Good Novels are Pointless

If there's one piece of writing advice that I try to abide by, other than read, read, read (see post on 18.09.13) it is Do not write fiction in order to convey a Point.*

I've just abandoned Tolstoy's Resurrection, having sauntered through the first quarter, plodded through the second and slogged lamely through the third. I just had to stop; I couldn't make it any further; I was dazed and achy from being bludgeoned over the head with Tolstoy's Moral Message.

It's not that I object in principle to a novelised critique of a corrupt society, but in order to be readable the satire should, I think, emerge organically from the characters and their interactions. It shouldn't be foisted on them. It's a novel not a pamphlet; the characters are the main event, not the author's opinions. In Resurrection it's as though Tolstoy decided he couldn't be doing with all the complexities of characterisation. Prince Nekhludoff, Maslova and the rest only exist in order to illustrate his philosophy. Their thoughts, feelings, actions and conversations are insignificant except in as far as they persuade people that a non-Tolstoyan world is a disgusting world.

In Resurrection, when the Prince's potential fiancée, Missy, makes a banal remark at dinner you feel that she is doing so because she represents (along with Turkish towels, perfumed mouth wash and feather-beds) everything that's wrong with the world. That's all she's for. She's not allowed to come alive and do surprising things, so she turns out two-dimensional.  In a great novel, like Anna Karenina, people aren't written off like that. Karenin, Vronsky and Anna are all alienating at times, and then at other times they're deeply lovable. You can't boil them down, put them in a nutshell or otherwise sum them up.

You can't sum up a good novel, either. The question, What's this novel about? should provoke interminable argument, not a tidy précis. One of the functions of fiction is to probe moral questions, not to close them. When he was an old man Tolstoy rejected Anna Karenina and War and Peace as 'degenerate', 'elitist', 'counterfeit art' and took to writing overtly moral works such as The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. In other words he was fed up with the amoral intricacies of novel writing; fed up, as he saw it, of putting aesthetics over morals. Better, he felt, to use his literary genius to lambast all the things he hated most: sex, the government, the church, the judiciary, private property and the aristocratic way of life. I wonder why he stuck with fiction at all. It's a curious instrument to choose; rather like picking up a scalpel when you're minded to cudgel someone's brains out.

 

Tolstoy looking like a man with a message

*People issuing writing advice always begin by claiming there are no hard and fast rules. They then go on to say, Oh, except for this hard and fast rule, and that one, and that one...I've now gone and done the same thing. Bother.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures?"

"Bless the child", my ten year old self thought when she read the opening paragraph of Alice in Wonderland. I, for one, was growing up. I was leaving Shirley Hughes and Beatrix Potter behind and heading for an adult world of wall-to-wall text without pictures. Mentally I patted Alice's tiny blonde head.

Now I am grown up and:
a) I suspect Lewis Caroll was more or less on Alice's side in this question. (after all, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is, itself, an illustrated book....) and therefore the joke was on me when I thought I was allying myself with the forces of wisdom and maturity.
b) I find I still have a lot of use for books with pictures. Some are breath-taking works of art in their own right, which is why I often find the children's section the most alluring part of the library. (Mind, I tend to use my daughter's baby-pink Junior Reader card when I take them out. I wave it ostentatiously under the librarian's nose as if to say, "Obviously, I'm not borrowing this for myself! I'd use my grown-up, white library card if it was for me! This is for a child!")

Though how anyone could be ashamed of borrowing Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, illustrated by Angela Burnett, I don't know. I'd been through life without ever reading The Snow Goose until a couple of months ago this edition, on the children's display table in Douglas library, made me do a double-take. I can't imagine it in any other format now. The text would be a bit baggy and untethered on its own, it seems to me. Angela Burnett's wistful illustrations make the book a complete and lovely thing.


I wonder why illustrated fiction is reserved, by and large, for children? (I'm not talking about graphic novels, which have their own kudos, I mean books where pictures serve a written narrative.) Obviously there are sound, practical reasons why children's books are illustrated; it would be difficult (impossible?) to learn to read without pictures there to prompt comprehension, turn a mind-boggling string of words into a story and generally keep things lively. But after childhood? Given that a good picture is a lot more than a mere vocab prompt?

