Posts Tagged ‘Vladimir Nabokov’
Breaking the silence
On Saturday, I participated in an event at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans with the authors Alex White (A Big Ship At the Edge of the Universe), Tessa Gratton (The Queens of Innis Lear), and Robert Jackson Bennett (Foundryside). It went fine—I signed books, met some interesting people, and had the chance to speak to librarians about Astounding, which is why I was there in the first place. I had also been told that I should talk about a book that I had recently read, but because of a miscommunication, the other writers on the panel never got the message, so the idea was quietly dropped. This wasn’t a serious problem, but it deprived me of the chance to recommend the title that I’d selected, which I feel comfortable describing as the most interesting book that I’ve read in at least two or three years. It isn’t about science fiction, but about the art of biography, which can be a form of speculative fiction in itself. As regular readers of this blog know, I stumbled into the role of a biographer almost by accident, and ever since, I’ve been seeking advice on the subject wherever I can find it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that biographers are eager to speak about their art and struggles, and that they’ll sometimes overshare at moments when they should be fading into the background. (I have a sneaking fondness for books like The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry and Anthony Burgess by Roger Lewis, in which the biographer smuggles himself into the life of his subject, even if I can’t defend it. And James Atlas recently published an entire book, The Shadow in the Garden, mostly as an excuse to air his grievances about the reception of his biography of Saul Bellow.) But it wasn’t until recently that I found a book that captured everything that I had been feeling and thinking, along with so much else.
The book is The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm, which was originally published in 1994. I think it’s a masterpiece—it’s one of the best nonfiction books that I’ve ever read of any kind—and it instantly elevated Malcolm, whom I’ve long respected, into the pantheon of my intellectual heroes. I’ve read a lot of her work in The New Yorker, of course, and I greatly admired her books Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives. (The former includes a passage about the history of psychoanalysis that I find so insightful that I’ve quoted it here no fewer than three times.) But The Silent Woman is on another level entirely. On the surface, it’s a close reading of all the biographies that have been written by others about Plath and Hughes, but as you read it, it unfolds into a work of fiendish complexity that operates on multiple planes at once. It’s a fascinating—and gossipy—consideration of Plath and Hughes themselves; an account of Malcolm’s own investigation of some of the figures on the sidelines; a meditation on biographical truth; and a fantastically involving reading experience. Malcolm has a knack for crafting a phrase or analogy that can change the way you think about a subject forever. Writing about the appearance of the first collection of Plath’s letters, for instance, she uses an image that reminds me of the moment in certain movies when the screen suddenly widens into Cinemascope size:
Before the publication of Letters Home, the Plath legend was brief and contained, a taut, austere stage drama set in a few bleak, sparsely furnished rooms…Now the legend opened out, to become a vast, sprawling movie-novel filmed on sets of the most consummate and particularized realism: period clothing, furniture, and kitchen appliances; real food; a cast of characters headed by a Doris Dayish Plath (a tall Doris Day who “wrote”) and a Laurence Olivier-Heathcliffish Hughes.
The result is as twisty as Nabokov’s Pale Fire, but even better, I think, because it doesn’t wear its cleverness on its sleeve. Instead, it subtly ensnares you, and you end up feeling—or at least I did—that you’re somehow implicated in the story yourself. I read the first half online, in the archive of The New Yorker, and as soon as I realized how special it was, I checked out the hardcover from the library. Once I was done, I knew that this was a book that I had to own, so I picked up a used copy of the paperback at Open Books in Chicago. I leafed through it occasionally afterward, and I even lent it to my wife to read, but I didn’t look at it too closely. As a result, it wasn’t until I brought it last weekend to New Orleans that I realized that it included a new afterword. Unlike many books, it didn’t advertise the presence of any additional material, and it isn’t mentioned on the copyright page, which made it seem like a secret message straight out of Dictionary of the Khazars. It’s also a confession. In the original edition, Malcolm states that Ted Hughes decided to posthumously release Plath’s novel The Bell Jar in America because he needed money to buy a second home. After the book was published, Malcolm reveals in the afterword, Hughes wrote to her to say that this was incorrect:
One part of your narrative is not quite right…You quote my letter to [Plath’s mother] Aurelia in which I ask her how she feels about our publishing The Bell Jar in the U.S. That was early 1970; I wanted cash to buy a house…When Aurelia wrote back and made her feelings clear, even though she said the decision to publish or not rested with me, I dropped my idea of buying the house. My letter reassuring her is evidently not in the archive you saw (or obviously your account would be different).
Before I get to Malcolm’s response to Hughes, who is politely but firmly pointing out a possible mistake, I should mention my own situation. Yesterday, I delivered the final set of corrections to Astounding. In the process, I’ve checked as much of the book as I can against my primary sources, and I’ve found a few small mistakes—mistyped dates, minor transcription errors—that I’m glad to have caught at this stage. But it means that I’m very conscious of how it feels to be a writer who learns that something in his or her book might be wrong. As for Malcolm, she wrote back to Hughes, saying that she checked her notes from the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington:
In 1971, Aurelia made an annotation on your letter of March 24, 1970. She wrote, in tiny handwriting, “’71—children said this was a horrible house’ and they didn’t want to live there. Ted did send me $10,000 from the royalties (I protested the publication, which Sylvia would not have allowed) and deposited [illegible] in accounts for Frieda and Nick—Ted [illegible] bought the property!!!” Not knowing anything to the contrary, I took Aurelia at her word.
Malcolm and Hughes spoke on the phone to straighten out the misunderstanding, and everything seemed fine. But on the very last page of the book, Malcolm slips in the literary equivalent of a post-credits scene that changes everything that we thought we knew:
The next morning I awoke with one of those inklings by which detective fiction is regularly fueled. I telephoned the Lilly Library again and asked the librarian if she would read me Aurelia Plath’s annotation of Hughes’s letter of March 24, 1970—I was especially interested in a word that I had found illegible when I took notes at the library in 1991. Perhaps she could make it out? She said she would try. When she reached the relevant sentence, she paused for a suspenseful moment of effort. Then she read—as I felt certain she would—“Ted never bought the property.”
Quote of the Day
I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
Quote of the Day
[Fred Astaire] is transcendent. When he dances a question proposes itself: what if a body moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical question, for no bodies move like Astaire, no, we only move like him in our dreams…He is “poetry in motion.” His movements are so removed from ours that he sets a limit on our own ambitions. Nobody hopes or expects to dances like Astaire, just as nobody really expects to write like Nabokov.
The back matter
“Annotation may seem a mindless and mechanical task,” Louis Menand wrote a few years ago in The New Yorker. “In fact, it calls both for superb fine-motor skills and for adherence to the most exiguous formal demands.” Like most other aspects of writing, it can be all these things at once: mindless and an exercise of meticulous skill, mechanical and formally challenging. I’ve been working on the notes for Astounding for the last week and a half, and although I was initially dreading it, the task has turned out to be weirdly absorbing, in the way that any activity that requires repetitive motion but also continuous mild engagement can amount to a kind of hypnotism. The current draft has about two thousand notes, and I’m roughly three quarters of the way through. So far, the process has been relatively painless, although I’ve naturally tended to postpone the tricker ones for later, which means that I’ll end up with a big stack of problem cases to work through at the end. (My plan is to focus on notes exclusively for two weeks, then address the leftovers at odd moments until the book is due in December.) In the meantime, I’m spending hours every day organizing notes, which feels like a temporary career change. They live in their own Word file, like an independent work in themselves, and the fact that they’ll be bundled together as endnotes, rather than footnotes, encourages me to see them as a kind of bonus volume attached to the first, like a vestigial twin that clings to the book like a withered but still vigorous version of its larger sibling.
