Donde la tierra es roja

Agriculture in Graham County, AZ

He looked out at the red earth stretching around them. It was hard to imagine, but millions of years ago this had been the bottom of a massive inland sea. Aquatic dinosaur bones had been dug up under this soil and there were still places in the desert where mounds of fossilized seashells baked under the sun. 

- Jane Harper, The Lost Man 

Harper’s story takes place in the Australian outback, an environment even drier and more severe than Arizona. The red earth passages, though, set me to musing, first on similarities between Australia and Arizona, and then to other red earth parts of the world. Here in southeast Arizona, our pinkish-grey mountains can turn red at sunset, and there are places in Cochise and Graham County where the soil is red enough to remind me of Georgia clay. Here’s a passage from a children’s novel set in Georgia:

Then it began to rain. It rained and it rained and it rained. The yard ran in gullies, the lane was pink and slippery, and the road was deep in red mud. 

“I’m a-going to lose my mind,” Ma said, “if you all don’t stop a-tracking that old red clay into my house.” 

- Virginia H. Ormsby, Long Lonesome Train Whistle

That reminds me also (as my train of associations rolls along) that the first time I traveled in the American South, camping with my parents and sisters on our way to visit grandparents who had moved in retirement to the Gulf Coast of Florida, the red Georgia soil seemed bizarre and alien to my Midwestern eyes, whereas now, in more recent years, whether traveling through the South or spending time in Southwest, I have repeatedly been struck by the similarity of red earth in the southern U.S. to that where my “pen pal,” Kathy, lives in New South Wales, Australia, and — between here and there, if you take the Atlantic route — the red earth of South Africa, Botswana, and other countries in Africa, places I only know by reading about them. 

I asked Kathy (she’s the one who sent me the book quoted at the beginning of this post), for permission to use one of her photographs, and she not only said yes (thanks, Kathy Dowling!) but also sent another image, one I hadn’t seen before and had a little trouble deciphering at first. The first photo you won’t have a problem interpreting, but the second image below is a photograph taken during a dust storm that had engulfed my friends’ country home and B&B. This is not an altered image: the dust is this thick, bright red. Can you believe it?

Red earth around dam (pond) in New South Wales

Red dust storm, New South Wales

And now an old friend from my earliest Michigan life, married to a Brazilian, has sent me photos from their South American life — and there it is again: red earth. Jeanie Furlan writes, “The color of the earth is sandy red … in Pereira Barreto.…  Closer to São Paulo, the Ribeirão Preto earth is a deep, rusty red, and it is much more fertile.”  

Red earth in Brazil

Besides photos of the red earth, she sent an example of local architecture, saying, “This is the Aunt and Uncle’s house where I first visited in 1973  (outside Sales Oliveira). They use flooring that will match the earth and outside wall color is also the same as the earth.  It makes sense since people will track this color from boots and rain, dust and wind will blow this color around.”

Utilization of earth tones, Brazil

Of course, dwellers in the American Southwest have long used the colors of local earth in houses, walls, tiles, and decorative items. And here are a couple more red-earth images from here in Arizona, down near Pearce:

We know now that the continents of earth were not always configured as they are today, but I was in school too early to have been taught about plate tectonics, so lately I’ve been doing some catching up, marveling that the idea of continents moving at all is so recent in scientific history. In The Fossil Book: A Record of Prehistoric Life, by Carrol Lane Fenton & Mildred Adams Fenton, I turn (after lingering on the familiar Devonian examples) from compelling illustrations of fossils in rocks to passages of text that dwell on the movements of continents. There I learn that when Alfred Wegener and Alexander du Toit seriously proposed the idea in 1912, neither they nor anyone else could explain how the continents might have moved. The theory of seafloor spreading didn’t come along until H. H. Hess of Princeton put it together and published in 1962. So when I was in my high school freshman earth science class, plate tectonics theory was brand-new, a subject of scientific debate, and not the accepted working model and received knowledge it has since become. Pangea, Laurentia, Gondwana — prehistoric continents — an entirely different configuration of earth’s land and water. Fascinating!

I read novels set in other parts of the United States and the world, dwell on images sent by friends, recall soils in places I have visited, and I imagine (mind you, this is only my imagination at work!) all the red earth territories originally conjoined, and when I’m actually in red earth country, staring at the bright ground and rocks, I feel closer to other red earth parts of the world, as well as to characters in books who live in such places, as if we are still connected somehow by being on similar ground. Then I wonder this: around the world, how many different languages are spoken in red earth lands, and how many different words do human beings use to describe those places?

The “world” is at once so large and, as “earth,” a home small and contained and intimate. Or so it often seems to me.

Thomas Wolfe Fatigue

My rule for including a book on my “Books Read” list for any given year is that I have to read the whole thing. If it’s on my list, I read it from beginning to end. That doesn’t mean I read every book I pick up from beginning to end, but it does mean I try not to waste much time on books that aren’t worth reading in their entirety.

