Steve Evans's Blog: The written world , page 9
July 28, 2012
Influences five: Plato
Plato was part of my formal education; I would imagine most high school and university arts students read at least the dialogues surrounding the death of Socrates and possibly more - for example the scene in the cave from The Republic. I liked those, but left the Greeks behind for a long time after university, returning to them - and the Latins - about thirty years ago when I decided I had not had enough of the "classics". I still haven't, but I've read a great number of them.
Plato was something of a fascist, and Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies demolishes Plato the politician and political theorist, and fairly too. When I read Popper on Plato I found myself nodding in agreement as I thought of The Republic and other of his political writings. But I nodded too at the beginning of Popper's demolition job when he said he admired other aspects of Plato.
When I launched into my classics phase I read quite a number of the dialogues. Some are more or less forgettable, or deal with issues that were a big deal in Plato's time but not so important to us now. But it was not till late in my reading of him that I reached the most impressive, and one of the shortest, of his dialogues: The Symposium.
To the Greeks a symposium was a dinner party, and like much of upper crust Greek life of that time, was formalised - one could even say formularised - just as I guess our own dinner parties would be. A classical Greek symposium involved a lot of drinking, and as it was otherwise a men-only affair, had dancing girls later on, who may or may not have just danced.
In this case, however, the host proposed something different - to dispense with the dancing girls and for all present to give a discourse on love; the dialogue sets out the various views of the participants.
Many - perhaps all - of those in the dialogue were real people: of them, Socrates, Aristophanes, and Alcibiades were significant figures in the Athens of their time, and Plato seems to have been settling a few scores in using them. It is not at all clear that the symposium ever took place, and the way Plato sets it out, even if it did, it is not at all clear that what was said was the way Plato wrote it up.
In other words, typically for him, Plato was being very cunning, and in his cunning both political and philosophical in a more general sense. The dialogue shows off "Socrates'" views on love while cleverly defending him against the charge of corrupting Athenian youth that at least implicitly cost him his life.
All these and more angles, often shown through the slyest of insinuations, rocked me: this was philosophy as literature, and vice versa. While I read other dialogues for the philosophical content, The Symposium was literature, and literature of a very high order. Nay more: of the kind that I aspire to write - an "easy read" that repays successive readings, with high purposes concealed in its apparently slight renderings. To my mind, it is easily Plato's greatest work. He was almost always a good writer, even when espousing the most cynically false ideas, but in this slim volume he outdid all his other efforts.
This is in spite of what I consider Plato's strange idealist philosophy, and the take on love that he puts into Socrates' mouth. The great man's love was for ideas, and thence for the ideal. Real people? Forget it: just imperfect manifestations of the perfect beings off somewhere else...Plato believed in "metempsychosis" or reincarnation, and it coloured his attitude toward life as we live it in the same way that a Hindu's or Buddhist's attitude toward life is coloured by a similar belief.
For those (including me) who find this, while possible, a bit hard to swallow, The Symposium remains a wonderful work of literature and philosophy, as well as psychology, and its depiction of Socrates as a kind of superior being is among the most beautiful in all literature. It is hard to recommend this dialogue highly enough.
It helps explain, too, why so many different schools of philosophy purported to trace their lineage back to Socrates, among them the peripatetics, Aristotle's brand, the sceptics, the Stoics, and the neo-Platonists. Socrates really was an exceptional human being, and he comes across in this dialogue in a truly amazing way.
Plato's influence, and via him, Socrates' , was terrific in the classical world, and was only finally crushed by Christianity in the fourth century or so. Of course, he hasn't gone away, but till the Renaissance Aristotle was the sole representative of the Greek tradition in western society. Plato's form of religion if you like was dealt a heavy blow by the Christian transformation of European life, and along with it all the philosophical schools that had a pretense towards being "a way of life": the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the peripatetics. In another post I'll talk about some of these, in particular the amazing document that is the teachings of Epictetus, and of Epicurus...but this one has gone on quite long enough, and is so cosmic that it deserves at least ten stars, of any colour you like, of any size or even shape! If the sides of your monitor are covered with the wee darlings, stick them on the body of your PC - if there is one - or on a special piece of wood you have my permission to purchase and hang on the wall behind your monitor, where you can chart your progress as a follower of frivolity.
Plato was something of a fascist, and Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies demolishes Plato the politician and political theorist, and fairly too. When I read Popper on Plato I found myself nodding in agreement as I thought of The Republic and other of his political writings. But I nodded too at the beginning of Popper's demolition job when he said he admired other aspects of Plato.
When I launched into my classics phase I read quite a number of the dialogues. Some are more or less forgettable, or deal with issues that were a big deal in Plato's time but not so important to us now. But it was not till late in my reading of him that I reached the most impressive, and one of the shortest, of his dialogues: The Symposium.
To the Greeks a symposium was a dinner party, and like much of upper crust Greek life of that time, was formalised - one could even say formularised - just as I guess our own dinner parties would be. A classical Greek symposium involved a lot of drinking, and as it was otherwise a men-only affair, had dancing girls later on, who may or may not have just danced.
In this case, however, the host proposed something different - to dispense with the dancing girls and for all present to give a discourse on love; the dialogue sets out the various views of the participants.
Many - perhaps all - of those in the dialogue were real people: of them, Socrates, Aristophanes, and Alcibiades were significant figures in the Athens of their time, and Plato seems to have been settling a few scores in using them. It is not at all clear that the symposium ever took place, and the way Plato sets it out, even if it did, it is not at all clear that what was said was the way Plato wrote it up.
In other words, typically for him, Plato was being very cunning, and in his cunning both political and philosophical in a more general sense. The dialogue shows off "Socrates'" views on love while cleverly defending him against the charge of corrupting Athenian youth that at least implicitly cost him his life.
All these and more angles, often shown through the slyest of insinuations, rocked me: this was philosophy as literature, and vice versa. While I read other dialogues for the philosophical content, The Symposium was literature, and literature of a very high order. Nay more: of the kind that I aspire to write - an "easy read" that repays successive readings, with high purposes concealed in its apparently slight renderings. To my mind, it is easily Plato's greatest work. He was almost always a good writer, even when espousing the most cynically false ideas, but in this slim volume he outdid all his other efforts.
This is in spite of what I consider Plato's strange idealist philosophy, and the take on love that he puts into Socrates' mouth. The great man's love was for ideas, and thence for the ideal. Real people? Forget it: just imperfect manifestations of the perfect beings off somewhere else...Plato believed in "metempsychosis" or reincarnation, and it coloured his attitude toward life as we live it in the same way that a Hindu's or Buddhist's attitude toward life is coloured by a similar belief.
For those (including me) who find this, while possible, a bit hard to swallow, The Symposium remains a wonderful work of literature and philosophy, as well as psychology, and its depiction of Socrates as a kind of superior being is among the most beautiful in all literature. It is hard to recommend this dialogue highly enough.
It helps explain, too, why so many different schools of philosophy purported to trace their lineage back to Socrates, among them the peripatetics, Aristotle's brand, the sceptics, the Stoics, and the neo-Platonists. Socrates really was an exceptional human being, and he comes across in this dialogue in a truly amazing way.
Plato's influence, and via him, Socrates' , was terrific in the classical world, and was only finally crushed by Christianity in the fourth century or so. Of course, he hasn't gone away, but till the Renaissance Aristotle was the sole representative of the Greek tradition in western society. Plato's form of religion if you like was dealt a heavy blow by the Christian transformation of European life, and along with it all the philosophical schools that had a pretense towards being "a way of life": the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the peripatetics. In another post I'll talk about some of these, in particular the amazing document that is the teachings of Epictetus, and of Epicurus...but this one has gone on quite long enough, and is so cosmic that it deserves at least ten stars, of any colour you like, of any size or even shape! If the sides of your monitor are covered with the wee darlings, stick them on the body of your PC - if there is one - or on a special piece of wood you have my permission to purchase and hang on the wall behind your monitor, where you can chart your progress as a follower of frivolity.
