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Class of 1954
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Nora Johnson's Talk
When Gail asked me to talk to you about the Writer’s Life, I wonder if she thought mine was very glamorous – full of lunches at the Four Seasons and dinners at the Century Club, book tours and parties and TV interviews and meetings with the famous. But being a writer herself, I suspect she knows better. There are magic moments, but they’re few and very far between.
I got misled pretty early about this. My parents and their friends were mostly writers, and they really did go to France on cheap steamers, and in Paris they hung out at the Deux Magots and the Brasserie Lipp with the other writers. They knew Fitzgerald and Hemingway and John O’Hara and Djuna Barnes and everybody else. My mother claimed to have spent an evening with the drunken Scott Fitzgerald’s head in her lap… and to have done the Charleston on a café table on Bastille Day… or so she said.
At home their friends were all writers or magazine editors or newspaper people or agents, and these people seemed to be making enough money besides having a good time with their work. So I grew up thinking that writing was a good, solid way to make a living – and at that time, in the Fifties, it was. My father didn’t agree. Just because he had supported himself writing short stories in the Twenties, and then made a fortune writing movie scripts, didn’t mean I’d be able to support myself writing anything. The golden days, he said, were over. Of course I didn’t believe him.
I was pushed toward writing by certain serious deprivations in my life. My mother never read to me, or I don’t remember her doing so - so I read to myself. We had no TV till the late Fifties. I had no siblings to play with, nor did most of my friends, because, my mother said, during the Depression the world was considered by thinking people to be too terrible to bring children into, or maybe one at the most. Also, my parents were divorced when I was six, and if that doesn’t make a kid write, then nothing ever will.
But they did have the sense and the money to send me to good schools, which made all the difference. At Smith there were courses with Evelyn Page and RG Davis, and senior year seminars with Al Fisher – who served red wine – and Mary Ellen Chase, who served tea.
We wrote stories and/or novels and read them aloud. We all were, of course, writing about ourselves because we didn’t know much about anything else. We were learning how to use our own lives as material.
One classmate’s novel, for instance, was about her two friends who were… shhhh… gay. And hiding the love that dare not speak its name. She wouldn’t tell who they were and we all went crazy trying to guess. Then a few years later it turned out – surprise – that the writer herself was… gay! None of this would attract much interest now, but in those days it was hot stuff.
I wrote a long and tedious novel about young love, the cold war, alienation, generational conflict, interracial relationships and God knows what else. My father, who had always been very involved with my writing, took it upon himself to revise this piece of work. He cut it down to about half. This probably improved it a lot, but it hurt my feelings and I swore I’d never let him near anything I wrote again. Not too surprisingly, nobody was interested in buying it.
After Smith, I set about trying to live a normal life and be a writer at the same time, which I thought would work.
Well, why not? From the outside the writer’s life sounds wonderful. You don’t need any equipment except a computer and some paper. You can make your own schedule – three or four or five hours a day, whatever works for you. If you aren’t lucky enough to have an office, you can write anywhere – at the dining-room table, on the crosstown bus, at Starbucks. People do it every which way. My late friend Nora Sayre had to have two large tables to cover with her notes. She had no money, she lived frugally to say the least, but the two tables would have been there if she had to sleep on the floor.
I know a man who wrote his books on little pads of paper while he walked around the streets of Larchmont… and Jean Kerr (remember Please Don’t Eat the Daisies?) wrote in her CAR to get away from the kids. Hemingway wrote STANDING UP in his house in Key West… Truman Capote wrote lying down on the couch with a bottle of sherry
Some writers talk about what they’re working on and some don’t say a word. I know a writer couple who read their completed pages to each other at the end of the day. I don’t tell a living soul what I’m working on. I’ve done so in the past “Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a story, blah blah blah” and the story never got written: so I learned.
I’ll tell you exactly how I write. I write first in longhand on 8x11 lined white pads with black Precise V7 rolling ball pens (fine) if you’re interested. I have to have these things. Yellow paper won’t do. Legal pads won’t do. Blue pens won’t do. When I was younger and stronger I did write on the crosstown bus or in bed next to a sleeping husband, but now I have to have a decent chair and a flat surface. I write usually at the New York Society Library on 79th street, a lovely nineteenth century place, or else the Starbucks at 92nd and 3rd – but don’t go there, it’s crowded enough already.
Then I take my messy pages home and put them on the computer. (Dell PC, bulgy-backed.) I do a little correcting. But the real editing comes next. I print it up, go back to the library or Starbucks, and edit minutely. This is possibly the best part, I love it, I could edit all day and all night. Then home, revise on the computer, print up again, edit again. It goes on and on. Eventually there comes a moment where it’s as good as I can get it.
