I also love how she said, "I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they will burn."
I am thinking of how I could shape her words into a play or a film. I have no idea. I just came across because I have a deadline coming up, and I'd completely forgotten some of the gems she shared with me.
* * *
WORDS OF HELEN NORRIS BELL
“I hear the voice of the story when I’m writing.”
“I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they will burn.”
I
spoke with Helen Norris Bell on a summer afternoon in 2007 in Black
Mountain, North Carolina and then I returned the following summer to
take a picture with her. These are here words that I weaved into an
essay called WORDS ON FIRES about Helen Norris Bell, Mary Ward Brown,
and Kathryn Tucker Windham.
Helen’s own words about an Alabama life
Childhood and growing up
I
am old. I was 91 last month. Can you believe that? I can’t believe
that. I am old but I remember everything. I lie in bed at night and the
“To be or not to be” speech comes back to me. Every word. I remember so
many things. I don’t know if that’s good or not, but I remember. Words,
sonnets, history – all this poetry comes back to me.
There
was a family of eight kids who lived down the road, and we were all
writing our novels. No street, a road – they lived a mile and a half or
so away – I grew up on a 500 acre farm – we walked everywhere. We used
to get together in this dry ditch near my place, a dry ditch – we
thought we’d discovered it – a virgin ditch – and we’d climb down in the
ditch and our write our novels. We wrote them in the seventh grade. We
didn’t want to write short stories. We were writing novels. We didn’t
even know the facts of life, but we were writing novels.
On
our farm, we had 7500 laying hens, 2000 turkeys, dairy cows…I also used
to write plays for the neighbors when I was a child…Of course, I always
gave myself the starring role. We’d get in the kitchen and get all the
ingredients to make fudge and we’d sell it at intermission.
I
wanted to write operettas – I wrote so many when I was young. I
attended the University of Alabama…I did my dissertation, passed the
language requirements. I was still wanting to write operettas, Oh, it
was so romantic, but my hands were small – I couldn’t reach an entire
octave. Then I thought, well, I’ll be a painter, watercolors, but I just
wasn’t good enough. I learned enough to enjoy myself in a museum, but
absolutely the details helped my writing. Everything you do helps your
writing.
Teaching
Then
I needed the money, so I taught for many years at that college in
Montgomery. What’s it called? Huntingdon College. Old age, oh my. I had
to earn money. I was teaching all these things – Shakespeare, I taught
the tragedies and then I taught the comedies. I became the world’s
leading authority on Shakespeare at Huntingdon. I taught 16th
Century prose, Victorian poetry and prose, I taught Chaucer. The Head
of the Department just piled all this stuff on me. The hardest of all
was literary criticism, oh my that was hard, but I put my course
together and students loved it. The students loved me, but I didn’t know
what I was doing. I taught for thirteen years, and then I quit. I
couldn’t write while I was teaching. I couldn’t do it.
Short Stories
I
never had done much with the short story, and after I was finished
teaching, I thought I want to write some short stories. I’m going to
give that a try, but I thought before I write short stories, I’m going
to write some poems. After I wrote fifty poems, I began to write short
stories. I used the techniques of poetry to write my stories. With
stories you have to whittle it down. You have once chance to get your
point across. With a novel, you have the freedom for the neighbors to
say, “I don’t believe they’re getting along, and then a cousin will say,
‘No, I don’t believe they’re getting along either,” and you can have
all these discussion and speculation and conjecture from everywhere, but
you don’t have that freedom with a short story. A short story has to
have the depth of a novel, but the focus of a poem.
Isak Dineson
I
wrote two volumes of poetry – WHATEVER IS ROUND and RAIN PULSE. I
wanted to call RAIN PULSE by a different title SPEAK LIKE RAIN, because
of Isak Dineson. You know she was in love with one brother, but wound up
marrying the other brother, whom she did not love, but she went to
Africa with him, and they had this coffee plantation that finally went
bust, and they had to give it up…but before they did, she would go out
into the fields and read poetry to the natives. They didn’t even
understand her language, of course, but she read to them, and they would
say to her, “Speak like rain.”
