James Marshall, George and Martha

novel-nubbins & video game breakthroughs

“‘Would you like to borrow it?’ said Martha.”

Learning to write fiction is difficult because the actual work of writing — the endless revision that transforms a piece from its seamy, unkempt conception to its immaculate typeset imperishability — happens entirely out of sight. Imagine learning to cook if you could never watch an onion being chopped, or learning origami without ever witnessing a single fold. The aspiring fiction writer carries home a pile of  crisp-edged books — the dauntingly perfect pages free of merciless X’s and marginal self-flagellations — and concludes that she, hacking away at her hopeless compost heap of a manuscript, must lack whatever capacity these virtuosi were born with.

One way to combat this grim delusion is to visit the bowels of a university library and ask to see a writer’s papers: peruse the suicidal correspondence with the agent; examine the stillborn novel-nubbin. Another way is to check out James Marshall’s George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends.

In case it’s been a while, the George and Martha books are, along with Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories and Roger Hargreaves’ Mr. Men and Little Miss books, exemplars of that genre of children’s book that might, if it weren’t too cumbersome to be printed on bookstore placards, be called: Books Of Extreme Simplicity that Have No Reason to Work as Well as They Do. Marshall’s books concern a pair of friendly, sensitive hippopotami named George and Martha (Marshall had, when he came up with the names, recently heard Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on the radio). George and Martha are close, though believably uneasy, friends — frequently embarrassed, occasionally squabbling, reliably forgiving. The stories — a few lines of text and one large, plain illustration per spread — have the brevity and shimmer of Zen fables.

And The Complete Stories, besides being an abiding  delight in itself, happens to contain the clearest demonstration I know of the actual, arduous business of writing. In it you see the elusive creature — Revisionus Literaria — snatched out of the air and pinned to the page.

The very first story in the book, published in 1972, is called “Split Pea Soup,” and it tells the story of a minor social mishap. Martha, we learn on page one, “was very fond of making split pea soup.” And George “hated split pea soup more than anything else in the world. But it was so hard to tell Martha.” The seedling of conflict is securely planted.

One day George — unable to choke down another spoonful — decides to empty his bowl of soup into his loafers under the table.

“Now she will think I have eaten it.”

But Martha was watching from the kitchen.

And so they have the sort of frank, blushing conversation that distinguishes George and Martha.

“Why didn’t you tell me you hate my split pea soup?” Martha asks.

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” says George.

Martha, it turns out, doesn’t much like the soup herself — she only likes making it — and so, resolving to be more honest going forward, they sit down to a plate of (strangely pink) chocolate chip cookies.

This wouldn’t seem, on first reading, like a story begging for revision — it features a relatable predicament, a climactic confrontation, a gentle resolution. But apparently Marshall thought he could do better.

Because sixteen years later — in what would turn out to be his last George and Martha book — he wrote “The Clock.” And here we retrace the route of “Split Pea Soup” almost turn for turn, only this time with the passengers reversed. Now it’s George who does something kind for Martha — he gives her a cuckoo clock for her birthday. And now it’s Martha who’s secretly dismayed:

“Do you like it?” asked George.

“Oh yes indeed,” said Martha.

But to tell the truth, the cuckoo clock got on Martha’s nerves.

So Martha, like George with the loafers, buries the cuckoo clock in the laundry hamper. And George, following the faint “Cuckoo… cuckoo… cuckoo,” discovers what she’s done. At which point the reader might conclude that Marshall is hanging it up not a moment too soon — we smile with the pity and embarrassment of someone sitting through a friend’s unknowingly repeated anecdote.

Martha reacts with faux-puzzlement as to how the clock could have gotten into the hamper, and George reassures her that it’s still in perfect working order. And then this happens:

“Would you like to borrow it?” asked Martha.

George was delighted.

You know that feeling when you’ve died playing a video game and you’re forced to start over? And how all the gameplay up to the point at which you previously died has a certain hasty, self-quoting feeling? And then, reaching the boss who did you in, you finally break through into actual play and you shift in your seat, your breath quickens?

This sentence — “‘Would you like to borrow it?’ asked Martha,” — is that moment for Marshall. He isn’t repeating himself at all. He’s devised a better ending for “The Clock” than the one he settled for in “Split Pea Soup.” George doesn’t catch on to Martha’s hatred of the clock, and they don’t shyly promise to be more straightforward with each other. Instead George cheerfully takes the clock home, mounts it over his mantle, and sits happily reading under it, marveling at his friend’s generosity in loaning it to him.

The reader, reduced on the last page of “Split Pea Soup” to the role of hall monitor (No lying, children), is promoted by the ending of “The Clock” into a co-conspirator. What a dope George is! What dopes we all are, giving things we wish to get and getting things we wish to give!

And this small but significant improvement took, I remind you, sixteen years. This is the real work of revision, the real work of writing. The fiddling and fiddling with what already feels satisfying (but always, if you’re being perfectly honest, thinly satisfying; you know there’s something not quite right about it) until, like a stubbornly shaggy dough suddenly coming together, it turns pliant and agreeable in your hands.

The pleasure of this is enough to keep you writing through the long, inevitable stretches when the world seems content to dump your work in a pair of loafers, to stuff it in the bottom of a hamper. You were doing it for yourself all along.