July 20, 2012
Interlude: taste and personality
Dear reader, I don't know about you, but when I go into someone's house I take the first civil opportunity to go through the bookshelf, if it's in a public area. It seems as if what is there is some clue to the personality of the books' owner(s), and more: what is there can be a plank for a bridge between us. "Oh, I see you have Being and Nothingness." "Yes, but I haven't had time to read it." "And The Open Society and its Enemies."
"Yes, great book." "Yes, though I think Popper is too mean to Wittgenstein." "You know, that's what I think too..." and you've enriched your association and maybe even started a lasting friendship.
Of course, a bookshelf in someone's lounge/living room may not exhaust a collection, any more than a meeting in a social gathering exhausts some one's real self. Hidden under the bed, or in a closet, or wherever, may be that collection of porn magazines that shows an entirely different side to the person; perhaps less interestingly but nonetheless revealingly, there are stacks of Reader's Digests hidden somewhere: the guilty secret.
What has been one of the great disappointments in my life, however, has been a different kind of revelation from a host's bookshelf. Many times, the collection reveals a striving intellect whose dimensions suddenly contract on finishing formal education - say, university. Sartre and Husserl and Wittgenstein, Popper and Marx and Plato, and Shakespeare and Donne, and Milton, and Shaw, all suddenly give way to pulp fiction of some sort or other, and it's obvious. As the years roll on, the dimensions of the mind have rolled up. Now, I write pulp fiction, and I am not denigrating it in the slightest: it has its role in life even for the most robust "intellectual". My aim in writing is to infuse my chosen genre with some intellectual fizz.
But that is only one aspect of life, of the life of the mind, and those who "go off" more serious reading are diminished as people. That doesn't mean they are not nice; they are. It doesn't make their lives less wholesome; they may indeed lead far more wholesome lives than mine. But it does mean - say I - that the potential of their intellect has been thwarted to some degree.
Is this unfair? Probably. But it's true too, or has its measure of truth. I don't own a television, and watch in others people's houses reluctantly, not because television doesn't have a place in our lives - it does - but because life really is too short for me to get through all the more satisfying intellectual (and by this I include emotional) adventures on offer, in particular but not only through books. I have spent getting on to thirty years now "exploring" Shakespeare, and I'm not done yet! I scarcely know many exciting writers, or know them less well than I would like - Donne, for example. And the thrill of reading Euripides, my previous post, knowing that this was a man who lived around 2500 years ago, whose mind is reaching across all that time, as an artist, an intellect, a philosopher, a human being...how can television stand up to that? It's an individual relationship, me and Euripides, Shakespeare and I, and the others. They speak to me - and I speak back.
So when I see that someone has dropped out of this adventure - and my experience is that this usually happens on leaving formal education - it doesn't mean I don't like them, but that I am a bit sad for them; I think they're missing out, not becoming the people they could become.
Is that arrogant? Maybe it is, but I hope it's not. Many of my best friends don't read at all and I don't judge them for it. It just seems to me to be sad for them, that they have never discovered the joys of reading. We still have a great time together on the planes of existence that matter to us, to our relationship.
Still, when I meet someone whose shelves are groaning from the weight, overflowing with a broad range of books with some intellectual grunt, I feel of frisson of pleasure, of anticipation: I think I have found a friend, and usually I have.
In the broader sense, a person's bookshelves do reveal something about them: their tastes somehow show something about who they are, just as their taste in music does: Mozart and Beethoven v Wagner for example. My book collection shows my ambitions, my past and my development, my pretensions and my failures in a very sophisticated way I think. Yes, there is something "under the bed" too, and there are gaps that are as revealing as what is there.
This series, these "blogs", does something similar. As I've gone along, I've begun to see how writing about my influences comprises a kind of intellectual autobiography: my mind's life's journey. I hope it's interesting in its own right, not because it's about my mind's predilections. After all, if I get fascinated by someone or something, I will be Kantian enough to believe it to be interesting to anybody, at least potentially.
The other side of that is being open to new interests, new tastes, new experiences, and reading as a practice ought to teach this, to each of us. If reading focuses the mind, it also opens it. So say I.
My next stop, I think, is Plato, but thought I might have a wee ramble through wider paddocks first. And you know that my other pastime - butterfly soothing - must get its due.
A screed. It is worth at least a dozen stars, mostly blue and yellow ones, but choose others if you wish.
"Yes, great book." "Yes, though I think Popper is too mean to Wittgenstein." "You know, that's what I think too..." and you've enriched your association and maybe even started a lasting friendship.
Of course, a bookshelf in someone's lounge/living room may not exhaust a collection, any more than a meeting in a social gathering exhausts some one's real self. Hidden under the bed, or in a closet, or wherever, may be that collection of porn magazines that shows an entirely different side to the person; perhaps less interestingly but nonetheless revealingly, there are stacks of Reader's Digests hidden somewhere: the guilty secret.
What has been one of the great disappointments in my life, however, has been a different kind of revelation from a host's bookshelf. Many times, the collection reveals a striving intellect whose dimensions suddenly contract on finishing formal education - say, university. Sartre and Husserl and Wittgenstein, Popper and Marx and Plato, and Shakespeare and Donne, and Milton, and Shaw, all suddenly give way to pulp fiction of some sort or other, and it's obvious. As the years roll on, the dimensions of the mind have rolled up. Now, I write pulp fiction, and I am not denigrating it in the slightest: it has its role in life even for the most robust "intellectual". My aim in writing is to infuse my chosen genre with some intellectual fizz.
But that is only one aspect of life, of the life of the mind, and those who "go off" more serious reading are diminished as people. That doesn't mean they are not nice; they are. It doesn't make their lives less wholesome; they may indeed lead far more wholesome lives than mine. But it does mean - say I - that the potential of their intellect has been thwarted to some degree.
Is this unfair? Probably. But it's true too, or has its measure of truth. I don't own a television, and watch in others people's houses reluctantly, not because television doesn't have a place in our lives - it does - but because life really is too short for me to get through all the more satisfying intellectual (and by this I include emotional) adventures on offer, in particular but not only through books. I have spent getting on to thirty years now "exploring" Shakespeare, and I'm not done yet! I scarcely know many exciting writers, or know them less well than I would like - Donne, for example. And the thrill of reading Euripides, my previous post, knowing that this was a man who lived around 2500 years ago, whose mind is reaching across all that time, as an artist, an intellect, a philosopher, a human being...how can television stand up to that? It's an individual relationship, me and Euripides, Shakespeare and I, and the others. They speak to me - and I speak back.
So when I see that someone has dropped out of this adventure - and my experience is that this usually happens on leaving formal education - it doesn't mean I don't like them, but that I am a bit sad for them; I think they're missing out, not becoming the people they could become.
Is that arrogant? Maybe it is, but I hope it's not. Many of my best friends don't read at all and I don't judge them for it. It just seems to me to be sad for them, that they have never discovered the joys of reading. We still have a great time together on the planes of existence that matter to us, to our relationship.
Still, when I meet someone whose shelves are groaning from the weight, overflowing with a broad range of books with some intellectual grunt, I feel of frisson of pleasure, of anticipation: I think I have found a friend, and usually I have.
In the broader sense, a person's bookshelves do reveal something about them: their tastes somehow show something about who they are, just as their taste in music does: Mozart and Beethoven v Wagner for example. My book collection shows my ambitions, my past and my development, my pretensions and my failures in a very sophisticated way I think. Yes, there is something "under the bed" too, and there are gaps that are as revealing as what is there.
This series, these "blogs", does something similar. As I've gone along, I've begun to see how writing about my influences comprises a kind of intellectual autobiography: my mind's life's journey. I hope it's interesting in its own right, not because it's about my mind's predilections. After all, if I get fascinated by someone or something, I will be Kantian enough to believe it to be interesting to anybody, at least potentially.
The other side of that is being open to new interests, new tastes, new experiences, and reading as a practice ought to teach this, to each of us. If reading focuses the mind, it also opens it. So say I.
My next stop, I think, is Plato, but thought I might have a wee ramble through wider paddocks first. And you know that my other pastime - butterfly soothing - must get its due.
A screed. It is worth at least a dozen stars, mostly blue and yellow ones, but choose others if you wish.
