James Friel

David Foster Wallace: Reading as a Writer

2011-09-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

Foster Wallace's marginalia is fascinating and characterful - almost as if he turns the book he is reading into one that he might write.
As reported in The New Yorker, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas announced their acquisition of the David Foster Wallace archive. Along with many manuscripts, notebooks and juvenilia

There are also some two hundred books from Wallace’s own library. “Virtually all of the books are annotated, many are heavily annotated,” Schwartzburg said, and noted that Wallace was especially fond of taking notes and compiling vocabulary lists on the inner cover. The collection, heavy on contemporary fiction, contains nearly all of Wallace’s friend Don DeLillo’s novels, including some pre-publication typescripts. Other titles include Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” and “The Tipping Point,” and Jonathan Franzen’s “Strong Motion.” “Unfortunately,” Schwartzburg said, “there does not appear to be a copy of ‘The Corrections.’ ”

There is, however, a paperback copy of Mary Higgins Clark’s pulpy suspense novel “Where are the Children?” “I have no context for it, but it looked like he was doing a rhetorical analysis of how gender relationships were playing out over the course of the novel,” Schwartzburg told me. “He appeared to really engage with her and looked carefully at how she structured her narrative. Clearly, he read very widely.” There’s even a marked-up edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which Wallace circled words like “witenagemot.”

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”

Further Enthusings: Adam Thirlwell on Muriel Spark

2011-09-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

This, from Arete, is the best piece I have read on Muriel - and by Adam Thirlwell. It captures what is tricky and goddessy about Muriel Spark and, amongst other things, is an elegant riposte to those who think 'Show, Don't tell' is a commandment, and not simply a useful strategy for writers who need to animate and dramatise character and action - and it's also an instruction that a great writer can spurn.

Between 1959 and 1961 Muriel Spark published four novels: Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means. These novels are great novels; they develop the technique of the novel as a form. And yet they do not seem like great novels. Instead they seem more delicate, less revolutionary, solid with competence. These novels are clean shaven, irreproachable, undiscussable – like lawn.

She is a great novelist who looks like a quieter novelist. An essay on Muriel Spark must be correspondingly loud.

So this, loudly, is the quiet shift at the centre of Muriel Spark’s writing.
She inverts the norms of the implicit and explicit in fiction. Her novels are reversed out, like negatives. Factual detail is given bluntly, authorially, directly. This means that she seems old-fashioned. Psychological detail – feeling, motivation – is withheld, or occluded, or only partly explained. This means that she seems avant-garde.
But she is neither old-fashioned or avant-garde. She is original.
* * * * *
Following Henry James, it was seen as a mark of skill in the serious novelist that factual information should be presented indirectly. This information should be dramatised, leaking out from the plot, as if the book had been merely overheard, not invented by the author.
The technical name for this – not used by James, but by his disciple, Percy Lubbock – was showing, which was superior to telling.
In an interview with the Listener, 7 February 1974, Kingsley Amis offers a wonderful rebuke to the forced stringencies of this tradition, talking about the cherished influence of W Somerset Maugham: ‘What I did learn – not consciously of course – was that there was really no need for shock tactics, obvious originality, experiments in style. One learns a great deal simply from, for instance, the fact that one of his Far East stories begins: “Jim Grange was a rubber planter.” It’s wonderful to think that one could get away with saying “that’s what he was” instead of saying: “The noon heat beat down on his back” – and you don’t find out what his name is for a page and a half. He did, I think, help to restore one’s confidence in traditional forms of writing.’
Sometimes, Muriel Spark is in this pre-Modernist tradition. Characters are introduced with dense factual sentences, clipped and informative – nutritious as protein shakes: ‘Joanna Childe was a daughter of a country rector. She had a good intelligence and strong obscure emotions. She was training to be a teacher of elocution and, while attending a school of drama, already had pupils of her own.’ Or there are these trim introductions in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: ‘Rose Stanley was famous for sex. Her hat was placed quite unobtrusively on her blonde short hair, but she dented in the crown on either side. Eunice Gardiner, small, neat, and famous for her spritely gymnastics and glamorous swimming, had the brim of her hat turned up at the front and down at the back.’
When Muriel Spark uses an unsubtle method, however, she uses it with subtlety; she thinks it through. There is a latent preciousness to the Jamesian method of indirection. The Jamesian imperative to dramatise all the narrative material – fulfilled only intermittently in the novels themselves – is motivated by an embarrassment at the contrivance of fiction. It is a way of trying to pretend that this is not a novel at all. In this respect, the blunt simplicity of Somerset Maugham is, quite rightly, to be emulated. It is truer to the materials.
Think of Lars von Trier, who, in an interview with Stig Björkman, remembered his days at film school.
‘If something took place in Vienna, 1934, our teacher wanted us to…Under no circumstances begin with a caption which read ‘Vienna, 1934’. We weren’t allowed to. I remember Zanussi paid us a visit. He said, ‘Yes, well’. He didn’t want to. Instead of writing ‘Vienna, 1934’ – he wanted to take a close-up of a fly crawling over some ink – making smudges on a cheque, and on the top of it was ‘Vienna, 1934’. After everything I learnt from various teachers, I was convinced – that in my film at any rate, there’d be a caption with ‘Vienna, 1934’. Why waste people’s time with a fly wandering over a cheque – when you can do it very simply?’
* * * * *
There are, naturally, two chronologies to a novel – the chronology of the events depicted in a story and the chronology of the order in which these events are told. There is no need for the two chronologies to match.
The great master of the possible disjunctions is Proust and his A la recherche. When she won the Observer’s short story competition in 1951, spark bought a complete set of Proust with her prize money. In an interview with Robert Hosmer – to be published in Salmagundi January 2005 – Spark analyses this technique: ‘my sense of construction in the novel was greatly assisted by [Proust’s] examples. In the matter of construction take for instance the chapter of A la recherche where Swann ends by deciding Odette was not, after all, his style. Next page, new chapter: Swann has already been married to Odette for some years.’ The past, in a novel, can occur after its future. It is a game displayed in one of the first ever novels – Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with its throwaway ostentatious gags, jamming the past and the future together – ‘a cow broke in (tomorrow morning).’
In a conventional novel, however, the telling of the story follows the chronology of the story itself. In this way, the reader follows the subjective experience of the main characters, and experiences the denouement at the same moment as the characters. It is a method designed to facilitate suspense.
Thus, although flashback is allowable – since it may be necessary to explain the plot – flash-forward, or prolepsis, is not. It is taken as giving up on suspense.
Muriel Spark, bravely and cleverly, uses prolepsis. She states the character’s futures; she states the ends of her plots. All her plots are, in some way, stories about how things end. They are about last things.
Within paragraphs, she uses prolepsis on a small-scale, a constant prefiguring that shadows the characters – as in The Girls of Slender Means: ‘She opened Jane’s door without knocking and put in her head. “Got any sopayjo?”[soap] It was some months before she was to put her head round Jane’s door and announce, “Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding”.’ Or in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where the characters’ futures interrupt the present, sadly, irrefutably:
‘Mary Macgregor walked with Sandy because Jenny had gone home. Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head, and for her anger, walked behind them with her dark red face, broad nose and dark pigtails falling from her black hat and her legs already shaped like pegs in their black wool stocking…. Behind Miss Brodie, last in the group, little Eunice Gardiner who, twenty-eight years later, said of Miss Brodie, ‘I must visit her grave’, gave a skip between each of her walking steps as if she might even break into pirouettes on the pavement…’
But the technique is broader than this. She gives away not only the character’s ends, but also the plot’s ending. Early in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we know that it is Sandy who has betrayed Miss Brodie, though we do not know why. On page seven of The Girls of Slender Means we know that Nicholas Farringdon – a poet, convert and missionary – has died in Haiti. And on page 60, we know this, the central moment in the novel, that will occur 60 pages later.
‘Meantime, Nicholas touched lightly on the imagination of the girls of slender means and they on his. He had not yet slept on the roof with Selina on the hot summer nights – he gaining access from the American-occupied attic of the hotel next door, and she through the slit window – and he had not yet witnessed that action of savagery so extreme that it forced him involuntarily to make an entirely unaccustomed gesture, the signing of the cross upon himself.’
The crucial thing is this. Prolepsis does not destroy suspense; it creates a new type of suspense. Because knowing the end is not an explanation or a solution. Rather than wondering how the story will end, the reader is forced to wonder how the story could have ended up at its end. And this is a complicated pleasure.
‘I think suspense is often heightened if the author “gives away” the plot from the very beginning,’ Spark told Hosmer. ‘The reader is then all the more anxious to find out how the conclusion came about.’
Compare this with the opening of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude – ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’ – magical, engrossing. But it is the sentence’s start that lingers. The ice is discovered fifteen pages later. It is the firing squad that the reader waits for.
* * * * *
This rendering explicit of what is normally implicit – facts, plots – represents a refusal to lie about the novel as a form. There is a refusal to take up Henry James’s imperative: ‘Dramatise, dramatise!’ There is a refusal to get hung up on showing, rather than telling.
In this, Spark is being very clever and careful about what we mean by mimesis in a novel.
The only thing that can truly be imitated, shown in a novel, is language – and this means dialogue, or billboards. Even thought is not linguistic. Everything else has to be told, described. (‘The famous monologue at the end of Ulysses,’ writes T S Eliot, correctly, in his essay on Charles Whibley, ‘is not the way in which persons of either sex actually think: it is a very skilful attempt by a master of language to give the illusion of mental process by a different medium, that of written words.’)
But there are some things that, perhaps, cannot be described, or not described accurately. These things are feelings. Feelings, for Muriel Spark, can only be shown. The conventional descriptions are only inaccurate.
Her most audacious experiment in showing is The Ballad of Peckham Rye. In this book, there are no expressed feelings or thoughts. This does not mean the characters do not have feelings; it means that they are implied from their actions, from their words.
Compare this with Eliot again, in his essay on Philip Massinger – ‘What the creator of character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility; the dramatist need not understand people; but he must be exceptionally aware of them.’
It is important to see how radical Spark’s reversal of the norms of showing and telling is: external facts which were once shown are now told; internal facts which were once told are now shown.
* * * * *
One of the clever things that Muriel Spark has done has been to vary her influences. There is Somerset Maugham. But there is also Robbe-Grillet, and the tradition of the French nouveau roman, as Spark told Hosmer:
I was very much impressed with Robbe-Grillet, not by the effect of what he did, I wasn’t carried away by his novels, but I was very, very interested in his methods. He got away from the novel of descriptions of people’s feelings: ‘he felt’, ‘he thought’ and ‘he said’. ‘He said’ is a fact, actually an outward fact, but ‘he felt’ and ‘he thought’ are interpolations by the author.
In his collection of essays Pour un nouveau roman, published in 1961, Robbe-Grillet tried to explain what he was up to. He was stripping the novel of baggage it could no longer sustain. In his essay ‘A path for the novel of the future’ – first published in 1956 – he stated the roots of his perceived problem with the contemporary novel: ‘One could easily go back as far as Madame de La Fayette. Sacrosanct psychological analysis constituted, already at this time, the basis of all prose: it was that which governed the conception of the book, the description of the characters, the unfolding of the plot.’ In place of this psychological analysis, Robbe-Grillet offered flatness, literalism: ‘There is now, in effect, a new element, which separates us this time radically from Balzac, as from Gide and Madame de La Fayette: it is the destitution of the old myths of “depth”.’ Robbe-Grillet was no longer sure that we understood the world, that the novelist could presume to understand the psychology of a character. All that was left for the novelist was the description of externals: ‘the optical, descriptive adjective, that which is content to measure, to situate, to limit, to define, probably shows the difficult path to a new art of the novel.’
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It was one part of Muriel Spark’s genius that she could read Robbe-Grillet’s anxious, tendentious novels and essays, and make them her own.
* * * * *
The art of Muriel Spark is an art of concision. It operates on a more reduced scale than most novels. But that is not very helpful. We need to understand what is at stake in this concision.
Take the refusal to give extraneous detail. This is nothing new. There is the dry opening to Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître, written in the 1770s, unimpressed by novelistic scene-setting: ‘How did they meet? By chance, like everyone. What were they called? What does it matter to you? Where did they come from? From the next town. Where were they going? Does anyone know where they’re going?’
And it is there, a 100 years later, in Chekhov, too. Writing to Alexander Kuprin, 1 November 1902, Chekhov says: ‘Your first chapter is taken up with descriptions of people’s appearances – again an old-fashioned device; you could easily do without these descriptions. Describing in detail how five people look overburdens the reader’s span of attention, and ultimately loses all value. Clean-shaven actors resemble one another like Catholic priests, and they’ll go on resembling one another no matter how much effort you put into describing them.’
This concision of extraneous detail is there in another of Muriel Spark’s techniques. She does not observe the normal hierarchies of facts to be depicted in a novel. She does not elaborate where she might be expected to elaborate. Instead, she is constantly interested in sentences which are flatly laid beside each other – even if the information in each sentence is not conventionally of the same order of magnitude. Zeugma is central to her comic method. So, in The Girls of Slender Means, ‘Dorothy could emit, at any hour of the day or night, a waterfall of debutante chatter, which rightly gave the impression that on any occasion between talking, eating and sleeping, she did not think, except in terms of these phrase-ripples of hers: “Filthy lunch.” ‘The most gorgeous wedding.” “He actually raped her, she was amazed.” “Ghastly film.” “I’m desperately well, thanks, how are you?”’
This deadpan lack of explanation or emotion can scare some critics. It has scared Christopher Ricks. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, in 1968, Christopher Ricks made the case against Muriel Spark as cruelly seeking to expose her characters’ frailties: ‘human beings cannot but be opaque…so ought our artistic ideal be, above all, to see through them?’
In her great novel Memento Mori, Spark offers this conversation, in a nursing home – an implicit anticipatory rebuke to critics like Ricks.
‘And yet,’ said Charmian, smiling up at the sky through the window, ‘when I was half-way through writing a novel I always got into a muddle and didn’t know where it was leading me.’ Guy thought: She is going to say – dear Charmian – she is going to say ‘The characters seemed to take on a life of their own.’ ‘The characters,’ said Charmian, ‘seemed to take on a life of their own.’
It is a form of literary sentimentality to believe, as Ricks does, that a character can be opaque to his or her author – though, in one crucial respect, Spark’s characters are opaque. When they behave evilly, they behave out of character. Their psychology, psychology in general, will not help us understand them. But this is not the opacity Ricks means.
The reason for Muriel Spark’s concision is this – character is much less complicated than we like to think. Everyone is so much simpler.
In Memento Mori, there is this send-up of the novel’s pretensions to psychological depth: ‘About your novels,’ he said. ‘The plots are so well laid. For instance in The Seventh Child, although of course one feels that Edna will never marry Gridsworthy, you have this tension between Anthony Garland and Colonel Yeoville, and until of course their relationships to Gabrielle are revealed, there is every likelihood that Edna will marry one or the other. And yet, of course, all along one is aware of a kind of secret life within Edna, especially at that moment when she is alone in the garden at Neuflette, and then comes unexpectedly upon Karl and Gabrielle. And then one feels sure she will marry Gridsworthy after all, merely for his kindness. And really, right up to the last page one does not know Karl’s true feelings. Or rather, one knows them – but does he know them?’
* * * * *
In her novels, Muriel Spark rethinks novelistic psychology.
Normally, novels believe in explanations. So a novel about a bad character will be a novel which attempts to explain why a character acts badly. It will attempt to describe a psychology – a set of motivations. Spark is not impressed by this – because it is easy enough, detecting people’s motivations; they are rarely unusual.
Psychology, for Spark, is not an explanation; it is a way of avoiding an explanation. It is a way of offering an explanation, when the crueller truth is that none is commensurate with the facts.
Compare her to D H Lawrence. In a letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, D H Lawrence tried to explain what he was up to: ‘You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element.’ This description is very close to Spark’s novels. She does not describe egos, she describes the allotropic states a character can go through – the sudden slippages of a seemingly stable character.
She describes the behaviour of a character which is not explained by a character’s psychology. This is one reason why all her books are not just stories about last things. They are stories about evil.
The subject of all Muriel Spark’s novels is Original Sin. And this is not an original subject, not in itself. Spark avoids the danger of dullness simply by the force of her precision, and by her economy. She offers no explanation. She offers no lesson. She simply describes how people behave. Spark’s great achievement is to show how accurate religious descriptions of psychology are – how congruent they are with the facts.
Before Hannah Arendt, Spark knew about the banality of evil. But Spark goes further. Evil is not just banal, evil is opaque too – flat, simply there. ‘I am not sure about the devil as a personification,’ said Spark. ‘But the Devil is a very useful personification of what we really do see in the world. Evil exists. Evil is in the world and we know it because we are born with a knowledge of good and evil.’
Spark is not a doctrinal novelist. She does not assert conclusions; instead she invents provocations.
The Girls of Slender Means is exemplary.
The boarding house – where the girls of slender means live – is burning down. Nicholas Farringdon has helped some girls, including his thin and graceful girlfriend Selina, to escape through the narrow bathroom window. Some girls still remain inside – too large to squeeze through the minuscule window. One of these is Joanna Childe, the rector’s daughter and elocution teacher – a devout and gentle Christian. All the girls are saved, except for Joanna, who is too late climbing the ladder to safety. She dies reciting the psalms. Another girl, Selina, re-enters the boarding house – apparently to rescue someone:
Nicholas then saw, through the door of the wash-room, Selina approaching along the smoky passage. She was carrying something fairly long and limp and evidently light in weight, enfolding it carefully in her arms. He thought it was a body…She climbed up on the lavatory seat and slid through the window, skillfully and quickly pulling her object behind her. Nicholas held up his hand to catch her. When she landed on the roof-top she said, ‘Is it safe out here?’ and at the same time was inspecting the condition of her salvaged item. Poise is perfect balance. It was the Schiaparelli dress. The coat-hanger dangled from the dress like a headless neck and shoulders.
Sixty pages earlier, Spark had noted the effect on Nicholas of an ‘action of savagery so extreme that it forced him involuntarily to make an entirely unaccustomed gesture, the signing of the cross upon himself.’ This action turns out to be Selina’s saving of a Schiaparelli dress. After which, the house collapses.
The Girls of Slender Means presents, bluntly, deftly, the problem of all theodicy. A gentle, moral girl dies, unsavable – while Selina saves a Schiaparelli dress. The good things of the world, the permanent things, are unsavable.
In the novel, there are three reactions to the catastrophe. Nicholas, who is converted, becomes a missionary, and dies in Haiti. Selina goes mad. And there is another chaarcter, Jane, who had introduced Nicholas to the girls of slender means in their boarding house. Jane is simply stoical. The novel ends on VJ day:
Jane mumbled, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have missed it, really.’ She had halted to pin up her straggling hair, and had a hair-pin in her mouth as she said it. Nicholas marvelled at her stamina, recalling her in this image years later in the country of his death – how she stood, sturdy and bare-legged on the dark grass, occupied with her hair – as if this was an image of all the May of Teck establishment in its meek, unselfconscious attitudes of poverty, long ago in 1945.
The novel doesn’t ask which of these three reactions is right. The novel is only concerned with putting the question, the problem. Nowhere is safe. The novel opens on the day of the first armistice in 1945, and it ends on the day of the second armistice, in 1946. Because the war is never over. There is no end to evil.
* * * * *
In Spark there is a connection between the precision of the form, and the insoluble discrepancies in morality that are described so precisely.
We cannot explain ourselves to ourselves.
Spark shows us this by telling us, tells us this by showing us.

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Arthur Rimbaud

2011-09-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

Certain writers have to be read at a certain age, and in Rimbaud's case it feels as if that age might best be the same age as Rimbaud when he wrote his poems. This biographical piece by Daniel Mendelsohn will both introduce the poet to those yet to discover him and remind others why Rimbaud had such an impact on them. His silence, to me, is more fascinating and bewildering than the poems, but I suspect we should attend to both. Here's the opening to Mendelsohn's New Yorker article.

On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, his taciturn employee had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. Until that moment, for all Bardey or anyone else in his circle knew, this man was simply a clever trader who kept neat books. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. His name was Arthur Rimbaud.

What Bardey learned about Rimbaud that day is still what most people know about Rimbaud. There was, on the one hand, the dazzling, remarkably short-lived career: all of Rimbaud’s significant works were most likely composed between 1870, when he was not quite sixteen, and 1874, when he turned twenty. On the other hand, there was the abrupt abandonment of literature in favor of a vagabond life that eventually took him to Aden and then to East Africa, where he remained until just before his death, trading coffee, feathers, and, finally, guns, and making a tidy bundle in the process. The great mystery that continues to haunt and dismay Rimbaud fans is this “act of renunciation,” as Henry Miller put it in his rather loopy 1946 study of Rimbaud, “The Time of the Assassins,” which “one is tempted to compare . . . with the release of the atomic bomb.” The over-the-top comparison might well have pleased Rimbaud, who clearly wanted to vaporize his poetic past. When Alfred Bardey got back to Aden, bursting with his discovery, he found to his dismay that the former wunderkind refused to talk about his work, dismissing it as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting.”

