By
JOHN SCHERBER
AND AMERICAN VOICE IN MEXICO
BEAUTIFUL WRITING––
WHO NEEDS IT?
Many
writing coaches counsel their students that “beautiful writing” in fiction usually
goes unnoticed by the public. Their readers are busy marching through the
narrative on their way to see what happens next. After all, as writers, isn’t
our primary job being storytellers? What does it matter how it’s done, as long
as it’s clear, concise, and well-paced. Aren’t most bestselling authors merely
good pacers?
But
if you’re like most writers, you still have that nagging need to really take
wing now and then, to show the world––and yourself––what you’re capable of
when you pull out the stops. You know you can do it, and you’ve already got a long
list of vivid but rarely seen words you haven’t been able to find a place for
recently just waiting for the right paragraph.
Once
on the page, however, these minor operatic arias act like a Mafia
informant––they tend to take on a certain kind of immunity. No matter how much
they might need pruning or even complete elimination, they linger under your
loving eyes like a wayward favorite child you cannot bring yourself to
discipline. No matter that they lack context, lying there like a gold nugget on
a muddy riverbank.
Some
successful writers have remade this pitfall into a virtue. One of these is
Cormac McCarthy. He appears to be a tweedy gentleman well into his seventies.
He has won numerous honors, including the National Book Award. He takes a long
time to craft a book and displays great pride in his style, which tends to shed
most punctuation and dialog attributions. When I read his work, I envision a
much younger man as the author, wearing a gritty headband that does not prevent
the sweat from dripping into his eyes. His arms are well muscled and his
knuckles scarred from intimate contact with his craft. His face is shadowed by
dirt or coal dust. He has taken care to hammer each word into place, and then
pulled it out again with a pair of tongs and rehammered it. His prose often aches
on the page. It is full of bold examples of beautiful writing; they are angular
and knobby, faceted and dense with meaning. When they work, which is most of
the time, they feel brilliant, if never entirely natural. They demand attention
for themselves, and indirectly, the author’s prowess. When they don’t work,
they fall into a black hole bereft of meaning, and they invite you to think
about all the other examples that stood out like a concrete block in the road. Whether
they succeed or not you are always aware of Cormac McCarthy at your side, sweating
and working hard.
It
reminds me of a dinner party where everything is perfect: the décor, the food,
the wine, the company selected for their established chemistry. And the host
and hostess are working themselves to death for your enjoyment. You are impressed,
you are flattered, you are relishing the wine from an obscure vineyard in
Burgundy that’s been in the same family since the tenth century; but you are
not having fun. One rule of hospitality is this: never let them see you sweat.
Another
author who has mastered beautiful writing is John Updike, who died a few years
ago. I recently reread his four Rabbit novels, written at ten-year intervals. His
method is to burnish rather than bludgeon, and his prose his honed and polished
to a gemlike luster. It is the style of a penetrating mind. You feel he would
prefer not to use any word that had ever been used before, at least in the way
he’s planning to use it. When successful, the effect can be more than
illuminating; it can be stunning. When it fails, it leaves the reader with her
mouth open, wondering what exactly Updike was trying to say.
Make
no mistake; good writing involves taking real risks. It is not for people of
great modesty, or for cowards, since it involves launching yourself through the
air without a net, knowing that you will occasionally fall and bruise your own
self-respect. This is how your skills advance. It is no surprise therefore,
that even McCarthy and Updike sometimes fail, but an occasional failure does
not diminish their long record of success. What I find lacking in both of them,
however, is the appearance of not working very much to make their magical effects
happen, the sense of having tossed off that brilliant paragraph without a
second thought, without kneading it, rolling it over, punching it down, and
kneading it again. And then moving off to the next triumph without looking back
over their shoulders.
The
word I use for this missing ease of delivery is grace. It is casual, apparently unthinking, natural, masterful and
yet informal, magisterial yet intimate––a tall order. It is the flick of the
wrist of a great painter as he lays down a brushstroke that is exactly right,
but almost looks unplanned.
One
writer who was a master of this was Somerset Maugham, who died at 91 in 1965.
While he never appeared to work as hard at beautiful writing, it was often
present in the precision of his prose. His work is layered with nuance, rather
than crusty with meaning. His sentences often evoke rather than relate or
explain. When they open a small, long-forgotten door in the reader’s mind,
emotions, thoughts and memories fly out in a rush.
Like
Updike and McCarthy, Maugham himself is present on the page. But rather than
sweating and pretending he’s invisible, he is to be found seated on the veranda
of a house near Kuala Lumpur with a tall cool drink, or at a sidewalk café in
Nice or Cap Ferrat. He is unafraid to be a character, major or minor, in his
own fiction, yet his work is largely not autobiographical. His opening lines are
often connected to his own experience, but primarily just as a starting point.
For example, this first sentence from a short story called Jane is typical: “I
remember very well the occasion on which I first saw Jane Fowler.”
How
simple that is, and how unaffected. This unselfconscious presence is what gives
the story both its intimacy and its credibility. The reader almost feels she’s
in a conversation with Maugham, relaxed and personal. There is never a false
note, nor does it ever feel reworked, although I imagine Maugham must have done
considerable revision just as we all do. Yet the naturalness of it is never
strained.
So
the question remains: Beautiful writing––who needs it?
I
think we all do. Certainly writers need to take wing now and then, to lift off
and soar above the mundane, the ordinary grocery list kind of prose that gets
us from point A to B. But I believe the reader needs it too. When writing
coaches discourage their students from attempting it, they perhaps fear its misuse
more than they doubt its welcome by the reader when it’s successfully done.
But
of course, it’s much like successful entertaining: you must never let them see
you sweat.
Please use this URL to visit the
Author’s website:
No comments:
Post a Comment