When you spend weeks at a time on your notes, you end up with strong opinions about how they should be presented. I don’t like numbered endnotes, mostly because the numeric superscripts disrupt the text, and it can frustrating to match them up with the back matter when you’re looking for one in particular. (When I read Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, I found myself distracted by his determination to provide a numbered footnote for seemingly every factual statement, from the date of the Industrial Revolution to the source of the phrase “nothing new under the sun,” and that’s just the first couple of pages. Part of the art of notation is knowing what information you can leave out, and no two writers will come to exactly the same conclusions.) I prefer the keyword system, in which notes are linked to their referent in the body of the book by the page number and a snippet of text. This can lead to a telegraphic, even poetic summary of the contents when you run your eye down the left margin of the page, as in the section of my book about L. Ron Hubbard in the early sixties: “Of course Scientology,” “If President Kennedy did grant me an audience,” “Things go well,” “[Hubbard] chases able people away,” “intellectual garbage,” “Some of [Hubbard’s] claims,” “It is carefully arranged,” “very space opera.” They don’t thrust themselves on your attention until you need them, but when you do, they’re right there. These days, it’s increasingly common for the notes to be provided online, and I can’t guarantee that mine won’t be. But I hope that they’ll take their proper place at the end, where they’ll live unnoticed until readers realize that their book includes the original bonus feature.
The notion that endnotes can take on a life of their own is one that novelists from Nabokov to David Foster Wallace have brilliantly exploited. When reading Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the first thing that strikes most readers, aside from its sheer size, is its back matter, which takes up close to a hundred pages of closely printed notes at the end of the book. Most of us probably wish that the notes were a little more accessible, as did Dave Eggers, who observes of his first experience reading it: “It was frustrating that the footnotes were at the end of the book, rather than at the bottom of the page.” Yet this wasn’t an accident. As D.T. Max recounts in his fascinating profile of Wallace:
In Bloomington, Wallace struggled with the size of his book. He hit upon the idea of endnotes to shorten it. In April, 1994, he presented the idea to [editor Michael] Pietsch…He explained that endnotes “allow…me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns…5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.” He also said, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.” Pietsch countered with an offer of footnotes, which readers would find less cumbersome, but eventually agreed.
What’s particularly interesting here is that the endnotes physically shrink the size of Infinite Jest—simply because they’re set in smaller type—while also increasing how long it takes the diligent reader to finish it. Notes allow a writer to play games not just with space, but with time. (This is true even of the most boring kind of scholarly note, which amounts to a form of postponement, allowing readers to engage with it at their leisure, or even never.) In a more recent piece in The New Yorker, Nathan Heller offers a defense of notes in their proper place at the end of the book:
Many readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the main text, but they’re too raw to digest, and often stiff. That’s partly true…Still, the back matter is not simply a garnish. Indexes open a text up. Notes are often integral to meaning, and, occasionally, they’re beautiful, too.
An index turns the book into an object that can be read across multiple dimensions, while notes are a set of tendrils that bind the text to the world, in Robert Frost’s words, “by countless silken ties of love and thought.” As Heller writes of his youthful job at an academic press: “My first responsibility there was proofreading the back matter of books…The tasks were modest, but those of us who carried them out felt that we were doing holy work. We were taking something intricate and powerful and giving it a final polish. I still believe in that refinement.” And so should we.
Cutty Sark and the semicolon
Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on December 22, 2015.
In an interview that was first published in The Paris Review, the novelist Herbert Gold asked Vladimir Nabokov if an editor had ever offered him any useful advice. This is what Nabokov said in response:
By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”
I’ve always adored that thunderous stet, which tells us so much about Nabokov and his imperious resistance to being edited by anybody. Today, however, I’m more interested in the previous sentence. A semicolon, as Nabokov puts it, can indeed be a point of honor. Nabokov was perhaps the most painstaking of all modern writers, and it’s no surprise that the same perfectionism that produced such conceptual and structural marvels as Lolita and Pale Fire would filter down to the smallest details. But I imagine that even ordinary authors can relate to how a single punctuation mark in a manuscript can start to loom as large as the finger of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
And there’s something about the semicolon that seems to inspire tussles between writers and their editors—or at least allows it to stand as a useful symbol of the battles that can occur during the editorial process. Here’s an excerpt from a piece by Charles McGrath in The New York Times Magazine about the relationship between Robert Caro, author of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb:
“You know that insane old expression, ‘The quality of his defect is the defect of his quality,’ or something like that?” Gottlieb asked me. “That’s really true of Bob. What makes him such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.”
It’s possible that the semicolon keeps cropping up in such stories because its inherent ambiguity lends itself to disagreement. As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” And I’ve more or less eliminated semicolons from my own work for much the same reason.
But the larger question here is why artists fixate on things that even the most attentive reader would pass over without noticing. On one level, you could take a fight over a semicolon as an illustration of the way that the creative act—in which the artist is immersed in the work for months on end—tends to turn mountains into molehills. Here’s one of my favorite stories about the making of Raging Bull:
One night, when the filmmakers were right up against the deadline to make their release date, they were working on a nothing little shot that takes place in a nightclub, where a minor character turns to the bartender and orders a Cutty Sark. “I can’t hear what he’s saying,” [Martin Scorsese] said. Fiddling ensued—extensive fiddling—without satisfying him. [Producer Irwin] Winkler, who was present, finally deemed one result good enough and pointed out that messengers were standing by to hand-carry release prints to the few theaters where the picture was about to premiere. At which point, Scorsese snapped. “I want my name taken off the picture,” he cried—which bespeaks his devotion to detail. It also bespeaks his exhaustion at the end of Raging Bull, not to mention the craziness that so often overtakes movies as they wind down. Needless to say, he was eventually placated. And you can more or less hear the line in the finished print.
And you could argue that this kind of microscopic attention is the only thing that can lead to a work that succeeds on the largest possible scale.
But there’s yet another story that gets closer to truth. In Existential Errands, Norman Mailer describes a bad period in his life—shortly after he was jailed for stabbing his second wife Adele—in which he found himself descending into alcoholism and unable to work. His only source of consolation were the scraps of paper, “little crossed communications from some wistful outpost of my mind,” that he would find in his jacket pocket after a drunken night. Mailer writes of these poems:
I would go to work, however, on my scraps of paper. They were all I had for work. I would rewrite them carefully, printing in longhand and ink, and I would spend hours whenever there was time going over these little poems…And since I wasn’t doing anything else very well in those days, I worked the poems over every chance I had. Sometimes a working day would go by, and I might put a space between two lines and remove a word. Maybe I was mending.
Which just reminds us that a seemingly minuscule change can be the result of a prolonged confrontation with the work as a whole. You can’t obsess over a semicolon without immersing yourself in the words around it, and there are times when you need such a focal point to structure your engagement with the rest. It’s a little like what is called a lakshya in yoga: the tiny spot on the body or in the mind on which you concentrate while meditating. In practice, the lakshya can be anything or nothing, but without it, your attention tends to drift. In art, it can be a semicolon, a word, or a line about Cutty Sark. It may not be much in itself. But when you need to tether yourself to something, even a semicolon can be a lifeline.
The act of noticing
Note: I’m on vacation this week, so I’ll be republishing a few of my favorite posts from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on September 24, 2014.
Yesterday, while playing with my daughter at the park, I found myself oddly fascinated by the sight of a landscaping crew that was taking down a tree across the street. It’s the kind of scene you encounter on a regular basis in suburbia, but I wound up watching with unusual attention, mostly because I didn’t have much else to do. (I wasn’t alone, either. Any kind of construction work amounts to the greatest show on earth for toddlers, and there ended up being a line of tiny spectators peering through the fence.) Maybe because I’ve been in a novelistic state of mind recently, I focused on details that I’d never noticed before. There’s the way a severed tree limb dangles from the end of the crane almost exactly like a hanged man, as Eco describes it in Foucault’s Pendulum, with its heavy base tracing a second, smaller circle in the air. I noted how a chainsaw in action sprays a fan of fine particles behind it, like a peacock’s tail. And when the woodchipper shoots chips into the back of the truck, a cloud of light golden dust forms above the container, like the soul of the tree ascending.
As I watched, I had the inevitable thought: I should put this into a story. Unfortunately, nothing I’m writing at the moment includes a landscaping scene, and the easiest way to incorporate it would be through some kind of elaborate metaphor, as we often see, at its finest, in Proust. (“As he listened to her words, he found himself reminded of a landscaping crew he had once seen…”) But it made me reflect both on the act of noticing and on the role it plays, or doesn’t, in my own fiction. Most of the time, when I’m writing a story, I’m following the dictates of a carefully constructed plot, and I’ll find myself dealing with a building or a city scene that has imposed itself by necessity on the action: my characters end up at a hospital or a police station, and I strain to find a way to evoke it in a few economical lines that haven’t been written a million times before. Occasionally, this strikes me as a backward way of working. It would be better, it seems, to build the story around locations and situations that I already know I can describe—or which caught my attention in the way that landscaping crew did—rather than scrambling to push out something original under pressure.
In fact, that’s the way a lot of novelists work, particularly on the literary end. One of the striking trends in contemporary fiction is how so much of it doubles as reportage, with miniature New Yorker pieces buried like bonbons within the larger story. This isn’t exactly new: writers from Nabokov to Updike have filled their novels with set pieces that serve, in James Wood’s memorable phrase, as “propaganda on behalf of good noticing.” What sets more recent novels apart is how undigested some of it seems. At times, you can feel the narrative pausing for a page or two as the writer—invariably a talented one, or else these sections wouldn’t survive the editorial process—serves up a chunk of journalistic observation. As Norman Mailer writes, rather unkindly, of Jonathan Franzen:
Everything of novelistic use to him that came up on the Internet seems to have bypassed the higher reaches of his imagination—it is as if he offers us more human experience than he has literally mastered, and this is obvious when we come upon his set pieces on gourmet restaurants or giant cruise ships or modern Lithuania in disarray. Such sections read like first-rate magazine pieces, but no better—they stick to the surface.
This isn’t entirely fair to Franzen, a superb noticer who creates vivid characters even as he auditions for our admiration. But I thought of this again after finishing Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. It’s a novel I’d wanted to read for years, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, while remaining conscious of its constant shifts into what amounts to nonfiction: beautifully written and reported essays on New York, London, the Hague, India, cricket, and just about everything else. It’s a gorgeous book, but it ends up feeling more like a collection of lovingly burnished parts than a cohesive whole, and its acts of noticing occasionally interfere with its ability to invent real interactions for its characters. It was Updike himself, I think, who warned writers against mining their journals for material, and you can see why: it encourages a sort of novelistic bricolage rather than an organic discovery of the action, and the best approach lies somewhere in the middle. And there’s more than one way of telling a story. As I was studying the landscaping crew at the park, my daughter was engaged in a narrative of her own: she ran into her friend Elise, played on the seesaw, and then had to leave abruptly for a diaper change. Or, as Beatrix put it, when I asked about her day: “Park. Elyse. Say hi. Seesaw. Poop. Go home.” And I don’t think I can do better than that.
Looking for quarters
In his odd, unclassifiable book Prometheus Rising, the writer Robert Anton Wilson, who has long been one of my intellectual heroes, proposes the following experiment:
1. Visualize a quarter vividly, and imagine vividly that you are going to find the quarter on the street. Then, look for the quarter every time you take a walk, meanwhile continuing to visualize it. See how long it takes you to find the quarter.
2. Explain the above experiment by the hypothesis of “selective attention”—that is, believe there are lots of lost quarters everywhere and you were bound to find one by continually looking. Go looking for a second quarter.
3. Explain the experiment by the alternative “mystical” hypothesis that “mind controls everything.” Believe that you made the quarter manifest in this universe. Go looking for a second quarter.
Wilson closes, crucially, by asking the reader to compare how long it takes to find the second quarter using either of the two hypotheses. And while I suspect that most of us instinctively come down in favor of one or the other model of reality, the whole point of Wilson’s exercise is to cultivate a healthy skepticism even—or especially—about what seems the most obvious.
Because there’s another, very similar exercise that’s much harder to dismiss. It involves going out into the world and looking, not for quarters, but ideas—and in particular for the kind of ideas that a writer needs when working on a story, which I think we can agree are worth more than a quarter apiece. These can range from a premise for an entire novel to solutions to specific narrative problems to self-contained observations of the kind that novelists use to fill out the fictional dream. Most writers don’t leave the house each day in the state of active visualization that Wilson describes, but what actually happens isn’t all that different: when you’re working on a writing project, your attentiveness to everything is subtly heightened, and you find yourself stumbling across useful material more often than seems explicable by chance. (A writer’s life can be seen as an ongoing experiment in observation: you alternate between stretches of work and inactivity, and you quickly become aware of the difference this makes in how you see the world.) You’ll frequently come across a detail or combination of ideas, totally by accident, that fits the story you’re developing so perfectly that it seems as if the universe is conspiring in your favor. There isn’t a writer who hasn’t felt this. And when we ask ourselves the same question that Wilson poses about those quarters, we find that the answer is harder to pin down. Is this a case of selective attention, with the writer finding more ideas because he or she is continually looking? Or has the writer’s mind somehow made these concepts manifest in the world?
I don’t think that the answer to this question is at all clear—which, I might add, is the secret moral behind Wilson’s exercise with the quarters. You could argue that whatever a writer puts into a story is something that already exists, if the result is meant to be an accurate reflection of human life, and that a writer’s ability lies in how fluently he or she can translate these common impressions into words. Graham Greene, whom I quoted here earlier this morning, was famously annoyed by reviewers who described his works as taking place in an imaginary “Greeneland,” and he countered: “They call it Greeneland, as though it bore no relation to the real world. And yet, one is simply trying to describe the real world as accurately as one sees it.” Which is true enough. But it also feels like a mistake to think of a novelist merely as a sedate repackager of sensory data. This applies to professional noticers like Nabokov or Updike, who seem to be willing quarters into existence that can be collected and spent as cold hard cash, but also to writers like Tolstoy, whose appeal rests on the illusion that he’s delivering reality to the reader with a minimum of authorial interference. There’s an element of active intervention even in fiction that defines itself as reportage, and it gets even stickier when you venture into nonfiction, which depends on the discovery, selection, and arrangement of details that no one else has collated before. It’s critical, even central, to nonfiction’s authority to imply that those quarters were there on the ground all along, but it often seems as if the writer has conjured them out of thin air. Which doesn’t mean that they aren’t legal tender.
All I know is that you find more ideas in certain states of mind than in others, which is a good argument for having a project brewing at all times. In fact, when writers are told that they should write every day, it’s less about the number of words produced or the habit of working—which are undeniably important in themselves—than about cultivating an intensity of awareness that persists even when you aren’t at your desk. (Note that it’s unclear which way the causal arrow runs: you could argue that an inhumanly fertile writer like Updike produced so many stories because he was noticing things all the time, but you could also say, with equal plausibility, that he was noticing things all the time because he was always writing a story.) It might even be worthwhile to conduct an experiment of the kind that Wilson proposes, and to see which approach is more effective: the writer as a transparent eyeball, or as an active inventor of meaning. In practice, you often find yourself alternating between one mindset and the other, as if you were switching between views of a Necker cube, which is ultimately a strategy for keeping your sanity intact. One is about receptivity, the other about imposition, and you can run into trouble if you neglect either one. But it’s also worth remembering that ideas exist to be used. All too many aspiring writers end up with the equivalent of a big jar of coins that never gets taken to the bank, or with something like fairy gold, which leaves the owner with nothing but a handful of withered blossoms at dawn. It’s important to find all the quarters you can. But it’s also important to spend them.
Cutty Sark and the semicolon
In an interview that was first published in The Paris Review, the novelist Herbert Gold asked Vladimir Nabokov if an editor had ever offered him any useful advice. This is what Nabokov said in response:
By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”
I’ve always adored that thunderous stet, which tells us so much about Nabokov and his imperious resistance to being edited by anybody. Today, however, I’m more interested in the previous sentence. A semicolon, as Nabokov puts it, can indeed be a point of honor. Nabokov was perhaps the most painstaking of all modern writers, and it’s no surprise that the same perfectionism that produced such conceptual and structural marvels as Lolita and Pale Fire would filter down to the smallest details. But I imagine that most authors can relate to how a single punctuation mark in a manuscript can start to loom as large as the finger of God in the Sistine Chapel.
