Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "raymond-chandler"
More blood, no floor
This is the fifth instalment of my blog which I am struggling personfully to keep up fairly regularly. It's mainly about writing, or has been so far. After writing the previous one about violence, things have kept popping into my brain about other writers with something like experience and I feel a bit shamefaced that I didn't include Dashiell Hammett, one of my great literary models, in the "experienced" writer category. Hammett didn't murder anyone, so far as I know anyway. But he was a detective (for Pinkerton) and may very well have killed some one, though I've never read that he did. Certainly his long-time partner Lillian Hellman said he often put people he had met as a detective into his stories as characters, along with the language of the underworld of his time. "Gunsel", she said, was slang for a gay, and Hammett was very proud of having smuggled the word past the editorial censors of his publishers.
Hellman's testimony is always suspect but perhaps can believed on this score.
What is useful for the "experience" motif I'm trying to explore here however is the contrast between Hammett and his "follower" Raymond Chandler. Chandler was educated in England but spent most of his adult life in California and came to writing late, after a career in the oil industry. Unemployed in the 1930s he came on a copy of Black Mask, the magazine devoted to the so-called "hard boiled" school of detective fiction where Hammett was something of a king, and began his career. Chandler's Philip Marlowe became the model for many other detectives in later years (most notably Ross Macdonald's [Kenneth Millar's] Lew Archer). More significantly for what I want to get at here, Chandler's style of "hard-boiled" and "wise-cracking" became the model for the early work of English espionage fiction writer Len Deighton, whose first novels (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin) owe a very great deal to Chandler and Hammett.
Chandler paid homage to Hammett in a famous essay, "The Simple of Art of Murder", an attack on the puzzle school of mystery writing exemplified by Agatha Christie, using an A A Milne novel The Red House Mystery, as his foil. Chandler was unaware that this best-seller was a satire, but then neither was the vast mass of readers who bought and devoured it. His larger point was the Hammett was aware of police methods and the reality of murder (he wrote that Hammett gave murder back to people who committed it "for reasons, not just to provide a corpse").
Yet despite Chandler's homage, he was considered by many critics to be a better writer than Hammett. I don't think that is fair. Any open-minded reader who reads both writers carefully - and there are not so many novels by the two combined, nor are they so long - will come to see Hammett's spare style refreshing alongside the cloying romanticism of his "pupil" (the two were not friends and met just once, at a Black Mask dinner).
And ultimately, I think the inferiority of Chandler derives, as I think he knew, from Hammett's genuine experience of crime and its aftermath. Chandler could write, without doubt, and Philip Marlowe was vastly more influential that any of Hammett's characters apart from "Nick and Nora Charles" of the last novel, The Thin Man, who became parodies of themselves on film and in television.
For this writer, however, Hammett remains the master. There is a terseness and a feeling of reality underlying Hammett's prose that I wish I could emulate successfully. There are other models for my work (Celine and Shakespeare for example), and I would not wish to put Hammett as a man on any more of a pedestal than he deserves - the destruction of his reputation since Hellman tried to make him a Lion King has been all too thorough. The contrast between his writing and Chandler's, though, is nonetheless a useful example how how real life knowledge can trump imagined reality.
Perhaps this is best seen through the prism of film. Not just The Thin Man and its spinoffs, but The Maltese Falcon were classic films of their time - the latter still able to pull in the crowds - while none of Chandler's novels was ever really successful as a film, though there have been several attempts. I reckon the reason for this is the mushiness at the heart of Chandler's work, while the toughness of mind that Hammett brought to his writing gives his work an edge.
To return to my original theme, most writers have no hope of having the experience that enabled a writer like Hammett to write "what he knew", and must use their "imaginative understanding" to visualise and create the scenes that will give their work verisimilitude. But given a real-life expert like Hammett on a plate - you can just go out and buy his books and eat them up - who can resist taking up a knife and fork?
Ah, a novel in its own right! If you are here reading this, put eight stars into your kit bag; you deserve them!
Hellman's testimony is always suspect but perhaps can believed on this score.
What is useful for the "experience" motif I'm trying to explore here however is the contrast between Hammett and his "follower" Raymond Chandler. Chandler was educated in England but spent most of his adult life in California and came to writing late, after a career in the oil industry. Unemployed in the 1930s he came on a copy of Black Mask, the magazine devoted to the so-called "hard boiled" school of detective fiction where Hammett was something of a king, and began his career. Chandler's Philip Marlowe became the model for many other detectives in later years (most notably Ross Macdonald's [Kenneth Millar's] Lew Archer). More significantly for what I want to get at here, Chandler's style of "hard-boiled" and "wise-cracking" became the model for the early work of English espionage fiction writer Len Deighton, whose first novels (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin) owe a very great deal to Chandler and Hammett.
Chandler paid homage to Hammett in a famous essay, "The Simple of Art of Murder", an attack on the puzzle school of mystery writing exemplified by Agatha Christie, using an A A Milne novel The Red House Mystery, as his foil. Chandler was unaware that this best-seller was a satire, but then neither was the vast mass of readers who bought and devoured it. His larger point was the Hammett was aware of police methods and the reality of murder (he wrote that Hammett gave murder back to people who committed it "for reasons, not just to provide a corpse").
Yet despite Chandler's homage, he was considered by many critics to be a better writer than Hammett. I don't think that is fair. Any open-minded reader who reads both writers carefully - and there are not so many novels by the two combined, nor are they so long - will come to see Hammett's spare style refreshing alongside the cloying romanticism of his "pupil" (the two were not friends and met just once, at a Black Mask dinner).
And ultimately, I think the inferiority of Chandler derives, as I think he knew, from Hammett's genuine experience of crime and its aftermath. Chandler could write, without doubt, and Philip Marlowe was vastly more influential that any of Hammett's characters apart from "Nick and Nora Charles" of the last novel, The Thin Man, who became parodies of themselves on film and in television.
For this writer, however, Hammett remains the master. There is a terseness and a feeling of reality underlying Hammett's prose that I wish I could emulate successfully. There are other models for my work (Celine and Shakespeare for example), and I would not wish to put Hammett as a man on any more of a pedestal than he deserves - the destruction of his reputation since Hellman tried to make him a Lion King has been all too thorough. The contrast between his writing and Chandler's, though, is nonetheless a useful example how how real life knowledge can trump imagined reality.
Perhaps this is best seen through the prism of film. Not just The Thin Man and its spinoffs, but The Maltese Falcon were classic films of their time - the latter still able to pull in the crowds - while none of Chandler's novels was ever really successful as a film, though there have been several attempts. I reckon the reason for this is the mushiness at the heart of Chandler's work, while the toughness of mind that Hammett brought to his writing gives his work an edge.
