Anyone wanting to know more about creative nonfiction, and how it works, can read the following. As the critical introduction to my master’s thesis, it is designed for academic readers and thus a bit formal, although I doggedly refused to adopt the stilted and jargon-filled, pseudo-intellectual style favored by much of academia. (If you’re impatient, go directly to the part about creative nonfiction, or for a brief answer, go to “What is Creative Nonfiction“.)
In this intro you’ll also find commentary on some of the pieces on my site, as well as a brief rant against the state of literary criticism in the academic world.
If I were to re-design heaven, I’d lose the streets-of-gold business and we would all sit around the fire telling stories. (I realize this isn’t everyone’s heaven; Woody Allen says, I am at two with nature.) The briefest comment on all the writers and works that echo in my head and my prose style would run to book length—Eudora Welty, Tobias Wolff, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, James Thurber, John McPhee, Molly Ivins, E. B. White, and Laurence Sterne are just a few—so I’ll mention several and then comment on just five significant or influential writers and their works. These works cover a wide range of style and technique, of fiction and nonfiction—and one is creative nonfiction, although rarely recognized as such: Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”—yet each relates to my work.
Why creative nonfiction? Why storytelling? I’m a journalist at heart. Everywhere I turn are things worth seeing, stories worth passing on. So I try to record them as the kinds of stories I like to read: accurate, economical, accessible, and enjoyable where the topic permits. Reading often seems to be more of a chore than it needs to be. I like to read a lively voice that reveals an active mind. Profiles appeal to me in particular. I like to capture character and get it on the page.
On subject matter: it’s too bad sensationalism sells so well. Other stories, often better ones, go untold in its shadow. I like to fight against the cult of celebrity (although I don’t expect to win many battles). We tend to glorify or idealize the “movers and shakers,” from Achilles to Frank Sinatra, implying that others are less worthy. Those lesser stories attract me.
As a developing writer, I find it important to keep my ear tuned to contemporary voices. And at some point I also decided that inasmuch as everything we study in the English department was once written as contemporary literature for a contemporary audience, that therefore contemporary literature is my field. It seems to me that studying literature can skew our conception of good writing, can turn it into something that used-to-be, something historical.1 However, my preference for the contemporary does not make me unappreciative or deaf to all other voices, so while I praise Tobias Wolff’s simple and direct style, I also appreciate Stephen Crane’s lyricism (and other qualities we’ll get to shortly), even if his style is verbose by today’s standards. So some aspects of the works I discuss here may contradict ideals I cite in others, but better that than to discuss only a limited group of homogeneous writers.
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Probably it was the awards and critical praise for Melissa Fay Green’s 1991 work of nonfiction Praying for Sheetrock—which reads like a compelling novel—that first alerted me to the genre’s possibilities. Then, everywhere I turned I found critically acclaimed nonfiction: Russell Baker’s Growing Up and then Good Times; Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life;
E. B. White’s essays; Joseph Mitchell’s collected pieces in Up in the Old Hotel; Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm; John McPhee’s shelfful of works; the works of Studs Terkel, Oliver Sacks, Calvin Trillin, Jonathan Raban, Ian Frazier. (I never could see the great attraction in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) Although I agree, in theory, that fiction is no less compelling than nonfiction, it seems that, in practice, true stories carry more weight. More is at stake; no one ever says well, it’s only a story about nonfiction.
In writing the pieces in this collection I have been guided by distinctions between the profile, personal essay, and memoir. I say “guided by” because, while these terms do help to distinguish one type of work from another, the stories sometimes assume, like that which they represent, an unruly life of their own. At some point each story seems to define itself, and not always in strictly systematic fashion. Philip Gerard’s Creative Nonfiction, widely recognized as a seminal guide for students in this field, defines these categories fairly succinctly. The profile is “narrated in anecdotes and scenes . . . making extensive use of the subject’s own words” (104). Like a good photograph, a profile portrays a person—or place or event, the way I think of it—so that readers feel as though they’ve met the subject, and “that the meeting mattered” (104). The best profiles, in my view, aim for a balanced or objective presentation, a virtual photograph, and leave judgment, as much as possible, to the reader.2 The personal essay is a “story with a point”; it begins with the raw material of firsthand experience and finds something in it that “transcends” the personal: again, to make the experience “matter to the reader” (105, 137). Memoir differs only a little from the personal essay; it is better contrasted with autobiography. While autobiography usually refers to a lengthy, perhaps all-inclusive, life-story, memoir concentrates on certain formative experience, especially if the writer’s experience illuminates an historical moment (105, 137). The terms are helpful, but strict classification in writing, just as in criticism, can lead to its undoing.