I wonder whether artistic snobbery is part of the answer, i.e. a sense that 'proper art' isn't illustrative? That 'proper art' is its own justification and shouldn't be subordinate to a text? After all, much twentieth century art was the heir of Impressionism, which consciously rejected an (admittedly tired and over-prescriptive) tradition of narrative painting in favour of capturing light, movement and the beauty of the incidental. It's been a while, I know, but out-moded prejudices can linger....


At any rate the Victorians were very keen on marrying words and pictures: the Pre-Raphaelites gorged themselves on Shakespeare, Dante and Malory, while Establishment figures like Lord Leighton and Edward Armitage were reworking stories from the Bible and Greek Mythology. The Victorians also illustrated their books and newspaper serials without worrying that they were doing anything odd or childish - think of Phiz's illustrations for Dickens novels or Sidney Paget's definitive Sherlock Holmes.



Paget's Holmes teetering over the Reicenbach Falls

Illustrations are irresistible to me, even the maddening one's that get it all wrong. It's always fascinating to know what someone else has made of a story, especially if it's a story that I know and love. It's the same kind of pleasure you get from talking about books or watching them adapted for TV. I suppose there's an argument that you risk stunting your own imagination (so, for example, Mr. Darcy no longer manifests himself in a million different imaginary incarnations but is forever possessed of the dripping face and torso of Colin Firth circa 1995) but I'm not convinced that good illustrations work like that. They are more suggestive, oblique and mood-enhancing. They give a few sidelong glances at the story; they meld into it; they don't warp or swamp.

It's partly my new Kindle that's made me think about all this. I was reading a freebie copy of Peter Ibbetson by George Du Maurier: the illustrations weren't there but, oh so tantalisingly, the captions still were, so that the text was interrupted here and there with [Illustration: "Good old Slade!"] or [Illustration: "Ominous birds of yore."] Now that throwaway paperbacks are giving way to electronic books, I wonder whether physical books will tend to be of the carefully-crafted, hard back type that people buy as a luxury? If so, might illustrations come back into vogue? Susannah Clarke's 2004 novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell with its lovely, smoky drawings by Portia Rosenberg, gave me some hope. But then again, the story is set in the early 1800s, so maybe they were included to give the book a retro feel. I don't want illustrations to be rare, retro novelties I want them (in case you haven't gathered) to be unsurprising and normal. Not universal; just normal.

An illustration by Portia Rosenberg for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

Awkward Encounters with Myself

It was reassuring to hear Zadie Smith talking on Desert Island Discs about how much she hates re-visiting her own books. Re-reading the first twenty pages of White teeth, she said, is enough to 'induce nausea'. Good. That makes me feel a bit better about the fear and loathing I entertain for some of my old stuff.

Actually I got rid of all my teenage diaries, and despite the occasional twinge of regret I think, on the whole, I was wise. It's not as if they comprised a Pepysian record of British Life in the 1990s. They didn't even record the events of my own life, in the sense that when I was writing I rarely lifted my gaze very far from my own navel. No, my teenage diaries documented the tedious ups and downs (mostly the downs) of my inner life. I only ever bothered to make an entry when the entire fabric of the universe had imploded (the unrequited Love of my Life failing to notice my murmured 'hello' at the church fundraiser barbeque, for example). 'Less is more' meant nothing to me; I never held back with my adjectives, under-linings, exclamation marks or general hyperbole.

Oh yes, I was definitely right to destroy those diaries. What if I were to go under the proverbial bus tomorrow? How awful to think of my children inheriting a pile of spiral bound notebooks filled with nothing but teenagery howls of angst. They might think it was actually me talking.

