Housemother Knows Best

Writers are passing strange, and those who herd together in writers' colonies are apt to be stranger still. Perhaps the strangest writers' colony on the North American continent is located in rolling corn-hog country on the outskirts of Marshall, Ill. (pop. 2,960) and looks rather like a struggling boys' camp, with two rows of barracks, a central cookhouse-cum-library and a pond swimming pool. Its founder and reigning queen is a bright-eyed, single-minded housemother of the literary arts named Lowney Handy.

Childless Mrs. Handy, who is 52 and a confessed "thwarted writer," dotes on young writers and boards as many of them as she can corral. They call her Lowney. Her star pupil, and still the star boarder at the Handy colony, is James (From Here to Eternity) Jones. To him Lowney is an inspiring evangelist of talent who "taught me everything I know." To less favored literary aspirants whom the trigger-tempered Lowney has not hesitated to cast into the outer dark, she is an unpalatable blend of army top kick and prison warden, running a literary brainwashing machine.

Cold Wet Sprays. Lowney's only sorrow was that in the five years since the colony was founded, it had produced no published book to follow Jones's Eternity. Last week Lowney could boast of a second, with the publication of Never the Same Again by Gerald Tesch.

Its unsavory subject is a homosexual affair between a 13-year-old boy and his 30-year-old seducer, a gas-station attendant. Tesch borrows from Jones the neo-Dreiserian conviction that life itself is a four-letter word. Among Tesch's victims and vermin: a girl who commits incest and goes mad, a wife-beating lush, an aging sadistic homosexual. The most defenseless victim is the English language, e.g., "A pang of lonesomeness settled over him like a cold wet spray." Some might argue that Tesch was a born bad writer. But Gerald, an off-and-on Handy colonist since 1952, has apparently been trained to write this way.

Literary Rock Pile. Upon joining the colony each neophyte gets a copy of From Here to Eternity and a good look at Jones's sumptuous house on the western edge of town at the end of Beech Street. The house is complete with hi-fi set, high-powered hunting rifles, 3,500 books, pushbutton kitchen and Hollywood-style bathroom (with a French-style bidet).

After this glimpse of the rewards awaiting a faithful disciple of the Handy method, the would-be writer is assigned a cell furnished with an army bed, lamp, table and typewriter in one of the barracks. He is expected to cut himself off from all social contact with the outside world: Lowney is adamant on "dedication." Reveille sounds for 5:30 a.m. breakfast, and then the writers are sent to their cells and typewriters. Afternoons are devoted to physical culture, exercises, or work on the "rock pile"--carting bricks or laying walks. Visitors are barred, and Lowney once heaved bricks at a trio of them. Liquor and women are also banned ("I'd kill one of my younger boys who got married") except for an occasional spree in Terre Haute. 16 miles over to the east. Lights are out at 8:30 p.m.

Dreiser v. Proust. The new trainee is not allowed to write. He copies books of Lowney's choice--Joyce. Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos and Raymond Chandler. Says she: "They copy the story from comma to comma, from cover to cover. It helps their typing and helps them forget themselves." No writer dares copy anything else. One disgruntled ex-trainee remembers being caught with a copy of Proust, which "Lowney snatched from me, ripped up and threw away. 'I didn't tell you to read that,' she shouted. 'Your God-damned style's too intellectual and sissylike as it is. Didn't I tell you to copy Dreiser? You're damned right I did. And why? Did you think about that? Did you? To get you out of that damned Proust style.' " Lowney, who only got past high school, takes a dim view of Proust, whom she calls "Frowst." Nor does she think much of "Kafkia" (Kafka), "Walter Stevens" (Wallace Stevens) or "Die-lane Thompson" (Dylan Thomas).

If a writer copies to suit her. Lowney moves him along to "skits." What about? "A bird, a dog. a boy. a tree." Out of these literary acorns, feels Lowney. giant novels may grow. "I mark them and I write ideas all along the margins where they could develop, where they could get a stream of consciousness." Her marginalia are often crisp ("This becomes idiotic") and sometimes to the point ("You say his uniform was clean. This is the first time I've seen anyone in this story with any clothes on"). Says Tesch: "Lowney really helped me. She went through that book line by line, yet it's still my book, it's me, not her. She's amazing."

Cheer & Heartbreak. Lowney has fed, clothed and sheltered as many as 17 writers at one time, currently has only four in residence. But she is often disappointed. The maverick personalities she attracts--social rebels, ex-jailbirds, protesting college boys--sometimes desert the colony at the crucial moment. Says Lowney: "I've had four books just about finished here that walked out. Good books. It's heartbreaking." But she is consoled by the fact that two novels are now in progress at the colony and six completed ones are currently in the hands of publishers.

To support the colony, almost silent partner and husband Harry Handy contributes $400 a month from his pay as a refinery manager for the Ohio Oil Co. But the real mainstay is Novelist Jones, who has expressed his whopping gratitude to Lowney by sinking $60,000 of his royalties in the colony and naming it a beneficiary in his will. Jones is on the last lap of a mammoth second novel (600,000 words written) about a love affair between a returned war veteran and a schoolteacher. He took eight years to write Eternity. "Today I can do in two years with my system," says Lowney proprietarily, "what it took Jim to do in eight."

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