Melissa Fay Greene’s Praying for Sheetrock is a nonfiction novel. Like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, it is historical. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, it has elements of the epic. It works like a profile, depending heavily on anecdotes and scenes, and especially on its subjects’ voices. Jonathan Raban’s work seems a mix of travel writing and profile. And John McPhee—other than damn good, nobody knows how to classify McPhee. Joseph Mitchell’s stories in Up in the Old Hotel, a New York Times best-seller in 1992, epitomize the profile. On the surface these stories are disarmingly simple, yet they reveal subtleties of character, irony, incongruity, and more. They are fodder for the curious mind. In “The Gypsy Women,” Mitchell profiles NYC detective Captain Daniel Campion—retired from over twenty-five years in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad—and his fascination with the gypsy rackets. Even in retirement he keeps files and maintains genealogy charts. It is apparent that—through prolonged, intimate contact, multiple arrests and such—Campion’s feelings for these people are complex. Considering their thievery, preying unmercifully on poor widows and such, his affection is striking. He recites names and describes grave sites in a New Jersey cemetery:
“There’s women lying over there that I stood in doorways across the street . . . waiting and watching for the moment to go in and nail them, and they despised me and I despised them, but I knew them very well . . . and when I look at their tombstones and read their names and dates, after all they’re dead and gone, I must admit it makes me sad.” (199)
Mitchell, the consummate New Yorker writer, grew up as a North Carolina country boy.
So let me begin looking at nonfiction with Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life: A Memoir. For concrete and economical storytelling, his work is a good model.3 The book opens:
Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. “Oh, Toby,” my mother said, “he’s lost his brakes.”
The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded in the wind that sighed in the trees all around us.
By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff’s edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder.
For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn’t help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle. (3-4)
One particular strength of this narrative is its economical characterization. First, it tells a great deal about Toby and his mother, and their situation, without resorting to abstractions. Their car boiled over “again”: in the story’s first five words we already know something about these two people (and their Nash Rambler) that no combination of adjectives— poor, unpropitious, troublesome, meager—would convey as well. Although Toby’s mother speaks only six words directly, she is revealed, by what she says and what she does, as a vulnerable and caring woman in an out-of-control world where the guardrails are insufficient. Her broken-down circumstances might suggest an ineffectual or careless woman, yet she “asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident,” which shows otherwise. The brief “arm around my shoulder. . . . looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair” dramatizes economically. The boy Toby is revealed as well, in a way that no abstractions—observant, intelligent, scheming, needy or greedy, conscientious yet weak—would capture as well. (Wolff’s honesty here, revealing himself in unflattering terms as he will throughout, signals a trustworthy account, as well.)
Notice, too, Wolff’s diction. For all its elaborate description, this is a deceptively plain style that does not draw attention to itself—some medium length, but mostly short sentences, informal and non-elevated diction, straightforward voice. He writes simple, declarative sentences. His language is concrete, rich in active verbs or verb-based modifiers: “boiled . . . crossed. . . . waiting . . . to cool . . . bawling . . . shot . . . shimmying.” Weathers’ and Winchester’s The New Strategy of Style refers to “texture” and “level” of diction: level being the “level of formality,” and texture the “vividness and intensity” of vocabulary (128, 135). Wolff writes densely textured prose at an informal level. Meticulous word-choice packs meaning into this prose: the strong connotation of “bawling” characterizes the airhorn (and the driver connected to it), and also sets mood beyond what is necessary to describe the horn. I think of this as “word soup”—the word “bawling” comes up in one spoonful of soup, but its flavor extends further and blends into the general mix. The same happens with the trailer “shimmying wildly” and other words that combine connotatively to flavor this soup with vulnerability: “lay on its back . . . pitifully small . . . feathering,” and the sound of the horn that disappears into wind “that sighed in the trees all around us.” This is economical description, elaborate yet succinct.4 It carries strong pathos, all the more effective for being understated.
4 It may be unnecessary to speculate on the why-and-wherefore of this economy, but another of its values has to do with the pace of our time. In Henry James’s day readers spent long contemplative evenings in the library with a gas-lamp, and willingly savored lengthier text; today’s readers haven’t the same luxury of time; their reading time competes with the TV, with Email and other E-seductions, and with expanded domestic demands. Prose that can not deliver succinctly, will not deliver at all; it will go un-read.
Another aspect of Wolff’s descriptive economy is imagery that works on more than one level. At one point in the story Toby’s (latest) stepfather is berating the boy for his mocking disrespect, calling him a “hotshot” and “liar,” this while careening drunkenly along a mountain road. Scared, Toby has his hands against the dashboard, bracing himself. His stepfather says, “‘You’re in for a change, mister. You got that? You’re in for a whole nother ball game.’” The next sentence ends the chapter: “I braced myself for the next curve,” the next curve being both the physical one in the road and the new phase of stepfather-and- son relationship (90-91). The explicit physical image further illuminates the corresponding human entanglement.