And there’s something about the semicolon that seems to inspire tussles between writers and their editors—or at least allows it to stand as a useful symbol of the battles that can occur during the editorial process. Here’s an excerpt from a piece by Charles McGrath in The New York Times Magazine about the relationship between Robert Caro, author of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb:
“You know that insane old expression, ‘The quality of his defect is the defect of his quality,’ or something like that?” Gottlieb asked me. “That’s really true of Bob. What makes him such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.”
It’s possible that the semicolon keeps cropping up in such stories because its inherent ambiguity lends itself to disagreement. As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” And I’ve more or less eliminated semicolons from my own work for much the same reason.
But the larger question here is why artists fixate on things that even the most attentive reader would pass over without noticing. On one level, you could take a fight over a semicolon as an illustration of the way that the creative act—in which the artist is immersed in the work for months on end—tends to turn mountains into molehills. Here’s one of my favorite stories about the making of Raging Bull:
One night, when the filmmakers were right up against the deadline to make their release date, they were working on a nothing little shot that takes place in a nightclub, where a minor character turns to the bartender and orders a Cutty Sark. “I can’t hear what he’s saying,” [Martin Scorsese] said. Fiddling ensued—extensive fiddling—without satisfying him. [Producer Irwin] Winkler, who was present, finally deemed one result good enough and pointed out that messengers were standing by to hand-carry release prints to the few theaters where the picture was about to premiere. At which point, Scorsese snapped. “I want my name taken off the picture,” he cried—which bespeaks his devotion to detail. It also bespeaks his exhaustion at the end of Raging Bull, not to mention the craziness that so often overtakes movies as they wind down. Needless to say, he was eventually placated. And you can more or less hear the line in the finished print.
And you could argue that this kind of microscopic attention is the only thing that can lead to a work that succeeds on the largest possible scale.
But there’s another story that gets closer to truth. In Existential Errands, Norman Mailer describes a bad period in his life—shortly after he was jailed for stabbing his second wife Adele—in which he found himself descending into alcoholism and unable to work. His only source of consolation were the scraps of paper, “little crossed communications from some wistful outpost of my mind,” that he would find in his jacket pocket after a drunken night. Mailer writes of these poems:
I would go to work, however, on my scraps of paper. They were all I had for work. I would rewrite them carefully, printing in longhand and ink, and I would spend hours whenever there was time going over these little poems…And since I wasn’t doing anything else very well in those days, I worked the poems over every chance I had. Sometimes a working day would go by, and I might put a space between two lines and remove a word. Maybe I was mending.
Which just reminds us that a seemingly minuscule change can be the result of a prolonged confrontation with the work as a whole. You can’t obsess over a semicolon without immersing yourself in the words around it, and there are times when you need such a focal point to structure your engagement with the rest. It’s a little like what is called a lakshya in yoga: the tiny spot on the body or in the mind on which you concentrate while meditating. In practice, the lakshya can be anything or nothing, but without it, your attention tends to drift. In art, it can be a semicolon, a word, or a line about Cutty Sark. It may not be much in itself. But when you need to tether yourself to something, even a semicolon can be a lifeline.
Masters of the earthworm, or the generalist’s dilemma
Over the past year or so, I’ve scaled back on the number of books I buy each month, mostly for reasons of shelf space. Every now and then, though, my eye will be caught by a sale or special event I can’t resist, which is how I ended up receiving a big carton last week from Better World Books. (As I’ve noted before, this is the best site for used books around, and a fantastic resource for filling in the gaps in your library.) The box contained what looks, at first, like a random assortment of titles: Strong Opinions, the aptly named collection of interviews and essays by Vladimir Nabokov; Art and Illusion by E.H. Gombrich, which was named one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the century by Modern Library; Cosmic Fishing, a short memoir by E.J. Applewhite about his collaboration with Buckminster Fuller on the book Synergetics; and best of all, Ernest Schwiebert’s magisterial two-volume Trout, which I’ve coveted for years. If it seems like a grab bag, that’s no accident: I really had my eye on Trout, which I ended up getting for half the price it goes for elsewhere, and the others were mostly there to fill out the order. But my choices here also say a lot about me and the kind of books and authors I find most appealing.
The most obvious common thread between all these books is that they lie somewhere at the intersection of art and science. Nabokov, of course, was an accomplished lepidopterist, and Strong Opinions concludes with a sampling of his scientific papers on butterflies. Art and Illusion is a work on the psychology of perception written by an art historian, and the back cover makes its intentions clear: “This book is directed to all who seek for a meeting ground between science and the humanities.” Fuller always occupied a peculiar position between that of engineer, crackpot, and mystic, and this comes through strongly through the eyes of his literary collaborator, who strikingly argues that Fuller’s primary vocation is that of a poet, and reveals that he briefly considered rewriting all of Synergetics in blank verse. And in Schwiebert’s hands, the humble trout becomes a lens through which he considers nearly all of human experience: in the first volume, he wears the hats of historian, literary critic, biologist, ecologist, and entomologist, and that’s before he even gets to the intricacies of rods, flies, and waders. As Schwiebert writes: “[Angling’s] skills are a perfect equilibrium between tradition, physical dexterity and grace, strength, logic, esthetics, our powers of observation, problem solving, perception, and the character of our experience and knowledge.”
In short, these are all books by or about generalists, original thinkers who understand that the divisions between categories of knowledge are porous, if not outright fictional, and who can draw freely on a wide range of disciplines. Yet these authors also share another, more subtle quality: a relentless focus on a single subject as a window onto all of the rest. Nabokov was as obsessed by his butterflies as Fuller was by the tetrahedron. Gombrich returns repeatedly to “the riddle of style,” or what it means when we say that we draw what we see, and Schwiebert, of course, loved trout. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any of them became generalists by accident; it takes a certain inborn temperament, and an inhuman degree of patience and curiosity, to even attempt such a comprehensive vision. But it’s no accident that all four of these men—and most of the generalists we know and remember—arrived at their expansive vistas through the narrowest of gates. Occasionally, a thinker with global ambitions will begin by deliberately constraining his or her focus, in a kind of apprenticeship or training ground: Darwin spent long eight years studying the cirripedes, a kind of barnacle, in what Thomas Henry Huxley called “a piece of critical self-discipline.” He knew that you need to go deep before you can go really wide.
And that hasn’t changed. The entomologist Edward O. Wilson recently published a book entitled The Meaning of Human Existence, which would seem insufferably grandiose if he hadn’t already proven himself with decades of laborious work on the ants and other social insects. When we think of the intellectuals we respect, nearly all are men and women who made fundamental contributions to a single, clearly defined field before moving on to others. That’s the generalist’s dilemma: it’s hard to think in an original way about everything until you know one thing well. Otherwise, you end up seeming like a dilettante or worse. I’m acutely aware of my own shortcomings here: I’ve spent all my life trying to be a generalist, to the point of becoming a writer so I had an excuse to poke into whatever subjects I like, but I’ve rarely had the patience to drill down deeply. And while I’m content with my choice, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone else. Hilaire Belloc once said that the best way for a writer to become famous was to concentrate on one subject, like the earthworm, for forty years: “When he is sixty, pilgrims will make a hollow path with their feet to the door of the world’s great authority on the earthworm. They will knock at his door and humbly beg to be allowed to see the Master of the Earthworm.” Belloc pointedly failed to take his own advice, but he has a point. We need to become masters of the earthworm before we become masters of the earth.
Quote of the Day
A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation.
