‘Msu RETURNING MATERIAL§: Place in book drop to LJBRARJES remove this checkout from -_ your record. FINES win , be charged if book is returned after the date stamped below. 19;. f i 14/“ f) / w -. ~' . 5* s ;.;':.13 ‘- Copyright by LEONORA SMITH 1983 REVISION PRACTICES OF PROFESSIONAL WRITERS by Leonora H. Smith A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Department of Curriculum and Instruction 1983 ABSTRACT REVISION PRACTICES OF PROFESSIONAL WRITERS by Leonora H . Smith Murray1 states that rewriting distinguishes the amateur from the professional, yet little research has been done on revision practices of skilled writers under normal working conditions. This study combined examination of successive drafts with interviews to describe the revision processes of Albert Drake and Lee Upton, two versatile, well-published writers. Narrative accounts trace the development of pieces of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The study identifies common revision practices and compares results to previous research. Notable features are (l) importance of early drafts which create a context that focuses the writer's attention, provides a "baseline" for type and amount Of revision, embodies external features and intentions in unique configurations, and cues and controls preservations and changes; and (2) physicality of revision-- i.e., the writers rewrote in order to "see," indicating complex relation— ships between perception and production. Revisions are cued not only by propOsitional meaning, but also by visual and auditory properties of the texts. Other influences on revision are writers' aesthetics, commit- ment to the piece, and external sources. Leonora H. Smith Though revision processes were multi-Iayered and recursive, they were also progressive. While revisions and their effects varied from text to text, the study identified an underlying three-stage (and some- times four-stage) process. In stage one, writers established structural features, to which they added and adjusted in stage two. In stage three they 'corrected,' changed format and established final form. Unexpected meaning some- times emerged in a variable 'discovery' stage. These stages were not strictly linear, since different parts of the texts were Often at different stages, but shifts in proportion of physical revisions from draft to draft and a three-draft minimum suggest an Obligatory order in which writers establish necessary features of a text-~language, structure and form, based on selective attention necessitated by limits on ability to "see" parts and relationships Of a complex task. Results suggest that routinized 'form first' tasks allow writers to combine stages, but the more variability of features, the more selec- tive attention must be, and the more distinct the stages. The conclusion discusses educational implications and suggests future research com- bining exegesis with coding of revisions with Faigley and Witte's2 taxonomy [used here descriptively). 1Donald Murray, "Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery," in Research on Composing, edited by Lee Odell and Charles Cooper (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1978), pp. 85-103. 2Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte, "Analyzing Revision," College Composition and Communication 32 (December 1981), pp. 400-414. DEDICATION For Roger, John, and Leonora, whose love and support sustained me, and for Lee Upton and Albert Drake, with great pleasure in their work. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sections of the dissertation have appeared in Rod Action, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, and Centennial Review. Thanks to the authors and /or editors of these publications for permission to reprint. Thanks also to the Sage Foundation, whose grant helped support the preparation of this manuscript. My great appreciation to the following whose help and support have been crucial: My co-chairs: Dr. Linda Wagner, whose perceptive reading and extraordinarily useful suggestions made the dissertation possible; and Dr. Ben Bohnhorst, whose kindness, guidance, and enthusiasm over many years have been a great source of encouragement; My committee members: Dr. George Ferree, Dr. Stephen Judy, and Dr. Max Raines, who in various and important ways have helped to shape my thinking; Those whose guidance and instruction have been invaluable to me over my years Of study: Dr. Marvin Grandstaff, Dr. Frank ViviO, and Diane Wakoski, among others; My friends Donna Hamilton. Cheryl Vossekuil, and Dr. Robert Aughmaugher, who helped me greatly with the proposal and manuscript; Jo Grandstaff, wonderful friend and typist extraordinaire; And again, Lee Upton and Albert Drake, with gratitude and a ifection . TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF APPENDICES .......................................... Chapter REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON WRITERS' REVISIONS METHODS ....................................... Guiding Principles ............................. Writers Studied ................................. What Counts as Revision? ....................... Conduct of the Study ........................... General Procedures ............................. Language/Methods of Analysis and Description Modes of Writing and Revision .................. Description of Results ........................... ALBERT DRAKE ................................ Drake's Fiction ................................. "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" .............. The Big Little GTO Book ...................... Street Was Fun in '51 ........................... LEE UPTON ..................................... Poetry ..... . .................................... "The Foreigner" ................................. "The Mountain" ................................. "The Tail of Robert E. Lee's Horse" ............ Fiction .......................................... "The Invention of Happiness" ................... Review: "Laurie Sheck's Amaranth: Charms for the SouP' ..................................... CONCLUSIONS .................................. Important Features in Revision .................. Questions Raised by the Research on Revision .. Suggestions for Future Research ................ Educational Implications ......................... ........ ........ SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................... iv Page 22 22 25 28 28 29 32 ll7 50 52 53 55 1011 128 165 166 171 195 213 231 233 247 261 261 279 310 315 317 LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix Page A. ALBERT DRAKE -— SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ....... 323 B. LEE UPTON -- BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................... 336 C. "THE CHICKEN WHICH BECAME A RAT" ............ 342 D. THE BIG LITTLE GTO BOOK ........................ 351 E. STREET WAS FUN IN '51 ............................ 355 F. "THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS ................... 359 G. LAURIE SHECK'S AMARANTH: CHARMS FOR THE SOUL ........................................ 366 PREFACE As a dissertation for a dual degree in English and Curriculum and Instruction, this study is structured in a way that may seem odd to readers in either discipline. It resembles most closely a piece of ethnographic research in that the long centeral section is almost exclusively description, for which the first two chapters establish a larger context, in relation to current research and composition theory, and from which the last chapter draws conclusions. Great care has been taken to separate description from conclusion; since such a study has no clear, replicable 'method,I the intent of the description is both to assert and support factual claims about what the writers actually did, and to give sufficient examples SO that the reader can assent or dissent to the conclusions drawn on the basis of evidence. Whenever possible, holograph examples have been provided. If the amount of such description seems inordinate, its purpose is to provide a thorough factual grounding for agreement or dispute, on the belief that though judgments about instruction are in the end normative, they should be made not only on ideological grounds but should be based in accurate, factual evidence. From an educational point of view, this dissertation is intended to provide a model or instance of research based in close Observation of particulars (3 regular practice in the study Of literature) which seem to me potentially applicable to a wide variety of specific subjects vi which focus on how those who do things very well go about their work. Though the dissertation moved across fields, it is not without theoretical underpinnings which should be made explicit, and which are crucial to my thinking and seem important to all forms of generalist study. The generalist, or scholar who works across fields, must be able not only to see patterns, relationships and differences on the metatheoretical level, but also to make these explicit in a detailed or particular way. This is made difficult by the generalist's responsibility to look with a skeptical eye on the canons of evidence and habitual practices of each discipline, to see how they differ, how they complement one another, and how they Shape the piece of work they pick out for study. Such metatheoretical activity can easily detach itself from the particular in the absence Of instance and example. Scholars whose writings have been important in helping me to keep a grounding in the particular in absence of methodological allegiance have been particularly useful in this dissertation, and have given me organizing principles that have been epistemologically invaluable. These are points to which I return time and again, which sustained me, directed and focused my attention: - John Dewey (1934) in particular the preface to Experience and Education, in which he cautions against thinking in dichotomies and forming principles by reaction, and his demonstration Of the possibility of developing a plan of action "proceding from a level deeper and more inclusive than is represented by the practices and ideas of contending parties" (p. 5). vii - Joseph Schwab, whose detailed and explicit discussion of directions generale study might take and his repeated admonition that metatheoretical discussion must be rooted in felt need; "the practical" in the best sense Of the word. — Ryle (1971) and Cavell (1971), who, each in his own way, reminded me of the importance of 'use'; that meaning lies not in the abstract, but in the context, the circumstances, the particulars of life and experience, and for their help in making it explicit how problems may be identified by the way language is used. - In the field of composition, to Janet Emig (19711) and Mina Shaugnessy (1977), whose pioneering work gave justification to the efficacy of taking a close look at worthwhile phenomena. viii CHAPTER I REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON WRITERS' REVISIONS In recent years, research on writing has shifted attention from the products of writing, embodied by the traditional 'ideal types' of narration, exposition, description, and argumentation, to the processes by which written products are created. Theoretically grounded in discourse theory (Jakobson, 1960; Moffet, 1968; Kinneavy, 1971), and developing methodologically from Emig's case study of the composing process, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (1971), this movement has generated a spate of observational studies Of the composing process or processes (Graves, 1975; Britton, 1975; Flower and Hayes, 1980, 1981; ‘Sommers, 1980; Perl, 1978; Pianko, 1979; Odell and Cooper, 1976; Bechtel, 1979; Odell and Goswami, in progress; and others) and several theoretical models of the composing process (Nold, 1979; Flower and Hayes, 1981). Though these studies and models differ in particulars, they uniformly reject what Young (1976) calls "the simplest and most widely shared concep- tion" of writing as: . a linear, unidirectional process capable of being divided into more or less discrete stages. We think first (e. g. , choose a subject, gather relevant information about it) then write a draft and revise it, editing for style, usage, etc. (p. 311). Instead, current research holds that writing is 'laminated and recursive,‘ with planning occurring throughout the writing to a much greater degree than current teaching practices and widely used writers' handbooks would suggest (Emig, 1971; Young, 1976; Odell, Cooper and Courts, 1978). Britton says, "there are some irreconcil— able differences between the way writers work and the way many teachers and composition text books are constantly advising students to set about their tasks (1975, p. 20). Sommers (1980) holds that instruction based upon a false account Of what writers do leads to "a parody of writing" (p. 379) on the part of students; this false account includes an extremely limited notion of revision as adjustment of a text to a series Of teacher-given rules and conventions. The line Of reasoning common to these investi- gators seems to be that school practices in writing instruction would be improved if they were based on complete, accurate accounts of what writers do when they write, though they do not seem to assert I that there is one generalizable account that could be applied to all forms of writing and all circumstances. Murray (1978) asserts, however, that "rewriting is the differ- ence between the dilettante and the artist, the amateur and the pro- fessional, the unpublished and the published" (p. 85). He claims that the process Of writing serves a 'discovery' function: that writers 'discover' what a text is trying to say only in writing it. He quotes over forty literary figures to the effect of George V. Higgin's remark: "I have no idea what I'll say when I start a novel. I work fast so I can see how it will come out" (p. 102). On this basis, he argues that instruction in writing should distinguish between 'internal' revision, which is revision for 'discovery,‘ and focuses on the development of meaning and structure, and 'external' revision, which involves 'polishing' the text to meet the standards or require- ments of an audience. Other writing educators such as Judy (1976), Shaughnessy (1977), and Elbow (1981) call for similar distinctions in instruction. Judy says: ". . . text books and composition teachers have too long blurred the distinction between editing (changing con— tent and form) and proofreading (polishing up matters Of spelling, mechanics and usage)" (p. 109). There seem to be two complaints about current instruction in revision: first, students "get away with first draft copy" (Murray, 1978, p. 85); and second, that instruction, when given, involves only 'polishing up.’ Gentry (1980) cited Squire and Applebee (1968), who found that only 12 percent of high schools they investigated required that students revise; Moetker and Brossell (1979), who found in a survey of 1,129 college freshmen that more than 75 percent seldom or never revised; and Scardamalia (1977), who reported that the eighth graders she studied were "astonished" at being asked to revise. Gentry concludes: These studies Offer solid confirmation Of Murray's contention that revision is one of the least taught Skills. It appears that teachers have a very narrow view of revision--at best equating it with rewriting a corrected first draft, but more often equating it with the correction of mechanical errors (p. 21). Another of Murray's contentions--that revision distinguishes the amateur from the professional--is supported by a number of comparative studies. Though these studies use different Operational definitions Of 'skill' ('experienced' vs 'Iess experienced,’ 'high scorers' vs 'low scorers,‘ 'student' vs professional'), they uniformly support differences in the revisions made by Skilled and less Skilled writers. Skilled writers revise in larger 'chunks.‘ Nold (1979) says ". . . skilled writers tended to revise by adding and deleting large chunks Of discourse first, and then considering mainly the felicities of sentences and words. Unskilled writers, on the other hand, were stuck at the word level" (p. 1). Stallard (1974) found that 'good' writers made more multiple-word changes than 'poor' writers. Sommers (1980) and Faigley and Witte (1981) report Similar findings. Sommers describes less skilled writers as following a 'thesaurus philosophy' of of revision, where changes are lexical rather than semantic, and are cued by recognition of a 'broken rule' or desire to avoid repeating a word. Skilled writers, on the other hand, revised more at the sentence level, often making major alterations in the sense of the text. Sommers' view is that less skilled writers seem 'stuck' with the meaning on the page, revising mainly for cosmetic effect, while more skilled writers Often reconceive the text when they revise. Faigley and Witte (1981), who distinguished between 'surface' and 'meaning' revisions, found that expert adult writers revised more on the level of meaning than either advanced or inexperienced student writers; they "devoted their energies . . . to reworking the content Of their drafts" (p. ll09) . Skilled writers use a wider variety of revision strategies. Sommers (1980) also found that skilled writers used more additions and re-orderings than less skilled writers, in addition to using all the revision strategies that the less Skilled writers used. Faigley and Witte (1981) asked expert adult writers to revise student drafts. They found that the experts made more changes on the level Of meaning, and used addition, consolidation (pulling together elements) and distribution (expanding elements)--revisions seldom made by the students. It seems that skilled writers simply have a larger reper- toire Of alterations they can make in a text. Skilled writers consider more aspects of the 'rhetorical situation' when they revise. Perhaps more crucial than the form or type of revision are the considerations writers have in mind when they revise. Flower and Hayes (1980) used 'protocol analysis' to code elements writers took into account as they wrote, by having them Speak as they composed. They found that expert writers ". . respond to all aspects Of the rhetorical problem. As they compose, they build a unique representation not only of their audience and assignment, but also of their goals involving the audience, their own persona, and the text" (p. 30). Expert writers continue to develop their conception Of this 'problem' as they write, while "poor writers often remained through- out the composing process with the flat, undeveloped, conventional representation of the problem with which they started" (p. 30). Revision for the skilled writers is a process Of formulation and sharpen- ing of their understanding of the external demands Of the writing task, and developing purposes in relation to the task at hand, as well as altering the text, according to this view, which is shared in a general way by most theorists. The literature is less clear on the amount Of revision done by skilled and less-skilled writers. Interviews with literary writers, despite Murray's selection of quotations describing revision as 'discovery,' demonstrate a great deal Of difference between writers on the amount Of revising they report doing. Anne Sexton advises "Expand, expand, cut, expand, cut, cut. DO not trust Spontaneous first drafts. You can always write more fullyll (Packard, 1979, I p. 21). On the other hand, Jack Kerouac says, characteristically: . well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long, wild tale to a bunch of men sitting in a bar and all are ] listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy Stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray the rhythmic thought impact . . . I spent my entire youth writing Slowly with revisions and endless re-hashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art . (Plimpton, 1976, p. 3611). In this case, it appears that the choice of whether or not to revise is based on aesthetic considerations-~the writer's stance in relation to the language as a medium of art. But literary accounts also Show that a given writer may revise a great deal at one time, or for one task, and little or not at all at another. Erica Jong says) "some poems are finished in one day. Others take years" (Packard, 1979, p. 296). A large study undertaken for the National Assess— ment of Educational Progress in 1977 found that while 13 year Olds I revised more than 9 year Olds, they also revised more than 17 year oldS. Faigley and Witte (1981) had Similar findings; their advanced students revised more than beginning students, but also more than adult expert writers. Nold (1979) explains the NAEP findings by suggesting that the 17 year olds were given an easier task; Faigley and Witte account for their findings in a similar way--because the writing task (describing a part of Austin, Texas) was of a type familiar to their expert writers, it was easier. In terms of the Flower and Hayes (1981) notion of 'rhetorical problem,‘ it seems that skilled writers revise to the extent that they need to clarify their purposes and the context Of writing, and if these elements are clearly in mind from previous experience, then less revision is needed. In Simple, skilled writers revise as much or as little as the situation requires. In any case, the absolute amount of revision is much less significant for either literary or educational purposes than ho_w skilled writers revise. Perhaps the most interesting questions are: What are the circumstances under which Skilled writers revise? How do they decide revisions are needed or aesthetically desireable? What intentions do they have in making revisions? What, specifically, in a given text, 'cues' the need for revision? Perl (1979) found that 'unskilled' writers made unnecessary changes, for the worse. How do writers know when not to revise? And how do they decide on one revision over another? Several models of the composing process have been developed ; they attempt to answer these questions in a general way by giving theoretical accounts Of the factors that come into play in writing. Three models will be discussed: Flower and HayeS' "Cognitive Process" model (1981), Nold's "Simplified Model" (1979), and Della- Piana's model of "writing as revision" (1978), which is Specifically concerned with revision in poetry. For the purposes of this study, the common features of the models are of more concern than their differences. They agree that revision can be understood only in the larger context Of the entire writing process, and view revision in the broad sense, as a "recursive and cyclical set of behaviors that can be brought into play any time during the writing task" (Gentry, 1981, p. 25) rather than a simple 'tidying-up' of an essentially completed text. They also agree that revision involves bringing a text into line with the context of the task, that is, the 'given' external requirements Of the writing situation, and with the writer's intentions and purposes. Nold (1979) believes a writer internalizes a set of criteria for a given text, then adapts the existing text to fit these criteria on the basis of (I) intended effect, (2) intended meaning, (3) intended audience, and (II) intended persona, through a cyclical process of planning, transcribing and reviewing the text's effect, meaning, and its match with conventions Of the language. Though the Flower and Hayes (1981) and the Della-Piana (1978) models are more fully elaborated in some respects, they share with Nold's the view Of revision as a cyclical, repeated process of 'checking' the text against some internalized criteria that can continue to develop until the work is completed, or, as Della-Piana (1978) notes is sometimes the case, abandoned . Flower and Hayes (1980, 1981) base their model on cognitive psychology, and see revision mainly as a form Of problem identifica- tion. The writer's main task is to identify the 'rhetorical problem,‘ which, like a complex speech act, includes the exigencies of the specific situation (reader, persona, meaning, and the conventional features of a text) as the writer has them in mind, and to generate a series of goals and sub-goals vis-a-vis this situation. They say, The act of composing is a goal-directed thinking process, guided by the writer's own growing network of goals . Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating both high level goals which embody the writer's developing sense of purpose, and then, at times, by changing major goals or even establishing entirely new ones based on what has been learned in the act Of writing (1981, p. 366). Revision, in this model, is seen as a process that hinges on the writer's development of a clear view Of the task at hand. To the extent that the 'rhetorical problem' is familiar to the writer, revisions can be made automatically. Flower and Hayes say: We think that much Of the information people have about rhetorical problems exists in the form Of stored problem representations. Such a representation would contain not only a conventional definition Of the Situation, audience, and the writer's purpose, but might include quite detailed information about solutions, even down to appropriate tone and phrases. Experienced writers are likely to have stored representations of even quite complex rhetorical problems (e.g., writing a book review for the readers of The Dail Tribune) if they have confronted them Often before (1980, p. 25). In such cases, as Britton (1978) suggests, a writer may find him or herself applying a series of conventions without a sense of having made a conscious choice, while in unique situations, the BOO—2 mmaOOLd witcmou .mm>mI new .532“. 10 10.5202 4 A A O 02.5% m 02555— ..(OO 3 ace..— W «SE? 1:.“ U. .uvco::.< .UZ:.<3._<>: UZ_N_Z<.U¢C .th 57.2.... a: 95......Sccv- >m02m2 02SK=>md OZF2m ¥m<._. 11 writer focuses on developing such a representation in mind, which requires more conscious choices in development of the text. Della-Piana's model takes the same general view, but places more emphasis on the elements in the text that 'cue' the need for revision. She says: Revision in the writing Of poetry is not solely editing and polishing after a work is largely finished. It occurs prior to and throughout the writing of a poem until completion or abandonment of the work. Revision is both the discrimination or sensing Of something in a work that does not match what the poet intends or what the poem itself suggests and the synthesis that brings the writing closer to what is intended or suggests the way this might be done. . . . The tension may be a concern by the writer that the work does do what he or She intended but that one is now dissatisfied with the intentions and wants to change the preconceptions. Or the tension may be a concern that the work does not do what the writer intended and one now wants to change the work. The writer may resolve this tension by reconceptions or re-seeing. This re-seeing or revision may have to do with changing pre- conceptions concerning style or other matters, seeing how one might change the work or make it more congruent with one's inner vision, or seeing how one may remove obstacles to attempting a resolution (1978, p. 108). Though all three of these models take into account both the internal conditions, that is, 'purpose and intent,‘ and the external conditions, that is, the 'context Of the writing,‘ Flowers and Hayes make the most explicit distinction between the two, viewing them, as Odell, COOper and Courts do, as representing two quite different points of view. How do writers actually go about choosing diction, syntactic and organizational patterns and content? Kinneavy claims that one's purpose-—informing, per- suading, expressing or manipulating language for its own sake--guides these choices. Moffet and Gibson contend that these choices are determined by one's sense Of the relation of Speaker, subject, and audience (Odell, Cooper and Courts, 1978, p. 6). Preconception and Set 0 Initial vision of what the wOrk will be 0 Stylistic preference 0 Intended effect of the writ on others 0 Beginnings of the work, e.g., a word, phrase, idea, character, or feeling Discrimination 0 Seeing what the work does or does not do 0 Seeing what the work itself suggests as to what it is about Dissonance 0 Seeing matches or mismatches between what the work does, what one intends, and what the work itself suggests Reconception 0 Resolution of the dissonance and tension by: 0 Revision or change in preconceptions 0 Revision to get the work to do what is intended 0 Revision to remove obstacles to a satisfactory resolution Tension 0 Concern with getting the work to do what one intends or what the work itself suggests I Fig. ‘l. A model of the process of writing-as-revision. Della-Piana's Model for Revision of Poetry 13 Their model includes both these elements, explicitly; but it appears that for most theorists and researchers, the distinction is less one of kind than of emphasis. Investigators who, like Della-Piana, focus on literary writing, emphasize intentionality and Shaping Of a piece of work to meet inner needs and visions. Those like Flower and Hayes who focus on writing tasks with clearly instrumental purposes stress the external demands Of the situation. Of the contextual, or external influences on revision, Faigley and Witte (1981) say that the volume and type of revision changes are dependent upon a number of variables besides the Skill of the writer. These variables might be called situational variables for composing. Included in the situational variables are probably the follow- ing: the reason why the text is being written, the format, the medium, the genre, the writer's familiarity with the writing task, the writer's familiarity with the subject, the writer's familiarity with the audience, the projected level of formality, and the length of the task and the projected text (p. 1111). "Successful revision," they go on to say, "results not from the number of changes the writer makes but from the degree to which revision changes bring a text closer to meeting the demands Of the situation" (p. 1111). Investigations of non-literary writing seem to indicate that writers' understanding of audience and the type of writing task are factors most potent in shaping the form a text takes (Flower and Hayes, 1980; Odell and Cooper, 1976; Britton, 1975; Berkenkotter, 1981) though this may be because these factors have been most extensively studied. It appears from these studies that when the "situational" or external variables are familiar, less revision is required . 1ll Britton (1975) says that a large amount Of work-related writing is done in 'house styles'; such writing requires less a full understanding of the rhetorical situation than 'serving an apprentice- ship.‘ Van Dyck (1980) found that the 80 bankers whose on—the-job writing she studied seldom revised routine reports and simple memoranda beyond correcting them for typographical errors, while more complex and less frequently-done tasks often tOOk multiple drafts, which were adjusted for focus, tone and impact. Mair and Roundy (1981) studied technical writers' revisions, and concluded that though they rewrote in the same 'recursive' fashion, the litera— ture reports for other writers: The rewriting stage we have delineated tends to be more deliberate than that of other writers described in the literature. The technical writers' audience, purpose, and form are set by his or her technical task. The parameters guiding the technical writers' revision are thus more clearly defined than is the case with other writers. The technical writers' major criteria for revision--inclusiveness and proper emphasis of the contents of the draft, and logical progression, can be met because the revisionary task itself is clearer (p. 10). It appears that for such writers, less revision is required, but Mair and Roundy note that even for familiar, technical tasks their writers reported 'discovering' new information during the process Of revision. Despite the emphasis in the literature on the context, or 'rhetorical problem,' the external elements alone are not sufficient to account for Observed differences in writers' revisions. Faigley and Witte (1981) gave expert writers the same non-literary task. They say: 15 We found extreme diversity in the ways expert writers revise. One expert writer in the study made almost no revisions; another started with an almost stream of con- sciousness text that she then converted to an organized essay in a single draft; another limited his revisions to a long single insert; and another revised mostly by pruning (p. I410). Not only may writers construe given external circumstances in differ— ent ways, but they may have different approaches to writing, and different purposes vis-a-vis a given task. Virtually all theorists who consider writers' revisions agree that writers revise in relation to their purposes. Judy and Miller say, "in making contact with others, human beings shape their language for particular purposes" and that "once your writing is motivated, you will find language to say what you have to say" (1978, p. 5). Moffet says: "Beneath the content Of every message is intent. And form embodies intent. lntuitively or not, an author choses his techniques according to his meaning" (quoted by Knoblauch, 1981, p. 154). Though theorists seem to agree that purposes are formed in relation to the external demands of the writing task, there is much less agreement on M such purposes might be identified or described. One of the difficulties, of course, is that while the external elements of the writing Situation are observable, purposes are not. One solution to this difficulty is to identify purposes in terms of the elements of the situation which they address, as Nold (1979) does, after the fashion of discourse theorists such as Jakobson (1960) and Kinneavy (1971) . 16 Britton (1975) and Emig (1971) cross writers' purposes with effects on the text, arriving at 'function' categories, which identify writing on a poetic/expressive/transactional continuum, where Transactional language is fully developed to meet the demands of participants; poetic language is fully developed to meet the demands of the spectator role; expressive language is informal or casual, loosely structured language which may serve, in an undeveloped way, either spectator or partici- pant roles (Britton, 1978, p. 18). Emig prefers the terms reflexivelexpressive/extensive, and says that the distinction suggests "two general kinds Of relations between the writing self and the field of discourse—-the reflective, a basically contemplative role: 'What does this experience mean?'; the extensive, 'How, because of this experience, do I interact with my environment?” (1971, p. 37). Though this distinction seems to involve a mix of factors, the main distinction in relation to purpose seems to be between ends and means, or intrinsic and extrinsic purposes, with reflexive or poetic writing arising from an inner need, and yielding a piece of writing that would be judged as an art work, and transactional or extensive writing from some external circumstance and yielding work whose 'goodness' would be determined by its success in accomplishing its instrumental purpose. The fact that investigators Of literary work, such as Murray (1978) and Della-Piana (1978) tend to put greater emphasis on intent, while those who focus on non-literary writing seem more inclined to describe revision in terms of elements of the context, tends to support some discinction of the sort Emig and Britton make, but in #7 17 terms Of understanding exactly what goes on when writers revise, distinctions of this type present some problems. Knoblauch (1981) says such "generic purposes" may be "accurate, but not very helpful" (p. 156). He asserts that Since their category systems are deduced only from an examination of text, Britton and Kinneavy are guilty Of the "intentional fallacy'l and says that: The inadequacy lies, not in oversimplification, which is inevitable, but in the blurring of an important distinction between the kinds of purposes that actually initiate dis- course and those that merely define categories in which completed discourses may be located (p. 1511). He suggests that 'purpose' in writing requires an 'operational' description, and says, quoting James McCrimmon: By 'purpose' we mean the controlling decisions a writer makes when he determines what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. We do not mean anything so general as deciding to 'inform,' 'persuade,' or 'amuse,‘ Since these terms mean so many different things they give almost no help (Knoblauch, 1980, p. 155). It appears that he would make similar criticisms Of Nold's (1979) categorization of intent related to effect, audience, meaning, and persona; though these are derived from writers' reports Of their intentions, and so cannot be fairly accused of wrongly inputing intentionality, they still lead to a less than full account of what the writers' purposes are when they revise. It seems he is asking for an account of purpose that would tell not just that a writer made a given revision because of purposes vis-a—vis an audience, but exactly what he wanted to do to this audience in the given case. Presumably, he is asking for something like what Geertz (1973) calls, after Ryle, "thick description": a full account. 18 Calls by other researchers on revision for further empirical work also seem to be based on what they see as a need for a fuller, more 'natural' account of what writers do when they revise. Most Of the criticisms of existing research focus on various restrictions or 'artificialities' that arise from the requirements of experimental research for generalizability and replicability, or out of a simple, practical need to limit the investigators' tasks to manageable propor— tions. Faigley and Witte (1981) say that a limitation "in studies Of both cause and effect of revision to date has been the artificiality of the writing situation" (p. 411). In an effort to examine as directly as possible what is a mental process, many researchers have followed Emig's (1971) lead and had writers compose aloud (Sommers, 1980; Wolff, 1981; Flower and Hayes, 1980, 1981; and many others). Bechtel (1979) also videotaped student writers, Observing such behaviors as knuckle-popping and thumping during the composing process. There is no clear way to determine how composing aloud or being observed influences or changes what writers do, but it seems that composing aloud adds an element to an already extremely complex task that _m_ig_h_t alter what the writers do, if they were already handling as many elements of the task at once as they could manage. Odell and Cooper could not persuade professional writers to compose aloud. Emig herself, whose work began case studies of writers, according to Odell and Cooper (1976) feels that sufficient research has been done on these lines. Many literary writers report being near-fetishistic about the conditions under which they work, 19 and though there is no clear way to determine how these artificial conditions influence the way writers work, it seems reasonable to suppose that if what is sought is an account of what writers "do," then one would seek such an account under the conditions in which they normally do it. One obvious factor that such situations influence is the time available to revise; writers Often revise over a long period of time—— Robertfi'raves rewrote The White Goddess over a ten year period (Plimpton, 1977)--and it does not seem that an afternoon in a labora- tory could fairly demonstrate the complexity involved in such a lengthy task. An additional artificiality, in light of the emphasis the litera- ture gives to intention, is the fact that in many controlled studies of expert writers, the writing tasks were set. Faigley and Witte (1981) asked writers to "describe a place in Austin that an out-Of-town audience would not be likely to know about" (p. I406). Flower and Hayes (1980) instructed their writers to "write about your job for the readers of Seventeen Magazine, 13-14 year old girls" (p. 23). Cooper and Odell (1976) asked writers to "imagine a situation in which you would be very angry with someone other than a member of your family" (p. 105). In terms of purposivity, these tasks appear to lack either what seem to be the self-impelled purposes of literary writers, or the 'real-world' requirements that arise from actual circumstances Of work, though it may be that they resemble school writing tasks precisely in this respect; it is at least questionable whether tasks without 'real' 20 purposes elicit the same processes that writers would follow with such a purpose. Faigley and Witte (1981) suggest that "such artificiality probably influences not only what the subjects wrote, but also the numbers and types of revisions they made" (p. 1111). Studies that have been conducted in 'real—world' settings, such as Van Dyck's (1980) study Of bankers' writing, or Mair and Roundy's (1981) of technical writers, are not 'artificial,' but are restricted to fairly limited tasks. Britton (1978), Della-Piana (1978), Murray (1978) and Faigley and Witte (1981) all call for more empirical studies of revision, and the later three suggest that such studies should aim for more natural accounts. Murray (1978) suggests that researchers Collect and examine a number of versions of pieces Of writing in different fields, not just examples of 'creative' writing but examples of journalism, technical writing, scholarly writing. . . . A research project might collect and examine such drafts and perhaps interview the writers/ editors who produced them (p. 99). Faigley and Witte say that "we need studies that employ more than one methodology, that examine the complexity Of revision in a variety of texts across a variety of situations" (p. 1112), and Della- Piana suggests research methodology sensitive to the complexity of the revision process [that] will focus on generating hypotheses rather than on testing them and on identifying crucial variables rather than manipulating them. Thus, descrip- tive studies will be more valuable than formal experiments or treatment studies unless the later are combined with description in such a way as to uncover the conditions under which development, learning or performance naturally occurs (p. 11). 21 This study picks up on the suggestions in current research for descriptive studies Of writers' revisions under the conditions in which they normally occur, and in line with suggestions Of researchers who have studied revision. It proceeds on the assumption that such research should focus less on testing Specific hypotheses than generating a body Of information against which current presumptions might be checked and providing information that would lead to the generation of new hypotheses which are based on the Observation of the actual revisions of writers. CHAPTER II METHODS The main aim of the study was to examine and describe how and why writers revise during the normal course of their lives, rather than in "artificial" settings or with contrived writing assignments. The results Obtained were then compared with claims made in, and questions raised by, the existing research on revision as reviewed above. The potential implications for instruction in writing and revision and for future research were explored. Guiding Principles Since current researchers felt many Of the laboratory studies on revision were both artificial and limited in scope, this study attempted to avoid these problems by giving as full a description as possible of what the writers studied actually did when they revised under their usual working conditions-—"thick description." The term comes from Geertz (1973), who takes it from Ryle; he uses it to characterize descriptions of actions that capture their fullness and complexity. Geertz contrasts "thick description" with 'operationalism,I a term he applies to social science research based on the canons of evidence of experimental natural science--methods used in much of the revision research described earlier. 22 23 Though he uses "thick description" particularly to describe what ethnographers do, his distinction between research, on the one hand, which begins with Operational (pre-determined and empirically identifiable) definitions and locates an action in a set of existing categories, and on the other, research which attempts to capture the full complexity of an activity as it actually occurs, holds for the writing process as well. The affinity is evident to Geertz: "Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of‘) a manuscript——foreign, faded, full of ellipses, inco- herences, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries . . ." (p. 10). Unlike ethnographic study, this one did not focus directly on social behaviors (though writing for an audience implies them) but in its aims and methods closely resembles ethnographic study of the type Geertz describes. It is based on the premise that human behavior--p_articularly, in this case, the behavior of experts at their work--iS not random but purposeful, and that close and careful observation will reveal patterns of purposefulness. Like ethnographic study, it was designed to be as 'natural' as possible, examining writing and revising under the conditions they normally occur, with as little interference (as could be practically arranged) introduced by the study itself. Each method of research carries with it certain inherent fail- ings, doing somethings consummately well at the expense of others. Experimental research has canons Of evidence based in the aim of generalizability, which can only be Obtained under correct controls 24 and restraints: representativeness, control of extraneous variables, Operational definition. The requirement of control mitigates against 'naturalness' and 'richness.‘ This study sacrifices generalizability for these features. There was no expectation that the study would yield a set of rules and prescriptions that student writers should follow, though it was hoped some would be suggested, nor that it would yield generalizations about 'what writers in general' do, though it was expected to suggest where future study might be directed. Della-Piana suggests that a study such as this one should be used to "generate testable hypotheses," and that is one of its purposes. However, the study proceeds on the assumption that since the writers studied are skilled and their work has intrinsic merit, the description of the works' development through revision is intrinsically as well as instrumentally valuable. The premise is, simply, that something done extremely well is worth close attention for its own sake. There were some conflicts between wanting a "thick" descrip- tion and wanting a "natural" one. Perhaps the most complete descrip- tion an outsider could get of a wrier's revision processes would be obtained by watching him/her constantly while s/he composed aloud. However, both composing aloud and being watched introduce artificiality by altering the natural context in which writing is normally done. This is especially true for writing, which is a notoriously solitary activity. While social behaviors can be Observed directly, though, mental activities cannot, so no known method (even direct observation) can give an exhaustive account of what writers do 25 when they write and revise. The written material, however, is an artifact of what goes on in mind. In the interests of the general aims of the study, I settled on a combination of examination of writers' successive drafts and interviews. This choice was based on the specific requirements of the task at hand, and on its affinity to subjects Of ethnographic study. The drafts themselves are artifactual remains of writing behavior and the writers' interviews serve the same purposes as reports ethnographers obtain from informants--to clarify, expand upon and check the accuracy of direct observation. Either, alone, was subject to some error-—interpretation of worksheets to plain mis- construction and mistaken attribution of intentionality, and interviews to the enormous difficulty of recalling all parts of a complex act, not all of which may have been conscious even when it occurred. Together, however, with the drafts stimulating memory and the interviews directing attention to important facets of the texts, they seemed to have potential for describing what writers did in the normal course of their work more fully than is described in reports of existing research. In addition, it was a combination that has been used successfully, though for 'Iiterary' purposes, by critics such as Wagner (1967) . Writers Studied There were three criteria for the selection Of writers studied: (1) accomplishment, (2) versatility, and (3) willingness to participate. No claim was made that the two 'represent' all similar writers. Two - 26 were selected, however, since if there were common practices between the two, I could at least distinguish them from what was 'simply idio— syncratic' and this might suggest where future research that sought generalizable principles might direct its attention. The writers were Lee Upton and Albert Drake. Accomplishment Both Drake and Upton were well—published, Drake with over ten books and more than two hundred other publications; Upton with over fifty poems in 'Iiterary' magazines, and several years' experience as a newspaper feature writer. Both had received competitive honors and awards: Drake had been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for his fiction, and had a story selected for the presti- gious Best American Short Stories in 1971; Upton had been a fellow in the writing. program at the University of Massachusetts and had been awarded poetry prizes there and at Michigan State University when she was an undergraduate. During the period of the study, Drake was awarded a second NEA grant, and Upton's first book, 333 Are Not a Child, was selected (in a national manuscript competition) for publication by the University Of Alabama Press. A more complete description of Upton's accomplishments is found at the beginning Of Chapter IV, Drakes' in Chapter III, and their Selected Bibliographies in Appendices A and B. Versatility Both writers had experience working in a variety Of forms. This seemed important, since existing research suggested that 27 revision patterns might be genre specific, and I wanted to be able to distinguish such patterns from those that held across texts. Drake wrote both book-length and short fiction and at one time had written and published poetry. Upton wrote poetry and reviews, had been a news feature writer and had recently begun to write short fiction. They had both been successful at literary and commercial writing tasks and in accomplishment and versatility, seemed to demon- strate writing abilities and performance to which instruction in writing might well aspire. Willingness to Participate They both expressed willingness to give their full coopera- tion by making draft material available and by being questioned and interviewed. This was a crucial factor, since the entire study depended upon their continued cooperation, which entailed an enormous amount of work and time on their parts. In addition, though it was not an initial requirement, the writers differed from one another in several potentially important respects not directly related to writing--age, sex, and geographic origin. These were demographic variables Often shown in social science research to influence many behaviors, and so of possible influence on the revision processes. Since the writers differed in these respects, age or sex could be eliminated as the 'cause' of any common features that might be found. Another important difference was that although they both write in a number of genres, Upton 28 considers herself primarily a poet, and Drake considers himself primarily a fiction writer. What Counts as Revision? There is some disagreement in existing research about the use of the term "revision." Sommers (1979) examined fifteen writing texts and found that twenty-three terms, ranging from 'polishing' to 'reconceptualization' were used synonymously with 'revision.' Britton (1975) says that the various activities that fall under the term "have in common only the fact that in them, the writer becomes reader of his own work" (p. 116). Since I was interested in as much of the process as possible, whatever it might be called, I took the broad view, and included all activities from the time they became readers of their own work under the general term 'revision.' When possible, I also tried to get information about mental activities previous to the point they began writing, if they felt initial purposes or revisions in mind influenced the development Of the work. Conduct of the Study At the beginning of the study, Drake was in the process of writing a novel, Fears. Except for a few colums for Rod Action, he was not working on material which would begin and be completed during the period of the study. However, he routinely saved draft copies of his work and agreed to make them available to me. Upton, who did not normally save early versions of her work, agreed to keep all drafts and worksheets of her writing for me, and to date them. She sent work to me as it was completed, between November 1982 and 29 March 1983. l limited my examination tO work intended for public promulgation or publication, not personal letters or journal entries except as they related to the work studied. The dating and retain- ing Of draft copies did alter Upton's normal practice, and so was a potential sauce of 'unnaturalness' in the study, but was necessary for the study to proceed at all. The limitation on the variety of work made the study less exhaustive than it might have been, but I felt the study was already intruding a great deal on the writers, and did not feel comfortable intruding further in the conduct of their private lives, which the examination of 'personal' writing would have entailed. Together, I gathered a novel, a history/memoire, a technical history of the Pontiac GTO, four short stories, a book review, five articles, and twelve completed poems, as well as several poems still in progress._ General Procedures I began by examining drafts of material Drake had worked on or completed during 1982--over 25 pounds, by weight, but only a fraction of the work for which he had kept worksheets over the years. I examined Upton's work as it arrived in the mail. In keep- ing with my original intention of keeping the study as 'natural' as possible, I tried to begin by looking at the draft material in a way as free as possible from a priori assumptions--to let the writing itself suggest how it might be best approached, to avoid introducing bias into my description of the texts because of preconceptions. Initially, this process left me rather bewildered. 