These are the words the editor Robert Linscott cabled to Truman Capote on reading early chapters from The Grass Harp, sent to Linscott from Italy where Truman was staying at the time. “There is a perfection about these two chapters that is simply miraculous.” One can imagine how lovely it was for Truman to hear these words while crafting his second novel, a follow up to Other Voices, Other Rooms, published to a good deal of acclaim for Linscott two years earlier.

Discovering, however, that his young author was planning to leave Italy and return to New York, Linscott cables, “Rumor has it that you plan to return . . . I hope this means with the completed manuscript, as it would be a pity to leave such ideal working conditions before the job is done.”

Linscott comes across as avuncular, perhaps, but his words carry an unspoken warning: Do not leave the place that is inspiring you!

His words came to mind today when strolling among all the beautiful houses here in Chatham, Mass., and imagining this or that addition or shed or tower as a perfect place to write a novel. While the work is progressing satisfactorily now, it’s not quite like what happened three years ago when I was here. In the summer of 2007, we rented a damp little house for two weeks; one of the first vacations of this length anywhere. Those of you who have stayed somewhere for longer than the usual week will know what changes seep into you when you are there long enough to feel yourself an inhabitant.

Looking back on that earlier stay, I recall two very important events in my writing life. I had been thinking of a story, a memoir-based novel about a car journey my family took when I was young. I knew at the time, however, and before writing a word, that my recollections of the trip were fragmentary and would not make a complete story. I would need to “fashion” other parts, to complement what I knew, buttress my memories with other parts of the narrative, and I wasn’t sure how this could be accomplished. So the story remained in the back of my mind, simmering until something would either deflate the power of the memories altogether, or electrify them into living words on paper. In either case, it was at the bottom of my working agenda.

Now, when I am on vacation, or even on business in another town, I visit the bookstores. I find them, measure the miles, obtain transportation, if necessary, and visit them. Not that I need any books I don’t have; Lord knows, most bookstore visits end with the sad feeling of knowing that my personal inventory is superior to the store’s. But because bookstores are like churches to me, I attend whenever and wherever I can.

So it happened that I was visiting Yellow Umbrella Books, one of two bookstores in Chatham (there used to be three, but that’s another story), and I picked up a copy of As I Lay Dying. I’d read a good deal of Faulkner, but not this short novel. When I read it in that damp house, I discovered, as countless writers have before me, the brilliance of its narrative technique. I was moved in a way I so seldom am (it actually happened again twice this year; more on that later). In a matter of days, my own novel appeared before me as a nighttime landscape under a flash of lightning.

And now I count the days before Lunch-Box Dream appears. It is, as you can imagine, a story told in multiple voices, as I am convinced some stories need to be told. I’m also rather convinced that being away from home, with its poor lawns, wilting plants, junk mail, dustballs, neighborhood shebangs, and recyclables, allowed my mind to explore, connect, tease out, and otherwise create — without the stultifying effects of the familiar — a new piece of fiction. A place was created in three dimensions, and my imagination inhabited it.

A second moment happened during those very same days. One morning, I was reading the newspaper in the backyard of the cottage, and a word popped out of the text and struck fire. A common word, but one I hadn’t thought of in any particular context. I mulled and mulled, then went to my computer and began to write another story I’d been thinking of. Now I have, not a lot, but perhaps forty pages of a novel that I am inching away on. Will it see publication? I hope someday it will, but it almost doesn’t matter. That single word showed the way this particular narrative would go. It was right and strong and perfect. It was no little joy to me to discover later that the word I had read was not in the newspaper at all. I had performed one of those common yet mysterious misreadings that we’re all prey to: rearranging the letters of a word to make another word, the mistake of which is then responsible for a flight of imagination you might never have experienced but for the error in reading.

Quite distinct from whatever novel might arise from the experience, I remember this moment of inspiration whenever my sullen mind tries to convince me that I’ll never come up with another idea. Ha, I say. I can’t always be brilliant, but I can always make mistakes.

So. Being away can indeed have a “simply miraculous” effect on your work. It almost encourages that kind of misreading where your mind is poised to leap at the slightest nudge. Retreats and colonies are designed to work the same way: take you the heck out of your common place, so that your mind can see what it could not see at home. To be completely random, I could say that The Wizard of Oz is more or less about the same thing.