To return to my original theme, most writers have no hope of having the experience that enabled a writer like Hammett to write "what he knew", and must use their "imaginative understanding" to visualise and create the scenes that will give their work verisimilitude. But given a real-life expert like Hammett on a plate - you can just go out and buy his books and eat them up - who can resist taking up a knife and fork?
Ah, a novel in its own right! If you are here reading this, put eight stars into your kit bag; you deserve them!
Influences One
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.
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.
Something even more completely different
This blog is about writing, and for the most part it's been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone along. There are more of these than I've written about so far, but rehashing the past, while interesting to me and I would hope to those who drop in to read these slim offerings, is not going forward really.
And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.
My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.
Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.
There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":
In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.
This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.
This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.
Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.
But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.
So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?
If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.
And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.
My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.
Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.
There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":
In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.
This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.
This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.
Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.
But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.
So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?
If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.
Dead Reckoning
This blog is notionally at least about writing and most of the posts have been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone about writing my novels, and how this has worked in practice. Fiction writers all however, even the most shallow or cynical, are really on about life and how it is lived. Lately I've been thinking and writing about other aspects of influence in this way - what comes to us by direct, lived experience, and how writers might or might not transform this in their books, what makes writing worth writing, and reading worth reading.
That brings up the ultimate of the ultimates - the death that comes to us all. As I write thrillers, death or the threat of death is a key element of all of my books. And it is unknowable, unless you count experiences of people who have died and been brought back to life, or have had "near death" experiences.
There is something these seem to have in common, in particular the "clear white light" seen/felt in the middle of the brain/mind featured in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead - a peaceful, very calm and reassuring light. This experience can be explained in a range of ways from the most basic materialism to highly religious, and it can be communicated so as to make sense in all these.
And after death? Writers do write about "after death", sometimes quite strangely. Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo is about a man who dies midway through the book yet who continues to interact with the living. B Traven's long short story "The Night Visitor", also set in Mexico, is about a man who comes to the narrator night after night to complain that the narrator's dog is eating his leg. There is a grave nearby that has partly fallen in and the dog has been feasting on the remains inside; when the narrator closes it off, the night visitor stops coming...
These fantastic notions contrast with a more dour attitude like Celine's. The French novelist has a scene in one of his novels showing the family of a dead man visting his grave and having a picnic; Celine describes what is happening to the corpse below as the bugs and worms do their work.
All these, fantastic and realistic, do not square up with the usual western attitude to death. Norman Mailer, in a long meditation near the beginning of his book about the moon shot, Fire on the Moon, argued that the expedition was an attempt by the scientific, rationalist west to abolish death. The idea came to him, he claimed, as he could not see well and used his nose to work out what was going on, yet in the Nasa headquarters there was no smell...no smell equals distaste for our physical nature, equals abhorrence of death equals attempt to abolish this unpleasantness. Perhaps I am being unfair to Mailer as this was one of the best things I ever read by him, a marvelous account and probing analysis of both American and western values. And not just "no smell", Norman, but "some smell"...deodorants change the way we are perceived, and how we think about other people.
When living in Hawaii - obviously many years ago - I saw Elizabeth Taylor in a supermarket in the Kaimuki district; it was during one of her liaisons with Richard Burton. She was genuinely beautiful, pushing her trolley along. She hadn't become a parody of herself yet - indeed she had shown she could really act in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where she starred opposite Burton, and won an Academy Award. I think Burton pushed her to excel; he had a commitment to his profession that inspired her, as perhaps Marilyn Monroe got from Arthur Miller, and when I saw her calmly making her choices of fresh foods from a cooler, I admired her for that, much more than for her assured yet understated poise at the controls of her shopping machine. (In case you are wondering, no one approached her, something that is unlikely to happen today anywhere in America).
What struck me most about Liz, though, was something I had read in an interview before this "near celeb experience" about her relationship with Burton that coloured how I saw her in the flesh, and appreciated her as an actress: that till she'd met Burton, she hadn't realised that people could be so dedicated. He would not bathe for days while preparing for a part, and actually pong! She had never met anyone like that before.
Weeelllllllll...I understood that completely. To be confronted with real life after a lifetime cossetted in Hollywood pseudo-reality, dressed up with deodorants and perfume and hair grease...Eddie Fisher, her husband when she met Burton, could hardly compete.
And in my own life, the fiction of Hollywood was only an exaggerated version of the America of the time: real people disguised themselves with hair grease, and deodorants, and incredibly silly haircuts and clothing. The Beats, and then the so-called hippies, took this America by the short and curlies and gave it a good shake, and whatever shortcomings these two movements (the latter the child of the former) may have had, westerners are all, Americans or not, much better off for their contribution. We've got our bodies back, with their sweat and smells and wrinkles - creases! - and if there is still a great deal in life that is unhealthy and a masquerade, today's world offers more personal freedom and more opportunity to be "real" by a great measure than that era so wholly make-believe only those who lived through it would believe it.
So: real life meets real death; the two are "obverses" of one another. Celine's most famous dictum was "the truth of this life is death", so perhaps it's hardly a surprise. But we want it to be a surprise, I think. We want to avoid it, as Mailer claimed.
In my writing, I want death to be real, not deodorised, but I'd like readers to find in my accounts of dying, or murder and suicide and natural passage, something more than shock and awe, something more than "verisimilitude": I want to provoke reflection, about life and death, about what this means in readers' own lives.
Naturally I have my own opinions about what everyone should think about these things; the Kantian imperative operates in all of us to some degree. But for me it is less important that people agree with me about how to live, or what death means, than at least that they are prompted by what I write to think about their attitudes, and perhaps change them.
My own ideas are still worth something, I think: that whatever the truth about "life after death" in the sense we usually take it, there is a life after death for each of us, in other people, and that is intimately connected with how we live. Do you, dear reader, care about how people will think of you after you are gone? If you do, you will treat others decently, that your memory, as it lingers, will be a kindly one. If you don't, it's immaterial. Doctrines of "enlightened self-interest" would suggest that you should be a nice person anyway, but it may be that this selfishness as a desire for a happy life beyond the grave is as good a basis for a "moral" life as any.
And it is clear - say I - that we do linger on, that it is not just our genes if we have children that carry us forward but our personalities. Those who love us, or who very emphatically don't, have us there, in themselves, and however they are changed by their perceptions of us, mixed up no doubt with their perceptions of other people and of the world, we are there, in them. We persist, whether we like it or not.
In me there are many people, and they jostle for position, one leaping into prominence because of something they, or someone else does, or I do, only to be shoved roughly aside by another, more relevant, more instructive, possibly enraging, perhaps more loving.
