The website of author Jefferson Flanders

Category: Literature (Page 4 of 6)

Blocking and tackling

I’ll confess that I was pleased to find this quote from Joseph Heller the other day: “Every writer I know has trouble writing.”

Whenever I am struggling to find the right words—the blocking and tackling of writing—I’m convinced that others must find it easier to write than me. I’m jealous of the facile writer, the first-time-right composers, those with the gift of “flow.”

football

So Heller’s comment lifted my spirits.

I’m a block writer, for the most part. My method is similar to Ring Lardner’s (according to Harold Ross,”…he {Lardner} said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.”), followed by revision. And more revision. I spend more time rewriting than writing.

Some writers I’ve talked to tell me that they can only write from front to back, from the lead sentence onward. They don’t move on until they’re happy with each sentence. Adopting that technique would give me a vicious case of writer’s block: I find skipping ahead to work on a sentence here or a paragraph there keeps me going. I think of my writing as a patchwork quilt, passages and paragraphs stitched together with transitions.


Copyright © 2007 Jefferson Flanders

Writing it down

“A poet never takes notes,” said Robert Frost. “You never take notes in a love affair.”

Frost knew something about writing poetry, but I think he was being a touch precious about the question of notes.

Isn’t it the rare writer who can create totally from memory? Perhaps I betray my journalistic roots, but I know that I find myself scribbling notes to myself all time—observations, phrases, something overhead, a particularly good argument I’ve made to myself. They come in handy, because of my all-too-faulty memory.

nOTES

In fact, I regret the times when I didn’t stop to write down some particularly apt or telling idea or sentence or description. Too often it would be lost forever (floating somewhere in my subconciousness, I suppose).

Now I would agree that Frost’s image of the lover obsessively chronicling the love affair—making notes instead of making love—isn’t an appealing one. But has all great love poetry been created from by noteless poets? I would think not. What are journals, diaries, letters, writer’s notebooks for?

I remember reading once that William Carlos Williams, a doctor and marvelous poet, would scrawl lines on his prescription pads; Wallace Stevens, insurance executive and poet, kept his “poetry notes” in the lower right hand drawer of his desk where he could quickly add ideas or words when the Muse moved him.

Yes, I have deliberately taken Frost’s comment too literally—he was, I think, contrasting the need to live without self-consciously observing that life while in the moment—but it got me thinking about “writing it down.”


Copyright © 2007 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved

Expats and the beauty of language

I stumbled upon some comments by the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, an exile in Canada, about how expatriates appreciate their native language in a distinct way. Skvorecky offered this:

Henry Miller recommended that writers live abroad, because their native language suddenly becomes precious to them. They see its possibilities and beauty, which they hadn’t noticed at home, because there everyone spoke Czech. I think that is confirmed by the fact that Hemingway, who was probably the most influential stylist in American literature, wrote his early stories and novels abroad.

Miller’s theory is interesting (if not self-serving, since Miller was an expat), one which obviously resonated with Skvorecky. Does absence make the heart grow fonder? Or the ear sharper? Does separation from the familiar bring it into better focus?

I’m not so sure. I look at those American writers today who clearly love the language, who play with it, and they are not expats: Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Tim O’Brien. Each offers us different American voices, rhythms, cadences, and their home-bound lyricism seems to suggest Henry Miller had it wrong.

For that matter, today there is no isolation for an American living overseas in the age of global culture. English is everywhere (admittedly in different flavors), but it’s harder to be homesick in Paris, to miss the American idiom, with Le Big Mac available at the corner MacDonalds.


Copyright © 2007 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved

‘The deeper they burn’

Robert Pinsky asks and answers an interesting question in his Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post's Bookworld: "What is a prose poem? Who knows?"

Pinsky then dances around the definition, suggesting it has something to do with "speed and compression," or the "deft, mysterious creation of feeling from a few words," or the idea of movement in prose.

The Academy of American Poets offers us a somewhat more precise explanation:

While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.

Say again? The Academy acknowledges the confusion: "the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry."

Hmm. Where should we place Ernest Hemingway's six-word story (composed in response to a challenge)?

Baby shoes. For sale. Never worn.

That certainly meets Pinsky's definition of a "deft, mysterious creation of feeling from a few words." What becomes harder is drawing the line between poetic prose and prosey poems. For example, take the following passage from Marguerite Duras' novel The Malady of Death:

And she, in the room, sleeps on. Sleeps, and you don't wake her. As her sleep goes on, sorrow grows in the room. You sleep once, on the floor at the foot of her bed.

She goes on sleeping, evenly. So deeply, she sometimes smiles. She wakes only if you touch her body, the breasts, the eyes. Sometimes she wakes for no reason, except to ask if the noise is the wind or high tide.

She wakes. She looks at you. She says: The malady's getting more and more of a hold on you. It's reached your eyes, your voice.

You ask: What malady?

She says she can't say, yet.

Prose or poetry? It has the feel of poetry to me, a sparseness and yet an emotional depth. Duras' entire novel, (in a minimalist translation from the French by Barbara Bray), strikes me as an extended poem in prose. Yet, despite its brevity, The Malady of Death meets all the requirements of fiction (a narrative, characters, etc.) and it has the ambition of fiction: to explore the depths of human heart.

