Category Archives: Writing

Bad Reviews 2: The Alix Ohlin Story

Posted on by
3

Here we pondered a bad review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing in the New York Times.

The latest kerfluffle is about an especially scathing review in the Times of Alix Ohlin’s latest books — a novel called Inside and a volume of short stories, Signs and Wonders. I’ve never heard of Ohlin, but her books have A-list publishers — Knopf and Viking — and bunches of good reviews and blurbs.  The review is by William Giraldi, whom I’ve also never heard of.  He’s published a novel called Busy Monsters.  So what’s up?  The review is online, and here’s the first paragraph:

There are two species of novelist: one writes as if the world is a known locale that requires dutiful reporting, the other as if the world has yet to be made. The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that “this world is but canvas to our imaginations,” that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity. You close “Don Quixote” and “Tristram Shandy,” “Middlemarch” and “Augie March,” and the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before, an “eternal and irrepressible freshness,” in Pound’s apt phrase. His definition of literature is among the best we have: “Language charged with meaning.” How charged was the last novel you read?

That paragraph was written by a guy who is trying way too hard.  To all you would-be writers out there: Take my advice and never use a phrase like “the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before.”  Your readers will be forever grateful.

Giraldi’s complaint about Ohlin’s work is that it “enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language.”  And he gives plenty of examples.  She describes teeth as white; people’s hearts sink and sing; she uses clichés like “Nice guys finish last.”

So anyway, thanks to Amazon, I was able to take a look inside Inside.  And the

Alix Ohlin, apparently dreaming up banal things to write

first chapter was, well, pretty good.  She sets up an interesting situation and draws a couple of interesting characters.  A young female psychotherapist goes out cross-country skiing and literally runs into a guy who has apparently just tried to hang himself.  She takes him to the hospital; she takes him back to his apartment afterwards; she takes an interest.  The dialog is snappy and occasionally unexpected, and the language was cliché-free; no one’s teeth are white in Chapter 1.

So then I looked at Giraldi’s novel. It too has good reviews and a mainstream publisher.  But he tries too hard.  He describes someone as “heaving his psychosis our way, sending bow-tied packages, soilsome letters, and text messages to the bestial effect of, If you marry that baboon, I’ll end all our lives.”  Soilsome?  WordPress’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize that word, and neither do I.

His novel is probably fine, too — it just inhabits a different universe from Ohlin’s.  He will claim it’s a better universe; he’ll claim he has Thoreau and Pound on his side (neither of whom wrote any novels that I can recall).

So why would the New York Times assign Ohlin’s books to be reviewed by someone you can be reasonably confident is going to hate them?  Dunno.  Why bother?  And, if you’re Giraldi, why write a review that makes you look like a dick? How is this going to help your career?

Here’s a balanced article in Salon about how to write a bad review. It ends with this advice:

In the end, the literary world is basically a small city. We could maybe all comfortably occupy Madison, Wisc. And so a book review is not being read in a vacuum: when you angrily eviscerate somebody’s work, you are shitting where you eat. It is important both to support each other and criticize each other, and to find ways to do both, respectfully and constructively. This means thinking things through before you open your piehole, whether it’s on Twitter or in the pages of the Times. Is that so hard?

Sounds right to me.

Bad beginnings; also some good ones

Posted on by
Reply

Here are the 2012 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst opening sentences that people can concoct for novels you’ll never want to read.  This is the overall winner:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

Here’s the winner in the crime category:

She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on … not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and – just like that cheap paint – the dress needed two more coats to cover her.

If you prefer shorter badness, you can try the Lyttle Lytton awards, which give you a maximum of 200 characters to be awful.  Here is the 2012 winner:

Agent Jeffrey’s trained eyes rolled carefully around the room, taking in the sights and sounds.