30 I read and reread, at first simply overwhelmed by the Sheer bulk of material, the number Of additions and deletions, crossings- Out and insertions and sometimes, illegibilities. The first 'sense' to emerge from the work was physical: that is, the amount of plain physical labor and shuffling of paper that had gone into the work. The second 'sense' was also physical--a "sculptural" sense of the work taking a certain physical form. (Examination of the successive drafts of Upton's poems in Chapter IV demonstrate this clearly.) This sense had very little to do with the 'meaning' or content or language of the writing itself; it instead came form the plain facticity of words on paper page after page, coming together, with each piece taking a unique shape--the sense of unique form emerging out of what seemed to be infinite possibility. This literal 'taking Shape' directed my attention then to the elements in the text that seemed decisive or crucial to this final shape--changes or preservations in the texts that determined what each piece became. I read forward, from early to late drafts, and backward, from the finished version to earlier ones, attempting to trace the development of these crucial elements through the revisions. As I initially examined the drafts, I noted questions and puzzles and interviewed each writer--Drake in person and Upton by mail--asking questions about specific pieces, and attempting to find out as much as possible about how they came into being, what the writers had in mind in writing them, and how they were related to the writers' aesthetic sense, and previous bodies of work. I also 31 asked, generally, about their revision practices. I did two detailed interviews with Drake and three with Upton. During the period I examined the work, I Spoke with Drake frequently on the telephone, and corresponded regularly with Upton, asking them to fill in missing details, such as the order Of events not clear in the draft material, and what they had in mind as they wrote. A bibliography indicating the dates of these interviews and other correspondence is found in the bibliographic section for each writer. My questions arose from elements in the drafts that puzzled or intereSted me. In the interviews and questions, I kept in mind features raised in the previous research on revision, such as audience, 'goal setting,‘ 'intended personna' and genre, but focused on the work itself. Since many of the claims in the literature seemed highly plausible, I tried to avoid 'putting words in their mouths'; to let them discuss the material and the writing processes in the way they would naturally describe them, and, as much as possible, to try to reconstruct the processes at work during the writing, keeping this as separate as possible form their own retrospective conclusions about why they had revised as they had: something, of course, not always possible. Not surprisingly, since both are teachers Of creative writing and 'Iiterary' people, both spoke of their work in 'literary terms': "character," "narrative," "voice," "image," "line," "tension," "metaphor." Since I had a literary background this seemed to be 32 the natural language in which to discuss the texts; they used this language even to discuss texts which would not generally be called 'creative writing,‘ for instance, non—fiction. In the meantime, I continued reading the texts, trying to settle on a way to describe both the interview material and the texts themselves. Working backward, from finished product to early drafts and notes tended to emphasize those particular features important in determining the shape of the final version. Working forward, from early to late versions, tended to emphasize the overall global development of the work, and the processes the writers followed. The examination involved an enormous amount of plain 'detective work,‘ following clues and reconstructing the order Of events, after the manner of textual analysis described earlier by Geertz. I had a great advantage over a researcher looking at Melville's papers, however: my writers were, happily, alive and willing to give me information that was not in the texts, though they could not always remember how or why they had done certain things. Language/Methods of Analysis and Description There seemed to be five general elements that required description to give a 'full account' of what I sensed and Observed in the texts: (I) the finished texts——their content, substance, language and form; (2) features introduced or removed during revision; (3) the general effects Of revision on the texts; (II) the 'reasons' for the revisions and (5) the actual physical changes made in the text--the 'revisions' themsevles. 33 Descriptions of Texts The language that students of literature use to describe it is rich, overlapping, metaphoric and allusive, like the texts them- selves. These qualities of this language are suited admirably to thick description of work with aesthetically important qualities, but are perhaps the reasons it is not used more widely in the research on revision. In its allowance for ambiguity and paradox, this language is 'unscientific' in that it does not create mutually exclusive categories. The terms discussed below were those that seemed important in describing the texts at hand--though not all to all texts--and that either do not seem to be commonly known, or are ambiguous or in dispute. The following is not a thorough or definitive description of such terms, as might be found in Beckson and Ganz's Guide to Literary Terms (1960) or the appendix of creative writing texts such as Minot's Three Genres (1982), but simply a description of use as applied to the texts and interviews, and the narrative accounts written about them. It also discusses some general principles useful in following and interpreting the narrative accounts. The attempt here is to describe the less common in terms of what is more familiar to a lay audience. Though their 'Iiterary'* use is Often genre- Specific, they applied in many cases equally well to 'non-literary' texts . *NO fine distinction is made between 'Iiterary' and 'non- literary,’ otner than common use. 'Literary' is applied to texts students of literature would study, 'non-literary' to any other writing. The distinction is not absolute. 34 The basic units: lines, sentences, stanzas, paragraphs, and drafts. The texts examined were comprised of words on paper, per- haps not such an obvious fact in an era in which writing is Often preserved on discs or magnetic tape. There was nothing particularly "unconventional" about either writers' work in the sense that both followed the normal prose conventions Of sentence and paragraph. Even Upton's peotry was sentence based, something not always the case with contemporary poetry. Sentences and paragraphs are commonly recognized, as are, perhaps, lines and stanzas. The term 'line' is used here in a simple, descriptive way to identify the basic visual units of which the poetry discussed here is comprised. Since there are such things as 'prose poems,‘ the distinction between poetry and prose is not absolute, but the use of the line is the feature which generally distinguishes poetry from fiction. It marks out points where the text begins, reading from left to right across the page, and on the right (and sometimes left) does not coincide regularly with the right margin. The end Of a line signals a visual and auditory pause, Since it stops the eye; it establishes both a relationship between the words in the line, which 'go together,I and between the line itself and the white space on the page. The stanza is a group of lines which are set Off from other stanzas by white space, grouping lines together and setting them Off from other stanzas. Though these terms are perhaps commonly known, the visual and auditory parallels between sentences and lines, and paragraphs and stanzas are less Obvious. Because of their physical positions in 35 relation to white space, the first and last words in lines, stanzas, and paragraphs take emphasis. The same is true for sentences, though the emphasis is less pronounced because there is less space. Though the sentence has a 'given' form, in that it generally has a subject and a predicate, begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, there are no such clear rules to tell a poet where to break a line. In 'formal' poetry, line breaks are dictated by a regular metric or other formal device such as syllable count. Much contemporary poetry does not use these devices, and lines are broken by 'feel,' whatever that may include for the specific poet. In poetry which is written in sentences, the line breaks work either 'with' or 'against' the sentence, since, like line breaks, sentences have elements that stop the eye and voice. Sentences are comprised of phrases and clauses, and in combination with punctua- tion, these Signal a 'rhythm,‘ a pattern of emphasis, de-emphasis and pause, which is both visual and auditory (Minot, p. 6). Though the term rhythm is usually used in connection with poetry, both poetry and prose exhibit properties of visual and auditory stress. A series Of words can read smoothly or 'bumpily,' quickly or slowly. The tension between the line and sentence is illustrated by a passage taken from Upton's poem, "The Mountain": The first junk to round the Cape of Good Hope was made of teak. In reading the poem, the reader pauses (slightly) between 'Cape' and 'of,‘ while in reading the same sentence in prose form, the reader would normally pause between 'junk' and 'to,' and/or between 'Hope' 36 and 'was,' depending on the amount Of breath. The line break in the poetic version thus creates a tension between normal speech and the spoken version suggested by the poem. The visual and auditory properties are pointed out here because though lines, sentences, paragraphs, and stanzas are Often discussed as units of meaning, sentences and paragraphs are less often considered in visual and auditory terms. The discussion here is not to suggest that all prose or even all poetry is designed to be read aloud. The point is simply that in written form, a phonetic language has both visual and potential auditory properties. These properties were frequently important in the texts examined in the study. Character/persona/voice. Persona and voice can perhaps best be understood in terms of character, which identifies a 'person' in a piece of fiction, though persona has somewhat different implica- tions. In some cases, such as in a dramatic monologue ("a poem con- sisting Of the word of a Single character who reveals in his speech his own nature and the dramatic situation"--Beckson and Gans, 1960, p. 117) the 'character' in the poem is identical with the persona. The character's 'voice' describes the distinctive and generally idiosyncratic elements of his or her speech--features which tend to identify the character, both in terms Of diction (word choice) and other traits of speech, such as rhythm, that identify or suggest the character's individuality or basic nature. However, the use of persona and voice alter in first-person poems which do not use a made-up character. Here, persona is used 37 to describe whatever identity the poet takes as it is revealed in his or her Speech--simply, how the poet 'comes across' in the text. In composition theory, the term is generally used to describe how the writer of any text represents him or herself in it (Nold, 1979). 'Voice' is more complex. In one way, it is analogous to 'style' because it picks out unique features Of expression, but it Often also carries implications Of sincerity or genuine emotion as Opposed to artiface: what is 'really' the writer, as Opposed to what is fake or contrived. Minot (1982, p. 10) says in advice to beginning poets: "When you begin to use the language Of poetry to reflect what is unique in yourself . . . you will find yourself going beyond mere mastery of convention to develop your own 'voice' as a poet." Narrative, scene and exposition. The term 'narrative' implies that a story is being told. Traditionally, narrative poetry is dis- tinguished from 'lyric' poetry, which "presents a single speaker who is concerned with a strongly felt emotion" (Minot, 1982, p. 320), rather than tells a story. Narrative, whether in poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, is com- prised to two basic elements, scene and exposition, though sometimes finer distinctions are made. 'Scenes,' like scenes in a play, show characters in action and occur in a given (though not always speci— fied) place and time. Scenes frequently, but do not necessarily, include dialogue between characters, combined with unfolding of events through description of actions. 38 'Exposition' is used in a general way here to apply to the parts of a narrative or story that "tell" the story without showing the events in scenes. Writers use exposition to 'fill in' necessary parts of the story, sometimes but not always in the past, that are important to the story line but not 'shown' in full detail. Point of view. "Point of view,‘ usually applied to fiction, overlaps with 'persona' in some cases, but describes not whg is Speaking as much as who is s_eei_ng whatever is described--"the agent through whose eyes a pices of fiction appears to be presented" (Minot, 1982, p. 320). These can be the eyes of a single character, or can be "omniscient," in which the author enters the minds and uses the perceptions of many characters. Though the term applies mainly to fiction, it is important in an epistemological way to many texts, since it involves what can be known or perceived by whom. A general prescription for beginning writers is that point of view should not "shift." Minot says: "Most short fiction and a majority of long fiction limit the means of perception to a single character" (1982, p. 321). Forms of address. Address has to do with the relations between the reader and the writer--that is, the sense a text carries about to whom the writer is speaking. A text might carry the sense that a writer is addressing him or herself in a reflective way, or that the writer is speaking directly to a known audience. In fiction, this sometimes takes the form of the writer making a 'dramatic aside' 39 to the reader, though this is not conventionally done in contemporary American fiction. Direct address is speaking from an "I" writer to a "you" reader, much in the way one would in writing a letter. Address establishes or works from a sense of the social relations between the writer and the reader and is related to the level of formality, diction, and 'tone' (the 'emotional content' of the writing, sometimes also used to describe the writer's emotional attitude toward the subject.) Direct address and self-address tend to be informal, while technical writing (such as the description Of an experiment) addressed no one, and so takes on a certain formality. These distinctions are highly developed by discourse theorists such as Kinneavy (1971) and Moffet (1968). l_m_2_3_g_e_. Though the term 'image' is widely used, these uses vary enormously. Minot (1982) says an image in a poem is "any Sig- nificant piece of sense data," and uses 'image' to subsume both figures of Speech and certain auditory properties of peotry. Beckson and Gans (1960) say the uses of the term range from description of a concrete 'Ianguage picture' to highly abstract uses, such as Dante's "image Of salvation" (p. 86), where it is used synonymously with 'vision.' The use here, shared by both authors and myself, is closely related to the lmagist movement in poetry, and refers to the con- densed use Of Ianguage--including metaphor, Simile, and description-- to precisely present or evoke direct sensory experience. Though 110 images are frequently visual, they may be auditory or appeal to taste, smell, or touch, or to a combination of senses. Image is best illustrated by example: in "The Mountain," quoted earlier, Upton uses the visual image, "The men huddled around a fire/ as if it were a game." In Drake's Street was Fun in '51, he describes the sound of a Porter muffler as being like a motorboat, "the soft blurb or exhaust exiting under water." There is no clear line between simple description and image, but image as used here carries implications of greater sensory intensity and verbal concentration. Structure/form. Both 'structure' and 'form' have a variety of uses, some descriptive and some prescriptive. Sometimes they are used synonymously and sometimes they are contrasted to one another. 'Form' is Often contrasted with 'content' to distinguish ho_w something is said from _w_h_a_t is said (Beckson and Gans, 1960, p. 611), and at other times is used specifically to identify received, replicable arrangements of language like the sonnet, or ballad, or five para- graph essay. At other times, it is used synonymously with structure. Beckson and Gans say "form" is "the total structural integration of the work itself" (p. 611), but later say that "structure" "usually refers to the organization Of elements other than words" (p. 203). A common view is that structure is a skeleton or framework upon which the rest of the text hangs, but exactly what elements create this framework is not always clear. All, however, seem to agree that structure determines the way in which elements in a text are ordered, and that structure 'unifies' a text. ’41 John Hawkes, who rejects the familiar elements Of setting, plot, and character in his fiction, says that structure is the crucial element in fiction: "Verbal and psychological coherence," the source of "meaningful density" in his work, which he describes in terms of "corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action" (Dembo and Pondrom, 1972, p. 11). Hawkes' notion of "meaningful density" is closest to the sense of structure used here. "Threads" or "strands" or orders of events supply this density in the texts examined, and Often appeared through revision. However, there seemed no clear way of identifying such elements in general, without the context of the Specific texts. Voice, for instance, point Of view, and certain patterns of visual and auditory repetition all gave 'structure' to various pieces. In discussion, I tend to use 'structure' to refer to the way such elements worked in the texts, and to reserve 'form' for the general shape the texts took. Description Of form, the overall development of the texts, seemed to require an additional language that would describe h_o_w_ they took on the forms they did. Though 'poem' carried certain implications about the physical shape of the material on the page, the literary vocabulary did not seem adequate to describe either the shape the pieces eventually took, nor the processes they went through to take that Shape. These are things which fall under the general notions Of form and structure but are not exhaustively described by them. None of the pieces examined were clearly identifiable as replicable 'forms'-—there were no sonnets, rondelles, or five paragraph .——_—.-_———~—r—v—‘ ’42 essays, though many of the pieces partook in one way or another Of some of the conventions of familiar forms. Things going on in the text through revision seemed to require a different way of talking-~a language of balance, proportion and shifts in emphasis; a language, perhaps, germaine to the visual arts. Drafts expanded and contracted, either form the ends, or in the middle, accordian-wise. These revisions shifted the balance of emphasis from one part of the text to another. Some elements blurred and others sharpened, in a way analogous to shifting depth Of field on a camera lens. These changes emphasized the text as a whole; any alteration in one part of the text had at least a potential effect on all other parts by changing the proportions and relationships between elements. When pieces of the text were moved around they moved relative to other pieces, altering the shape of the whole. This sculptural sense, noted earlier on, was only partly related to, and could not be exhaustively described in terms of meaning: it was very much related to the visual properties Of the text on the page. D_r_afl:_s_. Both writers composed in, and used the term 'drafts.‘ A draft is a version of a text, not necessarily complete but identified by the fact that when it ends, the writer starts over again on another draft, working from the beginning Of the text. A draft might be written in one sitting, or be comprised of many strands of material written at different times and shuffled together. It might be a complete version or a partial version. ’43 Reasons for Revisions There were clearly two 'kinds' of reasons for Specific revisions: 'cues' in the texts themselves and larger 'reasons' in the sense of aims and purposes. However, in the initial interviews with the writers, I had no sense of an exhaustive list of elements to which the writers 'compared' texts, as suggested by Flower's and Hayes' (1981) "rhetorical situation," or Faigley and Witte's "situational variables." Though both writers occasionally mentioned 'audience,' they tended to answer questions about their reasons for revisions in terms of (1) the texts themselves, (2) what they had in mind in writing a particular text, and (3) what they wanted the piece to do or be. These were not, obviously, independent of one another. They seldom, however, focused on any given set Of features that they considered as they revised. There was no way of knowing whether they had, as Flowers and Hayes suggested (1981), "internalized" a general set of criteria for an acceptable text. Such internalization seemed quite likely in the case Of 'correctness' revisions. If either misspelled a word, they sooner or later corrected it, and it seemed Odd to them to be asked "why." But there was no sense of a set Of external features in mind shaping the work across texts. I could not assume that there was not some such set, but could not find in the material or the interviews anything to suggest what it might consist of, though I continued to look . llll Physical Alterations to the Texts At the most basic level, writers made only two types of changes to the texts. They added something, or they took something away. All other operations were variations of these. Sometimes extant pieces were switched around by removing them from one place and adding them in another: Faigley and Witte's (1981) permutations and distributions. Sometimes one word was substituted for another (substitutions) and sometimes elements were conflated or pulled together in the text (consolidations). All Of the 'formal' changes Faigley and Witte identified, asuch as changes in format, tense, spelling and punctuation were evident in the texts. However, their taxonomy Of revision changes was not exhaus- tive in that there were two types of additions Observed in the texts that seemed important but were not picked out by their scheme. These were (1) forms of self address, and (2) 'trial runS.' These were elements that appeared on draft pages but were not actual alterations to the text itself. Forms of self-address were notes or marks the writers made as they read over what they had written. Sometimes these were marginal, sometimes in the body Of the text: "ok," "later," "make stronger or cut," "more willing to work on small expensive jobs." This category also included other forms of 'short hand' the writers used to signal revisions to be made later in the process—-underlines, arrows, and so one. These sometimes, but not always, followed con- ventional editor's marks. 45 Trial-runs were fewer and were generally short lists, written at the same 'pass' at the material, in which several words or phrases competed for the same position in the text. Sometimes contradictory revisions would be made in one draft to the same piece of text, and the final resolution would not be made until the next version. Though Faigley and Witte's System was the most robust of any in the composition literature for identifying physical changes in the text, it was difficult to apply in some cases. There was a prob- lem of 'tracking' in long texts. On short pieces, it may have been fairly easy to trace a distribution, but in long texts, it was quite difficult. If a phrase was removed from one sentence, and added to another ten pages later, there was no clear way to trace it, since the whole text was larger than could be kept in mind, except in a general way. There was also no way to insure that even if the phrase was verbally identical, the writer had removed it from one position and inserted it in another, unless there was a marginal comment to indi- cate this had been done. Though it was fairly easy to apply the system of handwritten alterations in the text (though there were some problems in identifi- cation), it was much more difficult to identify revisions that went from version to version, when revisions were made without 'signals' in the text. This was not a problem with the system itself, but one of physical and mental coordination. The categories made by this taxonomy did make it somewhat easier to track revisions that it would have been without such a system. 146 Perhaps the most important contribution of Faigley and Witte's work at this point was their distinction between 'surface' and 'text based' changes. 'Text-based' changes refer to alteration that adds new (propositional) meaning to the text, or that deletes information "in such a way that it could not be recovered by drawing inferences" (p. 1103). Though there was some philosophical difficulty with the premise that underlying propositional meaning exhausted the meaning- fulness of the texts, particularly with poems, the basic distinction was very important, because it tied physical revisions to effects on the texts, and was consequently useful both in describing the effects of certain revisions, and in reconstructing the writers' mental processes. Their further distinction between 'micro-structure' and 'macro- structure' meaning changes was also somewhat difficult to apply but useful in principle. Micro—structure changes alter propositional mean- ing without affecting the meaning of the rest of the text, while macro- structure changes alter both the piece of text in question and change the reading of other parts Of the text. In initial examination of the texts, I did not see single changes that dramatically altered the reading Of a whole text. In long pieces of work it would have been very difficult for any one change on the sentence level to change the reading of the whole text. However, several small changes in the same direction Often had this effect, on balance. That is, the effects of physical changes were cumulative. 117 There were no types of revision that seemed to correspond directly (in a one-to-one fashion) with a given effect on the text except in the most general way: additions made the text, or parts of it, longer, deletions and consolidations made it shorter, and formal changes tended to bring it closer to conventional notions Of correct- ness. Though no attempt was made to 'code' all revisions, Faigley and Witte's system (as amended) was used to identify physical changes in the text, and their distinctions between surface and mean- ing changes and macro- and micro-structure changes were used both in determining 'what was going on' in the texts and to make the narrative account Of the texts more explicit and precise. The identification of the physical changes in the text is demonstrated by selections from the second and sixth drafts Of Drake's "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" (Figure 1). Modes of Writing and Revision Both Drake and Upton typed and wrote by hand, and in general, used each mode at different points in their writing processes, though these points were not always the same for both writers or across texts. Both modes are evident in Figure 1 which also illus- trates the points in time at which the changes were made: (1) physical changes made and completed as the writer read existing draft material, (2) changes made in the next draft version that 'picked up on' notations made on rereading the previous draft, but not completed by the notations, and (3) changes made in the next __—.-_. ——- — .___.__..- .D‘fiz’l I. 118 ' O .. was cnIcIu-m autos seems a an ’ 3.1 That Spring, the hp appeared. \hni‘iltuted our neirhbor- l hoodéim-ing the «5:? without noise or luggage, and the next morning, when I peeked through the gun-slot of venetian blinds, he was on the flatlands, bent to his hoe. against the rising C. ,, sun. It was the third year or the tier. . D his blade flashed and hacked American soil. mdfiifi i. . . M silhouetted against the am which spilled red across 3 4 . (.1 E1. the tips of narrows et his feet, the tuft-MW ~1 , (wiroy, furry lhape reminded no of songhigg. d On the coffee table in front of the daveno use the current Liberty on the cover/ 5 hitler assumed the body of a Jackass. his hooves kicking tau-ope; beside him, iiuasolini was a baboon, dangling mindlessly from a stripped, usr-wreckeitree; and in the upper-right corner, Tojo at," A was a furry, menacing spider, whose web, like the land around 'ée).x;@f 1 q, “. our Jap. was stained blood red. 0. 1. Additions: add material. 2. Deletions: remove material. 3. Substitutions: "trade" words or phrases. ll. Permutations: rearrange with or without substitution in a sentence. 5. Distributions: move material in one sentence into two or more. Consolidations: compress material in two sentences into one. Self-Addressed Comments: notes, suggestions and questions the author makes in reading text. Trial-Runs: several words "compete" for one position. Format Changes: change relation Of text and white space. 49 DRAFT Io Z/Dr:.ke/Cllic. an the Allies would win, and now the land was revertinr to the desolrtion IE it hrd been a year ago-~a wasteland beyond the city's liaits, errshy in w‘nter, hiked! ard'in ”u...,.. It now res.:b1ed the useless 1* c ”"1 . "' - name-n" “W“ '7 AJI‘J—l l-ndscene offihp‘. 'prinr ”(XX/fl; the year before whefi‘J one nix-lit/ ‘ Cs smut-a L B; the Jap 135a infiltrated our neighborhood. Eithout noi-e or luggtcefimd- \ ?s— 4 The next aorning, when I peeked through the gun-slot of venetian blinds'] he was on the flatlands. bent to his hoe, ag-inst the rising sun. J5 (:75 it was the third year of the Har- D, lie blade flashed like a bayonet into herican soil. Silhouetted ag-inst the sun which spilled red across the tips of furrows, his insect shape reminded as of soeething I had seen or read-- Q. ”be some ru- don-)‘L 3 ' nothing thin, creepy, and utterly evil. [thug I re-oabered. On the coffee table was the eurr-nt gibgggzt on the cover litler assured the C} 3 body of a Jackass, h1'.2£§§ii kicking Europa; beside hi: Iussolini was a baboon, dangling aindlessly fro: a stripped, war-wrecked tree; and in the upper-right corner $030 was a furry, nenacing spider whose web, like the land around our Jap. was stained bleed-red. 1, A2, A3 ~> attempts to fit "spring" into the new time context 1 7'82 -> consoHdafion. ”The Jap appeared . . J' to ". . . the Jap inffltrated." 1 +C2 + format change 1 + D2 + distribution 1 -> E2 + addition F1 -> material moved from what was originally a later part Of the text. 50 draft that were not 'flagged' in the previous version. Not all marginal notes made were 'picked up,‘ indicating revision in mind from the change originally intended. Description of Results The body of the study was a series of narrative accounts Of the development of the pieces examined, including exegesis of the texts themselves and the writers' comments about them. Revision patterns were then examined to determine if there were common features across tasks and writers. Conclusions and implications were then drawn from the descriptions. Specifically, claims and questions raised by the body of research on revision as reviewed in the first chapter directed atten- tion to features Of interest in relation to the writers' revisions them- selves: 1. Are there two kinds of revision--internal and external-— and what do they involve? What distinguishes them? 2. DO writers revise to a set of rules such as found in writers' handbooks? 3. What elements or features influence the type and number of revisions the writers make? a. external features? b. aims/intentions and features in mind? c. features of the textitself? ll. Is there an identifiable 'revision process' across writers and texts or does it vary from writer to writer and text to text? 5. How do processes Observed in a naturalistic study compare to current models of revision? 51 In relation to the method of investigation, several questions were raised having to do with potential or Observed differences between the type of information Obtained by studying writers' revisions under natural as Opposed to laboratory conditions. These were: 1. What differences were Observed between the results obtained from a study such as this one, and studies reported in the reviewed research on revision, and how are these differences related to the differences in research methods? 2. What do the results obtained here suggest for future research? In relation to question 5, above, there was a third function of the study. This was to explore and suggest educational and instructional implications of the results obtained. Since it was not held that the writers studied were representative, or that the results were generalizable, such implications are necessarily speculative. However, there were a number of conclusions that seemed to Offer potential for the improvement of writing instruction, and they are presented as suggestion and speculation. CHAPTER III ALBERT DRAKE Albert Drake was born in Oregon in 1935, and is currently a professor of Creative Writing at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. He has published eight poetry chapbooks, three volumes of short prose fiction, two novels--One Summer and Beyond the Pavement, and has published poetry and fiction in more than 250 magazines. He is also a "street rod" buff and writes a regular column for Rod Action magazine. He has published two non-fiction books an automotive subjects, Street was Fun in '51 and The Big Little GTO Book. A partial list of his publications is found in Appendix A. He is editor of a literary magazine, Happiness Holding T__a_r_I_I£, and owns and Operates Stone Press. Drake began writing at twenty-four, though he recalls "thinking like a writer" much earlier, noticing mood and sensory detail and storing it away for some as yet unknown purpose. Once he began writing 'seriously,' he wrote at least five pages a day, a goal he set for himself, but it was not until the fall of 1964, after six years of steady work, that he wrote something he considered "decent." This was a short story called "The Spanish Parable." In 1960, when he entered the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Oregon, he re-read the more than one 52 53 hundred short stories he had written in the early years. "I found nothing I could use," he says, "and I moved on." In 1966, after completing his degree, he moved to East Lansing, where he began teaching creative writing at Michigan State University. Through the late sixties and early seventies he wrote poetry, fiction and reviews. In the late seventies he abandoned poetry. "I'm a failed poet," he says, "mainly because I can't revise poetry the way I revise fiction." Around the same time he began writing non-fiction, of which he had done very little up to that time except for book reviews and an occasional essay. The work examined here was completed or revised in 1982. "Revision," he says, "is what I really enjoy about writing." Drake's Fiction Drake says: "My strength is in my fiction. The only reason it has any merit is because of revision." He began writing fiction when he was in college, writing his first story after coming out of a psychology class. He divides his fiction into two general categories: traditional and experimental. "My very first stories were experi- mental, but I was working out of ignorance. The experiment was really trying to fill up a piece of paper." The distinction between his traditional and experimental stories is that he thinks of his traditional stories as realistic, with character and plot, a beginning, middle and end, and with emphasis on telling a story. His experimental stories consciously manipulate these features. He wrote both experimental and traditional stories 5'4 but had much greater success in publishing the latter, and so con- centrated on them. Point of view, something he is now very much interested in as a convention of the story, was a feature he never considered until 1966 when an editor read a story he had written, "In the Time of the Surveys," and Offered to publish it if he would limit point Of view. The story, though otherwise conventional, had eighteen shifts in point of view. "For the next five years," he says, "I limited point Of view as a way Of dealing with it." In the early seventies, he realized that he was doing the same thing in every story and wrote a story called "Voyeurs," "just as an exercise" in shifting point of view. Since that time he wrote a collection of experimental stories, Post Card Mysteries, and many traditional stories, including a collection In the Time Of the Surveys. In terms of his use of language, he developed in the middle and late sixties a dense imagistic style, different from his earlier writing, which he felt was naturalistic and not very interesting in a verbal way. He describes what he means by the "naturalistic" writing that he felt was characteristic of his earlier work. . in a room and out Of a room, through a meal: I wanted to cut it away and get to more interesting material, to keep the most interesting parts and to get rid of the naturalistic impulse to have peOple walk to a window and light a cigarette and look out the window. . . . My first impulse was to write these actions or non-actions into one sentence, and the next step was to realize this was pretty passive writing and either to say it better or forget about it. Later, he developed a more imagistic style. 55 Between 1965 and 1972 or so, I evolved a highly imagistic style that used elevated language, a compressed style that evolved to suit the short story. I wanted to get away from a naturalistic style that seemed very mundane and pedestrian. It's the language in the short story that makes it so interesting. By 1972, I had developed a tight, com- pressed, highly visual style. I felt in writing fiction that a short story should have the same kind of economy a poem has. However, when he began to work on the novel One Summer, which he developed from journal entries, "entries made in fragments or sentences, with no attempt to be poetic and lyrical," his style began to change. When he copied the entries into the book, he kept the same style. The novel dealt with the life of a thirteen year old, and is one of a proposed tetralogy, of which the novel E233, discussed in brief here, is the first, chronologically, though One Summer was the first written. The language isn't the kind I've used before. I'm not sure I like it stylistically--it's not imagistic--but it's serviceable. SO when I started to do the second novel, I continued with the plain style. The same style worked in the non-fiction. Drake feels his style is now at another point of transition. "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" was originally published in Northwest Review in the summer of 1970, and was chosen in 1971 for Martha Foley's prestigious Best American Short Stories. In 1982, Drake incorporated the story into a novel in progress, Fears, the second of a proposed tetralogy of which the first is One Summer. "Chicken" has a long history, arising originally from a note in Drake's journal circa 1965, and going through eight drafts written between that time and the completion of the original story in the 56 summer of 1968. Of these drafts numbered 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, as well as part of a version written between 5 and 6, and notes Drake made before and during the writing are extant. Of all the stories he has written, Drake says "Chicken" is "the most drastically changed and improved through revision." Description Of the Published Story "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" is the story of a young boy's life in Oregon during a year—and-a-half period near the end of World War II. It draws together the distant progress of the war with the unnamed protagonist's "home front defenses" against a dis- interned "Jap" who "infiltrated" the neighborhood, and scrabbles on the wasteland just beyond the city limits, "marshy in winter, baked hard in summer," with his hoe which "flashed like a bayonet into . American soil." Heavy with memory, and the xenophobic vocabularies of war-- "V—mail" and "liberty ships," "TOjO on the cover of Liberty . . . a furry menacing spider whose web, like the land around our Jap's was stained blood red"--"Chicken" traces the 'Jap's' relationship to the boy and his family, a relationship that is not personal but meta- phoric, particularly for the boy, who never sees the Jap's face but whose presence in the story creates a psychological 'front line.‘ When the boy and his friends attack the Jap from their "home front defenses"--foxholes, "a grid of slit trenches, pillboxes and tunnels" that serves as a base for their artillery--their clods of dirt "don't make the distance." But their hero, the protagonist's Uncle Boswick, flips a stone through the Jap's window. When the 57 boy's father, who like all good Americans hates Japs but believes "every man should own a piece of ground and that all others should respect the limits of ownership," pays for the window, the boy suspects him Of being a traitor to his country. Boswick's Archie Bunker character provides comic relief. Boswick's foot "missed a tailgate at Fort Ord" just before he was due to be Shipped out, giving him a bad back, 3 Purple Heart, a medical discharge, a disability pension, and freedom from rationing. When the Jap's garden begins to bloom, Boswick suggests the boys investigate, particularly the poppies, "not," Boswick says, "the kind the legion sells." The boy slips into the Jap's garden at night to get samples for Boswick to send his friends in Washington "for analysis,‘I but the Jap is waiting for him, "hands folded, hat tipped to conceal his inscrutable face." Later, as the boy Sleeps, the Jap comes offering his mother vegetables, which she buys regularly from him, though the boy never sees his face. Scenes of the boy's life in Oregon function contrapuntally with 'set pieces' of exposition that root the local events firmly in the larger movement of history, and set the tenor of the time. Elsewhere, Captain American turned bullets off his shield, the Green Lantern sought truth and even the Submariner turned to the side Of good: another ring of filthy Nazi spies and saboteurs was broken. The axis shed their animal skins in defeat. At home, "we fought on": we flattened tons Of tin cans for tanks and salvaged kitchen fat for munitions and bundled high stacks or newspapers and magazines for who knows what. We 58 bought a twenty-five cent savings stamp a week, and when the book was full, it became a war bond. On walks and walls we chalked our beliefs-—Hitler is a Heel-~and assertions of evolution--Tojo is a Monkey's Uncle. We said prayers, pledged allegiance, saluted the flag; and a thousand times our razored hatred cheered John Wayne's single-handed assault against the Japs on Friday night. The war continues: "Paris and Guam and Pilau had been liberated." School begins. "Besides Christmas, only two things happened that school year." Both are physical intrusions of the war at home, involving the boy's fellow home front warriors. "The MacGregor's" father dies "a hero" in the Battle of the Bulge, "where General McAuliffe said 'nuts' to the Nazis." Piggy's Uncle Jed sends home a footlocker from the Pacific containing three Jap rifles and two Officer's swords. The Jap continues his battle against the reluctant soil into the next spring ("What did he want," the boy wonders. "What was he working SO hard for?'_') adding a chicken coop "that made the tar paper shack seem like a palace" with the proceeds Of his vegetable crop. When school is over in June, the boys resume their attacks on the Jap half—heartedly. Now that "Tojo was finished," the Jap seemed a "docile intruder." Even Uncle Boswick relents, intrigued by the financial prospects of the Jap's unrationed eggs, frequently going across the "wasteland" to "interrogate" the Jap "about when the hens will be laying." As the protagonist watches the Jap, he swings his binoculars toward Piggy's house, where the shell-shocked Jed sits rocking on the porch and Jed's wife, Gussie, chops tenacious blackberry vines 59 with one of the souvenir samuri swords. "Suddenly, the field Of vision was filled with his striped bib overalls." Jed decapitates his wife, then shuffles to the basement and blows off his own head with one of the Jap rifles. This bloody event is not discussed at home, but as the war moves to its inevitable end, the boy's curiosity about the Jap is revived. Boswick is stunned at the Jap's refusal to sell his eggs, the eggs of "hens he knows personally": "For Boswick this was the ultimate puzzle and he abandoned his attempts to collaborate with the enemy." The boy watches as the carefully tended garden'is neglected, never seeing the Jap, only hens that "milled about the dusty arena without food or water" as the eggs that "dropped from the starving wirey hens" pile up. Finally, a bobbing hen pecks an egg: From the Side another hen licked into the air, wings flapping, mad with the smell Of food. A cloud Of feathers exploded over the oily yolk as the two fought--others jumped in, and mass hysteria spread like the rising dust cloud. I watched with excited horror, for I had been waiting for something like this--the dust, torn feathers, the savage, choked cries. From behind the wire a dust cloud rose, and the smell of rotten eggs drifted on the wind, an ominous yellow cloud that would stain every house, touch every life. AS the boy watches with "the same sense of excited horror 1 had known since that day Jed walked Off the porch and the morning the Jap appeared on our horizon," the hens turn on one another in bloody frenzy, until only two are left. "And suddenly, the War was over." The boy, "who could only recall a world at war," senses in those around him "a curious 60 mixture of gladness and despair"; the War had brought his family the only prosperity it had ever known. Two days after Hiroshima, he enters the Jap's house for the first time. Newspapers are pasted to the walls, tracing the events of the war; outside, "all traces . . . of industry were sucked into the baked earth." A Single hen remains: The angular massive head turned and behind deep folds her fierce eyes were fixed on me; with a crouching run she accelerated, to crash heavily into the wire. Her thick, Short neck absorbed the impact, and she moved back, grunting, to try again. Her rush carried the terrific odor of fowl, blood, dung, dust; and with this stink in my nose I now saw that she had lost all her feathers and her skin was a silky black, broken only by the white scars. Grown short and fat, the crescent beak hooked like a primitive tooth, she was metamorphosed into a kind of rat. "Of the flock, this was the Victor." Structurally, the story begins i_r_i media [32 (in the middle of the action) with a piece spoken by Boswick that functions in much the same way as a topic paragraph in an essay. "He ain't eating the eggs," Uncle Boswick said. His voice carried the same amazed indignation as when he had asked my father, "Yer Bald for the window?" or when he had reported to me, "He did it with the sam-yer-eye." This speech is set near the end of the year-and-a-half period the story covers. Six paragraphs from the beginning of the story the action Shifts backward in time, before this speech, and four pages from the end, returns to the point where it begins, closing back on itself (see Appendix C). Boswick's speech points out three major incidents in the story, and creates anticipation Of these events in the reader. 61 "Chicken" uses highly visual and imagistic language, and the final image of the chicken works in much the same way as an lmagist poem, allowing the description to 'Speak for itself' of the horrors of war that are the story's theme. This image, with its precise and sensory language, 'squeezes' the evocative power from description. There are few direct descriptions of emotional or psychological states Of mind; interior states are objectified by cor- respondances between them and the world of Objects and external events: "the corn stalks were stunted and brown, the chicken coop was a box of rusty wire, a small concentration camp." A slightly different strand of language is the vocabulary of World War II that dominates the story, and reinforces the temporal and geographical setting. The era is described in its indigenous vocabulary: "R.A.F.," "U.S.O." and "Errol Flynn." Unlike the imagistic language of sensory description, it 'stands by itself' in that its simple use identifies the era historically, and from the readers' point of view, evokes it even without detailed description. Development Of "Chicken" Drake says "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" developed originally from a note in his journal. ("Without my notebooks," he says, "I'd be lost.") In the winter Of 1965, he wrote: 62 Example 1: 3‘ rom Poet among the Painters-4!. Apollinaire: by Steegmullor, plou , } (Apollinaire telling story about his ubanian fri :nd in London:) "8 hortly before my arrival, Fail: beg Konitza had bought some hens, in order to have fresh eggs: but when he had them he found it impossible to eat them. And in truth, how can you eat the eggs of hens whom you know personally and whom you feed yourself? The hens soon began to eat their own eggs, and this horrified Faik beg Konitza to the point where he .looked on the poor birds with revulsion; he no longer let them out of the little hen coop, where by now they were killing and eating each other, except for one which survived and lived on, lonel and . victoriops. It was at that time I saw her. She had become f erce and mad; and since she was black and had host much weight, she soon came . to look like a crow; by the time I left, she Ind lost her feathers ahd was metamorphosed into a kind of rat." _ . ' . (Tell as if true, in let porson-- narrator's pt of view, through an uncle (?) who hows the old nobleman refugee; rel to civil war, or invasions in his old country. V subtle: why he can t eat the eggs. Dent t t it. ' . a oDate it in past. as remembrance: 1914.2" 0" 4935' or 19” A later entry in the journal reads: Example 2: 'écm. . .RAT" Harsh 2, l9h2-ovoluntary: March 27. l9l42 made mandatory. Gendral Dellitt ordered, in Military Area #1 in Hestern Hashington, Oregon, California and Arizona, the detention of all German as Italian aliens and .11 Japanese, U3 citizens and aliens alike. Before he wrote the first draft of the story in the spring of 1965 he made a 'sketch' of the story that lays out the main narrative elements of the final version, but suggests that the story be "told" by the Uncle to the boy, which would have put it at one more remove from the action. 63 Example 3: TEE CHICKEN H'HICH SNAKE A RAT Begins Spring l9hB (?) The narrator's uncle so and so relates history of the Ja bou ht the property at end of street: Nishi, interned for 2; (. at endelton (?), proverty taken, etc Jap develops property-- War progresses—-as seen by a small boy: Jap/rat/nonk-y of conic books, Liberty magazine covers, etc. The Jap's chicken house (and his garden)-- War thing:disasters-- ’ ‘ .' ‘ .‘ - p5 Jap cant eat tne eggs--wants to give them to the boy's mo.her. . \' ' - a. , -- . ... The garden gets weedy 30y sees that hens begin to eat their own eggs * Bens begin to kill, eat each other. “57.7" ----- “Finallyuone survivor: fierce, mad, black, lost weight, looked "fwd,“ like a crow, a buzzard, etc. P Then hhe‘d lost all her feathers and was metamorphosed : .- , 6’1 “xv'l'fip- into a kind of rat. Handwritten alterations make the shift to the first person boy narrator of the final version. Example ll: u éThat Spring the geld Jap appeared, as if he'd infiltrated in th- ; OY-o Scam Nan) ;_-fl_‘ eIa‘ ~ he» i - -- ’4‘“ A0)“ “new -5ka (ml: 1% . m. (“5" 3‘? ids L-M. u-«phbles vdt‘k-‘n. ch 41L» WW"; .7) ‘ ‘9'“?! k '2, Dru-#5-. 64" ‘L‘ M Q“! oh za~1 of Le... Into-1504:) ’ 0mm: -- p- com-e4 ‘(kc 0/011 “'Eg—E-f-éjpfifilp.jfi can! ‘f ”w.I’P:L;L2:.:o{ "taunt! Jay I h“ tr 3:2“! at 401d07‘. pg; . ) 8 3 I“! J ¢ _. . N . ;:4?;a;fzml.:£ ' Lie (0., 5-7/7”“ ....* la: 0 (/ Z7 64 Drake's original intention, he says, "was to write a story about someone who has a strong sense of humanity when the rest of the world was going crazy. Any war would have done." He con- sidered setting it in the Balkans during World War I, Ethiopia during the '305, or even in Viet Nam, which was going on at the time, and was one reason Drake was interested in writing an anti-war story. Finally, he decided on "his own war" and on the Oregon setting, mainly as an expedient, since it was a setting where he had grown up and which he knew well. In telling the story, I realized I was telling my own story. The war was distant and mysterious and interesting. I wanted to capture the sense of war happening at a distance--the 'global view' of war as I got it as a child. He also felt strongly that he wanted to write about the Japanese- American experience: "something I felt none of us knew about during the war, something that needed to be told." Though no indication of it appears in the notes, he considered telling the story from the point of view of an interned Nisei, but decided against it, feeling that story was better written by a Japanese-American. Patterns of Development Through Drafts The general pattern of development of "Chicken" is expansion of the story from beginning to end, with the earlier drafts extending the story further and further toward the conclusion with each draft. The following chart shows the length of each draft. Drake began the first draft of the story in the spring of 1965, outlining first the events of the war during the period he 65 Draft Pages Words Draft Pages Words 1 6* (7) 1675 (1925) 5+ 23# 8200 2 8 2300 6 27. 5 9000 3 13.5 3900 F 25 7850 5 21 6300 * The second number includes a second, attached version of the 'attack' scene. #Estimated from pagination of the extant seven pages. wanted the story to take place, sketching out one page of scenes to be developed in the story, and coordinating them (Examples 5-7). Though Example 5: 12/7/u1 War becins (11 L3-Tarawa) 12 u3- 2 yrs war _ ammo, ml 1:1 31:03: 3391.43 ‘I Jandktrfififiy— 4%, ' hm66.1%h thy . June uh Marianas Campaign June uh V-l start fill sng July Saipan (fini 7/9 bill—w . .. Aug 10 uh Guam won back . 7/25/uu Big pushthru surrandy Sent uh Palau taken 8/2u/hh Paris liberated 9/21/hu US Bomb manila 10/10hh domb Okinawa a Luzon 10/23/hb Invade Philippines (Gen fiacArthur,'on Leyte "I have returned") 12/?h Battle of the Bulge where Gen McAuliffe said 2/19/u5 Iwo Jima pacing (Big jattle) "huts” to the fiazis. 2/23/u5 flag up on mt Suribachi . ca 2/ to h/kE Japs dev namikazes & Bake. Bomb Italy v andi. . 1- L/l/hS Okinawa (1.55%nr) h/lB/hS Vergato a Toscanellc t; or ." g/Bi/uS dologna taxeen ‘51/6/115 HIROSIEIEA 14/27/15 derlin ta.-:e:1 /US-:luss meet B/B/AS NAGASAKI ” " 3enito fiussolini shot, hung BALL/Li; .55: 3:93 Ll/BO/zis Litler rep dos a b/C/hb V-J 92! \Hflé,lnu3( 66 W: peg-b1 and! Ash“... 1— so; we - . L. 1.3 days-- . p. flirted-‘- KM, 90“" J”_ «gun: __..Jar w_: n (“44! \ 'flzz‘?‘ t‘SC ‘fidv‘flsfi bf" W“ VCO'L“ ti" . sav- . "fl .- e . ‘ Ice— 2: van": 0.0;}. (e to". met- ' albu- K I aps‘nlepl' M“ ‘ ’2‘? P.7Jel,¢'k (mi-83) at ( 'hoifl' .“ W- O h Wh‘o‘ U a 3 o:&:°“.v J. 1’: 'Y‘;‘ (‘0’: 4:3”60’ We“ W; ““'.'-’ e -' (M5 1' . ‘ ‘fr- ’ ‘fle'fl'r ‘01 ’3‘,” k P. M+ JP, J.r|ll"" MGM.".". :wdfirh‘lé? W 44.4. 4. sw‘» ~ « 8W “‘5+.£~fl.cbw$ an; :‘:+ 4-. “1 ‘ ‘- uws — up a. N'CIM ?) (Mel's can. sci-vs _ . . 4. ) 'e “k ‘9“.- JW“ luau. ('1‘, tfuklfl3i“. k“ ewe-H “ U. oOtwfltV’ ‘k. ' LU+ fig? 5" 3“.“ e155, _ #45 w :11? c0" _, M — he: 91:... 4am - (#0 5w m‘fid L9.) 0' t M; 444, "1‘ 2"“ Sn “H0“ “"1. lion" fusmyuy. 