July 12, 2012
Influences four: Euripides
Episode ten! of the thrilling blog written by me, and which is about writing. And yes, now for something completely different: Euripides.
Of all the Greek playwrights Euripides is easily my favourite, and that is saying a wee bit as the others are not really slouches: Sophocles for example, who gave us Oedipus (and gave him his mum), was a powerful writer who did not flinch from his subject. But though I admire and like the others, Euripides stands out for me.
We don't always know how many plays the Greek authors wrote as much was destroyed by the triumphalists among the Christians, but in Euripides' case we kind of do - he apparently wrote around 80 plays (though some say nearly 100), of which about 20 survive. Of those, the hottest of a string of hot numbers is The Medea, a revenge play of such power that it is hard not to shrink back a bit from the anti-heroine as she rides into the sky in her chariot, leaving in her wake her dead children and parents-in-law. She had murdered them all.
There was more to this than a crazed woman out to wreak havoc on her husband's family, for her husband was Jason, and she the "pagan" daughter of chieftains who had helped him acquire the Golden Fleece and spirit it home. And this tale was about the Greek attitude towards non-Greeks, who could not be queens of their city states...and the anger evoked among them by second-class citizenry.
Euripides got his dramatic power from his imaginative understanding of Medea's point of view, his willingness to enter into her perspective, without flinching, to show too her blind spots: she was not merely unwilling herself to accept Jason's attempt to provide her and her children with a stable home, but she was unable to see the reasons for it - heightening the tragedy.
Many of Euripides' greatest characters are women, some of them more or less unknown. In The Trojan Women the defeated wives of Troy's warriors are among his finest creations as he pitilessly exposed the ongoing Athenian war for domination of Attica. For his querying of the motives of his native city, he could hardly have been the most popular of public figures, and myth has it that he left Athens and settled elsewhere at the end of his life.
Actually, this is unknown. But like Shakespeare, Euripides was seen to be a superior writer in his own time or near to it, hence the survival of so many of his plays. To me he was the greatest till Shakespeare, and given that this covers 2000 years, that's an amazing achievement.
My favourites among his surviving works are The Medea, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae, though others are also well-crafted and very moving. The Bacchae deserves special mention; it is his last play and one where he examined a problem still with us: alcohol and alcoholism. Any alcoholic seeing or reading this play will instantly recognise the portrayal of a blackout. It is the key point of the play and shows clearly that Euripides recognised what a blackout is and was able to show the unconsciousness of this type of alcoholic behaviour, all the more horrific as a result.
Yet Euripides did not, as one might imagine, see the abuse of alcohol as a reason to campaign against it. Rather the opposite - he saw the usefulness of this drug in taking away the pain of hard lives for the great mass of the people, while also seeing the dangers contained in it.
Public drunkenness at the time, particularly during "festivals", was a live issue. Plato's last dialogue, The Laws, begins as an examination of how drunkenness among young people can be counteracted; his "solution", effectively more songs and games, showed just how removed from the nature of alcoholism he was. That might be said to be unfair if Euripides had not shown his clear understanding of this problem, even if he had no solution. The nature of the alcoholic would not be better portrayed till Michael Cassio in Othello.
Euripides had a warm sympathy for the oppressed, for the selflessly courageous, for those isolated and condemned by the societies of his time; to me he is a true exemplar of the "writer as hero". In my own small way, I have tried to emulate him in my books (please don't misunderstand - I am not making any claims to personal courage), to use him as a model for some of my characters: Kathe in The Kleiber Monster for example; her portrayal has an eye on Euripides himself as well as some of the beautiful women he created in his work, in particular Alcestis in a play of the same name.
This particular play is relevant to a discussion in a thread of the "Shakespeare fans" Goodreads group about how much it is "acceptable" to doctor the greats...Ted Hughes did a version of this play that as the dust jacket says, "goes beyond translation". To my mind, it is excellent. Hughes captures the spirit of Euripides while confronting some of the implied issues more overtly; like the playwright, the poet had his own measures of courage.
I am not sure about the number of stars for this one. Anyone reading these blog posts conscientiously could have their PC monitor's casing nearly coated with the shining darlings and be thinking of getting onto the viewing surface. My advice is - don't! buy a new monitor...six stars, plus three for the wicked. Choose any colours you like.
Of all the Greek playwrights Euripides is easily my favourite, and that is saying a wee bit as the others are not really slouches: Sophocles for example, who gave us Oedipus (and gave him his mum), was a powerful writer who did not flinch from his subject. But though I admire and like the others, Euripides stands out for me.
We don't always know how many plays the Greek authors wrote as much was destroyed by the triumphalists among the Christians, but in Euripides' case we kind of do - he apparently wrote around 80 plays (though some say nearly 100), of which about 20 survive. Of those, the hottest of a string of hot numbers is The Medea, a revenge play of such power that it is hard not to shrink back a bit from the anti-heroine as she rides into the sky in her chariot, leaving in her wake her dead children and parents-in-law. She had murdered them all.
There was more to this than a crazed woman out to wreak havoc on her husband's family, for her husband was Jason, and she the "pagan" daughter of chieftains who had helped him acquire the Golden Fleece and spirit it home. And this tale was about the Greek attitude towards non-Greeks, who could not be queens of their city states...and the anger evoked among them by second-class citizenry.
Euripides got his dramatic power from his imaginative understanding of Medea's point of view, his willingness to enter into her perspective, without flinching, to show too her blind spots: she was not merely unwilling herself to accept Jason's attempt to provide her and her children with a stable home, but she was unable to see the reasons for it - heightening the tragedy.
Many of Euripides' greatest characters are women, some of them more or less unknown. In The Trojan Women the defeated wives of Troy's warriors are among his finest creations as he pitilessly exposed the ongoing Athenian war for domination of Attica. For his querying of the motives of his native city, he could hardly have been the most popular of public figures, and myth has it that he left Athens and settled elsewhere at the end of his life.
Actually, this is unknown. But like Shakespeare, Euripides was seen to be a superior writer in his own time or near to it, hence the survival of so many of his plays. To me he was the greatest till Shakespeare, and given that this covers 2000 years, that's an amazing achievement.
My favourites among his surviving works are The Medea, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae, though others are also well-crafted and very moving. The Bacchae deserves special mention; it is his last play and one where he examined a problem still with us: alcohol and alcoholism. Any alcoholic seeing or reading this play will instantly recognise the portrayal of a blackout. It is the key point of the play and shows clearly that Euripides recognised what a blackout is and was able to show the unconsciousness of this type of alcoholic behaviour, all the more horrific as a result.
Yet Euripides did not, as one might imagine, see the abuse of alcohol as a reason to campaign against it. Rather the opposite - he saw the usefulness of this drug in taking away the pain of hard lives for the great mass of the people, while also seeing the dangers contained in it.
Public drunkenness at the time, particularly during "festivals", was a live issue. Plato's last dialogue, The Laws, begins as an examination of how drunkenness among young people can be counteracted; his "solution", effectively more songs and games, showed just how removed from the nature of alcoholism he was. That might be said to be unfair if Euripides had not shown his clear understanding of this problem, even if he had no solution. The nature of the alcoholic would not be better portrayed till Michael Cassio in Othello.
Euripides had a warm sympathy for the oppressed, for the selflessly courageous, for those isolated and condemned by the societies of his time; to me he is a true exemplar of the "writer as hero". In my own small way, I have tried to emulate him in my books (please don't misunderstand - I am not making any claims to personal courage), to use him as a model for some of my characters: Kathe in The Kleiber Monster for example; her portrayal has an eye on Euripides himself as well as some of the beautiful women he created in his work, in particular Alcestis in a play of the same name.
This particular play is relevant to a discussion in a thread of the "Shakespeare fans" Goodreads group about how much it is "acceptable" to doctor the greats...Ted Hughes did a version of this play that as the dust jacket says, "goes beyond translation". To my mind, it is excellent. Hughes captures the spirit of Euripides while confronting some of the implied issues more overtly; like the playwright, the poet had his own measures of courage.
I am not sure about the number of stars for this one. Anyone reading these blog posts conscientiously could have their PC monitor's casing nearly coated with the shining darlings and be thinking of getting onto the viewing surface. My advice is - don't! buy a new monitor...six stars, plus three for the wicked. Choose any colours you like.
