But filmmaking has its own exigencies, and that fall, to her annoyance, two days elapsed before she and Spielberg were able to connect (owing in part, as she puts it, to the “nasty hoarding of the single lobby telephone by our receptionist”). The exchange appears in “ Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000” (Simon & Schuster), edited by the late Valerie Boyd. The last word sags with fatigue, or maybe a certain pragmatism, pulling Albert and Celie and Steven back down to earth. “What are you doing in London?” the director asks. “Readings,” the writer answers-no more, no less. Walker knew that her words, even the most diaristic, could well be destined for a public audience, and she knew this even before a word of hers was ever published. This conviction seems a precondition for a writing career, the kind of vanity without which one writes in vain.
The pages of the journal leave a record of both the pulsing epiphanies and the irritations of daily existence, and chart, for a dimly perceived intimate reader, the progress of a literary pilgrim. Pain, joy, spells of depression, unease, engagement, even disaffection-all are material.