—Vladimir Nabokov, on inspiration
The act of noticing
Yesterday, while playing with my daughter at the park, I found myself oddly fascinated by the sight of a landscaping crew that was taking down a tree across the street. It’s the kind of scene you encounter on a regular basis in suburbia, but I wound up watching with unusual attention, mostly because I didn’t have much else to do. (I wasn’t alone, either. Any kind of construction work amounts to the greatest show on earth for toddlers, and there ended up being a line of tiny spectators peering through the fence.) Maybe because I’ve been in a novelistic state of mind recently, I focused on details that I’d never noticed before. There’s the way a severed tree limb dangles from the end of the crane almost exactly like a hanged man, as Eco describes it in Foucault’s Pendulum, with its heavy base tracing a second, smaller circle in the air. I noted how a chainsaw in action sprays a fan of fine particles behind it, like a peacock’s tail. And when the woodchipper shoots chips into the back of the truck, a cloud of light golden dust forms above the container, like the soul of the tree ascending.
As I watched, I had the inevitable thought: I should put this into a story. Unfortunately, my current novel project doesn’t include a landscaping scene, and the easiest way to incorporate it would be through some kind of elaborate metaphor, as we often see, at its finest, in Proust. (“As he listened to her words, he found himself reminded of a landscaping crew he had once seen…”) But it made me reflect both on the act of noticing and on the role it plays, or doesn’t, in my own fiction. Most of the time, when I’m writing a story, I’m following the dictates of a carefully constructed plot, and I’ll find myself confronted by a building or a city scene that has imposed itself by necessity on the action: my characters end up at a hospital or a police station, and I strain to find a way of evoking it in a few economical lines that haven’t been written a million times before. Occasionally, this strikes me as a backward way of working. It would be better, it seems, to build the story around locations and situations that I already know I can describe—or which caught my attention in the way that landscaping crew did—rather than scrambling to push out something original under pressure.
In fact, that’s the way a lot of novelists work, particularly on the literary end. One of the striking trends in contemporary fiction is how so much of it doubles as reportage, with miniature New Yorker pieces buried like bonbons within the larger story. This isn’t exactly new: writers from Nabokov to Updike have filled their novels with set pieces that serve, in James Wood’s memorable phrase, as “propaganda on behalf of good noticing.” What sets more recent novels apart is how undigested some of it seems. At times, you can feel the narrative pausing for a page or two as the writer—invariably a talented one, or else these sections wouldn’t survive the editorial process—serves up a chunk of journalistic observation. As Norman Mailer writes, unkindly, of Jonathan Franzen:
Everything of novelistic use to him that came up on the Internet seems to have bypassed the higher reaches of his imagination—it is as if he offers us more human experience than he has literally mastered, and this is obvious when we come upon his set pieces on gourmet restaurants or giant cruise ships or modern Lithuania in disarray. Such sections read like first-rate magazine pieces, but no better—they stick to the surface.
This isn’t entirely fair to Franzen, a superb noticer who creates vivid characters even as he auditions for our admiration. But I thought of this again after finishing Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland this week. It’s a novel I’d wanted to read for years, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, while remaining conscious of its constant shifts into what amounts to nonfiction: beautifully written and reported essays on New York, London, the Hague, India, cricket, and just about everything else. It’s a gorgeous book, but it ends up feeling more like a collection of lovingly burnished parts than a cohesive whole, and its acts of noticing occasionally interfere with its ability to invent real interactions for its characters. It was Edmund Wilson, I think, who warned writers against mining their journals for material, and you can see why: it encourages a sort of novelistic bricolage rather than an organic discovery of the action, and the best approach lies somewhere in the middle. And there’s more than one way of telling a story. As I was studying the landscaping crew at the park, my daughter was engaged in a narrative of her own: she ran into her friend Elyse, played on the seesaw, and then had to leave abruptly for a diaper change. Or, as Beatrix put it, when I asked about her day: “Park. Elyse. Say hi. Seesaw. Poop. Go home.” And I don’t think I can do better than that.
Writing in hotel rooms
I got back yesterday from my brother’s wedding in Los Angeles, where I spent four nights with my wife and daughter at the excellent Omni Hotel. Along with a mountain of baby gear, I somewhat optimistically brought a few pages of notes for my novel, thinking that I’d have a chance to do a little work in my spare moments. Not surprisingly, that’s not how it worked out: staying in a hotel with a toddler presents enough of a challenge without trying to write at the same time. (We ended up stashing Beatrix’s travel crib in the bathroom, where she slept happily for most of the trip, much to the relief of her exhausted parents.) I felt a touch of regret at this, since I’ve always enjoyed working in hotels. Most recently, I vividly remember spending much of a trip to Las Vegas in my hotel room at Mandelay Bay, scribbling notes and trying frantically to think of a new title for my third novel, which my publisher had asked me to change. I wasn’t able to come up with much, and it was only while browsing at an airport bookstore on the way home that I finally hit upon the pleasing but relatively meaningless title Eternal Empire—although I still prefer The Scythian.
Writers, of course, have frequently used hotel rooms as places of work. Nabokov spent much of his itinerant life—and his summertime pursuit of butterflies—moving from one hotel to the next, spending his last fifteen years at the Montreux Palace in Switzerland. One particular stay, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, evidently served as a catalyst for the plot of Lolita, in which a pivotal scene takes place at a hotel called the Enchanted Hunters. (Thomas Mann, a writer for whom Nabokov had little respect, derived similar inspiration from his own hotel visits.) Maya Angelou rented a hotel room by the month in her hometown, where she worked every morning, lying across the bed, the sheets of which she insisted remain unchanged for the duration of her stay. Describing her routine to The Paris Review, Angelou gets close to the heart of why hotels are so conducive to certain kinds of creative thought:
I insist that all things are taken off the walls. I don’t want anything in there. I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything.
There’s a sense in which a hotel room occupies a unique place in the spectrum of the writer’s routine. Many authors can’t write away from a particular room or desk, to the point where some construct special writing shacks. Others prefer a particular lunch counter or restaurant, like The Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder, who had his favorite booth installed in his house after the coffee shop went out of business. And a select few take pride in being able to work anywhere. A hotel room represents a kind of compromise between these extremes. All hotel rooms are essentially the same, while remaining subtly different, so they provide a neutral setting for undistracted work while avoiding the boredom or monotony of the same unchanging space. Even now, when few of us write letters on hotel stationery, a writing desk and chair are still among the few standard furnishings of even the most modest of motel rooms. We may not get a chance to use the desk—I don’t think I even sat down at mine at the Omni for the four nights I spent there—but without it, the room would seem subliminally incomplete.
And there’s something fictive about a hotel room, which exists, like a short story, as a sort of simulacrum of real life. Nobody’s real house can or should look like this, although there are certainly people who spend much of their lives shaping their surroundings in imitation of what they’ve seen in hotels, from the towels to the robes to the sheets, just as many of us end up deriving our ideas about life from the books or movies we’ve experienced. Nabokov hints at this in a letter to Katharine and E.B. White, with a wonderful play on words that seems unintentional, although with Nabokov you never know: “I have no illusions about hotels in this hemisphere; they are for conventions, not for the individual.” By “conventions,” Nabokov means the gatherings of the “thousand tight salesmen” who descend on Lolita at the halfway point of the novel, but I’d prefer to focus on its alternate meaning. A hotel life is a conventional life, built up from a stranger’s idea of comfort or convenience, a vacant stage that we fill with our presences for a night or two. It’s a blank page. So it’s no surprise that those two areas of emptiness—and possibility—go together so well.
Bits of straw and fluff
All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to gather bits of straw and fluff, to eat pebbles…When I remember afterwards the force that made me jot down the correct names of things, or the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure…There comes a moment when I am informed from within that the entire structure is finished. All I have to do now is take it down in pencil or pen.
Life Itself and the art of the memoir
Over the weekend, I finally picked up a copy of Life Itself, the late Roger Ebert’s extraordinary memoir and valediction for one of the richest of recent American lives. I’m not sure why it took me so long to read it, but I suspect that it had something to do with my own resistance to Ebert’s shifting cultural role in his final years: as someone who grew up on his reviews—and basically learned how to read and think in the process—I liked to think of Ebert as more of a private friend. As the reaction to his illness and death made abundantly clear, though, that’s how he seemed to many of us. He was funny, accessible, unfailingly wise, and the last of the great figures from a golden age of journalism. Not surprisingly, his memoir is a delight, the first book in ages that I’ve been physically unable to put down. Ebert’s personality always came through in his reviews and essays, which amount to a disguised autobiography delivered over five decades, but here he speaks more candidly about the subjects he couldn’t discuss before: his alcoholism, his love life, his struggles with weight, and the curious business of being both a critic and a public figure with greater name recognition than many of the filmmakers he covered.
