3Bringing your Descriptions to Life
Close your eyes and sit quietly.
Bring into your inner field of vision – a lemon.
Examine it closely.
It is porous, with a little green dot in the middle of each pore.
Feel the knobbly, cool surface.
Imagine a knife.
You are slicing the lemon in half.
You raise one half to your mouth and sink your teeth into it.
What has happened?
This is an experiment suggested by José Silva and Philip Miele. I’ll wager that your salivary glands started pumping out liquid as you imagined yourself biting into the lemon. The lemon became real for you; your imagination tricked your body into believing it would have to cope with a mouthful of pure citrus. That is one of the things that writing does: it entices the reader into an ‘unreal’ world, a world ‘really’ only composed of funny marks on a page, and through those marks makes the reader consider something which may form no part of normal life. It throws words like real and normal into question, continually challenges and subverts the things we take for granted, the things we think we know.
As you work on the exercises in this chapter, I want you to hold the lemon up steadily, as a pole star. It engendered a physical response. Make that a central aim in your descriptive writing.
Here is a passage by Colette. As you read it, be aware of how it makes you feel:
The caterpillar was perhaps asleep, moulded to the form of a supporting twig of box thorn. The ravages about her testified to her vitality. There were nothing but shreds of leaves, gnawed stems, and barren shoots. Plump, as thick as my thumb and over four inches long, she swelled the fat rolls of her cabbage-green body, adorned at intervals with hairy warts of turquoise blue. I detached her gently from her twig and she writhed in anger, exposing her paler stomach and all her spiky little paws that clung leechlike to the branch to which I returned her.
‘But, mother, she has devoured everything!’
The grey eyes behind the spectacles wavered perplexedly from the denuded twigs to the caterpillar and hence to my face: ‘But what can I do about it? And after all, the box thorn she’s eating, you know, is the one that strangles honeysuckle.’
‘But in any case, what can I do about it? I can hardly kill the creature.’
The scene is before me as I write, the garden with its sun-warmed walls, the last of the black cherries hanging on the tree, the sky webbed with long pink clouds. I can feel again beneath my fingers the vigorous resentment of the caterpillar, the wet, leathery hydrangea leaves, and my mother’s little work-worn hand.
I can evoke the wind at will and make it rustle the stiff papery blades of the bamboos and sing, through the comb-like leaves of the yew, as a worthy accompaniment to the voice that on that day and on all other days, even to the final silence, spoke words that had always the same meaning.
‘That child must have proper care. Can’t we save that woman? Have those people got enough to eat? I can hardly kill the creature.’
My Mother’s House
Look at the adjectives that apply to the caterpillar: plump, thick, fat, cabbage-green, hairy, turquoise blue, spiky, leechlike. Colette works at marshalling our feelings of revulsion at this voracious creature who has almost killed the poor box thorn. It is ‘as thick as my thumb’ – too big, surely. It must be a monster. She is setting her reader up to want the caterpillar dead. But then we witness a sudden turn. The child Colette starts speaking to her mother, lamenting the destruction of the plants. It is the dialogue with the mother that performs the crucial shift, enabling the reader to see the caterpillar in a new way, through the mother’s loving intercession. It is her nurturing, sustaining tolerance, extended, it seems, to all the creatures in the garden, that gives the initially repulsive caterpillar permission to live, permission to carry on denuding the box thorn.
Colette’s universe is tactile, first and last. The little girl holds the caterpillar, plies it carefully from the twig to which it had moulded itself. The mother’s eyes waver on her daughter’s face, seeming to caress it. The sun has warmed the walls of the garden, the cherries hang on the tree. The writer can feel again the caterpillar, the hydrangea leaves and ‘my mother’s little work-worn hand’. Everything touches, everything depends on everything else. So her verbs are determinant in the making of her effects. But perhaps more important are the adjectives. I have discouraged the use of adjectives in the last two chapters but here you can see them used with superb skill. Colette positively revels in them. She often appends two to a single noun (long pink clouds; wet, leathery hydrangea leaves; stiff papery blades) to flesh out, give further fullness to the feeling she wants to call forth in the reader.
