Reading as A Writer - E.L. Doctorow on Herman Melville's Moby Dick

This is from a lecture on Moby Dick by E L Doctorow, and s developed further in one of a collection of essays, Creationists. In it, he imagines Melville's novel not as the complete and completed behemoth it might be to the academic or the general reader, as Melville might have thought of it while composing it, a frank acknowledgment that writing is a series of decisions, and that those decisions have consequences that determine the shape, grain and tenor of the novel. This is Doctorow very much reading as a writer.

E.L. Doctorow, “Composing Moby Dick: What Might Have Happened.”

I can claim a personal relationship to Melville and his works, having read MOBY-DICK three and a half times. The half time came at the age of ten when I found a copy in my grandfather’s library --- it was one of a set of great sea novels all bound in green cloth—and it was fair sailing until the cetology stove me in. I first read the book in its entirety, (and Typee, Omoo, Billy Budd and The Enchantadas , and Benito Cereno and Bartleby the Scrivener, for that matter) as an undergraduate at Kenyon College. Then, as a young editor at the New American Library a mass paperback publisher, I persuaded a Kenyon professor, Denham Sutcliffe to write an Afterword to the Signet Classic edition of Moby Dick, and so read the book again by way of editorial preparation. And now on the 150th anniversary of its publication (and after too many years) I have read it for the third time.

The surprise to me, at my age now, is how familiar the voice of that book is, and not merely the voice, but the technical effrontery, and not merely the technical effrontery, but the character and rhythm of the sentences…and so with some surprise, I’ve realized, how much of my own work, at its own level, hears Melville, responds to his perverse romanticism, endorses his double dipping into the accounts of realism and allegory, as well as the large risk he takes speaking so frankly of the crisis of human consciousness, that great embarrassment to us all that makes a tiresome prophet of anyone who would speak of it.

...

Literary history finds a few great novelists who achieved their greatness from an impatience with the conventions of narrative. Virginia Woolf composed Mrs. Dalloway from the determination to write a novel without a plot or indeed a subject. And then Joyce, of course: Like Picasso who was an expert draftsman before he blew his art out of the water, James Joyce proved himself in the art of narrative writing before he committed his assaults upon it.

The author of the sterling narratives Typee and Omoo precedes Joyce with his own blatant subversion of the narrative compact he calls Moby Dick. Yet I suspect that, in this case, the subversion may have been if not inadvertent, then only worked out tactically given the problem of its conception. I would guess that what Melville does in Moby Dick is not from a grand preconceived aesthetic (Joyce: I will pun my way into the brain’s dreamwork; I will respect the protocols of grammar and syntax but otherwise blast the English language all to hell.) but from the necessity of dealing with the problem inherent in constructing an entire 19th century novel around a single life and death encounter with a whale. The encounter clearly having to come as the climax of his book, Melville’s writing problem was how to pass the time until then --- until he got the Pequod to the Southern Whale fisheries and brought the white whale from the depths, Ahab crying “There she blows --- there she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby-Dick!” She blows, I note, not until page 537 of a 566 page book – in my old paperback Rhinehart edition.

A writer lacking Melville’s genius might conceive of a shorter novel, its entry point being possibly closer in time to the deadly encounter. And with maybe a flashback or two thrown in. A novelist of today, certainly, would eschew exposition as far as possible, let the reader work out for herself what is going on, which is a contemporary way of maintaining narrative tension. Melville’s entry point, I remind myself, is not at sea aboard the Pequod, not even in Nantucket: he locates Ishmael in Manhattan, and staying in scene every step of the way, takes him to New Bedford, has him meet Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, listen to a sermon, contrives to get them both to Nantucket, meet the owners of the Pequod, endure the ancient hoary device of a mysterious prophecy…. and it isn’t until Chapter 20 which begins “A day or two passed” that he elides time. Until that point, some ninety-four pages into the book, the writing has all been, a succession of unbroken real time incidents. Another ten pages elapse before the Pequod in Chapter 22 “thrusts her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves.”

I wouldn’t wonder if Melville at this point, the Pequod finally underway, stopped to read what he had written to see what his book was bidding him to do.

This is sheer guesswork of course. I don’t know what Melville himself may have said about the writing of Moby Dick beyond characterizing it as a “wicked book.” Besides, whatever any author says of his novel is of course another form of the fiction he practices and is never, never, to be taken on faith.