From the beginning, I have wanted to use a poem by Langston Hughes as an epigraph in Lunch-Box Dream, and now that the book is nearing advance reading copies, I’ve had to get permission to reprint it. Discovering the whereabouts of Hughes’s estate (he died in 1967) was a little job in itself. The copyright designation in, for example, the Vintage paperback of Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, states: “Copyright renewed 1987 by George Houston Bass, Surviving Executor of the Estate of Langston Hughes, Deceased”. So, I knew we were already two people away from the writer. But a simple question: “Who is the current estate holder?” elicited a short train of pointed fingers. Googling the obvious did not lend useful information. The reference librarian at my local library pointed me to the curator of the Hughes Papers at Yale; she, in turn, directed me to Harold Ober Associates, whose spot-on receptionist sent me to the voice mail of Craig Tenney, who appears to handle the estate. In an email, Mr. Tenney informed me that the estate is actually governed by two parties, Harold Ober Associates and Random House. Random holds the copyright domestically, while Ober handles international and certain subsidiary rights.

At Tenney’s urging, I faxed both Ober and RH’s permissions department the request. Some time later, I received a contract from RH, spelling out the fee, the license, and other points to be followed in printing the work. I was then to follow up with Ober to gain the other rights, and I’d be all set. Except . . .

Except that the agreement’s citation to the poem, and its bibliographic credit, were to a different version of the poem than the one I wanted and had asked for. Hughes tinkered with the wording of his poems. The poem I wanted is called “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car” and appears in the 1959 volume, Selected Poems, which was very much overseen by Hughes himself. In Collected Poems, however, published in 1994 under the editorship of Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, twenty-seven years after Hughes’s death, there is a different and, to my mind, slightly inferior version, which was picked up from Hughes’s final book, The Panther and the Lash. Since the wording of the RH agreement stipulated that no changes could be made to Hughes’s text, the agreement as written wouldn’t actually work for me. I argued for the primacy of the Selected version, and received that. The credit is being reworked, so all is dandy.

But the story doesn’t end there; not for me, at least. I went to Rampersad’s biography of Hughes, where he describes the occasion of the writing of the poem. In 1953, Hughes was traveling by train across Louisiana, in the Jim Crow car, and watched an elderly woman eat her lunch there. Rampersad describes how Hughes wrote the poem on the spot and cites in his text the version as it appears in Collected. Besides wondering how a biographer could know the circumstances of the writing of a text, I felt this could only be an oversight, for the version appearing earlier in Selected was rougher and, seemingly, the original.

It preyed on my mind. Rampersad is fastidious, a first-rate biographer and scholar, but I could not let go the feeling that I might be right about the poem. Could some sort of answer be found in the manuscripts of the poem? I emailed the Beinecke Library at Yale, the reliquary of the Hughes papers, for permission to consult the manuscript. Yes, fine. Prior to coming, I consulted the online guide to the holdings, which are part of the James Weldon Johnson collection, and jotted down the Call number, Box number, and Folder number of the materials relating to “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car.”

We get a bit breathless now. The Beinecke is door to door a half-hour from my house. I drove up this past Friday, requested Box 380, and a few minutes later was holding Hughes’s manuscripts, typescripts, carbons, and revisions in my hands.

Opening up the folded paper holding the first items, I found three sheets of lined paper ripped from a small spiral notebook that measured some 2.5” x 4”, with the spiral on the short side. The pencil script ran lengthwise down the page.

After the last line of the poem (which I will not reproduce here) is the notation, “aragonaut, just / before New Iberia, / June 16, 1953.” A little below that, in ink, “1st draft / Langston Hughes.

Anyone who has touched original holographic material will know the profound feeling of touching history when you hold such a page. Beyond that, my heart skipped when I realized that it was on those three ripped-off notebook pages that Hughes actually wrote the poem, in that train car, looking at that woman eating a sandwich. These pages were like dispatches from a war —and it was a war. It was not a great battle, but a small and striking moment. And Hughes was bringing his mind, his heart, and talent to bear witness to it.

But here’s the thing. The poem as he jotted it down in that rattling train car was in nearly every respect the Collected version. So where did the Selected version come from? The answer is partly to be found in the other items in the folder.

Inside the second folded sheet is an original typescript of the pencil holograph. It bears a title now, “Jim Crow Car.” Below it, a more extended legend: “Written in the Jim Crow / car of the Argonaut, / Southern Pacific train, / near New Iberia, La., / June 16, 1953. This / second draft, New York, / June 30, 1953. See / DEFENDER column for story.”

