Toby Litt's Blog, page 15

A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols: Book Review

A Voyage For Madmen by Peter Nichols

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a good follow up to Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way, but Peter Nichols is too head-screwed-on to get into the solo mindspace Moitessier reaches.

What Peter Nichols is best at is giving a balanced view of the nine different men who started the Golden Globe Race around the world. He’s as sympathetic to the robust Robin Knox-Johnston as to the frayed Nigel Tetley. Donald Crowhurst’s pathetic voyage is covered with tact.

Recommended, but read Moitessier if you’re only going to read one sailing round the world book.

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So Long, Whale Bum

This – a new story about the band called okay – has just gone online in The Manchester Review.

 To give you some idea how seriously I took it, that’s what I called my first solo album.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self – Some Ideas about the ‘I’ in Non-Fiction

 

KOMITAS

 

Here is some non-fiction – a biography.

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Komitas, birth name Soghomon Soghomonian, was born in 1869, in a part of the Ottoman Empire that now belongs to Turkey. He was an orphan, physically weak, but a wonderful singer. Brought as a twelve year-old boy to Etchmiadzin,

[image error] the Armenian Orthodox Church equivalent of the Vatican, Soghoman stood on a brightly coloured carpet and sang for the Catolicos, the Armenian Pope – he sang for his life. If he was successful, he would be taken in by the church, would be fed, would have a future of black clothes and chanted prayers.

The Catolicos liked what he heard, and Komitas did become a priest. He spent years recomposing the Orthodox Mass, and collecting and transcribing Armenian folk songs – like an Armenian Cecil Sharp, or Bela Bartok. Then he moved to Constantinople, intending to bring the music of his people to a wider audience. When the genocide began on April 24th 1915, Komitas was rounded up, with other Armenians, and would have died with them if influential friends had not intervened with the Turkish authorities.

He saw dozens of people he knew taken away, and knew they would die. Komitas survived. He lived from 1919 until 1935 in a French sanatorium, not composing. He had been destroyed, as a man.

After Komitas died, he was buried in Armenia’s Pantheon, near the capital city of Yerevan. Although not well known outside Armenia, Komitas is – for most Armenians – nearly a saint.

Here’s some non-fiction – this time autobiographical.

In May 2009, I was lucky enough to get to go to Armenia – to make a half hour documentary about Komitas for Radio 3, my first presenting job on the radio. It was one of the best experiences of my life – one for which I will never cease being grateful, because it was so unexpected.

I had first come across Komitas’s music on a previous visit to Yerevan. I went into a music shop on one of the main roads and asked them to play me the oldest recorded music they had. After a couple of false starts, with stuff from the 1980s, they played me a recording from the 1910s of Komitas singing his own songs.

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I had never heard anything so powerful, so mournful – not Robert Johnson’s blues, not Maria Callas ‘Casta Diva’, not Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’. When I got back to England, I played the CD to anyone who would listen. I wanted more people to hear it – to be moved by it. The title of the documentary I ended up making was ‘The Saddest Music in the World’.

Accompanied, guided and nudged toward professionalism by the producer Zahid Warley.

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I spent ten days travelling around the country, interviewing people about Komitas and what his music meant to them and to Armenians in the diaspora. We were lucky enough to have a brilliant fixer called Tigran Xmalian,

[image error] who arranged interviews and gave us history lessons and played Led Zeppelin loud as he drove without a seat-belt. We went went to monasteries and chapels, we climbed down into a prehistorical burial cave, we drove up a mountain and drank homemade vodka. And more homemade vodka. Then climbed to the summit.

Toward the end of our time there, Zahid Warley and I were driven out to the Armenian Pantheon, to visit the grave of Komitas.

In the taxi, we discussed the script. What should I say? What should my tone be? It was obviously going to be something we put in at the end of the documentrary. I wanted to say something intelligent but profound, something to sum up the tragedy of the Armenian people.

‘If you’re going to cry,’ said Zahid, as we got out of the car, ‘make sure I get it on mic.’

From twenty paces off, I saw the grave, a small-ish monument with a life-size sculpture of Komitas, and – seeing it – I hit an emotional wall. At that point, I walked away from Zahid. I didn’t let him record me. I did cry, I cried quite a bit, and all I could think to say – to myself – was, ‘Such a sad life. Such a sad life.’

Afterwards, I realized that was all I’d needed to say –

‘Such a sad life.’

Zahid was very good about it, but, as a radio presenter, I’d failed. I hadn’t cried into the microphone. When I’d recovered, we took a photo.

Today I’m going to be talking about using the ‘I’ in non-fictional writing, particularly in autobiography and memoir. I’m going to be talking about tone – trying to help you get the tone of your non-fiction right. As an example of this, I’ve chosen Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, which I hope you’ve had the chance to read. And in all of this, I would like you to think about that microphone – the documentary microphone – and whether or not, if you were there, if you started crying, you’d cry into it or not.

I’d like you to think about this, because that’s one of the main questions of non-fiction – how exactly you cry, or don’t cry.

FLUSFEDER

About a year ago, I spotted the writer David Flusfeder in the British Library, and he spotted me. We knew one another well enough for a chat. I asked him what he was working on. He said he was getting towards the end of a non-fiction book, although I knew he usually wrote novels. I said I was getting towards the end of a non-fiction book, too.

‘They’re really difficult,’ I said. ‘Aren’t they?’

David Flusfeder looked at me straight on and said, ‘Tone.’

I said it back to him, ‘Yes, tone.’

We made humming noises of agreement – mmm, mmm. It was one of the most satisfying conversations I’ve ever had.

You see, neither of us needed to say any more; we both knew what we meant, and we both knew what the other meant, and we both knew what ‘Tone’ meant and why it was so monstrously difficult. And we were both, I think, finding tone in non-fiction difficult not only because we usually wrote fiction but because tone in non-fiction is – in a way – the whole of non-fiction. Get the tone right – right for a certain group of readers – as, I’d say, Geoff Dyer does, and Maggie O’Farrell, Maggie Nelson, Bill Bryson – get the tone right, and the subject becomes almost secondary. The writing continues in the tone required because that tone requires more writing to fulfil itself.

Both David Flusfeder and I were admitting the thing that was killing us – Tone. I don’t know about him. Tone is what I think about what I think about the non-fiction book I’ve written, and which comes out today, Wrestliana.

(In her very worthwhile book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes about tone, but she calls it voice. This may be a better way of referring to it, but I’m going to stick with tone. While writing my non-fiction book, I felt I had an idea of my voice, of the things it could say, but what I wasn’t sure about was how exactly to phrase this or that. I wasn’t sure what tone to use.)

Although there are copies of it on sale, and this isn’t necessarily going to sell them, I’m now going to admit two big things about Wrestliana. First, it was a hard book to write, the hardest I’ve ever written, because it was – as you’d say – the one that took most out of me; and second, I had to struggle with tone in every paragraph. Not to get it absolutely right but to keep it from being absolutely wrong. My editors, Sam Jordison and Eloise Miller of Galley Beggar, did a lot of work keeping me there. They were the documentary microphone, held out in front of me.

Having finished the book, I feel more an apprentice at non-fiction than a master of it. My defeats are fresh ones. So today I’d like to talk out of that apprenticeship, rather than try to say anything that pretends to be vastly authoritative and wise. Because nowadays – I think – defeat, and the vulnerability of admitting defeat is perhaps necessary to the tone of non-fiction.

At this point, I’m not sure what to say.

UNCERTAINTY

I’m not sure what to say – let’s centre things there. Let me fix on that. As a start point. As a tone. Hesitant, self-questioning. For various reasons.

One is a general, historical reason. Because uncertainty is part of the tone of contemporary non-fiction. It wasn’t always the tone, but more and more it has become so. A tone of righteousness used to be acceptable, in the 19th century, yes – even a tone of self-righteousness. Look at Carlyle, Ruskin. You can still find writers who adopt that tone. V.S. Naipaul, for example. But it’s very hard to pull off – it takes a certain kind of imperial confidence. Since the 19th century, non-fiction has come under other influences. Slyer and more sceptical. Compare Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Look at Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That or Father and Son by Edmund Gosse. These books enacted the death of – the vanquishing 0f – a Victorian tone of righteousness, of moral certainty, of aboveness.

A second reason for starting with not being sure what to say is that a couple of years ago I published a book called Mutants, and in it I included some of these Birkbeck summer lectures I’ve given. The book wasn’t widely reviewed; the main review suggested that the collection’s greatest weakness was an offputting tone of certainty. The reviewer held to the idea of an essay being an account of a voyage into the unknown, undertaken uncertainly, rather than the mapping of already explored territory. Essays are wild rather than tame. The self is wild.

‘I don’t know what to say’ because I am admitting my doubt, my bewilderment – a word with wild in the middle.

Contemporary readers, I would say, prefer to read about bewilderment than certainty. Think about that, with regard to tone. Your tone.

Partly, with Mutants, there was an issue about lectures being published as essays. The tone of a lecture is more likely to be one of certainty: I am up here speaking, and unless I have something worth sharing, from up here, there’s not going to be much point in you listening.

A lecture may retrace steps of uncertainty, lostness, but does so from the safety of the public platform. There is, at the very least, the perspective of retrospect, of the self looking back at the self (this is going to become central to the discussion of tone, and of what an ‘I’ book is). Lectures aren’t given from floor level. They’re not spoken by someone so lost they are lying on the ground, weeping. Lectures may be about lying on the ground, weeping, but lecturers don’t lie on the ground and weep. I’m not going to do that today. An essayist may be lying on the ground, weeping, when they have the idea of the essay or even, possibly, when they are making notes for the essay.

What, in this, is useful for you? Well, writing about the self, about yourselves, you’re each of you – if you take my suggestion – going to adopt a tone that is closer to the essay than the lecture. It’s better to sound less like a confident world-expert on yourself (which of course, if nothing else, you are) than a bewildered observer or oppressed victim of yourself (which you may very well be).

This lecture, although it’s started by being quite a lot about me, is mostly going to be about you writing about yourselves, and about what tone to use in doing that. But I’m going to do that by speaking about my own experiences and bewilderments.

SELFISH

In 2014, I began writing autobiographically. Today, May 1st 2018, is publication day for the book that resulted – Wrestliana. It has changed a lot since the beginning, particularly in tone – and when you hear the beginning, you’ll be glad (I think).

The beginning was in a black notebook with these words on the cover: “SELFISH” – Autobiographical Notes. My tone was aggressively self-defensive:

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30th September 2014. Fuck modesty; this is about me – if you’re not interested in me, then what are you fucking doing fucking reading this? If you don’t think I’m worthy of my own attention, you are in a far larger group than those who think I am. Join them. Take the piss. Enjoy the rest of your life without the interruption or insult of this book. For those who have stayed, I intend to be remorselessly open. Not Oprah sofa. But metaphysically laid bare. This is about one male from Bedfordshire’s inevitable failure to exist in a satisfactory manner.

(In a way, I regret I didn’t pursue this voice for longer. It’s embarrassing. It’s crude. It would have been unpublishable, but it might have led somewhere interesting.)

There are books that adopt this tone – the why should I put up with all these stupid readers tone. V.S.Naipaul is famous for it. The patrician tone. Alan Clarke’s Diaries. Readers love writers who absolutely don’t give a fuck. But if you give even 0.5% of a fuck, that means you are nowhere near absolutely not giving a fuck. You care what the reader thinks. You hope for a reader. Your tone is already curving in their direction.

Your tone is likely to oscillate between ‘Fuck off’ and ‘Love me, because I don’t really care about whether or not I’m loved’ and ‘Love me, because I’m doing my best to change, to be more loveable’ and ‘Love me, I’m so needy.’ This wobbling tone can kill a book. If you’re going to be an arrogant bastard, be an arrogant bastard.

But don’t you need to be an arrogant bastard to write a whole book in the first person anyway? I think that’s what I was trying to deal with, in beginning like this.

One of the things you need to think about, in regards to tone, is the bookness of what you’re aiming towards. You need to factor in the fact that if you complete a book that a book is what it’ll be read as – not your diary, not as an email to a friend, but as a proper complete respectable between-hard-covers book.

In pitching your tone, you need to beware of self-hatred, of getting your hate in first, on the assumption that the reader’s going to hate you.

I think it’s probably safer to assume (tone-wise) that the reader is going to start off if not loving or liking you then giving you the benefit of the doubt, for a while. Better an assumption of readerly well-disposedness (they’re interested in me) than addressing, than hectoring imagined possible readers who – in truth – are never going to be your readers. Because they’re not readers at all. They’re the people out there who you feel the need to address, to shout at on the page, so as to justify the fact you’re writing about yourself at all. The general public. Or your sarcastic uncle. Or taxi drivers.

‘I’m writing an autobiography…’

‘Oh, really?’

As you just were forced to hear, when I started to write the book that became Wrestliana, I did a lot of this hectoring of non-readers. I didn’t write defensively. I wrote offensively.

But there’s no point writing for the haters. It’ll distort your tone from the first word. That’s what it was doing with me. And some of this tone made it into the first draft, and the second draft.

Let’s say you’re writing a non-fiction book, and you’re writing it in the first person. You can assume, at the very least, that your reader likes non-fiction books in the first person. They don’t hate you on sight. But you are a writer. You are the writer of a book.

For most people, this makes you weird. And enviable. And pitiable.

MEMOIRS

Non-fiction writing sends two messages to the reader. The first is this: ‘I did this’. The second is: ‘You didn’t do this.’

For example, my opening story about the making a radio documentary in Armenia. I did this and you didn’t do this.

I need to expand this, a lot.

The first message to the reader is not only, ‘I did this – had this experience’ but also ‘I did this – I had the time to do this’ and beneath that message, ‘I did this – I had the time to have this experience and then I found the time to write about it, because you’re reading about it now.’

The second message to the reader is not only : ‘You didn’t do this – you didn’t have this experience’ it is also ‘You didn’t do this – you don’t have time to do things like this – you only have time to read about someone else (in this case, me) doing this.’ And finally, ‘You didn’t do this – and you didn’t write about this either, you had someone else (in this case, me) write it for you.’

Let me go back to the first statement. ‘I did this – I had the time to have this experience and then I found the time to write about it.’

This is almost inevitably going to create a feeling of envy in the reader, time-envy.

(People are especially time-envious of writers because they believe writers have lots and lots of time – time in which to write books, which take a lot of time, of which there is never enough.)

To have time to write all the words in a book, the writer is obviously some kind of life-avoider – a truant from the business of living; and they will only be tolerated if they make of this theft (this theft of time) a gift: a good book.

Time-envy is, in a sense, the core of non-fiction – and perhaps of all books, these days. When I step into a bookshop, my first reaction is often panic, a time-vertigo. Oh my God, I don’t have time, in the rest of my life, to read even half of the books I can see at this moment. Bookshops make me feel extremely finite.

But the management that time-envy – that I don’t have time to – is the point of lots of kinds of non-fiction books. Cookery books, for example, never show the food that has gone wrong, because it has been rushed. They show perfect, perfected versions of the dishes. The celebrity chefs seem to have an infinity of time to create their masterpieces. When cookery books are bought, or given as presents, it’s highly likely that the reader will spend a small rushed amount of time, looking at the pictures and wishing they had a kitchen like that, than a large leisurely amount of time cooking the recipes through, one by one. Same goes for gardening books, DIY books, self-help books. And the reader is almost certainly to think, even if they do do the gardening or the breathing exercise, ‘Oh, I wish I had time to do this as well as the writer of this book – I wish I was living their life.’

That’s time-envy – and the strange thing is, readers seem to enjoy it. They love vicarous experiences. Just as novels are vicarious life; cookery books are vicarious cooking.

In writing non-fiction, your tone needs – without necessarily ever mentioning or acknowledging this – to manage the reader’s time-envy. If you come across as too smug or privileged, as if you take your time for granted, you will lose the reader.

Hence the sentence I included in my Armenia story:

In May 2009, I was lucky enough to get to go to Armenia – to make a half hour documentary about Komitas for Radio 3, my first presenting job on the radio. It was one of the best experiences of my life – one for which I will never cease being grateful, because it was so unexpected.

There is a flip side to time-envy. There is an opposite to cookery/DIY/self-help books. These are non-fiction books that take as they subjects unenviable experiences. The extreme of this are so-called ‘tragic life stories’ or ‘misery memoirs’ – Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It – white covered books with black images of pitiful faces, fonts that look a little like handwriting. They are non-aspirational, because they don’t offer a recipe for better food/plumbing/posture in the future; they offer a catalogue of worse everything in the past. The opposite of time-envy – managed by these books – is time-pity.

Depending upon what kind of life-experience you are covering in your non-fiction, in your piece of I-writing, the reader’s reaction to the message ‘I did this’ could be time-envy or time-pity or a mixture of both or both at different stages of the book.

If the reader is likely to be extremely time-envious, if you are telling them of an immensely good, fulfiling experience – then your tone, if you are sensible, needs to send this accompanying message: ‘I – the privileged writer, who acknowledge my own privilege – was lucky enough to do this, and lucky enough to have the time and money and opportunity to do this’.

If the reader is likely to be time-pitying, the accompanying message is: ‘I – the suppressed victim – was unlucky enough to spend a large part of my life having to go through this, and unlucky enough not to have the time and money and opportunity to escape’.

The origins of these two genres of memoir, time-envy and time-pity, are, I think, likely to be in two different kinds of religious texts – the autobiography of ecstatic union with god (such as Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love) and the biography of terrible martyrdom (Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs).

Time-envy, in this case, comes down to What a blessed life I’ve lived, and now I’m going to heaven. Time-pity, by contrast, is What a terrible death they died, and now they’re going to heaven.

As cookery books are vicarious cooking, misery memoirs are vicarious misery.

The epitome of the time-envy book is A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle, and of the time-pity book, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt.

Years ago, a music book came out.

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It was called We rock, so you don’t have to. This so you don’t have to is the time-relation of non-fiction, the relation between writer and reader rather than band and fans. So it’s ‘I’, not we. I do this, and write about it afterwards, so you don’t have to.

It’s a good game to play, coming up with versions of this for different non-fiction books.

I fall off a mountain, so you don’t have to.

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I travel around Ireland with a fridge, so you don’t have to.

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I have a nervous breakdown then train a goshawk, so you don’t have to.

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I wrestle with being a man, so you don’t have to.

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This is where non-fiction starts – I am me, so you don’t have to be.

By reading, readers save time. I think readers love vicarious living because they get a different kind of time rush to that I experience in bookshops – not time-vertigo but time-intoxication, a head-rush. They get to gain experience on fast-forward. Because what non-fiction, all non-fiction, offers readers is a distillation of time and experience.

I did all this, over all these years, so you can read about it in half a day.

Just as brewers distil alcohol, so writers distil time – and for the same end: to get people’s heads spinning.

THE OUTRUN

The second half of this lecture is going to be about Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun.

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It isn’t a perfect book. I haven’t chosen it because it’s a classic, though it has made a good start and may last quite a while. The Outrun started as a series of blogs for the website Caught By the River, and it retains some of that offhand freshness but it’s also a little scrappy, particularly towards the middle. It’s a bit of a grab-bag at times. But there’s an aesthetic reason for this. The book is dealing with a life – Amy Liptrot’s life – that is anything but neat, and anything but finished.

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I am interested in The Outrun because it steers an extremely fine course between time-envy and time-pity. Generally, the time-envy is the time Amy Liptrot spends in the Orkneys. The further north she goes, the more enviable she becomes. And generally the time-pity is London-time, drunk-time. This isn’t always the case, but when Amy Liptrot describes herself as happy in London the reader knows this is a fleeting, hedonistic happiness that is going to come at a cost:

The trips to the off-licence grew more frequent, the shrieks louder, and the poppers were passed around. Someone, it might have been me, dropped the bottle and the contents spilled onto the rainbow blanket. We all dashed to the wet spot, heads down, gasping in the fabric, snorting and squealing, like pigs at the trough, breasts down, ankles up. It was stupid and pitiable and fun, as I breathed in the solvent, rolled onto my back and looked at the sky. As the horizon tipped I was covered with warm light and flying with my friends, limbs and sun cream and honey and ants, all sticky and sweet, and the sun was blinding me, and I had never been so high. (pg 26-27)

At the points where the reader is feeing the greatest time-pity, Amy Liptrot is not afraid to seize hold of the microphone and cry into it – cry unashamedly:

In another new house, a flat in an ex-council block in Tower Hamlets, my flatmates began to understand that I was drinking alone in my room, then coming out in wildly different moods, and confronted me about it. I got a by-now-familiar ‘We need to talk’ email, followed by the sickening drop in my stomach. I’d let people down before and couldn’t bear to fuck up again. Broke and borrowing money to buy booze or convincing the local shopkeeper to give me some cans on tick. I avoided bumping into my flatmates and neighbours in the street because I knew they could hear my crying at night. (pg 58)

And yet, Amy Liptrot is also aware that the reader might judge her – that her experience of life might fall short of what the reader deemed worthy of pity. And so (as I did in the Armenia memoir) she stresses her luck:

At seventy-three days since I had had a drink, more than two months into the programme, one of the main ‘feelings’ I had was a sense of luckiness. I listened all day to the others’ stories and was so sad at the places their addiction had taken them… I had never injected drugs, been a prostitute, smoked crack in front of my baby, spent eight years in a Russian prison, mugged an old man in a park, or been through six detoxes and four rehabs, painfully relapsing every time… I also felt lucky that I’d had the luxury of taking three months out of the ‘real world’ to sort my life out, publicly funded, with the support of the excellent counsellors on the programme. (pg 71-72)

The Outrun is, in lots of ways, an autobiography. If you were being envious, you might say this: Every sentence within an autobiography ends not with a full-stop but with And then I wrote this book. However bad a time they (the ‘I’) may be having on page 100, this writing in this book is the pay-off – this is the moral: I was able to turn this experience to some account. I was able – because I am a writer – to convert these shitty experiences into decent sentences.

On page 16 and 17 of The Outrun, we read:

At the oil terminal, I had to clean workers’ bedrooms, mop bathrooms, sweep corridors and make beds. I became familiar with different types of dirt: from sweat on sheets, unseen but smelt, to dry footprint mud, satisfyingly hooverable. Toothpaste flecks on mirrors revealed the enthusiastic brusher, and ash showed who had been smoking out of the window in a non-smoking area. Dry and wet poo, ably distinguished by my supervisor, required different cleaning methods, and pubic hairs were left coiled on toilet seats. Most of the rooms I cleaned contained partially drunk bottles of Irn-Bru and some had finger- and toenail clippings buried in the carpet.

I felt as if I had become a ghost, walking nameless corridors under buzzing lights carrying a mop.

This – as writing – is very different, appearing in a book with ‘The Sunday Times Bestseller’ and ‘Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2016’ on the cover. Imagine it, instead, in the diary that a cleaner might write this evening. ‘Today I cleaned a hundred toilets. I feel as if I have become a ghost, walking nameless corridors under buzzing lights carrying a mop.’ But why would a cleaner bother to write that, if they cleaned a hundred toilets every day?

Instead, Amy Liptrot’s paragraph might be read as saying:

At the oil terminal, I had to clean workers’ bedrooms, mop bathrooms, sweep corridors and make beds, and then I wrote a book.

This outcome – and then I wrote a book – turns all autobiographies into success stories. We know from the book we hold that the autobiographer who calls themselves lazy isn’t really lazy. These are not likely to be the life stories of the people you see drinking in your local park, or who present to psychiatric services at the Maudsley. ‘And then I wrote this book’ is perpetual redemption.

Here we come across what you might call the Marcel Proust equation. Marcel, at one point in the novel of his life, thinks his whole life has been wasted. But the two sides of the equation are exactly balanced: all the life that had seemed to be wasted equals exactly the material necessary for the writing of his masterpiece, A la Recherche de Temps Perdu, in English, In Search of Lost Time.

The virtues of The Outrun are honesty, openness and clarity. There are paragraphs where the writing is extremely beautiful.

TRAVEL BOOKS

My reading of The Outrun is that it isn’t simply an autobiography, it’s a contemporary travel book in the form of a recovery memoir.

Journeys around the world have become easier. If you left for the airport now, you could be in Nepal within 24 hours. As this global ease of access has developed, travel narratives have reacted by becoming more psychological.

In The Outrun, if read as a travel book, addiction and recovery have replaced the difficult journey to a far land.

Today, it is – for affluent Westerners, anyway – far more difficult to make the journey from alcoholism to sobriety, from addiction to recovery, than it is to reach to a country it would once have taken them six months to walk to, through dangerous territory.

As a bracing comparison to The Outrun, you might want to read Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World.

This memoir gives an account of the 1910–1913 British Antarctic Expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott. There are psychological difficulties, but they are caused by extreme physical circumstances – cold, isolation.

It is no longer possible, unless you perversely set out to equip yourself badly – or with historical accuracy to an earlier, less technological period – for anyone to undertake this journey.

You will never be as isolated as someone who had to send a letter home and wait six months for a reply that might not come. You will never be as lost as someone in the era before satnav, before global mapping.

Histories of getting lost are now bookworthy in themselves – see Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and Wild by Cheryl Strayed. These are both about journeys made deliberately, you might say unnecessarily, difficult.

But even the journey of The Worst Journey in the World was, essentially, touristic. Those undertaking it with Scott didn’t have to go to the South Pole as a matter of survival.

So, if we want to read a narrative – a contemporary narrative – about someone being completely lost, it is going to read something like this:

I remember swigging expensive vodka from the bottle in a suite at a fashionable hotel before falling asleep at a bus stop, climbing over fences and being dragged angrily around a polished floor by my ankles in a silk party dress, trying to go to an AA meeting but ending up in a ‘spirituality workshop’, surrounded by middle-aged ladies in long skirts with bells sewn to the hems. (pg 45)

That was where the lost person (Amy Liptrot) has to journey from, and this is where they have to journey to:

I was running out of options. Although there was lower I could fall – more trouble, further to be cast out – for me, this was enough. One night I had a moment, just a glimpse but it was expansive and ambitious, as if the blinkers were temporarily lifted and my view was flooded with the light, when I saw a sober life could not be only possible but full of hope, dazzling. I held on to that vision and told myself this was my last chance. If I didn’t change, there was nowhere else for me to go but into more pain. (pg 60)

The bravery that was previously required for difficult physical journeys is now transferred to physiological and psychological journeys.

‘It’s been a real journey’ is a cliché of our times but, note, it’s never used to refer to physical travel (that would be tautological), it’s used to refer to personal emotional development. The wild that we go into is the wilderness of the self, because natural wilderness is extremely hard to find. Most places are known.

Amy Liptrot alludes to this wildness, elegantly, when describing her feelings after coming off alcohol:

Lightheaded, with sweet blossom swirling in the breeze around me, waving at mysterious officials in orange boats, an ice-cream van Yankee Doodling from an unknown location and aeroplane trails across east London’s sky, I thought, This is wild. I was finding that being sober could be kind of a trip… (pg 73)

As an aside, I think the reader ends The Outrun fearful for Amy Liptrot’s sobriety. She often frames her recovery in terms of chasing highs – which is addict-thinking. It’s worth you bearing in mind this face about memoirs: What you, the writer, offer as a final diagnosis, the reader is likely to take as an ongoing symptom.

What you offer as diagnosis, the reader will read as symptom.

We live in a world of known unknowns. The end of the recovery memoir is a known unknown, a foregone conclusion. If The Outrun ended in relapse, it wouldn’t be in the genre of recovery memoir. This doesn’t mean that Amy Liptrot may not relapse, but at the point in time chosen for the end of the book, she hadn’t.

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TIME

Like most writers, perhaps like most human beings, I’m obsessed with time. (I think Julia lectured about this last week.) If you’re writing using the non-fictional ‘I’, you’re likely to be obsessed with time, too. Because the relationship between yourself and yourself in the past, in non-fiction, is extremely complicated.

To talk about this, I’m going to first of all borrow a couple of terms from another non-fiction book, of a different sort, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is a book about how human beings make decisions. On page 14, Kahneman says, ‘..recent research… has introduced a distinction between two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self’.

The distinction between the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self in The Outrun could be taken as a. key to the book and b. very simple. But it shifts around a lot. At one point, in the paragraph quoted earlier, the Experiencing Self is the cleaner and the Remembering Self is the writer. In lots of other places, the Experiencing Self is intoxicated and the Remembering Self is sober.

But Kahneman’s split self is far too simple to account for the non-fictional ‘I’. That ‘I’ has at least one other aspect to go along with Experiencing and Remembering and that is Narrating. There is a Narrating Self.

Memory is not writing. If it were, everyone would be great non-fiction writers.

There are further complications and curlicues of time and identity in non-fictional ‘I’ writing. We can get at them by combining Kahneman’s categories. For example, there is the Remembered Experiencing Self – not the Experiencing Self in a present moment, but the Experiencing Self as Remembered years later. In a non-fiction book, this would be further recessed. It would become the Narrated Remembered Experiencing Self. This may sound unnecessarily complicated, but in fact the most simple diary entry would take this form. ‘I saw the first daffodil out today, and it was beautiful.’ That is theNarrated Remembering Experiencing Self.

Here’s a paragraph that touchingly does this:

In the car on the way to her house, I remember how, when Tom and I were small, Mum would reach back when she was driving and hold our ankles to reassure herself we were still there. (pg 86)

Another simple example would be the Remembered Remembering Self. Whenever you think back to what you once thought about something, that’s what you’re engaging with. And if it takes the form of non-fiction, it will become the Narrated Remembered Remembering Experiencing Self.

An example comes when Amy Liptrot remembers remembering her car crash:

Trying to sleep in the wind-rocked caravan, the muscle memory of the car hitting the verge keeps jolting through my mind and body. (pg 92)

Don’t worry. This expansion of the terms in Thinking, Fast and Slow is meant to be confusing. But it’s also meant to make a very simple point – by choosing to use the non-fictional ‘I’, you are setting out to do something very complicated. The best way to simplify that for yourself, I’ve found, is to be extremely honest. If you follow your thoughts, where they lead, then edit later, you are likely to come up with a much more interesting structure than if you try to write to a preexisting plan. Managing non-fictional time may be extremely complicated, but you’re already well equipped to do it, because you to know your material – your life – very well.

I’d like to look closely at a couple of pages from the first chapter of The Outrun. I’ve printed them as a handout.

What I hope you’ll see is that the ‘I’ is very fluid. It moves quicksilver through time, and through tone.

The passage begins: ‘The wind in Orkney is almost constant.’ This first sentence is objective. There is no ‘I’. (Although an ‘I’ viewpoint has been established on page 1, and earlier – in the Prologue.) An anemometer, placed at the correct latitude and longitude, and monitored over a year, could confirm that the wind in Orkney is almost constant.

The next sentence doesn’t introduce an ‘I’ but it does become more human and more personal: ‘At the farm, the westerley gales are the worst, bringing the sea with them, and tonnes of rock can be moved overnight, the map altered in the morning.’ The gales are ‘worst’ for the people living on the farm, as the narrator has – we already know this.

‘Easterlies can be the most beautiful – when the wind blows towards the tide and skims a glittering canopy of spray from the top of the waves, catching the sun.’ This is even more personal. It is an aesthetic reaction to the natural environment. In other words, it’s the reaction of an ‘I’ who is time-rich, who is able to note light effects. But it’s not a specific moment. It doesn’t put ‘I’ into their body. That takes another couple of sentences.

‘The old croft houses are squat and firm, like many Orcadian people, built to survive the strongest gales. The sturdy balance has not been bred into me: I am tall and gangly.’

Here, I think, is one of the main conscious themes of the book – the narrator as both insider and outsider, islander and Englander. There’s what you might call an evolutionary argument here, but it’s not one I can really go into. If you think about the time that the ‘I’ is referring to here – ‘bred into me’ – it’s genetic time. It’s the time of generations.

The ‘I’ has now gone inside the body, to be the Remembering Experiencing Self. Note that the narrator is using the present tense. ‘Following the familiar coast,…’ The implication is at this particular hour, on this particular day, when I sheltered behind a fridge and walked up to the Outrun for the first time in years, but which I am narrating in the present tense to make it as vivid as I can… ‘Following the familiar coast, I’m trying not to feel unstable. It’s been more than a decade since I lived here and…’ Now we get to what you might have seen as overly complicated – we get to the Narrated Remembered Remembering Self. ‘..since I lived here and memories from my childhood are merging with more recent events: the things that brought me back to Orkney.’

You see what I mean by the narrator’s quicksilver fluidity. The non-fictional ‘I’ here exists in and narrates from many points in time at once. They are at the kitchen table, typing this up on the laptop; they are on the coast, walking; they are on the coast, remembering walking along the coast when a child; they are walking along watching their childhood memories merge with later memories; though not given to the reader, they are remembering drinking, being drunk, deciding to stop drinking, etcetera.

Then we get to one of the key sentences in the book. ‘As I struggle to open a wire gate, I remember what I repeated to my attacker: “I am stronger than you.”

The narrative swerves away from this immediately. We hear no more, for many pages, of the attacker. We have to read on if we want to find out what the attack was and what it continues to mean. Instead, with a new paragraph, the narrator takes us back to something like the objectivity of ‘The wind in Orkney is almost constant.’ We get, ‘At the end of a winter the land is brown and washed-out…’ The rest of the sentence recapitulates the movement of the first paragraph. First becoming more personal, ‘..and the Outrun seems barren,…’ then reintroducing the ‘I’ with ‘..but I know its secrets.’ The book continues by going back to the Neolithic Age, then detouring into biology (the Arctic terns) and botany (Fucus distichus).

I don’t believe this knowledge was all neatly present to the Amy Liptrot at that particular moment, on that particular day. This introduces another kind of Self to the gang of Remembering, Experiencing and Narrating – it is the Researching Self. You might also call it the Googling Self or the Fact-Checking Self.

And all of this – and here’s the important point – all of this has been entirely painless to the reader, probably unnoticed. They’re accompanying a flickering being who is one moment in the present, another in the past. And the tone of that being, the way in which it addresses the reader, varies, too. Sometimes the tone is factual, sometimes subjective, sometimes – later on – it’s superstitious, mythical. At the end of the section in the Tremors chapter, the bit about the Stoorworm, the narrator concludes, ‘A tentacle may still be twitching around these shores and the tremors may be the aftershocks of the monster’s death-throes.’ (pg 12)

What can you take from this?

When you write using the non-fictional ‘I’, you have a great deal of freedom – freedom to move around in time and space. The contemporary reader is likely to expect the ‘I’ you use not to hang around in one place for too long. What the fluidity of Amy Liptrot’s ‘I’ says to the reader is, I am in control of my material – I can move around it at will.

The tone here wins the reader over, because it doesn’t waste their time. They are getting a lot of things at once. Distilled experience, good and bad. They are feeling time-envy and time-pity.

One of the crucial sentences, very early in the book, page 3, is there in case the reader has started to feel too much time-envy. We have just heard about the narrator growing up next to cliffs, walking on them with her mother.

We had a dog once that went over. The collie pup set of chasing rabbits in a gale, did not notice the drop and was never seen again.

My dog died, so yours doesn’t have to. But also, I lived on a cliff-edge, so you don’t have to.

I would say that the whole of The Outrun moves between idealized and unglamorized environments.

I’m going to sum up, with some unsystematic suggestions –

Don’t start by assuming the reader will hate you
But don’t assume the reader will love you, unless you give them reason to
Acknowledge your luck, good or bad
Be aware of the reader’s time-envy and time-pity
Think about whether your tone is that of certainty or bewilderment
Think about whether or not you’re crying into the microphone
The easiest way to be consistent is to be honest
If you’re going to be an arrogant bastard, be an arrogant bastard

I started by talking about Komitas, and crying or not crying at his graveside. My only conclusion there was, ‘Such a sad life.’

Amy Liptrot’s conclusion is different, on page 217 of The Outry she says:

Life is getting sadder but more interesting –

 

 

 

 

 

 

Souls

Why Souls?

What could be more irrelevant?

What’s Souls got to do with anything?

You’re not going to go all Archbishop of Canterbury on us, are you?

I do a Summer Lecture every year. When deciding what its subject is to be, I think about two things:

What will be useful for you to hear,

and

what will be useful for me to learn to say.

I try to choose the thing that has been bugging me the most, because it’s been on the point of expressing itself.

And I try to speak very directly to you about questions beyond the conventionally technical – point of view, dialogue, etc. However, this year, in a very immediate way, it seems to me that Souls – and the attitude you as a writer take towards them – are a matter of what might be called deep technique. Not style – Souls don’t seem to have a lot to do with that. Not style, but the matter of what you are doing in your writing, and what it is within that writing that will make it matter to another person. I think this addresses the ways most readers judge writing: Do I believe in this character? Do I care about what’s going on? Is this piece of writing alive – alive enough for me to forget that it’s a piece of writing? And, if I’m not wrong, what I will give you today is a deeply practical way of addressing the technical problems of unconvincing characters, inert situations, and dead or deathly writing.

A couple of years ago, my Summer Lecture was about Sensibility; last year, it was Sentences. Sensibility is the what – the what of your writing; Sentences are the where. Souls, the easy answer says, are the who. But I think that’s not exact. Souls are also what (or who) you write with, what (or who) you write about and what (or who) you write for.

I’m going to call this set of relationships the triangle: on one point is you, on the next is your human or human-like subject, on the last is the reader. Existing between all three points are the English language in its current state, fiction in its current state, and the world in its current state. When I say the triangle, this is what I mean.

But immediately I am going to complicate the triangle by drawing in a line to show there is a difference between, a distance between, you, the author, and him or her or it, the narrator.

This is already a philosophical question – whether, in writing, one can speak through or out of another person. It may be that one of the deep technical solutions we end up with is that, beyond the issues of who authors the words, the reader may be allowed to feel that their soul is in communication or even communion with another soul – not direct, but as close to direct as such communication can ever be. The narrator, if this is true, becomes irrelevant – and the reading becomes intensely, embarrassingly Romantic.

I am going too far too fast. But I hope I’ve now dealt with the opening questions-in-the-room, Why souls? What could be more irrelevant? What’s Souls got to do with anything?

These challenges, though, are likely to be reinforced by an even tougher set: Why Lawrence? Who could be more irrelevant? What’s Women in Love got to do with anything?

Lawrence is, in a very deliberate way, a catastrophic writer; after him, the deluge – with him, the deluge. But the deluge never really came – or what flood waters did come have now receded completely.

Some of you, I am sure, don’t particularly like Lawrence. In fact, you hate him – hate him most of all for his irrelevance. One person here came up to me and said, ‘You’re making us read D.H.Lawrence. I had to read him at school and now, twenty years later, you’re making me read him again.’ Then, even without my saying anything, he said, ‘I suppose once every twenty years isn’t too bad.’ And I back this up. Lawrence is someone you should read at least once every twenty years. But I know these are still questions-in-the-room, Why should I have read this? I didn’t get anything from it.

And that’s my first answer to Why Lawrence? Exactly because he is so hateful, so irrelevant; because, partly, he seems so gloriously ignorant of our technologies of self – the technologies with which we have replaced not Souls but (and I will come back to this soon) the very question of Souls.

A culture reveals itself nowhere more clearly than in those specific things it regards as useless. And, like it or not, you exist within this culture at this moment – and your writing will have to deal with it somehow, even if only by choosing in which direction and how fast you’re going to run away.

At the start I said I chose to lecture on the thing that’s been bugging me the most: so, Sensibility, Sentences, Souls.

In order to go forwards, I need to give you an idea of why Souls have been bugging me, and why I’ve ended up forcing you to read Women in Love. I am going to travel quite a long way, partly into autobiography, partly into literary history – this is necessary, not just as background but as an exploration of that stuff that is going on all around the triangle: the states of the English language, fiction, the world.

The beginning, for me, was a poem I wrote in 2005. It’s an imaginary dialogue between me and another person, a sceptic. This is it:

Grant me the soul – what then?

Speak as essence, badly; speak,

predictably, as putrescence. No.

So you refuse? Then grant me anything

essential at all. I’ll take, I’ll take

beauty, and an improvement towards

it, line by line. Even philosophy

might admit the seventh draft to be

better than the first. No, you say, not

better – and certainly not more

beautiful. Then at least leave me perception;

each eye to have its hole, seeing

outwardly. Or less even than that,

direction, not place, point or origin.

Grant me the length of the line,

sideways.

Then no again.

No repeatedly and without anger.

I understand – I hold your

refusal to be absolute. And that

I will take; there I will start; this I will say.

At the time, I wasn’t sure why I was writing the poem; I’m still not sure. Maybe just as a way of getting the word soul onto the page for the first time, in a reasonably unironic form.

Jump to another inexplicable act, much more recent. At the end of last year I was going down the stairs into SKOOB books (in the Brunswick Centre), and I saw a water-damaged blue Pelican edition of F.R.Leavis’s The Great Tradition. It wasn’t on sale. It was being given away for free. No-one wants F.R.Leavis these days, water-damaged or pristine. But I picked the copy up, and later began reading it – and I found The Great Tradition, surprisingly, quite sympathetic; not repulsive; a bit simple minded; very averse to any kind of paradox; ideological in an apparently non-ideological way; ultimately, and sympathetically, vitalist – on the side of vivid life. F.R. Leavis was the buried credo of my English teachers. And it’s impossible to read The Great Tradition without observing Leavis constructing his lineage of greats – his generating-forming canon of what we should read, because it is what most reads us. ‘What I think and judge,’ he writes, ‘I have stated as responsibly and clearly as I can. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence: the great tradition of the English novel is there.’

But Leavis leaves Lawrence out of the book itself, devoting a whole separate volume to him in D.H. Lawrence/ Novelist.

I found a copy of this in a charity shop in Bedford; and immediately switched my reading from the bits on George Eliot and Henry James to the volume on Lawrence. What was it about Lawrence that Leavis and, following him, so many writers of the fifties and sixties – principally Philip Larkin – found so exciting, so necessary? And why has Lawrence become so completely occluded, so shameful a light?

In my reading, I like to confront myself with oppositions – things I don’t get. What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with me?

As I began D.H.Lawrence/Novelist, and read alongside it the short stories Leavis focuses on – ‘The Daughters of the Vicar’, ‘The Captain’s Doll’ and ‘St Mawr’ – I found a wonderful, flexible writer – very much to my changing taste. But I also found difficulties.

These difficulties connected with another piece of confrontational reading I had recently done: Saul Bellow’s Herzog.

(If you are annoyed at me for forcing you to read Women in Love, be thankful I didn’t add Herzog in, too. Although, if you want any follow-up reading to this lecture, that’s where you should head.)

Why did the difficulties I found in Lawrence connect with those I found in Bellow? What were my objections? This takes us back to what I said about the matter of your writing, and why your writing might matter to another person. I found that both Lawrence and Bellow did matter to me – in a way that Raymond Carver or Amy Hempel or J.G.Ballard or Jennifer Egan do not.

Both Lawrence and Bellow seem, to many critics, to have got the human subject completely wrong; to have engaged with a nostalgic or wishful version of what we essentially are. We are not Souls, we are the current technologies of the self. Both Lawrence and Bellow have, in their fiction and in their critical writings, made Souls more material than they can possibly be.

That’s certainly what I would have thought, back at the time my first book was published. I am, in speaking about this, partly speaking against my earlier self; that’s what I think is necessary, at this point; that’s the thing I am learning how to say.

And so I chose Souls to talk about because it is a subject that has been profoundly bugging me – less spiritually than aesthetically; though the aesthetic is often where the spiritual manifests, when it’s embarrassed.

There will be some embarrassment in this lecture, and some in this room; I hope so – unless the cheeks are glowing, the blood is making some display of itself, you’re not really reading Lawrence; unless the gorge rises, and you force yourself not to swallow, you’re not taking your Bellow neat.

This is the question of Souls, the one I’ve now arrived back at. (The autobiographical excursion is over; the literary historical one is just ahead.) Why do I now find that Lawrence and Bellow matter to me more than the other writers I named, and many others I didn’t? More pressingly, why do I think they should matter equally to other people – to you?

The answer to this isn’t an argument, it’s a niggle – a niggling feeling – a niggling feeling to do with the triangle.

This is what Saul Bellow said in a talk he gave in 1975 called ‘A Matter of the Soul’.

‘What novelists, composers, singers have in common is the soul to which their appeal is made, whether it is barren or fertile, empty or full, whether the soul knows something, feels something, loves something.’

Here and elsewhere Bellow’s assumption is of Souls at all points of the triangle: Souls as artists, Souls as subjects, and Souls as audience.

That niggling feeling, arriving in me gradually, over the course of years, is this – that certain writers (chiefly Lawrence and Bellow) have something that other writers I admire (say Ballard and Egan) ostentatiously lack; something that I myself have lacked.

The something Lawrence and Bellow have is something at all three points of the triangle: in believing they might be possessed of Souls, in believing their human subjects might appear to be Soul-possessing, and in believing their readers might be Soul-encumbered beings.

This is the niggle, put as clearly as I can put it:

What if – looking back over the art of the twentieth century – I have started to suspect that the most enduring of it (so far, and not much time has passed) – alright, try again: the most vivid art is art produced on the basis of the question of Souls. Not, I’d say, on the definite assumption of Souls; but around a negotiation with the question of what it means not to have a soul, and to work towards a Soul, and to do so amid the doubt that anyone could ever attain such a thing.

I am going to have to define Souls, aren’t I? I’m not going to be able to escape this room without doing so.

By Souls, I do not mean immortal Christian Souls, that – depending on the level of misbehaviour of their owners – can be dropkicked to heaven or doubled-parked in purgatory or trapdoored down to hell.

By Souls, I do not mean positive singular entities but indistinguishable excesses to the merely physical, merely social.

By Souls, I mean what creates the possibility of seamless transition between different and otherwise incommensurate modes of being.

By Souls, I mean the assumption that what I write has access to meaning beyond the merely social.

In other words, that what I or you write is about something – and not about nothing.

I hope these definitions advance us a bit. They should become clearer, as we go along. For now, they are probably too wordy and therefore unsatisfactory.

As far as writing goes, let’s leave it that Souls are characters who move in the direction of trying to create a soul, even if they would explicitly disbelieve in such a thing. Characters are shown acting in the hope that their acts will be meaningful.

If I haven’t satisfied you with a decent definition, at least grant that I have attempted – perhaps embarrassingly – to say what I mean. I’m going on niggles here, not notions. Professor Catherine Brown in the first of her Oxford lectures on Lawrence, which you can find on iTunes University said that, “Lawrence himself says that he can’t define soul, ‘but nor could a bike define its rider. Our mistake is to pretend that there’s no-one in the saddle.’”

It’s time for the historical excursion – back beyond the birth of the European novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, 1605.

This that follows is Jack Goody, surveying the change from religious to secular storytelling, in his essay ‘From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling’, part of a two volume world-spanning book The Novel, edited by Franco Moretti.

‘The early narratives of Christian Europe were legitimized as being accounts of heavenly miracles (the New Testament) or of the lives of saints, in the same way that painting and drawing became possible in the early Middle Ages if the subjects were drawn from religious sources. Even in the eighteenth century, it was this aspect of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress that rendered it acceptable to many Nonconformist Puritans.

‘The modern novel, after Daniel Defoe, was essentially a secular tale, a feature that is comprised within the meaning of “realistic”…’

But Defoe (born around 1660 – died 1731) isn’t as crucial a break as Cervantes (born 1547, died 1616).

Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha – wisely or profligately – spends his life in a delusory quest after the kind of glory gained by the knights-errant of his favourite reading matter. Don Quixote mistakes the banal objects of the world surrounding him for the enchanted objects of romance.

The American critic Harold Bloom writes this about Don Quixote, in his introduction to a new translation, ‘Cervantes, like Shakespeare, gives us a secular transcendence… However good a Catholic he may (or may not) have been, Cervantes is interested in heroism and not sainthood… It is the transcendent element in Don Quixote that ultimately persuades us of his greatness, partly because it is set against the deliberately coarse, frequently sordid context of the panoramic book. And again it is important to note that this transcendence is secular and literary, and not Catholic.’

Going back again to the Why Souls? question, from the beginning: you, in your writing, are likely to be dealing with exactly this, ‘transcendence [that] is secular and literary, not Catholic’. Harold Bloom, here, provides a pretty good definition of the epiphany story.

You may have gone along with asking, What could be more irrelevant? What’s Souls got to do with anything? But if ever you decide to write an epiphany, I think you should at least be asking yourself, Who or what is this experience happening to? Who or what is gaining knowledge in this chiming moment? Am I, in what I write, suggesting there is a meaning beyond the merely social?

In your writing, I would suggest, you are all interested in ‘heroism and not sainthood’.

Don Quixote is not principally a story about salvation, the only question for a good Catholic. Don Quixote is about asking the question of the soul. What is this thing, this questing person, who may or may not be possessed of a soul and whose actions may or may not affect or express the state of that soul? What does or doesn’t this person’s quest mean?

To make a grand statement: the novel is not a form that orthodox Catholicism could ever have invented.

The Catholic establishment would have seen both the writing and reading of novels as, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, an encouragement to sin.

There are, belatedly, Catholic novelists – Graham Greene tries to be principally interested in salvation and damnation but he is, in fact, principally interested in theological quirks. To take the example of The Power and the Glory, we are presented with a damned soul (the whiskey priest) who is, even despite this, the vessel of salvation (the mass); or Brighton Rock, the soul who seems inevitably damned, because evil (Pinkie) yet who achieves salvation through last-minute split-second but genuine repentence. But we as readers are not seeing every soul at stake, within the novel; minor characters must take their own chances. Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye – the gaddings about of a maybe/maybe not devil in a so banal as to hardly seem worth redeeming world.

But the subject of Western art since the Renaissance has been the person – the mainly social being – the person who may or may not have a soul that may or may not be immortal.

At the very cultural moment that the soul became questionable, the novel came into being.

Here, the Soul is what’s in doubt; and without something in doubt, there is no subject.

Without the question of the Soul, the human subject of fiction is (by definition) less meaningful. Because it was the Soul that was previously the element within a human being that gave their life meaning; because, now that element of certainty had been taken away, we were and are left with the entirely rationally reduced physiological body, sociological presence, economic participant, mediated subject.

We are interested in all of these things, but to what extent?

One of my definitions of Souls was this:

By Souls, I mean what creates the possibility of seamless transition between different and otherwise incommensurate modes of being.

At the time, this was probably the most opaque definition. But what I mean is this, when writing about a character you can, within the same sentence, say what they think or remember, how they feel physically, how they are (in actual fact) physically despite them not even knowing it, or what they look like to another person. And, between these modes of being, there exist no transitions. You pass from one to the other quite without bump or friction. Because the thing experiencing them is the same being, even if – intellectually – you’d argue they aren’t a unified whole of any sort. Fictional characters are unified subjects, existing under a name.

It seems to me that in this, in the fictional subject, there is – unless you spend a lot of time deliberately undoing it – an assumption of a soul. Perhaps that soul is merely the unity granted by referring to a character by a name. But I think it is also that the character is constantly being pushed (in action, in description) to expand beyond their name, and not being undermined by being referred to as a completely physiological being.

Put very basically, people do not read Mills & Boon novels to read the chemical equations that might explain why she is attracted to him.

This brings me to Saul Bellow’s Nobel Lecture, which I asked you to read. After his social arguments, Bellow comes to a metaphysical climax:

‘The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as “true impressions.” This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But we never seem to lose our connection with the depths from which these glimpses come. The sense of our real powers, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes. We are reluctant to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove, because our language is inadequate and because few people are willing to risk talking about it. They would have to say, “There is a spirit” and that is taboo. So almost everyone keeps quiet about it, although almost everyone is aware of it.
’

This comes just after Bellow has said, ‘At the center, humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.’

What Bellow is saying here is very similar, I would say, to what Lawrence says in an essay, ‘Why the Novel Matters’. I don’t want to quote that yet, but I do want to emphasize the matters – and start looking into it.

Let’s turn to Women in Love. Lawrence’s novels are about human encounters in all variations – male-male, female-female but mostly female-male/male-female – that mean something.

Even if you don’t follow my argument far enough to reach the question of Souls, you would admit that for Lawrence the interrelation between, say, Birkin and Ursula means a lot more than the interrelation between any two characters in any J.G. Ballard or Jennifer Egan novel; in fact, means a lot more than between any two characters in any contemporary English-language novel.

(It is this striving to exist only in meaningfulness that is one of the things that makes people hate Lawrence.)

What goes on between the characters in Women in Love, moment by obsessed-observed moment, has an effect on what you might call the average level of cosmic rightness.

If there is disharmony, the entire universe is – overall – less harmonious; and less harmonious in a way that is greater than it would be, statistically, if Birkin and Ursula made up two billionths of the extant human material (in the universe).

Whether or not these two humans work something out between them means something, metaphysically, because upon it depends the question of whether any two humans can work it out.

This is what is at stake between Birkin and Ursula.

‘I do think,’ he said, ‘that the world is held together by the mystical conjunction, the ultimate unison between people – a bond. And the ultimate bond is between man and woman.’

Your object is already there on the page. Ursula says it, ‘But it’s such old hat…’

But I don’t think this is old hat at all.

J.G.Ballard wrote a famous essay ‘Which way to inner space?’ in which he said that science fiction should abandon journeys into outer space, and look into the human – well, he was J.G.Ballard, so he didn’t call it a soul. And also, as he was J.G.Ballard, he didn’t look to Lawrence for an example of where an astonishing voyage into inner space might have already taken place.

‘There is,’ [Birkin] said, in a voice of pure abstraction, ‘a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you – not in the emotional, loving plane – but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman – so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever – because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies…’ [p162-163]

Ballard also said, in the same essay, ‘The only truly alien planet is earth.’ And that seems to be what Lawrence is getting at, not just in this passage but with the entire thrust of the novel. Birkin’s speech describes creatures more alien than human.

This is what George Steiner meant when he called Women in Love one of the ‘classics of imagined life’. The cowardly question does come up, But would a person ever really say those words to another person? But this is irrelevant, and is much better asked backwards. Isn’t the person who says those words to another person far more worthy of our attention than the person who doesn’t?

We are at a societal high-point here, in these meetings between Birkin and Ursula, Gerald and Gudrun, Birkin and Gerald – Lawrence is (to the infuriation of his critics) a believer in an aristocracy of the Soul.

(Does this mean that he himself is an aristocrat of the Soul? Well, yes, he would have to be – or else these questions would not be occurring to him.)

This is what Lawrence, objectionably, says about the non-aristocrats of the Soul in his essay ‘Education of the People’:

‘The slave, the serf, the vast populace, had no soul. It has been left to our era to put the populace in possession of its own soul. Left to itself, it will never do more than demand a pound a day, and so on. The populace finds its living soul-expression cumulatively through the rising up of the classes above it, towards pure utterance or expression or being. And the populace has its supreme satisfaction in the up-flowing of the sap of life, with its vast roots and trunk, up to the perfect blossom.’

No, no, no, you say. This is appalling. But, without being facile, this sentence ‘The populace finds its living soul-expression cumulatively through the rising up of the classes above it, towards pure utterance or expression or being’ seems to me an extremely good explanation of celebrity culture.

And whether it’s appalling or not, this is what Lawrence believed, and what we see being played out in Women in Love – particularly in the chapter ‘The Industrial Magnate’ where Gerald’s reforms in his father’s mines are described.

‘..the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness.

‘But they submitted to it all… Gerald was their high priest, he represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied.’

Their souls are satisfied exactly because they are not aristocratic souls. And Women in Love is about Gerald (and Birkin, Ursula and Gudrun) because it is about dissatisfied, aristocratic souls.

In this Lawrence is very close to Nietzsche, another believer in an aristocracy of the Soul; you see how anti-Christian (strictly) this is: Christianity being, above all, based on the equality (in the eyes of God) of all created souls.