Perhaps Melville had everything comfortably worked out before he began, though I doubt it. Perhaps he had a draft completed of something quite conventional before his writer’s sense of crisis set in. The point to remember is the same that Faulkner made to literary critics: they see a finished work and do not dream of the chaos of trial and error and torment from which it has somehow emerged.

No matter what your plan for a novel --- and we know Herman was inspired by the account of an actual whaling disaster (the destruction of the ship Essex in 1819) and we know how this was a subject, whaling, he could speak of with authority of personal experience abetted by research, and we know he understood as well as the most commercial practitioner of the craft, that a writer begins with an advantage who can report on a kind of life or profession out of the ken of the ordinary reader --- nevertheless I say that no matter what your plan or inspiration, or trembling recognition for an idea that you know belongs to you, the strange endowment you set loose by the act of writing is never entirely under your control. It cannot be a matter solely of willed expression. Somewhere, from the depths of your being you find a voice: it is the first and most mysterious moment of the creative act. There is no book without it. If it takes off, it appears to you to be self-governed. To some degree you will write to find out what you are writing. And you feel no sense of possession for what comes onto the pages ---- what you experience is a sense of discovery.

“Excerpted from CREATIONISTS by E.L. Doctorow. Copyright © 2006 by E.L. Doctorow. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.”

Lola Montes

This is the trailer for Lola Montes, the last film made by Max Ophuls - a true genius of the cinema whose work becomes better and more moving with each decade that passes.

It was a troubled film, castigated and butchered on release - at least 40 minutes were cut. It isn't perfect, but it is a dream of a how perfect a film might be.

For this reason, it is a film best watched after the inestimable Le Plaisir, the fabulous La Ronde, the spellbinding Madame de, the exceptional Caught and, perhaps the best introduction to Ophuls, Letter from an Unknown Woman.

This doesn't mean that Lola Montes needs a primer to be enjoyed, rather that its beauty and its ambition is the greater for knowing the path that led to its making.


See these films because, unlike Lola Montez, they are wholly achieved pieces of cinema, and then see how Lola Montez is an attempt to transcend them. Don't see them if romance and emotion embarrass you, or if restraint means only common sense and sound judgement and not imprisonment, an impediment to motion to which all Ophuls characters are doomed or denied.

It's a movie aching with intent to summarise the maker's philosophy. It is epic in scale. It is in colour - the only Ophuls film that is - and it is an old man's dream of how life loops back on itself, a meditation of love, loss and fame, on freedom and imprisonment. Ophuls's use of the camera - those prowling tracking shots - is as eloquent as cinema gets.

In truth, and it hurts the film far more than any tales of botched editing, Martine Carroll is inadequate in the part. Any actress with whom Ophuls had worked previously would have succeeeded better, but, intellectually at least, her presence can be justified and made bearable if one thinks of the present day Lolas - the Jordans and the Paris Hiltons - oddly vacant and unexpressive women and yet about whom we seem unable to cease parading, circling, studying and interpreting - albiet less astsutely than Ophuls does Lola. Our current media prowl around and probe such women more lasciviously, insistently and with far greater cruelty, and yet, like Lola, they seem impelled to offer themselves up.

Anyway, praise the Lord, Lola Montez is available on DVD at last. One of my wishes granted. Next up, please - Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc - now that would be a great double bill with Lola

feet, room, poet

Continuing to Live

Continuing to live -- that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries --
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise --
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

Philip Larkin

Pavel Florensky: or why Neil Armsrong is not a muslim and Jeanette Winterson is guilty of prelest

I’m reading slowly - there is no other way – Pavel Florensky’s Iconostasis.

Pavel Florensky, philosopher, theologian, scientist, art historian and Orthodox priest lived in dangerous times, a world agonizingly making itself new while he worked on both retrieving the past and envisaging the future.

In Iconostasis, he takes it, understandably, as a given that God is the maker of all things visible and invisible.

The boundary between these two worlds, the visible and invisible, as is the way with boundaries, both separates and joins.

At times we become aware of how these worlds touch. We experience moments when the visible world yields, and ‘we sense the invisible world…is breathing.’

Dreams, Florensky states, provide our first and simplest entry into the invisible world, and while I dispute his belief that dreams are only ever caused and terminated by external stimuli – light, sound – he describes well how time acts differently in dream and also creates an imaginary space – ‘an imaginary truly real in the way oneself is real.’