They
heard the rhythm of it, the cadence, and to them it was rain, and so I
wanted to title a book SPEAK LIKE RAIN, and do you know some lady over
in North Carolina took my title for her book. I was so mad. So I had to
come with another, and I was thinking, “Rain Speak” and a friend had
written a poem called “Rain Pulse,” and folks said, “Make that your
title,” so I asked my friend if I could, and she said,
“Well, can I still keep my poem?”
I said, “Of course…”
Oh
it had the most beautiful cover, the first edition – but the second
edition was dark, you couldn’t see the words. Timberlake Press put it
out. But as a writer, we don’t have any choice with our book covers.
More on Short Stories
At
some point, I don’t remember when, the University of Alabama contacted
me and said, “We want your short stories. Have you got any?” I had some
so I told them to come look. It seems somebody from outside had to make
the final decision. George Core of the Sewanee Review liked my sense of
humor, but he would always pick out my sad short stories the ones where
I was hanging crepe. I’d write a funny one and then a serious one.
Folks would say, “How can you write such different ones?” Serious, fun,
religious, all kinds…I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they
will burn.
One
of my collections is “A Day in the Life of a Born-Again Loser,” and I
didn’t want my book called that, but they had a meeting of 25 folks or
so and only one didn’t like that title. The rest did, and I said, “Well
if you call it that you’re doing to have to put it at the back of the
book, but I believe readers still go straight to that story first.”
Russia
I’ve
been to the Soviet Union many times, and the Russians will not correct
you when you pronounce a word wrong. They won’t do it. The British will
always correct you. But Americans are just so awful – they want it to be
the way they want it to be – On one of my trips, the Russians learned
that I wanted to be corrected, so they began to correct me. Moscow is
pronounced “Moskva.” Ivan is pronounced “Ifan.”
The Stroke
After
the stroke, I was paralyzed on my right side and so I’ve been working
with right hand drawing loops. Well, this nurse and her husband wanted
me to sign their books, but I spelled their names wrong – I had to cross
something out – it was a mess, and they didn’t understand it was hard
for me to sign my books to them, but they were all excited.
Family
My family never liked my books – never read them.
The nursing home in Black Mountain
Now
there are a lot young people here – nurses in training, I guess, and
they come in my room to hear stories. Yesterday, I had nine young people
in here. They kept drifting in and out. I recited the Hamlet speech to
them, “To Be or Not to Be.” I told them about concentration camps…I
talked to them about history and many acted like they were hearing it
for the first time.
“I can’t believe that!” one of them said.
The Pen Faulkner Nomination and Peter Taylor
I
was a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. They flew me to DC and gave
me 1500 dollars for winning – if you won the whole thing you got 5000
dollars. Peter Taylor got that. He’s a love, dead now. Anyway, they
asked me to go, and I said yes. Part of the evening was that we had to
get up there and read – six minutes – I had no idea what to wear. It was
May and May in Alabama is warm and lovely, but in DC, it was cold. I
had on this thin dress, but thank goodness I had a white wool coat.
Well, William Gaddis was there, and he didn’t want to read. He told them
“I’m not going to read to them. A writer is not a performer. I don’t
write to read aloud, and I’m going to tell them that when it’s my turn
to talk.”
Well,
those folks paid fifty dollars a head to come to that dinner and hear
us read, but he got up there and talked about how he wasn’t going to
read to them, and I realized as he was talking about how he wasn’t going
to read to them that I was going to have to get up and go next. They’d
seated us alphabetically, and I said to Peter Taylor, “I’m next…I have
to follow that?”
And
he nodded – he was very sympathetic, and so they introduced me and said
something about my “courage and wit” and I got up there, so nervous,
and I said, “Well, I can think of nothing nicer than to read to you all
this evening.”
Well,
they were like butter. They just melted. And I read the last six pages
of “The Love Child.” In the back of the room, they had piles of books –
and mine sold out. They told me, “This is the first time we’ve ever had
an author to sell out.” And people came up to me and said, “We can’t get
your book. They’re all gone.” But the PEN FAULKNER folks took
everybody’s name and promised to send them my books if they wanted them.