Two trucks collided on the crisscrossed highways in the small hours of the morning when the mist was thick. The protesting squeal of metal against metal and smashing glass silenced whatever small noises were afoot in the dark country at that hour, the little noises of munching and grunting that arose from the great salt marsh nearby. . . . the blacktops of the rural state routes were slick; and the truck headlights merely illuminated the fog from within as if sheets of satin were draped across the road. . . . After that blast of sound and its fallout of hollow chrome pieces dropping onto the road and rolling away, the quietness of the rural county flowed back in, and the muddy sucking and rustling noises arose again from the marsh. . . . [the] Volunteer Fire Department truck arrived first, unfurling a long red scarf of sound on the country roads behind it. (1)
Greene’s poetic voice and imagery are more, however, than merely aesthetically pleasing; they serve as economical delivery of story material. Here she sets up themes that will continue throughout the story: outside entities arrive and have their effect in the county, yet nature will continue its quiet and inevitable work in the darkness beyond the main roads. And, concerning the distinctly local character of events: although the story features mostly small-town and even backwoods doings, these are also, paradoxically, epic events. (Alone on page xiii, just before the prologue: “McIntosh County is pretty country and it’s got some nice people, but it’s the most different place I’ve ever been to in my life. —Harry Coursey, GBI Special Agent, Savannah.”)
At the risk of oversimplification—almost anything you say about the book risks that—the story centers on two men: a “stammering, uneducated, local black man, Thurnell Alston, a disabled boilermaker,” who, in 1972, would galvanize his McIntosh County, south Georgia, black community to fight for civil rights, against all odds; and—the personification of all odds—the county’s High Sheriff, Tom Poppell, who reigned for thirty-one years, who, “‘If he hadn’t died, Tom’d still be sheriff,’ many people said in the 1990s. And others remarked, ‘Yeah, and he died unindicted’” (3). Alston is an unlikely hero, and come to find out, he’s also flawed; and Poppell is not purely villainous:
With daylight Sheriff Poppell knew, and the firefighters knew, and the deputies knew, and the people in the cabins in the surrounding woods knew—and if the truck drivers had realized their trucks had crashed in McIntosh County, Georgia (431 miles of swamp, marsh, and forest: population 7,000) they would have known—that it was nearing time for a little redistribution of wealth. It was one of the things for which Tom Poppell was famous across the South. It was one of the things that invariably put the sheriff in an excellent mood. (3)
I value Praying . . . particularly because it conveys ambiguity; it transcends the naive illusions of “good” and “bad” people. It counters such myths by presenting real people with complicated and inconsistent natures: “good” people caught up in impossible circumstances, and “bad” people being generous. Contrasting the complexities of real people with the idealized constructs of others, attorney David Walbert, looks back across the years and says:
I now realize that I—that we—idealized the black civil rights people. They represented something we were looking for, but they were regular human beings. They were real people, and real people are imperfect. (287)
At the same time it works relentlessly to represent life accurately, creative nonfiction admits imaginative treatment of its material. In order to characterize the place, Greene’s imaginative storytelling takes liberties that conventional nonfiction would not allow:
. . . from the pine woods comes the high, continuous growl of a buzz saw, and on the dirt roads crows pace and argue. If the Messiah did arrive today, the old black people of McIntosh would be the leastastonished group in America. They might send a young person to go look, and those with telephones might call their daughters, but the rest would remain in their upholstered rockers . . . and wait to be called upon Personally. . . . [offering] a dozen more amenities until the Guest has had a moment to look around and have a sip of tea. Then there would come the complaints: “Did y’all have to cause my Raymond to lose that job back in ‘81? You know he was fixing to change his habits, and he never did make good after that”—the big women aproned, standing, hands on hips; the men shushing them, embarrassed, but swinging around to hear the reply nonetheless. “Excuse me, Lord, but my old Buick only had eighty thousand miles on it. You couldn’t have given me another year out of it?”
The old people of McIntosh County have lived on close, practical and well-understood terms with God all their lives. . . . If a messenger of God were to appear on their porch one morning, there’d be no awkwardness of address, no groping for greetings of sufficient splendor . . . and no exaggerated prostration either: “Gertie?! Angel of the Lord’s here!” (27-28)
Such characterization in this brand of storytelling distinguishes between truth and fact. Nonfactual does not necessarily mean untruthful. Then too, years after events, it is often necessary to reconstruct or invent dialogue in order to dramatize events. Greene’s method is spirited storytelling; if this same story were retold in conventional documentary form and measured against Greene’s book, it would seem impoverished.
This story is driven by powerful characterization of people and place. So events seem to flow with inevitability, and it needs very little abstract summarizing. What explication there is is short and tight reiteration, as in the following. After newly-elected Mayor Sumner fires the seven blacks on the Darien city payroll (six sanitation workers and a cop), hundreds of local blacks crowd into city hall, pressing officials to reinstate the men:
Viewing the scene from across the street—for it was a city tumult again, not directly implicating the county— Sheriff Poppell was overheard to remark: ‘Goddamn Sumner’s gone and let the monkeys out of the cage again.’
The monkeys surely were out of the cage again, but with a difference: this time they had their lawyers with them.(199)
—a rare, cogent summary.
Another example of economy is dialogue both narrating and revealing character. Among those protesting at city hall, is Sammie Pinkney:
“The worst part of it was the mayor said to me. . . . ‘Sammie, I been knowing you all your life.’
I said, ‘Yeah, I been knowing you too, but I’m not the same Sammie you used to know. I’m a different person now.’
He said, ‘You were a cop up in New York.’