67 Example 7: SPRMSG- 44 (Stem! eta-om) swam 4‘l a”, c-I/ Hm? Fan “l 55 0"“ a 3 P2 C‘UICkH -- 114:; an. w" ”7372.: so“ .L'I'Jr's low“ "" “3’1 4 e I (T‘s!- ”‘6“"%W! a...“ :p'r W “4.) gsiveanal unfit" 45' \ J" a 7:4: 3 *7- yum-’7‘ ’ l" ”“0 at}, (Law:- sfnufé 45- “14.1.“, ' Mick" ( ‘+ q” .— wc‘f,..¢ r was.“ MA chalk”) - ‘ “(L on‘“ Sumw 43 can»: at” Lqu‘l' Liz-o- 1 La *4"; 1/6’ “W “h + {’I" ”‘5" 1" u 5 "y‘b (flu/15')" barb, 68 as he recalls, he made several 'false starts' which he threw away, the first extant draft of the story opens: Example 8: In Spring, the third year of the War, the Jap infiltrated our neighborhood. He came in the night, without noise or luggage,- next - and was simply there-iii morning, on the flatland, bent to his .hoe against the rising sun. Picking up elements from the notes he'd made, he describes the Jap's resemblance to the cartooned Tojo on the cover of Liberty, and the "home front defenses" he and his friends have created on the nearby open land. Two scenes follow, their attack on the Jap in which Boswick breaks the window (a second version of this scene is attached, evidently written between the first and second drafts) and the scene at the dinner table, in which his father pays for the window and returns to tell of the Jap's farm. During this scene, Boswick (before alteration "Bimbo") is described as "the first casualty of war." A paragraph of exposition covers the period of time between the Jap's first appearance and summer, when "the O.P. was an oven" and it got too hot for the boys to stay in the trenches. This is followed by a 'set piece'--a casualty list as it might have appeared in the newspaper, which the boy's mother looks over, trembling, for Grant's (the boy's brother) name. This is followed by the beginning of the piece quoted 69 earlier on that begins, "Captain America turned bullets off his shield . . . ." The draft leaves off in the middle of this piece. Drake says he remembers working on this, and successive drafts, for a number of days or weeks. He made very few hand- written alterations to the first draft, and when he began the second, started again from the initial beginning, typing from the first version and making changes as he went. One such change between the first and second draft is the removal of "the third year of the war" from the first sentence. it becomes a complete sentence, and is moved to the end of the first paragraph, emphasizing the temporal setting of the story. The second version completes the piece with which he left off in the first draft; completes the description of Boswick's ignoble injury at Fort Ord: "He lay screaming in pain as Roosevelt's voice called for unlimited sacrifices from our fighting men"; and adds the beginning of the scene in which the boy investigates the "opium poppies." Example 9: I admired Uncle Boswick: I would never have thought of opium. he rest of the day was spent with the Gang in our bashes-d, mapping out a plan of action to get some The third draft, written after Drake read and made hand- written alterations to the second, continues the same pattern of development, extending the story by making it longer, adding scenes 70 and exposition and developing further incidents already mentioned. This version extends the story into the next spring, when the Jap's garden has bloomed, he builds his chicken coop, and Jed has returned shell-shocked from war to sit rocking on the porch. In the Pacific, "lwo Jima and Okinawa had been captured and it was only a matter of time before we would invade Japan itself." The piece ends with the first sentence of the scene in which Gussie chops blackberries with the samurai sword. The fourth draft is missing, but when he began retyping the fifth version, he made what he considers the major structural change in the story, introducing the ill media [gs opening, and con- tinuing the story to the point where Boswick discovers that the Jap "ain't eating the eggs . . . of hens he knows personally." In terms of time, this version brings the story back to the point where it begins: Boswick's introductory speech that opens, "He ain't eating the eggs." It appears that after completing the fifth version, he wrote the remaining seven pages without beginning over, though there may have been a complete intermediate version from which pages are missing. This version completes the story, though the final scene is short and sketchy. Before writing the sixth draft, Drake made another half page of notes of details he wanted to include in the last scene (Example 10), and then retyped, again marking the previous draft as he re-read, and making changes in it and in retyping. In the sixth, and, as Drake recalls, later missing drafts, he began from Ill. u tn. l 71 Bample 10: .' 6&2; Rod. (e fem-I (as: 3!! w i v I‘ ll ( u “Hun-rufuTi-‘J‘M M3,; ,M “~va, ‘lfl ~ . . , T" .7 “‘0'“: abasabhd‘nnp. Lav- ”kw-v“ Mall ’5" ' fiLvlu. ‘uJ ‘w ,m: (Jul. 6mg“ .4 alum, U l ) awful ? leeyl _. I ‘ T‘Me {J/IUL" Let‘s, VLM‘U’ 6”,“‘I’v/d09f my“ ("ultfs'l’y (a... svuf- 2‘04:- {131;} 3'?) ’I'fl ‘ WM 4’0““, ’fulfll "/ ({"w‘ll-‘e—s’ 4-0 Laura} cur/l.- 4 ‘6 ’3 I a 36%,?“ // (”‘21: ‘W‘Myefl é * Lie-2:; )‘ 5:5- 714°" 3", H lob- )(gk ! cdm+ @cu‘k 5 °{’ ~49. HS} Chat”? Na- - boil-3* 35"“: L W \ at? V5 (ref {MA Ahh’ ieual=>d(“‘t"‘h“’ / . (a 5t.y ‘05’05’ on. aid, -/‘“w d/ “t 3 ”My gulf 1,40 73MQ¢= (owl/l W/fi‘so / WNW" \Ll ,/ (035' ha CPWL “W ' If“) LACE W ‘ 7 . “91¢.st 7.) Quantity (3" “1M” mull. ’ 1.0V- 71/ Nip“) an”! . 9% 1. AFN", f .iLZ'M" ”ovum”? ' l , ? SW“, It flfu' ? 332 0'7 SF“ on) r ‘4‘ 4r . fflfi" r! (ea/E W Spit“ 9' WI!“ ‘I- fl “5:01 5",“) 72 the beginning, continuing to develop existing scenes, particularly those which appeared later in the writing, and tightening the verbal surface, mainly by deletion and substitution. From the sixth to the final version, only one major addition is made--the inclusion of a 'set piece' which describes a [Life magazine article, "How to Tell the Japanese from the Chinese." The chart on page 65 shows quite clearly the general pattern of the story's development. Through the fifth version, the story continued to develop by addition of further scenes. ln draft 6, Drake continued to develop what he had written--also 'pruning' the earlier portions at the word level. He says: I try on first draft to fill up ten pages, but I've never been able to do that. I'd write a few pages, then start over again, retyping and revising from the beginning, and developing it from, say two to four pages. Then I'd retype and revise again. As he reread, he made marginal comments to himself: "style," "awk.," "2'," "reaction: shock, anger, etc.," "the I wbnders what the Jap thinks about the war." He indicated material to be omitted by using brackets or by crossing them out, some- times making actual changes in the text in pen. When he retyped, he usually (but not always) incorporated and developed in detail suggestions he made to himself in the marginal comments, and made many other changes, generally at the surface level, as he retyped. He could not recall why he stopped working on any one draft, at the point he did, except that he would feel dissatisfied with what he had and wanted to start over. He frequently left off in the middle of a sentence, and under the suspicion that like 73 Hemingway, he did this so that he'd know where to pick up next time, I asked him if he did this intentionally. "No," he said. "I write as much as I can and stop for some reason. Probably I had to do something else." Both in absolute number and in proportion to other types of revisions, the vast majority of those made in drafts 1—6 were addi- tions which changed the meaning of the text by adding new informa- tion. In drafts through 5+, this new information was in the form of new scenes and new exposition, as well as development of existing portions of the text by addition of detail. There were very few deletions that affected meaning. The development of earlier scenes tended to "push along" later scenes, so that, for example, the scene at the dinner table which appears in the first version at the beginning of page 3, begins in draft 6 in the middle of page ll. There was relatively little reordering of large 'chunks' of material, perhaps due to the notes he made before and during the writing. As the chart on the previous page 65 shows, the drafts 'expanded' and later 'contracted'; the 'contractions' tended to eliminate redundancy or unnecessary information, and to sharpen the verbal surface of the story. This pattern occurred both with pieces of exposition and with scenes in a quite regular way, though it was not invarient. An exemplary case is shown by the scene in which the boy slips into the Jap's garden at night. This begins as the note shown in Example 9. In the third draft, the scene is not 714 fully developed, but Drake made notes at the bottom of the page to show what he wanted to add: Example 11: (here: others make excuses, so the I goes--investigates, gat.ers some vegetables, then sees the Jap (desc how standing, not face) drots . ", and runs) Next day[ Jap comes to rive veretaoles to the 1's non-- she offers to buv them, okay he says, beenisa 5 some ch1ckens---I d>nesn t see the Jap's face he wants to buy The fourth version of this scene is missing, but in the fifth he developed it to approximately 520 words, from the point at which the note begins until he is back in his bed after sneaking into the garden . The sixth version continues to develop the sensory detail, but Drake cuts parts as he developed others. Examples 12 and 13 show the fifth and sixth versions of a portion of this scene. The following chart shows the length of selected scenes in the story through drafts: Home Front Draft Defenses 1 280 2 365 3 l:10 5 400 5a NA 6 365 Final 355 Gussie's Murder Into the From War's Garden End 270 -- NA 820 345 1020 310 920 75 Example 12: (Draft 5) 11/Dra‘xe/Chi cken a: two-tone perforated shoes, and I guessed«he was on his way to the USO club, although it was pretty early. \ ”Poppies," he said. "And not the kind the Legion sells." I admired Uncle soewiciX’I would have never thoucht of oniun—-and so when he asked me to reconnoiter the area and l' let D to at some fresh ve etables to be sent to his friends in i .9 ““5 8 g ' In spa e! '1 W5 eefiw. b" .n’“ 1 t a'ashinpton, D.C., for analysis, I agreed.4 The rest of the day (a 3:24? was spent with the Gang in our backyard, mapping out a plan of (k 3”" «a action. It was only after the details were settled that Slate f i mentioned it didn't get dark until nine, Whis I. bed-timegakmfim among hoots and l iJeeriflé they/fl! we realized that none of us could stay out \ it“ ll" l'that late . Since we could not effect a casual inVestigation during Mun . the daylight hours, I felt it was up to me tog-mast nine, l (l: N“, Hoe“ CW ‘3‘}! «St W, as the sun fell beyond thesneon of Portland, I crawled ' 12:”er from my bedroom window and slipped noiselessly into the high grass. at“, Efelt my way in near-darkness/along the trench-work and at the av’ furthest O.P.[I wiggled on my stomale inches at a time, toward Near my face the—WI chirrrup of crickets was deafening, and at every shift of my body the gas-mask bag I wore back and slapped my leg noisily: I paused to look‘through the mists I saw unte’ < the yellow glow of our frontroomfcaiLaiLaKa Wthe cucumber. M ay like small surface mines aimed in every direction, and when I had waited the garden at for what seemed an hour, staring into the blackness ‘d the .3" n tar-paper shack, I {#flffllf slipped the knife-blade under a ' en thick stalk and cut i-eeee three large speAimtns and put them in the bag. Beyond were totmato plants, their Iflflfdfl acrid smell strong in the dark: from a single stalk the bag became half-full. 76 (Draft 6) (O/Drake/Cllicx-n mh° corn was a screen thi k ‘ - . , c as any bamboo grove, and bolowAto-rtoes rlowed red, tiny suns of nirnon. Bayonets of onion greens strbbed upward; potatoes, peppers, lettuce and crrrots camouflaged the :roxnd. Even the tarnrper shack seemed to stand a littl' straighter in the chaos of flowers, and it: shutters and front door were painted yellow. Sneaking through the foliage was the Jap: he was building tripods, small tent skeletons, for the beans. Behind me Uncle Boswick came out, stretched, and surveyed th- changed, technicolor landscape. he sported a new panama hat and two-tons perforated shoes, and I guessed that he was on his way to the U30 club, although it was pretty early. "Poppies," he said. "And not the kind the Lesion sells." I admired Uncle Boswick-—I would have never thourht of 1 330‘ 5C, ’ gpium--and so,when he asked me to reconnoiter the area and to pet sore fr'sh vegetables, to be sent to his fri'nds in dashington, D.C./ for r "l analysis, I agreed. In spite of my father's order that the Jap be left - ‘4 OUR. M ‘O‘h‘e alone, I wanted to get in the fight.A The rest of the day was s ent with the Gangzin {MK our backyard) mapping out a plan of action. It was only after the details were settled that Slate mentioned it didn't 6"" ow: : _.._ get dark until nine, his bedtime. {zmongghoots and jeers at Slats, we 5- Euddenl; realized thatEhon:?:f SZSanld stay out that late. “ Therefore, at nine, as the sun fell beyond the muted, blacked-out neon of Portland, I crawled from my bedroom window and slipped noiselessly into the high grass. In near-darkness I groped along the trench-work,and at the furthest O.P. I began to inch toward that garden on my stomach, a hunting knife clenched between my te'th. leer my face the chiirruuup of crickets was deafening, and at every -hift of my body the gas-mask bag slappedEy lac] noisily: I Da'ltsqepdbs ‘ to look back, and through the summer mists I saw the dull yellon[xlow 7m“ blacked! 01(1004 l" a; our frontroom, far away. 77 Example 13: (Draft 5) 12/Drake/Cnicken I crawled cautiously flflfflf toward the corn, and among the wide, JR sharp leaves I M shielded from sight. The husks were Q large and solid, and as I split the fourth one from the stalk I felt a pang of feareW The knife 7 was in my hand as I stood up to stare into the silent, black night. lot three plants away the Jap waited, his #1 arms Even folded, his hat tipped across his face. is I jumped, I knew I \p ”HI \n it must be a scarecrow--but I threw the knife overhead and flung . as.» -—-———-—— ,.. Mr“ away the gas-mask bag and ran across the misty, deep grass, «pf: ,mv 4h ' *7 a) i" pursued by a nameless terror. Only when I was again in bed, 05“?»“4 4"". ‘- TJJ ‘fl rubbing my legs to stop their trembling, did I realize that 44.4.”,,,n~ ‘ 0‘ , ”19‘2“: “‘ the Jap had my knife--that he was now armed, and would fight ’ J 9 as back 0 0 Sam" ‘flh’lx ‘ ,,_. " " .‘z 4‘" ‘0‘ v_ I slept with these fears and‘uhen—I—wekelI heard the voices e<| at the back-steps: well they are lovelzwm let 53 .) let mar-en for them and I may keep the bag? 3 _- a.-- -.- (057 ' . /__,,_--.__.. -_ ,\ '""’"° ” ‘7’- , - n I heard the screen-door hzdkfll) open, and my mother say Thank you-At was a trick, no doubt, 4e— ?‘1’ Wubut then the door slammed shut and a 7 figure passed outside my window. He wore that same oversize ”‘7'” again shirt and dead hat I had seen last night--but I W could not see his face. "Well, you're awake," my mother said. She was running water into a dishpan at the sink, and on the table the gas-mask bag spilled out vegetables like a horn of plenty. "The Jap man gggg_us those," she said. " He wouldn't take any money, but I asked him to bring us some every week and I said I'd pay him a quarter-~does that seem fair? he said he wants to buy some chi ckens . " “J 78 ( D ra ft 6) It/Drnkc/Chicxnns “a*¥ . -5 m augffi'kéfi Crickets chirruped nearby, an echo of bullfrogs further out in the marsh, and along Johnson Creek the Gallopinr Goose cried ' -a pungent, acrid into the night. A veil of wind blewqgreen and than I saw the oiled, metallic sides of vegetables: cucumbers lay like small surface mines, aimed in every direction. When I had waited for what seemed an hour, staring into the blackness at the tar-paper shack, the knife blade slipped across prickly strlks and three large specimens were in the bag. I crouched among the corrugated sides of squash, knife slashing, and moved quickly (5.1.21.1?) the bayonets of green onions. Beyond were tomato plants, th'fl~ hard black fruit swimming in e metallic Emell 013 greennessZ‘from—r ? sinclasstalk—the~bag—was—§%}%ed:) Among the wide, sharp leaves of the corn I was shielded fiififfi#¢:#fl, and it was not until the fourth ear V\£.cI-K had been silit from its stalk that I felt a pang of fear.li listened . Ir ‘ l’yfl Ifléhe terror of silenceE-aad—thejue-p—klgleafflon leaf.Ennounced that a sneak attack was possiblig fhe knife was in my hand when I stood EB] to stare into the silent, black night. lot three plants away the Jap waited, arms folded, hat tipped to coneeal his inscrutable face. EVen as I jumped I knew it must be a scarecrow--but I threw the knife overhand and flung away the gas-mask bag and ran across the misty, deep grass, the uneven ground falling away under my racing feet, pursued by a nameless terror. Only when I was again in bed, rubbing my legs to stop their tr-mbling, did I realize that the Jap had my knife-~that he was now armed. 3 / I slept with this fear and(§£]in a dream I heard voices at the back-steps: well they are lovely and let =2|pav £23 them and l at! ___2kc- 2.1: ass? 79 Each of the scenes is first expanded, for full development, and then cut back to make the detail sharper. Drake says: I often find myself cutting out what I write in the first draft to make the sentence sharper. l have a hard time seeing it clearly until I get something down. I don't see things clearly until I get at least a version done, then I begin to see how things can be developed. The 'cutting,' which as the chart indicates, occurs later in the process, seldom involves elimination of large pieces of the text, but tends to compress the language. Drake says, "I don't overwrite in the sense that I then end up throwing away whole pages of material," and comparison of the initial word count for each of the scenes shown with the final version illustrates this--the final version is always longer than the initial version, but shorter than some intermediate version. (Note that this same pattern M represent other events in the development of the text, such as cut- ting large segments of text and replacing them with others, but in this case it does not.) There are exceptions to his pattern. The dinner scene is longer in the final than in the sixth version, due to the addition of a 'set piece,’ "How to Tell the Japs from the Chinese," and dialogue suggested by it; the final description of the chicken which became a rat goes from 75 words in version %+, in which it first appears, to 155 in version 6. It is about the same length in the final version. In general, the set pieces tend to change relatively little in length, appearing more fully developed in the first draft in which they appear. 80 Since Drake composed the story by rewriting from the begin- ning, the first parts are rewritten five times before the conclusion is written at all. Still, though he worked through all drafts on the surface level, there appears to be a definite shift of attention from further development by addition of new information, to what he calls "pruning" at the point the story is completely told. The extant sections of the story, at that point, begin to compress. The pro- portion of revisions, in balance, shifts from additions to deletions and substitutions, and less often, consolidations. Rearrangements on the sentence level also become fewer at the point where the scene begins to get shorter, and most often appear in the second version of a particular piece of text, or in handwritten alterations to the first version. Permutations and distributions seem to be used in about the same proportions throughout. Drake says that he normally does at least three versions of any piece of writing: "In the first draft, I'm feeling things out. In the second, I'm developing, and in the third I'm cutting back overwriting and developing more." Though he wrote more than three drafts of "Chicken," these general stages are evident in the story's development. However, in comparing scenes written earlier to scenes written later, it's evident that several things are going on in one draft. In comparison to pieces introduced earlier in the story, there are fewer "new" elements added to the later scenes through revision; it appears that the existing text--what he has written so far--limits and clarifies for him what might be included in later portions. 81 These pieces go through the same 'cutting' as earlier pieces, but they develop faster. In the sixth draft of the story, the later parts of the text are less well—developed, less precise and more heavily altered by hand than the earlier, more frequently read and revised pieces, but by the final version there is no detectable difference. Controlling Choices As important as the revisions Drake made to the text to improve it are choices he made early on in the writing that made "Chicken" the story it became. His notes indicate several possible stories that might have arisen from the original observation of the chicken that became a rat--stories with the same theme but with different characters, from a different point of view, and in a dif- ferent setting. The number of these 'possible' stories seems poten- tially infinite. Therefore, the choices he made that gave "Chicken" its individual shape are particularly interesting. He says: One begins with a blank canvas; information comes from all sorts of sources, in a way I don't fully understand. i do know that the possibilities seem unlimited, and as soon as you consciously or unconsciously decide on something, you limit or narrow the choices that follow. In Drake's case, the 'conscious' choices can sometimes be distinguished from the 'unconscious' ones because of the early 'sketches' of the story, and marginal notes. Four important choices he made limit what follows and make possible and necessary other, later choices. These are (1) his use of a child narrator and first- person limited point of view; (2) his elimination of the war death 82 of brother Grant, suggested in early notes; (3) his elimination of a scene suggested in early notes which would have shown the boy seeing the first pictures to come from the death camps; and (ll) his choice--made in a note at the end of draft 3--to keep the protagonist from seeing the Jap's face. These elements are 'revisions' in themselves, in that they represent changes in his original conception of the story, and they influence other physical revisions because they at once limit and make possible what happens in the story. They are not independent of one another, but work together to make "Chicken" the story it i_s_, rather than another it might have become. As the note in Example 1 indicates, Drake originally con- sidered having the story "told" by an uncle who knew the "nobleman refugee" who refused to eat the eggs "of hens he knew personally." However, when he sketched out the story, he decided to tell it from a boy's point of view, using "I" rather than "he." This point of view established a number of important features of the story. First, since the narrator is a child, his knowledge is necessarily limited. He is not a naive narrator in the fullest sense, since the audience does not possess knowledge that he lacks, but because he is a child of a certain type, his reflective abilities and his first-hand experience are both limited. As an American child he experiences the war from a great distance. Second, since Drake E a child during this era, the choice of such a narrator, as noted earlier, allowed him to "tell his own story," though the "Jap" is entirely fictive. He used the setting in 83 which he grew up, and a memory of a neighbor who sent home a box of weapons. The rest of the action in the story is fictive. Thus, it became a story that combined imagination with memory and limited what he had to "make up." The use of an "I" speaking gave the story a temporal immediacy which a "told to" story-~almost by definition-~lacks. Though "Chicken" is written in the past tense, the simple past ("had," "said") is easily experienced by the reader as a form of the present, in that events seem to unfold in front of us. In combina- tion with the "I," the simple past brings the reader 'closer' to the story by presenting events to us as they are experienced by the protagonist. This has a specific effect on the language used in the story by eliminating the need for an intermediate layer of commentary that a third person story often requires: "he observed," "he saw," "he thought." It also eliminates the need for reflection on the experience that is often found in a "told to" story, in which the teller seems obliged to justify his reason for telling the story, or at least to "make sense" of it in a reflective way. In a set of notes that appears to have been written after the third and before the fifth draft is the following, which suggests the brother be killed. Example HI: 3 .“r ' PM 'stkl‘fi)“ gee.»- W71 &,{' W)- 73”"! £11 (LIV . ) ”“4" 7 A1 ‘9 Lung 'H-e. J1 olf‘ , chQ on ’I’ . . L I " 01/ 5‘)” ”"‘ and...” leu Lek as e (07“. J u 'Hmt . wt _,/"" 0" 115+? corp-1+ A"; p.113,” )7;,yd‘_ v. (w ’ 2 due a. M an. uz’ius page J W! "‘8‘” (9 h “I“? a, ) 84 In the final version of "Chicken," the boy's experience with war is peripheral and largely positive. His family is more prosperous than ever before, and the distant war provides focus in the boy's life, enlivening school with scrap drives and war films. Since the father is llF, the son does not suffer the absence of a parent, the personal price that many American children paid for war. His older brother Grant's absence does not seem to effect him directly. This distance from war would have been drastically altered if Grant had been killed: it would literally have "brought the war home." Both the murder of Gussie and most of his observations of the Jap are made "through binoculars," a metaphoric as well as literal description of his distance both from the war, and from the Jap. Since he "never sees his face," there is no sense of personal relations between the boy and the Jap. Though he is "well-schooled in hate," the hate is impersonal and strictly derived from the tenor 01" the times. Unlike his father, he has no personal sympathies for the Jap, however vague. Drake recalls distinctly seeing the first pictures to Come from the liberated concentration camps in a life magazine article he read while visiting his aunt. This experience was imI'Dortant to him, and he tried to work it into the story twice, firSt in his notes, and again in draft 6: as the boy enters the Jap's hOuse, he sees newspapers pasted on the wall with "bold headlines" that "jumped from yellow paper: Buchenwald, Dachau, Aushwitz." The story establishes a number of parallels between our internment camps and the concentration camps, though they are generally 85 implied rather than stated: the Jap's yard is "a small concentration camp." If the camp pictures had appeared in the story, it would likely have altered both the boy himself and his stance toward the Jap. "It would really have changed the story," Drake says, and he wrote "Omit" by the lines in the sixth version. In terms of the building action, and the implied beginnings of realization on the boy's part that come with the final image of the chicken metamorphosed into a rat, inclusion of the concentration camp material would likely have 'split' the emotional impact of the story, defusing the power of the final image. Even a chicken who became a rat loses its horror next to images of the treatment of human beings in the camps. The boy's stance in the story is one of 'observer,‘ and any event that would have drawn him personally closer to the war--either genuine hatred for the Jap like The MacGregor felt when his father died in the Battle of the Bulge, or full realization of the implications 0f war that might have come from seeing pictures of the camps-- Would have altered this stance and hence, the entire story. The choices mentioned here have a variety of other effects on the text. If the boy's father had said, as notes suggest, "this '5 the kind of hate Grant died fighting against," the father's Cha Pacter would have changed drastically. In the final version, he '5 vaguely sympathetic to the Jap because of his own yearning for Property, but neither particularly wise or pompous. If he had been a man who might have said such a thing, the entire set of familial relationships would have been very different. As it is, the boy is 86 an "ordinary," not particularly reflective or thoughtful child-- though highly observant-~in an "ordinary" family of the era: a family which did not talk about unpleasant subjects like murder/ suicide, particularly at the table. His father is an "ordinary" working man who in no way resembles Polonius. All these choices work together to make "Chicken" the story it is, one which allows Drake to explore his own experiences as a child, and to recreate the forms of life of the characters with veri- similitude and specificity of detail. They allowed him to explore what was unknown to him--the Jap--in terms of what he did know. Complexity of Revision: Causes and Results It is considerably easier to give a general account of the overall processes involved in revision--though not necessarily to identify them in the first place--than to demonstrate in a rich way the complexity of the activity, both in terms of the reasons for revision and their effects on the text. The development of part of the dinner scene, in which the father repeats what the Jap told him about the farm he lost, will perhaps illustrate this complexity. Example 15: (Draft 1) ”I don't like him any better than you do," my father said, looking at me, Uncle Boswick, my mother, "but he's had quite a ties of it." Chewing always, he told us what the Jap had told him: that there had been a very good farm near ureshan which was confiscated after Pearl harbor; the Jap, who was a befhh¢:lsp). had been released now after two and a half years in an interrment (spa) - pie“ % camp near Pendelton. he had no fanily,kand Lees money. "So I think you ounhta leave hip alone," e 87 This scene has several important functions in the story. Since it is the family's first direct contact with the Jap, it is a suitable place to provide narrative background about him--who he is and how he came to be there: he is Nisei, English-speaking and a former property owner. It also establishes the father's 'live and let live' attitude toward him, which contrasts with Boswick's active, though impersonal, dislike. The second version is very similar, with a few surface revisions, but in the third, considerable detail is added, and existing information "fleshed out." The third version reads: Example 16: 'I don't like that ‘flifl/ damn Jap amy.;etter than you," my father said, looking at me, Uhcle Boswick, my mother, "but he's bad a rough time.“ As he dug into his food-~white Relief gravy ssread over cereal-laden bamburger--be repeated the story the :1, had told him: there_bad been a beautiful farm near h'resban, which produced strawberries big as a boy's fist, and corn so large and tender that a single ear would make ‘77 a meal, and radisbes, lettuce, carrots that popped out of the I ground like an army. In two more years the farm would be paid off, but after Pearl lsrbor it was confiscated by the government, and the Jhp, a Risei, had spent the last two and a half years in an internment eamp near Pemdelton. low released, be bad no family, #lsnd, or money. "do I think you--everybody--ought to lay off." The expansion of the description of the farm here has Several functions. Because the Jap himself describes his farm in 88 such loving detail, the passage emphasizes not only his loss of it, but also establishes details of character: he is both attentive to detail and metaphorically minded. The former is reinforced later in the story by his hard work, and his success in raising bloom and produce on the hard-scrabble land, attributes that by contrast make his final neglect of the hens more dramatic. The description of the "carrots that popped out of the ground like an army" continues the military metaphor already firmly established earlier in the story. Drake's dialogue change from "leave him alone" to "lay off" adds verisimilitude and also reinforces the family's social class; "relief" gravy demonstrates their economic condition. Perhaps most important, however, is the way in which the father repeats the story in this version. In the previous draft, it appears that his conversation with the Jap was perfunctory. Here, from the detail he gives as he repeats it, it is evident that he had a conversation with the .lap longer than was necessary to do the business he went for--to pay for the window. This establishes him as a man willing to listen to a stranger's story of loss, even if that stranger is the 'enemy.' The fourth version of this scene is missing from the draft material. In draft 5, Drake expands some parts of the scene and Cuts others. 89 Example 17: 'I don't like that Jap any better than you,” my father said, looking at me, Uncle Boswick, my mother, "but he's had a rough time of it." As be dug into his food--white'Relief gravy f‘fe spread over ceresllsden hemburger--he repeated the story the 7" \‘GJtp had told hill: there had been a large farm near I'reshaxs, where w)” the seeds would not stay in the ground, and in the spring the xii," strawberries grew big as boy's fist, and in the fall the corn gig” was so large and tender that a single ear would make a meal. Ms 3:2 two more years the fans would have been paid off, but after Pearl Harbor it was confiscated by the government and sold, and the Jap-ma lisei, who had been born on the farm, and was therefore U I an American citizen-dud spent the last two and a half years in an internment camp near Pendelton. low released, he had no I'30 I think you-~everybodym-ought to family, land, or money. lay off." Here he cut back what he had written in the previous version and developed, deleting the list "radishes, lettuce and Ca rrots." This deletion gives emphasis to the remaining features of the farm: "strawberries" "big as a boy's fist" and "com" "50 large and tender that a single ear would make a meal," and removes the army metaphor that describes the vegetables in the earlier Clf‘aft. This metaphor, though consistent with other imagery in the StOry, works against his purposes here, since the function of the faWm's description is to contrast the Jap's pre-war prosperity with his current isolated poverty. .\l 90 The marginal note adds another layer to the story in that it describes the father's own attitude and character and gives further information about the family's background and circumstances. The sixth version of this scene incorporates the marginal note Drake made to draft 5, and makes further changes. Example 18: S/Drake/Chi cken "I don't like that Jap any better than you," my father said, looking at me, Uncle Boswick, my mother. I'But he‘s had a rourh o ”w $9 M. time of it.” mmrmwmu Relief army s read-ovar- corefl-Tltmai‘fiuT-g‘efaflf‘Fpeated th:.rs.‘tory Ehe Jap had told 11.13: there had been a large farm near Gresham, where the seeds would not stay in the ground, and in the spring the strawberries grew big as m boy's fist, and in the fall the corn was so large and tender that a, m single ear would make a meal. Father told the story in the dreamy,7 ? ’1'? tragic tone of a man who has not owned anything himself. In only two here years the farm would have been paid off, but after Pearl Harbor 11: was confiscated by the government and sold, and the Japna Iisei, who had been born on the farm, and was therefore an American citizen-- and a half hnd event the last twoayears in an intern-ent camp near Pendelton. (J '80 I think you-- '01: released, he had no family, land, or money. Ovarybodyuought to lay off." In version 5 he considered two positions for the incorpora- tion of the father's "tragic dreamy tone of a man who has not him- Self owned anything," and he considers an additional position in handwritten notes to the sixth version, but decides it is "ok" where it is. He deletes the "relief gravy"; later events in the story, 91 which were written between these two versions, in draft 5+, emphasize the family's relative prosperity since the war began, a prosperity with which 'relief gravy' would have been inconsistent. The family's desire for greater prosperity is now implicit in the father's "dreamy tone" and so does not require further emphasis. Drake's tendency to compress for economy of expression is evident in the change from "the story the Jap told him" to "the Jap's story." This surface permutation does not change meaning but expresses the same information in fewer words. He makes further changes between the sixth and the final published version, which reads: Example 19: ‘ "I don’t like that lap any better than you do.” my father said, looking at me. Uncle Boswick, my mother. “But he's had a rough row to bee.” As he cleaned his plate with a final slice of bread. he repeated the story the lap had told him: there had been a large farm near Gresham, where the fields sloped of! toward the sun, and where seeds would not stay in the ground—in spring the strawberries grew big as a boy‘s fist. and in fall the corn was so large and tender that a single ear would make a meal. My father told the story in the dreamy. tragic tone of a man who has not owned anything himself—saying that in only two more years the farm would have been paid 05. but after Pearl Harbor it was confiscated by the government and sold at auction, and the lap—- a Nisei, who had been born on the farm, and was therefore an Americancitiserr—hsdspentthepasttwoandahalfyesninan internment camp near Pendelton. Now released. he had no fam. ily. no farm, no money. “Sol think you—everybody—ought to by 03 him.” Here, he consolidates, shifting from seven to six sentences, and introducing dashes to set off parts of the consolidated material. Since the dash is an informal mark of punctuation that sets off digressive parts of sentences, it is particularly suited to dialogue and to the reproduction of the patterns of speech. If one reads these two versions aloud, the rhythmic adjustments are quite clear, 92 and have powerful effect in the final version, where the long central summary of the father's report is framed at the beginning and end with short sentences of direct dialogue, creating an illusion as if the whole piece is directly quoted speech. It is hard to see, in this piece, where any further deletions might be made to the verbal surface without losing important information. The addition of the description of a more distant view of the Jap's farm, "where the fields s|0ped off toward the sun," adds a final element of poignancy, as if it is recalling the Jap's final survey of his land before it was taken from him. This passage hints at the complexity of the revisions Drake made to "Chicken"--the amount of re-reading and alteration of the text between versions, the incorporation and development of marginal notes, and the inter—relatedness of specific physical revisions, all of which Drake used in this piece of the text. There is no clear one- to-one relationship between the size of a revision and the amount of 'influence' it has on the text, or between the physical type of revision and a clear 'result' of applying it. Rather, it emphasizes how the context established by the text tends to pull otherwise disparate elements together through revision. Reasons for Revisions The previous passage illustrates both the complexity of the processes Drake used in revising, and the complex effects of any given revision on the text. In "Chicken," however, there were four major "causes" for revision that went through the entire text: 93. 1. the time span of the story and related structure; 2. the close, imagistic and auditorily attractive verbal surface; 3. the tension between the close surface and demands of narrative; and 4. the introduction of reflection and emotion. The notes in Examples 5-7 indicate the complexity of coordinating the two sets of events in "Chicken"--the external progress of the war, and the boy's "home front" activities. This story covered a longer span of time than any story Drake had ever written. The short story often takes place within hours or days, and he said he had a hard time sustaining the story over the year and a half period. The general method he used was to write the 'war' material in exposition and 'set pieces,‘ which covered large periods of time between scenes that took place on the homefront. These two 'strands' were unified by the first person narrator: both were seen through the boy's eyes. Drake says that he has to be able to "see" the story in order to make both structural and surface revisions. Though it is not extant in the draft material, he says he made a visual representa- tion of the story, as is frequently his habit, to help him see the shape the final version might take. He alters these as he writes: I made squares on a piece of paper--geometric shapes akin to portions of the story. If I have a long opening scene, I have a bigger square; if I have a smaller piece of expo- sition, I'll make a smaller square and shade it in. Since his diagram was not in the draft material, he provided a representation for another story, shown in Appendix C. As he wrote, he adjusted the diagram. 94 The extant portion of the original notes (Example 6) has a similar function in that it not only coordinates the two sets of events in time, but also establishes the relative proportion of parts of the text. Despite this early work, however, he was dis- satisfied with the way events unfolded through draft four. I just wrote over and over, feeling dissatisfied. I felt the essential story was interesting, but it didn't have any energy, any punch. Because the story covers almost two years, it was listless. The events unfolded like beads on a string. His decision to begin the story i_n_ 393:3 5%, "to fold the first part around like a film loop," is the change he feels 'makes' the story. Without it, he feels, the story would have been unpub- lishable: "I should have been able to see it earlier." Once he realized what to do to give the story more force, it seemed obvious: "I felt stupid, why couldn't I see it from the beginning?" But it was not until the story was almost completely told that he could make this formal decision. The actual physical form of this revision is, in a general way, a consolidation, since it pulls three elements from different parts of the text together. Drake feels this structural change was crucial to the story's success. By beginning the story near the end of the action, Drake created a spring-like effect, containing most of the action in the time frame created by the shift, and adding tension to the story by the addition of the new introductory paragraph required by the change in time sequence. The change not only foreshadows the three major dramatic scenes in the story and piques readers' interest and anticipation by 95 providing a puzzle (since, for instance, the meaning of "sam-yer- eye" is mysterious without a context) but also establishes Boswick's essential comic character through his diction. The introduction of the new structure necessitates other changes, some shown in Figure 1. Here, in the sixth version, complex alterations were required to accommodate the shift from the 'present' setting of the new opening to the 'past' in which most of the story takes place. Two related and crucially important elements in the physical revisions Drake made to the text have to do with a tension created by conflicting demands of his imagist aesthetic, strong at the time he wrote the story, and the demands of narrative. The highly imagistic style he describes on page 55 is sometimes set against the requirements of naturalistic writing: "in the door and out of the door," described on the page 5". and a frequent late revision in his work is the elimination of explanatory material that serves to introduce characters or move them from one place to another. This elimination of 'naturalistic' writing is evident in "Chicken," particularly in later drafts of the text, and frequently involves delection of explanatory events. In draft 1, the following passage serves as a transition from the boy's first sighting of the Jap, to the attack he and his friends make from their "home front defenses" : 96 Example 20: '\ After breakfast, Piggy, Slate, Hike,‘{he HacGregor and I met at the fort. They too had discovered the Jap, and, as it was Satudday, and no school, after a quick council of war, .we- moved out. Version 2 is very similar, but replaces the explanatory "it was Saturday" (answering the question "What were the boys doing out of school, since it was spring and not summer?") with the more descriptive "we were children of war, and well schooled." Example 21: Piggy, Slats, Mike and The lacurenor discovered the Jap too, and within the hour we met at the fort, to hold a quick council, W and move out: we were children of war, and well schooled. This piece persists in very much the same form until the sixth draft: Example 22: F—“-“"‘“\ / Piggy, Slate, like, an the MacGreror discovered the Jap f /’ /’ ' too and because wet: l—eheek7~engerT—eg§}hated within / x / the hour we mht at the fort, Ep/hold a quicklcbuncil and move out: we l/’ "I, l .A/ were children of war, and wel schooled. " / Rather than making it 'stronger,' he chooses to eliminate it entirely. The final removes the exposition and 'leaps' from one scene to another . 97 Drake feels that he should be able to avoid doing this pedestrian kind of writing in the first place, but that he can't seem to avoid it. Early in the writing, he says: I think about how to make it sensible and to qualify what I'm saying, and to create verisimilitude and various kinds of illusions. At a certain point, okay, it reads well, but it would be more interesting if I cut away the matter-of-fact --not because it's not well written, not because it's over— written, not because it doesn't make sense, but because it explains things in such a full way. I realize that if I cut out some of it, other things happen that are interesting: the unexpected narrative leaps, like leaps in poetry. I cut out things that are basically good writing to make other things happen. The 'narrative leap' evident in the final version moves the story faster. Physically, such leaps are created almost exclusively by deletions on the 'meaning' but not the 'text-based' level. Linguistic theory distinguishes between "new" and "given" informa- tion, and these deletions tend to remove "given" information--that is, they take away elements that are already stated or implied in the text. In this case, since the boys attack the Jap, it is evident in later parts of the text that they discovered his presence some- how. How and when is of no value to the story. This is a case where there is some clear distinction between language and content: Drake changes the way information is provided, without changing the essential nature of that information. When he made this change, he preserved the 'interesting part'--"we were children of war and had been taught to hate"--and moved it into the actual scene of the attack. He also shifted the names of the boys into the scene, using consolidation . 98 Though the deleted parts do not find their way into the final version, they have an important function in the writing: they 'explain' to Drake how and why certain things in the narrative happened, and so function to help him "see" the story fully. Once they are explained satisfactorily to himself, they are no longer important, and can be eliminated in order to make the story more forceful, evocative, and verbally attractive. There is a 'tension' between what narrative demands, and Drake's view that a story should function like a poem. He used the same compressed imagistic style in his novel, Beyond the Pavement, and he feels that because of this compression and high powered language, reading it creates a "kind of exhaustion: it is so tight there are no breathers." The telling of a story sometimes requires such breathers in that certain information which is not in itself interesting, must be explicated in order for the story to go on. Drake has managed to out almost all such writing out of "Chicken." Although he speaks of these changes in terms of "making the story more interesting," he says that in writing it, he did not consider audience or 'effect' of the story on someone at all. fi is the reader who needs to be interested, and what interests him is language and technique. Therefore, though these changes do influence the way a reader reads the story, the fact that they have this result does not mean that he had the intended effect in mind when he made them. The elimination of essentially narrative passages, and the deletion of phrases like "I observed," "I noticed," "I saw" from 99 early draft versions where the emphasis was on what was seen rather than the fact that the boy perceived it are closely related to the imagistic force of the language used in "Chicken," since their presence in the test mitigates against a dense verbal surface. Examples 15-19 show the expansion and contraction that work to create this surface, as do the samples of the second and sixth versions of the original opening of "Chicken" (Figure I). In the first version, the protagonist sees the Jap "bent to his hoe against the rising sun." Example 23: As I observed the Jap from the gun slot of the .V’enetian blinds, my surprise changed to recognition and horror: I had seen him Eonmwhere) . » before. dad when I looked dorm Wfihe coffee-table in front ' we»: . of the daveno,:the#current Liberty showed Hitler with the body of a jack-ass, his hooves kicking atrope; beside him,Mussolini was a baboon, dangling stupidly from a war-wrecked tree; and in the upper-right, ToJo was a furry, menacing spider, whose web, like the blood land around our Jap, was stained‘red. The second version adds a description of his "insect shape," "silhouetted against the rising sun," which reminds the boy of something," and deletes his "recognition and horror." In the sixth version, very close to the final, the horror that appeared in the first version is objectified--inherent in the language. The Jap reminds him of "something I had seen or read-— something thin, creepy and utterly evil." The repetition of the 5's in the early part of the sentence is as ominous as the rustle of 100 insect wings: "Sun spilled red," "tips of furrows," "insect shape." "Thin, creepy and utterly evil" repeats the 'creepy' long e's. The development of the language is not only from narrative description to visual image, but also to the auditory creation of the horror the boy experiences in the first version. The imagistic force is created by the use of all types of physical revisions, earlier on, additions and substitutions, and often later, deletions. These small but auditorily and visually important deletions are particularly evident between draft 6 and the final version where in several cases he moves from simile to metaphor, cutting the "like" from the phrases "like a small concentration camp" and "like the gesture of a wing tim," omissions which heighten the sensory immediacy of the work, as the auditory properties of the previous description of the Jap's appearance objectifies "horror." Drake says this emotion is the hardest thing for him to write about, and often the last type of revision he makes, usually by addition. Though he included the horror in version 1, he felt he had not demonstrated it, and cut back, allowing the visual and auditory images to speak for themselves, as they would in an imagist poem. But in some cases, he feels that emotion or reflection needs to be expressed directly. The marginal note shown in the draft 5 version of the dinner table conversation (Example 17) illustrates this introduction of emotion. The father, he adds, repeats the Jap's conversation in "the tragic tone of a man who had not owned anything." Drake is very sparing in his direct descrip- tion of emotion. He says: 101 It's very difficult for me to create emotion. I can't state it earlier because it seems excessive. It has to come out of the material. If it doesn't, I think the last thing I have to do is to go back and say how the character feels. Incorporation of "Chicken" into EeaLs In late 1982, Drake completed a first draft of a novel, firs, which incorporates material from over twenty short stories. He included "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" to cover the World War II years in the life of the young protagonist, who becomes "Chris" in the novel. In constructing the novel, Drake charted out the stories he would use, then went through and revised to make them consistent with one another. Since this is an unfinished version, only the section taken from the short story is described here. Three major changes are made from the published version of the story to its incorporation into the novel. The first person narrator becomes the third person "Chris" and the rest of the novel is shifted to the third person--—"we" to "Chris and his friends." Drake "unfolds" the story, removing the ED. m_e<_:l_ia E opening, so that events appear linearly in the actual order of their occurrence in time. Two pieces are removed from the story and placed earlier. One is a visit to his father's job at the shipyard, which serves as a transition from the previous events in the novel, which end with Pearl Harbor, and the time "Chicken" takes up in the third year of the war. The other is a description of Uncle Boswick's injury at Fort Ord. Since Boswick has not appeared in the novel 102 before, his presence requires explanation, and this piece serves to tell the reader where Boswick came from. The rest of the story unfolds as it does in the previous version, beginning with the description of the Jap's arrival: "He infiltrated the neighborhood." Brother Grant disappears from the story and is replaced by the mother's brother whose existence is already established in earlier parts of the novel. The third major set of changes involves increased emphasis on the boy's mother, whose fears, transmitted to and internalized by Chris, are the major theme of the novel. The mother plays a very minor role in the story, and except for her disapproval of Boswick, barely expressed, is hardly developed as a 'real' character at all. In the published version, Boswick tries to get her to per- suade the Jap to sell his eggs: We had never had any money and she was trying to appeal to her only fear: poverty. But she apparently feared the Jap even more, for she would not go--not even when he told her what he had learned. In the novel version, this becomes: Chris realized that Uncle Boswick was trying to appeal to her main fear: poverty. She had been broke, and though her husband was making a good living, although they had a refrigerator and venetian blinds and a Hollywood bed set, she feared they could lose it all. The persistence of her fear of poverty has been established earlier in the novel. Though it is difficult to generalize over the small number of revisions, almost exclusively additions except for those already noted, few of the additions heighten language use; they are added for narrative reasons. For instance: 103 There was a single house on the flatlands, empty for the past year, a place where the kind of people his mother had warned him against might live, but now it seemed a man had moved into the house. A comparison of this with the initial description of the Jap's initial appearance in the final version of the story shows the comparative lack of verbal force of the novelistic version. It is what Drake calls a "serviceable" sentence, made necessary because the nearby house could not simply appear in the already created world of the novel. The language Drake adds here--'Hollywood bed" and "venetian blind," is, like "V-mail," language that operates by evoking the era rather than providing new sensory image. Even though "Chicken" has been published and anthologized, Drake continues to revise. The marks on the version in Appendix C demonstrate special revisions he made to the story for the pur- pose of a reading. He is still dissatisfied with the title--he feels there must be a better one and when he reads the story aloud, asks the audience for suggestions--and with the last line, which he feels 'sums up' more than he would like and uses a sense of observation that is out of character for the protagonist. 