Peter
Taylor read a story of a man who wanted to be a writer, so he pedaled
himself off on other writers – drank like a fish, smoked like a furnace –
and ruined himself. I still think my short story is better very
long…One aspect of it will shed light on another aspect of it.
* A link for the year Helen was nominated for the PEN FAULKNER AWARD.
http://www.penfaulkner.org/award-for-fiction/past-award-winners-finalists/
THE CHRISTMAS WIFE
A
soap opera actress – I can’t remember who – was trying to market “The
Christmas Wife.” And she said, “How about we get Jason Robards and Julie
Harris to act in it, and Geraldine Fitzgerald to direct,” and I said,
“Well as long as we’re dreaming.”
And
do you know she managed to do it? She knew them all from acting days.
It took them forever to send me the tape. Finally they just sent it to
me, but it was going to be on cable one night, and the men were taking
forever to fix my cable lines, and so I went outside my house and said
to the men, “My story is going to be on TV tonight and I want to watch
it.”
And
the men said, “Well, we’ll take some juice from your neighbor and give
it to you – we’ll take it from both sides, and give it to you.”
My
family wanted to watch it with me, so did friends, but I wanted to
watch it alone. But I almost missed it. I had to go to the dentist, and
then I did some Christmas shopping. I couldn’t find my car. I finally
found it, and I got home about five minutes before it was to start. I
liked it. I liked my story better, but I liked the film. Jason Robards
was so good. And so was Julie Harris.
Helen
Hayes passed the torch to Julie Harris. They repackaged my story
collection, Penguin Chamberlain Books, with the DVD inside…That Kaye
Gibbons wrote an introduction, which I thought we could have done
without. It’s all about how hard it is to Christmas shop.
They
showed ‘The Christmas Wife” here last year in the lounge, and so many
of the old ladies sat down to watch it, and then they began saying, “I
can’t hear it!” and so they started leaving. I had them turn it up, and
so those who stayed were able to hear it.
I
try to get all the flora and fauna right in my stories – that’s very
important to me. But with “The Christmas Wife,” HBO wanted to make it
another “On Golden Pond” set in Canada about 100 miles North of Toronto.
While they were doing the film, they replaced the soap actress who
pulled it all together with another writer, and she called up crying and
crying. Then Julie Harris called up and said, “This is Julie Harris,”
and at first I thought she was somebody from Sunday School, but then it
dawned on me. I said, “Is this the Julie Harris?” and she said,
“Yes, it is. HBO wants to make it a sex movie.” I told her, “But the
feeling in mind is exchanged in a look, which says, “We wish we could
but we know we can’t.”
You
know, marriage can sometimes become a little like prostitution. “You do
what you’re expected to do.” I had relatives like this – it was just
easier for them to give in.”
Mary Ward Brown
Mary
Ward Brown writes stories over and over and over again. She is a true
revisionist. I’m sure she thinks I don’t revise enough. She is such a
fantastic housekeeper. Everything is cleaned from stem to stern. I have a
story. Mary Ward Brown had company year ago - Faulkner’s lover, a
college girl, who just thought he was everything. She wrote her memoirs
after he died, and she told her publisher to go with her to visit Mary
Ward brown.
And
so they went to Mary’s home in Marion, Alabama, and Mary entertained
them for hours. As it got late, she thought they would be tired, so she
showed them the bedroom. After they said good night, Mary went into the
kitchen and cleaned every dish. She washed up everything, but she
slipped on some water and fell and broke her arm.
Now,
she would never dream of waking them, so she roused some relative to
come and pick her up and drive her to the hospital some thirty miles
away. They set her arm, and she went home and went to bed. But she was
up before her guests the next morning making breakfast. That’s just the
way she was.
Now
I know Mary told George Core that one of my stories, “Starwood,” needed
to be cut. Cut it all out. I got the idea of the story when a preacher
said, “If Jesus were alive today, he wouldn’t be allowed to teach in the
public schools.” I thought, well that’s right. His point was that if
something is too good, we don’t want to touch it.
White Hyacinths
“If
I had but two loaves of bread, I would sell one of them and buy white
hyacinths.” That saying is from the Islam religion – and why I named my
story “White Hyacinths.” I loved that story. What is fearful symmetry
but courage, nostalgia, the music of Brahms…Heart not style…art.
