What I’m Reading Now: The City and the City

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The City and the City, by China Miéville, is an interesting novel, a straight-ish police procedural set in an unreal city (actually two cities) existing in our world, ostensibly somewhere in Eastern Europe.  The  plot is that of a policeman investigating the death of a young woman who was murdered in one city, but whose body was dumped in the other.  In the course of the investigation, he must deal with and overcome political intrigue and obstruction, internal, intercity, and international.  Nothing necessarily new there.

What makes the novel intriguing is that the two cities, Beszel and Ul Quoma, occupy the same physical space and the inhabitants of each are trained, from childhood, to “unsee” anything in the other city.  They can be walking down the same street, side by side, and see only the buildings and people of their own city.  If they willfully see anything of the other city, they are “in breach,” and are removed and dealt with by a third, shadowy entity called Breach, whose sole authority is to regulate breaches between the cities.  (All other crimes are dealt with by the city in which they occur.)  There is, of course, an official border at the town hall through which one can pass through customs to travel from one city to the other but, once there, one must “unsee” anything in the city they have just left.  Tourists and refugees and others from the rest of our world can and do visit or emigrate to either of the two cities.  The dead girl is an American who was working at an archeological dig in Ul Quoma, who got involved in local politics, and who was researching the myth of a third, unseen city, Orsiny, between the other two.  Ultimately, the protagonist, a Beszel policeman, must work with his Ul Qoma counterpart to solve the mystery of her death.  Without giving any spoilers, the resolution of the novel takes one into somewhat hazy fantasy territory, genre-wise.

The idea of two peoples occupying the same space and refusing to see each other creates opportunity for metaphor at a very deep level.  One thinks of cities like East and West Berlin (in their day), Jerusalem, Belfast–or even cities in the U.S. where one group of citizens try not to see the pain of the other; where those who are lucky enough to have a job and a home studiously “unsee” the homeless.  The potential for exploring social issues symbolically is tremendous.  Unfortunately, in this respect, I found Miéville’s book a bit disappointing.

I had hopes.  Miéville does an excellent job of creating the world of the two cities and how it connects with the rest of the world.  Likewise, the voice of his protagonist presents a satisfactory example of his type.  But, the detective story’s twists follow more or less the route that many police procedurals take without the depth I was expectantly awaiting.

I do acknowledge that a writer is entitled to write the story he wants to write, not the story I want him to write.  And one could justifiably retort: “If you want to write that story, write it yourself.”  But even when a book is adequately written and sufficiently interesting, it’s sometimes frustrating to see a story’s potential so clearly in its set-up–how large the theme and the weight of the book could have been if the author had desired to go there–and have him not go there.

 

 

Interrogation-Girl

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One semester, when I was working towards a master of arts in writing at Johns Hopkins,  I turned in three very different stories that each happened to contain an interrogation scene.  One was the first chapter of a novel about an Irish Traveler who had stabbed a barman; one was in a spy novel, and one was in a surrealistic short story.  After the third one, I remember my instructor saying to me, humorously:  “What are you?  Turning into interrogation-girl?”   I laughed then.  But now, some years later, I find myself writing another  couple of stories in which interrogations figure prominently.  And though they are central to the stories I’m writing, not gratuitously injected, I do find myself wondering why interrogations are turning up again in what I write.

Perhaps the subject matters I choose as my themes have made such scenes inevitable:  a suspected criminal interrogated by a policeman; a suspected spy interrogated by his or her captors.  But these are not the only circumstances in which an interrogation could take place.  One could have a husband interrogate a wife (or vice versa), or a boss interrogate an employee, etc.

Interrogation scenes, when evolving organically from the story, are useful vehicles for bringing arguments out in the open, advancing conflict, and leading the story toward its climax.  I think that’s one reason why I gravitate towards them–they’re a good way to allow characters to argue.  A form of action.

But I suspect that I am also drawn to them because they bring to the fore a contest of wills and the issue of power:  who actually has it?  (Between spouses, who has power will vary according to the relationship established between the characters.  Is the husband a bully and the wife afraid of him?  Is the wife the stronger character and the husband’s interrogation an act of desperation?  Are they equally matched, like George and Martha, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)

Where power is unequal–where the interrogator appears to control the environment, hold all the cards–how will the person at a disadvantage deal with it?  Does he cave and crumble?  Does he betray?  Does she stand up to it?  Does she find a creative way out of the situation?  Does he or she have the strength or the bitterness or the stubbornness to stand on principle and refuse to give in?  And if they do, what are the consequences?  Does the power shift?  Who ultimately will win a battle of wills?  By putting a character under stress, an interrogation tests the character’s mettle and, in so doing, can quickly and effectively reveal his or her essential nature.