That Rimbaud’s repudiation of poetry was as furious as the outpouring of his talent had once been was typical of a man whose life and work were characterized by violent contradictions. He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his home town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”

These paradoxes, and the extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay that Rimbaud’s story can evoke, are at the center of a powerful mystique that has seduced readers from Marcel Proust to Patti Smith. It had already begun to fascinate people by the time the poet died, in 1891. (He succumbed, at thirty-seven, to a cancer of the leg, after returning to his mama’s farm one last time.) To judge from the steady stream of Rimbaldiana that has appeared over the past decade—which includes, most recently, a new translation of “Illuminations,” by the distinguished American poet John Ashbery, and a substantial novel that wrestles with the great question of why Rimbaud stopped writing—the allure shows no sign of fading.

Tired Old Queen at the Movies

2011-09-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

Irresistible and essential, the Tired Old Queen at the Movies - No 83: a witty, benign enthusiast, fautlessly researched and wicked fun. Watch them all.

Philip Larkin - The Novelist's Poet

2011-09-13T07:41:00.001-07:00

Robert Browning is most often thought of as the Novelist's Poet - Hardy, being successfully both, somehow doesn't qualify - but Martin Amis makes a powerful - even moving - argument for Philip Larkin taking this role:

Particularly in his longer poems, which resemble Victorian narrative paintings, Larkin is a scene-setting phrasemaker of the first echelon. What novelist, reading ‘Show Saturday’, could fail to covet ‘mugfaced middleaged wives/Glaring at jellies’ and ‘husbands on leave from the garden/Watchful as weasels’ and ‘car-tuning curt-haired sons’? In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ the fathers of the brides ‘had never known/Success so huge and wholly farcical’; in ‘To the Sea’, immersed in the ‘miniature gaiety’ of the English littoral, we hear ‘The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles’ and ‘The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse ... ‘

Many poems, many individual stanzas, read like distilled short stories, as if quickened by the pressure of a larger story, a larger life. The funny and terrrifying ‘Mr Bleaney’ (a 28-line poem about the veteran inhabitant of a bedsit) has the amplitude of a novella. And Larkin’s gift for encapsulation is phenomenal. Admire this evocation, in ‘Livings, III’, of the erudite triviality of high-table talk in, as it might be, All Souls, Oxford – and Larkin does it in rhyme:

Which advowson looks the fairest,

What the wood from Snape will fetch,

Names for pudendum mulieris,

Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?

‘Livings, I’ begins: ‘I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed.’ And after a single pentameter the reader is lucidly present in another life.

Larkin began his career as an exceptionally precocious writer of fiction: he had two pale, promising (and actually very constricted) novels behind him, Jill and A Girl in Winter, by the age of 25. Twenty-five, and two novels. The reason he gave for abandoning his third (to be called A New World Symphony) is, in my view, dumbfoundingly alien. Which brings us to the more fugitive and subliminal component of the fascination Larkin excites in all novelists and in all students of human nature. The poems are transparent (they need no mediation), yet they tantalise the reader with glimpses of an impenetrable self: so much yearning, so much debility; an eros that self-thwarts and self-finesses. This is what rivets us: the mystery story of Larkin’s soul.

You can read the rest of the article here

Philip Roth - Nemeses

2011-09-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon the excellent Quarterly Conversations (and it will not be my last visit) via a link to Ben Jeffrey's thoughtful essay on the late - or latest - works from Philip Roth. The Nemeses quartet of books are often met with consternation and dissatisfaction, it seems, but Jeffries take on them, while not overly sympathetic, is both bracing and and embracing.

Here's an extract:

The Nemeses are weak stories, although that isn’t exactly the same as saying they’re badly written. In particular, The Humbling is an intellectual puzzle-box you could spend a lot of time with if you wished—but it’s also not much of a novel. Consider one of the stock critical responses to a bad book by a famous author—that it’s like someone “doing a bad impression.” Axler’s story is infected with the idea of being a bad copy, a zombie-version of what you used to be. It courts the suspicion that The Humbling is itself is a deliberately poor imitation of a Philip Roth book. A great deal of the novel’s art is expended in what could be interpreted as apologies for its failings, with a result that’s an odd mixture of craft and lack of craft. Subtle allusions are cast to players trapped in roles (besides Prospero and Macbeth, there’s James Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and an almost-too-obvious nod to Chekov’s dictum about the gun seen in the First Act having to go off by the Third), and once you start parsing the various motifs of role-play, rehearsal, and façade you begin to appreciate how many interesting lines could be drawn between Axler, his author, and Roth’s back-catalog. Yet in spite of the evident skill in design, The Humbling also has a narrative that is no better than skeletal, featuring characters waved into place and barely filled. Axler’s solution to his crisis is an affair with a 40-year-old ex-lesbian, Pegeen, the daughter of old friends of his. Their relationship is intensely erotic, but Axler realizes long in advance that it will end sooner or later, and that this will destroy him. “Pegeen’s history was unmalleable and Pegeen unattainable and… he was bringing a new misfortune down on his head”. So it transpires. Pegeen cheats on Axler and then abandons him. She is written out to be capricious, inscrutable, an agent of destruction as unmanageable as chance, but also—so we’re told—an insignificant weakling. “She’s not at all beautiful. She’s not that intelligent. And she’s not that grown up,” complains one of Pegeen’s former lovers to Axler. “It’s we who endow her with the power to wreck. Pegeen’s nobody”.
Is The Humbling plausible? In one sense, yes: terribly so. The notion that an ageing man, in failing health and stripped of his self-assurance, would throw himself into an affair with a younger woman—would then desperately cling to it though fully aware that it will rip him apart—is certainly believable. That someone could suffer from senseless bad luck or be made into the plaything of his own desires is nothing if not plausible. But The Humbling defies reason, too. As a character, Pegeen is incoherent. Her sex-life with Axler is (quite literally) beyond belief, featuring effortlessly arranged threesomes and green strap-on dildos. Sub-plots and minor players arise but then come to nothing. The rest of the Nemeses have similar failings. Partly, the trouble is technical. None of the books are long enough to properly identify with. The main characters haven’t got enough in them to be genuinely likeable or dislikeable; they never earn the reader’s total engagement. Even the production—with extremely generous margins and a very low word-to-page ratio—makes the stories feel somehow flimsy, like novellas artificially extended into novels. More seriously, except in expiring flashes, the Nemeses simply lack the magnetism of their predecessors. Everything is thinner, flatter, purged of scenery; lacking a third dimension. Yet this also gives the books their strangely compelling (and appropriate) quality. The Nemeses are largely unconvincing and vigorless stories about how unconvincingly feeble any story seems when set against blind fate. If the telling was too good—as in Roth’s earlier work, say—the very bleak and unengaging point would be more easily missed. In one of The Humbling’s other significant references, we’re told Pegeen is named after a character from Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, a play about how people would rather let themselves be entertained by a story than think about what it means.
Is that to say that these late novels of Roth’s are actually good instead of bad, not beautiful but somehow “serious”? It’s a genuine question, one that cuts straight down to elemental issues about what we really mean when we describe a piece of fiction (by definition, something untrue) as convincing. In Exit Ghost Zuckerman occupies himself writing a stilted erotic play about a young woman he meets in New York. The infatuation is even less reasonable than most, since prostrate surgery has left Zuckerman hopelessly impotent. His play, alongside the passages describing the exploits of Everyman’s “cunthound” hero and the chunks of porn-fiction in The Humbling are where Roth comes the closest to self-parody. (Sample dialogue: “Wait’ll the police see you in just that top and those shorts. They won’t leave either. You’ve got the prettiest cunt and the basest instincts.”) In Christopher Hitchens’s unimproveably blunt phrase, the suspicion begins to nag that Roth might really just be writing these scenes “to give himself something to masturbate about”. The Nemeses make it hard to avoid the thought that a dirty mind ages especially badly. But at the same time, Roth could scarcely fail to be aware of the grotesque impression he is making. The inability to escape desire’s humiliatingly relentless pressure (even as you become less and less able to satisfy it) is one of his tested subjects—most explicitly via David Kepesh in The Dying Animal, another short, late novel, although one that stands up rather better than the Nemeses thanks to Kepesh’s magnetically repulsive voice. “No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex,” he declares. “Every last vanity will come back to mock you.”

The rest of the article can be read here

Alice Munro: Dimension

2011-02-14T09:46:00.000-08:00

Well, I have an idea. Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward. I feel that this is something that people may find they have to adjust to, but it's a way of saying whatever it is that I want to say, and it sort of has to be done this way. Time is something that interests me a whole lot —past and present, and how the past appears as people change.
Alice Munro[1]

One the distinguishing features of Munro’s stories – most particularly of the latter half of her writing career - is the boldness with which she treats time in her fiction. A story may take a moment or series of consecutive moments in time such as ‘Red Dress’ or it might be told from different vantage points in time, such as ‘Axis’ or, more familiarly now, they will take great leaps in time and the progression is not chronological, as in ‘Friend of My Youth’.

A Munro story may begin as a memory and then slip back to an explanatory past and then ahead into a future that has been created out of such a past, but then a memory of something left unsaid or a detail left unnoticed at the time will changes our understanding or just tilts it so that it no longer seems complete.

Consider the story of ‘Dimension’ given straight, given chronologically: young girl meets older man and moves out to the country with him; they have children; the relationship disintegrates; he kills all three children, and is put away as criminally insane; she visits him several times; he tells her he communes with her dead children and, on her next visit, following a road accident in which she helps the crash victim, she decides to discontinue her visits.

This is the story, this list of stark sensational events, but this is not the plot as Munro fashions it, weaving as it does back and forth in time.

The story begins in media res – to be precise, as Doree takes her third trip to the prison, but, in truth, it feels like it begins in ultima res – as if we have come in at the end of the story: the worst has happened and we are waiting to be told what that might have been.

Doree had to take three buses – one to Kincardine, where she waited for one to London, where she waited again for the city bus out to the facility. She started the trip on a Sunday at nine in the morning. Because of the waiting times between buses, it took her until about two in the afternoon to travel the hundred-odd miles. All that sitting, either on buses or in the depots, was not a thing she should have minded. Her daily work was not of the sitting-down kind.

Considering the story’s events, this is quiet and deliberately undramatic – almost dull. It is not a hammering of the organ keys to announce that marital abuse, infanticide and burning grief are ahead – or even behind us. It’s a paragraph only possible – that one might only dare write – once a writer has organised the material in her mind and then on the page: a long slow labour, built out of many decisions, of choices made and then abandoned.

‘Dimension’ is the sum of Munro’s thoughts on the story: we may read it as if she is unfolding it for us as we read, but the carpet we tread has been woven and, indeed, nailed into place in advance. This is a finished piece. It is we who are dreaming it for the first time and not her. Only in hindsight – on a second, less dreamlike reading, would we realise why ‘all that sitting’ is something Doree might ‘mind’ and realise that this enforced stillness is also a terrible space of time that forces her to meditate on what has become of her and her family.

Munro does not rush to tell us the story. The contrary. Doree’s work is a dull and dulling routine, but she likes it:

…it occupied her thoughts to a certain extent and tired her out so that she could sleep at night. She was seldom faced with a really bad mess, though some of the women she worked with could tell stories to make your hair curl.

Its only the first sentence of the third paragraph – a sentence another writer might open with and how Munro opens a paragraph – and, particularly, a new section is worth studying alone – that Munro presses down on the accelerator and even then quite gently:

None of the people she worked with knew what had happened. Or, if they did, they didn’t let on. Her picture had been in the paper—they’d used the photo he took of her with all three kids, the new baby, Dmitri, in her arms, and Barbara Ann and Sasha on either side, looking on. Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft—a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.

And even here – on rereading the piece – we can see how what concerns Munro in this story, signalled by that phrase ‘as he liked it’, is not so much loss, but its seeming opposite, possession.

The next section takes us back one year ago in time and her sessions with her counsellor, Mrs Sands. We learn only that Doree’s husband is in prison, that Doree lives alone, and the children are not there. Only Mrs Sands’ blush at using the word ‘death’ suggests the children’s fate – a fate that is not made clear until the story is halfway told. Such hesitancy is planned: plot is not foregrounded: it is not as important to stress these events as is it is to explore the characters involved in these events.

One of the beats that reverberate in this tale of loss children is how Doree is most often in the company of those who are older than she is. We hear this beat first when we are told that Doree works with women who are older than she is and that even the women on the prison bus seem older than she is, and only look young from a distance.

The next section slips back seven years when Doree is sixteen years. We are at another institution, a hospital, not a prison. Doree’s mother is dying and Lloyd is an ‘orderly’ – a quiet wordplay here: Munro’s prose offers a smooth surface but there are games and tricks at work beneath it. Lloyd is popular and assured. He kisses her in an elevator – a confined place – and tells her she is a flower in the desert – a compliment but also a foretelling that he will cut her off from life, and then, in the space of paragraph, she is pregnant, married, they have moved to the country and a child is born.

Munro then returns us to Mrs Sands – after Doree’s third prison visit and their conversation – and we are circling around a trauma that has occurred but is never mentioning it directly, and we are given Doree’s memory of her visit with Lloyd.

We then fall back, this time to five years ago. A third child is born and the slow slide into abuse suddenly accelerates in seven sentences and as immediately ‘resolved’ in the eighth:

She told him that her milk had dried up, and she’d had to start supplementing. Lloyd squeezed one breast after the other with frantic determination and succeeded in getting a couple of drops of miserable-looking milk out. He called her a liar. They fought. He said that she was a whore like her mother.

All those hippies were whores, he said.

Soon they made up.

In the next section, Munro returns us to the present – although it’s a year from the story’s opening – and her first visit with Mrs Sands. These leaps in time can sometimes, as here, seem like leaps to safety. Munro could have continued with the slow disintegration of the marriage and the horror tale of abuse and finally murder that results, but theses rushes ahead also act like breathing spaces, times to reflect on what is becoming a sensational narrative. Here, Doree and Mrs Sands touch on God, redemption, on Hell – on an afterlife Doree can’t conceive because the thought of her children – what Munro glosses as a ‘familiar impediment’ - is like ‘a hammer hitting her belly.’

But we must return to those familiar impediments and the next section throws us back to the time when the children reach school age and introduces Maggie – yet another adult who befriends Doree, this child mother. Maggie provides a perspective on the story – on Lloyd – as the meetings with Mrs Sands will do – and, through her, Doree begins to realise slowly and with shame:

…that there were things that she were used to that another person might not understand…The truth of things between them, the bond, was not something that anybody else could understand and it was not anybody else’s business. If Doree could watch her own loyalty it would be all right.

In the next four sections Munro foregoes the established rhythm, the counterpointing of Doree’s past and her present condition, the account of her marriage with Doree’s visits to the prison or Mrs Sands, and the story’s central events are bought to the fore.

Look at the opening sentences of these four sections and how they introduce the sections with greater emphases on narrative and the stressing of the dramatic events.

It got worse graduall…y

And in fact it turned out as he had said…

In the morning, Maggie drove her home…

The verdict was that he was insane…

Yet even here, the narrative pace accelerated, Munro circles the violent events, almost withdraws from them even as she records them.

Doree is either driven from the house by Lloyd’s behaviour – it is made to seem like her decision, but we are not told what has triggered this exactly - and she spends the night with Maggie. It is another breathing space akin to those with Mrs Sands and in this lull the horror happens – off stage or off page as it were.

Note the quietness with which Munro delivers this moment – and not once but thrice. A crasser writer would detail it and insist on the horror, but, look, there is no need: it is horror enough, isn’t it?

We get:

Dimitri still in his crib, lying sideways. Barbara Ann on the floor beside her bed, as if she’d got out or been pulled out. Sasha by the kitchen door—he had tried to get away. He was the only one with bruises on his throat. The pillow had done for the others.

“When I phoned last night?” Lloyd said. “When I phoned, it had already happened.

“You brought it all on yourself,” he said.

And then a section break that leap forward to give us Lloyd’s fate:

The verdict was that he was insane, he couldn’t be tried. He was criminally insane—he had to be put in a secure institution.

And an immediate switchback to the moment of horror, not seen by Doree, but by Maggie who, we are told bluntly, finds what she ‘expected to find’.

And then the next paragraph goes to Doree, and the paragraph acts like a special effects shot in a movie: a vivid close up that zooms out, up and away in both time and place.

For some time Doree kept stuffing whatever she could grab into her mouth. After the dirt and grass it was sheets or towels or her own clothing. As if she were trying to stifle not just the howls that rose up but also the scene in her head. She was given a shot of something, regularly, to quiet her down, and this worked. In fact she became very quiet, though not catatonic. She was said to be stabilized. When she got out of the hospital and the social worker brought her to this new place, Mrs. Sands took over, found her somewhere to live, found her a job, established the routine of talking with her once a week. Maggie would have come to see her, but she was the one person Doree could not stand to see. Mrs. Sands said that that feeling was natural—it was the association. She said that Maggie would understand

Munro does not linger on the scene because Doree cannot. Munro circles it, as Doree will do, unable to face it directly, as who, involved in such a trauma, could.

We return to Mrs Sands. It is after the third prison trip. And only now do we get the reason for this last argument – the trigger for the terrible event: a dispute over a dented tin of spaghetti.

Two thirds of the way through, the story’s big event done with – at last in terms of covering it in the narrative – and the story’s progress through time begins to straighten like an arrow, but not quite, not yet.

There is a fourth and a fifth trip to the prison and then a letter from Lloyd.

A letter is a shift in the narrative point of view: we have had Lloyd as Doree has imperfectly seen him, how Maggie guess at his true nature, and how Mrs Sands encourages Doree to think of him, but this is our first direct contact.

His letter is less about loss and more about possession – the theme Munro so quietly in the story’s third paragraph: he writes of other people’s materialism while he, intent on the spirit, articulates what he sees as his new possession, the good he has made out of grief: self knowledge, and he offers this to Doree who has so lacked knowledge of both herself and others, of him most crucially: this child woman dependent on and alone among adults.

What passes as self –revelation in the letter ends as a narrative hook.

Doree, if you have read this far, there is one special thing I want to tell you about but cannot write it down. If you ever think of coming back here then maybe I can tell you.

What do you as a storyteller when your stories climactic events seem to have been delivered? You let your reader know that there is more.

Doree’s sixth visit to the prison has him withholding the story’s next twist – the unexpected ratchet, the turn of the screw we could not have anticipated, but it is delivered in the second letter

I will just say then: I have seen the children.
I have seen them and talked to them.

…I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be that there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions.

…Now I wish that you could be granted this chance as well because if it is a matter of deserving then you are way ahead of me. It may be harder for you to do because you live in the world so much more than I do but at least I can give you this information—the Truth—and in telling you I have seen them hope that it will make your heart lighter.

And Doree’s response:

Doree did think that he was crazy. And in what he had written there seemed to be some trace of the old bragging. She didn’t write back. Days went by. Weeks. She didn’t alter her opinion but she still held on to what he’d written, like a secret. And from time to time, when she was in the middle of spraying a bathroom mirror or tightening a sheet, a feeling came over her. For almost two years she had not taken any notice of the things that generally made people happy, such as nice weather or flowers in bloom or the smell of a bakery. She still did not have that spontaneous sense of happiness, exactly, but she had a reminder of what it was like. It had nothing to do with the weather or flowers. It was the idea of the children in what he had called their Dimension that came sneaking up on her in this way, and for the first time brought a light feeling to her, not pain.

It is in the final section that the arrow of time flies without swerving.

We take it that Doree might now return to her husband – to become his again:

Who but Lloyd would remember the children’s names now, or the color of their eyes? Mrs. Sands, when she had to mention them, did not even call them children, but “your family,” putting them in one clump together.

Going to meet Lloyd in those days, lying to Laurie, she had felt no guilt, only a sense of destiny, submission.

And then she witnesses the accident.Iit is this, in the scale of things, far lesser trauma that Doree witnesses but she does witness it – unlike the murder of the children – and so do we. Munro gives us what Doree sees:

She was sitting on the front seat across from the driver. She had a clear view through the windshield. And that was why she was the only passenger on the bus, the only person other than the driver, to see a pickup truck pull out from a side road without even slowing down, to see it rock across the empty Sunday-morning highway in front of them and plunge into the ditch. And to see something even stranger: the driver of the truck flying through the air in a manner that seemed both swift and slow, absurd and graceful. He landed in the gravel at the edge of the pavement, on the opposite side of the highway...

How did he fly out of the truck and launch himself so elegantly into the air?...

A trickle of pink foam came out from under the boy’s head, near the ear. It did not look like blood at all, but like the stuff you skim off the strawberries when you’re making jam.

