Author Archives: Heidi Wilson
Hostages to Fortune
Spoiler alert, and what I’m going to spoil is your mood. But it won’t last. Our moods come and go. Like everything. We come and go. Everything we love comes and goes.
The Greeks and the Romans knew well that the goddess Fortuna will eventually take back everything she gives. Every. Single. Thing. They concluded from this that fortune is a bitch.
“He who has wife and child has given hostages to fortune,” Francis Bacon tells us. Bacon was not a nice man: his objection to giving the hostages was that they might interfere with the giver’s chance at achieving great deeds. People who quote him, though, are almost always thinking about death.
One of my best friends died yesterday. You might say he had been Fortuna’s plaything for years.
The new millennium brought him a raging case of lymphoma. It responded to no treatment. The game was over. Then the cancer, all on its own, converted itself into what they call an ‘indolent’ cancer. No one knew why it converted. It progressed, but slowly, and when it caused trouble, chemo and radiation could whack it back into invisibility.
He suffered from the treatments. His family and friends grieved for his distress. I never heard him talk about it, except technically. (He was a doctor himself.) From my point of view, the result of his disease was a vast expansion of his already great appreciation of his life. It wasn’t just gratitude. He seemed to be in a constant state of amazement at how wonderful other people were. Not just their kindnesses to him, which were many, because he was a nice man. He was dazzled by their achievements, their brilliance, their wit, their own prospects for greatness. He wanted to tell you all about these wonderful people.
He went on this way for a decade and half. Then the cancer stopped responding to treatment. He qualified for a promising clinical trial. Administrative and bureaucratic snafus delayed the trial. It still hasn’t started.
He kept on with his own work. He taught medical students about the human heart, the red one in our chests and the other one. He had grave doubts about the course of modern medicine, ‘evidence-based’ medicine, because the kind of evidence perceived by the heart could not be entered into the computer. In the fullness of time, these students will stand as a bulwark between their patients and the dullards who want to treat statistics rather than people.
And now, he is beyond our reach. The words ‘never again’ echo in our minds. I feel my words are becoming romantic, or maybe I mean romanticized. The fact is, I want to throw up.
Whether I throw up or not, the seconds tick by. I am here; Arnie is not. Every memory of him, every impact he had on the world is here; Arnie is not. The me whom Arnie taught, amused and blessed is here; Arnie is not.
You tell me: is Fortune a bitch?
R. I. P.
Arnold M. Katz, M.D.
Wait, wait! It’s a mystery!
I should be writing Gothic fantasy, not mysteries. When I consult my pocket notebook (which I often do, because, as Oscar Wilde said, one should always have something sensational to read on the train), I seldom find jottings about sinister strangers or mysterious events. I seem to be attracted by weirdities. I overhear remarks that suggest the speaker is not living a boring life. My passersby live in an alternate universe.
So today I present a quiz, modeled on the radio news quiz, “Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!” The deal is, in each section, I give you three scenarios. One is from my notebook; I witnessed it. The other two are my efforts to create a similar, but more plausible, fiction. Your job is to guess which is the true event.
No prize; the answers are at the bottom of this post.
[Spoiler alert: I have no idea how to make the answers at the end show up upside-down. So don’t scroll past the fourth question till you’ve committed yourself to an answer.]
A London perfumerie in the exclusive Burlington Arcade has premiered its latest original scents. These are:
A. Breath of Bristol and Liverpool Breeze. “The tang of salt, seaweed and steamers to the Orient. The scent of Empire.”
B. Blasted Bloom and Blasted Heath. “Experience the Wild Scents of the British Coast.”
C. Rosalind and Lady MacBeth. “Are you a charmer or a femme fatale?”
Cutting edge European fashion in hair style currently includes:
A. The Angela Merkel short page boy
B. Thin, wispy curls arranged with scalp showing, a la Princess Charlotte
C. The Lisbon pony tail: a shaved head except for a long pony tail growing from the crown.
In his keynote address at Magna cum Murder XXI, author Simon Brett discussed:
A. The new Jane Austen app. It tracks all Jane Austen meetings, conventions and re-enactments worldwide, and lets users chat about their costume plans.
