Reading About Writing

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Ben Yagoda, Books About Books, Excerpts, Raymond Carver

Near the start of the year, delivering late Christmas presents to a friend’s children, I unearthed Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page, subtitled “Great Writers Talk About Style and Voice in Writing.”

Everybody who writes is engaged in the remarkable enterprise of making consciousness manifest — catching the slipperiest of substance, a thought, and nailing it to a page. It is amazing, when you think about it, that people should even try to do such a thing; that they would occasionally succeed nearly miraculous. And, indeed, there is something spiritual about the act of writing. When it’s done in a slovenly manner or in bad faith, it seems somehow sacrilegious. When it’s done well, we should stand back and regard it with a kind of reverence.

Yagoda  gathers — from previously published books or essays on the craft, or from personal interviews — what writers mean/think/feel when they talk about style. How writers define style. And, more importantly for this reader — a lot of the writers quoted in this book are writers I have read and admired for a long time.

Now, I avoid ‘how-to’ books on writing like the plague, not least because I am certain that there are far better sources for insight: what I’ve learned from teachers [writers, all of them], what I pick up from peers [writers, most of them] — and what I get from the books I read [not to mention, har, what horrors I face when I sit down and confront my own pages]. Occasionally, I’ll seek out books-on-writing by writers I respect. Charles Baxter is one.

And I’ve realized — in my long snake-eating-its-own-tail tradition of reading books about literature — that I read them not so much because I want to be taught something, but more so standing in wonder at how a writer’s mind works. If I walk away with a snippet or two about my craft, good. But if it all boils down to the wonderment and, well, the whole Yes, I have been thinking the same thing! aspect — I felt this with Jonathan Franzen, that nutter — if it stops there, I am happy.

[Allow me to assume that these writers, when they talk about how they approach literature, don’t do so with the primary agenda of teaching -- with the exception of, perhaps, Harold Bloom -- I always feel that they, very simply, want to share. Stephen King, James Wood, Siri Hustvedt, and many others. They may take on the occasional role of writing teacher, but it’s because people look up to them as writers, not so much educators. But they’ll always be writers who want to share shiz with all of us.]

It’s always a giddy thing, taking a peek into a writer’s head, feeling yourself enriched by whatever it is he lets you see.

* * *

Quoted in the book, my man Raymond Carver, who struggled with his alcoholism, once said, “If your life is in shambles and chaos, there’s the desire to exercise some kind of control. And I think maybe I was doing that in the prose of the stories which I tried to make so precise and exact. It was some arena, some place on the map where I could exercise complete and total control.” [Note to self: Reread all the Carver books in your shelves, and then savor the biography written by Carol Slenicka.] [Note to Mr. Carver: “Sir, I often stand back and regard you words -- that tender sharpness of yours, not unlike the sting of lemon and the calmness moments after -- with a kind of reverence.” How are you?]

marginalia || My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

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Anton Chekhov, Eileen Chang, Excerpts, Fiction - Short Stories, George Saunders, Gilbert Sorrentino, Grace Paley, Harold Brodkey, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Robison, Miranda July, Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, William Faulkner

I remember saving up for My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, tried the whole a-few-coins-a-day route.  I even prayed to Santa, I begged friends. I rarely buy books brand-new–I’m technically, well, poor. But then, in the middle of last year, a story of mine had won an award. As soon as I cashed the check, I went straight to the bookstore and bought it [okay, fine, I detoured and bought the awesomest stilettos evahr].

The book’s now one of my most treasured books in my bookshelves. When I’m feeling absurd and sentimental, I wonder about the trade-off of one story written one slow day, with twenty-six masterpieces from writers classic and contemporary. When I’m feeling dorky, I reflect on how this all began when about two years ago, somewhere in the deep abyss of the internet, someone had posted a passage from Jeffrey Eugenides‘ introduction to the anthology. I wrote that down, fell in love, bought a tiny piggy bank in hopes of acquiring this book. This is that quote:

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims-these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

He warned us. The twenty-six stories in this collection aren’t the kind that leave a fuzzy glow in your chest–not in the conventional sense of, well, of fuzz. They hurt, they’re masterful, and they hurt. They are stories I’m glad to have discovered, because otherwise, I would’ve been a lesser person, I would’ve been a far more lackluster writer. In many ways, the anthology subverts our common notions of what a love story is supposed to be. And with every story, the redefinition is cemented. These are what love stories are. And Sasha says, These are the sort of love stories I’d gleefully read stranded on a deserted island. These are the stories that ought to be taught to impressionable writing students, haha.

One of the best things the anthology has given me–beyond enviable examples of craft–is that it led me to many authors [that makes this an elaboration on aforementioned enviable examples of craft]. Reading begets reading, yet again. It was in this book that I discovered Grace Paley–whose story “Love” is one of my favorites of the anthology. This lead me to her collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and though that book would not count as my favorite overall, I did still enjoy most of her shorter stories–besides, I’d acquired her two other collections, so there’s plenty of room for me to change my mind. There’s Harold Brodkey’s “First Love and Other Sorrows,” which has had me hunting down a definitive collection by the author.

“Jon,” is one of my favorite stories, and it’s by George Saunders, a writer I’d never heard of. I have resolved to read more of Eileen Chang. There’s “We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek–I found it difficult to pinpoint which passages were note-worthy, because the language of the whole piece was just so good, and in a caught-this-reader-off-guard kind of way too. There’s “Yours” by Mary Robison, a short and deceptively simple story with one of the best endings ever, and such simple language:

He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

Of course, there is Miranda July, who is love. “Something that Needs Nothing,” isn’t one of my favorites from her collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, and I have some beef with Eugenides for that, haha. Still. I had high expectations of the anthology, of Eugenides’ decisions. So whenever I met a story that didn’t work for me, I take a note to reread it.  Most of the stories, though, have that immediate visceral ohmygoodness-seeking aspect to them. And they got it. Gilbert Sorrentino’s “The Moon in Its Flight,” for example, had me going Meh going in. And then the language just drew me in. And then I had to reread it, and it all made perfect sense, and then some parts refused to make sense, refused to be defined, and that was fine by me.

Most, if not all, of these stories deserve a rereading. And I’ve discovered that it’s the nature of such stories to somehow glow brighter with every turn. Take Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog”–incidentally, it was this story that urged me to finally get a copy of Chekhov’s Ward No.06 and Other Stories. It just gets better. Heartaches unravel. Not necessarily elaborated; they just take on more and more dimensions, and the result is a gem of a story that just gives more and more. Another is “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” a short story by Raymond Carver from his eponymous collection. How many times have I read this? How many times have I marveled at how charged the conversations are? How many times have I read the un-Lished version? There’s William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” a story that, having read it first when I was fourteen, informed me that, hey, one could write about anything beautifully.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful collection. I cannot stress this enough. And also, I cannot find the words. I tried to use the word beautiful repeatedly. I tried to distract you by enumerating, by being inane. My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead is a collection of stories that make you breathless. It bids you to pause, it constantly reminds you that no, not everything is okay. And that you cannot find solace in these stories. I suppose Gilbert Sorrentino said it best:

Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

Definitely one of the top reads of the year, of my goddamned life. Amen.

marginalia || What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver

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Excerpts, Fiction - Short Stories, Raymond Carver

It took forever to return to Raymond Carver. I mean, I love the man, and his writing  I don’t know the cause of my skittishness, although I have blamed it on the unease I feel when plunging into a book I know is good but whose goodness I might not be ready for. Am I making sense? Still, I dilly-ed, and I dally-ed, but one odd hour I just slipped What We Talk About When We Talk About Love from the Sasha Shelf at P.’s and just read.

I was immediately plunged into Carver’s world. The first story, “Why Don’t You Dance?” just blew me away. Well, it grabbed me by my neck, shook me around and then blew me away. Frankly, this wasn’t the Carver I remembered (gruff, mostly). It’s a disquieting story, and Carver-esque (hah) in its straightforwardness, its brevity. See, there’s a yard sale, or rather, there’s a bedroom set displayed in the yard of some man. A boy and a girl go check it out. And then, and then–how to tell you about a Carver story, why not just go out and read it? Please? Haha. The scenes call to mind some sensitive hipster movies but with a lot more dignity and [genuine] sadness to the desperation.

Ack, I don’t know what to say, darn it, it gave me the chills, okay? It was disquieting and it was kick-ass, and my breath caught, and I sighed, and I had to step away from the book a couple of minutes and just go Whoa.

Another favorite of mine would have to be “Sacks.” It’s a sad story–there’s rather careless reunion between a father and a son. There’s this scene where the father is recounting his affair with the woman who broke up his marriage–and you just know he’s saying all this by way of apology, an explanation that unburdens himself but also tries to reach out to those he’d left behind–and the son is just there, hardly listening [or--gasp!--maybe he is!] and looking around the bar for things that will distract him. It’s a heartbreaking little story, what with the father’s confusion, his helplessness:

“Well, I kissed her then. I put her head back on the sofa and I kissed her, and I can feel her tongue out there rushing to get in my mouth. You see what I’m saying? A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it doesn’t make a damn anymore. His luck just goes, you know?”

It’s just so cruel, the son’s indifference, this apathy. Told in his POV, a giant flashback, doesn’t this just hint at so many sad things? And goodness, that last line, that heartbreaker. Darn it.

There’s also quite a lot of anger to the stories here, and most of them aren’t elaborated. You need to hunt them elaborations down yourself. You have to want to. In the story “Gazebo,” for example, it’s classic Carver’s volatile domestic tale. Hidden desires. Charged conversations. Tensions skimming the surface of everyday things.

I think Denis Donoghue’s blurb (and he specifies “Gazebo,” though of course it applies to all of Carver’s) says best what I felt and thought in reading this collection:

In Raymond Carver’s stories, it is dangerous even to speak. Conversation completes the damage people have already done to one another in silence. It is not safe to form a sentence or even to speak a name. To say “Duane” or “Holly” is to pronounce yet another doom. This is the fiction Carver writes, and I know of nothing stronger in its kind.

