May 20, 2002
WRITERS ON WRITING
WRITERS ON WRITING; When Inspiration Stared Stoically From an Old Photograph
By KATHRYN HARRISON
Thirty-five years ago, in suburban Los Angeles, my grandfather showed me a photograph he had taken in Alaska in 1915. It was a picture of a native woman smoking a pipe. He said her name was Six-Mile Mary, and she stood alone in a bleak landscape, somewhere outside the new town of Anchorage. There was no house behind her, no man or child beside her, no dog, no horse, no campsite, no tree.
Her black hair was parted from forehead to crown with a line so exact it struck me as cartographic, necessary and absolute as a division of longitude. Looking at the photograph, I knew that Six-Mile Mary had neither ancestors nor kin but had invented herself, too powerful to consider beauty, and so her beauty surpassed any I had encountered before. Lingerie, lipsticks, bottles of perfume, curlers and talcum powder and Dippity-do: under her gaze the alchemy of my mother's dressing room would collapse into ash.
''Why did she smoke a pipe?'' I asked my grandfather, whose rules for women prohibited the comparatively mild sins of whistling and drinking beer.
''She just did,'' he said.
''How did you know her?''
''I knew her, that's all.''
''What were the six miles?''
He shrugged.
''She was your friend?''
''No, not a friend.''
Of course not. Friendship is a human measure; Six-Mile Mary was, I already suspected, an immortal. Years away from the work that would one day consume me -- decades away from a novel I titled ''The Seal Wife'' -- I had seen a muse.
During the time that intervened, Six-Mile Mary appeared, often in disguise, but I recognized her. On a bench in a La Jolla, Calif., park, a blond woman sat smoking a pipe. Twelve years old, I sat next to her. When she got up, I stood, too, and followed her along the path that overlooked the beach, through the picnic area and into the dank public restroom. ''Do I know you?'' she demanded, and I fled.
In my life as a writer I often remind myself -- comfort myself -- with what William Faulkner said about ''The Sound and The Fury.'' The whole novel, he claimed, hung on one image, the glimpse of a little girl's muddy underpants seen from the ground as she climbed a tree. How can an entire world spin off so small and incidental a hub? Can it be possible that Faulkner conceived his masterpiece from this tiny, grubby moment?
I imagine most writers of novels begin with such a fragment, a shard of experience so compelling, so troubling and unavoidable -- always there, on the periphery of consciousness -- that around it he or she must construct an elaborate world. This world, the novel, is not merely a container or a means of filing the image away but an attempt to make it comprehensible, and to guard its power.
Afflicted with wanderlust, my grandfather, who was born in London in 1890, drifted west and north across the Atlantic, across Canada, until the land gave out and he reached the coast of Alaska. The stories he told me of living on the frozen frontier helped me to assemble, stick by stick, a town in which to put Six-Mile Mary, whose face I can no longer see. The photographs my grandfather took in the north were lost in a move.
When I consider what survived the journey from one to another neighborhood in Los Angeles: chipped china, worn rugs, mismatched sheets -- all of these unpacked and then discarded in the critical light of freshly painted rooms -- it seems impossible, and inevitable, that the album was mislaid.
Bound in creased, dry leather that left crumbs on my hands, its luminous content was hidden by a shabby disguise and remained, like the magic of fairy tales, outside mortal agendas. Even when I was a child and the image of Six-Mile Mary was in front of me, she eluded perception, an apparition caught by my grandfather's camera, one among others: The silver mirror of an arctic lake, reflecting both moon and sun. My grandfather as a young man with a full head of blond hair, jodhpurs and shotgun. A white cloud stitched to a black sky with needles of ice.
The pictures I remembered, so fragile and so necessary, fragments of a life I could not stand to lose, demanded that I imbed them in a narrative that would ensure their survival. All the corollary and not inconsiderable work of creating characters and plot, as well as a plausible place and time in which to put them, I undertook as the only means I had of preserving my connection to my grandfather. So it is all the more paradoxical, if not exactly surprising, that Six-Mile Mary still seems to me self-created, without human attachment: without the vulnerability, the need for connection, that enslaves me to writing novels.
Bigelow, the main character of ''The Seal Wife,'' the narrative trap I set for Six-Mile Mary, is a scientist. Sent by the weather bureau to establish a meteorological observatory in the frontier town of Anchorage in 1915, he's obsessed with finding a formula that will let him understand and predict the weather. What Bigelow wants is not just to penetrate the heavens but the mind of God, or whatever force it is that throws us together in families and tears us apart.
Seduced by an Aleut woman who refuses to speak to him, seduced because she won't speak to him, whenever Bigelow is with the Aleut he searches her face for emotion. She is the only woman who has allowed him to watch her as intently, as much and as long as he wants, and the reason for this comes to him one night. She is self-possessed. There is nothing he can take from her by looking.
At the thought, he gets up from the bed and goes to the window; he rests his forehead on its cold pane. She possesses herself. How much more this makes him want her.
He is myself, of course, with the photograph of Six-Mile Mary in my hands. I made him a scientist, but like a writer he loves a woman who is more muse than mortal, so grand and self-sufficient, so complete unto herself that she would never labor over words and commas, tenses and metaphors. Six-Mile Mary's silence, and her solitude, her body that casts no shadow onto the ground: the gods take human form, but something always gives them away.
Writers on Writing
Articles in this series are presenting writers' exploration of literary themes. Previous contributions: nytimes.com/books/columns
Photo: Kathryn Harrison says that as a child she wondered about a mystery woman. That wonder inspired a novel. (John Patrick Naughton for The New York Times)(pg. E2)
