Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read online

  “Why are surprise endings hard to pull off?” I ask the class.

  “Because the surprise has to be worth it,” says Sven.

  “Right you are. O. Henry, the king of the surprise-ending short story, only rarely succeeded—“The Gift of the Magi,” maybe one or two others—because the surprise ending wasn’t worth the trouble it took to reach it. Something was suddenly revealed, and you didn’t care.”

  “But Nina’s surprise is worth the wait,” says Sven. Others agree.

  “You bet it is, which is why the story is very good. But we have to ask ourselves, on Nina’s behalf—would the story be better if we knew Shakespeare’s identity from the start?”

  I had mentioned the difference between anticipation and surprise before. Now, with a concrete example before us, I try to show that anticipation is more satisfying, because it allows a thought or a feeling to build in your mind, rather than assaulting you with a sudden twist. “Coleridge wrote about this when he was praising, of all people, Shakespeare. He said the power of Hamlet comes from the fact that we know Hamlet will die from the start, and when he does die finally, his death is much more moving.”

  “Funny about plays like Hamlet,” says Nina, who has studied Shakespeare recently. Nina is one of the more well-read of the group, but she never shows off. “You know Hamlet will die every time you see the play, but somehow you hope he won’t.”

  “So, Nina. What do you think? Would your story be better off spilling the beans at the outset?” She is mulling it over.

  Most of Nina’s story is told in the first person. “Why choose one voice over another? First person, second, third?” They all come up with the obvious answers involving the scope of purview and information available to each of the voices. “But is there not some other advantage, particularly to the first-person voice that Nina uses?”

  “Well,” says Jasmine, “we know that the narrator will survive the story—unless she’s already dead, like the narrator of The Lovely Bones. But logic dictates that the person telling us the story survives.”

  “And what does that fact suggest? Ishmael survives, the woman in Rebecca survives, Pip survives, Nick Carraway survives. What do their stories have in common?”

  After a moment: “They suggest that the people they are telling us about may not survive,” says Robert.

  “Nice. We have no proof of this, but every time we are greeted by a first-person narrator who announces a story about someone else—the narrator of The Good Soldier, for instance—we can be fairly sure that the person whom the story is about will meet a bad end.”

  “As in ‘The Laughing Man,’ ” says Sven.

  “As in ‘The Laughing Man,’ since we know at the outset of Salinger’s story, merely by the way the boy tells the tale, that his hero’s heart will be broken.”

  “Don’t you take a risk, writing in the first person?” says Ana. “Either you glorify yourself or you humiliate yourself. Either way, the reader dislikes it.”

  “So you think every story should begin ‘Once upon a time.’ It’s an interesting point of view. I’d adopt it if I, and you, hadn’t read dozens of great stories told in the first person.”

  “I guess it’s a matter of individual talent,” says Ana. “The strength of an individual voice.”

  “What’s all this talk of ‘voice’?” asks Suzanne.

  “You mean, ‘all this crap,’ don’t you?”

  “If you insist. Yes. Crap. That’s all anyone talks about when they talk about writing. Voice. If, at my age, I don’t know my own voice, I’ll never know it.”

  I tell her she’s right, that “voice” is merely the latest cliché to signify good writing. Its predecessor was “authority.” She is also right about linking self-knowledge to writing. “But instead of thinking of self-knowledge as idiosyncratic, try connecting it more to the task at hand. Subject matter determines voice. Voice should be selfless. Want to tell a tale in the voice of an idiot savant? Try The Sound and the Fury. Want to create an innocent learning morality? Put your glasses on Huckleberry Finn’s nose, but make sure the reader sees more of Huck’s nose than your glasses. Voice is the knowledge of what you want to say. After that, it becomes any voice that serves your purpose.”

  “I find I don’t know what I mean to say till I start to write,” says Robert.

  “You find that you don’t know what you think until you write it, too. You’ll be going along writing sentence after sentence about some slight received by a character, then you find yourself growing angrier on his behalf. Before you realize it, you’re in a rage, and the rage is what you felt from the start, though you had no sign of it until the words unearthed it. If we have to put it in terms of ‘voice,’ voice may be the imprisoned you, waiting to be paroled.”

  “We write what we are,” says Nina.

  “I think so. What we are, what we fear, what we love, what we believe, what we want the world to be.”

  “Do you believe that?” Sven asks me. “That we write to change the world?”

  “I do. If we look like we’re trying to change the world, the writing will sink from the weight of its own piety. But in the best of our work, the idealism is there, like trout below the surface of the water. Of course you want to try to change the world. You just don’t want to show your cards. But look at the world. Who would not want to change it? Books count. They disturb people. You never heard of a tyrant who wanted to burn the TV sets.”

  I ask if they know who first wrote the line, “We are the world.” Naturally, they say Michael Jackson. “Uh-uh. It was a poet. Robert Penn Warren,” I tell them:

  We are the world, and it is too late

  to pretend we are children at dusk watching fireflies.

  We must frame, then, more firmly the idea of good.