Earning that listing right (my own rule) might seem like enough reason for me to plow ahead with Of Time and the River, though at page 511 of the 912-page book I was beginning to long for the end. But I like to have at least one additional reason, because otherwise I begin to have doubts, coming because I remember a why-we-are-in-Vietnam argument that went, “We have to stay and keep fighting because it’s already cost us so much.” My Thomas Wolfe reading correlative might be, “I’ve spent so much time on the book that I have to [double my investment to] reach the end.” Not a great comparison, since it’s only time, not lives, at stake, and only my own time, and the end of the book is in sight, whereas, for year after year, no one could not say that about the war. But I do think I need more reason to keep reading a book than having already read a lot of it.

So what’s my supplementary reason for battling on through Thomas Wolfe fatigue? Maybe I should first say something about what’s brought on the fatigue, and I’ll introduce it with a question: How does Thomas Wolfe portray character?

The main character in Of Time and the River, Eugene Gant (from Look Homeward, Angel), is so intensely autobiographical it’s embarrassing. Wolfe spares us none of young Gant’s overwrought emotions, and we are privy not only to every sensation but also to every judgment that Gant makes about other characters, almost as if in reading the book we have the experience of inhabiting his mind and body. Other characters are portrayed very differently, which makes sense, since the story is told from Gene’s point of view, albeit in the third person. Of course Wolfe/Gant, with access to Eugene’s insides, could only know other characters from the outside – from their appearances, speech, and behavior. I get that.

But the extreme lack of sympathy shown for other characters, especially those with different ethnic backgrounds – is it only the characters, or is it also the author’s, or was it the way the author felt when younger but got over as he matured? Negroes (frequently referred to with the more vulgar N-term) and Jews, Greeks to a lesser extent, are “oily” and “primitive,” with features of face and hair and body exaggerated and dwelt on at great length. Women, of any age, are generally either seductive or repulsive – sometimes, paradoxically, both! Is it only Gant, or was it Wolfe, too, who looked on other human beings not only as separate from himself but almost as members of another species? All others in this book, it seems, are Others, examined and described with the glittering, objective, curious but at the same time repelled eye of a boy collecting insects and pinning them, still wriggling, to his collecting board. This would be off--putting at any time, but at the end of an election cycle marked by statements of prejudice, hatred, and fear, it's downright sickening.

Sickening. Tiresome. Sad. Maddening. You just want to slap the egocentric, self-dramatizing young genius (already a legend in his own mind) upside the head and remind him that he, too, is a human being, seen from the outside by other people! How about putting that gigantic imagination to work to try to understand other people’s situations? That’s what I mean by Thomas Wolfe fatigue.

So you’re probably wondering, why go on at all? What on earth can justify my spending more time in Wolfe’s world?

“I love the language,” a friend of mine frequently says of a book she’s just read. And while there’s plenty of Wolfe’s language I don’t love, there are other passages, long and lyrical, which absolutely soar. Overwritten, maybe, from the postmodern point of view (certainly often emotionally overwrought), but when he leaves characters behind and pens hymns to land and trees, to rivers, to cities and towns, to trains and night, to time – all manner of general experiential topics having nothing to do with individuals or plot – then I want nothing more than for a friend to interrupt my reading just long enough for me to say, “Wait! Listen to this!” And then I’d begin to read aloud.

The river is a tide of moving waters: by night it floods the pockets of the earth. By night it drinks strange time, dark time. By night the river drinks proud potent tides of strange dark time. By night the river drains the tides, proud potent tides of time’s dark waters that, with champ and lift of teeth, with lapse and reluctation of their breath, fill with a kissing glut the pockets of the earth. Sired by the horses of the sea, maned with the dark, they come. 

 They come! Ships call! The hooves of night, the horses of the sea, come on below their manes of darkness. And forever the river runs. Deep as the tides of time and memory, deep as the tides of sleep, the river runs.

In these passages, repetition of words and phrases, so very annoying (and at times disgusting) when a character is described over and over with the same objectifying words and phrase -- these descriptive passages not involving other human beings are poetry, song. Wolfe can go on for pages like this, and when he does I feel the wind in my hair as the horses of the sea carry me across the water, and I ride through the night in the train, peering through the window at passing scenes. Oh, then Thomas Wolfe is glorious!

So there you have it. In the early pages of the book, I was thinking of recommending the novel to others in our Ulysses Reading Circle. I have abandoned that thought. I will, however, finish my own reading Of Time and the River, and I believe it will have been time well spent.

On the other hand, will I re-read it someday or pick up another novel by Thomas Wolfe? Not likely. By the time I get to the last page of this one, I will have been well immunized. 