Life Itself is organized thematically, which allows me to skip from chapter to chapter in search of whatever tidbits I feel like reading about at the moment. There are juicy sections devoted to Ebert’s friendships and interactions with such directors as Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, and Russ Meyer, and an especially memorable chapter on Gene Siskel, all crammed with anecdotes, jokes, and memories. Ebert’s closing mediations on sickness, silence, and mortality are all the more moving because of the crowded eventfulness of the life that preceded it. And the way the memoir moves from one subject to the next, allowing the reader to browse with ease, creates a curious impression: it feels less like a book than a conversation, or even like the man himself, as if we’ve all been given the chance to hear Ebert’s voice on whatever we feel like talking about one last time. As far back as Montaigne, who concealed his autobiography beneath a series of seemingly disconnected reflections, readers and writers alike have known that an author lives most fully within a structure that makes that kind of interaction possible, allowing us to open happily to the middle and dive in—which, after all, is the way we experience the lives and minds of those around us.
When I look at the memoirs and autobiographies I’ve enjoyed and revisited the most, I find that most of them have this kind of thematic structure, so that the life becomes less a dry series of dates and events than a set of perspectives that allow us to regard the author from every angle. As Borges writes:
A history of a man’s dreams is not inconceivable; another, of all the organs of his body; another, on the mistakes he made; another, of all the moments when he thought about the Pyramids; another, of his dealings with the night and with the dawn.
Such a book, with each chapter devoted to a different inner history, would be much more readable than the staid chronological scheme favored by most biographers. (Borges continues: “One life of Poe consists of seven hundred octavo pages; the author, fascinated by changes of residence, barely manages one parenthesis for the Malestrom or the cosmogony of ‘Eureka.'”) And while this book can only be written by one person—its subject—that’s all the more reason to wish that more writers would take this approach when the time came to set down something meaningful about their lives.
My own short list of favorite memoirs, for instance, consists almost entirely of works with this sort of arrangement: Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, Self-Consciousness by John Updike, I, Asimov by you know who. (Curiously, one of my favorite autobiographies of all, Asimov’s earlier volumes In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt, takes the opposite approach, treating each minor event in the author’s life as if he had no knowledge of what was coming next. The fact that Asimov gets away with it—especially given that most of his life was spent at a writing desk—only speaks to his talents.) It’s perhaps no accident that all these books, like Ebert’s, are obsessed by the idea of mortality, as expressed in Nabokov’s opening lines: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Writing one’s memoirs, like writing of any kind, is an attempt to cheat death, or of ensuring that some fragment of our thoughts or personalities will survive us when we’re gone. And if you want to outlive yourself, the best way is to tell us what you thought about a few important things, as Douglas Hofstadter writes of his late friend Randy Read: “Perhaps these musings, dancing and sparking in the neurons of a few thousand readers out there, will keep alive, in scattered form, a tiny piece of his soul.”
“Karvonen surveyed the crowd…”
Note: This post is the nineteenth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 18. You can read the earlier installments here.)
On the short list of books that all writers should read at some point, two of the most interesting are Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature. Nabokov was the most formidably learned and technically skilled American novelist of the century, and for all his wit and playfulness, he can be a little daunting; as we speak, I’m working my way through Ada for the first time, and I’ve found myself repeatedly grateful for Brian Boyd’s excellent online annotations. The lectures, which were originally delivered at Wellesley and Cornell, present Nabokov at his most accessible—they were designed as a kind of oral performance, so they’re looser and less semantically dense than his written work, while still allowing his full intelligence and insight to shine through. (In particular, they’re a much better place to start with Nabokov as a critic than his commentary on Eugene Onegin, an insane work of scholarship that I love for other reasons.) And because Nabokov was one of the few modern writers both willing and qualified to go head to head with the likes of Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka, it affords a unique glimpse into a first-rate creative mind as it grapples with its peers.
If there’s one theme that recurs throughout these lectures, it’s the importance of precise visualization by both the author and the reader. Nabokov’s original notes are filled with sketches, diagrams, and delicately rendered maps, all meant to encourage us to picture the settings, costumes, and incidental furniture of a story as accurately as possible. Writing about Anna Karenina’s railway journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg, for instance, he begins: “To comprehend certain important aspects of Anna’s night journey, the reader should clearly visualize the following arrangement…” He follows this with a detailed breakdown of the sleeping car’s seats, layout, and occupants, complete with a floor plan and a little illustration of the candle lantern that Anna uses as a reading lamp. Some of this is undoubtedly due to Nabokov’s own natural obsessiveness, as well as to his frustration with translators, like those of Onegin, who render Russian texts into English without any clear idea of what they’re describing. But even for us mortals, there’s a lesson here: if we can vividly envision the physical setting of a story, it serves as a coherent stage on which the real action of interest can take place.
I’ve tried to follow this practice in my own fiction, although on a much less elevated level. Elsewhere, I’ve spoken of my love of location research, and how the physical constraints of a real building or neighborhood are often play a crucial role in figuring out how a particular scene ought to unfold. If I’m unable to visit the location myself—as in the case of Eternal Empire, with its extended closing sequence in Sochi—I’ll do what I can to fill in the gaps with nonfiction accounts, guidebooks, photographs, and Google Maps. Occasionally, I’ll need to fudge the real geography of a place for the sake of the narrative, but when I can, I stick to reality as much as possible, to the extent of counting the number of paces from one point of importance to the next. Part of this is my sense that accuracy, or at least plausibility, in trivial matters primes readers to accept the larger leaps that a story inevitably takes, as well as a desire to avoid being called out on an obvious mistake. Ultimately, though, it’s about furnishing the set, which in turn influences the behavior of the players, and I learned long ago that it’s a waste of energy to think these things up from scratch when the world is already bursting with detail.
You see this clearly in Chapter 18 of City of Exiles, which Karvonen, my Finnish assassin, arrives at the chess tournament at the Olympia Exhibition Center, where many of the other characters are already converging. Much of the chapter is devoted to Karvonen’s study of the layout through the lens of his camera, in his guise as a photojournalist, and I spend a page or two making sure that the relative placement of rooms and other landmarks is clear. Really, I could have rearranged this space however I liked—I doubt many readers would have objected—and a sense of the geography is only incidentally important to the action that follows. Again, though, the attention I give to the scenery here is less critical in itself than in its effects. Even if I’d invented a chess tournament out of thin air and situated it in an imaginary conference center, the space needs to seem real, both for my own sake and for that of the reader. In the course of the next few chapters, there’s going to be a chase, a confrontation, and a pair of murders, all of which needs to be timed so that the complicated sequence of events remains clear. Spatial logic leads to narrative logic. And the first step is to set the stage as clearly as possible…
The art of the epigraph
Years ago, in college, when I was working my way through a shelf of great books and dutifully writing down my favorite quotes, I came across the following anecdote in Boswell’s Life of Johnson:
This reminds me of the ludicrous account which [Johnson] gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. “Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.” And then, in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, “But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.”
It’s a deservedly famous passage—there’s even a statue of Hodge himself outside Johnson’s house in London—and it quickly ended up in my commonplace book. Then, just a few weeks later, I happened to read Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the first time, and I was tickled to find the exact same quote on the epigraph page. It’s still one of the oddest literary coincidences of my life, and although scholars have endlessly debated the significance of the quotation in the context of Nabokov’s extraordinary novel, to me, the moral was clear: quotations have a life of their own, and a line that catches one reader’s eye is likely to attract many others.