 

 

The Narrow World of V.S. Naipaul

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Recently, someone brought to my attention a 2011 Guardian article reporting on a Royal Geographic Society interview with Nobel Prize Winner Mr. V.S. Naipaul.  While the interview is a few years old now, Mr. Naipaul’s statements in it struck me as freshly as if the interview had been conducted yesterday.  According to the article, Mr. Naipaul stated the following views:

1. that no woman writer is his literary match;

2. of Jane Austen, that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world;”

3. that women writers are “quite different,” that “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.  I think [it is] unequal to me;” and that this is because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world;”

4. that “inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes across in her writing, too;” and

5. that “my publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.”

And of course, like any good bigot, in a preemptive non-apology apology, Mr. Naipaul apparently added:  “I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

For a Nobel Prize winner for literature, Mr. Naipaul seems to have an extremely narrow knowledge of literature, as well as an extremely narrow view of life.  When he accuses all women writers of being sentimental or dismisses all women writers as writing sentimental tosh, one must first ask what he means by the terms “sentimentality” and “sentimental tosh.”  He does not define them, so I  take the liberty of assuming he means either that women write tear-jerkers (or, in American parlance, stories fit for the Lifetime channel’s made-for-T.V. movies), or that their themes are limited to women’s concerns.  Taking this as my premise, I must then ask, has Mr. Naipaul ever read anything by Pat Barker?  Muriel Spark?  Margaret Atwood? Doris Lessing? Nadine Gordimer?  Has he ever heard of them?  (And as for “sentimental” tosh, has he ever read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections?  And if by “tosh” he means anything to do with what he considers women’s concerns or lot in society, is he familiar with the works of Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Flaubert, or just about anything by D.H. Lawrence–all male writers?  Frankly, for toughness, theme, and absence of “sentimentality,” I would set Barbara Kingsolver’s short story, “Why I Am a Danger to the Public” in her book Homeland above any of the stories in Naipaul’s Miguel Street.)

When Naipaul says of Jane Austen, that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world,” he is baring an incapacity to make an empathetic leap into anyone’s world but his own.  That is not the mark of a great writer, and certainly not of a great mind.  (It is no wonder that, in Naipaul’s Miguel Street, a book of short stories about people living in poverty on Miguel Street in Port of Spain, Trinidad, not only are the subject characters of all of the stories male, but to the extent women are mentioned in the stories, they are entirely stereotypical, one-dimensional asides.  The stories are quite entertaining, and Naipaul shows some sympathy for the men, but even the men are not given any depth to speak of.  This was an early work, and perhaps one should examine Naipaul’s later novels to see whether he developed greater insight over time, but his public statements suggest otherwise.)

When Naipaul says he can tell within a paragraph or two that something is written by a woman, and that “…inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing,” he sounds a bit like the pot calling the kettle metal.  In saying that a woman is not a complete master of a house, is Naipaul referring to women’s traditionally subservient position to the man of the house and to men in society?  If one is not master, is one then a servant or a slave or–dare one say–subject to some form of colonial rule?  On those terms, anyone–man or woman–who comes from an oppressed or colonized group or place and chooses that subject as a theme, and those people as characters–must have a narrow world view.  This, then, must apply to Mr. Naipaul’s choice of themes and characters as well.

Finally, to bolster his universal dismissal of female writers, Naipaul pulls out his anecdotal view that his female editor is a good editor but, when she wrote, sure enough–she wrote “all this feminine tosh.”  To that, I would say, first, that given his prejudices, Mr. Naipaul is hardly a reliable source for such an assessment.  But even if he is correct, editing and writing are two very different tasks.  Many people, male and female, can do one well and not the other.  Many people, male and female, want to write but find they do not really have something of consequence to write about.

This gentleman won the Nobel Prize for literature.  It is reported that some have dubbed him “the greatest living writer of English prose.”  I have not yet discovered who so-dubbed him, so I cannot vouch for whether those proclaiming that greatness are giving a sincere assessment or are part of the usual publicity campaign found in the publication industry.  But, considering that there are some other great writers, male and female, currently living, to dub any one of them the “greatest” seems a bit of puff.  Still, I wouldn’t begrudge him as much claim as anyone else to the title, but for his using his position, standing on these laurels, real and/or manufactured, to dismiss as inferior all literature written by a gender other than his own.

 

Travel Stimulates the Writer’s Eye

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Book Sculpture, British Library, London.

I have previously stated that my imagination is stimulated by that which is not familiar but strange, the stranger the better.  Accordingly, when I travel, the more unfamiliar the locale, the more it fuels my imagination.  I like best to wander, soak in foreign languages, and puzzle out other peoples’ cultures.  Italy has been wonderful for that.  And Prague in the Czech Republic.  The United Kingdom, where I spent two weeks this May, is a bit too similar to the United States in culture and language to provide quite the same effect.  But, still, a number of encounters have stirred my imagination.

With a writer friend who currently is living in the U.K., I took a number of tours and traveled the country.  By train, we traveled from London to Edinburgh to Dunbar to Bath to London to Brighton and back again.  Sharing little adventures.  Sherlock Holmes and Watson.  Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine.  Don’t ask me which of us was which.  Okay.  I concede.  We did nothing that these characters did besides travel a great deal on trains through England and Scotland.  But there is nothing like a train trip to make me live in my imagination.

In London, we took the Jack the Ripper tour, which allowed me to see some of the East End in evening, and though most of the landmark areas are now quite modern, there was one narrow alley that had kept some of the original atmosphere.  However, the thing that truly caught my imagination was waiting for me back at my safe little family-run Bloomsbury hotel.  The desk-man, a son of the owners, told me that, in the days of Jack the Ripper, one of the victims had lived and worked there.  At the time, the hotel had been a private residence.  The woman’s husband had been the butler and she the maid until her husband died and the family refused to keep her on alone.  With no place to go, she gravitated to White Chapel where she was murdered soon after.  To tell or retell the story of Jack the Ripper does not interest me.  But to tell a story in which this woman is the main character and in which her eventual murder by Jack the Ripper is only the horrible, luckless end would be interesting.  Even the few details noted here present possible themes of class, employment, the situation of women, the emotional despair that must accompany destitution, etc.  Her story has pathos.  And if my imagination can conjure it, my hotel provides a setting that would be interesting to use.

In Edinburgh, we toured the City of the Dead, a series of chambers under the city, where, in the late1700s, noxious businesses like tanneries were placed.  We were warned not to touch the walls (or wash our hands well if we did) because we would be touching several hundred years of excrement.  Meanwhile, stalactites of God-knows-what were dripping on our heads.  According to our guide, the poor often both worked and lived in these chambers which are, absent flashlight or candle, pitch-black.  The residents breathed in the fumes; they had to carry chamber pots through various chambers to empty them above ground; and they lived amongst illicit stills and in dark corners where murderers may have hidden bodies.  I thought to myself, never mind death; they were living in Hell.  Then the guide told of a great fire above ground, the smoke filtering down and killing hundreds from asphyxiation.  Horrific conditions.  But great atmosphere for a story of horror or mystery.  And I was there to catch the mood.

In Dunbar, we visited a John Muir museum.  Muir, a Scottish-born American naturalist, was an early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States.  We were told that he convinced Teddy Roosevelt to protect wilderness areas against corporate encroachment.  But, what I found most interesting for my purposes was that Muir was in San Francisco at the same time as Robert Louis Stevenson.  We were told that Muir usually  tried to meet with any Scots who came his way.  Yet there is no record of him meeting with Stevenson.  What if one posited a story in which these two philanthropic world travelers had met?  An idea to play with.

Back in London, we went to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, where I learned about John Hunter who, in the 1700s, pioneered so much of what is now established protocol in modern surgery, but who also apparently hired men to follow Charles Byrne, “The Irish Giant,” around until he should drop dead, so he–Hunter–could swoop in to obtain the body for dissection.  Byrne did not want to be dissected after death, and it seems to me that even if dissection might have gained Hunter knowledge that could help mankind, your body is the one thing you should have a say about.  But despite Byrne’s wishes and precautions, Hunter did manage to obtain Byrne’s body after his death (probably because of the men Hunter had ghoulishly hounding the man).  It is speculated that Hunter’s residence was the model for that of Jekyl and Hyde.  I would not be surprised to find that the man was Stevenson’s model for the story as well.  Probably stories have already been written about the Irish Giant, but there’s something about the idea of him being tracked in anticipation of his death that intrigues me.  Perhaps one could play with it from a new angle.  In any case, I think I might like to try.

In sum, I can attest that, if one is open to it, travel does broaden the mind, feed the soul, and stir the imagination.

 

By Hook or Nook

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Okay.  So I broke down and bought a Nook.  And trying to get it to work properly has just about broken me.

