Daniel Mason on Apples, North Woods and the Cutting Room Floor

Sometimes, long after finishing a novel, I’ll look back through my notes and scraps and other discarded matter, and think about what makes it into a book and what does not. Usually, months or years have passed when this happens. My third novel, The Winter Soldier, took me so long to write (14 years), that I found lines and images I could not even remember writing down at all. More recently, I was working on a short story when a phrase popped into my head that I was certain I had read somewhere. When Googling couldn’t turn it up, I went looking for it on my computer and found it in my notes for North Woods. (The line was ‘Emily Dickinson wakes from a dream of a great fire;’ I have no idea what I intended to do with it and suspect I didn’t know then either). But this led me back onto the computer cutting room floor that I’d left untidied on the day I finally finished North Woods, took a deep breath, and promptly, digitally, took my arm and with a great sweep, wiped clear my desk. 

But still it remained, a sprawling pile in various states of organization and disorganization that, in a taxonomical spirit, I might roughly group into 

1. Things I cut intentionally from the novel

2. Things I cut from the novel and intended to put back in, but forgot

3. Things that would have worked nicely in the novel, but because of the great volume of categories (1) and (2) I never found again

4. Things I knew were unlikely to ever make it into the novel, but I liked anyway (the image of Emily D. jolting awake from with visions of a burning world fits, I think, into this category) 

As I scrolled through this shadow novel, I was struck by the number of roads not taken, entire chapters I’d already forgotten, bits and pieces which now seem quite bizarre. Did I really intend to write ‘a chapter about the history of chimney construction’? Who was going to be ‘seduced by a wheelwright’? Whence ‘Ephraim P. Molloy’?  

Ephraim sits now in a list of unused names I’d come across in history books and graveyards and an old school ledger at the museum in Deerfield Massachusetts: Lucretia, Diadema, Noadiah, Abial.  Presumably they are now living in the imagined towns that never made it to the novel either (Windham, Ashbourne, Greenbush), staying forever at the Fife & Drum Motel, the Rip Van Winkle (a really great name for a place to rest one’s sleepy head; why did I strike it?), the King Phillip (sic) Motor Lodge (wait; that did make it, though spelled correctly). At least, I know they must be eating apples: deep in my notes for my chapter about an English Major who plants the orchard central to the novel are a list of my favorite varietal names, courtesy of John Parkinson’s 1629 Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris: including the Cowsnout, the Catshead, the Leathercoate, the Womans Breast, the Paradise, the Master William, all sadly exiled from my pages. In the novel, the Major and his daughters brainstorm for a name for their variety, and clearly I had done the same.o

Speaking of apples, notes on how to plant and graft and raise an orchard from a complete sub-category of the scrap pile. There are how-to notes on grafting, and home remedies for rot – the gall of a green lizard, according to Palladius’ 4th or 5th-century On Agriculture.  This was also where I found what may be the world’s naughtiest poem on grafting, in which the fusion of fruit trees of different species is given an equine metaphor:

If ardor prompt the mare of swiftest race,
To join the sluggish ass in love's embrace

This, sadly, did not make the final cut: the graft, one might say, didn’t take. Still, there are a lot of apples in the book, and in this case, notes that went unused in the novel did have an afterlife. When I began North Woods, I had never grafted an apple tree. But last spring, after the book was finished, I decided to try my hand at it. One of the magic parts of grafting is that one can get advice from sources as disparate as Pliny the Elder and YouTube. Rather than going searching for a favorite source again, I went and pulled a long and detailed description that I had cut out from the novel out of fear of losing those readers who didn’t really need four pages about how to make a ‘whip-and-tongue graft’ and its advantages over a ‘splice graft.’ Today, these trees – an Ashmead’s Kernel, a Baldwin, a Black Oxford, each at least a century old, but still too young to have made Parkinson’s list – now stand shoulder-high, and if they can survive the deer and the bunnies and the borers and the voles, may one day bear fruit. If they don’t make it, they’ll be scattered in the woods and left among the other fallen leaves and branches, where one day, when the rain and worms have done their work, I hope they’ll find themselves a part of something else.