In my writing this is usually put as memory, and reflection. Alex in Evilheart is profoundly affected by his woman Lisa, or at least believes himself to be - but his nemesis pushes himself inside of him at least as strongly, and stays there. The Kleiber Monster features a villain who carries on inside two of the characters for half a century, only to be vanquished at last by his own son - and not replaced - while those loved and gone remain. Savonarola's Bones has several characters who work themselves into the fabric of the living after they have passed away. Demented has one character in particular whose entire life from boyhood is dominated by his dead father, and another who is confronted with a traumatic realisation as the father who'd lived within him was revealed to be...shall we say, somewhat unlike the image. The Russian Idea, finally, counterposes these elements of personalities - those who we know live within us, and those who do not, but who are there in real life, unknown to us.
And the new one? Kaos has these elements too, these passages of the dead into the living in an active way, but with new and I hope very different twists. While I honestly think my books satisfy my own demand that they be moral tales in a "frivolous" genre, they must satisfy the rules of the genre first, and when in a tight corner, as Raymond Chandler once advised, have a man come through the door with a gun...
Maybe this makes sense to you, dear reader. I hope so. If it does - 20 stars, in any combination of colour, shape and size you like; you can peel them off their backing and stick them near the vents in your PC case. If you don't understand it - 50 stars! You stayed the course despite everything. You might have wanted more Liz Taylor. Sorry.
That brings up the ultimate of the ultimates - the death that comes to us all. As I write thrillers, death or the threat of death is a key element of all of my books. And it is unknowable, unless you count experiences of people who have died and been brought back to life, or have had "near death" experiences.
There is something these seem to have in common, in particular the "clear white light" seen/felt in the middle of the brain/mind featured in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead - a peaceful, very calm and reassuring light. This experience can be explained in a range of ways from the most basic materialism to highly religious, and it can be communicated so as to make sense in all these.
And after death? Writers do write about "after death", sometimes quite strangely. Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo is about a man who dies midway through the book yet who continues to interact with the living. B Traven's long short story "The Night Visitor", also set in Mexico, is about a man who comes to the narrator night after night to complain that the narrator's dog is eating his leg. There is a grave nearby that has partly fallen in and the dog has been feasting on the remains inside; when the narrator closes it off, the night visitor stops coming...
These fantastic notions contrast with a more dour attitude like Celine's. The French novelist has a scene in one of his novels showing the family of a dead man visting his grave and having a picnic; Celine describes what is happening to the corpse below as the bugs and worms do their work.
All these, fantastic and realistic, do not square up with the usual western attitude to death. Norman Mailer, in a long meditation near the beginning of his book about the moon shot, Fire on the Moon, argued that the expedition was an attempt by the scientific, rationalist west to abolish death. The idea came to him, he claimed, as he could not see well and used his nose to work out what was going on, yet in the Nasa headquarters there was no smell...no smell equals distaste for our physical nature, equals abhorrence of death equals attempt to abolish this unpleasantness. Perhaps I am being unfair to Mailer as this was one of the best things I ever read by him, a marvelous account and probing analysis of both American and western values. And not just "no smell", Norman, but "some smell"...deodorants change the way we are perceived, and how we think about other people.
When living in Hawaii - obviously many years ago - I saw Elizabeth Taylor in a supermarket in the Kaimuki district; it was during one of her liaisons with Richard Burton. She was genuinely beautiful, pushing her trolley along. She hadn't become a parody of herself yet - indeed she had shown she could really act in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where she starred opposite Burton, and won an Academy Award. I think Burton pushed her to excel; he had a commitment to his profession that inspired her, as perhaps Marilyn Monroe got from Arthur Miller, and when I saw her calmly making her choices of fresh foods from a cooler, I admired her for that, much more than for her assured yet understated poise at the controls of her shopping machine. (In case you are wondering, no one approached her, something that is unlikely to happen today anywhere in America).
What struck me most about Liz, though, was something I had read in an interview before this "near celeb experience" about her relationship with Burton that coloured how I saw her in the flesh, and appreciated her as an actress: that till she'd met Burton, she hadn't realised that people could be so dedicated. He would not bathe for days while preparing for a part, and actually pong! She had never met anyone like that before.
Weeelllllllll...I understood that completely. To be confronted with real life after a lifetime cossetted in Hollywood pseudo-reality, dressed up with deodorants and perfume and hair grease...Eddie Fisher, her husband when she met Burton, could hardly compete.
And in my own life, the fiction of Hollywood was only an exaggerated version of the America of the time: real people disguised themselves with hair grease, and deodorants, and incredibly silly haircuts and clothing. The Beats, and then the so-called hippies, took this America by the short and curlies and gave it a good shake, and whatever shortcomings these two movements (the latter the child of the former) may have had, westerners are all, Americans or not, much better off for their contribution. We've got our bodies back, with their sweat and smells and wrinkles - creases! - and if there is still a great deal in life that is unhealthy and a masquerade, today's world offers more personal freedom and more opportunity to be "real" by a great measure than that era so wholly make-believe only those who lived through it would believe it.
So: real life meets real death; the two are "obverses" of one another. Celine's most famous dictum was "the truth of this life is death", so perhaps it's hardly a surprise. But we want it to be a surprise, I think. We want to avoid it, as Mailer claimed.
In my writing, I want death to be real, not deodorised, but I'd like readers to find in my accounts of dying, or murder and suicide and natural passage, something more than shock and awe, something more than "verisimilitude": I want to provoke reflection, about life and death, about what this means in readers' own lives.
Naturally I have my own opinions about what everyone should think about these things; the Kantian imperative operates in all of us to some degree. But for me it is less important that people agree with me about how to live, or what death means, than at least that they are prompted by what I write to think about their attitudes, and perhaps change them.
My own ideas are still worth something, I think: that whatever the truth about "life after death" in the sense we usually take it, there is a life after death for each of us, in other people, and that is intimately connected with how we live. Do you, dear reader, care about how people will think of you after you are gone? If you do, you will treat others decently, that your memory, as it lingers, will be a kindly one. If you don't, it's immaterial. Doctrines of "enlightened self-interest" would suggest that you should be a nice person anyway, but it may be that this selfishness as a desire for a happy life beyond the grave is as good a basis for a "moral" life as any.
And it is clear - say I - that we do linger on, that it is not just our genes if we have children that carry us forward but our personalities. Those who love us, or who very emphatically don't, have us there, in themselves, and however they are changed by their perceptions of us, mixed up no doubt with their perceptions of other people and of the world, we are there, in them. We persist, whether we like it or not.
In me there are many people, and they jostle for position, one leaping into prominence because of something they, or someone else does, or I do, only to be shoved roughly aside by another, more relevant, more instructive, possibly enraging, perhaps more loving.
