7Hold the Tension, Hold the Energy

So far we have concentrated on taking control of feelings of humour or fright so you can represent them in a way which will evoke strong feelings in your readers. Now we need to explore how to sustain the states of mind you call up.

Sometimes I find that stories and poems lose force and energy halfway through. A tremendous amount of care and ardour has gone into the beginning and then the story tails off, almost as if that initial effort had been too much. This might happen because the writer is tired, because he or she wants to get the writing over and done with; but the fundamental reason seems to be that the writer has broken contact with the feeling that originally made him or her want to write the story or poem. If that contact is broken, the words and events become a sort of empty recitation, an alienated recounting of something that cannot proclaim its real significance. The gap between words and experience is already great; at its best, the language struggles towards a fullness it can never achieve. We often hear people say ‘I can’t express how I felt’ or ‘Words are inadequate.’ These sayings aren’t just conscious evasions. Words are always inadequate. But some get closer to the feeling, the experience or the thought than others. And the writer has to keep conjuring the feeling in him or herself, to keep it there, if he/she is to hope to do the same for the readers. In this chapter we shall work on ways of maintaining the connection with the feeling that animates, gives life to the story or the poem.

Let’s begin by looking at a well-known poem – William Blake’s ‘London’. I believe it is the most powerful poem he ever wrote and I want to analyse the way in which he maintains the clenched fist of resistant energy through four rhyming quatrains:

London

I wander through each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every black’ning Church appalls;

And the hapless Soldier’s sigh

Runs in blood down Palace Walls.

But most through midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot’s curse

Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Think first about the repetitions Blake uses: ‘charter’d’ occurs twice in the first stanza, and ‘marks’ three times. Why are these words repeated? What part does repetition play in creating a mood of sorrow, of hopelessness? Sometimes, when writing, we repeat a word unknowingly and when we read it again we recognise that our pen has slipped back over old ground: we have not found the right word. But here something different is happening. It is as if Blake is taking our hand and compelling us to see what he sees: streets mapped out, chartered, known, possessing no vital life of their own but owned; a river that has been forced to fit into this scheme, that is likewise owned, and hence deprived of some intrinsic quality that should belong to rivers. Faces are marked – stained or branded, disfigured. Repeating these words leads the reader to think that the poet sees these things everywhere he looks.

Look at the rhythm of the poem:

Iwander through each charter’d street

– di dum di dum di dum di dum. It is one of the commonest rhythms to be found but look what it does here. It is the limping walk of someone who has been crippled – the Greek name for it is the ‘iamb’, which means ‘lame man’ – people who have been manacled, marked, banned, chartered. Not only does the rhythm fit with what the poet is saying, it plays its own central part in creating the mood and meaning of the poem.

In the first stanza, the poet tells us what he sees; in the second, what he hears. Blake is using one sense after the other, as you have learnt to do. By doing this, he is able to show different sides of a thought or feeling, building up the sense impressions that cluster around it. He could have written, ‘Every time I walk through London I realise how chained down everybody is, how people make one another suffer, how no one is free from corruption’ – and he would have been greeted with our ‘Yes, so you think that. So what?’ It has no emotional effect upon the reader because it doesn’t show how the poet came to these conclusions. And as the aim of a writer is to take the reader with him, we can learn from the way Blake leads us along the path he is taking.

Look at the connections Blake makes in the third and fourth stanzas. The chimney sweep is bound to the church, not only because he cleans the chimneys that pump out the soot that disfigures the church but also because the church preaches a kind of Christianity that can countenance beating, starving and insanely cruel treatment towards chimney sweeps. Soldiers are compelled to fight, to bleed, to die, to safeguard the interest of the crown and the state – and Blake makes a metaphor out of that connection by having the soldier’s sigh run in blood down the walls of the palace.

These connections open out – inevitably, it seems – into the most terrible bond, in the fourth stanza: that between the ‘holy’, respectable institution of marriage and the harsh, exploitative world of prostitution, where bodies are bought and sold. In the last two stanzas, Blake is explaining the marks of woe that he sees in the first stanza – but what extraordinary connections to make! Outrageous they seem at first. Surely it is a kind of blasphemy to hold the church responsible for the cruelty and degradation going on around its blackened doors? Surely it is treacherous to blame the palaces of the rich for all the blood spilt on battle-fields? Surely marriage and prostitution are separate and it insults marriage to imply that they thrive on one another? These are the astonished questions we ask when we first read the poem. But when the dust has settled, when we consider what we know – from reading history, from films, from our own experience – we realise that although it is outrageous, the connections Blake makes are true ones.

Try to remember the things you’ve learnt from this poem until you do the next exercise when you will have the opportunity to transform the knowledge into something uniquely your own. In the writer’s place in your mind, retain these key words:

•repetitions

•rhythm

•sense impressions

•new connections

 

until it is time to do something with them. If you do this, you will be making your first experiment with Hemingway’s ‘letting the well fill up again’ before you return to write. Hemingway claimed that he always stopped writing about noon, when he knew what was coming next. He then forced himself to get through the rest of the day without writing, so that the well would have replenished its juice by the time he took up his pencil again the next daybreak.

It is to Hemingway’s writing I now want us to turn, to a piece of reportage published in 1935 called ‘Who murdered the Vets?’ The Vets in question are war veterans stationed along the Florida Keys, employed by the United States government to build a railway track. They are, Hemingway writes, ‘doing coolie labor for a top wage of $45 a month and they have been put down on the Florida Keys where they can’t make trouble. It is hurricane months, sure, but if anything comes up, you can always evacuate them, can’t you?’ The Vets were not evacuated when the hurricane struck and Hemingway reports on the wind and the tidal wave that killed hundreds of them. What I find fascinating about these eight pages is that they are sustained by rage – by a controlled yet immense rage against a government which could allow its veterans to die – and that Hemingway has the skill to let his anger unroll, rather like one of the giant waves caused by the hurricane, until his readers are held afloat upon it. It is this rage which draws us in, which has us participating in Hemingway’s feelings before we know it, that makes the piece so powerful. We need to learn and understand how he composes his rage, so we can harness similar potencies in our own writing.

The piece begins in an unlikely way – with three direct accusations:

Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presence a political danger?

Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months?

Who is responsible for their deaths?

Hemingway seems to have ‘gone off on top doh’ and fired all his big guns before the battle has even begun. But after this opening blast, in which he makes clear the depth of his anger, the tone is immediately reined in, measured. ‘The writer of this article lives a long way from Washington and would not know the answers to these questions.’ That itself is something we can take in: his way of surprising the reader, setting up a kind of emotional ambush, by a sudden switch from violent to measured tone. Hemingway takes us through a hurricane which is predicted, which comes very near but finally misses his home. In doing this, he takes us over the ground first, telling us what to expect, what to look for, so that when the hurricane does hit, it hits us harder:

When we reached Lower Matecumbe there were bodies floating in the ferry slip. The brush was all brown as though autumn had come to these islands where there is no autumn but only a more dangerous summer, but that was because the leaves had all been blown away. There was two feet of sand over the highest part of the island where the wind had carried it and all the heavy bridge-building machines were on their sides. The island looked like the abandoned bed of a river where the sea had swept it. The railroad embankment was gone and the men who had cowered behind it and finally, when the water came, clung to the rails, were all gone with it. You could find them face down and face up in the mangroves. The biggest bunch of the dead were in the tangled, always green but now brown, mangroves behind the tank cars and the water towers. They hung on there, in shelter, until the wind and rising water carried them away. They didn’t all let go at once but only when they could hold on no longer. Then further on you found them high in the trees where the water had swept them. You found them everywhere and in the sun all of them were beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry.

By this time we feel as if we are Hemingway’s companion, hauling out the bodies one by one, so that when he says ‘Well you waited a long time to get sick brother. Sixty-seven of them and you get sick at the sixty-eighth’, it is as if he is saying it to us over his shoulder as he bends down to examine another body. He is talking directly to us and we do feel sick.

What do we learn from this piece of reportage? That we can, must, involve the reader, make the reader participate in the feeling we are trying to represent; and we learn, too, that there are some subjects, like this one, so powerful in themselves that they require the simplest narration when it is time to take the reader to the climax. In one of Brecht’s last poems, ‘And I always thought’, there are the lines

When I say what things are like

Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.

When we have made contact with the pervading, dominant feeling in a story or poem and keep contact with it, then Brecht is right: the simplest words are enough to tear the reader’s heart to shreds.

Now try and achieve this yourself. You have witnessed some appalling incident. Those involved are either too distressed, too wounded or too ill-equipped to say what happened and yet it is vital, for the safety of others, that it be brought to public notice. Describe fully what took place, in a way which will arouse the feelings and sympathy of your readers.

Keeping the connections alive

In Blake’s poem and Hemingway’s reportage, there is a correspondence between the writer’s anger and the conditions that evoke it. The anger is an appropriate response to what the writer describes, a public statement about conditions of life or death. They each address themselves to the reader’s understanding of what a just society should be like: they are publicly political writings.

But how do we sustain, in prose or verse, a feeling that is intensely personal, not obviously called up by something ‘on the outside’ but which seems to be embedded deep within us? Like jealousy, for example?

I think for every feeling, no matter how inward and personal it appears, the writer has to find something in the visible world which corresponds to it, to make it visible for the reader. A feeling has no colour, no outline, no substance of its own. The writer has to give it these things to make it real for the reader.

The things in the ‘outside world’ which we use to embody or give a shape to our feelings are our metaphors. A dull, cold, rainy day does not literally mean ‘sadness’ – it is possible to be happy on such a day – but it is so obviously a metaphor for sadness that when it appears in writing it has become a cliché, intended to trigger a predictable response. What we see, or what a character in a story sees, is determined by the frame of mind in which it is seen. When we think of narrative or verse in this way, the underlying feeling assumes a primary importance. So how would we find an outside correspondence for jealousy, a way of writing about it that would make it real for the reader, so real that it puts him/her in touch with his/her own jealousy? To explore this problem, I’m going to talk about two short novels that have jealousy as their central, dominant feeling but are in all other respects wholly different from one another. The first is Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night by the French novelist Marguerite Duras, published in 1962.

This novel is about Maria, Pierre and Judith, their child, who are on holiday in Spain with Claire, their young friend. There have been several bad storms on the road and they have decided to break their journey to Madrid and stay overnight in a small town. Maria, a very heavy drinker, has begun to notice signs of passion between Claire and her husband:

Pierre’s hands moved towards hers and then pulled back. Earlier he had made the same gesture, in the car when she was afraid of the storm, the sky rolling over on itself, hanging over the wheatfields.

Although the whole story is written from Maria’s viewpoint, no mention is ever made of her jealousy. Pierre’s hands are there and what they want to do, and the storm, but not Maria’s jealousy. It is enough that we see these things and sit with her while she drinks manzanilla or brandy to wash the sight away (although we are never told why she drinks) – these things are enough to make us participate in what we surmise she must be feeling.

When they all arrive at the small town, police patrols swirl around. The place is electric with drama, with something weighty, weighted down more by the pressure of the storm. A man called Rodrigo Paestra has discovered his nineteen-year-old wife with a lover and shot them both. They are lying in a makeshift morgue, wrapped in brown blankets, and he is still at large. Maria learns from the men she drinks with in the café that he is hiding on the rooftops. So – the magnitude of Maria’s feelings is given to us because Duras has come up with another jealous person, whose jealousy was great enough to provoke him to murder.

That night, Maria cannot sleep in the hotel. She is preoccupied with the chimney opposite her balcony, against which a shape is leaning. It looks like a man wrapped in a shroud. It is Rodrigo Paestra. She calls to him, again and again. He doesn’t answer:

She wasn’t calling any more. He knew it. Again she opened the corridor door. She saw, she could see them, the others, sleeping cruelly separated. She looked at them for a long time. It hadn’t been fulfilled yet, this love. What patience, what patience. She didn’t leave the balcony. Rodrigo Paestra knew that she was there. He was still breathing, he existed in this dying night. He was there, in the same place, geographically related to her.

As often happens in summer, a climatic miracle occurred. The fog had disappeared from the horizon and then little by little from the whole sky. The storm dissolved. It no longer existed. Stars, yes stars, in the pre-dawn sky. Such a long time. The stars could make you cry.

Maria wasn’t calling any more. She wasn’t shouting insults any longer. She hadn’t called him ever since she had insulted him. But she stayed on this balcony, her eyes on him, on this shape which fear had reduced to animal idiocy. Her own shape as well.

