Monthly Archives: January 2010

January 28, 2010 · 1:03 pm

Erskine Caldwell on writers

“What has been my habit, I suppose for many years, is to read one work of a writer whom I have heard of as being worth reading. That’s how I get to a book, and when I read one book by a writer, I’m satisfied. I don’t have to read four of them to form an opinion. For example, we’ll take some of my contemporaries like William Faulkner. I read one book of Faulkner which I liked very much. I thought it was superior and I still think it’s a wonderful book and perhaps it’s one of the least know that he’s ever done. The title of the book was As I Lay Dying, which was not a sensational book. It was a solid book. So I formed my opinion of Faulkner just on that one instance, and I think I was right in forming that opinion. The same is true of other writers. One book only, that’s all I read. I read one of Steinbeck, for example. I read one book of Hemingway. I read one book of Dreiser; I read one book of Sherwood Anderson.”

“I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to start with and go on that basis. He’s not a great mind, he’s not a great thinker, he’s not a great philosopher, he’s a storyteller. I mean, that’s the field I belong in; there are, of course, writers who have great minds, but I don’t pretend to. I can’t take the responsibility of saying that I know anything that anybody else doesn’t know, because I don’t. I have my own way of writing, which I don’t recommend to other people. I do it my own way. I don’t like other people to tell me to do it their way. I’m just completely obnoxious and hardheaded. And I can’t help it. That’s why I can’t tell anybody how to write. I don’t know how to do it; it was just a combination of trial and error and revision that finally came out as it did. It’s not an exact science, as you know; you can’t pin it down. All I can say is I like plenty of yellow second sheets. That’s what I want in life: yellow second sheets—and typewriter ribbon and plenty of typewriters, too. I wear them out one or two every year; I dislike old typewriters, and I dislike ones that break down, and I dislike ribbons that get dim, and I dislike white paper. So you see I have my prejudices.”

The excerpt is from Conversations with Erskine Caldwell, edited by Edwin T. Arnold. Caldwell (1903–1987) was born in Georgia and grew up across the south, the son of a minister. He was married four times, including to the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, with whom he produced You Have Seen Their Faces, a collection of photographs and interviews with rural people in the Great Depression. He was most famous for Tobacco Road, considered one of the 100 most significant novels of the twentieth century, and God’s Little Acre, one of the best-selling novels of all time. In part, the novels dealt frankly with primitive sexuality, and the lurid covers on the paperback versions harmed his literary reputation. Much of his work explored the dire poverty of Georgia farmers and the abuse of southern industrial workers during the Depression, but he also wrote powerfully about racism and racial violence. Caldwell published, in his lifetime, twenty-five novels, nearly 150 short stories, and twelve books of nonfiction. He told one interviewer he wrote from nine to five, seven days a week, in a barren room with the shades pulled.

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January 23, 2010 · 9:24 am

Unrolling those narrative threads

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”—Paul Auster

A friend who is writing a complex book on evolution has been inspired by watching his artist daughter screen-printing layers of a picture successively in different colors, so that the image gradually emerges organically as a whole. He’s realized he needs similarly to line out his ideas slowly, giving readers the tools necessary to understand his theory’s major revelations deep into the book, as opposed to “describing each of the parts separately in detail, which just doesn’t work.”

Narrative literature must bring readers along, too, and for similar metabolic reasons. Multiple storylines are a commonplace in drama and comedy—watch almost any movie—and sometimes there are current-action threads while past threads move, in successive flashbacks, toward the present: How did that screwed-up guy or gal get there?

I’ve struggled with tugging along more than two storylines, however, in a book-length work. I can keep the main narrative unfolding across many chapters, maybe with a related subplot—a reappearing villain, say—but want to tie off other threads as they arise. Introduce them, wrap them up, get them over with. Snip! This is because I feel I’m already doing a lot in a chapter, and shoving one more thing into it seems to imperil its shapely arc. Sometimes, I think, a thread must be used in a discrete heap. But maybe then it’s not really a thread? And too much of such summary turns narrative essayistic, in the old-fashioned sense—bloodless.

I like narrative, event sequence leading to incidents that culminate in a big incident. But readers need to experience, with the main character or characters, all threads develop if they are going to feel the emotions the writer desires. This is how it happens in life too: ongoing issues and layers of backstory keep moving into the present. Rarely does something arise out of nothing. The car with bald tires wrecked at least partly because you were broke because of your troubled friend and because, two years ago, your dumb brother-in-law got you a deal on those tires, a deal, you learn, that really benefitted him . . .