He goes on:

A dream…is a sign of a movement between two realms… both shores of existence are given to consciousness… the dream happens whenever our consciousness hugs the boundary of the crossing and therefore sustains the double perceptiveness that occurs whenever we lightly dream and drowsily keep awake.

What Florensky says of dreaming, he holds true of art, but it is not a simple assertion that dreaming is art or simply that art comes out of dreaming. The movement of ascent and the return to the earthly waking world generate two types of imagery.

In the upper world, the souls sheds – like outworn clothes – the images of our everyday emptiness, the psychic effluvia that cannot find a place above, those elements that are not spiritually grounded.

That which is base or mundane is jettisoned and what is experienced in the higher dream world might feel an achievement. Those higher images and symbols might indicate a greater truth, but imagery gained in the uprush of inspiration needs to be grounded, returned to and rooted in the objective world. To steal from the higher world these ‘spiritual’ images – to make an art out of them - is to lie to about the nature of God's creation.

What is noticeable about Florensky’s observations is his emphasis on vigilance or attention, and his fidelity to the known world and which no mystic should ignore. Positing a higher world, a heaven of dreaming, he demands we guard against exploiting the images and symbols to be gained from it. Such spiritual booty is, ultimately, trash, unless ploughed back and made profitable in the waking world.

In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly; there, free from all images, the soul is fed by contemplation by the essences of the higher realm, knowing the permanent noumena of things; then, satiated with this knowing, it descends again to the earthly realm. And precisely at the boundary of the two worlds, the soul’s spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make the permanent work of art

Art that feeds only on high imagery, art that is, finally, not cognizant of earth and its connective tissue with heaven, is guilty of prelest:

.. the deluded self... imagines itself to be moving along the perpendicular of the sensory world, withdrawn from it... The soul closes in on itself and then all occasion is gone wherein the soul could... waken once more into consciousness: the encounter with the objective world of God's creation.

Prelest is a handy word for a writer. It is more than just overwriting. it is more than just writing purple. Its about noticing what gets trampled when one overwrites. What gets stained when writing purple. We can woo ourselves with phrases that are entirely musical, turn language into a hum, and in our rapture believe ourselves in the grip of truths.

The past week I have cringed each time I have heard a BBC trailer for a documentary on TS Eliot.
The trailer's voiceover has Jeanette Winterson telling us ringingly that Eliot was a man who could hear the grass grow and, so pained and sensitised by this ability, he built a protctive membrane between himself and the world.

While there is truth here in the notion of Eliot of a man who withdraws from the world in order to make it bearable to him, there is none in the image itself. Even as metaphor, it is hobbled. What in nature, deciding its enviroment is too noisy, further decides to grow itself a skin? If Eliot was pained by the world, was it through his ears?

Eliot could no more hear the grass grow than Neil Armstrong could hear the Muslim call to prayer from the moon for it is widely believed that Armstrong became a musilm convert after standing on the moon, he heard the Muslim call to prayer reaching him from earth. The story is quite wonderful. It is seductive. It is completely bogus in every detail but given as fact on thousands of websites, and is mentioned approvingly in Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil

Its extravagance, while charming, is a lie. Its beauty is only seeming. But so is Winterson's assertion that Eliot could hear the grass grow and that the noise pained him. Big and small, these are examples of prelest. While such images enchant, they corrupt because they are not true. Winterson has many virtues, and, for me, Nadeem Aslam has many more, but both display the vice of prelest. It's a vice that only seems to reward a writer and a reader, but it damages both - it mires where it appears to uplift.

In Florensky there is an insistence that it is the return to earth that makes the art. The flight into the higher realm must be anchored. Attention is paid to the moment of transit between the visible and invisible world. An honouring of both worlds, a connecting with both worlds, creates the art we need, the imagery that is true.

And I think that's why Winterson's claim made me wince at my every hearing. Because Eliot was a poet eminently innocent of prelest. His imagery is culled from heaven and earth, both the dreaming ascent and gravity's wakeful embrace.

