MaineCourse

1952

From Nancy Tomlinson Hall Rice's (Jennifer's mother) Senior Paper, October, 1952

Well, so perhaps my need to write, up through my freshman year in college, can be attributed simply to the fact that I wanted to be like my mother, and was copying those things which seemed to be important to her, without having any idea why. Actually I never saw any of my mother’s finished stories … [S]he was always scribbling down little bits of conversations on the backs of envelopes.
Some of these conversations were ones I remembered hearing or being part of myself, and these were always slightly distorted and much more fun the way my mummy had put them down. I tried not to snoop, but the temptation to see something as she had seen it was often too strong to keep me from looking at things she left lying around in the open. …
And I began to keep diaries … One summer in particular, as I remember it, I used up seven lined notebooks … [My mother] suggested that I try … for brevity. … My diary became not so much a record of what my life was like, but a cheerful practice in saying things well.
And I did say things well. My stories, the ones I turned out in the old days, still strike me as cleverly done. I had what my mother called a flair for the dramatic, by which she meant that I told my stories as she told hers. They were complicated and witty, and very little more. It began to seem to me even then, and increasingly my first year in college, that this was dishonest in me.
One of my best stories, published as the lead story in the school magazine my junior year, would be a good example.
My brother Jerry and I had decided one year to tap the maples on our lawn and in the churchyard next door. It was a silly-ish sort of a lark, and Mummy was cross with it all along, because it meant every pan in the house and rows of milkbottles and dishpans (everything but the bathtub) filled with sickish-sweet maple sap, waiting to be boiled on the stove. And it meant no burners for cooking and the house steamy for weeks, but she was a good-ish sort of Mummy and she let us go ahead. The sap came in a rush, and overwhelmed, we went next door to borrow the giant kettle that Mrs. Delarmy used for spaghetti suppers. Sometimes she let the ladies of the Ladies Aid borrow it for Church Suppers, when she could be there to help.
“If it were anybody but the Hall children,” we heard her say to her daughter as we left hugging it happily, “I don’t know as I would have.” And we remembered our promise to be careful, but wondered whatever there could possibly be to be careful about. After all, a kettle is a kettle, and indestructible.
It was not. We left it simmering one night, and woke to find the house a choke of smoke and the kettle a glowing mass of bubbling flames. The bottom, what with the heat from the gallons of sugar, just burned right out. It was wartime and the kettle impossible to replace. Jerry and I still squirm inside when we remember.
As I said, it was a dramatic story, and I told it vividly and with a high-handed amusement. The details, to be technical, were all slightly askew from the truth, but not more so than the details of the writing I do now. But they were askew in a different direction, and for a different reason. They were askew because it sounded funnier that way, and more dramatic, not because I wanted to make them reveal not only what had happened but the way I felt. I had told it to arouse in others first a feeling of amusement and then of shock, and it seemed to me (almost) that this was enough.
Two things nagged at me. First there was Mrs. Delarmy, who might, because she was a good person, have forgiven the kettle, but never, if she had seen it, the story. And then there was my brother. We never talked much, but we understood each other; about the story he said nothing to me, but I knew I hadn’t been true to something the two of us shared.

I'm curious as to why one would write about writing "clever, vivid, high-handedly-amusing" stories and not just post them? And Mike and I fall all over ourselves running our own writing down (but praising each other's) -- I'm non-plussed by such autoregard. Would love to have heard the original, full telling of the syrup story, though...

Posted by adam.

You don't think exploring what it means to be honest in one's writing should be a blog activity? But yes, her degree of self-centered assuredness was remarkable.

Posted by jennifer.

Apparently the need to write goes back at least two generations. Like mother like daughter. Is it in the genes?

Posted by rakkity.

Posted by Michael at May 5, 2005 07:51 AM