elegantly dressed art, with the right underthings
Elizabeth Bowen: always impeccable
I know this is primarily a poetry blog - and indeed this is an EDW post - but Chip Dale's very successful guest post not long ago, where he talked about his tips & tricks for writing novels, reminded me of something. I've been meaning to write about it ever since.
Back in the mists of time, your own correspondent - yes, that's me - was still too embarrassed to walk into a room and announce to all and sundry that she liked writing poems. (This phenomenon, called 15-year-old-girl syndrome, has been corroborated verbally by other poets, including big strapping guys.) So to that end, when her decade-long writers block cleared up, she started writing stories, and even a novel. It was a bloody good novel, except for one thing: it never got finished.
Of course if I'd had Chip to guide me with his common sense about not getting bogged down, or being too perfectionist, I might have finished it. But possibly not, because, as it turns out, my mental structures seem to be more those of poems than of stories - though oddly enough I do write narrative poems. Because I still love, I guess, character and incident. But I was unable to move a plot along through a whole, long, bewildering novel. I read and read and thought and thought and wrote and wrote, and I am about to share with you something that did help me a lot.* It still helps me a lot.
There is a wonderful little book, edited by Walter Allen, called Writers on Writing (Phoenix House, 1948),** which has both long and short quotes from almost every writer you can think of, pre-forties. Proust is in there, Henry James of course, Chekhov, Fielding, Coleridge, Maupassant, Ford Madox Ford, Dickens... the quotes are taken from letters, notebooks, prefaces, essays, and from novels themselves.
My favourite thing in the whole book is a little gem I've never seen anywhere else, before or since, headed Miss Bowen Sums It Up (originally published in Orion II as "Notes on Writing a Novel"). It's fifteen pages long so I can't give you the whole thing. In it Elizabeth Bowen spells out the moral, imaginative, structural, technical and other issues which must be addressed by a writer. Not, I stress, just a novelist, though this is what she was overtly writing about. Many things are interchangeable, and many issues are universal to the creation of written art, whether you call it "plot" or "the trajectory," "character" or "the narrator."
She begins:
"PLOT: (Essential. The Pre-essential.) Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot for the particular novel is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way.
He is forced towards his plot. By what? By 'what is to be said'. What is 'what is to be said'? A mass of subjective matter that has accumulated - impressions received, feelings about experience, distorted results of ordinary observation, and something else - x. This matter is extra matter. It is superfluous to the non-writing life of the writer. It is luggage left in the hall between two journeys, as opposed to the perpetual furniture of rooms. It is destined to be elsewhere. It cannot move until its destination is known. Plot is the knowing of destination.
Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action."
(KEB here: Michael Donaghy would leap up right now and say: "Notice that chiasmus? That's how Elizabeth Bowen is getting you to remember this point!")
"Plot is story. It is also 'a story' in the nursery sense - lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie."
(KEB again:) There's so much in here that can be taken apart and really examined - within oneself, of course - all this has to happen in oneself: the whittling away of alternatives, for a start. The emotional truth that makes it all worthwhile. The nature of one's material. What is it that is of no use in one's writing life?
Further down Bowen writes something that made a huge impression on me: that is, I kept looking at myself in light of it for years, until it had become part of me in the same way that Bootstrap Bill Turner is part of the Flying Dutchman.
Bowen continues:
"Plot, story, is itself un-poetic. At best it can only be not anti-poetic. It cannot claim a single poetic licence. It must be reasoned - only from the moment when its non-otherness, its only-possibleness has become apparent. Novelist must always have one foot, sheer circumstantiality, to stand on, whatever the other foot may be doing. (N.B. Much to be learned from storytelling to children. Much to be learned from detective story - especially non-irrelevance.) (See Relevance.)
Flaubert's 'Il faut interesser'. Stress on manner of telling: keep in mind, 'I will a tale unfold'. Inerest of watching a dress that has been well-packed unpacked from a dress-box. Interest of watching silk handkerchiefs drawn from a conjurer's watch."
(KEB again:) Can you see Donaghy here too? (A connection I'd never made until typing this out.) This image of the dress being unpacked stayed with me for years, and the handkerchiefs drawn from the watch are right there in his poems, like (for example, obviously) Upon a Claude Glass, or Caliban's Books. All good poetry has this quality of something magical, something transforming itself before your eyes, and transforming you a little with it.
Now, here is something really interesting. There is so much more in here that it's hard to choose, but I'll end with this, as a structural note. Chippy wrote about structure, and I am intensely interested in it myself. I think structure is a form of truth - the form of truth: a scaffold, without which no building can be built.
