About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
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several books of his stories. The one I recall most readily was Bold Heroes of Hungry Hill. If you read them, I suspect you will find them a little flat—though they are word for word as Mr. McManus told them.
While I considered the flatness, I was taken back to Mr. McManus at FitzHugh’s party. Afterward, we’d asked him questions about himself, about the stories, about Ireland. “After all,” I remember him saying, “the tales are hundreds of years old, passed on by word of mouth. We had some good storytellers, and some not so good. But the thing to remember—” and he sat back in his armchair again—“the tale is in the telling.”
The third storyteller I remember from that terribly odd, angular, and hyperlogical time called childhood was my geography teacher, John Seeger. He was the older brother of the folk singer Pete Seeger. They have practically identical speaking voices. Any one of you who caught Pete Seeger on the Johnny Cash show a few weeks back will have some idea of the terribly arresting quality of that voice. John—my elementary school was one of those fifties strangenesses where children called the teachers by their first names—John taught a good deal of his geography through storytelling.
They all followed the same form. Two children, a boy and a girl, variously named Pat and Pam, or Bill and Barbara, or John and Judy, along with their crotchety governess—the only one of her many names I remember was Miss Powderpuff—would get separated from their parents in a foreign country, and John would regale us with the economics, the geography, the landscape, the morals and mores of the country in a fusillade of fascinating anecdotes.
John’s stories were incredibly popular with the students. Twice a week, the geography room would stay open after school, and forty or fifty of us would squeeze into the circle while John, mimicking first this character, then another, with much slapping of the knees and clever gesticulations, would take his alliterative hero and heroine through Athens, Beirut, Calcutta, Damascus, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, and Geneva. I think John’s stories were the most enjoyable of the three. Besides being educational, they involved a great deal of audience participation. Whenever a new character entered, John would first describe him—a Greek musician, a French banker, a Turkish ambassador’s son—then he would turn to us and say, “And what should we call him?”
We would cry out names, and whichever one seemed most appropriate would stick with the character through the story.
During this time, I was indulging in my own first experiments with writing. I had even gone so far as to put down a hundred-odd pages of a novel, in cramped scrawling pencil, about an elderly gentleman of fifteen who spent a lot of time looking at the sea and taking long walks alone in the city. Sometime or other during its composition, it occurred to me that, besides spelling and grammar, something else was missing from the sorrows of my youngest of Werthers (it was called Lost Stars). But what …?
Once, after one of his more fascinating storytelling sessions, I went up to John and asked him if he had ever written any of his stories down.
All the other students had gone, and tall, gangling John and I walked down the hall toward the elevator. John looked surprisingly pensive. “I’ve tried,” he explained. “But somehow, I just can’t tell stories to a typewriter. And there isn’t the interplay back and forth between me and you kids.”
I was precocious. “Have you ever tried to record them?” I suggested. “Then you could transcribe—” (I had just learned the word two weeks ago and was using it now at every opportunity—) “you could transcribe them, and then they’d be just like you told them.”
“It’s funny you should suggest that,” John said. “Last year, I tried that. And once I forgot about the microphone, the telling went pretty well. Then I got my wife to type it out. And you know what?”
“What?” I asked.
“They were perfectly dreadful!” Then the elevator came.
I believe that was my first practical lesson in fiction writing. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that everything I know consciously about writing—and I’m painfully aware how little that actually is—has to do with the difference between written and spoken language.
I feel that I was lucky to have been exposed to so much purely verbal storytelling as a child, because it pointed out some essential differences between sitting, with a bunch of people, at the feet of a marvelous and magical raconteur, and sitting in one’s room, by oneself, with a book.
The aural art of storytelling, like theater, is essentially communal. People come together to hear stories. And the storyteller has the whole theatrical battery, including elements of dance and song, to compel his listeners’ attention.
Reading is very much a do-it-yourself entertainment. It’s private. There is no way for an author to compel the reader to do anything. Any call to the phone, or even a passing thought, can interrupt. On the other hand, the reader can determine his or her own pace at reading, can go back and reread; indeed, as a rule, the reader is far more conscious of details than the hearer.
In speech, incantation, invocation, and repetition are practically a must. But what the ear finds supremely enthralling the eye finds dull.
On the other hand, such a tiny part of the visual capacity of the eye and brain is used in scanning black print on white paper that practically the whole pictorial imagination is left free—so that in written texts, evocation becomes almost the entire process, the conjuring up of pictures, tones of voice, resonances, implications, and reminiscences.
Reading, as opposed to listening, requires a far higher level of attention, and the McLuhan formula, “Low resolution equals high involvement,” governs the whole play. Traditional phrases that weigh heavily on the ear, to the eye are mere clichés. The reader wants the information once and at the highest intensity, rather than beat into the tympanum with chanted repetition.
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