I found an exercise book full of adolescent 'poems' the other day. They're awful; goodness knows how they escaped elimination over the years. Self-pitying, melodramatic, humourless...and they don't even scan. I do remember feeling, in those far-off days, that I was a Victorian person born into the wrong century (which is what comes of taking Jane Eyre too seriously) and that's evidently the spirit in which I wrote these poems. I can't quite bring myself to quote, but let's just say there's an awful lot of death and unrequited love; epic imagery involving stars/fires/hell/blood/angels; words like "Alas!" and "thou" and plenty of personified abstract nouns ("Oh, Love!" "Oh, Hate!" "Oh Desolation!" etc. etc.). Greek gods and goddesses appear here and there - my attempt, I suppose, to salvage things with a bit of classical razzle-dazzle. Oh, and then there's the poem I wrote when our dog was put down, which references the death of Patroklos in The Iliad...

Teenage diaries and poems are one thing; at least they are private and easily destroyed. Published words are another matter. I used to think that being published would be like being vaccinated against self-doubt. Not so. Mere publication doesn't, in fact, have the power to turn nonsense into quality literature. What's worse, you no longer have the luxury to sigh, "Alas, what a complete fat-head I was when I wrote that," as you impale your notebook on a poker and shove it to the back of the wood-burner. It's out there and, if you let it, it will haunt you. The tiniest typo can make you wonder how you will ever show your face again, let alone all the soul-baring stuff that really matters. The potential for self-torture is massive. You start trying to work out what other people are thinking about you, which is a pointless, pompous, paralysing exercise.

Not all rediscoveries are nasty, though. I like finding cryptic notes-to-self that I dashed off years ago; things that must have made perfect sense to me at the time but have become pleasingly mysterious now that the context is forgotten. Scrawled at a funny angle across the cover of an A4 refill pad, for example:  'it's - disheartening (she went on). Strand of her hair'. What was that about? Or, 'Strong hand being pulled along by ghostly one? Possibly' They sound like clues for The Times crossword. It's nice to be intrigued by my own former self. At any rate, it makes a change from thinking: "Oh no! Not that self-obsessed teenager again! Maybe if I walk past quickly without meeting her eye she'll think I haven't seen her..."

Manx Lit Fest 2013

Just a quick post this, to say how much I enjoyed Manx Lit Fest last weekend. I'm not an aficionado of literary festivals, in fact I have never been to one before, but I loved it and am so glad I was involved. There was a lot going on; the organisers really went to town with a quiz night, a poetry slam, writing workshops, school visits, library visits, book signings, local authors' event, lots of talks (my favourite title: 'Killing people for pleasure and profit' by crime writers Andrew Taylor and Alan Bradley).

I wonder whether it was by design or coincidence that another of Alan Bradley's talks (on the genesis of his main character, 11 year old poison enthusiast Flavia De Luce) took place in the gothic environs of King William's College science department? Because location and subject-matter complemented one another eerily well. That gentle Canadian voice explaining all about strychnine and the properties of distilled pigeon poo, while the wind gusted against the windows and the Bunsen burners glinted wickedly in the lab across the way.....

The best thing about the whole Lit Fest thing was meeting and chatting to other bookish people. It's not every day you come across folk who sympathise with your own most pressing preoccupations (Should you plan your novel out in detail before you start? Do you find you get a bit possessed by your own characters? What do you do when it's a stark choice between ironing the school uniform and writing? that sort of thing) and it's very nice when you do.

Mind, I had a cold with a sense of humour that did it's best to spoil the whole experience. No, not so much a cold as an evil spirit that manifested itself in different ways according to which event I was attending. So, for example, at the launch party I was in deeply anti-social sniffling&sneezing mode. For the one-to-one sessions with publisher and literary agent I had metamorphosed into Frankenstein's bride, with a bright red, desiccated nose and one itchy, swollen eye (why only one? At least I would have been symmetrical with two). At the local author's event on Sunday the cold had got to my voice and I delivered my reading with all the mellifluousness of chain-smoking crow. Never mind. If that cold was trying to put me off Manx Lit Fest it failed miserably. Ha! Roll on 2014!

