Final Fridays (25 page)

Then there's William H. Gass's memorable response to a student who asked him whether a writer's first concern ought to be the reader's pleasure or the author's. Neither, Gass replied: To put the reader's pleasure first is pandering; to put the author's pleasure first is self-indulgence. A writer's first concern, he declared, ought to be for the verbal artifact that's trying, with the writer's collaboration, to get itself said. The author as midwife: I like that.

Ditto the so-prolific John Updike's response to my student who asked him . . . I don't recall exactly what; perhaps whether he had ever abandoned a project-in-the-works, for Updike's reply was to the effect that now and then he would set aside a fiction-in-progress because he didn't recognize its author as (quoting Updike) “nimble old me.”
Nimble
, yes: That's him, for sure, a self-assessment as modest as it is exact. Likewise James Michener's response to the student who asked him what he regarded as his major strength and his most serious weakness as a novelist. The former, Michener replied unhesitatingly, was
information
: Whether writing about Iberia, Texas, Poland, or Outer Space, he prided himself on doing his homework. And his major weakness? “Human psychology,” confessed our visitor with a smile and a shrug: “Don't know the first thing about it.”

And that sort of authorial self-recognition informs—most touchingly, by my lights—the final item in this little anthology of
en pas-sants
. In the only conversation I ever had with Robert Frost, who visited us at Penn State on a wintry spring day some 40 years ago, the old poet invited us to ask him anything we cared to: He was too deaf to hear our questions anyhow, he said, but he would answer
something
. I don't recall what my question was, but I remember clearly Frost's reply: that every spring for as long as
he
could remember, he would notice that the oak trees up his way still had a few forlorn brown leaves hanging on from the previous autumn. The sight of those weatherbeaten remnants, he declared, never failed to suggest to him the tatters of a blown-out sail on a ship limping into harbor after storms, and his professional intuition never failed to tell him that there was in that simile not merely a poem, but a
Robert Frost
poem—a Robert Frost poem that, alas, the poet of that name had yet to figure out. Nor did he ever, to my knowledge, although there is passing mention of oak leaves in several of his verses.

As might be expected, one supposes—given that
all
trees are oak trees (except pine trees).

From
Rules of Thumb
(subtitled
73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction-Writing Fixations
), compiled by Michael Martone and Susan Neville.
¹

 

 

T
HUMB-RULE #1 FOR aspiring writers, it goes without saying, is Be Wary of Writers' Rules of Thumb. Anton Chekhov liked the smell of rotting apples in his writing desk. Edna Ferber advised nothing more interesting on that desk's far side than a blank wall. Ernest Hemingway and Scheherazade, for different reasons, inclined to close their day's (or night's) output in mid-story, even in mid-sentence. I myself advise no more than that you merely perpend such advisements and predilections, including mine to follow, en route to discovering by hunch, feel, trial, and error what best floats your particular boat. Too many rules of thumb can make a chap all thumbs.

That said, I report that for this writer at least,
regularity
is as helpful with the Muse as with the bowels: a comparison to be taken just so far and no farther. Go to your worktable at the same time daily, establish your Personal Prep Routine, and you're likely to find that just as making breakfast (to change analogies) may sharpen your appetite, so some established little ritual of muse-invocation may get your creative juices flowing. I myself—after the breakfast
afore-alluded-to with wife and newspaper, followed by that
toilette
likewise alluded to and a ten-minute routine of stretching exercises picked up half a century ago from an RCAF training manual—refill my thermal coffee mug and disappear into my Scriptorium no later than half past eight every weekday morning. It has separate workspaces for Creation, Production, and Business; ignoring the third of those (appointments calendar, file drawers, check registers and accounting ledgers, telephone, clock, and calculator, all relegated to Later), I pause at the second just long enough to boot up and then promptly anesthetize my more-or-less-trusty Macintosh, which will remain in Standby mode unless this morning's work is to be the revision and editing of an already first-drafted text—for me, the most enjoyable stage of writing, because it
feels
agreeably creative, but is so much easier than invention and composition. Turning then to the
sanctum sanctorum
, the worktable consecrated to Composition, I do the following routine preps, the musely equivalent of those earlier RCAF exercises:

1) Insert a set of Mack's earplugs from supply in worktable drawer: a habit carried over from that same half-century ago, when my now middle-aged children were high-energy tots and their father was an overworked, underpaid young college instructor obliged to snatch the odd hour of writing-time at a little desk in the bedroom. By the time the nest was empty and my work-area a more commodious and quiet Personal Space, the earplug habit was as fixed as Chekhov's requisite rotting apples. My muse sings only through ambient silence—her song not always clearly distinguishable, I confess, from the tinnitus familiar to many of us oldsters.

2) Ears plugged, slide selfward the worn, stained, and battered three-ring looseleaf binder procured during Freshman Orientation
Week at Johns Hopkins in 1947, in which has been first-drafted every page of my fiction since those green undergraduate days. It's as weathered now as its owner, who however counts on its continuing to hang together for at least as long as he does.

3) Open that “serviceable old thing” (as W. H. Auden fondly addressed his aging body) either to the Page in Progress or to the blank Next Thing, and take from its nestling-place among the gently rusting triple rings the somewhat less venerable but by me equally venerated Parker pen bought 40-plus years ago in “Mr. Pumblechook's Premises” in Rochester, England, in honor of the great Boz. Uncap and fill that instrument with its daily draught of Permanent Jet Black Quink, and then....

Well, that depends. Like Hemingway & Co. aforementioned, I try to end each morn's first-drafting while the going's good, with maybe a brief penciled or ballpointed note of what's to follow (the Parker is reserved strictly for Composition, not for notes, correspondence, and suchlike mundanities). If today's session involves work in progress, then reviewing and editing the print-out of yesterday's installment usually suffices to reorient the imagination and pump the creative adrenaline enough for me to resume first-draft penmanship—which a couple of hours later I'll break off in mid-whatever, date in parentheses (with ballpoint pickup-note appended), and type into the waiting word processor for ease of subsequent revision, already editing the draft as I transcribe it. If, on the other hand, what awaited me back there at 8:30 was the between-projects three-hole ruled blank page, it's a whole 'nother story, so to speak: one in which I'm likely to have recapped and renestled that refilled Parker, taken up Papermate and clipboard instead, and scratched hopeful preliminary notes toward . . . who knows what? Maybe a mini-essay on writerly Rules of Thumb?

Most prose-writers nowadays in every genre—perhaps most
poets
, even—dispense altogether with the venerable, to them perhaps obsolete medium of longhand and compose directly on the PC. For all I know, maybe even their preliminary note-making is done on laptop or Palm Pilot. If so, so be it: As aforedeclared, whatever floats the old boat. For Yours Truly, however, the equation of narrative “flow” with the literal flow of ink onto paper, of the fountain pen with the Fount of Inspiration, holds as firmly as my right hand holds that maroon-and-brushed-silver Parker 51: a rule of (sometimes inkstained) thumb.

In the spring of 2008, for what it described as an upcoming Political Issue, the journal
Tin City
invited responses from a number of people to the following questions: 1) What is your greatest fear for the future? And 2) What is your greatest hope for the future? After due consideration, I replied (tongue at least partly in cheek) as follows:

 

 

1) My chiefest
fear
for the future is that, like past futures, it will become the present.

 

2) My main
hope
for the future is that when presently it becomes the present, and anon the past, the worst its relieved survivors in some future present will be able to say of it will be that although they had feared the worst, as now-past futures go it could have been worse.

From
The Art of the Word
,
¹
an anthology of essays by various scholars, critics, translators, novelists, poets, memoirists, essayists, editors, and others about some word that they find particularly fascinating, intriguing, poignant, irksome, whatever. . . .

 

 

S
LIMMEST OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE pronouns and yet most self-assertive, even self-important, the nominative-case first-person-singular
I
(identical in most type-fonts to the Roman numeral, as if to declare “I am Number One!”) is always upper-case, unlike the more self-effacing Spanish
yo
, Italian
io
, French
je
, and German
ich
, for example, capitalized only when beginning a sentence, or even the English
me
,
my
, and
mine—
suggesting that in our tongue the self that is acted upon, or that merely possesses things, is less self-possessed than the self that takes action or possession.

The skinny thing's antecedent, its user's self, is at once obvious—
self-evident
, let's say—and teasingly elusive. “Myself”: whose self is that? Who or what is the “self” that's conscious of self-consciousness, even of
being
conscious of self-consciousness, et cetera ad infinitum? The “I” who asks that not-unreasonable question—who tries to peer behind that so-slender vertical letter—finds him-/herself caught in the classic philosophical quandary of the Retreating Subject, the infinite
regress of facing mirrors.
Gnothi seauton
, “Know thyself,” advises the Delphic oracle: an incompletable project, sometimes vertiginous, in extreme cases even paralyzing, and commonly productive of unpleasant news. Professional storytellers like . . .
myself
. . . may incline to the “neurophilosopher” Daniel C. Dennett's definition of the Self as one's “center of narrative gravity”
²
(always allowing for the famous fictive device of the Unreliable Narrator). Not a bad idea, in “my” opinion, to sneak a peek from time to time in those funhouse mirrors. Having done so, however, better to turn away and ask, not “Who am I?”, but “Who are
you
? Who are
we
, and
they
? What is
this
, and
that
, and
that
?”—and get on with the story.

Although it was first published before the three preceding essays, I'm placing this meditation on story-openers here so that its “dark and stormy night” will be followed by “The Morning After.”

 

 

“H
APPY FAMILIES ARE all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I don't particularly agree with that famous kick-off proposition of Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina
, but I'll carry it to my grave, along with a clutch of other jim-dandy story-openers.

A first sentence's job is to draw its reader into the sentences that follow it—while at the same time, in the case of fiction, maybe establishing the tale's tone and narrative viewpoint, introducing one or more of its characters, and supplying preliminary hints of setting, situation, and impending action. Some do their job so well that they remain in our memory long after we've forgotten most of the words that came after, even in a novel that may have changed our lives, or at least deeply engaged our minds and spirits in the way great literature can.
A Tale of Two Cities
, in this reader's opinion, is neither the best nor the worst of Dickens's novels, but it's the only
one whose opening—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”—has stayed with me. Likewise the so-casual “Call me Ishmael” that opens Melville's
Moby-Dick
(the first time I met the novelist Ishmael Reed, he smiled and said, “Call me Mister Reed”), and García Márquez's time-straddling fanfare to
One Hundred Years of Solitude
—“Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—and a dozen more, from the bibliophilic beagle Snoopy's “It was a dark and stormy night” in Charles Schulz's
Peanuts
comic strip (a cliché opening by the 19th-century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which the poor mutt never gets beyond) to the slyly soporific first words of Marcel Proust's multivolume
Remembrance of Things Past
: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”

“
Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure
,” that last one reads in the original, and the poet/translator Richard Howard thought it sufficiently important to preserve that opening's word-order, even at some slight cost to its sense, that he amended Scott-Moncrieff's earlier translation to read “
Time was
when I went to bed early,” so that Volume One of Proust's epic about Time begins (as it will end) with that key word—and then, seven volumes later, outflanks its subject by having “Marcel,” at the saga's close, set about to write the time-intensive tale that we've finally finished reading: a story about a storyteller's preparing himself to tell the story that we've just been exhaustively told.