This belief in an aristocracy of Souls is a given of Lawrence’s universe, on a metaphysical level, that takes it far beyond the merely anti-communist, anti-democratic.

Unless some Souls are more developed, or more capable of development, than others, then there is no possibility for anything (any human action) to amount to anything.

Lenin, too, believed something similar – he had the idea of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat.

‘By educating the workers’ party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie…’

(As an aside, here is one of Lawrence’s best jokes – one of the best jokes of the twentieth century. In the preface to ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ by Dostoievsky, Lawrence says, ‘Lenin, surely a pure soul…’)

Again, What’s Souls got to do with anything?

Well, most of you – I am pretty sure – are writing about one-off Geralds rather than about masses of miners. You are not writing about characters who are engaged in repetitive mechanistic labour. You are writing about subjects who have enough liberty of movement and thought to count among the traditional subjects of novels. You are writing about people who have enough agency within their lives to be able to change them, even to a very small degree. If behind this there isn’t on your part a belief in an artistocracy of the soul, there is instead a calculated hierarchy of interest. You are not writing to emphasize the meaninglessness of your characters lives, nor of human life in general.

Do events need the participation of Souls to become meaningful?

At this point, the argument risks becoming circular:

The novels which mean the most to us are those that – in the deepest of their techniques – allow themselves the opportunity to create the most meaning.

More is at stake for persons with Souls or the possibility of Souls than for persons without Souls or the possibility of Souls.

Although you might not believe your characters or you are possessed of anything like a soul, you would not take it as a statement of mere fact were your work to be described as either ‘soulless’ or ‘lacking soul’ or ‘without soul’.

It is possible to see all this as an attempt – rather adolescent, no? – an attempt by Lawrence and Bellow and other writers to invest the world with more meaning than it in fact possesses. (No meaning should be permitted, that is, beyond the physical, social, economic, mediated.)

Lawrence is ridiculous – he knows he is ridiculous; he believes, I am sure, that a lack of or a fearful avoidance of ridiculous is inimical to ‘vivid life’. (This pleonasm (use of more words than necessary) is deliberate – and deliberately ridiculous: ‘vivid life’ is life within life, life upon life, life to the power of life.

But Lawrence is an essential countervoice to the assumptions of now.

Dismiss him completely, he still leaves behind a distinctive unease, the trace of burnt hair smell that suggests both unburnt hair and hair burning.

Lawrence is so not of our technological now, and yet he was very much of another, post-industrial technological world – to which he speaks:

‘Is it true that mankind demands, and will always demand, miracle, mystery, and authority? Surely it is true. Today, man gets his sense of the miraculous from science and machinery, radio, aeroplane, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did in the past. But, now man is master of mystery, there are no occult powers.’

Lawrence, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, Phoenix, p285

All you need to do with this sentence is replace the nouns: ‘internet’ for ‘radio’, ‘biological weapons’ for ‘poison gas’.

Again, why is this of importance to you? Why is this a technical question?

Because you need to address, in your fiction, what is happening and to whom it is happening. The distinctiveness and originality of what you write will issue from the freshness of your whats and your whos. You will have to decide what counts, for you, as an event. Generic events (murders, glances) or ungeneric events (of which, clearly, I can’t give easy examples – you’ll have to make them for yourselves.)

I’m now going to quote from the Lawrence essay, ‘Why the Novel Matters’ (Phoenix, p535-536):

‘Let us learn from the novel,’ Lawrence says. ‘In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead. A character in a novel has got to live, or it is nothing.

‘We, likewise, in life have got to live, or we are nothing.

‘What we mean by living is, of course, just as indescribable as what we mean by being. Men get ideas into their heads, of what they mean by Life, and they proceed to cut life out to pattern…

‘Turn truly, honourably to the novel, and see wherein you are truly alive, and you may be making love to a woman as sheer dead man in life. You may eat your dinner as man alive, or as a mere masticating corpse…

‘To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be a dead man in life. So much of a man walks about dead and a carcass in the street and house, today: so much of woman is merely dead. Like a pianoforte with half the notes mute.

‘But in the novel you can see, plainly, when the man goes dead, the woman goes inert. You can develop an instinct for life, if you will, instead of a theory of right and wrong, good and bad.’

And here’s where I’d like to return at last to the triangle.

What Lawrence is doing, and I think also what Bellow (self-consciously following on from Lawrence) also does, is try to grant every element here – you, subject, reader – as much vivid life as possible. And by this, I mean allowing each element to exist in a flux of becoming.

Lawrence assumes an alive-to-the-moment writer writing (in the moment) about imaginary but imagined as alive-to-the-moment human subjects for an alive-to-the-moment reader.

This, at the writer’s point, is what F.R.Leavis describes as ‘the free flow of his sympathetic consciousness’.

Here is where I think there may be a lesson of deep technique. It’s not that I am asking you to start believing in the Soul. What I’m suggesting is that – in writing any sort of fiction – you are working within a form that was created out of the wreck of the Soul, and emerged in order address the question of the Soul.

It may be that when your character are unconvincing, it’s because you aren’t allowing them to fight with this question – as Lawrence does – in their actions, through their relations.

It may be that when your situations are inert, it’s because this question has been put entirely to one said – and your characters are existing in an world that is entirely and unproblematically physical, social, economic, mediated.

Finally, it may be that when your writing is dead or deathly, it’s because it hasn’t – out of embarrassment, or for some other very good reason – it hasn’t made the attempt to be alive.

‘Show, don’t tell’ is the great clanging cliché of creative writing courses. But here’s Ursula, travelling towards Birkin, and is this showing or telling? And how else could a writer ever do this?

‘She found herself sitting on the tram-car, mounting up the hill going out of the town, to the place where he had his lodging. She seemed to have passed into a kind of dream world, absolved from the conditions of actuality. She watched the sordid streets of the town go by beneath her, as if she were a spirit disconnected from the material universe. What had it all to do with her? She was palpitating and formless within the flux of the ghost life. She could not consider any more what anybody would say of her or think about her. People had passed out of her range, she was absolved. She had fallen strange and dim, out of the sheath of the material life, as a berry falls from the only world it has ever known, down out of the sheath on to the real unknown.’ [p160]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sentences

 

Let’s start, and stick pretty close to, the reading I asked you to do – Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; the opening chapters. Why did I choose this?

No, let’s evade that for a moment – Why did I choose to talk about Sentences today? Last year, my lecture was on Sensibility – a subject that seems much vaguer. But it was one I decided hadn’t been covered by the rest of the course. I tried to ask and answer the questions, ‘What do we read writers for? What makes us love this writer rather than this other one?’ Their sensibility – that’s what’s important – their particular way of appearing, through language; their stance, within language.

I think that if you asked any of the other tutors, they would agree that the way the most promising writers on the course most clearly reveal themselves is through their obvious command of the sentence. These writers have what you might call a take on what sentences are and can do. They have a force behind what they write – a force that is the developing expression of their particular sensibility. And this, very often, can be revealed through reading just a single sentence of their work.

Conversely, the writers who are struggling elsewhere struggle most conspicuously in the sentence. Their rewriting of a story or chapter will result in something choppy, unsettled. They haven’t yet developed their sensibility; their sentences are still going in this direction, in that – falling under one influence after another.

As we I hope I’ll demonstrate, choppy, unsettled writing isn’t bad in and of itself. But the clearer you can be in your own take on sentences, the better your writing will become. (I could do something similar about paragraphs, too – but that would seem slightly more affected. Paragraphs are avoidable; sentences aren’t.)

Why did I choose The Power and the Glory? Well, because I’ve often referred to it in class, when talking about how writing on the micro level – punctuation – has to fit with that of the macro level – the story or novel as a whole. But it has been a while since I went back and closely examined it, line by line.

So, if the students who’ve heard this last term will forgive me, I’ll go over a little of what I usually say.

I had a lot of trouble getting into Graham Greene, to begin with. I was living in Prague where there was an English section to the National Library. It was quite out of date – had lots of books, for example, by Antony Powell – and so their holdings of Graham Green were almost complete. This is how it went: I would read the first page of one of his novels, be drastically unimpressed, return the copy to the library, hear again a few months later that he was worth reading, go to the library, etc.

Some of Greene’s opening are, I’d say, drastically unimpressive. This, for example, is the start of A Burnt-Out Case:

The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: ‘I feel discomfort therefore I am alive,’ then sat with pen in hand with no more to record.

I’m not talking about whether this is an enticing opening to a novel; I think ‘I feel discomfort therefore I am alive’ is about as rubbish a parody of Descartes as one could make – it suggests, to me, that this book has been written by someone uninteresting.

A Burnt-Out Case subsequently became one of my most-reread Greene novels, and although I am sure it isn’t as good as The Power and the Glory I found it more useful for what I was writing.

The first things of Greene’s that I managed to finish, and enjoy, were his autobiographies – A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980). I liked them because they emphasized very much the role of boredom in his life – how it was partly boredom that caused him to become a writer.

I feel that very strongly, too. I began writing because, on a few particular afternoons, it was the least boring option. Greene grew up in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. I grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, north of and adjacent to Hertfordshire. They are very similar no-particular-identity, got-to-get-out-of-here places; growing up there isn’t like growing up in North London or Sheffield or on the Isle of Iona. According to the AA Route Planner (classic) there are 27.7 miles of road in between Berkhamsted and Ampthill – most of it the M1 motorway.

Ways of Escape, as I remember it, contains some descriptions of the writing of The Power and the Glory. At some point, I returned to that particular opening page.

I had a conservative view of prose – I thought it should be well-written, just that. I loved symmetry in sentences, balance. There were certain things I believed. For example, with Kurt Vonnegut, I hated semi-colons. Vonnegut said:

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

(Vonnegut is so wrong here. Transvestitve hermaphrodites – quite frankly, the more of those anyone can get in their prose the better, really. And how is it possible a transvestite hermaphrodite could represent absolutely nothing? They seem to be overrepresenting, over determining, any number of things. Contradictions all the way from bottom to top, Kurt, I’m afraid. But at least it got a few laugh and scared a few nervous college kids into feeling even worse about their phoney-making educations.)

But, back in Prague, I agreed. What semicolons and colons do is make one part of a sentence lesser than another part. I thought sentences should be smoothly unbreakdownable. If they only contain a very few commas, sentences are more likely to have a feeling of polished integrity.

Also, I despised any repetition of words from sentence to sentence – the kind of thing that’s used to represent the laziness of speech. We’ll come back to this later with regard to David Foster Wallace.

Here’s an example of repetition I came across this morning – Ernest Hemingway writing in A Moveable Feast:

After Miró had painted The Farm and after James Joyce had written Ulysses they had a right to expect people to trust the further things they did even when the people did not understand them and they have both kept on working very hard.

If you have painted The Farm or if you have written Ulysses, and then keep on working very hard afterwards, you do not need an Alice B. Toklas.

This kind of thing used to drive me mad. I felt patronized, although Hemingway was doing it in the name of simplification – and of emphasizing a rhythm that’s within meaning, and of avoiding the falsity (in his opinion) of elegant variation.

Elegant variation, as I’m sure you know, is the deliberate avoidance of repeating, say, a noun in one sentence after another. One of the elements of Hemingway’s style that got imitated very often afterwards was his inelegant repetition. Because it is slightly infuriating to have the same word coming back and back, it’s a good way of building tension within a section of text.

Hemingway learnt this principally from Gertrude Stein, who is one of the world’s most deliberately infuriating writers. She has infuriated herself out of the canon – academics know she’s there, know she’s great, but don’t want to read The Making of Americans end to end.

Here’s just a little bit of Stein’s ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’:

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.

Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.

If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.

This is more interesting writing than Hemingway, more infuriating, more extreme. Hemingway took it and did a pop version – then became Pop Hemingway.

Just these two things, hating sentences that aren’t all the one level and hating sentences that contain repetition – these decisions would lead quite a long way towards one particular style of writing. They imply a prose that keeps its distance from speech and from the way its subjects would clumsily express themselves. Again, I’ll come back to this.

For now, we’re ready for the opening page of The Power and the Glory:

This isn’t beautiful prose. It’s ugly. The rhythm is choppy; the style unsettled. There are two obtrusive colons in the first paragraph alone.

Let’s examine that opening sentence:

MR TENCH went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.

It seems badly constructed in any number of ways. If you wanted a more elegant version, one that avoided the comma, you could have:

MR TENCH went out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust to look for his ether cylinder.

But this seems to emphasize how clunky those two descriptive phrases are – ‘the blazing Mexican sun’ and ‘the bleaching dust’.

Perhaps they could be integrated into the sentence if they weren’t there, just hanging around at the sentence’s end, being descriptive. How about this? –

Out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust came Mr Tench, looking for his ether cylinder.

They are still both a bit painful – ‘blazing Mexican sun’ because it seems to come straight out of pulp fiction, i.e.,

The tall handsome peon and the black-hatted gringo stood back to back beneath the blazing Mexican sun – ten steps, turn and fire, that’s what they’d agreed – last man standing.

‘Mexican sun’ is, it seems to me, a very cheap and cheerful way of conveying within the course of the first sentence that Mr Tench is in Mexico. By inserting Mexican between blazing and sun, it makes the cliché seem slightly less obvious. But it also raises some logical problems. Is this the blazing Mexican sun as opposed to another Mexican sun – the non-blazing Mexican sun? the gentle Mexican sun? No. So, the Mexican sun is logically always blazing when it’s shining at all. In which case, why not defer the information that this is Mexico, and just say the sun? Then, when we learn Mr Tench is in Mexico we’ll realize the sun must have been blazing.

The other phrase, by contrast, seems to be overliterary – ‘the bleaching dust’ – no, it’s not bleaching, not unless it gets into the weave of the cloth and makes it lighter in colour. It has a bleaching effect, with regard to the light and the way a fabric would look if it had become dusty. But this is always supposing that the observer was at a particular distance – too close, and they would be able to see that the fabric hadn’t been bleached but had merely become dusty. Given that Mr Tench, as he walks across the dusty ground, is likely to become bleached from the legs up; and given that any observer in the area is likely to have encountered the dust, and observed its properties; it is unlikely that anyone seeing Mr Tench with the bottoms of his trousers looking lighter in colour than the area around the thighs, would assume that he had deliberately bleached them, rather than that he had (as everyone walking on that surface does) got a bit dusty.

And so ‘bleaching’ seems to be a kind of stopgap word – a second draft word – something you’d put in there until you’ve thought of something better, more accurate.

Back again to the sentence. What’s say we do it as two sentences, for the sake of elegance:

Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder. The sun blazed on the white dust beneath his feet.

That’s how a writer trying to avoid a weakly constructed sentence would do it. But Greene chose something else –

Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.

It’s clear that Greene, former cinema critic for Night and Day magazine, and writer of numerous screenplays, is writing cinematically here. The comma marks a cut from interior shot, looking at Mr Tench’s back going through the door, to exterior shot of the plaza.

This would read:

INT. MR TENCH’S OFFICE. MEXICO. DAY.

A preoccupied expression on his face, Mr Tench turns and walks out of the door.

EXT. TINY PLAZA. DAY.

The sun blazes down on pale, dusty ground. As Mr Tench walks, he kicks up the dust.

Let’s move on to the next sentence:

A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.

Here the most noticeable thing is that Greene is using an extremely literary device, the transferred epithet. It is the vultures which are shabby, not their indifference.

Here’s another example of a transferred epithet from the opening lines of T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’:

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

The material in Greene’s sentence after the colon is emphatic (there for emphasis of what’s come before) –

A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.

If the vultures are indifferent it is because Mr Tench is of no interest to them; what is of interest to vultures? – mainly what they can eat. Therefore the vultures aren’t interested in Mr Tench because they can’t eat him because he isn’t carrion. This is on the point of being overemphatic. You could say the first half of the sentence is Show, the second half Tell.

However, there’s something going on here. The first sentence puts us inside Mr Tench’s head: in the screenplay, we would only know he is going out to look for his ether cylinder if he said, ‘Now, where’s that bloody ether cylinder?’ or something like that. So, if the second sentence is attributed to Mr Tench’s consciousness, it becomes a little more interesting. He’s thinking, ‘I’m not carrion, not yet.’

A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them.

This sentence has two subjects, the ‘faint feeling of rebellion’ and ‘he’, Mr Tench. We lurch from one to another, via the comma. It would be more pedantic, but logically clearer, if the sentence were to read:

A feeling of rebellion towards the vultures stirred Mr Tench to wrench up a piece of the road and toss it in their direction.

But by now it should be apparent that Greene is up to something by writing in this way. As I continued to read, those years ago in Prague, I realised that Green was writing about Mexico in a deliberately dilapidated prose – because the Mexico he is describing is a dilapidated country; he is also, in Mr Tench, describing a man who is falling apart. Therefore the sentences, when put under any kind of scrutiny, start to fall apart. Does this make them bad sentences? Again, I’d like to defer that question.

In avoiding writing ‘correctly’, Greene is doing something that many writers – particularly modern and post-modern writers – have done. (Not that it wasn’t a resource open to, say, Emily Bronte.)

There are other reasons for not wanting to write symmetrically, neatly, with conventional elegance.

In his Paris Review Interview (Winter 1966), Saul Bellow took the question directly:

My first two books are well made. I wrote the first quickly but took great pains with it. I labored with the second and tried to make it letter-perfect. In writing The Victim I accepted a Flaubertian standard. Not a bad standard, to be sure, but one which, in the end, I found repressive—repressive because of the circumstances of my life and because of my upbringing in Chicago as the son of immigrants. I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things I knew intimately. Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable. A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be “correct”? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker? I soon saw that it was simply not in me to be a mandarin. I should add that for a young man in my position there were social inhibitions, too. I had good reason to fear that I would be put down as a foreigner, an interloper. It was made clear to me when I studied literature in the university that as a Jew and the son of Russian Jews I would probably never have the right feeling for Anglo-Saxon traditions, for English words. I realized even in college that the people who told me this were not necessarily disinterested friends. But they had an effect on me, nevertheless. This was something from which I had to free myself. I fought free because I had to.

Here is the opening to The Adventures of Augie March (1953):

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Everybody knows there is no fineness of accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

Years after the Graham Greene, this was another prose style that I encountered and was deeply affected by. Bellow wasn’t writing about a dilapidated country – he didn’t have that excuse. He was redefining, for himself, what a good sentence was. He didn’t want it to be faux-European. He was writing about, he was writing out of, a non-classical, non-symmetrical self. Perhaps, you’d say, we’re all non-symmetrical. True, but some people like to show themselves off as if they are.

Here we’ve come up against the issue of mimesis – of sentences being fitted to, or aesthetically derived from – their subjects.

Bellow has been enormously influential on subsequent writers. If you take a look at a recent American novel like Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and you’ll see Bellow in every line.