Her own shape as well. By this tiny brushstroke and by the sky which has suddenly cleared, Duras draws the line of connection between Maria and Rodrigo Paestra. Maria confronts and explores her own jealousy through her obsession with the fugitive on the rooftops. She rescues him, drives him out of town as dawn starts to break and leaves him in a wheat field. She promises to come for him at noon. When she returns to Pierre and Claire, they are unwilling to believe what she claims has happened but they drive with her back to the field and Maria finds the opening in the wheat where he is lying. She is overcome with tenderness towards him, believing him to be asleep. But he is dead. The revolver lies beside him. Pierre comes over and sees him also. Maria and Pierre are the only ones who see him.

Rodrigo Paestra gives a body to the jealousy that lies between Maria and Pierre. In looking at him, Maria sees an aspect of herself, Pierre sees the outcome of the jealousy – a death – and the reader witnesses an internal struggle that has found a public stage. Rodrigo, the storm, the clear night sky, the overwhelming heat in the wheat field, offer Maria’s jealousy dramatic correspondences in the world outside. We read her state of mind from the people, the action and the weather of the story.

That’s one way of doing it. Another, far more ambiguous and strange way, can be found in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy. Its title in French, La Jalousie, means both jealousy and window shutter or blind; so from the outset the reader is taken into a maze of contending meanings. Is the novel about jealousy or about objects? We never really know. We have a narrator who presents us with a plan of his house, obsessively describes the objects therein and the way his wife, always referred to as A. …, moves about the rooms and onto the veranda. Also present, sometimes, is Franck, a neighbouring farmer, who comes at cocktail hour to drink with A. … and the narrator. Are Franck and A … having an affair under the narrator’s nose? To a readership schooled in ménages à trois from Anna Karenina to Dynasty it would seem so and yet we are never really sure. We know no more than the narrator, within whose obsessively observant mind we wander, searching, like him, for some sure knowledge. Objects assume an immense importance. They change size. Nothing can be taken for granted. The narrator, like Maria in Duras’ novel, reveals nothing directly about the feeling of jealousy. The feeling is represented through his perception of objects, through the way he sees the outside world. So, the jealousy does not form a subject of his thought, one among many, but a lens which filters, colours, interprets everything in its own way:

It was A. … who arranged the chairs this evening, when she had them brought out on the veranda. The one she invited Franck to sit in and her own are side by side against the wall of the house – backs against this wall, of course – beneath the office window. So that Franck’s chair is on her left, and on her right – but further forward – the little table where the bottles are. The two other chairs are placed on the other side of this table, still farther to the right, so that they do not block the view of the first two through the balustrade of the veranda. For the same reason these last two chairs are not turned to face the rest of the group: they have been set at an angle, obliquely oriented towards the open-work balustrade and the hillside opposite. This arrangement obliges anyone sitting there to turn his head around sharply towards the left if he wants to see A. … – especially anyone in the fourth chair, which is the farthest away.

The third, which is a folding chair made of canvas stretched on a metal frame, occupies a distinctly retired position between the fourth chair and the table. But it is this chair, less comfortable, which has remained empty.

Although the tone of the narrative seems neutral, empty of feeling, the minute observation of the way A. … positions the chairs gradually fills it up, so that it begins to pulsate with energy from a subject that is never once mentioned. It is the correspondences that summon forth the jealousy and hold it, throughout the novel, under the reader’s gaze, as we witness the perceptions of a mind pulled awry by the pressure of an overwhelming suspicion. Jealousy is called the green-eyed monster: it affects what is seen.

I’m inclined to think that every dominant feeling in a story or a poem affects what is seen and needs to find its correspondences in events and objects outside, which in their turn make the feeling real to the reader. Every feeling has to find the metaphor(s) which will give it a body.

Now is your opportunity to test out the ideas I have put forward in this chapter. First choose a state of mind, a feeling that you know particularly well. Think yourself into it and hold it for a while. How does this feeling affect you? How do you see things when you feel this way? In what ways is this different from your other states of mind and being? What could happen when you are feeling this way? What could possibly happen?

1.A story is emerging. Write it.

2.A poem is coming into focus. Write it.