So it happened, one day in Florida, that a thirteen-year-old shot a man in the head because he took two slices of pizza when he was only offered one. It has happened a thousand times over, will happen again tomorrow, and I hardly wonder why. That child believed the scene would fade out after he shot the gun, and then the world would be new again.
The simple, intense exposure of a vicious act, in film or in literature, is entirely different from a story that includes both the violence and its painful consequences. I can't even call these two things by the same name. Those who like to say there is nothing new under the sun will claim that TV is no more violent than Shakespeare. But three average nights of prime-time TV contain as many acts of violence as all thirty-seven of Shakespeare's plays put together end to end--and quantity is only partly the point. More importantly, there is also a world of difference in the context. Think of all we learn of the world from poor Hamlet: the whole play is a chain of terrible consequences that fall one after another from the murder of his father. It's about bereavement, guilt, and unbearable loss. Hamlet "raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being." That is a tragedy that has earned its place.
I find I'm prepared to commit an act of violence in the written word if, and only if, it meets two criteria: first, the act must be embedded in the story of its consequences. Second, the fictional violence must be connected with the authentic world. It matters to me, for example, that we citizens of the U.S. bought guns and dressed up an army that killed plain, earnest people in Nicaragua who were trying only to find peace and a kinder way of life. I wanted to bring that evil piece of history into a story, in a way that would make a reader feel sadness and dread but still keep reading, becoming convinced it was necessary to care. So I invented Hallie Noline, and caused her to die. I did it because this happened, not to imaginary Hallie but to thousands of real people. One of them was a hydroelectric engineer in his twenties from Portland, Oregon, named Ben Linder, whose family I dearly love, and whose death is permanently grieved; Animal Dreams is dedicated to his memory. I would write that story again, because people forget, and I want us to remember.
I'm sure Silence of the Lambs had its reasons, too. Possibly its creators, who are a vastly talented lot, were trying to evoke in us a hatred of psycho-killers. But I should have exercised my right to stay away, on the grounds that I was already pretty clear about being no friend to psycho-killers. And the woman who wrote to tell me she closed the book on Hallie's death already knew enough, too. She did the right thing.
I will not argue for censorship, except from the grassroots up: my argument is for making choices about what we consume. The artist is blessed and cursed with a kind of power, but so are the reader and viewer. The story no longer belongs to the author once it's come to live in your head. By then, it's part of your life. So be careful what you let in the door, is my advice. It should not make you feel numb, or bored, or demeaned, or less than human. But I think it's all right if it makes you cry some, or feel understood, or long to eat sand for want of more, or even change your life a little. It's a story. That's what happens.
THE NOT-SO-DEADLY SIN
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your facts. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
Whenever I am queried about my fiction, if people want to know something in particular they nearly always want to know the same thing: How much is autobiographical? Did it all really happen, in exactly that way? Was my childhood like that? Which character is me? Commonly people don't ask, they just assume. I get letters of sympathy for the loss of my sister (the heroine of one of my novels lost her sister) and my father (ditto, same novel). Since one of my characters adopted a Cherokee child, I get advice about cross-cultural adoptions. And so on.
My sister and parents are alive and well, thanks. I don't have an adopted child. The mute waif named Turtle who appears in two of my novels is the polar opposite of my own Camille--a sunny, blonde child who spoke her first word at eight months and hasn't stopped talking since. At the time I invented Turtle, I had no child at all. Mine came later, and I didn't find her in a car, as happened in The Bean Trees. Mine was harder to produce. I never use my own family and friends as the basis of fictional characters, mainly because I would like them to remain my family and friends. And secondarily, because I believe the purpose of art is not to photocopy life but distill it, learn from it, improve on it, embroider tiny disjunct pieces of it into something insightful and entirely new. As Marc Chagall said, "Great art picks up where nature ends."
I know, in real life, many fascinating people; every one of them has limits on what she or he can be talked into. Most, in fact, will ask for my recommendations on their love lives or vacation plans, then reliably do the opposite. When I'm writing a story, I can't mess around with that kind of free spirit. I need characters I can count on to do what I say--take on a foundling baby rather than call the police; fall in love with my self-effacing heroine rather than the sturdy, good-looking divorcee down the street; pursue a passion for cockfighting, then give it all up at a lover's request; die for honor; own up to guilt. What's more, they must do it all convincingly. That means they have to be carrying in their psyches all the right motives--the exact combination of past experiences that will lead them to their appointment with my contrived epiphany. Trying to graft a plot onto the real-life history of anyone I actually know, including myself, would be as fruitless as lashing a citrus branch onto the trunk of an apple tree. It would look improbable. It would wither and die. Better to plant a seed in the good dirt of imagination. Grow a whole story from scratch.