Bellow’s also influenced Martin Amis, for good and bad. But Bellow’s solution to the sentence isn’t backtrackable. It comes out as mid-Atlantic. Years ago, I wrote an attempt, a parody:

I am an Englishman, north London born – London, that unreal city – and I approach matters not higgledy-piggledy but in obedience to the best available models, and hence will write my autobiography accordingly: a place for everything and everything in its place; sometimes an innocent location, sometimes a not so innocent one. But, as Thomas Hardy says, ‘Character is fate’ – and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the display case by varnishing the oak or donning dark glasses.

That was just a bit of fun. It’s not an Amis parody – it’s a transposition of Bellow into Oxbridge English.

There’s one theory of the English language that asserts that it has for hundreds of years had three levels or styles, High, Middle and Low. It’s possible to read even a latterday American writer such as Bellow as being in constant struggle to integrate High and Low styles, whilst not being overwhelmed by the Middle.

Cyril Connolly wrote very piercingly about Mandarin English in The Enemies of Promise – High Style English; his argument, essentially, being that you couldn’t without great difficulty write a great novel in it any longer.

‘The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language. It is the diction of Donne, Browne, Addison, Johnson, Gibbon, de Quincey, Landor, Carlyle and Ruskin as opposed to that of Bunyan, Dryden, Locke, Defoe, Cowper, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Southey and Newman. It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits. Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed of a classical education and a private income. It is Ciceronian English.’

Graham Greene’s relationship to the High Style – particularly the rhetoric of the High Style – in The Power and the Glory is one of parody. If we look to the next sentence down the page, we come across this sentence:

One [one of the indifferent vultures] rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea.

This is a much more formally ambitious, set-piece-y bit of writing than the three sentences preceding it.

To me, this is an obvious reference to a famous passage in Chapter 10 of Dickens’ Bleak House:

The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully effective, for it is not quite dark. Mr. Snagsby standing at his shop-door looking up at the clouds sees a crow who is out late skim westward over the slice of sky belonging to Cook’s Court. The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Garden into Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

It’s a fairly notorious weak link, in which Dickens gets from one character (Mr Snagsby) to another (Mr Tulkinghorn). This, I’m afraid to say, ‘In another part of the city at just that same moment…’ is the kind of thing that Salman Rushdie is addicted to.

What makes it clear that this helicopter shot is a High Style parody is that, after a couple of bathetic sentences to finish off the paragraph, Greene begins the second paragraph with a fairly obvious parody of the monosyllabic, comma-avoiding Low style of Hemingway:

He said ‘Buenos dias’ to a man with a gun who sat in a small patch of shade against a wall.

Can you see what I mean about a jerrybuilt, ramshackle prose? This is stitched together, Frankenstein’s monster style, out of different styles of different ages.

The neutrality of ‘a man with a gun’ suggests the distance of a third person narrator – a narrator who can only see and say what she sees. But we’ve already established that Mr Tench’s consciousness dominates this chapter, until the two switches at the end (which are the point of the chapter). Yet it’s clear that Mr Tench knows a lot more about this man than that he is male and holds a gun.

But it wasn’t like England: the man said nothing at all, just stared malevolently up at Mr Tench, as if he had never had any dealings with the foreigner, as if Mr Tench were not responsible for his two gold bicuspid teeth.

Again, we’re back to an almost eighteenth century rhetoric of repetition and emphasis. But this is smack-bang against a sentence of slithery, unassertive modernity. The word malevolently sticks out here, particularly. It again takes us into a kind of pulp fictional writing – although this short circuits when one things about this as a genuinely Catholic book about the battle between good and evil. These men with guns, killing priests, are on the side of the Devil.

As a sentence, how differently it reads if one starts to minimalize it:

..the man said nothing, just stared up at Mr Tench.

Perhaps up is unnecessary, too, as we’ve already established that the man is sitting.

Just as malevolently, although it has a meaningful function in that sentence, is easily cuttable, in the next sentence we have sweating – another a clear example of overpacking the suitcase:

Mr Tench went sweating by, past the Treasury which had once been a church, towards the quay.

Sweating – Greene wants the word in, wants us to know Mr Tench is getting hotter in the blazing Mexican sun, but he doesn’t want to waste a whole sentence, or even a subclause, doing so. It creates a real awkwardness. You can sweat as you go by, and go by as you sweat, but how can you go sweating by?

The answer, really, is that here Greene is using some of the invisible commas that Henry James if not invented then patented. In his revisions to this novels, before publication in the New York edition, James habitually removed commas around subclauses – often leaving the reader needing to hear the sound of the sentence before they could pull apart its constituents and make sense of it.

Perhaps commas are too cumbersome, too pedantic, for Greene to include. But they would make the sentence grammatically better:

Mr Tench went comma sweating comma by comma past the Treasury etc.

Commas would detach sweating from went and force the reader back to Mr Tench as what’s doing the sweating. Greene’s fictional point, I expect, is that beneath the blazing Mexican sun, to go is to sweat.

The next mismatch is to put something approaching free indirect narration right up against something approaching omniscient third person narration:

Half-way across [the plaza] he suddenly forgot what he had come out for – a glass of mineral water? That was all there was to drink in this prohibition state – except beer, but that was a government monopoly and too expensive except on special occasions.

In the first sentence, the word suddenly seems to be forcing the drama; the event is more believable and I would say more dramatic like this:

Half-way across he forgot what he had come out for –

In the second sentence, the narrator clearly detaches from Mr Tench’s sweaty consciousness. There’s no way that Mr Tench is thinking the words ‘this prohibition state’ – he’s much more likely thinking ‘awful bloody fucking place’.

So far, Greene has stuck pretty much to conventional grammar, although the second colon in the first paragraph isn’t doing its usual job. If we look at the opening of the second chapter, we see Greene doing something more extreme:

The squad of police made their way back to the station. They walked raggedly with rifles slung anyhow: ends of cotton where buttons should have been: a puttee slipping down over the ankle: small men with black secret Indian eyes.

I can’t think of any other sentence constructed like this. Usually, to avoid confusion, only one colon is allowed in any sentence. The image I have for Greene’s jerrybuilt punctuation here is of nailheads – this is a badly put together shantytown shack, with pairs of nails jammed in all over the place just to stop the thing falling apart.

Is this bad writing? Is deliberately bad writing still not bad writing?

On my desk, a silverfish walks from the copy of The Power and the Glory, over my watch, around an HB pencil and onto to spine of the copy of Infinite Jest.

Not really, but it gets us there –

Infinite Jest, written by David Foster Wallace between 1991 and 1996, brings up a lot of questions that we’ve already raised. Those of the relationship between the class of the writer and the tone of the prose (DFW uses semicolons, so Kurt Vonnegut would rightly assume he’d been to college); those of the subject of the story and the level of mimesis of the prose; those of American writing and how it deals with American speech; those of correct grammatical practise seeming fussy, distancing, and a looser approach bringing a different life to the prose.

Like Bellow, David Foster Wallace’s prose attempts to integrate the Low and the High Styles. At points, this works against the ground-level believability of the characters – the vocabulary will be doing one thing (innocently misspelling or misspeaking words) whilst the syntax is doing quite another (turning post-Proustian cartwheels).

The tics of contemporary speech, contemporary speech as overheard by DFW, come into the prose of Infinite Jest even when it seems to be being narrated someone or something omniscient. Paragraphs start: ‘And but so…’ or ‘But so and…’ or ‘So but also…’, recalling offhand speech, speech which needs to recapitulate or pick up where it didn’t leave off.

However, the same paragraphs will also contain shortforms such as W/ for with, w/r/t for with regard to; Q.v., quod vide (‘which see’ – a way of flagging up cross-references) – shortforms that are unmistakably written.

The syntax is generally loose, although DFW can tighten to aphoristic writing when he wants (‘You can be at certain parties and not really be there.’ – p219). Some sections read as if they were written in note form – a kind of pre-prose:

‘1610h. E.T.A. [that’s the acronym, there are many many acronyms, for Enfield Tennis Academy] Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various resistance systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing…’

The basic form of this is the list – and the final sentence (‘doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical…) becomes a list within a list.

An aside here about the word and. One of the relationships you’ll have to establish in your prose is that between yourself and American writing. Ever since Whitman, and arguably before, American English – why don’t we just call it American? – has developed a different, more spacious syntax than English English. This is typified by the use of and which, I’d say, differs quite considerably. Without going into huge detail, an English and tends to place what follows more emphatically than an American and. That placing performed by the English and may be within a hierarchy – a hierarchy of importance socially, or within the society of the sentence – or that placing may be spatial or temporal.

The American and, particularly since Hemingway, since Gertrude Stein, is a more straightforwardly inclusive word – putting the matter in the sentence (and the sentence’s sense) but not necessarily forcing it to a location. The American and is more comfortable conjoining different grammatical elements within a sentence – for example, ‘He went to here and there and he saw this and this and this and this and it started to rain and he got very wet.’ An English list would tend to avoid constructing itself just around and… and… and... You might say that American ands are Republican; English ones are still semi-aristocratic, gentrified. Here’s a Hemingway sentence from ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ p71:

He waved to Helen and to the boys and, as the clatter moved into the old familiar roar, they swung around with Compie watching for wart-hog holes and roared, bumping, along the stretch between the fires and with the last bump rose and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp beside the hill, flattening now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and the bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of.

Interestingly, Hemingway does put the pedantic commas around ‘and roared comma bumping comma along the stretch…’ whereas Greene left them out, you’ll remember, around sweating.

Similarly, Greene’s use of those three consecutive colons at the start of chapter two is a way of non-hierarchical linking. This and this and this and this. To use and would be to overHemingwayise himself.

(This talk of ands may seem a long way from your own practise as a writer. But if you throw in a sentence containing three ands, you’re going to encounter it; just as, if you decide to stick entirely to an acceptable English usage, you’re encountering the American and by avoidance.)

If I were rejigging the Birkbeck course completely, I would be very tempted by the idea of only giving you only European or only British and Irish writers to read. The Reading Guide is quite heavy on American writing. British and Irish short stories would show you the ways other writers have dealt with the language-problems you’re going to encounter; their choices are closer to the choices you’re going to have to make – because American prose writers, in this Late Imperial phase of their country, have a lot of the advantages of a superconductive popular speech. An Essex girl who has taken on the so I’m like and the you know of L.A. Valley girls is doing so about three decades after the linguistic fact. American’s where it is and was at, wordwise.

It’s probably time to start approaching some conclusions. One of them, which I’m going to give straight out, is that – following on from my revelation about why Greene was writing like he does at the beginning of The Power and the Glory – I don’t really believe that there are such things as good or bad sentences, there are merely sentences in the wrong or right place.

There are a number of examples of very well written very badly written prose; one would be Hemingway’s story ‘One Reader Writes’. Another, the semi-literate letter that Leopold Bloom receives from Martha in Ulysses.

Good prose, in and of itself, is of no use whatsoever. Sentences are about getting a particular job done at a particular moment in the text – fitting their place, smoothly or obstructively, in between the sentence before and the sentence after.

This relationship is a lot less linear-smooth than it used to be. One of the interesting developments in Infinite Jest is the creating of the page as a kind of suspension, a field in which sentences appear in a carefully controlled order but not necessarily in a flowing logical sequence. This kind of jumping around between two or three or more lines of thought is very hard to illustrate without a fairly long quotation, so I’ll quote at length. Don’t fuss too much about understanding what’s going on, just listen to how certain threads come in and then reappear five or six sentences later. Hal Incandenza, one of the novel’s main characters, is lying on his back on the floor (p897-898):

After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson put his wet-combed head in the door and said LaMont Chu wanted to know whether what was happening outside qualified as a blizzard. It took over a minute of my not saying anything from him to go away. The ceiling panels were grotesquely detailed. They seemed to come after you like some invasive E.T.A. patron backing you up against the wall at a party. The ankle throbbed dully in the snowstorm’s low pressure. I relaxed my throat and simply let the excess saliva run post-nasally back and down. The Mom’s mother had been ethnic Québecois, her late father Anglo-Canadian. The term used in the Yale Journal of Alcohol Studies for this man was binge-drinker. All my grandparents were deceased. Himself’s [that is Hal’s father] middle name had been Orin, his father’s own father’s name. The V.R.’s entertainment cartridges were arrayed on wall-length shelves of translucent polyethylene. Their individual cases were all either clear plastic or glossy black plastic. My full name is Harold James Incandenza, and I am 183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet. Himself designed the Academy’s indirect lighting, which is ingenious and close to full-spectrum. V.R.5 [Viewing Room Five] contained a large couch, four reclining chairs, a midsized recumbency, six green corduroy spectation-pillows stacked in a corner, three end tables, and a coffee table of mylar with inlaid coasters. The overhead lighting in every E.T.A. room came from a small carbon-graphite spotlight directed upward at a complexly alloyed reflecting plate above it. No rheostat was required; a small joystick controlled the brightness by altering the spot’s angle of incidence to the plate. Himself’s films were arranged on the third shelf of the entertainment-case. The Mom’s full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D. She is 197 cm. tall in flats and still came up only to Himself’s ear when he straightened and stood erect. For almost a month in the weight room, Lyle had been saying that the most advanced level of Vaipassana or ‘Insight’ meditation consisted in sitting in fully awakened contemplation of one’s own death. I had held Big Buddy sessions in V.R.5 throughout the month of September. The Moms had grown up without a middle name. The etymology of the term blizzard is essentially unknown. The full-spectrum lighting system had been a labor of love from Himself to the Moms, who’d agreed to leave Brandeis and head up the Academy’s academics and had an ethnic Canadian’s horror of fluorescent light; but by the time the system had been installed and de-bugged, the gestalt of the Moms’s lumiphobia had extended to all overhead lighting, and she never used her office’s spot-and-plate system.

You might call this kind of prose fugal, bringing in different voices or subjects, turning them upside down, playing them backwards, the main theme becoming an accompaniment in the bass, a completely new subject entering late and turning out to be an earlier subject transformed beyond recognition.

You might also say that it’s a recent redoing of conventional stream-of-consciousness, familiar from, say, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but I don’t think that’s true. Hal’s is an extraordinary consciousness, but we’re not meant to assume the phrase ‘the gestalt of the Moms’s lumiphobia’ is pinging around in his head.

DFW’s take on the sentence, to simplify, is that it should be a very practical thing, that should be able to contain the most widely varying kinds of language. The sound of it is far less important than the sense. It’s not quite the IKEA flatpack prose of Douglas Coupland, a writer who covers or tries to cover a lot of the same contemporary territory. But DFW isn’t going to fuss itself over whether three or four consecutive sentences start with the word ‘The…’ This isn’t about elegance, it’s about By All Means Necessary. However, it does bear some relation to Cyril Connolly’s description of the Mandarin: ‘It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits.’

Here’s a character, Gene Fackelmann, being introduced, late in the book (p912):

But from age like eighteen to twenty-three, Gately and the prenominate Gene Fackelmann – a towering, slope-shouldered, wide-hipped, prematurely potbellied, oddly priapistic, and congenitally high-strung Dialudid addict with a walrusy mustache that seemed to have a nervous life of its own – these two served as like Whitey Sorkin’s operatives in the field, taking bets and phoning them to Saugus, delivering winnings, and collecting debts.

This is, quite possibly, a like Saul Bellow pastiche.

What the long section (about Hal on the floor) I read just now conveys, as does the novel as a whole, is a mass of material all pressing at the same time to get in. It’s Bellow’s ‘first to knock, first admitted’ – teeming prose. Sometimes the sentences are so full of possible digressions, the only way for DFW to cope with them is by overflowing into pages-long footnotes. These, I think, aren’t a postmodern stylistic affectation (although you could say they are, in a way, mimetic of a teeming world) – instead, they are a very practical way of dealing with the need to say more at a particular point.

In conclusion, here are a few questions that you’re going to have to think about, with regard to how you address a sentence:

How important to you is fidelity to the action you’re describing as opposed to the linguistic elegance and grammatical correctness of the way in which you describe it? In other words, what’s your relationship to mimesis? Are you writing TV on the page or are you choreographing your reader’s mind or are you actually trying to punch them in the face?
How American or non-American or anti-American is your language, particularly your syntax, going to be?
How do the sentences you write relate to the sentences you speak? Are you trying to social-climb in your syntax? Are you using words you have to go to the dictionary to understand? Or, are you using words that you’ve never said aloud, even when drunk down the pub? (Not that your writing should be circumscribed by your speech, but that there may be a limit to how far you can convincingly stray away from it without turning as wooden as a ventriloquist’s dummy.)
Not ‘Am I going to write short sentences or long sentences?’ but ‘What’s my rhythm? Am I strolling or tapdancing?’
Are you reading passionately enough? Not for the sake of the story and who does what to whom, but for the sake of being inside the sentences and feeling exactly how they move and thinking about why they move that way?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sensibility

 

I don’t think you’re going to like this. It’s probably going to hurt. If it doesn’t hurt, there’s a problem.

As part of your coursework, you’ll have read Flannery O’Connor’s essay ‘Writing Short Stories’.

She begins by saying this:

‘I have heard people say that the short story was one of the most difficult literary forms, and I’ve always tried to decide why people feel this way about what seems to me one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human expression. After all, you begin to hear and tell stories when you’re a child, and there doesn’t seem to be anything very complicated about it. I suspect that most of you have been telling stories all your lives, and yet here you sit – come to find out how to do it.’

As do you, here today.

‘Then last week, after I had written down some of these serene thoughts to use here today, my calm was shattered when I was sent seven of your manuscripts to read.

‘After this experience, I found myself ready to admit, if not that the short story is one of the most difficult literary forms, at least that it is more difficult for some than for others.

‘I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don’t have it, you might as well forget it.’

When, last term, I asked my students what they thought of the essay – a good, teacherly question – the first of them to speak up said, ‘Well, I think she’s a bit of a git.’

Although Flannery O’Connor had – of course – read none of this particular student’s writing, and this student was not at all being told to ‘forget it’, still this student felt compelled to take the comment personally; which, I think, is exactly how Flannery O’Connor intended it to be taken.

‘Forget it…’ – This is not the way we’re used to being spoken to, particularly nowadays. We are accustomed to being given the party line on the American Dream: ‘If you believe, you can achieve.’

Flannery O’Connor is advising some of us, some of you, to stop dreaming and forget it.

Forget it because you do not have the gift of creating life with words.

I’m going to return to forgetting it a bit later, but not in Flannery O’Connor’s way.

I should start by saying, that for much of this talk you’re probably going to think I’m a git, too.

Maybe even a bigger git than Flannery O’Connor because I don’t believe that ‘most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story’.

I’m going to take that away from you.

I do believe that most people start out with some kind of ability to paint a wonderful, free, energetic picture in primary colours.