Doree crouched down beside him. She laid a hand on his chest. It was still. She bent her ear close. Somebody had ironed his shirt recently—it had that smell.

She is the one who saves the boy – and he is a boy, younger than she is - not the ‘adult bus driver’, not the passer by. She saves him with her knowledge. inculcated in her by Lloyd, about CPR, how the tongue can block the breathing and about not moving the victim so you don’t injure the spinal cord and, the phrase is not given – is not needed – how to give the kiss of life.

The story reaches it conclusion when Doree decides for herself at last her own direction. The bus moves on – to prison, to Lloyd - and she stays where she is. At last, she is moving on.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/interviews/int2001-12-14.htm

DH Lawrence: Odour of Chrysanthemums

2011-01-23T03:57:00.000-08:00

A DH Lawrence story might not survive a writer’s workshop. Many texts don’t, and not always for the right reasons. Paradise Lost might eventually be hacked to the length of a short narrative poem as, for example, its opening lines:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat…

are met with the kindly-meant questions? ‘John, why tell us what your story means before it has even begun? Surely these lines can go? I like ‘fruit’ and ‘tree’, but, otherwise, isn’t all a little too abstract? And is that how you spell “taste”?’[1]

Editing, too often, means hacking. And often hacking is what might be required, but it was not required of Paradise Lost because Milton’s intention was to write in a grand style, to write an epic poem, to use the English language to create a work that equaled in scope what Homer’s Greek did with The Iliad and The Odyssey, what Virgil did with Latin in The Aeneid, what Dante did in Italian with The Divine Comedy.

Understanding what a writer intends should always be at the forefront of your mind when looking at the work of others. Helping the writer to realise that intention is the true work of the editor.

The most controversial editing of recent times centres around the work of Raymond Carver.

At an early stage in his writing life, Carver came under the aegis of Gordon Lish. No one can question that Carver’s influential style – as pervasive in its influence as Hemingway’s, which it only seems to resemble – was the result of Lish’s interventions.

One only needs – and one should – read ‘Beginners’, the original draft of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’[2] with its published version.[3]

It is impossible to read both versions without falling into debate. Which is better? Which is truer? Are all Lish’s edits wise? Does the story become Lish’s? Why did Carver accept them – although he was deeply troubled by them? Is his widow wise to release the original versions?

The story of Carver and Lish has become something akin to the short story world’s version of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: the argument has become a soap opera, the relationship more discussed than the work itself.

What can be said is that Carver’s original is a kinder, more Chekhovian work, intent on sympathy and understanding; Lish’s version takes the heart out of Carver’s draft, but this creates so heartless a prose that it shocks even now as something starkly bold and new. It is not the story as Carver originally intended. It is, however, Carveresque in a way that ‘Beginners’ is not: with ‘Beginners’, Carver wrote a fine story and, in editing it, Lish created a brand.

Imagine DH Lawrence Lished.

Consider the second page of ‘The Odour of Chrysanthemums’, written in 1909, and published in Lawrence’s first collection, A Prussian Officer, so it’s a work that, like Carver’s story comes early in Lawrence’s career. Page 2 is where, I imagine, Lish would have had Lawrence begin the story.

Do we really need all that cumbersome scene-setting?

The edits are in strikethrough and additions to the text underscored/in red.

“John~~!” There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly:~~ “Where are you?”

“Here!” replied a child’s sulky voice from among the bushes.

The woman looked ~~piercingly~~ through the dusk.

~~“Are you at that brook?” she asked sternly.~~

~~For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that rose like whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite still, defiantly.~~

~~“Oh!” said the mother, conciliated. “I thought you were down at that wet brook — and you remember what I told you —”~~

~~The boy did not move or answer.~~

“Come, come on in~~,” she said more gently, “~~it’s getting dark. There’s your grandfather’s engine coming down the line!”

The lad advanced ~~slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was dressed in trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard for the size of the garments. They were~~ his clothes evidently cut down from a man’s clothes.

~~As they went slowly towards the house~~ He tore at the ~~ragged wisps of~~ chrysanthemums and dropped the petals ~~in handfu~~ls along the path.

“Don’t do that — it ~~does~~ looks nasty,” ~~said his mother. He refrained, and she, suddenly pitiful,~~ She broke off a ~~twig with three or four wan~~ flowers and held ~~them~~ it against her face~~. When mother and son reached the yard her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she~~ and then pushed it in her apron-band. ~~The mother and son stood at the foot of the three steps looking across the bay of lines at the passing home of the miners. The trundle of~~

A small train was imminent. Its engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.

The engine-driver~~, a short man with round grey beard~~, leaned out of the cab ~~high above the woman~~.

“Have you got a cup of tea?” ~~he said in a cheery, hearty fashion.~~ It was her father. ~~She went in, saying she would mash. Directly, she returned.~~ “I didn’t come to see you on Sunday.” ~~began the little grey-bearded man.~~

“I didn’t expect you,” said his daughter.

~~The engine-driver winced; then, reassuming his cheery, airy manner, he said:~~

“Oh, have you heard then? Well, and what do you think —?”

“I think it is soon enough.” ~~she replied.~~

~~At her brief censure the little man made an impatient gesture, and said coaxingly, yet with dangerous coldness:~~

“~~Well, what’s a man to do? It’s no sort of life for a man of my years, to sit at my own hearth like a stranger. And~~ If I’m going to marry again it may as well be soon as late — what does it matter to anybody?”

The woman ~~did not reply, but~~ turned and went into the house,~~. The man in the engine-cab stood assertive, till she~~ returneding with a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter on a plate. ~~She went up the steps and stood near the footplate of the hissing engine.~~

What’s gained by this bareness?

The pace increases. The spareness of the writing, the deliberate paucity of detail, explanation, qualification, and the blank setting make the characters more alienated from each other, their exchanges more hostile and the tone more heartless.

What’s lost?

The dusk in which the boy hides, the darkness the woman looks piercingly through – and, remember, the story ends in a meditation on death and how it divides us, with a woman attempting to pierce an even greater darkness. The raspberry canes like ‘whips’ that are of a piece with the first paragraph’s depiction of a world that is essentially cruel. The boy’s hostility and distance from the mother – the ripping of the flowers, the throwing away of the petals so that the mother’s holding of the flowers to her face is both a riposte that shows her essential gentleness and love of beauty as the boy apes the manners of the men in this world. Even excising the position of her father, high in his cab or ‘standing assertive’ while the woman looks up, we lose another detail that evoke this world where women fetch and carry. The details are no longer there to catch in the reader’s mind; meanings are made blunter, less resonant or are just lost.

If you think this is just an exercise, then – for less severe but still telling revisions – study the University of Nottingham site: Odour of Chrysanthemums: A Text in Process, where one can compare Lawrence’s original version with the corrected proofs from The English Review, the magazine that first published the story in 1910[4] and the story as it appeared when published in A Prussian Officer in 1914. You can click on each page and compare what has been excised, amended and rewritten at each stage, (highlighted in yellow, blue and red). The cuts are far less severe than those incurred by Lish in Carver’s original story, but they still intrigue:

For example, in Lawrence’s original, we have:

"Here!" replied a child's sulky voice from among the bushes that crowded darkly on the bank of the brook. The woman looked piercingly through the dusk.

The highlighted phrase is excised for the magazine version of the story and for its published version too. The edits to the story in the magazine version were imposed on Lawrence –– but the version we read today is the one that appears in 1914, the one in The Prussian Officer.

Lawrence sent the original manuscript of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ to the English Review on 9 December 1909; it seems likely that the magazine’s editor Ford Madox Hueffer, who first suggested that Lawrence should write a story drawing upon the working-class colliery life that he knew so well.

Lawrence corrected the proofs in March, and he was asked to reduce the length of the story by five pages. In March 1911, Austin Harrison - now the magazine’s editor - asked for more changes. Lawrence heavily revised the old page proofs, but this time added eight manuscript pages to contain his new corrections (see Corrected proofs); his fiancée, Louie Burrows, wrote out a fair copy, which was sent to the English Review and the story was published in June 1911 (see English Review (1911)).

In July 1914, for the volume publication, Lawrence inserted additional material into the text and rewrote the ending yet again; in October, he corrected the proofs heavily. The story in its final form appeared in The Prussian Officer in November 1914 (see The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914)).

None of the edits caused him the heartache that Lish’s edits were said to cause Carver’s, but, as was Lawrence’s situation, Lish had insisted that the story would not be published without the cuts and so Carver said yes, no matter how deep, complicated and lingering his regret.

Lawrence’s editors were people like Ford Maddox Heuffer, Colin Duckworth and Edward Garnett - it is through his wife, Constance Garnett, and her translations that most of us know Chekhov – but Carver was also fortunate in that Iowa his tutors were John Cheever and John Gardner.

In John Cheever, Carver met a fellow-drinker and short story writer and, although different in class and kind as men and writers, it is curious how, after death, their names are often mentioned in conjunction [5]. But it is John Gardner who is most relevant to this discussion. Less well-known now as a novelist, through his books, The Art of Fiction and Becoming a Novelist and others, he has become a major influence on the way Creative Writing is taught in universities. The two books are testy, sometimes, dense, often dogmatic, but genuinely helpful books on the craft of writing, and in the first, he writes of an exercise that returns us to ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, and that page I completely Lished.

John Gardner in The Art of Fiction describes an exercise in which students are asked to describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not, he insists, mention the son or the war or death.

If worked or hard enough, a wonderful image will be evoked, a real barn would stand before us but one filled with mysterious meaning.

Another variant has a woman who has just given birth looking out of a window at a tree. Her child may be well and hale, sickly or stillborn, but we will only know from the way the writer describes the tree[6].

Written long before Gardner suggested the exercise, the first page of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ – in fact, every page Lawrence ever wrote – exemplifies the practice. It is soaked in the author’s intention, every word choice, verb or noun, adjective or adverb, and the syntax itself. If Lish made Carver monochrome, taciturn and skeletal, Lawrence is purple, full-throated and generously made, but he is just as purposeful in his writing.

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston — with seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.

The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour.

Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage, three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook course. There were some twiggy apple trees, winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung disheveled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect, having brushed some bits from her white apron.

That first sentence, before any character is introduced – before any character can be introduced – gives us the locomotive engine clanking, stumbling, and loaded full of coal. Whatever human struggles the story will tell, the setting is given first because setting determines what happens here: the price of those full wagons is paid by the lives of the people who live and work in this environment, necessary, discordant, rapacious.

Its loud threats of speed startle the colt and the woman must draw back into the hedge at its advent as it thumps heavily past, slow and inevitable, while she crouches, insignificant and trapped.

Here the oak leaves are withered and birds make off into the dusk: a deadly land where the smoke sinks and – such an animate verb - cleaves to the grass.

The pit looms up, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides. The wheels spinning against a sky stagnant with light, the chimneys, the head-stocks, the winding engine in spasms as it pulls the miners – appropriately the last sentence of this darkly majestic paragraph – out of the bowels of the earth (where at the end one of them will be returned) to pass like shadows diverging home in the next. [7]

The editor of The English Review, Ford Maddox Heuffer who accepted the story in its entirety – the edits made were done by another, less impressed editor and total some five pages - said of this story:

…this man knows. He knows how to open a story with a sentence of the right cadence for holding the attention. He knows how to construct a paragraph. He knows the life he is writing about in a landscape just sufficiently contrasted with a casual word here and there. You can trust him for the rest. [8]

A contemporary editor might quarrel with so heavily adjectival a piece of writing. A workshop might quarrel with ‘still flickered indistinctly’ – how distinct is a flicker – and a workshop might question ‘thumped heavily’ – aren’t thumps generally taken to be heavy unless distinguished as light? Individually, one might argue each choice – and if you were its writer, you should, and we should witness only the results of that quarrel – but the general effect is to create a world imbued by thought, by spirit, a world in which this story can happen fully and resonantly.

It is full-blooded writing because the approach is full-blooded. This is fine writing, and never before had such attention been lavished on subjects like this. Lawrence is writing here of characters, of a class, a region that went either under-represented or unrepresented both in his time and before it – certainly not represented in this fulsome manner.

His aim is not political – except that might be one of its effects[9] – but moral, psychological, even spiritual. The language he develops gives these characters the dignity, the depth, the importance of aristocrats. The world they inhabit, the world that crushes them to death or into ignominious living and thwarted relationships, is evoked in full seriousness.

I have the impression with Lawrence – and with other writers not otherwise or immediately comparable such John Keats, Colette or Whitman – that, when he was at his desk, he just sat more deeply in his chair, that he more deeply inhabited his body as he wrote. Whatever the thread he span his webs from, it came from deeper within than most other writers. There isn’t a page of Lawrence, from his novels, his short stories, his poems, his essays, his plays, his letters – that feels like writing that isn’t aimed at reaching a deeper level of understanding or a more sustained apprehension of the physical world and how it works on us and how we exist within it, no matter that, at times, he is maverick, wrong-headed or perverse - although the wonder is how often he is none of these things, as here in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums.’ So much of what he is was doing – and he did so much in a life that was a restless pilgrimage complicated by poverty, sickness and controversy – he was doing for the first time, doing it alone, and against the will of the world.

I have concentrated on the opening pages of this story, but a study of the final pages is yields riches, its meanings multiple and eloquently made[10]. The uncorrected proofs show a more contracted ending that comes to be amplified in the magazine version and re-addressed significantly for the book version. The original version of the story is rich with a mothers contempt of her spendthrift alcoholic husband; Lawrence described it as “full of my childhood’s atmosphere”’[11]; and his novel, Sons and Lovers, is the best expression of this, but in the final version of this story, the one we read, there is a fuller understanding of both husband and wife, and the world made both of them.

[1] This not being a patch on Billy Collins’ ‘Workshop’: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=176048

[2] http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/24/071224fi_fiction_carver?printable=true

[3] http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/24/071224on_onlineonly_carver?printable=true

[4] He was paid £10: see, p93, DH Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, John Worthen, Penguin, 2006

[5] For example, David Means, a peerless short story writer from this generation, who discusses both writers before reading a Carver story. ‘Chef’s House’, for this New Yorker podcast: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/10/18/101018on_audio_means

[6] This is only tangentially related but it allows me to mention a favourite poem: ‘The Transparent Man’ by Anthony Hecht: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-transparent-man/

[7] The uncorrected proof of the story does not have so swift a transition between the miners rising up from the earth to pass like shadows diverging home but a more detailed description of their manner and appearance, albeit in the same register as the rest of the paragraph.

[8] p67 , Worthen. Ford Maddox Heuffer, later and now better known as Ford Maddox Ford, knew something about how to write a paragraph, too, and ‘how to open a story with a sentence of the right cadence for holding the attention: Here is the opening of his peerless and perfect novel, The Good Soldier ‘:

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

[9] Ford was particularly welcoming of a writer from Lawrence’s background and the editing of the magazine version - made by anther editor - emphasises the social commentary more than the original and the final published version: Lawrence was not keen on being so pigeonholed.

[10] The Nottingham site has four related essays on the manuscripts of the story that address all the key changes and shifts in emphases http://odour.nottingham.ac.uk/critical.asp

[11]quoted p11 Worthen

Flaubert's 'A Simple Heart' and Chekhov's 'The Darling'

2011-01-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

Tolstoy recognised Chekhov’s particular genius with a modesty and insight that does not always characterise his literary judgements: for example, Shakespeare he considered ‘ordinary’ and Maupassant, at his worst, was no more ‘moral filth’ but:

…as an artist Chekhov cannot even be compared with the old Russian writers— Turgenev, Dostoevsky, or myself. Chekhov has his own manner, like the Impressionists. You see a man daubing on whatever paint happens to be near at hand, apparently without selection, and it seems as though these paints bear no relation to one another. But if you step back a certain distance and look again, you will get a complete, over-all impression. Before you there is a vivid, unchallengeable picture of nature.[1]

Tolstoy characterises Chekhov as a writer who saw differently from his peers, his work only appearing to be a series of glances, but, in truth, the product of a sustained and original gaze.

Chekhov's ‘The Darling’ was a particular favourite among Chekhov’s stories and Maxim Gorky recalls Tolstoy speaking of it with rapture to a group of listeners, one of whom was Chekhov:

‘It is like lace,’ he said, ‘made by a chaste young girl. There were such lace makers in olden times who used to depict all their lives, all their dreams of happiness in the pattern. They dreamed in designs of all that was dear to them, wove all their pure, uncertain love into their lace.’[2]

It is a tender evocation of a story that is not, in itself, wholly tender. Tolstoy even wrote an essay[3] on ‘The Darling’ in which he claimed that Chekhov may have written the story with the intention of satirising Olenka and all such women who unthinkingly devote their lives to men, but, Tolstoy asserted, Chekhov achieved, instead, a story that was a riposte to all who proposed women should be the equal or independent of men:

(Chekhov) intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless. And he did bless, and unconsciously clothed this sweet creature in such an exquisite radiance that she will always remain a type of what a woman can be in order to be happy herself, and to make the happiness of those with whom destiny throws her.

This, he claimed, was the effect of the story and, proving that ‘what makes the story so excellent is that the effect is unintentional’ Tolstoy recalled how.

I learnt to ride a bicycle in a hall large enough to drill a division of soldiers. At the other end of the hall a lady was learning. I thought I must be careful to avoid getting into her way, and began looking at her. And as I looked at her I began unconsciously getting nearer and nearer to her, and in spite of the fact that, noticing the danger, she hastened to retreat, I rode down upon her and knocked her down -- that is, I did the very opposite of what I wanted to do, simply because I concentrated my attention upon her. The same thing has happened to Chekhov, but in an inverse sense: he wanted to knock the Darling down, and, concentrating upon her the close attention of the poet, he raised her up.[4]

Tolstoy is misguided in believing that, despite himself, Chekhov wrote a hymn to the submissive woman, but right in considering that creating her was an act of attention by Chekhov, a sustained and rigorous gaze, but it strives neither to be judgmental nor definitive. Tolstoy, most especially in his latter days, felt art should have a moral thrust. Its business was to answer the question of how one should live, and the art he admired was an art that shared and expressed his own moral certainty.[5] For Chekhov, famously, there were no answers: one’s efforts went into framing the question, and not supplying the answer. In Tolstoy’s later work the moralist intrudes, but never in Chekhov’s. Chekhov, in this regard, is like Flaubert, who declared:

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Maupassant, for Chekhov, was an inspiration – the first modern writer, one who seemed to Maupassant without a moral agenda, a writer intent on looking and not judging. Maupassant, too, equated good writing with skilled observation.

There is an unexpected side to everything; the smallest thing has something unknown in it; we must find it.[6]

Maupassant took lessons in looking, and he took them from Flaubert. Maupassant was well placed enough in his associations as a younger writer to come under the tutelage of Louis Bouilhet and Gustave Flaubert. Bouilhet was a poet and head librarian in Rouen and Flaubert had been a close friend of Maupassant’s late uncle. The two men put the youthful Maupassant through what was something of a Creative Writing course.

For seven years, the young Maupassant did not attempt to publish his work but sent everything he wrote to Flaubert, and, the following Sunday over lunch, Flaubert

…little by little, hammered into me two or three precepts that summed up his long and patient teachings. One of these precepts was to be original: 'If you have any originality, you must first dig it out. If you don’t have any, you must get some.[7]

Originality, for Flaubert, was a question of attention. He regularly set Maupassant the task of describing something ordinary and familiar – ‘a blazing fire or a tree in a plain' – but, to describe it successfully, Maupassant had to search for the ‘unexplored’ element in it because, Flaubert believed,

we are accustomed to seeing things only through the memory of what others have said about them.

Next, Maupassant recalled:

…he forced me to describe, in a few phrases, a creature or an object so that it was clearly distinguishable from all other creatures or objects of the same race or species.

The creature or object might be a grocer on his doorstep, a concierge smoking his pipe, or a cab-horse in a row of cabs. The challenge was, ‘with a single word,’ to show how that particular grocer, concierge, or cab-horse resembled no other.[8] This was the search for le mot juste: the exact word, the precise word – verb, noun, adjective – that would recreate the creature or object for the reader:

One should never be content with approximation; one should never try to avoid the difficulty by resorting to subterfuge - even if it fools the reader—or to linguistic trickery.[9]

This is how Maupassant described his writing course in ‘The Novel’, one of the few texts in which he discussed his own techniques, but it has been suggested that some of the other lessons he was given can be deduced from Flaubert’s introduction to Bouilhet’s Dernières Chansons (1872). Here, Flaubert declared, art should neither:

…teach, correct, nor moralise…dénouements are not conclusions; no general inferences can be drawn from a particular case…Prose, like verse, must be written so that it can be read out loud. Poorly written sentences never pass the test: they tighten the chest and impede the beating of the heart…style goes straight to the point and leaves no impression of the author himself: the word disappears in the clarity of the thought, or rather, by sticking so closely to the thought, leaves it entirely unhampered.[10]

In Flaubert’s work, in Maupassant’s and in Chekhov’s, we witness the result of such principles in the clarity and specificity of the prose, the seamless and fluent style, and the complicated symbolism of the Felicité’s parrot – is Flaubert mocking piety or celebrating it as a human need? If Olenka is a fool, where do we find Chekhov saying this outright – if at all?