104 The Big Little CTO Book The Big Little CTO Book is designed for Pontiac CTO owners and afficionados, with 177 pages of detailed technical informa- tion and photographs about the car and its deveIOpment. The Big Little CTO Book traces the car from its inception through first production in 19611, to its 'eclipse' in 1974 as the era of the muscle car ended with energy shortages and increased Federal regulation. As the table of contents indicates, the book contains techni— cal information about GTO models on a year-by-year basis: specifi- cations, option, and technical improvements. It also describes the Example 24: CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE Origins ........................... 7 CHAPTER TWO Into the Marketplace, 1964 ................. 21 CHAPTER THREE The Great One, 1965 ................... 33 CHAPTER FOUR (BTtlliype ........................ 45 CHAPTER FIVE The Tiger Scores Again, 1966 ............... 57 CHAPTER SIX Royal Pontiac and the Bobcat ............... 65 CHAPTER SEVEN An Idea On Wheels, 1967 ................. 75 CHAPTER EIGHT GTO Advertising ..................... 95 CHAPTER NINE Car of the Year, 1966 ................... 93 CHAPTER TEN The Competltlon ..................... 103 CHAPTER ELEVEN “Heah Come Da Judge,” 1969 ............... 113 CHAPTER TWELVE “For People Who Think Driving Should Be Fun,” 1970 . . . .125 CHAPTER THIRTEEN “Pure Pontiac," 1971 .................... 139 CHAPTER FOURTEEN On Borrowed Time, 1972-1974 ............... 147 Appendices ........................ 157 Bibliography ....................... 175 Index ........................... 177 105 car in relation to the larger American context in which it thrived-- the 'muscle car' era, typified by "CTO" sung by Ronnie and the Daytonas, a song with the Beach Boy's 'surfing sound,‘ and the film, "Two Lane Blacktop" which features a cross-country marathon car race between a '55 Chevy and a 1970 CTO. There were GTO cufflinks, GTO cologne, even CTO shoes, by Thom McAn, "a shoe to make tracks in." The book's basic structure is chronological, with technical information given in order of its development. This structure is complemented by narrative, which describes how these innovations came about. The introduction describes the OTC as "easily mythicized" and the car's mythic character in an era when cars were "more than transportation" runs throught the book. Chapter One opens: Example 25: 171. birth of the GTO was a miracle. an immaculate con- ception achieved almost entirely by three wise men: an advertising man who was struck by divine revelation and two executive engineers who recognized the mean- ing of his prophecy. Or. in the language of board rooms. the GTO was conceived “to meet a marketing need.” a car which would help Pontiac maintain the hold it had on the youth market and help maintain Pontiac sales in general. And that is tl what it did. exec But the amazing thing about the OTC story is that the car happened at all. He later describes one of the three 'wisemen,' DeLorean, as "a visionary . " The book includes over 100 photographs, of cars, car parts, people important to the GTO's development such as Jim "Big Daddy" Wagners, to whom the book is dedicated, and of ad copy and 106 'spinoffs' such as CTO shoes. It also includes verbatim sections of primary material: excerpts from a Royal Bobcat catalogue, the com- plee transcript of an interview with Michelle Peters, who worked at the Pontiac plant building the CTO, and who also owned one, and appendices listing serial numbers year by year. A section describ- ing the 1968 model indicates the technical level of the year-by-year descriptions of the OTC (Example 26). The Big Little GTO Book is obviously directed toward "insiders," readers with an intrinsic interest in, and with some knowledge of, the CTO. Its main function is to give technical information and serve as a reference. However, the tone and style are not like that of a technical manual. Drake intersperses direct, informal address to the reader with information about gear ratios and engine specs: "If you stood on a busy street corner in the early '505 and closed your eyes you could easily identify the Pontiacs as they passed because of the high-pitched whine of the Timkin rear axle bearings . . . ." This, along with the narrative strands describing back-room machinations and power struggles leading to the CTO's production, and thematic elements that emphasize the larger social context of a car-mad era and the legendary significance the CTO took in relation to it, give the book an interest beyond simple technical reference, and potential appeal to a broader audience than one seeking technical reference. The alternation of technical information with scenic elements and description of the context, advertising, and GT0 107 Example 26: Everyone was impressed with the GTO's power. even though the engines were similar to those offered in 1967. There were four 400-ci V-8 engines: the econ- omy model with the two-barrel carburetor and Turbo Hydra-mafia transmission rated at 265 hp; another with the four-barrel carburetor rated at 350 hp (the standard engine); another rated at 360 hp; and the Ram Air engine rated at 360 hp. In mid-year Pontiac introduced the 196896 Ram Air ll engine with redesigned heads featuring round ports. This engine. rated at 370 hp. was the forerunner of the 1969-70 Ram Air IV. All of these horsepower figures were conservative. in keep- ing with Pontiac's policy, and it helped to placate insurance people. The Ram Air engine was reported by Pontiac to develop 360 bhp at 5400 rpm. but Car Lila claimed that the actual horsepower would probably be one-third more than the factory's figure! Motor Trend's test car was a Ram Air 400-ci V-6, with a four-speed and a 4.33:1 rear and. The car ran at the Orange County drag strip and turned 96 mph, with an elapsed time of 14.80 seconds. absolutely stock. With the air cleaners removed and a pair of Goodyear Super-stock ‘slicks' on the rear. the car turned 96 mph with a time of 14.45 seconds. Hot Rod magazine ran its GTO test car at lrwlndale Race- way and turned a high of 99.11 mph in 14.46 seconds. Car Life‘s test car was a'most identical except for gearing. Although most people agreed that one of the GTO's primary virtues was its gobs of low-speed torque, Car Life's driverfelt that the torque was relatively weak at low rpm. that it would rise above 3000 rpm, and that although the tachometer red-line was 5800 rpm the engine would turn 6000 rpm without any sign of valve float or lifter pump-up (this was with the 3.90:1 rear end!). The magazine calculated that at 5600 rpm in fourth gear the car's top speed was 112 mph. At the local drag strip it turned 0-100 mph in 14.6 seconds. and went through the quarter 1968 GTO on the assembly line being fitted with a grille. 101 108 'spin-offs' gives readers a 'breather' from what otherwise would be an unremitting density of engine specifications and gear ratios. Development of The GTO Book The Big Little GTO Book is the one piece of work examined here that was not originally conceived by the author. In 1979 Drake wrote a book proposal based on photos and oral histories he'd collected about the early years of hot rodding, in which he had been interested since he was a teenager. He sent the proposal to several publishers, all of whom turned it down. Motorbooks Inter- national, however, contacted him on the basis of this proposal, and asked if he would be interested in writing a book on the GTO. He agreed, and a contract was issued in March 1980. Although he had an intrinsic interest in hot rods, he had none in the GTO, so this book was one he would not otherwise have written. It was also his first major piece of non-fiction, though he had written several articles for Rod Action, and the first for which he had an externally imposed, contractual deadline--April 15, 1981. His main intention in writing the book was to take advantage of what seemed a good offer. "No one had offered me a book con- tract before, and I wanted to take them up on it." The idea of having a contract appealed to me, and I thought I could write the book in three or four months. Then, when I got into it, I decided that if I was going to write a book about the GTO, I wanted to write the definitive GTO book, so it took eighteen months. Since he originally expected to be able to write the book in short order, and because he was busy with teaching and other 109 projects, he didn't begin collecting material 'seriously' until September of 1980. He gathered primary material--factory releases, road test reports, off-prints of GTO articles from Car Craft, Car and Driver and Motor Trend, advertising copy and examples of GTO "spin—offs." He interviewed people who had been involved with the GTO, like Michelle Peters, and read Patrick Wright's On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, for background on car-industry management. As he gathered the material, he made notes on slips of paper, sometimes scraps, and put everything into a cardboard box. He continued to do this until February 11, 1981, when he sat down to begin the actual writing. He had collected an enormous amount of material, and says he felt overwhelmed by it, not knowing how or where to begin. Suddenly, the April 15 deadline seemed particularly apt and looming. His first step was to transcribe the Peters interview, so that all his primary material was physically available to him on paper. "The major problem was form. I just couldn't s_e_e_ the finished book in my mind." He did not know, at that point, which material "went with" which, or the order in which it should be arranged. For two days, making occasional notes, he sorted through the material, shuffling it into manilla folders, and moving it from folder to folder. At the end of these two days he felt he had the informa- tion in sufficient order to begin writing. For the next several days, he wrote short pieces of text, often a page or two per folder. 110 By Sunday night, when he was driving to the University, he felt he could "see" the final structure of the book, alternating "thematic" chapters such as the Michele Peters interview, the "GTO Hype" and "The Competition"--which unlike model year chapters had no 'logical' order—-with a chapter for each model year. He then made a chapter by chapter sketch of the book and began to write, beginning with the 1967 model year (see Example 27). He had no particular reason for beginning where he did, with what was then the eighth chapter: "It was a place to start." However, he says he felt uneasy about starting at what would be the beginning of the book, feeling it was simpler to begin in the middle. His reason for beginning in the middle is both puzzling and inter— esting to Drake, who feels it is very important in that it seems to reduce his apprehensiveness about the difficulty of beginning a large writing task. "To begin at the beginning seems too imposing," he says. Though the book's form--finding a structure that suited the material--was his major problem, he realized as he began writing that he would have to consider audience, something he had only briefly given thought to before, when he made an early, and abandoned, start at what would eventually become Street Was Fun in '51. He said he realized "there were differences in my own out- look, abilities, knowledge and interests" from The GTO Book's potential audience, but he did not have an explicit or clear picture of this audience in his mind. 111 Example 27: Re what PHD did hat was unique: I 1) 319 engine a small cars—— 4“ ”“541le 2) Made a wide ra e of options available from factory or dealers. 3) Heavily promoted- entificationuimage a... 1 among Begin w/ somethi re GrO-flanger' a ments? re how the GTO got st ted Then go back. quickly a vey--1950s. non-image. the 1955 vs, __-_ the changes/emphasis o formance Specific ex ples re performance-+1 Thompson. etc etc Then the at on racing the GTO option on the Tempest- st quickly: 1960-63 (the 63 v-e); add the all-new l (some?ere around here emph the excitement/possibilites of “QT auto irrEustrym-things happening-- 01 C excitment/unrestricted (31A? III \/ W04 Peters) cm "1% (LOGflK mi, The 1965 (a w 253 W'W’r“ 1‘“ 9“” CRAP v . l/ . R GTO BYPE- songs. prauotional italic. etc. cm am am ms 9W The 1966 are “GAP VII an Royal Pontiacflzy 63 031 ‘ CHAP (X The 1968 (ITO, CRAP XI The competition 112 He made a short page of notes for each chapter, and then began writing four or five first draft pages at a time, reading them over, making handwritten alterations and often, an interim page of notes, incorporating as he retyped. Additions and changes of order, often of large sections, were the dominant revisions in early versions. After the 1967 model year chapter, he wrote what was then Chapter IX, "GTO Advertising," and worked through the outline chapter by chapter. He skipped Chapter XI, "The Competition," one he had not originally planned to include but which the publisher wanted, and continued through the remaining model years. He had intended to write a separate chapter for each year but there was comparatively little material for the GTO's declining years, 1972 through 1974, so he combined these years into one chapter. When he reached the end of the book, he went back and wrote what were then the first eight chapters, in that order, beginning with what became the introduction. By the April 15 deadline, he had only thirty pages to send the publisher, which he did, along with a progress report on the remainder, though he was so nervous because of the lapsed deadline that his hands broke out in a rash. By June, however, he had finished all chapters except the "Competition" and an appendix on restoration, "Goodies for an Old Goat" which he wrote during the summer at his cabin in Sixes, Oregon. He sent earlier chapter to the publisher as he finished them, beginning with the introduction. When he had completed all 113 chapters, he retyped, making additional revisions, format decisions, and writing the photograph captions. The table of contents of this * final version is shown in Example 28. The development of The Big Little GTO Book is quite dif- ferent from "Chicken." Until he wrote it, Drake says, he had always done at least three drafts of anything he wrote for publica- tion. I find it difficult to organize my thoughts and even write a decent sentence in first or second draft. 1 could never do anything that was good at all in first draft. But I could see that l was going to have to use some first draft writing (in The GTO Book) if I was going to break even. To deal with time limitations, he shuffled together material written at different stages, writing the first draft of a chapter, then going over it and finding pieces that needed rewriting, often at the beginnings and ends of chapters. He then wrote and inserted new material, so that some of the writing in a given chapter would be first version, some second, and occasionally third. Though there were some revisions on the surface level, the vast majority of revisions were additions that developed ideas or added new information. He also rearranged pieces already in the text, some- times moving them from chapter to chapter. There seemed to be no consistent relationship between the order in which the chapters were written and the amount of * Reference to "final version" is made to the draft Drake sent to the publishers; they made further editorial changes mentioned later. 1111 Example 28: Emmmms abutmen- CONTSM‘S IlmowflIOIOOOOOIOOOOOIO00.00.000.000.OOICOOOOOOCOCC CHAIR-flit It ORIGINS eaeeeeeeeeeaaeaeeeeeaeeeeeaeeeeeee GIL-1P1?! III THE GREAT 0N3 eeeeaaeaaaaeaeeeeaeeeaeeeee CHAPTER III: on THE LINE "no....................u. CHAPTER IV: THE GREATER DIR eseaaaeeeeaaeeeaoaaeeeeee CHATTER V: 020 m eaeeeaeaaaeaaaeeeaeaaeaeeaeeaeeae GRAPH}! VI: 7113 TIGER SCORES AGAIN! aaeeeeaeeaeeeaaeo ClisPI‘ER VII: ROYAL PONTIAG AID TBB 8080A? aaeaeeaeaee 1 CHAPTER VIII! A8 IDEA 03 mm aaeeaaeaeeesaeeeaaeae 1 CHATTER IX. GTO ADVERTISIM o....o........."nu...“ tho CHAPTER x: "HIE CAR 0? THE YEAR' eeaeeeeeaaeeaaaaeeee 160 CHAPTER III THE 0031337171021 aeaeeeecaeaaeeeeeeeeeeaee 171 cum 111: mm out: in man .................. 182 mama rm: vpoa mom wao ram Damn snouw as mu .............. 198 CHAPTER XIV. .PURB PONTIAC. assessesaeaeaaaaaaaaaaeaa 212 BBfiEEPBe-u WEIR XV: INTO THE 5mm aeeeaeaaoeaseaeaaeeeee 225 mam m: ooonms son in cm our ................ at: mm rvm mam nous ......................... 253 APPENDIX ............................................ 275 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPE! aaeaaaoeaaaeeeeaeeaaaeeaaeeeaee '87 115 revision made to them. The following chart shows the word count for selected chapters: Chapter ll Introduction Chapter 6 "Starts" 270 -- 260 lst "Complete" 1000 500 1180 1 8 2 Combined 1500 600 (had only) 3800 To Publisher 2500 620 6000 These chapters are shown in the order in which they were written. Chapter 6, "Royal Pontiac and the Bobcat," is a thematic chapter which describes a Pontiac dealership in Royal Oak, and the Detroit car "scene" centered on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, where the evening's entertainment was cruising the drive-ins in fast cars. Chapter ll describes the 1961! model year. The introduction is shown in Appendix D. Drake says that in writing The Big Little GTO book, he used a "serviceable sentence," one which lacked the compression of the imagistic sentences in his earlier work but was suited both to fiction he had been writing recently and to non-fiction. As is apparent in comparing the last two versions of the two chapters shown on the chart, the major revisions Drake made to them were additions, with very little cutting back on the surface level. The sensory force in the final version is largely created by the addition of strong verbs, rather than by "pruning." There were no obvious systematic differences between the "type" of chapter and the 116 pattern of revision, or between the order in which the chapter was written and the kind and amount of revision, though there seemed to be a slight tendency toward more rewriting on the chapters that appeared earlier in the book (those written, chronologically, in the middle). The decrease in word count from the penultimate to ultimate versions of the Introduction represents one large rearrangement of material. A comparison of the penultimate and ultimate versions shows that Drake deleted an explanation of the term "to homologate," the English version of "Omologato," source of the "O" in GTO; as he rewrote his second version, he "pushed back" this explanation into Chapter 11: "The Great One." The vast majority of marginal comments Drake makes on these drafts are suggestions for further development, incorporated in later versions. The opening paragraph of the "Origins" chapter, shown in final version in Example 25, was developed from the following note on a combined first and second draft: Example 29: \L" '1; f, M "/ . M 4 3 f ,l 1"" W; ”A" 0ch" (”I p [/10 I *5 \ CHAPTER I. omens (I . I. —— Ln +0 M11 ‘ snub! (1’1 d“?, v’ V The GTO was conceived as a"double-pronged marketing strategy", a way to Kass maintain the appeal that Pontiac cars had for the youth market, and to keg: Pontiac sales in general. Which is exactly what it did. But the amazing thing about the GTO story is that the car happened at all. 117 As it demonstrates, Drake continued development through these versions, from marginal notes, and also worked on the sentence level to make the work read more smoothly. The majority of such language changes were made in his last retyping, when all of the chapters had been compiled, the structure was established, and most of the primary material he wanted to include had been worked in. Most of these changes were made without handwritten 'signals,' so in general draft versions of The Big Little GTO Book are much 'cleaner' than those of "Chicken." Markings on GTO drafts which don't suggest further development are most likely to signal changes in order, or to indicate that the information had been "used" as he moved from one version to another. Drake says, "I would have revised more, but I just didn't have time. 1 revised as much as I could." Reasons for and Results of Revision Drake solved his audience 'problem' early on, taking a cue from a Car and Driver article written by David E. Davis, then editor of the magazine, and an original test driver of the GTO. Example 30: How did the GTO compare with the new Mustang? David E. Davis. than editor of Car and Driver. remembered years later a comparative test he had made of both cars in 1964: . . in purely visceral automotive terms. I remember only that the first Mustang l drove caused me to cut my finger on an exposed sheet metal edge in the trunk. while my first ride in a GTO left me with a feeling like losing my virginity. going into combat and tasting my first draft bear all in about seven seconds. “I remember that the GTO slammed out of the hole like it was being fired from a catapult. that the tech needle slung itself across the dial like a windshield wiper. that the noise from the three two-throat carburetors on that heavy old 389- cubic-inch Pontiac V-8 sounded like some awful doomsday Hoover-God sucking up sinners. Conversely. I seem only to recall that the Mustang was red. or maybe orange . . . it's hard to say.” 118 As he did his original research, he read many car magazines, which gave him information about the GTO and a sense of the possible audience for his book. Rather than 'imagining' who would read it, Drake says, he partially "picked up Davis's excited, hyped—up rhetoric" as a way of identifying with the audience. This rhetoric sets the tone of the non-technical portions of the book. At the time, he says, he considered working further with this "Tom Wolfe" adjectives-strung-together style, and develop- ing the underlying irony he feels its over-statement suggests, but he decided against it, taking up the 'excited' tone and diction, but moderating it. For one thing, the technical nature of the primary material-- information he was responsible to provide--exercised stylistic limitations. "Four llOO-ci V—8 engines" can only be said in approxi- mately that way. For another, he did not feel the readers would appreciate cynicism such language might imply. As it is, his choice of language and tone give energy to a book that would otherwise be dull reading, and presents a persona who appears as thrilled by the GTO as Davis, certainly not a man "tired of gear ratios." The language is also suited to the elements in the book in which he did have an intrinsic interest. This was something he needed, since by then, he was "awfully sick of gear ratios." "I had to do some- thing to make the book interesting enough to me so that 1 could keep writing." He was interested in the mythic qualities of the car in rela- tion to the glamour of the "road" so important during Drake's own 119 adolescence; this was a glamour that seemed to disappear about the same time as the GTO. He did not know whether the audience would be interested in the mythic significance or literary parallels, but he was, and so as he developed the factual material, he also developed thematic and rhetorical undercurrents which seemed important to him. His incorporation of thematic elements, and his use of the early notes he made in working information into this draft is shown by a review of the film "Two Lane Blacktop," which is introduced at the end of the eighth page in the first version of Chapter IV: "GTO Hype." Example 31: (End w/ analysis of TWO LANE BIACKTOPure the car as more than itselfuas metaphor) When he picked up the draft the next day, he added: "Part of the GTO's appeal was that it was more than a car: it was, as Pontiac said, 'A device for shrinking time and distance.” To the next page, he stapled a note, one of the pieces of paper he had originally put in his cardboard box . 120 Example 32: racing; when not engaged in racing the 19199:; owners are -drIVing. flat and incessantlyr-when they find they must stop‘ \ ~-e~ang, fast and constantly. as if movement has a meaning in "Two u , who .n9::;3?¢cktqpu ‘T‘grould bring an end to the world n . 1'le - . cult f1 90.. co 9. rlce ”or, wktgn “‘” the an.“ 1” for "may “it/org 0“t". at c.” Gr.fitt)'¢.le¢u 1‘0" Us a” er. driftere ‘. where cars are usually tre..- to the character called GTO. who drives the car or buy . name. that he put a Chevrolet V—8 (blasphemy!) in the Pontiac: He developed it further, emphasizing the narrative and thematic aspects of the film. Example 33: The film focuses on the cross-country grudge race between the two cars. In the '55 Chev are the Driver and the Mechanic. who. like gunfighters of the old west. ride into town and challenge theifastest car; they always win. and because they bet on themselves this is a form of employment. Somewhere in Arizona they meet up with GTO. and the drivers engage in a cross-country race for pink slips; whoever gets to Washington. 0.0. first wins. and to prepare for that event they mail their titles to Washington. The draft pages to which it is attached introduce the literary theme of the journey, of which "Two Lane Blacktop" is an illustration. 121 Example 311: The Journey theme has been around at least since Homer. but it has become unmistakably important since the prominence of the automobile. The Okies in Grapes of Wrath were 52;; to make their exodus to the Promised land because they had automobiles. and. in a more optimistic vein. the footloose youth of post-WW II. as seen in Kerouac's 0n the Road. turned cross-country drives into a religion. The literature and films of the Sixties are full of examples of the Journey theme. and one. Easy Rider. flflgflfid a film where two characters set out to discover America. was seen as a metaphor for disenchanted youth etc A comparison of the paragraph about the journey theme from early to final versions illustrates the amount and type of surface revisions Drake made to The Big Little GTO Book. Most are made simply in retyping, without handwritten alterations to the text. The published version of this passage reads: Example 35: The journey theme has been around at least since Homer ' unmistakably important since the automobile came into promlggrtiger‘TshgeCcliye': in Grapes of Wrath were able to make their exodus to the Promised Land because they had automobiles. in a more optimistic vein. the footloose youth of post World War "America. as seen in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. turned cross-country drives into a religious experience. The literature and films of the 1960's are loaded with examples of the journey theme. One. Easy Rider. a film in which two charac- ters set out to discover America. was seen as a metaphor for disenchanted youth. Note how few and minor are the surface revisions here. What are here the second and third sentences were in the previous version one sentence. The shift from complex to simple sentences was one 122 Drake often made in editing the final version; though the technical nature of the material frequently required complex sentences necessary, the non-technical portions were written, in final, in a simpler and more straight-forward fashion. Drake did this partially as a concession to audience, and his editor at Motorbooks made further, similar, shifts in the final editing. Physically, these revisions were distributions. Word substitutions and rearrangements are minor--"full of examples" to "loaded with examples," which picks up the established colloquial tone and also plays off the notion of cars "loaded" with extras; "it has become . . . important since the prominence of the automobile" to "it has become unmistakably important since the automobile came into prominence," which substitutes a verb for the nominal + propositional phrase." This is a type of revision Drake frequently uses: when possible, he uses verbs because he feels that they give more force to the writing-~particularly (though not evident here) when they are strong and precise words. It also avoids the adverb phrase/prepositional phrase construction which because of the repeated rhythm it sets up, often becomes tedious if it is not used for a particular purpose. His tendency to dramatize kept him interested in writing, and he used it frequently in describing the interactions between the main players in the OTC drama. 123 Example 36: When Wangers read that test he was furious! He threw the magazine on John DeLorean's desk. saying that he had worked like hell to promote the OTC and be- cause the magazine had used an unprepared car the result was a lousy Opinion of an outstanding car. Without a word DeLorean Opened his desk drawer and pulled out two forms. which. when presented to the front office. would release two GTO's to Wangers for as long as he might need them. Wangers took the two GTO's to Royal Pontiac and said. "Tune them." When Royal finished “tuning them the GTO s would turn the quarter mile at 106 mph. which was a sizable increase over the 92 mph that Hot Rod had wruno from its unprepared GTO. "it was fun," he says, "to get out of gear ratios and adapt different styles. I enjoyed moving into scenic modes just for variety." Other semantic changes are more important to the text, as evidenced by the changes in the introduction from draft 1 to the final shown in Appendix D, and to which 1 direct your attention. The initial sentence in the first draft--"Pontiac Motors defined the name simply as 'ready,‘ meaning that it was ready for the customer and ready to motate" -- picks up the "hyped" rhetorical tone carried through in the next version in the phrase "scare the bejeezus out of the drivers." But in the next, more heavily marked version, "motate" is changed to "ready to go." Drake felt he had overdone the hype, and retreated to a more moderate tone. Adjustments to the surface of the text (for instance, one word substitutions) that heightened the original tone were relatively few. Once it was established, he worked with it, using it to develop his marginal notes. Since so much of the original or early writing has this flavor, it didn't require much alteration on the sentence level. Additions sometimes made the sentence structure more com- plex, calling for adjustment of existing text. Deletions, as evident 121-l in the versions of the Introduction, tend to remove redundant information—-material already given in the text. In December and January, Drake read the galley proofs which the publishers returned to him. Motorbooks had made a number of changes, some evident by a comparison of Drake's final table of contents with the published version. Several chapters were conflated and the Michelle Peters interview was put in an appendix rather than in its own chapter. In addition, parts of the "Origins" chapter which discussed the car industry previous to the GTO were cut. The main revision was the reduction in sentence complexity-- by distribution—-cutting the average sentence length from about 28 to 2“. There are several particularly interesting features of the revisions to The Big Little GTO Book. First is the way Drake handled large amounts of external material. Though he sometimes made notes, he also gathered primary material and worked with it directly, sorting pieces and moving them from folder to folder, changing their relationship to each other. In several instances, notes and off-prints are stapled directly to the drafts. Handling this material directly was the only way Drake could bring order out of what originally seemed chaos, though the year-by- year chronology was initially obvious. He wanted the book to be definitive, which meant he needed to incorporate all material he had collected, but there was no advance plan to tell him what shape the final version might take. Working as he did kept him in direct contact with his primary sources until the last draft, because he 125 often had to reread to find what he wanted to use next, and in the process, found other information he wanted to add or develop--a constant rechecking which fed into new additions to the drafts. When these additions were made, they often required adjustment of existing text. Form emerged from his handling of the primary sources. First and second draft versions 'Iaid out' the territory the book would cover, transferring factual material from the primary sources and organizing it so that a context was provided into which new information could be added. Here, he worked on the chapter level. Chapter divisions had the effect of creating self-contained units of work that were more easily "seen" than the whole text. Additions were the primary revision. When he put the 'pieces' together, additions and rearrange— ments continued, here, moving material between chapters and shifting the focus of his attention from the chapter level to the book as a whole. In the last draft, when he moved away from the primary material and worked with the whole text, he shifted to the sentence level, cutting and consolidating. Though he continued to make addi- tions, they were proportionately fewer. As with "Chicken," he made all revisions at all points in the rewriting, but the balance of revisions changed between the earliest and latest points, most notably in the handwritten changes to the compiled version: as he got closer to the end of the writing, he changed fewer words. 126 In comparison to other texts of Drake's I examined, The Big Little GTO Book had fewer surface revisions and fewer that involve alteration in sentence structure. It was not that he was not interested in style, but that time restrictions allowed him less time to work on this level, and though he has a "full repertoire" of physical revisions he is capable of making, he could not put them fully into play until the structure was fairly complete. Their use depended upon his ability to "see" the whole book, something he cannot do completely until it is physically on the page. I can't think in the fullest sense of what I want to say in early drafts. I guess as l revise I'm doing two things-- I'm cutting out things that seem redundant or badly phrased, but mainly I'm developing it with notes. The third thing is moving it around. Physicallyl can't see it until it is written out. In writing, I have to have this physical sense, and in writing--unlike painting or sculpture--you can only see part of it--a page. I can only see a paragraph at a time. I have to rewrite the whole thing so I can see it as a whole. 127 Example 37: STREET WAS FUN IN ’51 Albert Drake 128 Street Was Fun in '51 Street Was Fun in '51 is a local/history memoire, 88 pages and LIZ photographs which reconstructs the early hot rod scene in Portland, and the role it played in Drake's life. The cover photo- graph sets the tone of the book, and indicates its contents--the "tradition of Northwest Rodding"--and Drake's continued interest in it and the '29 A-V8 roadster which he still owns. The photographs include pictures of hot rods and hot rod memorabilia, ads for cars and car parts, and a swim-suit clad "Miss Speedster." Street is written in a plain style, using an "I" speaker and a "you" of conversational address, which includes the reader in the scenes he describes: "If you had a 1942-50 Cadillac, you didn't park it on the street overnight." It is plainly nostalgic, full of longing for this rich past when "there were fewer people in Oregon, far fewer laws and regulations, when gas was cheap, when driving was a pleasure," when "you could polish the chrome, point the grill down an empty road and $3." Example 38: Specifically, back to a time before hard rock, uppers and downers, LSD, pocket calculators, swinging singles, yogurt, bulgar, uni-sex, Viet Nam, sit-ins, anti-war demonstrations, computers, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and JFK, before the Beatles, before the Beatniks and Sputnik, even before hula-hOOps, bongo drums, Todd-A0, Cinemascope, 3-D movies, before the opening of the first “stylish” tavern in Portland (The Pink Bucket, 50th and Powell, 1957), before the first freeway (Banfield, 1956), before the introduction of pizza (Shakey’s, Slst and Foster, 1955), before the first .151: hamburger joint (Scotty’s, 12th and East Burnside, 1954), back to mid-century, to that simpler Portland that had just discovered television and the one-way street, back when the air was always clear, the streets always smooth, the sun always shone, everyone was young, and no one died. 129 After two pages of introduction, Drake introduces the narrative line: Example 39: The first hot rod I remember was being driven along Harbor Drive; it was 1947, the summer. We had stopped to make a left turn when a roadster coming the other direction made a right turn and shot up the street ahead of us. The first person reminiscence runs through the text, providing a structure for the exposition of factual detail-~the drive-in joint, the fender skirts, the dual exhausts. "A machine with dual exhausts sounded fast, and never mind raising the hood to verify whether the engine had been modified." The detail is explicit--sharp and sensory: "A Ford or Merc equipped with Porter mufflers sounded like a motorboat-~the soft blurb of exhaust exiting under water." The cars he remembers are described in extraordinary detail, and he does remember them, fender and header, down to the names of factory—original paint colors. This feat of memory is made all the more dramatic by the fact that these 'rods' were often built with parts from five or six cars. A slight self-irony in no way diminishes his love for the rods, and for the era: "I dropped to my knees before the front bumper as if in worship of the machine, to see whether the car had hydraulic brakes." Some of the cars he describes he saw only once, but his reflections on the past from the perspective of the present show he 130 loved them then, and he loves them still. He reports hunting down, in 1963, a car he'd admired in the early fifties. It wasn't for sale then, but when it was sold, in 1965, Drake found out where it was advertised, (The Oregonian), who bought it, and how much it sold for. He still wonders "who owned the 1934 Ford three window coupe that was frequently parked at the tire recapping shop at 93rd and Division." The precision with which he remembers and evokes the texture of this past is the most striking feature of _S_t_r_e_et, and as a Proustian exercise in memory, Street has a literary interest which goes beyond the factual information it presents. Between the time he wrote "The Chicken Which Became a Rat," and Street Was Fun in '51, Drake's use of the sensory detail he had stored in memory since he was a child (even then, "thinking like a writer," though he wrote nothing) had changed dramatically. "Chicken" used the landscape of Drake's youth mainly as a conven— ience. Though it mentions cars--the 19311 Terraplane "that sat with- out tires, graded by the A sticker on its windshield," the 1930 Hudson, "an immense, magnificent car, dark and square"--the story uses car details to give a sense of reality and facticity to the narra- tive. "I had not sense," he says, "of creating a [El past." While he was working on the novel One Summer, which arose from journal entries he began making in the early seventies and which was almost ten years in the writing, "something changed." I wanted more than verisimilitude, I wanted factual accuracy. I wanted to believe someone fifty years from now could follow the kid around in the summer of '48 the 131 way you could follow Leopold Bloom around Dublin in 1904. If the kid is listening to a radio program, and it's sup- posed to be during the week, after school, I wanted to make sure it was a program he could listen to on a Wednesday after school, instead of just saying "The Shadow." This change is his use of memory and historical detail seems to Drake to be the link between his fiction and non-fiction, at which an early "try" at Street was his first attempt. Currently, he sees both his fiction and non-fiction as "attempts to reconstruct the past"-- in the novel, to reconstruct a semi-factual and semi-imaginary past; in the non-fiction to evoke a completely full and accurate past and "to have in both cases a sense of fidelity to certain real things." Between the time he began Street and its completion, almost ten years later, he had written The Big Little GTO Book and when he wrote Street, he wanted to "talk about more than gear ratios." I wanted to write about the context in which the car moved, and what was so interesting about 1951, when there was less traffic and you could move more freely-- about the names of people, the street where a garage was, the image I first had of a guy kneeling on the floor straightening radiator fins. The mix of memoire and factual, often technical, information is particularly suited to his aims, extending the factual material metaphorically, and through the conversational style, inviting the reader to join him not only in the experience of the street scene, but also in the process of recreating a past from memory. Development Through Drafts Street Was Fun in '51 went through four distinct versions, in addition to an early 'start,‘ and an interim article Drake wrote for 132 Rod Action magazine from early draft material. The approximate length of each version is shown below, in chronological order of their writing. The first complete version combined text and notes. Number of Words Version Text lio_te§ (1) "Start" (ca 1973) 120 —- (2) "Early Rough" (Fall 1979) 2,500 3,000 (3) Article (Winter 1980) 3,800 -- (Ll) "Later Rough" (Winter 1982) 10,500 -- (5) "Rewrite" (Winter 1982) 18,900 (6) "Final" (Spring 1982) 214,000 In 1973, Drake made several "lousy starts" (his term) at what was then titled "Rodding in Portland, circa 1950." Of this 'start,‘ two one-page versions are extant. The first is three sentences with handwritten notes, and the second is a slightly longer rewrite of the first (Example 110). Though he had both memory and primary material--journals, hot rod memorabilia, photographs, even the roadster in which he is pictured on the cover of S_tree_t, all material he had collected over the years for their intrinsic interest rather than as potential sources for a book--he did not know "what to do with it." He could not decide who the audience would be, "people I knew when l was 16" who were interested in hot rods, but didn't read much, and who "were almost by definition not interested in 133 Example 40: RDDDING IN PORTLAND CIRCA 1950 In those days the roads were wider, uncongested, and every other\bar had been altered in some way to make it more interestlng. That's the trouble with nostalgia: the passing of timexplurs all edges and it's difficult to remember exactly\ ow things were. Perhaps the roads weren't wider, and‘ buck didn't stretch any farhter, but for a fifteen year 0 d kid obsessed with cars there was an awful lot of good at to admire. ' ; : eta—aae_the_—e . . , am, \ s2£=333333=£§§$=ever1 \ To stand on 82nd or cruise through Yaw:s Top-Notch drive in was to view automotive history: nosed and decked postwar mild customs were everywhere, Hollywood flipper hubcaps/ flashing, the roar of Smitty mufflers. '36 Fords with solid side-panels and cut-down spare tires were common. history: if they were, they'd be restorers" or "a popular culture or history professor." The problem was partially how to shape the material to a particular audience, but more crucially, whether there was anyone but himself who would want to read it. He set the material aside until the fall of 1979. 1311 In the interim, Drake lived in Michigan, where he taught. He wanted to be in Oregon, where he could be only in the summer. Still, he felt he could recreate Oregon and the year—-what he had not been able to do in 1973--if he could only "see it clearly enough." During the intervening years, he had collected more memorabilia, and begun to visit, interview and correspond with '50's hot rodders, not only in Oregon, but also in California where the hot rod had its origins. As he continued to collect the primary material, he had, more and more strongly, "the altruistic sense that it was important and should be saved." By the late '70's, many of the people who figured in the '50's hot-rod scene-~adults at the time Drake was still an adolescent--were getting older. Several had died, and Drake was afraid the material would be lost. In the fall of 1979, he began again, writing what he calls "early rough draft," seventeen pages of text and notes. He was not any clearer, at this point, about who the audience for the book might be, and was still unsure that anyone would read it, but he wanted to write it, and went ahead. The first sentence of this draft, "The first hot rod I remember seeing was in 19117 . . ." has a surety missing in earlier attempts, and establishes the memoire tone of the final version (Example lll). "Earlier Rough Draft" contains several "strands" of material, ten pages of double-spaced text, and seven pages of single-spaced notes, some of which is written out in sentences, but most of which 135 Example ill : \ / .- qd‘zll‘l; it" nor resume: roasts-AID. 1950 (I779 ' M pal . " 8" Walt”) “his / \ The first hot rod I remember seeing was ‘ in 1924?, down.- along Hardbor Drivetin Portlang lvle had stopped to make a left turn and tits roadster W/eominc, the other way made a right turn and went up the stre‘e’t ahead of us. I still have a mental w/ picture of the car, the two boys in it, as it slowed and than I was just getting interested in cars & sped off.“ asked my father what kind it was. He said that fir it was "all kinds"-- * the boys had built it thenselves./I was impressed, but a couple years passed before I became seriously interested in such care. By that: tumwafl something like a revolution Every had. occured in terms of styling and customizing ‘Detroit car had Mt outgrown m was essentially prr.-,(l‘ar m body a .apes and the new cars were longer, lower, sleeker. As a result, , an awful lot of people. who oaned older cars did what they ould to make than look more modern, or at least nicer. rt 7 1) 112': h md b 51: .r.- l' s : " %fm Ff; o r n m or ow ra mo p 0 19,9 car were high ":4 20‘ f and bon‘QTl—drapo), with sluggish acceleration,” plain interiors and a “ ‘ standard colors, usually W black, dark bluc, ,or grey. But, on the other hand, it: didngt take much to make them 3 pretty internsting: lowering blocki or long shackles at: the back, skirts, dual exhausts with chrome "echo cans", deluxe seat colors and a metallic paint Job would m -e people take notice at any .5..th A" stop light. / ”4‘0" 55' (M If you had a few bucks more to invest you could have a body shop fi'nose and deck“ your car--they removed the hood and trunk chrome, brazed in the holes, and installed an inside latch assembly so that the trunk could be opened, like the hood, from inside. (Some people never got around to installing the latch, and the trunk lid would fly up and down at every bump until the lead had fallen , ‘ / 1‘“ n 136 is in the form of phrases and lists: "names to mention," "car shows," "odd rods." At this point he wrote as much as he could remember and appended to it lists of what he needed to investigate further: "shifting," "car clubs," "shows," "wrecking yards." The pagination of the notes is mixed, and some pieces are repeated, indicating that he worked on various parts at different times and then put them together in new orders. Drake made at least four distinct 'passes' at the early draft, identifiable by different colors of ink. As he reread, he made notes suggesting points to be developed more fully, or additions of new material--"goofy," says a marginal note shown on page 1, "now we think of them as interesting," referring to the "drab pre-1949 cars" mentioned in the text. "Re emphasis," he wrote on a later page, "fix up new cars-—make old look new (topic sentence)?" He asked himself questions: "Did it have a dropped axle?" ('it' being his friend Gary's car) and answered them "Yes, put that there." Handwritten revisions to this version seldom changed wording, though as in all of Drake's work, he occasionally "improved" a sentence, often by deletion, as shown by the omission of "It seemed to me that" from the tenth line of the page shown in Example 41. Though he went over the text at least four times, only one of these readings has a clear function distinguishable from the others--as he wrote the next version, he went over the existing material as he incorporated it, marking it paragraph by paragraph: "used," "omit" or "later." As he developed the notes, he drew a line through each completed section. 137 "Earlier Rough" draft is complete in the sense that in it, Drake touched on all the major factual topics covered in the final version. Later drafts develop this information, rearrange it and add additional 'layers' of authorial reflection and emotion that 'make sense' of it. This version ends: Example ll2: ,rf <::é§2£Eof names at end :2) <23fi$0 ,,,J gmote Tom healey: "The Pacific "orthwsst has always had a r putation (3]: ”)3, for fine machines." in conver ation) c" 03 course they learned sone things from SO-Cal. "I came back to Portland in an A-VS, and they'd never seen one um there-~this was before the war. I remewbcr driving from downtown, over the Burnside Bridge, and sto pad in a cafe out on 82nd ard nalscy. When I came out there was this guy all over the car, he d followed me_clear across town, and he was looking it over to see how‘it was done. he wanted to fiflllfl put a V8 in his fiodcl A" (hedley, in conversation) During the winter of 1980, Drake developed the material marked "used," "omit" and "later" into an essay for Rod Action entitled "Street Scene: Portland Oregon," by picking extant pieces from the first version, and adding several new sections. The version between the first draft and the published article is not available, since it was sent to the publisher, but presumably it is very similar to the published version shown in Appendix E. Drake does notrecall that the editor made any major changes. As the title of the article suggests, it focuses on the "street" aspect of hot rodding, omitting information about car shows or racing and emphasizing, by an addition to the first draft, that "these cars were used for daily transportation." It develops the historical and geographical context in which hot rods became popular: 138 there were many old cars still on the road due to World War ll pro- duction curtailments, the Oregon climate was "kind to cars," and when the Korean War broke out, old cars were readily and cheaply available from draftees. The article opens in much the same way as the original version, with the addition of a sidebar added by the publisher. Example 143 The way things have been done in the world at hot rodding turned street rodding has changed since 1951—but not the fun. Here’s a look at the way it was. by Albert Drake The first hot rod I remember see- ing was iii 1947, along Harbor Drive. We had stopped to make. a left turn and a roadster coming the other way made a right turn and shot up the street ahead of us. I was just getting interested in cars. and I asked my father what kind of car it was. “All kinds," he said, as the low-slung car sped off, and he explained that the two boys had built it themselves. Like the final version, the factual information is structured by his own memories, and the narrative they provide. He goes on to describe his friend Gary's car, cars he saw on the street, and his desire for one of his own. 139 Example nu: Everyone seemed to be fixing up his car, but all I was doing was reading Hot Rod, day-dreaming, and leaning against the louvers of are trying to see what, if anything, had been changed. I had dreams of free-wheeling motion, where what- ever I was on or in moved effort- lessly like a bike coasting down a continuous hill, the wind blowing my jacket sleeves and hair back, making my eyes water. I had to get something with an engine and final- ly, after months of looking at car ads, I talked my father into letting me buy a ’29 Ford roadster that I had passed daily on my way to work at the Oregon Theater. The article ends: Example 45: _ It was warm, reliable, fun to drive. and got good gas mileage— which is why, thirty years later. I still have the darn thing! I The addition of the "dream of freewheeling motion" empha- sizes Drake's participation in the rod scene, and how romantic it seemed to him at the time-—features that will be discussed in more detail later. In combination, the two additions shown here have a structural function, giving the article a 'wish fulfillment' narrative frame: he saw a hot rod, he dreamed of one, he finally bought one and fixed it up, and he still has it to this day. After completing the article, Drake then laid the material aside, though he continued to gather information to answer the 1’40 questions he had raised, and continued to do interviews, which he transcribed. In the interval, he completed a proposal for a larger, coffee-table book on hot rodding's origins in California, and its development, which would incorporate his large collection of photo- graphs. This was the proposal that prompted Motorbooks to offer him a book contract for The Big Little GTO Book, which he also wrote in the interim. On January 2, 1982, with the galley proofs of The Big Little OTO Book still in hand, he began rewriting a second version of Street, picking up material directly from the first version and also from the Rod Action article, most of which appears word for word in the final version. Example 146: l_2i45(. ygmfi7L\ CL4NL£4’ NORTHWEST RODDING: STREET WAS FUN IN '51 ~w/ié/itz xxmww ma always had a reputationf fine machines. Tom ("Stoker McGurk”) Medley . in conversation. Columbus, Oh1o June a 1979 Hot rodding began in California. bt it found fertile ground in which to flourish in Oregon. Why this region?-—why not, say. Dubuque. Iowa or Orlando. Flordia. There is something about Oregon that has generated & sustained an interest in quality machinery. Perhaps it's the climate which allows a roadster to be driven the year-round. or the topographywhich/filth/Itar’iflrfflrlfllfifl/Mfl. Idfig/fld challenges a man to build a car that handles well. or the ~1Bfi3==$nct£hes—o£46§ggnéy space to be crossed. Perhaps it's the clear air.‘Whatever, we have always had den/flhd/ people who have been builders. interested in getting the most out of an engine; who have had a sense of aesthetics, who have been able to put together an interesting and pleasing machine. Perhaps it's that pioneer spirit// and that western sense of individuality etcr 141 He began by rewriting the material from the first version, developing it, and using many portions that had been revised for the article verbatim. This version adds an introduction, the eventual title of the book as a subtitle, and picks up as an epigraph the Medley quotation with which he ended the first version. Follow- ing the same general pattern as early writing of "Chicken” and The Big Little GTO Book, Drake expanded the text by addition, both of 'new' information and of more detail about extant topics. He read through the two interviews which he had transcribed, and incorporated information from them into the text, marking paragraphs "used" as he went. Two strands of text are clearly identifiable in this version. Much of the first strand, written on fourteen-inch paper, consists of information included in the Rod Action article, some almost verbatim. (This may be the original version of parts of the article but Drake could not recall exactly the order of events.) The second strand, written on eleven inch newsprint, was obviously written later and "shuffled in." It includes pieces on Portland car clubs, street racing (and the related 'speed shifting'), and short section which descibes the distinctive sounds of the various mufflers available, and a short description of the early drag races. Both strands are comprised both of notes and completed text, though the second adds more new information in comparison to the 'early rough draft..' He ended the draft with a compressed version of what became the book's eventual conclusion: nou- . a.- ....3.. . . MN" 142 Example 147: End w/ speeds went up. the cars went faster and faster. m ‘ . ' . I' I u -1 One wonders. where are all those cars new? 'I still have my 29 roadster. 30 years later. Glenn Kokko saw his '28 roadster just #-5 years ago at a car show. unchanged except fer an OHV engines. it was for sale. and that he didn' t buy it is ”one of my great regrets now”. Wes Strohecker saw his old 27 T a few years ago. and rumor has , it the car is in Spokane or Tacoma. (Other examples?) But I' d love to see some of those cars again: Mid-Barbour' s 35 pheaton. Wayne Mahaffey' s 35 pheaton. the '28 roadster with the race car nose that Tom Story built. the Story Special. etc. . etc. . ad infinitum. Those cars were so beautiful. such stunning examples of Northwest craftsmanship it seems impossible that they would be destroyed; one wants to believe that they are. like rare wines. aging in a secure place. ready to be brought out should the occasion arise. - 4 And the peeple--cite some who are still at it--ex. of NW craftsmen. In March, he began writing a complete draft, "rewrite." Before the actual writing, he made a list of thing he needed to do Example ll8: NOBTHWEST RODDING BOOK .Finish transcribing tapes: ‘//r -—w~xew1ane~ .__xakka_. -&treheeker—- ,.—&eugET‘TZfld‘Une) r'fiakr-an—OUEENE—- s_warrs A POMPLETE eaArT--w/’ Go back & plug in any useful info REWRITE. typing single-spaced to see how long it'll be Make a few more quick calls. re quotes REWRITE/TYPE final draft TAKE TO PRINTER t my photos 1) selected 2) screened Get other photos?? Krueger? Strohecker? 143 and crossed them off as he accomplished them. Since he intended to publish the book himself, he included related activities such as having his photographs screened. At the same time he wrote an outline, rearranging some parts of 'later rough draft.' He then finished transcribing the tapes, which yielded over sixty pages of interview material (see Example l19). He then began rewriting, starting with the introduction, continuing to expand, and changing the order of events. Pieces added here continue to develop existing information, heighten the 'mythic quality' of the era, introduce authorial comment, and heighten sensory detail--a "Y-pipe" which in the earlier version "sounded like a wet rag" not "sounded like a wet rag dragged across the pavement." He then made handwritten alterations to "rewrite," continuing to add notes suggesting further development but giving more atten- tion than in earlier drafts to additions, deletions and substitutions on the word and phrase level which did not affect meaning. Both in the "rewrite" and in alterations to it, he made decisions about format, indicating where the list of "odd rods" and various photo- graphs should be inserted, and where white space should be left between sections. This white space was important in the final version because it served to make transitions between sections that did not have a logical relationship between them, but were contiguous in the text. Each day as he began work, he read over what he had completed so far . Example 49: ) /- __,,~—— 144 message? RODDINS: OUTLINE ———— , Medley's epigraph OPEN w/ direct statement developing that: re region Then: re. altho many wd diSpute this claim. awning a good street roadster made sense. Fun. econom' and people looked at th .. Speed. or at least performance. also made sense. You cd drive 75 mph legally. and someplaces. esp eastern Ore. people had been known to drive 100 11 (re gas, upkeep). parts were abundant. (even if it didn't make sense. there were lots of them} Describe context: open highways. etc. Describe a ”typical" rod Describe ”how plentiful'--re Gary‘s 32 coupe Hubcaps Exhaust systems Car clubs (re my joining Road Angels) Drag Races--Eugene Scappose Street racing The Law ./ Odd rods: v/I' list some Car shows (Track Roadsters) (List some quotes from diff. people?) Hid: Stock vs rod/custom-- L."'/ 4 14‘ _ _pg// ’4 " )JH‘ 1:3"! U"L Where are those cars--cite where some are: question re others?? The people: cite some who are still building--carrying the tradition. Unsafe Illegil equipt Dual exhausts ..y‘ The law i stealing hubcaps Clubs, to off-set this bad image Club activities Drag racing (& track roadsters) Daily tran2portation 1145 As is evident from the comparative word count and the descriptions of the drafts' development, the major proportion of revisions to the text, throughout, were additions. These were developed both from marginal notes, and in retyping, and virtually all sections of the text expanded as Drake added detail. The development of a section about the first car show in Portland illustrates. On page 5 of "earlier rough draft," Drake wrote: Example 50: Ricqt 12L one-~l9im Azmd;;\\\ fates? let: I went 7/ ”ad In a later page of notes attached to the same material, he expanded the description of the show to about 175 words. Example 51: /7 First hot 768 shoa'ia>£§:tland w?sfl1950 at Kat Guard Armory of ',- r ; 10th and Dav13.w1List act/cars m The first hot rod 3 ow in Portland was held in January 1951 in the National Guard ry at 10th and Davis. The effect of \ walking {fl from a street 1 ere one saw drab, everyday cars into , the armory, where no rods an customs were gathered, was terrific. ' One fififlfli f/flflfl might see 1 o 2 rods together on the street, or rerhaps in a drive-in, bflf/ f or a bunch of go machines at the drags, but to see no really 3 ick rods together-~wild P I Included at the show: \\ ' l Mid Barbur's chapped 35 ord phaeton (desc--photo) Wayne Mahaffety's choppe 35 Ford phaeton from balem (desc) A chopped & radically low ed black no hero custom--perhaps / from Calif. // Bo Nabb's chopped and channe ed 32 3 window. Purple. Chrome enpine and front end. Tinf 1 over the windows because it ' V):"Coupes go fast too lacked upholstery. Sign (Med Ton Story's Special (dcsc--photo U One car I esp liked was a 27 T uh- h rosegbled an “O sfertg car--cvclo fenders-~chnrtruese a d black fenders-:sulciuc front and. Pontiac straight 8 en ine, w/ buboln ior carb. Long chrome outside exhaustsx\ rovc it all tn: time (Mi “V 146 In the next version, "later rough draft," the description of the car show is expanded to almost 650 words. Here, Drake describes the cars in the order in which they appeared in the show, having done research on the interim about the show and the cars and the people who owned them, both of which he describes in detail. In the center of the show was a "black shopped '40 Mercury convertible-—a real, sneaky So-Cal looking job which I never saw again." Next to it was a car which Drake identified with a phrase in the previous draft. Example 52: Beside it was Mid Barbour's '35 Ford phaeton. which was around Portland for years but which I saw only at that show. But one glimpse was enought--I've never gorgotten it. Black/ lacqueur. a chopped and padded white top. De Soto bumpers. skirts. white walls. Hollywood hubcaps. a LaSalle type grille--everything moulded into a sleek machine. I had forgotten about the dashboard until Don Krueger reminded me:” She had Stewart-Warner instruments from one side of the dashboard to the other. probably 14. She had dual oil gaugues. pil temperature--this was way before people thought of putting them in. It even had air speed gauges on it off an airplane. came out by the windshield. little chrome tubes pointed forward. and these ran the air speed gaugues in the dashbaord." It also must have been one of the older customs in Oregon. because Don remembers seeing it as early as 1942 at the boat races at Dee Lake. He also remembers Mid Barbour as a real builder: ”She was a good gal. and mechanically. she was a lot smarter than a lot of men." She was a member of the Pacers. and Wes Strohecker remembers she ”was a fantastic mechanic. and got her start in ourboard racing. [She lived in a house where the park is on the Willamette River now. behind the Huntington Rubber Mills. She was big on inboard-outboard racingiland she knew Crosley engines inside and out. She was a super mechanic.... Shekreally\knew her stuff." 1’47 His incorporation of increasingly precise detail, and of interview material, is typical of the development of the entire book. The next version, "rewrite," expanded the description of the show to almost 800 words, and the final version to 1200. The final version, shown in Appendix E, illustrates the amount and type of detail Drake incorporates through revision. Note that in the interim he identified the So-Cal Mercury, and described it in greater detail. The 'rewrite' version reads: Example 53: In the center. like peacocks preening. were four cars that would be the teens of attention at any show or rod run today. There was a black. chopped 'bo Iercury convertible. with hood and trunk chrome removed. the fenders molded to the body. and the bumpers only inches from the ground. It was the epitome of what we think of as a '50s custom.bu¥ears~1atan I learned that it had been built in California. it had been owned by Bob Davenport of Portland. and was probably parked at his house near 82nd and Glisan the evening I discovered the hot 'rod underground. The other major revision involved rearranging material, and this was frequently done in combination with additions. Drake moved large pieces of text from position to position, generally making them longer--more detailed and explicit--at the same time. As will be discussed in greater detail, there was no clear "pattern" which dictated where new material should be inserted, unlike the chrono- logical chapters in The GTO Book, or the war events in "Chicken." 148 The general pattern of rearrangements is shown by a passage about Tom Story, originally included in the section about car shows, where his car is next to Mid Barbour's. Drake admired Story enormously, and he had recently died. On page 24 of the rewrite, Drake made a note in the margin to himself, suggesting he discuss another car Story had built. Example 54: Parked beside her car was the Story Special . built by the late Tom Story, another guy who really knew his stuff. Story, who was responsible for the metal work on many of Portland's most outstanding (WV. roadster. fid/fifllz’t/flflfl/tfi was a body and fender man at hum t WM #4:.”"0" Lincoln-Mercury. and he had W built this car from a ombination of “ reworked stock parts and custom-formed sheet metal. In the final version, he inserted on page 30 a description of another car Story built, and added a paragraph describing his admiration for Tom Story, whom he'd never met: "a grown man, spending his time building, with enthusiasm and skill, the kind of cars I dreamed of building." This passage is shown in Appendix E and the reasons for the shift in position in terms of features established in the text are discussed in greater detail in the next section. When he had completed the 'rewrite'-~63 pages of text, he retyped from the beginning, making mainly surface changes but continuing to develop the text to 83 pages, and making a few rearrangements. He then read over, editing for correctness and 1’49 inserting parts of pages where he needed to develop further. He put the material into a binder and sent it to the typesetter in April of 1982. The book came out in early summer under his own imprint, Flat Out Press. Controlligg Choices Drake says that if he had written Street Was Fun in 1973, it would have been a very different book, and he is happy that he waited. if he had completed the book at that time, he feels, he would have written only about what he remembered, rather than including research and interview material that he thinks makes the book stronger. As is obvious from the revisions discussed, the research provided him with an enormous amount of sharp and pre- cise detail. He suspects that historical distance was also important in shaping the book: "Maybe the eighties had to occur for the fifties to become interesting." Despite the shift from what might have been, simply, 'I remember when,‘ to a detailed history of the era, the memoire aspect of 33191 is extremely important in the book, and the first sentence he wrote in the fall of 1979 (early rough draft) is a crucial choice in establishing the book's development (Example ill). "The first hot red I remember seeing was in 1947, along Harbour Drive." Drake says that this was a formative event for him in that the 'idea' of a hot rod gave him a sense of the possi- bilities of making, a sense he feels is at least partly responsible for him becoming a writer. "In a way, writing Street was a substitute 150 for building a car." This first sentence was equally formative in the development of the book. It (1) sets the conversational tone of the book, (2) establishes the persona--very close to, if not identical with Drake's person, and (3) provides a narrative frame which structurally orders the historical detail. Drake does not carry through many of the implications of this sentence in the early version, but much revision that follows adjusts and develops the text in ways suggested by it. Though Drake had a memoire in mind in the "lousy start," a comparison of the language he uses here (Example £10) with the first page of the earlier rough draft (Example 41) shows the inter-relationship of tone, diction and persona, and of persona and address, all suggested by the initial sentence quoted above. The 'try' gives little sense of a speaker, or of someone spoken to--Drake describes himself in the third person: "a fifteen year old kid obsessed with cars," never using "I." This sense of depersonalization continues in the later sentence: "To stand on 82nd or cruise through Yaw's Top—Notch Drive In was to view automotive history." This sentence makes a general claim about what can be seen from 82nd Street without giving a sense of $9 is standing and seeing, or to whom what is seen is being described. By comparison, the first paragraph of early rough draft uses the "l" persona in the first sentence five more times, as well as "we" to identify Drake and his father. At the beginning of the last paragraph, he says, "If you had a few bucks to invest . . . ." This suggests both that someone--a clearly identifiable persona--is 151 telling a tale or recounting events to an identifiable reader-—someone who is presumably sufficiently interested in rods to "have a body shop 'nose and deck'" his car, in the event he gi_d_ have "a few bucks to invest." The inclusion of personal detail in the established narrative also adds a sense of trustworthiness missing in the first version. Drake says that in writing M, he often wondered if people would believe him, as, for instance, when he said he saw "hundreds" of modified cars on his way to a high school Jamboree, and he often added more detail and direct quotations from others who remembered the same things to give a sense of veracity. However, because of the persona established in early rough draft, the reader is inclined to believe him, whereas there seems no good reason to believe in the accuracy or veracity of the statement "To stand on 82nd . . . was to view automotive history," since it carries no sense of anyone--let alone someone trustworthy--speaking. These related features establish both the tone of what Drake adds to the text, and surface revisions he makes to what is already written. For instance, in the second version of the description of the first car show in Portland, he writes, "The effect of walking in from the street where one saw drab, everyday cars . . . was terrific." In the next version, he alters this by making it personal—- "When I entered the show arena, I felt my knees get weak." When, in early versions, he used the vague "one," he frequently later changes it either to "I" (when he is recounting something he actually experienced) or "you" (when he uses a speculative, 152 conditional construction: 'if you . . .'). This makes the meaning clearer, and reinforces the persona and his relationship to the reader. The first sentence also has a crucial structural function in that it establishes a narrative frame for 21%. As is evident, the major revisions made to draft material are additions and rearrange- ments, and the narrative provided by his own memories provides a way of organizing otherwise disconnected material. Again, the meta- phoric relationship Drake sees between writing M and building a car is apt: his own experiences provide a 'frame' on which new parts can be installed. This function was discussed in terms of the 'wish fulfillment' structure of the Red Action article, and works through the whole text in similar, but perhaps more dramatic ways. Unlike the raw material for The Big Little GTO look, which had a certain intrinsic order implicit in the model year changes, the material used in Street has no intrinsic order. The only common feature of the information itself is the subject--street rods. It was obvious to Drake that certain pieces "went together'--car shows with car shows, and mufflers with mufflers--but there is no obvious or logical order in the information itself which suggested how these sections should be related to one another. in terms of his own experience, Drake was dealing with a relatively short period of time--a summer when he became aware of and was involved in hot rodding, a crucial period in his education. (This will be discussed in more detail later.) In terms of the 'scene' 153 itself, he wanted to describe as much as possible what it was like, "to name names." Many of the cars and events he includes have their own histories, which went into the past and extended into the present, but at the time, he was experiencing them simultaneously. The literary problem of how simultaneous events--particularly as they affect the flow of perceptions and motion of mind--has been one of the main 'problems' of twentieth century literature, with Joyce's Ulysses as an example of an attack upon it. Drake, here, was not concerned with presenting a sense of simultaneity (though he was in his novel Beyond the Pavement), but he was faced with the practical problem of how one orders events going on at the same time, in prose, which is linear in the respect that one thing must follow another. In a note to himself at the top of a list of cars he wanted to mention, Drake wrote "Desc. each car m." Some of the cars he describes, he saw frequently, others, once. How would these various descriptions be tied together in some readable order? The narrative line established by the first sentence provided a method of organization, and a framework for further development. The section of the book shown in Appendix E illustrates. The material is not related by some intrinsic or logical order, but pro- cedes by association, in the very roughly chronological order of Drake's perceptions. The only connection between the hot rods and people mentioned in Street is Drake's perception of them, and because of this, the pieces seem to "follow" beautifully, though they are con- nected only by association. An instance is provided by a section 154 that begins with a trip Drake made to the movies, with a friend, to see the film Hot Red (in early versions, he does not use the name of the film, but adds it later), shown at the Granada Theatre. Watching the film, about peeple working on hot rods, makes him yearn to participate. "Months later," the text goes on, "I learned that the area around the Granada Theatre was a hot bed of car building activi— ties . . . ." He then describes how one evening, a friend's father drove them to the area, where he saw Don Kruger "kneeling, straightening radiator pins" at the Montavilla Garage. The text then quotes Kruger, using material from an interview Drake did with him in 1978, describing how, in the early fifties, you could "get into" hot rodding "on a working man's salary." From here, the text describes other garages in the area in physical order, mentioning the cars associated with them. "Two blocks away was the Chevron station owned by Bob Newcomb, where Larry Eave was building his radical roadster." "Three blocks west" "Willy Wagner was finishing his super-low '29 A-V8." Both of these cars are described in detail, and Eave's drag racing career is discussed. The section ends with a description of another car which he "later learned" was "a few blocks down Glisan." "It's just as well I didn't see the coupe that night," he adds, bringing the scene around to its beginning. Another instance appears on the bottom of what, in the book, is page 26, Drake describes the first day of spring--"l mean the first real day of spring, after weeks of rain and grey skies." He 155 was riding a bus, and jumped off to see a "radical coupe" parked in a Dairy Queen. The text describes the coupe in detail, and then adds, "the possibility of seeing cars like that, even once, supplied a kind of adrenalin to my life." He then describes another car, one he saw at a different time, which also "supplied adrenalin"--a track roadster originally built by Tom Story, one of the craftsmen whose work Drake admired, but whom he had never met. Picking up on Story, the text then describes two other cars he built, including a roadster Drake had heard about but never seen, and whose last owner "drove it into the rear of a garbage truck." Next, Drake includes a paragraph in praise of Story's workmanship: "I never met him, but I wish I had--a grown man spending his time building, with enthusiasm and skill, the kind of cars I dreamed of building." The reordering of the piece about Story, as shown in Example 54 and picked up from a description of another car Story built that was in the car show, illustrates how the patterns he established provide organizational principles. To have included everything he eventually discovered that he wanted to say about Story in the car show section would have taken the emphasis off the cars, and 'over-balanced' this part of the text: the main cars are described in approximately the same detail. By moving the material up in the text, he introduced information about Story in a place where he was already mentioned, a place where it fits quite easily and naturally into the text. 156 There are many similar instances. His description of failing brakes on his '37 coupe leads into a discussion of dangerous flaws in hot rods, his search for roadster parts to a description of wrecking yards and parts stores. Drake's use of these patterns as he revised demonstrates the extreme importance of the features established by the first sentence, and the interrelationship of the changes in order of events, the addition of new information, and development of what is already in the text. However, though the structure established by the narrative line provides a basis for ordering description, the reverse is also true, particularly in later versions, and the relationship between additions and orderings, and between descriptions and narration is complex. In the Red Action article, Drake moves from a description of "after-market accessories" to costs of modifying cars--"Fords from 1932 to 1936 were abundant, inexpensive." In the final version, approximately four pages which describe two major modifications crucial to any red are inserted between these two sections of text. These pages describe hub caps and dual exhausts. In 'later rough draft,‘ these descriptions are included in a section which describes illegal street racing: "Hot rodders did not enjoy an especially good reputation with the law." Hub caps are introduced by the "rumor" that hot-rodders went "hub-capping." This leads into a description of various hub caps. The next para- graph, loosely associated with illegal activity, begins with the state- ment that hot rods "also make a lot of noise." The noise was due to the exhaust systems. "Everyone knew that before anything, you 157 had to have dual exhausts." This piece, expanded from approxi- mately 100 words in 'early rough draft,I is about 250 words and describes various exhaust systems and their respective sounds. In 'rewrite,‘ this material is inserted very near the front, in the place noted in the outline shown in Example 49 and expanded to about 600 words by the addition of more description and addi- tional detail. In the final version this is expanded further. The last additions continue to add detail, but also add several anecdotes that pick up on Drake's personal experience. In 'rewrite' he says that the only 'unacceptable' dual exhaust set up was the "imitation dual pipe," a cosmetic version with no real function "found on the cars of nerds . . . who drove Plymouths or Nashes.’I "The nerd was finally exposed on a cold morning when everyone could s_e_g the exhaust was coming from one side only." In the final version "nerds" are also described as using chrome extensions that were too long. "A guy I knew named Gary, who could have been the model for the Fonz, was offended by this unstylish and ostentatious display, and liked to mete out his idea of justice by jumping on the protruding extensions." When Drake writes of Chevy "MoPars," he adds to this version a memory of a ride in a car that had them, and another memory of working at Costanzo Automotive. The major point to be made here is that the basic structure created a context which established certain features of order and tended to "capture" other ideas and memories, not only those that 158 have already been developed, but also that are still in mind. In the outline, Drake notes "car clubs--£e_2 my joining the road angels." This context not only suggests m such information should be included, but also serves to stimulate memory by providing a focus of attention that directs perception. Drake said that while he was writing Str_ee_t he would often think of revisions while driving, or in a meeting, and when he went home, he would add them. Often these later additions would be part of the memoire strand of the text, so that, in a general way, narrative ordered description, which in turn ordered and suggested further narrative. Other Reasons for and Results of Revision Three other elements evident in the revision of Street are of particular interest. The first is the adoption of what Drake calls the "serviceable sentence" and its effect on the revision process, and second, closely related to the previous discussion, is the emergence of authorial comment as the last 'layer' of revision, which functions to make Street a reflection on the functions of memory. Third is the effect of format decisions. Drake says that in Street he used a "plain style." The plain style came out of journal entries; entries perhaps written in fragments, not attempts to be lyrical or poetic. When I copied them, the style transferred from the journal to the page. I originally used this style in One Summer because it seemed appropriate for a thirteen year old. He didn't go around talking in some elevated, compressed, Faulknerian dialogue. The language isn't the kind I used before--it's not imagistic. I'm not sure I like it stylistically, but it's serviceable. 159 He evolved this style before he began writing non-fiction, but when he did, he found it very suitable. It was "straight-forward and got the necessary information across." As is evident in Street and in The Big Little GTO Book, Drake's style remains physical and vigorous, with active, explicit verbs, and colorful description. The major difference between it, and the earlier, more imagistic style in terms of revision is that when he uses the plain style, a "step" is removed from the revision process-~the tightening of the verbal surface, most often by deletion. "With a plain style, I don't have to revise as much." This 'missing step' is evident in the word count charts for the three pieces--while "Chicken" is cut back near the end of the writing, §_t_r_e_et and 9311 continue to expand. The function of format decisions is particularly interesting in M because of the loose, associative structure. These decisions were made in the penultimate revision "rewrite" and further in the final and handwritten revisions to it. Since the narrative or memoire strand is not continuous, the various sections do not flow together in a natural way, and without the white space between sections, the sections would have seemed oddly discontinuous when butted together. 160 Example 55: Tom Medley had an early A-V8, and when he returned to Port. land from California shortly before WW II, he found that the car aroused great interest. They'd never seen one (an A-V8) up here . . . I remember driving from downtown, over the Burnside Bridge, and I stopped at a cafe out on 82nd and Halsey. When I came out there was this guy all over the car, crawling underneath it; he’d followed me clear across town, and he wu looking it over to see how it was done. He wanted to put a va in his Model A. My father and I stopped at a used car lot on 8.15. Grand near the Ross Island Bridge to look at a l930 Model A roadster. It was a real Uncle Daniel, completely stock except for sixteen inch wheels, a ’32 grill, 3 down draft carburetor, and a finned aluminum side plate on the stock Model A engine. The man on duty came out and leaned on the cowl, chewing a cigar stub. He was impressed with this “up- dated" A-bone. “Isn’t it something the way guys rejuvenate them?” he said. “Had one in here last month with a V8-60 motor in it." “Yeah," my father said, “the kid ’s got one with a hundred horse V-8." The man opened his month, then shoved the cigar in the open- ing and, in astonishment or disbelief, without a word walked back to the shack that was his office. With the advent of car shows and drag racing, hot rods became more visible and that prompted others to build rods. But there was always the problem of finding certain parts, especially used speed As is evident, this material would have been rather difficult for the reader to follow if the text were continuous. Here it creates a 'leap' that signals transition, making the juxtaposition of these pieces seem quite reasonable. The most interesting feature of the revisions Drake made to S_t_r_e_et from a literary point of view is the emergence of authorial comment, and what it suggests about the effects of writing and revising on memory and perception. Despite the importance of the first sentence of the early rough draft, the remainder of the draft material itself is mainly straight information about the cars and the 161 era, with small amounts of narration and almost no reflection on the description. The period about which Street was written was very impor— tant to Drake, in memory, and he says: "I wanted to do something to convince M, if not some other reader, how important it was-— to capture the mystery of the moment." On page 3 of the early rough draft, Drake describes shoving his face "against the louvers in the side panels" of a model A "to see if I could make out the shadowy configuration of a V-8 engine." To the next (article) version, he adds to this section: Example 56: Everything was new to me, and I savored the thrill of recogni- tion when I could identify any al- terations. I loved the smell of lea- ther and oil blowby in the cockpit, the curve of a ’32 grille shell, and the shape of a Stromberg carburetor. I sought out these configurations un. til I truly believed that, at one time. I knew, at least by sight, every hot rod in Portland. Why did he make this addition, I asked him, and what suggested it? "Probably," he says, "'shoved my face against the louvers.' I remembered it so clearly.‘I There was a mystical quality . . . l was being educated to rework cars, and I had to be able to see what was new and what was original. I just loved to look at cars to see whether anything had been changed. There was no point in looking at a stock engine. I had to be able to recognize the things that were different--that had been changed-- and name them. 162 This period of "education" covered only a short period of time. "The newness only lasted a few months. Once I was able to identify and name the modifications, it was still interesting, but the newness was gone." It seemed terribly important to him to capture the sense of "how it was," both in a personal way, and because the fifties represented for him the midpoint of the twentieth century, a time when he feels American life in general began to change radically. The addition of the passage above introduces reflection, not only on the era, but on Drake's younger self, seen from the per- spective of a man approaching fifty. It implies a contrast between both the present and the past, and between his younger and present selves: a present self who presumably does not find everything "new," and adds a sense of yearning for a focus which would engage his attention in the way hot rods did when he was fifteen. While the revisions to earlier versions develop, organize and express factual information, the later additions stress the memoire strand, and add to the layer of authorial reflection. This reflection heightens the romanticism of the era, establishes a then/now contrast, and reflects on the functions and processes of memory. It repre- sents a culmination of Drake's original vision, and his need to explain and understand what was so important to him about this period in history and in his life. Drake says: Even when I think I know what I'm going to say with some completeness, it seems to me that what gets written is very different. I admire mechanics who are very careful about the work they do--very precise. I would like to be that way. I write until I've gone through at least three drafts, at least, and I can see it and make it precise. 163 Like emotion in his fiction, reflection--the "upshot" of what he writes--is the last thing to appear in the writing. Drake is not entirely comfortable about what he feels to be a lack of precision and foresight. I guess I'm confessing to limitations--an inarticulate quality, a kind of blindness--in my character that carries over into the writing. If I could just see things more clearly, I wouldn't have to go through three drafts. The drafts are a process to get to what I want to say. The way in which reflection emerges from the existing text is illustrated by an alteration Drake made to the introduction of the rewrite version, which was nearly complete. Example 57: __...-O been known to exceed the century mark; Horsepower felt good.‘i~t~ ! upended—good. and a hopped-up car was rual to drive] long before ;W to. Detroit got into the horsepower race hotffixifirs were easily ’9’.. doubling the W masher bf horses that a stock engine could genera I In those days. when there were far fewer people in Oregon. \ far fewer laws and regulations. when gas was dirt cheap, when driving was a pleasure. “ if you owned a perlq roadster you could polish up the chrome, point the grill dovm an empty highway. (inch-39H I 164 The development of this marginal note into the version shown in Example 38 not only contrasts the past with the present from the reader's point of view-~one of its functions, since it occurred to Drake that younger readers might not have a historical sense of the era, but also helps Drake explain to himself why he misses the past so, and what events seem to him representative of the changes in America since the middle of the century. In the first version, the "lousy start," Drake says: "That's the trouble with nostalgia: the passing of time blurs all edges and it's difficult to remember exactly how things were." The function of §t_re_et, for Drake, was to 'unblur' these edges. In this first, early paragraph, he presented himself with a kind of puzzle, a tangle to be unwound, a need for understanding he attempted to attain in writing the book. On page 13 of the final version, Drake says, "I sometimes question my memory and have to ask myself if I'm viewing the past accurately. But others were aware of the abundance of modified machines." This sentence describes how he used the writing of St_ree_t as a means of recovering memory, expanding it and checking it against others' perceptions. The confidence and sense of detailed accuracy in the voice of the final version is very different from the tentative, insecure voice in the "lousy starts" and this difference arose from his work with the material itself. The edges grow less and less blurred, and he can speak with increasing confidence of a time when "everyone was young, and no one died." CHAPTER IV LEE UPTON Lee Upton was born in Maple Rapids, Michigan, in 1953. From the age of eighteen she worked as a paid free-lance journalist for newspapers, and little magazines. She continued this work during and after her undergraduate study at Michigan State University where she was awarded a B.A. in journalism. As an undergraduate, Upton began writing poetry. At the time, she says "I didn't think of writing poems for publication, really, at least not publication outside of college papers and the like. That seemed vain and hopeless. But I knew thé‘n that the work itself was indispensable for me." In the late seventies, she began to publish her work nationally, and in 1979, was awarded a fellowship to the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she completed her degree in 1981. Also in 1981 she traveled to Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines, with her husband, Richard Buttny. In Asia she worked as a lecturer for The University of Maryland's Asian Division. She now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. Upton has published poems widely, and has two chapbooks, "Beer Garden" and "Small Locks." You Are Not a Child was selected 165 166 for publication in a national manuscript competition by the University of Alabama Press, and is forthcoming. She has been awarded many prizes for her work, including awards from the National Academy of Poets (University of Massachusetts), "The Red Cedar Review" (Michigan State University), a National Author's Award, and others. Upton no longer writes for newspapers, but does reviews and has recently begun writing fiction. I became interested in writing fiction last year as an extension of writing poetry. Perhaps I missed writing for a newspaper and longed to try my hand at a form of writing that elaborated more explicitly than poetry. As a writer, Upton sees herself as "near theory—less." I respond to a piece intuitively. . . . Overall the poems and fiction don't arise much from any pre-arranged idea or plan. I'm often attracted to the weather of a piece-- the atmosphere it promises. I hope to arrive at some form of knowledge via that atmospheric change . . While revising, I work to clarify whatever truth I can find in it. Writing and revising are, in a sense, tools that help me to achieve some sort of understanding. The pieces of Upton's work studied are shown on the chart on the following page. Poetry Since Upton's poems have many similar features and are based in the same general aesthetic, they will be discussed in one section. Though she does not work from a theoretical position, there are definite features she works to develop in her poems, and these features have changed over the years. When I was 21 to 23, I wrote a sensual sort of poem--one that primarily worked to focus on one to three visual images. Later I would try for a more clipped, odd-ball, circum— scribed sort of poem--one that worked on the level of 167 m 2: 3 832m cocci ..8_.ts< s 9.862.. a $22.. 8; 2 seed .amaocfimm of... a 3:5 2; 2 58a .3563“. 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More recently the poems have taken on more formal qualities; they have a bitten-off atmosphere that I like, are more overtly philosophical, move by indirec- tion, seem a little more assured. She feels that though she has studied with many fine teachers, the deepest influence on her poetry comes from her childhood and her family--"their rural, lilting Midwestern voices (not flat at all)." Though she enjoys all forms of writing, she says: I feel most comfortable and most challenged by poems. I feel as if I'm trying to rope a calf--it fights back, but I know the calf a little. Perhaps I use the comparison because I work a great deal with the line--seeing how it tugs, letting it run slack and then tightening up a bit. Upton works by what she calls the "touch and see" method. "Every poem suggests its own set of rules." Similarly, each poem arises from a unique set of circum— stances: "Driving Under a Full Moon" arose from "a sensation" Lee had: "I was sure someone was running up behind me. I turned quickly; it was only the full moon." Some poems--"The Tilting Floor," "The Bathhouse," "The Foreigner" and "The Unhappiness"-- are suggested by paintings or prints. "The Tail of Robert E. Lee's Horse" was stimulated by lines she wrote in a letter, and a story she'd heard about a man throwing a telephone into the street. She says she wrote "Mud Dog" "in response to a dream and my nephew." In comparison to other writing she has done, particularly journalism, "my writing and revising of poetry are more influenced by my immediate environment--the mums and Shoelaces and the chair." 169 Nevertheless, she tries to write from "active imagination," rather than simply from memory. This distinction is extremely important to her, but difficult to explain: "the toughest question of all." She For The actual facts of an event that arouses emotion seldom evoke the 'truth' of that experience. Memory seems pale and timid compared to the power of imagining, even though memory should be given its due, since it supplies the seminal material for imagining. But simple facts haven't taken on proper power--we need to invent in order to make the 'real'--the emotionally and experientially truth- ful. Maybe my inate Puritanism has something to do with it; memory-~just relying on what mother and father did-- doesn't require enough effort. Do you remember Jack Web on Dragnet? "Just stick to the facts, Ma'am." I couldn't abide it. says further: One needs all of one's power for any sort of poem, and relying on memory alone means we're not using all our powers. It doesn't allow us enough freedom. It doesn't allow us to surprise ourselves. To transform memory by imagining, Iby dreaming while awake a vivid dream, is to move further. To make poems, it seems that transforma— tion is essential. her, this active imagination is an important part of the revision process, which involves seeing and exploring what the early draft of a poem suggests. She begins poems, generally, with scrawled, unpunctuated rough drafts, which she then types. She alters these by hand, making "a lot of alternatives surface." Then she "cuts them away." (this process will be demonstrated in more detail in discussion of specific poems.) Then she retypes: "so I can see what's happening." 170 I am conscious of working to sharpen the images-—to clarify. I like the feeling of 'randomness' in a poem; I like an air of freedom in each piece. Often I want the piece to seem as if it might veer from control. The images are linked, but perhaps not on an explicit level . This "randomness" is balanced by "tension" that develops as she writes. I like a certain amount of resistance in the material. I'm fond of surprise and chance, the odd, the quirky-~at least two tensions present. I'm fond of the tangential, a certain amount of getting off the track. Frequently I fight the tendency to circle back on an earlier image in the poem, since it's possible to deflate the work that way, to find the easy way out. I like unresolved endings. I'm fond of the one-man-band approach--the poems clashing and clanking away, cymbals on the knees . Though each poem has its individual pattern of development, and, as Upton says, "suggests its own methods of working," Upton first establishes general content and structure. Then she begins to work more closely with line breaks, and sometimes, stanzas. For me, poetry involves a certain 'spring action' at the heart of which is the line. The line is important in terms of emphasis, surprise, as a unit of vitality, as a mark for the barest split second of silence. It's musical. When she works with the line, she likes "turning the poem around a bit, exploring it." Once I start deciding more firmly on line lengths and stanza breaks, the whole poem is apt to undergo a revolu- tion. I often 'rethink' the poem again. I prefer the scrawled, marked-over version, dense with ink, to some of the not-quite-final drafts. Sometimes I'm a little hesitant about typing the copy again, cleaning it up. I have a feeling it will all collapse, seem insubstantial, tinny, calculated, straining for orginality. I'm happiest when the poem is just beginning to gel. All poems Upton wrote which were examined here went through at least four drafts, and frequently more; all are a page or 171 less in length. Though none have a 'named' form, the majority are broken into stanzas. The three poems considered here represent a variety of those examined in terms of subject, form and method of construction. Final versions are shown first to provide a context for discussion of the finished work. "T he Foreigne r" Upton's poem "The Foreigner" (Example 58) is 'spoken' by a woman in a strange land, as the title suggests. In comparison to the oriental landscape, embodied in the tiny, dark school uniform her friend were as a child, she sees herself-~in a moment of both recognition and loss-—as "white and large / and strange even to myself." Thematically and psychologically, the poem reflects on a particular kind of self-consciousness, a double recognition of foreignness in the environment and in the self, and the way the self can lose its moorings when familiar things--"the people I loved / up in the morning bent over cups / and newspapers without us"-- are replaced by what cannot be known in the same natural way. And if the self wavers so, perhaps even the familiar is equally strange and wavering. Thematically, the poem explores the tenuous- ness of the self in the world by presenting a moment at which the woman becomes totally foreign, even to herself. 172 Example 58: 027/773 March 11 THE FOREIGNER "Just outside the courtyard a wash of gold-white light spread over the street like an elaborate fan. I wanted to leave. Even ' the post office window couldn't please me. its few meticulous envelopes. Some nights I thought I could see through to the world's other aide. Was it the same there with the people I loved up in the morning bent over cups and newspapers without us? My mind was not porous enough. a mind of white paper. Here with our bowls and sticks I live among the young who swivel as they walk. who chop their hair. who bow toward their stunted icy flowers. who still fold tissue into the shape of what they desire. The first friend I had took me to her tiny room. slid open a door and drew out the uniform she wore as a schoolgirl. I turned and saw for a moment how she saw I was: white and large and strange even to myself. So very black. she cried. holding it up. so very little. Ink flowing to the tip of a brush." 173 The images in the poem are connected by the contrasts of black and white, paper and ink: the light "like an elaborate fan,’I "meticulous envelopes," "the young . . . / who still fold tissue / into the shape of / what they desire." The persona's mind is "not porous enough / a mind of white paper." These images are force- fully drawn together by the final image - the uniform held up in front of her, "so very black," "so very little. / Ink flowing to the tip of a brush." The regular four line stanzas give "The Foreigner" a meticw- lousness and sense of order that reinforces the enormous restraint the persona is exercising in face of disintegration--'holding on.‘ The language is neither formal nor, strictly, conversational; in combination with quotation marks, it gives the sense of a rather constrained but confidential recounting, as one might give a psychia- trist or a priest at first meeting. Together, the images and the voice give the poem its structural continuity. Upton says that "The Foreigner" and two other poems, "The Unhappiness" and "The Bathhouse," which were written at the same time, arose from prints she had at home, "though none of the prints show a bathhouse or much of what I narrate in the poems." In writing "The Foreigner," she says, I was interested in saying two things at once, an ambivalence toward what is new, strange to the self. The self in turn becomes estranged--objectivies itself. It was written in small part because I had the last line and wanted some- thing Ieading up to it. 1714 As the draft version (Example 59) shows, Upton wrote the first version of "The Mountain" in a scrawled, loose hand. This is typical of her first versions. "I like to work in longhand first, writing large." My first drafts tend to be handwritten in large, looping scrawle. I'm writing quickly in order to capture what I can as it comes. I am unable to think of punctuation while concentrating during those moments. I almost feel as if I'm holding my breath when I first begin to write-— I need to maintain a certain pace, a certain largeness on the page. The words are almost like gestures at that point-~they are, it seems to me, wholly physical acts. The early lines establish the first person point of view, and suggest the persona's tenuous state of mind: "These days I knew just out- side the courtyard there were voices." This draft then gives a narrative account of the "l's" visit to the post-office, "where even the window was clean." There, she imagines a woman in an apron polishing the postbox windows, and she thinks perhaps she could see through them "to the other side," to the people she loves. "Is it the same moon there?" she wonders, where in the morning they bend over newspapers and cups. Here there are "blue bowls" and "wooden spoons" (later altered to "sticks"); "who here would put metal into their mouths" or "swivel their hips"? The persona then describes her friend of the final version and the friend's school uniform, "dark--tiny--ink flowing to the tip of a brush." The first version, like the early handwritten draft of "voices," is unpunctuated, but though it is in the form of notes, it does have thematic continuity, which here is primarily a simple 175 Example 59: 176 Example 59 (continued): 177 contrast between the oriental environment--with its cleanliness and precision--and the newer Western world. Lee made several handwritten alterations to the first draft, adding "mind was not porous enough—-mind of white paper"; deletions eliminate "hoping for something," the persona's yearning for something that might come in the mail. Two days later, on March 8, Lee typed a second draft (Example 60), making only one major addition and few deletions, and following the order of events established in the first version. This broke the poem into 35 lines, separated into two stanzas. Deletions made 'between drafts' (in retyping, without hand- written signals) eliminate the "metal spoons" she remembers at home, making the East/West constrast less explicit and, on balance, shifting the focus of the poem toward the persona's mental state: "My mind is not porous enough, mind of white paper," is typed on the right side of the page and inserted into the text with an arrow to a posi- tion in the poem later than suggested in the first draft. On the same day, Upton made a number of handwritten addi- tions to the poem, which was as yet untitled. This general pattern is characteristic of the poems examined in the study. Upton says I go through the typed version and muddy the pages with my changes. l like a lot of alternatives to surface. I like a page that looks thorny--lots of ink markings, lots of brambles. It reminds me of the prince cutting through the thorns to make his way toward Sleeping Beauty, god help me. There's potential asleep within the lines, certainly, and l have to grow my own thorns, and on the next go- round, cut them away. 178 Example 60: j, .V" NC ”(Av/L4 / ’3 l . fl, 7%,? L/ Those days émf'---_ / d just outside the courtyar ime stopped . k %e ““9 a ch hair 1 c, and elaborate1-Jackages fif/F/CZ/ ver L L ike an 1elaborate fan. (7Z/L 4’ ’ dn ‘ . I 9 _ . L/j wanted to leave-{V _ ' / I walked to pick um} - l ,-I/ n 's'." o c [L meticulous envelopes. w“ E - Jdndow - -—--";0' '23 clean . Someone; . . 1.“. .. . pXrS‘qung” I would picture .- ver morning ,, mind of white paper - - ' e clp moving across thepost- - --‘- a. \2 Some days I thought 7 could see through to the ober side odehe'munca-Va /[Q@’ it the same moon- there with the people we lov up in the morning nt over cups and newspapers without us. 1"" Here with our bowls and wood stick [/j, 'r the new young pea-pie— , fl‘ffl/L - 632;!" / who swivel and chop_ thei it. .{Cza- ~" -‘7 ' Wm t eir nts flm The first friend I had «that 4 £7. :2 took me to her tiny home' ,0! g" . opené’ a,” door and m drew out the flick uniform she wore as a Wilda/I Sc She thought it would interest me. A‘? 47/” fl/MJMZ/x' » ii i2 as. 179 The 'thorns' here include material that is later deleted, material that appears as is in the final, and material that is later altered or transformed through revision. "I turned and saw her as she was / as l was as l was / My mind for a moment was no one." (Here, the repetition suggests she is 'searching' for the proper way to express the state of mind which the uniform suggests to the persona.) These two references to mind introduce, explicitly, the moment of self consciousness so crucial to the final version but leave the 'direction' of the realization ambiguous. Further handwritten additions include a short section describing 'girls' who cross 'footbridges' "their mother's mothers crossed." This addition introduces a thematic tension between the continuity of the foreign, oriental world and the influences of modern Westernism, shifting the original East/West contrast to a more specific tension between the pre- and post-modern oriental world. Deletions remove much of the information about the imagined woman who polishes the post box windows. On March 9, Upton retyped the poem into five unequal stanzas (8-8-8-7-11), incorporating the revisions and a description of the girls (who here become "the new young") as they "bend toward their stunted flowers," who "still fold tissue into the shape of what they desire." Here the persona's self-recognition becomes specific with the addition of the self-referential "I am large and white." In this version, the penultimate lines of the poem become "saw . . . her as she saw I was." 180 Example 61: i” .' NW 0\ % fizz/Mam Those daysz just outside the courtyard Mir [A tfiémd 4F!” aboratespacr dZ—rfl‘fl/ 0/ A wash of spread j I 1) [Vi/3L over the? ike an elaborate I . W / Now I know ' 1 - ' I wanted to leav A" ‘ wL—ntke- . 