In my writing this is usually put as memory, and reflection. Alex in Evilheart is profoundly affected by his woman Lisa, or at least believes himself to be - but his nemesis pushes himself inside of him at least as strongly, and stays there. The Kleiber Monster features a villain who carries on inside two of the characters for half a century, only to be vanquished at last by his own son - and not replaced - while those loved and gone remain. Savonarola's Bones has several characters who work themselves into the fabric of the living after they have passed away. Demented has one character in particular whose entire life from boyhood is dominated by his dead father, and another who is confronted with a traumatic realisation as the father who'd lived within him was revealed to be...shall we say, somewhat unlike the image. The Russian Idea, finally, counterposes these elements of personalities - those who we know live within us, and those who do not, but who are there in real life, unknown to us.
And the new one? Kaos has these elements too, these passages of the dead into the living in an active way, but with new and I hope very different twists. While I honestly think my books satisfy my own demand that they be moral tales in a "frivolous" genre, they must satisfy the rules of the genre first, and when in a tight corner, as Raymond Chandler once advised, have a man come through the door with a gun...
Maybe this makes sense to you, dear reader. I hope so. If it does - 20 stars, in any combination of colour, shape and size you like; you can peel them off their backing and stick them near the vents in your PC case. If you don't understand it - 50 stars! You stayed the course despite everything. You might have wanted more Liz Taylor. Sorry.
Wit
Or something like wit. This is the 23d post of this blog which is mostly about writing.
When I'm feeling defensive, which is not seldom, I say that my writing has "a serious purpose in a frivolous genre". I mean that, but it would be possible to say that thrillers aren't "frivolous" in any but a "not truly literature" sense. After all, they deal with death, with intrigue, with crime and sex, and those are pretty serious topics. What people mean when they say the genre is frivolous is only that the plots, and the characters are "stock" and fit into a formula, a format, that is shared with other thrillers.
There are other frivolous ways of being serious however - take Tom Sharpe.
For those unaware of him, Sharpe is an English satirical novelist; he manages to be viciously funny with an underlying serious intent, and because his novels are comic novels they are "by definition" frivolous. His first two novels were set in apartheid South Africa - he had been deported for "sedition" - and hilariously pull the regime to pieces. Some people say these were his best two books, but my favourite is The Great Pursuit, a novel that takes the stick to pretentious literary analysis and criticism of the F R Leavis variety. Possibly Sharpe was irked at not being taken seriously - if so, I understand that completely.
Well, whether he is a great novelist or not, Sharpe can be pretty funny. I'm envious of this wonderful talent that has an entirely different way of going about being "serious in a frivolous genre" than I have. I keep saying to myself that I should write a witty book, whether or not it comes up to the Sharpe edge of things, or has a different way of expressing what I have to say. But so far - I haven't. And Kaos, the book I'm working on now, doesn't seem to be making much room for the odd laugh. I'd like it to do that, but I find that sitting down and thinking up funny is entirely different from just being funny. The context of wit makes wit witty, and when I'm writing a novel, that context is usually not there.
Of course there are ways of going about this, and maybe that's what I'm trying to get at: just dropping the way I do things now, and adopting those ways. Raymond Chandler's advice in writing was "analyse, and emulate" and if one reads his books in that light, it is possible to see the emulation, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Having influences is fine - writers and other artists don't just create out of their heads; they live in a society and respond to what is around them, and other writers are among what is "around them". Tracing that interaction is part of the joy of understanding them. Shakespeare had a huge range of influences and sometimes more or less copied them - he put slabs of Plutarch's Parallel Lives in the North translation into his plays, just rendering them into blank verse from prose. He did the same with Holinshed's Chronicles. Yet somehow the copy outshone the original...Shakespeare couldn't be pinned down. He could write it sad, he could write it mad and bad, he could make you smile. It is not easy to defy categorisation in this way as J K Rowling is finding out.
Where was I? Oh, yes, funny. The Russian writer Gogol supposedly said that he laughed so he wouldn't cry - the Russia of his time being a pretty depressing place. As a teenager I loved his short story about a nose that left its owner (who'd complained because there was pimple on it) chasing it round as it leapt from face to face. How I laughed! But there was more to this than a teenager might have noticed, that a writer a few years on does: that nose's journey revealed Russians, Russia, real life masquerading as absurd, and while the nose raced around its catalogue of faces, the censor was avoided...
Well, Gogol even as a humorist was treated as a serious writer. Sharpe is not. My sex thrills and chills romps are not either.
I set out to write thrillers as a means of writing about serious subjects for people who don't usually read books with serious subjects in mind. I took this cue from er Shakespeare actually, who put bums on seats with tales of bloodlust, lust, intrigue, laughter, nastiness, wit, broad humour, and more. People paid the price of admission to have a good time, and they got it. Shakespeare was competing not just against other dramatists for the public's shilling, but bear-baiting and similar amusements. He had to deliver, and he did.
Nowadays he is regarded as an untouchable icon but in his own time he was feted - by Francis Meres for example - because he could do what I would like to do: deliver serious themes in "frivolous" dress. Others were writing "serious" at the time, aimed only at the educated classes. Shakespeare showed he could do it with his sonnets. But what we remember him for was in principle always accessible by anyone.
That's the attraction of humorous writing to me too: that you can treat quite serious, even complex, subjects, in ways that are accessible to people who wouldn't want to know otherwise.
Ben Elton has written a number of books like this, but unlike Sharpe, I think his books - the ones I've read - are failures. They betray their seriousness too much, and end up not being really funny. Then the focus is on the argument, and the argument can't be as well-put as a non-fiction argument, and it's just a bore anyway. Sorry, Ben. Fiction needs to affect to be convincing, not convince to be effective. There are (non-humorous) exceptions to this, at least in their own time - Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is perhaps the most notable, though a contemporary novel of the type is The Celestine Prophecy, a book I have never been able to bring myself to read.
So as I struggle away on Kaos, a book that is too serious by half, I would like to put some humour into it, to make people smile and even laugh. It would be nice to do that. But underlying that always, my "serious purpose in a frivolous genre".
If you've got this far give yourself a treat...go to the fridge, check it out, have a snack...or do a wee dance of the sort you would like to do when no one is looking...a true Fonteyn or Nureyev! Thanks for reading.
When I'm feeling defensive, which is not seldom, I say that my writing has "a serious purpose in a frivolous genre". I mean that, but it would be possible to say that thrillers aren't "frivolous" in any but a "not truly literature" sense. After all, they deal with death, with intrigue, with crime and sex, and those are pretty serious topics. What people mean when they say the genre is frivolous is only that the plots, and the characters are "stock" and fit into a formula, a format, that is shared with other thrillers.
There are other frivolous ways of being serious however - take Tom Sharpe.
