HOW A NOVEL HAPPENS.

My Staggerford
Journal
Jon Hassler
Ballantine Books, $14, 100 pp.

After almost two decades of teaching in high schools and colleges in northern Minnesota, Jon Hassler decided one day in 1970 to start writing. He determined to finish a short story every two weeks. By 1975 he had completed some two dozen and had published six. In 1974, the future author of Staggerford and North of Hope had begun a novel about a thirty-five-year-old teacher and a Native American uprising. But after he had completed more than a hundred pages, "the work died." He then took a year's sabbatical, hoping to support himself, his wife, and three children on his half-pay and the sale of his landscape paintings.

As both the record of a year in a novelist's life and a glimpse into a well-loved writer's mind, this journal is an important document. We learn how the hero of Staggerford, Miles Pruitt, lost the wife he never had and how characters emerge from recollection into life. We also learn the derivation of Hassler's most famous character, the pre-Vatican II parochial school teacher, Miss Agatha McGee. Agatha had figured in an early short story, which Hassler incorporates into the developing novel, giving it new impetus.

There are also more general remarks about fiction writing and inspiration. Hassler's whimsical comment on one of Staggerford's most mysterious characters as "the first bonewoman in all of world literature," does not gainsay her mythic quality, nor the insight into how a writer becomes aware of a character's power and importance.

In another place Hassler describes a dream in which a friend who has died speaks to him: "It did not strike me as odd that he should be telling me this after his death. A dead man speaking didn't seem strange until I began to write it down. Writing brings out the true aspect of things...the oddness of things, which should be obvious."

The novelist's love of solitude is also evident. Hassler recalls the week in October 1975 which he spent writing alone in a cabin near Park Rapids, Minnesota: "It has to rank as one of the best weeks of my life," he says. The cabin and its oil-burning stove also recall scenes from later novels.

We learn the joys of revising. Unable to let the completed first draft "cool," Hassler begins rewriting immediately: "I enjoy working on a second draft better than a first. If I had my choice I would write nothing but second (or later) drafts." But he becomes annoyed at his family's intrusions: "Now these are all basically good people, and it is not their fault that their fuel pumps and noses leak, that their toes and tax forms need attention." So he retreats for "a few blissful, uninterrupted days of writing" to Blue Cloud Abbey in South Dakota.

With the manuscript of Staggerford complete and mailed off to his editor, Hassler begins immediately on Jemmy, a coming-of-age story of a part-Native American girl. After a few more entries we learn that an earlier young-adult tale of suspense, Four Miles to Pinecone, is likely to be published. In September 1976 he records with exaltation, "I have sold, ten days apart, two novels."

For readers familiar with Hassler's career, there is a bitter sweetness in finishing My Staggerford Journal. We know that after his early success with Staggerford, Simon's Night, The Love Hunter, and Grand Opening, Hassler's novels went out of print. But we also know that in the 1980s, with a new publisher and insistent fans, he and his novels once again came to prominence. A Green Journey became a TV special, and Dear James and North of Hope were followed by glowing reviews, book tours, and an endowed professorship at Saint John's University in Collegeville. Since then Hassler has also published two comic campus novels, Rookery Blues and The Dean's List.

My Staggerford Journal leaves us with some tantalizing questions. Clearly, it is a "selection." It reads almost too much like a novel. Of those "perhaps thirty notebooks" that Hassler describes "lying around my den," how many parts of how many notebooks went into My Staggerford Journal? And will there be another installment that takes us through the '80s and beyond? In Hassler's Dear James, when a neighbor gets access to the letters of the marvelous Agatha McGee, he is shocked by their candid portraits of Staggerford. Will there be like surprises if and when Hassler's notebooks become public?

Despite an ongoing struggle with Parkinson's disease, Hassler continues to write. He is working on a book for Loyola Press of Chicago titled On Goodness: Sketches from a Novelist's Life. A new novel is also in the works, tentatively titled Agatha at Eighty. And a revised stage version of Grand Opening will be presented this month at the unveiling of the Jon Hassler Theater in his hometown of Plainview, Minnesota.

Ed Block is professor of English at Marquette University and editor of Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature.