Fire Shut Up In My Bones

I have a lot of friends who write. Some of them write mainly commentary and publish it on their blogs. Some of them are journalists. Some of them are academic writers. And some of them write fiction.

Because writers with any sense at all have other people proofread their work, and because my writing friends are sensible, they send out their writing to people whose opinion they respect. Sometimes, less sensibly, that includes me. Accordingly, a lot of what I read is much better than anything I could write myself. Almost every piece teaches me something important about writing. I rather enjoy that.

One of the things I learn is that I tend to read other people’s work with an eye on my own weaknesses. The things I am most prone to point out to them are the same things that bother me about my own work. Because that is the case, and because I see the same tendency in other people’s work, and because I don’t think anyone wants to hear me repeat myself a dozen times, I’d like to use a published author’s work to make a point about a very common set of mistakes that are good mistakes in that they are mistakes of exuberance, but they are mistakes nonetheless.

We get so caught up in the joy of writing sometimes that we become a little slapdash. Being joyful is good, of course – even essential. But writing is a craft, and a craft requires that the craftsman work with a great deal of discipline so that he can create something that in the end doesn’t fall apart. A slapdash carpenter’s table, no matter how nice the wood it’s made of, will collapse if the joints don’t fit exactly right. A slapdash builder’s roof will cave in. A slapdash potter’s jar will shatter. And, likewise, a slapdash writer’s piece will fail. It’s really not fair to writers to pretend otherwise.

The example I’m going to use is an excerpt from a novel titled The Broken Shore by an Australian writer, Peter Temple. Temple writes crime fiction, but unlike that of most so-called genre-writers, Temple’s style has led critics to describe his work as literary. A recent New York Times Book Review article about The Broken Shore observed that in this novel, “Peter Temple drops the clipped delivery that gives a hard edge to his popular Jack Irish mysteries and delivers a mature and measured account of the kind of crimes committed in the dead quiet of rural Australia.” The Irish Independent praised his “spare, muscular prose.” The Washington Post wrote, “Temple can write, can make magic with words” and added that the novel was “an exceptional blending of first-rate crime fiction and a literary sensibility.” It sounds nice to say something like that about a crime writer, a very generous gesture towards all those genre writers who write for Philistines and make money off their work, from someone who is a real writer, or at least runs with their set, and so rarely does make money, but of course is superior in that he doesn’t care, officially.

There is a catch, though, that comes with the compliment.

Literary, if you’re not familiar with the term, used to mean deep, thoughtful, well-crafted, philosophically interesting, stylistically innovative, and probably of lasting influence on other writers. Sadly, it no longer means that. Literary now tends to be a nice way for critics to say that a book is artsy rather than crafty, superior and showy rather than accessible and sturdy, coffee shop and poetry jam smart-alecky rather than life-shaping and intelligent. (Read B.R. Myers’ Atlantic Monthly article “A Reader’s Manifesto” for a sharp-witted analysis of that change. Yes. Go ahead. Read it. It’s a must-read for future writers and it’s better than the rest of this article.)

Here is an excerpt from the first page of The Broken Shore – in fact, the first four paragraphs of the book:

Cashin walked around the hill, into the wind from the sea. It was cold, late autumn, last glowing leaves clinging to the liquid-ambars and maples his great-grandfather’s brother had planted, their surrender close. He loved this time, the morning stillness, loved it more than spring.

The dogs were tiring now but still hunting the ground, noses down, taking more time to sniff, less hopeful. Then one picked up a scent and, new life in their legs, they loped in file for the trees, vanished.

When he was near the house, the dogs, black as liquorice, came out of the trees, stopped, heads up, looked around as if seeing the land for the first time. Explorers. They turned their gaze on him for a while, started down the slope.

He walked the last stretch as briskly as he could, and, as he put his hand out to the gate, they reached him. Their curly black heads tried to nudge him aside, insisting on entering first, strong black legs pushing. He unlatched the gate, they pushed it open enough to slip in, nose to tail, trotted down the path to the shed door. Both wanted to be first again, stood with tails up, furry scimitars, noses touching at the door jamb.

At first glance this is a beautiful piece of writing. Strong images let us picture the scene. Plus, an opening that features a man and his dogs is always useful to show a lot about the man without having him do much. If the man is good with his dogs, we will like him. If his dogs are strong, we will think he is strong. If they are wild, we expect a hint of the wild to be in him, too. Moreover, it lets Temple unobtrusively introduce the autumnal coastal setting while he has the dogs run through it. Those are good choices.