And I said, ‘Yeah. But I’m home now.’” (199)
A story can be overwhelmed by too much detail, and good profiles are made by the “telling” detail. So one key to good storytelling is a discriminating eye, one that winnows its material and selects the most revealing details. As in Gerard’s formula for profiles (“anecdotes and scenes . . . extensive use of the subject’s own words”), places are described in Greene’s story mostly through anecdotal events, and events mostly through people (and other creatures), and people mostly through their vocal chords. Greene listens for idiom and dialect, and she selects particular details that characterize economically:
“Come in! Come in! Let’s have some gossip and slander!” cried an old man living near the sea, whenever a passerby roamed within sight of his porch. “I believe these young ladies of today might clothe themselves more modestly,” he said. “Of course, I am getting on and it has been years since I was conversant with the wherewithal and nomenclature of the female.” (23)
In her acknowledgments, Greene mentions a senior editor who “led me and an eight-hundred page manuscript into the world of editorial cuts,” so that we read a trim 335 pages (337).5
Imagery serves, not as mere ornament, but to clarify, to illuminate a concept. In a description of the county’s remove from the “riots and civil disobedience and racial confrontations” of Newark, Birmingham, Montgomery and other foreign places, we get:
And blacks in their distant cabins shut their doors and windows and located, through static, on their radios and televisions, the voices and images of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Seale. In Leningrad and Moscow in the same years, Jews and intellectuals drove far into the country to escape the censor’s blackout of the airwaves over the city. They parked in starry fields in the small hours of the morning and captured fragments, falling from the night sky, of the Voice of America, on black-market radios. Just this exotic and incredible and forbidden did the voices of the civil rights movement sound to the fishermen, gardeners, and maids of McIntosh County. (36)
Greene also compares the distant civil rights crusade with Biblical events: “The people felt about Montgomery and Selma roughly the way they felt about Mount Sinai and Gethsemane. The stories of heroes were stirring, but it seemed unlikely that such miracles would occur again, much less locally” (22). Such imagery points up the epic nature of events in this story.
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Whether you call it creative nonfiction, literary journalism, or whatever else, this genre shares many of the narrative conventions of fiction. Some works could be mistaken for fiction if you didn’t know better. Creative nonfiction’s methods diverge less from those of fiction than they do from conventional nonfiction forms like documentary and journalism. One work that influenced me particularly is Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” It reads like a short story, yet it comes directly from Crane’s experience in a ten-foot dinghy after the steamer Commodore went down off the coast of Florida in 1897.
Perhaps it’s a bent for empiricism, but I’m attracted to writers who begin as journalists, and I’m impressed by Crane, especially. Concerning his approach to writing:
I renounced the clever school in literature. . . . my chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably so that all . . . might read and understand. . . . I endeavored to express myself in the simplest and most concise way. . . . I have been very careful not to let any theories or pet ideas creep into my work. Preaching is fatal to art in literature. I try to give the readers a slice out of life; and if there is any moral or lesson in it, I do not try to point it out. I let the reader find it for himself. (qtd. in Kwiat 137-38)
“The Open Boat” conveys to the reader worlds of perception, yet it makes no moral or ideological judgments; this account presumes no omniscience. Instead we get lively, intelligent reportage, full of irony and pathos, yet without mawkishness. The story proves also that the most wretched circumstances do not preclude humor.6 Rather than say the men felt vulnerable in their small craft, the narrator says instead, “Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea” (657). His narrative vitality shines also in a passage like: “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping small boats” (657).7 Personification—“nervously anxious to do something”— helps animate the passage. Crane avoids the possibly intrusive “I” by casting himself in the third person, “the correspondent,” yet he does not back off entirely from subjectivity: “the waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall”; and “the correspondent . . . wondered why he was there” (657).
The story does not focus on one theme or another, but illuminates any number of issues: how reality can appear differently from different vantage points (this, several years before Einstein published on relativity), i.e., shore vs. boat; or from one time to another, such as before sighting land and people, and after that sighting does not result in rescue. And of course the story illustrates nature’s towering indifference. The story is noteworthy, however, not primarily because of some clever proposition about humans and nature, but because of Crane’s style; because, for instance, he takes a sentiment like he felt utterly forsaken and resented it and makes it lyrical:
When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: “Yes, but I love myself”
A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him. (Crane 666)
7 Likewise, in Great Plains, Ian Frazier elaborates on nuclear-missile silos dotting the prairie, each enclosed in an eight-foot-high cyclone fence: “In the lonesomest stretch of prairie, you could find no faster way of meeting people than rattling that fence for a moment or two” (200). The image makes its point about missile security, and sticks tight to the theme of isolation on the prairie.
Crane’s voice in the story is versatile: at times tender or thoughtful, at times choleric, frank, and unapologetic—always personal. He describes empathically the injured captain who lies in the dinghy’s bow as:
buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her . . . and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in the grays of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a top-mast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went lower and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears.
“Keep ‘er a little more south, Billie,” said he.
“‘A little more south,’ sir,” said the oiler in the stern. (657)
Interesting too, from the standpoint of craft, that Crane describes the captain’s voice, then follows it with the short line of dialogue. Even though the man’s voice is characterized in abstract terms—rather than something concrete, like murmur or sigh—the captain’s line of dialogue forces the reader to imagine the voice, to concretize it, and thus the captain and his grief.
