Suppose I were to try to write a story which began with a journey I made to the north of Mexico twenty-seven years ago, taking with me my son, then aged five. We were going to pay a winter visit to two old ladies called Delaney who lived comfortably, in spite of recent economic reforms, on the proceeds of the family silver mine. They had lived in Fonseca ever since they were girls—one was sister-in-law to the other. Their relations in Ireland had died, they were alone in the world, and it was hoped that because of some distant friendship they might take kindly to my son and leave him all their money. Indeed, if I had understood their letters correctly, they had suggested the idea themselves.
The old ladies lived in a shuttered mansion in the French style, surrounded with pecan trees; the house was always cool because of the double height of the rooms. In the half-darkness of these rooms, as I discovered the very first evening I arrived, they were drinking themselves steadily to death. For two hours or so every morning there was a lucid period, and that was the time for callers. The manager of the mine came then, and so did everyone in Fonseca who was interested in the Delaneys’ wealth and therefore wanted to get rid of me and my son as soon as possible. If I got as far as this, I should have to stop. The details are accurate, these things happened in Fonseca, and many more were to follow. I take it that the novel proceeds from truth and re-creates truth, but my story, even at this stage, gives me the impression of turning fiction into fiction. Is it the legacy, or the silver, or the Latin American background, testing ground of so many twentieth-century writers? I know that in any case I could never make it respectable (by which I mean probable) enough to be believed as a novel. Reality has proved treacherous. ‘Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated.’ And I am sorry to let it go, because of what seemed to me the natural energy of the plot.
Watching a good plot is like watching something alive, or if it is adroit and sinuous enough, something struggling for life. Between the once-born and the twice-born plot (which makes the reader, even if he is reading it for the twentieth time, want to interfere at every stage), the difference, of course, is great. But I am easily satisfied in this respect. The test lies in the plot’s independence of characters, and even of names: only relationships are necessary, as in rhythm without music. I would place very high—irrespective of whether they were borrowed or not—the plots of Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Galdos’s Miau, W. W. Jacobs’s short story ‘Head of the Family,’ and Somerset Maugham’s still shorter one, ‘The Servant Who Went to Samarra’. Thinking of these, I can remember how I became an addict.
I was brought up in a journalist’s home and in a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish, something. We children also tried to write, and our elders were resigned to this. Being dipped in ink began for us, I suppose, at about six or seven when we were first allowed to use it, and we were given the back of old galley proofs to write on. What was more, although my father once pointed out that there was no difference between journalism and literature except that journalism is paid and literature isn’t, we expected to become rich by writing novels, or, if not novels, then short stories, for it was still the heyday of the railway magazines—The Strand, Nash’s, Pearson’s, The Windsor.
For these stories, which were also called ‘tales’ and even ‘yarns,’ the author had to find a plot, rather as the academic painter once had to look for his annual subject. It was the main thing. But writers, temperamentally less hopeful than painters, have always suspected that the supply is not inexhaustible. Gérard de Nerval put the entire number of dramatic situations at twenty-four; his calculations were based on the seven deadly sins, ruling out Sloth and Lust as not likely to produce significant action. Goethe, quoting the author of Turandot, suggested thirty-six, but added that Schiller, who set to work methodically on the problem, hadn’t managed even to get as far as that. All this looks unpromising, but the ‘yarn’ business was so important in the late Twenties that the magazines offered, so to speak, their own remedy. Among the back pages there were advertisements for Plotfinders. They could be ordered by mail and sent in plain envelopes, presumably because writers in those days were thought to live in boarding houses where they would not want their affairs known.
The Plotfinders consisted of revolving cardboard circles with three concentric rings of slots. Through these, you could read off characters and actions and vary and recombine them until the donnée made its appearance. Seaside landlady, landlady’s daughter, hero, hero’s friend, jealous rival or enemy, vicar, elderly lady or aunt, practical joker (the influence of Kipling here), comedy foreigner, censorious neighbour, returning husband or foreigner, mysterious lodger. All, of course, were interchangeable, ready both to act and to be acted upon. Many years later, when I heard Lévi-Strauss lecture on his Mythologies, he told us to do what amounted to the same thing—plier et replier le mythe—with King, Queen, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Sister-in-Law, and, among the Pueblo and Algonquin Indians, the Ceremonial Clown and the Ancestor of Owls.