'Reading Like A Writer' by Francine Prose

'Can creative writing be taught?' Francine Prose is a teacher of creative writing but she deals seriously with this big question...in fact it's her opening sentence. It's a question that most writers ask, but one that 'How to Write' manuals usually take for granted. That's what drew me to read this book, and I speak as someone who tends to eschew expert guide-books on matters (such as parenting and writing fiction) where it feels right - most of the time - to trust to intuition.


The first chapter is entitled Close Reading. We all began our reading lives as close readers - slowly deciphering books word by word. Perhaps - although achieving fluency is obviously a joy - something was lost when we became older, brisker, more careless readers? Writing, after all, can't be done well in a half-hearted rush - it requires the writer to put "every word on trial for its life." Francine Prose argues that the writer needs to be just as exacting in all her dealings with words.

Not that Reading like a Writer deals with literature at the microscopic level only. That's just how it starts. As the chapters progress the magnifying glass draws back ever further (so chapter two is called Words, chapter three is Sentences, chapter four is Paragraphs...) If you think that sounds like a dry approach you'll be pleasantly surprised. Francine Prose always illustrates her arguments and never waffles on in the abstract. Every chapter is awash with excerpts from great writers, showing how the raw materials (i.e. words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, dialogue, gesture...) have been used to brilliant - and wildly varying - effect.

One consequence of all these examples from great writers is that you become aware of the sheer tensile strength of language. It's like a sappy twig that you can bend any which way - not only will it not break; it won't even show the strain. It serves both Raymond Chandler and Jane Austen and it serves them well. Once you appreciate this it becomes difficult to take writing rules - all those lists of contradictory Top Ten Tips that the experts lay down like they're the Ten Commandments - terribly seriously. Cut down on adjectives! But Dickens used adjectives pretty freely. Show don't tell! But where does that leave Dulse, by Alice Munro, which opens with a deft resume of the main character's life so far? Stick to one character's point of view! Make it clear whose story your telling! Make sure your character has a good reason to do what he does! But Chekhov breaks all those rules and more.... (In fact the penultimate chapter of Reading like a Writer is a hymn to Chekhov and a plea for would-be writers - not to mention creative writing teachers - to read his short stories.)

So what's the best (the only) way to learn to write? Not by memorising a list of rules, not by taking a book apart in a methodical way to "see how it's done". You don't learn French by committing the dictionary to memory, but by living in France. In the same way you learn to write by living in a world of books. Read, argues Francine Prose, and you will learn by osmosis. Read, read, read - critically, slowly, reflectively. Find out what chimes and what jars, try out your own voice in the context of other people's voices. It's so simple, and so obvious, that it has to be true. Nobody can tell you how to write, and yet there's one hell of a lot to be learnt.

Somnolent Stories and Bed-ridden Books

     I've noticed that when I write a story I often have my characters lying in bed at one point or another. (Very rarely, I should say, for sexual purposes, I'm still ludicrously prim when it comes to writing about...all that sort of thing...but I'm working on it.) No, more often than not they're sitting on the edge of the mattress mulling things over, or else they've thrown themselves face down in a fit of despair, or they're drifting into sleep, or staring depressively at the ceiling,...that sort of thing. Which is all very well once or twice, but it's becoming an unintentional theme. How embarrassing. I mean, when you consider the potential depths of the sub-conscious, and the self-knowledge that there is to be mined there - Freudian complexes and the rest - it's disheartening to uncover nothing more interesting than: the thing about you, Elizabeth, is you'd rather be in bed.

     This reminds me of a dignified party I once went to, and hovered about at, as an undergraduate. Towards the end of the evening I found myself talking to (which is to say, staring red-faced at the feet of) an emphatic don.
    "It's a such pity," she said, "That we humans spend so many hours of our lives asleep. Time is short, after all, and there is so much to see and do and learn!"
    "Mmm," I nodded, concealing, as best I could, a shudder of alarm. I was new to university, and anxious to conform to received opinion, but still...One has one's standards.
    "I had a student, years ago now," she went on, "who simply couldn't bare to waste time sleeping when she might be studying instead. So she used to take a piece of string, perhaps a foot in length, and sit at her desk with one end tied to the back of her chair, and the other end fastened to a strand of her hair. That way if she began to nod over her books she would be yanked awake - rather painfully too. Ha ha! Marvellous!"
      "Ye gods," I thought.
       She was having you on! You're thinking. But she wasn't. Really she wasn't. If you'd been there, you'd know.

