It is true, and everyone understands it. EB White recounts a conversation that Margaret Mitchell had:
“Someone asked her what she was ‘doing,’ and she replied, “Doing? It’s a full-time job to be the author of Gone With the Wind.”
Tag Archives: Writing
Producing Art
In volume 2 of the Paris Review Interviews is a piece with James Baldwin.
The last question: “How does it strike you that in many circles James Baldwin is known as a prophetic writer?”
Answer: “I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, ‘I don’t look like that.’ And Picasso replied, ‘You will.’ And he was right.
DEATH BE NOT PROUD, John Gunther
I knew of John Gunther from two sources: Books from Book of the Month Club selections which were in my parents’ bookshelves: They were general and dated before they arrived. AND, upon reading William L. Shirer’s Twentieth Century Journey, he favorably mentions Gunther, a generous journalist and writer, helpful to a newcomer to Paris in the mid-1920s.
When I found this volume at a library book sale, I tossed it in the dollar bag. This book tells of the last year and a half of Johnny Gunther’s life, son of his parents who died at 17 years. The boy had a brain tumor; he struggled and survived against some of the most primitive, outrageous treatments that can be imagined (use of mustard gas). There apparently was never a doubt about the outcome. The boy would not survive.
Johnny Gunther was intelligent and bright. He had a very pleasant demeanor and disposition. He was positive, despite losing more and more physical and mental functions and abilities.
A month before his death he was at his high school graduation. He sat on a bench getting a calculus lesson from a fellow student. His mother came up, worried he might be tired. Johnny Gunther answered her, giving an alternative title to the book, and a lesson to the human race: “There’s no future to just sitting.“
ONE MAN’S MEAT IS NOBODY’S WRITING
ONE MAN’S MEAT, E.B. White
If the author sounds familiar, he authored Elements of Style. At a library sale I found this paperback book and put it into my dollar bag. Hence, the cost was perfect, $.03, plus inside the cover was a bonus, a note from girlfriend to boyfriend: “Dear Dayton [wonder if he races cars] – I enjoyed this very much this summer. White has a way with words! Merry Christmas! Love, Sally”
The book had been read once; there were pages turned down. I wonder if Sally did anything cheesy like give Dayton the copy she had read over the summer. She uses entirely too many exclamation points. If so, I don’t think he read it. I wonder if Sally and Dayton ever married. Probably not. The book was given after 1978. They would be in the late fifties now, and this book would be a keepsake. Divorced? Probably not. Dayton or Sally probably would have removed the note. It’s easy; it’s in there with scotch tape. Dayton had the book, never read it and this year gave it to the library.
Most of the book is properly written, but it is not well written. There is no sense the writer knows how to dramatize a point, an event or a description. He is a poor journalist. Of 304 pages about 30 are engaging and a few are excellent. The remainder is dull, a lot of the writing is about seed crops and animal husbandry (the animals have no names). Examples:
1) “Removal” is about moving. White’s line should be, “I didn’t like the old mirror. Each time I looked at it, I appeared tired.” INSTEAD, White described his toils trying to rid himself of the mirror and ended the paragraphs with: “A few minutes later, after a quick trip back to the house, I slipped the mirror guiltily in a doorway, a bastard child with not even a note asking the finder to treat it kindly. I took a last look in it and I thought I looked tired.”
2) “Progress and Change,” an article about the El Sixth Street train removed circa 1938. White describes veterans and visitors’ reactions to the train coming into a station. EB mentions the suddenness of the training stopping, and the visitors always being unsettled. But EB does not write it: EB’s spotlight is on the New York City residents who feels superior because he does not wince, but he does not give enough facts to allow the reader to understand why wincing is not necessary.
3) White had very bad hay fever, throughout his life. He went to the New York World’s Fair in 1939 while suffering a bout of hay fever. He wrote, “When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.” Tomorrow is the theme of the fair, but “seems strangely” is a seemingly strange verb and adverb combo. White should complete the simile with a direct verb – “is”, “smells”, or since he’s a mouth breather that day, “tastes.”