Since our Plotfinder was for ‘sunshine stories,’ the action suggested was largely romantic, but the main object, in every case, was the ‘turn,’ introduced by the linking words after all, suddenly, to the general astonishment/consternation, unexpectedly, little realizing that, through an absurd misunderstanding. More expensive models, I suppose, would have produced a double or multiple effect. I have sometimes wondered since who should be considered the presiding genius of the ‘turn’—perhaps Mark Twain, who wrote a sixty-thousand-word novel to lead up to the surprise in the last sentence. But even the greatest novelists, those who stand in the way of all subsequent comers and threaten them with bankruptcy, use it at times. Ulysses ends with the returning husband climbing into his house, only to find that the door, after all, is open; he introduces a mysterious lodger/son into the home, little realizing that his wife has taken a fancy to him. This is quite within the capacities of the Plotfinder, and I am sure Joyce meant it to be.
The short stories I wrote at the age of eight and nine did not bring me the success I hoped for, and years of formal education in English literature gradually taught me the uneasy moral status of plots. If they were of the extravagantly ingenious kind, they had to be ‘forgiven’ or ‘overlooked’ on behalf of the writer. They were ‘strained,’ and, worse still, they strained the reader, or ‘made demands’ on him. Dickens and Hardy were overlooked in this way. Clearly, the acceptable story was imposed by life upon fiction without hope of appeal. By the time I reached university the final ‘turn’ was not much in favour either. Indeed, the novels I admired most at that time, Afternoon Men, The Root and the Flower, Confessions of Zeno, A Passage to India, all avoided it, although for Forster this must surely have been a considerable sacrifice.
When at last I tried to write fiction again, I was more cautious. Everyone has a point to which the mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own. I recalled closed situations that created their own story out of the twofold need to take refuge and to escape, and which provided their own limitations. These limitations were also mine. I knew that I hadn’t the capacity to relate the wide-spreading complications of the Mexican legacy, however well I remembered them. As time went on, more pretenders had arrived, even one who claimed to be a Delaney, and moved into the house. On the other hand, the manager was eliminated. Seeking to extend his sphere of influence, he began to drink level with the old ladies, slipped on the polished French Provincial staircase, and cracked his skull. My son and I were blamed for these and other disasters, and we left on the long-distance bus without a legacy, but knowing what it was to be hated. We had been characters in a yarn, and I am only sorry not to be a yarn-spinner.
In the novel’s domain, plots were the earliest and the poorest relations to arrive. For the last two hundred years there have been repeated attempts to get them to leave, or at least to confine themselves to satire, fantasy, and dream. Picaresque novels, however, both old and new, are a kind of gesture towards them, acknowledging that although you can easily spend your whole life wandering about, you can’t do so in a book without recurrent coincidences and, after all, a return. And the readers of books like plots. That, too, is worth consideration.
London Review of Books, 1980
Of course you want to hear their voices. Having summoned up these human beings, you want to know what they sound like. In the novels I used to read, and still do for that matter, people spoke ‘sharply,’ ‘reluctantly,’ ‘with unaffected warmth,’ ‘with a touch of bitterness.’ They spoke of ‘taking her hand in his,’ or ‘whipping out a gun.’ These last two, of course, are actions, and must be described if anything is going to be understood at all, but when I’m writing myself I have a slight sense of failure every time I put in a ‘sharply’ or a ‘reluctantly.’ The characters and the situation between them ought to have made it clear already how sharp or how reluctant they are. When the dialogue begins, the tempo slows down to the pace of the story itself. The reader understands very well that he is being drawn close in. He, too, is relieved to hear what the voices are like.
What is the first thing he is going to hear? The first novel I did was called The Bookshop. In the opening paragraph Florence Green, who is worried about whether she should open a bookshop in a small town on England’s East Coast, dreams of a heron she once saw
flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.
I now think this was a mistake, because dreams in fiction are just as tedious as people’s dreams in real life. I should have done better to start straight away with Florence Green courageously asking the bank manager for a loan, so that the first speaking voice would be the manager’s, suggesting in itself the strength of the sluggish opposition ranged against her.
At the beginning of The Gate of Angels Fred Fairly, a lecturer in physics, is biking into Cambridge on a stormy day. Acquaintances catch up with him one by one.
He was shouting. It was like sea-bathing…A whole group went by, then one of them detached himself and was riding alongside.
‘Skippey!’
He couldn’t hear what Skippey said, so dropped back and came up on the other side, the lee side.
‘You were saying?’
‘Thought is blood,’ Skippey replied.
Fred speaks for the first time in public, so that there is likely to be a difference between what he is saying and what he would like to say. In this way I hoped to get the words to work twice for me.
You can, of course, write a novel entirely in dialogue. One writer who did this was a late-nineteenth-century woman of the world called (or calling herself) ‘Gyp.’ Henry James admired her, and thought of doing the same thing in The Awkward Age, but fortunately didn’t. And you can manage without dialogue, as Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels, where all the conversations are reported (except, I think, the Lilliputian words ‘Hekina degul’ and ‘Borach mivola’). This is all the more remarkable because Gulliver, as a traveller’s tale, is necessarily a monologue, and in a monologue above all you feel the need of another voice breaking in, a very different one if possible—like, for instance, Mr Antolini, the corrupt schoolmaster in The Catcher in the Rye.
But exactly when ought speech to be reported, and when ought it to be out loud? One of the few advantages the novelist has over the dramatist (and they are getting fewer all the time) is that his passages of dialogue last for a limited time only. The storyteller’s instinct, or perhaps his judgement, tells him when they have gone on long enough to make their greatest impact, and when to let the voices fall silent. Kafka’s The Trial (as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir) opens with the famous incident of K.’s arrest at his lodgings.
‘I’d better get Frau Grubach—’ said K., as if wrenching himself away from the two men (though they were standing at quite a distance from him) and making as if to go out. ‘No,’ said the man at the window, flinging a book down on the table and getting up. ‘You can’t go out, you are arrested.’ ‘So it seems,’ said K. ‘But what for?’ he added. ‘We are not authorized to tell you that. Go to your rooms and wait there. Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course.’…‘You’ll soon discover that we’re telling the truth,’ said Franz, advancing on him simultaneously with the other man. They both examined his nightshirt and said he would have to wear a less fancy shirt now, but that they would take charge of this one and the rest of his underwear and, if his case turned out well, restore them later.
The change to reported speech distances you from K.’s visitors, and makes any hope of understanding them, or of the case ‘turning out well,’ seem less and less likely.
While the talking is going on, the novelist has a welcome feeling of relaxation and freedom. There are so many possible variations in dialogue, the most musical of all the novelist’s techniques. Confrontation is, of course, only one of them. TV probably conditions us too much to disagreement and insults, the staple of the comedy script. A novelist can allow time, if he wants to, for conversations that just tick over, the dialogue of contentment. Nothing is more extraordinary in War and Peace than the last chapters, where the happy (but not perfect) marriages are, as John Bayley has said, ‘the equivalent of the Russian victory over Napoleon.’ At the Bolkonskys’ country home, when Pierre comes back from the wars, the children are in ecstasy because the governess has finished a pair of stockings, and, by a secret known only to herself, has knitted both of them at once. ‘Two of them, two of them,’ the children shout. Tolstoy doesn’t suggest that this happiness can last. The French invasion lies behind these people, the December revolution is just ahead, but through the children’s voices he shows what the nature of happiness is.
Kazuo Ishiguro, the most restrained of contemporary novelists, uses a high proportion of dialogue. His narrators, although apparently as clear as daylight, are ambiguous because they are always self-deceiving. In A Pale View of Hills the narrator, Etsuko, is a Japanese woman living in England. She has to come to terms with the present (her daughter has committed suicide) but also with her past. She recalls the 1950s, when she was living in the muddy wasteland outside Nagasaki, and the people who mattered to her then—her irritable husband, her bewildered father-in-law, her friend Mrs Fujiwara who had lost everything and was reduced to keeping a noodle shop, her strange new acquaintance Sachiko who declared or pretended that her American lover was going to pay for her passage back to the States. These are all unsensational people who talk in a quite unsensational way, but with a certain formality and repetitiveness that is understood as Japanese convention.
‘In any case, Etsuko, why would he have gone to all this trouble if he wasn’t absolutely sincere? Why would he have gone to all this trouble on my behalf? Sometimes, Etsuko, you seem so doubting. You should be happy for me.’
‘Yes, of course, I’m very happy for you.’
‘But really, Etsuko, it would be unfair to start doubting him after he’s gone to all this trouble. It would be quite unfair.’
Gradually these repetitions begin to sound like a ritual whose meaning we are afraid to understand. None of the speakers ever raises their voices. Ishiguro has the chance, at any point, to change the whole tone of his book and to introduce shock or violence, but he never does. Behind everything, however, that is said or done there are recurrent images of hanging and drowning, rope and water. The sinister enigma of Etsuko’s daily life is never quite solved. Nor is the nightmare of Japanese history.
Ishiguro excels at one-to-one dialogue, and it has to be admitted that this is the easiest kind to write. I used to find that after I had got quite a long way with a book I hadn’t managed a single scene where more than two people were talking to each other. I still have this difficulty.
In D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers William, the collier’s eldest son, who has been working in London as a clerk, brings his smart fiancée back to meet the family at Christmas.
She glanced round the kitchen. It was small and curious to her, with its glittering kissing-bunch, its evergreens behind the pictures, its wooden chairs and little deal table. At that moment Morel came in.
‘Hello, dad!’
‘Hello, my son! Tha’s let on me!’
The two shook hands, and William presented the lady. She gave the same smile that showed her teeth.
‘How do you do, Mr Morel?’
