Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "mark-twain"

This is number seven of my blog, which is mainly about writing. This one as it says is about influences, and it came into my head while I was writing the previous one about Shakespeare, who means so much to me. After having written a big screed, I've decided to make it a multi-parter.

Before I began in 1999 writing novels that actually finished, I had read a huge number of thrillers and detective stories, beginning decades before. I started with the puzzle type stories of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and similar British or British-style writers, and moved to the more realistic "hard-boiled" Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and their school later, and finally to spy-fi, which to some degree sprang out of the Hammett-Chandler approach to writing, to mystery, and suspense.

Along the way I read a lot of straight-out thrillers. These did not have "mystery" associated with them, or did not need to: their model was and is to create tension and sustain it, and my taste in these was almost uniformly British. Writers like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene were my heroes of this genre. Greene remains to me outside the pale of the "typical" thriller writer: his interests and abilities far outshone others.

There were others, and I'll go into them perhaps another time. Anyway my familiarity with these genres and sub-genres was the underlying reason why I chose to write thrillers once I decided to try to succeed as a novelist. I had read so many of them the requirements of the form(s) were almost second nature to me; I could feel as much as think what would work as writing, as plot, as characterisation and so on as much as think these things through, and this gave me, or so I thought and think, an immense advantage in terms of creating believable stories that "follow the rules".

Even so, my aims as a writer were never to exist wholly and solely within the thriller genre; I wanted to succeed in the ways that Dashiell Hammett succeeded, that Graham Greene succeeded, and Shakespeare too: to create work that was ultimately "literature" or as I like to put it yet, with "a serious purpose in a frivolous genre".

This was out of a deep-seated prejudice against what is described usually as serious literature, and by Marxists as "the bourgeois novel". I reckon that sometime in the 19th century popular taste and the taste of the "literati" began to diverge, and that in the 20th this divergence became a gulf, that vast numbers of readers ceased to be interested in "serious" fiction because they were bored and/or "left behind" by the writers. If James Joyce could be fairly numbered as number one of these alienators of readers, there are plenty more, with less talent, and they tend to people the book reviews while the greatest number of readers follow other writers. You won't find Stephen King for example winning a Pulitzer, though in my opinion he should or even a Nobel Prize. Writers like Hammett, and Greene and Chandler, set the tone for me: they had serious purposes while the genre they chose was less "elevated".

Shakespeare didn't need to confront this problem, or perhaps more fairly, his genius allowed him to appeal to everyone - to the nobles and the "groundlings". The point I am making is that he needed to appeal to the groundlings, and if he also needed to appeal to more aristocratic sensibilities, it was kind of on top of the basics.

That has been my aim as a writer. So my "first port of call" in terms of influences in this blog is those who master the genre, the "sub-literary" genre of the thriller. But it would be pointless if that was all there was to it, and my other influences, like Shakespeare, Euripides, Celine, Mark Twain, and others, are ultimately the source of my inspiration.

Do readers care about this? Do writers have the same feelings as I do? If you've got this far, feel free to comment.

More anon...

Seven stars, with an extra three for the dedicated.

This blog is mainly about writing, though I stray from time to time to account for my unaccountable interests – as Douglas Adams so famously wrote, in life, the universe and everything! It is never entirely clear to me, whose life it is I am living, why I get interested in the things that I do, or how they transform themselves into fiction or indeed any kind of writing, and I am perhaps being self-centred in thinking that other people might enjoy reading about the process as mystery, as it always partly is to me. But I do think that.

Just now I am putting together the elements of a new novel, tentatively called Lemmings though I have some other possible titles in my head. It is the kind of book that is easy to spoil by talking about in advance, and I definitely don’t want to do that. If I can write it properly, it will be the kind of book my heroes wrote. I am not sure I can.

Writing for publication is hard. Joan Didion called it the loneliest profession or something like that, and I think I understand what she meant. There you are, all by yourself, tip-tapping or scribbling away with only yourself for company, necessarily, yet what you are doing is aimed, in principle, at the whole wide world. If no one out there reads it, that changes absolutely nothing. All this is just as true in a newsroom, where I spent many years, as it is in total isolation, where I have spent long periods working out novels. You are there alone with your thoughts as you create, but your words, once put “out there” into the world, are never alone to you as author. They are incapable of being erased, even if you go to a great deal of trouble to erase them as writers ashamed of some efforts devoutly wish they could do.

Yet writing is easy too – too easy you might say. Electronic keyboards and the internet make it so simple to go from brain to the outer reaches of our solar system and even beyond! Somewhere far far from Earth some intelligent but indescribably bizarre being may read these words as soon as they are published, and say to itself in whatever way it is able, “???? Hey this dude is weird. Not only that, he’s ridiculous too.”

Before typewriters, when writers typically made do with pens made from bird feathers and ink that smeared, writing was a lot harder than it is now. It seems amazing to me that so many writers in the 19th century could write really fat books, just immense really, hundreds of thousands of words…and in more than one draft. Even after the invention of the pencil and the steel-nibbed pen this was still a problem. Celine, the French novelist, used to string his manuscript pages up in his lounge with clothes pegs so he could read them in flow as it were. He claimed late in his life that he wrote significantly fat books – like eight hundred thousand words fat – and then cut them back to a few hundred thousand or even fewer, pruning and pruning as well as rewriting.

Today writers are gifted with PCs and easy to use editing tools, and extra fat books are in vogue again, but it’s not the same as when Dickens wrote them, or Thackeray, or indeed Celine, whose books were not noticeably short and were handwritten. The typewriter – which featured prominently shall we say in his second novel, Mort a credit* – had been invented in the 19th century and Mark Twain, a fan of new technology to the point of bankruptcy**, wrote Life on the Mississippi on one, the first author apparently to script a book with the wonderful new device.

Where was I? Ah, right here, in front of the laptop, watching the letters cascade, one after another, onto the screen. Dear reader – I am embarked on this adventure, a lemming in my own right mysteriously determined to jump over the cliff of literature to land on the choppy seas of indifferent readership.

Yeah sure. Onward. If you’ve got this far, dear reader, thanks for your perseverance.



*The first person narrator attacks his father with one in a gesture of contemptuous modernity at his conspicuous inability to learn to type.

**Twain invested huge sums into a linotype machine that was pipped by the real deal. Visitors to Twain’s home in Hartford, Connecticut, can see the version he sought to develop, a monstrosity compared to the successful competitor. Twain had to embark on an extended tour of the world, lecturing and writing. Following the Equator, far from his most successful work, is nonetheless worth a read.