Unroll all those threads over the course of a larger narrative and, wham, what a payoff the reader receives, when the car wrecks, for all that you’ve shown across 300 pages. It took me an embarrassingly long time to see that leaving out any element from the prior narrative, such as that mendacious brother-in-law, greatly dilutes the climax. His role cannot be revealed and wrapped up when the car wrecks without the reader feeling distanced or cheated.

Feeding the threads out inch by inch is both difficult to do and rich, conceptually and emotionally, for readers. To pull  all the strings, a writer must see clearly his main threads—surely defined as those connected directly to climaxes—and bring them along steadily. There’s much craft and artifice to this, unfolding while steadily and consciously withholding, and readers love writers for it.

An example in nonfiction is Jon Karakauer’s Into the Wild, as well as the movie Sean Penn made from it, which shrewdly dramatizes the book’s twin-story parallel structure. The ostensible main narrative is of Alex steadily dying of starvation in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. There’s a flashback thread, magically vivid in the movie, of his road adventures that took him ever-closer to the bus: he tests himself dangerously by kayaking through whitewater rapids and repeatedly turns his back on promising human relationships. A recurring thread set farther in the past explores his difficult early family life.

It fascinates me how much we get invested in the thread that gets Alex to the bus, when that setting constitutes the story’s present action and is the only thing “really” happening. But the bus is boring compared with Alex’s past adventures on the road, plus his disturbed childhood explains his final wilderness ordeal more than anything. There’s actually very little action in the “now” of Alaska compared with the long physical and emotional journey toward it. And those backstory threads within Into the Wild connect directly to the death of the smart, ascetic idealist who realizes, too late, that he must rejoin humankind for the meaning that he craves. All story elements support the same theme and form a whole that resonates.

Such thematic and event layering works beautifully but doesn’t happen accidentally. It takes work and conscious craft. Even then, there are no guarantees. A novelist once defined a novel as “a book with something wrong with it.” And in her 1989 New York Times essay “Write Till You Drop,” quarried from her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says, “Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too—the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed.”

So, it appears, I’ve noticed my latest impossible task: driving more story threads through a larger narrative, so that they run along with the main story, without creating a worse problem than what I’ve already got. To fix this flaw I’ve got to pull apart a bowl of spaghetti—making a mess of what I so carefully built. The result may work better but will be a different book, one surely with its own unique blemish.

Yet, Saint Annie promises, “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.”

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January 19, 2010 · 1:20 am

Dinty’s Google Maps essay

Not especially funny or witty myself, perhaps that’s why I admire those who are: I must have opened my blog a half dozen times today to read the first sentence by Anthony Lane in the post below this. Then tonight I read it—again—to my wife and laughed, again. It’s one of the wittiest sentences I’ve ever read. Lane’s  follow-up quip is pure gravy.

“It got a rise out of Dinty, too,” I told Kathy. “He left a comment today on that post.”

“He did?”

“Yes—and, oh, did I show you his Google Maps essay about his bizarre encounters with George Plimpton? Dinty, when he was a drug-addled student, was sent to pick up Plimpton at the airport . . .”

So I showed her, and we cackled. Which made me realize I need to share with you Dinty W. Moore’s “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge,” the cleverest experimental essay I’ve ever read.

We await with bated breath his tale of breakfasting with Grace Kelly. Meantime, if you haven’t seen Rear Window lately, watch it for its beautiful structure—and for hers; plus she was adorable to a criminal degree, even when dealing with Jimmy Stewart’s character, who was pretty much a big jerk.

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January 18, 2010 · 3:37 pm

Noted: Anthony Lane on Grace Kelly

Princess Grace, to you . . .

The sex life of Grace Kelly, like the home life of the Incas, is one of those distant but down-to-earth matters which we can investigate in depth, and muse upon at length, but never really hope to understand. According to some observers, she herself may not have grasped its implications; in the words of a columnist at Photoplay, “I wonder if Grace Kelly knew she had so much S.A.” To which the only proper response is, W.T.F.?

The quote is from the witty Mr. Lane’s New Yorker review essay, “Hollywood Royalty: Two Sides of Grace Kelly.”

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January 13, 2010 · 12:01 pm

Finding a font for our words

The New Yorker online recently excerpted a passage from Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City concerning a man who believes his mind to be controlled by the magazine’s font. This mention allowed The New Yorker to reveal:

“Fiction editor Deborah Treisman expounded a bit on the font (it’s ACaslon Regular), and how it factors into the story selection process: Often when we’re reading stories, and thinking about them and editing them, we’ll say, ‘Let’s go ahead and put it in the font.’ It’s a sort of test marker. It makes things much more official. You get it in there and suddenly it looks much better, or sometimes it looks much worse.”