Following that is the carbon of the above, with a penciled notation: “Poem sent / to Davis / 10-15-56 . . . ”

The next item is another typescript with no changes to the poem as it has existed so far.

In the next item, however, things begin to happen. Above the title, “JIM CROW CAR” Hughes has penciled in “Lunch Time In A ” with a penciled bracket to the left of both lines and the notation, “1 line,” indicating that the title is to read in a single line as “Lunch Time In A Jim Crow Car.

The text of the poem shows penciled revisions, too, beginning to bring the wording in line with the Selected version. Punctuation at the ends of two lines is either crossed out or added, and two commas in the final line are changed to dashes.

The second to last item, a typescript incorporating the full title and the penciled changes in the above version, now contains the additional revisions in pencil — the deletion of one word, and the substitution of another — that bring the text into line with the poem published in Selected.

The final document is a fair typed copy of this poem, now bearing the trimmer title, “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car.”

To me, this last item shows Hughes revising the wording to become, in fact, more jagged than the more easily scanned original, a bit more problematic, but powerful in a new way and, oddly perhaps, more immediate. The poem has only four lines; in the original 1953 train-car manuscript, lines two, three, and four all begin with the word “And.” In the revision that stack is eliminated and the ease of reading and speaking it is disrupted, to bring it more fully, I think, in keeping with its explosive subject matter and the image of the bomb that is central to the poem. Its roughness, if you will, makes readers pay closer attention to what is being said. I like it better.

So, what is the answer to the two versions? My feeling is that Hughes liked his 1953 original up through at least October 1956, but that sometime after that and before he organized his Selected Poems in 1959, he revised it into the final version seen in the Papers. Perhaps he thought the text too soft because the progress of civil rights was too slow, and it made him mad.

After 1959? I’m not exactly certain (I would be more certain, but Rampersad’s biography is at home and I’m not), but since Hughes died the year of his last volume, The Panther and the Lash, in which the poem has reverted to its original form, he may not have been well enough or even alive to see it through. If he was, he may have decided to go backward. If he wasn’t, the texts in that final book may have been chosen or partly chosen by an editor who made the decision to negate Hughes’s 1956-1959 tinkering.

A heady experience, examining primary documents. Since Hughes apparently wrote about the incident that incited the poem in a column for the Chicago Defender, I may find my way back to the Beinecke to see if I can shed further light on the subject. Anything to touch his manuscripts again.

Carson McCullers gives Mick Kelly, the complex twelve-year-old girl at the center of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, both the tortured and splendid parts of herself when she was young. In one scene almost exactly midway through the book, Mick is with her brothers and a neighborhood boy, waiting — as in so many scenes in this novel — for sluggish Time to pass. For Life to move on. For things to be altered forever. Suspended in the porch heat of the long afternoon, even as the reader becomes aware that something indeed is about to change, Mick stops time altogether.

She sat down on the steps and laid her head on her knees. She went into the inside room. With her it was like there was two places—the inside room and the outside room. School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. Mister Singer was in both rooms. Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. The songs she thought about were there. And the symphony. When she was by herself in this inside room the music she had heard that night after the party would come back to her. This symphony grew slow like a big flower in her mind. During the day sometimes, or when she had just waked up in the morning, a new part of the symphony would suddenly come to her. Then she would have to go into the inside room and listen to it many times and try to join it into the parts of the symphony she remembered. The inside room was a very private place. She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself.

Mick’s intense, physical love of classical music certainly mirrors Carson’s own. More important to the rest of us, however, is that in Mick’s deep feeling for music, and for the memory of music, and her description of the recreation of music using memory, Carson has created a powerful and extended metaphor on writing.

Substitute “novel” for “symphony, and what could be more precise an analysis of the “growing” of a story, idea by idea, word by word, sentence by sentence, than having “ . . . to go into the inside room and listen to it many times and try to join it into the parts of the symphony she remembered”?

Writers must feel this, as least I imagine they must, on a daily basis. How, in fact, to join this brilliant new thought to the growing bulk of the work in front of you.

Twenty years after Lonely Hunter, Carson published her essay “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing.” Flowering as a metaphor had carried across her career:

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious and the struggle that goes on between them. . . . After months of confusion and labor, when the idea has flowered, the collusion is Divine. It always comes from the subconscious and cannot be controlled.

