BEFORE SKIP GAVE me that boxed set of Steinbeck, no one had ever given me a book as a gift. But the gift was even bigger than he’d imagined. When I read the first line of The Grapes of Wrath—“To the red country and part of the gray of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth”—some writerly thing broke loose in me. “Spread a page with shining,” Steinbeck once advised writers, and I could see that shine as I read. I understood it. I had read big, fat novels before, losing myself in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Those sweeping stories, tragedies and triumphs spanning years and years, had captivated me for their otherness. But The Grapes of Wrath was so American, and the Joads so familiar somehow, and the language so lyrical, and the setting so real, that by reading it I saw what writers could do. And it dazzled me.
For years I had asked English teachers and guidance counselors how to become a writer. No one could tell me. John Steinbeck could though. Write like this, he seemed to be saying. Tell our story. Tell your story. Steinbeck intentionally wrote The Grapes of Wrath in five layers, intending to “rip the reader’s nerves to rags by making him participate in its actuality.” By writing the novel this way, Steinbeck ensured it would have an impact on all kinds of readers, and that impact might be personal, historical, sociological, or political. Grace Paley said: “No story is ever one story, it’s always at least two. The one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath.” I understood this somehow when I read The Grapes of Wrath, those layers slowly revealing themselves to me, showing me how a novel can have such breadth and touch anyone.
I only wish my brother had lived to see my first novel in a bookstore window. But he died on June 30, 1982, in his bathtub in Pittsburgh, when he slipped and fell, drowning in less than an inch of water. My first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, was published five years later. For years I had been writing a dreadful first novel called The Betrayal of Sam Pepper, about a woman in her mid-twenties living in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and feuding with a neighbor who has betrayed her boyfriend—in other words, a woman very much like me. How I toiled over that mess, staying up late at night to revise the pages I’d written in hotels on layovers as a TWA flight attendant. Some chapters sounded very much like imitation Hemingway, some like imitation Fitzgerald—
which is exactly what they were. The plot meandered and grew preposterous, the dialogue was stilted, characters appeared and then vanished from the story, forgotten. Hundreds of handwritten pages.
The summer that my brother died, I moved home to be with my parents, until one day in August my mother told me to leave, to “go and live your life.” What a gift that was, to free me from their grief. A few weeks later, I boarded an Amtrak train to New York City, my clothes and manuscript in a Hefty trash bag, $1,000 in my front jeans pocket. I moved into a tiny sublet on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village, with a door topped with a piece of foam on a sawhorse for a bed. I had never lived alone and wasn’t actually sure what to do. So I did what I always did—I wrote. Except after what had happened to me that summer, The Betrayal of Sam Pepper seemed banal and facile and dull—which it was. I gathered all those hundreds of pages and threw them in the dumpster in front of my building. Then I sat down at my newly acquired electric typewriter and typed: “To Sparrow her father was a man standing in front of a lime green VW van . . .” The first line of my first published novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine.
I began writing it the September after Skip died, trying, I see now, to understand what happened to him, to my family. I once heard an interview with the writer Kaye Gibbons in which she said all of her novels are about the death of her mother. Confused, the interviewer notes that none of her novels are about that. Gibbons said, “Oh, yes they are. Every one.” Nowhere in that novel does a character resembling my brother appear, yet to me he is on every page.
Like many first novels, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine tackled a lot of themes and topics: grief, friendship, love (romantic, parental, first love), cancer, the upheaval of the 1960s, the materialism of the 1980s, and even more. Overly ambitious perhaps, but I wanted those five layers that Steinbeck wrote about. All those years ago, on that Christmas when I sat on my yellow-and-white gingham bedspread and read The Grapes of Wrath, I understood viscerally and intellectually how good books illuminate so much more than the story on the surface, as Paley would say. True, the Joads are “a people in flight,” and the plot follows that flight from Oklahoma to California. But Steinbeck is also writing about the post-Depression urge for mobility and striving, political protests, the American Dream, desperate misery and suffering, disillusionment, and somehow hope. How I knew this as a sixteen-year-old reader, with no one with whom to share my ideas about literature, I cannot say. But I did know it, and I knew too that all I had to do to make my own dream of becoming a writer come true was to write every day, and to read every book I could get my hands on, to spread pages with shining.
Lesson 6: How to Fall in Love with Language
? Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows BY ROD MCKUEN ?
“ONOMATOPOEIA,” MY EIGHTH-GRADE ENGLISH TEACHER said. Then she wrote the strange word on the board. “A word that imitates the natural sound of the thing,” she continued.
I copied the word into my notebook, my mind already excited by this new thing, this word with too many vowels.
“Whoosh,” she was saying. “Cock-a-doodle-doo. Splash. Bang.”
Wait. There was a word for that? This was my first introduction to the world of literary devices, and I felt like a door had just opened into a kingdom where I belonged.
The teacher told us to write down examples of onomatopoeia, and once I began, I couldn’t stop.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Plop. Slap. Rustle. Cuckoo.
I filled one lined page and began another. Buzz! Boom! Onomatopoeia!
That year, I was trying not to be the kid who always raised her hand with the right answer, the kid who kept asking questions long after the lesson had ended. My endless curiosity for learning, my hunger to discuss everything with anyone, even sometimes exhausted my teachers. It definitely irritated my classmates. I had vowed to stop. But when the teacher asked for some examples of onomatopoeia, I couldn’t control myself. I stood and read my forty-two examples, so thrilled by the sounds of those words and the fact that there was actually a name for them that when I’d read all the ones I’d written down, I kept talking because more examples of this lovely thing were still popping into my head.