I like to read paper books.  But, since the nature of book marketing is changing rapidly, I figured that it was time I tried to join the twenty-first century.  Given the number of people now reading books this way, as a writer, it behooves me to learn about how humanity now browses and shops for books.

Except for the screen’s visual blip that makes me blink when I tap the Nook to change pages (I’m not sure that’s good for the eyes, long-term), I rather like the actual reading on the Nook.  However, the technology involved in setting it up has been and still is DRIVING ME INSANE.  I’m sufficiently frustrated and angry that, if I weren’t so stubborn, I would have returned the device or stuffed it down someone’s throat.  Perhaps I’ll write more when I figure out to what degree the problem is the device and to what degree it is my problem with technology.  Suffice it to say that, between purchase and exchange, I’ve had to go back to Barnes and Noble four times in one week, and in that time charged the batteries of three difference devices.  The batteries in those devices do not work at all the way it is claimed. (Three or four hours to charge?  Try ten–or overnight. And then, the batteries of at least two of them drained ten percent the next day, without use.  Ten percent per day will not result in the ability to read for the claimed two months without recharging.)  Furthermore, I couldn’t buy and/or download books by connecting it to my computer (I assume that’s because you’ve got to have wifi–and if you are me and don’t happen to have wifi at home, you are stuck.–that of course, is assuming the lack of wifi is the problem, and it’s not the device itself.  One thing’s for sure, the instructions are not sufficient and the thing is NOT user-friendly, except for the reading itself).

The little I could tell about how one must shop or browse books on these devices, I actually rather hate.  You can download samples, but you can’t flip through them the way you can with paper.  You can’t look at a little of the beginning a little of the middle, a little of the end to see if it really interests you, only the first x-number of pages and, even if that’s a good number of pages, it is a marketing hook, not a browse.

I don’t like the intrusion of marketers doing my thinking for me; imposing their recommendations of “best sellers,” as if that’s what everyone wants to read.  I don’t like having books I have no interest in pushed on me by an automated medium that’s decided because I like one book, surely I want these others; that decides for me what books should be grouped together as my potential choices.  In addition to the annoying mediocrity of those choices (at least on my device thus far) there’s the limitation of it.  One is deprived of the chance to discover that unexpected book you can happen across when browsing along a shelf.

I need to master the Nook.  Or the Kindle.  Or some other reader–in order to understand how people are starting to find their books.  But I don’t have to like it.

 

 

Some Additional Thoughts on Oscar Wilde

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Back in my December 2012 post, I noted that in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde wrote that Basil Hallward (the honorable artist who begins by worshipping Dorian and ends horribly murdered by Dorian when he takes him to task for his infamies) “is what I think I am;” that Lord Henry (who espouses an amoral aesthetic and ostensibly leads Dorian astray) is “what the world thinks me;” and that “Dorian [is] what I would like to be–in other ages, perhaps.”  I said I could easily believe Wilde’s statements about Basil and Lord Henry and, given the double life Wilde, as a homosexual, was forced to live, I could understand an affinity for a character living a double life.  But, given the novel’s presentation of Dorian as a shallow, rationalizing, and ultimately cowardly, self-deceiving hypocrite, I asked, what did Wilde mean when he said Dorian is what he would like to be?

I still don’t have an answer to that.  But, the Dorian Grey statement led me to read Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde. The biography seems to support what I have often felt about the man:  that his philosophy of art was rather shallow.  (For example, Wilde goes on and on about Lilly Langtree’s profile being Hellenic.  But what is that to be proud of?  That is not a talent.  It’s nothing she accomplished.  Could she act? Possibly, but that was not the basis for his compliments.)

On page 169 of the biography, Ellman writes of a meeting between Wilde and Walt Whitman:   “Wilde declared, ‘I can’t listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style, or by beauty of theme.’  At this the older poet remonstrated, ‘Why, Oscar, it always seemed to me that the fellow who makes a dead set at beauty by itself is in a bad way.  My idea is that beauty is a result, not an abstraction.'”  I am of Whitman’s view.

Furthermore, Wilde’s compliments to the work of fellow artists, particularly those with whom he became enamored seem so overly effusive that one cannot help wondering whether he fell in love with people because he liked their work or liked their work because he fell in love with them.

On the other hand, as a human being, he is no phony.  Wilde appears to have been extremely kind and to have had a great sensitivity to other people’s pain. (Something that Dorian certainly would not have had.  Also, although I believe Dorian was written first, the character seems very like Lord Alfred Douglas in his callousness and self-absorption.  Indeed, in the relationship between Wilde and Douglas as presented by Ellman, Wilde reminds me of the battered spouse who keeps coming back for more.)