Isn’t this the journey Eliot endorses at the conclusion of The Four Quartets?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Dennis Cooper's 69 Modern Classics Condensed via Amazon's SIP

From the excellent Dennis Cooper's blog

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is an SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

What Amazon doesn’t tell you is that, in the case of fiction, their SIP feature does not merely “hint at important plot elements” but MAGICALLY DISTILS THE ESSENCE OF THE WORK. They don’t tell you that because, obviously, if they did, why would anyone bother to order a novel or short-story collection after reading its SIPs?

To show you what I mean, I have compiled the SIPs for 69 works of twentieth-century fiction. Nearly all the works I’ve chosen would qualify as “modern classics,” and they include a number that are of special interest to readers of this blog. You’ll be surprised at how many you can recognize, though there’s an answer key at the bottom if you need it.


If there are any books here that you haven’t read before, you can go ahead and cross them off your list. Trust me, this is all you need to read.

—Alan

(visit my blog, The Purest of Treats)


1.

medical attaché, annular fusion, entertainment cartridge, improbably deformed, howling fantods, feral hamsters, dawn drills, tough nun, professional conversationalist, new bong, ceiling bulged, metro boston, tennis academy, red leather coat, soupe aux pois, red beanie, addicted man, magnetic video, littler kids, little rotter, technical interview, police lock, oral narcotics, sober time, veiled girl


2.

advertised phone number, snuff video, previous reviewers, cute face


3.

wanta screw, cock flipped, rectal mucus, disk mouth, distant fingers, dawn smell, blue silence, como perros, sex rooms, carbolic soap, como eso, green boys, tide flats, penny arcades


4.

mother cell, old gash, old junky


5.

grey hen, sick leg, four pounds ten, real silence, sixteen stones


6.

entomological allusions, cryptogrammic paper chase, enchanted hunters, moral apotheosis, verbal figurations, perilous magic, durable pigments, corrected misprint, gray star, glass lake


7.

enchanted hunters


8.

matrimonial gift, quaker librarian, charming soubrette, editor cried, retrospective arrangement, pike hoses, pensive bosom, seaside girls, absentminded beggar


9.

wather parted


10.

muted post horn


11.

inner party, three superstates, chinless man, chocolate ration, varicose ulcer


12.

red hunting hat, tiny little kid


13.

hands for the conch


14.

leaden circles, solitary traveller


15.

cultured gestures, pleural shock, little extra therapy, dining attendants, placet experiri, sine pecunia, ragged lips, informal pronouns, wild departure, baptismal bowl, classic gifts, good engineer, light favorites, rest cure, moist spot, purple cheeks, checked trousers, ivory complexion, silent sister, fever chart, social rooms, world republic, nightstand lamp


16.

ostensible acquittal, definite acquittal, pettifogging lawyers, man from the country, first plea, accused men, prosecuting counsel


17.

laughing aristocrats, bad zombies, black pear tree, emerald dust, falling dog, personal worthlessness, captured woman, damned birds, naked models, flee from the wrath


18.

Los Angeles, Captain Blood, New York, Tolstoy Museum, Louis Escher, Hotel Terminus, Engineer-Private Klee, Paul Klee, Richard Widmark, Errol Flynn, Old Testament, Shock Art, Chivas Regal, Count Leo Tolstoy, Fighter Squadron Five, Holy Ghost, Madam Olympia, The Interpretation of Dreams


19.

pink hawthorn, little nucleus, little clan, little phrase


20.

two buttocks, old libertine, lovely ass


21.

duffle coat pocket, landing slip, big lighthouse, sheltered angle, vertical embankment, old country woman, uneven cobbles, table wedged, cardboard strip, memorandum book, window recess


22.

moratorium owner, conapt building, kidney balm, consultation lounge, precog ability, empathy box, prudence organization, mood organ, many inertials, poop sheet, parked ship, harness bull, laser tube, false animal, psi field, brain unit, roof field, tomb world


23.

red drum, railroad gloves, railroad earth, lonesome traveler, nylon poncho, golden eternity, back scat


24.

independent dependent kind, dependent independent kind, one being living, servant queerness, independent dependent being, ten acre place, rich right american living, being ones being living, having stupid being, independent dependent nature, servant girl nature, loving repeating, poor queer people, having such angry feeling, being important inside, beginning middle living, mostly every one, country living feeling, one being fighting, completely little one, right rich being, fierce little temper, ones being thinking, dependent independent nature, dependent independent being


25.

sale cerveau, beautiful room with bath, fout ici, nearest cinema, hundred francs


26.