These entries are generally much more subtle in their awfulness than the Bulwer-Lytton ones, which rely on top-heavy metaphors and overly detailed descriptions for their comic effect.  Here’s a fantasy runner-up in the Lyttle Lytton contest that for some reason struck me as hilarious:

Kaldor fondled the hilt of his sword with his lanky fingers and inhaled the sunrise. “I taste the future blood of my enemies,” he relished.

So how about a few good beginnings to wipe that bad taste out of your mouth?  Amazon’s “Click to Look Inside” feature makes it easy to check out the opening of any book.  Beginnings aren’t as crucial to novels as their endings.  Sometimes the writer needs to take his time to set things up.  Here is the matter-of-fact beginning of Great Expectations, whose ending we talked about previously:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

Then there’s the spectacular opening of Lolita, after the hilarious faux foreword, which tells us the story should make all of us “apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo. Lee. Ta.

How about Gravity’s Rainbow, whose opening sentence is so central to the novel that it was reproduced on the cover of the original edition:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now.

And here are the great opening sentences of Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Makes me want to read all these books all over again.

Sam Harris is opposed to lying — go read his free ebook about it

Posted on by
1

I find that Sam Harris is always interesting, even when I disagree with him (and lots of people disagree with him about lots of things).  He has a post up on his site about Jonah Lehrer. In response to the Lehrer scandal, he has made his short ebook Lying available for free as a PDF for the rest of the week.  You’ll find a link to it in the Lehrer post.  I have started reading it, and his position on lying is pretty clear — he’s agin it.  My sense is that Harris is not an especially deep thinker, but he is a clear and graceful writer, so you may want to check out his book — it’s only about 60 pages.

I also have Harris’s book Free Will on my e-queue. He’s not necessarily agin free will, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think it exists.

 

What it’s like to be a young writer

Posted on by
2

Yesterday I mentioned the young Harvard writer, Kaavya Viswanathan, who apparently stole material for a YA novel she wrote in the summer after high school.  Here’s what she said in an interview on NBC:

All I can say is that I’ve read both of Megan McCafferty’s books, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings” when I was in high school.  I think the first one came out when I was about 14, and I read both those books three or four times each.  I completely see the similarities, I’m not denying that those are there, but I can honestly say that any of those similarities were completely unconscious and unintentional, that while I was reading Megan McCafferty’s books, I must have just internalized her words.  I never, ever intended to deliberately take any of her words.

The Wikipedia article about her novel points out other similarities to other books from other writers.  They’re pretty obvious.  I don’t want to litigate this.  It could be that this was all a calculated attempt to craft a novel that would get her into Harvard and make a name for herself.  Her parents had hired some consulting agency to help with the college admissions process, and it sounds like she had a good bit of assistance, from them and others, in writing, packaging, and marketing the novel.  But I’d like to assume it was something entirely different — that this was a girl who was desperate to become a writer, and was just too young to pull it off by herself.

I’d like to think that because it feels awfully familiar to me.  Like a lot of would-be writers, I suspect, I wanted to become a writer from a very early age.  And, again, like a lot of those would-be writers, I had two major problems:

  • I didn’t know how to write.
  • I didn’t have anything to write about.

As a result, I had to live in other people’s imaginations.  And what a wonderful place that was!  I remember when I was about eleven years old reading a science fiction novel that I couldn’t get out of my head.  So I decided to write my own science fiction novel — in pencil, with my own hand-drawn illustrations.  The plot, as I recall it, was pretty much the same as that of the novel I had read, except that I was the hero.  I don’t think I got more than a few pages into the thing before I abandoned it.  It’s much easier to read than to write.

I got better at writing as I got older, but it was always hard to escape other people’s imaginations — they lived more interesting lives, thought more interesting thoughts, and could express themselves in more interesting ways.  I couldn’t compete.  So when I wrote a short story, it would come out sounding like an adolescent imitation of a Graham Greene short story, or an Isaac Asimov short story, or a Ray Bradbury short story.  What I wrote didn’t sound like me, because I didn’t yet have a sound.