7 up .4: , ticulous envelopes. 3 7 Even the post off window ' I . ould pic ure e woman every morning mffi7 Ml Mf/moving a white mm the glass. ' fl {4’ 2 hought could see through to the other side M Was it the ame moon there with the peopl loved up in the morning bent over cups and-news» 4!" newspapers without us. My mind was ot porous enough my mind Mfiute paper. / ere wit our bowls and wood sticks 39 liv the new youn who swivel and chop their hair ' he still fi‘ cross thc’footbridge 's mothers . ?seg«/s{2j W I first friend I had ' " ’me to her tiny room / fr} 5 iqpbpen a door and drag/out ,1 the B uniform she were as a 1 6 very littlex very black. 181 A further addition of self-reference is aOmovement from physical description--"even the post office window / was clean," to "Even the post-office window / made me unhappy." However, she is not sure whether to include "I knew" in the first line, which she had crossed out, then added again in the previous version, and here again crosses out. Upton also adds the title of the poem here, and introduces the quotation marks that give the poem its sense of a spoken confi- dence and suggest a distance between the persona and the Upton's person. On March 10, Upton again retyped (Example 62) still in five stanzas (4-8-8-9-9), each of which ends at the conclusion of a sentence. She deletes three lines from the first stanza which reflect the time-stopping sense of living in a land so old and culturally continuous ("time stopped outside the courtyard") and the later "their mother's mothers crossed,‘I which introduced this theme in the previous version. She adds "even the post-office window / couldn't please me,‘' shifting away from description toward self- reflection. Yet, unlike the final version, the direction of attention at the final moment of recognition is focused not on the persona, but on her friend, who suddenly seems "large and white" in con- trast to the tiny dark uniform, as "large and white" as the foreigner herself. In handwritten changes, Upton eliminates, finally, her reference to the imagined woman polishing the post office window, and the "foot-bridges," both of which remain from sections of the 182 Example 62: .; fl /‘ ‘ %M /d 4H3 FOREIGNER (arose days just outside the courtyard 4 at mind a wash of acid-m light ‘ Md over the street" 7 like an elaborate fan ./7' Now I know I wanted’\+ to leave Even ttho os ice window couldn' please me. its few meticulous envelopes. Some nights I thought I could see through to the other side. Was it the same moon ther W the people I loved up in the morning bent over cups and newspapers without us. My mind wa ot porous enough, ' é/white paper. Here” with our bowls and& sticks I live among the new young/égmaA-fl-j 4/ who swivelwa th 1 Wézdz {wa rd “flowers fisti fold ti sue ntg the shape/oi what they desire. The first friend I had took me to her tiny room slid open a door and drew out . . the uniform she wore as a s lgirl. 4 I turned and saw for a momeg’t‘aerk as she saw-'I- - s (7 white and large and strangee n to myself. So very black. she cried. holding 1 up /" so very little, Ink flowing to the tip of a brush. 183 poem originally longer and thematically powerful in earlier versions. Up until this version, Upton's main activity has been gener- ating alternatives, cutting them back, giving on balance a fairly equal number of additions and deletions, almost all on the level of meaning. Though the word count of "The Foreigner," in terms of typed text steadily decreased the second and third drafts, including handwritten emendation, are longer than the first. Unlike the word count of Drake's writing, however, this increase does not indicate a steady development of the work in one direction, but rather additions and deletions that change the meaning of the text in terms of thematic emphasis. At this point in the writing, Upton's attention shifts from generating and cutting back on the alternatives, to the form and surface of the poem--to Iineation, stanza breaks, and to close work on the word level. This shift is not absolute, but again, proportional, since shehas worked to some degree with line since the first version, and continues to make additions and deletions. However, the fourth version, now 38 lines, establishes an approximate scale for the final poem, and the order in which verbal events in the poem appear. In general, the poem is complete in terms of structure, and she now turns her attention to form. A visual examination of the versions in terms of the relation of amounts of type to handwriting demonstrates this shift visually in a quite dramatic way . 181-l She says, "punctuating the material and breaking it into stanzas occur during later stages, after I believe I've found some— thing that 's worth measures that seem to confer a kind of finality on the poem." On March 11, Upton again retyped a fifth draft of the poem (Example 63), now 188 words, incorporating the changes she had made to the previous draft, shifting several line breaks, and chang- ing the direction of the final observation in the poem to its ultimate sense-—"her as she saw I was," to "how she saw I was," which makes the recognition more sudden and more shocking. In handwritten changes, Upton shifts the stanza breaks so that the poem is now broken into nine four-line stanzas rather than five, unequal stanzas. Of the nine, only two now end with the end punctuation of a stentence (rather than four of the previous five), increasing the tension between the line and the sentence. A second March 11 version (Example 64) compresses these stanzas to eight, primarily by format shifts that change line breaks. Visually, the effect of these revisions is to make the poem more regular, and to increase the sense of space around the stanzas, 'slowing down' the poem as it is read. The shifts in line breaks move away from the speech patterns of the 'ordinary' sentence, breaking more and more in the middle of phrases and clauses, rather than between them: "who swivel as they walk / who chop their hair" to "who swivel as the walk, who / chop their hair." 185 Example 63: W” THE FOREIGNER ”Those days just outside the courtyard a wash of gold-white light spread over the street like an elaborate fan. w I know I wanted Even t e post of ice window coul n't please me. its few meticulous :nzelgpsi;ffl:::> Some nights/I thought I could see through to the other side. Was it the same 4‘: there y €E§Eh the people I lov up in the morning nt over cups and newspapers without us. My mind was not porous eno gh. a mind of white paper, 7% We .with our bowls and sticks I live among the new young who swivel as, they walklgéé who chop their air but still bend toward their stunted flowers. ' They still fold tissue fidfi/ ‘ilzp the shape of what they desire. The first friend I had took me to her tin room slid open a door an w out the uniform she wore as a schoolgirl. I tur ed and sa for a moment W sheypwas: white and large an strange even to myself. So very black. she cried. holding it up, 0 very little. Ink flowing to the tip of a brush." 186 Example 64: fl/Z/VM // /, THE FOREIGNER \t «”3393; just outside the courtyard a wash of gold;white light spread . ‘g 4(// over the street/like an e aborate fans—fin!) fia- W Pwanted to‘rgave. he post office wind couldn't please me. its few meticulous envelopes. Some nights I thought I could see through to the other side. Was it the same there with the peOple I loved up in the morning bent oves cups and newspapers without us. My mind was not porous enough. a mind of white paper. Here 'th 4% bowls and sticks I live among") the can young. who swivel as they walk. who $229}! bi! , still bendotoward their stunted owers. They still fold tissue into the shape of unsxsxnr; w t t ey desire. he first friend I had took me to her tiny room. I turned an saw for a moment how she saw I was: .nhitg_ggg11;;gegand strange even to myself. So very b a . he cried. holding it up. so very little. Ink flowing to the tip of a brush. 187 Example 65: March ll THE FOREIGNER ”Just outside the courtyard a wash of gold-white light spread over the street like an elaborate fan. I wanted to leave. Even the post office window couldn't please me. its few meticulous envelopes. Some nights I thought I could see through to the othe ide. Was it the same wfkfié' the people I loved up in the morning bent over cups and newspapers without us? My mind was not porous enough. a mind of white paper. Here with our bowls and sticks I live among the young who swivel as they walk. who chop their hair. who diI!l bend toward the'r stunted icy flowers. . 2s ' _fold_tissue 7 e shape of what they desire. The first friend I had took me to her tiny room. slid open a door and drew out the uniform she wore as a schoolgirl. I turned and saw f ent 049 how she saw I waszSEEEEQEBQ‘égéggz and strange even to myself. So very black. she cried. holding it up. so very little. Ink flowing to the tip of a brush.47 188 A further March 11 version continues to shift line breaks in the same direction. In it, Upton makes one deletion to this version--"who still bend" to "who bend," and consolidates two sentences into one, changing "flowers. They still . . ." to "flowers, who still . . . ." The eighth and final version is shown at the beginning of this section (Example 58, page 172). Causes and Results of Revision There are several features of particular interest in Upton's development of "The Foreigner" through revision. First is that relatively clear progression of events--the shift from generating and deleting "alternatives" in early versions, to work with format in later ones. This will be discussed in more detail in relation to all the poems examined, since it is a typical pattern which, with some varia- tion, runs through all the poetry examined here. Related to it is the fashion in which these additions and deletions work together to give the poem its final shape-“how elements suggested to Upton by words and phrases in the poems are developed and expanded, while others are reduced or eliminated: this pattern is culumative and progressive, rather than drastic or sudden. Also of interest are the development of imagery through revision, thematic shifts related to addition and deletion, the emer— gence and solidification of meaning through revision in terms of the context created by what appears on the page, and the format changes she makes near the end of the writing. Again, these features are not independent, but work in concert to give the poem its final meaning and shape which are inseparable from one another. 189 As is evident, in generating 'alternatives,' which to Upton are words and phrases, rather than "ideas," she also generates a number of thematic elements, any of which could have been developed into a final poem using the same general elements as exist in "The Foreigner." The first version of the poem is largely descriptive, con- trasting the strange circumstances in which the persona finds her- self with her familiar home surroundings, suggested by the post office, her only contact with them. There are many elements in the poem that might have been picked out and developed further: (I) the sense of loss represented by waiting at the post-office--the implication that something might come through the mail that would change her life, (2) the contrast of the age and continuity of the orient, clean and delicate, in contrast to the rawer western world evident in the persona's sense of herself as large and raw, or (3) the epistemological implications of strange gs familiar surround- ings, in terms of how one comes to know, or not know, what is foreign. All these elements are present in the final poem, but the emphasis is on the persona and her mind as altered by her experi- ence of strangeness--not only in the momentary and sudden recogni- tion of her own strangeness, but by implication, some continuing change in the self that continues past the point at which the poem ends. Though the actual revisions delete and add 'pieces' on the meaning level, the thematic shifts are created over several versions, and by a variety of small changes which 'add up' to have enormous 190 influence on the overall meaning of the poem, one theme gaining emphasis while another loses it. The ultimate theme is clearly introduced in the first and second versions with reference to "mind," noted earlier; these focus the poem internally. However, the "l's" visit to the post office, which is related to but does not specifically address this theme in the early versions, occupies at least as much space in the poem in the earlier versions. In the second (first lined) version, the visit to the post office occupies eight lines. Upton cuts it to six in the next versions, and finally, in the fifth, to three, which it occupies in the final poem. Shifts in emphasis, however, are not created solely by addition and deletion, but also by substitution: version three reads: Here with our bowls and wood sticks We live among the new young who swivel and chop their hair but who still cross the footbridges their mother's mothers crossed. The same section of the poem in the fifth version is: Here with our bowls and sticks I live among the new young who swivel as they walk who chop their hair but still bend toward their stunted flowers who still fold tissue into the shape of what they desire. The change from "we" to "I" in the second line shifts the emphasis to the persona, and in the second version, "I" contrasts with "our" in the first line, creating a distance between the persona and 191 whoever else creates the first version's "we," a contrast that is heightened by the last lines of the fifth version's--a loss or lack of what she desires, implied by the new young's ability to fold tissue "into the shape of / what they desire." The contrast implicit between the new and the old in the first version exists in the second, but it is a tension or secondary emphasis, rather than the major theme. The thematic development is less one of adding and removing than it is of transformation that draws initially related ideas into closer relationship with one another, much like a magnet passed over iron filings, so that other themes fall in line with and become intertwined with the main theme Any of those mentioned, however, could have taken this emphasis. The matter is one of balance and proportion. The alternatives Upton generates are evident in a 'trial' she makes in writing the first draft of the poem. Here she is describing the "schoolgirl's stockings." She tries several adjectives-- "bright" and "pastel," crossing both of them out and settling on "black." Note that the meaning here is not only altered but actually reversed. Example 66: 3 / / j I Though the stockings never appear in later versions, the "black" is important because it picks up on the final line, "black ink," which 192 flows to the end of the brush. This was the image Upton had when she began the poem, and which she was writing toward, and it is the ink which suggests 'paper,' mentioned in this version only indirectly--"newspaper" and "meticulous envelopes," "light . like a fan." She says I frequently try out alternatives--more often in my mind than on the page. The right word is like a little key--if I can find it, I can unlock the poem. The right word sets one dreaming--into the dream state required to write, where one is unfettered. "Black" in this instance led me to other areas. It allowed for travel. By draft four, the light has become "white-gold" rather than "blue-gold," the woman in the post office (who later disappears from the poem) wipes the glass with a "white tissue" and the young "still fold tissue / into the shape of what they desire." Of the references to paper in the final poem, only "mind of white paper" is added in the most general sense. Rather, the continuity of image arises from existing description: what was originally a cloth used to wipe the window becomes a "tissue"; Upton then shifts the word to a later position in the poem, making it the tissue the young fold. The images here develop from what exists in the text rather than being 'grafted on.‘ They are not ornamental, but the verbal pieces of which the poem is made and from which its theme arises. The addition of the quotation marks to the third version of the poem is extremely important to its meaning. In combination with thematic elements and image, the quotes work to create a kind of recounting of a potent psychological moment, rather than simply to 193 describe an experience. The difference is that the quotation marks emphasize who is speaking--the fact of observation rather than what is observed. In this way it replaces the "I knew" of earlier drafts, which Upton omitted after she introduced the quotation marks, which substitute for the phrase in an epistemological way. The quotation marks strongly alter the way the poem is read. Upton says: By placing quotation marks around the poem, I force the poem to be read more carefully. The experience is no doubt a common one to many people who have traveled and I wanted the voice to be distanced a bit in order that it might be "searched"--seen as an utterance by an other, a confidence--rather than simply having the reader identify with the voice. Though "I knew" appears in the first version, exactly v_v_l_1_a_t she knew--the recognition of her own strangeness—~begins to become explicit only in the third version, once the major elements of the poem are established. The moment of recognition continues to change through the fifth version. What the persona sees remains the same, but what she makes of it is quite different. In version four, the "I" saw here friend "as she saw I was." In five, the persona saw "M she saw I was'I (my emphasis). The first version is implicit in the second~-the doubleness of the moment--but the change alters the direction of the observation and so, increases the persona's desperation: in the first form, it is a shared moment, but in the second the persona experiences it in a totally isolated way. Upton says that writing and revision are ways of gaining knowledge and understanding, and the process of developing a new understanding of an already potent observation is quite evident in this poem, even though she had the final image in mind from 194 the beginning. As her revisions demonstrate, her understanding arises very much from the physical, written language-~words, phrases and written images as they appear on the page. The shifts in line breaks, in later revisions, are interesting from the point of view of the 'music' of the poem-—here, a quiet, spoken voice who recounts a story with some control and care. Upton works extensively with line breaks only after the stanza breaks are suggested, since they work together. By shifting stanza breaks away from the sentence--that is, allowing sentences to con- tinue through the space between stanzas, draws the reader on through a mental space, the small hesitancy is created. Similarly, breaking lines in the middle of phrases and clauses gives the poems a tension and energy that is as much a part of its meaning as propositional content. From version five, where she begins to give line breaks careful attention, the number of lines that break at places where one would not otherwise pause in speech go from five to ten in version six, more than a quarter of the lines. If too many lines break in this way, the poem would be auditorily disjointed, if too few, the speech would have more speed than is suited to the subject. Here Upton alters them in relation to thematic elements and to the established voice, as with other changes, making her alterations in relation to the particular demands of the individual poem and line . 195 "The Mountain" "The Mountain" (Example 67) opens with an image from the historical past: "The first junk to round the Cape / of Good Hope was made of teak." There is no clear persona in the poem, and the image is described in an omniscient voice that moves through time from the past to the present, reminiscent of the peculiarly shifting voice Virginia Woolf takes in To the Lighthouse in its disembodied- ness and range of perception. From this opening, the poem closes in, much like a lens focusing on a subject--the broad view of the Cape, the mountain, then closer on men "huddled around a game I as if it were a fire." The "sliver of teak which "is" rather than "was" shifts from the past to the present and continues to close in on the dwarfed travelers, their mules, the old women with bound feet. In the middle of the fifth stanza, the point of view leaps dramatically from the external description into the young woman's mind, as she watches the old women: "After a while, perhaps, the woman believes, there is no / pain for them." In the next stanzas, the woman is both observer and observed, her private sadness coalescing with the world's sadness and loss suggested by the omniscient view. This sense of distance from others is reinforced by the visual openness of the poem, a sense of control by the short, even stanzas. Like other of Upton's poems, it is sentence based, and generally uses the standard conventions of the prose sentence. Note, however, that several sentences are not conventionally 196 Example 67: FINAL COPY THE HOUNTilN The first junk to round the Cape of Good Hope was made of teak. It passed the improvised dwellings of the poor. the men huddled around a game as if it were a fire. A sliver of the teak is now lodged in glass with the portrait of thglmountain of mountains. That mountain s i ll dwards travelers. the little mules wob ling under saddles. the monastery. A the young Western woman ell-ing with five old women whose feet scale the moutain. Th IA~re-eu-sss£sgey quick. They wait for}; tinge—n. After a while perhaps. the believes. there is no pain for them. Little specks of earth dance inside the womanz‘s eye and will not run down her face. will not rest in a world of change. sudden disappearance}. remnants. These old women--that they still exist-— tottering on claws. They stop to drink and look down. /’—_\ rivers-s. is a silvery streak. As if one hand brushed it upon the earth quickly. determined to leave everything to chance. 197 'sentences,' though they begin with capitals and end with end punctuation, the markers of the sentence. Normally, the last sentence would be considered a dependent clause, and would be consolidated with the previous ". . . is a silvery streak.‘I The phrase in the first line of the penultimate stanza, "--that they still exist--" inserted between the subject and predicate, works very much like an exclamation of the young woman's astonishment at the sheer existence of these old women who seem to belong to the past. In this way it resembles a parenthetical comment one might make in conversation, but is a structure relatively infrequently found in prose. Upton began "The Mountain" on December 17, 1982, with a handwritten draft (Example 68). She says: The subject matter came to me against my will, in a sense. I didn't want to write a travel poem. They often seem artificial and stilted. Nevertheless, the images arrived. I had been talking to a friend a few days earlier and she told me about walking up a mountain in China with women whose feet had been bound when they were children. I suppose I have been concerned in recent years with the soul as it appears to be locked away from life. The bound feet of these women offered a way to look at life that appears to be bound, impoverished and limited. Yet these same women offered strength. Her first draft "began with free-writing, aimless, unfocused." Through the final version (to which Upton made further revisions) the poem goes through seven drafts. As with "The Foreigner," the first version is handwritten and unpunctuated. It opens, "This is a spell for luring desire sad one.‘' Then it shifts from this direct address, which suggests a poem as a 'gift,' to the third person: "She is thinking of the first ship to round the Cape of Good Hope a 200 ship of teak." A later phrase reads "Paula with five old women," another use of the third person, and still later, the first person: "They waited for me." Each of these points of view hints at a cor- responding speaking voice which might have 'told' the poem, though none is fully realized here, and none finds its way fully into the final version. However, many words and phrases in this first draft are incorporated into the final poem: "the improvised dwellings of the poor," "the mountain of mountains," "the mules," "the five old women" who are "quick." Many other elements come into the final in less direct ways--phrases that pick up on the theme implied by the first line of this version, "a spell for luring desire," and further suggestions of the theme: "A woman . . . does not wear perfume." Both she and her husband "must live with her body." These imply a loss parallel to the bound feet of the old women, a loss hinted at but not made explicit in the final version of the poem. The first version ends with a description of an automobile, seen from above, "a bullet among bullets each with somewhere to go," a description which includes a play on the Buddhist notion of life's repeatedness and suffering: "can get used to the wheel." Also on December 17, without making handwritten changes to the poem, Upton typed a second version (Example 69), which begins very much like the final version: "The first junk to round the / cape of good hope is made of teak." This establishes the point of view taken in the final poem, and precludes others suggested in the first version. It also establishes the progression of verbal 201 Example 69: The first teak junk to round the cape of good hope is made of teak it passes the improvised dwellingfiof the poor the men huddled around-e game as if.it'€ja4firev ,Q/tfie‘tea ow encased in glass . along with the mountain of mount ins. theKmountain still fw rdfs ape travelers the little mulesl’ifigfifil adafes,ths\high monastery. the fibstern woman val s with tum-x five old women wfipn:bound feet .iup the moutain. they get quick. they wa' . . .7514 g” 4’ 24 after a while perphpaszgp§g£9§:HZb{3;}:. ’1 Af’ .4c 'thsy=ere little spek5’64 the earth eufiers the young woman's eye and will not run down her face I,/) to live h a world of changes ’“sudden disappeareacnes and re_ nant these old women-~they they still exist—- ,theee‘unaon_tottering on claw9-. they pause now to drink from a cup and look down te monuth at a river m it is a silvery streak as if aflhand drew it quickly determined to leave everythinpto chance. I events taken by the finished poem, which moves from the junk to the men around the fire, to the piece of teak, the mules, the women with bound feet, and then to the young woman, and the specks in her eye, ending with the distant view of the river below. Virtually all descriptive elements in the first draft appear here, though the woman's loss becomes less specific and the 'silvery streak' becomes a river rather than an automobile. The physical revisions from the first to second draft are mainly changes in mean- ing made by deletion and substitution of phrases. Upton's working process was to read through the first version and select phrases and words she wanted to use, leaving out those she did not: 202 "There is a spell for luring desire, little one," "She is thinking," "can get used to the wheel," "a bullet among bullets," and selecting from or altered others: "Paula with five old women . . . they were quick they waited for me," becomes "the western woman walks with five old women / with bound feet . . . they are quick, they wait for her." They also appear in the same order as the first version, though their order relative to one another is altered in several cases by deletions and additions. Though the explicit sense of loss in the first line--"a spell for luring desire," obviously missing if it must be lured (and "they both must live with her body") are removed from the poem, the sadness and sense of some crucial element of life being absent is very much present in this second version. Though the "automobile" of the first version, "the bullet of bullets," parallel in construction to "the mountain of mountains," does not appear in the second directly, it too is carried into the second--transformed into "a river." Upton says that she does not punctuate the first draft because of the speed with which she works, as noted in the dis- cussion of "The Foreigner." Punctuation, she says, and stanza breaks, "confer a kind of finality on the poem," and she works with them only after the poem seems at least potentially deserving of such finality. Note that in the second version, which breaks into lines, she begins to introduce end punctuation, typing in five periods, though only the first word of the poem is capitalized. The poem is broken into 26 lines, with no stanza breaks, and the line breaks 203 seem fairly arbitrary, with lines coinciding with phrases and clauses--points at which one would ordinarily pause in speech: "It passes the improvised dwellings of the poor / the men huddled around a game I as if it were a fire." Handwritten emendations to the second draft, added on the 17th or 18th, lack the 'thorniness' evident in almost all of Upton's other poems. Though she began with 'free writing,‘ the poem established its general content and structure very early, in compari- son to other poems. However, though these handwritten changes are small in number, they are very important to the poem's sense. One important change is what Faigley and Witte identify as a 'surface change,‘ the shift of the initial observation of the junk from present to past tense ('passes' to 'passed'), which emphasizes both historical distance and scope, and establishes more firmly the nature of the voice, belonging to an entity that can see into the past. Here, Upton changes "perhaps there is no pain" to "perhaps, the young woman believes, there is no pain," while, in the typed version, all events seem to be seen by the disembodied, broad ranging observer who (or which) sees "little specks of earth enter the woman's eyes," the handwritten changes create the central shift in point of view to the mind of the woman herself, so crucial to the final poem. Upton says that "each peom suggests its own system of rules. I sometimes enjoy a sudden shift in point of view. That unexpected shift may, finally, communicate more fully than a voice that continues without interruption." The sense of an immanent 201-l presence, which the woman begins to perceive, is heightened in these handwritten alterations by the substitution of "the hand" for "a hand" which "drew" the river on earth. On December 18, Upton retyped a third version of "the Mountain," incorporating the changes she'd made by hand. She also made, in retyping, a number of what Faigeley and Witte would call surface revisions. In this version, sentences take form, and make Example 70: fl /g‘ Lee Upton THE MOUNTAIN The first junk to round the Cape of Good Hope was made of teak. It passed the improvised dwellings of the poor. ._.—ehe'men huddled aroun game as if it were a A piece t e teak is now encased 4“ Mlong with the mountain ,_n£a-euneeifl'~ hat tain st' — dwarfs travelefg’the litgglenulesi) wobb 'nd under saddles‘fithe high monastery. e young western woman walks with five old women whose bound feet scale the moutain. They are quick. They wait‘f%§ the young woman. “xfter a while perhaps the young woman believes there is no pain. Little spekks of the earth dance insise the young woman's eye and will not ““run down her face to live in a world of changes sudden disappearances end-remnants. B‘These-old women--that they still exist-- tottering on claws. d Theybpause now to drink from a cup '" and look down the mountain at a river. sixsxxixlxx It is a silvery streak as if one hand it ickly (555 determined leave ever nQQto chance. 205 full use of the conventions of the English sentence--capitalization and end punctuation. She begins to shift line breaks, in the same direc- tion as noted in "The Foreigner," away from what might be expected in ordinary speech. In the previous version, only two lines break at places where there would not, in ordinary speech, be a pause. In this version, six lines break in the middle of groups of words that would ordinarily be said in one breath: "Five old women" becomes "five / old women," "the mountain of mountains," becomes "the mountain / of mountains," "still dwarfs," "still / dwarfs." Handwritten changes break the 26 lines into seven 3-line stanzas, conflating two lines and leaving a four line stanza at the end of the poem. The same day she typed a fourth version (Example 71), incorporating these changes. In the fourth version, by breaking the first line of the last stanza so that part of it is added to the previous line, Upton gives the poem its final eight-stanza form: "They pause now to drink from a cup / and look down the mountain at a river" becomes "They pause now to drink from a cup and look / down at the river." The major changes Upton makes in re-reading and altering the draft by hand are line shifts, again in the direction away from pauses in ordinary speech (by count): seven now break in the middle of phrases, though several shift toward the expected--"the mountain of mountains" is again on one line. Upton says I'm conscious of line length when l revise and I attempt to make a check of each line--that is, I attempt to determine if each line is carrying its own weight effectively. Is the line interesting, for instance, as an isolated unit? 206 Example 71: /d‘ 8 Lee Upton THE MOUNTAIN The’first junk to round the Cape of Good Hope was made of teak. It passed the improvised dwellings of the poor. the men huddled around a AM as if it we e a fire. of the teak/,7 is nowufig glass along with gm 627/ the mountain of untais That mountain still dwarfs travelers” ittle mules wobbling under saddles. thehiqh monastery. The young Western woman walksd with five old women whose bound feeit tthmountain. They ar i’STWi/‘i ,4", ”ye; “W After a while perhaps.t woma be ev . there is no pain Little Mof the earth dance WKC'/&\ 1.nside the M woman's e e and willno downiher face to live 3 aqud of hang . s den disappearing-gs. remnants. These old women-—thst t e still exist—- tottering on claws 5" They pause edrhk from a cup and look ‘4’ *\ .W at a river.“ alvery streak. 3 if one hand drew it quickly. determined to leave everything to chance. 207 The general statements quoted earlier on about the function of the line are evident here: the "spill overs from stanza to stanza . as a means of assuring the flow, the overlap of images," "the split second of silence" at the end of the line. She also makes additions, deletions and substitutions, in the interest of increasing precision, a closer verbal surface, and musicality. A "piece" of teak becomes "a sliver," "encased" becomes "lodged," changes in both sense and sound. The old become "surprisingly quick," which tends to shift the point of view to the young woman earlier in the poem, since she seems to be the one surprised by it. (The "surprisingly" disappears in handwritten changes to the fifth version.) The "mountain of mountains" is now seen in "portrait." Further typed versions, the fifth (Example 72), also written on December 18, and the sixth (Example 73) and seventh (Example 67) written on January 2 continue this delicate "tinkering" with word and format. She says, I retype so that I can see what's happened. The reason I have so many nearly clean copies of "The Mountain" is that I kept thinking I was finished each time I retyped, only to discover I needed to tinker a bit more. This tinkering involved, particularly, revisions made for the ear. In the fourth version, "young woman" replaces "her" in the first line of the fifth stanza, a change which softens the auditory quality and emphasizes the contrast between the sorrow-laden young and the nimble old, reiterating the tension between time and time- lessness so important to the poem. "Women" or "woman" is repeated 208 Example 72: Lee Upton THE MOUNTAIN The first junk to round the Cape of Good Hope was made of teak. It. passed the improvised dwellings of the poor. the men huddled around a game as if it were a fire. A sliver of the teak is now lodged in glass along with a portrait of the mountain of mountains. That mountain still dwarfs travelers. the little mules wobbling under saddles. th? monastery. e young Western woman alk! h five ld women whose bound feet and canes scale this mountain. They are surprisingly quck. They wait for the young woman. After a while. perhaps. the m woman believes. there is no pain for them. Liktle specks of th earth dance inside the woman's eye and will not ”MW m her face to live in a world of change. sudden disappearances. remnants. These old women--that they still exist—- tottering on claws. They stop to drink from a cup and look down at a river. It is a silvery streak. As if one hand drew it quickly. determined to leave everything to chance. 209 five times in a space of ten lines in the final version, with shifts from "them" and "her" which create softer rhythms and add to the poem's sense of control and restraint. "The" added to "little mules" creates a construction parallel to the elements which follow: "the monastery," "The young." Upton is very much concerned here with musicality. How- ever, she finds it hard to explain. I know what I want, but I find it hard to explain. I want complexity, a certain amount of closed rhythm--that is, the poems may pinch themselves a bit. I like a music that seems to strain against its Iimits--that seems to swell but does not do so . . . I want a little sweetness and a lot of repression in the sense of pressure being applied and pressure being maintained. Perhaps repression is apt in the psychological sense as well. My people want more than they can get. The voices in the poems are often voices that suffer through one form or another of desire. They hold themselves back from engulfing or embracing their worlds. This auditory sense of repression is often created by small deletions, which tend to focus attention on remaining detail, and make the poem's surface very compact-~removing, as Drake does, words implicit in the text--in version six, "along," "youngest" for "young woman." As the poem gets closer to its final form, she also elimi- nates detail that has persisted through the drafts, but now seems unnecessary: she does not use detail for its own sake, and is quite sparing with it, eliminating in draft six the old women's "canes" and the "cup" from which they drink. The revisions she makes here are extremely delicate: in version two, Upton adds, "the young woman believes." In following versions, this phrase continues to be altered: 210 Draft MES Handwritten Change 3 "the young woman believes" ll "the young woman believes" + "the woman believes" 5 "the young woman believes" -> "the woman believes" 6 "the young woman believes" + "the youngest believes" 7 "the woman believes" Because these identifying phrases are so closely related-—with so many women to account for, and refer to, Upton keeps readjusting. In "The Mountain," she says, "I wasn't revising at a deep level, in one sense . Yet even to change a word shifts the weight of the poem and suggests another possibility. It's so simple to throw a piece out of whack by adding or deleting words or changing line lengths--to lose its essential chord, and then have to begin the search all over again. Upton says, further, In I like turning the poem around a bit, exploring it. Once I start deciding more firmly on line lengths and stanza breaks, the whole poem is apt to undergo a revolution. I often "re-think" the poem again. "The Mountain," this "re-thinking" happened in version six. I kept retyping the poem, feeling it was finished before I retyped each time. I was impatient that day, wanted the piece to be finished; I was hurrying it during those final drafts. But I couldn't let the poem go, since each simple retyping job would show me something new. I intended only to retype, but wound up re-seeing the poem after casting it again. In handwritten changes to the last stanza of version six, Upton changes "as if one hand drew it quickly" to "as if one hand brushed it on earth." This apparently small change makes an enormous 211 Example 73: Lee Up ton THE MOUNTRIN The ,first junk to round the Cape of.Good Hope was made of teak. It passed the improvised dwellings of the poor. the men huddled around a game as if it were a fire. A sliver o teak is now lodged in glass ”9 with p rtrait of the mountain of mountains. That mountain still dwarfs travelers. the little mules wobbling under saddles. the monastery. A o the young Western womaan walkmrfit’h five old women whose bound feet Ms scale twmtain. They are surprisingly quick. They wait for the c we 3?,I’After a while perhaps. the W eves. there is no pain for them. 1.. ttle specks of p earth dance inside the want? ye will not run down i her face Id of change. dden disappearances. remnants. These old women-~that they still exist-- tottering on claws. They max stop to drinkm and look down at a river. It is a silvery streak. As if one hand quickly. determined sxna to leave everything to chance. 0‘1)er Zer/LS/z’ 4% 91A 212 difference in the philosophical position the poem takes--while "drew" carries strong implications of intentionality, "brush" is just the opposite, implying accident, or haphazardness. Upton says: "The word "drew" seemed improper as I studied it. "Drew" has the quality of premeditation, planning, conscious choice, artistry (cer— tainly). "Brushed," on the other hand, suggests motion more vividly and has an off-hand character. When she retyped again, she made this change, and then, in handwritten changes to what was called "final copy." she dramatically altered the lineation in the last stanza, so that each line in it ends with a mark of punctuation. When I asked her about the reasons for these changes (compare the sixth with the final versions), she repHed: By beginning the final stanza with a complete line rather than a continuation--a little jagged piece of music--the line seems to bear more weight, more formality. It seems more planned--the opposite of what is being suggested in terms of the river. The voice appears sure and quiet. it doesn't appear to be asserting anything recklessly or haphazardly. Here is a voice seeking control. Each line in the final stanza ends at the point of a natural pause, a natural orderly pause. The voice describes what she believes to be a disorderly world, a world dedicated to chance, and yet the voice itself is orderly. In terms of the words that end the lines, thus taking emphasis, Upton says: Leaving the knotty "determined" out on a limb in the penultimate line seemed too raw and self-assertive for my music and my purpose here. A simple, natural pace seemed more interesting to me--l didn't want flow-over from the preceding stanza, nor flow-over in the lines. The final words in each line--"streak," "quickly" and "chance" suggest a fleeting sort of vibrancy--they are brief, glimmering, seem to fade a little. "Determined," on the other hand, seems heavy-handed, over-drawn if placed at the end of a line, at the point of emphasis. 213 Though the early development of "The Mountain" is quite different from other of Upton's poems in terms of speed with which the ultimate scale and general content of the poem appeared, its later development illustrates the delicacy and careful word-by-word and pause-by-pause attention Upton gives to her work in later stages, and shows the relationship between formal decisions and meaning: not only does meaning dictate form, but form also creates and suggests meaning. Her need to retype shows the importance of the physical s_e_eirlg of the work, also evident in Drake's writing. Also, as in her other peoms, she often makes "corrections" which are not in the direction of standard conventions--such considerations are secondary to the particular context created by the individual poem: here, the poem ends with what is technically a sentence fragment, but this alteration to the poem is intentional and had the effect of heightening the philosophical and psychological force the earlier sections of the poem suggest, and that Upton wants it to have. "The Tail of Robert E. Lee's Horse" "The Tail of Robert E. Lee's Horse" (Example 711), as the title suggests, is very different in tone from either "The Foreignerll or "The Mountain." The poem speaks in the first person in a plain- spoken, slangy American voice--the voice of a traveler, rootless, yet somehow not totally out of place anywhere in America. The persona tries to make some sense of her life in terms of American monuments--public park statues of Cristofo Columbo and Robert E. Lee . 214 Example 714: Lee Upton Jan. 23 THE TAIL OF ROBERT E. LEE'I HORSE When I walk down Monument Avenue past Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee I take courage. More so Jim—mm»than in Springfield where Cristofo Columbo) five feet tall. grey. st ed far out into an auto dealership nd the boys asked me Play the ponies much? Here it's the man next door who shouts Don't tell me about long distance. I'll show you long distance. He hurls his telephone into the street. Still. here at least I'm trying to take heart from the Declaration of Independence. I tie a sofa to the roof of my car and little circles reflect off the monument railings like suns of good health and ‘the absence of worry. The tail of Robert E. Lee's horse holds itself out a bit in the wind one straggler a pointing North. Iron hairs wild like the freshets off the James. Defiance and bad odds forever. So long. it says. ,L‘ One odd spot in the worlld. And another. Another. ‘-’ The voice, very much in the William Carlos Williams tradition of a poetry based in American speech--"Don't tell me about long distance / I'll show you long distance"--is reinforced by the unstanzed, short—lined form of the poem. The language provides the poem with a quirky good-naturedness, a persistent humor quite unlike "The Foreigner," another traveler. Here, the persona is "trying to take heart from / the Declaration of Independence." Though she is traveling, she is not traveling Iight--"l tie a sofa I 215 to the roof of my car." Her hope, and the essential familiarity of all American places, North and South, despite their "oddness," is represented by monuments, particularly here by the iron hair on the tail of Robert E. Lee's horse, whose name--never mentioned in the poem, but not incidently--is "Traveler."* This poem harks back to Upton's earlier poetry, before the more formal and philosophical work she began in 1979. Though she is "less affectionate" toward "the naive, pained sort of voice" she used in the work she did in her middle twenties, she says she occasionally finds herself "Iapsing back into this tender, soft- headed voice," and in general, this is the voice in which "The Tall" is based. Rather than working on the level of description, image and formal tension, it works on the level of voice. Upton says "this is one of those pieces a person writes partially to cheer herself up." For the year previous, Upton had been traveling in the Orient, and when she returned, she moved first back to Massachusetts, where her husband completed his doctorate, then to Virginia, where she began to teach at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was feeling rather itinerant. Shortly after she moved to Richmond, in January 1983, she began this poem with a handwritten draft (Example 75). It opens: "When I walk down Monument Avenue past Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. . . ." * After reading this chapter, Upton said that until 1 men- tioned it, she didn't know the horse's name was Traveler. This is an instance of the synchronistic occurrances writers sometimes report. 216 Example 75: 1%46 C§LW W27” 2279 (if/2%; V/HZ Kzflzflw/zé/ga/a/c/W FAQ? 5 Abe :9 W ' Cree /9\ //////:M/? fl (9% 3c fl/Z/zz é’ . .9, 0”” W /, 92/: 70 Zm ’7}; W /&V » ~i a / 9%] szflz/Zfi 95/ fl] ””7”” ’ / /%7Zo< L353 9:395... ..coo.2 :3“. a Loco: 052.5: 1:39.322 o..:... o8 Xe w Xm m x... XM xv Coco m 5m 05 c. coznggmog 3:: U33? “3 .82. 2.: 7.2 a... 3 3.2.9.5 uEmzfizw CO 3.87.333 co UumonEou :95 “mt“. C ..anm3_2 c0335.... < a... c. 8:295... N — :33: <. < 900.. .m tone”. .0 :0... 05...: «ct _< 18$ 9.2:. of... mo 0.3 :0 0:0.0.>0.. 03 .0 0:030:30. 300:.00 3:0.0...0 30 08.030. .050 8 830.0. :. 3.50 8 0.0000 83800.0 .305 .8530: I.00:.E0x0 03x0. :0 3 000... 0.8.030. 3:05.000 03 .0. >0 0.0 08.30.00 0:0 0:03.00.) .0503 >05 0.0 0:0.0.>0. «0:». 3x0... 5 0:20.335 "0:030..0ao .0030. >0...» 00 m:.00 >093 0.0 «0:; .003.>30< .:0 3:030 0300 0.0 .2. 0 0.0 u . 0.0:; 0.3 .0 00:00 m:.v.0E ...:0300..0... ...~0..0n.3.. .:030...0 .. . . a. 0 :3 8”. 9.0.8.. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + . "2.2.0 8 8:05.30 0.0:: 0.3 0030.... i 0030.... n 0030.... u .0 00:00 . cowuwflwu. .. 00:0.00 0300.05 0:033000. 1 C030: 0000. l 1.2.003. .. 0m00 0.3 :0 00000 0. 830.0. u .3 35:00... .0.303.30 .. 0030.... .0000...0 .008... 830.00 I 05:00... .030... n ..0000... 1 “830.8000 .0 0.0.3038... i .02.z0_ 4.9 008.30 :0 7.030.. 0:0300..00:00 .030. 0:032:30? 0830.35.00 I _0>0_ .090. .0 _0>0_ 00:03:00 9.380... :0 _0>0_ 0000.30 :0 @580... :0 350330030 0:0 m:.:00... .0 _0>0_ 0:03.000 1 0:03330030 .0830.00 .0:03.000 l 5:30.00 65000 n 0.3 :0 3:30.00 0:0 @5000 i umzo....<~.m.n.o 03:0E0m:0..00. 8 3x0. m:303_00 4.9 4:9 3:303:00 35009.0 6:350 .m:.:3..0 6:30.00 1 05.00.00. .m:300.00 1 6:33.00 5:363:00. a .mm.....>....u< >0:030.0:00:. .0535 .0300: :030E..0.:. .:0>.m. i 4+ ‘bthvmvooano H muLa :DND: 0.: I magma .5000: 0...» I a I 05:00... 00:33 0:0 2x0: 00:80 30:! 0.306080 3.30330 30: n ..0._.00... u. 30.. .>0:00:300. ...0....0 n 0.30330 ..00.0 .. £230.00 «0.3 ..003.0.. u ””.0“. 023.00.. 0 MUS; n wowm 303 There are also three sets of elements in the text that require attention: controlling features that give the text its essential con- tent and shape must be selected or established, remaining or new text must be adjusted to these features, and the surface of the text must be edited for correctness or other surface features. The con- trolling features establish both what the text becomes in comparison to what it could be, and the internal structure of the text and other parts of it adjust to these features. The existence of these stages is supported by shifts in type of revisions used from draft to draft, particularly evident when the writers did many drafts. These shifts were not changes in the absolute number of the types of revisions, but in their proportion to one another. Since the revisions were not coded and counted, my sense of these shifting proportions is impressionistic, but it appears to me that in stage one, additions and deletions that changed meaning on the sentence level and larger were most frequent. Though they continued to be used in stage two, meaning changes on the phrase and sentence level, with an increase in substitutions and permutations, were proportionally more prevalent. In the third stage, the writers continued to use all operations, but the proportion of surface and format changes increased, with more changes that did not alter essential meaning. Suggestions for further investigation are found at the end of this chapter. However, as has been noted, the revisions required depended upon what appeared in the original draft material. There was no case where a piece of writing was exhaustively planned in advance of 304 writing, though "Chicken" shows the most planning in the form of notes before and during writing. Presumably, if there was such a successful plan, or if the writing task had externally established conventions and requirements, the first stage would be essentially complete before the writing began, since controlling features would already be established, and the writer could 'skip' to the final stage. Whether or not such pre—planning would give the quality of result observed here is questionable. Since both writers are highly skilled and experienced, it seems likely that if extensive pre-planning and detailed outlining had proven effective in terms of their aims in writing, they would work in that way. Since 'form first' is the traditional method of teaching writing, it seems likely that writers' departure from it has some rationale or function, and that the order in which they work is not due to whim or caprice. Whatever features were determined in advance, whether by intent or 'lucky accident,‘ did not require revision, and the part of the process they represented could be skipped, though such 'skips' were not observed here. The chart is self explanatory. In stage one, writers looked over their first draft for 'clues' or features that established impor— tant aspects of the text. Rather than being critical or finding fault at the word level, they tended to look at the text positively, picking out what seemed effective, what was interesting or successful. The additions and deletions they made were on the level of meaning and involve large pieces of text. This is in line with the findings of other researchers, including Faigley and Witte, and Sommers. 305 The second stage involved a rewrite (or more than one) that firmly established these features in the text, and tended to establish the order of events. This is not to imply that for a given text, all controlling features were established in the same draft version. Frequently, parts of the text were quite well formed while others were very much open to revision. Usually it was the beginning of the text, which, because it was written earlier and therefore read more often, established these features most firmly. However, changes made at the end of the text might then establish new con- trolling features which required changes in earlier text. In theory, a change in such a feature could occur at any time in the process, requiring changes in the whole text, and thus beginning the process again, but in fact, the number of such changes was quite small. For example, the addition of the in M re_s_ opening of "Chicken" had a considerable effect on the reading of the text, but required adjustment of relatively few other parts of the text. Controlling features can be changed at any time during the process (one can easily imagine a late change in point of view, requiring many other changes) but what I observed here is that the number of such changes becomes fewer and fewer as the process progresses. In the third stage, writers continued adjusting to the established features and addressed matters of correctness and format. Format changes often suggested other revisions. Through the first three and most clearly identifiable stages, the revisions themselves decreased in scale. That is, in early stages, 306 the additions and deletions were in much larger chunks and as the process progressed toward the end, the physical size of the revisions decreased, until in the last stages the changes were quite small and delicate. It seems likely that there are different ways of 'seeing' associated with these changes in scale. Earlier texts were much 'messier'; what the writers have to see in these stages is larger, and can be picked out in a confusing text. It is, in Upton's case, literally 'writ Iarge.