Dad's Maybe Book Page 9
Avoid ridiculous, flowery, decorative, long-winded language. Do not write this sentence: “Her neck was like a swan’s, long and arched and rubbery and graceful.” Instead write: “She honked.”
Avoid excessive, falsely poetic alliteration. Do not write this sentence: “The red, rollicking river of his tongue rubbed me the wrong way.” Instead write: “He kissed me. I gagged.”
Use active, not passive language. Do not write this boring, passive sentence: “Jack had been happily married for twenty years.” Instead write: “Jack turned on the TV, opened up the Cheetos, sat back, and scratched himself.”
Delete ugliness. It will lighten your heart to strike out a recalcitrantly wooden clause in favor of the breathtaking sunset of a period.
Proofread your own writing. There is a difference, for instance, between the word “throng” and the word “thong,” and you may not want your readers to imagine a frenzied thong dancing through the purple twilight.
When writing fiction, do not be afraid to lie. For a fiction writer, lying is a necessary, noble, and sublime virtue. (Try telling that to a man in a straw boater.)
The art of fiction is generally, but not always, concerned with that which did not occur, at least not in the so-called real world, but which nevertheless illuminates emotional, moral, and spiritual aspects of the human creature. Middlemarch is a sublime lie. War and Peace is a noble and necessary lie. As Pablo Picasso put it, bluntly and clearly, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Along similar lines, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” Or as Marianne Moore instructed: a true poem should have “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
”Of course, the truths of an invented story are rarely verifiable by empirical means. We cannot prove, for instance, that Thumbelina was a young lady whose stature was, to put it kindly, on the smallish side; in fact, we cannot prove that Thumbelina was a young lady at all, because she never existed as an actual person. The truths of fiction, like the truths of our daydreams and of our nightmares, reside outside history, complementing history, reimagining or manufacturing history, even when the stories we tell have been inspired and midwifed by actual historical events. (War and Peace is once again an example.) Art in general and stories in particular live in a kind of twin universe, sometimes reflective of our own, sometimes contradictory. (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Mickey Mouse, Slaughterhouse-Five,and “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” jump to mind.) In the end, story-truth is only marginally a function of what actually is or what actually was. Rather, as Picasso and Hemingway suggest, a well-told lie might help us realize why Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, even if we can find no evidence in the real world of the peppers or the peck or a guy named Peter Piper.
Art is not science, and science is not art, but each is keenly informed by aspects of the other: close observation, curiosity, experimentation, coherence, internal consistency, accuracy of expression, and general confidence in the principle of causation. And while a story’s “truths” may not be verifiable by the scientific method, they surely can be verified—and are verified—in the hearts and bellies and tear ducts of individual readers as a page is turned at the stroke of midnight. A novel may fail as science, but the same novel may succeed brilliantly in providing consolation and encouragement to a sleepless, heartsick, and lonely old woman in Tallahassee. This is not an esoteric defense of fiction. It is a practical defense.
Fiction writers choose to invent things for a reason, otherwise there would be no fiction. There would be no novels, no movies, no short stories, no TV dramas, no Lake Wobegon, no War of the Worlds, no Romeo and Juliet, no Ulysses, no Scrooge, no Seinfeld, no Little Red Riding Hood or Rumpelstiltskin or Thumbelina. Broadway would go dark. Hollywood would shut down. Fathers would stop telling bedtime stories to their children. Considering all that, imagine what an impoverished world it would be in the absence of noble falsehoods.
And so I’m urging you, Timmy, and you too, Tad, to tell your lies carefully and vividly and honestly and bravely. This will be difficult. You will lose sleep. But the good news, which I’ve rediscovered often over the years, is that you will not be required to know anything. You can just make it all up.
Express your own thoughts, not thoughts that others may expect you to think or want you to think. If you yearn to cuddle bunnies for a living, say so. If you believe mankind is a failed experiment, say so. However, be sure to carry a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Unpopular Essays as fortification against those occasions when courage fails. Which it will.
The essays of George Orwell may come in handy, too, for the same reason. “If liberty means anything at all,” Orwell wrote, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Do not impose symbols on your work. Let symbols grow in and from your work. If you write a sentence that contains a symbol merely to insert symbolism, hit the delete key and dip your computer in Clorox.
When writing fiction, if you find yourself stuck, write the reverse of what you mean to say. Often the reverse of what you mean to say is what you mean to say. Or, if the reverse of what you mean to say is not what you mean to say, it may turn out to be a great deal fresher and wiser than what you mean to say.
Also, if you wish to become writers, it can’t hurt to pay heed to the obvious: a writer must write. In this regard, Joseph Conrad describes his daily routine in a letter to a friend: “I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all.” Religiously, Conrad says. Every day, he says. He sits down not only when he is in the mood, not only when inspiration strikes, and not only when he can think of nothing better to do. A writer performs the act of sitting down to be wholly present, wholly receptive, as the fingers and the mind prepare for those occasions when language and imagination miraculously begin to fuse.
