February 14, 2013 · 11:04 pm

Accepting the Versatile Blogger Award and passing it along to others….

Hello, readers!  Today I have decided to accept the Versatile Blogger Award, not only because it is, as it always is, an honor to be nominated, but also because today I am not engaged in another time-consuming project which would prevent me from accepting.  Also, I am quite adamant that I want to pass the award along to some other folks, some of whom I have nominated for other awards before, others of whom have not been previously nominated.  As you are probably aware, the correct procedure is to thank the person who nominated you, tell at least 5 things about yourself, nominate at least five others to receive the award, and let them know that they have been nominated, so that they can pass the award along should they also choose to accept.  So, here goes:

I would like to thank JM at thelivingnotebook for nominating me, and for saying such kind and wonderfully encouraging things about my work.  He is a male graduate student at a large public university in the States, who chooses to be anonymous in a suitably mysterious way, knowing full well that one day he will burst full blown like Athena from the mind of Zeus upon the public in an acclaimed work of fiction or non-fiction and will then have to reveal his true identity (or this is my take on it, anyway!).  He teaches undergraduates writing and composition, and is in his 30’s, born on Cape Cod but something of a rover, to judge by some of his posts written from other locations.  He considers his blog to be “a framework for exploration and discovery,” and writes many valuable, informative, and tutelary posts on various aspects of writing, as well as composing music and putting links to that on his blog as well.

Now, as to telling the five things about myself, and hoping not to repeat myself from the other award I accepted, here are the five facts.  While they may not be original enough to illuminate the writing process much, perhaps they will at least indicate my potential membership in the club of writers, with all of its pitfalls and foibles:

I have written books and poems from the time I was in first grade, often using the prose or poetry involved to trade friendly slurs with friends who also wrote (hence my interest in satire) or to praise and acclaim them (hence the happy, comic moments in my comedy and satire which highlight positive personal characteristics).

My first poem was published in a teacher’s magazine when I was in the sixth grade.

Also when I was in the sixth grade, I wrote a hysterically inaccurate historical play based on Ivanhoe (I give this work to a character in one of my novels).  In my play, the Normans lived in England and the Saxons invaded them (the exact opposite of what actually happened).  This is probably one of the reasons I have never written historical novels!

One of my scariest literary memories is one of having Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” read to me in bed at night by a friend at whose house I was staying for a sleepover.  And I love cats, but man! was that one scary!  But the main character got just what he deserved for harming the cat in the first place.

I have three more novels to complete before my projected series of eight novels will be complete (these novels, however, can be read separately, and have no plot connections to each other).

Now it’s time to nominate at least five other people to share my award:

First, I would like to nominate Emma McCoy, the author of a frightening and vital suspense novel “Saving Angels” and of a work-in-progress entitled “Unethical” which I am all agog to read when she finishes with it. Emma has been completing full character sketches for her characters in her WIP, and has published one or two or them on her site just to whet our appetites.  She has had some personal challenges to overcome this year, in particular an experience with grief and a brand new job, but blogs often to keep her readers informed as to what’s happening with her and her site.  She is also seeking other avenues of publication for “Saving Angels” and took place in 2012’s NaNoWriMo.  Her facebook address and her e-mail address are also published on her site.

Next, I would like to nominate Caroline at Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat (I couldn’t agree more!).  Caroline is an enthusiastic reader of fiction and non-fiction, who hails originally from Paris, and whose original languages are German and French.  She is the daughter of a multinational family and has all the strength of this variety behind her in her multi-lingual blogsite, on which she canvases and discusses literatures of many countries, usually doing her reading in some language other than English, all the while making her analyses and her knowledge of translations available to English speakers as well.  Caroline has multiple M.A.s, in cultural anthropology and French literature and linguistics.  In her latest post, she has branched out into Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry, doing a service to the literary communities around her.

Thirdly, I would like to nominate djkeyserv140, the prolific and talented writer from Australia who, while rigorously engaged in seeking full-time employment of an extra-literary variety, is also keeping a number of us happily engaged with his science fiction, historical, fantastic, and etc. worlds fictively.  While working on a major WIP, David has also written a very exciting story about two Japanese swordsmen named Mune and Mura, and is currently writing a story about a mining colony on Venus, a very tantalizing tale which promises some odd and curious developments to come.  Other short stories are also listed on his site.  To a vigorous sense of what readers might find gripping in action, David joins a really strong capacity for narration and descriptive word-pictures.  Together, the two make for some excellent reading.

My fourth nomination goes to Katherine Gregor, a writer originally situated in London who has recently decided to make a sudden and dashing move to another city, from which she plans to continue her intriguing and poetically gifted prose writings involving traditions from various parts of the United Kingdom and Europe.  Katherine has many opinions to share, all of them happily quite entertaining and challenging to various elements of the bland status quo; we can all do with a large dose of what she has to say, just to keep us from becoming too solemn or out-of-balance.  “Scribe Doll” is how she bills herself, and that is what she is!

Lastly, I would like to nominate Richard Gilbert, of the blogsite NARRATIVE.  Richard has said on his own that he considers he has formed a “bivouac between the two literary camps of New York and academia,” and all things considered, I find this very just.  Richard writes about and keeps tabs on memoirs and non-fiction narratives and essays in general, but still finds time for the occasional remark which relates these categories to fiction as well.  The father of a family, who has a wife and two grown children, Richard has practiced subsistence level farming for ten years, and has lived to tell about it in various publications.  Meanwhile, he is writing his own memoir and teaching writing at Otterbein University, after having taught at a number of other major midwestern universities.  Richard’s blog is one sure way of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of narrrative, whatever one’s chosen and preferred form.

Thanks again to all of you who have ever nominated me for an award, whether I followed through or not–they were all appreciated, whether or not I felt I could take them up at the time.  I hope that those whom I have nominated will feel like accepting as well, for I have certainly enjoyed reading them, just as I have enjoyed reading JM’s inspiring posts on thelivingnotebook.

