About Ann Beattie: A Profile

Myth has it that Ann Beattie published her first short story in
The New Yorker when she was twenty-five years old,signed a first-read contract with them, and thereafter made five to seven annual appearances in the venerable magazine -- with stories she would write in one sitting, in one afternoon.

As myths go, this one is pretty accurate. In the early seventies, Beattie was a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Connecticut, and a professor, J. D. O'Hara, who was a mentor of sorts, began sticking stamps on envelopes and submitting Beattie's stories for her. After a couple of acceptances at literary quarterlies, O'Hara suggested she try
The New Yorker. Her story came back with an encouraging note from one of the editors, Roger Angell, so Beattie tried again. And again. A total of twenty-two stories before
The New Yorker finally took one. A seemingly arduous road, except for the fact that all the stories were written in a little over a year, each of them banged out in -- yes, it's true -- a few hours.

In 1976, the simultaneous publication of a collection of short stories,
Distortions, and a novel,
Chilly Scenes of Winter (for which the rough draft was written in three weeks), quickly and permanently vaulted Beattie into literary stardom. Her work drew comparisons to Salinger, Cheever, and Updike, and the eight books that followed -- all written under contract -- confirmed her ranking among the best writers in the country: the story collections
Secrets and Surprises, The Burning House, Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories, and
What Was Mine, and the novels
Falling in Place, Love Always, Picturing Will, and
Another You, which will be released this fall.

Beattie resides for the moment in Maine with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry. They live modestly, a large studio for Perry on the top floor of the house their single extravagance. Without children, without fixed job commitments -- Beattie taught at UConn, the University of Virginia, and Harvard for eight straight years, but hasn't had a regular teaching position for the last eighteen -- she and Perry can afford to be peripatetic, and they will likely take off soon to other favored locales: principally Key West and Charlottesville.

At turns animated and circumspect, Beattie is always witty, self-possessed, and forthright. She looks much like she did in her twenties, and often displays a youthful mischief. She is, for instance, a famous practical joker. Once, she called Rust Hills,
Esquire's fiction editor, before visiting him, and said she would be accompanied by her personal trainer; then watched his jaw drop as he opened the door to Beattie and her obese friend, with whom Hills had to be stutteringly polite. But Beattie has also developed a territorial distance over the years, wary of intrusions to her privacy. No doubt, much of this guardedness comes from her early celebrity, which created as many burdens of expectation and envy as occasions for privilege. Beattie will readily admit, however, that she was extremely lucky, particularly since writing fiction was something she just fell into.

Born in 1947 in Washington, D.C., she grew up as an only child -- introverted, but generally happy and bright, until she became a teenager. The public schools she attended were terrible -- academically indifferent -- and Beattie responded accordingly. "I became self-destructive," she admits. She graduated with a D- average, and without a providential connection of her father's, she would not have been able to enroll at American University, much less any

college. Lacking any real plans or ambition, she chose to study journalism. After a few years, though, a boyfriend convinced her that journalism was "totally uncool," that it was a bourgeois trade. He told her she should really be more like an artist and consider being an English major. She switched on the same day.

Not knowing what else to do after graduating, she assumed she would probably end up teaching literature for a living and entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Connecticut. Certainly, she never thought writing could be anything but a hobby. There were M.F.A. programs then, but no one she knew went to one. Writing short stories didn't seem to be a viable career choice. To her good fortune, however, J. D. O'Hara heard about her fiction from some other graduate students, and took an interest in her. "He really became my official editor," Beattie recalls. "He taught me more about writing than I could have imagined learning elsewhere. He did it all by writing comments in the margins of my manuscripts. We never once sat down and talked about things. I would put a story in his faculty mailbox, and he would return it, usually the next day, in my student teaching assistant mailbox."