B. Sense and Sensuality, JA’s only attempt at a pornographic novel.
C. An academic article on a murder near Austen’s home at Chawton.
A British gentleman in business attire is walking down Piccadilly with a similarly dressed lady. She gives him a perky smile and says,
A. “So, they exhumed his body?”
B. “She stabbed him. But only with a fish knife.”
C. “My, what a tightly rolled umbrella!”
AND THE ANSWERS ARE:
B, C, B, A
So, what do you find in your pocket notebook?
Shakespeare Encumber(batch)ed
Hamlet (or Mr. Cumberbatch), in the throes of madness
(christmaswarehouse.com)
Last night, I didn’t see Benedict Cumberbatch play Hamlet in HD at Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center. He certainly played Hamlet, the melancholy Dane, only the play wasn’t Hamlet. It was a three-hour performance of pieces of Shakespeare’s play, sliced, diced, and chopped. The meal was tasty. But I went for a dinner of Hamlet and got several interesting “small plates” instead.
I don’t call in the Holy Inquisition whenever anyone alters a word of Shakespeare. New views of old masterpieces occur each time anyone first reads/sees/hears them. Experiments with the text can be fine. And Cumberbatch is a perfect Hamlet for our times: a man trying to do the honorable thing in the face of enormous evil and confusion. Cumberbatch also treads the line between verse and ordinary speech so well you don’t notice he’s doing it. The play would have been comprehensible to an intelligent high-schooler, which is not always true of more conventional productions.
But why open with Hamlet in an attic, listening to a portable record-player spew out Johnny Mathis? Well, all right, if Horatio will then appear and we can get right out on the battlements and see the ghost. But no. Horatio’s first business is to get Hamlet to for Heaven’s sake come downstairs to dinner with the court. When he gets there, everybody else is dressed in Edwardian style. (I suppose Downton Abbey now defines “the olden days.”)
When the ghost finally appears – oh, dear. He speaks his lines very well. He even disappears at one point down a very Shakespearean trap door. But he also rips open his shirt to display a precise plastic imitation of mouldering human flesh. Just like in the movies. The camera closes in, so the HD audience gets a better view than the theatregoers did. And there is a musical (?) sound track, just like in the movies, that conventionally roars its instructions to the audience: Be horrified! Be grossed out! The sound track banged on through most of the play, often drowning out the actors, while the lighting effects mimicked sharp camera cuts.
Hamlet, in case you’ve forgotten, pretends to be mad while actually being driven almost mad by his impossible situation. Poor Cumberbatch, whether willingly or not we may never know, enacts this strategy by trying on a Hallowe’en costume or two, then settling on the uniform of the traditional toy soldier, complete with snare drum. He then marches the length of the banquet table – that’s on the table – drumming. This fools everyone.
Other business is equally incomprehensible. Ophelia has hobbies: she take pictures with a Mathis-era camera and she plays the piano. And your point is? Her final madness causes her speech to soften and accelerate so greatly that she might be listing the deadly side effects of some newly advertised drug. We certainly can’t hear her.
Then, in the final scene, as we try to weigh up the pros and cons of the production, Cumberbatch gives us a performance that absolves him of all offenses. He believes entirely in his reconciliation with Laertes; he behaves and fences like the Elizabethan gentleman, athlete and scholar that he really is, and he dies reconciled to death.
I’m no tekkie, but I hope some computer nerd somewhere will make sure that this performance will be preserved for the ages.
A Writer’s Twelve Days of Christmas
On the first day of Christmas, my karma brought to me:
A manuscript in a mad tangle
I’m grateful to have a complete first draft. Really. But the tangle starts on page 2.
Two hackneyed plots
It’s not that I’m a plagiarist. It’s just that my memory gland is too strong for my imaginary gland.
Three foreign phrases
I don’t use them myself. So where are my characters getting them?