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February 11, 2013 · 8:53 pm

“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” the Sentimental Novel, and the Argument from Popular Art to Reality

In this post, in order to illustrate my points more fully and in a more authoritative manner than I can assume as a person only passingly cognizant with this particular form of novel–that is, I’ve read a number of sentimental novels for study, but I lack that sympathy with them which would help make my remarks enthusiastically informed–I intend to quote heavily from other authorities.  So, in reference to the sentimental novel, of which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is a prime and famous example, this is what Wikipedia has to say:

“The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an eighteenth century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility….Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters.  They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than actions.  The result is a valorization of ‘fine feeling,’ displaying the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect.  The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations….[The sentimental novel] was a reaction to the [colder] rationalism of the [immediately preceding] Augustan Age.”  Wikipedia further notes something that is rather obvious in reference to this genre:  “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is most often seen as a ‘witty satire of the sentimental novel,’ [which] juxtapos[es] values of the Age of Enlightenment (sense, reason) with those of the later eighteenth century (sensibility, feeling)….”

The genre focuses on the values of “humanism” and often features the “weaker members of society” such as “orphans and condemned criminals” and encourages the readers to identify and sympathize with them.  For example, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, the young heroine Lotte’s brothers and sisters are taken care of by her because they have lost their mother; also, Werther, the hero, sympathizes with a young man who, like him, falls in love to no avail with a young woman as Werther is in love with Lotte, and when the young man commits a crime, Werther makes an impassioned plea for his release; finally, there is a wandering lunatic in the book, and Werther begins to compare his own state to that of the lunatic, whom he meets when the lunatic is searching for flowers for a mysterious lady whom he loves.  All of these other characters have much prose attention devoted to them by Goethe in the book, though ostensibly the attention occurs in Werther’s letters to his friend William and sometimes to Lotte.  And though the novel is thus in the main an epistolary novel, there are omniscient sections written by an unnamed “editor” which relate things to do with Werther (as he too becomes one of the unfortunates upon whom sentimentalism is to be lavished).

Hermann J. Weigand, in commenting on the way The Sorrows of Young Werther was perceived in the 1770’s when it was written (it first appeared in 1774, though Goethe continued to revise as late as 1787), has this to say:  “We are not likely to follow the example of the young people of the 1770’s and succeeding decades, who read [the book] as a sob story, and made a fad of wearing his blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat, and in many cases found in the hero’s fate an invitation to suicide.  Today we read [the book] as a highly illuminating, vivid, and colorful document reflecting the Zeitgeist of the ‘age of sentiment,’ and as a closely knit work of literary artistry.  As the fictional case history, moreover, of a highly endowed and appealing individual who allows himself to drift into disaster under the spell of a passion the danger of which he fails to sense until his will to live has been sapped and his sanity undermined, the story has a powerful appeal for the psychologically oriented reader who follows the stages of the hero’s mental disintegration with rapt fascination.”  As Weigand further remarks, in Werther’s letters a picture of his personality and qualities emerges.  He is “cultivated, well-to-do, generous, talented, sensitive, observant but more inclined to reverie, under no pressure to conform to the discipline of gainful employment, self-indulgent in his cult of pure feeling, an idealist finding pleasure in the company of simple folk and children, religious without adherence to dogma, a devotee of nature as opposed to the artificial conventions of society, preferring the cult of genius to the cultivation of taste governed by rules, an antirationalist in short, exhibiting all the winning traits of that late-eighteenth-century man who has come under the spell of Rousseau’s gospel of nature.”  And yet, with all of this going for him, he commits suicide when he must finally come to terms with the fact that the woman he loves, Lotte, cannot properly return his love in good conscience.  Lotte has been married to a young man named Albert for some time who is moreover a young man Werther likes and is friends with.  The prose in fact “imitates” Werther’s cessation of existence, at least in the translation by Catherine Hutter which I used, in the sense that though the writing is florid and overdone throughout much of the novel, overly emotional and passionate and frankly rather silly in parts (to my sense at least), when Werther is finally dead, the last sentences are stern and solemn and funereal:  “At twelve noon, Werther died.  The presence of the judge and the arrangements he made silenced the crowd.  That night, at about eleven, he had the body buried in the spot Werther had chosen.  The old man and his sons walked behind the bier;  Albert found himself incapable of doing so.  They feared for Lotte’s life.  Workmen carried the body.  There was no priest in attendance.”

Now, this translation and the appended foreword by Weigand were published in 1962, when psychology was becoming increasingly important; hence, Weigand comments that what we are likely to take from the book is the interesting psychological picture of a certain type of person, Werther himself.  There’s something in this, of course, but think of it this way:  the book was interesting in 1774, and what people took from it was what they brought to it:  a desire to find models to imitate, which funnily enough was a personality trend inherited from the Augustans, who were full of models for imitation; it’s just that with the “age of sentiment,” the very models had changed in nature, but the tendency to look for them was still there.  So, certain sentimental characteristics continued to appear in fiction even as late as Dickens, a point commented on with certain caveats by Wikipedia.  In 1962, people (notably Weigand in his commentary) were still finding in the book what they brought to it, though then what they brought to it then was a desire to watch a character’s psychological development as he “mentally disintegrated”; that is, they wanted to read a case history.  So, what do we find in the book now, if anything?  What is there for us, in 2013, in this book?

Perhaps we can take a certain comfort from the thought that just as The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired some odd forms of imitation as in those who dressed as the character was said to dress, or very negative actions as in those who were inspired, like Werther, to commit suicide for some motive or other, there are always people who imitate unhealthy tendencies they may find in art.  Art, in short, is not to blame.  In addition to being generally encouraging, this might appease those adherents of violent or at least action-packed videos who don’t like to hear that their favorite art form is the source of real-life violence, though of course calling it art might be over-generous.  But what of the opposite point of view?  That is, we, homo sapiens sapiens, self-knowledgeable and aware of being self-knowledgeable, self-reflecting humankind, have perhaps come full circle back to a certain naive (though not innocent) interpretive stance, one in which some of us see art as having an intimate connection with the way we conduct ourselves, one in which art legislates and dictates our world strategies.  There are among this number those others of us who do not enjoy the violence, either depicted in artistic terms or encountered in real life, who attempt to eliminate the whole tawdry mess by lumping it all together as something undesirable to be gotten rid of.  So there are still two tendencies of humankind thus, one which excuses art by pointing to the unlikelihood that art could cause someone to “do that,” and the other which insists that art should be “healthier, more wholesome, more idealistic.”  But wasn’t young Werther idealistic?  Wasn’t Werther cultivated, and loving to children, and kind to the unfortunate and to older people, and polite to those which society considered his betters?  To return to the notion from the early 1960’s commentator Weigand that the novel is intended as a psychological portrait for our times, the picture of the tumultuous decline of a young man who has everything going for him, isn’t this just exactly the sort of background story often referred to by those who say of a young criminal or suicide “He was so quiet, and nice.  No one would have thought he would do something like this”?  Is it only a chance acquaintance with a young woman like the beautiful Lotte which inspires such self-destruction by an unsuccessful suitor?  And what of the aggravations young Werther suffered in his attempt to work as a secretary to an ambassador after he left Lotte’s side?  Or what of his signal and powerful humiliation at the hands of a Count who had befriended him, brought on by the interference of others who did not like him?

All of these considerations are perhaps pertinent to a contemporary reading of The Sorrows of Young Werther, the moreso as we are everyday provided with examples of young and not-so-young people killing themselves and/or other people, ostensibly because of one primary thing in their lives, but often brought on, in the history we are after the fact given of them, by a whole series of events.  It is, though overly sentimental in its manner of expression quite often, not only a romance but also a casebook for our times.  We have to remember one key item of resemblance between Werther and the ordinary contemporary suicide/homicide:  in at least one spot in the novel, Werther reveals that he had had thoughts not only of destroying himself, but also of destroying Lotte and/or Alfred.  And this speaks to the hopelessness and general destructive tendency Goethe was so aware of in his otherwise exceptionally gifted hero, as well as to characteristics we might expect to find in a modern Werther, a young man born to distinguish himself somehow, who rather than settle down into being an average young man like his friend Albert or a sage counselor as his correspondent William is said to be, determines to distinguish himself through annihilation, and thus make an indelible, if tragic, mark on the world.  This is the true sign of the romantic hero as he just a few years later came to be delineated in fiction and poetry, and sadly, often imitated in fact by some of those who were of the ones determined to model themselves on their fictional heros:  he was determined to be distinguished, by whatever means necessary.  And perhaps that is what we all need to remember, if there is a moral at all to be drawn from this particular fiction:  sometimes, in some contexts at least, it’s okay just to be average and forget about being overly distinguished!

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February 8, 2013 · 9:26 pm

New novel up on this site–why not have a look?

Yes, I’ve finally finished novel #6 in the 8 part series I’m working on.  And I know that those of you who can count will find only 5 novels published on this site in toto, and will probably think that I’ve slipped a gear, or at least that I myself can’t count.  Take it from me, though, this is novel #6.  I was working on novel #5 at the same time as I worked on this one, and #5 lost out in interest to this one, because this one had a lot more to say for itself early on, and so got ahead in life.  #5 novel will be out as soon as I can manage it, and will also be slotted into the lineup, in its proper place, I hope having gotten a lot more interesting to me (and therefore one hopes to you too!).

In the meantime, you probably want to know something as to what novel #6 is about, its title, so on and so forth.  Well, it’s called Abyss of an Attendant Lord, and it’s a short novelette.  It’s also an academic satire, and those of you who know how much time during my life I have spent in academia may wonder (as of course you have a right to) just how much is fictional and how much is based on fact.  Let me say that I have done no deliberately unkind portrait-painting, though I have teased now and then, here and there.    I have relied on comic types for “the unkindest cut of all” sorts of remarks.  The action is such as could conceivably happen in any large university prone to committees and academic groups foregathering, though of course many an English major will say, “Just when and where did any English department manage to get so much clout for itself in these science-and-technology ridden days?”  Let me answer to that caveat that this part is a sort of pipedream, though of course I am far from wishing to cast aspersions on the science and technology folks as some of my characters do; in fact, “Big Bang Theory” is one of my favorite shows on television, though like Penny, I rarely understand much of the technological vocabulary.  What small amount of technological verbiage is in the novel is from the same pool of university dialect and jest as the writers of “Big Bang Theory” have borrowed from, too.  My basic reaction to any kind of debate is a sort of “Now, why can’t we all just get along?” sort of attitude, so peaceable am I in person.  But never mind that!  Let’s have a little fun with our differences.  I do hope that all my readers will be able to have a fun time with the book, as I had a great deal of fun in writing it.  And with respect to all those who may feel that they are singled out for attention, I can only answer, as did the main character in “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” on television a good thirty or forty years ago.  She asked for anyone in her audience who felt they had had fun poked at them to stand up, and lo and behold! a major portion of her audience stood up!  These are faults and foibles of all of us from time to time, and I include myself in that number, so I hope you will enjoy laughing at all of us.  And please, let me know how you felt!  From time to time, someone reads a novel or some of my poems on the site, but mostly people don’t seem to comment.  Comments of a polite variety, whether positive or not, are always welcome.  So, let me know what you think!

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February 3, 2013 · 10:50 pm

The Art of the Novelistic Vignette–Muriel Spark’s “Reality and Dreams”

As we are all aware, chacun à son gout, or de gustibus non est disputandum; in other words, there’s no accounting for tastes.  We all like different things, and no doubt that’s as it should be,  to allow all the many different things in our world to thrive and flourish.  As Robert Louis Stevenson also put it, in his A Child’s Garden of Verse, which first expressed the matter to me when I was quite young, “The world is so full of a number of things/That I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”  So, why am I not entirely happy with Muriel Spark’s shortish novel Reality and Dreams, especially since it is so relatively short that any readerly boredom and pain incurred in reading it could certainly not be long-lived?  I can’t answer that question without referring to the movies, and since that’s what the book centers around, a span of time in the life of a British movie director obsessed with his work and his own legend, perhaps that’s entirely as it should be as well.

There’s a movie I’ve heard of but have (thankfully) never seen:  I’ve heard that Andy Warhol once filmed an eight-hour movie of someone sleeping.  And that’s what the movie was, simply the encapsulated experience of watching someone sleep.  I cannot imagine how unutterably boring it must have been to watch, but I have to confess that I thought of that movie when suffering my way slowly through the longueurs of Spark’s novel.  For, it operates similarly in the sense that it is composed of a series of vignettes, painted on the stage scenery of our minds, by a largely omniscient narrator, with a great deal of telling and not much showing.  Before I proceed, let me say that I have no objection to omniscient narrators and have at times found the opposite tactics, those of stream-of-consciousness or limited points of view, equally boring in other cases.  Nor do I have enshrined in my temple of taste E. M. Forster’s long ago preference for showing over telling, which so many writers took as gospel until now it is once again starting to be questioned or even to fall in disfavor.  I simply am describing some qualities of the book in enumerating these characteristics.