This is not to claim that the sitting down is all good fun. It is almost always painful. You will wait and wait. You will fidget. You will mutter to yourself. You will compose mediocre sentences, repair them, and then throw them away. You will endure tedium and failure and self-doubt as the price to be paid for a few moments of intense pleasure.
In large part, the satisfactions of sitting down each day will be taken in small linguistic accomplishments, word by word: the rush of endorphins, for example, that accompanies the discovery of a perfect adjective, one required by rhythm but one that also gives unique, vital identity to a noun, lifting the noun into bright being, breathing into it the singularity of thatness—that house, that sewer, that butterfly and no other—all without sacrificing grace and good sense, a sweet coupling of adjective with noun that brings into the world new beauty and new insight and new music. The musicality of prose, its rhythms and counterpoints and harmonies, is the sea upon which the vessel of fiction always rides and upon which the buoyancy of plot and character always depends. A discordant, graceless sentence will jeopardize the vessel’s integrity, and repetitive musical blunders will send an otherwise enchanting story plunging to the ocean’s bottom, much as an out-of-tune piano will sink an otherwise gorgeous nocturne. The writer’s struggle for linguistic felicity demands an intensity of concentration—a ferocious listening—that cannot be achieved without the artist’s complete presence. You cannot write while you’re bowling.
Finally—wake up, Tad!—I conclude today’s home school session with Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”
To this, one might reasonably add: every word, every syllable.
24
Home School
In our previous session, I had cited George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
At this point, Timmy and Tad, we must contemplate the consequences of exercising the rights of liberty.
It is one thing to applaud George Orwell; it is another thing to summon the courage to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Consider beheading.
For years, Americans have been appalled by gruesome and well-publicized decapitations performed by members of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, and other such radical Islamist organizations.
For about the same number of years, Americans have snoozed through the no less gruesome beheadings performed with our own bombs, drones, rockets, artillery, helicopters, naval vessels, and fighter jets.
Does the word “hypocrisy” ring a bell?
If we condemn beheadings by others, should we not condemn our own?
Is one beheading more moral than another?
Are the headless less headless?
Is the gore less gory?
Are we not, as a country, toying with a double standard by refusing to call our beheadings beheadings? Is this not a kind of narcissism?
And is it less sinful, less outrageous, less barbarous, and less disgusting to perform beheadings in the sanitary, well-insulated anonymity of a jet’s cockpit than in a squalid alleyway in Kabul?
Does technology make the moral difference?
Do clean hands make clean hearts?
Is it more civilized to ignore our own beheadings—disguising them with neutral language, avoiding ugly photographs, hiding carnage from public scrutiny—than it is to post barbarous, cutthroat videos on YouTube?
Is it an act of Christian decency to denounce “up-close” beheadings, performed with a knife or a sword, while dismissing long-distance beheadings with the techno-shrug of “collateral damage”?
Is intentionality somehow compounded by “in-person” beheading?
Conversely, is intentionality diminished by pushing a launch button at an air force base outside Las Vegas?
Is one an accident and the other not?
When you swing a sword or when you drop a bomb, do you not realize, Timmy—and you too, Tad—and you too, America—that people will lose their heads?
And which is more cowardly? To slit the throat of Daniel Pearl, drenching yourself in Pearl’s blood splatter, or to blow off the head of a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother in Pakistan as you sit drenched in the electronic sterility of a computer trailer in the United Arab Emirates?
Is it not the case that human beings are not only beheaded but also be-armed and be-legged and be-bodied and turned to slush at least as often by drones and jets as by swords and knives?
Is body slush more agreeable to you than throat slush?
Is a Pakistani corpse more agreeable to you than an American corpse?
Do you wish to inspect the corpses to make up your mind?
Do you believe, as pious decapitators and pious body-slushers must, that the Ten Commandments were delivered to Moses as the Ten Suggestions?
In plain English, if not in the original Hebrew and Aramaic, is it not true that beheading is beheading, that killing is killing, that commandment is commandment, and that double standards are the tools of tyrants and madmen?
Why is it, Timmy, that literalists abandon literalism at the drop of a convenient head?
How can it be, Tad, that one man will say to another: “Do as I say, not as I do”?
What happened to decency?
What happened to the Golden Rule?
Enough—you get the idea.
Such questions, which challenge hallucinations of inviolate rectitude, will boost the blood pressure not only of Rush Limbaugh but of a substantial portion of our country’s citizenry. You may be viewed as less than wholly American for having raised these and similar matters. You may lose friends. You may be hated. You may be ridiculed. But that’s liberty for you.
25
The Old Testament
One evening as we sat watching a televised basketball game, Tad asked, “How old was that guy Methuselah, the one in the Bible?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Almost a thousand years old, I think.”
“Wow,” Tad said.
An hour or so later, near the end of a tight and exciting game, Tad said, “What exactly did he eat?”