Four dimpled darlings
Such adorable turns of phrase! Why do my readers get that gag-me-with-a-Smurf expression?
Five false starts
Once, you got a litter of crumpled paper on the floor, signifying writerly despair. Now it’s just delete…delete…delete….
Six friends kibitzing
I rely on their advice. And there’s so much of it! But I like to share my toys.
Seven cocktails calling
My protagonist knocks back Scotch. F. Scott Fitzgerald was drunk more than he was sober. Why do I have to stick to coffee?
Eight deadlines looming
I should be so lucky.
Nine unanswered queries
See above.
Ten howlers howling
Last week I left the same corpse in two places at once.
Eleven critics carping
See Eight and Nine above.
Twelve distractions dithering
E.g., Christmas. Happy holidays, all!
Baby’s First Rewrite
I think I passed a milestone this week.
It wasn’t literally my first rewrite of a scene. My writing group would never let me get away with that. All kinds of changes have rippled through my manuscript, usually to remedy total howlers in the plot, but also to remove unlikely remarks by a character or make my subplots more like a braid and less like railroad tracks.
This week is the first time I forced myself to abandon a scene totally and write another to do the same work in the book, better. Be warned: it hurts.
If only my red pencil were as sharp as the Geisha’s blade!
(Geisha’s Blade Philippines Samurai Sword Shop)
Two criticisms forced me to it. Our group’s homicide detective told me that interviews of witnesses would never be conducted with other witnesses present. You isolate them and get each one to tell her own story. Even weightier, there was a sad consensus that ‘it all went on too long.’
Even I could feel the latter problem. While I never used the dread locution, ‘and then,’ I might as well have. On plodded the scene, until slept the mind. I resolved on surgery.
I work in the Scrivener writing program. It’s hugely useful, letting you switch from any scene to any other with a single click, showing links to notes, outlines and subplots on the main page. Unhappily, that makes it so easy to tick back into your original draft, to tinker with it instead of starting fresh, to cheat by leaving your new text to lift just one or two sentences – such clever prose! – from the old.
Somehow, this time, I realized that I had to resist. I stayed with the blank white screen of the new version. When I needed to analyze the old scene for necessary information, I did it in longhand on a yellow pad. I changed the location of the scene, narrowed the point of view, pushed beloved characters into the background.
Lo and behold, it worked. When I checked back with my yellow pad, I found that the new scene did all that the old did, more briskly, with more conflict in the present and more tension about what is to come. The new scene is 25% shorter.
The exercise wasn’t without losses. On my yellow pad, I had drawn two columns: Needed and Good. The latter listed five brief passages in the original scene, a few words or a sentence or two at most, which I liked very much. Four of them showed characters acting characteristically. When I had forced my way through the new scene, these vignettes were gone. The course of action just didn’t allow them to happen.
Were they darlings? I still don’t think so. I’ve stored them in a file called ‘fragments’ for possible reinsertion in a final smoothing. Deep in my heart, though, I don’t expect to see them again.
Dancing About Architecture
Donald Swann in full voice
Singer and composer Donald Swann once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. You can walk around that simile for quite a while. The writing is pointless? Music is bigger, more impressive, more lasting and hence more important? The one can’t substitute for the other?
At the moment, I’m writing about architecture, and Swann’s dictum haunts me. I need to take my readers into a house that is as real to me as my own. I know that each reader will blend my descriptions with her own home, her family’s homes, her feelings about home in general and god knows what else. But I need her to see some parts of the house clearly, and I want her to experience much more than an architectural plan.
A possible model for Fallowfields
The fictional house in question, recently named Fallowfields by its snobbish owner, was built in the late 1800s in rural New Hampshire. It is an uneasy blend of Victorian-era ostentation and New England tradition. Both aspects are important to my plot and to the personalities of my characters. So both have to come through.