Most people readily acknowledge the difference between life and art. Why, then, do so many artists keep answering the same question again and again? No, none of those characters is me. It's not my life, I made it up. Yes, all of it! Strangers' assumptions about deaths in my family and the like, odd as this might seem, have caused us some genuine pain. How I wish my art could stand apart from us, carrying no more suggestions about my private life than the work of, say, a stonemason or a tree surgeon. I was raised to be polite, but sometimes I'm inclined to get cranky and bark about this: Give us writers a little credit, will you? We're not just keeping a diary here, we're inventing! Why can't you believe we're capable of making up a story from scratch? Of stringing together a long, elaborate lie, for heaven's sake?
When it's put that way, it dawns on me that this may be the snag--the part about lying. In the book-jacket photos I look like a decent girl, and decent girls don't lie. That social axiom runs deep, possibly deeper than any other. The first important moral value we teach our children, after "don't hit your sister," is the difference between fantasy and truth. Trying to pass off one for the other is a punishable infraction, and a lesson that sticks for life. Whether or not we are perfectly honest in adulthood, we should be, and we know that on a visceral level. So visceral, in fact, a machine measuring heart rate and palm perspiration can fairly reliably detect a lie. We don't even have to think about it. Our hearts know.
So I suppose I should be relieved when people presume my stories are built around a wholesome veracity. They're saying, in effect, "You don't look like a sociopath." And it's true, I'm not; I pay my taxes and don't litter. Track down any grade-school teacher who knew me in childhood and she'll swear I was a goodie two-shoes even back then.
But ask my mother, and she'll tell you I always had a little trouble with the boundaries of truth. As the aerospace engineers say, I pushed the envelope. As a small child I gave my family regular updates on the white horse wearing a hat that lived in the closet. When I was slightly older, family vacations offered me the delightful opportunity to hang out alone in campground restrooms, intimating to strangers that I came from a foreign country and didn't comprehend English, or plumbing. When I got old enough to use public transportation by myself, my sport was to entertain other passengers with melodramatic personal
histories that occurred to me on the spot. I was a nineteen-year-old cello virtuoso running away from my dreadful seventy-year-old husband; or I had a brain tumor, and was determined to see every state in the union by Greyhound in the remaining two months of my life; or I was a French anthropologist working with a team that had just uncovered the real cradle of human origins in a surprising but as-yet-undisclosable location. Oh, how my fellow passengers' eyes would light up. People two rows ahead of me would put down their paperbacks, sling an elbow over the back of the seat, and ride all the rest of the way to Indianapolis backward, asking questions. I probably registered an increased heart rate and sweaty palms, but I couldn't stop myself. I strove for new heights in perjury, trying to see how absurd a yarn I could spin before some matron would finally frown at me over her specs and say, "Now really, dear."
No one ever did. I concluded that people want pretty desperately to be entertained, especially on long bus rides through flat midwestern cornfields.
For me, it was more than a pastime. It was the fulfillment of my own longing to reach through the fences that circumscribed my young life, and taste other pastures. Through my tales I discovered not exactly myself but all the selves I might have been--the ones I feared, the ones I hoped for, and the ones I'd never know. None of them was me. Each of them was a beckoning path into the woods of what might have been.
Eventually I found a socially acceptable outlet for my depravity. Now I spend hours each day, year after year, sitting at my desk with a wicked smirk on my face, making up whopping, four-hundred-page lies. Oh, what a life.
I do want to state for the record that I no longer have any inclination toward real dishonesty; I don't bear false witness to strangers or to friends. And I check my facts obsessively when serving the journalist's or essayist's trade. So my mother isn't to blame--she did, evidently, teach me to know true from false. I gather I was just born with an excess of story, the way another poor child might come into this world with extra fingers on each hand. My imagination had more figment in it than my life could contain, so some of it leaked out here and there. As I've matured, I've learned to control the damage.
I don't believe I'm extraordinary on this account. Every one of us, I think, is born with an excess of story. Listen quietly to a group of toddlers at play: the lies will swarm around their heads, thick as a tribe of bright butterflies, flickering gracefully from one child to another, until they notice a grown-up has come into the room--and in a sudden rush of wings the lies will vanish into air.
A little bit sad, isn't it? If you look it up, you'll find lying was never registered as one of the seven deadly sins. (Pride--an anemic sin if you ask me--is on that list, and so is gluttony, and of all things, sloth. But not lying.) Yet, in the age of evidence and reason, it has gotten such a very bad name. When so many smart, lively people keep insisting to me that all my stories must be true, I begin to suspect they can't quite get their minds around the notion of pure fabrication.
I want to tell them: Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still, then close your eyes, and tap the well. Find the lie you are longing to tell. It's in there. When you manage to wrestle that first one out, a whole flood may gush out behind it. Take them up in your hands, drink their clarity, write them down in a secret book. Tell them to your children behind the golden door of "Once upon a time." Choose one chair at your dinner table, give it to a different family member each night, and declare it "the liar's seat."
