My Engine of Truth

bathe my crippled hands in warm water

Ignatius J. Reilly once said, “I must lay down my pencil, my engine of truth, and bathe my crippled hands in some warm water.” Ignatius J. Reilly is a fictional character created by a man named John Kennedy Toole, a brilliant man who loved to write but never believed anyone would ever read what he wrote. Only after his death did his mother (with considerable help from Walker Percy) find a publisher for his novel “A Confederacy of Dunces,” which won a Pulitzer prize in 1981. If you’re from here, you’ve most likely either read the book or been highly recommended it. There have been several attempts to film the novel, all failed, and one successful stage play.

I’ve known many writers and studied many more. They all seemed to believe their pencil was an engine of truth. It’s why they write. Even those who do it just for the money still believe they’re sharing something the world needs to hear.

John Grisham believed so much in “A Time to Kill” that he was selling it out of the trunk of his car before he became famous with “The Firm.” He’s unusual in that way, though. Most writers I’ve encountered weren’t that forward about getting people to read their book. Larry Brown had finished two novels and more than a dozen stories before he thought about letting anybody at Ole Miss look at them. Like Ignatius J. Reilly, he believed his scribblings revealed a fair amount of the world’s truth; he just wasn’t as sure anyone would ever want to read them.

I don’t know when I first became aware of words, but I’m sure it was fairly early. In my home were three children (soon to be four), two parents, a grandparent, and a maid, all using words. My father always had a book on his nightstand, and my mother kept a paperback book in her purse. She usually went through one or two mystery novels a week. She read so many that it was her practice to trade in the books she read for books she hadn’t read at a store by the park, where many other readers did the same thing. For most of her life, a grocery bag of completed paperback novels was sitting in her closet, ready to trade in.

Laurie Hammond, the neighbor girl, was babysitting when I said my first word, “Daddy.” In my baby book, my mother noted that I listened intently to everything, but it would be a while before my second word came. By the time I was three, it was clear something was wrong. Although they eventually took me to specialists at the University Hospital, my pediatrician, Dr. Alexander, thought I had a stutter. The speech pathologist confirmed it. As much as I loved words, they would be an unyielding companion because any distraction made it difficult for me to speak.

Before first grade, my mother tried to teach me to read, but she soon found that I was remembering what she said the words in the book were, not reading them for myself. She also learned that I was struggling to make my letters properly. First grade will straighten that out, she thought.

I’ve written about this before; first grade came the year the Justice Department took control of Jackson Public Schools. Although I had a great first-grade teacher, I didn’t make much progress with my reading and writing problems. In second grade, the justice department changed my teacher three times before May, and on the advice of the retiring superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, my parents took me out of Casey and moved me to St. Andrews.

In third grade at St. Andrews, my teacher was Madora McEntyre. It didn’t take her long to figure out that something was terribly wrong with my language skills. With her help, I was tested again. This time, the results were more serious; besides my stutter, I had ADHD and Dyslexia, a pretty terrible combination for a little boy who loved words. Their recommendation was to move me back a grade in school and begin pretty intensive therapy.

I’ve written before about the extensive process of teaching me to read and write. I would struggle, but I could do it. The world of reading was finally open to me. My dyslexia meant I read very slowly, and my ADHD meant I found it difficult to focus on my reading for extended periods. Still, if I persisted, I could eventually finish the same books my classmates were reading, even though I usually finished them long after the rest of the class, often too late to receive full credit.

Writing was equally difficult. If I took my time and formed my letters correctly, then ADHD would make me lose my train of thought. Once again, I could do it, just not easily. As much as I loved words, they taunted me by their closeness. One day, my mother had a brilliant idea. What if I took a typing course after school? Typing interacts with the brain differently from writing with a pencil or reading. Typing with my fingers freed me of my dyslexia. Even if I couldn’t read as fast as my peers, I could write faster than any of them, and did. Soon, I graduated from typewriters to home computers. Once I made that transition, writing became a daily ritual, and remained so for more than forty years.

Like Ignatius J. Reilly, I wrote scores of essays thrusting my engine of truth into the universe, but, also like Reilly, I never let anyone see them. Because writing came to me after such a struggle, I never considered the possibility that I might actually be decent at it, so I just stored all my essays and recollections away on floppy disks and hid them from the world.

Not believing I had any particular gifts, I decided to study business like my father. He thought I could fit in there. He gave me a copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Combined with a Millsaps business education, he believed I was pretty well set to become whatever he wanted me to become. Since I didn’t know what I wanted to become, I went along for the ride.

When we buried my father, I buried his ideas for my life with him. I didn’t know what my path would be, but I knew I needed to find something that made me feel more complete and more worthwhile. That’s when my love for words began calling to me. Aloof and cold as she’d always been, now she was calling to me and inviting me to find her.

It’s one thirty in the afternoon. Including this essay, I’ve written about two thousand-eight hundred words today. I’m probably not done yet. My normal productivity is between two and five thousand words a day. Sometimes as little as five hundred, sometimes as many as ten thousand. I’m told that’s quite a lot. Ray Bradbury said to write a thousand words a day. I can do that pretty easily. My back is tired so I might end here. I’m not really telling anybody, but I’m still a little sick. I act like I’m not to sort of encourage the universe to hurry up and heal me. I’ll probably return to this idea of an “engine of truth” someday because I think there’s something to it.

I saw Suzanne Marrs at lunch today. She’s always been an omen of good luck to me. For most people my age, she’s famous because of her work with Eudora Welty and Charlotte Caper. For me, she’s famous because my father’s best friend fell in love with her, and she helped him transition from this state of being to the next. I told her about my substack. I hope she finds it.

Tomorrow, I want to completely rewrite the first chapter of the Rudy story. (I still don’t know what to call it.) I’m worried that since it takes a couple of chapters before we get to the actual birth of Rudy that I need to introduce something suggesting unnatural goings on as a point of inciting interest. I had an idea that maybe the Indians put a curse on the river when the French stole their land. A good curse is always welcome in a ghost story.