      It's not just that I'm lazy. Other writers do it too. Proust opens A la Recherche du Temps Perdu with his narrator in bed, and keeps him there for about six million pages, which is more than I've attempted yet. Mr. Lockwood is tucked up in bed while Nelly narrates Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre is has to swing her feet out from under the covers many a time in order to investigate funny noises in the corridor. Lucy and Mina are always abed when Dracula calls. Tom, in Tom's Midnight Garden, is lying there, wakeful and bored, when the clock strikes thirteen.

    So you see? Bed is very happening place to be from a storytelling point of view. The world becomes more manageable - more ponderable - when you're curled up, safe as a rabbit in a burrow. On the edge of sleep you can think your best thoughts, dream your best dreams, and hope to lose yourself. And that's not something you can do with a thirty centimetres of taut string tied to your head.

(Next time: mooching around with a cup of tea as a literary motif.)

What do nine year old girls like reading about?

Before I start I should say that this post is the result of chatting and reading with my nine year old daughter, Bella, rather than any extensive scientific research. Still, for what it's worth:

1. Food.
    Jaqueline Wilson knows this. Her books are full of food descriptions which Bella trots out in detail (with the implication, more often than not, that it would be nice if I'd roll up my sleeves and get replicating): "pizza triangles and quiche fingers and little sausages and amazing chocolate cake and a sponge with pink icing too and ice cream with special strawberry sauce."* It's the way J.W. details all her feasts that really seems to tickle Bella's imagination.
    Then there's made-up food. What could be more enticing than something that doesn't actually exist - like the B.F.G's frobscottle - whose scrumptidiliumptiousness can never be tested, and therefore never disproved? Narnian turkish delight has the same fascination - and the fact that it is Forbidden Fruit only adds to the allure.
    Foul foods are also of interest - the B.F.G's snozzcumber springs to mind, or Horrid Henry's gloop. The next best thing to literary deliciousness is literary vileness.

2. Horrible people.
    Obviously. There's nothing like a villain - or at least, someone unlikeable - to get a story rolling. A lot of Belle's favourite stories follow the Cinderella model: the tormented or overlooked nobody who triumphs against the forces of evil (whether that's the terrifying Other Mother in Coraline or the merely snotty Ethel in The Worst Witch). More often than not it's obvious whose side you're meant to be on - morality isn't very nuanced in books for nine year olds, and I suppose that's fair enough.
    Having said that, my daughter's feelings for her Enid Blyton books stray into the realms of moral ambiguity. She loves Malory Towers and The Famous Five with a passion, but she manages to do so without adopting the Enid Blyton world view. In fact, she (Bella) can get quite annoyed with the 'good' (i.e. insufferably priggish) characters whom E.B. is clearly championing.
    "See what's made Gwendoline such an idiot?" says one of the author-approved Malory Towers girls, on witnessing Gwendoline's tearful farewell to her mother at the start of her first term. "Her mother! Well, I'm glad mine is sensible. Yours looked jolly nice too - cheerful and jolly."
    Maybe, as nice as it is to have your own thoughts and feelings echoed by a favourite book, it's fun to be outraged?

3. The Olden Days.
    Until quite recently the Olden Days was, for Bella, a slightly unbelievable era comprising Henry the Eighth, the-childhoods-of-grandparents, dinosaurs, Romans - and probably some other stuff - in no particular order. Quite vaguely conceived. But that's no longer true. She's starting to take an interest in history, and that's because she's been reading stories (fictional and non-fictional) about people who lived in the past. The Railway Children, Little House on the Prairie, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Kaspar Prince of Cats....
    It's vertigo-inducing (and not just for a nine year old) to realise that things so distant that they might as well be made up...are not made up, and that real people, as real as herself, lived through them. Bella whizzes round a version of nineteenth century England with Jacqueline Wilson's Hetty Feather series and the fact that she's being educated passes her by entirely - it's the story that matters.   
    Everything about The Olden Days seems bigger and bolder - that must be part of the attraction too. The Olden Days were grimmer (freak shows, orphanages, consumption, rationing), but also more glamorous (the dresses, the carriages, the balls), whilst somehow managing to be cosier too (think of all those buttered crumpets and steam trains).

