No Time to Spare Read online

  I imagine writers commonly had secretaries a century ago. Henry James did, sure enough. But Henry James was not exactly your average writer, right?

  Virginia Woolf didn’t.

  Among writers I know personally, only one has a secretary to do mail. To me it seems a perquisite of the extremely successful, and of a magnitude of success that daunts me. Privacy to be with my family and do my work was of the first importance to me. So when I began to need help answering my letters, I found it extremely difficult to convince myself that I needed it badly enough to justify my hiring “someone,” bringing a stranger into my study, setting myself up as a boss.

  I always had trouble calling Delores my secretary, it sounded so pompous (echoes of “my housekeeper . . .”). If I had to speak of her to strangers I said her name, or “my friend who does mail for me.” But I knew that this latter phrase was one of the mildly devious devices by which we handle guilt, the ways we try to reintroduce humanity into the relationship of hirer and hired, which inevitably, to whatever slight a degree, involves inequality, the raising up of one and degradation of the other. Democracy, by strenuously denying the fact of inequality, does enable us, to a surprising extent, to act as if it didn’t exist; but it does exist, and we know it. So our job is to keep the inequity of power as small as possible, and refuse to let our common humanity be reduced, however slightly, even by a careless word, by an assertion of unequal worth. My envy of writers who hire a person to handle their mail and annoyance at people who assume that I have such help are really quite mild, but they are painful now, because I did have “someone,” but I have lost her.

  Delores Rooney, later Delores Pander, was my helper and dear friend.

  Thirty years ago or so, I finally got up my courage and asked around for a professionally competent and discreet person to give me a hand with my letters, which were getting beyond me. Our mutual friend Martha West, who had worked with Delores as a secretary in an office, recommended her. She was then working as manager-agent for a dance company. We rather nervously gave it a try.

  I had never dictated anything to anybody (outside Beginning French courses, where you very slowly and clearly read a dictée in French to the students, who very slowly and inaccurately write it down). Delores had taught herself shorthand and was a whiz at it—a skill now, I suppose, almost entirely lost—and she’d taken lots of dictation from lots of dictators. She coached me in composing a letter orally, and encouraged me with praise; she was an excellent teacher. And also she’d worked and lived with artists, painters, dancers, and was used to artistic temperamental peculiarities, having a few of her own.

  We got to doing letters quickly and easily, and I soon began to draw on her as a collaborator in composing the letters—what to say and how to say it. Does that sound all right?—What if you said this instead of that?—What on earth am I going to write to the man who sent me the 600-page manuscript about fairies on Venus?—This one’s a whiner, you don’t have to answer him . . . Delores was always better than me at kind answers to kooks, but she was tough-minded too, and encouraged me not to answer a letter that was troublingly weird or made unreasonable demands. She got to be so good at replying to the eternally repeated questions that I could hand her a letter and just say “idea for Catwings” and the true tale of how I happened to think of cats with wings was all ready in her computer—though she varied it slightly according to her mood and the age of the inquirer. She had a gracious, graceful tone in discouraging problematic requests by explaining why I couldn’t personally reply just now. She covered for me beautifully. She loved to answer children’s letters, even when they were the mechanical kind some teachers make kids write. The open kindness and generosity of her spirit lent all my correspondence a quality it would never have had without her collaboration.

  She never came more than once a week, usually only once every three or four weeks. I’d do the most urgent business correspondence and let the rest and the fan mail pile up. She got a computer before I did, and it eased her work a great deal. When I got one, it didn’t make much difference at first. But when email really got going I began to be able to deal with all the real business myself. Still Delores and I together handled nonurgent business, the fan letters from readers, and what we called the Gimmies: the letters everybody who becomes visible to the public gets, asking you to do this, give to that, endorse this book, speak at that good cause, etc. Even if you can’t possibly say yes to them, most such letters are well intentioned and deserve a civil no. Delores said no thank you in every possible way, always politely. It was a great burden off me. She said that the Gimmies were boring but just various enough to be entertaining too.

  As for fan mail, letters from readers have always come to me on paper only, my crude but effective way of keeping the volume down. The letters people write me—often with pen and ink, or in pencil, crayon, glitter, and other media if they’re children—are ever amazing, giving me immense pleasure and reward, but they are also never-ending. I knew there was no way I could handle the load if I tried to read and answer them on my website or on email. But I have always felt that such letters deserve a reply, however brief, and for years Delores was my invaluable aide in answering them.

  We loved each other as friends, but didn’t have extensive contact outside our work sessions. She was a busy woman: she soon became the writer Jean Auel’s secretary four days a week, and was agent and manager for her husband, the painter Henk Pander; when her parents grew old and sick she looked after them, and late in life she adopted and brought up her granddaughter. Our friendship was expressed mostly during and in our working relationship. I always looked forward to Delores coming, and we always spent half the time talking, catching up. Once, when I was scared by a stalker, she and Henk gave me wonderful immediate support.

  As the years went on she seemed to grow shyer and more withdrawn from her friends than she had been, I do not know why. She told me once that she liked coming to work with me because we laughed together.