There is a great deal of reported dialogue in the book, in fact much of the book centers on what people say to each other about themselves and others and there are only brief spans when we learn from the narrative what they felt.  In any case, when we do learn something felt, there is no analysis of it in the omniscient voice, which is surely a neglected opportunity, since it can be one of the genuine pleasures inherent in reading about characters in this mode, to hear a voice-over analysis of  their feelings as a continuation of being told what their feelings are.

The story centers around an accident to the director of films, the main character Tom Richards, and his recuperation, his “redundancy” period (for non-Britishers, “redundancy” is becoming officially unemployed), and the resumption of his film career.  His fall from a high crane while filming is the cause of his accident, and towards the end of the novel, we see his disaffected daughter Marigold and a minor disgruntled starlet and a previous husband of a woman the director has slept with plotting to sabotage a second crane again to injure or to kill him, but interestingly enough (and that the writer chose largely to write around these opportunities is more interesting than what she actually did; one wonders at her choice), the starlet is actually the one who falls and is instantly killed, and Tom Richards at the end of the novel is going on his merry way, continuing his typical life as before his accident.

What the novel centers around instead are the conversation and conflicts inherent in the pairings and re-pairings of the characters Tom, his family and friends, and co-workers, who in their personal lives act a lot like a set of spoiled children, and they are of course the spoiled darlings of the screen, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with that choice.  It’s just that there’s so much of it that it itself becomes “redundant.”  Tom and his wife Claire are serially unfaithful to each other but happy together with this arrangement, but Tom himself cannot even be faithful to a mistress whom he is otherwise obsessed with.  “But he was Tom Richards; he could not help his moods,” we are told.  Even his children are part and parcel of the series of ironies visited upon the characters of the book.  One of the best moments of the book occurs when his daughter Marigold resurfaces after a mysterious long absence; it turns out that she has been living in tent cities and camper communities with those who, like her father, have lost their jobs, but who unlike her father are not rich and therefore have her sympathy.  The headline we are asked to imagine reads:  “Millionaire Film Magnate’s daughter lives rough to show solidarity with the out-of-works.”  She certainly has little or no sympathy with her father.

Probably what I miss the most from the potentialities of this book is more exploration of the spirituality inherent in two statements made tantalizingly at the very front and at the very back of the book.  The first line of this book about a director who thinks he is something like a minor god reads:  “He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.”  In the last paragraph of the book, Claire, Tom’s wife, is pouring drinks for herself, Tom, and their daughter Cora from Tom’s other marriage.  The last sentence reads, “Both Tom and Cora felt her strength and courage sustaining them, here in the tract of no-man’s land between dreams and reality, reality and dreams.”  There is no question but what Muriel Spark has mastered the art of the novelistic vignette, which often reads so like dialogue and stage directions from a play.  But why, oh why, I ask myself, didn’t she make more of the potentialities inherent in her novel as she began and ended it?  And for that, I have no ready answer, except “There’s no accounting for tastes.”  That’s evidently just not what she wanted to write about!

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January 27, 2013 · 6:26 pm

A short post on standing at the crossroads–for me, “despair and utter hopelessness”….

“Now is the winter of our discontent,” begins Shakespeare’s play Richard the Third, and indeed no better season could have been chosen to represent discontent and melancholy in general than winter, at least for those of us who live in the temperate zone.  When it’s cold and gloomy, the weather dominates our mood even if we are determined to remain cheerful, and when it’s warm and balmy, we may equally well feel sad and doomed because we know it is the result of disastrous global warming.  So it’s the perfect season in which to review a certain remark made by that genius of discontent, Woody Allen.

Allen once said, “More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads.  One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.  Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”  Of course, the humor comes  from the fact that this is a parody of morally uplifting sentiments which would oppose negative choices to more positive ones, which choices require that one imagine oneself at a crossroads without helpful markers to point the correct direction, but simply a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, requiring a guess.  And as well, in this case, the choices are both negative, to make the imagined situation even more extreme.

Taking Allen’s redaction of such old saws seriously for the moment, however, “total extinction” is the end of life, finito! all things over and done with, whereas despair and utter hopelessness, though perhaps the emotional equivalent, are not quite as bad.  Or is it the other way around?  Would it, Allen perforce asks us to imagine, be better to pass entirely out of existence rather than to live in despair and utter hopelessness?  A fine point, and one only someone who is at least pretending to a very somber world view would come up with.

The trick to this whole problematic choice is of course to choose despair and utter hopelessness, because it is as impossible to maintain these constantly as it is to maintain constantly the opposite, total cheerfulness.  Woody Allen’s maxim is the proof in itself that there is some residuum of this choice, and it is humor, even if a particularly wry and wan gallows humor.

After all, sooner or later, we will all face extinction to some degree anyway.  I say “to some degree” to allow for human philosophical quibbles about the afterlife, whether by that one means heaven or the after-the-fact gratification of persistent personal fame.  The poet William Butler Yeats even indicated that he believed that each person had the afterlife he or she had believed in before death:  if heaven, then a choir of angels for company, if nothing, then nothing.  So in this situation, why go the “extinction route” any sooner than necessary?  We’ll see that scenery soon enough.  No, for me it’s the route of “depair and utter hopelessness,” because I know that such conditions don’t persist constantly, and I will surely have my good days as well, even if I sound like Woody Allen in a “down” mood (and that is quite funny enough to be going on with!).

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January 25, 2013 · 6:53 pm

A rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner and the modern moment–Joseph Conrad’s “The Warrior’s Soul”

There are fashions in modes of fiction, and sometimes even in the same author’s work, more than one fashion (or era style) can be observed.  Many stories outlive their own time, and continue to have an influence on new generations of readers.  This is especially true of some of the works of Joseph Conrad, whose novella The Heart of Darkness continues to be read, interpreted, and re-used for its modern-day applications and significances (as one might note by recalling that the movie “Apocalypse Now” was based loosely upon it).  Even his novels Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, though more dated than The Heart of Darkness, are still quite popular in classrooms and library circulation systems alike.  Yet, there is something more to this selection of fashions than just a come-again go-again style or styles to be considered; there is also the role played by the various elements of the story in relation to each other which helps establish and make popular the style.