‘ As more delicate adjustments are needed, such as changes in format, line shifts, or punctuation that is not strictly conventional, the writers need cleaner and cleaner copy in order to focus on the text in a way that allows them to make delicate adjust- ments. As the chart indicates, a fourth stage is identified. This optional stage has to do with the emergence of new or unexpected meaning and 'upshots' late in the process, as seen in the last version of "The Mountain" or the reflective strand of §t_re_e1. It is placed rather artibrarily, since it seems to occur any time after the text is structurally complete. It appears that 'discovery' of meaning occurs throughout the revision process, but this stage represents a wholistic form of new knowledge or feeling or understanding created by the near-complete text. This seems to happen with texts most frequently with which the writers seem most fully engaged, though the evidence for this was only suggested by the study. The evidence for such stages is, of course, only suggestive. However, examination of Upton's drafts were particularly helpful 307 because they went through so many versions. In "The Mountain" she reported working on a 'deep' level first, and then 'surfacing' for the later drafts which worked with line and stanza, and this is quite obvious in the texts. This is not to suggest that each time the writers read or revised they were looking for only one set of features. This is obviously not the case. As has been noted many times, revision is a complex process, involving a constellation of features which work together, focused toward an end view by the writers' attention to their texts. It appears very likely that with relatively simple tasks, or tasks that de-emphasize certain features, writers can "juggle" many of these complex activities at once, so they do not have to pass through the steps separately, but as the task gets more and more complex, the more re-seeing is involved, and the more they need to focus attention on one aspect, feature or result of revision at a time. In Upton's poetry drafts, the first and second and other early drafts are most often written on different days. However, as she gets closer and closer to being done, she often does the last two or three drafts one after another on the same day. This seems to suggest the existence of such stages, in that work at one sitting seems directed to one general kind of activity, an activity different from wrok at another sitting. In sum, the identification of these stages is mainly to suggest that writers do some things before others, and that they do them in this order for a reason. Though the literature suggests that revision is "recursive," and repeated, which it certainly is in terms 308 of alternately reading and writing, it is not simply circular. It has direction and order, and proceeds toward the accomplishment of an end view--the completion of a satisfactory text. This is not to deny that the process itself has intrinsic rewards, which it does for both writers, but rather that their activity is not random, but purpose- ful, progressive, and moving toward an end, even if the nature of that end is not specified in advance. This chart also seems to make sense in a logical way. Before something can be structured—-there must be something to structure. And as long as the structure is in flux, it makes little sense to correct surface errors, since the surface is shifting as the structure changes. The large leaps in meaning--what Faigley and Witte would call macro—structure changes--seem to appear only when there is sufficient and sufficiently organized text to alter meaning in a drastic way. These 'leaps' in meaning reveal another interesting feature about the way the writers make and discover meaning of all kinds. Neither Drake nor Upton began writing in an expressionistic way-- that is, by expressing impulses, feelings and emotions. There were no early drafts that were out-pourings of emotion, later shaped to audience. This is true even for texts in which the writers had strong emotional investments. That is, though their original impulse to write may have been emotional, the emotion did not appear in the drafts early on in an explicit or personal way. What emotion appears in the final versions--as much does-—arises from the words and phrases and forms of language on the page. The meaning that 309 arises from the text is both ideational and emotional or psychological, but it emerges as a result of the writing process, rather than being pre-determined. (This may be the main argument against "form first" writing: does it develop or suggest meaning in this way?) Poetry and fiction were no more likely to begin with emotion, here, than were other pieces of work that normally wouldn't be called "creative writing." All in all, though there were differences in revision attributable to generic features of poetry and fiction, there was no clear difference in the revision process itself that dis- tinguished between what would usually be identified as "creative" writing and other work. This may be due to the limited range of tasks. However, it seems likely that though poetry and fiction may involve different original material, and different sets of attention and perception than other types of writing, the general revision process is the same or similar. Poetry and fiction, like other generic tasks, have certain special requirements to which adjustment is required through revision. It appears here that what distin- guishes the revision of poetry and fiction from revision of other tasks is not the simple fact of being a poem or a story, but other, variable, features such as the comparatively few pre-established restraints on content and structure. It seems likely that they require more revision because the writer has more latitude and there- fore is likely to have to make more choices. 310 5. How do the processes observed here compare to the models of revision? In a general way, the models represent what these writers do. However, many of the features the models identify--particularly Nold's intended effect--tended to be rejected as explanations for their activities by the writers. None of the models is 'wrong' but in asking the writers questions based on them, as I did later in the study, there was rather the sense that they "wouldn't put it that way." Again, they much preferred to talk in terms of the text and its features in a literary way--or, in a plain spoken 'writer's' way, evident in their remarks here. The suggestion here seems to be that the more distant the language of discussion of the model from the writers' own experience, the less it seems to them to represent what they do. For instance, I asked Drake if he set 'sub-goals' as he wrote. "Goals?" he said. "The goal is to get the thing written." In simple, there is nothing here to directly refute any of the models, or suggestions made by them, and Della-Piana's seems perhaps most amenable because it focuses on poetry and so tends to use more literary language, but neither is there anything to suggest that these models give a particularly exact or precisely accurate account of what these writers do. Suggestions for Future Research One of the main purposes of this study was to explore and demonstrate the potential value of textual studies of successive drafts, and interviews with writers which focused on writing done 311 under normal conditions. Results indicate to me that it does add considerably to other forms of research that have been done on composition and revision, since the writers studied here wrote more drafts than writers studied in laboratories, and these, and the interviews with writers, allowed for a more fully elaborated account of how the writers revised. This account included a fuller under- standing of the features that came into play in writing, since there was more variability in natural circumstances than there is in a laboratory situation. Certainly, however, the study raised more questions than it answered. Many of these questions suggest directions for future research on composing and revising. It suggests that a full and complete study of revision should include, at least: 1. Information about the relation between perception and production in relation to the way and frequency with which writers read their own texts. 2. Information about time spent at 'sittings' and between drafts, which could be done by dating drafts and logging in work time and what was written in a given work period. (This would add considerable informa- tion without too much disruption of normal habits.) 3. Information, in the form of interviews, about writers' intentions and purposes, and the larger context. This guards against mistaken attribution of intention- ality from results, and is crucial both for a full picture of context and for factual accuracy, since drafts are often confusing. ll. Information about features of the texts themselves. On the basis of elements I observed in the texts, I suggest that revision is probably most fully understood through inter- disciplinary study in which, as Joseph Schwab suggests, 312 "unsystematic, uneasy but useable focus is effected among diverse theories, each relevant to the problem in a different way'I (p. 306). As a cross-disciplinary dissertation, this study is an attempt to suggest approaches such research might use and features to which it might direct attention. A wide-ranging study, using a large sample of writers studied over a long period, could very much use the combined talents of a visual artist, a phil050pher of aesthetics, a literary critic or reviewer (one skilled at textual exegesis), as well as composition theorists and experimental researchers with strong statistical, coding, and computer skills. Since the dissertation does identify a staged process, it generates competing hypotheses about revision practices that could be empirically tested, supporting or refuting the findings here for a larger sample of writers. Features in the drafts which the study suggests deserve attention are: 1. The revisions themselves. Faigley and Witte's taxonomy was very helpful, though there were several problems in application beyond the practical ones. Since it used the sentence as a unit of analysis, it didn't identify rearrangements in the order of sentences when no other changes were made to them, which seems to imply that sentences could be randomly shuffled without changing meaning. Also, there were cases when changes that the taxonomy identified as surface changes had great importance to the way the text was read, such as the change in "The Mountain" from present to past tense. These problems are not limitations of the taxonomy itself, but with the underlying notion of propositional meaning, which suggests that 313 'meaning' of texts is exhausted by propositional content. My sug- gestion is that the taxonomy be supplemented with other methods of approach that address other kinds of meaning. This taxonomy seems very important in the examination of the stages of the writing process, since the 'clue' to them, and methods of verification of their general applicability, rest partially in the proportion of various types of revisions to one another at different points in the writing, something that could be more easily identified in fewer drafts if writers logged work done at different times. 2. Other marks on the text. Marginal comments and writers' 'short hand' notes to themselves such as underlines, arrows, and so on, seem to provide important clues to the way writers read their own texts, and to the aspects of it to which their attention is directed at different points. Five distinct forms of self-address were identified: a. Questions indicated by question marks, which indicated puzzles or something 'not right' in the text that the writer wasn't sure how to solve. b. Comments suggesting relocation of pieces of text. c. Comments suggesting further development of existing material, sometimes in the form of a few words which serve as an 'outline.‘ d. Comments like (c) which suggest new material that should be added. e. Evaluative, self-directed comments. These include orders to the self ("dol"), 'pep-talks' ("good"), or self-chiding ("dull"). 3114 These are clues to the writers' thought processes, and it seems that investigated on a larger scale and in a systematic way, they would be very informative. Trial runs are particularly interesting since they sometimes showed a direct reversal of meaning, where, for instance, in Example 66, the writer began to say one thing and ended up saying the opposite in a short period of time. These cases seem important clues to whether the writer is working 'meaning first,’ that is, trying to express a pre-determined idea, or is working from the visual words on the page. Other physical marks on the page such as underlines, brackets, and cross-outs also seem important. Why, for example, do writers sometimes use brackets to signal deletions, and other times cross out, in the same draft of the same text? Perhaps the first, which preserves the original text, is applied when deletion decisions are more tentative. 3. Error. Linguistic studies of spoken language have deduced many important features of spoken language, including processes of language aquisition, by speech errors such as slips of the tongue and over-generalizations (see Clark and Clark), and it is quite likely that errors writers make when they write offer similarly revealing clues to general principles. This is particularly true with skilled writers, who, as indicated here, sometimes make errors when they 'know better.‘ In these cases, it seems quite clear that the writers' attention is focused on other aspects of the 315 texts, so that type and amount of error at different points in the text may prove important in reconstructing mental processes. Educational Implications Any educational implications of an observational study such as this one are necessarily indirect, since the factual claims made are not generalizable to other cases without further empirical study. Since this study generates testable hypotheses, however, follow-up work could generate direct suggestions for practice to the extent that instructional models can and should be based on the practices of experts. The amount of re-reading the writers did, stages in the revision process, the way they used their time, the perceptual rela- tionship of reading and revising, and their use of outside sources all seem to offer quite specific and helpful suggestions for ways in which instructional models might be developed and in which student writers might procede. However, the applicability of any empirical evidence to school writing practices is necessarily tenuous, in that school writing has pur- poses which other forms of 'good' writing, such as studied here, do not have; these purposes serve as constraints on the writing practices of students. School writing has quite specialized aims: preparation for general post-school writing, writing related to the function and struc- ture of schooling itself (for example, grading and evaluation), and induction of students,mainly on the gratuate level, into the specific writing methods of a particular field or profession, which includes knowledge of specific conventions and canons of evidence. 316 It seems likely that certain functions of school writing mitigate against students revising like the writers studied here. For example, the use of writing as a method of evaluating students puts an addi- tional constraint on their revision practices, since unlike most other writing tasks, it has the purpose not only of using knowledge, but demonstrating the students' possession of it. Time restraints created by schooling also come into play; it may be that students revise less simply because they have less time to do so. These special purposes and constraints must be taken into account in translating empirical evi- dence about expert performance into suggestions for practice, though, of course, the structure and functions of schooling are themselves sub- ject to revision and reformation. However, future research which compares student and expert writing practices or which aims to develop instructional models, must take into account the special circumstances of school writing. It seems likely that differences between student and expert writers are due not only to differences in experience and level of skill, but also to the demands schooling makes in terms of the type of writing assignments, time allotted, teacher requirements, and so on. I hope that this study, in combination with other empirical work on writers' revisions, helps to prepare the ground for forms of instruction that recognize that school writing does not account for the full variety of writing students might choose to do, and that helps to prepare them with versatility and range in their writing practices, so that they are able to adapt to whatever writing tasks they might encounter. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 317 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Apple, Michael et al. Educational Evaluation. Berkeley: McCutchan, 1974. Bechtel, Judith. "Videotaped Analysis of the Composing Processes of Six College Male Freshmen." ERIC #177-588, 1979. Beckson, Carl E. A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms. 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Svobada, Fred. "Crafting of a Style: Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1981. Van Dyck, Barrie. "On-the-job Writing of High Level Business Executives: Implications for College Teaching." ERIC #185-584, 1980. Wagner, Linda. Denise Levertov. New York: Twayne, 1967. Young, Richard. "Invention: A Topographical Survey." In Teaching Composition: Ten Bibliographic Essays, pp. 1-uu. Edited by Gary Tate. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. APPENDICES 322 APPENDIX A ALBERT DRAKE -- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 323 APPENDIX A ALBERT DRAKE - SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Published Material Books Behind the Pavement. Adelphi, Md.: White Ewe Press, 1981. The Big Little GTO Book. Osceola, Wisc.: Motorbooks International, 1982. In the Time of Surveys. Adelphi, Md.: White Ewe Press, 1978. I Remember the Day James Dean Died and Other Stories. Adeiphi, Md.: White Eve Press (forthcoming). Michigan Signatures: An Anthology of Current Michigan Poetry. Edfied. Madison, Wisc.: OuixotePress, 1969 . One Summer. Adelphi, Md.: White Ewe Press, 1979. Pomes. Okemos, Mich.: Stone Press, 1972. The Postcard Mysteries 8 Other Stories. East Lansing, Mich.: Red Cedar Press, 1976. Street Was Fun in '51. Okemos, Mich.: Flat Out Press, 1982. Three Northwest Poets (with Lawson Inada and Doug Lawder). Madison, Wisc.: Quixote Press, 1970. Tillamook Burn. Union City, Calif.: The Fault Press, 1977. Poetry Chapbooks By Breathing In and Out. Pittsburgh: Three Rivers Press, 19711. Cheap Thrills. Rock Hill, S.C.: Peaceweed Press, 1975. Garage. Santa Barbara: Mudborn Press, 1980. Reaching for the Sun. Woodinville, Wash.: Laughing Bear Press, 1979. 321-I 325 Returning to Oregon. Cincinnati: The Cider Press, 1975. Riding Bike. Okemos, Mich.: Stone Press, 1973. Roadsalt. Poynette, Wisc.: The Bieler Press, 1976. Fiction "An Attempt from the Store." Colorado State Review 4(1) (Winter 1969): 18-21. "The A-V8 and How it Went." Michigan Hot Apples 1 (Summer 1972): 86-93. "Barthelme Saved from Boredom." Yellow Brick Road 2 (Fall 1974): 15-17. "Beyond the Barricades.‘I Egg 4 (Winter 1974): 15-24. "Beyond the Horizon." Rockbottom 9 (Summer 1979): 86-92. "Beyond the Pavement." The Fault 11 (April 1977): 31-44. "Bopping at the Pink Pail.’I Graffiti 4 (Spring 1975): 21-27. "The Breakage." South Dakota Review 6(3) (Autumn 1968): 1190 122. Reprinted in Latitude (Scott, Foresman 8 Co., 1977) under the title "The Last of the '84 Fords." pp. 210-212. "Carpe Diem." Plaintiff 8(1) (Fall 1971): 37-38. "Champale." The Fault 5 (Spring 1974): 1-7. "The Chicken Which Became a Rat." Northwest Review 10(3) (Summer 1970): 4—26. Reprinted in Bestjmerican Short Stories 1971 (Fall 1971): 86-106; and in Fiction 100 (Macmillan, 2e ed., 1978): 271-283. "Cravings" (short version). Fresh Weekly/Willamette Week (March 18, 1980): 4-5. "Cravings" (long version). Red Cedar Review 14(i) (Spring 1981): 18-28. "Director of Absit Omen." Quartet 2(14) (Spring 1966): 26-29. Reprinted in Mindrift 1 (Fall 1978): 19-20. "The Eco-System Murders." Seizure 4 (Spring 1974): 42—45. Reprinted in Garfield Lake Review 4 (Spring 1974): 90-95. 326 "The Encounter." The Fault 10 (November 1976): 77—80. "Father to Son." Redbook 133(4) (August 1969): 77, 153. "Friday Night at the Place." Ante 3(4) (Winter 1968): 25-35. "The Genuine Artificial Leopardskin Headliner." Cottonwood Review 23 (Fall 1980): 5-12. "A Good Man is Hard to Understand." New Mexico Humanities Review 3(3) (Fall 1980): 59-69. "A Happening." Coe Review 3 (Fall 1973): 2-6. "Hawking." Bogg 45 (Fall 1980): 16-17. "The Hem of Harvest." December 11(1-2) (Fall 1969): 75-85. "In the Time of Surveys." Northwest Review 8(1) (Summer 1966): 106-113. "In the Year of Our Ford." Rod Action 2(4) (June 1974): 10—11. (Published under the title "It Could Happen.") "The Landscape of Tragedy." Next 1(1) (Winter 1965): 20'25- "Making the Point." The Falcon 4 (Spring 1972): 75-81. "No Land for Young Men." Quixote 4(9) (Spring 1969): 33—43. "Odyssey: Corinthos to Patras, by Train." Ante 2(4) (Fall 1966): 5-15. "Overtures to Motion." Chicago Review 21(3) (December 1969): 5-15. "Pegged." Wind 12 (Fall 1974): 56-63. "A Perch for the Eagle." The Fiddlehead 55 (Winter 63): 30-42. "The Postcard Mysteries." Fiction International 1 (Fall 1973): 10-17. "Psalms." Gallimaufry 3 (Fall 1974): 28-29. "The Reserves." New South Writing 1(1) (Winter 1975): 51-53- "The Schrams at Waterloo." West Coast Review 1(1) (Fall 1957): 5-11. 327 "Starts." Mississippi Mud 21 (Winter 1980): 56-62. "The Summer of the Sad Cars." Cutbank 1 (Winter 1974): 50-63. "Sunday Night." Rockbottom 9 (Summer 1979): 68-72. "I Remember the Day James Dean Died Like It Was Yesterday." Epoch 22(3) (Spring 1973): 229-248. "A Spanish Parable." North American Review 250(4) (September 1965): 22—26. "The Take-Home Test." TransPacific 3 (Spring 1970): ill-15- "Tangents and the Floating Continent Theory: An Elegy of Love and Death in Three Movements." Graffiti 1 (Fall 1973): 3-12. "The Test." Plaintiff 7(1) (Fall 1970): 42-48. "The Thirty-five Most Important Words." December 15(1-2) (Summer 1973): 258-259. Reprinted in Essgfing Essays, R. Jostelanetx, ed. (Out of London Press, 1975): 89. "Two Stories: 'When Gas was Regal' and 'Textures.'" Mississippi Mud 22 (Fall 1980): 34-41. "When Gas Was Regal" reprinted in Car Exchange 3(5) (May 1981): 60-61. "Voyeurs." Cairn 10(1-2) (Autumn/Spring 1974): 36-40. "Won't You Please Sit Down?" Northwest Review 15(1) (Summer 1975): 41-50. Reprinted in The Third Coast: Michigan Fiction (Wayne State University Press, 1982): 34-44. "Workshoes." Memphis State Review 3(2) (Fall 1982): 31-35. "Young Buck Fever." Salt Lick 5 (Spring 1970): 20-25. "The Yo-Yo Artist" (under the title "Textures"). Center 12 (1979): 41-42. Poetry "Academic Freedom." December 11(1-2) (Fall 1969): 168. "Addicted to Late-Late Shows the Poet Reconstructs the Past in His Head." Sumac_ 3(3) (Spring 1971): 105. 328 "Ambush." Michigan Signatures (Quixote Press, 1969): 60-61. Reprinted in Windsor Review 6(1) (Fall 1970): 12-13. "Anne Frank's House." Human Voice Quarterly 3(1) (Spring 1967): 21. "The Apprentice." Wisconsin Review 5(3) (Spring 1970): 12—13. Reprinted under the title l'Auto-Biography" in Assembling 6 (Summer 1976): n.p. "The Arms of St. Peter's." Prism: International 5(3) (Winter 1966): 71. "The Arnold Street Swere." Mid-American Review 1(2) (Fall 1981): 134. "Assuming the Position." Collage (October 2, 1969): 9. Reprinted in 10 Michigan Poets (1972): 38-40. "Awaiting Your Return." The Midwest Quarterly 8(3) (Spring 1967): 260. "Bestiarie" (4 poems). St Andrews Review 8 (Spring/Summer 1974): 309-313. "Beyond the Tundra." Asphalt 4 (Spring 1972): 12. "Boone's Vision." Assembling 4 (Winter 1974): 70. "Campfire." Poetrl Now 6(5) (Fall 1982): 32. "Chartres." More New Verse II (chapbook) (Summer 1966): 15. Cheap Thrills series: "The Bunko Game." Michigan Hot Apples 2 (Spring 1973): 73. "Conduct Your Own Kinsey Report." Wormwood Review 13(3) (Fall 1973): 108. Reprinted in Cream Ci_ty Review: 1(3) (Fall 1976): 56. "Planning a Career." Wormwood Review 13(3) (Fall 1973): 107. "Planning a Career II." Wormwood Review 13(3) (Fall 1973): 107. "Reality Sandwich." The Pikestaff Forum 1 (Spring 2978): 25. 329 "Start a Literary Magazine." New York Quarterly 13 (Winter 1973): 116. "Start a Rumor." Wormwood Review 13(3) (Fall 1973): 108. "Survival Cookbook." Michigan Hot Apples 2 (Spring 1973): 74. "The Swimming Pool." New York Quarterly 13 (Winter 1973): 116. "Write a Novel." 3 Rivers Poetry Journal 1 (Winter 1973): 22. "Write a Poem." Gallimaufry 1 (Summer 1973): 20. "CIickity-Clack" (visual). West Coast Poetry Review 12 (Summer 1974): 107. "Conversation with my Father." Trace 64 (Spring 1967): 51. "The Craftsman." Prism: International 5(3) (Winter 1966): 50-51. Reprinted in 10 Michigan Poets (1972): 43-44. "Crystal Creek." Amphighroia (The Fault Press, 1978): n.p. "Crystal Creek Sequence." Rockstream 9 (Summer 1979): 70. "Days: A Nature Poem." Quixote 3(4) (Summer 1968): 3. "Death Notice." South Florida Poetry Journal 4-5 (Spring 1970): 149. "Detroit." The Dragonfly 4 (Winter 1970): 19. "Doggerel for Diplomats." Wormwood Review 10(2) (Summer 1970): 48. "Doing the Dishes." University of Portland Review 32(2) (Fall 1980): 46. "Dropping the Pan." Grand Rondo Review 14 (Winter 1973): 9. "Eaters." PermaFrost 3(2) (Fall 1980): 65. "Eden." Poetry Now 2(3) (October 1981): 10. "Every Saturday He Stands." South Florida Poetry Journal 4-5 (Spring 1970): 148. 330 "Falling Off Edges." Poetry Now 1(4) (September 1974): 14. "Fixing a Flat Tire in Iowa." Coe Review 2 (Fall 1972): 13- "For Monica Durrell, Daughter." Wormwood Review 6(2) (Fall 1966): 31. "Found Fame." Wormwood Review 10(2) (Summer 1970): 49. "Foxglove." Colorado State Review 5(2) (Fall 1977): 32. Reprinted in Rockbottom 9 (Summer 1979): 78. "The Freeway." December 9(2—3) (Fall 1967): 58. "Gap." Images 8(1) (Spring 1982): 10. "At the Grave of Lautrec." The Fiddlehead 76 (Summer 1968): 70. "Hearing Robert Lowell Read Student Poetry." Western Humanities Review 20(1) (Winter 1966): 23. Reprinted in More New—Verse ll (Summer 1966): 10; Gallimaufry 1 (Summer 1973): 20. "High-Lites South of Sonora." The Far Point 2 (Spring/Summer 1969(: 30. "How to Fall a Tree." Open Places 16 (Winter 1974): 34-35. "The Hound of Heaven." The Dragonfly 4 (Winter 1970): 18. "Hubcapping." Grand Rondo Review 14 (Fall 1972): 19. "The Humboldt Undercut." Colorado State Review 5(2) (fall 1977): 33. "The Intern: #2." South Dakota Review 5(3) (Fall 1967): 27- "The Intern: #3." The Fiddlehead 76 (Summer 1968): 43. "Iona City Breakdown." Green River Review 13(1-2) (Spring 1982): 36-41. "The lsolationists." Descant 11(1) (Fall 1966): 36. "Jockey-Boxing." Fuse 1(1) (Summer 1971): 9. "Leda and the Swan." TransPa_c_i_fig 1(1) (Winter 1971): 18. "The Lents Gang." Grande Rondo Review 14 (Fall 1972): 20. 331 "Lines for Moss, Two." Next 1(4) (Spring 1966): 30. Reprinted in West Coast Review 1(2) (Fall 1966): 10; Collage (November 26, 1968): 6. "Listening to Marty Robbins Sing White Sport Coat 20 Years Later." Pebble 12 (Winter 1975): 32. Reprinted in Sequoia anthology (Littlefield Press, 1973): 36-37; Scree 19-21 (1981): 80. "The Making of a Monster." Losers Weepers anthology (Kayak Press, 1969): 34. Reprinted in Pictures that Storm Inside My Head (Avon, 1967): 45; Living Literature (D.C. Heath Co., 1981): 528. "Madrid: 1962." Wormwood Review 6(2) (Fall 1966): 31. "Memory: Returning to an Empty Intersection." Next 1(3) (Winter 1966): 2. Reprinted in Trace 64 (Spring 1967): 50. "Moonlighting." Colorado State Review 5(2) (Fall 1977): 34. Reprinted in Rockbottom 9 (Summer 1979): 77. "My Mother." The Fiddlehead 64 (Spring 1965): 37-38. "My Own Junkyard." Asphalt 4 (Spring 1972): 13. Reprinted in~Karaki 3 (May 1972): 34. "1942 Lincoln Zephyr." Egg 3 (Summer 1973): 26. "1934 Terraplane." New Mexico Humanities Review 1(2) (May 1978): 63. "1935 Ford." Open Places 12—13 (May 1972): 23. "1939 Mercury." St Andrews Review 2(1) (Fall 1972): 33. "Old Car Haters." Open Places 16 (Winter 1974): 32-33. Reprinted in Open Places Fifteenth Anniversary Issue 31-32 (Fall 1981): 74. "Old Car Poem." Poetry Now 2(4) (Fall 1975): 31. "On Ladybird's Proposal to Eliminate All Junkyards." Recycle This Poem: Poems on Ecology (Dragonfly Press, 1971): 6. 332 "Out to Pasture." Green River Review 13(2) (Spring 1982): 42. "Parts Hunting in Nebraska." December 11(1-2) (Fall 1969): 167. "The Poet is Miscast as Protector." Arts in Society 5(3) (Fall/ Winter 1968): 4. "Poem Ending with the Words of Kintpuash." Poetry Northwest 14(3) (Autumn 1973): 35-36. "Pursuing the Coin." Shenandoah 19(4) (Summer 1968): 47. Reprinted in COSMEP Anthology 2 (1969): 11-12. "Reading The Foxfire Book." Granite 5 (Spring 1973): 21. "Red Verne." Writer's Forum 7 (1981): 183-184. "Regarding Those Who in the Name of Ecology Buried a Brand New $2500 Automobile." Cimarron Review 14 (January 1971): 44. "Returning to Oregon." Poetgy Northwest 14(3) (Autumn 1973): 35. Reprinted as a postcard by The Fault Press (Spring 1976). "Returning to Oregon II." Poetry Now 2(4) (Fall 1975): 31. Riding Bike Series: "The Bike Shop Walls are Plastered." Asphalt 4 (Spring 1972): 14. Reprinted in Scree 1 -21 (1981): 81. "On Seeing The Wild One." Easyriders 3(4) (June 1973): 20. Reprinted in EasyridErs Anniversary Issue (June 1982): 22. "Riding with the Lents Gang." Asphalt 4 (Spring 1971): 15. "Sensations." Back Door 5 (Spring 1972): 34. Reprinted in Karaki 3TMay 1972): 33; Coe Review 2 (Fall 1972): 14. "What We Hated, What We Loved." Happiness Holding Tank 1 (Winter 1971): 28. "What We Rode." Salt Lick 6 (October 1970): 7. "Rivers I have Known." Granite 5 (Spring 1973): 20. l 333 "Rustfire." COSMEP Antholo 2 (1969): 11. Reprinted in The World 23 (Summer 1971 : 30. "Southern California." Wormwood Review 10(2) (Summer 1970): 49. "Spanning." Passages North 2(2) (Spring 1981): 7. "Stasis." Sumac 2(1) (Fall 1969): 31. "Statistics." December 9(2-3) (Fall 1967): 58. Reprinted in New Generation: Poets anthology (AAR Book, 1971): 116. "Sunday Night." Wisconsin Review 13(3) (Fall 1979): 10. "Talking 1955 Blues." Quixote 3(9) (Summer 1968): 3- "Things to Do Around Coos Bay." Is 1 (Summer 1973): n.p. Reprinted in Poetry Now 3(1T (April 1976): 23. "13 Ways of Looking at a Model-A." Northwest Review 9(2) (Winter 1968): 102-105. Reerlted as PosteWoem #6 (Stone Press 1973). "The 'Thirties as Allegory." Sumac 2(1) (Fall 1969): 30. "Three Reasons for Staying Out of Oregon." Wisconsin Review 13(3) (Fall 1979): 10. "Tillamook Burn." Rouge River Gorgg 2 (Fall 1970): 10-11. Reprinted in Rockbottom 9 (Summer 1979): 73. "Tomato Soup." Rockbottom 9 (Summer 1979): 79- "Travelling Salesman." Wormwood Review 6(2) (Fall 1966): 32. "United Artificial Penis." Losers Weepers anthology (Kayak Press, 1969): 72. "Where is Gary?" The Landlocked Heart: Poems from Indiana anthology (1980): 64-65. "Work." Scree 22-23 (Winter 1983): 15. "The Wrecker." Poetry Now 2(4) (Fall 1975): 31. 334 Review Essays "American Traditional." A Gallery of Modern Fiction: Stories from the Kenyon Review. Robie Macauley, ed. New York, 1966; Northwest Review, 9(1) (Summer 1967): 117-119. "Fiction from the Small Presses." The (San Francisco) Book Review 24 (September 1972): 33-35. "Five Poets: Birney, Ondaatje, Goldfarb, Williams, Ammons." Red Cedar Review 7(3-4) (Summer 1971): 79-83. "Is There an Ithaca School of Poetry." Leaving by the Closet Door. Stephen Shrader; The Gaflery Coers, Ray DiPalma. Ithaca. N.Y., 1971. Salt Lick 9-10 (Winter 1972): 51-53. "Recycle that Car." Book Magazine 28 (June 1973): 29-31. "The So-Cal Chronical." Mayo Sergeant. New York: James B. Hall, 1968; Northwest Review 10(2) (Winter 1970): 131-135. "Three Canadian Fictions: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje, Toronto, 1971; Columbus and the Fat Lad , Matt Cohen, Toronto, 1972; The Truth, Tiarrence eath, Toronto, 1972." Ann Arbor Review 19 (Fall 1974): 93-96. "Three First Novels: The Broken Places, Joseph Dionne, New York, 1972; Benjamin Grabbed His Glicken and Ran, Fred Gordon, New York, 1972; Shedding Skin, Robert Ward, New York, 1972." Red Cedar Review 8(2-3) (Fall 1973): 96-99. Columns: "Fifties Flashbacks " in Rod Action "Hubcaps" (August 1982): 24, 76-77, 84-85. "Rappin' Pipes" (September 1982): 12-13, 87. "Street Racing" (October 1982): 12-13, 86-87. "A Hot Rodder's Wish Book" (November 1982): 12-13, 87. "We Never Called them Kemps" (December 1982): 12-13. "Drake's A-V8" (January 1983): 12-13, 75. "The Gook Wagon" (May 1983): 12-13, 81. Title "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" The Bi Little CIO Book Street Was Fun W'SI Interviews 335 Unpublished Material Cited* Draft 1 2 3 5 (not identified) 6 Version incorporated into Fears 1 2 3 {additional drafts 4 for some chapters Drake's final-- sent to printers "lousy start" "earlier rough" Rod Action article "later rough" "rewrite" Drake's final version-- sent to printers Code noonnnn '<' zé< Dates Written unknown-- ca. 1965-68 Fan 1982 Feb. 11, 1982 Summer 1982 ca. 1973 Fall 1979 Winter 1980 Winter 1982 Winter 1982 Spring 1982 Drake was interviewed in person and tapes made of the interviews February 4, 1983 and May 22, 1983. Tapes and transcripts of the interviews are in possession of Leonora H. Smith. * o This, and all material mentioned but not cited m the dissertation has been returned to the author on completion. APPENDIX B LEE UPTON - BIBLIOGRAPHY 336 APPENDIX B LEE UPTON - BIBLIOGRAPHY Published Material Books You Are Not A Child. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1984 (forthcoming). Poetry Chapbooks Beer Garden. Okemos, Michigan: Stone Press, 1978. Small Locks. Highland Park, Michigan: Fallen Angel Press, 1979. Other Publications "After She Knows Her Husband Will Leave Her." Montana Review 2 (1980): 50. "Anniversaries I." Croton Review 6 (Spring 1983). "Anniversaries ll." Croton Review 6 (Spring 1983). "Armadillo." Croton Review 6 (Spring 1983). "Barbara's Story." Gargoyle (Spring 1983). "Belated Birthday Poem." Greyledge Review (Spring/Summer 1980): 22 "Carla." Nimrod (forthcoming). "Cemeteries." Labyris 2(7) (Winter/Spring 1981): 24. "Ceremony of Small Girls." California Quarterlj (1977). "Channel 13." Green River Review 13(1,2) (1982): 175. "Come Out." Poetry Now 6(3) (Issue 33): 42. 337 338 "The Confusion." waves 2 (Spring/Summer 1979): 3- "Cortortionist." Penny Dredful (1978). "Coral Reef." Wisconsin Review 27(1) (1983): 23. "Danae." Akros (forthcoming). "Doctors." Green River Review 13(1,2) (1982): 177. "Embarrassment." Labyris 3(8,9) (Spring 1982): 13. "Emergencies." Green River Review 13(1,2) (1982): 173. "Emergency Cannibals." Massachusetts Review 22(4) (1981): 694. "Examination." Sun Dog 2 (Spring 1980): 81. "Holding the Heads of Animals." Green River Review 13(1,2) (1982): 176. "Hotel Earle." Labyris 3(8,9) (Spring 1982): 14. "The House That Falls." MiSSlSSlPPi Review 10(3) (Winter/ Spring 1982): 54-55. "How I Lost My Job at the House of Doughnuts." Labyris (Spring 1983). "I Cannot Leave Well Enough Alone." Seed 8 Stamen 1 (Fall 1977): n.p. "In the Rudolf Nureyev Dream." Salmagundi 47-48 (Winter- Spring 1980): 61-62. "In the Supermarket Orange Juice Display." Labyris 111(8,9) (Spring 1982): 15. "Jesus on a Tortilla." Red Fox Review (Spring 1978). "The Lambs." Black Jack 9 (1980): 33- "Las Vacas." waves 2 (Spring-Summer 1979): 5. "Lillie Langtry." Passages North 1(1) (1979):5. "Limbo." Mississippi Mud 22 (Fall 1980): 25. "The Losses" of the Gardener." Denver Quarterly 14(3) (Fall 1979): 84. 339 "Love of Ornament." Confrontation 21 (Winter 1979): 123. "Lou Anne in the House of Glass." Webster Review (Spring 1983). "Lute Brilliancy." Seed 8 Stamen 1 (Fall 1977): n.p. "Making Supper for My Father and His Friends." Labyris 2(7) (Winter/Spring 1981): 25. "Marks We Would Give Her." Greensboro Review 32 (Summer 1982): 57. "Marry Me." Green River Review 13(1,2) (1982): 174. "Message to Joaquin #40." Greyledge Review 1(2) (Spring/ Summer 1980): 20. "Milking." Black Jack 9 (1980): 87. "More Pleasures Should be Granted in Lower Degrees." Labyris 2(7) (Winter/Spring 1981). "The Mountain." Centennial Review (forthcoming). "Not Beautiful." Labyris (Spring 1983). "Photographs." Passages North 1(1) (1979): 4 "Pied Piper." Montana Review 2 (1980): 49. "Plank Hill Farm.‘I Massachusetts Review 24(2) (Summer 1982). "Poem to the Harmonica." waves 2 (Spring/Summer 1979): 'l- "The Servant of Snow." Little Balkans Review (forthcoming). "A Single Drop." Concerning Poetry 14(1) (1971): 51. "Sleeping in a Cellar." The Little Magazine 12 (1,2) (Spring- Summer 1978): 90. "Somewhere So Lush." Chicago Review 29(2) (Autumn 1977): 102. "The Tail of Robert E. Lee's Horse." Cimarron Review (forthcoming) . "Toys." Mississippi Review 10(3) (Winter/Spring 1932): 52-53. "Visiting My Family in the Country." Hawaii Review 9 (Fall 1979): 84. "Warning." Seed 8 Stamen 1 (Fall 1977): n.p. 340 "The Wives." Connecticut Poetry Review (forthcoming). "The Woman and the Flame." Labyris (Spring 1983) . "The Woodcutter." Greensboro Review 32 (Summer 1982): 58. Unpublished Materials Cited * Title Draft "The Foreigner" "The Mountain" "The Tail of Robert E. Lee's Horse." "Laurie Shecks Aramanth: Charms for the Soul" "The Invention of Happiness" U'l-PWN-A MGM-EwN—A oouosmcwM-d 014:de DON-3 Code F-I F-II F-Ill < séé _.'..__'- <:"' l < >'>'>'>'>' -I-I-ITI-I EIZIEZZIEZZIZI Date Written 3/6/83 3/8/83 3/9/83 3/10/83 3/11/83 3/11/83 3/11/83 3/11/83 3/17/83 3/17/83 3/18/83 3/18/83 3/20/83 3/21/83 3/21/83 2/20/83 2/21/83 2/22/83 2/23/83 2/23/83 11/7/82 2/5/83 2/12/83 1/12/83 2/7/83 9/?/83 3/8/82 3/9/82 * This, and all material mentioned but not cited in the dissertation has been returned to the author on completion. 341 Interviews Personal correspondence, Lee Upton to Leonora Smith, January 1, 1983 to May 31, 1983. APPENDIX C "THE CHICKEN WHICH BECAME A RAT" 342 "Sketch" of a Story by Albert Drake Showing Scenes and Exposition 734a sm'l‘ ‘ 'EXPoSlTlm ? (LASHBAC K LMQEK -/ é FLASH-BACK 7321. We’ll“ 343 Published Version of "The Chicken Which Became a Rat" 344 4'0 J)» t}. «3 Albert Drake, The Chicken Which Became a Rat Albert Drake . “ e ain’t eating the eggs,” Uncle Boswick said. His voice carried that same amazed indignation as when he had asked my father, “Yer paid for the window?" or when he had re- ported to me, “He did it with the sam-yer-eye.” His world had its own practical logic, of survival; these were acts which left him confounded. “The Jap ain’t eating the eggs and he won’t sell \ them." “What's he plan to do?” I asked. “No plans.” Uncle Boswick shook the beads of dew from his slacks, and pointed his whsngee cane across the tall grass which stretched from our house to the Jap’s tarpaper shack: within the wire I could imagine the gaunt, long-necked hens eyeing each other suspiciously. “Nothing—the chickens are getting wild, the eggs are piling up, the garden's full of weeds—I don't get it.” And then, after picking out the grass kernels which jutted from his perforated two-tone shoes, Uncle Boswick was 05 to the USO club. To build the boys' morale. I was surprised that his attitude toward the lap had changed from hatred to amazed indignation. The lap had disappoin'ed him. Eggs were rationed and Uncle Boswick saw the Jap's re- luctance to sell his not as a foreign plot but rather as evidence of the humorless intensity of a backward race: Uncle Boswick NORTHWEST REVIEW Into these trenches we crawled—Piggy, Slats, Mike, The Mac- Gregor, and myself—soot streaked across our faces, like Com- mandos in movies; and we moved out, sinking low until the last observation post, where smooth throwing rocks and solid dirt clods were piled. F or we were children of war, and had been taught to hate. “I can smell hint,” The MacGregor said. I crawled to the rim and partly turned, one eye on the lap and the other on The MacGregor, who braced a foot against the dirt wall, his arm cocked. When I raised my finger he fired a dis. tance round. It sailed across the broken landscape and dropped so far behind the Jap did not pause in his stroke. “Correct elevation,” I whispered. The MacGregor sent 05 another stone, which arced white against the blue, until, falling, it became a black speck lost in the weeds. Still the enemy hoed on. I realized that if The MacGregor, our strongest gunner, couldn’t make the distance, none of us could. But I whispered, “Harrass- ment rounds,” and raised two fingers, which meant to fire at will. Our hate spun five clods upward, where they teetered against the sky, to fall in uneven area on the dull ground. The Jap, un- touched, continued his insidious ground work, chopping treacher- ously at this piece of the United States, knocking crystals of dew from the weeds as be enlarged his claim. Over our heads a whistle pierced the sky. The black speck seemed to travel forever in its swift, guided flight, diminishing until it reached an invisible peak; with a flash of white, the gesture of a wingtip, it peeled off, screaming earthward, to crash through the window of the Jap's shanty. The enemy jumped, dropped his hoe, and ran, flapping his wings like a chicken attempting flight. We cheered, and as I turned to see who our supporting artillery might be, a volley of laughter strafed the field. At the edge of the pavement Uncle Boswick flipped a heavy stone from hand to hand; he looked more than ever like the posters of Uncle Sam. It was toward the Jap that he pointed: I want you. 1968 345 DRAKE would know how to make money here, somehow, if the lap would only work with him. What surprised me most was the change in the Jap's property: weeds choked the garden, the corn stalks were stunted and brown, the chicken coop was a box of rusty wire, a small concentration camp. If Uncle Boswick was baffled, how could I be expected to understand? But it seemed that after V-E Day the Jap had given up, as if he knew the Allies would win, and now the land was reverting to the desolation it had been a year ago—a wasteland beyond the city‘s limits, marshy in winter, baked hard in summer,“ It now resembled the useless landscape of Mat spring, when one night the lap had infiltrated our neighborhood. He had sneaked in without noise or luggage, and the next morning, when I peeked through the gunoslot of venetian blinds, he was on the flatlands, bent to his hoe, against the rising sun. It was the third year of the War. His blade flashed like a bayonet into American soil. Silhou- etted against the sun which spilled red across the tips of furrows, his insect shape reminded me of something I had seen or read— something thin, creepy, and utterly evil. Then I recalled the source. 0n the coffee table was the current Liberty: on the cover Hitler assumed the body of a jackass, his hoofs kicking Europe; beside him Mussolini was a baboon, dang- ling mindlessly from a stripped, war-wrecked tree; and in the upper-right corner Tojo was a furry, menacing spider whose web, like the land around our Jap, was stained blood-red. The pavement ended at our house, and Home Front defenses honey-combed the neighborhood‘s perimeter. The day after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor we had marched into this wasteland and each boy had dug a foxhole, a hiding place against the bomb- ing raids which seemed imminent. The only bombs to fall were random fireoballoons which fizzled out in the wet forests west of Portland; but as weeks turned to months into years, all our young muscle was directed at the War Efl'ort. We dug a gridwork of slit trenches, pillboxes, and tunnels, and for armament we had stacks of dirt clods, stones, bags of smoke dust, apples drilled to accept a firecracker, and of course our B-B guns. Uncle Boa. wick had often said that we could expect a Presidential E flag. DRAKE p5 could not understand why my father, when he learned of our victory, carefully folded the evening paper, hitched up his 3:24;“ strode down the street, off the pavement, and across e . He was gone a long time, and dinner was halfway through be- fore he returned. In fact, Uncle Boswick was well into seconds, his mouth so full he could barely esclaim: “Yer paid for the window?” “But why?” I asked. Was he a traitor? Aiding the enemy. I almost believed this in spite of the signs on our front door glass: We Bought Our Quota. We Have A Boy in the NAVY; the blue cloth with the gold star. V for Victory . . . — “Because your Uncle broke it,” he said, spreading white mar- garine on his bread, digging into the Relief gravy over cereal- laden hamburger. “And because what that Jap does on that gawd- forsaken land is none of your business." New I could not believe it. I felt sick, confused, as shattered as the Jap’s window. I looked to Uncle Boswick, but he was smil- ing as he snubbed out his cigarette—smoked as usual to the middle. Another wasteful habit which aggravated my mother. “Just leave him alone," my father said quietly, always chew- ing. “Stay away from his place.” Uncle Boswick could not tolerate the sight of my father calmly eating supper, asking us to leave the Jap alone. “But he’s the ENEMY l” he shouted, fists clenched on the table. “How do you know?” my father asked. “Well. . . he's a gawdamn Jap, ain't be?” "There,” I said, jumping up, pointing to the wall. "There." 0n the kitchen wall were two pages my mother had torn from Lile magazine: How To Tell Japs From The Chinese. The photos had an overlay to show that Chinese have long, fine-boned faces, parchment yellow complexion, and net er have rosy cheeks; laps have squat faces with the nose a flat blob, earthy yellow complex- ion, and sometimes rosy cheeks. I read: An alter: sounder clue is facial expression, shaped by cultural, not anthropological factors. Chinese wear rational calm of tolerant realists. Japs, like General Toio, show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics. The other 7 '1 (l I») NORTHWEST REVIEW page showed Tall Chinese brothers and Short Japanese admirals —our allies and our enemies. “He looked just like the Short Japanese admirals, and . . . .” “Did he have rosy cheeks?” my father asked, smiling. “Yes,” I said, although I really wasn’t sure. I hadn't been able , to see m nemy's face. —- llI don't like that Jap any better than you do,” my father said, looking at me, Uncle Boswick, my mother. “But he's had a rough row to hoe.” As be cleaned his plate with a final slice of bread, be repeated the story the lap had told him: there had been a large farm near Gresham, where the fields sloped ofl toward the sun, and where seeds would not stay in the ground—in spring the strawberries grew big as a boy's fist, and in fall the corn was so large and tender that a single ear would make a meal. My father told the story in the dreamy, tragic tone of a man who has not owned anything himself—saying that in only two more years the farm would have been paid ofl, but after Pearl Harbor it was confiscated by the government and sold at auction, and the lap-- a Nisei, who had been born on the farm, and was therefore an American citizen—had spent the past two and a half years in an internment camp near Pendelton. Now released, he had no fam- ily, no farm, no money. “So I think you—everybody—ought to lay off him." “Whadda think the Nips‘re doing to our boys?” Uncle Boswick shouted. “Wake Island, Bataan, the Death March. And don’t for- get Pearl Harbor: those jokers didn’t pay us for any broken win- dows there. I wish . . . ." My mother got up and began to clear the table. No doubt she was thinking of Grant on the USS Plymouth, now a month out of Hawaii. My father rolled Bugler into tan. wheat-straw paper, touched his tongue to the edge and flattened the ends. He always enjoyed one of Uncle Boswick’s real cigarettes after dinner, but he would not ask; nor was one offered tonight. The last thing I heard as I got up and went to sit on the front porch was Uncle Boswick finishing his sentence: “. . . I could get my licks in.” Uncle Boswick was our hero. The Declaration of War was being read over a million radio speakers when Uncle Boswick's NORTHWEST REVIEW saved bullets by using his bayonet on the wounded. We knew too well of his exquisite tortures—bamboo splinters ignited under toe-nails, fingernails removed by pliers, the eye-lid lifted 08 by the knife's thin whisper. thoughts were bothering me when Uncle Boswick came out to sit on the porch. “What I’d like to know is how he got re- leased. With a War on.” “Maybe he escaped,” I suggested. “He's up to something,” Uncle Boswick whispered. “Keep your eye on him, kid. That slant-eyed devil is a spy or a sabo- teur.” Our eyes were on him all right. Every day after breakfast Piggy, Slats, Mike, The MacGregor, and I gathered in the farthest observation post. We pushed Uncle Boswick's binoculars over the rim of the hole until the lenses were full of yellow skin— earthy yellow, I was sure. We harrassed the lap with random shots. We saluted him with raised middle-fingers and screamed Banzai, and asked how the hell Tojo was. But the Jap refused to notice us, and anyway, we saw nothing auspicious. Just the hoe striking the ground and weeds flung from the tiny green shoots which were beginning to appear. This went on for a week, and suddenly the eighth day was Summer. By ten o’clock it was seventy, the flatlands shimmered, and the Jap, slashing with his has or carrying buckets of water, looked like a movie mirage. The 0? was an oven. When Piggy refused to drink the buck ish canteen water, he went home. Then Mike remembered the bandoliers of ice in his mother's refrigerator. Soon only The Mac- Cregor and myself sweated in the hole, pouring water over our heads, swearing, hating the lap for keeping us there. And atnoon, whenthe sun was straight up, erasing any shade, we went swimming. But the War, glorious and dreadful, near and distant, con- tinued to touch us in many ways. Every day my mother scan- ned the paper fearfully: 346 and when he placed an ironing board across the jump seats he was essential this was to the war eflort, he could not get the red and DRAKE foot missed a tailgate at Fort 0rd; he lay screaming in pain as Roosevelt‘s voice called for unlimited sacrifices from our fighting men. The truck had been barely moving, but something had hap pened to Uncle Boswick's back. He was given a medical discharge and a fifty per cent disability pension, which meant he did not need to work even if he could. In the confusion of that December the papers oficially honoring him as the first casualty of the war were lost in channels, but Uncle Boswick got the pension, a Purple Heart, and freedom from rationing: he had unlimited supplies at the airbase PX. It was unfortunate, my mother often said, that the PX did not stock eggs and meat, but only cigarettes and liquor. With my magmas“?- he was 4r. At times I felt that he was let ing us down by not being in uni- form. Oh sure, building Liberty Ships was pretty important work, but I could not get too excited about it-—not even on those days when we would go to Swan Island for a launching, when after the speecha and free lunch he would show us the whirly crane he drove, a tiny cab sitting a hundred feet high on delicate girder legs. But seeing it sail down the tracks, with a bulkhead dan- gling from the long cables, just wasn't the same as seeing those North Africa. 50 I could not understand why he had paid for the Jap's win- dow. Although we were not so poor as we had been before the war, there was no money to spend foolishly. Oh, perhaps I had a vague idea why my father had paid off: because he believed that every man should own a piece of ground and a house, and that all others should respect the limits of ownership—even if it was a house thin, censored V-letters that The MacGregor’s father sent from ‘4 no better than ours, where the wind whipped through the in covered lattice-work which was its foundation. As I looked through dusk across the field I could see the lap, his hoe flashing in the dim light. The sight made me furious. How were we to leave him alone? He was the Enemy: newspapers, magazines, our teachers, had taught us to hate him. And we learned well to hate. Oh, how we hated him—deeply, intensely. He was the grinning monkey-pilot who gleefully leaned into his I gunsight to machinegun parachutists. He was the spidery Nip who l DRAKE TODAYS ARMY-NAVY CASUALTY LIST Washington—Following are the latest casualties in the military services, including next of kin. ARMY-NAVY DEAD Her finger would tremble through the list to where Grant's last name, first name, rank, might be; then the newspaper would col- lapse in her folded hands and she would cry or pray or both. Sometimes, in the afternoon when the house was empty, I would burst in from play to find her at the writing desk, sobbing over a stack of tissue-thin V-Ietters; they were all postmarked San Fran- cisco, Censor's Office, and she was wondering, no doubt, where in the wide Pacific her oldest boy might be. Elsewhere, Captain America turned bullets ofl his shield, the Green Lantem sought truth, and even the Submariner turned to the side of good: another ring of filthy rotten Nazi spies and sab- oteurs was broken. The Axis shed their animal skins in defeat. In our comics we fought the war, and in the papers we read of its progress: June 6th was D-Day; during that month V-l bombs, a terrible undreamed of weapon, began to fall on England; the Marianas Campaign pushed ahead. The pleasant summer ad- vanced, and so did our boys: troops landed at Saipan, and during July the big drive began through Normandy; Guam and Paris were liberated in August. At home the war controlled us. Our battles were fought every day: we could buy comic books, but few fireworks and no bubble- gum. The B-B's for our guns turned to lead. The currency of con- versation was ration discs and coupon books. In our driveway in father’s 1934 Terraplane sat without tires, graded by the sticker on its windshield. Now he drove only the sedan, a 1930 Hudson; it was an immense, magnificent car, dark and square; able to haul nine people every day to the shipyard. However white B sticker changed to the coveted grade C—so the coupe restedonits rimsandthesedaneased around town at35mphon \/ 3*“ {-x II NORTHWIS‘I' REVIEW ancient patched rubber and there was not enough extra gas that summer to even go to the beach. But we fought on: we flattened tons of tin cans for tanks and salvaged kitchen fat for munitions and bundled high stacks of newspapers and magazines for who knows what. We bought a twenty-five cent savings stamp a week, and when the book was full it became a War Bond. On walks and walls we chalked our l beliefs—Hitler is a Heel—and assertions of evolution—Tofu is a Monkey's Uncle. We said prayers, pledged allegiance, saluted the flag; and a thousand times our razored hate cheered John ! Wayne's single-handed assault against the Japs on Friday nights. ne bright morning, when even the haze of war could not hide the sun, I came from behind the bumped, tireless coupe in the driveway and suddenly noticed the marshland had become a profuse garden. The corn was a screen, thick as any bamboo grove, and below the tomatoes glowed red: tiny suns of nippon. Bayonets of onion greens stabbed upward; potatoes, peppers, lettuce, carrots camouflaged the ground. Even the tarpaper shack seemed to stand a little straighter in the chaos of flowers, and its shutters and front door were painted bright yellow. Sneaking through the foliage was the Jap: he was building tripods, small tent skeletons, for the beans. Behind me Uncle Boswick came out, stretched, and surveyed the changed, technicolor landscape. He sported a new panama hat and two-tone perforated shoes, and I guessed that he was on his way to the USO club, although it was pretty early. “Poppies,” he said. “And not the kind the Legion sells.” I admired Uncle Boswick—I would never have thought of opium-4nd so I said yes,when he asked me to reconnoiter the area and to get some fresh vegetables, to be sent to his friends in Washington, D.C., for analysis. In spite of my father’s order that the Jap be left alone, I wanted to get in the fight. Our fight. The rest of the day was spent with the Gang mapping out a plan of action. It was only after the details were settled that Slats men- tioned it didn’t get dark until nine, his bedtime. Our boots and jeers at Slats were suddenly silenced when we realised that there wasn’t one of us could stay out that late. I3 NORTHWEST REVIEW figure passed outside my window. It shufled under that same loose, flowing shirt and broad hat I had seen last nighP—but again I could not see any Ieature o] the lace. “Well, you’re awake,” my mother said. She was running water into a dishpan at the sink, and on the table, the gas-mask bag spilled out vegetables like a horn of plenty. "I'be Jap man gave us these,” she said. “He wouldn’t take any money, but I asked him to bring us some every week and I said I’d pay him a quarter —-does that sound fair? He said he wants to buy some chickens.” Once a week until November the Jap came with a bag of pro- duce, to accept my mother’s money (as if there was no war on!) andtopasssoclosebeneaththewindowthathemusthavefelt the glow of my hatred. He never did return my knife, either. it what seemed the middle of summer, school began again. No matter that Paris and Guam and PaIau had been liberated, or that bombs were falling on Manila, Luzon, and Okinawa, we marched into dull classrooms, carrying new notebooks already marked A.A.F.: we were all destined to become pilots, wearing white scarfs, chamois helmets, and leather jackets with the Flying Tiger patch on the back, like Errol Flynn. School for us was the twice-weekly War Communique film, where in the fluttering light we saw Patton tanks smash hedgerows, and bombs tumble like eggs toward the ultimate explosion. We squirmed with excitement as infantry charged across beaches strewn with dead and debris, as a flame-thrower sucked burning Japanese from caves, ending their ruthless mysticism. When the narrator’s voice and the marching music ground to a halt and the projector stopped and the olive drab blinds were raised, the boys would turn to look at one another and even Ellie Chombrake, the skinniest kid in the class, were a sense of purpose on his face. The war was a common bond, holding us together; we all knew our role in this struggle for freedom. , Besides Christmas, only two things happened that school year. One night in December, shortly before vacation, I was doing homework when I heard shouting in the field: it was The Mac- Gregor. 