So I can imagine an 18-year-old girl from India desperately wanting to write a novel about her life in America, but I can’t imagine her pulling it off.  Not without channeling all the authors she had read who had helped her make sense of her experiences, who had helped form her imagination.  And maybe what she wrote with the help (conscious or unconscious) of those authors was pretty good: it got her parents excited, it got her college admissions consultants excited, it got her an agent and some assistance in fleshing out her ideas, and before long everything spiraled out of control.  She was no longer just a kid dreaming of becoming a writer; she was a professional.  And that’s when her problems started.

That’s what I’d like to think.

Self-plagiarism is one thing; making stuff up is something else entirely

Posted on by
8

The last time we encountered Jonah Lehrer, he had been caught committing the odd crime of self-plagiarism.  Things have now taken a turn for the worse. In fact, his meteoric career has crashed and burned, as meteors tend to do, with the revelation that he fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works.  This time he ran afoul of the relentless reporting of a journalist and Dylan freak named Michael Moynihan, writing for Tablet magazine.  (Tablet‘s website has apparently also crashed and burned, and I can’t link to the article.)  Here is a report that quotes Moynihan:

I’m something of the Dylan obsessive — piles of live bootlegs, outtakes, books — and I read the first chapter of Imagine with keen interest. But when I looked for sources to a handful of Dylan quotations offered by Lehrer — the chapter is sparsely and erratically footnoted — I came up empty, and in one case found two fragments of quotes, from different years and on different topics, welded together to create something that happily complimented Lehrer’s argument. Other quotes I couldn’t locate at all.

He finally got Lehrer to confess.  The result: his book has been recalled, and he has had to resign from the New Yorker.

I imagine that Lehrer thought he could get away with his fabrications because book publishers don’t do the kind of obsessive fact-checking that the New Yorker is famous for.  But it’s a terrible risk to take, especially when you’re fabricating Bob Dylan quotes for a public with any number of Dylan obsessives in it.  As with the self-plagiarism, it seems to be a case of cutting corners.  At least he came up with what sounds like a sincere apology:

The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed.

That’s pretty classy in a world of mealy-mouthed passive-voice pseudo-apologies. The classic in this genre is Newt Gingrich blaming his love of country for his adulteries:

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”

Things happened–lovely.  Anyway, this blog is primarily about fiction, and in fiction you don’t have to apologize for making stuff up.  On the other hand, you do have to apologize for stealing stuff.  Don’t steal stuff. It’s not worth the risk of getting caught, and the more successful you are, the more likely you are to get caught.  Here is the sad story of an overachieving Harvard student who plagiarized passages in a big-time young-adult chick-lit novel she wrote.  Wikipedia tells you much more than you want to know, comparing passages from her novel with similar passages from half a dozen others.  The really sad part of the story is that a few years after the plagiarism controversy her parents died in a plane crash.

I hope she gets over it.  I hope Lehrer gets over it, although I doubt he will.  From the New Yorker blog posts I read, I’d say the guy knows how to write.  He just lost sight of the rules.

Great Expectations and sad endings

Posted on by
4

Here we saw how Hemingway struggled with the ending to A Farewell to Arms. You need to get the ending right.

For some novels, the most important decision will be whether the ending is sad or happy.  You’d think this decision would flow inevitably from the story you’re telling.  In some cases, that’s true.  In a genre private eye novel, the private eye will crack the case.  In a genre romance, girl will get boy.  In mainstream Hollywood movies nowadays, you’re pretty much guaranteed a happy ending; otherwise the movie wouldn’t have gotten made.  But for lots of novels, the ending balances on a knife edge between life and death, marriage and loneliness, joy and despair.  That, in fact, is what keeps the reader reading.  The author gets to make the call.

The ending to Pontiff caused me the most problems in this regard.  Should girl get boy, when boy is a priest?  If so, does that qualify as a happy ending?  In any case, did the ending work–was it true to the story?  Lemme know! (There is another sad aspect of the story that involves the death of a character at the climax, and I really didn’t want to do it.  But my plot gave me no choice.)