For those unaware of him, Sharpe is an English satirical novelist; he manages to be viciously funny with an underlying serious intent, and because his novels are comic novels they are "by definition" frivolous. His first two novels were set in apartheid South Africa - he had been deported for "sedition" - and hilariously pull the regime to pieces. Some people say these were his best two books, but my favourite is The Great Pursuit, a novel that takes the stick to pretentious literary analysis and criticism of the F R Leavis variety. Possibly Sharpe was irked at not being taken seriously - if so, I understand that completely.
Well, whether he is a great novelist or not, Sharpe can be pretty funny. I'm envious of this wonderful talent that has an entirely different way of going about being "serious in a frivolous genre" than I have. I keep saying to myself that I should write a witty book, whether or not it comes up to the Sharpe edge of things, or has a different way of expressing what I have to say. But so far - I haven't. And Kaos, the book I'm working on now, doesn't seem to be making much room for the odd laugh. I'd like it to do that, but I find that sitting down and thinking up funny is entirely different from just being funny. The context of wit makes wit witty, and when I'm writing a novel, that context is usually not there.
Of course there are ways of going about this, and maybe that's what I'm trying to get at: just dropping the way I do things now, and adopting those ways. Raymond Chandler's advice in writing was "analyse, and emulate" and if one reads his books in that light, it is possible to see the emulation, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Having influences is fine - writers and other artists don't just create out of their heads; they live in a society and respond to what is around them, and other writers are among what is "around them". Tracing that interaction is part of the joy of understanding them. Shakespeare had a huge range of influences and sometimes more or less copied them - he put slabs of Plutarch's Parallel Lives in the North translation into his plays, just rendering them into blank verse from prose. He did the same with Holinshed's Chronicles. Yet somehow the copy outshone the original...Shakespeare couldn't be pinned down. He could write it sad, he could write it mad and bad, he could make you smile. It is not easy to defy categorisation in this way as J K Rowling is finding out.
Where was I? Oh, yes, funny. The Russian writer Gogol supposedly said that he laughed so he wouldn't cry - the Russia of his time being a pretty depressing place. As a teenager I loved his short story about a nose that left its owner (who'd complained because there was pimple on it) chasing it round as it leapt from face to face. How I laughed! But there was more to this than a teenager might have noticed, that a writer a few years on does: that nose's journey revealed Russians, Russia, real life masquerading as absurd, and while the nose raced around its catalogue of faces, the censor was avoided...
Well, Gogol even as a humorist was treated as a serious writer. Sharpe is not. My sex thrills and chills romps are not either.
I set out to write thrillers as a means of writing about serious subjects for people who don't usually read books with serious subjects in mind. I took this cue from er Shakespeare actually, who put bums on seats with tales of bloodlust, lust, intrigue, laughter, nastiness, wit, broad humour, and more. People paid the price of admission to have a good time, and they got it. Shakespeare was competing not just against other dramatists for the public's shilling, but bear-baiting and similar amusements. He had to deliver, and he did.
Nowadays he is regarded as an untouchable icon but in his own time he was feted - by Francis Meres for example - because he could do what I would like to do: deliver serious themes in "frivolous" dress. Others were writing "serious" at the time, aimed only at the educated classes. Shakespeare showed he could do it with his sonnets. But what we remember him for was in principle always accessible by anyone.
That's the attraction of humorous writing to me too: that you can treat quite serious, even complex, subjects, in ways that are accessible to people who wouldn't want to know otherwise.
Ben Elton has written a number of books like this, but unlike Sharpe, I think his books - the ones I've read - are failures. They betray their seriousness too much, and end up not being really funny. Then the focus is on the argument, and the argument can't be as well-put as a non-fiction argument, and it's just a bore anyway. Sorry, Ben. Fiction needs to affect to be convincing, not convince to be effective. There are (non-humorous) exceptions to this, at least in their own time - Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is perhaps the most notable, though a contemporary novel of the type is The Celestine Prophecy, a book I have never been able to bring myself to read.
So as I struggle away on Kaos, a book that is too serious by half, I would like to put some humour into it, to make people smile and even laugh. It would be nice to do that. But underlying that always, my "serious purpose in a frivolous genre".
If you've got this far give yourself a treat...go to the fridge, check it out, have a snack...or do a wee dance of the sort you would like to do when no one is looking...a true Fonteyn or Nureyev! Thanks for reading.
Serial killer
This is a dilemma some authors might er, die for: whether to transform a novel originally meant to be a one-off into a series. Having now published a number of one-off novels in the “indie” line on-line, and working on a new one, it has occurred to me that this one might turn itself into a multi-parter.
I’ve had this inclination in the past. Savonarola’s Bones, a romp of a certain sort, has periodically cropped up in my consciousness as a possible part one, and I’ve even toyed with an introduction to the sequel. I may do it yet.
What makes me think more of this now is Joleene Naylor. She is the author of a kind of genre fiction that normally I would never bother with: “vampire lit”. Till I read some of her books in what is called “beta” – apparently some pre-publication version put out to friends/enemies/passersby for a response before tidying it up as a “finished product” – the only vampire novel I had ever read was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Several “beta” novels in the Amaranthine series later, I know that my contempt for the contemporary dress of this genre (teenage junk lit, inevitably superficial, unendingly boring, without literary, moral, or intellectual merit) was just prejudice on my part. Moreover this is but a reminder of an argument I put in an essay many years ago, and that forms the basis of my own genre writing:any genre can be the occasion of literary merit. In the case of Joleene Naylor, as she has gone along her series has improved as writing, and it has always had a serious purpose.
Nor is there anything unliterary about a series. Many English novelists with shall we say advanced reputations wrote them. Dostoevsky was toying with extending his last finished work, The Brothers Karamazov with a second part. Shakespeare, my model for many aspects of writing, did an eight part play cycle – King John, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, Henry VI one two and three, and Richard III. I have seen an argument that this greatest of all writers actually conceived this cycle, and worked out all its ins and outs, from the first.
Actually I find this hard to believe. But who am I?
There are of course “series, and series”. Some writers use a hero or heroine whose exploits and problems consume book after book. This is not quite the same thing but nonetheless there is a link there that allows for development both of character and plot. It is a motif of thriller writers whose principal character or characters is in a sense “the story”. Yes, Sherlock Holmes. Later, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was a model for this type of series, and spun off many similar characters (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, perhaps most significantly the unnamed protagonist of the first few espionage thrillers by Len Deighton). The plots could be unrelated to one another because the hero was the same hero, but they could have loose or very close connections. It’s a popular wheeze today.
Putting that aside the full-blown series is an epic and takes quite a bit of doing seems to me. Joleene Naylor so far has five parts plus a “prequel” in her Amaranthine series and for those reading this who are not writers, to keep this logical and interesting and relevant is not at all easy. If there is a pot of gold at the end as there should be, all the twists and turns getting to it should add up to something, not just be bumper cars at a literary fairground, banging about haphazardly on the track till at some point time is up.