July 10, 2012
Influences three: B Traven
This is the ninth post of my blog-out, which is mainly about writing and has settled into a wee niche of talking about writers who have influenced me. This one is about B Traven.
Traven was probably a German and his real name was possibly very prosaic: Otto Schmidt, or perhaps Feige. No one knew much for many years after his death as he had fabricated a range of identities to keep his real one secret, and when confronted - which was seldom as he didn't advertise his address - fell back on one or another of them, usually successfully. He was thought to be an American, possibly of Swedish extraction, possibly from Chicago, or New Orleans, possibly named Traven Torsen, or Torsven, or Hal Croves, or indeed B Traven.
There are adherents of all these and more theories, even that he claimed to be an illegitimate son of the Kaiser. Have a look at the very extensive Wikipedia article on him. It seems to me he was the German who was Ret Marut; the rest is even more unclear.
Traven as we shall now call him supposedly originally did this because he was a political refugee and didn't want to risk repatriation to his native Germany from Mexico, where he washed up under unknown circumstances in the 1920s. An anarchist, he had written under the name of Ret Marut in the chaotic period after Germany's defeat in WWI, was involved in a short-lived socialist government in Bavaria, and when it was overthrown was supposedly destined for the firing squad when he somehow escaped. If his first novel, The Death Ship, is to be believed, he ended up in Spain, and somehow from there made his way to Mexico.
The Death Ship was an international best-seller and must have enabled Traven just to write, though he must have travelled widely in Mexico before he made his breakthrough, and was among other things apparently, an orchid hunter. He fell in love with his adopted land, and with the inspiring upheaval of revolutionary activity that gripped the country from before WWI to the end of the 1920s, and that became the backdrop, if not the theme, of his work. Many of his novels dealt directly with the conditions of the Indians of southern Mexico who took part in the revolution, and they have acquired a cachet of their own as "The Jungle Novels" - March to the Monteria, Rebellion of the Hanged, The White Rose...in all seven as I recall. These overtly political thrillers stand out for their realistic, convincing portrayal of the conditions that led to revolt, and for their realistic assessment of the needs of revolution: Traven was no hand-wringing liberal (a Marxist I knew was thrilled by Traven's attitude on this score: he was "staunch").
Perhaps their dominant political nature kept the Jungle Novels in the background for a long time. The best-known of his works, Treasure of the Sierre Madre, is also political, but the politics is in this case in the background enough to allow this adventure story to succeed as an adventure story. Traven's success was assured when the novel was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart; the film was made in Mexico and Traven seems to have turned up on the set as "Croves" representing the author. When questions about his real identity got too close, "Croves" disappeared.
Treasure of the Sierre Madre is without doubt Traven's most famous book, courtesy of the film I guess, but to me the one that resonates most strongly is The Bridge in the Jungle. Despite having "Jungle" in the title, it is not usually listed as among the Jungle Novels. It is the one that hit me strongest when I ripped through the corpus of Traven's work in the 1960s and 1970s. Its latest reprint says it is regarded by many as Traven's best book so I am not alone.
What this book did for me as a writer was to show me how to make larger points through the detail of narrative. Bridge concerns the death of a boy in a village in the jungle and whose brother has been working in the United States. The brother returns for a visit and gives the brother his first pair of shoes. The proud youth runs through the village to show everyone his wonderful gift, going back and forth across a wooden bridge. He disappears and his body is eventually found in the stream below the bridge after a local magician puts a candle on a piece of bark and floats it down the stream; the candle stops above where the body is found.
Traven's account of this small event and the trauma surrounding it is a masterpiece of storytelling. But it is more: it is a sobering account of the impact of industrial civilisation on pre-industrial culture, all told through the simple fact of a boy's death because he was wearing shoes for the first time in his life. Traven can't help but draw out the message later on; he was too political a writer to resist the temptation. But he didn't need to do it, and it taught me a lot that I stored carefully till I began to write fiction seriously decades later.
There was more to Traven's effect on me too: his secretiveness appealed to my own nature, and his radical politics were attractive for their realism. Here was a man who had been in the firing line - indeed, almost in front of the firing squad, and who had not resiled. Like Celine, the anti-Semitic nasty of my previous post, he was an anarchist, but an anarchist of a different stripe altogether: he believed as the Spanish anarchists who fought in the civil war in that country in the 1930s, in collective action.
So as with Celine, this taught me something about bravery in literature. My work is largely though far from wholly about people who stand for the weak and dispossessed or isolated and alienated, and if my work might be called more a plea for tolerance than a rallying cry for action, the possible need for action is implicit in it. Traven's politics would not be relevant today in the west, but his books instantly came to mind when a group of Indians in the south of Mexico briefly seized control of a town in the name of a revolutionary group espousing an ideology not a million miles removed from Traven's. Traven saw redemption for the human race in the close-to-the-soil culture typified by Mexico's Indian cultures, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre was a critique of the greed of western culture contrasted with the holistic appeal of pre-industrial Mexico, as Bridge in the Jungle was a heart-rending account of the effect of the one on the other, and for writers a guide for how to "show" while "telling".
Five stars if you want them. Buy them in a novelty shop, peel them off the backing, and stick them onto your screen.
Traven was probably a German and his real name was possibly very prosaic: Otto Schmidt, or perhaps Feige. No one knew much for many years after his death as he had fabricated a range of identities to keep his real one secret, and when confronted - which was seldom as he didn't advertise his address - fell back on one or another of them, usually successfully. He was thought to be an American, possibly of Swedish extraction, possibly from Chicago, or New Orleans, possibly named Traven Torsen, or Torsven, or Hal Croves, or indeed B Traven.
There are adherents of all these and more theories, even that he claimed to be an illegitimate son of the Kaiser. Have a look at the very extensive Wikipedia article on him. It seems to me he was the German who was Ret Marut; the rest is even more unclear.
Traven as we shall now call him supposedly originally did this because he was a political refugee and didn't want to risk repatriation to his native Germany from Mexico, where he washed up under unknown circumstances in the 1920s. An anarchist, he had written under the name of Ret Marut in the chaotic period after Germany's defeat in WWI, was involved in a short-lived socialist government in Bavaria, and when it was overthrown was supposedly destined for the firing squad when he somehow escaped. If his first novel, The Death Ship, is to be believed, he ended up in Spain, and somehow from there made his way to Mexico.
The Death Ship was an international best-seller and must have enabled Traven just to write, though he must have travelled widely in Mexico before he made his breakthrough, and was among other things apparently, an orchid hunter. He fell in love with his adopted land, and with the inspiring upheaval of revolutionary activity that gripped the country from before WWI to the end of the 1920s, and that became the backdrop, if not the theme, of his work. Many of his novels dealt directly with the conditions of the Indians of southern Mexico who took part in the revolution, and they have acquired a cachet of their own as "The Jungle Novels" - March to the Monteria, Rebellion of the Hanged, The White Rose...in all seven as I recall. These overtly political thrillers stand out for their realistic, convincing portrayal of the conditions that led to revolt, and for their realistic assessment of the needs of revolution: Traven was no hand-wringing liberal (a Marxist I knew was thrilled by Traven's attitude on this score: he was "staunch").
Perhaps their dominant political nature kept the Jungle Novels in the background for a long time. The best-known of his works, Treasure of the Sierre Madre, is also political, but the politics is in this case in the background enough to allow this adventure story to succeed as an adventure story. Traven's success was assured when the novel was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart; the film was made in Mexico and Traven seems to have turned up on the set as "Croves" representing the author. When questions about his real identity got too close, "Croves" disappeared.
Treasure of the Sierre Madre is without doubt Traven's most famous book, courtesy of the film I guess, but to me the one that resonates most strongly is The Bridge in the Jungle. Despite having "Jungle" in the title, it is not usually listed as among the Jungle Novels. It is the one that hit me strongest when I ripped through the corpus of Traven's work in the 1960s and 1970s. Its latest reprint says it is regarded by many as Traven's best book so I am not alone.