I’ve read most of George Orwell’s essays; they are impossible to remove from my memory. I will say EB White’s writing about totalitarianism is wrong and childish. He reveals he is absolutely ignorant, and poorly read and out of step with thinking and knowledge. Before his death in 1935 Will Rogers told America about Hitler, We’re going to have to watch this guy. ON THE OTHER HAND, White is engaged by The Wave of the Future, Anne Lindbergh, circa 1940. The Lindberghs were pro-Nazi until the United States had to declare war on Germany on December 10, 1941; they then shut up forever. The Lindberghs received medals from the Nazis; they overlooked Crystal Nacht; they disregarded reports of plunder and murder in recently German occupied countries in Europe. Nothing the Lindberghs wrote was worth reading, yet White devotes an article to Anne although is slightly uncomplimentary. In 1941, White gets around to reading Mein Kampf.
The best article White has in at the beginning, “Removal,” and only part of it: (Written in 1938)
“…Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound “effects” are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images – distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals. A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light – those will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face the impression will be of mere artifice. I like to dwell on this quaint time, when the solid world becomes make-believe, McCarthy corporeal and Bergen stuffed, when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane, to whom the antics of the sane seem crazy twistings of a grig”
White is entirely correct that television has contributed to depersonalizing human society, and that it will allow broadcasters and governments to be and promote dishonesty: “…sights may become more familiar to us than their originals.” One would expect that human beings with less intelligence would have the most difficulty determining what is “the real and the true,” and what “will be of mere artifice.” HOWEVER, White himself {Ivy League, Eastern Establishment} amply demonstrates in One Man’s Meat that he is completely befuddled. He is dwelling “on this quaint time,” but neglecting to use his powers to examine it.
White quotes excellent passages from Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, about the weaknesses and annoyances of the spoken word, but upon reading Mein Kampf, White writes and quotes in “Freedom,”
“…it is not the written word but the spoken word, which in heated movements moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the stand standing next to him thinks, ‘I know,” wrote Hitler, ‘that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than the written word…’ Later he adds contemptuously, ‘For let it be said to all knights of the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of today: the greatest changes in this world have never yet been brought about by a goose quill. No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these things theoretically.'”
White properly reports what others have said about the spoken versus the written word, but where is the further analysis from the Eastern Establishment, Ivy League great mind? White says of himself in the same article, “Luckily, I’m not out to change the world…” The best that could be said of White is he is lazy and vacuous. The worse justifiable conclusion is, White is intellectually dishonest. He complains about mass media changing human behavior and society, yet he is unable to cope with the confusion, so sticks his head in his salt water farm on the Maine coast.
WAR AS I KNEW IT, George S. Patton
Seven months after the end of World War Two in Europe Patton was seriously injured in an auto accident. Two weeks later he died.
For his family he wrote a brief memoir of his commanding experiences, and the “dash” across France in a chapter entitled: Touring France With an Army. That chapter is the best account of rolling the German Army out of France: The Germans had no time to plan and burn Paris. It took less than a month for the Third Army to go from Normandy to Lorraine with a detour west through Brittany.
Because “Touring France” is short there is no good account of that month’s campaign and the decisions – day to day, tactical and strategic which Patton made. At one time he determined that German occupied France did not mean the German Army was there. Patton left his flank open to attack figuring that any Germans would be subject to air attack followed by ground forces. He swept the enemy east. To a field commander Patton challenged: “Why haven’t you taken Chartres?” “There are Germans there.” Patton didn’t know but said, “There are no Germans in Chartres! If you aren’t in Chartres by 5:00 p.m., you’re relieved of command.” Patton left. The field officer gathered available forces and drove into Chartres which had been evacuated by the Germans.
It is important to know the highlights of Patton’s campaigns because this book also has command and military guidelines: How to fight in a forest, in town, etc. How his army command was organized. How he ordered everyone to do their work. These 80 pages of management and business techniques are informative if one can extrapolate from the military and war to business. OR, if a writer can, by analogy, use military tactics to attack and write a novel. It is entirely feasible that writing a book is a type of war, waged by the writer who strives for perfection. (Patton says perfection is not possible, only victory.) How a writer approaches the subject and how to go about expressing ideas through the characters, or whether an idea can be carried from character to character. Write efficiently, write effectively, write economically. The three “Es” are all military concepts which will make writing better and more perfect.
I have yet to figure out and understand the military campaign in France in August 1944, but I know Patton’s management instructions and tips are of value beyond their military specificities.
WRITERS DREAMING, Naomi Epel
This book is miss-titled. Writers do not dream and next write. Writers use their imaginations and write. Some writers have more control over their imaginations than do the majority of scribblers. I strive for the state of the imagination called The Educated Imagination. Northrup Frye authored a book by the same title, which is my source.
Hence, the idea that writers dream and writers use their imaginations confuses the issue. Dreams are not products of the imagination; they come involuntarily while the writer is unconscious. Using the imagination is a conscious activity, without which nothing gets on the page. Likewise, daydreams come from the wonderments of the mind, and may be the product of the imagination. But daydreams are not dreams.
It is a mistake to allow writers to attempt to explain the tools they employ to originate because most writers don’t understand those processes. Witness this book, which would be better presented as interviews – the interviewer had to be well-read, quickly spoken and knowledgable about each subject that came up. The editor didn’t do a complete job.
Therefore it is not surprising that the best pieces in this book are the shortest, fewer than seven pages. In the longer pieces writers show off, talking about dreams. Some mention Freud. BIG MISTAKE. The exception to my observation is the chapter by Robert Stone, which I liked.
If the writers in most chapters are accurate about their dreams, I am woefully deficient: “I dreamed last night and am writing the great American novel. Every point came to me.” OR, “I dreamed about a character which I put into my novel.” Perhaps I should stop using my imagination and load up on drugs and booze.
THE ART OF THE NOVEL
Collection of Prefaces by Henry James
Can’t read it. What is it about Henry James? Can’t read him. Around the end of his life he was asked to write Prefaces to a new edition of his novels. He did. Each is about 10,000 words, sentences ground out and always similar to the last, the next – the next Preface, the last Preface. One paragraph covered two (2) pages! I stopped reading it before determining whether James also decided to economize on periods and make that paragraph one sentence. If a novelist can’t describe his own work in 2,000 words, he shouldn’t try 10,000 words.
Fortunately, I bought this book on the last day of a library book sale. I put it into a bag full of books and tapes and paid $1.00 to walk out.
THE WEST OF THE IMAGINATION
This excellent book by Wiliam H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann (father and son) attempts to explain how perceptions of the West (of the USA) live and how many are myths and legends. Our views are sculpteed by lands which are artworks in and of themselves. No artist, painter or photographer can ever represent Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon or numerous physical features elsewhere. In and among these monuments to the earth have come human beings, many illiterate and others incapable of recording life. The motto for the American West (and perhaps for all human history) is best described in a John Ford movie: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Art and painting represent the legends of the West. Most paintings were made put on canvass in the West. Early on, painters sketched and painted in the off-season in the East. OR, paintings were made in a studio long after an incident occurred e.g. Custer’s Last Stand. Indeed, one depiction was known as the “Anheuser-Busch Poster” a marketing tool. Beer drinkers could sit in bars and saloons and speculate about the Last Stand. Of course, recent forensic studies have proven all the paintings, legends and eye-witness accounts, are pure fantasy. In 1913 another Indian battle Wounded Knee, was filmed using as many participants of the original incident as could be gathered. All but one reel of the film has been lost.
More myths? How many United States soldiers did Native Americans kill after 1865? Another history gave the answer of fewer than 1000. But given the massacres depicted in film and in some books, it seems the total amounts to a genicide. Until reading the Goetzmanns’ book I did not know that forts west of the Mississippi were not attacked by Native Americans alone; they knew the futility of attacking fortifications. The books mentions one of the last attacks of a fort or settlement, circa 1770, Booneville, Kentucky, the settlement of Daniel Boone. Yet, film is primarily responsible for perpetuating the myth of numerous attacks in the nineteenth century.
The chapter on Frederick Remington is excellent. When individual artists come up much humorous stuff comes out: Buffalo Bill’s first impresario, Ned Buntline, had the unprofitable careers as an U.S. Army deserter, an politician-instigator of race riots in St. Louis, a bigamist and a temperance reformer, all before he went into entertainment. But the best chapter is about Charles Russell and his business-savey wife, Nancy. When he was considered to paint a mural for the Montana House of Representatives, Russell told the committee in very Western fashion: “If you want cupids and angels and Greek goddesses, give this New Yorker the job. If you want a western picture, give it to me.”
What Remington and Russell show in paintings, drawings and sculpture was motion in the world they knew. They did that as well as anyone. Viewers can see a paintings and know what had happened in time before the painted scene; the viewer can anticipate what will happen. Viewing A Dash For the Timber (Remington) horses and riders are coming at the viewer. Russell’s, Smoke of a .45, the viewer is in a gun battle and wants to stand out of the way of bullets and fleeing men on horses. These paintings catch motion as completely as Rembrandt did in The Night Watch, or Michelangelo did with Moses. (see Sigmund Freud essay) Yet contemporaries of Remington and Russell (Impressionists) did not show motion well. Their paints relied on technique and style to project the images.
The painters and most other Western painters knew the animals they painted and drew – standing still, at peace, cold, war, running, off balance. At art schools in the East horses and other animals were dissected in classes to demonstration motion of the animal, for the greenhorn students. And all artists knew the magic of horses: Frank Tenney Jackson explained, “People like to buy pictures with white horses. If I paint a picture with one horse in it – it’s a two-hundred dollar picture. If I paint the horse white, it’s a four hundred dollar picture.” (319)
This book is entirely too short. Not every picture discussed is shown. There could easily be another 100 prints. More text could be hand about a painter’s impression of his intervention with nature to produce art; and the historians could tell by interpretation the painter’s impressions. In its survey the text runs through movies as being an extension of painting and photography, but movies distort the history, perpetuating myths and legends. The text about movies runs until 1970; Westerns are on the decline; comedy rips apart the genre in Blazing Saddles; also omitted is the saloon scene from The Great Race. The end of the Western era arguably lasted in 1976 with John Wayne’s, The Shootist.
A sidebar about Westerns and movies: Taking the place of Westerns and its heroes and anti-heroes in this day of Machines Take Command are crime stories whether the protagonist be a detective, a private investigator, a low-life cop or a rogue spy. The common elements to these characters, whatever be the previous job, is an obsession for truth, justice and the underhanded way, plus a speck of heart that is gold.
Finally, the authors of The West of the Imagination observe an disturbing trend that is running amock today: “Modern publishers seem to think that the eye measures the depth of the popular mind.” (314) As for this book, READ IT.
NATURALLY BEWILDERED
I’ve long held the opinion that human beings look for ways and people that take them from accepted routines, understandings and strictures. I saw a quote from Bruce Lee which many human beings follow: Always obey principles but never feel bound by them. Human beings willingly go far, endangering themselves and others in the exploration of life.
Where does my thinking put me today? Not very venturesome. I have a manuscript to edit. I wrote three stories in 2011 which I lumbered through. Parts of them are imaginative and engaging, but passages and some chapters are clunky. I now like rewriting and editing. Every first draft is a meager communication of the imagination, what it intended, what it could produce or what must be created off the draft. The process of fixing everything, not all at once, excites me. An advantage I have – Time has written and rewritten the book, in my mind. I now know what is important, what might be improved, and what is stupid and never should have been dropped in.
I’ve begun to edit, getting through 1500 words in the shortest novel. That’s not enough; I suspect the opening needs rewriting. The words do not impel the reader into the story, and I also added a theme which will carry through the novel. No one can drop in a second draft references to a running theme throughout the entire manuscript.The best I can do is make each paragraph and each chapter as cogent, comprehensible and complete as it can be. In the third draft I can attach the chapters to one another. Two more drafts aren’t onerous, just careful.
Of course that level of detail and concern varies greatly from the great sweep of mind a writer must when dreaming and driving a writing along a new story. My last effort to devise, dream and drive was so arduous and fitful that: I didn’t want to – I want to – I didn’t want to – do it again. In essence I’m conflicted, disorganized and unsettled. I know how to calm myself: Read, read very good books, read stuff that carries me along.
Almost every book I buy now comes from library book sales. The History of Dogma, Vol 1-7, by Harnick is heavy lumber. Early Christianity, Vol 1- 4, ditto. Each meets the review of Pilgrim’s Progress appearing in Huckleberry Finn. “About a man who left home; it didn’t say why. Statements in it were interesting but tough.”
It’s good to read books that give new information, new pleasures and new exposures. I found one, The West of the Imagination, William N & H Goetzman (father & son). How do Americans perceive the West? How did the new country perceive the West? Will we be stuck with “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend,” from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The book tells of exploration and painters production of art as they traveled through the West. So far I’m surprised to learn that Native Americans liked to have their portraits painted.
Whatever I may gain from reading, and until now, everything that amused me was a means to prepare myself to write. None of the reading was research; it was background, sensing what is good and bad. Military histories usually have a quick pace; it is the subject matter. Novelists have to write well. I may read as many as 50 books, and at the end I exhaust myself – I want to read no more: Garbage in. Time for Garbage out. Many fewer words go out than come in.
I mentioned library book sales. I’ve been lucky. Early Christianity volumes in excellent condition was $5.50. A biography of Theodore Roosevelt by Carleton Putnam was $.15. Carleton from New York got his BVDs in a twist in the last 1950s, and publicly he came out against integration. No more Roosevelt volumes, but he wrote an inconsequential book about race, the nineteenth century sort of thing that relied on antidotal evidence but no studies and no research. George Washington as the French Knew Him, Chinard, also cost $.15. I’m hardly prosperous by these purchases, but I beat the world of bar codes and scanners.
None of this instantly changes my state of mind to allow me to write an original story. I have to sit and wonder at the world passing me by – current events, other artists with energy producing and my own inertia. I’ll have to wait. I can not write everyday because I don’t do [platform] [serial] [genre] fiction. So now I’ll write nothing big, but every so often I’ll write and post something like this.
NONOWMO NO MO’
Many of us remember November novel writing month. I heard about it and said, What the hell? Do it but start early. [There are a long list of cheaters, cads and horse thieves in the family.]
I began with a novel about my life. I’ve always failed when writing anything factual and completely honest about myself. This was another chance. It didn’t work. My standards were too high; I couldn’t meet them. Perhaps it’s a family limitation.
Maybe I should get religion. If movies are correct Jews talk about all sorts of things, airing feelings and telling one another what’s wrong with life and the with the lives others are living. A lot of what is discussed is true. It frequently happens in the movies that issues, problems and dilemmas are happily resolved for one or another of the actors.
I could become Catholic and confess, but that takes guts to tell a complete stranger wrong deeds and tales of woe. The worst that happens is a requirement to repeat Hail Marys. I’ve seen Hail Marys work on the football field, but a team that relies on them too much isn’t very good. Once again the movies are instructive. I’ve forgotten the title but Stephen Rea is a priest hearing confessions at a church in Ireland. Suddenly the penitent bolts from the booth, and Rea whisks out yelling, “That is disgusting…” Confession is entirely too intimidating.
I don’t believe religion would work for me, due to family limitations.
I did continue to write in November, but not about myself but about my activities: writing. There’s lots of fraud and dishonesty written about writing; I advanced in a very disorderly way. Excelling was a family strength.
The writing was a mess. The longest coherent segment was 500 words. Some were a line: “I’ve never solved a Soduko puzzle.” That is a qualification for proclaiming myself a writer. Part of my approach was reading and researching while writing, and my impressions couldn’t be put anywhere. I wrote about the same subjects the other writers wrote about writing. I had 41,000 words and stopped with days to go in November.
I began cobbling things together in January. I took a break. February, I had productive days. Almost half of it was revised, but what remained needed work and thinking. I glowered at the manuscript for three weeks until Spring 2014, when getting it done was the only job I would do: 35 pages, 12 pages, 20 pages and this morning 2 pages.
From the 41,000 November words, I have 54,000 words, most of which make sense. Part of all the text can be better organized.The amount of work no longer involves the whole manuscript, only chapters. I can’t say what the genre is. There are signs of my life in it, and my impressions of writing. I call it a How-to Memoir. Time and the subconscious will write now. I’ll take another shot at the manuscript in June, when revising won’t take two months.
muymue 