Musings on a Book: THE SNOW CHILD

I don’t want to call this a “book review,” but I do want to write something about this lovely first novel, written by a bookseller colleague up in Alaska. We’ve never met. I know her only through her book, and not until I reached the end of the novel did I read “A conversation with Eowyn Ivey” and learn that she is a bookseller. There, when asked to tell a little bit about what energizes her, the author replied:

One of the reasons I left the newspaper business and joined Fireside Books [in Palmer, AK] is because I wanted more time and energy to write. What I didn’t expect is how stimulated I would be by the actual work of bookselling. To be constantly surrounded by all these ideas and stories and art!

The “more time and energy” part comes from being an employee, I guess, rather than the business owner, but I can certainly relate to the stimulation a bookstore atmosphere provides.

The Snow Child is a mysterious book. As readers, we are not sure, early on or even by the last page, whether we are meant to understand it as a fairy tale or realistic fiction, that is, a fantasy or a story with characters who could be real people in situations that life might present us with ourselves, were we to be transported through time and space to an Alaska homestead in 1920. The place feels real enough.

The morning was so cold that when Jack first stepped outside and harnessed the horse, his leather boots stayed stiff and his hands wouldn’t work right. A north wind blew steadily off the river. He’d have liked to stay indoors, but he had already stacked Mabel’s towel-wrapped pies in a crate to take to town. He slapped himself on the arms and stomped his feet to get the blood flowing. It was damned cold, and even long underwear beneath denim seemed a scant cotton sheet about his legs. It wasn’t easy, leaving the comfort of the woodstove to face this alone. The sun threatened to come up on the other side of the river, but its light was weak and silvery, and not much comfort at all.

The author’s inspiration for her novel was a used paperback she ran across by chance at Fireside Books, and what initially captivated her in the book was the role of place in the story. (Shades of Lynn Kimball!)

...Black spruce and dark winters spoke of lonely isolation, and the fresh, sparkling snow brought hope and magic. 

Growing up in Alaska, I’ve at times felt a foreigner in the pages of my country’s literature. All the books I had read and loved, but not one of them told of my home. The characters didn’t live the way we did. ... But the setting of the old Russian fairy [tale] was hauntingly familiar.

The paperback book led her to a fairy tale telling of an elderly childless couple who fashion a child out of snow. The snow maiden comes alive – and from there various versions of the tale spin out differently, but all somehow involve joyful childhood, love, marriage, and death.

In Ivey’s The Snow Child, the homesteading couple at the center of the story are in their fifties and childless, the sole pregnancy of their marriage having ended in a stillbirth. It was the loss of that infant that ignited Mabel’s desire to leave familiar surroundings, family and friends, to make a life in the wilderness that would encompass just the two of them. When Jack meets their nearest Alaskan neighbors, Mabel is initially reluctant to socialize. Making new friends and becoming known again is not why she came to Alaska. But somehow meeting George and Esther begins to thaw something in Mabel, providing an opening for fun and joy. Thus when that winter’s snow comes, she and Jack, at her suggestion, fashion a girl of snow.

In time the snow girl disappears, but so do the scarf and mittens. Human footprints, the size of a child’s feet, lead into the woods. Jack follows the trail but does not immediately share his discovery or his search with Mabel. He is uneasy.

As readers, we hardly believe the girl is real even after she comes to be a regular part of Jack and Mabel’s life. She comes to their cabin again and again, but she never stays, and no one else sees her. No one else believes a child could survive alone in the wilderness. Esther thinks winter’s isolation has made Mabel a little bit crazy. One day Jack and Mabel and the girl, like three children at play, lie in the snow and make snow angels. That will prove the girl’s existence to Esther, Mabel thinks, but by the time Esther gets around to visiting, the angel prints in the snow are no longer discernible.

Is Faina real, or have Jack and Mabel imagined her? We read on, expecting to receive a clear answer in time. As the girl comes to seem more and more real, however, the author somehow continues to keep us in a state of uncertainty, suspended between belief and doubt.

I love books, fiction or nonfiction, with women characters surviving in nature and pitting themselves against wilderness. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River; L. E. Kimball’s Seasonal Roads; Down the Wild River North, by Constance Helmericks, and so on. In the early chapters of The Snow Child, while the girl (real or imaginary) was a creature of the wilderness, the role of Mabel, the homesteading wife, was pretty much restricted to housework. Then Jack meets with an accident while plowing, and while he is laid up their neighbors come to help Mabel with the spring planting. From then on, throughout and following Jack’s recovery, Mabel takes her part in the hard work of the farm.

...She had never understood how Jack could fall asleep in a chair without washing up, talking to her about his day, or even removing his filthy boots. Now she knew. Yet for all the sore muscles and monotony, the days of working in the fields filled her with a kind of pride she had never known.