The tutoring came to an end when Maupassant wrote his first great short story, ‘Boule de Suif.’[11] Flaubert edited the story, considered the completed tale ‘a masterpiece’ and died three weeks later. Maupassant helped prepare his body for burial,

…bathing it in eau de Cologne, dressing it in silk underwear and a suit, complete with waistcoat, cravat and skin gloves, and brushing the famous moustache.[12]

In this description of preparing the body, it is the number of details - the careful accounting of them – the attention to detail - the 'silk' underwear, the 'skin gloves' and, especially, the brushing of the ‘famous moustache’ that evoke Flaubert's lingering presence, Maupassant's tenderness and the debt to be honoured. These are the details that make a funereal moment blush into life.

Maupassant learned his lessons well.[13]

Three years before this – and while those lessons were in progress – Flaubert wrote Three Tales, of which ‘A Simple Heart’ is the first. ‘A Simple Heart’ exemplifies the writerly craft he so effectively instilled in Maupassant.

There is much to say about Three Tales and the sense in which the small book is the culmination of all his pre-occupations as a writer, but the focus here is ‘A Simple Heart’ and its relation to Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’.

Both are accounts of women. Both deny themselves complicated plots. Both, in short forms, take the long view of a life, and both concern themselves with love, love both with and without an object.

‘A Simple Heart’ opens with a cameo of Felicité and the context in which she exists. From the start there is a wonderful and noticeable specificity:

For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, washed, ironed, mended, harnessed the horse, fattened the poultry, made the butter and remained faithful to her mistress--although the latter was by no means an agreeable person…Summer and winter she wore a dimity kerchief fastened in the back with a pin, a cap which concealed her hair, a red skirt, grey stockings, and an apron with a bib like those worn by hospital nurses. Her face was thin and her voice shrill. When she was twenty-five, she looked forty. After she had passed fifty, nobody could tell her age; erect and silent always, she resembled a wooden figure working automatically.[14]

It is a detailed summary of the character, but it seems to end with a dismissal: is this our heroine? What will animate this wooden figure?

Abused and unregarded since birth, Felicité is presented as a victim, one with a tendency, that later becomes a habit, for reverence: this, in itself, might be the definition of a martyr, but Felicité is no simple victim. After being abandoned by Theodore, her first love, she is in great distress but quickly recovers her equanimity

The poor girl's sorrow was frightful. She threw herself on the ground, she cried and called on the Lord, and wandered around desolately until sunrise. Then she went back to the farm, declared her intention of leaving, and at the end of the month, after she had received her wages, she packed all her belongings in a handkerchief and started for Pont-l'Eveque.

This is the first of several instances when she shows a vigour and resourcefulness that surprises others, but of which she seems unaware such as the episode when she fends off the bull, or the incredible long walk overnight taken to see her nephew leave port, or the way she chases and catches up with the carriage taking Mme Aubain to the dying Virginie.

In both the protagonists of ‘The Darling’ and ‘A Simple Heart’, there is a lack of awareness, a lack of self-image. In ‘The Darling’, when Olenka is left bereft by two dead husbands and an unreliable lover, she vanishes even to herself. Olenka is made human, is made purposeful, by her love. She is nothing unless he loves. In love, she parrots her lover’s words. Felicité, too, is nothing to herself. She, too, is a parrot:

And Felicité worshipped devoutly, while enjoying the coolness and the stillness of the church. As for the dogma, she could not understand it and did not even try. The priest discoursed, the children recited, and she went to sleep, only to awaken with a start when they were leaving the church and their wooden shoes clattered on the stone pavement. In this way, she learned her catechism, her religious education having been neglected in her youth; and thenceforth she imitated all Virginia's religious practices, fasted when she did, and went to confession with her. At the Corpus-Christi Day they both decorated an
altar…

When Virginia's turn came, Felicité leaned forward to watch her, and through that imagination which springs from true affection, she at once became the child, whose face and dress became hers, whose heart beat in her bosom, and when Virginia opened her mouth and closed her lids, she did likewise and came very near fainting.

The following day, she presented herself early at the church so as to receive communion from the cure. She took it with the proper feeling, but did not experience the same delight as on the previous day.

There is always the temptation to go inward when investigating character, to ignore the externals of a life and dig up the secret within. In both texts, the inner lives of the characters are narrow. There is, seemingly, little booty to be had. Not every character is a Hamlet or a Mrs Dalloway. They seem to offer less, but it is a matter of looking and not of judging.

Flaubert’s story covers the long arc of Felicité’s outwardly undramatic and unremarkable life and one of the signs of Flaubert’s immense skill as a fiction writer is the way in which he conveys the passing of time. He does not plod in his account of the passing years or appear to skip from incident to incident.

His ability to create a scene is evident – Virginie’s first communion, the horses in the sky, the procession that coincides with Felicité’s death are just a few examples of when the writer lingers and carefully showcases a significant moment, event or exchange, but the technique most vital to Flaubert’s handling of time is the rendering of a habitual action as if it, too, were a dramatic scene.

Take the ‘Horses in the Sky’ passage in ‘A Simple Heart’

When she reached the Calvary, instead of turning to the right, she turned to the left and lost herself in coal-yards; she had to retrace her steps; some people she spoke to advised her to hasten. She walked helplessly around the harbour filled with vessels, and knocked against hawsers. Presently the ground sloped abruptly, lights flittered to and fro, and she thought all at once that she had gone mad when she saw some horses in the sky.

Others, on the edge of the dock, neighed at the sight of the ocean. A derrick pulled them up in the air and dumped them into a boat, where passengers were bustling about among barrels of cider, baskets of cheese and bags of meal; chickens cackled, the captain swore and a cabin boy rested on the railing, apparently indifferent to his surroundings. Felicité, who did not recognise him, kept shouting: "Victor!" He suddenly raised his eyes, but while she was preparing to rush up to him, they withdrew the gangplank.

The packet, towed by singing women, glided out of the harbour. Her hull squeaked and the heavy waves beat up against her sides. The sail had turned and nobody was visible; —and on the ocean, silvered by the light of the moon, the vessel formed a black spot that grew dimmer and dimmer, and finally disappeared.

This is a scene. It is rendered with the simplicity and visual clarity one might expect of a film script: one could, with only slightest changes, turn it into one, and, remember, a film can only be made of scenes, not summary:

1.EXT. OUTSKIRTS OF HONFLEUR. NIGHT.

Long shot: FELICITÉ reaches the Calvary outside the town, looks right and left, turns right.

2. EXT. STREET IN HONFLEUR. NIGHT.

Mid shot: FELICITÉ stands in the empty street, looks left and right, turns left.

3.EXT. STREET. NIGHT.

Mid shot: FELICITÉ stands in another empty street, looks left and right, and then walks on.

4. EXT. COALYARDS. NIGHT.

Long shot: FELICITÉ surrounded by the black slack heaps of the coal yard, dwarfed by them.

5. EXT. THE HARBOUR. NIGHT.

Long shot: moonlit, a harbour filled with vessels.

6. EXT. HARBOUR. NIGHT.

Close up: a boat knock against hawsers.

Pull back to midshot and Felicité’s feet as she walks past and we follow her as the path slopes abruptly and then, from behind her, we pan round to see the harbour, its lights flittering to and fro. Close up of FELICITÉ, searching the skyline. Offscreen, the sudden scream and braying of several horses. FELICITÉ, terrified, looks up. Silhouetted against the moon, several horses suspended against the sky, manes flaring, legs galloping on air, the screams increased etc…

This is a scene that Flaubert presents in detail. We are ‘in the moment’, so to speak. A scene is where the writer attends to the actual moment, dramatises it.

Summary is an account of more than one moment – or when the moment described is given only cursory attention. Summary is where in your stories patient tutors scrawl in angry capital letters: Show, don’t tell.

Summary (or telling) accelerates a narrative – events are being compressed. Summary, by its very nature, condenses time. One can summarise a novel in a sentence or even a title – War and Peace? But with this speed comes distance and detachment. It is much harder to make summary as vivid or immediate to a reader.

Making a scene or dramatising an event (showing) decelerates a narrative. The narrative slows down for dialogue, for the description of a room or a gesture. Detail gives weight, and suggests to the reader that this moment or this exchange is significant.

Too much scene-making, however, and the pace can be meandering or static. The story eventually stalls. This is why most fiction shifts between these two modes.

In Flaubert and Chekhov, however, telling is a showing; they render summary as if it were a scene, as here, from ‘The Darling.’

Now she was completely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his armchair lay in the attic covered with dust and minus one leg. She got thin and homely, and the people who met her on the street no longer looked at her as they had used to, nor smiled at her. Evidently her best years were over, past and gone, and a new, dubious life was to begin which it were better not to think about.

In the evening Olenka sat on the steps and heard the music playing and the rockets bursting in the Tivoli; but it no longer aroused any response in her. She looked listlessly into the yard, thought of nothing, wanted nothing, and when night came on, she went to bed and dreamed of nothing but the empty yard. She ate and drank as though by compulsion.

…Gradually the town grew up all around. The Gypsy Road had become a street, and where the Tivoli and the lumber-yard had been, there were now houses and a row of side streets. How quickly time flies! Olenka's house turned gloomy, the roof rusty, the shed slanting. Dock and thistles overgrew the yard. Olenka herself had aged and grown homely. In the summer she sat on the steps, and her soul was empty and dreary and bitter. When she caught the breath of spring, or when the wind wafted the chime of the cathedral bells, a sudden flood of memories would pour over her, her heart would expand with a tender warmth, and the tears would stream down her cheeks. But that lasted only a moment. Then would come emptiness again, and the feeling, What is the use of living? The black kitten Bryska rubbed up against her and purred softly, but the little creature's caresses left Olenka untouched. That was not what she needed. What she needed was a love that would absorb her whole being, her reason, her whole soul, that would give her ideas, an object in life, that would warm her aging blood. And she shook the black kitten off her skirt angrily, saying:

‘Go away! What are you doing here?’

And so day after day, year after year not a single joy, not a single opinion.[15]

Notice how seamlessly that summary of actions and events – the passage of time - melted into the scene with the cat: a moment in that passage of time. Flaubert covers the months and years in the same way – with the specificity of detail a writer often only gives a scene:

Each morning, out of habit, Felicité entered Virginia's room and gazed at the walls. She missed combing her hair, lacing her shoes, tucking her in her bed, and the bright face and little hand when they used to go out for a walk. In order to occupy herself she tried to make lace. But her clumsy fingers broke the threads; she had no heart for anything, lost her sleep and ‘wasted away,’ as she put it.

In order to have some distraction, she asked leave to receive the visits of her nephew Victor.

He would come on Sunday, after church, with ruddy cheeks and bared chest, bringing with him the scent of the country. She would set the table and they would sit down opposite each other, and eat their dinner; she ate as little as possible, herself, to avoid any extra expense, but would stuff him so with food that he would finally go to sleep. At the first stroke of vespers, she would wake him up, brush his trousers, tie his cravat and walk to church with him, leaning on his arm with maternal pride.

His parents always told him to get something out of her, either a package of brown sugar, or soap, or brandy, and sometimes even money. He brought her his clothes to mend, and she accepted the task gladly, because it meant another visit from him.

We have a habit of thinking the short story is about a moment, intensely observed, a moment of change, of the chance for change or revelation. Here are two stories that take account of years with characters that decay with time but do not, in essence, change although one is granted what seems, to her at least a revelation.

But whether a story covers an hour or a century, a short story writer always handling time and Chekhov and Flaubert more vividly exemplify this.

The passage of time is there in the way Flaubert and Chekhov depicts its effects. In her youth, the sight of Olenka’s plumply naked shoulder reduces her first husband to a sigh. By the story’s end, she is old and stout, embarrassingly chasing the callow youth she has elected to love, a youth who even in his dreams shouts at her and fends her off. And there is a falling off in the quality of objects of her love: the theatre owner and then the timber merchant who marry her, the Vet who does not, the vet’s son who repulses her as he grows older, curses her in his dreams.

Time in both stories is a record of decline.

The sturdy Felicité who can outpace a horse and carriage in her prime and outface an angry bull grows deaf, lame and blind. Her mistress loses her daughter, her money, and her status. Even the minor characters that thread the story are marked by time, such as Bourais

Monsieur Bourais, a retired lawyer. His bald head and white cravat, the ruffling of his shirt, his flowing brown coat, the special way he bent his elbows when taking snuff, his whole person, in fact, produced in her the kind of awe one feels in the presence of a great man

A counsellor to Mme Aubain, a respected authority, there comes a point in the story when he seems suddenly to slip from his prestigious position when Loulou enters the story

Bourais' face must have appeared very funny to Loulou. As soon as he saw him he would begin to roar. His voice re-echoed in the yard, and the neighbours would come to the windows and begin to laugh, too; and in order that the parrot might not see him, Monsieur Bourais edged along the wall, pushed his hat over his eyes to hide his profile, and entered by the garden door, and the looks he gave the bird lacked affection.

The slip in respectability is not sudden. It has simply been unnoticed, unattended, by the characters, except the parrot.[16] The parrot sees before anyone else – because the parrot truly sees him, having no investment in Bourais, no agenda: in this Loulou is an artist – that Bourais is sham. Towards the story’s close, they and we learn:

…of Monsieur Bourais' death in an inn. There were rumours of suicide, which were confirmed; doubts concerning his integrity arose. Madame Aubain looked over her accounts and soon discovered his numerous embezzlements; sales of wood which had been concealed from her, false receipts, etc. Furthermore, he had an illegitimate child, and entertained a friendship for ‘a person in Dozule.’

In Flaubert, the body withers, reputations crumble, and so do objects

Virginie's frocks were hung under a shelf where there were three dolls, some hoops, a doll-house, and a basin which she had made. Felicité and Madame Aubain also took out the skirts, the handkerchiefs, and the stockings and spread them on the beds, before putting them away again. The sun fell on the piteous things, disclosing their spots and the creases formed by the motions of the body. The atmosphere was warm and blue, and a blackbird trilled in the garden; everything seemed to live in happiness. They found a little hat of soft brown plush, but it was entirely moth-eaten. Felicité asked for it. Their eyes met and filled with tears; at last the mistress opened her arms and the servant threw herself against her breast and they hugged each other and giving vent to their grief in a kiss that equalised them for a moment.

Think, too, of Mme Aubain’s house, so lovingly itemised in the story’s first page and monitor how it changes throughout the story, how the furniture is moved from room to room, then sold off, how the house empties and falls asunder, the roof rots, the shutters no longer open.

And, of course, there is Loulou, the parrot. At first sight:

His body was green, his head blue, the tips of his wings were pink and his breast was golden.

After death, he is stuffed

…screwed into a mahogany pedestal, with his foot in the air, his head on one side, and in his beak a nut, which the naturalist, from love of the sumptuous, had gilded.

And then

Although he was not a corpse, he was eaten up by worms; one of his wings was broken and the wadding was coming out of his body…Sometimes the sun fell through the window on his glass eye, and lighted a spark in it which sent Felicité into ecstasy.

The parrot an object of veneration not just to Felicité but also it becomes one in the service that ends the story when it stands upon an altar - although only its skull is visible on the altar:

…hidden beneath roses, showed nothing but his blue head, which looked like a piece of lapis lazuli.

In the introduction to the Penguin edition of Three Tales, Geoffrey wall comments on the tales:

…each portray a certain religious experience, but they do so in (a) contemporary idiom…the sacred survives, oddly disguised, even in the century of wide-awake bourgeois techno-miracles.[17]

Wall goes on to quote from one of Flaubert’s letters in which he writes:

I do not know (nobody knows) the meaning of body and soul, where one begins and the other begins. We feel the play of energy and that is all.

It is this play of energy that complicates the details that Flaubert deploys in ‘A Simple Heart.’ Loulou is a parrot, a dead parrot, a stuffed parrot, but not to Felicité: it is the object of her love; it is the Holy Spirit. Trace the references in the story to birds, to the sky, to those horses hoisted into the air, to the Loulou, living and resurrected only to rot again.

One of the markers of time in ‘A Simple Heart’ is the Feats of Corpus Christi, a Catholic celebration of the Eucharist in which a wafer of bread becomes the body of Christ while remaining a wafer of bread. In such a way, Loulou is both parrot and Holy Spirit because that is how Felicité attends to it.

As Felicité ages, as her eyesight fails, as her hearing diminishes, her world narrows. Everything passes her by. The parrot is all she sees and even seems to hear. Like a saint intent on decreation, her attention on the world concentrates upon the parrot and she sees through it, through its reality, to some supernatural dimension,

Pay enough attention to a thing – to anything- and even the tooth of a dog will glow, and a parrot will not only partakes of God’s grace, but also become it – and still be a parrot.

[1] http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap8.htm. Tolstoy’s opinions seem dismissive when given in such a summary, but, at length, they reveal a great deal about his own purposes as an artist. One of the best reflections on Tolstoy’s literary judgements is George Orwell’s ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf This site also carries Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’ http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/ and the highly influential ‘Politics and the English Language’ http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/ . For those of you whose experience of Orwell includes ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ the breadth, incisiveness and accessibility of Orwell’s essays will be a particular pleasure.

[2] ibid

[3] http://www.submissivewife.org/publicresources/tolstoy_darling.html

[4]http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap8.htm

[5] That said, in the work of his prime, what distinguishes Tolstoy is his almost complete understanding of what it is to be human and contradictory. The anecdote about the bicycle might more especially apply to his own original intentions in writing of adultery in Anna Karenina, a novel that may have began as a critique of an adulterous woman but that resulted in a work with a rich, generous and varied presentation of what family and marriage involve as well as a comprehensive understanding of the question of ‘how one should live’; in that novel and in War and Peace, he arrives at ‘a complete, overall impression.’ As a critic and thinker, he was a dogmatic: as an artist, he was incapable of being so, which is why, perhaps, he came to disown the novel as a means of pursuing his philosophy.

[6] See ‘The Novel’, G. de Maupassant, Pierre and Jean, Penguin, 2006.

[7] As well as de Maupassant’s essay, the relationship is also covered in Graham Robb’s review of Maupassant’s Afloat: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/cruising-with-genius

[8] Quite simply, to see this in practice, note how each of the characters in ‘A Simple Heart’ and ‘The Darling’ is introduced, not just the main characters, but also especially those who pass by, appear for just a sentence. Each could set off to become the protagonist in a story of his or her own.

[9] Ibid

[10] ibid

[11] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm#2H_4_0003

[12] Ibid

[13] Tolstoy, who was repelled by Maupassant’s tales of lesbians and prostitutes, came to admire the ‘moral relation’ of the author to his subject, and (no doubt remembering Maupassant’s account of Flaubert’s lesson in the introduction to Pierre et Jean) ‘that peculiar, strained attention, directed upon an object, in consequence of which the author sees entirely new features in the life which he is describing.’ Robb: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/cruising-with-genius/?page=2

[14] Quotations from ‘A Simple Heart’ are taken from http://www.fullbooks.com/A-Simple-Soul.html. Roger Waterhouse’s translation, Three Tales, Penguin, 2005, offers a more eloquent version as well as introduction by Flaubert biographer, Geoffrey Wall.

[15] Quotations from ‘The Darling’ are from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Darling. The translation is by Constance Garnett, among the very first to translate Chekhov and other great Russian writers into English, and, while others are said to be more accurate, it is in Garnett’s translations that Chekhov is most widely known by English readers.

[16] If one were to look for a crucial difference between Chekhov and Flaubert – possibly Chekhov and any writer before him – it might lie in VS Pritchett’s remark that in Chekhov the ‘sights and sounds are heard’ as if by the characters.

[17] p. Xiii, Flaubert, G. Three Tales, translated by Roger Whitehouse and, with an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wall, Penguin, 2005

'Can a Book Change Your Life?'

2011-01-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

David Markson's Readers Block 2

2010-12-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

A blocked pipe, frozen; a bath that wouldn’t drain and then a flood through my kitchen ceiling: nothing to do but call a plumber, mop up, wipe down, sit unbathed and wait for the plumber to arrive, which he does by the day’s end but, before he does, from Amazon, David Markson’s Reader’s Block drops through the letterbox.

I dip it into it.

The dip becomes a dive.

How to describe this novel without it seeming arid and self-conscious, but the excerpt below does it best: a series of indented paragraphs – sometimes no more than a word, a title, a name - in which an author known as Reader attempts to spell out to himself the novel that seems always to be evading him.