Another part of Colette’s method of making round, making substantial, is her habit of moving backwards and forwards, towards and away from the object. In this piece she starts very near, so near she makes us want to vomit at the sight of the caterpillar, and then she slowly moves away, gaining emotional balance as she gains physical distance. She is able to tell us more because she refuses to stand still. And just as she will not keep the caterpillar restricted to one plane of vision, so also she avoids obsessively restricting herself to the object. She allows her mind to wander, following the associations that the caterpillar calls up, in a kind of trance, knowing they will lead her to where she needs to go.
Robert Lowell talked about the importance of this risk-taking, this following of the associative details, when he was interviewed for Paris Review:
Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of manoeuvring. You may feel the doorknob more strongly than some big personal event, and the doorknob will open into something that you can use as your own. A lot of poetry seems to me very good in the tradition, but it doesn’t move me very much because it doesn’t have personal vibrance to it. I probably exaggerate the value of it, but it’s precious to me. Some little image, some detail you’ve noticed – you’re writing about a little country shop, just describing it, and your poem ends up with an existentialist account of your experience. But it’s the shop that started it off. You didn’t know why it meant a lot to you. Often images and often the sense of the beginning and the end of a poem are all you have – some journey to be gone through between those things – you know that, but you don’t know the details.
You have to take the risk of describing the doorknob, or the little country shop, because they may be the only details that can take you in – into the strange and wonderful labyrinth that is your writer-self. They may be the clew to take you into what you didn’t think you wanted to say.
In Chapter 2 we embarked on the task of building a house for the writer-self, a beloved abode where the writer in you can live. Now it is time to bring movement and activity into those secure, quiet recesses. Bring a part of your own body into the house and watch how it moves.
The hand
You could probably use any part of your body for this exercise, but I suggest you start with your hand, your writing hand. Look at it. Place it on the table in front of you. Hold it in the air. Survey it on both sides. Clench it into a fist, then open it out. Look at it close up, then at a distance. Smell it. Feel it.
Here are a few words, all associated with the hand:
Mount of Venus callus ring knuckle
phalange scar vein life-line
You will find many others as you search your mind and, later, your dictionary.
As you explore your hand, allow your mind to wander over the significance of all its markings. Is there a scar? Where did it come from? What are the nails like and the cuticles? Let your hand tell you about yourself. Follow the clues on the hand.
Now write a description of your hand, taking the risks, following the associations that may lead nowhere but are more likely to lead exactly where you need to go. Write for as long as you can. Then rest. Leave yourself time to regain energy before starting the second part of the exercise. Imagine several movements your hand habitually makes – like holding a saw, peeling potatoes, rubbing in cream or making a pot of tea. How does your hand move? What does the state and movement of the hand indicate about its owner? Again, you need to make the hand do the telling, rather than bring in any extra information from outside.
When you have completed the whole exercise, scrutinise it, paying particular attention to your adjectives. The exercise in Chapter 1 questioned the use of these seductive parts of speech, so you will be healthily suspicious of their allure. But you have also read the passage from Colette and felt the sensuous materiality of the physical world she evokes with her adjectives, so you know too how strong an effect they can produce. With these two seemingly contradictory attitudes in mind, underline all the adjectives you’ve used. Look at each one in turn. Does it add a new dimension to its noun or would the noun be better off without it? Does it make you feel the meaning of the noun more fully? Is it a necessary part of the structure of your sentence? In Colette’s description we have the sentence: ‘There were nothing but shreds of leaves, gnawed stems and barren shoots.’ The adjectives here are gnawed and barren and they are both structurally crucial to the meaning of the sentence: the sentence needs them. To test whether or not you need an adjective, all you have to do is reduce your sentence to the form of a telegram. Take it down to the bone, to as few words as possible. Which of the following would be more accurate?
a) nothing stems and shoots.
b) gnawed stems barren shoots.
c) shreds stems shoots.