King Lear‘s ending is so damn sad that even critics like Samuel Johnson thought it was unbearable. For 300 years, from the Restoration to the mid-nineteenth century, the only version performed was a revision by Nahum Tate in which Cordelia survived and married Edgar. We have seen evidence that Shakespeare revised the play, but the revisions, if anything, made the play’s ending sadder.

The most celebrated case of revising an ending to make it happier was Great Expectations.

Dickens’ original ending was bleak. The narrator, Pip, who has been in love with the unattainable Estella since he first laid eyes on her, meets her on the street many years later:

It was four years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness.

I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune.

I was in England again — in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip — when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

“I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!” (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

Too sad! One of his friends–maybe Wilkie Collins–complained.  So Dickens tried again.  He has Pip and Estella meet on the grounds of Miss Havisham’s ruined house, where they had first met many years ago:

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. “And will continue friends apart”. I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Too happy!  That’s what lots of critics have complained.  Shaw said: The novel “is too serious a book to be a trivially happy one. Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy; and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it.”

Well, I dunno.  A novel can be unhappy throughout, yet achieve its happiness at the end.  Characters grow; characters change.  And there’s no question that the revised ending is better written than the original, which is awfully flat.  Most modern editions include both endings, I think, like a DVD where you can choose the author’s cut.

Dickens himself seemed happy with the revision.  He said: “I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.”

You be the judge.  Also, see the David Lean movie, with John Mills as Pip and Jean Simmons as the ethereally beautiful young Estella.

Which is the better title: “Bride of the Slime Monster” or “Locksley Hall”?

Posted on by
3

Previously we looked at the titles Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies and Dover Beach and decided that Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies won hands-down. In fact, in my opinion Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies might be the most awesomest title ever.

Let’s consider Bride of the Slime Monster.  There’s no question that this is also an excellent title.  Short, funny, gives you a clear sense of what the book is all about.  Is it as good as Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies?  I think not, but I recognize that others may feel differently.  The cover is also pretty good.

Now, what are we to make of Locksley Hall?  I think it’s pretty clearly an awful title, except maybe for a Regency romance, with a cover showing an auburn-tressed young maiden running from an English country estate, her half-uncovered bosoms heaving with strong emotion.  While “Dover Beach” has the benefit of being the title of a somewhat familiar poem, nobody nowadays reads the 1842 poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred Tennyson.  It’s too long, too hard to follow, and it’s got just this one memorable line: “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”  So memorable, in fact, that it has been totally decoupled from the poem in which it occurs.

So what kind of an idiot would title a science fiction novel Locksley Hall?  That kind of idiot would be me!  That’s what I named the long-unawaited sequel to Dover Beach.  If you think you have read this sequel, you are quite probably deluded.  But before too terribly long it will be an ebook you can put on your eshelf next to your dog-eared ecopy of the original novel.  Yay!

My original error, it seems, was in buying into my editor’s idea that naming a post-nuclear-war private-eye novel after a nineteenth-century poem was a good one.  So I decided that I should do the same thing for the sequel.  But when Bantam examined the box office receipts for Dover Beach, it decided that the market for post-nuclear-war private-eye novels named after a nineteenth-century poem wasn’t as strong at they had imagined it to be and, in spite of great reviews, they didn’t want to publish its already-completed sequel.  Boo!

Which isn’t to say that Locksley Hall is a bad title, in the sense that it is tightly integrated with the novel’s themes, in just the way that Dover Beach is. The poem “Locksley Hall” (that’s its author over there on the right) is all over the map.  In outline it is a standard romantic poem about lost love.  But it takes weird digressions into sexism, racism, and weirdest of all, science fiction.

Here is the SF-y passage, which seems to come out of nowhere:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

My novel, it turns out, is about the attempt to form a better government as New England is recovers from the “ghastly dew” that rained upon it.  Some people are still dreaming of a parliament of man, a federation of the world, and other are thinking: You’ve got to be shitting me.  Look how well the old government worked out for us!