The promise of a second part to some of my own work, including the present one, is comprised of loose ends. I like loose ends, or at least ends that are not spelled out exactly. There are things that may look like something that isn’t resolved in the existing writing, that I decided to leave unresolved, or perhaps “full of promise” – I like the idea that my books become the readers’ books too, that they engage with the stories and where things are not specified, spelt out just so, colour them in with their own private palettes of the mind. Yet these can prompt another book, and then another…as the loose ends unravel at another end…and if there is still a loose end, another one…and then another one…all of the plot elements remain relevant by necessity. Yet I’m not sure I’m made of the right stuff to do that.
With Kaos, the book I am working on now, I finished the “body proper” of the first draft and was working on a sort of coda when I began writing this post. This coda shuffled into my consciousness as perhaps something that might be quite long by my standards – a part two of the novel, or the second part, that could lead to a series! That may yet come. But for now, I finished the coda off at 10,000 words, knowing that more words are going to spin out of what is there. But I’d like to rewrite the whole thing, so am going to do that and call it a second draft, or even a reworking and a first draft.
So nope, it’s another one-off. So far.
Thanks for reading.
I’ve had this inclination in the past. Savonarola’s Bones, a romp of a certain sort, has periodically cropped up in my consciousness as a possible part one, and I’ve even toyed with an introduction to the sequel. I may do it yet.
What makes me think more of this now is Joleene Naylor. She is the author of a kind of genre fiction that normally I would never bother with: “vampire lit”. Till I read some of her books in what is called “beta” – apparently some pre-publication version put out to friends/enemies/passersby for a response before tidying it up as a “finished product” – the only vampire novel I had ever read was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Several “beta” novels in the Amaranthine series later, I know that my contempt for the contemporary dress of this genre (teenage junk lit, inevitably superficial, unendingly boring, without literary, moral, or intellectual merit) was just prejudice on my part. Moreover this is but a reminder of an argument I put in an essay many years ago, and that forms the basis of my own genre writing:any genre can be the occasion of literary merit. In the case of Joleene Naylor, as she has gone along her series has improved as writing, and it has always had a serious purpose.
Nor is there anything unliterary about a series. Many English novelists with shall we say advanced reputations wrote them. Dostoevsky was toying with extending his last finished work, The Brothers Karamazov with a second part. Shakespeare, my model for many aspects of writing, did an eight part play cycle – King John, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, Henry VI one two and three, and Richard III. I have seen an argument that this greatest of all writers actually conceived this cycle, and worked out all its ins and outs, from the first.
Actually I find this hard to believe. But who am I?
There are of course “series, and series”. Some writers use a hero or heroine whose exploits and problems consume book after book. This is not quite the same thing but nonetheless there is a link there that allows for development both of character and plot. It is a motif of thriller writers whose principal character or characters is in a sense “the story”. Yes, Sherlock Holmes. Later, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was a model for this type of series, and spun off many similar characters (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, perhaps most significantly the unnamed protagonist of the first few espionage thrillers by Len Deighton). The plots could be unrelated to one another because the hero was the same hero, but they could have loose or very close connections. It’s a popular wheeze today.
Putting that aside the full-blown series is an epic and takes quite a bit of doing seems to me. Joleene Naylor so far has five parts plus a “prequel” in her Amaranthine series and for those reading this who are not writers, to keep this logical and interesting and relevant is not at all easy. If there is a pot of gold at the end as there should be, all the twists and turns getting to it should add up to something, not just be bumper cars at a literary fairground, banging about haphazardly on the track till at some point time is up.
The promise of a second part to some of my own work, including the present one, is comprised of loose ends. I like loose ends, or at least ends that are not spelled out exactly. There are things that may look like something that isn’t resolved in the existing writing, that I decided to leave unresolved, or perhaps “full of promise” – I like the idea that my books become the readers’ books too, that they engage with the stories and where things are not specified, spelt out just so, colour them in with their own private palettes of the mind. Yet these can prompt another book, and then another…as the loose ends unravel at another end…and if there is still a loose end, another one…and then another one…all of the plot elements remain relevant by necessity. Yet I’m not sure I’m made of the right stuff to do that.
With Kaos, the book I am working on now, I finished the “body proper” of the first draft and was working on a sort of coda when I began writing this post. This coda shuffled into my consciousness as perhaps something that might be quite long by my standards – a part two of the novel, or the second part, that could lead to a series! That may yet come. But for now, I finished the coda off at 10,000 words, knowing that more words are going to spin out of what is there. But I’d like to rewrite the whole thing, so am going to do that and call it a second draft, or even a reworking and a first draft.
So nope, it’s another one-off. So far.
Thanks for reading.
Agatha's agony
My e-reader came with 100 books, mostly classics out of copyright. It was a surprise to see one of Agatha Christie’s novels included and after an operation on my eye, when I wanted something light I could read in quite large type, I decided to check out The Secret Adversary.
It is terrible – not the worst book I have ever read, but thrusting strong at the finish line. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the owners of Dame Agatha’s rights just didn’t bother to hang on to this lamentable effort, or sold it very cheaply into a package.
The Secret Adversary was Christie’s second novel, after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was only published after she agreed to change the ending. Styles introduced the world to Hercule Poirot, an enduring character through television and films. The Secret Adversary featured “Tommy and Tuppence”, and is something like one would imagine an Enid Bylton adventure to be but very slightly more adult. Christie went on to write another five featuring this silly duo, while adding Jane Marple and others to her stable of detective heroes. In all she wrote 66 detective novels as well as short stories, romances under another pseudonym, and some enduring plays, The Mousetrap – still in production – and Witness for the Prosecution.
Her estate claims she is the third most published writer in history after Shakespeare and the Bible and one of her mysteries, And Then There Were None, has sold over 100 million copies. Another, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was just a few years back, voted by fellow Crime Writers as the greatest detective novel ever. In all, her works have sold 2 billion copies.
For me two of these stood out – Ackroyd, by common consent a pathbreaker, and Crooked House, one of Christie’s own favourites.
Christie’s genius – and it was genius – was to script very easy-reading puzzle stories. There is typically little if any attempt to be realistic in her novels; they attract for their intellectual dimension of figuring out “whodunnit” before she, he or them is revealed. Secret Adversary has next to no description; it relies heavily on dialogue and action, and that is part of how she did it. It is a kind of trick and a good one, and I have learned from it in my own writing. Once a reader understands it, “whodunnit” is typically not hard to decipher. The “secret adversary” was obvious from first appearance to me, though reviewers at the time were fooled right to the end.
There is something else that pops up with this novel that casts a sly sidelight on Christie’s life. With Christie, art imitating life is never far away as she used the upper class milieu of her own life in her books. But four years after Secret Adversary, she reversed things in spectacular fashion.
