to the post office in a gigantic leather satchel she found somewhere, such as might have been used by the Pony Express: over her shoulder she slings it, and off she goes, does Violet Brown. I can’t help thinking you would appreciate the irony of her name, for she is a dove-gray little bird. And something like the mother I need, commanding me to leave the house for fresh air at least once daily, if only to the corner for cigarettes. Lately she has stepped up the program: I am to undertake some level of social adventure each week. Going to the movies by myself is acceptable (Mrs. Brown is lenient), and not too bad if I slip in after the house has gone dark. The purpose of the outings is to overcome my dread of the world and all things in it. Now the magazines are saying I have a punctured eardrum, which is helpful. If the world howls too loudly, I can pretend I don’t hear.
Please send word you are recovering. Diego’s telegram was a shocker. He seems extremely angry, not only with your doctors but also the world and Every Damn Gringo in it, myself included. You might let him know, Truman did not consult me before committing to defeat the Communists in Greece and Turkey. Secretary of State Marshall has announced a new plan for European assistance that won’t thrill your husband either. Frida, you understand men. How are these leaders different from the boys I used to watch at school, trying to make up their teams for football? Before this war we had six great players on the grass.
Now only two are left standing. Naturally those two will be rivals, and try to get the rest to line up on their side. Dimes and candy will help, sure.
I struggle to understand why Diego supports Stalin now, after working so closely with Lev, and even seeing him murdered. What rational motives could cause Diego to make this change? “It’s a revolutionary necessity,” he said, but how am I to know what that means? Betrayal, as the means to an end? Nearly every day I wake up shocked at how little in this world I comprehend. Perhaps Diego is right, and despite all my years of serving brilliant men I am only a dumb gringo. I shall try to keep to the task I seem to know: writing stories for people who believe if you throw a rock, it could roll uphill. If your husband says I am an idiot on the subject of politics, certainly he should know. So don’t ask me about the peaceful atom, or how to raise the birth rate in France.
For your amusement I enclose a newspaper review, a favorite from the last round. I take it as proof I am no literary great, but Mrs. Brown says it proves my books are about Important Things. Diego may take it as written proof that someone here besides myself opposes Truman’s shocking turn against the rising proletariat. But mostly it proves nothing. You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails. I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.
I’m not brave, as you are. However badly broken, you still stand up. In your Tehuana dresses, in your garden, with the pomegranate trees bending toward you to open their red flowers. No matter what happens, you will still be at the center of the world. Your friend,
INSÓLITO
The New York Weekly Review,
April 26, 1947
Author’s Second Strike Hits the Mark
by Donald Brewer
Do not mistake Harrison Shepherd for a literary great. His stories are full-to-brimming with lusty, bare-chested youths. The settings are glamorous, the plots chest-heavers. You may not admit it to your friends, but somehow you can’t put them down.
Pilgrims of Chapultepec
(Stratford and Sons), set in Mexico before the Conquest, recounts a pilgrimage of people cast out from home, doomed to follow a neurotic leader who picks fights with his own shadow. Shepherd makes the case for those who find themselves on the ropes against bad policy, wondering what the Sam Hill their leader could be thinking. The protagonist, a boy named Poatlicue, struggles to be a model citizen but comes to view his nation’s long march as a winning game for the king, and the scourge of everyone else.
Author Shepherd combines Leatherstocking action with Chaplinesque pathos, as shown in this symbolic hunting scene: Poatlicue and his friend skin a deer, grousing about the king as they hack their kill into anatomical bits. Their leader has made another outrageous edict, reversing a treaty of friendship with a neighboring clan, deciding now it can’t be trusted. The tribe will have to move again, in a season when food is scarce. These youths are rankled. Poatlicue tosses a pair of testicles in the dust, calling them “the buck’s last big hopes in sad little bags.”
He tells his pal, “Our leader is an empty sack. You could just as well knock him over, put a head with horns on a stick, and follow that. Most of us never choose to believe in the nation, we just come up short on better ideas. It’s probably a law: the public imagination may not exceed the size of the leaders’ ballocks.”
The author may be alluding here to the testimony of Donald Benedict, the New York theological student who refused
to register for the draft during the war. “We do not contend that the American people maliciously choose the vicious instrument of war,” said Benedict during trial, “but in a perplexing situation they lack the imagination and religious faith to respond in a different manner.”
Does Shepherd mean to put himself in the draft-dodger’s camp? One could ask many questions of this politically astute novelist, starting with his opinion of a leader who has just set the nation reeling with an abrupt foreign policy reversal, from friendly cooperation to Truman’s so-called “containment” of the USSR.
We can only wonder, as Shepherd declines to be interviewed. But this week as we line up behind our man in Washington, shelling up $400 million to fight our friends of yesterday because “Every nation must choose,” we might listen for a thump in the dust, and wonder whether the public’s big hopes will fit in that small, sad sack.
