Read Online Mozart and Leadbelly by Ernest J. Gaines - Free Book Online Page B

mother to rent me a typewriter. I had gone through my book in longhand; now it was ready for typing. I knew absolutely zero about typing. Later, it would be proven that I knew even less about writing a book. Anyway, my mother rented the typewriter for me that summer of 1950, and for twelve hours a day I pecked and pecked with my right index finger. (I should mention here that my mother had had a baby in ’49, and I had to babysit and write my novel all at the same time that summer of 1950.)
    So I did everything to keep Michael asleep while I worked on my novel. I found that if I kept something over his eyes awhile—my fingers, preferably (I only used one hand while typing, so the other one was always free)—he would eventually go to sleep, giving me time for my work. Later that summer, I wrapped up my manuscript and sent it on to New York. My little package probably looked more like a bomb than like a novel to the New York people, because it was returned to me later. And I took it to the backyard and burned it in the incinerator.
    I had read many books in the Vallejo library, but I had read only what I wanted to read, what I liked reading. Now I had to read what was needed to make me a writer, if I was to be a writer. Now I had to look deeper into the story or the novel, into what the writer was really trying to tell us; now I had to analyze form, which I had never thought of before. “Read Twain,” they said, “especially
Huckleberry
Finn
; read Faulkner as much as you can; read Hemingway—see how ‘grace under pressure’ applies to you, to your people, especially to your athletes. Read Eudora Welty and Steinbeck; read James and Conrad. Have you read Flaubert?”
    “No, I’ve read de Maupassant.”
    “Read Flaubert. Have you read Cervantes and Shakespeare?”
    “A little Shakespeare, but no Cervantes.”
    “Read
Don Quixote,
and as much Shakespeare as you can. And the Russians?”
    “I’ve read Turgenev and Chekhov.”
    “You must read Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
; Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and
Punishment
; Gogol’s
Dead Souls,
and
The Inspector General
if you have the time. Read Thomas Mann. Read him. Read James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as Young Man,
and you should also read
Dublin
ers. Forget Ulysses and Finnegans Wake for now. Read T. S. Eliot.”
    “I don’t like that man. I don’t understand anything he’s talking about.”
    “Read him. When you begin losing your hair and your teeth begin loosening in the gum, you’ll understand him. Read. Read. Read. You want to say something about your people? You did say you wanted to say something about your people, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then read, read, read—the tools of the trade. There are other tools that you’ll discover later, but these I recommend, and they are worthy tools, I assure you.”
    So I read and I wrote, read and wrote. In all classes except creative writing I made average grades. In creative writing, only As. So I knew I was determined to be a writer. Everything pointed that way.
    After San Francisco State College, I went to Stanford for a year. On leaving Stanford, I went back to San Francisco, where I rented a one-room apartment with a Murphy bed. A Murphy bed is one that you push into the wall during the day and pull out at night. Besides the bed, there were a small couch and two chairs in the room. I had a small kitchen, a small bath, a small hallway with a small dining table. The dining table would be my desk. There I was determined to make my name. From that small table, I would write the books that would bring me the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes, and lots and lots of money—l thought.
    Earlier, I mentioned leaving Louisiana with a block of wood in a sack across my shoulder. Now this block of wood must reappear in my narrative. Chekhov said so. According to Chekhov, if a gun is over the mantel when the curtain rises, then it must be taken down before the curtain’s final descent. Therefore, being an admirer of