The `token plain person’ > Author Carolyn Chute awarded a Guggenheim

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In “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” novelist Carolyn Chute wrote about poor people and rural squalor. She created a fictional place that throbbed with real misery, yet she treated its characters with compassion.

For some readers, that was not enough.

“Everyone goes, `Why don’t you find a solution to poverty?”‘ Chute says, remembering the reaction to her book. Then she pauses for a moment. “I didn’t know I was supposed to find a solution.”

Chute has taken the suggestion to heart. Her solution to poverty is playing itself out in the pages of her newest novel, now in a first draft with the working title “Merry Men.”

“It’s the story of a modern day Robin Hood, only his name is Lloyd,” Chute explains. If that sounds like a lighthearted fantasy, remember who is writing it. “It’s got light moments, but it’s like real life. Real life is not that flat.”

Chute’s life, in fact, has seen its share of frost heaves. After the dizzying success of “Beans,” her next novel, “Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts,” received less attention and praise.

The money from both books — affluence that Chute had never before tasted — quickly drained away, as Chute helped family members with medical and legal problems. Chute’s husband, she admits, also likes to lend a hand to their Parsonsfield neighbors, when they need a little help paying the bills or feeding their pets.

So for the last few months, Chute has been living on the modest advance payments for “Merry Men,” an advance that runs out this July when the manuscript is scheduled to be delivered to her publisher. Chute thinks she might have it ready by December, if all goes well.

That’s where her own Robin Hood comes in.

Earlier this month, Chute was one of 143 artists, scholars and scientists awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. More than 3,000 people applied for the prestigious award, and the winners included lofty names like Harvard mathematician Arthur Jaffe and writer Francine du Plessix Gray.

Chute, sounding a little overwhelmed by the company, calls herself the “token plain person” on the list. She will receive $25,000, before taxes, over a six-month period — enough to keep her writing full time, and still help out a few neighbors along the way.

“I’m not rolling in dough, or taking lots of expensive trips,” Chute says. “But the financial trickle has made it possible for me to work full time.”

As it has since the days of “Beans,” full-time writing means 12-hour days and seven-day weeks. Success with one book does not make the next one any easier, she says.

“I work sort of like a dump truck. It all comes out at once,” Chute says. “The excruciating part is wondering if it ever will make it to a draft.”

When the swirl of characters and stories in her mind has finally jelled into a story, she works on each page, over and over, until she feels it is right.

“Once I get started I sort of feel like I’m in one of those cars where you press down the pedal and it only goes about 30 miles per hour. Everyone else is going by real fast, but I press the pedal and nothing happens,” Chute says.

But she keeps on pressing the pedal, anyway. And every time you ask her why, she offers a different answer. Sometimes she says it is the money. Sometimes she claims that writing is the only thing she can do well.

Sometimes she does not answer the question directly, but talks about the stories she wrote as a girl — wonderful tales with their own Robin Hood endings. In one story, the protaganist — who looks remarkably like a young Carolyn Chute — finds herself at a dance. Suddenly all the boys, who would never dance with her before, ask her to dance.

In a story she wrote at still a younger age, the protaganist — again a young girl with certain recognizable qualities — opens the gates of an Underwood Deviled Ham factory and sets loose all the pigs. The pigs stampede out the front gates, trampling the factory workers who were ready to make them into ham. At the end of the tale, the pigs trample the little girl’s first-grade teacher for good measure.

As Chute grew older, however, the pigs in her stories could no longer escape. The young girls did not always dance, and they ended up living in trailers. People beat other people up, and committed incest, and drank themselves into oblivion. They also hung on, and occasionally performed small acts of kindness and loyalty that grew large in the face of their circumstances.

That balancing act is still at the heart of Chute’s work, and her idea of fiction. In a writing class she taught recently, she asked her students to write a short profile of an unmitigated villain. One student described a Nazi who helped mastermind the killing of millions of Jews. The sketch, she says, was disasterously boring.

The next day Chute told the students to go back and give their villains an endearing quality. When the student re-read his piece on the Nazi, the rest of the class was riveted. “It made it more horrible, more real,” Chute remembers of the improved villain, who suddenly took on a third dimension.

For the most part, Chute stays out of the classroom, and away from academia. She feels no need to live in New York, or spend her time with other writers. She thinks that living in Parsonsfield is perfect for what she does.

“You are alone when you write, anyway, so what difference does it make?” she asks. “Writing a novel is so private — it’s almost like an altered state, or a meditation.”

“I don’t make a lot of references to Melville and Shakespeare in my books, and I don’t talk about ideas a lot. I draw on my Irish emotions,” Chute says.

And the people who keep coming up in those books, who are tied to those emotions, are her family. Chute has a theory that throughout life, people dream about the experiences of their childhood and early adult years. Those dreams, she says, are what seep into her fiction and give it flavor.

Why would anybody move away from all that?

“I feel blessed that I have not left them behind,” Chute says.