And in the middle of it all, Walter Sands stumbles onto his second case, and he has to figure out which side a private eye should be on.

The Sandman rides shotgun and quotes Titus Andronicus

Posted on by
1

Here is another excerpt from Dover Beach.  It’s early in the story, and our narrator is accompanying two of his friends on a trip to New Hampshire to do some business.  It’s nighttime, and it’s snowing out, and they’re far from what’s left of “civilization.”  Not a good combination in the world of this novel.

Our narrator, we are beginning to discover, has an odd literary bent.

*************

The road barely existed anymore. Hunched over the wheel, Mickey stared out through the snow and swerved constantly to miss the rocks and potholes and assorted debris. A broken axle up here would not be a good idea.

Bobby was nervous. When he’s nervous, he talks too much. “So she says, ‘Oh, it’s so hod to pot with all this. It’s been in the family for generations, you know. We godded it all through the Frenzy and now things are settling down, but what am I to do? One must eat, mustn’t one?’

” ‘Oh, certainly one must,’ I says. Jesus, they all make you feel like they’re doin’ you a favor, handing over their firstborn or something. But I’m not the one that’s starving. You know what I’m saying? Jesus, this snow’s a bitch.” Bobby leaned forward and peered out at an abandoned house. He doesn’t see very well. “I hate bein’ outside the city. I mean, the city is dangerous, but at least you know what’s goin’ on. There are rules, sort of. Who the fuck knows what’s goin’ on up here?”

Bobby sat in the middle, between Mickey and me. A shotgun rested between my legs. I held its smooth barrel in my right hand. The van’s heater was turned up full blast, and it felt great. I wished Bobby weren’t so nervous. He was making me nervous too.

We were off the highway now, passing by cold white fields and scrawny trees and rocks. Bobby was right: we didn’t belong here. Still, something stirred inside me—wisps of memories that were better left unremembered. “How much further, Mickey?” I asked.

“Not far,” he said. Mickey was about as talkative as Gwen.

Bobby drummed his fingers on his thighs. “This guy is so fuckin’ weird, Wally, you won’t believe it. It’s being stuck up here in the boonies, if you ask me. You got no human interaction, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“He has you. And O’Malley’s people.”

“O’Malley’s people. Shit. Talking to one of them’s like talking to a tree. This guy is so weird. Christ, I wish I could see something.”

Mickey was going even slower now. Eventually there was a light in the distance. “That’s it,” he said. We aimed for the light, and came to a stop in front of a large gate. The light shone down at us from behind the gate like a beacon from heaven. A dog was barking. I don’t like dogs.

“Get out with your hands up,” an amplified voice ordered. It sounded like God.

I looked at Bobby. “So fuckin’ weird,” he said, shaking his head. He motioned to me to get out. I left the shotgun behind and climbed down into the snow with my hands over my head. Bobby and Mickey did the same.

The gate swung open, and two figures appeared out of a shack. One stayed behind and trained a shotgun on us. The other moved forward. He had a revolver in one hand, a Doberman on a leash in the other; the Doberman was about the size of the van. The figure was wearing a knitted cap and a homemade sheepskin coat. He was about twelve.

He searched us. The Doberman growled when it was my turn. Good doggie. I kept my hands up. The boy found my Smith and Wesson and pocketed it. He found the shotgun in the van and gave it, and the Doberman, to the figure waiting by the gate.

The boy returned to us. “Okay,” he said. We all got into the van. The boy kept the revolver trained on Mickey, who drove slowly through the open gate. We passed the other figure, standing by the shack and restraining the Doberman. It was a girl, maybe a little younger than the boy. The Doberman kept barking. The gate clanged shut behind us. I felt as if I had crossed a border.

