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99 12 At Home with Ruth and Dave On a piece of paper I write it On my looking-glass And on snow I write it —Ruth Krauss, I Write It (1970) For Ruth Krauss, the harsh 1947–48 winter brought writer’s block. Through the middle of December, the temperature had been a bit warmer than usual , but on the 26th, two feet of snow blanketed Rowayton, the beginning of a three-month stretch when New England received twice as much snow as usual. By February, Krauss found it difficult to write, a situation for which she blamed William James, although she mixed him up with Henry:“It must have been Henry because according to my present figuring William is the fictionist (I know I should know which is who and all but the fact remains that except for this figuring out loud, I off hand do not).”William James (not the fictionist ) disliked being interrupted when inspiration struck, anxious that he would lose his creative spark. She took his words to heart, and since then, Krauss explained ,“I’ve spent a lot of time seizing on the impulse divine. I have stopped all and sundry—in fact, I stop everything still. I hide, I seek, I lure, I pretend I’m alone . . . to insulate myself, in order to carry out the creative urge because this James guy told me off at an early age.” As a result,“I have got so I really find I write best only when‘inspired,’ in fact that [I] otherwise cannot write at all.” In the winter doldrums, sitting around waiting for inspiration was a poor strategy.1 To get started, Krauss borrowed an idea from a friend, possibly Nancy Goldsmith, who “planned to write three pages a day, in this way getting her ‘novel’ done.” From late February to late March, Krauss sat at her Remette 100 At Home with Ruth and Dave typewriter nearly every day and wrote a few pages. If she kept typing, she reasoned, she would eventually come up with something she could publish— she could do “a lot of cutting and then a lot of building up the places where interesting subject matter comes in.” If that plan failed, then “maybe it can be of value just as a historical document.” The resulting 123-page manuscript is precisely that, providing a glimpse into Ruth and Dave’s daily lives, their relationship , and Krauss’s aspirations.2 Krauss titled the piece “Where Am I Going?,” reflecting her uncertainty about the direction her professional life was taking. She was not earning a living from writing children’s books, and Ursula Nordstrom had rejected Krauss’s most recent efforts. Hoping to publish an old novel manuscript, Krauss sent it off to be retyped. Thinking that she might publish her work in magazines, she composed an article about the writing of The Great Duffy. She worried that her life lacked focus.3 Movies provided her with welcome distraction. When reading a novel, Krauss tended to get bored by the details about a quarter of the way in, skip to the ending, and then put the book aside. But movies were her “own special form of almost (infantile) secret pleasure”:“I . . . like to just slump in the dark with my feet propped up on the back of the seat in front.” Krauss had recently overcome her fears and learned to drive, though she did so only during daylight hours and close to home. Either alone or with Phyllis Rowand, Krauss would drive to Stamford, do some shopping, and see a movie. She described Red Skelton’s Merton of the Movies as “very funny and also pathetic in parts,” but on a weekend trip to New York City, Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique; ou, Les Quatre Saisons, a symbolic film about rural post–World War II France, sent her straight to sleep.4 In New York, she and Dave had “a sublet of a sublet.” On winter Fridays, they would take the train into the city for the weekend. There, they would see publishers,go to parties,and visit friends such as Herman and Nina Schneider, left-leaning authors of many science books for children, and anthropologist Gitel Poznanski and painter Bob Steed, both of whom had traveled with Ruth on the Blackfeet expedition nine years earlier. Ruth could not stay awake through all these visits. After dinner one night with Dave, Poznanski, Steed, and psychologist Al Leighton, the author of The Navajo Door...

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