The epigraph, as I mentioned yesterday, is one of the most powerful—and underrated—tools in a writer’s arsenal. It appears in a uniquely privileged position at the beginning of a book, and it’s usually the first, and possibly the only, text a reader encounters. (Whenever I repeatedly pick up and drop a book for years, as I did with Gravity’s Rainbow, the epigraphs start to take on a weird prominence in my inner life.) It doesn’t consist of the writer’s own words, but it benefits from what seems like a considered process of selection, and it grows in apparent importance in proportion to its isolation on the page, in the way a random scrap of paper can take on new meaning as the centerpiece of a collage. It’s one of the few moments in a good novel in which the writer’s process appears in the foreground: any authorial decisions in the story itself should seem inevitable, or invisible, but in the epigraph, we see the writer at work, speaking directly to us through someone else’s words. This is particularly true in the case of a novel like Pale Fire, in which the relevance of the epigraph is pointedly obscure. It’s like a clue in a mystery novel, as capable of misleading as much as clarifying, but always turning the reader’s thoughts into unexpected directions.
In particular, an epigraph serves two complementary functions: it both sets a tone and conveys additional information. The epigraph to Anna Karenina—”Vengeance is mine; I will repay”—alerts us at once to the fact that this is something more than an epic novel of manners. The epigraphs that Borges puts at the head of his short stories are often nods to his sources and inspirations, like the line from The Anatomy of Melancholy that appears in “The Library of Babel,” or offer a hint as to how the story itself ought to be read, as in the epigraph to “Three Versions of Judas,” taken from Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “There seemed a certainty in degradation.” Foucault’s Pendulum opens with an untranslated quotation from Hebrew, which tells us immediately that this is going to be a polyglot, occasionally impenetrable journey. Eco’s epigraphs here are particularly fascinating: they often include additional tidbits of lore or arcana that provide a kind of running annotation of the main action, like footnotes in epigraph form, a technique that I openly copied in The Icon Thief. (I used the epigraphs to incorporate material that I couldn’t include elsewhere but desperately wanted to preserve, like the implication that Marcel Duchamp may have occasionally appeared in disguise while he was living in New York.)
Ideally, however, an epigraph should leave something to implication. Poetry, for instance, is a rich source of allusive material, which is why the appearance of certain writers, like T.S. Eliot, John Donne, or William Blake, has almost become clichéd from overuse. (I include a quote from John Donne in City of Exiles, but only as part of a larger thread, almost a subplot in itself, that runs through the epigraphs of the last three sections, connecting Donne to The White Goddess and the Book of Ezekiel, with a sideward glance at Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.”) And if it manages to strike the right balance between illumination and obscurity, an epigraph can highlight a buried theme that allows the reader to view the entire work in a different light, like the quotation from Dante that opens “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As a rule, it’s a mistake to spell out your themes explicitly in the text, but there’s nothing that says you can’t give the reader a nudge in the right direction, and an epigraph is the perfect place for this: it stands slightly outside the body of the narrative, together and apart, and at its best, it can feel like a whispered aside from the author just before the curtain rises.
“So now he is ready to write it…”
When the writer settles down to his reconstructive work, creative experience tells him what to avoid at certain moments of blindness which overcome now and then even the greatest, when the warty fat goblins of convention or the slick imps called “gap-fillers” attempt to crawl up the legs of his desk…
So now he is ready to write it. He is fully equipped. His fountain pen is comfortably full, the house is quiet, the tobacco and the matches are together, the night is young…and we shall leave him in this pleasurable situation and gently steal out, and close the door, and firmly push out of the house, as we go, the monster of grim commonsense that is lumbering up the steps to whine that the book is not for the general public, that the book will never never—And right then, just before it blurts out the word s, e, double-l, false commonsense must be shot dead.
The art of translation, part 2
In one of the wonderful short essays that appear in the anthology Selected Nonfictions, Jorge Luis Borges writes:
Around 1916, I decided to devote myself to the study of the Oriental literatures. Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of a certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage: “A man condemned to death doesn’t care that he is standing on the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.” Here the translator attaches an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus: “The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.”
Speaking of the experience, Borges concludes: “A mysterious skepticism had slipped into my soul.” That skepticism never left him entirely, and you can see it on full display on his essays—which are among his best—on the translations of the Iliad and The Thousand and One Nights, most of which tell us more about the personalities of their translators than about the work itself. (If you ever want to disillusion yourself on the subject of translation in record time, just try reading a few translations, in parallel, of poetry in an Eastern language. This list of versions of Basho’s famous haiku on the jumping frog is a good place to start.)
And the irony here, of course, is that I’m also reading Borges in translation, in this case filtered through the words of the editor and translator Eliot Weinberger, and I didn’t think twice about it. Nearly every encounter I’ve had with Borges, who ranks among my four or five favorite writers, has been thanks to the midwifery of translators, and although I used to know enough Spanish to puzzle my way through a few familiar stories in the original edition of Ficciones, I haven’t tried this in a long time. And my conscience is clear. My only real firsthand experience with comparing translated texts to their originals was in college, when I studied Latin and Greek, and it left me with a few workable assumptions. Prose in a Western language can usually be translated into English without any devastating loss: Plato or Thucydides in English misses something, sure, but ninety percent of the original’s interest is preserved. Poetry is a different matter, and I never found a version of the Iliad I liked enough to read for its own sake. (I ended up relying mostly on what Borges calls Samuel Butler’s “unruffled” prose version, which renders Homer’s poetry as “a series of sedate news items.”) This is doubly the case with translated poetry from a non-Western language, which turns into a kind of performance art on the part of the translator, and it’s tempting to agree here with Robert Frost: “Poetry is what is lost in translation.”
So what’s a reader to do? I’d been aware of these issues for a long time, but it wasn’t until I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot that I started to piece together my own feelings on the subject. Le Ton Beau is a very strange book, a highly personal work on translation that ranges widely over multiple authors and languages—Hofstadter refers to himself as “pilingual”—while maintaining the chatty, nerdy, occasionally prickly tone of an interested amateur. Hofstadter’s conclusion is that poetry should be translated in a way that honors both the form and the content to the best of the translator’s abilities, even if this inevitably involves compromises in the literal meaning. It’s a sensible stance, and one that allows readers to more or less keep reading the same translations they always have. But it also pits Hofstadter against a formidable opponent: Vladimir Nabokov, whose epic translation and commentary of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin stands as the ultimate rejection of such easy consolations. For Nabokov, any conscious deviation from the literal text is a betrayal, a sop at the expense of the author to readers who can’t be bothered to learn Russian. To prove his point, Nabokov devoted unimaginable effort to a plodding, agonizingly “faithful” translation of Pushkin, published with two massive volumes of commentary. It’s a translation designed to destroy the reader’s very idea of translation itself, as well as the project in which Nabokov most resembles one of his own obsessive characters.
To be honest, I’ve never made it through all of Nabokov’s translation, but I’ve read all nine hundred pages of his notes, in which he lavishes all the invention, wit, and fire that he intentionally drains from the text itself. These notes strike me now as a defiant creative act in their own right, a statement that Nabokov would have been more than capable of blowing us away with a conventional translation if he hadn’t been too principled to do so. And it’s a stance that somehow manages to be unimpeachably correct and spectacularly wrongheaded all at the same time. Nabokov’s argument that fidelity to literal meaning should come first is impossible to refute, but he destroys the village to save it: his translation of Eugene Onegin is an “aesthetic self-wounding,” as Harold Bloom says elsewhere of Shakespeare, and it has little if anything to do with the qualities that draw readers to Pushkin in the first place. That’s a betrayal of its own, and in choosing between the two kinds of compromises, I can only speak from my own experience: reading a few stanzas of Nabokov’s work is enough to put me off Pushkin forever, while James Falen’s sparkling verse translation has made Eugene Onegin, or some version of it, a permanent part of my life—which is all a translation can ever hope to do. It’s hard to reconcile this, and rightly so, with our ideal of what a translation should be. But in response, I can only quote what Borges said, through an intermediary, to a translator who said that it was impossible to render one of his poems into rhyme: “Borges thinks you should try a little harder.”
Music for crappy speakers
It’s the very naive producer who works only on optimum systems.
—Brian Eno
There’s a moment in Once, one of my favorite movies of recent years, in which the leads, played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, stuff themselves into their recording engineer’s tiny car so they can hear how their freshly mixed debut album sounds on the worst speakers imaginable. It’s a cute scene, and it contains a germ of good advice. A while back, the record producer Bill Moriarty made a case on his blog for mixing records on “crap speakers,” rather than high-end studio monitors, to more closely replicate the experience of a listener playing the album at home. The original post seems to have disappeared, but a long quote is available here, including my favorite part:
All that low end in the guitar? It’s useless in the small speakers. It’s just taking up frequencies the bass or drums or organs or tenor instruments can occupy. You have to be ruthless in cutting away useless frequencies so the record is loud and jumps out of all speakers. Make the record sound outstanding on little crap speakers since that’s where most people will hear it. I’ve found when I do this it still sounds great on the fancy speakers.
At first, this advice may not seem to be applicable to writers, since the words on the page don’t change from one format to another. Like me, you may prefer that readers experience your book on the physical page, rather than on Kindle or squeezed onto a tiny cell phone screen, but there’s no real loss of information. But if there’s an equivalent for the speaker—which turns an electrical audio signal into sound—in the reading process, it’s the reader’s brain, which transforms words into actions and images. And even if you ignore the natural variations between readers, there’s no question that people are going to be encountering your story in many different states of mind. Some will be reading it closely and attentively, although this may only be your copy editor; others will be looking at it critically, with an eye for flaws; many will be distracted, tired, or simply looking for escape; and nearly all will be giving it something less than their full attention, both because there are so many other available distractions and because close attention is something a book earns.
This only means you need to be mindful of how your book will read under less than perfect circumstances. Many novels, including mine, are designed to be read straight through, which is something you rarely, if ever, get in practice: readers pick books up and put them down, often in the middle of a chapter or sequence you’ve carefully constructed to read as a whole, and days or weeks may pass between one page and the next. And just because you’ve introduced a key plot point on page 50 doesn’t mean the reader will remember anything about it when it reappears on page 200. In particular, I’ve learned from hard experience to keep the characters as clear as possible. If a novel has a large cast, I try to give each character a distinctive name, often beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, and I’ll unobtrusively drop in a reminder of who this person is whenever he or she has spent a long time offstage. Not every writer follows this rule—George R.R. Martin, for one, takes pride in trampling on it—but I see it as a small courtesy for a reader who may not be reading the story with as much attentiveness as I’d like.
But this doesn’t mean that every novel should be pitched at the level of a reader who is glancing at the book between sips of sangria at the beach, any more than an album designed to play well enough on a squeakbox from Radio Shack can’t also sound great on the top of the line from Bose. It’s more about optimizing the frequencies that all readers will hear. The best books—like the best stories of every kind—work on more than one level at once: ideally, there’s a thread of story that will draw in even the most distractible reader while deeper registers of meaning are available for those who want to discover them. Nabokov constructs Lolita like a thriller; Jonathan Franzen knows that his novels have to compete with multiple other forms of distraction, and he structures them accordingly; and Shakespeare, above all others, understood the value of plot and suspense as a vehicle for the most agonized intellectual explorations. For those with the patience to hear them, the subtler frequencies are there, but even on the most distracted of mental speakers, the underlying music ought to come through.
Alec Nevala-Lee 
“A kind of symbolic shorthand…”
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Note: This post is the thirty-seventh installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 36. You can read the previous installments here.
When we remember a story after the fact, our minds have a way of producing juxtapositions and connections that weren’t there before. Most fans, for instance, are aware that Kirk and Khan are never in the same place at the same time in Star Trek II, and their only real face-to-face confrontation, courtesy of a viewscreen, consists of a single scene. Still, they’re indelibly associated in our imaginations, certainly more so than the modern incarnations of the same two characters who shared so much screen time in a far less memorable movie. Similarly, in the movie version of L.A. Confidential, Jack Vincennes says just one line to Bud White—”White, you better put a leash on your partner before he kills somebody”—and Bud doesn’t even bother responding. Yet we rightly think of Vincennes and White as two points in the movie’s central triangle, even if they interact largely through the contrasting shapes that they assume in our heads. As I wrote in a post on Legolas and Frodo, who also interact only once over the course of three Lord of the Rings movies: “We think of a novel or movie as a linear work of art that moves from one event to the next, but when we remember the books or films we love the most, even those that follow a strict line of action, we have a way of seeing everything simultaneously, with each piece commenting on every other.” When the book is closed and put back on the shelf, all the pages overlap, and links appear between characters that aren’t really there when the story is experienced as a sequence.
You could also make the case that separating characters can paradoxically result in a closer relationship than if they were physically together. When two characters share a scene, they can’t help but be themselves; when they’re further apart, each one begins to seem like a commentary on the other. Closeness tends to emphasize dissimilarity, while distance stresses the qualities they share. Some movies do this deliberately—like Heat, which keeps Pacino and De Niro separated and invites us to draw the parallels—while others do it by accident. (In L.A. Confidential, it seems to have been a little of both: Vincennes and White simply wouldn’t have much to talk about, and trying to force them into a conversation would have subtly diminished both men.) Movies and books benefit from the way we’ve been taught to read them, in which we assume that two lines of action will eventually converge. It’s a narrative technique as old as the Odyssey, and it can be used to create anticipation and lend structure to the story even if it never quite pays off. The first season of Fargo devoted a lot of time to foreshadowing a confrontation between two characters, played by Allison Tolman and Billy Bob Thornton, that it ultimately didn’t feel like providing. This worked well enough as a strategy to unite a lot of disconnected action, but the second season, which has consisted of a series of immensely entertaining collisions between disparate characters, reminds us of how satisfying this kind of convergence can be if it’s allowed to play out for real.
And one of the unsung arts of storytelling lies in drawing out that distance as much as possible without losing the connection. One of the basic rules of visual design is that two elements in a composition, like two dots on a canvas, create a tension in the space between them that didn’t exist before. Elsewhere, I’ve written:
The tricky part is the placement. Put your dots too far apart, and they no longer seem related; too close together, and we tend to see them as a single unit. Much the same goes for characters, and it’s no accident that many of the fictional pairings we remember so vividly—like Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, or Holmes and Moriarty—consist of two figures who spend most of their time apart, which only adds to the intensity when they meet at last.
I thought about this constantly when I was cracking the plot for Eternal Empire, in which Wolfe mostly keeps her distance from Maddy and Ilya, the two other points in the narrative triangle. Maddy and Ilya eventually converge in a satisfying way, but Wolfe isn’t brought into their story until the very end, and even then, their interactions are minimal. In the case of Maddy, they consist of a voice message and a long conversation in the last chapter of the book; with Ilya, Wolfe has little more than a charged exchange of glances. Yet I think that Wolfe still feels integrated into their stories, and if she does, it was because I devoted a fair amount of energy to maintaining that connection where I could. Wolfe spends a lot of time thinking about Maddy and following her movements, and even more so with Ilya—who also gets to send her a message in return. In Chapter 36, I introduce the concept of the “throw,” a symbolic shorthand used by thieves to send messages. An apple cut in half means that it’s time to divide the loot; a piece of bread wrapped in cloth means that the police are closing in. And when Wolfe finds a knot tied in a dishtowel at the crime scene in Hackney Wick, she realizes that Ilya is saying: I’m not responsible for what you’ve heard. As a narrative device that allows them to communicate under the eyes of Ilya’s enemies, it works nicely. But I also love the idea of a visual symbol that allows two people to speak over a distance, which is exactly what happens in many novels, if not always so explicitly. As Nabokov puts it so beautifully in his notes to Eugene Onegin, which I read while plotting out this trilogy: “There is a conspiracy of words signaling to one another, throughout the novel, from one part to another…”
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Written by nevalalee
December 9, 2015 at 9:26 am
Posted in Books, Writing
Tagged with Eternal Empire commentary, Eugene Onegin, Fargo, Heat, L.A. Confidential, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, The Silence of the Lambs, Vladimir Nabokov