My plot requires that people sneak around the place, in and out, upstairs and down, undetected. So I designed Fallowfields on the model of ‘big house, little house, back house, barn.’ Farm housekeeping in the nineteenth century required more than one structure. The little house was usually built onto the back wall of the big house, which was where the humans lived. It might be a summer kitchen, a dairy, a woodshed or all three. A third structure, the back house, would share the back wall of the little house and shelter a different activity. One way or another, all the space that made up the house was formed around the chores and the home production of goods that supported the family.
The Fallowfields barn now has an apartment built into the old hay loft. My heroine has converted the tack room into a home laboratory for her botany experiments. Readers need to notice that proximity. The little house has, unusally, a second story and an internal flight of stairs. There’s another flight at the front of the big house. Before we can do exciting scenes of rushing up and down and dodging round the house, I must lay the routes out for the reader in the course of their ordinary use. Needless to say, my writing group read the early drafts and scratched their heads. “Wait! She was in the barn. How did she get to the bedroom?” Time to revise.
I want much more from Fallowfields than these mechanics. My heroine is facing forced retirement from work that took her around the globe. Unless I can convey her growing contentment with a life in northern New England, she and the book will come to an unhappy end, which is not my intention. Fallowfields and the rest of her home town must convey the possibility of that contentment.
A view of Peacham
Parts of Fallowfields are based on my grandfather’s house in Peacham, Vermont, purely for the pleasure I take in recalling it. To a five-year-old, its little house was Aladdin’s cave. It held pairs of rubber boots tall and thick enough for Jack-in-the-Beanstalk’s giant, or to survive a universal deluge. There were thin bamboo sticks as tall as my father and balls of bright green twine that would stake vines in the garden next summer. There were little, square wood boxes streaked inside with bright crimson, waiting for yet another year’s raspberry crop. There was a tub of something called paraffin, which I was forbidden to touch. It felt smooth and slick.
Grandpa’s back house was a chicken house. Every egg we ate in that house was less than 24 hours old. At Fallowfields, the old chicken house has been converted into a paradise for a pair of pet ferrets, but hovering sharp and dusty in the air, somewhere between a scent and a memory, is the smell of the feathers, droppings and dirt generated by a flock of healthy chickens. Even today, one breath of that scent takes a half-century off my age. Can I manage to show that? Because telling just won’t do.
Magna cum Murder
I’m hoping to earn a summa cum murder one of these days, so naturally I’m working my way up. Last weekend, I attended the 21st annual Magna cum Murder conference in Indianapolis. My pocket notebook is bursting with wise tips, potential contacts and off-the-cuff sketches of typical attendees of murder conferences. Face it, people. We’re weird.
We’re also smart and funny and very good company.
On the “smart” front, I call in evidence Cheryl Hollon, formerly an engineer who constructed flight simulators all over the world, now full-time writer of the Webb’s Glass Shop mystery series. Sarah Wisseman was there, too. She’s a former archaeologist, who’s just started her second series of archaeological mysteries, this one starring an art conservator in Siena (Burnt Siena.) My table mates at lunches and dinners included more archaeologists, an anthropologist, a lawyer….
And funny! International guest of honor Simon Brett gave an after-dinner speech that was even better than the chocolatey dessert.
Simon Brett, Michael Dymmoch (hidden by Simon), Monica Ferris, M.E. May and Andrew Welsh-Huggins debate amateur sleuths vs. P.I.s vs. police detectives
I won’t steal too many of his jokes, but here’s a taste:
In a British accent even plummier than his own, he read excerpts from Jane Austen’s only attempt to write a pornographic novel, Sense and Sensuality. (It began, “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” I leave the rest to the reader as an exercise.)
He plundered T. S. Eliot’s business correspondence and came up with a letter to an overdrawn bank customer, beginning, “Dear Mr. Prufrock….”
Dylan Thomas’s Welsh accent sounded from the grave in an excerpt from Under Murder Wood.
We heard some of the latest Scandinavian Noir, The Girl with the Unpronounceable Name, apparently read by the Muppets’ Swedish chef: “The inspector brooded… …. … Then he brooded some more.”
Brett had a few sharp words for the clichés of our genre, too. My favorite: “Writing about serial killers is a lot easier than making up a proper plot.” The hard-as-nails, gorgeous female pathologist came in for heavy criticism, accompanied by Brett-produced sound effects: a liver squishing and a bone saw.
Monica Ferris, hatted by Angie’s Hats of Minneapolis
What is it about mystery writers and hats? I’ve written here before, with pictures, about the hats worn at Malice Domestic’s closing tea party. At Magna cum Murder, Monica Ferris, author of 18 fabric-arts mysteries, stood out for her millinery. Here she is at the cocktail reception, in the blue confection made especially for her by Angie’s Hats of Minneapolis. Check the lower left corner of the mirror behind her to get the full effect of the white feathers. And below, by permission, is one of Angie’s Kentucky Derby hats.
“Ruby” — a Kentucky Derby hat by Angie (already sold, sadly)
And here’s Monica again in the hat (not one of Angie’s) that she wore at the final panel. With her is Michael Dymmoch, author of the John Thinnes/Jack Caleb mystery series, and wearer of dragons.
Michael Dymmoch with dragon and Monica Ferris with hat.
All right, I suppose we should do some work here. Some of the writing and publishing tips I collected at Magna included:
Now that publishers do so little and ask so much of writers, a small publisher with a smaller list may put more resources into getting your book known.
Small-town gossip is always a good way to convey information to a reader, but to judge from audience response at one panel, people enjoy reading it for its own sake. Similarly, most of one Q&A was taken up with anecdotes of interesting overheard remarks.
The last impression made by your final scene is what determines whether the reader will buy the next book in your series.
Sally Wright, author of both the Ben Wright and the Jo Grant series, outlines before she writes…and outlines, and outlines…. Sometimes, she goes on for fifty pages before writing the first sentence of the text.
From Sarah Wisseman: have your protagonist miss a clue because of a crisis in her personal life.
And now I suppose, as Willem Lange says, “I gotta get back to work.”
Vicarious Eviltude
‘Eviltude’ is our family’s term for a certain kind of transgression: those delightful delicts that are entirely voluntary, pleasurable and unregretted. Taking the last piece of chocolate cake without apology or second thought is eviltude, as is buying that adorable, vulgar sequined vest that you will never have the guts to wear in public. Eviltude can be identified by a certain YAHOO! feeling, lamentably scarce in my day-to-day life.
There are days, though, when it just isn’t enough. Respectability weighs heavy, and the odds of becoming a pirate seem vanishingly small. That is one of the times when writing murder mysteries comes to the rescue. (Yes, I know we call it crime fiction now. Mine are murder mysteries.)
Kate Flora blogged the other day, on Maine Crime Writers, that “writing things out of our systems is why we crime writers usually are pretty cheerful.” And this is true. Giving an unpleasant character some of the traits of your venomous neighbor can really ease your mind. It probably counts as eviltude. But it seems to me that Kate left out a lot of the upside. When I am plotting crime, I’m not just relieved of care, I’m gleeful. There is nothing I couldn’t do! And nobody I don’t want to get caught, will get caught!
I just finished reading The Map Thief, a nonfiction account of Edward Forbes Smiley III, who stole hundreds of rare maps from libraries, sold them to collectors and lived the jet set life among the ultra-rich. I learned the details of library security systems, the twist of the wrist used to run a razor blade down a book binding, and the little alterations that can be made to disguise a stolen parchment. It just so happens that my mystery #2 concerns the theft of an ancient manuscript, complete with gorgeous illuminations, glittering and bizarre.
Monkey-lion centaur sawing books (much worse than eviltude)
(Courtesy British Library, Add. 49622, f.146)
As I read about Smiley, I kept thinking, “I could use that! I could use that, too!” It was almost as if I were stealing the books myself. Onward to piracy!
With only two plots (and no completed manuscript) to my credit, I’m amazed at the amount of mayhem I have already enjoyed. Young and old have fallen at my hand, by poison, violence and an intricate plot involving a clown at a children’s party.
Clostridium botulinum bacteria. (Science Photo Library)
As a bonus, every murder needs alternate explanations that the detective must investigate and discard. It’s as much fun as killing your venomous neighbor two or three times. In mystery #1, the first victim is found to be full of botulism toxin. Of course, it is found in the canned tomatoes. But the victim’s house is also full of Botox (as is the victim’s fiance.) How to choose? Shall I have a single murderer kill several people off, one per source of botulism? Or shall I invent more murderers? Now sounds the evil pirate laugh, BWAH-HAH-HA-HA!
I’ve begun to see opportunities for murder in every chance-met object. Here in rural New Hampshire, we have myriad neglected houses dating back a century or two, just crying out for renovation. What if, while the carpenters are rebuilding the sash windows, having found lovely antique sash weights for the purpose, a murderer finds his victim alone in the house?
6-lb Antique Sash Weights
(Need a blunt instrument? Get these on Ebay!)
In my saner moments, I fear no good can come of this. Vicarious eviltude could take me to new and dangerous places. I might just wear that vest. To a bar. Where I would get into a fight. With a cop…. Or maybe I should just keep my eviltudes vicarious.
It’s Christmas!
My pre-order has been in for weeks (at my local independent bookstore, of course.) Tomorrow I shall swoop down and scoop up my copy of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. It is Salman Rushdie’s first new novel in seven years. Everything else I’m currently reading will start gathering dust.
I encountered Rushdie in the same way many others did: I bought a copy of The Satanic Verses purely to show solidarity against censorship, after Iranian clerics ordered that Rushdie be murdered for the “blasphemy” it contained. It sat on my shelf unread for years. Once I finally read it, I began a reading marathon of everything he ever wrote.
How to explain his magic? Plot summaries wouldn’t do it, even if I could recall every twist and turn of the fantastic events that befall his characters…his myriad characters, his worldsful of characters, the armies of imagined people who march, parasang upon parasang, the length and breadth of the Rushdie universes.
The universes themselves are miracles. These are not alternate worlds like Middle Earth or Westeros. They contain, for example, the India we all know, the England, the United States. They also contain impossible events (two men survive a fall from a bombed plane miles in the air), strange powers (e.g., telepathy and witchcraft), eerie coincidences (an Indian songwriter anticipates all Elvis’s greatest hits.) Real-world politics, popular culture, “high” culture – usually taken down a peg – toss these very-not-ordinary people hither and yon. Some of them survive and even triumph, in a way. Others are ground to bits by the entirely ordinary evil and stupidity that permeate every human institution. But somehow, Rushdie’s Children defeat even defeat itself, simply by being more genuine – realer – than the real-world institutions that destroy them.
If I had to choose one characteristic that will keep me reading Rushdie till they bury me, it would be his perfect pitch for detail. Given his tortuous plots, many in the 500-600 page range, he must select just the right objects to bring the meaning of each scene into focus. Here is a passage that begins by evoking a real-world place in rather general terms, only to explode into the imaginary detail it calls forth from a character’s mind. From Fury:
“In Amsterdam in his middle twenties Malik Solanka – in the city to speak on religion and politics at a left-leaning institute funded by Fabergé money – visited the Rijksmuseum and was entranced by that great treasure-trove’s displays of meticulously period-furnished dollhouses, those unique descriptions of the interior life of Holland down the ages. They were open-fronted, as if bombs had knocked away their façades; or like little theatres, which he completed by being there….
“After a few visits, however, it became clear that mere houses would not be enough for him. His imaginary environments must be peopled. Without people there was no point. The Dutch dollhouses, for all their intricacy and beauty… finally made him think of the end of the world, some strange cataclysm in which property had remained undamaged…. After he had this idea, the place began to revolt him. He started imagining back rooms in the museum filled with giant heaps of the miniature dead: birds, animals, children, servants, actors, ladies, lords.”
And how about that “left-leaning institute funded by Fabergé money”?