The novel’s form is that of a notebook –a writer’s notebook, but almost, too, the kind of commonplace book a reader might keep - and, as Markson’s Reader forages his imagination (or his memory?) to pad out the fugitive work, other facts, anecdotes, quotations rise up:

Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples; Anne Sexton drank vodka as she waited for the closed garage to fill up with fumes; Roland Barthes was hit by a laundry truck; Rupert Brooke and Alban Berg died from insect bites.

Knut Hamsun was a horse-car conductor in Chicago; Cervantes was a tax collector; Maugham, Larkin, Virgil and Moses were stutterers; Wallace Stevens could not bear to say out loud the word ‘womb’; Rossini wore a wig and, in chilly weather, he wore two

William Butler Yeats was an anti-Semite; so was Chesterton, Kant, Heidegger and Martin Luther – these accusations come as regular as heartbeats - and, yes, why didn’t Kafka call Joseph K a Jew and ‘be done with it.’

102 boulevard haussmann; 26 Piazza di Spagna; Roslyn Harbor, Long Island

‘But at that moment the door opened and a personage entered who was a stranger to all present’ (Dostoevsky); ‘Our sister, Death’ (Francis of Assisi); ‘But who are you? You are not from the castle, you are not from the village, you aren’t anything.’ (Kafka?); ‘Yesterday at eight o’clock Madame Bérenge, the concierge, died.’ (?); and, decades afterwards, locked indelibly in Reader’s mind, the last two pages of Good Morning, Midnight;

Susan Sontag, writing on Elias Canetti, described the notebook as 'the perfect literary form for an eternal student,’ and every writer is an eternal student, perpetually learning yet again - and as if for the first time - the same set of skills to answer the same problems, the previous solutions no longer available.

Sontag wrote that the notebook holds that the ‘self that one constructs to deal with the world,’ and Markson’s Reader is battling both to deal with and construct a fictional world as well as fending off the troubled facts of what might be his own experience as he imagines:

A character, the Protagonist… a house… a house by a cemetery?... a house in a cemetery… no, a house on a beach!... no, a cemetery. And why is the Protagonist alone? Might there be others? Women? A woman. A wife? If so, are there children? Where are they now?

And as Reader moves these figures and thoughts, teases them from the shadows, reality’s darker backing promises either to peel back or advance even further forward.

David Markson's Reader's Block 1

2010-12-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

S A L O N ’ S    B O O K S    O F    T H E    Y E A R

Fiction

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

READER'S BLOCK
By David Markson
Dalkey Archive Press, 193 pages

Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday.

To me, or to him?

Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday.

Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen's family that he had been killed in battle one week before.

Picasso made Gertrude Stein sit more than eighty times for her portrait.

And then painted out the head and redid it three months later without having seen her again.

Pablo Casals began each day for more than seventy years by playing Bach.

I have, Reader has?

Reader has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

Someone nodded hello to him on the street yesterday.

Anna Akhmatova had an affair with Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Late in life, not having left Russia again in a third of a century, she would be astonished to learn how famous he had become.

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen, the population of Stratford would have been little more than fifteen hundred. Is it a safe assumption that he knew the woman named Katherine Hamlet who fell into the Avon that summer and drowned?

Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house.

Even among the most tentative first thoughts about a first draft, why is Reader thinking of his central character as Reader?

Gray's Elegy is 128 lines long. Gray spent seven years writing it.

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt.

I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Do I wish to put certain things down?

Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that. Presumably in most others he will not be the I at all, however.

Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall.

Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me?

Saint Thomas Aquinas was an anti-Semite.

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death.

Bianchon being a doctor in Le Pere Goriot.

His life evidently static. Alone, seemingly without occupation or achievement, his means meager.

Emptiness.

Anthony Trollope said he had read Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie at least three dozen times.

Protagonist?

Perhaps someone from a shop Protagonist had stopped in at, a clerk? Or merely someone in a friendly mood in passing?

Severn, lift me up, I am dying.

Don't breathe on me, it comes like ice.

The world is my idea.

Saint Augustine said his first teacher was also the first person he ever saw who could read without moving his lips.

Back to Salon’s Book Awards

Neither Fantasy Nor Realism

2010-12-20T08:24:00.000-08:00

This, via this space

Neither fantasy nor realism

Ramona Koval: You say modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism, both Tolkien and Graham Greene, both Philip Pullman and VS Naipaul, out of respect for the world. Tell me what this horror entails. Why?

Gabriel Josipovici: The last part of that phrase is something that I touched upon when I was saying that this is not simply a clever modernist trick that springs from a desire to make the reader see that everything that can be said about the world is still going to leave a lot unsaid which is there in the world. So, in a way, they are trying to make you ... just as much as the lyric poets are trying to make you ... see the world itself as it is out there, and what I was saying there was I think this proliferation of fantasies from Tolkien through to the Harry Potter books and Philip Pullman and so on, is a curious sort of indication of the way in which we would rather just turn away from the world and live in pseudo myths and mythologies, and they are pseudo, they're not the real thing as they were in cultures that really had myths and really believed in them. And similarly I think straightforward realism also stops you actually recognising this mysterious thing that our lives are open, are not going to be subsumed in a narrative we can easily tell, but we are constantly going to come up against something which is much more mysterious, much stranger, much more un-inchoate than we imagine.
Part of a transcript from interview on ABC Radio National of Australia about Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Cups to Australian talk radio in general and cups to the estimable Josipovici - although it has to be said that Pullman uses fantasy to critique Christian myths in which he thinks we should no longer believe, and that both Rowlings and Pullman write for children and there is no harm and every delight in encouraging a love of fantasy in such readers - is there a modernist book for children? As CS Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism put it:

children are indifferent to literary fashions. What we see in them is not a specifically childish taste, but simply a normal and perennial human taste, temporarily atrophied in their elders by a fashion.

It's adult readers who read such books - and write them - fantasies unengaged by the mind, without considered thought, set in feudal and monarchical worlds, sexist and sexless, and who seem wholly accepting in such fiction that there is a spiritual, political and moral elect (fated to be so by birth), that evil is immediately identifable by black costumery and that twisted visages reliably indicate twisted souls.

And I'm not quite sure I have ever read a 'straightforwardly realist' text. Greene's 'realism' is not Naipaul's; neither writer say everything that can be said about the world, and each of them leave much unsaid and utter only as much as each of them can - which, for both, even when similar (A Burnt-out Case/ A Bend in the River), is also, eerily and necessarily unlike.

James Merill: Christmas tree

2010-07-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

Not seasonal - nor is the snow bound picture of the Stevens' house below - but I came across this after reading the first chapter of Helen Vendler's Last looks, Last Books. The chapter is downloadable here, and worth the read.

To be

Brought down at last

From the cold sighing mountain

Where I and the others

Had been fed, looked after, kept still,

Meant, I knew--of course I knew--

That it would be only a matter of weeks,

That there was nothing more to do.

Warmly they took me in, made much of me,

The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.

I could assent to that. For honestly,

It did help to be wound in jewels, to send

Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep

Fragrant sable that cloaked me head to foot.

Over me then they wove a spell of shining--

Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,

Amulets, milagros: software of silver,

A heart, a little girl, a Model T,

Two staring eyes. The angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA

(The children's names) in clownlike capitals,

Somewhere a music box whose tiny song

Played and replayed I ended before long

By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV

To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead

Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals

Plowed back into Earth for lives to come--

No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn't bear,

Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.

Needles and bone. The little boy's hands meeting

About my spine. The mother's voice: Holding up wonderfully!

No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today's

Dusk room aglow

For the last time

With candlelight.

Faces love lit,

Gifts underfoot.

Still to be so poised, so

Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.

Wallace Stevens: The House was Quiet and the World was Calm

2010-07-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Dreams of Monochrome Men

2010-07-30T09:34:00.001-07:00

dv8 The Cost of Living

2010-07-30T09:32:00.001-07:00

DV8 - Enter Achilles

2010-07-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

Talk to Me

2010-07-30T09:17:00.001-07:00

Theatre on film is so stagy - the audience either give a standing ovation or walk out and the stage itself seems a too thin a place for magic to occur - but, in Almodovar's Talk to Her, perhaps because he films it so simply, he does get what it is to sit in a theatre and witness a performance.

That he is filming two dances by Pina Bausch helps. The trailer for Talk to Her only suggests the brilliance of the film, but it is cut to suggest that the whole film might be choreographed by her.

And, in addition, this:

Liverpool

2010-07-19T01:47:00.000-07:00

This, from L RB: I'm not convinced that this string of epiphets does much to convey contemporary Liverpool, but it does evoke a Liverpool and it makes a tuneful litany

Epithets
Jamie Mackendrick
Toledo la rica, Salamanca la fuerte, León la bella, Oviedo la sacra, y Sevilla la grande.
Liverpool the impoverished, the liverish, the void, the full,
the self-besotted, the blarney-argoted, the blitzed and blackened,
the bella-brutta, the rag-rich, the moss-stained sandstoned,
the green-lung’d, the ricket-ridden, the loud and adenoidal.
Liverpool the last-to-be-served, the least-accounted,
the over-arched and undermined, the mother-tongued and plurilingual,
the Catholic-Protestant, the cap-in-hand, the hand-
to-mouth, the pub-encrusted and the hovel-haunted.
Liverpool the riverine, the ocean-avid, the slaveship-tainted,
sugar-whitening, matchstick-making, slum and dockland
refuge of Lascars, Chinese, Irish, Jews, Somalians.
Liverpool the deserted, the polluted, the de bon aire,
the clinker-built and shipwrecked, the chameleon,
the edge-of-everywhere-and-nowhere’s-centre.

The Animator: Adam Thirlwell on Charles Dickens

2010-07-04T04:12:00.000-07:00

This review of Michael Slater's biographical study of Charles Dickens is by Adam Thirlwell - a critic more wayward than James Woods or Wyatt Mason, perhaps because, as a fiction writer, his approach is more idiosyncratic, with less laying down of laws and more of a search for a personal method.

He is a critic who hits and misses with his insights - somehow that's part of the narrative tension in his generously cerebral and wide-ranging novel, Miss Herbert - but he is more than capable of enthusing a reader to visit or revisit a text with a new perspective.

This review, from The New Republic led me to read The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel everyone thinks they know even without reading it, but its many surprises are indicated in Thirlwell's piece, which looks at Dickens' output as a whole, and is, in its way, as good a overview of Dickens than the ones given by George Orwell or GK Chesterton.

For a long time, everyone has known that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, the city where the modern was invented: the society of the spectacular. But everyone was wrong. The capital of the nineteenth century was London. Think about it. Walter Benjamin’s symbol of the Parisian modern was the arcade. The arcade! In London-according to the social campaigner Henry Mayhew, there were 300,000 dustbins, 300,000 cesspools, and three million chimneys. It was there that the truly modern was invented: industrial, overpopulated dirt. Its symbol was the slum. London was managed by a majority of minority trades, all in the business of garbage: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, toshers. And London’s greatest describer, who converted the ghostly industrial city into a new world of words, was a novelist who could taxonomically and poetically enumerate, say, the varieties of polluted fog: “Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black.”

And yet, in public, this same writer could also put on an act like this:

Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, that to the earnestness of my aim and desire to do right by my readers, and to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people, I shall ever be faithful,--to my death-in the principles which have won your approval. [Loud applause.]

Charles Dickens gave this sincere speech in Sheffield, the city of steel factories, in December 1855, on being presented by the mayor with a service of cutlery. It is unbelievable, perhaps, but it is true: that, too, is the voice of the most avant-garde European novelist of the nineteenth century.

Of all his impersonations, Dickens’s greatest was his fluent mimicry of what the bourgeois public imagined that a novelist should be--through prefaces to his novels, which offered doctored accounts of their geneses as serial sketches in magazines; through his efforts on behalf of the Guild of Literature and Art, or his work with the Royal Literary Fund; through his collected editions (he supervised the following editions: the Charles Dickens, the Cheap, the Library, the Diamond, the People’s, and the Hachette). He had a mania for canonization, for the public paraphernalia of authorship.

And this extended, most importantly, to his biography. Dickens died in June 1870. Seventeen months later, in November 1871, the first Life of Dickens was published by his friend John Forster--an eminent man of letters, the biographer of Goldsmith, Swift, and Landor--who had been appointed Dickens’s biographer by Dickens himself. Dickens gave Forster autobiographical fragments, manuscripts, letters--which were all to be kept secret until the posthumous biography. On its publication, it revealed how autobiographical much of his writing had been--“watered,” as one critic wrote, “with tears of self-compassion.” The pain in Dickens, it turned out, was less a moral philosophy than a natural identification with the marginalized, the defenseless, the lost. And yet such autobiographical pain did nothing to change the essential idea of Dickens as a moralist, and of his novels as didactic agents of social comment.

But the era of psychology, and of social reform, were not alive to the energy in Dickens’s art. His real greatness, I think, lay elsewhere: in his savage, magical style. With the appearance of Michael Slater’s extraordinary biography, which exuberantly tracks the mercurial energy of Dickens’s publication history--as well as his editing and his public readings--it is possible to be accurate to Dickens’s wild originality, the career of his career.

The premise of this new biography is very simple, and wholly admirable. “Mindful of Dickens’s words in his will about resting his claims to the remembrance of his country upon his published work,” Slater declares, “I have focused primarily upon his career as a writer and professional author.” The salacious reader will find the occasional brothel, the passing prostitute. But Nelly Ternan, the actress implicated in Dickens’s separation from his wife around 1857 or 1858, is only a background figure: partly because Slater scrupulously refuses to speculate on unavailable evidence, but also because of his emphasis on that adjective “professional.” The furious energy of Dickens’s production in this biography is astonishing. As well as his novels, Slater gorgeously includes also “the context of the truly prodigious amount of otherwriting that he was constantly producing alongside the serial writing of those books”--the “short stories, sketches, topical journalism, essays, travel writing and writings for children, polemical pieces in verse as well as prose.”

This is a biography of a writer as writer. It is therefore quite unique. “Overfamiliar metaphor,” writes Kundera in The Art of the Novel: “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel. A novelist’s biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid.” This is not true of Slater. “All their labor cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel,” adds Kundera. I have always agreed with him; but this great book allows one to imagine a more delicate biographical form--a heuristic instrument for the analysis of spectral themes.

For Dickens’s life--like one of his novels, with its parallel plot--was ghosted by two central motifs. He is the connoisseur of characters acquiring, in the words of the old cliché, a life of their own--like Dr. Marigold, who “came flashing up in the most cheerful manner, and I had only to look on and leisurely describe it.” But he is also the connoisseur of corpses. In Paris, the hidden twin to Dickens’s London, his favorite destination was the morgue. Dickens digested the dead with gusto. He was drawn to the morgue--“dragged by invisible force,” by “the attraction of repulsion.” And this is Dickens’s subject, the invention of his style: the uneasy, queasy hinterland where it is alluringly unclear what is alive and what is not.

One day, in 1911, Kafka finished reading a biography of Dickens and then turned to his diary:

Is it so difficult and can an outsider understand that you experience a story within yourself from its beginning, from the distant point up to the approaching locomotives of steel, coal, and steam, and you don’t abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it.

In this marvelous sentence, where the subject writing and the subject written sinuously swap places, Kafka identifies the mobile essence of Dickens’s lesson for fiction. His great subject is the force that gives anything animation at all. His work constitutes a sustained examination of the conditions for lifelikeness.

Dickens can animate anything. Even an oyster opener: for what happens to oyster openers, wonders Dickens, in an improvised moment in a letter from Montreal in 1842, when oysters are out of season? “Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically-sealed bottles for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster season. Who knows?” Dickens’s animating style discovers the uncanny energy of the commonplace. For Dickens is the great novelist of junk: the décor of hotel restaurants, the clutter of secondhand shops, the wallpaper in pretentious dance schools. London was supremely the city of the industrial, and the industrial was so savagely modern that it was impossible to keep up: everyone lived among the outmoded, among cherished objects which had lost their use value. This was Dickens’s discovery--the surreal poetry of what is obsolete, or seems to be obsolete. His life was spent observing how much a life became a collection of useless, loved objects.

London was the capital of the nineteenth century, and Dickens was its greatest flaneur. In London he walked and walked--making sure of his “fifteen miles a day”: “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” He was the great ambulatory writer. In particular, he liked to walk at night. Slater’s biography records how much he was the genie of gaslight--able to compare, for instance, the quality of gaslight in London and in Paris: “London is shabby by daylight, and shabbier by gaslight. No Englishman knows what gaslight is, until he sees the Rue de Rivoli and the Palais Royal after dark.” In Paris, illuminated, Dickens could therefore be found “wandering into Hospitals, Prisons, Dead-houses, Operas, Theatres, Concert Rooms, Burial-grounds, Palaces, and Wine shops”--which all became a private “rapid Panorama.” In 1855, he mentions “some of the strange places I glide into of nights in these latitudes.” The idea of gliding is wonderful; but then Dickens has a whole vocabulary of flaneuring. In London, he asks a friend to come with him on one of his “great, London, back-slums kind of walk[s].”

It was on these walks that Dickens discovered the everyday--his profane illuminations. When his sketches, which first appeared in magazines, were collected in book form, Dickens added a new term, with its hesitant hyphen: “Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People.” But the border between his early sketches and his serial fiction is distinctly porous. His style swarms everywhere. And the everyday was “lumber,” it was junk:

The walls were garnished with one or two large maps; and several weather-beaten rough great coats, with complicated capes, dangled from a long row of pegs in one corner. The mantel-shelf was ornamented with a wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half a wafer, a road-book and directory, a county history minus the cover, and the mortal remains of a trout in a glass coffin.

The style of this flaneuring novelist was, then, founded on the observation of the city. Like all great novelists, of course, he tried to occlude the sources of his style. In one of his earliest sketches, “The Prisoner’s Van,” he included a brief manifesto (which he cut when the piece was collected into a book):

We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about in the streets. Whenever we have an hour to spare, there is nothing that we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy--walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about us as if, instead of being on intimate terms with every shop and house in Holborn, the Strand, Fleet-street and Cheapside, the whole were an unknown region to our wondering mind.

Dickens had the talent not to be averse to the shameful emotions--prurience, or curiosity, or self-deception, or hypocrisy: the shameful emotions without which no noble knowledge would ever be acquired. His style was formed in the voyeuristic city--London, with “that great heavy canopy,” as he wrote to Bulwer Lytton in 1851, “lowering over the housetops.” The walker alive to the smoggy city of junk: this was Dickens. And the usefulness of the city was very simple. London was a laboratory where the human was transformed into surface in as concentrated a form as possible. Or, as one of his best critics, John Carey, puts it, Dickens’s territory was “the border country between people and things, where Dickens’s imagination is mostly engaged.” And so it was where everything was always on the point of transforming from the animate into the inanimate, or vice versa. For anything, and anyone, can undergo a metamorphosis: it just depends on the strength of someone else’s will, desire, fetish--or belief.

II.

In his novels of reanimation, Dickens went for ghosts, for guilt, for bottled fetuses and effigies: for murder. His necromantic imagination needed corpses. Dead bodies are his constant prop. What else could he do? His subject was how strange the transition was between the live and the dead. But the motifs are all subject to the mechanics of his sentences. A sentence, for Dickens, was the medium in which he could investigate how reversible lifelikeness was. The effect of Slater’s book--so lavishly truffled with quotations from the vast range of his prose--is to emphasize how thoroughly Dickens was inhabited by this process of style. His life was itself a constant experiment of writing, of quickening by form. And so we must take the time to enumerate the elements of Dickens’s sentences. They constitute the true events, after all, of any novelist’s biography.

In 1869, in his inaugural address as president of the Birmingham & Midland Institute, Dickens confessed something to his audience: “My own invention or imagination, such as it is, I can most truthfully assure you, would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention.” Drudgery is the ritual of Dickensian transformation. It enabled inspired detailing, such as a slum with its “starved white horse who was making a meal of oyster-shells.” And it also produced exuberant squiggles: a child reading the newspapers, “which are so very large in proportion to himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up The Times to run his eye over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night, and to have disappeared under the bedclothes.” And it emerged in the full dense complexity of a sentence like this: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” The sentence describes a comic apocalypse--but then Dickens’s style itself may be called a comic apocalypse, energized by the twin engines of personification and metaphor, where everything and everyone can be transformed into the uncannily alive or the uncannily dead. So it becomes impossible to say how far a metaphor is ornament, or instead a precise description of what is seen.

Dickens’s techniques are constant experiments with what we accept to be real. And so, alongside the metaphoric transformation of the everyday, he loved inversely to transform everyday metaphoric activity into literal sentences. The revolutionary Russian critic Shklovsky once suggested that literary style was there to increase our knowledge of reality: “to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere ‘recognition.’” His example was Tolstoy’s baroquely literal description of an opera: “In the middle of the stage sat young girls in red bodices and white skirts. One young girl, very fat, and attired in white silk, was sitting separately on a low bench to which a green cardboard was attached from behind. They were all singing something.” But Dickens had been there already--more intensely, poetically literal than Tolstoy--watching Macbeth at the Theatre Royal in Chatham, confused by the ontology of double casting: “Many wondrous secrets had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else.”

His sentences are festivals of the flickering, the passing, the dying, the obsolete. He inherits the use of junk allusion invented by the English poets: by Pope, and Swift, and Dryden--the geniuses of mock epic. (Henry Fielding’s description of what he was up to in his novels was, significantly, this doubly oxymoronic definition: a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose.”) In The Pickwick Papers, the everyday kitsch allusion is duly incorporated: “‘Mrs. Leo Hunter has many of these breakfasts, sir,’ resumed the new acquaintance--‘“feasts of reason, sir, and flows of soul,” as somebody who wrote a sonnet to Mrs. Leo Hunter on her breakfasts, feelingly and originally observed.’” For what is more junk than unwittingly plagiarizing Pope, the greatest ironist of the glibly serious? But Dickens’s true innovation is to incorporate this kitsch appropriation of the classics into his own mobile narrative voice, as in his Hamletian description of

the Harmonic Meeting at the Sol’s Arms; where the sound of the piano through the partly-opened windows jingles out into the court, and where Little Swills, after keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar like a very Yorick, may now be heard taking the gruff line in a concerted piece, and sentimentally adjuring his friends and patrons to Listen, listen, listen, Tew the wa-ter-Fall!

(The Sol’s Arms, I should add, whose tables are hyper-realistically “ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses.”)

The profound innovation of Dickens’s style is in this way of describing the human as endless superficiality, infinitely bathetic: a bricolage of bric-a-brac. His profundity is precisely in the refusal of depth. He is often attacked for the creation of caricatures, not characters. As a binary opposition, this seems as uselessly simplistic as Forster’s division of characters into the flat and the round. It fails to honor the way his vision of what is real, what is alive, is tense with what is dead. His characters, therefore, are necessarily collections of repetitions. When describing the character of Skimpole in Bleak House, Dickens described him as “a delightful manner reproducing itself under my hand.” A character, for Dickens, is a self-reproducing entity; as artificial as a self--another system of repetition.

Famously, Dickens’s daughter Mamie recorded interrupting her father at composition--when he was, she said, performing a “facial pantomime” in front of the mirror. Dickens did not invent: he imitated, he mimicked. “I don’t invent it--really do not, but see it, and write it down.” Instead of the novel as psychology, he copied out his hallucinations: the repetitive gestures of his characters’ bodies, the repetitive jingles of their speech. With these gestures and jingles, he constructed the collages of his scenes:

“We are all weak creeturs,” said Mrs. Corney, laying down a general principle.

“So we are,” said the beadle.

Nothing was said, on either side, for a minute or two afterwards. By the expiration of that time, Mr. Bumble had illustrated the position by removing his left arm from the back of Mrs. Corney’s chair, where it had previously rested, to Mrs. Corney’s apron-string, round which it gradually became entwined.

“We are all weak creeturs,” said Mr. Bumble.

Every novel by Dickens is already an illustrated novel. The actual illustrations are just confirmations, tautologies.

III.

But it is not just the sentences. Dickens’s form is the novel, after all. His plots, like his sentences, are forms of resurrection. All Dickens’s great novels--from Dombey and Son, through Bleak House and Little Dorrit, toOur Mutual Friend--use multiple plots that resolve themselves, gradually, into one: characters are reborn under new names, or discover their true bloodline. Each individual plotline seems unrelated. But every novel turns out, in the end, to be a family romance. And this formal property possesses its artisanal double; the resurrections of Dickens’s style--from Dombey and Son onward--were facilitated by his new way of working: to use folded sheets of paper, divided into sections, to plan out his novels in their serial parts and chapters. With this, he planned the ballet of his characters, the choreography of his plots.

Early in his career, in Oliver Twist, Dickens defended the novel as a place for steep transitions--like “all good murderous melodramas” where the comic and the tragic alternate, “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” Some readers thought that this was overly dramatic, but for Dickens it was the structure of “real life.” The difference was that in real life we did not notice the transitions “from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments,” because “there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on.” This principle of transition was the central method by which Dickens constructed a fiction. Like a morgue, it was a system that produced the irony of transition: the abrupt juxtaposition of the living and the dead.

It was a lesson, the reader discovers, that he would learn himself. (Life is so philistine in its exaggerated care for form!) On April 14, 1851, Dickens gave a speech to the General Theatrical Fund dinner, praising the resilience of the actor who came “from scenes of affliction and misfortune--even from death itself--to play his part before us.” And then Dickens left the dinner--and was told that his infant daughter, “with whom he had been happily playing just before leaving home,” had died.

Life, as always, had a double plot. Later, when he was writing Little Dorrit, Dickens wrote a note to himself, wanting to intensify this way in which a plot could enact deaths and resurrections--a plot would be a structure to produce the parallels that would unify the vast city: “People to meet and part as travellers do, and the future connexion between them in the story, not to be now shewn to the reader but to be worked out as in real life. Try this uncertainty and this not-putting of them together, as a new means of interest.”

In his essay “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” written in 1944, Sergei Eisenstein hailed Dickens and his use of the intercut double-plot as the ancestor of cinema--the inventor, in prose narrative, of montage. Montage, after all, depended on parallel action. “Griffith arrived at montage through the method of parallel action, and he was led to the idea of parallel action by--Dickens.” Eisenstein went on to describe both “Griffith’s montage exposition” and also “a montage progression of parallel scenes, intercut into each other.” I admire this invocation of Dickens, alongside the early art of cinema; but it is important to see how Dickens’s art of montage was more advanced than Eisenstein’s. The idea of the parallel is everywhere in Dickens’s notes. In August 1862, about to begin work on Our Mutual Friend, he remarked to Forster about his germinating idea of a structure: “bringing together two strongly contrasted places and two strongly contrasted sets of people with which and with whom the story is to rest, through the agency of an electric message.”

An electric message! This is Dickens’s description of a parallel, and its importance, I think, is this. The parallel allows a novel to become a whole force field, a living and expanding universe--an animating network of motifs--or, in his terms, a network of “shadowings.” As he told Wilkie Collins--that other master of melodrama--a plot was an impersonation of fate: “I think the business of Art is to lay all that ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself--to shew by a backward light, what everything has been working to--but only to SUGGEST, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence--of which ways, all Art is but a little imitation.”

Dickens, the novelist, impersonated Providence. This is another way of saying that he impersonated the city. It is the city, after all, where such fateful parallels happen with the densest rhythm. The city, as Eisenstein knew, is where montage was invented: “that head-spinning tempo of changing impressions with which Dickens sketches the city in the form of a dynamic (montage) picture.” London was the capital of the nineteenth century, and its form was montage.

Dickens, it is true, used the montage form to prove that the rich could not separate themselves from the poor, to prove the “connexion” that existed “between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!” He was hysterically exercised by the way in which civilization could ignore the fact that it was barbaric. Before Walter Benjamin’s famous late thesis on history--“there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”--Dickens had already noted the inanimate animation. The urban graveyard at the center of the city, “with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life”: “a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.”

But this does not imply that Dickens had a coherent politics. In his essay, Eisenstein criticized the implications of Griffith’s montage: “the structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith’s montage is the structure of bourgeois society.... And this society, perceived only as a contrast between the haves and the have-nots, is reflected in the consciousness of Griffith no deeper than the image of an intricate race between two parallel lines.” Eisenstein, I assume, would have been similarly infuriated by Dickens. Dickens, after all, annoyed Brecht, and he dismayed Lukács, who lamented “the limitations of Dickens’s social criticism, his sometimes abstract-moral attitude towards concrete social-moral phenomena.” But why must Dickens have a politics? He was a novelist. He had a style instead.

Dickens’s politics was just a mode of feeling. He had been marked, after all, by one particular experience of living death--when he worked at a blacking factory off the Strand in 1824, when he had just turned twelve, and his family was almost bankrupt. Slater records the humiliating everyday detail: along with his partner, Bob Fagin (Fagin!), Dickens worked, with remarkable speed and dexterity, at the window--so remarkably, writes Slater, that passersby “used to stop to stare admiringly in at the window by which they worked.” Dickens was transformed into a spectacle. And this experience comprehensively haunted him. Every time Dickens let his imagination become frivolous, the Blacking returned. At Christmas, the Dickens family played a parlor game in which everyone had to remember a sentence made up by the family, and add another phrase. According to his son Henry, “My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand!’”

A theory of the political in literature needs a theory of feeling: this is a conclusion that may be drawn from the life, and the biography, of Dickens. A theory of junk needs a corresponding theory of the sentimental. The sentimental, after all, is just the junk of feeling, its hollow repetition. Dickens often described himself having “a real good cry” when he wrote. Such outbursts were constant. On April 21, 1849, writing in The Examiner, Dickens quoted from an inquiry into a recent scandalous case of children who had died of cholera in a baby farm. When the scandal was uncovered, the surviving children had been taken to the Royal Free Hospital--where the nurses fed them milk and bread. And, Dickens reported, there was a child who could not eat: “No; he held up his hand, and said, ‘Oh, nurse, what a big bit of bread this is!’”--“a little touch,” added the writer, “of a peculiarly affecting kind, such as the masters of pathos have rarely excelled in fiction.”

The masters of pathos: there is real admiration in that phrase. Dickens was not at all embarrassed by the sentimental. And yet he was also an expert in compassion, which was not fake. He institutes the modernist examination of fake and true feeling: what is live and what is not. “I should not like to hear the charge of sentimentality made against this strain that runs through Bleak House,” observed Nabokov rightly, at his lectern, in his Lectures on Literature. “I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.” And he added: “Dickens’s great art should not be mistaken for a cockney version of the seat of emotion--it is the real thing, keen, subtle, specialized compassion.”

The compassion is there most decisively in Dickens’s generous precision to minor characters. Like, say, Mrs. Piper, who comes to the Sol’s Arms in order to present her minor evidence at an inquest:

Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the Plaintive--so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased--was reported to have sold himself.

Mrs. Piper is just a flicker in that vast electric network that Dickens called Bleak House--and she is permanent. With Mrs. Piper, the reader comes upon the center of Dickens’s life-giving style, in the care lavished so quickly on lesser figures. For there is also truth in cliché, in the way a self freezes into its gestures. In the end, the self can be content with very little--like a cabman who is given twopence, which he receives “with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires.” Nabokov commented: “this gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet ‘over-handed’--a trifle--but the man is alive forever in a good reader’s mind.” And then he added: “A great writer’s world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character ... has the right to live and breed.” This, in the end, is the flimsy, ethereal, convincing politics of Dickens’s prose: not in his speeches, or his newspaper campaigns, but in the democracy of his fiction, in its massive crowd of animate extras.

IV.

The medium in which these minor characters lived was the mixing and refining solution of Dickens’s voice. Among all the Dickensian system of repetitions, the most repeated element is Dickens himself: his prose style. At his audience with Queen Victoria in 1870, he may have commiserated sedately over “the price of butchers’ meat, and bread,” but he was really a revolution of one. And the key to this revolution, to this style, may be found in his performances.

Around 1843, when he was writing A Christmas Carol, Dickens changed the way he wrote. He developed a more performative system of punctuation: a musical notation of semicolons. And it was also in A Christmas Carol that Dickens allowed his prose to become an electric message between the novelist and the absent reader: “Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.” When he came to give his famous performed readings, he chose to begin with A Christmas Carol--but he cut that passage, because at last there was no need to remind the absent reader of the absent novelist’s presence.

Before he became a novelist, Dickens had considered becoming an actor. With his assiduous precision, he had practiced “even such things as walking in and out, and sitting down in a chair.” His hero was Charles Matthews, who would come on stage as himself, in evening dress--and then play all the parts, culminating in a final bravura “monopolylogue.” It was an early form of stand-up. And this solo performance of multiple imitations formed the nucleus of Dickens’s style: a new form of prose, based on mimicry.

Mimicry, of course, is based on an idea of the human as repetition. “How easily peculiarities may be acquired by negligence,” observed Matthews, “and how difficult they are to eradicate when strengthened by habit.” Dickens made this offhand observation central to the art of the novel: a sustained analysis of how far the repetitive is the essence of a character, or the appropriation of a self by the other. Dickens is the great comic impersonator. In the vocabulary of the nineteenth century, he is the great assumer. He impersonated other people, and he impersonated himself. This is why his biography is of such prickly and absorbing interest. He performed his own multiple imagination.

He wanted to be ghostly. He liked the idea of the novelist as ghost--as in his idea of an editing persona for his magazine, Household Words: “I want to suppose a certain SHADOW ... a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature” which would “loom as a fanciful thing all over London ... a sort of previously unthought of Power going about.” But this was simply a way of describing his infinite vampiric style. And the main subject he haunted was himself. This was the secret he imparted to a Russian admirer, another genius of “good murderous melodramas,” who came to interview him in the summer of 1862. Dostoevsky, who was not yet the author of Crime and Punishment or Demons or any of his major novels, later recounted Dickens’s theory:

There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.

Toward the end of his life, Dickens decided to add to his repertory of readings the murder of Nancy by her lover Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist. In performance, he continued to create the tale, to embellish the novel, adding extra detail--such as Sikes’s dog, his paws bloodstained, “crawling as if those stains had poisoned him!!” Famously, his enactment of the guilty murderer made Dickens feel like a murderer: he wrote to the painter Frith in November 1868 that his acting was “horribly like, I am afraid”--“I have a vague sense of being ‘wanted’ as I walk about the streets.” A short while earlier, in April 1867, Dickens had written to his friend Robert Lytton that with his performed readings, with “this interpretation of myself (then quite strange in the public ear),” he had hoped to hint at “some new expression of the meaning of my books.” The new meaning, I think, was simple. It was the living proof that Dickens--with gas jets rigged up to shine brightly on his face, because he was, after all, the flaneur of gaslight--had invented the narrator as impersonator.

From Paris, on May 16, 1863, Dickens published an essay in his magazine Household Words. His essay featured the Paris morgue. In particular, it noted the variety of expressions adopted by the tourists when looking at the corpses (adopted by the flaneur, looking at the world):

there was a wolfish stare at the object.... And there was a much more general, purposeless, vacant staring at it--like looking at waxwork, without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it. But all these expressions concurred in possessing the one underlying expression of looking at something that could not return a look.

The Paris morgue was the hidden, concentrated form of London--of life. In the horrified italics of this asymmetrical looking, where the world is observed in the form of a waxwork, the disturbed energy of Dickens’s art and life may be found. So horrified by the inanimate, by the world’s junk, Dickens gave himself the infinite task of quickening everything, of impersonating everything--a demiurgic task of animation, through the precarious immortality of art.

How We Read Online

2010-06-10T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Internet Diet Nicholas Carr is a sane guide to how it's changing us.
By Michael AggerPosted Monday, June 7, 2010, at 10:05 AM ET
In his new book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind. He begins with a feeling shared by many who have spent the last decade online. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think," Carr tells us. "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading." He relates how he gets fidgety with a long text. Like others, he suspects that the Internet has destroyed his ability to read deeply. "My brain," he writes, "wasn't just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."
As Carr embarks, though, he has a firm grip on his brain, admirably subjecting his hunch to scrutiny. He's self-conscious about its Luddite and alarmist spirit and steps back to take the long view. The Internet, he observes, is "best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped mold the human mind." It's similar to other "intellectual technologies" that have reshaped our activities and culture.
By equating the impact of the Internet with the impact of such things as the printing press, Carr is trying to move the whole "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" argument forward. This Web is seismic. It's definitely changing us somehow. Instead of debating whether it's turning us into distractible oafs or a superintelligent collective, let's first look back into history and see how humans have responded to similar transitions. Then, let's see whether the new tools of neuroscience can detect any effects of our current transition.
The same anxieties that we have about the Internet, the ancient Greeks had about the new technology of writing. In The Republic, Plato has Socrates famously declare that poetry has no place in the perfect state. As Carr explains, this attack may seem a little out-of-nowhere unless you understand that poetry was Plato's stand-in for the oral tradition of Greek thought. Epic poems like The Iliad were how the Greeks preserved and passed on knowledge from one generation to the next. Plato is arguing that the new technology of writing is superior because it allows for a more ordered and logical transmission of knowledge. Also, you don't have to repeat stuff a hundred times.
Literacy won out, but each new technology gives something and takes something away. The scholar Walter J. Ong looks at oral cultures and sees "verbal performances of high artistic and human worth" that are lost forever in the transition to literacy. But without literacy, he argues, there's no science, no history, no philosophy.
At first, books did not have any spaces between the words, and required a lot of work to understand. They were typically read out loud, and those who could read silently to themselves, like Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, were viewed with amazement. Eventually, punctuation marks and spaces between the words eased the "cognitive burden" of reading. The "deep reader" was born. Readers trained themselves to ignore their surroundings (countering our evolution, which encourages wariness) and to focus on a text. Writers responded to this new reader. "The arguments in books became longer and clearer, as well as more complex and more challenging, as writers strived self-consciously to refine their ideas and logic," Carr explains. Private carrels were built in libraries; reference books sprang up to help the solo reader.
The next earthquake was Gutenberg's printing press. Early booksellers were often seen as agents of Satan, so stunned were people by the sudden appearance of formerly rare and precious volumes. (And at such low prices! Kind of like Amazon.) In a virtuous feedback loop, the public became more literate as more books circulated. The sensitive among us began to complain of information overload. The melancholy Robert Burton had this to say: "We are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning." Yet books were a hit, a convenient way to reference important information and to learn about the latest ideas. Naturally, there was a fair amount of pornography and trashy stuff floating around, too.
The literary mind began its centuries-long rule. Scientists, authors, politicians, crackpots, and poets could all assume the same basic thing: attentive, book-trained minds would be willing and able to follow their complex arguments and plots.
Carr arrives at the Internet era armed with the latest brain science. I think that science makes him a little too confident in assessing our current moment and less willing to look outside the lab for real-world effects. Brain science is like the new freshman quarterback who shows lots of promise. Biologists and neurologists assumed for a long time that the structure of the adult brain never changed. In the late 1960s, Michael Merzenich discovered that a monkey could remap its brain—a result that was later confirmed in humans. The current theory is that our brains are constantly changing in response to everyday experiences and circumstances.
On the one hand, the fact of our "massively plastic" brains should make us optimistic about our ability to adapt in the face of our own technology. We'll take advantage of opportunities (the spurs to thought supplied by literacy) and work around the losses (the ability to concentrate deeply on a task). On the other hand, we can worry that the rewiring now under way might be exacting too steep a price. Is the kind of brain that engages in deep reading and mindful contemplation like a dying salmon swimming upstream with no chance of finding a mate? "When we go online," Carr writes, "we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning."
Carr's argument is based on the work of scientists studying online reading and brain researchers studying memory and attention. One big problem seems to be hyperlinks. The foundation of the Web acts like a road bump in a sentence. A link causes us to stop reading and evaluate whether or not to click on it—activating the decision-making pockets of our mind. Books present a more passive environment, letting the mind concentrate on the words instead of constantly being on the lookout for new, possibly better words. Carr sums it up this way: "Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet."
So what if we are a little distracted? Maybe the Internet is helping us develop new minds, ones that can quickly process and evaluate information in short, directed bursts of attention. Thinkers like Tyler Cowen have argued along these lines. I may not be able to drink deeply of Proust like I used to, but I collect information from a diverse range of sources and am more informed about the things that I care about than I have ever been before. This is where I salute the genius of Carr's title, The Shallows. It's not that we aren't learning things when we scan our sites and feeds, he argues; it's that we are missing out on making the kind of deeper connections of which we were once more capable. We are splashing about in the shallows.
The problem isn't necessarily that the information online is of poorer quality than the information found in books or conversation. The trouble is that we are consuming it in a state of distraction. Carr quotes the neuroscientist Jordan Grafman: "Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness?" The studies show that when we try to do two things at once, the attention given to both activities lessens, and we do each more carelessly. Doing more multitasking doesn't mean getting better at doing two things at once; it means continuing to do many things more poorly.
The literary mind was a mind that could pay attention, and attention turns out to be a cornerstone of memory. With our plastic minds, part of learning is converting our working memory (what you are using to read right now) into long-term memory (what was that Carr book about again?). Carr points to research that suggests it's attention that determines what we remember: "The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory." If we are only paying half-attention, if we are distracted by all of the buzzes and dings on our computers, or if we don't bother to pay attention at all because we can just Google it later, we are losing a chance to build lasting connections in our minds. Connections that might one day mingle and mesh in ways that we don't understand, connections that would allow us to frame the world differently or come up with a new solution.
Carr acknowledges throughout The Shallows that it's neither possible nor preferable to rewind technology. He loves his RSS feed as much as the next guy. But because Carr is someone who grew up in the linear, literary mind-set, he's trying to capture the virtues of our "old brains" before they become even more of a rarity. It's tempting to feel he's worrying too much. You may lose an afternoon to pointless Web surfing, but not an entire mind-set. But here I am, making an extreme argument again, when what Carr is saying is actually quite measured and cautious. The Internet is changing us, changing our culture. Perhaps some of these lab experiments are detecting the initial effects of this change. Maybe we're more distractible, more frenzied, less able to concentrate. Maybe these mental tics are part of the turbulence of the transition, a pocket of air as we soar to ever higher intellectual heights. Maybe they aren't.
Whatever our destination, Carr would have us reserve a place for attentive thinking. For to judge by history, he is being not an alarmist but a realist in pointing out that the literary, attention-capable mind, though it may not quite go the way of the chanting Greek poets, will no longer reign. When that happens, our culture will lose something ineffable. And we're likely to have forgotten what it is or was.

Unwritten Novels - Doris Lessing

2010-06-10T03:52:00.000-07:00

I like to imagine that I am reading a piece headed ‘Unwritten Novels’:

Just sent for review, a parcel of reprints of neglected Victorian novels, each of unique interest and illuminating, as only literature can, areas of 19th-century life known hitherto only to historians. (It was a historian who said: ‘It is to the glory of the novelists, and the shame of the historians, that it is the former who have written the novels which present the past to the common reader.’) John Mercury is an exciting tale about those men who, risking transportation and prison, smuggled on carts and mail coaches, then up and down the railways, batches of pamphlets, broadsheets, newsheets, all clandestinely printed or copied out by hand – the ‘alternative press’ of those days, a 19th-century English samizdat – about the lives and conditions of workers and their families, their aspirations for a better life. The New Jerusalem Maker is a psychological novel about a group of Chartists who live for the future, their own present comfort neglected, in an intense interaction, inspired by the fumey influences of Shelley, Byron and Blake. The charismatic Charles Hoop, orator and visionary, compels men, women and children into his orbit, not always to their benefit. Dame Betty: Her School tells how the widow of an Army captain, left destitute, taught the neighbours’ children in her tiny cottage in Spitalfields. The story is written by one of her pupils, a grown woman, when this and similar schools were closed in favour of compulsory state education. The room where the children – many of whom turned out to be remarkable – were taught was described in the inspector’s report as ‘damp, insanitary and ill-equipped.’ The Shadow Running. This country was host to revolutionaries from all over Europe, always on the move, outwitting the Police and Home Office spies, smuggling letters, pamphlets, instructions. This shadow world of intrigue and passion (revolution was ever a begetter of sexual intensity) and the type of person who later, with the coming of ‘the media’ would be terrorists, will be found instructive by the authorities even now. This novel foreshadows Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Not to be missed. Divas of the Divan, based on an exchange of letters between Florence Nightingale’s doctor and the explorer Isabella Bird’s doctors, throws light on how clever women suffering from the miseries and frustrations of middle-class Victorian life used invalidism, often consciously, but even more interestingly, unconsciously, to protect their vulnerabilities and nurse their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She and her sisters, unknown to her father, brothers and later, her husband, befriended a poor girl dying of tuberculosis in ‘The Rookeries’, which were, after all, not a mile from their house. This fine and compassionate novel was the result.
Unfortunately these novels and a thousand others were never written. Why not?
There are some subjects it is almost impossible to believe have never found a novelist. How about Marx’s household? It was a composite of Victorian dramatic stereotypes: the illegitimate child by the servant, the set-aside wife, mysterious and conspiratorial visitors, reprehensible relatives and the noble-minded philanthropic benefactor. And the exploited, suffering daughter. There is Kapp’s biography of Eleanor, letters, history books. No novel – though Marx’s deplorable son-in-law appears in The Doctor’s Dilemma, I think, and he apparently inspired Meredith’s The Tragic Comedians, that dry, urbane, witty, grown-up tale about revolutionary politics in Europe. Out-of-print. I wonder why?
I first began to brood about unwritten novels in the late Fifties, after the Twentieth Congress. (Everyone over a certain age will know what I mean: youngsters, even the politically minded, ask, what was that?) I knew I had lived through an extraordinary time, but now it was over. What had ended was a political atmosphere – and this is always impossible to describe to later people, who are living in a different, equally compelling atmosphere, nearly always inimical to the first. (In the last few weeks we have seen a similar sudden change, one that no one foresaw, and the way we all thought so recently will rapidly seem improbable. Young ones are already asking their elders: ‘How was it possible you did that?’) What I looked back on – 1941, the date of Russia entering the war – was a fever, a ferment, an intoxication, every possible social idea up for grabs, from feminism to communal living, all based – and in areas that extended far beyond the Communist Party – on a goody-and-baddy scenario: the Soviet Union was good, everyone else, bad. The further I get away from that stretch of years, the more of a lunacy it seems, a paranoia essenced – but that is false memory trying to instal itself, trying to discount the atmosphere of then, which is the whole point. What I particularly wanted to know was: had this kind of thing happened before? How nice to read a novel about the men and women of the Communist movement before 1905, when they split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The personal dislocations must have left everyone scarred. Or why not a novel about the Chartists, the flesh-and-blood stuff, not the propaganda: I had already observed how the (small) historical events of which I had been part had frozen into tidy stories that tended to leave out certain people and events, often the key ones, as if these had about them something abrasive and raw and itchy that could not be included. And the atmosphere that had made everything possible had evaporated. There were whole tracts of the 19th century that literature hadn’t covered at all, though Dickens and Hardy and Meredith between them had done a good deal. Well, I would write a novel that would convey the atmosphere, the taste and the feel of the politics of a certain time. Roll on the decades, and they are setting The Golden Notebook in history and politics classes, and I couldn’t be more pleased.
But why the missing books? The most surprising lacunae are in the Second World War. Hundreds and thousands of women were in uniform, drove vehicles, worked on the land and in Intelligence and in offices. They made munitions, cooked in canteens, suffered the Blitz. (Or enjoyed it. One old woman said: It made a nice change.) Where is The Landgirl and Luigi (after Lawrence), where the novel about the icy run to Murmansk, or the Battle of the Atlantic – where we nearly lost the war – told by the sensitive young officer later sunk in the Repulse in the Pacific, and picked out of the water to fight again in the Med? Where the novel, rather than the memoirs, of the POW camps in Germany, the internment camps in Southern Rhodesia, Australia (the latter housing improbable mixes of fascists and antifascists boxed up together for the duration). In the Second World War camps to train pilots were set up in Southern Rhodesia (at least ten of them) Kenya, Australia, Canada, South Africa. This meant moving – how many men? Millions? – on ships pursued, and sometimes sunk, by submarines, meant building camps like towns – but all-male – in countries that often struck these involuntary tourists as unlikeable or – sometimes – as politically oppressive as the countries we were fighting. I know that is how Southern Rhodesia seemed to many men of the Air Force. All this was an extraordinary feat of organisation. Has anything like it ever happened before? Yet people have forgotten all about these camps, these men. They are not in literature, except, glancingly, in my Children of Violence. The fate of the ground crew – the men who serviced the aircraft and ran the camps, and stayed put, sometimes for years – was to be bored. Boredom is conducive to the production of literature. But no, nothing, not a word. Where are the novels about the Second Front in Europe, Dunkirk, the evacuation of Singapore, the war in Burma (Yes, India did all right), the war in North Africa, Army camps in Britain? Very well, let’s look at what we have. Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy, about combatants; Olivia Manning’s trilogies, mostly about civilians dodging death, deportation or destitution while contending armies reel back and forth. Alexander Baron’s From the City, from the Plough. The Cruel Sea. Sharp, sardonic sketches, in New Writing, Shaving through the Blitz, by one Fanfarlo. Fragments of verse remain, none as sharp or as painful as Brooke’s, or Sassoon’s or Owen’s.
Dark angel who art clear and straight
As cannon shining in the air
Thy blackness doth invade my mind
And thunderous as the armoured wind
That rains on Europe
Is thy hair.
(Was there really such a poem?) Prokosch wrote an intensely romantic novel set in Lisbon, that clearing-house for spies. Have I left much out? I don’t think so. Where is our equivalent of Elsa Morante’s History, that marvellous novel that says everything about what it was like in Italy during World War Two? No, Britain was not invaded, but was bouleversed, changed for ever. Very few British people (or Americans) were actually killed, but millions were shifted from one part of the country to another, from one country to another, from continent to continent. Civilians were involved, for the first time ...
Are we approaching that perennial theme, the Sensibility of the Writer – not everybody’s favourite?
A clue or two. A few years ago I was invited to address a gathering of industrialists and business people in Toronto. I was intrigued: it appeared that the wife of that year’s chairman had suggested a writer might make a nice change for the weekly get-together. Several hundred people, a third of them women, had turned up. One point I made was that it is literature, not history, which has created a map of this or that society. (I was talking about the novel not from an aesthetic point of view, but as information: for instance, a businessman friend of mine, when he is sent off to some new town or country, goes to the library for all the novels from there. That’s where you learn what a place is like, says he, not from blueprints and pamphlets.) We all know about pre-revolutionary Russia because of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and the rest. Up got a businessman, a prominent one, it seems, to make the point that before the Revolution in Russia an industrial revolution was well under way, but it nowhere appears in literature. Our view of that Russia is entirely created by intellectuals, not one of whom, not even Gorki, had anything to do with manufacture or industry. I was naturally delighted that this point was being made by a capitalist, and not by the Canadian equivalent of Comrade Len, Lit. Sec. of the Marxist-Socialist-Revolutionary Party of West Ealing.
Another point: why do people engaged in business and industry, the engine of all the world’s societies, capitalist, socialist – and, now, Communist – never write novels? You can hardly think of a serious novel about the machinations in the committee rooms, the clandestine struggles to steal technology, the arms trade, the men who build dams and pipelines, the international conferences where the destinies of nations are decided, let alone the day-to-day being in an office which is the lot of millions. (Yes, Something happened... Heller). Was it, I wondered aloud, that the aristocratic disdain for business (still alive and well, so I’m told, in this country) has percolated down to the intellectuals (sorry, shorthand) of this country, and then, somehow, to this country’s ex-colonies? There are levels of society in Britain, including some of the most socially aware people, where it is enough to mention ‘business’ or ‘businessman’ to see delicate little moues – of distaste, imaginary skirts being drawn aside. Not so in America, where some people have to make regular visits just to get some relief from all these genteel sensibilities.
Why, I enquired, did not the members of this distinguished audience go off and write novels about their fascinating lives? One after another got to their feet, to say they indeed cherished dreams of writing novels, but it had not occurred to any of them that their business lives were interesting. One man confessed that when he retired he would write about his teenage passion for the girl next door, for this had coloured his life. Another planned something like A Sportsman’s Sketches about his hunting trips with his dog. A woman said she would write about her recent divorce and the consequent psychoanalysis.
If that enquiring sociologist from Mars (or from one of Jupiter’s moons) decided to use the good literature of the last three hundred years as a map of our societies, the 18th century would be fairly well-chartered, but the gaps would be serious in the 19th – and you could read all of 20th-century novels and never suspect that it is trade that makes the world go round. Bad literature – yes, comics, airport literature – but that’s a different matter and a different article.

Billy Collins: The Quaintness of the Past

2010-06-09T02:56:00.000-07:00

The Quaintness of the Past
Billy Collins
Posted Tuesday, June 8, 2010, at 6:51 AM ET

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Billy Collins read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

I turn the page of a magazine
and find a black-and-white photograph
of a roadhouse taken in the 1950s,
an old clapboard affair
with a car of that vintage,
maybe a Plymouth, parked in front.

It is almost enough to inspire me
to take a snapshot of something around here
first thing in the morning,
maybe the little bakery down the street
where I often go for coffee and a muffin
and the big city paper
and the French girls behind the counter.

Ideally there would be a few modern cars
parked in front,
then all I would have to do
is walk back home and wait 50 or 100 years
for the photograph to become a thing of interest and value.

Of course, I will be long gone by then
and time will have marched on,
though I never think of time as marching
down a football field blowing a trumpet
or into a city square
with a rifle on its shoulder.

I picture time advancing more slowly
up a mountain, leaving
all the moments of history behind
like climbers who have to leave behind
one of their companions on a cold glacial slope.

And sometimes, decades later,
the body is discovered,
the ice is chipped away, and we get to see
a photograph of the remains—
the bones of the hands arthritically
fisted up, the jaw locked tight,
a skull wearing a woolen cap,
the man quaintly smiling out at us from the past
before we wet a finger and turn the page.

Alex Reads Twilight

2010-06-09T02:52:00.000-07:00

I love this guy. Follow him - and his haircut - as he reads Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. Just really engaging - and the only way I will ever get through this book.

David Means: The Spot

2010-06-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

David Means' fourth collection, The Spot, is new out. There are writers you wait to hear from, and writers you track through periodicals and websites: David Means is one such - and it's not the easiest name to track through Google.

The first story is 'The Knocking', originally printed in The New Yorker, in which a man is plagued by a noisy neighbour and (in brackets) the demise of his own marriage, is a monologue, even a rant - a beautifully cadenced rant that runs from a pathological obsession to near hysteria only to return again and again to resignation and to reverie.

Could more be made of it than a writerly exercise? Yes, it has that feel, but what redeems it, and redeems all Means's work, even the most brutal, is its tenderness, and even as an exercise it shows how match fit the prose is, fascinatingly auditory not only in what it chooses to describe but in its diction and syntax.

Imaginative capacities gather around the knock. A hammer against a nail, sharp and determined, goes on a beat too long, pounding and pounding throughout an entire evening, with metronomic precision. The rounded edge of a sap—lead in leather—is slapped against the floorboards overhead, making a blunt rubbery thud with a leathery overtone. A sharp metallic tap, not too loud and not too soft, comes out from under the casual noise of a summer afternoon—the roar of traffic on Fifth combined with high-heeled taps, taxi horns, and the murmur of voices—with a hauntingly pristine quality, like the tin tip of a walking stick. A sweeping sound stretches from one side of the head to the other, arriving one afternoon . . . Again, many of these knockings come late in the day, when he knows, because he does know, that I’m in my deepest state of reverie, trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions, throwing out, silently, wordlessly, my theorems: Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, begins to form something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the penultimate days in the house by the Hudson), and then is, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss; Mary gone, kids gone).

The prose savours sound even as the narrator savours the pained memories of his failed marriage - just as we all secretly savour the complaints we make against those who disappoint or do us wrong, and how we permit incomprehension and a sense of victimhood to goad us almost into ecstasy.

The story is one long complaint and complaint - which means to express a grievance but also a mourning, an outcry of grief , a yearning for lost love- here becomes a prayer, even a hymn.

To complain means also to groan and creak as a mast - and the narrator is islanded in his Manhatten flat -which makes me think how Melville also haunts this prose. I never want David Means to write a novel - and not one the size of Moby Dick - his commitment to the short story form is admirable and, to this reader, necessary - but something akin to a Billy Budd is within his register and his reach.

But then not enough is said about the future books or stories we imagine might come from a favourite writer. David Thomson is well practiced in expressing how we dream other movies, other combinations of stars in favourite films, how, in reading a novel, we cast and direct a future adaptation. We do it, too, with books we have yet to read and ones we can have no reasonable expectation of reading. You find me, having already read this first story and three others in magazines, staving off reading anymore today, imagining what the other nine might be so I can compare my dream of them with printed reality.

Frank O'Hara/ Anne Carson/Vladimir Mayakovsky

2010-03-07T04:17:00.000-08:00

Because A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island by Frank O’Hara is one of my favourite poems, and because Anne Carson in the LRB has written a response to it.

The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying "Hey! I've been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don't be so rude, you are
only the second poet I've ever chosen
to speak to personally
so why
aren't you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can't hang around
here all day."
"Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal."

"When I woke up Mayakovsky he was
a lot more prompt" the Sun said
petulantly. "Most people are up
already waiting to see if I'm going
to put in an appearance."
I tried
to apologize "I missed you yesterday."
"That's better" he said. "I didn't
know you'd come out." "You may be wondering why I've come so close?"
"Yes" I said beginning to feel hot
and wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me
anyway.
"Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you're okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you're different. Now, I've heard some
say you're crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you're a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You'll
find that some people always will
complain about the atmosphere,
either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don't appear
at all one day they think you're lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don't worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.

And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won't be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes."
"Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!"

"Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's
easier for me to speak to you out
here. I don't have to slide down
between buildings to get your ear.
I know you love Manhattan, but
you ought to look up more often.
And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.
Maybe we'll
speak again in Africa, of which I too
am specially fond. Go back to sleep now
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem
in that brain of yours as my farewell."

"Sun, don't go!" I was awake
at last. "No, go I must, they're calling
me."
"Who are they?"
Rising he said "Some
day you'll know. They're calling to you
too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

And here is Good Dog by Anne Carson

I was waiting for you to get to work
‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’
Frank O’Hara

1 You know the second person in the history of the world
the Sun chose to speak to personally was Frank O’Hara, the
first was Orpheus [me]. You are my Sweetheart said the
Sun. He was sitting on the hood of his truck. Somehow it
was menacing. I hardly knew what to say. I got into the
truck that strange autumn light sharpening all glass and
harm my hands fell off. The Sun got in beside me took my
hands one by one blew into each finger filling it with a
kind of sound. Gave my hands back to me. That was the
beginning of my being interesting

2 I had originally an idea to record the sound of skirts
moving on legs on the runway this blank verse. She was a
model when I first of course no one runs on a runway
but the skirts the legs are like pumas. Desire she said is not
harmful til lips spill it then be careful

3 Tell you a story about the best poem I ever wrote the one I
lost. That page was terrific it slid out of a dream about the
littorals above Europe and me looking down as. As on oh
oceans I had all the answers I was an answer! I was high as
day arising and truth shot out of me like a lark. Years ago.
These are tears I do not use. I lost the page again and again
found it again and again every time I moved finally
captured it in a plastic sleeve put it on top of the TV. A
scrap of paper torn and brownish now some words just
stain. What does it mean the littorals above Europe I never
found out. I look at it fast sometimes Hoping

4 Like any couple we’d sat silent in restaurants staring
opposite ways our pockets stuffed with useless summer
money doesn’t mean we were a pissed palindrome

5 Like any couple don’t whistle I’m not your good dog she’d
say I’d say swimming at this hour you must be mad

6 My fifteen minutes in hell I scarcely remember. I know it
was cold. I saw uncreated things seeping here and there
with roots for ears they hadn’t heard a voice in centuries. I
sang a bit. The very ghosts shed tears (Daily Mirror). Eurydice
limped over. Lawyers arrived reciting conditions. Soon
we were off down the hall me admiring the acoustics
wondering could I get a gig and What’s the phone number
down here I said starting to turn poof shall we say a sad
mischance. All my skin cried back all my wings beat once
and that was that. The story that she said nothing but Who?
is a lie

7 One thing about hell is the echo is fabulous. No sound
studio on earth can give you a transverse magnetisation
leak of less than zero. I stood in the black trees transfixed
and pulsing and her stroking off down the lake so strangely
slow

8 I was. I lost. I sang. I knew. I ever hope for that strange
autumn light again with the good dog again with the
thousands of years. Scrap of [me] off Eurydice torn. Her
number I lost her lark I shot and she a pulse. History never
looks so possible as when leaving a heart spilt among the
stones crying Don’t read it again it was perfect

The illustration for the Anne Carson poem is really a drawing of Anna Ahkmatova but its a nice connection to the poem that begat both the O'Hara and the Carson poem

An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovksy In A Summer Cottage
Vladimir Mayakovsky

A hundred and forty suns in one sunset blazed,
and summer rolled into July;
it was so hot,
the heat swam in a haze—
and this was in the country.
Pushkino, a hillock, had for hump
Akula, a large hill,
and at the hill’s foot
a village stood—
crooked with the crust of roofs.
Beyond the village
gaped a hole
and into that hole, most likely,
the sun sank down each time,
faithfully and slowly.
And next morning,
to flood the world
anew,
the sun would rise all scarlet.
Day after day
this very thing
began
to rouse in me
great anger.
And flying into such a rage one day
that all things paled with fear,
I yelled at the sun point-blank:
“Get down!
Stop crawling into that hellhole!”
At the sun I yelled:
“You shiftless lump!
You’re caressed by the clouds,
while here—winter and summer—
I must sit and draw these posters!”
I yelled at the sun again:
“Wait now!
Listen, goldbrow,
instead of going down,
why not come down to tea
with me!”
What have I done!
I’m finished!
Toward me, of his own good will,
himself,
spreading his beaming steps,
the sun strode across the field.
I tried to hide my fear,
and beat it backwards.
His eyes were in the garden now.
Then he passed through the garden.
His sun’s mass pressing
through the windows,
doors,
and crannies;
in he rolled;
drawing a breath,
he spoke deep bass:
“For the first time since creation,
I drive the fires back.
You called me?
Give me tea, poet,
spread out, spread out the jam!”
Tears gathered in my eyes—
the heat was maddening,
but pointing to the samovar
I said to him:
“Well, sit down then,
luminary!”
The devil had prompted my insolence
to shout at him,
confused—
I sat on the edge of a bench;
I was afraid of worse!
But, from the sun, a strange radiance
streamed,
and forgetting
all formalities,
I sat chatting
with the luminary more freely.
Of this
and that I talked,
and of how I was swallowed up by Rosta,
but the sun, he says:
All right,
don’t worry,
look at things more simply!
And do you think
I find it easy
to shine?
Just try it, if you will!—
You move along,
since move you must;
you move—and shine your eyes out!”
We gossiped thus till dark—
Till former night, I mean.
For what darkness was there here?
We warmed up
to each other
and very soon,
openly displaying friendship,
I slapped him on the back.
The sun responded!
“You and I,
my comrade, are quite a pair!
Let’s go, my poet,
let’s dawn
and sing
in a gray tattered world.
I shall pour forth my sun,
and you—your own,
in verse.”
A wall of shadows,
a jail of nights
fell under the double-barreled suns.
A commotion of verse and light—
shine all your worth!
Drowsy and dull,
one tired,
wanting to stretch out
for the night.
Suddenly—I
shone in all my might,
and morning ran its round.
Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very deeps of the last days,
to shine—
and to hell with everything else!
That is my motto—
and the sun’s!