  “What if readers don’t like the way you want to change the world?” asks George. “I know you don’t want to stoop to such a practical subject, but if you hope to change the world, you ought to have a few people on your side.”

  “You’re a goner if you write for any standards but your own. Some will love your work. Some will hate it. Either way, you must simply go at it. You know Bill Russell, the great Boston Celtics center? He was the best player of his day, but he was black playing basketball in antiblack Boston, and his slightest error was always crushed under boos and catcalls. Russell’s daughter asked him, ‘Daddy, what do you think when they boo you like that?’ He said, ‘I never hear the boos because I never hear the cheers.’ Your vision, only your vision, matters.”

  One of the pleasures of teaching writing courses is that you can encourage extravagant thoughts like this in your students. These are the thoughts that will be concealed in plain and modest sentences when they write. But before that artistic reduction occurs, you want your students to think big—to think big and write small. I don’t tell them that in so many words. But there’s no purpose to writing unless you believe in significant things—right over wrong, good over evil. Your writing may deal with the gray areas between the absolutes, and all the relativities that life requires. But you still need to acknowledge that the absolutes exist, and that you are on the side of the angels. I have never known a great writer who did not believe in decency and right action, however earnestly he or his characters strayed from it.

  “Writing is the cure for the disease of living. Doing it may sometimes feel like an escape from the world, but at its best moments it is an act of rescue. Each of you has his own way of seeing into suffering and error. But you share the desire to save the world from its blights by going deeper into them until they lie exposed. You show up the imperfections of living for what they are. You hope to write them out of existence.”

  “Say that again?” says Diana. “Not the whole thing. Just the part about writing being the cure for the disease of living.”

  “You like that?” I ask foolishly.

  “Not especially,” she says. “But you’re the only person I know who would dare talk like that.” More laughter a
t my expense.

  “It seems that you’re saying a writer should write with moderation, but think grandiosely?” Ana asks.

  “That’s it. Trust not the humble writer. Every one of us craves immortality. Every one of us harbors a special fear and hatred of dying, both for its finality and its solitude. A writer wants to continue to live among others, many others, and that may only be accomplished through his work. This is why all writers long to be loved by younger readers. The young will imitate them and re-create them over and over.”

  “We’ve spent a lot of time on the beginnings of stories,” says Nina. “What about endings?”

  “Much easier, I think. Because your ending lies within your beginning. You simply have to discover it again and follow it to its anticipated conclusion. Like Harold in Harold and the Purple Crayon, when he draws his window in order to get home, and creates what he knows or suspects already exists.”

  “The end was in the beginning,” says Donna.

  “Eventually, we all tell the same stories, yet none of our stories sounds like anyone else’s. Think of your dullest family member, the pixilated uncle who tells the same family anecdote over and over every Thanksgiving. Even he never tells his story the same way twice.”

  “I really don’t think of my voice as special,” says Suzanne.

  “It may not be. But it’s different from George’s.”

  “I hope so,” she says. He chuckles.

  “But if we’re all different,” says Jasmine, “how will we write the way you want us to write?”

  “Sameness has to do with commonly agreed-upon qualities. That’s all.”

  “Are we all supposed to wind up writing like you?” asks Inur.

  “That would be impossible.” I remain deadpan.

  “I mean it,” she says. “If what you tell us constitutes good writing, it’s the writing you believe in, the writing you do yourself.”

  “Well, you’re right about one thing. I believe in spare writing. Precise and restrained writing. I like short sentences. Fragmented sentences, sometimes. I enjoy dropping in exotic words from time to time. Either they put off readers or drive them to the dictionary. I do it anyway. I’ve enjoyed reading florid writing and thunderous writing, and even manically self-conscious writing. But I don’t want to do it myself. And I don’t want you to do it.”

  “Is there never a time we should use heightened language?” Nina asks.

  “There’s a saying about the making of musicals: ‘When you can’t talk anymore, sing. When you can’t walk anymore, dance.’ I think it works for writing too. You go along, telling your story, and it’s moving very well and very fast, and then, like a glider pilot, you come to a cliff and you have no choice but to soar.”

  “Is this another one of these mystical things?” asks Sven. “Fly when you hit the cliff?”

  “It gets less mystical the more you do it.”

  “How do you practice heightened language?” Donna asks.

  “Concentrate on every word you write.”

  “We’re back to that,” says Suzanne. “The lightning.”

  “We’re back to that. We never leave it. Every word is an idea. It triggers images in your reader’s mind. Let’s say you’ve created a woman in your story, and you want to describe her hair color, which is a mixture of browns.”

  “A medley of browns,” says Ana.

  “There you go. Every word you use to describe your woman’s hair gives you something about the woman herself. Otherwise there’s no point in heightening the language around her. So her hair can be the color of freshly tilled earth, or of old books on a shelf, or of a dirt road . . .”

  “After a rain,” says Jasmine.

  “After a rain. Better. Or an old tweed coat, or bricks in a fireplace . . .”

  “Or stones in an aqueduct,” says Sven. “Or the stock of an antique rifle.”

  “Or a newly dug grave,” says George.

  “Which is not the same as freshly tilled earth,” says Donna.

  “Or the woods on a winter day,” says Kristie. “Or a dish of oatmeal.”

  “Or mixed nuts.”

  “Her hair was a box of light and dark chocolates,” says Suzanne.

  “A medley of light and dark chocolates,” says Ana.

  “A medley of milk chocolate and dark,” says Veronique.

  “What if you said her hair was a Whitman’s Sampler? What would you be saying about her?”

  “Old-fashioned and delicious,” says Kristie.

  “And boring,” says Diana.

  Wordsworth quoted Coleridge as saying that every poet must create the taste by which he is relished. The same is true of teachers. I really don’t want my students to write as I do, but I want them to think about writing as I do. In them I am consciously creating a certain taste for what I believe constitutes skillful and effective writing. I want them to be both clear and wild in their work. The hammer descends on the nail. The nail is driven deep into the wood. And the wood sings.

  Chapter 4

  Memory and Dreams

  Kristie comes to office hours to ask me to write recommendations for her. She is applying to Ph.D programs in English. “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “So I can grow up to be just like you,” she says.

  She has landed an assistant teaching position at a local community college, which, in the current market, wasn’t easy. “First thing I teach my students is about throat-clearing,” she says. Amazing, the influence of teachers. I use a little phrase to make a point. Kristie tells it to her students, one of whom may become a teacher of writing, and tell others. “A ripple widening from a single stone,” wrote Theodore Roethke, “winding around the waters of the world.” Or, as one of the James boys put it—William or Henry, I can’t recall which—“a teacher can never tell where his influence stops.”

  The teaching of writing is like publishing something you write. You come up with an idea, and out it goes. Only with teaching you don’t get first and second “passes,” a publisher’s term for proofs you can have second thoughts about and correct. You need to be as careful with what you say as a teacher as you are as a writer—maybe more careful, because as soon as you go public with your words, your students will blow them about like rumors. What I teach my students about writing may become writing. I try not to overthink this, because the burden of competence is daunting.

  Like Kristie, I am but one teacher who has had a few memorable teachers. Yet I have spread their thoughts and inventions abroad like a town crier. And I have learned over the years that my students have taken those same thoughts and inventions and have done as I have done. For my Modern Poetry course, the students’ assignment is to produce an anthology of poems. I put some forty recently published books of poems by contemporary poets on reserve in the university library. Throughout the term, along with our discussions in class of established modern poets—Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, William Empson, Margaret Atwood, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Graves, and the like—I ask the students to read the forty new books, which we do not discuss in class, and select ten poems from different authors for their anthologies. Then I ask them to write a ten-page introduction explaining their choices. By the end of the course they have created a little book that speaks for their taste. It is a wonderful assignment, and not my own. I took it from John L. Sweeney, curator of the Woodbury Poetry Room at Harvard—a brilliant, courtly teacher who looked like the actor Edmund Gwen, and whose Modern Poetry class I lucked into when I was a first-year graduate student. Jack Sweeney and his wife Màire retired to County Clare in Ireland, and have long since died. But this idea of his lives—such a good way to develop independent discrimination in poetry.

  Another thing Jack Sweeney did which I also try to imitate: he found something valuable in every comment students made, no matter how far off the mark it might be. I’m not as consistently good at this as Jack was, but I’m aware of its warming effect on a classroom. If you gi
ve every student the idea that his answer can never be entirely wrong, it makes him feel part of the group enterprise. We’re all in the same leaky boat in a writing class. No one, the teacher included, is ever completely right anyway. Jack used to say: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” in response to a comment that might as well have claimed that black was white and up was down. “Right!” he’d say, and then very slowly, like a weaver, proceed to spin gold out of poppycock.

  After Kristie leaves, I look at my students’ short stories one more time before the class moves on to essays. I do this for a couple of reasons. The first is simply to check if I was wrong about something the first time round. It happens. I can get so caught up in verbal errors, or in my own definition of what constitutes good writing, I sometimes fail to catch something new. I miss the larger picture. I’m not sure I would have recognized Donald Barthelme as the writer he was. Or Amy Hempel. I’m pretty sure I would have told Michael Chabon to calm down and limit his exhibitions of learning, so that the reader might feel something other than dazzle. Right or wrong as these judgments might have been, they would have been deadly to young writers who were trying to write with a difference. So I reread my students’ work in which I have found this fault or that, to see if I was looking at too many trees, too close up.

  Then, too, I like to descend on a piece of work like an octopus, tentacles stretching to clasp as many conclusions as possible. In a first reading I may see strains of mythology running through the text. In another reading I may see the story as a morality play. Or I may dwell on the logic of the piece, and read it as a science paper. It pleases me to change my mind this way—not to demonstrate my agility, but rather to show how many interpretations are available to a student’s work of which they remain gloriously unconscious. “You meant this ambiguity, did you not?” I’ll ask Donna or Jasmine. And before they deny any such intent, I’ll say, “Of course you meant it. Whenever anyone discovers something brilliant in your work, you meant it.”