That The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published when McCullers was only twenty-three can, if we choose, admonish and disparage the rest of us. But if the collusion truly is Divine, and such sacral doings are in part willed from without, we have little option than to keep working.

We’ve talked before about sequence (see FBR 69, below). The order in which a writer chooses (or does not or may not choose) to assemble the shelf of his or her career seems hugely significant in the course of an ongoing writing life, certainly more so than after it’s over and the task of summing up an oeuvre, a body of work, is left to someone else.

Last night I asked a novelist how she approaches her next book. “I never leave a book without knowing what I’m doing next, and I start it within a week of finishing the previous one.” She expressed a fear I imagine we all have: of waking up one morning “between” books and finding she has no direction, no impelling idea, no pulsing story urging her forward. This fear is a real one; we see it in action, the great early splash followed by the long waning tide. It must account in some way for the truism that the American writer has no second act.

For myself, a number of unique elements are at play at this particular time. This past week I’ve finished work on the copyedited manuscript of a book coming out in the spring, setting down the final wording, so to speak. For the last year or so, I’ve known that there were two books I wanted to do next, and have been sketching them out, but since there was no physical time, and because the just-finished book was so absorbing, no mental space to let them grow, I strung them both along, like two invitations for the same date I knew I’d finally have to accept one of.

Now the time has come. And as if the tray wasn’t crowded already, I find two other stories whispering longingly at me. But it’s more than simply pointing at one of them and saying, “I’m slapping on my tie for you!”

Part of the issue I’m chewing over is that I haven’t had that conversation. You know, the one between you and your editor about what to write next. It’s not as simple as moving ahead with the one I really want to write (assuming I discover which one it is). It’s also a matter of which book I should write. Because, let’s face it, I’m still alive. The book just leaving my desk is serious, short, historical, and a little experimental. Should the next one be a counterpoint to it? Assuming I can write a commercial book, should I embrace my ability to do that? Or should I dig deeper than the present book and write something that not even I want to read?

You’ll know by now that you can listen to Faulkner’s lectures at the University of Virginia, where he was Writer-in-Residence in 1957-58. Well, folks. I could live and die listening to those sessions. He addresses so many questions that the writer confronts daily, the archive becomes no less than a church. Here’s a bit of what he says about today’s topic (from John Coleman’s Undergraduate Writing Class, of February 26, 1958):

Unidentified participant: Sir, do you find it best that—once you get an idea, to sit right down and write it, or is it best to think it over and sort of let it [gel]?

William Faulkner: After you have been properly snake-bit with writing, you don’t have any spare time to sit down and think something over. You get one idea while you’re in the middle of—of getting another one down, and the new—new idea has simply got to—got to take its chance, unless it’s, as they say, so hot at the moment that you will put down what you’re doing to take it up. But probably some sort of a—you might call it protective coloration, that that idea don’t come into the mind as new until subconsciously it has been hovered over for a while. That it has begun to take its final shape before it ever comes into the conscious mind as an idea to write. That you don’t know where you got it, you don’t know how long you’ve had it. That it—it was an—was an egg, or—or a hen that’s been sitting over that single egg for the—whatever length of time it takes to hatch the thing out, before it comes into the conscious mind.

This morning I had breakfast with several writers and a writer/illustrator, and our conversation got round to things electronic, as the illustrator was in the process of turning some of his enormous output into E-book apps for the iPhone and iPad. Another of us, a writer of illustrated stories, was, if I recall correctly, crafting a manuscript as an original iPad publication. Heady stuff, and completely depressing if you happen to like the old wood-based book as more than a museum artifact.

This prompted one of us to assert that the quality of reading — qua reading — was degrading by the minute, and sooner than we can turn a page what people think of as reading will be unrecognizable to those of us who were born in the last century, let alone in the middle of the last century. It will be a species of viewing or surfing or visual manipulation.

As it happens, in the course of some research yesterday, I’d come across a perfectly wonderful and, in the context, dismal assessment of what it is I fear we will lose, both as readers and as writers. I know that Dave Eggers has counseled hope, and that’s a nice thing but, as young as he is, he may be a dinosaur, too.

The text I have in mind is from Toni Morrison, published in Issue 132, 1994, of The Paris Review, as part of its interview on “The Art of Editing” with Robert Gottlieb and writers he has worked with:

I think we erroneously give pride of place to the act of writing rather than the act of reading. People think you just read because you can understand the language, but a certain kind of reading is a very high-level intellectual process. I have such reverence for that kind of sensitive reading—it is not just absorbing things and identifying what’s wrong but a much deeper thing that I can see would be perfectly satisfying. . . .