Recently, I rescued from a free book bin a book of four short stories by Joseph Conrad called Tales of Hearsay, and each of the four stories is constructed as the telling of a tale, with three of them using the fictional device of a frame story in which the external narrator relates a story from the past.  In this sense, the story is not unlike The Heart of Darkness, which also uses a frame story.  Yet, the story I’m concerned with today is of an older time both in its setting and in most of its tone, and is a quite simple story for most of its length, with none of the complexity of Conrad’s famous novella.  It is the first story in this book, “The Warrior’s Soul,” and it has all the earmarks of a very old story style indeed, with a passionate young lover, a mysterious beautiful woman, a slightly older gallant soldier, a war, an intrigue, a significant promise, a deathly request–where shall I begin, and where else could it end than in a story of this kind?

The basic story is this:  Just before the time in history when Napoleon marched on Russia, a young Russian soldier attached to a diplomatic corps is in France, in Paris.  He is first inspired by and then falls madly in love with a beautiful society hostess whose drawing room he frequents, and who in a kindly, slightly more mature woman’s fashion, tolerates his adoration and is kind to him.  While there one evening, the young man is witness to some sort of political intrigue between her and a slightly older male French officer, and the upshot of this situation is that the two save him and his diplomatic corps from internment indefinitely in France during the coming war by warning him in time for him to flee.  He is able to pass the warning along to his superiors, and all escape safely back to Russia, after he has vowed to the officer that if ever he can help him even unto his life, he will.  Time elapses, and we are now at the scene of France’s defeat in Russia and Napoleon’s death-filled and starving retreat from Waterloo.  As an old Russian campaigner (the external narrator of the story) sits by the fire one evening in the freezing winter weather, the young soldier comes into the firelight leading a sore-encrusted, raggedy, starving French officer dressed in full regalia except for his nearly frozen feet, which are wrapped in sheepskins.  As it turns out, this officer is the once gallantly attired and regal-mannered older officer of the mysterious woman’s drawing room, who had been so kind to the young Russian soldier when he was staying in Paris, and who had allowed him to escape.  After making himself known to the young soldier, the French officer begs him to shoot him and put him out of his misery, and after a while of debating with himself, the young soldier does so, to be sternly rebuked by his fellow soldiers for shooting a prisoner, all of whom had before reproached him for being too soft and loverlike in his mannerisms, all except the old campaigner, who tells the tale to the end.  For, though the young soldier is able to retire later without overt disgrace, he must retreat to his country province “where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.”

The simplicity with which the mutual sacrifice of the gallant French officer and the high-minded Russian soldier is enacted is part of the old-fashioned quality of the tale.  We are told at the end as a form of summation, “Yes.  He had [shot him].  And what was it?  One warrior’s soul paying its debt a hundred-fold to another warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  Even the rather trite and well-worn phrase “a fate worse than death” (though it may perhaps have received one of its first usages in Conrad’s tale) slips past the critical reader’s censor rather more easily if one is content to forego modern complexities of thought.  Yet, even in Conrad’s simple tale, at the end we read of the young soldier “He was stooping over the dead in a tenderly contemplative attitude.  And his young, ingenuous face with lowered eyelids, expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror–but was set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent meditation.”  That is true Conradian prose of the complex variety, but it occurs only at the very end of the story, so we may read past it in our first reading, and notice mainly the ease of expression in the portrait of the scene.

The picture of the woman involved too is part of the nimbus cast round the act of glory in battle which is the unspoken referent of both the warriors’ activities, in fact is of the essence of the glory itself.  As the old Russian campaigner relates, “She was of course not a woman in her first youth.  A widow may be….She had a salon, something very distinguished; a social centre in which she queened it with great splendour….Upon my word I don’t know whether her hair was dark or fair, her eyes brown or blue; what was her stature, her features, or her complexion.  His love soared above mere physical impressions.  He never described her to me in set terms; but he was ready to swear that in her presence everybody’s thoughts and feelings were bound to circle round her.  She was that sort of woman….She was the very joy and shudder of felicity and she brought only sadness and torment to the hearts of men.”  It is in fact against  the background of the salon that we are supposed to imagine, superimposed, the image of war to come, and then later, in the scene in the Russian snowy waste, the image of the woman and the salon superimposed over the scene by the fireside, as in the hallucinatory double image sometimes used in film-making.  For, it is the woman and the salon that both men are glancingly referring to in their moment of mutual “heroism” (or what Conrad has used to represent the replacement of a more standard act of heroism as it is usually portrayed, meaning ferocity in battle).  Their heroism lies in the determination of one not to be less than the man he has been because of being in a situation of extreme suffering that might cause him to perform less than heroic acts, and in the determination of the other to act up to the top of his bent and be worthy of the life (and the death-shot) that the other has entrusted to him.  They are brothers and equals in this sense, though one is years older and the other relatively untried.

It is only the hallmark of Conrad which in fact saves this tale from being a typical sentimental (and therefore pernicious) tale of heroism in warfare, for sentimentality about war is as loathsome to the genuine soldier as it is to the conscientious objector; and that is why I would like to return to that final section of the tale, which portrays the old campaigner and the young soldier over the French officer’s corpse.  For, they do not accede to his request immediately.  At first, the young soldier cannot bring himself to kill the French officer, who is then seized up with an “agony of cramp” as his limbs begin to defrost by the fire.  The young soldier says, “It is he, the man himself….Brilliant, accomplished, envied by men, loved by that woman–this horror–this miserable thing that cannot die.  Look at his eyes.  It’s terrible.”  The old man realizes what the young man means, because “We could do nothing for him.  This avenging winter of fate held both the fugitives and the pursuers in its iron grip.  Compassion was but a vain word before that unrelenting destiny.”  The French officer continues to beg, then calls the boy in anger a “milksop” to try to drive him to do the deed.  There is another pause.  At this point, the old man turns his back and then hears the young man’s gunshot.  He says, “I give you my word [I guessed it because] the report of Tomassov’s [the soldier’s] pistol was the most insignificant thing imaginable.  It was a mere feeble pop.  Of the orderlies holding our horses I don’t think one turned his head round.”  The gunshot is thus made into a small thing, which has an inverse great effect upon the future of the young soldier Tomassov.  Another key Conradian tactic comes into play, though, and that is one I did not mention when I previously quoted the passage about one warrior’s soul “paying its debt a hundred-fold to another’s warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  And that is that immediately following this sentence, Conrad continues, “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know.  And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know himself.”  And then he goes on to paint the picture of the young soldier, his hat off in a gesture of respect, bent over the corpse.  There’s all the makings of a great melodramatic death scene, yet by giving the reader a choice, by saying “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know,” Conrad has robbed the matter of its melodrama and produced not only a rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner, but a triumph of modern tone at the very last minute.  It is at this moment that one suddenly remember the other Joseph Conrad, the author of The Heart of Darkness, and all the complexity which he was able to bestow on the topics of colonization and decadence in Africa.  For this story too is from the same pen, and in small measure at least bears the hallmark of that great work of Conradian modernism.  And is saved thereby.