What this book did for me as a writer was to show me how to make larger points through the detail of narrative. Bridge concerns the death of a boy in a village in the jungle and whose brother has been working in the United States. The brother returns for a visit and gives the brother his first pair of shoes. The proud youth runs through the village to show everyone his wonderful gift, going back and forth across a wooden bridge. He disappears and his body is eventually found in the stream below the bridge after a local magician puts a candle on a piece of bark and floats it down the stream; the candle stops above where the body is found.
Traven's account of this small event and the trauma surrounding it is a masterpiece of storytelling. But it is more: it is a sobering account of the impact of industrial civilisation on pre-industrial culture, all told through the simple fact of a boy's death because he was wearing shoes for the first time in his life. Traven can't help but draw out the message later on; he was too political a writer to resist the temptation. But he didn't need to do it, and it taught me a lot that I stored carefully till I began to write fiction seriously decades later.
There was more to Traven's effect on me too: his secretiveness appealed to my own nature, and his radical politics were attractive for their realism. Here was a man who had been in the firing line - indeed, almost in front of the firing squad, and who had not resiled. Like Celine, the anti-Semitic nasty of my previous post, he was an anarchist, but an anarchist of a different stripe altogether: he believed as the Spanish anarchists who fought in the civil war in that country in the 1930s, in collective action.
So as with Celine, this taught me something about bravery in literature. My work is largely though far from wholly about people who stand for the weak and dispossessed or isolated and alienated, and if my work might be called more a plea for tolerance than a rallying cry for action, the possible need for action is implicit in it. Traven's politics would not be relevant today in the west, but his books instantly came to mind when a group of Indians in the south of Mexico briefly seized control of a town in the name of a revolutionary group espousing an ideology not a million miles removed from Traven's. Traven saw redemption for the human race in the close-to-the-soil culture typified by Mexico's Indian cultures, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre was a critique of the greed of western culture contrasted with the holistic appeal of pre-industrial Mexico, as Bridge in the Jungle was a heart-rending account of the effect of the one on the other, and for writers a guide for how to "show" while "telling".
Five stars if you want them. Buy them in a novelty shop, peel them off the backing, and stick them onto your screen.
July 9, 2012
Influences Two: Celine
Sometime in the 1970s I fell under the influence of a French novelist practically no one had heard of at the time, though he'd been dead since 1961: Celine. He was a revelation to me, and my second novel, Evilheart, was as close as I could get to doing homage to him. Later, in Savonarala's Bones, I returned to him, but not in the detail, or attention to moral nuance.
To my mind Celine was one the great writers of the 20th century - both funny and wise in his way. He is ignored because after his second novel in the 1930s, Mort a Credit, variously translated as Death on Credit and Death on the Instalment Plan, he revealed himself as an anti-Semite in a series of really disturbing works. Not surprisingly after 1945 he was in bad odour among those who used to champion him, to the point where many French literary critics refused to review his later books, though they bore no traces of his crackpot ideas (they did bear all too many traces of his views of the treatment he'd received for holding them). Jean-Paul Sartre, who had dedicated one of his 1930s works to Celine, wrote a scathing essay after the war, "The mind of the anti-Semite", that was directed at Celine while not naming him. Celine gave as good or better than he got, and in his later novels mercilessly pilloried the once-lionised existentialist philosopher and writer - he became "Tartre" and a magazine he wrote for Your Ferrule.
Celine's anti-Semitism troubled me a lot, and it still does. I was far from the only person to find in Celine's "ordinary" fiction a genuinely extraordinary sensibility who seemed to have divined what life is all about, and given it both barrels - a savage view that was ameliorated by humour, somehow salvaged by it.
And I was far from alone, too, in being confused by the writer's revelation that he was, to put it mildly, down on Jews. (A contemporary in the 1930s, when the first of his anti-Semitic ravings was published, thought it was a satire). It seemed contradictory, and Celine himself later admitted as much in a somewhat left -handed way - "I got mixed up in stuff that was none of my business". But he never resiled, never said "I got it wrong". Far from it, he went out of this life as persuaded as ever that Jews were the enemy...
...but the enemy of what? Celine's larger message was one of the futility of life for the individual; his most famous bon mot was "the truth of this life is death". Why care if the Jews are in control of everything if even the Jews who are in control of everything are under the control of the grim reaper? Celine's terrific strength was to juxtapose and even portray as humorous the sad reality of physical life and death. In one of his most famous scenes, a trip over the English channel turns into a vomit parade, in which the deck is awash with the stuff and our hero, the hapless Ferdinand, retches and retches till he has just one something left...out it pops: a strawberry.
Celine delivered this strange amalgam of horror and humour with a vigorous style he refined to deliver through the ellipse (...), a punctuation that few writers since have felt compelled to emulate, at least to the same degree. He scoffed at this invention of his - "my three little dots! All the real writers will tell you what to think of it...". Except that when quizzed as to who the real writers were, he always mentioned three Frenchmen who are even more forgotten than he, presumably for literary rather than political reasons. Since he also said (in his last book), "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school", it seems that he had a better idea of his ultimate literary reputation than he sometimes let on.
Celine regarded his writing as a form of impressionism, and he sometimes compared his work to the French impressionists, but the virtue of the ellipse in his hands was to a kind of cubist writing, with the perspective of the narrator jumping from phrase to phrase, seemingly "stream of consciousness" but very artfully contrived.
Kurt Vonnegut in a much-quoted and republished essay said that "every writer" is in Celine's debt. I'm not sure this is so. But certainly many writers are, and those whose work bears the hallmark of his sensibility include Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tom Wolfe, whose non-fiction attack on art criticism The painted word, is written using the ellipse, but whose first novel, Bonfire of the vanities was clearly written in a Celinian style.
I wrote my first three or four novels using the ellipse; I liked it for its ability to shift perspective so rapidly, and, as Vonnegut said, give the writing an instant immediacy. While most of my readers didn't complain, enough of them did that I later went back and reworked those books to remove most though not all of them.
The ellipse was really the least significant of the many ways Celine affected me. He freed me to write more energetically and adventurously, not to fear criticism - his took the savagings he got on the chin, but got his own back in his writing - and to aspire to write the black humour that seemingly so effortlessly flowed off the nib of his pen.
I have been to many of the places Celine put in his books, most notably the sleepy town in Germany, Sigmaringen, where he set his fictionalised account of the last days of the Vichy government, Castle to Castle. I have stood outside his last home in Meudon, outside Paris, and at his grave in the nearby cemetery. The shopping arcade where he spent some of his youth is still there too, and one can see the narrow staircases in the small shops of the type his mother lamely mounted and descended many times a day. And I have puzzled over this man who as a doctor spent much of his non-literary life treating the poor, who worked for the League of Nations as part of what is now the World Health Organisation, aiming to eradicate diseases affecting the poor the world over, who maintained he was a devout pacifist after being decorated for bravery in the First World War, yet volunteered on the outbreak of the second, and before this, had "warned" his countrymen not to fight because the Jews were the cause of it all.
I don't have a way to explain Celine. I wish I did. Henry Miller, a writer who took much of his style from Celine, said that Celine lived within him and always would. He was that powerful a personality, shining through his work.
Certainly the last twenty years have seen his reputation, if not restored, certainly altered for the better. Many of his later works have been translated into English, there have been numerous biographies and literary studies, and if they all try to grapple with his hatred of Jews, none succeeds in explaining it to my satisfaction anyway. And recently the first of his anti-Semitic broadsides, Bagatelles for a massacre, was translated into English and made available in e-reader format, with "trifles" instead of "bagatelles" beginning the title. Non-francophone readers can now read it for themselves, and make up their own minds.
For me nothing can undo Celine's terrible attacks on Jews, not least because he was such a gifted writer he was more effective than most turgid anti-Semitic lunatics.
People try to explain away other anti-Semites - Wagner, for example. Yet when I listen to Wagner, I feel I hear in his music the limitation, the thwarting of potential, that is implied by something so self-evidently foolish as anti-Semitism. Perhaps Wagner was a great composer, but he was not as great as he may have been had he overcome his demons.
I guess that is how I feel about Celine - a powerful writer, able to transform our understanding of the world, but how much more powerful might he have been had he seen his hatred of Jews for what it was, and laugh at it as he laughed at his father's anti-Semitism in his second novel.