tall black circles, watching jewel, dont reckon, aint right, aint nothing, prescription case


27.

fractured windshield, airline coach, scarred mouth, instrument binnacle, windshield pillar, instrument dials, wheel housing, screen actress, radiator grilles, slip road


28.

behavioral sociologist, hostess bars, sex tourism


29.

snapper pizza, little hardbody, wool tuxedo, patterned silk tie, drink tickets, striped cotton shirt, dry beer, broadcloth shirt, pocket square, pleated trousers


30.

cool pants, chain artist, hitting women


31.

bun compartment, nucular bum, exercising board, cabinet under the bar, kickoff rally, young man sighed, front shutters, looseleaf folder, fat mother


32.

artificial extended families, new middle name, flying fuck


33.

carrie carrie carrie, town whistle, pig blood


34.

religious white men, white religious men, dildo thrust, male creep, fake brother, evil enchanters, cunt lips


35.

bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, intelligence tent, more combat missions, sei pazzo, sixty missions, seventy missions, illegal tobacco, railroad ditch, bomb line, forty missions, flak suit, group chaplain, lead bombardier, fifty missions, medical tent


36.

cyclone shot, apish man, head sidewise


37.

purring voice, little revolver


38.

plait round, plaited cord, extra button


39.

vivir sin amar, walnut grower, absolutamente necesario, old bean, first policeman


40.

smut gig, cop beaters, smut job, stag books, whore book, smut books, justice jail, purple car, young stuff, lab man, months suspension, trial board


41.

central booking, foxy brunette, hock hock hock hock, hack hack hack hack hack, girl with brown lipstick, social grin, bond trading room, circus arrest, haw haw haw haw haw, ordinary arrest, whaddaya whaddaya, entry gallery, plastic speaker, oak pedestal table, elevator vestibule


42.

malenky bit, real skorry, old baboochkas, old ptitsa, real bezoomny, starry ptitsa, kashl kashl kashl, old moloko, horrorshow smeck, real gromky, starry veck, red red krovvy, other veshches, oddy knocky, writer veck, young ptitsas, old veck, horrorshow groodies, real horrorshow, public biblio, top millicent, milky chai, prison charlie,

young swine


43.

shock shop, seclusion room, least black boy, bull goose loony, big black boys, wicker bag, ward policy, tub room, drug room, red capsules, dorm door, two black boys


44.

American Dream, Psychiatrist's Club, Mint Hotel, North Vegas, New York, Jesus Christ, Great Red Shark, Boulder City, Carson City, Desert Inn, Vincent Black Shadow, Horatio Alger, White Rabbit, San Francisco, Death Valley, Los Angeles, Barbra Streisand, Savage Henry, Main Street, Tim Leary, Coupe de Ville, White Whale


45.

great butler, distinguished household, staff plan, back corridor


46.

rich cunt, fifteen francs


47.

kif paste, much kif, delicate prey, smoking kif, lotus pods, circular valley


48.

black mahn, white mahn, ole lady, leg chain, tank room


49.

dees girl, pie wagon, accident policy, hell cat


50.

lit conductor, lit uniform, scarlet kimono, womanish voice, quarter past one, own compartment, communicating door, small dark man, restaurant car


51.

little china figures, judge stroked, judge nodded


52.

leather bracelets


53.

tormented writer, productive writer, gathering shadow


54.

gray caviare, heroin life, love under will, magical diary, adore thee, magic room, taking heroin


55.

uncivil teacher, circular ruins, blue tigers


56.

bearded bloke, scarlet tights, rummy thing, bally thing, mess jacket, nasty jar, second footman, purple socks, dear old chap


57.

black pickpocket, baize bag


58.

pitchpine table, rediffusion set, wild tannia, morris suite, laden hampers, exhibition examination, coal barrel, saman tree, stomach powder, back verandah, soft candle, bicycle clips, younger god, back trace, elder god, front verandah, stale cakes, tonka beans


59.

coloured fellow, jack ladder, coloured boy, coloured folks, copper shop, grey boy, coloured workers


60.

whiskey joint, short black man, funny boy


61.

handicraft instructor, inchoate eyes


62.

madness most discreet, golden dove


63.

dowager empress, silk cultivation


64.