  Her computer began to get out of date, and her life was complicated by various issues; her energy was being overtried. She couldn’t or didn’t want to figure out how to help me with e-correspondence the way she did with paper mail, which she took home along with dictated answers or suggested notes from me. So I came to do all the email and most of the letters, leaving her only some Gimmies and no-thank-yous and those fan letters that needed only acknowledgment.

  Delores’s joy in life had been visibly flagging for a long time when she was diagnosed, last year, with cancer. At first it seemed local and curable, but proved to be metastasizing. It killed her in a few months. There was a brief and lovely respite or remission for a few weeks late in her illness, when we were able to visit with her quite often, and laughed together as we had used to laugh. Then the cruel disease closed in again. She died a few months ago, attended with great tenderness by her husband.

  I find it extremely hard to talk about people I loved who have died. I can’t now make a proper tribute to that complex and beautiful woman, or say more than that I miss her friendship in every way.

  Without her, I’ve had to give up the effort to answer fan mail, at least temporarily. As for the Gimmies, some of them get answered, some of them don’t. I suppose I could hire someone to do that.

  But I doubt that I will. I can’t put my heart into it.

  Without Egg

  July 2011

  VISITING VIENNA IN the early 1950s, Charles and I stayed in style for very little expense at the old König von Ungarn Hotel, which had been there since at least the 1820s. We ate breakfast at a café around the corner. Always the same café and the same breakfast: good coffee, fresh fruit, crisp rolls with butter and jam, and a soft-boiled egg. Perfect. Invariable. Every morning.

  I don’t know why I got it in my head one morning to vary it, but I did, and when the tall, middle-aged waiter arrived in his impeccable dark coat, I indicated that I wanted the usual breakfast, without the egg.

  He appeared not to
understand, which, given the quality of my German, was understandable. I repeated something like “Kein Ei,” or “Ohne Ei.”

  He responded slowly, in a shaken voice, “Ohne Ei?”

  He was disturbed. I was ruthless. Yes, I said, without egg.

  He stood for quite a while silent, trying to handle the shock. He visibly forced himself not to appeal, or plead, or show his disapproval. He was a waiter, a disciplined, skillful Viennese waiter, and must obey the most perverse customer. “Without egg, madame,” he said softly, almost unreproachfully, and went away to fetch my eggless breakfast, which he brought and set before me with silent, funereal dignity.

  We still laugh recalling that tiny incident of nearly sixty years ago, but it is also kept alive in my memory by a sense of guilt. For one thing, in 1954, in Vienna, an egg meant something. The city was just coming out of very bad times. It was still occupied, divided among the U.S., the British, and the Russian armies; the cathedral had rearisen and the opera house was rearising from the rubble of bombing, but damage and destruction was everywhere, and the effect of privation plain to see in the faces and bodies of people on the street. An offer of food in a city that has gone hungry is not a small matter.

  Also, I willfully and needlessly disturbed the order of that waiter’s universe. A very small universe, the Viennese café breakfast, but a stable, orderly, perfected one. Better not change something that has achieved excellence. And it was unkind to demand of a person who spent his working life maintaining that excellence to impair it, to do something he so clearly felt was wrong. After all, I could have let him bring the egg and simply not eaten it. He was far too good at his job to have taken notice, except possibly for a mild, commiserative “Madame doesn’t feel hungry this morning?” To have an egg and not to eat it was my privilege. To refuse to let him bring the egg was to interfere with his privilege, which was to bring me a complete and proper Viennese café breakfast. I still want to laugh when I think about it, and I still feel a twinge of guilt.

  The guilt has increased since I began, a couple of years ago, to have a soft-boiled egg for breakfast—to have, in fact, a Viennese café breakfast—every morning. Invariably.

  I can’t get those lovely, light, crisp European rolls. (Why do the artisanal bread people in this country think crust should be thick and tough? The more leathery, the more artisanal?) But Thomas’s English muffins are very good, so I have them, with tea, fruit, and a three-and-a-half-minute egg eaten, as in Vienna, from the shell.

  To soft-boil an egg I put it in a small pot with cold water to cover, set it on high heat till it boils furiously, take it off at once, turn over the egg timer (a three-and-a-half-minute glass), and start the muffins toasting. When the sand is through the glass, the egg comes out of the water and into the egg cup.

  As you see, a certain care and ceremony is involved, which is what I wanted to talk about, and also why the egg cup is important.

  If you crack a soft-boiled egg and dump it out into a bowl, it tastes the same but isn’t the same. It’s too easy. It’s dull. It might as well have been poached. The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.

  So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup. But not everybody is familiar with egg cups.

  In this country they are usually an hourglass shape, with one lobe or bowl bigger than the other. The small end is just big enough to hold the egg. You could eat it there from its shell, but most Americans take it out, turn the egg cup over, crack the egg, and dump it into the larger bowl, where they smoosh it around and eat it.

  British and European egg cups don’t offer that option; they have no big bowl; they are just a small china cup on a short pedestal, like a goblet, in which the egg sits upright. You have no choice but to eat your egg out of its own shell. This is where things get ceremonial and interesting.