I had Big Caslon in my font menu but not Adobe’s ACaslon Regular, and I love the New Yorker’s elegant font so I bought it and downloaded it. I wrote this post in it, in hopes of increasing my eloquence. So far, I’ve wasted twenty-five bucks. It is a gorgeous font even on screen, though boldface is hardly distinguishable in it.

People are funny about fonts. An editor once changed my typeface from Times to Times New Roman and seemed fairly self-righteous about it, as if every professional knows the latter is the only acceptable font. He’s published a lot and for all I know he’s right, but somewhere along the line I got the idea that good old Times was that gold standard. The two fonts are very similar but Times New Roman is slightly larger. His font was his talisman, as if a publisher would snarl at work submitted in mere Times (and flee from something as crass as Helvetica). Publishers are going to pick their own fonts in the end.

I think the font we usually write in is the one that we get used to and that feels right to us. Or just long use itself makes it feel correct. Often I feel uncomfortable and vaguely disloyal with fonts other than the Times family. I like serifs, their elegance and ease on the eye, plus their widespread use in periodical and book publishing.  But I sometimes put an essay in a sans serif script to see it in a new way.

I usually draft blog posts in Gill Sans, a sans serif font that feels right for my changeup to the blog. Its lines are beautiful to me and its bold type is wonderfully thick and meaty. I’ve used it for a few essays since a friend sent me something she wrote in it. Of course when I paste Gill Sans copy into the blog’s setup it converts it to WordPress’s choice of font, which is a decent serif, Times-ish or in that family.

Anne Rice recently told The Wall Street Journal she writes in 14 point Courier, which is the font that approximates typewritten copy; it’s a large serif font, even in standard 12 point, because each letter gets the same spacing—an “i” allowed the space same as an “M,” as a typewriter would—and so it’s also airy. Her widescreen Apple monitor is just filled with her words.

I have enlarged my Times to 14 on occasion, and once to 16, for printing out; seeing the words so large helps pick out and cut the useless ones. But while composing usually I just use Word’s zoom function under View and enlarge the document to 175 percent—that’s what works on my new MacBook and at the distance I sit when I write.

Last week a freelancer friend sent me a draft of a magazine article of his to read; I was surprised when I opened it to see it was thirty pages long. Then I noticed the type seemed awfully large, and it had opened at only 100 percent. I checked the font and found that he’d used a sans serif called Lucinda Grande, which was enlarged to 18 point. I asked why he picked that font (“At random,” he replied) and size (“Because it’s easy to see”). “I still don’t know how to use Word,” he added, “and, in fact, write in Text/Edit so Bill Gates isn’t trying to outguess my spelling, grammar and formatting.”

Most of us are locked into Word for various reasons, though, so picking our font is our degree of freedom. As I’ve said, font choice seems very personal and most writers may have emotional connections to their chosen one, my friend apparently excepted (I’ll bet he would have rejected a font that didn’t feel right to him, though). Let’s face it: every writer wants to be a font, of words, of wisdom, of beauty, of pity.

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January 8, 2010 · 9:08 pm

Narrative structure in ‘Nat Turner’

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages.

Eventually I realized that William Styron’s poetic descriptions of weather and landscapes in The Confessions of Nat Turner aren’t supposed to represent the world as we know it—or even as the characters know it, save perhaps for the narrator, Nat Turner—but to create a feeling in the reader of tragic grandeur, of a doomed place saturated with significance and emotion. There’s an element of the fantastical at play in the novel’s dreamy mise en scene:

“Behind us in the cart the three boys had gone to sleep, sprawled against each other lifeless and limp in the moonlight. The night was clamorous with frogs and katydids, warm, fragrant with cedar, clear like day, the moon powdering the trees in light as starkly white as the dust of bone. The lop-eared mules, plodding along with a crushed rasping sound against the dewy weeds, found their way ahead as if they knew the road by heart, and I let the reins go slack in my hand, drowsing too, and fitfully slept until the end of the trace, roused only once and then dimly by the high wail of a bobcat miles off in the swamp, its distant scream echoing through some perplexed strange dream like the sound of claws scraped in anguish against the bare face of the heavens.”

I’ve never read two words lashed together quite like “crushed rasping.” Styron loved language—metaphor, adjectives, orotund phrases—especially its rhythm and sound. His prose is tuned to the ear. In the passage above, the long “o” sounds evoke the slumberous nighttime excursion. Why did he write “dust of bone” instead of the equally arresting, and shorter, “bone dust”? I think because of sound: dUHst UHv bOHn. His language in The Confessions of Nat Turner lends itself to theatrical reading.