I happened to be in Saudi Arabia when I wrote my first novel, The World of Henry Orient. I had a study till the baby was born, then I moved my desk and my white Olympia portable into the bedroom. I started a process that went on for years. Feed the baby. Write a couple of pages, or maybe sentences. Put the chicken in the oven. Load the washer. Waste some time – those were the days of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Write a paragraph… change my daughter and tell her how lucky she was to have what she later called a “typer-mommy.” This was it for years, through two marriages and four children.
My writing career has in a way gone backwards. The glory came early – stories sold to The New Yorker, articles to Atlantic Monthly, the publication of Henry Orient and, a few years later, its transformation into a movie (my father and I wrote the script – I broke my promise never to let him near my work again) and then into a Broadway musical. There were parties and radio interviews and lunches with agents. I was off and rolling, and there were more novels and stories and the Times asked me to review fiction for the Sunday Book Review, which I did for many years.
This was all very well, but the normal life part was giving me serious trouble. I was absolutely unable to manage the Writer’s Life, and marriage, and motherhood, all at once. I’m told there are women who can. They must have very understanding and well-heeled husbands, and very self-sufficient kids, and not too many kids. They must have the strength of oxen and the speed of gazelles.
I tried. I worked when the kids were in school and sometimes at night after they were asleep, and the rest of the time I tried to act like a wife and mother. I had two husbands who were – or said they were – supportive of my career, but it always ended up with them telling me, sometimes at the top of their lungs, that I just wasn’t holding up my end. I won’t say that these two marriages failed because of my writing. But there’s something about the distraction I always feel, the staring off in another direction and constantly saying, “what did you say?” that annoys men no end. Which is understandable.
After the second divorce I spent twenty years as a single Mom in New York – and I did a lot better without a husband. But if it isn’t one thing it’s another – it was soon clear that my father had been right, the writer’s life has its charms, but money isn’t one of them. Cursory research shows that $50,000 is a dazzling annual income for most writers. For me a good year was $25,000, and I knew people who made a lot less. They had day jobs or they taught. How did I live? I sometimes wonder. Husbands were helpful while they lasted. I’ve never gotten a grant. I lived across the street from Sotheby’s which was handy for selling old wedding presents that surely I would never need again.
By then, in the 70’s and 80’s, I was turning out articles for Cosmopolitan. “Anger: Hold it in? Let it out?” “So You Think You’re a Little Nothing” “Are You a Natural Victim?” “An Open Letter to My Lover” etc. I liked to think I was doing these to pay the rent, but the attention and appreciation of Helen Gurley Brown lifted the whole project to a higher plane. And I was still selling an occasional short story – one of which made the O.Henry Stories of 1981.
I’ve written eleven books, many stories and articles for magazines and newspapers, and many reviews for the Sunday Times Book Review and the LA Times. I am a midlist writer, which is like a Gentleman’s C. We are treated politely but we are definitely in the middle-to-back of the bus. Michael Korda was my editor for my last book, Coast to Coast, in 2004, and it was quickly obvious that there wasn’t going to be much glory. Lunch at the Four Seasons? No – that was for those best-selling ladies with three names. I did have the pleasure of going to Michael’s office, where he greeted me in a bright yellow vest and jodhpurs… or was it bright yellow jodhpurs?.. and we had a very nice talk about the book and Hollywood and other things. But lunch? Nope – only a bottle of Evian water. My agent only sighed and said that things were not like they used to be.
Not to be churlish, I have to admit that a lot of this is my own fault. We writers are told constantly to go forth and sell ourselves, to somehow get our faces on Larry King and Oprah and The View or any magazine cover we can. I have to admit I’ve made little effort to do this. The truth is I can’t bear the thought, I’d rather be writing, and the older I get, the more jealous I am of my time. A lot of writers seem to take naturally to the limelight. One new novelist – can’t remember her name - took dozens of copies of her mildly-reviewed first novel, stuffed them into her car, and took off. She went everywhere in the country signing books, giving talks, and visiting bookstores. Of course she sold a lot of copies. Many very successful writers, like Erica Jong, run real businesses, staffed by many people, with meticulously maintained websites and constant attention to keeping themselves visible. She sells a lot of copies too.
And now, in these parlous times? It’s not so good. They’re laying off editors by the score, they don’t buy anything but big-name bios or diet or exercise books. Times are harder than ever for us so-called literary types. And they like Youth - being 76 doesn’t help. Nor is it a good thing that every other person you know is writing a book, there are more writers out there than readers.
But I don’t care, I’m writing another novel, for whatever fate awaits it. It makes me happy. Writing makes me happy. The children and the grandchildren are all sadly far away, though as a friend said, “if they were around you’d never get any work done” - not real solace. I have a partner, who has put up with me so far. And who knows? This one might hit the jackpot.
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