THE I AND THE SHE OF ME
Picking a voice, a sex, a personality and character for the main figure of a novel is seriously daunting. Writers of great ability show us how it can be done even as we read their work with facility, oblivious to the grief they’ve poured out onto their pages.
I understand that abashedly. I make no claim for greatness. For me such seminal choices about a central character, decisions that may rule one’s mind for a year or more, have come in lightning flashes, explosive as revelations of primal matter. Not once in the writing that follows have I strayed from that first eager epiphany.
If these intrinsic values had been more challenging to me in the conception of the novels, they would surely have been better. Although I won’t complain of them. I am proud of their accomplishments, of having accomplished them. I am quite OK with my work as it stands. Complacency is not a virtue. But it is me. Many hundreds of days I’ve finished my allotted section, that I composed in my head in the morning over coffee, with euphoric confidence in its brilliance only to reread it later in dismay and despair. I see my work, novels and short stories each the same as digging a ditch. Choosing a spot, starting and finishing. It’s a tremendously complex laboring.
In my novels I am most comfortable as a woman. I wrote The Prairie Dancers, L.O.V.E. and Small Games of Chance with a Woman at the core. Possie Victoria Vandermark, Magda Ott and May Skinner Bell are strong centers, as different as they are they do share strength.
This comfort zone is especially perplexing because until I was in my 20s I was afraid of women. Terrified. Once that fear was lost I wrote about women with a cognitive passion and conviction. Just as I could begin to make love to them, with more than desire, with reverence, in my physical life, they sprang up in my imagine spirit.. Others can best judge my success in this. I myself wonder if my obsession with them as characters, imagined beings, gave me the control to love them as real ones.
Only in Beware of The Dog have taken a male protagonist, a very flawed hero, Randal Peyton Purcell. I work in, through, him as a first person, in present tense as a highly unreliable narrator. The only time I’ve assumed that most intimate of persona and point of view throughout an entire novel. Yet even Dog I build an unattractive male character who to be saved must be destroyed by women. I can’t ask why, it’s an intriguing blank spot in my otherwise replete self awareness.
I make two of the women heroines—Possie and Magda Kansans, perhaps because that was easier for me. Doing so gave me an authentic mentality for both. In Small Games of Chance my focus is on my grandmother, a person I never knew. I tell her story as fragments stitched together from the rare and sketchy snippets I heard about her from my father and his siblings. To me she is the most fully realized of my women characters. She is female, Goddess, little girl—a compendium of too much history, of mystery, of feminine allure and power. May is both bedrock and bipolar.
Creating Possie was pure delight, a turn on for me. She too is larger than life but ethereal despite her size and ‘child of God’ simplicity. To the contrary, Magda is the thick waisted, burley Madonna of The Trail. Virtually lost in our America without a memory. 12 of these statues were made and erected in the 1920s larger than life in small towns across the prairie and the High Plains. The one I’ve seen and that moved me is in Council Grove, Kansas. The work might be a bit kitsch which doesn’t bother me at all. It reminds me of the line from a western folk song, “She arose from her warm bed, a battle to fight” a fragment that also rouses me to a sense of great affection.
Although I don’t see my own mother as heroic, rather very loving as well as very troubled, she certainly did carry an enfolding and protective feminine presence as surely as the book she was reading at the moment.
Mostly, the source for my female heroines is Georgia, my brother Steve’s wife, who remains one of my great loves and who was larger than life. And with a pioneer woman’s strength and perseverance.
Still, I do wonder why I punished Randy Purcell so severely? Poor fellow he is my only male protagonist, sly and unpleasant until the novel teaches him his lesson.