The novel is divided into three major sections, and the first third, with Turner in jail awaiting execution moves the slowest. The next, which recreates his life from boyhood to young manhood, is compelling in its depiction of his growing up in unusually lucky circumstances amidst the quotidian rhythms of plantation life. When the thin coastal soil fails under the burden of continuous tobacco crops and the bankrupt farm’s chattel is dispersed, Nat is thrust into increasingly brutal hands. The section ends with the blossoming of his hatred—not for his crude new owners but for his kindly and enlightened first master, who taught him to read and gave him hope. The man’s naivete about people and his essential ignorance of slavery’s hopelessly degrading and depraved nature thrust the institution’s cruelties upon Nat at last.

In the novel’s final third, Turner’s hatred grows to encompass all whites, the guilty and innocent both; and it portrays his relationship with the sweet and spiritual eighteen-year-old girl he would kill. The insurrection is a powerful dramatic culmination that depicts shocking attacks. Most significant in the violent maelstrom are Turner’s murder of the innocent girl and his sparing of another (who then spreads the alarm). A brief fourth section returns to Turner in his cell, on the eve of execution.

I wondered why Styron structured the book as a long flashback instead of chronologically. The opening does introduce an obvious mystery: How did Turner end up there? And more specifically: Why did Turner himself murder only one person, the belle of the county? This is a hook, but still the opening is challengingly slow by comparison with the rest of the book, with dense passages lacking much paragraphing or line breaks. I found Styron’s answer in an interview he gave to Humanities in which he explained the enormous influence Albert Camus had on him:

“In fact, the architecture of The Confessions of Nat Turner was largely determined by the architecture of his book The Stranger. I began to see just how the plight of a man condemned to death reflecting on his life from a prison cell, which is true for The Stranger, I might use as a similar structure for The Confessions of Nat Turner, which indeed is what I did.”

Styron’s close friend James Baldwin urged him to try entering the psyche of the slave. In an interview for the book Conversations with William Styron, Styron said the structure and point of view also allowed him to introduce Turner’s lawyer, who interviewed the slave and published the original Confessions, and to show in ironic counterpoint what Turner might really have said and thought, in contrast to what the confessional documents—with “a lot of white man’s hokum” in them—purport he said. And Styron wanted to explore in the opening Turner’s questioning of his relationship with God and to depict his despair. Scenes in the first section show, as well, Turner’s attraction to the girl and his fraught encounter with the judge who would decide his fate a year later.

After widespread acclaim, a handful of black intellectuals, amidst the upheavals of 1968, launched a sustained attack on the novel for various political reasons, including over the issue of whether a white man should write in a black man’s voice, telling his story. (Similar outrage occurred years later over Styron, a gentile, writing a Holocaust story, Sophie’s Choice.) Plans for a major movie were scrapped (there are now rumors that Spike Lee may be considering filming Confessions). Styron knew he’d written a book for the ages, but was grieved over most of the fuss. Even today, more than forty years after its publication, anyone who writes about this book is bound to call it “controversial.” An essay last year in The New York Times Book Review claimed it “became the center of a debate that has helped shape American literature ever since” but added fatuously that there are now novels that tell “a messier, trickier, less comforting story.”

This harrowing story, beautifully expressed and plotted, a work of art, deserves better. The Confessions of Nat Turner must be read without agenda, slowly and receptively, to appreciate Styron’s feat in bringing to life an America we cannot remember and can scarcely imagine—and to honor his sheer courage in doing so. Its unrestrained imaginative depth achieves the definition Styron himself once gave of greatness: “Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.”

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January 3, 2010 · 2:29 pm

The poetic prose of ‘Nat Turner’

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages.

William Styron told interviewers he worked slowly, writing his thick books by hand, in No. 2 pencil, on yellow legal pads. In Sophie’s Choice his alter ego reads his sentences aloud, testing them, as he goes. Styron had an ear for rhythm and a fearsome vocabulary that he wasn’t afraid to unleash. The lovely word motes was what I remembered about his The Confessions of Nat Turner, not much else, from my first reading of the novel when I was about sixteen, though it’s likely the book’s sonorous language sank deep. When I told a writer friend that I was rereading it, she said, “Bill Styron can flat knock a sentence out of the ballpark, can’t he?” Oh, yes.