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January 23, 2013 · 6:45 pm

Several approaches to writing a love scene–emotionally intense narrative, dialogue, sexually intense narrative, and a different possibility….

One of the most difficult kinds of scenes to write well in a novel or short story is the love scene.  Perhaps this is because of the great similarities most people experience in their own love lives which writers draw the models of scene and incident from.  The reader may in this instance say, “Yes, this is verisimilitudinal, but so what?  It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know about love.”  In other cases, the reverse may be true:  the reader may say, to the author’s best efforts, “Yes, but I don’t know anyone this has ever happened to, and I don’t believe in it, and that’s that!”  We all judge some kinds of endeavors on our pulses to a certain extent, and this is especially true of the literary love scene.  We expect to be titillated, involved, enlightened, and validated, all at once, and while scenes which can do all of these things at once happen along only too infrequently, two or three out of the four qualities we look for are often what we settle for, or even one, if it’s strongly enough expressed.  The truly gifted writer tries for emotionally intense and/or sexually intense narrative, inspired dialogue, and sometimes finds a way to throw us a curve ball or two when it comes to our expectations about being validated in particular, especially as demanding readers; I’ll explain what I mean.

First as to emotionally intense narrative:  as James Thurber said, “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”  There is a double entendre here in the sense that not only does Thurber refer to the drama of interpersonal relationships being expressed in fiction, or face it, sometimes even the melodrama, but also being Thurber (whose work once was accompanied by a cartoon with his wife morphing into his house, ready to swallow him up) with an emphasis on the word “through,” as in “finito!” or “over and done with.”  The implication is one of much sturm und drang for the reader to make his or her way through, and the enjoyment thereof depends to some extent on how much the ordinary reader enjoys seeing things worked out to their logical conclusion through many an ordeal.  Will the lovers end up together or apart? is the question, but as in many another case, the journey is the essence of the experience, the conclusion just not as important.   The reader may even breathe a sigh of relief after a sustained experience with this sort of narrative, or feel like giving himself or herself a pat on the back for sticking with it.  A really good writer of course ameliorates these feelings with the quality of his or her writing, but there’s no denying that the more intensity the experience has, the more demands it makes of the reader’s skills and tolerance.  Often with a fiction of this kind, bloggers following a readalong will write in with quibbles with the way the fiction ended up, lovers together or lovers apart, with less emphasis on the way they got there (which is really what often writers in this mode want to emphasize) than on how it ended up plot-wise.  The feeling seems to be “I put up with all that hooey, the least the writer could do is throw me a bone of a happy/melancholy ending!”

Another path a writer may take when writing a love scene is to focus heavily on the dialogue and let the winds blow where they may, assuming that the reader responsive to punctuation and conversational tags will get the gist of the tennis-match-like verbal drama just fine.  As Elizabeth Ashley said, “In a great romance, each person basically plays a part that the other really likes.”  The reader watches two characters doubly, not only as each is to and of himself or herself but as they are in combination, to each other when they are playing the roles of lovers.  In this case, it’s not the fictional participants who have to like the parts they are playing in relation to each other, it’s the reader, whether the reader hopes for weal or woe for them.  The reader must assent that yes, that character can actually be imagined stepping forth from his or her own interior cave of subjectivity to make that remark to the love interest in the given situation, and that the love interest would respond as cited.  Again here, it’s a question of verisimilitude, but possibly people in fiction say weirder things than they do in real life or than they are content to hold themselves accountable for, because on the basis of no statistics whatsoever but only on that of a certain experience of fiction, I’ve noticed that characters’ dialogue is often used to “up the ante”dramatically whether or not the characters actually ever do anything astounding or not.

There is again the sexually intense narrative, and it is this sort of narrative which hints that it lurks hidden behind the other two forms above, and for which we often read though we are most often disappointed of its appearance.  How many times have you been reading about two characters engaging in displacement activity described in an overwrought narrative, or jawing away at each other passionately about some topic which both have really invested with deeper significance than seems called for, however sincere they might feel they are being, however sincere for the moment you might even feel they are being–how many times have you wished they would just grab each other and exchange passionate embraces, and get it over with?  As Proverbs 7:17-18 says, “I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.  Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning.”  This sort of narrative, though rewarding, raises the ante in the sense that once the characters and the readers have been sated (and unless you like reading pornography, you will get sated fairly quickly with two or more characters who are always successful at their “grappling” the others to themselves), some misfortune has to befall them, to part them permanently or temporarily so that the writer can feel that he or she is carrying on the business of actually writing literature and not writing trash.

In most love scenes, there is probably a combination of the three kinds of writing listed above, or at least two of the three.  It strikes me, though, upon reading a thought sequence by a character in Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not… (the first volume in his tetralogy Parade’s End) that there is from this combination an emerging fourth kind of love scene, a love scene which encompasses not only the submerged or hidden sexual scene and the two others, the dominant emotionally intense narrative and passionate dialogue, but a kind of love scene which engulfs the whole being of the novel (perhaps now I am speaking thematically, however).  With indirection, we are given the character Valentine Wannop’s thoughts about her married (and physically Platonic) love Christopher Tietjens:  “….[I]n these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her.  It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it.  Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself.  The moon so draws the tides….The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her mind as her great love scene.  That had been two years ago; he had been going into the army.  Now he was going out again.  From that she knew what a love scene was.  It passed without any mention of the word ‘love’; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin.  Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart.”  This reflection upon an earlier scene is yet another kind of love scene, an emergent fourth, for the original scene she is reflecting upon contains a sort of emotionally intense narrative so ratcheted up as to incorporate sex as a feeling in the air, so strong it is, and the dialogue is its manner of conveyance (I know you think I’m cheating by not selecting a scene which includes actual sex, but Ford doesn’t write much of that in my experience of him–The Good Soldier and now this tetralogy–but prefers to give reflections of reflections and reflections upon reflections of what has happened behind closed doors).  This would be an example of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” except that in this scene itself, Valentine is not tranquil, but is disturbed by her recollections, made to feel other feelings than those that would be most comfortable.  And this is a kind of love scene experienced by one person alone when recollecting the emotion of a scene in which both emotional and sexual intensity are present behind a totally socially unexceptional ordinary dialogue, an unexciting “English” sort of social dialogue, using the word “English” now as the writers of England have often in modernist literature used it, to mean socially unadventurous, though for true real-life adventurous conversation on an intellectual level, the English are often hard to beat.