Or take a long bus trip through the cornfields. You may find a new career.
REPRISE
Buster the crab remains well, at this writing. His dominant left claw, which is much larger and purpler than his right and which he slams like a door behind him when he withdraws into his shell, is showing some wear. It's rumpled and split around the edges like an old laminated countertop. In fact, even though he has no greater adversary in his life than his own mood swings, he has recently managed to lose one of his antennae and is looking pretty dinged up. We think he may be preparing to molt. Crabs have this option: they can split themselves open from time to time and start life over with a fresh skin, complete with new appendages and even--if need be--whole regenerated eyes. The molting process itself is as astonishing as its results: the hermit preparing to shed its brittle skin will creep out of whatever seashell it's wearing at the moment, bury itself in damp sand, and inhale water (insofar as an animal with gills "inhales") until it has built up enough hydrostatic pressure to split its old casing and shuck it off. This is self-renewal at its fiercest and most tempting. It's the secret belief most of us carry forward from childhood, that we might have in us somewhere the capacity, like Rumpelstiltskin, to rupture and transmogrify out of a sheer tantrum of desire.
The crab's new skin is soft for a time, until it has the chance to dry and harden up like varnish. This is the brief period of its life when an edible marine crab becomes the potential delicacy known as soft-shelled crab. When the crab molts, it emerges larger; since its skin has no elasticity, this is the only way it can grow. If a newly molted hermit crab finds it can't fit back into the shell it parked nearby prior to molting, it may panic. My guidebook to hermit-crab care, written by Neal Pronek, advises that it's good to leave an assortment of shells of various sizes lying around just in case. Pronek waxes mostly pragmatic in his book, explaining for example that hermit crabs "will eat anything they find, from hard dog biscuits to a dead fish...where certain items are concerned, the deader the better," and also warning, "Don't expect an about-to-molt crab that loses a leg on Tuesday to pop up with a new one after a molt on Wednesday." But on the topic of hermit crabs stranded without shells, Pronek can hardly contain his alarm: "They'll start having nervous breakdowns....They want those shells, and they'll do everything in their power to make sure that they don't get cut off from them. Pinch, scratch, smash, kill--whatever." Not something to mess around with. Since Buster started showing molting inclinations, we've sorted through our shell collections from every vacation in recent history (we knew we were saving these things for some good reason) and pulled out the cream of the crop. We believe we have got the situation in hand.
But one can't be sure. In the chapter called "Diseases and Ailments," Mr. Pronek offers darkly: "All of their ills boil down to the mysterious croak; the crab is outwardly well one day, dead the next." And so, while I can say that Buster remains well at this writing, around here we take nothing for granted.
After two days of gentle winter rains, the small pond behind my house is lapping at its banks, content as a well-fed kitten. This pond is a relative miracle. Several years ago I talked a man I knew who was handy with a bulldozer into damming up the narrow wash behind my house. This was not a creek by any stretch of imagination--even so thirsty an imagination as mine. It was only a little strait where, two or three times a year when the rain kept up for more than a day, water would run past in a hurry on its way to flood the road and drown out the odd passing Buick. All the rest of the time this little valley lay empty, a toasted rock patch pierced with cactus.
I cleared out the brush and, with what my bulldozer friend viewed as absurd optimism, directed the proceedings. After making a little hollow, we waterproofed the bottom and lined the sides with rocks, and then I could only stand by to see what would happen. When the rains came my pond filled. Its level rises and falls some, but for years now it has remained steadfastly pond, a small blue eye in the blistered face of desert.
That part was only hydrology and luck, no miracle. But this part is: within hours of its creation, my pond teemed with life. Backswimmers, whirligig beetles, and boatmen darted down through the watery strata. Water striders dimpled the surface. Tadpoles and water beetles rootled the furry bottom. Dragonflies hovered and delicately dipped their tails, laying eggs. Eggs hatched into creeping armadas of larvae. I can't imagine where all these creatures came from. There is no other permanent water for many
miles around. How did they know? What jungle drums told them to come here? Surely there are not, as a matter of course, aquatic creatures dragging themselves by their elbows across the barren desert just in case?
I'm tempted to believe in spontaneous generation. Rushes have sprung up around the edges of my pond, coyotes and javelinas come down to drink and unabashedly wallow, nighthawks and little brown bats swoop down at night to snap insects out of the air. Mourning doves, smooth as cool gray stones, coo at their own reflections. Families of Gambel's quail come each and every spring morning, all lined up puffed and bustling with their seventeen children, Papa Quail in proud lead with his ridiculous black topknot feather boinging out ahead of him. Water lilies open their flowers at sunup and fold them, prim as praying hands, at dusk. A sleek male Cooper's hawk and a female great horned owl roost in the trees with their constant predators' eyes on dim-witted quail and vain dove, silently taking turns with the night and day shifts.