Later, when the correspondent (Crane) vents his “rage,” he does not cheapen nature with romantic or deferential terms, but speaks bluntly:
if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble. The whole affair is absurd. . . . But, no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work. (662)
Crane emphasizes the futility of this slur against nature, capping it with irony: “‘Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!’” Like Shakespeare when he puts the drunken porter in Macbeth, Crane deftly juxtaposes pathos and humor.
There is an immediacy to this narration—something palpable, tangible—that brings the reader vicariously into the story. All je-ne-sais-quoi aside, Crane’s imaginative treatment is more compelling than conventional journalism’s just-the-facts style.
I am lying here in my private sick bay on the east side of town . . . watching starlings from the vantage point of bed. Three Democrats are in bed with me: Harry Truman (in a stale copy of the Times) [etc.]. . . . I take Democrats to bed with me for lack of a dachshund, although as a matter of fact on occasions like this I am almost certain to be visited by the ghost of Fred . . . dead these many years. . . . In life, Fred always attended the sick, climbing right into bed with the patient like some lecherous old physician, and making a bad situation worse. All this dark morning I have reluctantly entertained him . . . felt his oppressive weight, and heard his fraudulent report. He was an uncomfortable bedmate when alive; death has worked little improvement—I still . . . wonder why I put up with his natural rudeness and his pretensions. (White 147-48)
While the opening paragraph signals possible incoming political fire—“three Democrats” —the topic does not emerge again until four pages into the piece. Instead, White reminisces about his late dachshund, Fred, who comes off as troublesome and unsavory, yet whimsically appealing:
He was red and low-posted . . . he certainly gave the quick impression of being a dachshund. But if you went at him with a tape measure, and forced him onto scales, the dachshund theory collapsed. The papers that came with him were produced hurriedly and in an illicit atmosphere in a back room of the petshop. . . . So much of his life was given to shady practices, it is only fitting that his pedigree should have been . . . a forgery. (149)
His comically apt characterization of Fred—this dog lives and breathes in these pages—will color all that follows. In 1956, during the cold war and closely following McCarthyism:
[Fred] watched steadily and managed to give the impression that he was a secret agent of the Department of Justice. Spotting a flicker or a starling on the wing, he would turn and make a quick report.
“I just saw an eagle go by,” he would say. “It was carrying a baby.”
This was not precisely a lie. Fred was like a child in many ways, and sought always to blow things up to proportions that satisfied his imagination. . . . He was the Cecil B. deMille of dogs. He was also a zealot, and I have just been reminded of him by a quote from one of the Democrats sharing my bed—Acheson quoting Brandeis. “The greatest dangers to liberty,” said Mr. Brandeis, “lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Fred. . . . had a dossier on almost every living creature . . . (150)
Then follows two more pages of dog—“this ignoble old vigilante. . . . held the belief that under the commonplace stone . . . lay the stuff of high adventure and the opportunity to save the nation”—so that when the topic turns to politicians, they compare easily with Fred: “these quick Democrats. . . . have been busy writing and speaking, and sniffing out the truth. . . . they converged on me by the slick device of getting into print. . . . so I make bed space for them” (150, 152, emphasis added). Readers associate dog and political situations because of their closely drawn resemblance. In the latter part of the piece, the actions and statements of Truman, Eisenhower, and others are compared with the dog’s behavior:
Fred was an unbeliever. He worshiped no personal God, no Supreme Being. He certainly did not worship me. If he had suddenly taken to worshiping me, I think I would have felt as queer as God must have felt the other day when a minister in California . . . said, “We believe Adlai Stevenson to be Thy choice for President of the United States. Amen.” (155-56)
When “Mr. Truman” complains that “the press sold out in 1948 to ‘the special interests’” and otherwise sabotaged his candidacy, White says “this bold, implausible truth engages my fancy”—and ours, since it closely parallels the dog’s bold, implausible report that preceded it. The dog comparison is clear in White’s charge of “pure irascibility” in Truman’s “gloomy report.” Yet the sting of his charge seems downplayed by the indirect connection, conveyed by the dog, between politician and spurious report. The tight resemblance between dubious dog conduct and slanted political rhetoric makes White’s point doubly explicit, even as humor softens its rhetorical impact.
Then, perhaps anticipating an overly sensitive reader’s possible indignation that the essay had likened anyone to a dog, White puts himself in the dog’s place: “when I see the first faint shadow of orthodoxy sweep across the sky, feel the first cold whiff of its blinding fog . . . I tremble all over, as though I had just seen an eagle go by, carrying a baby” (156). I doubt White’s points would come across half as well had he just come right out and stated them plainly—especially in such tremulous times. One of the greatest feats in writing is to slip past readers’ defenses and deliver serious comment, made palatable, or otherwise tempered, by humor. (See Huckleberry Finn, for instance.) The rhetorical aspect of the personal essay is often implicit. Personal experience is presented as allusion or metaphor to other issues or situations, and it is left to readers to make final connections, to draw their own conclusions. Also, this allusive business appeals to me because it comes closest to mirroring real experience—which we don’t necessarily understand in abstract so much as we compare one experience with another. The abstractions come later.