She didn't -- and still doesn't -- begin her stories with any idea of where she might go, never charting out a plot or outline. "My feeling is that physically I couldn't," she says. "If there isn't that moment of surprise for me, I don't think that I could stay in the material." Likewise, she did not set out to be a chronicler of the sixties and the baby boomer generation -- a label she finds reductive, dismissive. She simply wrote about the people who surrounded her: educated New Englanders, some who'd participated in the counterculture of the sixties, languishing now in the ennui of the seventies, fighting vague disappointments and failures with impulsive acts and eccentric obsessions. Especially regarding relationships, Beattie was fascinated with examining people's passivity -- "this whole Beckettian thing -- I can't stay and I can't go" -- but she chose not to excuse the circumstances in which her characters found themselves, or explicate how they got there. Instead, she adopted the deadpan, stark style about which
critics made such a fuss. "I think I was kind of a sponge," Beattie says. "I soaked up all of the obvious weirdness that was around me, and I tended to be nonjudgmental. That tone, apparently, superimposed with the more outlandish things, was surprising to people."

Yet, as she has matured and accrued experiences, it has become increasingly difficult for her to remain objective and open. "I do think I've figured some things out, and it's a disadvantage in a way, because you can pigeonhole people too quickly. You can say, 'This person is only crazy.' In graduate school, I knew this guy who was a genius in mathematics and whose best friend was his dog, and he said, 'Fuck it,' and went to work in a factory making axe handles. I thought, 'Huh.' Now, I wouldn't really think, 'Huh.' Before, I would be surprised in point of fact. Now I'm more surprised that I'm surprised. In a way, it's fighting against what time has taught me."

Stylistically and structurally, her work has changed as well, becoming more complex and sophisticated. "I'm much more interested in formal issues now," she says, "in how things are put together, and what I might do on that level to get a trajectory that is more clearly the author's. I know ten ways to move through time, and my interest is in finding the eleventh. I want to do something that I haven't done before. I'm not so pleased to have written a bright sentence, because even if it's, let's say, very bright, so have others been."

Consequently, she doesn't write with the rapidity or frequency she once used to. A novel like
Picturing Will will take up to three years to finish, and she'll work in spurts between projects, sometimes idle for as long as six weeks. In recent years, she has also become frustrated with the vagaries of the publishing world, particularly with the magazine market for her short stories, which she has more and more difficulty placing. Despite having a terrific agent, Lynn Nesbit, and being able to choose her book editors, Beattie finds the business disheartening at times. "Any notion that this gets easier, or that people treat me nicer -- it's exactly the opposite of what really is the case," she says. "People think that things are progressive, that when you get to hurdle number three, you've won the race. Only to find out that the terrain has changed after hurdle number five, or that your editor is fired after hurdle number eight. The same contingencies, the same contradictions and problems, exist as you're going along. It's not just an obstacle course that you can do correctly and win. The ground
rules are always changed by those in control, the people who own the publishing houses."

Those external forces, however, did not, at least directly, lead to the crisis Beattie experienced when working on her new novel,
Another You. After amassing three hundred fifty pages, she scrapped the book. Pretty much all of it -- the entire plot, most of the characters. Less than ten percent of the original version remains in the final manuscript. Why did it take her so long to realize that the novel wasn't working? Part of the problem was that she was writing adequate prose. "Moment to moment, there was no reason to say, 'Oh, I'm really off today.' " But eventually, she recognized that there was no momentum to the novel, and she didn't care deeply about the characters.

No one ever saw a word of the original book -- not her husband, not the few trusted friends who usually critique her initial drafts. Somehow, Beattie still managed to get
Another You to her publisher, Knopf, on time, but she has resolved she will never write another novel on contract, and she will concentrate for a while on her preferred medium -- stories and novellas.

The anxiety of
Another You's false start still haunts Beattie. It took her five long months to recover and begin anew, and during that period, she found little to reassure her. "I was thinking that really I had to admit to myself that there was no other skill I had, and that I couldn't just get into a snit and change careers, because it just wasn't going to happen. I mean, you just hope that there's mercy."