June 11
She has raised the subject of the memoir yet again. I thought it had died a natural death, but no, she presses. If only to put to rest the perforated eardrum question, I suspect. The first chapter was very good in her opinion, and today she confessed that since the day I gave it to her, she comes to work each morning hoping I’ll have the next part of it ready for her to type.
“It’s been near six months now since chapter one, Mr. Shepherd. If it takes that long for each, you’ll not outlive your own boyhood.”
I told her I was very sorry to crush her hopes in coming to work and so forth. But there will be no next part. It was a direly mistaken idea. And anyway, even several months ago when I was entertaining the project, I’d run across a problem, the missing notebook. The very next little diary after the first one. I hadn’t yet told her.
“I can’t recall that year without it. I should have let you know a while ago. I just hoped you’d forget about it. The memoir fell apart before I’d even gotten started.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Her eye went to the shelf. She knows where I keep them. They should all be put to the flame.
“The crucial missing piece of the manuscript. There’s a word for that, historians use. A lacuna. So blame it on fate and history, if you want.”
“Did you have it before? When you first took all of them out of the crate?”
This is not a set of keys gone missing, I informed her with some irritation. It just didn’t come with the rest, when Frida packed up the notebooks and papers. Probably it had burned at the police station, or slipped behind a cabinet. It’s small, I know exactly what it looked like—it was a little leather-bound accounts book I stole from the maid. About the size of your hand. And now it’s gone. Just forget about the memoir, I’m working on something different now. I should burn up all these notebooks so you’ll stop nagging me about it.
Mrs. Brown is no fool. “If you remember what the booklet looked like, you could remember well enough what was in it.”
June 23
It was only one letter, but she carried it up the stairs like a sack of bricks.
“I hate to disturb. But it says they need this back by return mail.”
“Who is it?”
“J. Parnell Thomas.”
“Friend or foe?”
“Chairman, House Committee on Un-American Activities, formerly known as the Dies Committee.”
“Rings a bell, Dies. Oh yes, I know these gentlemen.”
Committee Diez
, we’d pronounced it, like “ten” in Spanish. They arranged Lev’s trip to Washington, the visas all prepared and then canceled at the last minute.
“You do?” She seemed startled.
“I mean, I know what they do. They called up my former em
ployer once, from Mexico. To testify on the treacheries of Stalin. They’re still in business?”
She held up the letter. “It’s just a form. They say it’s gone out to all employees of the Department of State.”
“I don’t believe I’ll be shipping any more art for the government.”
“Present or previous, it says. They need you to sign a statement saying you’re loyal to the United States government.”
“Goodness. Why wouldn’t I be?”
She moved her glasses from her head to her nose, and read: “Due to close wartime cooperation between the United States and Russia, certain strategic areas of our government may have been opened to Communist sympathizers. As of March 21, 1947, the President and Congress have undertaken to secure the loyalty of all government workers.”
“Very cloak and dagger. Where do I sign?”
She approached the bench. “Are you sure you ought, Mr. Shepherd? If you aren’t looking to work for the government again, maybe there isn’t need.”
“Are you doubting my loyalty?”
She surrendered the letter for signature.
“Mrs. Brown, I don’t hate much and I don’t love much. I’m a free man. But I love writing books for Americans. Look at those letters, all that sky-blue goodness, this country is the berries. And Joseph Stalin murdered my friend. He would have gotten me too, if I’d stood in the way.”
“So you’ve said, Mr. Shepherd. I know it sets a haint upon you, especially of an August, and no wonder. It’s no small thing to see bloody murder.”
I signed the letter and handed it back. “I’m inclined in this case to stand out of the way. If I ever had to choose, I might just be a coward and save my own skin.”
“That’s people,” she said. “That’s how the Good Lord made us to be.”
“No, I’ve known brave men. Lev saw his children murdered, and never gave in. Even young boys, like Sheldon Harte. I’m told they loved life even more than I do, it’s why they became revolutionaries. And ended up bludgeoned, or dead in a lime pit.”
She stood waiting. For a happier ending, I suppose.
“What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won’t even stand close to the blade. I’m one of those. We don’t bend anything.”
“You do, though. Look here, I’ve got boxes of letters downstairs, as you said yourself. People telling how you’ve saved their day. Do ye think that’s ordinary?”
“I give them a lark. A few hours to forget about a disappointing family, or a boss who’s a tyrant. But all that mess is still there, when the book ends. I don’t save people.”
The corners of her mouth turned down. “Mr. Shepherd, here’s your trouble. You don’t know your own strength.”
July 3
The Pack Square Soda Shoppe could not have been decked out with more flag bunting if it were the president’s train car. Romulus was dazzled, mostly by his buffalo-like ice cream sundae. Mrs. Brown was rosy-cheeked, sipping cola through a straw. “You ought be thrilled,” she said. “A Hollywood movie.”