William Littlejohn

WWPH's forthcoming 2009 fiction contest winner, Calvin (October 15, 2009), weaves the divisive and difficult issue of race into a story in which the title character, a black servant, bridges the divide with character and compassion. In the summer of 1940, ten-year-old Billy Smithson’s headstrong and capricious mother abducts Billy from her former husband’s home and leaves the boy with her father in Athena, South Carolina. The boy’s grandfather, in turn, delivers the boy into Calvin's care. What happens over the summer and the months to follow is explored in spare but evocative prose.

William Littlejohn makes his literary debut with the novel Calvin. He holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Virginia. After serving in the United States Marine Corps, Littlejohn practiced law in Chicago for thirty years before retiring to write full time. Littlejohn and his wife, Marcia, now live in Washington, DC.

Excerpt: Calvin, Chapter One

A dream-sound.

Not real, not like any sound he’d ever heard before. A dull hollow thump followed by strange night noises, none natural, all sharp, with jagged edges, nothing that sounded like anything that belonged in this world—yet he came awake knowing right away what it was.

But he didn’t move. He lay, waiting. After a time he sat up on the edge of the bed. A big man, he and the iron framed double bed seemed to fill what space there was in the small room. A chipped white porcelain chamber pot sat in the corner a few feet away. The room’s only window etched a dark rectangular shadow on the water-stained and faded wallpaper where once, long ago, pink cherubs had danced among white clouds in a blue sky.

An alarm clock on the floor next to the bed ticked loudly. Every now and then the bell shivered, the muted tingling sound impatient, waiting for its time.

He got up once to piss in the chamber pot, then sat back down to wait. With eyes closed he could have been asleep, except every few minutes he lifted his heavy head, cocking it to one side or the other, listening, as if the pre-dawn silence were full of sounds.

At last a faint gray light crept into line around the drawn window shade.His closed eyes opened, called to account somehow by this shadowy penumbra.He looked around, wide-eyed, as if seeing the room for the first time. With a shake he made ready for whatever was to come.

He stood and walked to the kitchen at the rear of the house. With a few powerful strokes he pumped water at the sink. It rose quickly through exhausted air, then ran rocking and seeking through the aqueduct of the old-fashioned spout to splash heavy and hard against the metal sink below. As the flow of the cold well water eased he caught a glass full and drank it thirstily.

Under a plain wall mirror Calvin Lemoyne checked his kit, a carrying case from his years on the railroad. Except for his cash money, most of the things he owned of any value were in it. He took out a pearl-handled straight razor, opened it and stropped it several times against a wall strop with big, almost careless strokes before returning it to the case. Only then did he raise his head to look at himself in the dim, poorly lit mirror.

A large Negro, flat-faced and heavy browed, stared back.

His dark brown, near black eyes—half eclipsed by heavy brooding lids—were grim, threatening looking. For a moment he didn’t move. Then he smiled, a small smile, but the face in the mirror stayed the same, just a faint golden grimace in the early morning gloom.

From his kit he took out a pair of round, metal-rimmed store-bought glasses and put them on, hooking each ear piece carefully into place, only to find they were broken. One lens was smashed into a cobweb pattern, a honeycombed scallop of jiggling glass. He searched for a narrow box at the back of the shelf below.When he found it he removed glasses identical to the broken pair. He put them on. They were a little stiff at the hinges.

When he’d finished dressing he went outside to the front of the house, where he’d parked the car on the street. A rusty tire iron lay amid broken glass on the front seat. He picked it up, felt its weight, then used it to knock out the jagged glass still lodged in the window. He cleaned off the front seat, picking up as much glass as he could see in the half light. As he worked the shards of glass nipped at his callused hands, like pecking chicks. But he was careful to see that no blood got on the new automobile’s seats. Then, as he closed the car door he saw the metal license plate (‘1940 South Carolina’) bent in half, dented and battered looking, lying in the street half under the door.He put the tire iron and license plate on the back floor board. Then he started the engine.

Interview with William Littlejohn

Q: What made you decide to trade your law practice for full time writing?

When I was a young man in college--and even in high school--I had an intense interest in the theater, and I had always thought I'd like to write a play. Well, as so often happens, I knew I had to earn a living so I went to law school and then practiced law in Chicago for almost 30 years. After that length of time the law business got a little stale, so, with the permission of my partners, I decided to take a sabbatical for a year to try and do some writing.