They became true partners in the farm. As for the snow child, she grows up into a young woman, but what are we to make of her?

I don’t want to give any hints about Faina’s evolving role in the homestead and neighborhood world of this bit of wilderness Alaska, because you should not be deprived of discovering her world as I did, page by page. In the end, one thing you will know for sure is that you have been transported, carried on story’s wings to another world. Do you need more certainty than that?

And how delightful that the author is a bookseller! For me, that is icing on the cake!

Not the Albert I Recognize: From Writer to Character

Camus, My Take: PART I

Recently, I was introduced to an Albert Camus I could not recognize, and the presentation shocked and dismayed me. Consequently, as much in self-defense as to defend the Camus I remembered, I began to re-reading some of his work. I began with his famous novel, that most frequently encountered by readers coming to him for the first time, The Stranger, and went from there to political essays on rebellion, revolution, and art in The Rebel. I am concerned that some readers of The Stranger have been led to mistake Mersault for Camus himself. The mistake troubles me deeply.

Fictional Characters in General

There have always been novelists who draw their characters pretty directly from life, changing little more than the names (“to protect the innocent”), and it has long been recognized that the protagonist of many a first novel is but a thinly veiled, somewhat exaggerated version of the author. Since writers of fiction are creating their own versions of reality, why would they not use themselves as a first model and present themselves according to their daydreams?

But not all fictional characters can be clearly traced back to the author’s life and personality. More often, every character in a novel has something in common with the author and also similarities to other people the author, intimately known or distantly encountered, perhaps in a history book, a psychology text, or a newspaper article. Wherever the features and habits originally appeared, specific original personalities are born in the writing of fiction.

The Character of Mersault and the Style of The Stranger

The Stranger is a “study in alienation.” ‘Stranger’ in French is also the word for ‘foreigner’ or ‘outsider’ or ‘alien.’ The narrator and main character, Mersault, is alienated from himself and his society. He is without self-awareness (a stranger to himself) and thus without emotions.

Mersault’s response to the world in which he finds himself can be summed up in an exclamation current in the U.S. today: “Whatever!” Marie wants to get married? Whatever! Raymond wants to think they are friends? Whatever! The French phrase is Ca m’est egal. That is, Mersault does not care one way or the other. If Marie had no interest in marriage or Raymond disinclined to be friends, Mersault would think nothing lost. Either way, it’s the same to him. Makes him no never mind.

The style of the narration reflects the character’s detached presentation of events. Sentences are short statements of fact, devoid of affective content. Mersault is telling his own story to us, as it transpires.

Is too much made of the opening sentences? “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” After all, Mersault is giving us a day-to-day report, and the telegram notifying him of his mother’s passing did not give the day, telling him only when the funeral was to take place. Very soon, however, our suspicions aroused by the opening lines are confirmed, the bare-facts statements having foreshadowed what we encounter in what follows: Mersault feels nothing in response to his mother’s death. The weeping of a woman at the wake, his mother’s close friend, annoys him. When an old man from the home joins the funeral procession the next day, a man he is told used to go out walking with his mother, who was then teased about having a “fiancé,” he makes no attempt to speak to the old man. He has no questions about his mother’s last days and no sympathy for the friends she has left behind, those who – unlike him -- grieve her loss.

Along with a lack of emotions, then, Mersault has an almost complete lack of curiosity. And as he says much later of himself, “I never had a real imagination.” No imagination, no curiosity, no feelings – no empathy. That is the character of Mersault before his conviction for murder.

Mersault is an outsider when first we meet him, but he is not yet a rebel. The rebel is one who says both no and yes – no when he feels his rights have been infringed and yes to the value of life in himself – and then, necessarily, logically, to that value in other human beings. The first step is awareness of absurdity, the second awareness of the value of life in oneself.

Only in prison, when he begins at last to feel unfairly treated, harassed about God by the priest who will not accept his unbelief, does Mersault begin to come to an awareness of himself, to an understanding of his mother’s late-life attachments, and to his own attachment to life. At the beginning of the novel, he is imprisoned, held in solitary, completely alienated; by the last page, he has begun to recognize himself as a member of the human race. But the first, dawning awareness of the rebel – in this case, the Meursault who says no to the priest and yes to the value of his own life – partakes of much remaining confusion. It is a long way from that beginning to a full existential awareness of solidarity with all other human beings.

In logical terms,

Mersault ≠ Camus

To identify one with the other is to miss both the writer and the character.

The Character and Style of Camus

Although Camus, like Mersault, was an atheist and believed strongly that meaning was not given, ready-made, with life, in most other ways the author could not have been more unlike his character. Anyone who has read of his boyhood in Algeria knows him to have been a joyous, active, and inquisitive boy, and anyone reading his later essays recognizes his passion and concern for humanity.