Narrative techniques in creative nonfiction—whether essay, memoir, or profile—translate well from fiction (Crane was, and Wolff is, adept in both). From the world of fiction, one modernist influence on narrative that we often trace from Hemingway, and through Raymond Carver, for me comes more explicitly from James Joyce, and especially from the stories in Dubliners. The meaning of these stories depends greatly on what is understated, elliptical, or withheld. This concept of an absence that complements the remaining form is essential to a full appreciation of Dubliners. Throughout the stories, the shadows of things that are present highlight corresponding things that are absent. The visible tip of an iceberg alerts the reader to an unseen mass.
It seems that part of Joyce’s design in Dubliners is to lodge a question in the reader’s mind, a question which carries more weight than any overt statement by the author. Joyce learned from Yeats that “insinuation could be more forceful than the statement of fact” (Magalaner and Kain 27). The narrator in “The Sisters,” for instance, quotes “old Cotter” talking about the priest who has died: “—No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly . . . but there was something queer . . . there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion,” Cotter says—and then goes quiet (1, Joyce’s ellipses). He puffs his pipe, “no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. —I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was one of those . . . peculiar cases . . . But it’s hard to say. . . .” (1,2 Joyce’s ellipses). Cotter never does venture an opinion about the priest, yet his oblique remarks accumulate with those of other characters, forming an implicit question about the man’s character. Through pointed yet incomplete reference Joyce plants questions, leaving the reader to speculate, as the stories’ inhabitants do: Did he . . . ? Joyce’s elliptical prose emphasizes the withheld elements. This matter of understatement, of challenging the reader to interpret or resolve matters, coincides with Joyce’s aesthetic theory, as expressed by his alter ego, Stephen Daedelus: ideally, the artist “like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (Joyce, A Portrait 215).
Joyce focuses on a given scene or event, but claims no omniscience; he goes no further than the barest inference, and sidesteps definitive comment. Instead he lets actions and events speak for themselves, leaving it to readers to make sense of events. Richard Ellman says that Joyce’s elliptical style “claims importance by claiming nothing; it seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be an interference” (James Joyce 88).9
But you can speak of humor if you’re careful; Thurber did. He referred to humor as “chaos recollected in tranquility” and to his own work as the “anatomy of confusion” (Kenney, 4). Among the motifs in Thurber’s work are trivial or domestic difficulties, linguistic confusion, men versus women (I hesitate to say “gender” difficulties because the word has taken on such weight), and his reservations about the power of reason over instinct, and finally what I’ll call the skeptical debunking of over-seriousness or decorum. Literature seems filled—from the epic to the novel to the short story—with grave problems, severe dilemmas, moral conundrums, and such, but the character in a Thurber story is more likely afflicted with vague doubts, or problems “with his digestion, the rear axle of his car, and the confused flow of his relationships with six or eight persons . . .” (Thurber 175). I think part of Thurber’s appeal is that readers recognize themselves in his stories: the everyday problems of most readers come closer to digestion and rear axles than to the fate of the nation. Thurber also had the knack of pushing familiar circumstances just slightly over the top, to the absurd. A man and wife in bed: familiar; the man doubting that she has heard a noise: utterly familiar; “All right, have it your way—you heard a seal bark”: absurd. But there’s the seal, looking as if it belongs there at the head of the bed.
10 One page later this same writer is comparing King Lear’s final moments with “Walter Mitty’s mumbling about puppy biscuits [that] somehow underscores our horror at his wasted life.” I think this writer needs a double scotch and a vacation.
Thurber’s work questions our modern obsession with reason. Not because he doubts the value of reason, but because we take it to extremes and reject instinct and common sense. Reason taken to extremes becomes unreasonable, and defeats itself. I have long been enthralled with just the title of Is Sex Necessary? (his collaborative work with E. B. White). Let Your Mind Alone echoes the theme. The Thurber influence should be apparent in “Urban Folklore Inspires a Novel.”
Despite its simple appearance on the surface, the effects of humor seem to run deep. Yet humorists go undervalued. In the introduction to Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber, Neil Grauer quotes E.B. White, who quotes Mark Twain:
[White:] “The world likes humor, but treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.” White noted that Mark Twain once . . . reflected on how so little of what [humorists] had written remained funny. “Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration,” Twain wrote. “Humor must not professedly teach, and must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” Then Twain added dolefully: “By forever, I mean thirty years.” (xv)
Not every humorist works wonders; Louis Grizzard’s columns grew tiresome. But I’d be proud to achieve anywhere near the quality of Erma Bombeck, Baxter Black, Garrison Keillor, or Bill Bryson—let alone Thurber or Twain.
part memory, part invention. I can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. The very act of writing has transformed the original experience into another experience, more “real” to me than what I started with. (Commentary 26)
I believe Stephen Crane was aware that fact—the journalist’s god—and truthfulness aren’t always the same. Sometimes bare fact is too weak, incapable of carrying truth. Crane said: “a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes. . . . I, however, do not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow” (qtd. in Kwiat 138). I can’t remember exact when-and-where conversations with Harold, for instance, but I do remember commiserating with him when he told me about gathering steers and the Cleburns showing up at the last minute to ruin the job. And, since deer-hunters were like ticks or black-flies—a seasonal nuisance that he and I both had to deal with—I remember talking with him about deer and one of us said, and we both agreed: “I get more out of watching them than I ever could shooting ‘em.” And I know that given the context, both of us would have then looked into the distance and said nothing for a moment. So the final scene in that story is truthful, if not factual. The fact is I saw the procession of deer while driving up the road with my kids in the pickup.
