Now in My November

A Story Whose Time Has (Almost?) Passed

A couple of recent publications of the print-on-paper kind (written about here) have been gratifying, but they’ve got me worrying a little that I may have left my life work, which I feel I’ve only started, rather late. So late, in fact, that I sometimes wonder if I still have time left to do it. Better late than never, they say. Well, yes, as long as never doesn’t wind up getting the jump on you, and turn into: Oops, TOO late.

Musing about this at 2 AM recently (OK, obsessing – words matter), I recalled an encounter I had decades ago, in the late 1970s – let’s say 1978 or 79, though memory being slippery as it is, now I can’t be certain – an encounter with another writer (notice how I bring myself into that august circle with a simple “another”; words matter), a writer who had definitely NOT put off her own life work too late. She was, in fact, the youngest writer ever to be awarded the Pulitzer for Fiction – a record she still holds – when she won the prize in 1935, at age 24, for her first novel … Have you guessed it yet? … Have you got her name?

In case you haven’t: Josephine Johnson, Now in November.

I won’t claim any close connection to her. In fact, I met her only the once, for the couple of hours that it took, on an early spring afternoon, to load into the trunk of a rental car the boxes of her manuscripts I’d been dispatched to fetch – a gift to our mutual alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, though we’d done our time there 40 years apart. My charge, as assistant manuscript cataloger and courier (I’ve written some about that here), was to see that record of her life work from her rural farm, somewhere east of Cincinnati, back to the safety and security of the WashU (really, that’s what we lovingly called it) Special Collections (i.e., Rare Books and Manuscripts) Department of the university library in St. Louis.

I confess that, before our brief encounter, I did not know Ms. Johnson’s name or novel. This is not a commentary on her, nor her work, but rather a marker of my own ignorance and youthful hubris and lack of curiosity at the time in not finding out – especially since I was actually going to meet her, going to take away her manuscripts, possibly even going to be the one to catalog them when they reached their new home.

I remember her as an old woman, though she was 10 years younger, that one time we met, than I am now. She’d already reached the latter days of a long career: her last published book, Seven Houses: A Memoir of Time and Place, already out in 1973 – last but one, that is, since a collaboration, Circle of Seasons, appeared the next year. Perhaps the writing continued – she lived another decade plus – but the publication seems to have stopped.

Since, unlike me, she had started so young, I wonder if she’d said what she had to say even before I met her that day at her farm, where she lived alone – husband gone by then, died in 1969, three children grown up and moved away. Maybe she already knew that there would be no more books, that she had told the stories she had to tell, and so the time had come to send those manuscripts away too.

I drove the boxes filled with the records of her writing life safely to St. Louis – back to St. Louis for some of them, since she’d written that early novel there all those decades earlier. And then I never thought again of Josephine Johnson and her novel precocity until the other morning, 2 AM. Isn’t memory strange the way it works, and also middle-of-the-night obsessing? Suddenly there she was, almost 50 years later, in bed with me – shocking for many reasons to those who know me well! Who can explain it? Could it be that I have some unsuspected, unresolved issues involving her?

Could it be that I’ve been envying, all these years, her youthful accomplishment, and fame? Fleeting as that fame may seem now, except for those (probably few) who know all the winners of the Pulitzer for fiction. Fleeting as it had been even then. Envy, and maybe also regret, that I now have such little time left to do whatever it is I’m to do in this life.

“Calling” is now an old-fashioned, outmoded concept, I suppose, but getting started as early in life as Ms. Johnson did, and staying at it her whole life (almost, at least), it seems to me she must have felt a calling – a calling to write. Even as late starting as I am (though I confess I did make an early try, which came to little), I like to think that maybe I have a calling too, that my calling has just been on hold a while, a l-o-n-g while, that now, at last, I’m getting through. Now I only hope the call(ing) won’t get dropped before some satisfying resolution.  

Still, I have to be realistic. Though whenever anyone says that, we all know it’s really just for show!

But to be realistic: mine is a story whose time has passed. I know that. I’m old-white-Anglo-gay – that’s right, no alphabet of otherness for me, just GAY. At my age, I’m not transitioning to anything but older age, then death. (Those of you who are regular “Randy Readers,” to quote one of you, knew I’d slip DEATH in somewhere!) I probably should have told my story 50 years ago, when I was in my 20s, as Johnson did, for it to have any hint of the cutting edge, the au courant. But I didn’t. And now, too late!?  Not too late to tell it, but too late to expect much of any interest from others in hearing it.

But if I had written my story 50 years ago, how different it likely would be: tear-soaked, angst-ridden (anguished is probably too grand a term), lacking in even the feeble wisdom (too grand a term: acceptance, more like) that the years have brought. Now that I’ve left so much of the turmoil and strife of life behind, my story can be crystal clear, true, like distilled water, all the toxins filtered out. A purer thing than it would have been if written young. (Isn’t that philosophical? We all have our fantasies.)

And so here I am, now that it’s the November of my life (or could it be I’ve already phased into my December?) answering my calling, beginning my life work very late, fearing it may be too late to get it done, feeling an urgency to get on with it, feeling that there’s still so much left for me to do.

Better late than never? Sure; why not? And if it turns out that I don’t have quite all the time left that I’d need to get it done? Well, maybe even better never, when it comes down to it, than finishing too soon - while there's still time left to fill. Such a frightening prospect: time to fill and no longer anything to fill it. (That’s me being philosophical again.)

So, as I was saying, before my calling got put on hold …