stillsuit manufacturer, panoplia propheticus, gom jabbar, inkvine scar, ducal signet, factory crawler, poison snooper, voice from the outer world, stillsuit hood, weirding way, dew collectors, diamond tattoo, little makers, maker hooks, message cylinder, water flagon, funeral plain, death commandos, spice liquor, palm lock, prison planet, shield belt, terrible purpose, demanding memory


65.

barn cellar, famous pig, grey spider, old sheep, egg sac


66.

golden ticket, chocolate river


67.

ole chappie, killing beds, fertilizer mill, pickle rooms, chilling rooms


68.

brown bureau, redheaded fellow, little revolver, perfect murder


69.

little mole



BONUS:

Can you identify these two novels from the results of Amazon’s concordance feature, listing their “100 most frequently used words”?


1.

again alone always among another asked away bankes book cam came children come day down even eyes father feeling felt go going great hand head herself himself house husband itself james knew last let life light lighthouse liked lily little long look looked looking man men might mind minta moment mrs must night nothing now old once own paul people perhaps picture ramsay room rose round sat saw say saying sea see seemed should sitting something still stood table tansley things think thinking thought time together took turned upon wanted waves went window without woman words world years yes yet


2.

acid alex anything anyway ass away bed body boy chris come cool cute david door down drew dwarf even eyes face feel felt few first friends fuck fucked fucking get go going goof got guess guy hand hard head idea kid kind know least let life little long look looked love luke makes man mason maybe mean minutes now oh okay pam people place point porn really right room say scott second see seem sex shit should smear sniffles something sort sounds still sure take tell thing think thinking thought time turned two voice want weird whatever words world yeah








KEY:


1. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

2. The Sluts, Dennis Cooper

3. The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs

4. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

5. Molly, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

6. The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and Alfred Appel, Jr. (ed.)

7. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

8. Ulysses, James Joyce

9. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

10. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

11. 1984, George Orwell

12. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

13. Lord of the Flies, William Golding

14. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

15. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

16. The Trial, Franz Kafka

17. 60 Stories, Donald Barthelme

18. 40 Stories, Donald Barthelme

19. Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

20. 120 Days of Sodom, Marquis de Sade

21. The Voyeur, Alain Robbe-Grillet

22. Four Novels of the 60s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik by Philip K. Dick

23. Road Novels 1957-1960: On the Road / The Dharma Bums / The Subterraneans / Tristessa / Lonesome Traveler / Journal Selections by Jack Kerouac

24. The Making of the Americans, Gertrude Stein

25. Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys

26. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

27. Crash, J.G. Ballard

28. Platform, Michel Houellebecq

29. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

30. Money, Martin Amis

31. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

32. Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut

33. Carrie, Stephen King

34. Don Quixote, Kathy Acker

35. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

36. Collected Novels, Dashiell Hammett

37. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

38. Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau

39. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

40. L.A. Confidential, James Ellroy

41. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

42. Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

43. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

44. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson

45. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

46. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

47. Collected Stories, Paul Bowles

48. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

49. The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

50. Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

51. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

52. The Story of O, Pauline Réage

53. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

54. Diary of a Drug Fiend, Aleister Crowley

55. Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges

56. Right Ho, Jeeves; The Inimitable Jeeves; and Very Good, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

57. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Saul Bellow

58. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipal

59. If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes

60. The Third Generation, Chester Himes

61. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

62. Vertigo, W.G. Sebald

63. Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald

64. Dune, Frank Herbert

65. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

66. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

67. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

68. Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith

69. Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin


BONUS:

1. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

2. Guide, Dennis Cooper

Revising The Great Gatsby

Now that Wyatt Mason’s blog is no more, although its archives are there to be surfed and enjoyed, hunting round for an alternative led me to The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas' blog,
where I came across Revisioning the Great Gatsby by Susan Bell. The site has the piece in four extracts, and is itself extracted from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

Like Bell, most of us read The Great Gatsby at school or university, but, for most of us, it is the second reading that makes the difference. What intrigues, delights, astonishes and moves us in the novel is often the consequence of re-reading it. Fitzgerald's execution is breath-taking, but its unerring technical grace is allied to deep and direct plumb line into the spirit.

A recent Slate podcast, usually a reliable source of enthusing commentary, sounded several cloth-eared suspicions concerning Fitzgerald’s technical brilliance, as if he wrote the book to be taught, which is a nonsense, of course, but it is very much a novel whose excellence is visibly achieved, and it can stand as a primer on how a novel might be conceived and written.