Horton Foote
He was informed by reality – a memory of a time that is gone but we want to hang on to – childhood.
* * *
A NOTE FROM FAYE GIBBONS LAST WEEK, 2014
Yes, let’s get together and talk about Helen. She and Kathryn left voids in my life that no one can ever fill. And I was honored to be compared to you by Don Nobles. It was good to share this weekend with you.
Love,
Faye Gibbons
(Author of HALLEY, New South Books, 2014)
* * *
AN EXCERPT FROM MY ESSAY “WORDS ON FIRE” published in FIVE POINTS, A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART in 2008.
July 31, 2007
I’m
late for my interview with Helen Norris Bell on a rainy day in late
July due to an accident on I-40, but when I arrive she is smiling
radiantly from her wheelchair wearing fresh lipstick, looking decades
younger than the age of 91. She lives in an assisted living facility in
Black Mountain, North Carolina. She can’t wait to start talking and
points to a trunk of stories that she hopes to get organized. Before I
can ask a question, she shows me her smiling great-granddaughter on the
computer screensaver, where a baby floats across the screen in bold
photo-shopped splotches of purple and pink. We watch a while, and Helen
says, “She looks weird, doesn’t she?” Then she laughs and our
conversation begins, but whenever I write something down, she gets
irritated. “Why are you writing? Don’t write it down! Listen!”
So
I put the pen down and listen. Hard. Helen Norris Bell is a born
storyteller and even the most tangential threads lead to more stories of
her favorite honey from Tupelo flowers in the Florida Everglades to
getting locked inside the P.O. in Montgomery, Alabama. A postal worker
tried to force her to leave even though she’d arrived well before
closing time to stand in a long line. When she refused, he decided to
teach her a lesson and locked her inside and turned off the lights.
Helen’s eyes light up as she describes the scene, “I let out what I
considered to be a most primal scream and was released. I wrote the
newspaper a letter describing the event, and my story made the front
page. I became the lady who was locked inside the Post Office. They
apologized and changed the rules.”
Next,
she talks about delivering the graduation speech at Huntingdon College
on a blistering Alabama morning in June. Dressed in a heavy gown, she’d
been forewarned in increasingly anxious calls by her son “to practice
the speech and to absolutely take an alarm clock or timer so as not to
bore the crowd.” She greeted the graduates by discussing her son’s
concerns, and they burst into loud laughter and applause.
She
moves from one subject to another—teaching, aging, writing. I try to
keep up and not take notes—being under strict orders to put my pen down
and listen. We leave the door to her room open, but after a while I shut
it with her permission. The nursing home is a cacophony of
interruptions from nurses to patients to aids to volunteers to gardeners
outside the window. She has a history for every single person. It
almost feels like we are living in one of her short stories. An aid
comes in with a tray of supper, which she ignores.
When
Helen talks about her childhood, she says, “I am old. I was 91 last
month. Can you believe that? I lie in bed at night and the ‘To be or not
to be’ speech comes back to me. Every word. I remember so many things. I
don’t know if that’s good or not, but I remember. Words, sonnets,
history. These old ladies here don’t even remember George Washington!”
She
grew up on a 500 acre farm with 7500 laying hens, 2,000 turkeys, and
hundreds of dairy cows. As a child she used to write plays for the
neighbors, gave herself the starring role, and served fudge at
intermission. She and a neighbor family of eight children wrote novels
together too. “We didn’t know about the facts of life but we were
writing novels!”
She
smiles when she speaks of Peter Taylor. “I was a finalist for the Pen
Faulkner Award. They flew me to DC and gave me 1500 dollars—if you won
the whole thing you got 5000 dollars. Peter Taylor got that. He’s a
love, dead now. Anyway, they asked me to go, and I said yes. Well,
William Gaddis was there, and he told the audience, ‘I’m not going to
read to you. A writer is not a performer. I don’t write to read aloud.
’Well, those folks paid fifty dollars a head to come to that dinner and
hear us read, but he got up there and talked about how he wasn’t going
to read and too bad for them—and I realized that I was going to have to
get up and go next, and I said to Peter Taylor, ‘I’m next…I have to
follow that?’ And he nodded—he was very sympathetic, and I got up there,
so nervous, and I said, ‘I can think of nothing nicer than to read to
you all this evening.’ Well, they were like butter. They just melted.”