To me, the most profound comment she makes is this one:

Writing for me is just a very sustained process of reading. The only difference is that writing a book might take three or four years, and I’m doing it.

What is Ms. Morrison saying here? If I may be bold, I believe she is referring to the two things that happen the instant a writer puts words on the page. The creative impulse is, in a way, and for the sake of understanding this moment, divine; that is, unquantifiable, unknowable, a flash of brilliance as something is brought to light.

For a writer, the outward act of this is the moment the pen scratches across the page. At the same time the words are formed on the page, however, something else happens: the artist becomes the reader of those words. He savors in them their depth and wisdom as only a reader can. The writer-portion of his brain may not even recognize the beauty of the newly minted words. It is the reader-part, being the immediate receptor, that manifests that brilliance in the world.

When you link writing with reading in this way, you do honor to both. It’s this “high-level intellectual process” that we are at risk of losing.

Your memory is a shop of old goods, both true antiques and cheap junk. It stands in a narrow passage the sun has never seen, a crooked alley off a series of crescents and side streets, far off the traveled road. This main road, by the way, is a substantial thoroughfare, set east to west, reasonably sunny, but resolutely one-way. You have to battle your way back through the oncoming traffic of your life to find your shop of memories but, strangely, no matter how far you travel on your road, you can find most always your way back to it. Perhaps, you sometimes think, your thoroughfare is more a great and somehow winding rotary than a straight road, but life pushes you on and you won’t really know what it is until one day you stand above it, looking down. By then, your traveling days will be over, and your shop will be closed and lost, for you are the only one who has the faintest idea where it is and what’s in it.

When you do find the shop, it may not be open for business. You can rap on the door window, and the proprietor may reluctantly open the door. Oh, you thought you were the shopkeeper? No. It’s your shop. It was built to house your goods. But there are rules. You quickly find that the proprietor, like Pratchett’s librarian, would prefer you leave things where they are. The shop is his domain, and it doesn’t need you mucking about in it, disturbing his age-old arrangement of trinkets, foraging needlessly, forcing new paths between the tables, upending things he’ll spend forever re-ending. It was fine without you.

But for you, it’s a playground, if a dangerous one. You pick up this or that object, look at it under the light, return it to its place, move on to the next; as if the memory were a cluttered shop and you are standing in it, looking for something, perhaps, but finding innumerable other things along the way to it. Sometimes another object, a memory, lays over what you are seeking, as a picture might lay frame-down over a stack of concert programs or folded yellow pillowcases, a box of mismatched pencils, an upturned Halloween mask, or a half-eaten sandwich.

Other times your steps are more directed. You remember exactly where one particular memory is; it lies prominently under a lamp and is lighted sufficiently (since you have been there to consult it before). Perhaps you have picked it up recently with the intention of coming back to it when there’s time, and now there’s time.

The shop is a place you’ve been to so many times, you think you know its floor plan, its various rooms and hallways, have them memorized, in fact, and yet, often, you are surprised by some previously unnoticed pantry, caught up short on what you believed was a longer corridor, discover a slight change to the wallpaper, an odd tilt to a familiar object that was always only in the corner of your eye, or a dimness to what was clear and well-lit not so very long before.

Maybe the rooms with the true antiques, from your childhood or from your parents or grandparents, are the most brightly lit and well-traveled. Other rooms are far less often visited, have grown dusty. Lamps have already flickered out in a far corner, or are fizzing, ready to. Perhaps you need a flashlight to enter one room anymore. That room is curtained, this door sealed with tape. You notice a wall where previously stood an archway.

When you enter the shop, you may not find exactly what you are looking for. Sometimes on your way to one object of memory, your gentle or clumsy fingers cause a cascade of memories you hadn’t expected to discover at all. You fumble, but cannot restore them to their pre-disturbed state; the seeming exactness of your restoration is deceptive. Occasionally disturbed objects remain disturbed; they slide into other objects, drop from the table, are lost in the carpet fringes or between the floorboards; and you suddenly realize you have ever only visited the street-level of a shop with a basement, a sub-basement, a dozen levels where something dark might just be moving, as if alive.