At least an eight star effort. Give yourself more if you like, and paste them into your notebook.
To my mind Celine was one the great writers of the 20th century - both funny and wise in his way. He is ignored because after his second novel in the 1930s, Mort a Credit, variously translated as Death on Credit and Death on the Instalment Plan, he revealed himself as an anti-Semite in a series of really disturbing works. Not surprisingly after 1945 he was in bad odour among those who used to champion him, to the point where many French literary critics refused to review his later books, though they bore no traces of his crackpot ideas (they did bear all too many traces of his views of the treatment he'd received for holding them). Jean-Paul Sartre, who had dedicated one of his 1930s works to Celine, wrote a scathing essay after the war, "The mind of the anti-Semite", that was directed at Celine while not naming him. Celine gave as good or better than he got, and in his later novels mercilessly pilloried the once-lionised existentialist philosopher and writer - he became "Tartre" and a magazine he wrote for Your Ferrule.
Celine's anti-Semitism troubled me a lot, and it still does. I was far from the only person to find in Celine's "ordinary" fiction a genuinely extraordinary sensibility who seemed to have divined what life is all about, and given it both barrels - a savage view that was ameliorated by humour, somehow salvaged by it.
And I was far from alone, too, in being confused by the writer's revelation that he was, to put it mildly, down on Jews. (A contemporary in the 1930s, when the first of his anti-Semitic ravings was published, thought it was a satire). It seemed contradictory, and Celine himself later admitted as much in a somewhat left -handed way - "I got mixed up in stuff that was none of my business". But he never resiled, never said "I got it wrong". Far from it, he went out of this life as persuaded as ever that Jews were the enemy...
...but the enemy of what? Celine's larger message was one of the futility of life for the individual; his most famous bon mot was "the truth of this life is death". Why care if the Jews are in control of everything if even the Jews who are in control of everything are under the control of the grim reaper? Celine's terrific strength was to juxtapose and even portray as humorous the sad reality of physical life and death. In one of his most famous scenes, a trip over the English channel turns into a vomit parade, in which the deck is awash with the stuff and our hero, the hapless Ferdinand, retches and retches till he has just one something left...out it pops: a strawberry.
Celine delivered this strange amalgam of horror and humour with a vigorous style he refined to deliver through the ellipse (...), a punctuation that few writers since have felt compelled to emulate, at least to the same degree. He scoffed at this invention of his - "my three little dots! All the real writers will tell you what to think of it...". Except that when quizzed as to who the real writers were, he always mentioned three Frenchmen who are even more forgotten than he, presumably for literary rather than political reasons. Since he also said (in his last book), "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school", it seems that he had a better idea of his ultimate literary reputation than he sometimes let on.
Celine regarded his writing as a form of impressionism, and he sometimes compared his work to the French impressionists, but the virtue of the ellipse in his hands was to a kind of cubist writing, with the perspective of the narrator jumping from phrase to phrase, seemingly "stream of consciousness" but very artfully contrived.
Kurt Vonnegut in a much-quoted and republished essay said that "every writer" is in Celine's debt. I'm not sure this is so. But certainly many writers are, and those whose work bears the hallmark of his sensibility include Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tom Wolfe, whose non-fiction attack on art criticism The painted word, is written using the ellipse, but whose first novel, Bonfire of the vanities was clearly written in a Celinian style.
I wrote my first three or four novels using the ellipse; I liked it for its ability to shift perspective so rapidly, and, as Vonnegut said, give the writing an instant immediacy. While most of my readers didn't complain, enough of them did that I later went back and reworked those books to remove most though not all of them.
The ellipse was really the least significant of the many ways Celine affected me. He freed me to write more energetically and adventurously, not to fear criticism - his took the savagings he got on the chin, but got his own back in his writing - and to aspire to write the black humour that seemingly so effortlessly flowed off the nib of his pen.
I have been to many of the places Celine put in his books, most notably the sleepy town in Germany, Sigmaringen, where he set his fictionalised account of the last days of the Vichy government, Castle to Castle. I have stood outside his last home in Meudon, outside Paris, and at his grave in the nearby cemetery. The shopping arcade where he spent some of his youth is still there too, and one can see the narrow staircases in the small shops of the type his mother lamely mounted and descended many times a day. And I have puzzled over this man who as a doctor spent much of his non-literary life treating the poor, who worked for the League of Nations as part of what is now the World Health Organisation, aiming to eradicate diseases affecting the poor the world over, who maintained he was a devout pacifist after being decorated for bravery in the First World War, yet volunteered on the outbreak of the second, and before this, had "warned" his countrymen not to fight because the Jews were the cause of it all.
I don't have a way to explain Celine. I wish I did. Henry Miller, a writer who took much of his style from Celine, said that Celine lived within him and always would. He was that powerful a personality, shining through his work.
Certainly the last twenty years have seen his reputation, if not restored, certainly altered for the better. Many of his later works have been translated into English, there have been numerous biographies and literary studies, and if they all try to grapple with his hatred of Jews, none succeeds in explaining it to my satisfaction anyway. And recently the first of his anti-Semitic broadsides, Bagatelles for a massacre, was translated into English and made available in e-reader format, with "trifles" instead of "bagatelles" beginning the title. Non-francophone readers can now read it for themselves, and make up their own minds.
For me nothing can undo Celine's terrible attacks on Jews, not least because he was such a gifted writer he was more effective than most turgid anti-Semitic lunatics.
People try to explain away other anti-Semites - Wagner, for example. Yet when I listen to Wagner, I feel I hear in his music the limitation, the thwarting of potential, that is implied by something so self-evidently foolish as anti-Semitism. Perhaps Wagner was a great composer, but he was not as great as he may have been had he overcome his demons.
I guess that is how I feel about Celine - a powerful writer, able to transform our understanding of the world, but how much more powerful might he have been had he seen his hatred of Jews for what it was, and laugh at it as he laughed at his father's anti-Semitism in his second novel.
At least an eight star effort. Give yourself more if you like, and paste them into your notebook.
July 3, 2012
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.
June 30, 2012
William S
Ah, blog number six! It's mostly about writing, just like the other ones, and this time is about my favourite writer: the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.
It grieves me to admit it, but Shakespeare is not for everyone, even if, as Jonson said in his piece in the first folio, he is for all time. There are people I have tried really hard to interest in Shakespeare - talked to them, taken them to plays, given them authoritative and easy-read editions, done everything I can think of except pass them a Classics Illustrated, and they just don't care. Maybe it's me.
To me, Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, in any language and in any genre - fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction...that is, even in the types of literature he never tried, he outshone those who did and do. "Greatness" is a funny word, and by it I mean (in writing) that the work will be just as Jonson said, for all time; so far, that has been true of Shakespeare. Successive generations have discovered and rediscovered him, and I don't see any reasons why future ones shouldn't.
Being lucky and writing in English, a language of incredible adaptability that has now become the er lingua franca of the world, can't have hurt the Bard. And it is also true that at the time he was writing, the language was changing fast, incorporating an explosion of new words that were appearing to describe new things and places that the rising British Empire was meeting and greeting. But there was more to Shakespeare than being in the right place at the right time; others were also. Some of them were very gifted, and we remember them: Marlowe, Donne, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, and others. But even in his own time, Shakespeare stood out. Jonson was not alone in seeing this factor in his talent. He was better than the others simply because he was better. Ha! A genius.
When I read Shakespeare, I am aware that I am in the presence of this genius, even when it lets its bearer down. Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, is a nasty, misogynist play, whose anti-woman attitudes generations have tried to explain away. The Merchant of Venice, despite its deeply moving portrayal of Shylock, is nonetheless, as the Arden edition I own makes plain, anti-Semitic. That it is not so anti-Semitic as Marlowe's Jew of Malta is beside the point.
The point is that Shakespeare's genius rose even above his own limitations, so that Shylock remains a great creation despite the Jew-baiting. Not all the plays are perfect in other ways - structurally, thematically, historically...it doesn't matter: the deep penetration into the reality of the human condition remains, and re-reading and re-seeing the work can bring new insights, fresh understanding.