Bell came back to reading The Great Gatsby after reading Scott Berg’s exemplary biography of the editor, Max Perkins. Perkins discovered and edited not only Fitzgerald, but also Hemingway, James Jones, and Thomas Wolfe.
By the way, does anybody still read Thomas Wolfe. He is certainly less than little-mentioned these days, although he is a major influence on Beat writers like Kerouac, and his titles, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, From Death to Morning, are very evocative and indicate his singing, swinging prose, and there is also the stunning demotic of his short story, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

Perkins tussles with Wolfe were detailed and protracted, and Perkins' relationships with him and other writers are astutely recorded in Berg’s biography. Modern editors are less hands-on, perhaps, but there are echoes of Perkins role in the current debate over Gordon Lish’s involvement in the work of Raymond Carver – see The New Yorker and its related links.

Bell’s essay shows between Fitzgerald and Perkins a more generous, sustaining and insightful nexus between editor and writer. Its title, Revisioning the Great Gatsby is the only ungainly thing about it, as revising and not revisioning was what the pair were involved in doing - not in seeing differently the work at hand, but in seeing it truly:

Perkins diplomatically complained of a common structural flaw: clumping. Fitzgerald had shoved a clump of biographical information into one place. Actors have an expression to describe the mere facts an audience must know to understand the story: they call them the plumbing. “I’m not doing the plumbing,” some will protest, when asked to say a few lines that explain plot or a character’s history but stick out from the action like the proverbial sore thumb. At its best, a book’s pipes are laid into the work so suavely that the reader simply feels them function and never notices their cold, hard nature.
But pipes protruded in the original version of the scene in which Nick visits Gatsby after the fatal car accident. The two men go to the terrace and sit “smoking out into the summer night.” Into this static setting, Gatsby gushes his life story. “Suddenly he was telling me a lot of things,” Nick says. The line is a warning to the reader: be patient, you are about to be hammered with “a lot of” information. Yawn. The historical details of Gatsby’s life are given up in a monotonous drone. He explains his Oxford claim, then recounts his teenage reveries, his subsequent apprenticeship with yachtsman Dan Cody, from which followed his army career, during which he met and fell in love with Daisy Fay, after which he received a letter at Oxford telling him he had lost her to Tom Buchanan. Are you with me?
Fitzgerald edited his way out of this clump once Perkins pointed it out to him. He broke up the thick block of data into smaller pieces he judiciously distributed throughout the text and enmeshed in the dialogue and drama. The improvement can be seen in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom. In the manuscript, this scene carried no reference to Gatsby’s Oxford claim or his army career; in the revised proof, Fitzgerald fully explains and seamlessly weaves the Oxford and army stories into the drama. The final version reads:
Gatsby’s foot beat a short restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.
“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”
“Yes—I went there.”
A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:
“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi [a poseur who’d falsely claimed he’d gone to Yale] went to New Haven.”
Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice, but the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.
“I told you I went there.”
“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”
“It was in nineteen-nineteen. I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”
Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.
“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”
I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.
The editor had helped the writer reconceive the information as dramatic.
GG Fitzgerald obliged his editor with no hint of defensiveness or anger. The writer had gone very far on his own with Gatsby and was ready for the last editorial push—one he freely admitted he was incapable of envisioning alone. He wrote to Perkins, “Max, it amuses me when praise comes in on the ‘structure’ of the book—because it was you who fixed up the structure, not me. And don’t think I’m not grateful for all that sane and helpful advice about it.” In fact, it was Fitzgerald who did the fixing, but the writer needed his editor to point the way and was not embarrassed to say it.
Perkins’s influence was more or less limited to the macro-edit. Unlike his editing of Thomas Wolfe’s work, Perkins didn’t mark up Fitzgerald’s text word for word, didn’t roll up his shirtsleeves, dig in, and reposition the prose. The micro-edits of Gatsby were a solitary endeavor. Fitzgerald was a prose techie who could not merely polish but power up a weak passage, raise the ram of a slow sentence. Take this early one: “The part of his life he told me about began when he was sixteen, when the popular songs of those days began to assume for him a melancholy and romantic beauty.” This sentence may seem all right, but I dare any reader to argue its elegance or gravity. Fitzgerald would delete it altogether. In its place, he wrote:
It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.
Fitzgerald was driven to edit a sentence silly until it punched.
Inclined to clarity when he wrote, Fitzgerald’s first forays onto the page were at times—as for most mortal writers—blurred with ambiguity. As Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:
[A cause] of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not . . . exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea.
Sure enough, Fitzgerald seems unclear of his meaning in an early draft of the crucial scene at the Plaza Hotel. As Nick listens to Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby bicker, he tells the reader:
I was thirty. Beside that realization their importunities were dim and far away. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.
A few paragraphs later, as he rides home with Jordan in a taxi, Nick adds:
I was thirty—a decade of loneliness opened up suddenly before me and what had hovered between us was said at last in the pressure of a hand.
Nick’s thoughts are opaque. A threat looms, but he does not say what it is. Fitzgerald is trying to conjure up the narrator, reveal his deepest concerns, but Nick remains hazy. The writer blankets the insufficiency with three multisyllabic words—realization, importunities, portentous—that sound smart and say little.
Now look at the final version of this same passage, after Fitzgerald dramatically reworked it:
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
That’s all. He deleted the rest of the paragraph to aim at one point. In the next paragraph, Nick is in the taxi as before, but this time Fitzgerald picks up the line he had held back—the undefined threat—and casts it:
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, the thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
Fitzgerald took a couple of wordy, imprecise sentences and transformed them into a limpid exposé of a single idea: the loss of youth. The danger of turning thirty is defined: “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” The theme of aging underscores the character descriptions and is not a coarse intellectual aside: “But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.” The final sentence was a detached commentary on a detached relationship; now it is a commitment to human tenderness, however flawed: “the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.” By changing “a hand” to “her hand,” Fitzgerald created a truer intimacy that offers the poignant conclusion that human affection alone can compensate for the indignities of growing old.
Fitzgerald, Berg writes, “is generally regarded as having been his own best editor, as having had the patience and objectivity to read his words over and over again, eliminating flaws and perfecting his prose.” But The Great Gatsby would be a different book, and very possibly a lesser one, without Perkins’s counsel. Many consider editing as either the correction of punctuation (copyediting) or the overhaul of a book such as Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. The editing of The Great Gatsby sits between these extremes—a testimony to a writer’s discipline to edit himself and his wisdom to let himself be edited by someone worthy: that is how he crossed the gulf.