26
Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (I)
My father had been drinking again, and he no doubt felt some shame about this, and on a hot summer afternoon he entered my bedroom bearing a fat, heavy-looking book. My father had decided, I suppose, to be a father. “Take the book,” he said. “It’s full of stories. I want you to pick five of them and I want you to read them, and then I want you to talk to me about them.” The year was either 1957 or 1958. I was almost, but not quite yet, a teenager. I loved my father very much, but I was afraid of him, and I was embarrassed by the vodka flush on his face and by the thick, too-careful precision in his voice. The word “want” did not mean want. It meant: You will do this, and no arguments.
A few hours later I finished reading. I went in search of my father, feeling a mix of things, mostly apprehension, because I had almost nothing to say about the five stories I’d selected.
I had read “The Killers” because its title promised thrills to a boy of eleven or twelve. I had read “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “Cat in the Rain” because both were short. I had read “Soldier’s Home” because I liked playing soldier on the golf course, killing Japanese and Germans, and because I had expected a story called “Soldier’s Home” to contain a great deal of gore. I do not remember the fifth story. Almost certainly it was a short one.
I looked for my father in each room of our house, and then I went outside to see if he might be washing his car or mowing grass. His turquoise-and-cream Oldsmobile was no longer parked in the driveway.
For a time, I sat on the back steps and tried not to cry. It was a Saturday, I am almost sure, and the world had the stop-time emptiness of any small-town summer Saturday in the 1950s, when my country and I knew little of irony, when I was old enough to grasp the vocabulary of Ernest Hemingway, his sentence structures and Midwestern syntax, but was far too young to have experienced betrayal or heartbreak or entrapment by my own moral failures.
Eventually I went back inside. Where my father had gone I did not know. I still don’t. The month must have been July or August, because the house was very hot and we had no air conditioning then, and because I was clammy with the dread of forgetting even the little I could remember of “Cat in the Rain”: A lady looked out a hotel window. She saw a cat in the rain. She went outside to retrieve the cat, but the cat had disappeared, and later a hotel maid brought the lady another cat. Or was it the same cat? Totally unclear.
I felt stupid.
Why, I wondered, would anyone write such a story and think it was a story worth writing? My father would know, of course, and that too scared me. I wanted my father to love me and wanted him to be proud of me, but I had nothing to say about “Cat in the Rain” except that it seemed exceptionally real and exceptionally boring. The same was true, more or less, of the other four stories I had read that afternoon. The exciting and dramatic parts had been left out. It was too bad, I thought, that the cat hadn’t drowned. It was too bad that the guy who came home from the war didn’t want to talk about all the exciting stuff he must have seen and done. It was too bad the Swedish boxer didn’t get out of bed and beat the crap out of those two gangsters who had come to kill him. It was too bad the old waiter couldn’t remember the actual words to the Lord’s Prayer.
My father must have come home very late that night. What happened then, or the next morning, I can’t recall, but in the days and decades afterward he never again mentioned my summer reading assignment. He probably did not remember giving me that fat book. He probably did not remember deciding to be a father. He was a good man and was not to blame. It was alcohol. It was chemistry and sadness.
Nearly six decades have passed. The year is 2016. My father has been dead for a long time.
But when I think about “The Killers,” I think first of my father handing me a book and then vanishing into the summer afternoon
. “The Killers,” for me, is first about booze, then about other things. When I think about “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” I think of the VFW hall in Worthington, Minnesota, where my father spent many days and many more nights drinking with his friends and playing backgammon and wishing he were in Nassau or Brooklyn and not selling life insurance to farmers in Worthington, Minnesota, the Turkey Capital of the World. When I think now about “Soldier’s Home,” I think of my father’s brooding silence at the dinner table, his dreams rotted, his medals from World War Two scattered in a drawer beneath his socks. When I think about “Cat in the Rain,” I think of how much I yearned to come up with smart things to say to my father, so that he would love me, and so that he would stop drinking vodka and explain why a writer would write such a terrible story.
* * *
Don’t forget, Timmy—nor you, Tad—that readers bring their lives to and into other people’s books. And someday, if either of you sits down to write a story, please remember that it will become your responsibility to leave room inside the story for your readers’ own joys and terrors and lost fathers.
Mediocre stories leave little such room; bad stories leave almost no such room. Bad and mediocre stories explain too much: how the wicked witch became so completely and irreparably wicked—abused as a child, no doubt. Bad and mediocre stories tidy up the world, sorting out the human messes of serendipity and tangled motive. Who among us truly understands the plot of his own life? Do you, Tad? Do you, Timmy? Do you truly understand your own swirling, half-formed, and contradictory motives? Who recalls more than a tiny fraction of his own life—last Tuesday, for example? And if we cannot recall our lives, how can we pretend to explain our lives? It is guesswork. Scantily informed guesswork at that. I think of Hemingway’s line in A Farewell to Arms: “There isn’t always an explanation for everything.” Or I think of this line from “The Three-Day Blow”: “There’s always more to it than we know about.” Or I think of “The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers” by Robert Graves: “Nice contradiction between fact and fact / Will make the whole read human and exact.”