Free Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach Page A

alone. I felt it was all too insignificant, too scrappy, to put into a bound notebook. But still.… What had at first been enriching and sustaining as I lived it, became, well, subject matter. I found I was living, listening, thinking, watching, in order to have something to write , in much the same way, I had always thought, that Heming way went to wars, fishing, and big-game hunting in order to write novels about them. For me, however, it was a mistake, I decided. This was wrong. What I put down should always come from the rich roil of the past, from the memory and the storage bins of the mind, never from the experiences of the moment. So I stopped writing about being alone, I was alone, and that was enough for the present.
    I went back to writing fiction.
    E VERYWHERE I traveled on a round of chores during the coldest day we had had all winter—the post office, the general store, the gas station, the new-books store, the library to donate review copies, the hardware store to buy melting crystals—I was the only customer there. The only one there ! I thought of the crowded city I had left behind, the lines to the check-out, the lines at the movie theater, the people in cities who are not only there but who pushed me from behind, from all sides. I was relieved that I had escaped to this peninsula, even though the temperature when I left the house was twenty below.
    I HAVE never been a saver of things, like Sybil. As quickly as I can I throw away whatever I cannot use at the moment. But small things, reminiscent of places I have visited or lived, cling to me without my noticing them. Until last week when, to my surprise, I found an old matchbox hidden under a wooden candlestick. IOWA HOUSE was printed on its cover, a place I had not stayed in eighteen years. Then, having nothing better to do on an early evening (which started at four in the afternoon), I went through a pen-and-pencil holder in the kitchen and discovered an old, small, red automatic pencil with ALBANY ACADEMY on its side in gilt. Why had I never noticed it before in the twenty years since I lived in Albany and sent my daughters to the sister school of the academy?
    And in the same week, searching for scrap paper in a stack of old pads I came upon a neat, blue-printed one that read: DEPARTMENT OF STATE and under it, in smaller letters, The Secretary. I must have picked it up twenty years ago to take notes when the editors of the New Republic were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Henry Kissinger. It was, I believe, in March 1974. I can’t remember much of what the Secretary of State said in that State Department dining room. But I still had the pad.
    And, again in the same week: Out of my copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North , which I read when I was in Bellagio fifteen years ago, there fell the Villa Serbelloni bookplate. How did it get there? Why did it choose to show itself in the week in which all the other memorabilia appeared? What were they all saying to me about the insistent role of the past in the life I was now leading? Were they demanding some kind of autobiographical recognition, an acknowledgment in fiction or memoir? Or was it accident, the detrital reminder of times and places, for some reason I wished to forget, the debris of dead matter in a dead season?
    L ATE one night—it might have been two in the morning but, being alone, the exact or proper time for doing anything mattered not at all to me—I started a new section of the novel, feeling much inflated and proud of myself to be able to work at an hour I was usually asleep. Henry James called fiction “the balloon of experience,” a wonderful phrase which, that night, described not only the fiction but the fiction writer.
    O N A day of absolute nonproduction, a day as blank inside as the white stretches of covered ground outside my study window, I began to wonder if white was the color of creative drought. I made the trek through the snow to the