What with all that you'd think I'd have pumped the Shakespeare references through my own work, no opportunity lost. Sadly, this has not proven to be the case. One of my novels, Savonarola's Bones, has a big Shakespeare component, but I don't regard it as anything like my best book, though the Shakespeare aspect seems fine to me. Another that involves a man searching for a lost Shakespeare play is to me unpublishable. The one I'm working on now has a major bit "pencilled in", but I haven't got to it yet and may change my mind.
Well, it does puzzle me. Giordano Bruno, Savonarola, Celine, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky - they all get there, no problem. And the writers among them stand tall for emulation. But not William S. Sometimes I think that the reason Shakespeare is harder to make work into one of my books is that he is too big to handle, and there might be something in that. Then I think that it's because he was primarily a playwright, if a poetic one, and I write novels. There might be something in that too, but...
My plan now is to make good with the Bard this time. The book I'm writing now owes a lot to Dostoevsky, but not in the sense of discussing him as it was with The Russian Idea, which features a very large helping of the great man.
There is a let-off too, that I do incorporate Shakespeare into my books in my thinking and what interests me and how I express myself and so on. A pale version, without doubt, but a version even so. But I'm not going to flatter myself like that. It's probably not even true.
Whatever, Shakespeare is worth another visit another time. Hope you have enjoyed this one.
This one is another five star effort, but if you don't like Shakespeare and have reached this point, have another two or three. They're free to a good home.
It grieves me to admit it, but Shakespeare is not for everyone, even if, as Jonson said in his piece in the first folio, he is for all time. There are people I have tried really hard to interest in Shakespeare - talked to them, taken them to plays, given them authoritative and easy-read editions, done everything I can think of except pass them a Classics Illustrated, and they just don't care. Maybe it's me.
To me, Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, in any language and in any genre - fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction...that is, even in the types of literature he never tried, he outshone those who did and do. "Greatness" is a funny word, and by it I mean (in writing) that the work will be just as Jonson said, for all time; so far, that has been true of Shakespeare. Successive generations have discovered and rediscovered him, and I don't see any reasons why future ones shouldn't.
Being lucky and writing in English, a language of incredible adaptability that has now become the er lingua franca of the world, can't have hurt the Bard. And it is also true that at the time he was writing, the language was changing fast, incorporating an explosion of new words that were appearing to describe new things and places that the rising British Empire was meeting and greeting. But there was more to Shakespeare than being in the right place at the right time; others were also. Some of them were very gifted, and we remember them: Marlowe, Donne, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, and others. But even in his own time, Shakespeare stood out. Jonson was not alone in seeing this factor in his talent. He was better than the others simply because he was better. Ha! A genius.
When I read Shakespeare, I am aware that I am in the presence of this genius, even when it lets its bearer down. Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, is a nasty, misogynist play, whose anti-woman attitudes generations have tried to explain away. The Merchant of Venice, despite its deeply moving portrayal of Shylock, is nonetheless, as the Arden edition I own makes plain, anti-Semitic. That it is not so anti-Semitic as Marlowe's Jew of Malta is beside the point.
The point is that Shakespeare's genius rose even above his own limitations, so that Shylock remains a great creation despite the Jew-baiting. Not all the plays are perfect in other ways - structurally, thematically, historically...it doesn't matter: the deep penetration into the reality of the human condition remains, and re-reading and re-seeing the work can bring new insights, fresh understanding.
What with all that you'd think I'd have pumped the Shakespeare references through my own work, no opportunity lost. Sadly, this has not proven to be the case. One of my novels, Savonarola's Bones, has a big Shakespeare component, but I don't regard it as anything like my best book, though the Shakespeare aspect seems fine to me. Another that involves a man searching for a lost Shakespeare play is to me unpublishable. The one I'm working on now has a major bit "pencilled in", but I haven't got to it yet and may change my mind.
Well, it does puzzle me. Giordano Bruno, Savonarola, Celine, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky - they all get there, no problem. And the writers among them stand tall for emulation. But not William S. Sometimes I think that the reason Shakespeare is harder to make work into one of my books is that he is too big to handle, and there might be something in that. Then I think that it's because he was primarily a playwright, if a poetic one, and I write novels. There might be something in that too, but...
My plan now is to make good with the Bard this time. The book I'm writing now owes a lot to Dostoevsky, but not in the sense of discussing him as it was with The Russian Idea, which features a very large helping of the great man.
There is a let-off too, that I do incorporate Shakespeare into my books in my thinking and what interests me and how I express myself and so on. A pale version, without doubt, but a version even so. But I'm not going to flatter myself like that. It's probably not even true.
Whatever, Shakespeare is worth another visit another time. Hope you have enjoyed this one.
This one is another five star effort, but if you don't like Shakespeare and have reached this point, have another two or three. They're free to a good home.
June 28, 2012
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!
June 27, 2012
Blood on the floor
Number four of my blog series which is mainly about writing. As I write thrillers, packing the action in is an important ah, element of writing a successful book. This may very well be true of any sort of book, or play, or film, or whatever, depending on the way we mean "action", but if people are reading a thriller it stands to reason they want a thrill. Or two, or possibly even many. Tension and then release and then tension and release, and finally release, with maybe a tiny frisson of the tension that is going to go on in the story even though the book has actually concluded.
Most of this involves violence or the threat of violence.
Well, I don't know. I have never - to my knowledge anyway - murdered anyone. The idea that somehow one should know what something is like to write about it falls at this hurdle for most though not all writers:
There are exceptions. A Dutch thriller writer was arrested and convicted for the murder of his wife many years after the fact, having written a novel describing it. A New Zealander whose murderous exploit as a child was made famous in a Peter Jackson film was not all that long ago unmasked as an elderly mystery story author living in a village in Scotland.
For almost everybody else, the violence they portray on the page relies for success on "imaginative understanding", coupled with research. "Imaginative understanding" raises questions about one's personality, at least a little bit. Research? Well, established writers can do research that wannabes like myself can't hope to do unless they are very lucky - visit crime scenes, attend post-mortems, and so on.
Of course technical details not only give at least a patina of verisimilitude but are essential for it. According to me, however, much of the "authenticity" of highly detailed grisly murder scenes mistakes the gruesome reality for the moral nuance that is the point of writing about this stuff in the first place. Murderer X may chop his victims into tiny pieces, lightly fry them in olive oil, and wolf it all down with greasy fingers while watching porn on the telly, but so far as I am concerned it is the watching the porn on the telly part that matters most, with the greasy fingers an accomplice, even though all of these elements may be served up to the reader in different ways to emphasise the writer's point.
My first book focused on a serial killer whose favourite but not only method and tool was the garotte. To ensure his crimes were really authentic, I went to the Manchester Public Library and discovered an old book on forensic medicine that described, for the assistance of pathologists, the effects of virtually every means of murder, saving me from making the mistakes that might confuse mere strangulation with the hands with the effect of a fast-acting and altogether different garotte.
This involved a few paragraphs in an account whose emphasis was always on the moral nuance of the killer's murders. People were horrified by the method, without doubt, but more by the madness that made for them.
Since then, I've tried to emphasise this in my books: the sickness that underlies "my" murders is what matters, not the reality of death. Death comes for us all anyway, and I mean to talk about this in another post. It's the senselessless of a murder, the powerlessness of the victim, the madness of the perpetrator, the evil of it, that fascinates me and is the mainspring of most of my violent characters. In Evilheart, my second novel and the earliest of them to make it to the public, one of my murderers used fists and drugs (heroin overdoses), while three others used knives. Each had an evil all his own, and a madness too, that was unique.
My later books have used knives, guns, explosives, strangulation, and even a good old fashioned push off a cliff, and I hope I have managed with all of them to give the violence a realistic feel. But it is the motive, the moral nuance, that makes each what it is, or I hope so.
Some of the nuance is ambiguous. Is the villain in Demented really all that demented? And if a man discovers his father is a serial killer, and murders him, is it justice, or justice denied? I don't necessarily know the answer to these questions and am more keen on posing than resolving them: These kinds of moral dilemmas help make fiction worth writing, and one hopes worth reading.