In (a) the ‘nothing’ seems to contradict the ‘stems and shoots’ and in (c) the ‘shreds stems shoots’ simply does not make sense. We have to agree that Colette could not have done without her adjectives. Try to keep this exercise in your mind as you test out the necessity of your own adjectives.
Movement in the English sentence
For the second part of the exercise, you explored the sense of your hand in motion. Did you find this hard, harder than your description of the hand when it was still? Many writers, at first, feel frustrated and dissatisfied with this aspect of their work, rather as an archer does when he is learning to hit a moving target. If this is true for you, it may be worth considering the movement that lies immanent in every English sentence.
The English language is structured around its verbs. In each sentence, the subject and object are hinged together by the connecting verb, the verb that shows just what the subject is doing to the object:
She brought the hammer down on the nail.
We have the subject – she, the object – the hammer, and the indirect object – the nail. The nail is an indirect object because it is related to the verb through the preposition – on. It is the verb ‘to bring down’ that forges the link between the otherwise still nouns and pronoun in the sentence. Without the verb they would be doing nothing. With the verb, we know that she is bringing the hammer down, and that the nail is being hammered. The verb calls all the nouns into a relationship of movement. From the Middle Ages to the present our language has hinged together the words that represent people, animals and things through verbs, through doing words. A verb always makes a link and it always represents some kind of movement.
That’s all very well, you may object, but how do I make my verbs strong? How do I elicit a sense of bold movement in my sentences? I think Melquiadez, the gypsy in Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, gives an answer when he says: ‘Things have a life of their own. … It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.’ For you as writer, this entails looking so hard at the world you write about that you begin to feel the minute, imperceptible movements within it and learn to give them their most appropriate names. Notice, for example, in the sentences quoted above, how Márquez uses the verb ‘waking up’ before the object ‘souls’. He does not say ‘It’s simply a matter of showing their souls’ or ‘bringing out their souls’. Those verbs, although roughly appropriate, evoke no tingle of recognition in the reader: they are flat, inert. In ‘waking up their souls’ Márquez cuts straight to the heart of our earliest desires: to rise from the dead and be reunited with the souls of our lost ones, our dead forebears. ‘Waking up’ associates with new life, a new day, rousing from sleep, a new beginning. It is therefore an immensely energetic, hopeful verb – and because our states of mind are influenced, without our conscious knowledge, by the language that surrounds us, this energy and hope is ‘fed’ to us through the verb.
If you have enough living movement in your writing, if your nouns support each sentence and your verbs fly, like flung ropes shaking cobwebs, between them, then you are in a position to decorate it with adjectives and adverbs – but not until. If you load up your sentence with trifles before you’ve built it properly, it will of course fall down. William Carlos Williams made a lovely poem from this advice about architectural structure. It begins:
Rather notice, mon cher,
that the moon is
tilted above
the point of the steeple
than that its colour
is shell-pink.
‘To a Solitary Disciple’
It is the angle of the moon and its position in relation to the steeple, rather than its colour, that is important to the poet. ‘Shell-pink’ would give a prettiness to the poem but a prettiness that is inappropriate because at this moment the moon has no connection with shells and every connection with the lines of the steeple.
It is hard to know for sure why this is so, why this firmness of outline is so important for the reader. When poetry, the oldest form of writing (apart from household accounts) came into being, it was written to serve a purpose: Sappho’s lyrics entertained the guests at wedding parties; the bravery of warriors was celebrated in song to encourage the others and thrill the attendant crowds. Our word verse comes from the Latin vers, which means furrow. A verse covers a span of time, as does the ploughing of a furrow. People sang songs (lyric poetry simply meant songs accompanied by the lyre) while ploughing, scything, threshing and grinding corn. The song was a part of the day, a way of getting through the day tunefully, in rhythm. Perhaps the origins of song help to explain why we still require a firm outline. Decorative details add further delight only if the outline has achieved its sure balance.