Damn it, but it feels good to be back in Carver’s world. The stories here are definitely on my Reread list (and I do think Carver’s a writer to be reread). It’s almost like a spell, what comes over me when I’m in Carver’s world. Good times, my babies, good times.

PS — I’m OC, so this has to be put in here. The story “The Bath” is an early version (an un-Gordon-Lished version?) of my favorite Carver story ever, “A Small, Good Thing.” In this early version, there’s pretty much no baker telling the couple about the small, good things of the world and wasn’t that what made this story the kickest-assiest of them all? Just saying.

marginalia || Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce, ed by Caitlin Shetterley

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Alice Munro, Anthology, Fiction - Short Stories, Raymond Carver

Sometimes you pick up a book even if you have no bleeding clue if it’ll be worth the couple of bucks you shelled out for it. I did this a lot back then, back when I had no notion of TBR-piles toppling, or taking matters into their own hands and just forming their very own land mass. Now, I’m a boring sod who scours the Intarwebz for feedback before I even contemplate buying the book.

One of the books I got in those days of yore was Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce, collected and edited by Caitlin Shetterley. I was a few months into my Creative Writing thesis–a short story collection + poetics essay, which were all about domesticity and the familiar and the mundanely intimate relationships of people blah blah blah–and I needed to read stories that would help me write my own stories for the collection, some literary memory, so to speak. (Even though, technically, divorce isn’t recognized in this country. Hello, Catholics.) The books is about, well, divorce. The stories are categorized into four “parts” — the Prologue (including only one story, John Cheever’s “A Season of Divorce”); What Falls Apart; The Children; and The Afterlife. Among the writers found in this anthology are good ol’ Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Michael Chabon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and John Updike, bless his soul. Now, most of these writers, I hadn’t read before. I’d heard of them, almost as though gossip [Did you know Lorrie Moore's such a talented biatch?] I was most familiar with Beattie’s work–a drunken conversation with a poet concluded with my promise to read her stuff because she’ll, dude, she’ll change your life. The others, as I said, hearsay; occasionally I’d see them on a friend’s shelf, but nothing compelled me to read them.

Until this book fell into my hands. I ordered it from Jasper of Avalon, a website that sells secondhand books, rare books, and the cheapest Moleskines this side of the Pacific [NOTE: this is NOT a shameless plug; Avalon's such a kick-ass part of my life at this point, haha.] I ordered it on a whim. A whim along the lines of, “Hm, wouldn’t it be nice for a hefty enough book about divorce?”

Let me run you through what I think are noteworthy experiences with them noteworthy stories.

[1] “The Children Stay” by Alice Munro. This is the first short story of Alice Munro that I read, and that first time got the ball rolling. [And whatever I say next won’t make much sense because I’m trying not to gush too hard, haha.] It’s this quiet little tale of a woman and her husband and their children and the director at the amateur theater and Orphée and Eurydice. And the payphone from where woman calls her husband, and the oh-so-calm negotiations over their children. And the mini-epilogue. Because anybody else would have ended this long long long short story with that phone call right there – but Munro dedicates a couple of paragraphs of dialogue between the mother and her daughter, and damn, it was great. While I was reading it, I was thinking, “Who the hell is this chick, she’s so goddamned audacious?” Thus began my love for the Munro. [And really, isn't that title kick ass?]

[2] “Intimacy” by Raymond Carver. Also, the first Raymond Carver story I ever read, and I’ve been in love with this gruff ol’ man ever since. It was strange story, it was really strange, and brief and succinct and simple to the point of utter pain for this Purple Proser. It’s told in the first person, very short lines and very, er, stoic sentence construction. Man visits ex-wife, tries to rehash things. That’s basically it. But the real story is done in such an underhanded way (oh, Carver, you sneaky little fuck), that it took me another reading to fully appreciate it (because the first time I read it, I thought, “It’s a nice story, but it’s so macho.”)

When reading fiction, there’s a part of you that expects the characters to do things and react in a romantic, fiction-worthy way. This story of Carver’s – and most of his other stories I’ve read – slaps that expectation silly. These people are normal, unglamorous – and they’re “fiction-worthy” because they manage to transcend that mundaneness because of all the great secret heartaches they carry with them whether they know it or not — I guess this is why I love these two stories so much, as well as other mentionable in the book: it modified my reading preferences, and it was big influence on how I do my own writing. So, YAY READING.

Mostly, well, I like these. These are good stories, and it makes me feel like The Big Kahuna is smiling down on me. It’s such a surprise, for such an unassuming-looking book. (I mean, I like Matisse as much as the next guy, but that boxed-in book layout isn’t doing it for me. Couldn’t we have just had the whole painting as cover? Just saying.) When you find these little gems, it just feels like something’s just so freaking right with the world. Know what I mean? Am I making sense? Do you want to tell me to go take a Red Bull? Ahem. I guess that’s what I’m trying to point at — sometimes the book in our hands can surprise us, and that surprise goes a long way in restoring my faith in humanity, and the mending/saving/squeal-able power of literature.