Camus engaged not only with literature but, often painfully, with the divisive politics of postwar France and the searing questions of his time. One cannot imagine Camus the man shrugging and saying, “Nothing matters.” Had he been as alienated from himself and from life as Mersault, he would never have taken the public positions he did against France’s treatment of Algeria, the land of his birth and youth, and the Algerian people.

In his essays, moreover, where he wrote in his own voice rather than the voice of a fictional character, there is nothing half-hearted, no verbal shrugging, no choppy, robot-like reportage. Instead we find crystalline thought, logically developed, and convictions – for him, conclusions -- that ring with passion.

Absurdism and Existentialism

Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behavior from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say the least, and hence possible. If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance. There is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right or wrong. We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice.

Yes, these are words written by Camus. They occur in his introduction to the essays comprised in The Rebel, and it is something like the statement in the paragraph quoted that I encountered in the strange, faux Camus recently introduced to me. Attention, mes amis! Note that ‘seem’ in the first sentence! Remember that we are reading an introduction! And then keep reading, carefully, because awareness of life’s absurdity is the first step, not the conclusion of Camus’s argument!

To illuminate the question of murder, he harks back to the question of suicide that troubled earlier generations of nonbelievers. “To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.” Only a living human being can recognize life as absurd. The act of suicide, then, would undercut the very basis necessary for the act. Thus, affirmation of suicide is contradictory, logically impossible. As to murder --

How is it possible, without making remarkable concessions to one’s desire for comfort, to preserve exclusively for oneself the benefits of such a process of reasoning? From the moment that life is recognized as good, it becomes good for all men. Murder cannot be made coherent when suicide is not considered coherent. A mind imbued with the idea of the absurd will undoubtedly accept fatalistic murder; but it would never accept calculated murder. In terms of the encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe, murder and suicide are one and the same thing, and must be accepted or rejected together.

To accept murder and suicide, to be indifferent to life, is the mark of nihilism, absolute negation. Mass murder and mass suicide illustrate absolute negation. “There are no half-measures about nihilism.”  On the other hand,

Absurdist reasoning cannot defend the continued existence of its spokesman and, simultaneously, accept the sacrifice of others’ lives. [Rejection of suicide must entail rejection of murder.] The moment that we recognize the impossibility of absolute negation—and merely to be alive is to recognize this—the very first thing that cannot be denied is the right of others to live.

Conclusion: Life matters. All life matters. To live is to breathe is to choose is to choose life. For Camus, beginning with an awareness of life’s absurdity did not permit one to abandon logic, and logic led right back to life as a value, an inalienable right. It is by choosing that each of us must create our own life’s meaning.

The rebel is one who says both no and yes. The character of Meursault, by the end of the book, has taken the second step, the step away from nihilism, by recognizing the value of his own life. Whether or not, given enough time, he would pursue the logic of “absurdist reasoning” to Camus’s conclusion of a right to live held by all human beings, we cannot know.

Are we taken aback by the phrase “absurdist reasoning”? Does it strike us as a contradiction in terms? It is not, please note, absurd reasoning, not reasoning to absurdity but from one’s awareness of life’s absurdity to recognition of our own freedom and responsibility.

What Does a Story Need?

Critics and fans alike have struggled for decades over what to call The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett, and so I suggested to the Fearless Leader of our Ulysses Reading Circle that when we discussed Pointed Firs we should address the question, “Is it a novel?” He was somewhat shocked, but I raised the question, anyway. We were only seven that evening, and I abstained from answering right away. Only one person immediately answered with a resounding “No!”

“Why not?” others asked.

“Nothing happens!”

Voices were raised around the table, five people eagerly and simultaneously enumerating various events from Jewett’s pages. “They go out to the island!” “She visits the old man!” “They go to the reunion!”

Yes, there are these quietly related events, but what is lacking is conflict, or, to put it more generally, tension.

“I loved it!” “I did, too!” Pointed Firs defenders were staunch and vocal around the table, although one of them admitted the story had “no dramatic arc.”

I said I meant nothing derogatory by saying it wasn’t a novel. Neither was I was saying it should have been different. I loved the book, too. I think the place itself is the main character, and it’s a charming place -- although I couldn’t help thinking the narrator’s impressions of the place might be different if she were a fulltime, year-round resident. It’s easy for annual visitors to see a place through rose-colored glasses. I admitted that Grand Marais is my Dunnet Landing. Perhaps Willcox, Arizona, even if I never return, is another, but I recognize that my feelings for those places don’t take into account the struggles people making Grand Marais or Willcox their homes and needing to make a living there. Vacation, after all, is a very different kettle of fish. But I digress....

Jewett herself, according to Willa Cather, never referred to this work as a novel or even as stories. Her term was sketches. (See “Miss Jewett,” in Cather’s Not Under Forty, published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf.) That intrigues me, as it suggests that there might be a form of fiction besides novels and stories.