I started with a play, but it soon became apparent that playwriting was impractical. Not only did I not know how to write a play, I soon realized there was almost no chance of it ever being produced. So my wife suggested, “Why don't you write a novel?” I took her advice and enjoyed it so much that I never went back to practicing law. I told my partners that this was the life for me, and I’ve been basically writing on and off full time ever since.

Q: Was Calvin the first novel that you were trying to write?

No, Calvin is my second novel. The first was was a sort of a John Grisham type of book, that is, it was based upon the law business . The protagonist of that book, The Law of Iroquois Hart is a young lawyer, in fact a law student, who is accused of murder and then must defend himself. Calvin is more of a coming-of-age book set in the deep South of the early 1940’s.

Q: What made you decide to write Calvin in particular?

I was born in the South, and I grew up as a young boy in the South. And it so happens that my grandfather, who lived in Greenville, South Carolina, had a black man who worked for him whose name was Calvin. But the title character of the book, of course, is completely different from the man he was named after.

Q: How and when did you find out that Calvin was being published?

The Washington Writers’ Publishing House has a competition for poets and fiction writers every year. I saw the request for submissions in the Washington Post, I think sometime in early October [2008], and I decided that I would submit Calvin as my entry. I got a call in February [2009] that I was one of the finalists. And that was, you know, terrific. Frankly I didn’t expect to win. But I got a call the very next week that I had won, so it was a great event!

Q: What is it like seeing your book in print for the first time and finally getting published after so many years?

There is nothing like it. I was a trial lawyer and had my share of courtroom victories. When a jury returns a verdict in your favor it is a great high. When you work hard on a case and you’re able to get a jury to agree with you, there’s nothing like it. At least I had thought so until now. Getting your book published is better.

Q: Can you describe your writing practice, and are there any particular places or times of day that help you write?

I started out with an electric typewriter, which I used for the first year or so after I began writing. And it evolved from there. Initially, what I was trying to do was get a feel for writing on a daily basis, so I would write a journal entry of maybe 500 or 700 w ords every morning, to try to get into the rhythm. Warmed up, so to speak, I would then turn to work on the project of the moment. . That particular routine was good in that it sat me down every day in a certain place at a certain time. And I wrote. I believe that’s the way to do it.

I can’t imagine a routine like J.K. Rowling’s, who is supposed to have written the first Harry Potter book in a coffee shop. I see aspiring writers in coffee shops looking up at the ceiling from their computers amid the hubbub, and I know he or she is trying to emulate Rowling and write a novel. I want tap them on the shoulders and tell them it’ll never work…Anyway, you need a place you’re comfortable in. You have to have a spot where you’re not distracted. If you’re writing fiction you have to enter into it, lose yourself in your story. That’s when you’re at your best and that’s when you do your best writing.

Q: We just talked about your writing practice, but how would you describe your writing style? Is there anything that makes it unique?

Well, everyone tells me that I write cinematically--that is, I write with sort of a camera eye on the scene. Many of those who who’ve read my work say that it should be made into a movie, and I take from that that it has a sort of cinematic quality. I do think that’s true. I try to imagine a scene, and as I say, if you can live it, it sometimes comes out just that way on the page.

Q: Who are your favorite authors?

As a boy I started out reading Rafael Sabatini, who wrote swashbuckling tales. When I was in college I read a lot of the classics. John Fowles was a favorite. He wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus, and others, like The Black Tower. He died about four or five months ago. I didn’t care for the iconic figures of my time such as Hemingway or Fitzgerald, although I did admire Updike.

Among the women, I like Anne Tyler, who lives in Baltimore. Joyce Carol Oates is another; one of the best books I’ve ever read, one ignored by most people, is her You Must Remember This. It’s gritty and difficult, an erotic type of book, dealing with incest, a very tough theme, but it is an absolutely fascinating book.

I don’t really have favorites. I have non-favorites, that is, writers such as Hemingway. What I look for is a writer like Penelope Fitzgerald. She’s the author of The Blue Flower. She’s also an inspiration for older writers. She didn’t get published until, I believe, she was 60. She represents the kind of writer I like, those that are not ostentatiously literary or precious in their writing style. I like writers who carry you along in their fictional dream.

Q: Were there any particular authors that inspired your writing? I know a reviewer compared you to William Faulkner, for example.

Yes, I love Faulkner. Absalom, Absalom! is a wonderful book. But you probably couldn’t get it published today; it’s hard to get through the first three or four pages. They are so dense and so convoluted; You have to read Faulkner with a certain mindset. For example, in The Sound and the Fury, with Benjy, the retarded boy who begins the story, you have to surrender yourself to Faulkner and be Benjy. You have to let yourself go. It’s a master writing, but difficult, especially to today’s tastes.