Storytelling, as I approach it, is very much like photography. Where the photographer achieves subtle effects with light—the velvety orange light of dawn, sensual and seductive with its soft shadows, for instance; versus the stark midday sunlight, contrasty and emphatic with shallow but dark shadows—the writer does the same with voice. And I push voice and imagery to achieve what aesthetic effects I can without overwhelming the story. I try to blend art and fact just as Greene does in Praying for Sheetrock.
During the first photography course I took, I asked the instructor what kinds of subjects make good photos. He said: “Anything makes a good subject. If your composition captures and reveals that which interests you, it will interest others as well.” A written profile comes close to photography in that respect; it reveals—through visual and other sensory details—a subject, and its peculiarities, that fascinates the writer. “A Picture of Harold” especially, with its photo motif, illustrates this. The piece profiles Harold, and it profiles ranch life to some degree. I want to portray particular aspects of Harold and that life. Considering how to abstract those qualities here reminds me why I like profiles: it is exceedingly hard to find words to accurately explain Harold and his situation; it’s much more satisfactory to ask myself what those aspects were that appealed to me, and reproduce them as clearly as I can.
“A Leaf in the Wind,” was my last fling with writing fiction. It originated near Anadarko one day when I saw a deer flashing through the timber, followed closely by three dogs.12 Someone labeled my earliest draft as naturalism. I had heard of naturalism, but it was only a word: I thought perhaps it had something to do with nature-writing. Later, when I studied Crane, London, etc., it all came clear. I don’t subscribe to any particular -ism, nor do I mean to dabble in any. But I’ve spent half a lifetime observing things outdoors more than in, and I’m fascinated with psychology—enough to have read some. However, the story is not meant as a treatise on determinism. It means to say more about tolerance for others whose circumstances we do not know. And it is an attempt to render animal experience authentically—which is no mean trick.
One small detail in the story illustrates a technique of emphasizing meaning through word-connotation. There is a small area of grass, an open hill in the timber (a place I know well), where the fawns are killed by dogs. It is described as “a grassy knoll” partly because ever since November 1963 in Dallas, “grassy knoll” means more than just a raised area of grass (103).
It seems to be driven by trendy theory: hackneyed ideas couched in hackneyed “prose.” The feminists, post-colonialists, and -ism-driven ideologues of every stripe excoriate hegemony—by imposing moral hegemonies of their own. When I leave the English department, I hope never again to see the word “gaze,” unless someone is looking out a window.
Imagery is the basic vehicle of literature—and it works: the story’s imagery doing implicit rhetorical work, which points to another reason why literary criticism makes my skin crawl, except in those rare instances when it’s done well. A good story conveys a living idea, a concept that’s difficult to encompass in any other form—that’s why we recognize it as literature. Abstraction translates the physical life that we know and inhabit into an artificial form. So when you try to abstract a story, you generally strip the lightning from the sky: it’s like opening a vein to air: what was blue turns red; it’s something else altogether now, besides having lost the pressure that makes it work.
You say somebody has to do it, I suppose; but I don’t know—they said that about slaves and cotton. A good story comes closest to being life, and anything less than the story itself, does violence, lessens the thing, is rape of a sort. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for instance, gives form to something that any other form cheapens or misunderstands. To explicate it is like explaining the punchline of a joke, and thus deflating it. If you have to explain it, you had the wrong audience, and no amount of explaining will do. E. B. White’s story, “The Second Tree from the Corner,” gets a handle on this issue. Maybe good storytelling is like pornography—indefinable, but you know it when you see it.
So why is it that we must take the best stuff fitted into words and treat it as if we wear white labcoats and carry clipboards? It seems the height of irony. What if Homer or Twain or Woody Allen had taken to their stories with the voice (or worse yet, the mindset) of the Modern Language Association? Where would we be then?
The cold, formal language of scholarly science results from the notion that ideas stated in such form can be protected or prevented from such troubling things as bias and personal emotional involvement. Instead, this strained and convoluted language only cloaks the inevitable bias and emotion. That humans could do anything without emotional investment is a leftover fiction from the nineteenth-century perfection-of-man notion, doubly ironic in a discipline that affects an enlightened understanding of such stuff.
