Write About Now

White Whales and Cat Detectives

Deborah Solomon interviews Joyce Carol Oates, and one response in particular catches my eye:

Q. ... Why do you find violence so alluring as a literary subject? 
A. If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write “Moby Dick” than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of art. 

God Preserve Us! Chekhov on Writing

From an 1886 letter written by Anton Chekhov:

"In the sphere of psychology, details are also the thing. God preserve us from commonplaces. Best of all is it to avoid depicting the hero's state of mind; you ought to try to make it clear from the hero's actions. It is not necessary to portray many characters. The center of gravity should be in two persons: him and her." 

Flipping through a notebook from 1999, my last year in grad school, I discovered this passage from Chekhov. The advice strikes me as excellent -- he's Chekhov, after all -- and I only wish I'd paid more attention to it over the past ten years. It's funny how, the more you learn, the more that's left to learn -- and most of it is quite simple, and you knew it all along.

Are Artists Special?

"Once the artistic element has been separated out from any area of human activity, whatever remains risks being devalued as mechanical and even contemptible. Once religious paintings were made into works of art, then any church decoration that did not bear the mark of a master was of little interest; any building not designed by a known architect was 'vernacular'; any anonymous folk song might be charming but could only become real art when arranged by a serious composer. Low art disappeared below the horizon of history until its rediscovery by social (but not art) historians.

"This legacy has not simply divided 'low art' from 'high art', but has decreased the possibility of artistic achievement in everyday life. Once the decoration of churches or the painting of icons on the design of cathedrals and guild-halls was taken out of the hands of wood-carvers and masons and journeymen and given to artists, then the role of the artisan was decisively degraded. Artisans may take pride in their work but they must know that it is always somehow second-rate. When the artist is removed from society and made into a special person, then the artist within each of us begins to die."

ROGER OSBORNE

Civilization: A New History of the Western World, p. 212

Thanks to Myron Glaser for pointing me to the passage.

The Policeman's Tortured Psyche

Now that I'm writing crime fiction, I keep running across things like this:

"I'm not the cop-hater I'm reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to in your speech if we were debating is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would maintain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal...."

NORMAN MAILER
in a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., quoted in The New Yorker, October 6, 2008, p. 59.

If you take on a genre...

"If you take on a genre, you should know something about the form, but you shouldn't let the form gain greater importance than the novel itself. All novels are about characters and their transitions based on the story being revealed through a precise plot."

-- WALTER MOSLEY
in This Year You Write Your Novel, p. 98.

Condemned to Tell All

"Today, the writer of an autobiography is condemned to tell all or nothing. If he cannot reveal everything, then he should abandon all attempts at revelation."

-- FRANCOIS MAURIAC
in Memoires Interieurs, p. 10.

The Flavour of the Wood

"It's strange that you can still write drama, but not fiction."

"Ah well, you see, I can do dialogue all right," said Frobisher. "And somebody else does the pictures. But with fiction it's the narrative bits that give the writing its individuality. Descriptions of people, places, weather, stuff like that. It's like ale that's been kept in the wood: the flavour of the wood permeates the beer. Telly drama's like keg in comparison: all gas and no flavour. It's style I'm talking about, the special, unique way a writer has of using language. Well, you're a poet, you know what I'm talking about."

"I do," said Persse.

DAVID LODGE
in Small World, pp. 181-182

The Basement of Enjoyment

"Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital. Those without a gift for criticism can't be appreciative beyond a certain point, and the point is set quite low, in the basement of enjoyment."

CLIVE JAMES
Cultural Amnesia, p. 127

One of the high points of last week's Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing for me was attending John Wilson's discussion of book reviewing. Wilson, amiable and erudite, is the editor of Books & Culture, making him both a reviewer and a master of reviewers. (His re-cap of the festival is now online.) In the session, he read an essay of Orwell's on book reviewers, then unloaded a stack of prospective volumes onto the table, explaining how he'd approach the problem of reviewing each one -- whether it should be noticed, and if so what kind of notice it should receive (and when), and to whom the review should be assigned. As an inveterate reader of reviews -- a fan of the genre, if you will -- I was in heaven. One thing was clear. In the house of reading enjoyment, Wilson is nowhere near the basement. The task of criticism is a labor of love.

This is sharply at odds with the idea of critics as a bitter lot, working out their spite at the expense of hapless authors whose only crime was to create. It also gives the lie to the notion that critics are, first and foremost, failed or frustrated artists, operating on a hatred for the success of other writers rather than a love for the written word. Wilson was quick to point out that there's little money to be made in book reviewing, especially at the entry level. The only reason to persevere is because you enjoy reading and writing about good books.

The Death of the Death of the Novel

The Southern Review keeps knocking my socks off. I subscribed last year because my friend Allison Smythe had a poem in the Spring 2007 issue, which also features a jaw-droppingly good piece by Mark Jarman on metaphor. When it comes to journal subscriptions, I'm used to disappointment. I can't count how many I've let lapse. Maybe this would be different.

Last night I started flipping through the recently arrived Winter 2008 issue, wondering if it would live up to expectations. It did. Robert Clark Young's essay "The Death of the Death of the Author" is required reading. Young was at the University of Houston a few years before me, and mentions a few of the people I knew there. I wish I'd had a chance to meet him, because he's offered up the antidote to a festering affliction of mine.

A False Notion?

Here's something to think about, from Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster:

All this leaves Jacques Polge resigned. "I hear the briefs of [perfume] brands that declare that they want to create a 'classic,' like [Chanel] No. 5," he says with a sigh. "This is a false notion. We should try to create a perfume of its time, and perhaps it can become a classic." (p. 154)

Polge is the "nose" at Chanel. The question is, does the same thing apply to novels? We talk about writing for the ages, but books aren't classics when they're written or published. That takes time, and it's a process over which we have little control.