If you compare the paintings of three-year-olds to the paintings of thirteen-year-olds, there’s no doubt that – during the intervening years – some element of uninhibited genius has disappeared.

Adolescent art is always the worst art.

I will go along with Flannery O’Connor so far as to say that you were all gifted, at an early stage, with the ability to speak charmingly, innovatively. You will have said things, in trying to speak the world clearly, which came at it sideways and got it more right than cliched adult speech almost ever does.

But this haphazard charm of accuracy is something quite different to being able to tell a story.

And most of the time, you were probably running round shouting poo-bum-willy-fart poo-bum-willy-fart as all children do; all children who are allowed to get away with it, anyway.

Even though I’ve grown up to be a writer, I don’t feel that, as a boy, I ever had a great, free, natural ability to tell stories. But Flannery O’Connor is quite stringent, quite determinedly gittish. All she’s granting any of us is ‘some kind of ability’.

I’m going to make a number of statements to you – about writing, about good writing, about bad writing. I don’t expect you to agree with all or any of them, but I’d like you to listen to them as carefully as possible; because I am saying them on the basis of a belief that there are potentially good writers who nevertheless write badly – potentially good writers who have always written badly.

As an aside, I can imagine someone objecting: ‘You can’t just say some writing is good and some bad.’

To which I’d reply, ‘Yes, you can.’

Bad writing is mainly boring writing. It can be boring from any number of different causes. It can be boring because too confused or too logical, or boring because hysterical or lethargic, or boring because nothing truly happens.

If I give you a four hundred page manuscript of an unpublished novel – something that I consider is made up of bad writing – you may read it to the end, but you will suffer as you do.

It’s possible that you’ve ever, in fact, had to read eighty-thousand words of bad writing.

The friend of a friend’s novel.

I have.

On numerous occasions.

If you ask around, I’m sure you’ll be able to find a really bad novel easily enough.

I don’t mean by someone who is in this room, who has taken our classes.

I mean someone who has spent isolated years writing a book they are convinced is a great work of literature.

And when you’re reading it, this novel, you’ll know it’s bad and you’ll know what bad is.

The friend of a friend’s novel may have some redeeming features – the odd nicely shaped sentence, the stray brilliant image. But it is still an agony to force oneself to keep going. It is still telling you nothing you didn’t already know.

As an adjunct to this, I’d like to say one more thing:

Our tastes as readers may differ considerably, but it’s very rare that when Russell, Julia and I mark your dissertations, we disagree by more than two or three marks. And it’s almost unheard of for us to end up disagreeing as to what mark a piece should receive.

We are by no means objective judges; I’m not asserting that. But we find concensus on bad writing 100 per cent of the time.

So, here are my propositions about bad writing – which you may still not believe exists.

Bad writers continue to write badly because they have many reasons – from their point of view, very good reasons – for wanting to continue writing in the way they do.

Writers are bad because they cleave to the causes of writing badly.

Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self – even, or especially, when its’ overt topic is self-disgust.

Bad writing accepts that the person who will admire it first and most and last is the writer herself.

While bad writers may read a great many diverse works of fiction, they are unable because unwilling to perceive the things these works do which their own writing fails to do.

The most dangerous kind of writers for bad writers to read are what I call Excuse Writers – writers of the sort who seem to grant permission to others to borrow or imitate their failings.

I’ll give you some concrete examples of Excuse Writers – Jack Kerouac, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou.

Bad writers bulwark themselves against a confrontation with their own badness by reference to other writers of the past and present with whom they feel they share certain defence-worthy characteristics.

In order to protect their badness, bad writers form defensive admirations: ‘If Updike can get away with these kind of half-page descriptions of women’s breasts, I can too…’ or ‘If Virginia Woolf is a bit woozy on spatiality, on putting things down concretely, I’ll just let things float free…’

If another writer’s work survives on charm, you will never be able to steal it, only imitate it in an embarrassingly obvious way. This writing will be adolescent, and adolescents lack charm – adolescents don’t value charm.

Bad writing is written defensively; good writing is a making vulnerable – a making of the self as vulnerable as possible. The psychic risk of a novel such as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is vast – particularly for someone for whom psychic risk was so potentially debilitating and ultimately dangerous. When John Updike began writing Rabbit, Run all in the present tense, it was either going to be a great technical feat or a humiliating aesthetic misjudgement. (Excuse writers aren’t, in themselves, bad writers; not at all.)

Good writing is a hymn of praise to everything the self feels itself incapable of perceiving.

Good writing is of necessity a betrayal of the known self, of the version of the self we believe we know, and through that a betrayal of the known world – a betrayal into truth.

What are some of the direct causes of bad writing? What are some of the good reasons people have for continuing to write badly.

I’m going to suggest four mains ones – there are others, I’m sure.

Often, the bad writer will feel that they have a particular story they want to tell. It may be a story passed on to them by their grandmother or it maybe something that happened to them when they were younger. Until they’ve told this particular story (which may be what has drawn them to taking writing seriously), they feel they can’t move on. But because the material is so close to them, so precious to them, they can’t mess around with it enough to learn how writing works. And, ultimately, they lack the will to betray the material sufficiently to make it true.

Bad writers think: ‘I want to write this.’

Bad writers often want to rewrite a book by another writer that was written in a different time period, under completely different social conditions. Because it’s a good book, they see no reason why they can’t simply do the same kind of thing again – with the characters wearing different clothes, eating different food. They don’t understand that even historical novels or science fiction novels are a response to a particular historical moment. And pretending that the world isn’t as it is – or, perhaps more accurately, that the world should still be as it once was – pretending this is disastrous for any serious fiction.

Bad writers think: ‘I want to write this.’

Conversely, bad writers often write in order to forward a cause or enlarge other people’s understanding of a contemporary social issue. Any attempt at all to write in order to make the world a better, fairer place – to write stories, I mean, not essays or polemics – any attempt to write world-improving fiction is almost certain to fail. Holding any value as more important than learning to be a good writer is dangerous. Put very simply, your characters must be alive before they seek justice; justice will never be achieved by cardboard cutouts or mannequins; cardboard cutouts and mannequins don’t need justice.

Bad writers think: ‘I want to write this.’

Bad writers often believe they have very little left to learn, and that it is the literary world’s fault that they have not yet been recognised, published, lauded and laureled. It is a very destructive thing to believe that you are very close to being a good writer, and that all you need to do is keep going as you are rather than completely reinvent what you are doing.

Bad writers think: ‘I want to write this.’

Good writers think…

What do you think good writers think? – I think good writers think: ‘This is being written.’

I’d like to sidestep now. You’ve probably heard the words good and bad enough for one day. Although I’m afraid – git that I am – that they’ll be recurring later.

What I’m now going to do is quote another essay by Flannery O’Connor. This one called ‘The Nature and Aim of Fiction’:

‘In fact,’ Flannery O’Connor says, ‘so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.’

Competence, obviously, lies in between bad and good writing. But the territory isn’t as simply mapped as that.

Competent can be a lot further from great than awful is.

To go from being a competent writer to being a great writer, I think you have to risk being – or risk being seen as – a bad writer.

Here are a few propositions about competence:

Competence is deadly because it prevents the writer risking the humiliation that they will need to risk before they pass beyond competence.

Competence will never climb the trapeze, take a pie in the face, put its head in the lion’s mouth, transfix a raging audience through wit and will and voice. Competence will never truly entertain because it will never run away to join the circus.

To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus.

Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been busking for ten years, and earns their living busking.

When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to go, ‘Well done.’ They want to go, ‘Wow.’

Competence never makes people go Wow.

At worst, on this course, we will have shown you how to do some magic tricks; at best, we will have taught you how to be a good magician; beyond that, though, is doing magic – and that you will have to learn for yourself. For what we can’t show you is how to do things you shouldn’t be able to do.

By this point in your Birkbeck Creative Writing MA, you are all far more likely to be competent writers than bad writers.

You’re probably at the high-point of thinking I’m a git, now.

You didn’t take a creative writing MA in order to be told to run away with the circus.

The situation isn’t that extreme, is it?

What’s the point of saying all this if it isn’t going to help; if I’m not going to give you some way of improving, as a writer?

But that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

First, though, I’d like to take another sidestep – from the circus to high-level physics.

One of the questions that teachers of creative writing get asked most frequently, apart from ‘How do I get an agent?’ is ‘Can creative writing be taught?’

For a long time, I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to this. I would say that I believed creative writing couldn’t be taught, but that it could be learnt. In other words, that the process of going through a creative writing course could radically improve a student’s stories, even though it probably wouldn’t be the taught element which caused this improvement. I would say that the most useful thing for me, when I studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, was to feel that I had a small audience who weren’t (unlike my friends and family) emotionally committed to me as a person. I could hand in a piece of work to the class in the knowledge that they would respond without thinking they had to spend the rest of their week, or maybe even the rest of their lives, dealing with the consequences of being negative. It’s a completely different feeling, knowing that you are writing for a small group of committed readers, rather than for the judges of open competitions, for skim-reading agents or work-experience people in publisher’s offices. This, I used to say – the provision of an audience of peers – was how creative writing was learnt.

But a while ago I came up with what I thought was a better answer. Yes, creative writing can be taught, but only in this sense: what we teach you on the Creative Writing MA is equivalent to Newtonian Physics. In other words, it’s a pretty good way to do the basic jobs of dealing with matter. If you want to predict where the moon will be at a certain time in the future, Newtonian physics will enable you to do this – at least to the extent that your telescope won’t be pointing in completely the wrong direction. Newtonian Physics, for most things you’re going to come across, gets the job done.

However, as we’ve discovered since Newton, the universe – including both the moon and the telescope and also your eye – the universe doesn’t operate according to Newtonian physics. The universe exists on a quantum level, and the rules of Quantum Physics are often in direct contradiction of Newtonian Physics. In the quantum world, things can simultaneously exist and not exist. In the quantum world, things can travel backwards in time. Quantum physics means matter can do things it shouldn’t be able to do.

Now, transfering this over to Creative Writing. What we do on the MA is, I’d say, to teach you the equivalent of Newtonian Physics. The technical stuff that we go through – point of view, use of time, narrative tone – all of this will let you find the moon, observe it, predict it. But if you want to do good or great writing – what I think of as good or great writing – you are going to have to step up to Quantum Physics. And this is where the analogy between Creative Writing and Physics starts to break down. Because whilst you can teach Quantum Physics to very bright students, it’s almost impossible to teach Creative Writing on the Quantum-equivalent level.

Why?

Because on that level it’s ceased to be Creative Writing and has become just really good or great writing. And to say anything useful about that, your tutor would have to be in your head, commenting on your vague plans and your specific choices within sentences. But commentary, at this point, is probably the last thing you need. You may not even, strictly, be conscious of what you’re doing. You’ll just be following your developed instincts as to what seems right.

Good writers think: ‘This is being written.’

To tie this in with the running away to join the circus: Newtonian physics makes the crowd say ‘Well done’; Quantum physics makes the crowd say ‘Wow’.

I’d like to turn now to the subject of this talk, which I’ve done a remarkable job of not mentioning before: Sensibility.

The reason for this is that Sensibility belongs very much to the Quantum world of writing. And, in order to reach it, I needed to pass through bad and competent writing.

And, yes, for those that are worried, I’m soon going to come to that quintessentially Quantum writer, Fernando Pessoa.

The best thing I’ve heard said about Sensibility came in an interview between the poets John Betjeman and Philip Larkin in a documentary made in 1964 for the BBC programme Monitor.

JOHN BETJEMAN asks PHILIP LARKIN:

What sort of attitude do you take to adverse criticism?

and PHILIP LARKIN replies:

Well, I don’t know [if] you feel this, but I feel it very strongly – I read that, you know, I’m a miserable sort of fellow, writing a sort of Welfare State sub-poetry; doing it well, perhaps, but it isn’t really what poetry is and it isn’t really the sort of poetry we want; but I wonder whether it ever occurs to the writer of criticism like that that really one agrees with them but what one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, and the kind of environment one’s had, and has now, that one doesn’t really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write or can write.

Here, although he doesn’t say the word, Larkin is describing Sensibility. His own disappointing Sensibility.

What do I mean by Sensibility? Is it the same thing as in the title of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen?

In a way yes, and in a way no.

It was in the mid-Eighteenth Century that the idea of Sensibility came to prominence – as much as something to be mocked as something to be proud of. Novels were full of what my father would call ‘sensitive little flowers’.

Slightly later, the Romantic poets adapted the idea of a distinctive hyper-sensitivity to the things of the world; if one had Sensibility, one would be able to react appropriately or even originally to (here’s a very common example) the sight of the snow covered heights of Mount Blanc. One might even feel moved to write a sonnet on the feelings stirred in one by the vision.

The understanding of Sensibility I’m talking about has developed from this proud Romantic notion. It’s the particularity of someone’s response to Mount Blanc that displays their particular sensibility. And, because we’re no longer Romantics, or we try to kid ourselves we’re not, this sensibility doesn’t necessarily have to express itself as appreciation of the sublimity of the natural world. W.H.Auden, for example, said: ‘Apart from nature, geometry’s all there is… Geometry belongs to man. Man’s got to assert himself against Nature all the time… I hate sunsets and flowers. And I loathe the sea. The sea is formless…’ [W.H.Auden, quotes as ‘Weston’, in Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, 1938] Here, Auden is defining himself as an anti-romantic sensibility, by aesthetically attacking the things the romantics held dearest. Where they valued mountains, he would value disused Victorian industrial machinery. And he would do this, he asserted, even before he became a poet:

‘From the age of four to thirteen I had a series of passionate affairs with pictures of, to me, particularly attractive water-turbines, winding-engines, roller-crushers, etc., and I was never so emotionally happy as when I was underground.’ [The English Auden, p.397-398]

Auden was unusual in having a Sensibility that revealed itself, to him and to others, even in adolescence. People like Auden end up being called geniuses. But I think it’s more likely that they are people who begin working on their Sensibility very hard and at a very early age – even if they are not aware that that’s what they are doing.

Which brings me, at last, to Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) and to The Book of Disquiet.

Although to call it a book is to make it appear more planned and finished than it ever was.

If you’ve researched Pessoa a little, you will have found out the unimportant facts:

– that he lived a quiet life, working as a translator in Lisbon

– that he was known in his life as a poet; in fact, as more than one poet, because be wrote in completely different styles under a series of what he called ‘heteronyms’

– that The Book of Disquiet was left unfinished by Pessoa, and that each printed Book of Disquiet we have is a version created after Pessoa’s death by editors who have tried to put his fragmented manuscripts into readable order

– that whichever edition of The Book of Disquiet you have looked at, you won’t have read all of it – and unless you learn Portuguese and become a Pessoa scholar you probably never will

So, why did I choose Pessoa as the required reading?

Well, I hope you will remember my earlier reference to the bad novel you might borrow, and the bad writer who had written it – the friend of a friend:

‘I mean someone who has spent isolated years writing a book they are convinced is a great work of literature.’

This was Pessoa:

‘Today’s dreamers are perhaps the great precursors of the ultimate science of the future, not that I believe in any such ultimate science… Sometimes I invent a metaphysics like this with all the respectful scrupulousness of attention of someone engaged in real scientific work. As I’ve said before, it reaches the point where I may really be doing just that.’

This was Pessoa, and he was right – he was writing a great work of literature.

In fact, The Book of Disquiet – in Creative Writing MA terms, in Newtonian physics terms, in some of my own terms – looks very like bad writing. It has many of the faults that the worst writing has. It centres on one isolated autobiographical character who believes, against all evidence, that they are worthy or universal attention. It hardly ever engages this character with another character. There is almost no dialogue. There are very few scenes. The character is depressed and, probably to some readers, depressing. There appears to be no chance of change within his life. There is no story as such. The writing is disorganized, repetitious, seemingly directionless. The world described is limited, drab, boring.

And yet – and this is where we flip to the Quantum world, and go beyond Creative Writing – and yet this is a great, endlessly readable, endlessly fascinating work of fiction.

Why?

Sensibility.

The Book of Disquiet is a book which works consistently to remove anything from itself which is neither an examination of Sensibility nor an expression of Sensibility.

Take any random page and it will almost certainly contain a statement of the sort: ‘I see things like this’ or ‘I have always seen things like this’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t always seen things like this…’

I took a random page and found;

‘When I first came to Lisbon the sound of someone playing scales on a piano used to drift down from the flat above, the monotonous piano practice of a little girl I never saw. Today, through processes of assimilation I fail to comprehend, I discover that if I open the door to the cellars of my soul, those repetitive scales are still audible, played by a girl who is now Mrs Someone-or-other, or else dead and shut up in a white place overgrown by black cypresses.’

Imagine how this would be workshopped – ‘Look, this is just an inert description. How about if another girl moves in above the narrator and starts playing scales, and how about if he meets and falls in love with her mother, or with her, or with the idea of playing piano himself? Make something happen.’

Pessoa is about the removal of making something happen in order to allow Sensibility to take the happening’s place.

In this, and in other things, he is a more extreme version of other modern writers of a similar period – Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf – all of whom I would recommend you investigate with Sensibility in mind.

Pessoa’s writing is great because, and only because, he has a fascinating Sensibility. It is a Sensibility he has cultivated but it is also a Sensibility that oppresses and poisons him.

The Book of Disquiet is constantly summing itself up, but here is one definition of Pessoa’s project:

‘Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from oneself.’

This is Quantum writing – writing that has risked total humiliation in order to pass beyond competence. It is great or it is worthless. It is doing something that it shouldn’t be able to do.

So, why don’t we teach Sensibility as part of the MA?

Perhaps if we had an exclusively tutorial system and ten years with each student, we could.

I doubt it, though.

Because Sensibility is partly about rejecting those things which can be taught – rejecting those things which others believe worth teaching.

Sensibility is the difference between Creative Writing and writing – meaning good writing and especially great writing.

This is why I chose Sensibility as something worth talking about at this stage of this term. If you’d heard it mentioned in Week One, it would have become just another thing to angst over: ‘Oh God, not only is my use of point-of-view wobbly but I don’t have an original and fascinating Sensibility. Maybe I should forget it?’

Forget it.

Which brings us back to where we stared, that old git Flannery O’Connor. Perhaps now she seems less of a git than she did; now that I’ve become the uber-git. But I hope I’ve supplied an explanation of her words on telling stories and on competent writing.

My definition would be:

‘Competent writing is writing that lacks an interesting Sensibility.’

However, O’Connor was clearly aware of Sensibility, she just called it something else:

‘We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it…’

I think Sensibility is a better word than Vision because it not only suggests that you need to see a different world, it also suggests that you need to inhabit and create a different world.

And I’ve already said that Sensibility is unteachable.

Does that mean that the talk is going to end right now?

Bummer.

No.

Because I think that, without teaching you, I can give you some suggestions which might help you develop as a writer and, through this, develop your Sensibility.