Morel bowed obsequiously.
‘I’m very well, and I hope so are you. You must make yourself very welcome.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, rather amused.
‘You will like to go upstairs,’ said Mrs Morel.
‘If you don’t mind; but not if it is any trouble to you.’
‘It is no trouble. Annie will take you. Walter, carry up this box.’
‘And don’t be an hour dressing yourself up,’ said William to his betrothed.
Annie took a brass candlestick, and, too shy almost to speak, preceded the young lady to the front bedroom, which Mr and Mrs Morel had vacated for her. It, too, was small and cold by candle-light. The colliers’ wives only lit fires in bedrooms in case of extreme illness.
‘Shall I unstrap the box?’ asked Annie.
‘Oh, thank you very much!’
It isn’t only the cross-currents of feeling here that Lawrence does so well, but the integration of five voices and five distinct points of view to make the whole complex family-kitchen situation. He worked hard on his dialogue, as his manuscript corrections show, and yet it was so much a natural element to him that he could risk all kinds of bizarre effects. In Kangaroo the speakers can hardly hear each other over the roar of the sea, and in The Captain’s Doll the lovers’ voices are carried away by the noise of the car, so that the Captain has to shout in Hannele’s ear: ‘When my wife died I knew I couldn’t love any more.’ Women in Love, which begins with dialogue, also ends with it. Ursula tells Birkin that it’s out of the question for him to have ‘eternal union’ with one man, as well as one woman:
‘You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,’ she said.
‘I don’t believe that,’ he answered.
Lawrence is also, when he wants to be, a faultless impersonator. He can ‘do’ voices, tones, accents and dialects, although this is something a lot of writers are good at; it may have been why they started to write in the first place. Joyce, I suppose, took impersonation about as far as it can go, imitating even the cab horse. Novelists, however, quite often prefer to heighten the dialogue and, in general, to make the speakers more acute and knowing and more articulate than they are likely to be in real life. Henry James did this, Ivy Compton-Burnett did, so did Samuel Beckett in his novels:
What a joy it is to laugh from time to time, [Father Ambrose] said. Is it not? I said. It is peculiar to man, he said. So I have noticed, I said…Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said. What? He said. It takes us to find that funny, I said loudly. He mused. Christ never laughed either, he said, as far as we know. He looked at me. Can you wonder? I said.
This kind of dialogue shows us what we could say if we had our wits about us, and gives us its own peculiar satisfaction.
I ought perhaps to try to say something about the great high points, but I should like to end instead with one of dialogue’s special effects which, as far as I know, has never had a name given to it.
Before they separated, however…Mr Bob Sawyer, thrusting his forefinger between two of Mr Pickwick’s ribs, and thereby displaying his native drollery, and his knowledge of the anatomy of the human frame, at one and the same time, inquired, ‘I say, old boy, where do you hang out?’
Mr Pickwick replied that he was at present suspended at the George and Vulture.
If Dickens had made Pickwick say ‘I am at present suspended &c &c’ the effect would be gone, vanished into the vast limbo of failed ironies.
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, kindly Mrs Musgrove has to think what to say to Mrs Croft, who is an Admiral’s wife.
‘What a great traveller you must have been, ma’am!’ said Mrs Musgrove to Mrs Croft.
‘Pretty well, ma’m, in the fifteen years of my marriage, although many women have done more. I have crossed the Atlantic four times, and have been once to the East Indies, and back again; and only once, besides being in different places about home—Cork, and Lisbon, and Gibraltar. But I never went beyond the Straits—and never was in the West Indies. We do not call Bermuda or Bahama, you know, the West Indies.’
Mrs Musgrove had not a word to say in dissent; she could not accuse herself of having ever called them anything in the whole course of her life.
Does Mrs Musgrove in fact say anything at all? Again, in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, the speaker is Cassandra, a teacher of classical languages who has been made redundant by the cuts. She is also doomed, like her Greek prototype, to foretell the future, but in vain.
Tomorrow he’ll say Sandra my love when shall I see you again I’ll be free tomorrow, I’ll be free Friday Saturday Sunday. Friday Saturday Sunday I must prepare my classes correct papers no I must weed the vegetable garden clean the pigsties wash my hair meet Orion invent Andromeda from time to time unheeded and unhinged discover the grammar of the universe.
What has been said so far? Nothing. ‘If he were someone in a nineteenth-century novel I might ironically detach him,’ Cassandra thinks, but Amalgamemnon is a post-modernist novel and Christine Brooke-Rose uses ‘non-realized tenses’ to conjure up spoken voices. However, like Dickens and Jane Austen, she can remind us that one of the privileges of dialogue is silence.
from The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of
Fiction Writing Explored, edited by Clare Boylan.
Penguin, 1993