Ten Rules for Writing

2010-03-07T03:43:00.000-08:00

The Guardian's !0 Rules for Writers is proving very popular and the article as a whole is thought-provoking as to the mechanics of writing and to the psychology of the writer.

It is good to note that there is some awareness that it is a commercial endeavour deeply determined by industrial practices and not simply rules for a mad solipsistic existence in a garret. Far less occasionally is there an attempt to define what future there is in the form itself (the contributors are mainly novelists) or in printed book itself, but that's a great deal to expect of an article that doesn't depart from the notion of a writer as presented by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies essay, The Writer on Holiday, but there is inspiration aplenty here and that was the article's main intention.

Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Diana Athill

1 Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).

2 Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count.

3 You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Roddy Doyle

1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph –

3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.

4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".

7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.

8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.

9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.

10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.

Helen Dunmore

1 Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.

3 Read Keats's letters.

4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

5 Learn poems by heart.

6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.

7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.

9 Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".

Geoff Dyer

1 Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over – or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: "I'm writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job." Publisher: "That's exactly what makes me want to stay in my job."

2 Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

3 Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

4 If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great autocorrect files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes "photography" and so on. Genius!

5 Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.

6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

7 Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

8 Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.

9 Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don't follow it.

10 Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. But writing is all about perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

Anne Enright

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

6 Try to be accurate about stuff.

7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

8 You can also do all that with whiskey.

9 Have fun.

10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Richard Ford

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

2 Don't have children.

3 Don't read your reviews.

4 Don't write reviews. (Your judgment's always tainted.)

5 Don't have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don't drink and write at the same time.

7 Don't write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don't wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.

Jonathan Franzen

1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

3 Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.

4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".

7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.

8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

10 You have to love before you can be relentless.

Esther Freud

1 Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn't use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.

2 A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.

3 Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.

4 Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.

5 Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.

6 Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.

7 Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.

Neil Gaiman

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

David Hare

1 Write only when you have something to say.

2 Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

3 Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

4 If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.

5 Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.

6 Theatre primarily belongs to the young.

7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.

8 Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.

9 Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.

10 The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".

PD James

1 Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

2 Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

3 Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

4 Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

AL Kennedy

1 Have humility. Older/more experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.

2 Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.

3 Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.

4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn't matter that much.

5 Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.

6 Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.

7 Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.

8 Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence.

9 Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

10 Remember writing doesn't love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.

Hilary Mantel

1 Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.

2 Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

3 Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

4 If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

5 Be aware that anything that appears before "Chapter One" may be skipped. Don't put your vital clue there.

6 First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?

7 Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard to instruct the reader.

8 Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.

9 If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.

10 Be ready for anything. Each new story has different demands and may throw up reasons to break these and all other rules. Except number one: you can't give your soul to literature if you're thinking about income tax.

Michael Moorcock

1 My first rule was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.

2 Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.

3 Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.

4 If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.

5 Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.

6 Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.

7 For a good melodrama study the famous "Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.

8 If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.

9 Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).

10 Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.

Michael Morpurgo

1 The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.

2 Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.

3 A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

4 It is the gestation time which counts.

5 Once the skeleton of the story is ready I begin talking about it, mostly to Clare, my wife, sounding her out.

6 By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.

7 Once a chapter is scribbled down rough – I write very small so I don't have to turn the page and face the next empty one – Clare puts it on the word processor, prints it out, sometimes with her own comments added.

8 When I'm deep inside a story, living it as I write, I honestly don't know what will happen. I try not to dictate it, not to play God.

9 Once the book is finished in its first draft, I read it out loud to myself. How it sounds is hugely important.

10 With all editing, no matter how sensitive – and I've been very lucky here – I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.

Andrew Motion

1 Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.

2 Think with your senses as well as your brain.

3 Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.

4 Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.

5 Remember there is no such thing as nonsense.

6 Bear in mind Wilde's dictum that "only mediocrities develop" – and challenge it.

7 Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.

8 Think big and stay particular.

9 Write for tomorrow, not for today.

10 Work hard.

Joyce Carol Oates

1 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.

2 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – except for yourself perhaps, sometime in the future.

3 Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

4 Unless you are writing something very avant-garde – all gnarled, snarled and "obscure" – be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

5 Unless you are writing something very post-modernist – self-conscious, self-reflexive and "provocative" – be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic "big" words.

6 Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

7 Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Annie Proulx

1 Proceed slowly and take care.

2 To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.

3 Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.

4 Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

5 Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.

Philip Pullman

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.

Ian Rankin

1 Read lots.

2 Write lots.

3 Learn to be self-critical.

4 Learn what criticism to accept.

5 Be persistent.

6 Have a story worth telling.

7 Don't give up.

8 Know the market.

9 Get lucky.

10 Stay lucky.

Will Self

1 Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . .

2 The edit.

3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

4 Stop reading fiction – it's all lies anyway, and it doesn't have anything to tell you that you don't know already (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).

5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

6 Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

7 By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ."

8 The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply.

9 Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.

10 Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Helen Simpson

The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it."

Zadie Smith

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don't confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

Colm Tóibín

1 Finish everything you start.

2 Get on with it.

3 Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.

4 Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

5 No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.

6 Work in the morning, a short break for lunch, work in the afternoon and then watch the six o'clock news and then go back to work until bed-time. Before bed, listen to Schubert, preferably some songs.

7 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.

8 On Saturdays, you can watch an old Bergman film, preferably Persona or Autumn Sonata.

9 No going to London.

10 No going anywhere else either.

Rose Tremain

1 Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

2 Nevertheless, remember that in the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. So don't throw it all away on autobiography. (There are quite enough writers' memoirs out there already.)

3 Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

4 Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

5 When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

6 In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

7 Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

8 If you're writing historical fiction, don't have well-known real characters as your main protagonists. This will only create biographical unease in the readers and send them back to the history books. If you must write about real people, then do something post-modern and playful with them.

9 Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

10 Never begin the book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.

Sarah Waters

1 Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me on to . . .

2 Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . .

3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

4 Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.

5 Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. At the same time . . .

6 Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualised, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed. On a similar theme . . .

7 Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some of the work of Colm Tóibín or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch.

8 Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

9 Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

10 Talent trumps all. If you're a really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.

Jeanette Winterson

1 Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

2 Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.

3 Love what you do.

4 Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are doing is no good, accept it.

5 Don't hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.

6 Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.

7 Take no notice of anyone with a gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.

8 Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

9 Trust your creativity.

10 Enjoy this work!

Shelley Jackson: The Writer Whose Medium Is Reality

2010-03-01T02:06:00.001-08:00

This article on Shelley Jackson is worth reading if it does nothing else than introduce you to her work and world.

Shelley Jackson: The Writer Whose Medium Is Reality

And from her website Ineradicable Stain, this is an excerpt from the opening of Sleep, one of the best stories I have read in recent years. Set in a world where sleep falls like snow, I can no longer think of snow without thinking of Jackson and what she makes of it here might invade your dreams.

Sleep

Sleep is falling. The crumbs run in drifts down the street, collect in the gutters.

Sleep falls every day at noon here, with soothing regularity. Sometimes it melts on the way down, and falls as golden rain, or in cold weather, golden sleet, but mostly our siesta is warm and dry. The occasional sleepstorm is cozy and harmless: a war waged with croutons and dinner rolls. Once, years ago, when the children were young, we woke to find we were slept in: I opened the front door and the living room filled with gold. We had a sleepball fight around the sofa, which my wife won—she was always fierce in defense of her own. The drifts blew away by evening, but our house was gilded until the next rain, and the shrubs were like torches!

Where we live, the skies are heavy with sleep. Sometimes high-flying jets come down encrusted with it, like bees dusted with pollen. Fielded by Midas and thrown home, how beautiful these shining apparitions are. They roll unsteadily to a stop, transformed into fairy-tale coaches. A crack opens, a patch of golden coral swings aside, stairs descend, and then the baffled pilot emerges like a new Aphrodite from a peculiar Edenic shell.

Permanent banks and shoals of sleep drowse above us. They can be thick enough, it is whispered, to slow a plane to a standstill and hold it fast above the earth. Some planes disappear and are never found. Some fall to earth, but no human remains are discovered in the wreckage. Many years ago, a pilot landed a plane alone, and insisted forever after that everyone else got out above, forced open the emergency exits in mid-flight and stepped out into a landscape of gilt towers and archways.

Sleep sometimes coagulates in the shapes of animals: bruin and bunny are the most common, though I have seen sheep and cows as well. These form naturally, like snowflakes. Under favorable conditions these sleep-sheep "stalk the earth," the colloquial term for wafting or "mere wafting," as O'Sullivan pointedly calls it, eschewing what he calls the "credulous jargon of simpletons and charlatans." He is practically alone in his refusal to see familiar forms in sleep, of course. Animalcules take shape in every substance known to us; it is a tendency written into the very structure of matter, a statistically significant swerve towards animaloid structures, especially cute ones. The universe, we now know, is far from that chill mechanical model so unaccountably adored by physicists past. The world that gave rise to feathers, pill-bugs, cookies and whales is silly, showy, comfy. Above all, it is kind.

O'Sullivan and his humorless cronies are just the latest incarnation of our abstemious church fathers, who held it a sin to sink into the friendly pillowing of sleep, in which every living thing delights. Sleep, they taught, is the dross of souls rejected by God, who chews us up en masse, strains the juices through his baleen, and spits out the crud. "The damned will stay in hell as broth and yeast," says Luther. Sleep is that broth, that yeast.

Of course, sleep is literally both broth (add water) and yeast: a few grains of it scattered over warm, honey fattened water will bewitch bread into a fantasia of dough turrets, minarets, grottos, candelabras and credenzas, now sadly out of culinary fashion, but still traditional at Sleepmastide. Its flavor is unremarkable, though children love it, but I find it has a mild intoxicating effect, albeit short-lived. The taste is reminiscent of cardamom, with an incongruous hint of spearmint. A few grains on the tongue will calm a fretful baby; cooked up and injected, its effects are stronger but still mellow, hence its reputation as a drug for hippies and beginners, though it is probably more frequently taken by users of all descriptions than this reputation would suggest.

Exotic varieties of sleep, named for the region in which they're gathered, are popularly believed to have special qualities, though scientists say there is no significant difference between these and our domestic sleep. My private investigations (the wayward probings of a curious mind) have brought me to the same conclusion. These rare strains of sleep are some countries' biggest cash crop, so their governments turn a blind eye to the traffic, and are not very hospitable to foreign scientists who want to test on site the exaggerated claims that circulate about the properties of the sleep when fresh.

There are gnostic teachings of another sleep, the opposite in every respect of our sunny everyday sleep. One reads of a dark, greasy, subterranean sleep, which seeps out of solid rock and hardens into strange fungal forms, and plugs underground rivers with a glassy but flexible mass that can be reliquified by one blow of a pickaxe. Miners have staggered out of shafts and told tales of slow-motion tsunamis of sour treacle. Do not sample this sleep, they say; it will spoil your appetite for every other thing. Nevertheless, I cannot help wishing that someday I will be given a chance to taste it. I love sleep, I confess, and as I watch the grains fall slowly outside the window, I think how lucky we are. Into our difficult lives this surplus falls. This gift.

I have not mentioned the greatest consolation sleep grants us. At the proper time and with the proper ceremonies, you may make yourself a substitute out of sleep. How to do it must be writ in our genes. I watched my children miming it in sandboxes; like birds building nests, they needed no tutors. You may fail at every other endeavor, but you will not fail at this one. Even the clumsiest become deft and knowing as they pat and roll the golden column, persuading it into human form.

This substitute or scapegoat is legally empowered to act as a person in your stead. Your substitute can vote for you, take a test or a beating, deliver a public speech, perform the marital duties, or commit suicide for you. Politicians are all substitutes, as are firemen, astronauts, and most people forced to make public apologies, but substitutes are often made for sadder, more personal reasons. I have watched friends grow ever more restless and unhappy, until one day the complaining stops, and I know they have gone to start a new life and left this diplomat behind. We say they are "dreaming." I am happy for them in their bright new world.

My children are already dreaming. So young! At their age I kept telling myself, a better time will come. I can endure this moment. And when the next moment came, I found I could endure that one too, and so on, to this day. But I don't think less of them for making their escape. We are all waiting for our chance. Out of care and duty leaps the shocking blossom of the new: vibrant, imperious, reeking of pollen. It is a subpoena, a lure, a gauntlet. If we are honest and brave we have little choice: we kick over our happy home and go. We step out of the airplane onto a golden cloud.

It is a terrible thing when it is the substitute that is sent to find a new life, a sign that a person yearns for change but cannot imagine creating it herself. The irony is that her failure of imagination marks her proxy too. When you see someone creeping through life, as if everything in the world were new, yes, but in its newness an assault, she is sure to be one of these.

An action is in the works to protect the rights of substitutes. It is bound to fail, because the substitutes themselves show no interest in it; the meetings of the Substitute's Union are all attended by solicitous originals who—in an odd reversal—are empowered to vote for their substitutes! These good-hearted citizens betray a basic confusion about the existential condition of the substitutes. If scapegoats feel pain, it is only the delegated pain of their originals.

Use your substitute well: you will not get another. If you use it too early—to feign a teen suicide, maybe, or escape the school bully—you must live out your own life from then on, and that is a hard, lonely prospect. People who use their substitutes frivolously find that they have given all their frivolity away, and are compelled to be serious characters from then on, while their substitute dutifully practises dissolution.

Eventually, of course, the substitute has suffered enough knocks that it no longer looks quite human. Dents alter the form little by little; scratches expose the waxy interior.

It is the originals' responsibility to lay their substitutes to rest when this time comes, but not surprisingly, they often fail to take this in hand. (Those battered pawns we've all seen staggering around are a civic disgrace.) When the original is ill or badly hurt, on the other hand, the substitute's pupils turn white, while if the original should die, the substitute falls in its tracks and turns to sleep again, sifting out of the sleeves and collar. This can be a brutal shock to family members who did not know their loved one was a substitute.

If an enterprising person is standing by, this sleep can be patted together again; it is the only time a person can make a second substitute. These secondary substitutes, lit as it were on the embers of the one before, have certain specific defects that do not vary: they cannot enunciate the consonants d or t, they cannot create nested sentence structures, they are color-blind, and they have recurring nightmares of spiral forms and infinitely mounting abstract quantities.

No substitutes can have children, in the usual run of things, although they make kind, responsible parents. A substitute wife can become "pregnant" and in due course deliver a waxy figurine, but this baby will not move or cry, since it has no original and is not a true substitute.

There is a mystical tradition that if two substitutes fall in love (true love must be specified, for many marriages are made up of a pair of substitutes, in fact nothing is more common), their child has a fifty-fifty chance of being an original. If such a child is born, and reality thus springs from the loins of artifice, then all people will fall to their knees before it. It will be the living god, and this can be proved by conjuring it to make a substitute for itself. The sleep will fall apart in the child's hands: the real Original can have no substitutes.

Last night I lay awake, and in one of the thousand insomniac hours before dawn I switched on a lamp. A fine scar on my wife's eyelid caught the light and gleamed like a gold thread. I turned back the sheets, I examined her entire body, and I found incontrovertible proof. My wife is a substitute. As I got out of bed, she mumbled something and reached for me. I touched her hand and saw her smile into the pillow.

I am not shocked. Is that dreadful? She could not endure the demands of our love and she left. I understand this as I have understood other surprises she has given me in the past. I feel lonely, and yet in a curious sense there is something right about this. I have spent my life in adoration of sleep. I may have loved it better—more carefully, more knowledgeably—than I've loved the people in my life. Its beauty, its mystery. The evidence it bears of a universe capable of mercy. Now when I say, I love sleep, I can also say, I love nothing else. Everything I love is made of it.

The sleep is falling steadily. I could go out and gather it. I could pat it together. My hands would know what to do. I used to be a pilot, did I mention that? I would like to make one more flight. This time I would not let my chance go by.

I could leave my life. I could change completely. Is it time?

Somerset Maugham and Gauguin's Child of God

2010-02-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

A recent BBC programme, The Private life of a Christmas Masterpiece considered Gauguin’s Te Tamari No Atua (God's Child), a re-imagining of the familiar nativity scene, the Madonna lying exhausted on a bed, blunt- featured, dark-skinned and stocky, easily recognisable as Gauguin's 14-year-old pregnant mistress.

The programme mentioned how Somerset Maugham, researching the novel that became The Moon and the Sixpence.

The visit is recorded in A Writer’s Notebook (p117-118), and in a 1950’s interview, later published in Apollo.

Maugham said: 'There was such an informal and merry atmosphere about the Tiare Hotel, that we could easily overlook some of the primitive features of bedchamber and plumbing, to say nothing of huge flying cockroaches, the pariah dogs and cats who fornicated all night long on the metal roof or in the free space under the dwelling.'

The prime attraction of this hotel was its proprietress, the fat rollicking Louvaina Chapman, of Tahitian, French and Scandinavian blood, who had befriended Gauguin on numerous occasions. Her mouldy ledger still contained, stuffed between its ink-smudged pages, many of his unpaid bar-chits.
'No mattah! No mattah!' Louvaina told Maugham ... 'If he no hab monnee, dat hokay. I like talk wit' him, 'cause he hab many new t'ings tell me. Vahines (girls) let him paint dem noho (naked), an' dey tell me he vairee goo' lover. Too bad he hab badluck here in Tahiti ...'

As Maugham remarked: '... When I arrived in Tahiti in 1917, Gauguin had been dead for less than fourteen years, so there were many people still living in Tahiti and the Marquesas who remembered him very well. My research was able to progress remarkably, indeed, thanks largely to Louvaina.

Dear loveable fat lady! She was so huge, draped loosely in a pink Mother Hubbard dress. She was always singing or laughing, her triple chins forever shaking jelly-like. So kind and generous, a heart larger than herself. She told me many previously unknown things about Gauguin's life in Tahiti. I felt Louvaina was too outstanding and colourful not to include her in my novel on Gauguin. She became Tiare Johnson in my The Moon and Sixpence, and her lively rundown boarding-house Hotel de la Fleur. Louvaina died just few months after I left Tahiti, in the calamitous 1918 influenza scourge. I mourned her passing.'

Louvaina had introduced Maugham to the chieftainess in a village on the south coast of Tahiti, from whom he learned of a Gauguin painting on the glass panes of a native's hut in the district of Mataiea ...

'I found the wooden frame dwelling, hidden in thick foliage on the southern coast of the island. When I saw the painting, strangely executed on the upper glass panes of a door, I was spellbound. An original Gauguin! How it had escaped not being carried away by a collector, I could not understand. However, it was a good thing I came along when I did and bought it. There had been other doors in the front of the hut painted by Gauguin, but the children of the Anani family had scraped them mostly away with their fingernails. Had I left the remaining painting where it was, it would have been shortly destroyed, also. I gave the native man two hundred francs and he was very happy with the transaction.'

Gauguin had given it to the farmer in 1892 after the farmer had looked after him when he was sick from syphilis. The painted glass took pride of place in the writing room at Villa Mauresque, Maugham’s glamorous home for most of his life.

But The Private life of a Christmas Masterpiece also suggested that Gauguin did not understand the title he gave to his most famous painting. Te Tamari no Atua, always translated as God’s Child, is actually a plural. The mistake is attributed to Gauguin’s less than precise Tahitian, but if – as it is – the painting is a radical re-imagination of the Nativity, then it may not just be that haloed child that belongs to God, but the child-mistress-Madonna, the women tending the infant, and – why not - even the cattle in the background and that white cat nestling at the Madonna’s feet, and with that plural the suggestion that God does not discriminate, purchase or value us at differing rates.