Bowen writes:
"Plot must not cease to move forward. (See Advance.) The actual speed of movement must be even. Apparent variations in speed are good, necessary, but there must be no actual variations in speed. To obtain these paparent variatons is part of the illusion - task of the novel. Variations in texture can give the effect of variations in speed. Why are apparent variations necessary? (a) for emphasis. (b) for non-resistance, or 'give', to the nervous time-variations of the reader. Why is actual evenness, non-variation of speed, necessary? For the sake of internal evenness for its own sake. Perfection of evenness = perfection of control. The tautness of the taut string is equal (or even) all along and at any part of the string's length."
(KEB) This principle is the reason why reviewers talk of something being "flabby in the middle" or movie-goers say it's "slow." Those are the places where the actual speed slowed down, and the momentum was lost. It is wonderful to think of this speed/tautness thing in conjunction with the dress thing. And it is crucially, critically important in poetry. In fact, it is the essence of elegance.
* Not so much that I actually finished the novel, mind.
** There are other books called Writers on Writing: popular title! I own a couple more. Also good, if you're into this kind of thing, are the Paris Review Interviews, published as books and now available online; Henry James' Notebooks and prefaces; Keats' wonderful letters; Don't Ask Me What I Mean (ed. Paterson & Brown); and a funny thing I have, A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions (U. of Iowa Press).
6 comments:
Excellant post katy.
I am responding off the cuff and making it up as i try to learn how to skate, so please forgive any tangency, but it is an honest return to an increasingly adventurous and hOnest bush whose voice i detect is tightening and firming up.
~
As i was reading two things - or rather writers - entered my mind. The first was when my eye apprehended:
"The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie."
Shelley's: Defense of Poetry; where he talks about poetry being:
"..a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.."
A lie (fiction) being conjured and kinked by the writer's mind until it's imprinted reflection imports into the readers mind, some poetic gravitas or wider universal truth; more hinted at, not explicit, and with an unseen, implicit gravitas, absent and buried in the text as the psychic weight of a creational mind.
The effect we can imagine produced when a féath fíadha, or druidic mist of invisibility was conjured by the filidh, back in the time when fiction and fact mixed, appearing on the pages time forgot, in old irish manuscript, where i found my answers and myth hoard, still perfectly working, supremely poetic, oiled to roar of eternal truths, and a gift from Ogma, the islands' god of poetry in both Brythonnic and Goidelic culture.
Shelleys quote, and indeed his Defense of Poetry, is written in lingo far deeper than a dry intellectaul cognition of - what George Szirtes calls - the quotidian "linguistic aggregate," of everyday speech.
And as i read the Donaghy parallel, another master sprung to mind, and various lines from Heaney's 1986 T.S. Eliot memorial lecture at the Univeristy of Kent.
This is the essay on Plath in Finders Keeps: The Indefatigable Hoof Taps, whose influence i detected as a template for Sziertes eloquent skating metaphor in his address the other year.
Certainly it was a contributing intellectual third to the poetic i cobbled together, as my own three point take which charts the stages of poetic development, or as Heaney describes it:
"..poetic journey" or "three stages which seem to exemplify" the "three degrees of poetic achievment.."
Heaney's logic is very poetically persuassive, as he reduces all the mumbo jumbo other poets try to pass off as verbal beauty, to an easy abc of poetry, using Wordsworth's There Once Wa A Boy poem from Lyrical Ballads - as the core of his analogy - to effortlessly elucidate, in an affirmational register, what poetry is; explaining his poetic in deceptively sophisticated, yet straightforward terms, based on the grounds of belief, rather than attempting to define it in oppositional terms. Not bad going when dissecting a poet who committed suicide. A true pro, who uses There Once Was A Boy:
"...as a parbale of these three stages.."of poetic development in the chase for the magical linguistic gravitas only they who genuinely profess poetry possess.
And he takes the young wordy one tramping in the Cumbrian woods making owl calls; telling us:
"The first task of the poet" is "to learn how to entwine his or her hands so that the whistle comes out right...to trumpet and tu-whit, tu-whoo..happy to perform this feat for its own sake, repeatedly, self-forgetfully and tirelessly..an original act of making, the equivalent in the oral/aural sphere of.." making sand castles or mud pies.
And i concurr, also believing that this is the first stage in ones career as a verse-smith, when we write our first poetry, and as Heaney says, go:
"Listen I can do it! Look how well it turned out! And I can do it again! See?"