I think we still want our songs (poetry, story, play) to enable us to get through the day tunefully, to afford some new angle of vision that will ‘give’ us the world in a new way, elicit our love for the world again, although our faculties may be tired, although the world may be desolated. And the writer can only conjure up this gift for the reader if he/she is prepared, first of all, to write plainly what he/she believes to be true, rather than fall for the surface sweetmeats which seem to satisfy but which, like sugar, leave the reader hungry minutes later. Hemingway said, rightly I think: ‘The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.’ For ‘shit’ we can also read ‘sugar’ or ‘soap’ of the ‘opera’ variety. Some readers have grown accustomed to reading/watching/eating shit because they have never been offered anything else. This is an unspeakable tragedy. As a writer, your sovereign responsibility is to produce real food by making truthful representations. The first poets played their part in the making of bread: today’s writers grow a different kind of food but still provide a nourishment neither they nor their readers can do without.
Cutting it down to the bone
During the fourteenth century, Japanese poets began to develop the form of verse we now call the haiku. Haiku literally means ‘starting verse’ because it was originally the beginning of an older verse form called the tanka. They are the sparest verses imaginable, so short that there is no room for anything but the concentrated feeling. Because of their brevity, Japanese students of poetry and religion are given the task of reading and writing haiku. One of the aims of the haiku writer is to avoid ‘putting words between the truth and ourselves’, to write the ‘transparent’ poetry that T. S. Eliot strove for, poetry that tries to close the distance between the word and the object it represents.
Words are not things: we have to accept that. There is a perilous gap between the table I write on and the word ‘table’. The writer works at the impossible task of creating a poem, a narrative, which tries to narrow the gap between the signal and what is signalled: tries to reverse the separation between the world and what we write about the world. This effort to unite what cannot be united lies at the heart of the haiku and accounts for some of its tense, sad loveliness.
Here are three haiku from Matsuo Bashō, an early master of the form:
The beginning of all art:
a song when planting a rice field
in the country’s inmost part.
On a journey, ill,
and over fields all withered, dreams
go wandering still.
‘Leaving the house of a friend’
out comes the bee
from deep among peony pistils –
oh, so reluctantly!
As you can see, although each of these poems ‘simply’ describes a moment that has something to do with the natural world, other thoughts and messages come through at the same time. The haiku poets aimed to condense many meanings into each phrase, so that the poem should speak of something that has both a particular and a general significance.
It is this degree of concentration I want you to work towards, using the haiku both as a point of departure and as a discipline you frequently return to. These are the formal dimensions of the haiku: five syllables in the first line; seven in the second; five in the third. The form can be made more flexible in English (the translator of Bashō has bent the rules considerably) because it does not possess the same internal formal necessity as it would in Japanese, but try to stick roughly to the proposed number of syllables. Your own haiku can have ‘movement’ as its subject, ‘my town’, ‘spring’ or whatever has moved you to powerful feeling. It can be funny or sad. You can experiment with the creation of different tones and moods in your three allotted lines.
Below are a few haiku written by students in a writing class. I include them here to encourage you to write about anything at all. Among the qualities for which Bashō’s haiku are revered are ‘a desire to use every instant to the uttermost; an appreciation of this even in natural objects; a feeling that nothing is alone, nothing unimportant; a wide sympathy; and an acute awareness of relationships of all kinds, including that of one sense to another.’ Notice the verbs in the haiku below and the way they catch the emotion of a single moment:
‘Thirteen floors up’
if you fall
off the balcony
you’ve had it
Smaaack!
Nigel Young
Blowing top notes
She lifts her trombone up high
I watch her breathless.
He is everywhere
This younger greedy brother
Wanting to join in.
Mel Kathchild