347 DRAKE Therefore, at nine, as the sun fell beyond the muted, blacked out neon of Portland, l crawled from my bedroom window and slipped into the high grass. In the near-darkness I groped along the trench-work, and at the farthest OP I began to inch toward that garden on my stomach, a hunting knife clenched between my teeth. Near my face the chiirrruup of crickets was deafening, and at every shift of my body the gammask bag slipped noisily; I paused to look back, and through the summer mists I saw the dull yellow cracks around black-out curtains in our frontroom, far away. Crickets chirped nearby, an echo of bullfrogs farther out in the marsh, and along Johnson Creek the Galloping Goose cried into the night. A veil of wind blew a pungent, acrid green and then I saw the oiled, metallic sides of vegetables: cucumbers lay like small surface mines, aimed in every direction. I waited, staring into the blackness at the tar-paper shack. Then the knife blade slipped across prickly stalks and three large specimens were in the bag. I crouched among the corrugated sides of squash, knife slashing, and moved quickly into the bayonets of green onions. Beyond were tomato plants, the bard black balls swimming in metallic greenness. Among the wide, sharp leaves of com I was shielded, and it was not until the fourth ear had been split from its stalk that I felt a pang of fear. In the terror of si- lence leaf rasped on leaf. The knife was in my hand when I stood to stare into the silent, black night. Not three plants away the Jap waited, arms folded, hat tipped to conceal his inscrutable face. Evenasljumpedlknewitmustbeascarecroso—butlthrew the knife overhand and flung away the gasomask bag and ran across the misty, deep grass, the uneven ground falling away under my racing feet. Only when I was again in bed, rubbing my legs to stop their trembling, did I realise that the Jap had my knife—that he was now armed. I slept with this fear and in a dream I heard voices at the back mzzuielltheyarelovelyandlamepayandlmaybeeptlte I heard the screen door open and my mother say Wartime—4t was a trick, no doubt—but then the door slammed shut and a 18 DRAKE From my front porch I heard him shouting crazily at the Jap and there was a distant crash of glass. I ran across the field, leap- ing trenches, until I saw the blurred outline of The MacGregor lohbing rock after rock at the tar-paper shanty; through the dark mist came the report of splintering boards. He was screaming and falling forward with every rock he threw, and I waited a minute before placing a hand on his shoulder. The face that mmedwasdistortedintoacraaymashandlsteppedbachbut not quickly enough—his throwing fist, clutching a rack, came from the night to smash into my face. It was my father who helped us both home, and when he re- turned from The MacGregor’s house, to hold an ice pack against my bleeding cheek, he told us that Mr. MacGregor had been killed in what the newspapers celebrated as the Battle of the Bulge—-where General McAulifie said “nuts” to the Nazis. The telegram from the War Department assured Mrs. MacGregor that her husband had died a Hero. My check no longer hurt: I felt good, and I wanted to shake The MacGregor’s hand. But it was too late that night, my father said, and for the rest of the week The MacGregor's desk at school was empty, and by Saturday the mother and son had moved to Seattle, leaving a dark, lifeless house. The next week, as if to replace our loss, Piggy's uncle sent home a large, olive drab box from the Pacific. Piggy was certain it was a Christmas present for him but Gussie, his aunt, who was staying for the duration, said the box contained souvenirs, and that she had been instructed not to open it until Jed came home. And within five minutes she had a crowbar against the lid, splintering wood; inside lay three long, dark rifles, a pistol wrapped in tan, oil-slick paper, and two Jap oflicer swords. Everything was coated with a thick rancid grease, but the guns were beautiful and the swords were works of art: they had scab- bards crafted with inlaid wood and pearl, into which the delicate blade whispered. Gussie, who no doubt expected silks, hammered thelidbackand fromtbenonthebasementdoorwaskeptlocked. But for us, knowing these weapons were there, the war seemed much closer. IS f. l NORTHWEST REVIEW chool was a huge wheel, grinding toward Spring. Its monoto- nous progress was interrupted only by the excitement of paper rives and tin can collections, practice blackouts and marches to the basement, which was now called the Air Raid Shelter. Here we huddled until the All Clear bell, discussing how we would fight the war when called, even though we could not see how it would last another eight years: the newspaper maps showed wide arrows, and by April the Americans and Russians were shaking hands in a defeated Berlin, while most of Europe was occupied by our boys. Although the Japanese were using kami- kaze: and Baka Bombs, Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been cap- tured and it was only a matter of time before we would invade Japan itself. Our winter had been mild and the spring rains turned the ground an energetic green. The trenches were hip-high in water, but from my bedroom window I watched the Jap at work seeding and hoeing. I wondered what he thought—surely he knew now that his country was defeated. A hundred short Japanese ad- mirals were no match for one tall John Wayne marine. Why had he come here? What did he want? What was be working so hard for? No matter if he should again transform that wasteland into a blooming paradise, the whole neighborhood blotted him out with hate. Yet he foolishly worked on: feet bare, pants rolled to the knee, he dashed along the furrows in a lurching, forward- slanting crouch under the wide straw hat. When he was not work- ing the land he was building the chicken coop. He had scrounged fragments of wood and wire; and the coop, a temporary, tottering structure, made the tar-paper shack seem a palace. Apparently he had sold enough vegetables the previous summer, because one morning the fenced area was filled with small puffs of yellow, like frantic flowers. His dream was coming true, and I wanted to cross that field to make sure he understood that this could only happen in America—this was free enterprise, democracy. The Jap had his chicks, V-E Day was celebrated, my dad was talking about the new car he would buy when this war was over, the neighborhood grew green, and school would soon end. It was into this spirit of optimism that Piggy’s uncle returned. If I had not seen him in uniform for a fleeting minute, as he 16 NORTHWEST REVIEW rocks, and sometimes lobbed an occasional missile at the Jap’s chicken coop—but half-heartedly, for now that we knew Tojo was finished our Jap seemed more like a docile intruder: un- wanted, but harmless. Uncle Boswick had even taken to crossing the field two or three times a week, to “interrogate” the Jap about when the hens would start laying. For eggs were still rationed. I trained Uncle Boswick’s binoculars on the Jap’s shack, then slowly swept them across the chicken coop, the vast garden— for I wanted to see my enemy’s face, to see if in these last days of the war that face could maintain its humorless interuity— wben at my elbow Slats said: “What’s that noise?” All I heard was Gussie’s radio. Whenever she was sunbathing her radio blared hot hillbilly music into the quiet neighborhood. But today she was not sunbathing. When I swung the binoculars past our house to Piggy’s backyard, I saw Gussie in the far corner wearing tiny shorts and halter. The noise that Slats heard was the blackberry vines being chopped, and what Gussie was using was the big Jap sword. She was working, and I recalled what my mother had said about Gussie “straightening out” with Jed home. It was the first time I had ever seen her do work of any kind. Like Uncle Bos- wick, she did not need to work. We charged from the trench, knowing that long wooden box of war souvenirs was lying open in an unlocked basement. But Piggy said: “If we wait for Jed. he’ll show them to us.” Under the hot sun we waited while on that porch Jed rocked, his eyes focused on something above the rooftops, and in the far corner of the yard the sword flashed like a mirror. We waited, wondering how many American boys’ heads that long blade had lopped oil. We shuddered, for the courageous blood spilled on Bataan, Corrigedor, Wake Island, and for the blade each time that Gussie hit a rock. Through the binoculars I watched Jed’s face, dull and impassive, and finally I saw the lips tighten slowly, pulling his eyes narrow. Suddenly the field of vision was filled with his striped bib-overalls. l lowered the glasses to see Jed stand up; he spit once over the porch rail, scratched his seat, and started down the steps as we charged from the trench. Jed walked slowly past the basement door, down the driveway, 348 DRAKE walked from the car to the house that first day, I would not have believed that he had been in battle: all day, every day, he sat on the front porch in a rocking chair, wearing faded bib overalls and a brown shirt, and bearing no visible wound. He was a strange man with small, dull eyes and skin which became red without tanning; when he spoke his voice faded through short sentences, and he refused to talk about the War, even to Uncle Boswick. “All he wants.” said Uncle Boswick, “is to get back to that Alabama dirt farm, and sit." “That's okay," my father said. “A man ought to own a bit of land.” “Gussie, now she’s out from a difi’erent bolt,” Uncle Boswick said, winking. “I know her pretty well. She likes it here—plenty of ocean and forests and no triggers. Bet you five dollars she don’t leave with him.” “Oh, now,” my mother said, but her protest was weak for she had the gossip about Gussie straight from Piggy's mother: how Gussie had worked at Oregon Shipyard for two weeks after Jed had been shipped overseas. She had been back only for launch. ings, when the company gave out free beer and food, and we were told that any Saturday night she could be found along Harbor Drive, where ships on the Willamette tied up. Gussie, my mother said, was “wild" and “needed a baby to keep her home.” Now that Jed was back she was sure that Gussie would “straighten out.” Uncle Boswick, who seemed to know an awful lot about Gussie, said he wasn’t so sure. But rain or shine Jed remained in his rocking chair on the front porch, surveying the neighborhood with dull eyes. His uni- form remained in the closet, and Piggy reported that Jed had goneintothebasementonlyoneetochecktheheavyboxof souvenirs. So we were surprised to see Gussie with the big samurai sword. That late June sun was already an explosion of fire, bunting life from the grass, but Piggy, Slata, Mike, and I worked in the trenches anyway; we felt needed, for after V-E Day the war focused on the Pacific, our ocean. We repaired trench walls where the rains had worn them away, and filled sandbags, piled our 17 DRAKE and was blotted from sight by our house. We were halfway to the road when Jed re-appeared, to take the sword from Gussie. Later I was unsure exactly what I saw—we were still a good distance away, and it happened very fast. She had the sword raised overhead in both hands, to assault the tenacious blackberry vines, when Jed stepped from behind and grabbed the blade. The surprise of his movement sent her spinning ofl balance, and she fell among the daggers of the vines. We heard her cry once—a single, abrupt noise—and saw the blade flash, an arc of sunlight across our eyes, forever impressed. An irregular, stunned line of boys watched in horror as Jed came from behind the trees and the obstructing house; he lurehed toward that cool dark basement. We retreated to the trench, where I exchanged one nervous glance with Piggy: Gussie lay in the vines, pumping her blood out, and beyond that dark, recessed doorway Jed had the guns. We gripped the lip of turf, not even pretending to arm ourselves with throwing stones, until we heard the thin siren droning from Loaner’s Corner, an insect in the hot afternoon; and at the same instant a muffled explosion churned up from that basement, grow ing like a cloud to envelop the neighborhood. "" A few minutes after Uncle Boswick jumped the fence which separated Piggy’s yard from mine, the police car rocked to the curb. As the officers moved up the driveway, guns thrust into the yard's calm, we raced to the road and saw Uncle Boswick point to that far corner. Blood smudged his shirt, and his eyes slanted against tears—at the time, it was my impression that he had cut himself coming over the fence. And before the policemen came back from viewing Gussie’s slim, decapitated body, and before Uncle Boswick chased us into the street, we gathered at the small, dirt spattered basement win- dow: Jed was sitting in the corner, propped against the dirt wall by the Jap rifle. The big toe of his right foot was hooked into the trigger-guard; the barrel pointed into the darkness where half his head was missing. Behind him a fan-shaped stain drew flies. The deaths were not mentioned that evening at supper, a meal eaten in silence; but later, on the front steps, Uncle Boswick announced, as if I did not already know: “He did it with the sam-yeheye sword. Can you believe that? Ahhhh. she was a bea- I9 70 it; ‘— “G "Ll I) T w... NORTHWEST REV] EV utiful girl." He went on, in a voice charged with amawd indig- nation, to tell how he had seen the blade flash once across the sun from the chaise lounge in our back yard; he thought it was a dream. From that moment his world was one of missing pieces, of edges that never did quite meet, and when I asked him again what really had happened all he could say was: “He did it with the sam-yer-eye." But that was not what I wanted to know. Nor did the Jap make any sense to him. A few days after the deaths Uncle Boswick crossed that wasteland to “interrogate” the Jap, and when he returned his voice was charged with amazed fury. “The hens are finally laying, but he ain’t eating the eggs. The Jap ain't eating the eggs and he won’t sell them. I’m telling you the whole world's gone nuts." After Uncle Boswick left for the USO club, I got out his binoc- ulars and my plane spotter's manual—for four years I had been searching the skies for a Zero or Mitsubitsi bomber. From the blue skies I lowered the glasses to focus on the Jap’s shack, and for the first time I noticed that the profusion of flowers had shrunk back into the mud. The shack leaned to its own shadow; a yellowed newspaper fluttered from the window broken long ago by The MacGregor's stone. I shifted to the garden out back, and saw corn burned by the sun fold into stifi' stalks, diminishing like candle wax. The glasses focused on the slanting assemblage of wood and wire, and although the nests were concealed I could see the clumps of dirty white which flashed from corners: the hens had begun to lay their eggs in any depression. I slowly swung the glasses across the Jap's property—scanning every inch of peeling paint, broken glass, and browned foliage—but I saw no sign of the Jap. The chickens milled about the dusty arena, without food or water, eyeing one another suspiciously. The eggs began to pile up, dropped from the starving, wiry hens, and I knew this was another fiendish, exquisite eastern torture. I pictured the Jap hiding in a corner of the shack, drunk on sake, giggling his sharp- toothed, rat-faced fanaticism. The eggs piled up, delicate and white, and every day Uncle Boswick crossed that wasteland to beg, plead, argue the J ap into I) NORTHWEST REVIEW crowded as they rotated in an endless circle under the blazing sun. I saw those near the fence stretch through the wire, their hysterical beaks reaching for any green leaf. One day toward noon, just as I was about to return home for lunch, I saw a hen squat in the dust and when it rose, the quiuical eye aimed at the sun, its dusty, hoarse clocking was suddenly strangled. The hen's head darted like a wedge; the sharp beak smashed the shell, and the hen began to devour her own egg. From the side another hen kicked high into the air, wings flapping, mad with the smell of food. A cloud of feathers ex- ploded over the oily yolk as the two fought—others jumped in, and mass hysteria spread like the rising dust cloud. I watched with excited horror, for I had been waiting for something like this—the dust, torn feathers, the savage choked cries. From be- hind the wire a gas cloud rose, and the smell of rotten eggs drifted on the wind, an ominous yellow cloud which would stain every house, touch every life. Fifteen minutes later, when the air was fairly clear, I could see that every egg had been peeked open. Again the tide rotated wing to wing, hungry for food, space, the freedom of flight. They pressed together tightly, accelerating in a small circle within the confines of the wire until motion be- came a brown blur. Their movement held no hope for escape, but the smell of food had driven them mad and this was a kind of direct action—in desperation their yellow feet raced across the baked earth, the head at the end of the arched neck in pursuit of something. I waited, watching with that same sense of excited horror I had known the day Jed walked 03 the porch and the morning the Jap had first appeared on our horizon. Then, near the wire, one stumbled with exhaustion. Her wings fanned the dust, but before she could rise the beak of her neighbor slashed out. She struggled, her chalky cluuuul: filled with ur- gency and alarm, but from the circle’s momentum a dozen hens peeled off and were on her, necks extended, beaks chopping at her eyes. When two of the attackers drew back, their dusty feathers were speckled with blood. Through binoculars I could see the stained hens lift their wings, crane their necks at a difficult angle 349 DRAKE selling him some eggs. I would watch Uncle Boswick cross the field and stand by the bottom step of the porch; I could see his mouth moving, hands flying—but I never saw the lap. Only a shadow across the broken window, a faint movement which might have been the curtain blowing. On any day during the past year he would have been running on short admiral legs across the tilled soil, a water bucket in each hand, or he would have been leaning on his shovel, or kneeling over seeds, as if in prayer. Now he did not come out of the tar-paper shack, not even to feed the chickens. It was not until two weeks later, when the heat of summer shifted into August, that Uncle Boswick was able to learn why the Jap refused to part with his eggs. Uncle Boswick was trying to talk my mother into going across that field to plead with the Jap. “You’ve got to go—the egg route is all sewn up, I've got the customers. We’ve got to make some money soon, before this war is over. Gawd knows every business« man has lined his nest: the junk-yards selling gas tarnps and tires from wrecks at black-market prices, the gas stations, the meat markets—they're getting rich!” We had never had any money, and he was trying to appeal to her only fear: poverty. But apparently she feared the Jap even more, for she would not go—not even when he told her what he had learned. “Do you know why he won’t do anything with them?” Uncle Boswick asked. “He bought the chickens so he could have some eggs—4nd now he tells me he can‘t eat the eggs of hens he knows personally. That he has fed with his own hands. Hens he knows personally!” P or Uncle Boswick this was the ultimate puzzle, and he aband- oned his attempt to collaborate with the enemy. Other afternoons would be spent in the chaise lounge, warming his war wounds against the sun, clipping money-making advertisements from magazines. But I continued to watch the drama of torture with a strange fascination: every morning I went to the foxhole and focused binoculars on the chicken coop, where lean hens milled, eyeing each other suspiciously. Their high wiry bodies bobbed and 11 DRAKE to dink off the beads of blood. Behind them the circle began to disintegrate, and the smell of blood carried to my foxhole as hens surrounded to attack the attackers. Originally there were perhaps thirty chickens, and the next day when I returned there were half that number. On the third day their were ten, and then five walked among the debris of feathers and bones. These five had grown heavy, nourished by the fallen, and they waddled grotesque and wary. One stayed in each corner of the coop, and one p ced a small circle in the center. Later there were only two(lefband these had been changed until they looked more like buzzsrds—-—their necks were plucked bare, and what lower feathers remained had turned black from the blood and dust. Seen through the binoculars the birds looked arrogant, fierce, and utterly mad. Their feet were claws and their heads like hatchets, topped by the bloodofilled comb. Each preened and arched in her space, proud that she had survived. I wondered whether inside the shack the J ap was giggling or filled with revulsion—after all, these were hens he had known person- ally. And suddenly the War was over. On our small street people spilled from houses, cheering and shouting, touching one another. My mother, after saying a prayer to God, even smoked a cigarette in her excitement, and there was cold beer on the table. The cloud of War had lifted. Relief and happiness passed through our house like a seismic wave. From the radio came the official details: At 12:01 The Great Artiste dropped the second bomb . . . a pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high. shot skyword with enormous speed, moving to become a mushroom shaped cloud which eventually attained a height of 60,000 feet . . . oficials estimate that the blast caused extensive damage. . . . The War had ended. In that room I sensed a curious mixture of gladness and despair, as if we were suddenly released from what had held us together. I could not remember a time before Pearl Harbor, I could only recall a world at war, and all my energy for four years had been consumed by the war effort—I’d spent hundreds of hours digging the home defenses, scanning the sky for enemy aircraft, watching war communique films at 23 ~41 .1; gm NORTHWEST REVIEW school. I had collected tons of waste paper, tin cans, old cooking fat. I had grown Victory gardens, stayed up nights watching for tire thieves, helped my mother to keep the OPA Consumer's Pledge. “Jesus.” Uncle Boswick heard the news and his hand reached ‘Ofi frother cold beer. y father had his bank book out, and was searching the col- umns with a scowl. The War had killed the Depression. moving him into the only prosperity he'd ever known. He wet the pencil tip against his tongue and began to figure on an old envelope, moving into peace half-heartedly. I walked to the street's edge and looked both ways, as if I might see that creating mushroom cloud, or be touched by its gigantic shadow. For the war had touched us all: W . _ . '1' WI . I I'll“! 1M "ll‘mllmlkwl . I T y. And in the field where we had labored hard and well, grass already grew in our trenches. Perhaps because the Jap was no longer my enemy, but more likely because I was curious of the face I had never seen, I walked slowly through the yielding high grass toward the leaning tar- paper shack. Against the broken window the old newspaper floated, the type erased by sun and wind. Closer, I saw that the shutters threatened to fall from rusty hinges, and that their bright yellow paint had now curdled into rivulets. My knock was timid, and unanswered, but the door was ajar and I could see through the single room to the back yard. The house was empty. Any furniture the Jap might have had was gone, and so was he. There was not even the smell of soy sauce, nor the odor of yellow; not even a grain of rice captured in the floor‘s parallel cracks remained as evidence. I stood in the tiny room, where dust motes drifted like dandelion fuzz across the sun’s scorching shafts, and I wondered where he had gone. I wanted him to see my triumph—we had won, Japan was con- quered. Also, I wanted to see his face—just once, up close, to see if he wasn't an exact copy of the grinning monkey the magazines had shown us. Where was he? Had he committed hari-kari in the garden? 2‘ 350 DRAKE The only evidence that the empty room had been lived in re- cently were the newspapers covering one wall. Bold headlines jumped from the yellow paper; the print faded into blurred words, columns of statistics, tracing the war’s progress—down to the two day old newspaper taped at a crazy angle in the corner, its ink still firm. Under the low ceiling the August heat collected; thick blue flies bummed furiously in the hot air, and as I walked out the back door it occurred to me that the Jap's departure would really baffle Uncle Boswick. The garden was levelled; except for the small, open dirt mound, a row of scabs where the corn had been, all traces of the Jap's industry were sucked into the baked earth. A few loose feathers drifted across the space -‘-- 1.... , L L“ . . . . . . n rend )_-1. J 1:— .L- .L- _n‘ at ‘LA I up. fi‘U-w _v c r my, W‘L‘J“ ""1““ ‘W ‘~ 4“ :f ‘ filmed-with 4‘ L ’ J 5.. From inside the shed came a brittle noise. and I wondered if there could be a survivor—I had imagined those last two hens fighting by moonlight until each had driven a slashing, crescent beak into the other. W, ”_.'1' a A: JfJ 1 --......L-.J 'h- h.k.d II‘“ I As the grass drifted down, each blade flashing like a knife, the burlap cover at the small doorway moved. Then the single re- maining chicken emerged. She dashed across the enclosure on thick legs to where the blades were still falling; cautiously, she sniffed at my offering but did not touch it—she had acquired a taste for blood. The angular, massive head turned and behind deep folds her fierce eyes were fixed on me; with a crouching run she acceler- ated, to crash heavily into the wire. Her thick, short neck ab- sorbed the impact, and she moved back, grunting, to try again. Her rush had carried the terrific odor of fowl, blood, dung, dust; and with this stink in my nose I now saw that she had lost all of her feathers and the skin was a silky black, broken only by the NORTHWEST REVIEW white scars. Crown axon and in, the dr‘éscent beak hooked like 7° a primitive tooth, she had metamorphosed into a kind of rat. Of the flock, this was the Victor. APPENDIX D THE BIG LITTLE CTO BOOK 351 The Big Little GTO Book First Version of Introduction 5‘77 &4 6]“qu 1.71 (fl fiVL/Igflk 3°54 ””7 .a 774 M rmcoucrron /W ' gro. m m m. M Pontiac hotor Divison defined the name simply as ”ready“ , neaning that it was ready for the customer and ready to rotate. In their advertsing they elaborated on that definitionr”In Italian that means about twenty thousarsl bucks. The way we say it is easier to pronounce and it costs 1 less besides.“ John 2. DeLorean. one of the men most responsible for the are. defined it as The GTO Association of America defines a GTO as “an idea on wheels- the idea thi there' s more to driving than moving from place to place #1! in isolated indifference.“ 6M5? ‘2“ IT "76" 7°‘f ?z ”A.” 76 "0:65:01, ore, or Gran 'rurisiao Onologato means nanologated Grand Touring, Ml classification determined by the rederation Internationale Automobile, the international governing body of autoraobile racing. It describes a closed (It. production model «r suitable for both touring and certain forms of competition. To W establish a car as a production “.1.“qu Monks must be built and sold, and after a car has been accepted under this classification changes are permitted in the engine and drive train. or the chasis, but not on both. (rewr) Borsologation means accredidation by the PIA (a formal process which the Pontiac Motor Division “M ignored) but fill/tad because of the popularity of. the are the tarts soon became KIM accepted by automobile butts as a verb. “to horaologate", meaning that a manufacturer had “homologated” parts, special parts which were available to the public. 352 353 Z/Intro It's interesting that this car. so American. had a European designation. Re how Pontiac chooses it names (see the flyer). Appeal here to the European GT cars: the Iso Grifo We}. the Maserati Ghibili. the Alps fl Giulia GT or the Alfa Romeo 2000 GT Veloce. and. most obviously. the Perrari GTO. Some people took the GTO classification too seriously felt that the GTO classification was an affront to those cars int the $15,000 prince range which had earned it. On at least two occasions a Pontiac GTO and a Ferrari GTO were compared as if they will had both been built to do the same things (it was to the chagrim of the purists that the Pontiac GTO went around the course almost as fast (more specific) as the Perrari). But the PHD ads played off the idea that the Pontiac GTO could compete with imported cars: ”Can't afford a xuropean GT machine? fake it.“ Lha th wav er - .W The sports car appeal-~thooughtout the 1950s motorists had been yearning for an afforadble sports car which would combine handling and roadabilityt the GTO turned out to be the car that thousands had been waiting for. It combined those things with great gobs of horsepower, bucket seats, and stylish body. Moreover, there was rofi for a family. Mfi/W That Pontiac/belorean did two things: i;2 ’338 l) he put a big V-B in M eta car—this was the first time this combination had been offered by the factory at an afforable prices 2) II actory offered a list of options so that a customer could in essence have the factory hand-build a custom, high performance automobile. The combination worked. The result is a car which has a nice feel. which is agile and precise. with a solid body-Manet}! 'WM'Which turned 100+ in the quarter mile and 120 mph top and. (etc) Second Version of Introduction IbTRODUCTIOI GTOrjggan Turismo Onologgtg. An unique car with an unique nameJa name almost unpronouncable most Arnericans, and one whose {Kale meaning was unknown to three out of four ¢1¢ owners of the car gnome 1 reduced by most“: its inital 7 lett , GTO, an) later (Erambled an Ar’iigrl'ii'ddriized to ”Goat"3. Pontiac translated the name as "ready", making it clear that that foreign name was describing an all-American product which was ready in both sense} of the word: readily available, and 12 w ”it?” The name modem, in a way, since the GTO was described by the manufacturer as a "sports car", and such cars had always had foreign rflwas a sports car, (but; an Americanized version, and it was in eed the sports car that thousands of ready to go. American drivers had yearned for since the early 19503: it had the trappings associated with q sports car‘S--bucket seats, tachometer, floor shift-«and it handled reasonably well. Most of all it had m--it had enough power to scare. the bedjeezus out of drivers accustomed to four doors and mAinches of undercoatingt Moreover, it would easily do double-duty: you could run it ids-Mite!!! Saturday night at the stoplight burnouts or at the legal karat) drags, with-a good chance of coming within a hair of the class record, and on Sunday morning you could load up the whole family and drive to church without having to change anything but the rear tires. Such is the stuff of the GTO myth. Today it is the archetypal musclecar, the car that comes instantlw’u mind when one thinks W performance. Immortalized in song, «the hero bf an unending saga IN 354 35ua 2/Intro . . my ofgstreet racing, drive-ind] restaurants, Saturday night dates, film’showifg-a QKW, the GI‘O seems to glow/ like the knight /// errant, true to its code/t it is pure and clean and classic. / Classic not according to any automotive club's definition. / but classic in the Grecian sense, re simplicity, form and finction. GR Today the GTO.£K'continues to be sought out for those same / virtues. But the passage of years has increased the intensity 5 ‘9. Ef' of the heroic glows the GTO, especially those built during the hl li’; dd' early years, represents the kind of car that could be built (’it‘.“ 2 3 by people who actually loved cars, who cared about the product, 1J1:’q who JKZKKH knew that there was a motoring public that wanted 4341/”: a specia‘llyfbuilt‘ficar; that would n_\o_ve_. The GTO grade} represents 0‘ ”v.43 the best ofADetrdit, of an industryQoaeh—‘built-cars/unfettered ¢;"2* by federal safetv and emission limitations, and the best of L4“ America, when streets were not crowded and {ME/speei/Iim/ there was an unlimited supply of twenty-five cent a gallon gasoline and the legal speed limit was eighty miles an hour. (Golden Age) The GTO Iliad/1Y1!!! is easily mythicized because it was that kind of car, but it's important to remember the origins of the myths. Here is what made the GTO unique: 1) The GTO was the first car to use an intermediate size body with a big V-8 engine. As such, it was the first "musclecar", and the godfather of all those that followed. 2) It was offered as an option on the Tempest series, and by Alma checking a box on then‘U—Whe factory "built" a special {Id car for the customer. A second sheet listed a wide variety / of dealer-installed performance and appearance options, so a customer could drive off in exactly the kind of car he desired. 3) It was heavily and expertly promoted until it had a clear sense of identity. The GTO image This was extremely important I iui/iv Q " ' A MVl “if/V C"I‘M/i“ , l, L fig 4; M" fit/(E uJ i‘b wuilL gwf, Sn'yhnlvlu) dl'Jl; (3?;- fii‘jfiv/ 6 «I. K II) APPENDIX E STREET WAS FUN IN '51 355 Street Was Fun in '51 Car Show Description talk with the owners. Such an opportunity came with the first-the very first— Portland hot rod show. The idea of a car show seems obvious, but it hadn‘t been done before; perhaps there wasn't enough interest, or not enough cars, but the hot rod movement was growing and there was both interest and cars new. “Speed Cycles” was held at the Armory in March, 1951 —exactly a month after I bought my roadster—and when I walked through the doors I felt my knees get weak. Com- pared with today’s shows, there weren’t as many cars at that first show but those on display were real hot rods and customs, and they were stunning, especially for a fifteen year old kid who had never seen anything like them. In the center, like peacocks preening, were four cars that would be the focus of attention at any show or rod run today. There was a black, chopped ‘40 Mercury convertible, with hood and trunk chrome removed, the fenders molded to the body, and the bumpers only inches from the ground. It was the epitome of what we think of as a ’505 custom. Years later I learned that it had been built in California, it had been owned by Bob Davenport of Portland, and was probably parked at his house near 82nd and Glisan the evening I discovered the hot rod underground. Beside it was Mid Barbour‘s 1935 Ford phaeton: black lacquer, white chopped and padded top, Hollywood hub caps, a LaSalle-type grill, solid side panels, ’40 Ford taillights, and chrome exhaust extensions that exited through the rear fenders. I had forgotten about the dashboard until Don Krueger refreshed my memory: She had Stewart-Warner instruments from one side of the dash to the other—probably fourteen (gauges). She had dual oil gauges, oil temperature—this was way before people thought of putting them in. It even had air speed gauges on it off an airplane, came out by the windshield, little chrome tubes pointed forward, and these ran the air speed gauges in the dashboard. Her phaeton must have been one of the oldest custom cars around Portland because Don remembers seeirg it as early as 1942 when she used it to pull her boats to the races at Dec Lake. He remembers Mid Barbour as a “good gal, and mechanically she was a lot smarter than a lot of men.” She was a member of the Pacers club, and Wes Strohecker remembers that she “was a fantastic mechanic, and got her start in outboard racing . . . and knew Crosley engines inside and out. She was a super mechanic . . . she really 36 © Albert Drake, 1982 356 357 knew her 5th ." She was a friend of Harry Eyerly, who for many years was involved with inboard racing boats, usually powered by a Crosley engine, and he had a Crosley Hotshot that he drove to first place in the Golden Gate Park race in 1954; he also built experi~ mental aircraft, which is probably how she got the air speed indica- tors that she mounted on her car. Beside her phaeton was the Story Special, built by Tom Story. This was a custom sports car, reflecting the public‘s interest in an American sports that would compete with those from Europe, and reflecting Story’s ability to work metal. Story drew the original plans in 1944, kept changing them over the years, and drew a final set in 1949, when he began to build the car. The frame was chrome- molly channel steel, with Willys independent front suspension and rear axle; the engine was a full-race Ford V-8 60 rated at I 13 hp. Motor Trend did a story on the car and reported that it was built on a 97" wheelbase and weighed 2100 pounds. It “accelerates to 7250 in second gear, and 6500 in high, takes city corners at 3000 rpm, and has no indication of wheel slippage.” Front fenders were 1949 Chevrolet, rear fenders were 1949 Pontiac, shortened, and the rest of the body—doors, hood. cowl, trunk—was built by Story. At the time of the show the car had been sold (reportedly for $3500) and Story intended to build several more, including a four seater on a l02” wheelbase, but nothing came of that. Next was Wayne Mahaffey’s ’35 Ford phaeton from Salem; like Mid’s, it was low, black, with a chopped white top. It had a filled-in spare tire cover, ’40 Ford taillights, stock grill, ’49 Plymouth rear bumper, ’41 Buick instruments in a chrome dash, and beautiful " leather upholstery with a blue headliner done by Gaylord of Los Angeles. Power was by a stock flathead Cadillac with Hydramatic, which did the job on street and strip. It’s hard to describe a car like this, or to say what it meant to me when I first saw it—the car had connotations of Hollywood, movie stars, and a way of life that most of us yearned for; against the background of dull traffic, the plain- ness of the Truman-Eisenhower years, it represented the exotic; it was as close as we might get to a custom-built boat-tail Packard or dual-windshield Cord. It was the kind of idealized machine that I drew in my school notebooks. Of those four outstanding cars, I saw Mahaffey's phaeton once later that summer, and the others disappeared -I never saw them on the street, and I know that they weren‘t on display at any Portland car show over the next few years. What, I wonder, happened to them? 37 358 Every car at that first show was of interest to me, but of the others I remember best Bo Nabb’s ’32 three window coupe. Like the owner’s name, the car was bobbed, short, and quick. It was chopped until the windows were mere slits, channeled about six inches, and the entire engine and front end were chrome plated! Because the interior was unfinished, tinfoil had been placed over the windows. The car had a low, nasty look, and it was painted purple. Beside it was a placard with a Medley-type drawing that said: “Coupes go fast too!" Bob Scovell and Mel Andre, who built and owned race cars, were responsible for the body work, and Blackie Blackburn had built the big fiathead. Bo Nabb sold the coupe to Jim Snyder, a student at Cleveland High, and it was a familiar sight in Southeast Portland for the next several years. One car was probably not that outstanding—I’ve only found one other person who remembers it -—but it was unusual and I always liked the car. A ’27 T roadster, it had been cut off fiat behind the doors; it had a hood twice as long as the body; it had suicide front suspension and elliptical springs in the rear. The reason for the long hood was because of its powerplant, a Pontiac straight eight! Painted Chartreuse, a 1950 Ford Crestliner color, it had purple cycle fenders, a white top, and twin chrome exhaust pipes that ran the length of the right side of the body. Don Krueger remembers the car: “It was kinda hash—an old straight eight. It wasn’t very fast-we were shutting him down with our sedans. He just bluffed everybody—he could lay a lot of rubber.” I always had a fondness for the car because it was an early rod, an original design, it resembled an MG-TC, and because I saw it often on the street in all kinds of weather, the driver snug and dry with the top and side curtains in place. This car was in the Southeast area for years; in 1958 I found the fenders in the scrap heap at Salama’s body shop, but I’m told that the car still exists. APPENDIX F "THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS" 359 "The Invention of Happiness" Final Version THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS The television is making suspense noises. Tweak tweak tweak. we don't have a television set but I hear my neighbor's from down the hall and invent the action. Mice on a battlefield. A jeep of mice. A mouse with a six gun. A bedroom scene. violins, pink lace. ”Take my hand. Please just take it." A clock falls off a counter and crushes an ottoman. "All right. Down on your haunches." "Me!" The words, the music, arrive blurred, scraped, faint. Le have given up television to improve our lives. Two dish pans crash together. My husband pops in. The opening door makes the television come across clearly. I want him to say, "Thank god you're alone and not with a sailor." He says, "What are you worrying about now?" "ME." We've eaten our supper of noodles and tomatoes--fresh tomatoes from the man down the street who grows them in lard cans on his fire escape. And now Jack is treating me by dohrg the laundry. He has slipped into his lounging shorts that read High Quality Brand on the back pocket. 360 361 UPTON THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS He turns to go back down to the laundry. As the door opens, tingling music floods in. Jack dumps more laundry on the floor. We both go through it and disentangle our clothes. I put mine in one pile. He puts his in another. "I don't want to go to bed tonight." "Oh." "Ask me why." "Why?" "I don't want the night to end and tomorrow to start." He looks at me awhile. "I've been drinking 10 cups of coffee every day at work," I continue. "You'll never get to sleep tonight." "I hope so." In the bathroom I change into my nightgown with the tiny pink sprigs on it. Jack used to laugh at this nightgown--it is so innocent. It's like sleeping inside a lamb. A hairbrush on the windowsill is all crammed with Jack's hair. As I slide into bed I try not to touch him. For four months now Jack is angry if I touch him. I draw my knees to my chest and hug myself hard. This is what I do all day at work: I type letters that evade the word "money." How about your remittance, your oversight? Bernard, one of the callers, is angry. One of his deadbeats keeps 362 [12'ch THE INVENTION or HAPPINESS hanging up on him. Bernard lets the woman's phone ring in her apartment for half an hour. "Let that jangle her nerves." Bernard stands in front of my desk with more letters for me to type in the top pocket of his vest. His eyelids are purple, a lovely purple. He's tired but it looks good on him. Nomen would buy that shade. I think of an invention: surgery that gives coloring. That fine purple shadow etched on the lid-— no more worry about eye shadow dripping and making Japanese characters on the face, no more repeated applications. Blusher forever or as long as you live. Always rosey cheeks. They could do it by breaking the capillaries. They could guarantee the shade. "I have too much to do," I tell my boss. "Look at all these letters." I thrust a packet of letters toward him. "I can't even finish yesterday's letters." He nods and swivels and smokes in his office with all the cheeseburger wrappers wadded up on his desk and windowsill. He doesn't say anything. He just watches me walk out. At my desk I save myself by thinking up bright ideas. For instance, how about a laundromat where you can get your clothes clean in a nightclub atmosphere? You could meet people, have a few drinks, stare at the carpeted and mirrored walls while your clothes take a tumble. If you take a tumble you have clean clothes with you for the next day. No last minute rush to make it home to change. 363 UPTON THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS Another possibility: musical vacuum cleaners. Once, when I was a kid impressed with Jesus I had this idea that it would be nice if you could have a cross to get up on-— but without the blood or the nails or the pain. You could just get up on the cross and people would come to see you. My problem was how to keep myself there. I had this idea about using wet chocolate as a fixative. I find Bernard in the hall and tell him about it. He smiles at me. He goes into his office, shaking his head. ********* The case that interests me most at the moment is that of Hiawatha Taylor of Mackinac Island, Michigan. I type her name every other week. They're ready to put her through small claims. But what I like is the idea of this fugitive with the odd name who won't pay in that tourist haven. Her name makes me feel better. As a child I went to that island. All I remember is the absence of cars and a man with a dog in a little dog coat--tweed, with a pocket and a tiny gold chain in the pocket, as if the dog had a watch fob. I also remember the fudge. The island is famous for fudge. I tell this to Bernard. He says, "The fudge is thick on Mackinac Island. Don't make promises you can't keep." Hiawatha. A month ago I consulted a fortune teller. She said I would have fifty years with my husband, that very soon he would touch me again. That nothing continues as it has in the past. She tried to prove herself to me. "Your husband," she said. "When I think of your husband I smell french fries." Jack manages a Wendy's. 364 UPTON THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS 0n break I flip through a woman's magazine about the new life that waits for me if only I reach out. The article is called "Reach Out for Pleasure--It's Yours!" I stretch my arm over my head and reach out. I take a tiny little bottle of cologne out of my purse and dot the cologne on my neck and in the crooks of my elbows. I stand up and dot some on the backs of my knees. Pulse points, the magazine calls them. I smell like oranges and little white flowers. I imagine I smell like Hiawatha Taylor--like a woman in hiding. Through the partition I can hear Bernard talking on the company phone to one of the men he tells me he loves. "Ha ha ha," he says, "no, that's the name of a disease." Because he cannot touch me Jack does dishes. He does the laundry. He vacuums. I tell him he doesn't have to do all that. We both work; we should share the housework. He picks up an empty ashtray and says, "I want to." He says, "Why do we even have this? We don't smoke. We should get rid of it." He is poking the vacuum cleaner under the coffeetable with one hand, holding the ashtray with the other. Suddenly the coffee table tips over and one of the legs falls off and rolls under the sofa. "They should make them better," I say. "I hardly touched the thing," he says. 365 UPTON THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS Over coffee and cereal the next morning I try to explain a dream I just had. Jack says "You're making it up as you go along. You'll be late." The thing is, I dreamed that I invented a new sort of moon out of linoleum. You could mop it. The earth spun far away, tiny and black as a number. Suddenly Jack and I became mice. It's funny. I was a mouse but I was able to think. I thought: Hat No cheese. And then I ran around and bit people. I ran over and bit our neighbor who grows tomatoes in lard cans. I bit Bernard. I bit Jack. I bit a shopper. Jack picks up our cereal bowls carefully, as if they might break in his hands. He puts them in the sink, turns on the tap and squeezes a bottle of yellow detergent. He turns. "I mean it," he says, "you'll be late. I've got another fifteen minutes but you'll be late." He reaches over with his hand, all soap, and pats the hair on my head. For a moment I forget and almost kiss him. My hair still feels a little damp from his hand. On the bus to work I think about a bottling company that would bottle milk in a container shaped like a cow. A cow with a little udder. A cow with big mild eyes. A cow with clear tiny horns. You could hold the back hooves and pour. There would be no special reason for the bottle being shaped like a cow. It would just look nice. It would just make people happy. ----end---- APPENDIX C LAURIE SHECK'S AMARANTH: CHARMS FOR THE SOUL 366 Laurie Sheck's Amaranth: Charms for the Soul 650 words Final Version Lee Upton Amaranth by Laurie Sheck. The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1981. LAURIE SHECK'S AMARANTH: CHARMS FOR THE SOUL There is much u: admire about the poems in Laurie Sheck's collection Amaranth--their richness and ambition, their ability to reflect the diminishing effects of time yet praise the vitality of passage, their compassion. It is as if these poems are charms for the soul. They offer a quiet, steadying voice that, nevertheless, penetrates to the core of Sheck's most important concerns: mortality, shelter, the self's hunger, suffering. Sheck never reaches for easy, flashing effects. Instead, the voice here is meditative, carefully shaded. Sheck is a poet to be trusted. That clear voice, never pandering, focuses attention on a world in which change is our constant lot. The children in Sheck's world seek to protect themselves from the assaults of time and the outer world. They are secretive: ...the self, I think,. possesses a great reticence, not unlike the white camellias opening slowly after storm. ("When We Were Children") The beauty here is not facile. In fact, much of the beauty of Sheck's vision arises in moments before or after storms of one sort or another. She would have us imagine the beauty of deathlessness simply because it cannot be our fate. This voice is not comforting--surely confort isn't what we seek in these poems. The self's longing for permanence, for direct contact with what is most real is offered to us. 367 368 Upton ALARANTH The doll, perfectly stable, is one of Sheck's favored images: Holding it the child touches the pure stasis it secretly desires of its body, to be as a pearl cloistered from the world's becoming, whole and perfect though the universe slowly expands though atoms are smashed ("Doll") Without change, however, Sheck knows that life would be impoverished, empty of energy and depth. In "Natural History" stasis is viewed as deadliness. No fulfillment exists among the animals poised in the diorama: ...the sky so flat it won't shimmer near the moon, the pond so still no fish will break its surface. The atmosphere of these poems is shadowy, faintly lit, yet it glints with the unexpected. This is especially evident in "Rose Light through the Windows." The poem might serve as a description of Sheck's way with light: subtle, shifting. The poem tells of an 18th century duchess who designs and has built a house made completely of shells. here is shelter beyond our best notions of shelter: "An entire house made of other houses,/ that must be the point." 369 Upton AMARAN TH Walls are often thin in Amaranth. The world is insubstantial, fragile. There is the appearance of calm, yet violence waits under :gzg‘surfaces. The sea, for instance, is presented by Sheck as "black and forever," "the box planed smooth by sunlight." Such calmness suggests a constrained violence: Sheck's very insistence on order dramatically anticipates its reverse. This is not to say that Sheck never presents overt violence or horror. In on.- m moving poem. in the volume, "The Hazel Tree," child contemplates starvation, death, and grief. The poeéw visiona;::i locks both horror and beauty inextricably: White worms are eating the white blossoms. The collection ends with one of the most striking poems in this impressive volume’rthe title poem. Devoid of sentimentality, yet capable of great tenderness, Sheck asks us to imagine the unthinkable--immortality--in "Amaranth." Imagine it, the Amaranth is said to be undying, its petals like pearls harboring the pink light of sunsets. It is forgiveness. It is the peasant who refuses to abdicate his small patch of land. A young poet, Sheck is'a eady able to detail the struggle I I ‘ ' (I W l/ "“ to keep one's sou -o~ --;fi.’-...m - - - .. “r - --. / '3, ' ‘ ,_ - "' -. ‘- this-mic. oull our love J?:F'?;ldfz"’ -'k'5"1-‘T g;:;e and - g-.- /‘ ~ 4% .. ‘ . a.’ J‘. / ‘t'LJ‘ ‘ . —.~,-...---.......- e» a... ma “ «W 777’ "”"” v: MW ,7 ’— \‘_~ 370 Upton AMARANTH wise voice. As I read through Amaranth that voice begins to create echoes, somewhat like the even-edged, solemn voice out of an old and frightening story that would warn us that our souls may be stolen. One's soul may be stolen, Sheck suggests, but there are ways to charm it back. ”IEEMMWEW