So tomorrow I shall vanish from the world for some days, to read Rushdie and do nothing else. I hope my friends will speculate that something very odd may have happened to me. After all, I understand that in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, genies rise up from the sea bed in New York Harbor and eat the Staten Island ferry.
Word Death
Eventually, the words get you.
You struggle with plots, with character development, with the godawful job of pulling it all together. And while you are wrestling with that angel, the words he is made of creep through your pores and invade your brain. They become the plaque that stops the neurons firing.
It happened to James Thurber. Much of his last two books, Lanterns and Lances and the posthumously published Credos and Curios,
My 1962 copy of Credos and Curios
were compendia of words that had dug their little claws into his mind and wouldn’t let go, long lists of words that had, perhaps, only sounds in common, or were all place names or first names beginning with O. He packed them up and disguised them as essays and stories, and his most devoted fans slogged their way through, but even they knew it was crazy.
Thurber had shown signs of the word disease much earlier. After “The Night the Bed Fell” and “The Night the Ghost Got In,” he wrote “More Alarms at Night.” In it, you hear the Siren song of verbal miscellany. One of the episodes recounted in “More Alarms” begins when the words won’t let Thurber sleep:
I had been trying all afternoon, in vain, to think of the name Perth Amboy. It seems now like a very simple name to recall and yet on the day in question I thought of every other town in the country, as well as such words and names and phrases as terra cotta, Walla-Walla, bill of lading, vice versa, hoity-toity, Pall Mall, Bodley Head, Schumann-Heink, etc., without even coming close to Perth Amboy…. I began to suspect that one might lose one’s mind over some such trivial mental tic as a futile search for terra firma Piggly Wiggly Gorgonzola Prester John Arc de Triomphe Holy Moses Lares and Penates….
When I read that for the first time, I nearly fell off the end of my mother’s bed, laughing. Mother, propped up at the head and reading herself to sleep, listened with a grin as I read it aloud, choking with laughter. But in Thurber’s later books, the humor had drained out, leaving only the words.
Thurber’s woes came back to me when I read Howard Elman’s Farewell, Ernest Hebert’s wonderful finale to the Darby Chronicles. In the first book of the Chronicles, The Dogs of March, Howard Elman is an illiterate adult, a man with a good eye and a wondering mind but few words with which to order his experience. His rural New Hampshire world is being invaded by the come-heres, wordy, untrustworthy flatlanders who end by taking not only Howard’s land but also his children into their insubstantial world of hot air and incomprehensible notions.
In the Farewell, Howard has learned to read, and death approaches. He is now up against the next generation of strangers, who are obsessed with ones and zeroes and with an ‘ecosystem’ apparently coterminous with, but different from, the New Hampshire forests he loves. They seem to have invaded, not from the flat lands, but from Mars. One of them is his son, who has changed his name.
In this milieu, words have begun to bother Howard. You accumulate them, they name new things that may or may not exist, and then when you put them up against each other, you can see that they don’t make sense. What do they mean, “the prime evil forest”? “Why does ‘purposes’ sound so much like ‘porpoises’?” Howard has begun talking to himself in a final attempt to ‘combobulate’ his world. “How to say it and make it make sense?”
Perhaps it’s a problem of scale. Thurber vanished into minutiae. From Howard Elman’s point of view, his son’s new friends operate in a world of vast, airy nothings. All their words are code words, but the code refers to nothing he can get a grip on. Behind the airy nothings he can see only more airy nothings.
For those of us less talented than James Thurber and Ernest Hebert, a focus on the words themselves just produces ‘darlings’ – abominable cutenesses and dreadfully, dreadfully clever repartée. Once these insinuate themselves into a first draft, the novice writer can find them impossible to dislodge, even knowing that the reader will find them impossible to stomach. When the words begin to preen themselves this way, when you feel the poison creeping into your writerly veins, what to do? Here is one suggestion: imagine this question from an innocent, eager child reader:
“But what happened next?”
Eleanor Ingbretson
Karen Whalen
llandrigan
Heidi Wilson
Mike M
Thursday Night Writes 