She
talks of her lost library and about her son who sold her home, and how
she came to live in Black Mountain. It’s late in the day by the time she
tells this story, which began with her making a cup of Earl Gray tea
and suddenly feeling very strange. “I can’t really recall what happened,
but I guess I went into the hospital for a time. When I came out, I
didn’t return to my home in Montgomery. I came here. My son arranged it.
Eventually, I asked him about my books. That’s the only thing I really
cared about. My books. A friend had built me wonderful bookshelves in my
home, and they were filled with books, floor to ceiling. My son said he
kept the books that he thought looked important and threw the rest
away.”
She
shrugs, but there are tears. Hours have passed. A thunderstorm blows up
and we stare outside. “I wish it wouldn’t rain. I know we’re supposed
to need it, but it’s so gloomy.” She looks at the red maple. “I do love
my tree. I hope they leave it alone.” Then she moves from her wheelchair
to her bed and wants no help. Thunder cracks the sky, and I tell her
about my plan to write a story of her, Mary Ward Brown, and Kathryn
Tucker Windham.
“What
for?” she asks, unimpressed. “We don’t even like each other. Kathryn’s
popular with the students and the university crowd. And Mary is a true
revisionist. I’m sure she thinks I don’t revise enough. I’m sure she
told George Core that my story, ‘Starwood,’ needed to be cut. She is
such a fantastic housekeeper. Everything is cleaned from stem to stern.”
“What about Harper Lee? Did you like To Kill a Mockingbird?” I ask.
“I
never saw all the fuss. I liked the scene with the pocket watch. Did I
tell you about Russia? Let me tell you about my trips to Russia.”
We
talk some more through the raging summer storm.The sun comes out, and
slowly sinks. I have spent five hours with Helen Norris Bell. I had
meant to take her picture, but now she’s tired and lying in bed. I will
have to return or ask one of the nurses to do it.
She
says, “Please come back. You bring your stories next time.” I say
goodbye, and minutes later I stand outside in the warm air of Black
Mountain washed clean by the rain. I try to catch my breath. I sit on
the curb and write down everything as best as I can remember it. I think
of the first line in Helen’s story, “The Singing Well,” which reads:
“She was Emilu, named for two dead aunts, their names rammed together
like head-on trains.” There was an Aunt Emilu in my husband’s family,
who grew up near Black Mountain—dead now like Peter Taylor. I’ve been to
Taylor’s grave at an old cemetery in Sewanee, Tennessee—but by chance,
not intention. His “new” grave is surrounded by crumbling ones dating
back to the Civil War. Poets at the Sewanee Writers Conference recite
poetry in the cemetery in the summertime, though I’ve recently heard
Taylor’s grave was moved to Memphis. I don’t know where Aunt Emilu is
buried.
Months later, I will hear that Helen’s Harper Lee Award was sold as
part of the Estate Sale. Professors from the University of Alabama are
trying to locate it to return it to her. Her home was sold because
family members were concerned about her health and all the yellow
Post-It notes with scribbling around her house, but a friend of Helen’s
says, “Those Post-It notes were all her story ideas! She’s a writer!” I
think of my son, Flannery, a sunny teenager with rock star aspirations
to be the next David Bowie/T-Rex, growing old and putting me in a
nursing home and throwing away my books that didn’t look important.
I drive through the dark mountains invisible against the night sky of North
Carolina with Helen’s words floating around me: When
I finished teaching, I realized I never had done much with the short
story, so I wanted to write some. I used the techniques of poetry to
write my stories. With stories you have to whittle it down. You have one
chance to get your point across. With a novel, you have the freedom for
the neighbors to say, “I don’t believe they’re getting along, and then a
cousin will say, ‘No, I don’t believe they’re getting along either,”
and you can have all this speculation and conjecture from everywhere,
but you don’t have that freedom with a short story. A short story has to
have the depth of a novel, but the focus of a poem. I try to set the
words on fire and then maybe they will burn.
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