The Geography of the Imagination

Last week I was shown a series of plans for novels by Arvon students. Discussion of such plans are useful but a plan - or (dread) a synopsis - is only a way of thinking about the novel. It is not the novel itself. A plan is as like the intended novel as a map of France is to France itself - it is like, but not like.

This isn't to dismiss the usefulness of planning. Maps are very useful: we get lost without them, errors in them cause neighbourly disputes, wars even - but to put their usefulness into perspective.

This week, the analogy came back to me while reading a posthumous collection of Michael Donaghy's prose - a benign and only seemingly quirky series of reflections on poetry - I came across his account of work with a number of deaf poets who, introducing their craft, gave him a photocopy of a poem by the American deaf poet, Clayton Valli.

He found himself 'acutely embarrassed by the apparent mediocrity of the work' until he was shown a video of Valli performing the piece.

Donaghy realised that it was:

...a clear example of Frost's dictum 'poetry is what's lost in translation,' for this performance was the poem. the photocopied sheet on my lap was no more a work of literary art than a choreographer's stage direction can be said to constitute a ballet or pediscript a pavane.'

It was so in the same way that a clock is merely a diagram of time, a means of measuring and representing it and yet so different from time as we experience it, or that these ice dance charts:


resemble this:

Donaghy quotes R G Collingwood who called dance 'the mother of language':

We get still farther away from the fundamental facts of speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, where tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored... the written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of byzantine music

Neumes, Donaghy explains, are the little strokes indicating pitch and ornament accompanying the chats in ancient missals that gradually modify into musical notation that we use today.


Donaghy's point, to simplify, is that the poem exists to provoke its real life in the reader's mind - the (successful) poem, on paper, is as like in the reader's head as a a map of France is to France itself.

It is my point, too. The book exists to provoke a world inside the reader's head. And even for the writer this is true. The book as it comes into being is only a shadow - a map - of what it feels like in the writer's head.