About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
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Allan Poe (1809–49), and Walter Pater (1839–94).
Still I think, basically, Orwell is right.
Another fine and informative book for people who write regularly and understand the mechanics of writing is Jacques Barzun’s Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (1975; revised 1985). Rich in the history of words, the book is particularly good at explaining why some mistakes are, indeed, mistakes. Here’s an analysis from Barzun’s book that dramatizes particularly well one of Orwell’s points, using the example “They said they had sought a meaningful dialogue on their demands, which, as they made clear before, are non-negotiable.”
Meaningful is usually quite meaningless. Does the writer mean productive, fruitful, satisfactory, fair-minded? It is hard to say; the word dialogue is too vague to suggest its proper epithet, and taken together with non-negotiable, it lands the writer in self-contradiction; for what is there to discuss if the issues are not subject to negotiation? The only tenable sense is: “They faced their opponents with an ultimatum.” This result is a good example of the way in which the criticism and simplifying of words discloses a hidden meaning.
Barzun’s chapter on frequently confused words is far more thorough than, say, the one in the ever popular Strunk and White (The Elements of Style, 1959), and it lets us know something about the history of those confusions, which are often more complex than they appear. “Restive,” for example, does not mean restless—or at least up until the Second World War, it didn’t. It was the adjective from “rest” and meant fixed, immobile, or stubborn. Now it means almost anything. Barzun points out how the poor use of words by careless writers makes writers more sensitive to the language less willing to use them for fear of being misunderstood. Barzun’s book is not a remedial text. It’s another grown-up text for grown-up writers.
Other works that I have found useful and stimulating include the essays in W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand and Forewords and Afterwords; William Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life and The World within the Word and Habitations of the Word; Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, Every Force Evolves a Form, and The Hunter Gracchus; and Jorge Luis Borges’s Other Inquisitions and This Craft of Verse; as well as Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s The Lord Chandos Letter (1902). This last is a fictional letter from a young Renaissance writer, presumably to Sir Francis Bacon, explaining why the twenty-eight-year-old young man is giving up literature. If you are feeling discouraged, Hoffmannsthal’s text is all but guaranteed to make you want to get back to writing. Also a turn-on in two very different modes are G. E. Lessing’s Laocoön and Laios Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.
As well, I’m a fan of E. M. Forster’s 1927 meditation Aspects of the Novel. We’ll get to that one shortly.
In his astute and useful essay “On Writing,” Raymond Carver says he doesn’t like tricks, cheap or otherwise. Yet the creation of a certain order of particularly vivid description is a trick. (I discuss it in two essays, “Thickening the Plot” and “Of Doubts and Dreams.”) It is one of the many tricks that, in his own writing, Carver generally eschews. While he was an extraordinary creator of moving and poignant miniatures, and while his descriptions are always adequate for his own narrative purposes, few would cite him as a master of description per se.
Yet the “trick” I speak of was used by Flaubert and Chekhov and the great American short-story writer Theodore Sturgeon. Buoyed by a raft of other descriptive planks, Joyce uses it particularly effectively in Ulysses and “The Dead”; all Virginia Woolf’s mature fiction relies on it more or less heavily, as does Richard Hughes’s, Harry Matthews’s, William Golding’s, Vladimir Nabokov’s, John Updike’s, Lawrence Durrell’s, William Van Wert’s, Gene Garbor’s, Antonia Byatt’s, Robert Coover’s (particularly in his early “realist” novel The Origin of the Brunists), William Gass’s, John Gardner’s, Angela Carter’s, Harlan Ellison’s, Luisa Valenzuela’s, Guy Davenport’s, John Crowley’s, Charlotte Bacon’s, and Rikki Ducornet’s—indeed, just about every writer known for both beauty of language and vivid scene painting. The reason to call it a “trick,” rather than a technique, strategy, or method, is because it doesn’t always work in every instance with every reader every time. It rarely works in the same way with the same reader in repeated readings of the same text. Because it’s fundamentally psychological, its success tends toward a statistical existence across a general audience. Yet, statistically, readers find it highly pleasurable, even though three or four readers will often argue over why it works and when, indeed, it doesn’t. This book several times discusses how it’s done. If you can wrap your mind around it, it’s interesting to try.
Before we get on to the “how,” though, let’s talk a bit about the “why” and the “what.”
VI
During a recent conversation I was having with a friend, he picked up his well-read Vintage paperback of Ulysses, opened it to page 36, and said, “Listen to this: ‘On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.’ Now, I love that sentence. But why is it better to write that than, say, ‘Sunlight fell on him through leaves’? Or even to omit it altogether and get on with the story, our day in Dublin?”
Actually my friend had already given the reason: because he loves it. A possible reason to love it is because it makes two things pop up in the mind more vividly than does the sentence “Sunlight fell on him through leaves.” One is what specifically happened at that particular time when light fell through those particular leaves; it has been described. In some light, in some venues, when someone walks under a tree, the bits of light simply slide over him or her. In others, such as this one, when, yes, a breeze is passing, they dance. The second thing that pops up is your awareness of the possibilities for the person in that space of shadow and light—in Joyce’s case the jocularly anti-Semitic Mr. Deasy, whose know-nothing claim that there are no Jews in Ireland sets up a controlling irony for the novel: Leopold Bloom, who represents Ulysses to Stephen’s Telemachus, is a Dublin Jew. The combination of specific description and strong implication (in this case, the irony in the word “wise”) is one that, to a statistically large sampling of readers, affords a more vivid reading experience than the simple “statement of information.” As well, because the sentence mimes what it describes—that is, it dances—in a manner I discuss in the essay “After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on ‘The Beach Fire,’” it calls up a chain of further implications about the way perceptions and words dance and are flung about through the day, which the reader can take as far as he or she wishes.
Now, such combinations of presentation and implication are a trick—though it’s one used by the J-Writer who wrote many of the really good parts in the early books of the Bible (the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, for instance), by Homer throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, and by Shakespeare in his plays and sonnets; also by Joyce, Woolf, and Nabokov. (Pater located it as an element in the true genius of Plato, above and beyond any of his specific philosophical arguments.) I persist in calling it a trick because of these, yes, intermittent successes. But it works for enough readers, enough of the time, to keep writers such as G. K. Chesterton and Djuna Barnes in print, when the political (or, in Chesterton’s case, religious) content of their work has become highly out of favor, if not downright repellent. We love a sentence only partially because of what it means, but even more for the manner and intensity through which it makes its meaning vivid.
People with whom the trick tends not to work include people who are just learning the language and/or who have no literary background in their own or any other language before they start. It tends to include people who know exactly what they’re reading for, and who are not interested in getting any other pleasure from a book except the one they open the first page expecting.
The vividness comes from a kind of surprise, the surprise of meeting a series of words that, one by one, at first seem to have nothing to do with the topic—striding under a tree on a June day—but words that, at a certain point, astonish us with their economy, accuracy, and playful vitality. Again, some of it will work on one reader, whereas others will only find it affected. But it’s