  So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup—but which end up? Eggs are not perfect ovoids, they have a smaller end and a bigger end. People have opinions about which end should be up, i.e., which end you’re going to actually eat the egg out of. This difference of opinion can become so passionate that a war may be fought about it, as we know from Jonathan Swift. It makes just as much sense as most wars and most differences of opinion.

  I am a Big-Ender. My opinion, which I will defend to the death, is that if the big end is up it’s easier to get the spoon into the opening created when you knock off the top of the egg with a single, decisive whack of your knife blade. Or possibly—another weighty decision, another matter of opinion, with advocates and enemies, the Righteous and the Unrighteous—you lift the top of the egg off carefully from the egg-encircling crack you have made by tapping the shell with the knife blade all the way round about a half-inch down from the summit.

  Some mornings I whack. Some mornings I tap. I have no opinion on the matter. It depends on my mood.

  Some elements of the ceremony offer no choice. The knife has be steel, since the sulfur in eggs blackens silver, and the egg spoon must also be untarnishable—stainless steel, or horn. I’ve never seen a gold egg spoon, but I’m sure it would do. Whatever the material, the spoon has to have a small bowl with a fine edge on it: a thick edge can’t coax all the egg white off the inside of the shell. The handle is short, for good balance and easy handling. An egg spoon is a tiny implement that, like the Viennese breakfast, cannot be improved. Like all good tools, it gives pleasure by its pure aptness. It does one thing only, but does it perfectly, and nothing else can do it. Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.

  The sole imperfection of the egg spoon is that it’s so small it gets lost. Horn spoons are larger, but the beautiful horn spoon my daughter gave me finally wore out, its edge becoming coarse and fibrous. Replacement can be a problem; most Americans don’t eat their eggs from the shell, and the implement has become rare and hard to find. When I see one, I acquire it. My current egg spoon is stainless steel; on the handle are the letters K L M. I will not go into how we came to own this spoon.

  You see what I mean about difficulty. Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.

  If you are in the whacking mood, the first whack of the knife on the shell is decisive. A firm whack on a good shell in the right place decapitates the egg cleanly with one blow—ideal. But some eggshells are feeble and crumbly, and sometimes your aim is tentative or faulty (after all, this is something you have to do before breakfast). If you hit too high, the opening isn’t big enough; too low, you get into yolk, which you don’t want to do yet. So maybe you choose to tap instead of whacking—nowhere near as exciting, but you have more control of the outcome.

  So now you have opened your egg. You stick the spoon right down into it, but not too suddenly, or the yolk will well up and dribble wastefully down the outside of the shell. The three-and-a-half-minute egg white is barely firm, while the yolk has thickened just enough to make a beautiful golden sauce for the white. Your job is to mix the two nicely so you get a balance of yolk and white in each small spoonful, while not destroying the delicate little bowl you’re eating from, the eggshell. This takes attention.

  The more complete the attention, the more you actually taste the egg.

  It may be apparent by now that this whole blog is a subtle blow against double-tasking, and a paean to doing one single thing with, as the Bible puts it, “all thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

  Nor is there any breakfast there. The grave is without egg.

  The flavor of a fresh soft-boiled egg is extremely subtle. I like salt and pepper on a fried egg but nothing at all on a boiled egg. It is completely satisfactory in and by itself. If a little butter from the muffin gets into it, that’s fine too.

  The soft-boiled-egg experience is the same every morning and never the same. It remains endlessly interesting.
It is invariably delicious. It delivers a small, solid dose of high-quality protein. Who could ask for more?

  Of course, I’m very lucky: I can get toxin-free eggs at our co-op from local farmers who don’t cage their birds in pestholes and don’t feed them on carrion. The eggs are brown, with strong shells and orange yolks, not the weak, pallid things laid by hens kept in filth and torment all their lives. The Oregon Legislature has at last decided to ban poultry batteries, hurray—the ban to take effect in 2024, unhurray. The lobbies who run our lives demand that torture, ordure, and disease continue for thirteen more years. I will not live to see the birds go free.

  Nôtre-Dame de la Faim

  October 2011

  I VISITED A great cathedral this week. It’s situated in a mixed industrial/small business/residential area not far from the Portland Airport, an odd place for a cathedral. But it has a huge congregation and is full of people, not just on Sundays but every day of the week.

  And it’s big. Nôtre-Dame de Paris covers about 67,000 square feet. This one is nearly twice as big, 108,000 square feet, two full city blocks (and its overflow, adjunct building across the river covers 94,000 square feet).

  Nôtre-Dame, with its towers, is much taller, and is built of stone all carved with saints and gargoyles, and is endearingly ancient and beautiful. This one looks rather unimpressive as you approach it, partly because there are buildings near it and you can’t really get a view of it, and partly because it wasn’t built long ago to celebrate and embody spiritual worship, but recently, in dire need, for a specific material purpose. Still, I wouldn’t discount a very large element of the spirit in the building of it.