If you've got to the end, give yourself another star on top of the four I'm awarding myself.
Most of this involves violence or the threat of violence.
Well, I don't know. I have never - to my knowledge anyway - murdered anyone. The idea that somehow one should know what something is like to write about it falls at this hurdle for most though not all writers:
There are exceptions. A Dutch thriller writer was arrested and convicted for the murder of his wife many years after the fact, having written a novel describing it. A New Zealander whose murderous exploit as a child was made famous in a Peter Jackson film was not all that long ago unmasked as an elderly mystery story author living in a village in Scotland.
For almost everybody else, the violence they portray on the page relies for success on "imaginative understanding", coupled with research. "Imaginative understanding" raises questions about one's personality, at least a little bit. Research? Well, established writers can do research that wannabes like myself can't hope to do unless they are very lucky - visit crime scenes, attend post-mortems, and so on.
Of course technical details not only give at least a patina of verisimilitude but are essential for it. According to me, however, much of the "authenticity" of highly detailed grisly murder scenes mistakes the gruesome reality for the moral nuance that is the point of writing about this stuff in the first place. Murderer X may chop his victims into tiny pieces, lightly fry them in olive oil, and wolf it all down with greasy fingers while watching porn on the telly, but so far as I am concerned it is the watching the porn on the telly part that matters most, with the greasy fingers an accomplice, even though all of these elements may be served up to the reader in different ways to emphasise the writer's point.
My first book focused on a serial killer whose favourite but not only method and tool was the garotte. To ensure his crimes were really authentic, I went to the Manchester Public Library and discovered an old book on forensic medicine that described, for the assistance of pathologists, the effects of virtually every means of murder, saving me from making the mistakes that might confuse mere strangulation with the hands with the effect of a fast-acting and altogether different garotte.
This involved a few paragraphs in an account whose emphasis was always on the moral nuance of the killer's murders. People were horrified by the method, without doubt, but more by the madness that made for them.
Since then, I've tried to emphasise this in my books: the sickness that underlies "my" murders is what matters, not the reality of death. Death comes for us all anyway, and I mean to talk about this in another post. It's the senselessless of a murder, the powerlessness of the victim, the madness of the perpetrator, the evil of it, that fascinates me and is the mainspring of most of my violent characters. In Evilheart, my second novel and the earliest of them to make it to the public, one of my murderers used fists and drugs (heroin overdoses), while three others used knives. Each had an evil all his own, and a madness too, that was unique.
My later books have used knives, guns, explosives, strangulation, and even a good old fashioned push off a cliff, and I hope I have managed with all of them to give the violence a realistic feel. But it is the motive, the moral nuance, that makes each what it is, or I hope so.
Some of the nuance is ambiguous. Is the villain in Demented really all that demented? And if a man discovers his father is a serial killer, and murders him, is it justice, or justice denied? I don't necessarily know the answer to these questions and am more keen on posing than resolving them: These kinds of moral dilemmas help make fiction worth writing, and one hopes worth reading.
If you've got to the end, give yourself another star on top of the four I'm awarding myself.
June 24, 2012
Toppings
This is post number three in my series about writing (mainly). One of the things that has held me back from blogging has been my desire to concentrate on writing novels and not get caught up in the online netscape with its endlessly voracious hunger for ever more. But it seems that if one is an "indy author" who publishes via the net, "extras" like olives and pepperoni really are needed for making this narrow slice of intellectual pizza scrumptious for the all-too-discerning public. You want them to eat your pizza? You attract them with olives. And maybe pepperoni. They get it that there is always cheese (and in my case heaps of it) and tomato sauce. Mushrooms. Yo! Anchovies? Well, to tell the truth, I am not at all sure about anchovies though they are definitely desirable to certain classes of the human species. See below.
Anyway it's fun, this. It's an opportunity to be playful when novel writing is pretty serious business, even if one is trying to be funny. Novelising is pretty structured, though one can build in some deconstructive elements that allow wild careenings, and my present opus has just now hared off into a direction I had briefly considered before starting, but thought I'd dropped. But no. It's back, and it's mean!
Partly this relates to sex. My books typically have a reasonable amount of sex; I like it, think other people like it, and have something to say about it: I'm a sort of Reichian about sex (Wilhelm, not Third), and to me that means acknowledging people's interest and dealing with it positively and hopefully anyway not just erotically but also intellectually. My that was a long sentence.
But before I put finger to keyboard on my first book, I thought about how I was going to handle this potentially explosive topic, and worked out a standard: that whatever I wrote it should be at least in principle erotic to women. I reckon that's a good way to be, and it's helped me through my books since the first one in 1999.
In that time though, things have changed. Fifty-zillion shades of grey later, it seems what's erotic to women extends well past what I thought it ever would, and I'm not sure of what that means, at all. Put into my pizza metaphor, anchovies are in! S & M is not my own cup of tea, but it turns out that many women like both initials. A male friend who is into it has tried, without my taking part, to explain to me what it's all about, and I've watched some DVDs that had me killing myself and cringing in embarrassment for those involved, but not in the slightest bit aroused. One of these, made in England on the sly, had a gentleman tethered by a nipple to a chain his "mistress" yanked from time to time to keep him whining and mewling, dragged him out onto a driveway, urinated, and forced him to lick the pebbles. ??? Well, whatever turns you on...it did for me what the Young Ones television series did. I was howling with laughter till it got too repetitive, and hence boring.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for this kind of sexual encounter, I'm still trying to learn about these evidently ever-enlarging, elastic boundaries, about what is acceptable in male and female imaginations, in their erotic fantasies. My aim is to excite and liberate, not offend. Sex in fiction that leads to serious violence just makes me shiver, as it would in real life, and I think even if it becomes de rigeur, I'll stay old-fashioned. But others, like so-called "water sports"...well, maybe...still thinking about this. If you have thoughts on your pizza preferences, drop me a line: how salty do you like your anchovies?
A five star epic. Go on, reward yourself. You know you want to.
Anyway it's fun, this. It's an opportunity to be playful when novel writing is pretty serious business, even if one is trying to be funny. Novelising is pretty structured, though one can build in some deconstructive elements that allow wild careenings, and my present opus has just now hared off into a direction I had briefly considered before starting, but thought I'd dropped. But no. It's back, and it's mean!
Partly this relates to sex. My books typically have a reasonable amount of sex; I like it, think other people like it, and have something to say about it: I'm a sort of Reichian about sex (Wilhelm, not Third), and to me that means acknowledging people's interest and dealing with it positively and hopefully anyway not just erotically but also intellectually. My that was a long sentence.
But before I put finger to keyboard on my first book, I thought about how I was going to handle this potentially explosive topic, and worked out a standard: that whatever I wrote it should be at least in principle erotic to women. I reckon that's a good way to be, and it's helped me through my books since the first one in 1999.
In that time though, things have changed. Fifty-zillion shades of grey later, it seems what's erotic to women extends well past what I thought it ever would, and I'm not sure of what that means, at all. Put into my pizza metaphor, anchovies are in! S & M is not my own cup of tea, but it turns out that many women like both initials. A male friend who is into it has tried, without my taking part, to explain to me what it's all about, and I've watched some DVDs that had me killing myself and cringing in embarrassment for those involved, but not in the slightest bit aroused. One of these, made in England on the sly, had a gentleman tethered by a nipple to a chain his "mistress" yanked from time to time to keep him whining and mewling, dragged him out onto a driveway, urinated, and forced him to lick the pebbles. ??? Well, whatever turns you on...it did for me what the Young Ones television series did. I was howling with laughter till it got too repetitive, and hence boring.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for this kind of sexual encounter, I'm still trying to learn about these evidently ever-enlarging, elastic boundaries, about what is acceptable in male and female imaginations, in their erotic fantasies. My aim is to excite and liberate, not offend. Sex in fiction that leads to serious violence just makes me shiver, as it would in real life, and I think even if it becomes de rigeur, I'll stay old-fashioned. But others, like so-called "water sports"...well, maybe...still thinking about this. If you have thoughts on your pizza preferences, drop me a line: how salty do you like your anchovies?
A five star epic. Go on, reward yourself. You know you want to.
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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