But, unfortunately, this wonderful framework, once carefully read, turns out to be brittle and slap-dash. The writing is more exuberant than sensical. Its effects are flashy and intriguing, but then quickly fall apart. When the artistry needs to turn into craftwork so that the effect holds, the pieces turn out to be misshapen and no longer fit.

Take a look at the first paragraph. At first everything seems clear. Cashin walks. Leaves cling. The great-uncle plants trees. Then someone surrenders and we aren’t sure whether it’s the trees or the leaves or what. Then someone loves this morning stillness more than… um…spring, which makes no sense whatsoever. Three sentences in, we’re lost.

We backtrack. Who is surrendering? We know from the use of “they” that it has to be someone who is plural – and we infer by common sense that it might be the leaves, probably to the wind or to autumn, although the writer doesn’t feel the need to say what he means. But then we note that grammatically, it’s not the leaves that surrender: it’s the trees. And then we think about it a moment and realize that actually, neither leaves nor trees can surrender. To surrender, you have to be in a fight and then give up. But they’re not in a fight. They’re not about to relinquish anything because they have nothing to give. They’re clinging, holding on for dear life. They’re afraid of letting go. But the act of letting go isn’t surrender; it’s losing hope or strength, yielding, relenting, falling, being blown away by the wind. It isn’t walking out into the field of battle to face an enemy and tell them you’d rather not be killed so you’re going to stop fighting back. That’s a bit of a cheeky swagger to assign to a mere leaf floating out into autumn storms over the roaring sea. A small distinction, you say. True. But it is precisely because the two meanings – surrender and defeat – lie so closely together that the image only makes sense if it the distinction is carefully made. To quote, inevitably, Mark Twain, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word… is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Next, we have to ask whether this novel will be a ghost story. Who loves the morning stillness? Well, technically, it’s the great-grandfather’s brother. Grammatically speaking, the inferred subject is always the nominative closest to the subject pronoun. Cashin at this point is half a paragraph away; his forebear, on the other hand, is only five words up the line. And the great-grandfather’s brother, the past perfect suggests, is no longer with us. If he is still thinking about the autumn air, he’s a ghost. This might explain why the old man is a little confused about time. He loves the morning stillness more than the spring. That’s nonsensical. Of course, we know we’re supposed to think that it’s Cashin who loves the still autumn mornings more than the still spring mornings, but once again Temple doesn’t say that, exactly. He’s too busy dwelling on the terms of surrender the leaves with the stiff upper lip will be presenting to Poseidon to care or, for that matter, to point out why we need to know how Chasin feels about the spring at all. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you it won’t come up again and so doesn’t matter in the least.

Next, we turn to the dogs. As dogs do, they don’t confuse us much at first. They do appear out of nowhere, but we’ll grant the author that bit of flashiness. And when they appear, they act reassuringly dog-like. They tire (though we don’t know from what, quite, we assume it’s from running around), they hunt, they put their noses into the grass, they sniff, lope around, then vanish into the nearby trees. We feel good about these dogs, who seem neither confused about the difference between seasons and times of day nor do they strike us eerily like ghost-like gardeners do.

But then things change. They come out of the trees. Not just out from between the trees or out from among them – but out of the trees themselves, like canine dryads. They seem not to have expected this either; it confuses them so much that they begin acting mightily un-doglike. They look around. They turn their gaze on Cashin, who can tell even from all the way down the hillside that they’re not staring or watching like most dogs do, but actually gazing. Willfully appreciating. With admiration, surprise, or thought, as Webster’s has it. Having waved and said hello to their admirable friend Chasin below, these mightily human dogs then start down the slope for a jolly old jog and the specificity of the verbs disintegrates after that: they reach him, they nudge, insist, push, push again, slip in, and only then do they turn back into animals and trot. Gazing all the while, presumably.

Sadly, how to abuse verbs is not all the poor creatures teach us. Temple manages to jumble metaphors wildly with the canines, with no regard whatsoever for the beasts or for the metaphors.

First off, the dogs are black as liquorice. There is nothing wrong with calling a dog black by comparing him with something black, but since there are hundreds of other blacknesses to compare the dogs’ color to, the comparison matters. It would matter if Temple called the dogs black as night or black as wrought iron or black as soot. Black as liquorice means not only that they’re very black but also connotes that they’re similar to a slightly rubbery candy, edible, with a sharp anis flavor – a charge these dogs might answer with a gaze of slightly pained disdain.