Perhaps no tension is required of a sketch? In visual art, we do not expect of something is called a sketch all the qualities of a finished oil painting. And yet sketches have their own charm. Done well, literary sketches, too, can be delightful. And who is to say that a sketch lacks anything if it is everything its author intended?

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock, is in a very different vein from Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Whereas Jewett shows the beauty and dignity of ordinary lives in a remote place, Leacock’s intent is humor. He holds up and exposes his main characters to our ridicule and laughter – and yet, he does so gently, even lovingly. Truly, we must laugh at ourselves when we laugh at the people in Leacock’s little Canadian village, for inflated self-worth and self-importance can be found in towns of all sizes. Doesn’t each one of us imagine ourselves the center of our world? And how silly is that, in all the enormity of the universe?

In Leacock’s book, as in Jewett’s, there is chronology, and there is one major event (the sinking of the picnic boat) to which smaller events lead, as in Pointed Firs (the reunion), but at no time in either book do we fear disaster. Whatever there is of pain in Jewett lies in the past and has been smoothed and mellowed by the passage of time. In Leacock, conflicts arise in the story as it develops, but the reader cannot be terribly concerned, since the author’s tone is saying all along, “Tempest in a teapot, isn’t it silly?”

On Saturday, looking for something else on my store shelf of writers’ helps, my eye stopped on The Essence of Fiction, by Malcolm McConnell. I have a friend who wants to turn a piece of memoir writing into fiction and isn’t sure how to proceed. Maybe she wonders where to start. Anyway, I brought the book home with the thought that it might shed light on my friend’s problem, as well as on my own meditations on what constitutes a story.

Malcolm takes a clear stand: fiction is drama. What the playwright creates for the stage, the novelist or short story writer must bring alive for readers on the printed page, but the very essence of fiction is always a dramatic core. Take Malcolm seriously on this point, and you’ll hardly be surprised to have him tell you next that the scene is the basic building block of all fiction.

Here is the list of scenic elements from Malcolm’s assignment sheet to his students:

o    Believable and Relevant Physical Setting
o    Point of View
o    Problem or Conflict Situation
o    Dialogue (or Monologue or Thought)
o    Relevant Physical Action
o    Relevant, Original Descriptive Metaphor
 From The Essence of Fiction: A Practical handbook for Successful Writing, by Malcolm McConnell (NY: Norton, 1986), p 37

(I have highlighted “problem or conflict situation” in red, since it is my major concern.)

In his discussion of the “problem or conflict situation,” McConnell does not even bother to argue that conflict is necessary. There is no drama without conflict; therefore, if fiction is drama, conflict must be present in all fiction, if it is to be worthy of the name. That’s a given, not something that needs stating except as it must be part of each scene:

Somewhere in any scene there must be dramatically revealed some aspect of the overall conflict of the story.

Malcolm quotes a friend and fellow writing teacher, Will Knott, who wrote in The Craft of Fiction that fiction is always about people in trouble.

...I take this one step further. Fiction is never about people with no problem or conflict in their lives. At first examination, this may seem perverse, that literature, one of the most respected art forms of Western civilization, is entirely devoted to the negative aspects of life. Be that as it may, the fact remains, that all effective drama, on the stage or in the pages of a fictional work, involves characters faced with one kind of problem or another.

Lest his reader turn away from all this gloom, he adds,

This central core of conflict, of course, does not necessarily mean that the writer must accentuate the negative side of life.

Perhaps the central character will rise to a challenging occasion, triumph over adversity, learn valuable lessons for the future. Whether or not there is a happy ending, however, drama and fiction, unlike the chronicle of factual events most of us recognize as history, allow us a special way to share emotionally in the experience of characters onstage and in books. Like us, the writing teachers say, fictional characters face problems, and that is what captures our interest. Without a problem, without a conflict -- no reason for the reader to keep turning pages.

What, then, accounts for the love so many readers feel for The Country of the Pointed Firs?

Nature is never static, and no one season of the year and no single day, not even the solstices, give us time in which “nothing happens.” If we are very fortunate, however, there may be moments or days or even seasons in our lives that seem uneventful, stretches that flow so gently we have the illusion of time standing still. Those peaceful moments will be lost, and time will resume its headlong rush. But recollection of an illusory season of stillness – perhaps that is inspiration for the literary sketch.

What do you think? Can a sketch be called fiction if it has no conflict? Can something that lacks tension be called a story? Or is it dealing in contradictions to say so? 

And finally, in your limited reading time (because reading time is always limited for all of us), are such slight productions, whatever we call them, worth reading?