    As I say, this is an idiosyncratic and by no means comprehensive list of things that Bella enjoys reading about. I'll probably keep changing and adding to it (until I notice that I've edited it out of existence, and that what I've got in its place is a wholly fresh post called What do ten year old girls like reading about?)

(*That's a quote from The Dare Game - A Tracy Beaker Story. The Malory Towers quote is from First Term at Malory Towers)

Chagall No. 5

 

It was late July, I was fifteen years old and the art teacher was handing out summer holiday homework. I'm sure I heard her say, "Elizabeth, I want you to do your project on Chanel."

"Right." I nodded meekly, wondering how my friends had managed to land Bonnard and Cezanne while I'd got ladies' perfume and the little black dress. It didn't seem very me. Fortunately, but embarrassingly (oh, how the art teachers laughed) this misunderstanding was cleared up before the end of term, and I spent my August collecting Chagall postcards, reading one of those great big glorious Taschen books and copying the colour plates with oil pastels (albeit in a rather incongruous spirit of carefulness). I've loved Chagall ever since, in the way you only love the things you fall for in your teens.

I spent a happy couple of hours at Tate Liverpool in July, wandering round the Chagall:Modern Master exhibition. I don't know if 'Chagallian' is an adjective but if it is I want to be it (as a writer...as a person). To be Chagallian is (off the top of my head) to be lyrical, magical, colourful, joyful, nostalgic, exotic, homely, musical, whimsical, insouciant and kind. (Qualities I would earnestly strive for, if earnest striving wasn't a bit unChagallian.)

I found this painting, The Red Jew (1915), very moving. I'd always skimmed past it in books, thinking that he looked a bit of a grump, unlike Chagall's usual gentle rabbis. But then the audio-guide (which, by the by, is informative and to the point, like the exhibition itself : long enough to absorb; short enough that neither brain nor feet are aching before it's through) pointed out that The Red Jew's divided face - one melancholy eye open, the other shut - shows a life lived in both prayerful introspection and engagement with the world. I looked again and bought the postcard in the museum shop. He's propped up on my desk even as we speak, and I can't get him to do the querulous look anymore.

Chagall:Modern Master is on at Tate Liverpool until October 6th.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/chagall-modern-master

The Sea, The Sea

 

There's a row of old fishermen's cottages not far from the stretch of Manx coast where I took this photo. In an ideal world (not this one) I would own one and retreat there to do my writing. I went inside one of them recently and had a look round, so I know exactly where my desk would be positioned in relation to the wood-burning stove and tiny, briny windows.

It would be difficult to live there and not be a writer of books peopled by maritime ghosts. The woman who owned it (as if to prove my point) said that this particular row of houses was notorious, two or three hundred years ago, as the haunt of prostitutes, smugglers and brewers of illicit hooch. More than likely there are purses of doubloons behind loose bricks at the back of the fireplace, or at the very least a map of Treasure Island. It was a dark cottage - the walls were fortress-thick and wonky, with inexplicable niches carved out here and there - but with the sea glowing through every south-facing window wasn't going to bother me.

I do know, really, deep down, that I'm not going to metamorphose into some kind of Daphne Du Maurier/Herman Melville hybrid just by transporting my desk to a seaside cottage. I'd probably sit there drumming my fingers on a blank sheet of paper, my shoulders sagging from inspiration-overload. I do know. It's difficult to shake the suspicion though (especially as the composition of this final sentence has just been interrupted by my children wanting to know whether we've got any peanut butter) that all I need to be a top-notch writer is a particular kind of quiet, a particular view, and a house of a certain vintage that's mine, all mine...