Here is a survival skill I have learned. Generally, when you come upon an isolated farm surrounded by barbed wire, with searchlights and Dobermans and shotguns in evidence, it is a good idea to move on. Quickly. Not tonight, however.

“So how do you like this snow?” Bobby asked the boy.

The boy didn’t reply.

“I don’t think there was this much snow in the old days,” Bobby went on. “Of course, they say that about a lot of things. But I think maybe they’re right about the snow. A lot more snow than there used to be.”

Bobby was nervous. I wished he would shut up.

The land extended flat and unbroken on both sides until it disappeared in the darkness. The road along which we were traveling was plowed and newly paved. We were headed for a sprawling house that blazed with light about a half mile in front of us. Several smaller buildings were scattered like seedlings around it. There was a large barn and a silo off to one side, and in the distance a windmill loomed like a creature from a fairytale.

“Stop,” the boy said when we had reached the house.

Mickey pulled up by the front porch.

Another figure stood by the door, holding another shotgun. The boy got out and waved, and the figure motioned for us to come in.

“Here goes,” Bobby muttered. We got out and crunched across the snow to the open door.

“Wipe your feet,” the figure commanded.

We wiped our feet and walked inside.

“Come with me.” The figure took off her cap—it was a girl with a misshapen face. We followed her while our senses reeled. Warmth: the house was warmer than the van, warmer than the Ritz; a month’s supply of logs blazed in a fireplace. Light: electric lights, shining out from chandeliers and sconces, reflecting off mirrors and polished mahogany furniture. Smells: the sharp sweet scent of burning birch, the rich aroma of something sweet being baked. Apple pie? Strudel?

Somewhere close by a piano was playing, children were laughing. I felt as if I had stepped into a storybook.

The deformed girl led us into a long dark room lit only by a coal fire. The room had a vaulted ceiling, tapestries on the wall, a Persian carpet on the floor. At the far end of an oak table sat a man with a gray beard and deep-set, glittering eyes. He was wearing a flowing white robe. Maybe I hadn’t stepped into a storybook; maybe I had stepped into the Bible. Maybe he was God.

“You may return to your post, Lavinia,” the man said in a deep, God-like voice.

The girl silently left the room. The man’s gaze turned to us: three travelers from a distant land, bearing gifts.

Not much to look at. Bobby is the only fat man I know—but it isn’t a healthy fat, a storybook fat. And his eyes are clouded, and his teeth are rotten. Mickey is short and has a shriveled arm. And I—well, I am reasonably normal, which means reasonably scrawny, reasonably scarred by life. I don’t think I look like a private eye.

“Please sit,” the man said.

We sat.

“I trust your drive was uneventful.”

“Wasn’t bad, Mr. Fitch,” Bobby said. “But the snow didn’t help matters much.”

“Ah, yes, the snow.” Mr. Fitch paused. “‘When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul.'” He fell silent then, as if he had exhausted his supply of sociability, or forgotten the next line. He looked as if he didn’t have much need for sociability. He sat straight and stiff as a pine tree, his hands folded on the table in front of him. His skin was leathery, his mouth hard. He scared me.

“We brought some very good merchandise,” Bobby said. “You’d be surprised at how much is still out there, if you know the right people.”

Mr. Fitch nodded, unsurprised. “I’ll take a look.”

“Want us to bring it right in here?”

Mr. Fitch unfolded a hand and gestured at the empty table.

Bobby stood up. “Great. Come on, boys.”

Mickey and I followed him back out to the van. Lavinia kept a careful watch on us from the front porch. “What’d I tell you about that guy, huh?” Bobby asked as Mickey opened the doors and jumped inside. “He’s got maybe thirty kids and half a dozen wives and he goes around lookin’ like the goddamn Lord of the Universe. Watch that stuff, Mickey, okay? It’s fucking fragile.”