I have peeked ahead in the tetralogy (this is a spoiler alert, so be warned, those of you who plan to read it); in my exasperation with the fact that Valentine and Christopher are still Platonic lovers by the end of the first volume, I find to my surprise that they are still together at the end of the book, though that’s all I know.  His wife Sylvia had cheated on him from the beginning even in the first volume, so with an ordinary reader’s sense of justice, I was hoping that he would ditch the bad bride and take up with the constant girlfriend.  Still reading in the interim, I’m not sure if there are other love scenes of a more traditional nature, but this sort of odd love scene, what I have called the “emergent fourth” in which a person alone recollects so intensely a past love scene that he or she encapsulates the whole thematic content of the novel–which is also about war–in its opposite (for love and war form a sort of opposition), this is the source of the fascination I feel with the four novels now, and which will, I feel, keep me reading until the end.  And for four connected novels, that’s filling a tall order.  I remind myself of something said in The Little Prince:  “The essence of things is in the unseen world,” or words to that effect.  Certainly, the unseen world has a real force and existence in Ford’s tetralogy.

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January 21, 2013 · 6:04 pm

Other-hatred and Self-hatred in John Gardner’s “Grendel”–Knowing Your Enemy

In some English class or other, from middle school days through college days, most of us have read some version of “Beowulf,” the Old English heroic tale pitting man against monster, in which Beowulf wins and goes on later to fight a crafty dragon, who then dies only when Beowulf’s friend and thane Wiglaf fights by his side; but Beowulf dies from his wounds, and receives a hero’s burial.  In this version of the tale (and for so very long, there was no other version), the men know and care little about the monster Grendel’s characteristics or inner qualities, all that concerns them is how to combat and kill him so that he will cease to haunt their meadhall and eat their thanes.  As far as his motives go, he is of the race of Cain and therefore commits murder.  As the text of Beowulf reads, “Unhappy creature, he lived for a time in the home of the monsters’ race, after God had condemned them as kin of Cain.”  Full stop.  If we are led to think of Grendel’s motives at all, we perhaps suppose that after being attracted by the noise of the meadhall (Heorot) being built, he feels envy because the men sleeping at night inside “felt no sorrow, no misery of men.”  But his motives are unimportant, for he is clearly the evil-doing interloper, and as such does not merit our sympathy or understanding.

Taking his cue from slight hints in the text, however, John Gardner fully fleshes out a picture of Grendel not as a monster of a different race from humans, but as one having some relationship to them:  he understands their language, and can speak it though unclearly (later in Gardner’s rendition, Grendel taunts the coward Unferth and is haltingly understood by him).  He himself is aware of his relationship to men, and attempts more than once to approach or be understood, though it is to no avail.  He is hated and scorned, and because he feels a kinship to man, he internalizes these feelings and hates and scorns himself, and everything else as well.  Gardner has clearly taken hints from Robert Browning’s monster Caliban in “Caliban Upon Setebos” (a borrowing of yet another monster in later days, this time from Shakespeare’s Caliban in “The Tempest”).  Like Caliban, Grendel reasons upon his own life, the things he observes of men, the relationships between the two, and God, the universe, and the nature of things.  In these “studies” of mankind, God, and nature, Grendel is led by the dragon (Gardner introduces the cunning dragon who will be Beowulf’s downfall as a “tutor” of Grendel, one who can read his mind) and by the Shaper (the scop or poet whom he hears singing and intoning poems for men in the meadhall at night).  Of the scop’s song, he says that “he had made it seem all true, and very fine,” even though he thinks it is lies.  He asks himself, “What was he?  The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and [the people] who knew the truth [] remembered it his way, and so did I….I was so filled with sorrow and tenderness I could hardly have found it in my heart to snatch a pig!”  He thinks not only of the heroic tales but of the tale of Creation which the scop sings as “the projected possible.”  He thinks, “It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land-dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed.  Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery.  It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it.  As they did too, though vicious animals, cunning, cracked with theories.  I wanted it, yes!  Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable.”

Grendel, this Grendel, is both intelligent and has moral perceptions.  He perceives the boasts in the meadhall (of which many a teacher has made learned analysis as to their poetic merit) as the ravings of drunken men bent upon impressing each other.  He notes that men often kill men, slay other animals, and destroy landscape as a sort of warfare, without meaning to eat.  He notes the waste of the men journeying back and forth across the land with tribute of goods and animals to other kings who have dominion over them.  And as the dragon tells him of human rationality, which is supposedly the division between humans and Grendel as well as between humans and animals, “They only think they think.  No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spider-webs.  But they rush across chasms on spider-webs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that!”   This Grendel constantly spies on the humans, keeps in touch with what affects them (as if he is an outcast one of them), and feels anguish when the Shaper (the scop) is dying.  He refers to it as “meaningless anguish,” but its meaning is obvious.  Even more, this Grendel becomes capable near the end of the book not only of reflections upon past, present and future, which he first learned from the dragon, but also of poetry.  When the scop dies, it is as if it’s the end of an era for him, until suddenly the Geats (Beowulf and his warriors) appear.

Grendel’s reaction to their presence is strange.  He feels a sort of gleeful excitement because something new is in his world, but it is clear that he does not fully recognize his enemy.  He tells himself that he could avoid the meadhall until they leave again and so be perfectly safe, yet he knows he will not do so.  He notes that Hrothgar, the king of the meadhall, and his thanes are not best pleased to have strangers coming in to finish off their monster for them, so he concludes, with an odd sort of loyalty to old enemies, that he must finish off the newcomers for the honor of Hrothgar and his retainers.  He has an additional motive, however, and that is that he is afraid of tedium possibly resulting from his life as it is.  As he thinks to himself, “All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal–a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world–two snake-pits….Violence is truth….”  He thinks when he hears the stranger (Beowulf) speak, however, and answer a challenge in the meadhall against his bravery, that Beowulf is “crazy.”  He’s had this thought long before in the book about men when he watched them killing each other, yet he seems fascinated by Beowulf and fatally drawn to him.  “I grew more and more afraid of him and at the same time–who can explain it?–more and more eager for the hour of our meeting.”

