FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: LONG FUSES BEING LIT (PART 40)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

Just as in my high school days when we were more interested in the basketball games than in current worldwide events, so in the 1950s the local happenings, particularly Stephen's basketball games, claimed our immediate attention rather than the world affairs, especially those going on half a world away in Southeast Asia.

We knew, somewhat vaguely, from skimmed-over newspaper accounts and half-listened-to TV news, that the French who had long controlled that area known as Vietnam had been defeated by an uprising of the Vietnamese people. What we, Edward and I and a lot of other people, didn't pay much attention to at the time was that when the French sued for peace, terms of which were known as the Geneva Accords, many nations that had been involved signed the Accords. The United States did not, and therein lay a problem, but someone would take care of it, wouldn't they?

The Southeast portion of our own United States was simmering too. Ever since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case had, by the Supreme Court, declared segregation in schools to be unlawful and for segregation to cease, news came boiling out of the South that Rosa Parks, a black woman, had refused to give up her seat in the bus to a white man, and a Reverend Martin Luther King was organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to make peaceful demonstrations demanding civil rights. Countering this were White Citizens Councils and a flurry of little racial incidents. But someone would take care of this, wouldn't they?

What were these things compared to our city's building a flood wall to keep out almost annual floods of the downtown area, Stephen shooting a goal from mid-court in the last second to beat Perryville, Edward operating more sophisticated and complex printing presses, and I in the midst of a "cyclone of writing!"

My time at the typewriter had doubled, maybe tripled. It seemed I was trying to make up for "lost time." I would have 12 to 15 story manuscripts circulating at one time. Most of them sold, ranging in payment from $2.50 to $2500 and a few at $3000.

My five drawer steel filing cabinet I bought from Arnold Roth when he purchased a new one became stuffed with copies of manuscripts, letters and speeches.

Yes, speeches. It seems that when one's thoughts get published, it is assumed the writer can give speeches. So I gave speeches all over the state and in southern Illinois. It was time consuming and took away from my writing time.

Program chairpersons were always on the lookout for program material and I was fodder. My speeches at Writer's Conferences, Missouri Journalism Week, Associated Press meetings, service clubs, clubs ad infinitum were mostly about writing or the telling of some story I had written.

I did not claim to know all about writing and prefaced many of my speeches with this bit of verse:

I knew a writer who would cure

The state of mind we all endure,

Declaring war on his neuroses,

The root, he said, of his phycoses.

So off he went and had him fixed,

All wires straightened that were mixed.

Creating thus a second plight,

When sane, he found he couldn't write

I don't know the author of those lines, but it sounds like Odgen Nash or Richard Armour.

Embedded in many of my talks was this quotation from William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "The ... writer must leave no room in his workshop for anything but love, honor, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice." I would sometimes examine my manuscripts to see if I was coming anywhere close to Faulkner's standards.

In moments of reflection, I try to sort out which events in my writing career were the most thrilling. Was it the first sale? The first story sold to Saturday Evening Post? The first article to Reader's Digest? Publication of my first book? Receipt of the C.S. Lewis Silver Medal for The Deep Forest Award?

They were all very satisfying moments, but I believe the most satisfactory was when A.S. Burack, editor of The Writer, a leading trade magazine for writers, asked me to write for his magazine. Some quotes from his letters were: "It occurs to me that anyone with your ability would have some valuable advice to pass on to writers who are just trying to get a foothold in the writing profession." "Your article, "Triple Threat Flashback" certainly brightened our day! It is one of the best articles we have read in a long time ...." "The texture of the story

("One Night Together" in Saturday Evening Post), the feeling of purity and simplicity that you manage to get across is remarkable."

These comments were a balm to my writing ego and somewhat like receiving a diploma, a certified graduation.

I wrote other articles for The Writer but writing about writing was hard for me to do. Having tumbled unexpectedly into the writing world with no formal training or experience except college Freshmen English Composition and senior college thesis, I could never shake off the feeling that my "diploma" was an honorary one.

International and national affairs have a dreary insistence of sifting down through layers of everyday listening to nibble and bite at zones of comfort and make one question if he is just riding on the backs of those who are down in the trenches taking care of things.

The United States, which had not signed the Geneva Accords, decided to try to hold on to the southern portion of Vietnam, on which they had a tenuous claim, in order, so it was said, to stop the spread of Communism and to have a toe-hold in that corner of the world. Thereafter, just as strange words like Ypres, Verdun, Belleau, El Alamein, Anzio, St. Lo, Bastogne, Pingyang, Pusan, Seoul, Iwo Jima, Eniwetok had earlier crept into our vocabulary, now we heard Ho Chi Minh, Ngo Bienh Diem, Tonkin, Mekong, Cordillers. Thinking back, it seems we learned a lot of geography by warfare.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.