When I consider some of my favorite authors and the elegance and beauty in their choice of words, the manner in which they evoke the felt life, I am reminded of Pinsky's "deft, mysterious creation of feeling." Consider the final two sentences from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses:

He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

Poetry or prose? Does it matter? It's the control over words that these authors/poets have, their economy, their ability to hint at something profound with one descriptive adjective ("darkening") or the use of cadence or repetition, that gratifies the reader.

As England's poet laureate in the early 19th century, Robert Southey, once wrote: "It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."


Copyright © 2006 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved

Joseph Conrad and “The Secret Sharer”

Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is usually grouped with his other sea stories for critical consideration, but the nautical setting is incidental—it is the “conflict within” that fascinated the Polish-English writer, a reflection, we can conjecture, of Conrad’s own identification as a homo duplex—a “double man.”

The Secret Sharer

English was Conrad’s second language, and he acknowledged his own dual loyalties when he told a British friend in 1903: “Both at sea and on land, my point of view is English, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning.”

The immigrant Conrad struggled with this dual national identity, balancing two cultures and allegiances, knowing that he would always be considered somewhat less than truly English. Conrad understood full well the potential for alienation and conflict that such a straddling act could produce.

“The Secret Sharer,” published in 1911 in Harper’s Magazine, was, according to Conrad, based on both his own experiences as a young captain and on the highly publicized murder of a sailor on the clipper ship Cutty Sark in 1880 by the first mate (who subsequently killed himself).

Not much occurs in the “The Secret Sharer”per se: there are no shipwrecks or mutinies, no sea battles or feats of seamanship. The drama, for the most part, takes place in the mind (and heart) of the unnamed young English captain—the narrator—who has recently assumed command, his first, of an unnamed ship off the coast of Cambodia in the Gulf of Siam (Thailand).

As the story opens, another young Englishman, Lassatt, swims to the ship, a fugitive from justice. An officer aboard the ship Sephora, Lassatt has killed a sailor during a crisis in bad weather; he openly explains his situation and acknowledges his guilt in the matter to the captain. Like the story’s narrator, Lassatt has been schooled on the Conway—the training vessel for the Royal Navy and British Merchant Marine—and the young captain immediately identifies with him.

He decides to shelter Lassatt, hiding him in his cabin, concealing his presence from the crew. It’s never made clear why he identifies with the fugitive so deeply: is it the bond between two sensitive men of the same social class? Is there an element of sexual attraction? Is Lassatt his doppelganger, his double?

Conrad’s unnamed narrator struggles with this, drawn to the fugitive, and yet aware of the twisted aspects to the relationship.

He was not a bit like me, really; yet, as we stood leaning over my bed place, whispering side by side, with our dark heads together and our backs to the door, anybody bold enough to open it stealthily would have been treated to the uncanny sight of a double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self.

“The Secret Sharer” is about duality (the text is crammed with references to “my other self,” “my double, “the secret sharer of my life,” “my intelligent double”), a common theme in 19th century literature: think of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe’s William Wilson, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In fact, Conrad revised the title of the story from “The Secret-Sharer” to “The Secret Sharer” so that dualism was recognized from the start.

The question of command

While the Other Self fascinates Conrad, the story is also about command—command in the sense of commanding a ship, but also of commanding one’s destiny. One critical interpretation of the story sees the episode with Leggatt as the mechanism by which the young captain faces down his self-doubts and assumes his responsibilities as the authority figure on his own ship. Certainly the resolution of the story suggests that Conrad introduced the fugitive as a way to force his young narrator to confront the very question of command. It is an unabashedly male question for Conrad: does the captain have the strength and resolve to deserve command? Can he gain the respect of his crew—who wait to see that his titular authority is matched by competence and judgment?

Joseph Conrad

Where Conrad’s work rises above the conventional sea story is in his portrait of his hesitant, conflicted captain. The narrator confesses: “But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself.” He doubts himself: “…I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.”

In contrast to this hesitancy, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey—perhaps the two best-known protagonists in 20th century nautical fiction—rarely if ever suffer from self-doubt or second thoughts: they are “men of action” and natural leaders, cool and collected in times of crisis.

It is now clear that neither Forester (the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith) nor O’Brian (named Richard Patrick Russ at birth) were the naval experts they made themselves out to be; both fashioned public biographies that veered sharply from the truth. Indeed, Patrick O’Brian, who was neither Irish nor a retired naval officer as assumed by many readers, apparently had limited hands-on sailing skills! It is a testament to his skills as a researcher, and his imaginative powers, that he could produce the Aubrey–Maturin series. Perhaps Conrad’s stint as a sea captain freed him to explore the ambiguity of command in ways that Forester and O’Brian—concerned about “authenticity”— could not.

By the close of “The Secret Sharer,” Conrad’s young captain embraces his command, just as he bids farewell to “the secret sharer of my life.” He confronts this alone, having faced down his prior doubts (made human in the form of Lassatt?), and he now turns eagerly to this new responsibility. “Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command.”


The Amazon.com link for the reviewed story:

Joseph Conrad: “The Secret Sharer” and Other Stories


©2006, 2015 by Jefferson Flanders

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