One of the characters in Secret Adversary, a young American woman, feigns amnesia for years to deceive kidnappers who want her to reveal the whereabouts of a dangerous document that could – yes – end life as we know it by ushering in “Bolshevist” rule in Britain. The character has a background story not entirely unlike Christie’s own.
When her husband asked Agatha for a divorce in 1926*, amnesia seems to have appealed to her. Col Christie, for it was he, took off to spend a dirty weekend with his new love, and Agatha disappeared after leaving a note to say she was heading for Yorkshire. Her car was found near a lake but she was nowhere to be seen. A hue and cry that involved a thousand police and 15,000 volunteer searchers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Home Secretary was played out through the media until she was turned up in a Yorkshire hotel under another name – why, the surname name of her husband’s new lover! Two doctors confirmed she was suffering from amnesia.
Agatha Christie never said. When she wrote her autobiography, she did not even mention the drama. Attempts to make her disappearance a contrived publicity stunt have been met by the estate with unsuccessful lawsuits. The natural and more likely explanation (to me) is hat she wanted to embarrass her husband and was herself embarrassed by the publicity.
Still, it never hurt her career. Agatha later married an archaeologist named Mallowan, but kept her first married name for most of her fiction. The colonel and his new missus actually seem to have lived happily ever after.
For many people – certainly for me – Christie’s books lose their appeal with age. By my early 20s their lack of realism and their predictability palled enough that I stopped reading her, along with others in the genre she so successfully dominated – Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh. Detective stories still flourish by using more realistic characters while not abandoning the puzzle element she made her own. It is perhaps ironic that Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, appeared in 1929, three years after her acknowledged masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Raymond Chandler, in his famous essay “The simple art of murder”, showed how Hammett undermined the Christie style puzzle story, giving murders “back to people who commit them for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”.
Hammett had advantages Christie did not. He had been a detective, a real one, so had to hand a cast of characters based on real people and he had a school of writing, so called “objectivism” to employ that suited the genre. Like Christie he was phenomenally successful, but ran out of steam after five novels in five years and afterwards had other things to worry about.
Modern detective masters have split into a range of sub-genres: “police procedurals” which rely on the detail of crime investigation, which can include forensics, almost a sub-genre on their own, adventure, psychological thrillers, and more. Yet Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple have ploughed on through the decades especially in television and film. British actor David Suchet not too long ago retired as the Belgian detective after a mere quarter century reprising the role. The Dame endures, if The Secret Adversary does not.
* The other woman and the colonel met while travelling the world promoting the “British and Empire Exhibition” to be held in London in 1924-25. Agatha and she were on a committee designing a children’s feature for the exhibition. On this trip Agatha and her husband were introduced to surfing, and claimed to have been among the first Europeans to stand up on a surfboard when visiting Hawaii. Sadly, Agatha never made this a feature in her novels or stories; she missed a trick there!
It is terrible – not the worst book I have ever read, but thrusting strong at the finish line. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the owners of Dame Agatha’s rights just didn’t bother to hang on to this lamentable effort, or sold it very cheaply into a package.
The Secret Adversary was Christie’s second novel, after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was only published after she agreed to change the ending. Styles introduced the world to Hercule Poirot, an enduring character through television and films. The Secret Adversary featured “Tommy and Tuppence”, and is something like one would imagine an Enid Bylton adventure to be but very slightly more adult. Christie went on to write another five featuring this silly duo, while adding Jane Marple and others to her stable of detective heroes. In all she wrote 66 detective novels as well as short stories, romances under another pseudonym, and some enduring plays, The Mousetrap – still in production – and Witness for the Prosecution.
Her estate claims she is the third most published writer in history after Shakespeare and the Bible and one of her mysteries, And Then There Were None, has sold over 100 million copies. Another, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was just a few years back, voted by fellow Crime Writers as the greatest detective novel ever. In all, her works have sold 2 billion copies.
For me two of these stood out – Ackroyd, by common consent a pathbreaker, and Crooked House, one of Christie’s own favourites.
Christie’s genius – and it was genius – was to script very easy-reading puzzle stories. There is typically little if any attempt to be realistic in her novels; they attract for their intellectual dimension of figuring out “whodunnit” before she, he or them is revealed. Secret Adversary has next to no description; it relies heavily on dialogue and action, and that is part of how she did it. It is a kind of trick and a good one, and I have learned from it in my own writing. Once a reader understands it, “whodunnit” is typically not hard to decipher. The “secret adversary” was obvious from first appearance to me, though reviewers at the time were fooled right to the end.
There is something else that pops up with this novel that casts a sly sidelight on Christie’s life. With Christie, art imitating life is never far away as she used the upper class milieu of her own life in her books. But four years after Secret Adversary, she reversed things in spectacular fashion.
One of the characters in Secret Adversary, a young American woman, feigns amnesia for years to deceive kidnappers who want her to reveal the whereabouts of a dangerous document that could – yes – end life as we know it by ushering in “Bolshevist” rule in Britain. The character has a background story not entirely unlike Christie’s own.
When her husband asked Agatha for a divorce in 1926*, amnesia seems to have appealed to her. Col Christie, for it was he, took off to spend a dirty weekend with his new love, and Agatha disappeared after leaving a note to say she was heading for Yorkshire. Her car was found near a lake but she was nowhere to be seen. A hue and cry that involved a thousand police and 15,000 volunteer searchers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Home Secretary was played out through the media until she was turned up in a Yorkshire hotel under another name – why, the surname name of her husband’s new lover! Two doctors confirmed she was suffering from amnesia.
Agatha Christie never said. When she wrote her autobiography, she did not even mention the drama. Attempts to make her disappearance a contrived publicity stunt have been met by the estate with unsuccessful lawsuits. The natural and more likely explanation (to me) is hat she wanted to embarrass her husband and was herself embarrassed by the publicity.
Still, it never hurt her career. Agatha later married an archaeologist named Mallowan, but kept her first married name for most of her fiction. The colonel and his new missus actually seem to have lived happily ever after.
For many people – certainly for me – Christie’s books lose their appeal with age. By my early 20s their lack of realism and their predictability palled enough that I stopped reading her, along with others in the genre she so successfully dominated – Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh. Detective stories still flourish by using more realistic characters while not abandoning the puzzle element she made her own. It is perhaps ironic that Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, appeared in 1929, three years after her acknowledged masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Raymond Chandler, in his famous essay “The simple art of murder”, showed how Hammett undermined the Christie style puzzle story, giving murders “back to people who commit them for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”.
Hammett had advantages Christie did not. He had been a detective, a real one, so had to hand a cast of characters based on real people and he had a school of writing, so called “objectivism” to employ that suited the genre. Like Christie he was phenomenally successful, but ran out of steam after five novels in five years and afterwards had other things to worry about.
Modern detective masters have split into a range of sub-genres: “police procedurals” which rely on the detail of crime investigation, which can include forensics, almost a sub-genre on their own, adventure, psychological thrillers, and more. Yet Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple have ploughed on through the decades especially in television and film. British actor David Suchet not too long ago retired as the Belgian detective after a mere quarter century reprising the role. The Dame endures, if The Secret Adversary does not.
* The other woman and the colonel met while travelling the world promoting the “British and Empire Exhibition” to be held in London in 1924-25. Agatha and she were on a committee designing a children’s feature for the exhibition. On this trip Agatha and her husband were introduced to surfing, and claimed to have been among the first Europeans to stand up on a surfboard when visiting Hawaii. Sadly, Agatha never made this a feature in her novels or stories; she missed a trick there!
Say what?
Recently a friend suggested I write "stream of consciousness". and discussed a successful novel by a New Zealander that seemed to him marred by a structure imposed on the writer's stream of consciousness style. Not having read this writer, I don't know what to say about that particular book.
My friend's suggestion did make me think a bit, not only about my own writing, which has been heading in a different direction really, but about the writing known as stream of consciousness.
The thing about it is that it seldom, if ever, is what it seems. Of the writers I am familiar with who could be grouped under this rubric, none gives any evidence of really having written just as it came into her or his head. If any wrote a first draft like that, it changed fast enough before publication.
As readers of this blog will know, I greatly admire the French writer, Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches). Celine was many things as a man, among them an anti-Semite, and the unpalatable parts of his personality I don't admire at all. but as a writer, he had a gift that many other writers would love to share. Some of his most devoted followers and emulators were themselves Jewish - one admirer, a teacher at Brandeis University in its early days, visited Celine in exile in Denmark and wrote a not especially good book about his disillusion with the writer as man, as if this should have been a surprise,*
Celine was a complex character and delving into his ideas about writing has any number of traps. He made things up, at will - about himself, his style, his reputation, his influence. What he really thought is never quite certain. Did he mean it when he said in his last book, "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school"? Or did he mean it when he said, "My three little dots. All the real writers will tell you what to think of them."
When Celine sounded serious, there was some meat to these bones. He said once that he might write 800,000 thousand words, only to pare them down to less than a quarter that number. And he went on to say that when people admired his style because it seemed as if he was talking, that he actually contrived this so as to give readers not the word they expected, but a different word.
Maybe getting it from 800,000 to less than 200,000 meant the result of stream of consciousness was only realised through rivers of sweat.
There are many writers who have been influenced by Celine and whose work seems "stream of consciousness". Americans Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac are perhaps the two best known. To me, they are a struggle to get through - their work lacks the immediacy and fun of Celine's best writing, perhaps because they really did just write it and put it out there, though I don't really believe this. Serious writers write seriously. They try. They struggle.
I don't know where my best writing comes from. From my brain obviously but from some time or place in it, where some little pinprick of inspiration puts a few things together. But I do know that as with Celine good writing does not come by itself; it comes through toil and revision. Writing is easy. Good writing is hard. Making words work together as they ought is the best thing I do, but I know that I fail and go on failing, and that my successes are only partial.
The book I am writing is on its fifth version. The fourth attempt I abandoned after nearly 10,000 words. This one is past 11,000 and it feels better, somehow. A lot of the writing is not much good, but the bible of writing I follow says to keep going, and that's what I am doing. There is another draft, and then another, and another and another. . .and in the end, if it's no good, there is version six!
Well, I would like that not to happen. The drafts are fine, but throwing away a manuscript. . .it's hard. This version really does seem better even if there are some things I don't like much about it, so far. Raymond Chandler is alleged to have written that when stuck for what to do next, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. It's tempting; I've been thinking just along those lines. . .
Thanks for reading.
* Milton Hindus, Crippled Giant.
My friend's suggestion did make me think a bit, not only about my own writing, which has been heading in a different direction really, but about the writing known as stream of consciousness.
The thing about it is that it seldom, if ever, is what it seems. Of the writers I am familiar with who could be grouped under this rubric, none gives any evidence of really having written just as it came into her or his head. If any wrote a first draft like that, it changed fast enough before publication.
As readers of this blog will know, I greatly admire the French writer, Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches). Celine was many things as a man, among them an anti-Semite, and the unpalatable parts of his personality I don't admire at all. but as a writer, he had a gift that many other writers would love to share. Some of his most devoted followers and emulators were themselves Jewish - one admirer, a teacher at Brandeis University in its early days, visited Celine in exile in Denmark and wrote a not especially good book about his disillusion with the writer as man, as if this should have been a surprise,*
Celine was a complex character and delving into his ideas about writing has any number of traps. He made things up, at will - about himself, his style, his reputation, his influence. What he really thought is never quite certain. Did he mean it when he said in his last book, "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school"? Or did he mean it when he said, "My three little dots. All the real writers will tell you what to think of them."
When Celine sounded serious, there was some meat to these bones. He said once that he might write 800,000 thousand words, only to pare them down to less than a quarter that number. And he went on to say that when people admired his style because it seemed as if he was talking, that he actually contrived this so as to give readers not the word they expected, but a different word.
Maybe getting it from 800,000 to less than 200,000 meant the result of stream of consciousness was only realised through rivers of sweat.
There are many writers who have been influenced by Celine and whose work seems "stream of consciousness". Americans Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac are perhaps the two best known. To me, they are a struggle to get through - their work lacks the immediacy and fun of Celine's best writing, perhaps because they really did just write it and put it out there, though I don't really believe this. Serious writers write seriously. They try. They struggle.
I don't know where my best writing comes from. From my brain obviously but from some time or place in it, where some little pinprick of inspiration puts a few things together. But I do know that as with Celine good writing does not come by itself; it comes through toil and revision. Writing is easy. Good writing is hard. Making words work together as they ought is the best thing I do, but I know that I fail and go on failing, and that my successes are only partial.
The book I am writing is on its fifth version. The fourth attempt I abandoned after nearly 10,000 words. This one is past 11,000 and it feels better, somehow. A lot of the writing is not much good, but the bible of writing I follow says to keep going, and that's what I am doing. There is another draft, and then another, and another and another. . .and in the end, if it's no good, there is version six!
Well, I would like that not to happen. The drafts are fine, but throwing away a manuscript. . .it's hard. This version really does seem better even if there are some things I don't like much about it, so far. Raymond Chandler is alleged to have written that when stuck for what to do next, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. It's tempting; I've been thinking just along those lines. . .
Thanks for reading.
* Milton Hindus, Crippled Giant.
The written world
This blog was originally started "just because" but as I've gone along I've realised how valuable it is to be able to think about writing, about the writers who matter to me, and to help clarify my th
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