The ancient proprietor of your shop, the undertaker of your past, with an unbearable smell of death about him, is always crotchety, if not downright hostile to you. He’ll sneer at your rummaging, play dumb to your requests, sell you false goods, cheat you, scuttle your transactions, sell off the precious items you bring him. In fact, he loathes you. You have every right to be there, all the goods are your own, but he’ll never tell you that or allow you to feel at home. You are his landlord, he is merely the caretaker, but like Bartelby, he’ll never leave your rooms, thinks of them as his, haunts them constantly and would rather burn the place down with the both of you in it, than warm his demeanor one degree. Where did he come from? Did you hire him? He comes from another place and by other means. Don’t press him, or he’s likely to show you his true face, the one that may not be human.

Visit your shop. You must. But remember that once the dust is off them, your memories cannot be restacked in their former order — or misorder. The fingerprints of your conscious self mar them, and there is no returning things to their sleeping state.

Spoke yesterday at a regional SCBWI conference at the Free Library in Guilford. Some 45 folks attended. It was a mess of a talk, all jumbled, the best part of which was that I was able to bring my friends along — in the sense that I quoted from several books by the writers who keep me company in my room when I write. Each of them dead, of course, or they wouldn’t all fit into my room or at the podium. The talk made so much more sense on my note cards than it did when I gave it, and it was so much less of a talk than a sort of confused rant.

Interestingly, the organizer of the event mentioned that she had actually met me some thirty-plus years ago and thought me, then, a kind of cross between Jesus and Charles Manson. A lovely image, and apt. For as it happened, a poor guy caused a five-car accident in Norwalk yesterday by running around naked, yelling, “I am Jesus!” And recalling my talk, I almost wonder if he wasn’t the one who delivered it. Alas, no. He was in police custody by then, so I have no one to blame but myself.

Still, the topic of it was, and is, one of the most fascinating I have come across in my years of writing: the interrelation, cross-pollination, mutual resonance — in novel writing — of fact and fiction, truth and imagination, reality and invention.

I did warn the folks that the remarks weren’t going to be tidy. At one point, I believe I denied the existence of God. Someone may or may not have walked out at that point. But I said it more to make the point that events are random; we struggle for meaning, but there really isn’t any, so our attempt to shape life into fiction is fraught with presumption and error. For me, the key word is Metaphor. As writers of fiction, we rely so heavily on invented meaning — something that journalists (I suppose) are not supposed to do. You don’t make connections where there are none, only for the sake of a point. Novelists do this all the time.

Yesterday I spoke for the third or fourth time to a sizable group about this book coming out next year, Lunch-Box Dream, since it was — or began as — my attempt at a metaphor-less story. Didn’t succeed in achieving that, or not in the same way I desired. It was simply too artistically . . . what’s the word? convenient? presumed? necessary? . . . to allow metaphors to assert themselves in the text. But there are some scenes. . . .

It’s rather easy to talk about the book before it is out. After it is out, I will either have to do a lot of defending, or not show myself publicly at all, or beg people to read it. Nothing pleasant will come out of it, either way. I suppose that’s okay, too. Writing shouldn’t be all that much fun. Or, rather, the writing can be fun, even deeply healing, and the editorial process, too, which I am enjoying immensely, but no one ever claimed that the actual publishing — the making public — of it, should be anything but, well, a mess.

What about the old man, the Census flyer, and the Ferris wheel? Yeah, I could tell you, but my friends know what I mean. I’m talking about those dead guys and the forty-five people at the Free Library. Minus one walkout.

. . . starts on Wednesday. At the desk, we are in the middle of final revisions on a novel coming out next year, a story based in part on a journey taken with our brother, mother, and grandmother in 1959. The replication of that long-ago trip, from Cleveland to Atlanta, will fix in place a handful of geographic and scenic details we feel impelled to get right, though the story itself is quite done. We have not been back to Cleveland since 1961, and are anxious about visiting the old homestead again. It still exists, apparently, though you might have thought it would go the way of the dirigible. A half century seems a fairly long time, but we’ll have a better understanding of that next week.

The route we took back then is only known because the original AAA Triptik from 1959 has been preserved. Mom saved everything, a blessing in this case. One interesting note: according to the Triptik, after leaving Cleveland we stayed at a place called El Siesta in Delaware, Ohio. This makes an appearance in the novel and, indeed, still exists. On the manuscript we’re now working on, our editor queried the improper El in the motel’s name. But there it is, in our travel documents and in real life. What more will we find? There is a Facebook fan page at which we’ll post updates from the road.