When his fall finally comes, he is able to persuade himself that it came about through an “accident,” that he was caught off guard by Beowulf, who then took advantage of him and tore his arm off.  In the end of the novel, Grendel is surrounded by animals, “enemies of old,” who are watching him die.  “I give them what I hope will appear a sheepish smile….They watch with mindless, indifferent eyes, as calm and midnight black as the chasm below me.”  Then he asks the key question, really, of the whole book:  “Is it joy I feel?”  This is the motive of self-hatred having come full circle in Grendel’s life.  At the last, he says to the mute witnesses of his death:  “Poor Grendel’s had an accident….So may you all.”  Thus, the self-hatred leads into other-hatred just as often as the expression of other-hatred (feasting on his enemies) used to lead him into further self-hatred as he got further and further away from any possibility of fellowship.  Yet, part of the driving force of his self-hatred also comes from the fact that there was never really a chance of rapprochement between him and the humans, because from the very first they were, in his words, “stupid” and “crazy” and suspicious of him.  Finally then, the book is a book about fate, just as the original text carried notions of fate, though in “Grendel” we are concerned not with the nobility and fate of men but with the nobility and fate of the “monster” who wants to be one with and of them, yet cannot make them understand.  Published in 1971, in a time when the heroic outcast figure was once again becoming popular in literature, this book takes the formulas a step further, containing many moments when Grendel is petty and non-heroic, and yet the book transmutes even these moments into startlingly emotive episodes which excite recognition and fellow feeling in us for the anti-hero of the tale.  In its ability to force us to recognize our own thoughts and impressions, feelings and speculations, this book teaches us to know what are proverbially called our own worst enemies:  ourselves, both in the singular application and in the plural application, in which all men and women are to some degree enemies of the others, not the least because they are enemies to their own best instincts.  I think now, having read and commented at length upon so dismally moving and darkly motivated a book, I will go and read a light-hearted poem or improving essay, just to lift my spirits again, lest I too begin to feel like a Caliban or Grendel and foist my destructive instincts upon others!

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January 17, 2013 · 5:53 pm

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” –Anais Nin

There are many different kinds of friendships one makes in life, not the least of which is the kind made with the authors of our favorite books, though we may never meet them or exchange a word with them.  As Wentworth Dillon, the Earl of Roscommon said, “Choose an author as you choose a friend.”  One might equally well reverse the equation and say, “Choose a friend as you choose an author.”  Then, there’s the more remote, hail-fellow-well-met kind of human friendship and goodwill which Sam Walter Foss had in mind when he said “Let me live in my house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”  And there’s a connection between these two ideas, if you’ll grant me the time to expound upon it.

Perhaps, however, the most significant idea which I want to put before you today is that from Anaïs Nin’s Diary, in which she says (as I quoted in the title of my post), “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”  Each friend we meet is thus an opportunity to extend ourselves further into the human equation (if I may use so dry and mathematical a figure for so “moist” and fulsome a reality).  Whether we are meeting a friend of the mind through a book or a friend of the heart in a café or private home, or whether our friend is the result of some combination of an intellectual and emotional friendship, we are witnessing and participating in the birth of a new world, and this new world causes us to grow and develop human characteristics that were perhaps formerly shut off from us, as we had never encountered the need or the use for them in ourselves or others.

In essence, we become a new person in relation to our new friend.  A new human quadrant or area, the area of the Venn diagram formed by the overlapping of the two circles (us and our friend) now exists in the world, and it is, one hopes, for the enriching of the overall human being, that being spoken of in the quote which above mentions being “a friend to man,” in the general category of humankind.  For, as the interior growth we experience causes us to be able to understand other people better, so it is that “tout comprendre, tout pardonner,” as the French say, or “to understand all is to forgive all.”  Though possibly forgiving “all” is a bit much to imagine, the sentence is generous and tolerant and conveys quite adequately the sense of latitude it’s meant to.  And it is through our understanding of our own dilemmas that we come to understand those of our fellows and vice versa.  That is, often in looking for the solution to a personal conundrum, we can find illumination in the situation of a friend and how he or she has handled something, just as surely as if we had received advice from them given from the heart.

Those of you, both friends and acquaintances, who have been following my column for some time and have been wondering just what this possibly preachy or in some other manner showy little disquisition on another aspect of friendship has to do with creative writing will now get your answer:  for it is one of the main ways we create characters, through the employment of our pictures of ourselves and others, that shows that we have a true connection with the human equation, as I previously called it, always assuming that we have created well and truly.  That is that we imagine:  we imagine beings, sometimes partially like ourselves, sometimes partially like our friends, to inhabit our worlds.  Even our villains must be drawn from this pool in order not to be just stock “flat” figures, but to have body and life.  We must be able to imagine their internal struggles too, just as we do those of the more positive characters.  So now, we have come full circle in our examination of this view of friendship, back to the point where I started, selecting books as we do friends:  for even our favorite authors supply us with models we can use for our characters, to be followed in a rough way, not slavishly, an idea I’m sure you will find a truism entirely, since so many famous writers have commented upon the influences on and sources of their works.  Make sure that you too select both your friends and your favorite writers by a revised sort of Golden Rule:  as you would want them to select you:  because they sincerely admire/respect/want to imitate well your being with their own.  My preachment is over, and for those of you who may be pondering what brought it on this time, it is the effect of reading about a serious quarrel between two fiction writers in a letter written by another (memoir) writer, and wondering how they all came to be friends in the first place.  And no, I won’t tell who it is, chances are you’ve not heard of them, and I’m feeling foolish now that I have!  But there may be a day when I have to create some rather silly villains, and I’m saving up a non-specific, very generalized, and non-libelous set of characters, and you can guess whom they’re based upon.

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January 16, 2013 · 3:49 pm

This is a meta-post–do you know what your browser is?

Hello again, folks!  This is a short meta-post.  “Meta-” in this context means, “beyond, transcending, situated behind.”  Which is to say, this is just a short post to test whether or not the Google Chrome browser works differently on my site than the Internet Explorer one.  That’s all!  Really quite simple!  I’ll be back to post again later this week, I hope tomorrow, on a literary topic or with an essay in hand.  Ta-ta!

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