I don’t know of anyone who influences me particularly, I don’t try to imitate anyone. If anyone sees something in my writing that is similar to someone else, it is an accident. I don’t try to do it.

Q: What is the best writing advice you ever received, and from whom?

From Frank Baldwin, who is among my acknowledged influences in the back of the book. He is an author and screenwriter. Frank read my early draft of Calvin, and he just tore it apart. He was totally ruthless. He said he liked it, but he was absolutely unsparing in his criticism of it. And what I learned from that is that you have to be equally ruthless with yourself, you can’t indulge yourself. For example, in Calvin I must have removed 30 pages between let’s say the next to last and the second to last draft. I took them out because, while I liked the scene, and it was what I thought of as good, it really didn’t advance the story, it really didn’t elucidate the characters in the story. That’s the most valuable lesson that I’ve learned from anybody.

Q: How and why did you choose the setting of Athena, South Carolina for Calvin, and what importance does the setting have in shaping your novel?

Well, the setting of course is everything, because that is where I was as a young boy of 10 and 11 myself. That’s a very impressionable time. I lived in Greenville, South Carolina, which is in the book as one of a triad of cities, Greenville, Spartanburg, and Athena. Athena, in fact, is fictional. I grew up in Greenville and was at that age when you absorb everything around you. So when I started to write this book about the South and about that era, it was obviously the time and place that I would choose.

Q: So did you let your memories and your ideas kind of shape the course of the novel?

Yes, it did, although there’s not one scene in the book that is not fictional, It is not a memoir. It’s true that I lived in South Carolina, and I went to live with my grandfather for a while, and my grandfather was an important man in Greenville, South Carolina. All that is true. But the actual incidents, what shaped the characters-the title character, Calvin, in particular-are completely fictional. I adapted the the time and the place and some of the people--not all the people of course--and used those elements as a vehicle for the story.

Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world to write, where would you go and why?

I’d probably go to Italy. I’d go to Rome and to one of the seaside resorts and I would stay long enough to be homesick, and long enough to write a book, and then I would go home. And I would want to stay long enough to get a smattering of the language. One of the problems that we all have in this country is that we don't have a second language as most do in Europe; we would all be better off and more rounded if we had a second language. But my main motive would not be to write a book, my main motive would be to travel and to have those experiences. To write depends on one thing: the writer. You can do it anywhere--if you’re reasonably healthy and you have an idea, and have the motivation. You don’t need an exotic south Pacific or Italian atmosphere, although that would be nice!

Q: Do you have any plans to publish another book?

Well, yes I do, I’m glad you asked! I have another book, it’s on the backburner at the moment. It’s about a boy, age about 12, who in the book becomes a member of an actual group of boy guerrillas in Burma (now Myanmar) called God’s Army, who invaded Thailand, took an entire hospital hostage until they were captured by the Thai army who executed these kids on the spot. From this real life incident, I developed a story about one of the boys who was on that raid, but was able to escape. He makes his way through Bangkok and Singapore, and finally comes to this country illegally. So that’s the genesis of my next novel. I’m working on it and hope to have something to present to publishers soon.

Q: Very different from Calvin but similar in a way, you’ve got the boy protagonist who is in a terrible situation. Is that a pattern for you?

It’s a pattern with Charles Dickens and me! Although the first novel I wrote did not have a boy as the protagonist . That was the law novel I mentioned. But, these two, Calvin and Lucky in America--‘Lucky’, that's the name of the boy in the next book--are both in that age group. You choose those kind of things because, as I said earlier, these boys, and young women too, have absorptive natures. They are being formed and they absorb everything around them, and it’s a very sensitive time in all of our lives.

Q: Do you have any advice for other first time authors?

Yes, and that is that you have to persist. That’s a tired bit of advice, but it’s so true. Unless you are very talented, unless you are, you know, John Updike who could just whip off a letter-perfect novel, or Joyce Carol Oates who writes a novel a week--people like that who have a great talent, you have to persist. You have to work hard. You have to be thick-skinned about all the rejections, and you have to have faith in yourself. It can be a very hard road to get something published, especially today. Fiction: Everybody seems to be writing it but nobody seems to be publishing it. Memoirs are the hot item these days, but so many of them are phony—if you are going to write this stuff, it might as well be fiction.

Q: Yeah, I guess people just think if it really happened to someone, it’s more true, right?

If you are reading good fiction, and you are in the story, and you are with the characters, it is true. That’s what makes good fiction good.