“If I wrote the truth about my experience in the mountains,” I said, “I would only be proving that salmon snap at our heels and that there are still Indians.”
Mary said, “What difference does it make? At least you’d be writing and using your great talent.”
All that talk about my great talent was beginning to hit home. Up to that moment I had never shown any particular talent in anything except making Christmas cards, and picking and cleaning chickens, and it was a nice feeling to sit there at my golden oak desk littered with unchecked purchase orders and think that every publisher in the United States was foaming at the mouth with impatience waiting for me to write about the North-west.
“What time is the appointment?” I asked.
“Five o’clock”, Mary said. “You’ve only got five minutes so hurry.”
As I put on lipstick and combed my hair, I told one of the girls in the office that I had to hurry as I was going to meet a publisher’s representative at the Olympic Hotel to discuss my book. She said, “Gosh! Betty, are you writing a book?”
“Sure”, I said with the casualness of great talent, “and this publisher’s representative has come all the way from New York to talk to me about it.”
“What’s your book about?” she asked.
“About my experiences on a chicken ranch”, I said.
“Oh”, she said, with obvious disappointment and changed the subject.
Walking up to the hotel in the February rain, I decided that I would tell Forrest that I was going to write a sort of rebuttal to all the recent successful I-love-life books by female good sports whose husbands had forced them to live in the country without lights and running water. I would give the other side of it. I would give a bad sport’s account of life in the wilderness without lights, water or friends and with chickens, Indians and moonshine.
The publisher’s representative, who was very friendly anyway, liked my idea and told me to go home and write a five-thousand word outline and bring it to Mary’s dinner party the next night.
Having never written either an outline or a book, I was a little slow and found it necessary to stay home from work the next day to finish it. I called the construction office and told my best friend there that I had to stay home and write an outline for a book, but would she please tell the boss I was sick.
She said sure she would, wished me luck, hung up the phone and skidded in and told the boss that I was staying home to write a book and so I was fired, and in one day transferred my great talent from construction to writing.
When I told my husband and daughters that I was going to write a book they were peculiarly unenthusiastic.
“Why?” they asked.
And I couldn’t think of any reason except that Mary thought I had great talent, so I said, “Because every single publisher in New York wants me to, that’s all.”
A likely story they told each other, as they tapped their foreheads and suggested that I take a nice long rest.
During that long, long year between the conception and birth of The Egg and I, I sometimes got so depressed I put the book away in disgust and went into town and applied for, and got, dreary little part-time jobs that seemed much more in keeping with my ability than writing. Then after a month or so, Mary would hear about it and call me up and demand that I quit and again unleash my great talent.
One Monday morning during the summer, I was hanging out the last of a huge washing when Mary called and demanded over the long distance phone, “Betty Bard MacDonald, are you going to spend the rest of your life washing your sheets by hand, or are you going to make fifty thousand dollars a year writing?” It didn’t leave much of a choice so I got out the manuscript and got started writing again.
Toward the end of the summer, when the book was almost finished, Mary called and told me to write to Brandt and Brandt, literary agents whose name she had got from the former editor of the Seattle Times. All successful writers have agents, she told me, and Brandt and Brandt are the very best. I thought, “Well, if they are the very best at least I’ll be starting at the top, and after they turn me down I’ll go to the Public Library and learn the names of some others.”
Mary said, “Be sure and tell them about the short stories, the children’s stories and the t.b. book. Remember, Betty, nobody likes a one-book author.”
From that day on until I wrote my second book, Mary waved that ‘Nobody likes a one-book author’ slogan around like an old Excelsior banner. When I finished my second book she changed it to “Nobody likes a two-book author.” Then three. But now the tables are turned because she has written her first book and I’m on my fifth.
Feeling exactly as though I were trying to join an exclusive club on forged credentials, I wrote to Brandt and Brandt and sent them the five-thousand-word outline I had shown the publisher’s representative. In my eagerness to prove that I wasn’t a stinking old one-book author I made it sound a little as though we had to wade through old manuscripts to go from room to room in our log house, and that I was a veritable artesian well of the written word. Much to my amazement and chagrin, Brandt and Brandt, immediately on receipt of my letter, wired me that they were delighted with the outline and to send every manuscript I had, which certainly wouldn’t take long.
I called Mary and told her about the telegram and she said, “Now, bonehead, are you convinced that you’re a writer or do you still want to work in some musty little office?”
