Back in April when I wrote the first of these essays, the words “On Writing, Embracing the World, and Trying to Live Normally,” somehow scrolled out of my fingers to appear across the top of the page as a subtitle.
Wait. “Somehow” isn’t right in that sentence, for the words didn’t appear mysteriously; I wrote them. And “scrolled” isn’t right, either, so maybe I’ll change it to “flowed.”
Which is better, “scrolled” or “flowed”? Or does some other word better do the job?
And, back to “somehow…”
Does it convey enough of writing’s bedrock enigma for me to leave it alone?
Yikes and aargh! Do you see what I’m up against?
Every time I write a paragraph, a sentence, a part of a sentence, or even something as simple as that subtitle, I have to mess with it until it passes a kind of internal “I guess that’s good enough,” test that my mind’s eye, or better stated, my mind’s ear has devised over the years.
With the heartfelt work of my graduate students, too, back when I was teaching fiction writing in Las Vegas, I held a deep belief that when things went wrong in a story or a novel, they almost always went wrong “in the trenches”. And by “the trenches” I meant in the clauses, the sentences, and the paragraphs.
I didn’t like to talk with my students about what their stories were about, or, God help us, what they were “trying to say,” but I could carry on until the cows came home regarding a misplaced and therefore ruinous “but,” or tell them that they had to reach in, grab hold of the lines they’d written, and shake them until all of those excess modifiers fell out.
And I am here to tell you that at the end of each of those workshops there would often be dead or dying adjectives littering the table top and floor. You could sweep them into a dustpan and throw them out.
It wasn’t always like that… I wasn’t always like that.
There was a time when I would swoon like a love-struck wood nymph over the heavily described paragraphs I found in the writers I chose to adore. For example, when I was twenty years old and as crazy about literature as only a twenty-year-old can be, I read straight through The Alexandra Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) twice! The books in the Quartet are: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, so when I say “straight through” and “twice”, I mean I read the eight hundred or so pages in those four books and then started over again almost without a pause. I read them during the course of one long hot summer month, all while so thoroughly digesting the fancy prose that I sweated it out again through the armpits of my blue Sears work shirt, I swear. Do you remember those shirts? The kinds with the pencil slits in the flaps of its pockets? They were an essential part of the hippie uniform.
Here is a quote from the latter part of Justine, the Quartet’s first novel:
“Suddenly at the end of the great couloir my vision is sharpened by a pale disjunctive shudder as a bar of buttercup-yellow thickening gradually to a ray falls slowly through the dark masses of cloud to the east. The ripple and flurry of the invisible colonies of birds around us increases. Slowly, painfully, like a half-open door the dawn is upon us, forcing back the darkness.”
Holy shit. What do you think of that?
Does it strike you as beautiful? And did you have to look up “couloir” just now, like I did?
It certainly struck me as beautiful back in the day, and the part about the “ripple and flurry of the invisible colonies of birds…” still seems to work well. But is it awful of me to admit that I now think what Mr. Durrell wrote in his forties and I so deeply loved in my twenties, seems packed with authorial intrusion, even conceit, and is as good an example of how a love of one’s own facility with language can get in the way of describing the dawn?
Is it also awful of me to admit that I now prefer something like: “The sky is high, the sun is low, and the morning clouds have dissipated?”
It isn’t my intention here to belittle Mr. Durrell. Those four books of his were a huge and thrilling influence on me. But why did he choose not to bracket “thickening gradually to a ray” with commas, thus not only making things clearer, but also giving his paragraph a better rhythmic balance? It wasn’t that commas were anathema to him, for he used three of them in the paragraph’s last sentence.
I never read The Alexandria Quartet again after storming through it twice in the 1960s. All I ever did after that was talk about it, often in far too glowing terms.
And here is something else to add to an essay already overburdened with the word “admit.”
Other than my first novel, Soldiers in Hiding, which I had to reread a few years back in order to write a foreword to a new edition, I have never reread a book of my own after it was published.
Never. If you don’t count public readings during the month or two after each book came out.
I hope the reason for this is clear, but if not it is because I am afraid of the urge I might have to reach in and shake my earlier self’s sentences until a phalanx of unjustified modifiers falls out.
Or worse… that I won’t like the books anymore at all.
I recall you said that Updike was more interested in flaunting his flashy prose than keeping his novels on track.
Take a look at the rejection letter to Gertrude Stein that I forwarded to you; the editor made a similar point.