From Anne Sexton to W. D. Snodgrass, February 24, 1959:

. . . I read “Heart’s Needle” and I changed. It made me see myself new. In seeing you, in feeling your marvelous restrained sense of immediate loss, I saw my own loss in a new color. And I changed. I said to Fred [Morgan], “A poem isn’t supposed to do that! It isn’t supposed to be that vital!” . . . meaning, of course, how unusual, how much genius and the fine grip of talent, is in such a poem that reaches down and touches the inmost part of the reader. A writer, showing himself, in his true light, and doing it so well, has indeed done something so great that one might be afraid. Afraid of the writer’s truth and their own truth. . . That’s what I think you did. That’s the great thing you did. And who would expect it from ‘just a poem’ . . .

. . . What I’m trying to say is that, I think a poem that can do that to people, make them see themselves through yourself, is valid . . . not unseemly, not too personal . . . but worth it!

Christ. I’m off again. Talking in circles. My darling, the peanut butter calls.

We are interested in different things, some obsessively. So this book has come into our little library (because we order all books on the topic), Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee by one Tom Dardis. We won’t say anything here about the warning that sounds in the mind of the reader when the author uses the relaxed form of his name on what might reasonably be considered a scholarly work.

Nevertheless, a warning of sorts it should have been. Skipping the Scotty chapter for now, we dive right into the saga of our man from Mississippi. And scrape the bottom of the pool. On the second page of the chapter the author states that at the beginning of The Big Sleep General Sternwood “is dressed completely in white.” Uh, no. Granted, the book bears the copyright dates of 1976 and 1981, so personal copies of movies were not the norm (even though Dardis states that the film “is an extremely popular rerun on television and is still frequently shown in film houses”), but Sternwood is wearing the opposite of white. He is dressed in a dark (perhaps black) suit, white shirt, dark tie, checked shawl, with a dark plaid blanket over his legs.

So what does this mean? What possesses a writer to make this stuff up. Does he somehow think it helps his case — more than the facts? Is it simple sloppiness? Or is it a kind of arrogance? Arrogance, as in: “Whatever. White. Black. They’ll believe me. I’m authoritative.” Yeah, but no.

He continues. On the next page he claims that Lauren Bacall’s famous line in To Have and Have Not about how to whistle is “You just pucker up . . . and blow . . . ” Yikes! As anyone who has felt a certain little tingle when he watches the scene can tell you, the line is, “You just put your lips together and blow.”

And this is how the world falls apart.

Alas, six pages later, another howler, smaller, but still; it shows how the author thinks. Even Blotner reports that after he bolted the studio his first week on the job, only turning up a week later, Faulkner claimed he spent his time wandering in Death Valley. Death Valley? Farmer Bill among the cacti? Blotner and Parini both imply that Bill was joking. Well, yeah. Because we all say that. Our Dardis, however, seems to think he was on the level, and points out that Death Valley has been a setting in a couple of movies.

This is as far as we’ve gotten, but the warning flags are flying high. Still, obsessives will get their information wherever they can, so we do anticipate, by hook or by crook, some good stuff to come.

Bottom line? This sort of arrogantly sloppy writing is unacceptable. You find it from time to time where you shouldn’t. In his otherwise all right In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature (Vintage — normally first rate — 2003), Christopher Woodward consistently mistitles Dickens’s little travel book Pictures from Italy Letters from Italy, and he does it every time the Great One’s lovely guide is mentioned (often), as well as in the bibliography and the index! Gosh, folks! We’re pretty sure there was Internet back then. Or your own bookshelf. Who relies on his faulty memory when accuracy is a glance away? Boy, is that annoying. Such an inaccuracy, such a gaffe calls into doubt whatever else you want us to believe and renders your book kinda useless in a bunch of ways.

Finally, Peter Ackroyd does this, also against Dickens, in a fashion. In his hastily thrown together Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, Ackroyd calls the first (and famously suicided) illustrator of The Pickwick Papers not Robert Seymour but Edward Seymour. Ouch! And this, despite the fact that his earlier Dickens is as completely wonderful and magisterial a biography as any written (and correct, too, at least as regards Seymour’s name).

The upshot? Not as bad as blindness or totalitarianism, for a book is almost always a better thing than no book; but one does get annoyed by completely fixable lapses that, let’s agree, harm both reader and author.