I did most of the lugging. Mickey couldn’t help much because of his arm, and Bobby preferred talking to lifting. After a few trips back and forth we had covered the table with our stuff, and Bobby started his sales pitch. “Look at this china, Mr. Fitch. Rose Medallion. Service for six, plus assorted other pieces—almost perfect condition. See this portrait? Look at the signature: John Singer Sargent. He was famous. Ever see his murals in the Boston Public Library? That tea set is sterling silver. And you said you liked books, right? A complete set of Dickens—leather bindings, acid-free paper. I don’t think anyone ever opened them. Isn’t that something?”

Mr. Fitch examined everything while Bobby rattled on. He unwrapped every piece of china and stared at it. He took the painting out into the hall to study it in better light. I noticed he was wearing hiking boots under his biblical robe. Bobby was sweating. Mickey and I stood by the fire and waited.

“All right,” Mr. Fitch said eventually. “Come with me.” He strode outside and signaled to Lavinia, who fell in step behind us. We crossed to a long, narrow structure off to one side of the main house. He took out a key and opened the padlocked door, then went inside and flipped on an electric light. We followed him in.

It was a storage building—shelf after shelf of cartons jammed against the walls, a narrow aisle down the middle. Amazingly, the place was heated. We stood awkwardly in the aisle while Lavinia waited outside, her shotgun cradled in her arms.

“PC?” Mr. Fitch asked.

“Right,” Bobby said.

Mr. Fitch reached up and took down a small box. He opened it. The object inside was covered with bubbly plastic stuff. He unwrapped it.

It was not as beautiful as the china, but Bobby was not interested in beauty. He took it from Mr. Fitch and hefted it approvingly. It was a hard drive, I knew.  Not that I cared.  “How many?” he asked.

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Are you crazy? I need fifty, or no deal.”

Mr. Fitch shrugged. “I haven’t got fifty.”

“Well, what else do you have? Got any ammo?”

Mr. Fitch stiffened. “I don’t deal in weaponry.”

“Okay, okay. How ‘bout software? And printers. How about them?”

Mr. Fitch and Bobby started dickering. I was impressed by how forceful Bobby was, considering that his entire future was on the line, and a girl stood ten feet away holding a shotgun she was clearly prepared to use. He obviously knew what he was doing, at any rate, because after a few tough minutes they had struck a deal, and I found myself lugging the precious equipment out to the van.

“Nice work,” I said to Bobby when he came to inspect.

“Thanks. He’s weird, but he’s a Yankee, and that means you can do business with him. Jesus, I could use a drink. Let’s go inside.”

I followed him back into the house, carefully wiping my feet before I entered.

Our merchandise had been cleared from the table. One of the Rose Medallion plates was piled high with pieces of cake. A solidly built woman with gray hair was pouring cups of tea, using the sterling silver tea set. I sat down next to Mickey, who was eyeing the cake with considerable interest.

“Can I get you anything else?” the woman asked when the tea had been poured.

Bobby cleared his throat. “I was wondering if there might be anything stronger than tea in the house. To celebrate our new business relationship, you understand.”

The woman looked at Mr. Fitch. He paused a moment, then banged his fist on the table. “‘What?'” he thundered. “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?'”

She smiled and left the room. In a moment she returned with a green bottle, which Bobby gazed at with something approaching religious ecstasy. She poured an inch of the amber liquid into a glass and gave it to Bobby, then did the same for Mr. Fitch. She offered the bottle to Mickey and me next, but we refused. We were tea people.

Bobby toasted Mr. Fitch. “Here’s to many more nights like this,” he said.

Mr. Fitch nodded his agreement.

The cake was delicious. Bobby drank half his whiskey. “You must come to Boston and let me return your hospitality,” he said.

Mr. Fitch’s face darkened. He set his glass down. “I will not go to Boston, Mr. Gallagher. I lost a child there once. Killed by the brigands who inhabit that place.”

“Well, it’s really a lot better than it used to be,” Bobby said, a little uneasily.

“‘Dost thou not perceive that it is a wilderness of tigers?'” Mr. Fitch roared. “Tigers must prey, and Boston offers no prey but me and mine.”