We both laughed and then Mary, speaking with clenched teeth I could tell even over long distance, said, “Of course, your book will be a best seller and they’ll want you to go to New York and then to Hollywood.”
“What’s the matter with Europe?” I asked.
Mary said, “Just wait and see.”
Before I could answer Brandt and Brandt’s telegram, I got an airmail letter from them telling me that J. B. Lippincott Company, publishers, wanted to buy the book on the strength of the outline and would I accept a $500 advance? Would I accept a $500 advance? Huh, would I accept a fifty-cent advance was more like it.
I was on my way to town, and had stopped at the mailbox on the way to the ferry, and there nestled among a pile of bills, was this long white important-looking envelope. My first thought, of course, when I saw the Brandt and Brandt on the back, was that it was a letter taking back the telegram. I didn’t have time to open it on the dock so I waited until I was installed in the Ladies’ Cabin of the ferry before ripping open the flap and removing with trembling fingers the letter that rocked my world.
I read it over and over again, and with each reading it became more wonderful. My book, that nebulous product of Mary’s faith in me, had suddenly materialized into an actual thing. I was a writer and I had to tell somebody. I hurried all over the upper deck of the ferry but the cabins were empty. I went down to the car deck but there were only trucks.
When we docked at the other side, I scanned the waiting cars for a familiar face and finally, in desperation, rushed over to a man and his wife whom I knew very slightly and told them that my book had been accepted and I was to get $500. I couldn’t have picked nicer people. They were as enthusiastic as though it had happened to them and I left them feeling very successful and terribly talented.
The next dandy thing that happened was the next spring when I was learning that the darkest, lowest period in a writer’s life is that awful interval between acceptance and publication. I knew I was a failure, I knew the book was no good, I was sure I was going to get the manuscript back and I had spent all the advance.
I decided to go to town and look for a job. Preferably one involving the filing of the same card over and over and over again day after day. I had found a reasonable facsimile of the job I had in mind and was making my weary way home along our trail, when Anne came running to meet me calling, “There’s a telegram for you and you’re to call Seattle operator twenty-eight right away.”
It’s come, I thought. They have decided not to publish the book and they’re demanding their
money back.
“Hurry, Betty”, Anne said. “Find out what the telegram is.”
“No”, I said. “I’m going to wait until after dinner. I’d rather get bad news on a full stomach.”
After dinner I called the operator and Whispering Sam, who was at that time relaying all messages to Vashon before burning the only copy, read me a very long wire of which I got about ten words. Three of these were Atlantic Monthly and ‘serialization’, which I knew must be wrong, as the Atlantic Monthly represented to me the ultimate in literature achievement and I was certain they couldn’t be interested in anything I had written.
I called Mary and she immediately changed her tune from best sellers, and trips to New York, to awfully important books, not very good sellers, and trips to Boston. She said she’d call Western Union for me and call me right back. She did in a matter of minutes and told me that I was to call Boston the next morning at eight o’clock and she thought I’d better get the next ferry and pick up a copy of the telegram, which Western Union was reluctantly holding at the edge of their telegram burner. The next ferry left in sixteen minutes so I sent Anne and Joan up to stay with my sister Allison and I ran the mile and a half to the dock.
The main office of the telegraph company is located on a dark side street in the financial district in Seattle, and as I got off the bus and walked in the rain across the deserted streets, I kept thinking, ‘This is the most important moment of my life. I must remember everything.’ I felt enchanted and as though I should be leaving a trail of light behind me.
My steps made no sound and I was as light as a petal when I entered the telegraph office and asked for my telegram. I read it standing by the counter and then, stuffing it in the pocket of my raincoat, I floated out to my sister Mary’s.
I told Mary about my strange enchanted feeling and she said, “You just feel successful, but imagine how I feel.
“All of a sudden my big lies have started coming true!”
Also by Betty MacDonald
The Egg and I
The Plague and I
Onions in the Stew
and, for the young-in-heart of all ages
Nancy and Plum
All in print and available from any good bookshop
or direct from the publisher
Copyright
ANYBODY CAN DO ANYTHING by Betty MacDonald. Copyright 1950 by Betty MacDonald. Copyright © renewed 1973 by Donald C MacDonald and Ann Elizabeth Evans and Joan Keil. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First published in Great Britain 1950
First published in this edition 1991
ISBN 0 7041 0243 9
EPub Edition September 2016 ISBN 9780062672247
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Betty Macdonald, Anybody Can Do Anything
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