One example of Wilde’s character, from Ellman’s book, (at page 412), touched me immensely.  Ellman refers to Nelly Sickert’s retelling of how, when her father, Oswald Sickert died, Wilde came to call on her mother.  The mother, beyond despair, refused to to see him, but he would not leave.  Then, still saying she refused receive him, she nevertheless came into the room.  As Ellman retells it, “Nelly saw Wilde take both her hands and draw her to a chair…’He stayed a long time, and before he went I heard my mother laughing….She was transformed.  He had made her talk, had asked questions about my father’s last illness, and allowed her to unburden…those torturing memories.  Gradually, he had talked of my father, of his music, of the possibilities of a memorial exhibition of his pictures.  Then, she didn’t know how, he had begun to tell her of all sorts of things, which he contrived to make interesting and amusing. ‘And then I laughed,’ she said.  ‘I thought I should never laugh again.'”  What Wilde did here shows not only a great sensitivity and empathy, but also a very mature understanding of what this woman, in deep despair, needed.  It makes me like him more than all his many witty works put together.

A last passing thought:  I feel so very sad for Wilde.  I know the world has a long way to go, but one cannot help but think what his life, and his art too, might have been if he were living today rather than in the time in which he was born.

 

Drawing out the Writer in You

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In If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland suggests that beginning writers often write in a pretentious manner because they are anxious to impress.  She speaks of helping them to break through that not by pointing out what is bad or wrong in their efforts, but by helping them to write more freely.  She writes, “I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months.”  To combat this, she dared her class to write something completely bad from beginning to end, claiming that it was impossible to do.  Then, in examining their “bad” compositions, she pointed out what was good in them, both freeing the students in their writing and steering them in the right direction.  In my own teaching experience, I have found Ueland’s insight accurate.

Some years ago, I was teaching a class called Playing with Style, in Georgetown University’s  Continuing Education Program.  The students were all adults with day jobs.

At first, some in the class took too literally the old injunction, “write what you know,” and it made their writing stilted and restrained.  I’d go home each week after class, read the new work, target where they were tight, and try to construct an assignment for the next week to force them to loosen up.

In one assignment, I had them write a story from alternating points of view:  that of the protagonist and that of the antagonist, the enemy or opponent.  This was done to get them to make the empathetic leap that allows one to truly see a situation through another’s eyes. One man, I remember, wrote of fishing from the point of view of the fisherman and the point of view of the fish.  I believe he actually got it published later in a fishing magazine.

There were two other students’ works that were most memorable.  One, a lawyer, was an avowed perfectionist and loathe to read her work aloud in class.  I told her I’d never pressure her to read aloud, but would always ask her–always give her another opportunity to do so.  The second was a military man who said he’d never written anything but short releases.

The assignment was to interview a deceased historical figure or a character from literature; or to write a story in the style of a particular writer.  I said, for the interviews, they could conduct them anywhere they liked, and that their subjects would probably try to evade or give facile answers, but don’t let them get away with it.  Make them answer the questions, and make them do so honestly.

On class night, the lawyer, in response to my general call for readers, volunteered to read her story aloud, and I was never more pleased with the leap in someone’s writing.  She had chosen to interview the two male characters from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.  The novel is the wartime story of a writer, a married woman with whom he has an affair, and her husband.  She breaks off the affair, and it is only after she is deceased that the writer discovers she made a bargain with God that if he survived the war, she wouldn’t see him again.  The writer is left embittered.  This student injected herself into the story.  With an assignment to interview the writer, she goes to his home, only to be greeted by the husband.  The two men, bound by their love for the deceased woman, are now sharing a house.  The student is ushered into the study, where she conducts the interview of the acerbic writer, interrupted by the husband’s small, mild interjections.  This student had imagined what could come next after the novel ended, and had captured Graham Greene’s style and the natures of the two men, while addressing some of the novel’s themes.  In my view, this particular exercise had permitted her to play in a way that freed her writing wonderfully.

The military man chose to interview Leo Tolstoy, and his story was lyrical and beautiful, as if he actually had been talking with Tolstoy.  Sadly, for whatever reason (possibly his work?  I’ll never know), he was not in class on the night when we examined these stories and did not turn up again.  I sincerely hope he didn’t stop writing, because this man, who said he’d only previously ever written short releases, had talent and insight.

There were many and varied exercises that preceded the ones referenced here that freed these particular writers.  So the “moral” of this post is that one never knows what writer will respond to what exercise, and it pays to experiment with many different techniques to find what will draw the best and freest writing from you.