The second stage in the trajectory to ollamh, is when the owls start returning our calls, us fooling the real thing, much as when we start getting into mags and being considered as genuine by other poets. Heaney describes this stage as:
"..the vale filling with the actual cries of owls responding to the boy's art," and "we have the image of the classically empowered poet, the one who has got beyond scale-practising..who rejoices in the spirit of life" and "..the owls in our own dream branches begin to halloo in recognition."
He goes onto describe how the third stage of poetic achievement, when the poet can no longer make the owl calls, "cannot make any noise with his hands" as Heaney described it, and is summed up in the Wordsworth poem:
"And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening...the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and the uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom..
~
Heaney has a beautifull metaphor for this moment, describing it as:
"..like the bird of poetry at the glass pane of intelligence , seeing where it needs to go but unable to gain entry. But the windo glass is miraculously withdrawn and deep free swoops into the blue pool.."
Achieved as the poet is gifted - out of the blue - full sight of their myth kitty and eternal image/symbol hoard, by whatever gods their gods swear by in the music of what's happening in our career, as we ascend or nea, hear or not in the return of silence, what ghosts flit to us from the anima mundi.
This is the third stage, after we have become the bees knees at mimesis, and engaged in our call and return with the birds of poetic utterance, and - my spin is - that we reach the point where we have become so real to other poets/owls, that they no longer return the call, and we are left dumbstruck and unable to make the sound, and in this moment of complete surrender - when we believe the game is up and their will be noe more return - we are rewarded for our slog and effort by the gifting of whatever poetry gods one believes in; with the keys to the door of our myth hoard, along with our poetic garb, dress and badge of entry to the third and final stage of sound-development few possess.
You certainly do Bush, you talented pretend british american, much like oim a pretend brit and plastic paddy. Two outsiders on the inside track, both native english speakers who need no title to be eloquent, no Sir or Lord to boss us about.
10/10 for todays love-in katy. Hurrah!! Award ourselves a pat on the back and right to laugh in the face of the trolling moaners.
crikey, I've never read any of these kind of books, as anyone who visits my blog will testify, so I'll just say ta very much for the link Miss Baroque. I have dropped in from time to time via a certain naked welshman of our mutual aquaintance so I'm very honoured. I shall allow you intellectuals to get on with it now, tootleoo
Hi Ms B
Lovely choice for EDW. I'm a total failure as a novelist. It's not that I can't finish them - I'm actually pretty good at that. It's just that I can't get them accepted for publication. I hope you won't mind me offering insights anyway.
The process of writing a novel is a wonderful one and, in my almost entirely pleasurable experience, that old cliche that the characters take on a life of their own and the book starts writing itself is absolutely true.
The story is completed at the end of the first draft and only then does the writing begin. The author becomes director; sketching in the streets, trees, rivers, clouds, cafes, factories, kitchens and bedrooms that the haste to find out what happened in the end left behind. Only then do the characters stop being one voice and start functioning as individuals. Only then is the untidy drone of everyday life remodelled into a beginning, middle and end; transforming random activity into the continuous narrative that we call a novel.
For me, there is almost as much inspiration in tutorials as there is in original sources. I've got a lot out of reading Natalie Goldberg, Dorothea Brande and Josip Novakovich's practical advice - especially when I've felt a bit flat.
But it's only in the writer's own experience that the raw material exists. Where there is an individual - there is a new story that no one has heard before in quite the same way. This is why we hunger for books knowing full well that there are only 7-20 (depending on your level of optimism) plots in the fictional canon.
Ultimately, I think the writing of a novel is a very long journey that can't be undertaken by anyone but the writer - and we certainly wouldn't want it any other way. Unless you've got the memory of the smartest elephant in the herd, some methodology is going to be necessary.
What I'm trying to say here is that developing the story is actually the easy part - it's the grind of making sure you've conquered the continuity that's going to define whether the created world rings true or not. As you rightly say Ms B - it doesn't matter how illogical the premise, what matters is that the novelist makes it work. We readers, and I'm an avid one of those, are only too eager to be pleased.
xxx
Pants
Desmond, you amaze me as always, and flatter me too.
Rilly, delightful to see you here in Baroque Mansions; I'm a great fan of yours.
TSP, yes, yes, that's as may be. It doesn't work that way for me! Alas. And that is why I bow to all of you who can do it.
Hi Ms B
What I was trying to say is that you find your own way to do it and that's the delight of it.
xxx
Pants
Was reading down and came across this interesting post, wondered if you've read Al Alvarez's The Writer's Voice? I meditated a bit on structure, and life, in my own first blog post but thought I was straying a little closely to pretension!
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