Literature chronicles the human condition, which—isn’t that a fusion of the heart with a smattering of reason? If logic (reason) is an imperfect science, surely logic contaminated by passion—a fair idea of what happens in story?—is an impossible science. And it seems absurd to imagine that we could apply any sort of theory to literature and have it hold, the way you can in other disciplines—the tensile strength of a four-inch steel I-beam will hold it intact until 18,000 lbs. pressure is brought to bear. In terms of people, it might require 18,000 lbs. pressure to cause panic and injury today, while two feathers and a drop of water would have the same effect tomorrow, or across town at Rhonda’s Cafe.
1. My kids grew up thinking I’m a heartless brute because I didn’t take in every pitiable canine we passed on the roadside. They didn’t understand that people abandoned unwanted pets enough to overrun us.
2. One of my early memories is seeing ice-bound deer carcasses in a New York lake in late winter: chased by dogs they would get only so far out on the ice and then break through.
3. I despise the Disney-fication of nature.
On the subject of imagery—and not only that, but concerning any element of style—Hemingway makes a good point about simplicity and writerly excess: “No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over” (1201). This amounts to economy of another sort; writers (or their editors) do well to check the impulse to show off virtuosity where it does not serve the work. Here is a quality that, if it is done well, can not be demonstrated; if a work lives up to this standard, its proof is the absence of unnecessary ornament. Unless writers take particular care, they are likely to toss around simile and metaphor unnecessarily. Some rules of thumb that I believe best govern imagery are: such comparison helps clarify an otherwise difficult concept; or by comparing an entity to something more familiar the comparison depicts more economically than straightforward description might; or it serves a motif in the work. Sometimes, however, one might fiddle with the definition of “necessary and irreplaceable.” Sometimes imagery is a matter of voice. But it allows only so much fiddling—you do not want fluted columns holding up a cabin porch.
Even before I returned to school (and occasionally since), I reviewed Strunk and Whites’s The Elements of Style, so that like a Hebrew with the word of God affixed to my forehead, I go into the world believing above all else that “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary parts”; and this requires that “every word tell” (Introduction xiv). The Biblical allusion above explains an aspect of prose-writing more economically than I could have spelled it out, which validates the image. Yet, to have preceded it with “White was my Moses, leading me into [etc.],” as I was tempted to, would have added nothing; it would have been ostentatious, the reason Hemingway preaches against it. Imagery must be constructed of tight parallels. The comparison should seem so obvious that it suggests itself, as if the writer plucked it from the air fully formed. Like so much else in writing, it should appear seamless.
And I revel in linguistic color, sonorous gems like: finagle, harangue, sumptuous, turmoil, lurid, ravish, guile, cajole. The w’s, for instance: someone wanting to learn storytelling could begin by opening a dictionary to the w’s (and especially any word with a wh– in it) and stocking up: whelp, wheedle, wheeze, whipsnake, whiskey, whomp, wince, winsome. I listen for long vowels, and words with an “ou” in them. (People wonder why novelists and storytellers are concentrated in the South, but it’s simple, really—the Southern voice is better equipped to do justice to a long vowel. Plus, it converts every short vowel to a long one. When it comes to holding a listener’s ear, the voice that can stretch two or three syllables out of “house” or “hell” has a natural advantage over its Northern cousins.) For the most part I avoid polysyllabic, Latinate abstractions, although certain voices get rhythmic, King-Jamesian splendor with words like “nomenclature.”
Although I value subtlety, I work to make accessible stories—I like Crane’s approach: “write plainly and unmistakably so that all . . . might read and understand”—simple words and sentences, stories packed tight with meaning. I’m comfortable accepting mystery or ambiguity, but I hate compounding it with complexity; the world has ample complexity under its own power.
I admire effortless-sounding, seemingly casual prose that you know someone sweated over to achieve that effect. Ideally each sentence, and the story itself, should look simple, inevitable, seamless—as if alive in its own right, telling itself, and I just repeat it. A good story leads the reader to feel, naively: anyone could do this.
I’ve listened to storytellers for guidance. Garrison Keillor, for instance—on paper his stories are uninspiring, but get his voice behind them and there’s some sort of magic vitality involved. My neighbor Allen—one Sunday morning I slipped a mini-cassette recorder covertly into my shirt pocket and stood visiting with Allen in his back yard (I was not using or patronizing him; other than getting him on tape, this visit was like a hundred others) recording him so I could pay attention later to cadence, inflection, and such. Allen, who works for the city street department, is a gifted storyteller. In the midst of discussing a local character’s misadventures in the cattle business, Allen referred to a low-lying field as: that goddamn frog hatchery north of town. It piles color on top of unmistakable meaning. You can’t get all the rhythmic cadence of speech onto paper, but to whatever extent possible, it’s an invaluable contribution to a story. A sentence can be made—or ruined—by rhythm and meter.
And surely I’m motivated more by self-indulgence than some virtuous-sounding conceit. But I do think that at the most primal level of human consciousness, you’ll find open flames and storytelling bucking up the human soul. I like what Nick Bottom the weaver says, “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream” (IV, i). And don’t say I’ve quoted him out of context, because that can’t be done, the way I read the play. I like Mark Twain’s prefatory note to Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” I don’t think that means necessarily that you can’t find those elements in the story, so much as: leave ‘em the hell alone.
CB Bassity ©2000 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED