ON WRITING FROM THE HEART,
TO THE HEART.
November 1987
I just read a book that ought to be unequivocally unpublishable. But it is going to be published, and its publisher thinks it’s going to be a bestseller, and I think the publisher’s probably right.
The book is Poppy, by Barbara Larriva. Ballantine Books is publishing it as a hardcover title in October, and has taken the unusual step of launching the book with a special reader’s edition in trade paperback format for free distribution at the American Booksellers Association convention. They sent me a copy, which is how I am able to rush into print with a column inspired by Poppy even as the book is finding its way onto bookstore shelves.
Poppy is the story of Allegra Alexander, once the brightest of stars in the Hollywood firmament, now a bitter old woman with terminal cancer who has elected to refuse radiation and chemotherapy and is waiting to die. While she lies grumbling in her hospital bed, she is visited by a relentlessly cheerful and cheering young girl named Poppy. Ultimately, inevitably, Poppy’s sunshine pierces Allegra’s dark despair.
That’s enough by way of plot summary. The book is brief and the plot none too complex, and I don’t want to give away its few surprises.
But why did I begin by categorizing it as “unequivocally unpublishable”?
For starters, consider its length. Poppy runs to something like 30,000 words. If you were to set out to write something unpublishable, and you wanted to make it unpublishable in every respect, you couldn’t pick a better word length than 30,000. A short novel runs 60,000 words, and a very short novel runs 50,000. Thirty thousand words is far too long for a magazine and far too short for a book.
What does this mean when a manuscript is making the rounds? It means that a lot of markets would reject it without really looking at it. If I were an editor with a desk piled high with submissions, and if I saw at a glance that a particular manuscript was half as long as the shortest novel we’d published in the past 20 years, I might very well send it back to its author without even scanning the first page. Not every editor would do so—some are as compulsive as the rest of us, and can’t dash a few drops of A.1. Sauce on a hamburger without reading the label on the bottle. But some would.
More to the point, virtually every editor who did read the manuscript would do so knowing full well he was reading a manuscript that was unmarketably short. Given the realities of publishing, given the glut of submissions, given the fact that one is never called to account for the bestsellers that got away but must justify the flops he said yes to, every editor who’s been on the job for more than a few months has a built-in predisposition toward rejection. A first novel by an unknown writer and it’s only 30,000 words long? Come on!
Enough about length; if I don’t watch myself I’ll devote more words to the subject than Barbara Larriva did to her whole book. Obviously Poppy got published in spite of its length, not because of it. The book has something that made it impossible for an editor to say that automatic No to it.
What is it?
It is not the brilliance of its style, the poetry of its composition. I do not want to imply that Poppy is poorly written. It is not. Barbara Larriva is a good writer, and Poppy is well-organized, lucid and accessible. But it is not so superbly written that the writing announces itself as a masterpiece. The individual sentences are not so flawlessly composed that they resonate within us as prose poetry. The prose and dialogue are adequate. They carry the story quite effectively, but they never transcend the story. We do not read Poppy in spite of the way it was written, but neither do we read it because of the way it was written.
Is it the characterization that grabs us? I don’t think so. The only characters of much importance are Allegra and Poppy. While they are both drawn with some finesse, and while they are etched strongly enough to linger in the mind, I didn’t find either all that compelling. It’s no chore to spend an hour or two in their company, but I wouldn’t ink in either on my list of fiction’s most unforgettable characters.
The plot, then? Some books overcome a multitude of flaws because the plot just draws us in and won’t let go. We can’t wait to find out what happens next, and our eagerness to do so allows us to overlook any other deficiencies the book may have.
Is that the case with Poppy? Again, I think not. If anything, it seems to me that the plot errs on the side of simplicity. I was able to anticipate most of its twists and turns.
So what’s the answer? Why did the book get published? Why does the publisher think he’s got a bestseller here, and why do I suspect he’s right?
I don’t think intellectual analysis will supply the answer, because I don’t believe the magic success factor here is one that has anything much to do with the intellect. Poppy works on an extra-intellectual level. It hasn’t got all that much to say to the mind, certainly nothing the mind hasn’t heard before. But it somehow manages the feat of speaking directly to the heart.
Fiction’s emotional impact is achieved through the transfer of feeling from the writer to the reader. The writer feels something, encodes that feeling in words upon the page, and transfers that feeling through those words to the reader at the other end of the line. And all of this takes place irrespective of what’s going on in the conscious minds of writer or reader.
While I read Poppy, there was not a moment when I was unaware that I was reading a story someone had written. My mind was busy throughout, analyzing, evaluating, criticizing Because I am not only someone who writes fiction but also someone who writes about writing fiction, I have become a very tough audience for fiction. I am constantly weighing alternative ways of phrasing the sentence I’ve just read, paying an untoward amount of attention to the technical choices the author has made and the extent to which they have or haven’t worked. As a result, I inevitably keep a certain amount of distance from virtually everything I read, even the books I’m drawn into.
I wasn’t all that much drawn into Poppy, and I had no trouble keeping a detached eye on the narrative. This is a little obvious, my mind would say. This doesn’t really work. I see what she’s doing here. I know what she’s getting at. And so on.
And, while I was busy being aware of everything that was less than perfect about Poppy, I kept finding myself moved to the point of tears.
I have to tell you that this was disconcerting. It is one thing to be all caught up in a book or movie and be moved to tears. That happens to me now and then and I welcome it. But in this instance I was not all caught up in the book, I was detached and remote and analytical throughout, and I was moved to tears anyway.
That sort of thing doesn’t happen often. Oh, if I’ve been up for 36 hours on airplanes, or if I’m under a ton of stress of one sort or another, I may be emotionally vulnerable to an unusual extent. When I’m like that, I may get misty-eyed over a supermarket opening. But the day I read Poppy I was as close to stability as I ever get, and the little book worked its magic upon me nonetheless.
Magic. I think that’s a fair word for it. I was not deeply drawn into the story, I didn’t care a whole lot about the characters, and yet my heart was touched. According to Pascal, the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. If I want to know why my heart was touched, I can’t look to the world of reason for the answer.
Feeling comes from feeling, the reader’s feeling from the writer’s feeling. Poppy is not the first book to succeed emotionally beyond its artistic and intellectual success. After I laid Poppy aside, the book that came first to mind was Love Story, by Erich Segal. That too was a short book that tugged (shamelessly, I always thought) at the reader’s heartstrings. It was also a book one could very easily ridicule, as I don’t doubt Poppy will be ridiculed in some quarters if it is the commercial success I expect it to be. (No one bothers to ridicule flops.)
Whatever was right or wrong with Love Story, I can recall that Mr. Segal always claimed to have been overcome emotionally when he wrote it; he said he had trouble typing the final section because he kept breaking down and weeping. The same people who criticized the book as mindless pap had a fair amount of fun with the image of the author blinking back tears through those last pages and all the way to the bank, but I have never doubted that Mr. Segal was speaking the literal truth. I think he was indeed moved to tears writing the book, and I think he instilled that feeling in the book, and that it worked as it did for readers because of the feeling that communicated itself from him to them. Other factors may help explain why Love Story was the specific book it was, but that alone explains to me why it worked the way it did.
With Poppy, I think the feeling is love. The rather simple message of this rather simple book would seem to be (rather simply) that love heals all. Poppy’s selfless and unconditional love transforms Allegra. The love Allegra is then able to express transforms her life and her world. This is by no means the first time this message has been told, in fiction or elsewhere; it works so powerfully here because of the love which empowered Barbara Larriva when she put it on paper. That love, which she seems to have been able to receive and embody and transmit, is what makes her little book work.
Isn’t it a hell of a note? We try to study writing as a craft, seeking to learn what to put in and what to leave out and how to best arrange our selected ingredients, and then it turns out that, as E. E. Cummings put it,
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
Is that all there is to it? Should we forget about the syntax of things altogether?
No, of course not. The better we are at our craft, the tighter a ship we provide for our feelings to set sail in. But there must be more to it than craft; we must learn too how to put our own hearts into what we write. Otherwise we’re sending empty vessels out to sea, and the world will not much care whether or not they reach port safely.