First, you do need to forget it. Forget it and give up completely and forever.

Then, immediately, you need to start again, but not from where you finished before. Do try to forget where that was – for the moment at least.

Cease to attempt to be what you will never succeed in being. If you are Larkin, there’s no point in you trying to be (as he did) D.H.Lawrence or W.B.Yeats. A great deal of the business of developing a unique Sensibility is to do with the failure to be X or Y, the failure to be other than one is.

I repeat, slightly altered, cease attempting to become what you stand no chance of ever convincingly being.

To develop as a writer, and so as a Sensibility, there are four basic things you can do: Writing, Re-writing, Reading, Re-reading.

I wouldn’t put them in this order of usefulness, though. My ranking would go something like this, from least useful to most useful:

Writing
Reading
Re-reading
Re-writing

Here, by re-writing, I also mean intensively and honestly re-reading what you have written.

These four things should be obvious to you by this point in the course. Here are a few other, less usual suggestions:

Write a list of your obsessions. Allow it to be as short or as long as it wants to be. Add to it over the following week, whenever a forgotten thing occurs. At the end of the week, go over it once more. Take out any item you think is there to impress or in any way speak to other people. Now, who does this list remind you of? Read it. Read it again. Then destroy it. A week later, repeat the exercise. You can try to remember what was on the first list, if you like, but it’s better to return to the question, ‘What obsesses me?’ This second list, you can – if you want – keep. Perhaps it will come in useful.

Take five good but not necessarily great novels quickly, randomly, from your bookshelves. Read the opening page (just that, not a word more) – the opening page of each of them. Then read just the opening page of your most recent piece of work. How do they announce themselves to you, these other writers? And how do you find yourself announcing yourself? How, if you could choose, would you like to announce yourself?

Create a pseudonym you don’t care for, and begin immediately to write as that person. Don’t worry any longer about whether what you are writing is good or not. Just write as energetically as you can. After a week, compare what you wrote, spontaneously-as-another, with what you wrote the week before, consciously-as-yourself. How do the two periods compare? Is one truer to you than the other? If not, why not?

Choose a writer whose work you know really well. Now, write a parody of them – exaggerating every feature of their style but still applying it to the kind of subject matter they applied it to. A week later, reread what you’ve done. Where do you fail to be true to the parodied writer? Are there any gaps through which you can peak at your own sensibility? Writers always used to learn by imitating. The first thing we have by Keats is an imitation of Spenser. Because when a writer puts something forwards and says, ‘This is an imitation of so-and-so,’ the reader looks for the places where the imitation succeeds but more so for the places where it fails. And these failures are where the two Sensibilities fail to coincide. So they are places you can use to investigate your own Sensibility. If you were to do conscious imitations of a series of writers, you would learn a great deal about yourself as a writer.

After you have done the previous exercise, write another parody, this time trying to take the original writer’s Sensibility but using it to write about something they never (to your knowledge) wrote about. If it’s Hemingway, say, have your version of him write about the doings of a family of white mice or a women’s institute coach trip to London to see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. If it’s Jane Austen, have your version of her write about a mafia killing or a speed-dating event or zombies.

Maybe not zombies.

Stop writing your first drafts on a computer. Even if you find your handwriting unusable (because illegible, because slow), a page of handwritten manuscript will reveal more to you of your own Sensibility than the neutrality of Microsoft Word ever will. The faults of your writing are covered over when not actually exacerbated by wordprocessing. The stage of typing up a handwritten draft – of seeing it transform from rough scribbly letters to respectable-looking text – is very clarifying. But if the words have never been rough and scribbly they will never gain those qualities. In one way, the words will always have been public. And a feeling of privacy is one of the most attractive qualities in writing.

Also, the physical labour of writing is useful; increase rather than decrease this for yourself. By doing this (handwriting) you are inhabiting your sentences, allowing them to pass through your body in a less distanced way than if you simply type them out. Don’t try to rush to the final draft; learn the difficult art of dwelling.

In all of these things, don’t be concerned at all whether you are writing badly or well. Simply try to write as energetically, as committedly, as you possibly can.

I’m going to conclude with a third set of propositions. I began by trying to define good and bad writing. Then I went on to competent writing – with some side-references to running away to join the circus, busking magicians and Quantum physics. I’d like to finish by making some propositions about Sensibility. This is on the basis that great writing is writing that displays or reveals a fascinating and unique Sensibility.

A unique Sensibility begins to find things very important which the majority of others have always seen as trivial.

A unique Sensibility will find mountains which are not mountains.

A unique Sensibility refuses not to see as still important things which the majority of others believe were last year or last decade or last millennium’s concern.

And original Sensibility is formed by encountering original obstacles. The great writer discovers a unique obstacle, just for herself. There are far fewer obstacles than styles or sensibilities.

Proust’s obstacle: to incorporate the time of a life into a book.

Joyce’s obstacle: to refer to everything all the time without a moment’s cease.

Beckett’s: to remove human referents as totally as possible without removing human referents totally.

Woolf’s: to depict idiosyncratic minds which are yet still porous to other idiosyncratic minds.

Pessoa’s: to write about no subject other than writing about Sensibility.

Where do difference is individual Sensibility stem from? This is perhaps the most tricky question.

I would say that is has something to do with time.

A person’s Sensibility stems from a person’s unique relation to time, of which we have very few maps.

There are conventional relations to time, as expressed in fiction. Genre fiction depends on conventional relations to time. Literary fiction is a kind of genre fiction.

There are also dominant relations to time, in any given literary period.

I’d say that a writer like Raymond Carver has a limiting, standardizing relation to fictional time – if you imitate him too closely. The simplification of tenses, avoiding even the past perfect, and allowing the past historic to overtake all, reduces the chances for writers to display their unique relation to time.

In other words, ‘She had…’ predominates over ‘She had had…’ or ‘She had been having…’ or ‘She hadn’t been having…’ or ‘She might perhaps have been having…’ or ‘She will have been having…’ or ‘She would have been, perhaps, having…’

I’m not trying to encourage you to write like Henry James or Proust. Just to realize that Carver’s obstacle isn’t your obstacle. His time isn’t your time.

Examine your unique relation to time and examine how you express it in words.

I have used enough of your time.

Good luck.

It’s time for questions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simple, Stupid – Minimalism in Prose

‘KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID’: MINIMALISM IN PROSE

Kiss.

K.I.S.S.

Does anyone know what this stands for?

Yes, this is the American playwright and screenwriter David Mamet’s famous formulation, which we are to imagine him muttering to himself as he bangs away at his typewriter: “Keep it simple, stupid.”

I’m not going to be talking about David Mamet today, but “Keep it simple, stupid” is a useful stepping off point for this lecture.

Why would any writer want to take this as a maxim? How might addressing themselves as ‘stupid’ be useful to them?

Today, I’ve taken minimalism as my subject – literary minimalism, the minimalism of fiction. Most of what I say wouldn’t apply to the music of Steve Reich or the architecture of John Pawson, though they are often referred to as minimal – and there are probably points to be made about a general cultural yearning for simplicity, for a stripping away of unnecessary detail.

Instead of David Mamet – who would be a very interesting case – I’m going to talk about Raymond Carver. This is for a couple of reasons.

First, he’s a writer who bugs me. I think about Carver quite often. I sometimes think about him halfway through writing a sentence: ‘Is this word necessary?’ I think. ‘Carver wouldn’t have it, would he?’

For better and definitely for worse, Carver has become something of a literary saint – or maybe a Holy Ghost. Almost everything one reads about him emphasizes his moral qualities – everything, that is, apart from the things he wrote and let slip about himself. Here’s Salman Rushdie’s quote on the front of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: ‘One of America’s most original, truest voices.’ The poet Tess Gallagher, Carver’s wife and widow, wrote in the introduction to Call If You Need Me of Carver’s ‘extraordinary voice – its witnessing so clarified by relentless honesty that its stories have entered into over twenty languages around the world’. (Sorry, as an aside, I can’t help saying this is ludicrous. How does a greater number of foreign translations prove a more relentless honesty?) At the climax of the same introduction, Gallagher writes, ‘This book is like rain collected in a barrel, water gathered straight from the sky.’ Carver’s goodness and bounty have become the goodness and bounty of nature itself – the nature of the Pacific Northwest, what she called in another book Carver Country. In a long essay I particularly hate, Richard Ford wrote blandly about Good Raymond:

As long as I knew Ray – the next ten years – there was this feeling of so much good and bad that had been left behind in a single lot, so that among my friends, he seemed to be facing life in the most direct and jarring way, the most adult way – a way that made the stories he wrote almost inevitable.

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To say ‘almost inevitable’ is to turn the stories into a physiological process. No story is every inevitable – particularly no great one. Carver’s greatest friends are, in my opinion, his worst enemies. Sanctification is a great disservice to such a morally complex, morally implicated, writer.

Just to add, I wasn’t immune from this myself. I bought this copy of Where I’m Calling From in Stanford in October 1989. I was about to travel across the country on a Greyhound bus, and I wanted the right company. What I eventually wrote on the back inside cover of the book, referring to the picture on the front, was ‘So tell me, friend, is it honest?’

Look at the picture.

Look at this image of Raymond Carver.

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I’ll come back to this later. But for now I’ll pass on, because the sainthood issue brings us to the second reason I’ve chosen to talk about Carver.

I think this is a very interesting moment for Carver’s reputation. Perhaps the most interesting since his death. The general view of him is about to be permanently altered. In October this year, a brand new book by Carver is going to be published. It will be called Beginners, and will contain the original versions of the stories which became What we talk about when we talk about love. Beginners will be brought to press (against some opposition) by Tess Gallagher who believes that these stories, in these versions, have their own integrity – an integrity that Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, I won’t say ‘compromised’ that might be too strong – an integrity that Lish helped to change.

You have all, I hope, read the fantastic material that was put up on the ‘New Yorker’ website – the story as Carver submitted it, which I’m going to call ‘Beginners’; the story with the edits, which I’ll call ‘Beginners,’ Edited; and the story as it finally appeared, which I’ll refer to as ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’ (or ‘What we talk about…’ for short’); and also the letters between Carver and Lish.

But before I start looking at these words in detail, I’m going to backtrack a little. The book that resulted from this editing process, What we talk about when we talk about love, became one of the founding documents of literary minimalism. Yet what we see in the back-and-forth between Carver and Lish is a game that is still in play. And, since then, minimalist writing has become a far more formalised thing. It goes beyond ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ although that – or something very like that – may have been in Gordon Lish’s mind when his blue pencil was travelling so confidently through Carver’s sentences.

This definition comes from a footnote in James Dishon McDermott’s book, Austere Style in Twentieth Century Literature: Literary Minimalism. I think it’s very useful, because it is almost scientific in its distancing. Back in the 1980s, there was a poetic movement which took as its start point Craig Raine’s poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’. Taking the alienated point of view was seen as a good way of refreshing the world. I like to see this definition as something like ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home About Raymond Carver’:

“Minimalism” refers to a short or short-short story that is nearly plotless, treating isolated moments or random, insignificant events, begins in media res, is depicted, dramatic, and filmic rather than expository or novelistic; leads nowhere or to a minor vastation or anti-climax, and favours the present tense. Characters inhabit working-class environments typified by economic disenfranchisement and menial empty work; an overwhelming consumerist culture of ubiquitous brand names and loud televisions; dysfunctional and ad hoc families; violence; alcoholism and drug abuse; rootlessness; and a bleak quasi-Naturalist sense of entrapment. The language of “Minimalism” features simple diction and syntax, colloquialisms, a blank tone, lyricism directed towards surfaces and mundane objects, and an elliptical quality.

Now, I’m pretty sure that had Raymond Carver read that, sitting down to begin writing ‘Beginners’, he would have been appalled – it might even have halted him entirely. There’s an almost murderous quality to the reductionism of James Dishon McDermott’s definition. Footnotes are often where the blade breaks the skin.

For something a little warmer, we can go to Raymond Carver’s own description, not of his writing but of his tastes as a reader. This comes from ‘All My Relations’, Carver’s “Introduction” to The Best American Short Stories 1986, included in Call If You Need Me, Harvill Press.

I lean toward realistic, “life-like” characters – that is to say, people – in realistically detailed situations. I’m drawn toward the traditional (some would call it old-fashioned) methods of storytelling: one layer of reality unfolding and giving way to another, perhaps richer layer; the gradual accretion of meaningful detail; dialogue that not only reveals something about character but advances the story. I’m not very interested, finally, in haphazard revelations, attenuated characters, stories where method or technique is all – stories, in short, where nothing much happens, or where what does happen merely confirms one’s sour view of a world gone out of control. Too, I distrust the inflated language that some people pile on when they write fiction. I believe in the efficacy of the concrete word, be it noun or verb, as opposed to the abstract or arbitrary or slippery word – or phrase, or sentence.

Now, there’s a clear gap between these two descriptions of a kind of fiction. The Carver quote is recogniseably what one would expect the author of ‘Beginners’ to say. ‘Beginners’ is the sort of story that’s being described. Whereas the Dishon McDermott quote could, to some extent, be an attempt to convey the particular qualities of ‘What we talk about…’ Certainly, the finished book as a whole is one of the main sources for the characteristics Dishon McDermott is itemizing.

What we find here, then, in the editing process, is a direction – a moving-towards what became known as minimalism.

Let’s look more closely at the story itself. If you could turn to the edited version, that’s the one with the atrociously painful crossings-out.

I think a little background here would be useful. Where are we, when all this is taking place? And who is it taking place between?

Gordon Lish, aged fourty-six, is one of the most established and respected editors of fiction in America. He has published the anthology of the work he has published as fiction editor of Esquire magazine, The Secret Life of Our Time. He works at Alfred A. Knopf, one of the best fiction lists in America. He has already edited and published Carver’s first collection of stories, Will you please be quiet, please. He is also a writer of fiction, including – at this point – A Man’s Work and All Our Secrets are the Same.

Carver himself is far from being such an established presence. He is forty two years-old and, apart from his first slim collection of stories, has published three books of poetry. In his letter of July the 8th, he writes to Lish: ‘I’m not unmindful of the fact of my immense debt to you, a debt I can simply never, never repay. This whole new life I have, so many of the friends I now have, this job up here, everything, I owe to you for “Will You Please”…’ The job was Professor of English at Syracuse University. And Lish had been publishing Carver in Esquire magazine for over five years, bringing him on.

Let’s look at the paragraph in italics at the beginning of the New Yorker page: ‘The following document compares the original draft of “Beginners” with the final version of the story, retitled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” edited by Gordon Lish,…’ etcetera ‘Additions to Carver’s draft appear in bold; a strike-through indicates a deletion; and paragraph marks indicate paragraph breaks that were inserted during the editing process.’

This doesn’t make it clear whose changes we’re looking at, when we look at ‘Beginners’, Edited. However, a recent paper by Michael A. Powers titled ‘Double Visions – Separating Gordon Lish’s Edits From Raymond Carver’s Original Authorship in Three Stories’ deals with ‘Beginners’, and is based on consultation of the original manuscript in the Lish Maunuscript Holdings, the Lilly Library, Indiana University. It’s worth quoting Powers’ description of Lish’s alterations in full:

The original manuscript shows Lish added lines of text in his written hand (usually just above a deletion) to simplify description and to segue from one sentence to the next, and his insertions shortened dialogue, in many instances changing intonation and vernacular. He also added words to the text (after deleting certain words) to make the descriptions more poetic, more charming, even more imaginative. He added paragraph breaks and he inserted punctuation to create new, shorter sentences out of broken, longer ones, raising the case of any given word to restart a sentence or lowering the case to extend a sentence. He added question marks, and periods, and commas to provide rhythm. And he added space-breaks to divide the story into shorter sections.

This essay is an MA thesis, and there seems no reason to doubt that what it gives us is the basic liberty to take the alternations we see before us in ‘Beginners,’ Edited as being essentially Lish’s.

I’m sure you’ll already have formed a clear idea of what these changes are. But I’d like to go over them in rough before taking a more line-by-line look. (There will also be some time at the end to do this.)

The most major cuts are:

The huge reduction in length of the story
The radical shortening of the anecdote of the couple, Henry and Anna Gates
The removal of the original ending

The most major alterations are:

The title (‘Beginners’ is an okay title, a wannabe-Chekhov title; ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ is a great title, a 100% Carver title, a defining title.)
The punctuation, and therefore the overall approach to what a sentence is and does
The addition of a new ending
The change of character name from ‘Herb’ to ‘Mel’
The introduction of verbal obscenity as a marker of Mel’s character – and Mel’s increasing drunkenness.

Now let’s look at the opening paragraph. Let’s look at it as if we were in a creative writing workshop.

My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Herb and I and his second wife, Teresa — Terri, we called her — and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from somewhere else. There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Herb thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.

What Lish proceeds to do to Carver’s writing is pretty basic creative writing class stuff. The change from ‘Herb’ to ‘Mel’ – if we’re going to put that down to Lish – seems to be partly a matter of taste. In my reading, Herb is one of those quintessentially seventies names (the late seventies is clearly when this story is set – Terri used to be a hippy, so some time has passed since 1968/69). Perhaps Lish thought it was just too seventies – what would come to mind is the slightly naff Tijuana brass trumpeter Herb Alpert. Or even the car-star of the Disney film series Herbie. Herb also suggests pot-smoking. Mel, whilst still a fairly seventies names, is a little less dated. The pop cultural figures it would call to mind would be Mel Brooks, the film director (notable for The Producers) and Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Pepé le Pew and many others. As Lish’s change makes the character into the equally alliterative Mel McGinnis, this might not be irrelevant. Of all the characters in the story, Mel is the one who seems most likely to become a cartoon.

Both Mel and Herb are shortened versions of fairly uncool first names, Melvin and Herbert. (Both, when I was at public school, were terms of abuse or for particular kinds of abuse.)

Unless the name Herb really didn’t seem to suit the character, (in terms of class, for example), it’s unlikely that anyone in a writing class would suggest making such a change.

At the end of the paragraph comes something a lot more straightforward. Instead of having the narrator introduce information about Mel (we’ll call him that from now on) – ‘When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary…’ – Lish suggests that Mel brings this information into the conversation at a point we are passing over as indirect speech: ‘He said he’d spent five years in a seminary… He said he still looked back on those years etcetera’.

The biggest change, though, comes in the first sentence. To my mind, this is a fantastic improvement. Carver’s version is:

My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking.

Fine, it gets the job done. It has a similarly understated quality to some opening sentences in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? For example in ‘Neighbours’, ‘Bill and Arlene Miller were a happy couple.’

Lish’s version:

My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.

Bom – end of paragraph.

From these two sentences, we learn a lot more about the narrator. We learn that he has a sense of humour, and will likely be better company than the narrator of Carver’s version. We learn that he judges his friend – there is a curious mix of resentment and respect in ‘sometimes that gives him the right’. In order to find out which wins out, resentment or respect, we’ll have to read the rest of the story. On a very basic level, Lish’s changes do this – they make the story more readable. And this goes for the rest of the story as well. Carver’s original is, in places, quite dull. Lish’s, for me, only slacks off when the characters start bullshitting about knights in armour, although I can see how that fits in thematically: do you rescue charge in to rescue women on a noble steed or do you drag them round the living room by the hair, or do the two really amount to the same thing?

More importantly, Lish’s changes to the opening sentence shift the register of the entire story. I’d say that they push quite a few steps towards that of American hardboiled fiction – a fiction based on the laconic, macho voice of men of experience; a fiction largely derived from Ernest Hemingway. The syntax changes from that of the page to that of the page mimicking the voice. The formality of punctuation is violated. By itself, the sentence: ‘Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.’ doesn’t mean very much. The right to what? Well, we already know. But the function of the full-stop or period after ‘was talking’ has been changed. It’s more of a breath mark than a punctuation mark. Because even though there are two sentences here formally, in terms of meaning there is only one. That full-stop would be better as a semi-colon, but an editor like Lish almost certainly believes semi-colons are for wimps.

The change of syntax, the change of approach to punctuation – these changes necessitate a whole cascade of other changes throughout the remainder of the story.

The first of these comes a few sentences later. Carver wrote: ‘There were Herb and I and his second wife, Teresa…’ Which has to change to ‘There were Mel and me and his second wife…’ ‘Herb and I’ is too correct. It’s too written. This narrator isn’t the Queen of England!

By aligning the tone more closely to that of the spoken voice, Lish has committed himself to eliminating anything – or almost anything – that the narrator wouldn’t genuinely say, or report as having been said.

In other words, Lish is making Carver’s writing less literary. He is doing this in what remains a literary way. I don’t really believe that the narrator, if he were telling this story whilst sitting across from me in a diner, would say the sentence ‘Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink’ or the sentence ‘There was an ice bucket on the table’. He might, however, say, ‘We lived in Albuquerque, then. But we are all from somewhere else.’

This is where I start to have problems with American discourse – when it becomes folksy. Carver’s writing is full of literary conventions, and so is Lish’s revision of it. But Lish resents these conventions, would like to get away from them, destroy them. Carver’s later stories, those in his later collections, are far more conventional, in this strict sense.

Let’s go to the next of Carver’s long paragraphs, which Lish broke up, and to the description of Terri. This seems to me a fairly clear example of a creative writing teacher getting ‘Show Don’t Tell on someone’s ass. Carver’s text reads: ‘She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces of turquoise, and long pendant earrings. She was fifteen years younger than Herb, had suffered period of anorexia, and during the late sixties, before she’d gone to nursing school, had been a dropout, a “street person” as she put it. Herb sometimes called her, affectionately, his hippie.’

The second two sentences, pure exposition, pure knowledge brought into the room by the narrator, are cut. In the rest of the story, we don’t learn that Terri is exactly fifteen years younger than Mel, but we know she’s younger from the way she defers to him, speaks about him when he’s out of the room, and also from the way Mel speaks to and about her. The anorexia we don’t exactly get, but the non-appearance of the food at the end of the story becomes (with this change) less of a symptom of her condition. We don’t, in the finished story, learn how Mel met Terri. However, I think her choice of jewellery – added to the date the story is set – gives us a clear idea that she’s a bit of an old hippie.

Hemingway’s dictum comes up here. Whatever you cut leaves something behind.

I’d like to jump a long way now, into the middle of the anecdote about Henry and Anna Gates. But first a quick word about this anecdote. The story, as Carver originally wrote it, took the literary form of a story within a story. This, I’d say, he took from Chekhov, who used it frequently. At a certain point, our interest shifts from four characters sitting around a kitchen table getting drunk on gin and tonic to two characters who have been in a terrible car smash and are clinging on to life, driven by a deep and passionate love. By radically cutting the story down, Lish doesn’t allow this shift to take place. Our interest remains in the kitchen and the things that are at stake there. For Carver, I think, what he wanted to say about love resides in the story of Henry and Anna. It may even have been the germinal anecdote, and the rest was a frame for it, so it wasn’t too obvious or sentimental. When this was cut, he came out and told Lish – in his anguished letter of July 8th, 1980: ‘I’d want some more of the old couple, Anna and Henry Gates, in ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’…’ (I’ll come back to this letter.)

For a moment, forget the story. Just listen to this as a piece of storytelling:

He told me they’d married in 1927, and since that time they’d only been apart from each other for any time on two occasions. Even when their children were born, they were born there on the ranch and Henry and the missus still saw each other every day and talked and were together around the place. But he said they’d only been away from each other for any real time on two occasions — once when her mother died, in 1940, and Anna had to take a train to St. Louis to settle matters there. And again in 1952, when her sister died in Los Angeles, and she had to go down there to claim the body.

To me, this is quite dull. Does it really matter whether it was 1940 or 1939?

This starts as just about believable spoken. But the writing becomes extremely flat around those dates. It’s hard for this to exist in the same story as, ‘Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.’

The anecdote of the Gates is an attempt by Carver to transcend the room. Lish denies him it.

As a final aside, there is a deep literary model for ‘Beginners’ – and that is Plato’s ‘Symposium’ (the title of which means ‘drinking together’); this philosophical dialogue also involves a group of people (all men, however) sitting around, getting drunk and arguing about the nature of love.

It would be good to spend more time on ‘Beginners’, but I’d now like to focus more on the relationship between Carver and Lish – as it played out through the editing of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Let’s look at an earlier letter from Carver to Lish.

September 27, 1977

What can I say? [Lish had left Esquire.] You’ve made a single-handed impression on American letters that has helped fix the course of American letters. And, of course, you know, old bean, just what an influence you’ve exercised on my life. Just knowing you were there, at your desk, was an inspiration for me to write, and you know I mean that.

There’s respect, and there’s sucking up.

The next letter is the one I quoted from earlier, the dark-night-of-the-literary-soul letter. Carver fights back against Lish’s brutal editing of ‘Beginners’ and the other stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

July 8, 1980, 8 a.m.

Please help me with this, Gordon. I feel as if this is the most important decision I’ve ever been faced with, no shit. I ask for your understanding. Next to my wife, and now Tess, you have been and are the most important individual in my life, and that’s the truth. I don’t want to lose your love or regard over this, oh God no. It would be like having a part of myself die, a spiritual part. Jesus, I’m jabbering now. But if this causes you undue complication and grief and you perhaps understandably become pissed and discouraged with me, well, I’m the poorer for it, and my life will not be the same again. True. On the other hand, if the book comes out and I can’t feel the kind of pride and pleasure in it that I want, if I feel I’ve somehow too far stepped out of bounds, crossed that line a little too far, why then I can’t feel good about myself, or maybe even write again; right now I feel it’s that serious, and if I can’t feel absolutely good about it, I feel I’d be done for. I do. Lord God I just don’t know what else to say. I’m awash with confusion and paranoia. Fatigue too, that too.

This shows, I think, a man being tortured. He begs, pleads, attempts to reason, elevates his torturer to a godlike status – the status of a deity who may cause the pain to stop. The letter ends with the words ‘God almighty comma Gordon.’ I’m going to come back to the idea of torture in a while.

A couple of years later, more defiantly, but still cringing in tone, Carver writes concerning his next untitled book, the book that was published as Cathedral:

August 11, 1982

..the stories in this new collection are going to be fuller than the ones in the earlier books. And this, for Christ’s sake, is to the good. I’m not the same writer I used to be. But I know there are going to be stories in these 14 or 15 I give you that you’re going to draw back from, that aren’t going to fit anyone’s notion of what a Carver short story ought to be—yours, mine, the reading public at large, the critics. But I’m not them, I’m not us, I’m me. Some of these stories may not fit smoothly or neatly, inevitably, alongside the rest. But, Gordon, God’s truth, and I may as well say it out now, I can’t undergo the kind of surgical amputation and transplant that might make them someway fit into the carton so the lid will close. There may have to be limbs and heads of hair sticking out. My heart won’t take it otherwise. It will simply burst, and I mean that.

Let’s go back to Raymond Carver the literary saint. In the essay ‘Rough Cuttings: The cutting of Raymond Carver’, which accompanied the New Yorker’s publication of ‘Beginners’ and the Carver-Lish letters, there’s this paragraph: ‘After years of failure, illness, work and obscurity, Carver naturally relished the reception. The public praise also insured that he kept to himself his ambivalence about the way Lish had edited some of the stories. In Tess Gallagher’s view, Lish’s work encroached upon Carver’s artistic integrity. “What would you do if your book was a success but you din’t want to explain to the public that it had been crammed down your throat.” Gallagher said recently. “He had to carry on. There was no way for him to repudiate the book. To do so would have meant that it would all have to come out in public with Gordon and he was not about to do that. Ray was not a fighter. He would avoid conflict because conflict would drive him to drink.’

This is a very different image than that of ‘rain collected in a barrel, water gathered straight from the sky’.

The important point to make here, I think, is simply that Carver’s most distinctive stories – those most likely to be called ‘Carveresque’ – those most fitted to James Dishon McDermott’s definition of literary minimalism – were, in Gallagher’s words ‘crammed down [Carver’s] throat’. They were, as we’ve seen from Carver’s letters, the result of a form of torture.

This is where I’d like quickly to bring in Chuck Palahniuck’s essay on Amy Hempel which you have from the Los Angeles Weekly website as‘She Breaks Your Heart’ but which later appeared as ‘Not Chasing Amy’ in Non-Fiction: A Book of Extraordinary Truths. I’ve included this is a good example of what you might call formalised minimalism, even mannerist minimalism.

The Gordon Lish role has been taken over by Tom Spanbauer. But the most crucial sentence is this: ‘Every sentence isn’t crafted, it’s tortured over.’

I’d like to take Palahniuk absolutely seriously. For there to be minimalism, there must be torture. But, usually for there to be torture, there needs to be a torturer and a torture victim.

Palaniuk’s thinking is muddled throughout. How can something be tortured over? Perhaps in the same way something is slaved over? Who exactly is doing the torturing here?

Minimalism is torture (Lish’s torture of Carver) that has become self-torture (Amy Hempel – in Chuck Palahniuk’s view).

And this is how minimalism is passed on to creative writing students.

At the same time, however, there is a sanctification of Raymond Carver – Good Raymond – as an entirely honest man – for the very work which he should, if he had been entirely honest, have disowned.

Let’s look again at the cover of Where I’m Calling From. I’d like you to imagine how this would change if it were to have two people on: Gordon Lish sitting alongside Raymond Carver. Or even, Gordon Lish hovering behind Carver, a friendly, torturer’s hand on his shoulder. It buggers the iconography, doesn’t it.

Where this really starts to bother me is when Carver himself presents his more minimal writing as the result of his own aesthetic. Go straight from Gallagher’s ‘crammed down his throat’ to Carver’s essay – his credo – ‘On Writing’, published in Call If You Need Me:

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else… It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other.

(The word Carver is struggling towards here, but avoiding because it’s too literary, is sensibility. Each writer has a unique sensibility, which they possess but also cultivate. Each human being born probably has by adolescence a unique sensibility, but because they are not artists they are unable to express it or develop it beyond a rudimentary level. Carver would never wish to say this.)

And now let’s go straight to the final lines of the story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, published in a book with only Raymond Carver’s name on the cover:

“I’ll put out some cheese and crackers,” Terri said.

But Terri just sat there. She did not get up to get anything.

Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table.

“Gin’s gone,” Mel said.

Terri said, “Now what?”

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

Apart from the first couple of sentences, these marvellous, memorable, distinctive lines were all written by Gordon Lish. This, I think, is what Carver is alluding to in his letter to Gordeon Lish of October 29th, 1982: ‘Please help me with this book [Cathedral] as a good editor, the best… but not as my ghost.’

The stories in Would You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which have long been held up as examples of how to write – how you should write – are soon to be be revealed as the painful achievement of not one but two men. And you, whatever else you are, are not binary. In your writing, you will be able to torture yourself – feel free, as much as you like – but you will be internalising what was (to begin with) a two-way process.

When Beginners, the book, is published, I hope there is a whole heap of recantation that goes on.

Raymond Carver knew he was not a saint. I think his exquisite awareness of dishonesties of all sorts was partly dependent upon his experience of covering up for the dual authorship of his first two books.

I think he can be blamed for not being honest about this. I think you could, quite justly, call him a liar – a sinner by omission if not commission.

He is a much more complicated writer, and much more ambiguous, than his admirers have taken him for. There’s a long distance from my pencilled motto in the back of Where I’m Calling From ‘So tell me, friend, is it honest?’ to the epigraph Carver placed at the start. It’s from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Kundera, you might almost say, was Carver’s opposite as a writer (along with Donald Bartheleme). Here, Carver is quoting Kundera paraphrasing Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return. ‘We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.’

This, also, is a universe away from Keep it Simple, Stupid.

Minimalism, as it has been propagated, could be defined as writing for stupid people.

 

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—

In 2015, Gordon Lish was interviewed by The Paris Review. He did not disappoint. The section about his work with/on Carver was excerpted for the Guardian.

In light of what I said above, ten years ago, it’s worth quoting one sentence from Lish (though you should definitely read the whole thing):

I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick: Review

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am sure I did not find this novel – and the presence in it of Elizabeth Hardwick – as endearing as some readers will do. But I think that’s my fault. Elizabeth Hardwick is an America Virginia Woolf, concerned with peripheries and with making them near-central. Woolf’s diaries are the closest thing I’ve read to Sleepless Nights. (Particularly Part Nine, which deals with Josette and Ida and Angela, Hardwick’s – as far as I can tell – cleaning ladies.) And Woolf’s diaries are one of my favourite books to go back to.

Sleepless Nights is an odd construction. Not always, I think, deliberately so. I wouldn’t say it’s fragmented so much as not assembled. If it’s a novel, it doesn’t concern itself with a central character’s gradual development. It is about a writer looking and writing. She looks well, and she writes even better. She makes of her little more than enough.

‘Oh, M., when I think of the people I have buried, North and South. Yet, why is it that we cannot keep the note of irony, the jangle of carelessness at a distance? Sentence in which I have tried for a certain light tone – many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.’

That’s an encapsulation, offered by Hardwick, on the penultimate page. For the tone of the book, nothing could be more accurate than ‘the jangle of carelessness at a distance’. And there are many sentences where you stop and think, ‘That couldn’t be bettered.’ Even when they seem not to connect with what goes before or after.

‘Everything has come to me and been taken from me because of moving from place to place.’

What flows within the book takes place as set pieces. Some of these are astounding. Part Three, about Billie Holiday is one of the best written portraits I’ve ever read.

‘The sheer enormity of her vices. The outrageousness of them. For the grand destruction one must be worthy. Her ruthless talent and the opulent devastation. Onto the heaviest addiction to heroin, she piled up the rocks of her tomb with a prodigiousness of Scotch and brandy. She was never at any hour of the day or night free of these consumptions, never except when she was asleep.’

This is a companion piece to Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘The Day Lady Died’.

Often Elizabeth Hardwick writes by compiling list after list of objects or attributes. There was an artwork I once saw, in the reception of Penguin Books. It was a vast sheet of paper, about the proportions of A4, listing every noun in War and Peace. At moments, with adjectives and attitude, Sleepless Nights resembles a Manhattan version of that.

‘Skirts and blouses and jackets of satin or flowered cloth, Balkan decorations, old beads, capes, shawls, earrings.’

Probably, you would need to know a lot more about the details of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life and influences to know where to place this as a work (published 1979). But I avoided finding out, because I wanted to take this book by itself. It is fascinating and sad, drab and brilliant. I am sure it’s better on the fifth reading than the first. But I’m not sure what it’s about, apart from watching lives disintegrate, and trying to integrate what one has seen of that into sentences.

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The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier: Review

The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First published in 1973, if The Long Way is dated, it’s in a melancholy way. The book ends – after Moitessier’s circumnavigation and more – with the wise sailor encountering environmental destruction on Tahiti. He becomes engaged, politicized, after months of selfish (in a good way) voyaging. Just him, the Joshua his boat, the porpoises, the sea robins, the sky, sea, sun and moon. But you can’t help but feel, if we could dial the planet back to the state it was in in 1973, we would be a long way towards some kind of eco-sanity. Not perfect, but nowhere near the point we are now.

Some moments in The Long Way jar painfully. Moitessier’s departure from his wife and children. His avoidance of them throughout his time away. Also, the amount of stuff he chucks over the side of the boat – to save weight. He does not have a contemporary sensibility. He gleefully smokes his way around the world. He is not a saint. But he’s on a genuine quest for something. Hence his famous message to the Sunday Times:

‘Dear Robert: The Horn was rounded February 5, and today is March 18. I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul.’

(This is a forerunner of Bruce Chatwin’s invented telegram to his editor ‘Have gone to Patagonia’.)

The Long Way is one of the great books about the satisfactions of isolated dedication to a task. It is full of contradictions. Moitessier is both at rest but also involved in a gung-ho race – against other solo sailors but also against the seasons. Moitessier is a yoga-performing hippie sympathiser, but he’s also a very old kind of macho.

I re-read this, listening to Dave Crosby’s ‘The Lee Shore’ in a fairly obsessive way. If you’re a city-dweller who wants to run away to sea, that combination is the best I can offer.

And if you’re engaged on any long project (for example, writing a novel or recovering from an illness), Moitessier is a great companion to have in your solitude.

‘One thing at a time, as in the days when I was building Joshua. If I had wanted to build all the boat at once, the enormity of the task would have crushed me. I had to put all I had into the hull alone, without thinking about the rest. It would follow… with the help of the Gods.

‘Sailing non-stop around the world. I do not think anyone has the means of pulling it off – at the start.’

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Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively: Review

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This acute, ambitious novel was unexpected. It had been recommended to me only a couple of times, but by people whose opinions I took seriously. I thought Moon Tiger would be polite, lyrical, easily-put-asideable. Instead, it’s a tight, vastly ambitious, tender and troubling (in a good way) book.

Moon Tiger is the fascinatingly fragmented life story of Claudia Hampton, plus the history of the world. It’s one of the best books I’d read about war (and I’ve just finished Michael Herr’s Dispatches). It is also a love story, a story about the disorientations of growing old, and a very English family saga.

The point of view shifts between characters. The tense changes. But mostly this is a way of cutting out the boring bits. Repeatedly, an event is mentioned as having happened or as soon to happen, and three lines later you’re in the middle of it. There’s absolutely no throat clearing. This gives the whole novel an urgency and excitement.

I remember my parents reading it, when it won The Booker Prize. They’d have said ‘it’s very well written’, and it is. But it’s much more.

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