The novel is based on the life and actions of Nat Turner, a slave who led an uprising in 1831; his angry band butchered about sixty people before being subdued. Vengeful whites murdered about two-hundred innocent slaves in retribution. After escaping into the woods for some time, Turner was caught, and, after his confession and trial, hanged and his corpse mutilated. Apparently he was a religious fanatic and perhaps crazy—probably schizophrenic—and Styron found him unappealing. His Nat is also deeply religious and highly intelligent but more normal, a man driven to butchery by the insanity of slavery. Styron called the novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize after it was published in 1967, a “meditation on history” rather than a historical novel. He said he was lucky so little was known of Turner’s life, beyond his rampage and his confession, leaving Styron free to create.

The novelist, however, had grown up in the same area of tidewater Virginia as Turner’s rebellion, was descended from a slave owner, and had thought for decades about bondage. He also read widely on slavery and devoured the handful of documents on the insurrection. Turner’s voice which tells the story is strangely believable, despite possessing a vocabulary astounding for any human, then or now. A bachelor preacher’s voice is like “the crepitation of a cricket in the weeds.” “Crackle” would’ve been a lot simpler, but the elevated, antiquarian diction suits the period and its narrator.

Early in the book, with Nat wrapped in chains, having been kicked, spat upon, and stabbed in his shoulders by women wielding hat pins, he meets with his court-appointed attorney the day of his trial, his execution inevitable:

“Sluggish autumnal flies filled the cell, stitching the air with soft erratic buzzings as they zigzagged across the golden light, mooned sedulously over the slop bucket, crept in nervous pairs across Gray’s stained pink gloves, his waistcoat, and his pudgy hands now motionless on his knees. I watched the leaves merging with the shadow shapes swooping and fluttering at the edge of my mind. The desire to scratch, to move my shoulders had become a kind of hopeless, carnal obsession, like a species of lust, and the last of Gray’s words seemed now to have made only the most dim, grotesque impression on my brain, the quintessence of white folks’ talk I had heard incessantly all my life and which I could only compare to talk in one of my nightmares, totally implausible yet somehow wholly and fearfully real, where owls in the woods are quoting price lists like a storekeeper, or a wild hog comes prancing on its hind legs out of a summer cornfield, intoning verses from Deuteronomy. . . .

“When he had gone and the door had closed me in again, I sat there motionless in my web of chain. The midafternoon sun was sinking past the window, flooding the cell with light. Flies lit on my brow, my cheeks and lips, and buzzed in haphazard elastic loopings from wall to wall. Through this light, motes of dust rose and fell in a swarmy myriad crowd and I began to wonder if these specks, so large and visible to my eye, offered any hindrance to a fly in its flight. Perhaps, I thought, these grains of dust were the autumn leaves of flies, no more bothersome than an episode of leaves is to a man when he is walking through the October woods, and a sudden gust of wind shakes down around him from a poplar or a sycamore a whole harmless, dazzling, pelting furry of brown and golden flakes. For a long moment I pondered the condition of a fly, only half listening to the uproar outside the jail which rose and fell like summer thunder, hovering near yet remote.”

While he risked wordiness, Styron’s lavish language can satisfy in a way that submissively stripped prose can’t. He chafed at being called Faulkner’s heir, but in both cases their prose is rhetorical—concerned with style or effect—in a way different than the clear-windowpane declarative mode that’s carried the day. His descriptions aren’t dabs on the canvas but suffuse the narrative; if it’s hot, we’ll be reminded of how the characters experience heat throughout a scene, which is liable to unroll over many pages of action and lengthy explanation.

Light’s shifting quality is a motif as it swarms with motes or is “cool white” or smoky or golden or “yellowish and wan” or autumnal or dusty or “pale as water” or “pollen-hazy,” or “glimmering, crepuscular, touched with that greenish hue presaging the onslaught of a summer storm.” There’s the “slanting icicle light of Christmas afternoon.” And: “Light from the descending sun fell amid the October leaves and through wood smoke and haze lay streaming upon a tangled desolation of weeds and brambles, so furiously luminous that it seemed a field ready to explode into fire.”

The sky’s a presence too: one day a “white rack of cloud hovered, covering the heavens, impermeable, its surface crawling with blackish streaks of mist like tattered shawls.” And the wind is always palpable: “Across the roof of the woods the wind rushed in hissing, majestic swoop and cadence, echoing in far-off hollows with the thudding sound of footfalls.”

Of course, the guy could tell a story too. In this case he entered into a lost world and the foreign consciousness of the humans who inhabited it, black and white alike. The Confessions of Nat Turner underscores how much the novel is a form of history, for its ambition is to recreate, portray, explain, a world in the entirety of its emotional and physical and historical aspects.

Next: More on the book’s language, plus its structure . . .

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