Unless It Moves the Human Heart (5 page)

“We’ve spent a lot of time on the beginnings of stories,” says Nina. “What about endings?”

“Much easier, I think. Because your ending lies within your beginning. You simply have to discover it again and follow it to its anticipated conclusion. Like Harold in
Harold and the Purple Crayon
, when he draws his window in order to get home, and creates what he knows or suspects already exists.”

“The end was in the beginning,” says Donna.

“Eventually, we all tell the same stories, yet none of our stories sounds like anyone else’s. Think of your dullest family member, the pixilated uncle who tells the same family anecdote over and over every Thanksgiving. Even he never tells his story the same way twice.”

“I really don’t think of my voice as special,” says Suzanne.

“It may not be. But it’s different from George’s.”

“I hope so,” she says. He chuckles.

“But if we’re all different,” says Jasmine, “how will we write the way you want us to write?”

“Sameness has to do with commonly agreed-upon qualities. That’s all.”

“Are we all supposed to wind up writing like you?” asks Inur.

“That would be impossible.” I remain deadpan.

“I mean it,” she says. “If what you tell us constitutes good writing, it’s the writing you believe in, the writing you do yourself.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing. I believe in spare writing. Precise and restrained writing. I like short sentences. Fragmented sentences, sometimes. I enjoy dropping in exotic words from time to time. Either they put off readers or drive them to the dictionary. I do it anyway. I’ve enjoyed reading florid writing and thunderous writing, and even manically self-conscious writing. But I don’t want to do it myself. And I don’t want you to do it.”

“Is there never a time we should use heightened language?” Nina asks.

“There’s a saying about the making of musicals: ‘When you can’t talk anymore, sing. When you can’t walk anymore, dance.’ I think it works for writing too. You go along, telling your story, and it’s moving very well and very fast, and then, like a glider pilot, you come to a cliff and you have no choice but to soar.”

“Is this another one of these mystical things?” asks Sven. “Fly when you hit the cliff?”

“It gets less mystical the more you do it.”

“How do you practice heightened language?” Donna asks.

“Concentrate on every word you write.”

“We’re back to that,” says Suzanne. “The lightning.”

“We’re back to that. We never leave it. Every word is an idea. It triggers images in your reader’s mind. Let’s say you’ve created a woman in your story, and you want to describe her hair color, which is a mixture of browns.”

“A
medley
of browns,” says Ana.

“There you go. Every word you use to describe your woman’s hair gives you something about the woman herself. Otherwise there’s no point in heightening the language around her. So her hair can be the color of freshly tilled earth, or of old books on a shelf, or of a dirt road . . .”

“After a rain,” says Jasmine.

“After a rain. Better. Or an old tweed coat, or bricks in a fireplace . . .”

“Or stones in an aqueduct,” says Sven. “Or the stock of an antique rifle.”

“Or a newly dug grave,” says George.

“Which is not the same as freshly tilled earth,” says Donna.

“Or the woods on a winter day,” says Kristie. “Or a dish of oatmeal.”

“Or mixed nuts.”

“Her hair was a box of light and dark chocolates,” says Suzanne.

“A
medley
of light and dark chocolates,” says Ana.

“A medley of milk chocolate and dark,” says Veronique.

“What if you said her hair was a Whitman’s Sampler? What would you be saying about her?”

“Old-fashioned and delicious,” says Kristie.

“And boring,” says Diana.

Wordsworth quoted Coleridge as saying that every poet must create the taste by which he is relished. The same is true of teachers. I really don’t want my students to write as I do, but I want them to think about writing as I do. In them I am consciously creating a certain taste for what I believe constitutes skillful and effective writing. I want them to be both clear and wild in their work. The hammer descends on the nail. The nail is driven deep into the wood. And the wood sings.

Chapter 4
Memory and Dreams

K
ristie comes to office hours to ask me to write recommendations for her. She is applying to Ph.D programs in English. “Why, for God’s sake?”

“So I can grow up to be just like you,” she says.

She has landed an assistant teaching position at a local community college, which, in the current market, wasn’t easy. “First thing I teach my students is about throat-clearing,” she says. Amazing, the influence of teachers. I use a little phrase to make a point. Kristie tells it to her students, one of whom may become a teacher of writing, and tell others. “A ripple widening from a single stone,” wrote Theodore Roethke, “winding around the waters of the world.” Or, as one of the James boys put it—William or Henry, I can’t recall which—“a teacher can never tell where his influence stops.”

The teaching of writing is like publishing something you write. You come up with an idea, and out it goes. Only with teaching you don’t get first and second “passes,” a publisher’s term for proofs you can have second thoughts about and correct. You need to be as careful with what you say as a teacher as you are as a writer—maybe more careful, because as soon as you go public with your words, your students will blow them about like rumors. What I teach my students about writing may become writing. I try not to overthink this, because the burden of competence is daunting.

Like Kristie, I am but one teacher who has had a few memorable teachers. Yet I have spread their thoughts and inventions abroad like a town crier. And I have learned over the years that my students have taken those same thoughts and inventions and have done as I have done. For my Modern Poetry course, the students’ assignment is to produce an anthology of poems. I put some forty recently published books of poems by contemporary poets on reserve in the university library. Throughout the term, along with our discussions in class of established modern poets—Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, William Empson, Margaret Atwood, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Graves, and the like—I ask the students to read the forty new books, which we do not discuss in class, and select ten poems from different authors for their anthologies. Then I ask them to write a ten-page introduction explaining their choices. By the end of the course they have created a little book that speaks for their taste. It is a wonderful assignment, and not my own. I took it from John L. Sweeney, curator of the Woodbury Poetry Room at Harvard—a brilliant, courtly teacher who looked like the actor Edmund Gwen, and whose Modern Poetry class I lucked into when I was a first-year graduate student. Jack Sweeney and his wife Màire retired to County Clare in Ireland, and have long since died. But this idea of his lives—such a good way to develop independent discrimination in poetry.

Another thing Jack Sweeney did which I also try to imitate: he found something valuable in every comment students made, no matter how far off the mark it might be. I’m not as consistently good at this as Jack was, but I’m aware of its warming effect on a classroom. If you give every student the idea that his answer can never be entirely wrong, it makes him feel part of the group enterprise. We’re all in the same leaky boat in a writing class. No one, the teacher included, is ever completely right anyway. Jack used to say: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” in response to a comment that might as well have claimed that black was white and up was down. “Right!” he’d say, and then very slowly, like a weaver, proceed to spin gold out of poppycock.

After Kristie leaves, I look at my students’ short stories one more time before the class moves on to essays. I do this for a couple of reasons. The first is simply to check if I was wrong about something the first time round. It happens. I can get so caught up in verbal errors, or in my own definition of what constitutes good writing, I sometimes fail to catch something new. I miss the larger picture. I’m not sure I would have recognized Donald Barthelme as the writer he was. Or Amy Hempel. I’m pretty sure I would have told Michael Chabon to calm down and limit his exhibitions of learning, so that the reader might feel something other than dazzle. Right or wrong as these judgments might have been, they would have been deadly to young writers who were trying to write with a difference. So I reread my students’ work in which I have found this fault or that, to see if I was looking at too many trees, too close up.

Then, too, I like to descend on a piece of work like an octopus, tentacles stretching to clasp as many conclusions as possible. In a first reading I may see strains of mythology running through the text. In another reading I may see the story as a morality play. Or I may dwell on the logic of the piece, and read it as a science paper. It pleases me to change my mind this way—not to demonstrate my agility, but rather to show how many interpretations are available to a student’s work of which they remain gloriously unconscious. “You meant this ambiguity, did you not?” I’ll ask Donna or Jasmine. And before they deny any such intent, I’ll say, “Of course you meant it. Whenever anyone discovers something brilliant in your work, you meant it.”

The main reason I reread their work has to do with the way they think of themselves. The other night, Helen Simonson, a graduate of our program, gave a reading from her novel
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
, which has become a great critical and commercial success. Helen was my student many years ago, and because she had a family to tend to, it took her all those years to finish her book. Before proceeding to read, she told the audience that what she cherished most about our MFA writing program is that the teachers made her feel like a colleague while she was becoming one. In that, she offered the best reason for rereading the students’ work. I simply want to show them that I think enough of them to dwell on what they write. All the teachers in our program do the same. Bob Reeves, who shapes and leads the program, has done many remarkable things, but none more useful than this—to encourage us to make the students feel alive and significant in a world that tells them they don’t count. A student in a novella class I taught a while back said to me, with a sort of wonder, “How do you remember all our stories? You seem to recall every character, every detail.” I may seem to, but after a semester is over, I rarely remember most of the things written for a particular class. For the time I am teaching them, however, I want the students to feel that their work is the most important thing on earth. When a few of them become real writers, they will know the deep abiding pleasure of hearing a stranger quote a line of theirs. I like to give them a foretaste of that.

“How many novelists can you name?” I ask the group at our seventh meeting. It is endless March, the heart of the bleak season on eastern Long Island. Only the lights from the college buildings, blazing in the dark, suggest life. “How many novelists can you name?” Some of them are counting on their fingers.

“Twenty,” says Inur.

“Oh, you can name many more than that. Don’t you think you could name at least fifty?”

“I suppose,” she says.

“A thousand,” said Diana, full of mischief.

“Go ahead, Diana,” says George. “And do it alphabetically.”

“Aaron Aardvark,” says Diana. “The great novelist of the Antilles.”

“Abyssinia,” Jasmine corrects her.

“While we’re waiting for Diana’s novelists beginning with B, how many essayists can you name?”

“You,” says Kristie.

“That’s one. The last shall be first. Name another essayist.”

“Bacon,” says Sven.

“That’s two.” A long silence follows.

“Emerson,” says Suzanne.

“And his delightful walking companion, Thoreau,” says Diana.

“So we’re up to four, if you still count me, and I wouldn’t. But I
would
count Montaigne. And Orwell. And G. K. Chesterson—you should read Chesterson’s ‘A Piece of Chalk.’ James Baldwin wrote some remarkable essays. Mary McCarthy, too. And Annie Dillard. And let’s throw in Twain. We’re up to a whopping dozen. My little point is that you can hardly name a dozen essayists in all of history, not because there weren’t a dozen, but rather because the essay is the weak sister of genres.”

“But I like essays,” says Jasmine.

“So do I. It’s just that if you had to be locked away with one piece of writing as your company, it probably would not be an essay.”

“Why is that?” Robert asks. “Because the other forms are livelier?”

“Beerbohm is pretty lively,” says George.

“But not like
Dr. Zhivago
, or
The Tempest
, or anything by Yeats,” says Robert.

What we’re saying about essays is true, but you can still approach them in ways that are fun for the students. In a course I teach exclusively on the personal essay, I have the students write essays in the form of a menu, a kiss-off letter, a school song, a stand-up comic routine, and a will and testament. “Let’s get down to cases. What is an essay?”

“It’s not a short story,” says George. “We’ve been over that—how an essay deals with something that really happened.”

“Oh, please let’s not get into that again,” says Suzanne, referring to a discussion that occurred at our third meeting in anticipation of their writing their personal essays. “I didn’t get the distinction the first time, and I won’t get it now. I just know an essay and a short story when I see one. Can’t we leave it at that? For once?” Everyone laughs.

“You know, George, I used to feel sorry for Suzie, married to you. Now I’m beginning to see your side of the story.”

“Of the essay,” says Suzanne.

“It’s not a column, is it?” asks Inur.

“No, it is not. And you’re smart to bring that up. Because people often call newspaper columns essays. They’re not essays. Picture an actual column, an architectural column—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. Remember them? A column in a magazine or a newspaper reads from top to bottom the way you might look at a stone column. It proceeds downward from its topic sentence, and you read it in a straight, unswerving line to its conclusion. There are no detours, no digressions. But an essay requires digressions, depends on them for total effect. A digression in an essay is like a riff in a blues song. It flies off from the basic theme or tune and then when it has created something wonderful out of itself, it returns to base, which in turn feels changed, heightened, because of the digression.”

“Like comic relief,” says Donna.

“Precisely like comic relief. Imagine
King Lear
without the Fool. At first you think, what’s this Fool sticking his Fool’s nose into the play? Then you see the play cannot go on without him. In a way, it’s the digression of the Fool that makes
Lear
tragic.”

I ask if they recall the scene in
The Catcher in the Rye
where Holden attends a speech class. The teacher tells the kids to yell, “Digression! Digression!” whenever a student speaker wanders from his main topic. “What’s Salinger saying here?”

“That digressions are the only interesting parts,” says George. In the novel he is working on, the hero’s name is Holden.

“But you can’t just digress and digress,” says Ana. “You’ll lose the thread. You’ll fly off into space.”

“Also like the blues,” says Kristie. “You can go away from the tune for just so long, but no longer. Otherwise you’ll forget the tune. So will the listener. So will the reader.” My thumbs go up again.

“Whatever the subject, we always seem to come around to denigrating journalism,” says Nina. “That is,
you
do.”

“I know. And I’d be ashamed of myself if I were capable of human feelings. And in fact I admire lots of journalists. But what they do is not what writers do. As you have already discovered, there’s a mystery to the act of writing. You write, yet you don’t always understand what you’ve written. And you’re not always understood. And you’re never fully understood. And this is a good thing—dwelling in and creating mysteries. But in a column, or an editorial, or a news article, you
must
be understood, clearly and completely. Your words convey a subject. They are
about
something. In real writing the words drift away from the subject. Journalism is communication. It delivers information, even in the form of ideas. If you only do that, you’re not writing.”

“But don’t you think writers need to be in touch with the world?” asks Robert.

I tell him I do think so, but that writers have their own way of being in touch. When Richard Wright wrote
Native Son
, he was certainly in touch with the world of racism, but what gives the book its lasting power is that it is a work of art, and not a polemic. The fact that Bigger Thomas semi-accidentally suffocates the Dalton girl makes him a target for all the categorical hatreds of the time. But when he murders his girlfriend and throws her down a shaft, he becomes a willing killer, and thus oddly more human. James Baldwin took Wright to task for his later books that were nakedly political, because they were too much in touch with the times, and they surrendered to them. The healthiest relationship between a writer and his world is a vague one, not tethered to specific incidents or specific causes, but rather one that uses those specifics to disclose an abstract truth. Pure thought is contaminated by the news, and by history, too. The real writer uses history only as a moral reminder. He is in touch with the world in his heart. And the world of events is of no greater or lesser inspiration to him than the wings of a katydid.