Tigers? Bobby scratched his head, for once at a loss for words. I reached for another piece of cake. “‘How happy are thou, then,'” I remarked, “‘from these devourers to be banished.'”

Mr. Fitch stared at me. “You know Titus Andronicus?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t everyone?”

He smiled and drank his whiskey. “Maybe this world has a future after all,” he murmured.

Bobby looked at me as if I had just caused the blind to see and the dumb to speak.

Mickey poured himself another cup of tea.

Hemingway tries to get the words right

Posted on by
1

Apropos of these post about revising and rewriting, it turns out the Simon & Schuster has released a new edition of A Farewell to Arms that includes all Hemingway’s alternate endings.  He claimed that he wrote the ending 39 times before he was satisfied.  The basic issue, he famously said, was “getting the words right.” Turns out that the actual number of endings was probably more like 47.

Here’s the first page of the manuscript, which is stored, with the rest of Hemingway’s papers, at the JFK Library in Dorchester, MA, about ten miles away from where I am sitting.

Endings are hard because they are so important. They don’t need to sum up what the novel was all about, but they control what readers are going to be feeling when they put the book down.

For close readers of Hemingway the endings are a fascinating glimpse into how the novel could have concluded on a different note, sometimes more blunt and sometimes more optimistic. And since modern authors tend to produce their work on computers, the new edition also serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author’s process.

One of the endings was suggested by Fitzgerald.  Speaking of Fitzgerald, has anyone written a better ending than the one he wrote for The Great Gatsby?

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Rules for writing — Rule 3: Rewrite

Posted on by
6

This is another in my random series of rules for writing, designed for for those among us who aren’t geniuses and therefore don’t get to make our own rules.  This means you.  And me.

Let’s distinguish rewriting from revising.  Revising is when you tinker with stuff you’ve already written.  That’s fun!  Rewriting is when you throw away what you’ve written and start over again.  Start a new computer file.  Go through the whole story or novel again, typing it from scratch.  That can be intimidating.  It can be overwhelming.  It can feel like a complete waste of time, when you encounter paragraph after paragraph that, as far as you can tell, doesn’t need to change.  Why bother?  There are more novels to be written.  The Red Sox are on TV.

In my post about outlining, I stole an image from E. L. Doctorow of writing as a car journey in the darkness, with only your headlights to guide you as you make your way towards your destination.  What happens when you reach that destination?  Do you really want to start the journey all over again?

Well, yes, you do.  If you’re like me, you accumulate notes during your journey — should have made a left turn here, should have driven a little faster in this stretch, should have taken a shortcut to totally eliminate that stretch. Some of these notes may be the basis for revisions, but often they call for much more.  Generally, for me, they accumulate to the point that I need to start from the beginning.

The most obvious example of this was when I figured out that I had come up with the wrong murderer in Senator.  That required rejiggering the whole novel.  Everything needed to be recalibrated, from the opening sentence to the ending.  I’m currently rereading my novel Dover Beach, and I recall one ultimate plot twist that I figured out only when I had finished the first draft.  Without the twist, something basic about the book was out of whack.  The twist occurs at the very end, but I needed to prepare for it throughout the plot.  I can no longer tell exactly where I made the changes, but I figure that’s a good thing — everything in the final product needs to be seamless.

Rewriting is less fun than revision, because it’s more work.  But I find it deeply satisfying.  And it goes much faster than the first draft, which is what causes me to sweat blood.  I have never done more than three drafts — but maybe my work would be better if I had!  At some point I’m content to take the latest draft and revise it.  And revise it, and revise it.

And still I can look at it later and see where the thing has still fallen short.  Here is the famous quotation from Paul Valéry:

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

This applies to novels, as well, except you have a hundred thousand words to tinker with instead of a hundred.  You can tinker forever, so at some point you have to stop.  But if you stop too soon, you’re not doing your story, or yourself, justice.