oft-quoted dictum, “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” (Raymond Carver quotes it in his fine essay “On Writing.”) Notice, however, Pound says “morality,” not value. The first information I read for, at least in fiction, is usually visual and generally sensual. I want to know where I am, and in particular what that place looks like, smells like, sounds like, and feels like. If the writer can make me sensorily aware of his or her setting—trick me into seeing/hearing/smelling it vividly (again, vivid description is a trick, and a more complex trick than simply laying out what’s there), so much the better. Throughout my fictions I want Stein’s one-third “description simple concentrated description not of what happened nor what is thought or what is dreamed but what exists and so makes the life the island life the daily island life”—or, if not, then something that I will find equally interesting.
The next kind of information I read for is any tone of voice in the writing that is informative itself about the story, about how the story is getting told. Just who is the narrator? Should I trust that narrator? Should the narrator awake my suspicions? Should I like the narrator or not like the narrator? Should I look up to the narrator? Or should I assume the narrator is my equal? What is the narrator’s attitude toward the characters who occupy the foreground of the fictive field? And toward those in the background? And to the other characters? And the situation and the setting itself? If the writer keeps giving me those shots of vocal and sensory information, forcefully and with skill, I can be happy with any one of the narrative stances above, because I am disposed to trust the writer creating that voice and painting the pictures—whether I “like” a character or not. Even if the narrator gives me mostly vocally modulated analysis (Proust, James, Musil …), I can be happy with the tale—though probably a reader other than I will have to discover that book and alert me to its excellences before I read it. (Proust, James, and Musil are not writers I’d have been likely to pick up on my own and stick to without some critical preparation. Joyce or Nabokov I might well have.) Those fictive works that make their initial appeal through tone of voice—often a tone solidly bourgeois, educated, ironic—can take on more complex concepts and explore them through a level of formal recomplication that is often richer than the relatively direct fiction writer can achieve. But the greatest failures in this mode occur when the voice runs on and on without ever managing to erect the narrative structures that create beauty, resonance, and finally meaning itself. These failures usually hinge on a misunderstanding we have already seen: the confusion of “the literary effect” with an effect of tone rather than an effect of form that can even contour the tone (a confusion I would say my very smart twenty-six-year-old male creative writing student had fallen into).
Writers working in this mode, however, should avoid creative writing workshops. Little or nothing in such works can be criticized on the workshop level. Often the resonating structures take 60, 130, 300 pages to construct. By the same token the most successful works in this mode (Proust, late James, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein of The Making of Americans and Lucy Church Amiably, Marguerite Young’s Miss McIntosh, My Darling, James McElroy’s Plus and Men and Women, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions …) do not find their audience quickly. (In his Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell tried to have it both ways and was, I feel, remarkably successful—though the reader has to commit himself to the whole thing. Moreover, most of Durrell’s theoretical folderol about axes and so forth is simply distracting nonsense.) Those structures have to be built just as clearly—in their own larger, more generous terms—and the writing must eventually seem just as economical, if such works are to garner a readership.
When I read, I am also aware of tone (apart from tone of voice) and mood, and often a quality that can only be called beauty. Still, a writer who tries to go for them directly without giving me a hefty handful of writerly stuff on the way is usually not going to make it.
He walked into the room and saw Karola sitting there. She was beautiful. He thought of flowers. He thought of butterflies. He thought of water running in the forest.
The writer who begins a story with these sentences is probably very aware of tone—but is not really giving me, as a reader, much else. (I would be getting even less, if it were in the present tense—“He walks into the room and sees Karola sitting there. She is beautiful. He thinks of flowers. He thinks of butterflies. He thinks of water running in the forest”—more “tone” and even less voice.) It is much easier for me to be interested in a story that begins:
He walked into the little room with the white plaster ceiling and the wooden two-by-fours making rough lintels above its three windows. Karola sat at a small table, her forearm in the sunlight. When he looked at her ear, he remembered the pink and white flowers in his aunt’s kitchen garden back in New Zealand. By her tanned cheek, some of her white-blond hair lifted and shook in the breeze, and he remembered the flaxen butterflies flicking in and out of the sunlight and shadow of the big Catalpa outside in the green and gray Bordeaux landscape they’d been staying in three summer months now. Just standing there, just looking at her, he felt the same surge of pleasure he’d felt, a year before, when he’d come around the rocks in the twelve acres of forest his aunt had purchased for the farm in that last, sweltering New Zealand winter, and he’d seen the falling water for the first time, how high it was, how it filled his head with the sound of itself, how cool it looked in the winter heat. Karola did that to him.
Although I can’t know or even be sure, I suspect the first writer wanted to describe something as interesting and richly detailed as the second writer, but was afraid to, or was just imaginatively incapable of it—or, perhaps, had gotten distracted by thinking only about tone. But as a reader, I find the second more interesting.
As I said, the vocal approach I can also find interesting:
He stepped into the room—Jesus, it was so white—but Karola was sitting there. If you’d asked him, later, what he’d been thinking right then, he would have answered, “I don’t know what to tell you. I thought she was beautiful. I did, really. It’s stupid, yeah. But I thought about flowers. You think about flowers, you think about butterflies. That’s just what’s going to happen with some guys. And waterfalls in the forests, that kind of thing—I thought about them, too.” But then—right then—standing just inside the door, a dozen memories flickering in and out of his consciousness, he thought only: “She’s beautiful.”
Here, in terms of direct information about the scene described, this third writer is giving no more than the first one. But what it lacks in specific detail and associative richness, it starts to compensate for by giving a sense of a person, with a voice, that lets us know a fair amount about the character, either as it infects the narrative voice (“Jesus, it was so white!”) or directly (“I don’t know what to tell you. I thought she was beautiful. I did, really”).
Personally I find the tone and the mood of the second and third examples much more interesting than the tone and mood of the first. In all three cases, tone and mood would be things not to violate, as the story—or at least the scene—progresses. With number 3 (“He stepped into the room—Jesus, it was so white—”), I’d probably want something to start happening on Forster’s “pure story” level faster than I would with number 2. (In number 1, I’d want something to happen almost by the next sentence, or the tale would lose me.) Too much of number 3’s foot shuffling and embarrassment grows quickly tiresome though. Soon I’d want some proof that this personality, this sensibility, this observer was worth my time to stay with. He’s got perhaps another three sentences in which to observe something interesting and tell it to me in an interesting way. Almost certainly I’d have more patience with the second narrator—because what he gives me is informatively richer. I’m more willing to let the second narrator take time to build up my picture of where these people are, who they are, what their relationship is, and suggest how, in the course of the tale, it’s going to develop. So the second narrator has about five more sentences in which to let me know a lot more about the woman at the table (or let me know why the narrator doesn’t know it).