Seriously, I Really Am Working: Progress Report from Dos Cabezas

Some of my friends must be wondering, after so many posts about horses and cattle and history and botany and day trips to exciting places, just how serious is my notion of a sabbatical? Aren’t I, really, just having a long, extended vacation? The short answer is: I really have been working -- steadily, every day. A longer answer follows, for those interested; whoever prefers pictures can switch to my other blog and see some of what’s blooming these days in baja Arizona, plus some fantastic rock formations in the Dragoon Mountains.

Writing

My focus for this winter’s sabbatical has been long fiction – not short stories (though I did manage to wrap up one that had been simmering a while, and that felt good) but a novel. I didn’t expect to have a finished book manuscript in three months but vowed to get as far as possible with a good, strong first draft. And so I’ve been getting up before the sun every morning here in Dos Cabezas, my quiet little ghost town, and sitting down and work. (Work: getting up and sitting down. Funny!) At first the morning program was coffee and writing. That has been expanded to include a bit of yoga, but the main thing is still the writing.

Around the beginning of March, out of curiosity, I did a word count. Output to that point was eleven chapters and over 17,000 words. It was a slower accumulation than I’d hoped for but steady progress.

Then, unexpectedly, I hit a wall. I was stuck only 48 hours (and tried not to take it out on the world, i.e., David and Sarah), but for two days I was silently fretful, disappointed, and irritable, stewing in self-doubt. Maybe the project was beyond my ability and doomed from the start?

Let me be clear. I had no problem generating words, which is what I think most people have in mind when they use the phrase “writer’s block.” Words kept coming. Unfortunately, I was not seeing value in my words, so I intentionally stopped writing.

There’s a passage in James Baldwin’s Another Country where the character Vivaldo is frustrated by the novel he’s trying to write. His characters seem wooden, and he feels like he’s pushing them around mechanically rather than bringing them to life. Vivaldo’s impasse came to my mind but didn’t exactly describe what I was feeling. My characters, as far as I was concerned then and still am now, are very much alive. I believe in them and even (for all their shortcomings) like them.

So what was the problem?

The answer woke me up in the middle of the night: I was fussing way too much -- fussing over the timeline, fussing over the scenery, fussing over every little logistical detail. Like a nervous, first-time playwright/director, trying to control everything, I was keeping my perfectly competent characters sitting around backstage on folding chairs instead of letting them get up and act! I needed to get out of their way!

It was such a relief to see the problem clearly that instead of jumping up to get to work I went back to sleep. In the morning, over coffee, having decided to take the day off, I talked over my epiphany with David, so he would know what was going on with me and wouldn’t worry. “It means I have to start all over at the beginning,” I told him, “but that’s okay.” Then the next day, clear about what needed doing, I got back to work and now, having started over, I’m three chapters into a new, much more satisfying version.

It may be slower going from now on – or maybe not, I really don’t know. Either way, though, it’s all right. Piling up words on a schedule is not the object. The story is the object. Telling it well.

The other day after asking David if he wanted to read my new first chapter, I realized that until then I’d let him read no more than the prologue. That told me that already, somewhere inside, without acknowledging the fact, I knew all along those words weren’t measuring up.

Now, having been introduced to one of the main characters in my new first chapter, David asked the next morning, after I’d worked for a couple of hours, “What’s the Wild Man up to now?”

Me: “He’s on his way to the U.P.”

David: “If he’s going to Canada, I hope he has a passport.”

Me: “He doesn’t.”

David: “I didn’t think he would.”

This is the kind of guy the Wild Man is. He doesn’t think ahead. And I’ve gotten him across. (“I didn’t think he would.”) Very satisfying!

Big question: were the last two months “lost” time? Wasted time? If what I wrote in that time isn’t going in the novel, after all? I say no.

When I reached dissertation stage in my graduate program, I wrote and rewrote my first chapter for a couple of years, then finally put it aside, plowed ahead, wrote all the other chapters, and in the end went back and wrote an entirely new first chapter, with maybe one sentence from all my previous drafts. (It might have been only a footnote.) But none of the time spent on all those unused versions of a first chapter was wasted, because it was all part of the process, or what one dear person in my life calls “the journey.” I got where I am now by going through everything that came before.

This is important. There are no shortcuts to the novel I want to write, because (and this is so Bergsonian!) the “endpoint,” the finished novel, has no pre-existing reality. Only by way of the working-through does it come into existence, and whatever that working-through involves and however long it takes will be what is necessary.

(I’m guessing what I’ve said here is even true for formulaic genre novels. What do you think?)

I’ll confess that I’m a little leery about my winter sabbatical coming to an end. I can’t help wondering how much room in my very busy, full Michigan life I’ll find to move ahead with this project that means so much to me. At the same time, I have to say that since starting over from page one, I have now have more faith (‘confidence,’ if you prefer) in how my story is unfolding and am not as nervous about the end of sabbatical as I was a month ago.