Next, they morph from chewy candy into explorers – once, that is, they have stopped actually exploring and stopped to stand and gaze. This strikes me more as something conquering generals might do, or cartoon lion kings surveying the circle of life, or breathless hikers at the end of a climb, or toddlers too shy to come any closer. But these dogs are conquistadors, first laying their eyes on the Pacific. They are Henry Stanley, have traversed the African bush, and are holding out their right hand, tea cup in the left, ready to say, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” and then to stand and marvel, with admiration, surprise, and thought, at the cascading majesties of the Victoria Falls, while they sip their cuppa. Quite the dogs indeed.

As if that were not enough to make us question the nature of dogs, Temple gives them curly black heads, which is ok, and then, in a breath-taking surprise twist, furry scimitars for tails. Now I am quite certain that liquorice does not carry furry scimitars, or any other scimitars. I suppose explorers might take something like that along to whack at the lianas and the occasional lion. Except that scimitars, if I am not mistaken, are not machetes. They’re short swords with a curved blade used by Arab corsairs and the like to cut the heads off their pirate enemies. But not only are Arab corsairs neither black nor liquorice-flavored, they’re also not likely to carry furry swords; the hair gets in the way when you’re swashbuckling. Nor are they explorers. More like buccaneers – you know: raping, pillaging, that kind of dogs. But perhaps we should accept that what Temple means to suggest is that these dogs are intelligent and ferocious and muscular and assertive, like good hunting dogs are. Thus the strong legs pushing and the snouts nudging.

Except that then – in the fifth paragraph, which I left out in the quotation because it’s rather long and only this one detail matters for this discussion – we readers finally find out that these hunting drops of liquorice, these majestic surveyors of the ocean shore, these raven-haired pirates of the kitchen door are… poodles. Yes. Not Great Danes or German Shepherds or Chocolate Labs or even Jack Russells or any other respectable hunting dog. Poodles. The frilly French dogs with the funny haircuts, sans the haircuts, presumably. Which could be hilarious if we weren’t so confused at this point that we’re no longer sure whether Temple actually means to be ironic, and so we wince instead.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the reason for all this befuddlement. It’s in the compliment from the Washington Post. Temple is aspiring to be a literary writer. It means he has to sound artsy, his images flashy, his meaning unclear. Note that the four paragraphs are essentially lists of verbs shorn of subjects, with other subjects interspersed and then ignored. We are always uncertain who exactly does what. That’s the root of most of the confusion. But it makes the prose sound stark and muscular, like Cormac McCarthy’s, who is very literary in the newer sense of the word. Slurred out of the side of the mouth, past the tooth-pick, spoken into the wind and the dust. Would that Temple, who otherwise writes great mysteries indeed (and even The Broken Shore is worth a read), had instead taken that other strong and muscular and truly literary writer to heart: Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s four rules of good writing were to a) Use short sentences, b) Use short first paragraphs, c) Use vigorous English, and d) Be positive, not negative. By positive he means, posit something rather than say what something’s not. This includes being clear about who does what; a lost subject is just as unclear as calling someone not insubstantial instead of saying they’re fat. Make verbs fit their subject. Keep your imagery consistent. Don’t meander and then take shortcuts to make it sound like you’re not meandering, even if you are. Vigorous English means honest, sensical English. Don’t sell us a poodle for a hunting dog.

What’s the lesson in this? It’s that it takes more to be artistic than just to be artsy and ignore the meanings of words and the rules of grammar. The first duty of a writer is to be clear. The second duty of a writer is to be interesting. Wordplay can help with that; it’s true. But the effect of a striking image is only striking if it’s rarely used. If every image is so unusual that it makes no sense at all, then the entire passage ends up making no sense at all. We end up not appreciating the artistry and instead questioning the ability of the writer to be clear.

To take an example from pop music, imagine your favorite song and then imagine Christina Aguilera singing it. And not only is she singing it, she’s putting in her trilling ascents and descents and she’s warbling all over the place. That could be a nice effect. But if she does it with every note, not only is it not beautiful, we also have no idea which song it’s supposed to be. I think it’s fair to say that it’s not a good idea to write like that.

This isn’t to say that Temple is a bad writer. He’s quite a good writer, actually, even if he’s a little obsessed with having his cops raped and with cluttering his book with so many minor characters that we lose track of who’s who. The point isn’t to malign Temple. It’s to point out that being artsy for artsy’s sake isn’t being artistic – it’s just being artsy. Don’t. Be clear instead. We’ll love you for it, and we might even be willing and able to listen to what you have to say.