This morning David asked me, "What are they up to now, those people you're hanging out with?" I am hanging out with them: I wake up in the dark, and they are already there, in my mind, ready for me to pay attention to them.

Planning for Summer in Michigan

If you’ll look at the right-hand column for author events 2015, you’ll see that I have not entirely neglected my role as bookseller. Two authors have committed to dates in June, and I’m very excited about both, as I know my Northport customers and bookstore fans will be, too. There will be much more about Ellen Airgood and Holly Wren Spaulding as spring unfolds. By June I may even have firm dates in August for that month’s writer guests. As always, stayed tuned....

I Had a Jane Austen Moment

It wasn’t the first time, either. 

Many years ago a man came into my bookstore and somehow got onto the subject of concealed weapons and his right to carry same. Don’t ask me how that subject arose. It was very important to him, so my guess is that he was adept at bringing it into the conversation. But as he was giving his impassioned speech, all I could think was, Are you carrying a weapon? Because I’m not. So we are on very unequal footing. I don’t like unequal footing. And while I occasionally have people wander into my bookstore, hands in pockets or clasped nervously in front of them, exclaiming (much to my annoyance, because it’s not as if I’m running an opium den or a speak-easy), “This is such a dangerous place for me to be!” I can’t imagine any of them would feel the serious need to enter armed. And I thought then, and think now whenever I recall the encounter, of Emma’s protests when she learned from the concern of her friend Mrs. Weston that Frank Churchill, who had flirted with her outrageously, had all the time been secretly engaged to another young woman.

“I have escaped, and that I should escape, may be a matter of grateful wonder to you and myself. But this does not acquit him, Mrs. Weston; and I must say, that I think him greatly to blame. What right had he to come among us with affection and faith engaged, and with manners so very disengaged? What right had he to endeavour to please, as he certainly did – to distinguish any one young woman with persevering attention, as he certainly did – while he really belonged to another? How could he tell what mischief he might be doing? – How could he tell that he might not be making me in love with him? – very wrong, very wrong indeed.”

That Frank Churchill should come into that small country society and behave as a single man, without romantic or marital commitment, when his affection and promise had already been secretly given, meant to Emma that Frank had been treating society, as well as the marriage market of the time, as his personal plaything. “Impropriety!” Emma exclaims.

“Oh! Mrs. Weston – it is too calm a censure. Much, much beyond impropriety! It has sunk him, I cannot say how it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be! None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.”

I am not saying that Jane Austen or the society of her time would have the same attitude toward concealed weapons as they had toward concealed engagements or marriages, only that in my mind there is a parallel. Do we meet openly, as equals, or with our secret selves carefully hidden away until -- ???

Well, that was a lengthy introduction, but get me on the subject of Jane Austen, and I am as likely to be carried away as my one-time visitor with his own pet hobby-horse. My more recent Jane Austen moment came when Mr. X said of Mr. Y that the latter was often considered “arrogant.” Mr. X continued, “When you find out about his life, you see he’s entitled to be arrogant.” Austen fans will not have a moment’s hesitation here but will know instantly that Mr. X’s account of Mr. Y brought Pride and Prejudice to my mind.

Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike .... but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. ,,,[H]e was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

Mr. Darcy is quickly detested by almost the entire town of Meryton and all the family at Longbourne except Jane (who never thinks ill of anyone) for his insufferable pride, and it takes nearly the whole novel for Elizabeth to realize that she, too, has been guilty of the same deadly sin, prejudiced against Mr. Darcy because he wounded her own amour-propre. A couple of more moderate voices are heard, however, as early as Chapter 5.

“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”

Elizabeth’s friend, Miss Lucas is in general much less critical of others than Elizabeth, sometimes (as we later learn) carrying nonjudgmentalism to extremes Elizabeth regards with something like horror. Elizabeth’s sister Mary, the family moralist, “who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections,” was the first to make a distinction between pride and vanity.

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

What, though of Mr. X’s opinion of Mr. Y? Can one have a “right” to be arrogant? A man who takes pride in his accomplishments – or, of course, a woman who takes pride in hers – does not necessarily need to parade them before others to satisfy his or her vanity. But arrogance – where does that put us?

Without consulting a dictionary, and only going by my own sense of the word, I can’t help finding arrogance, as one of Austen’s characters would put it, “a grievous fault indeed.” I see the arrogant individual lording it over others, disdaining others, riding roughshod over anyone who gets in his or her way – and can there ever be a question of a “right” to such behavior?

Yes, I sound like Mary! Sigh! Mary the earnest bluestocking, not the lively, witty Elizabeth Bennett. And yet, I don’t think Elizabeth would put up with arrogance for one minute. She would puncture it verbally and/or turn and dance away gaily in another direction.

P.S. Next day: Here's an interesting site, not only defining but giving tips for spotting and dealing with arrogant people.