Critic Roman Jakobson said that language has two basic functions: the communicative and the poetic. Strictly communicative writing includes business memos, instruction manuals, news articles, college textbooks, scientific papers, and government statutes: text whose object is imparting data. Strictly poetic writing is, well, poetry. The functions have an unmistakable correlation with style: to the extent a speaker or writer is communicative, the emphasis in on matter, so that a transparent, anonymous, middle style is expected and appropriate. To the extent he or she is poetic, the emphasis is on manner, so that a distinctive style is an essential, perhaps the most essential, part of the project of writing. This chapter takes a look at the way style works in different kinds of writing, starting with genres that are just the least bit poetic and ending with, well, poetry. (I place the genres in this order for the sake of convenience and argument, and understanding that there is no shortage of highly personal biographers, relatively anonymous poets, and other exceptions that prove the rule.) In each case, some introductory remarks are followed by in-depth testimony from a notable practitioner.*
Persuasive Writing
I use the old-fashioned term persuasive writing to encompass op-ed columns, old-fashioned essays, writing-class assignments, and legal briefs and opinions. It may be surprising that I have put it all the way at the communicative end of the scale. I have two reasons for doing so. First, its representative in these pages, Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, is a passionate believer in self-effacing stylistic clarity. Second (as Breyer recognizes), it’s often the case that opinions are more forcefully and persuasively communicated when the personality of the expresser is removed. Personality is by definition singular. In making a didactic point, by contrast, the emphasis should be on dispassionate evidence and universal logic, so that ideally, the argument should seem lucid and self-evident. Generally speaking, style will cloud the waters and shift the focus of the piece away from the issues at hand, toward something literary or personal.
Needless to say, many opinion writers are very distinctive stylists, including (to name a few) Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd, William F. Buckley Jr., H. L. Mencken, E. B. White, and Breyer’s colleague Antonin Scalia, who wrote the following in just two paragraphs of a recent dissent:
This is an astonishing exercise of raw judicial power…. What a wild principle of reinterpretation the Court today embraces…. I would not subscribe to application of this deformed new canon of construction even if there were something about “clerical error” that made it uniquely insusceptible of correction by the means set forth in the statute…. By taking the responsibility for determining and remedying the error away from Congress, where the statute has placed it, and grasping it with its own hands, the Court commits a flagrant violation of separation of powers.
I’d offer Scalia’s declarations as evidence of the proposition that a “stylishly” expressed opinion can be entertaining and revealing of the writer’s personality, but not particularly convincing.
Stephen Breyer was born in San Francisco in 1938 and graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School. He was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1980 until 1994, and since 1994 has been an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. From Bush v. Gore, U.S. 98 (2000):
…I think it not only legally wrong, but also most unfortunate, for the Court simply to have terminated the Florida recount. Those who caution judicial restraint in resolving political disputes have described the quintessential case for that restraint as a case marked, among other things, by the “strangeness of the issue,” its “intractability to principled resolution,” its “sheer momentousness,…which tends to unbalance judicial judgment,” and “the inner vulnerability, the self-doubt of an institution which is electorally irresponsible and has no earth to draw strength from.” Those characteristics mark this case.
At the same time, as I have said, the Court is not acting to vindicate a fundamental constitutional principle, such as the need to protect a basic human liberty. No other strong reason to act is present. Congressional statutes tend to obviate the need. And, above all, in this highly politicized matter, the appearance of a split decision runs the risk of undermining the public’s confidence in the Court itself. That confidence is a public treasure. It has been built slowly over many years, some of which were marked by a Civil War and the tragedy of segregation. It is a vitally necessary ingredient of any successful effort to protect basic liberty and, indeed, the rule of law itself. We run no risk of returning to the days when a President (responding to this Court’s efforts to protect the Cherokee Indians) might have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” But we do risk a self-inflicted wound—a wound that may harm not just the Court, but the Nation.
I fear that in order to bring this agonizingly long election process to a definitive conclusion, we have not adequately attended to that necessary “check upon our own exercise of power,” “our own sense of self-restraint.” Justice Brandeis once said of the Court, “The most important thing we do is not doing.” What it does today, the Court should have left undone. I would repair the damage done as best we now can, by permitting the Florida recount to continue under uniform standards.
I have two favorite quotes about style. The first is from José Ortega y Gasset: “Clarity is the courtesy of the philosopher.” And the second is a French saying, “When one thinks well, one expresses oneself clearly and the words come easily.”
I try to write clearly. I assume that my audience is not just lawyers and judges. Still, my first objective nonetheless is to write so that the judges, who must apply what I write, can understand me. Lawyers must be able to use the opinions and explain them to the clients. But the court has a broader audience. The public must also understand why we have reached our conclusions. Ideally, an opinion is also written for the lay members of the general public who will take the time to try to understand it.
Sometimes an opinion demands special effort to be clear. An opinion in a major civil liberties case, for example, will be read by average citizens as well as newspaper reporters, lawyers and judges. Even in complicated matters, one must be concise. But it’s important to explain technical matters clearly—more than technical matters may be at stake. For example, in writing a dissent in Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC [535 U.S. 467 (2002)], I tried to explain some extraordinarily complicated concepts in a very simple way. I’m not sure that I was completely successful, but I put effort into doing so, and I think it was worth it.
My writing process is quite regimented and disciplined. My law clerks first write a fairly lengthy memorandum or draft. I take that and then go back and reread the briefs. Afterwards I sit at the word processor and write an outline. I make notes and references in the outline to other documents in which I’ve written down notes to remind myself of one fact or another, or to refer to a particular page in a brief. I then use the outline to write a first draft of the opinion. When I give that draft to my law clerks, I often say, “I want you to rewrite this so it makes sense.” They then rewrite it. Inevitably—and I can’t tell you why this is so—when I get the draft back from my law clerks, I look at it and say, “This isn’t really very good. They must have ruined it.” But I may discover that the parts I’m most displeased with are those that I wrote myself.
In any case, at this point I cast the draft aside. So there I am, back at the word processor, starting once again. Generally, when I’m done with this second draft, I will be reasonably satisfied. I’ll give it to my law clerks again, and they edit it. When I get it back, I edit it some more. It is an interative process. It typically takes me two drafts to translate my thoughts into an understandable written form. Once I’ve reached that stage, I can try for better phrasing. But no matter how much I might try, I could never, like P. G. Wodehouse, simply put pen to paper and compose a beautiful draft. The fact that Proust went over every sentence many times is consoling—despite my quite different results.
There are a few identifiable characteristics of my writing style. I try to list the relevant issues at the beginning of the opinion, just as I learned to do in my high school Latin class. I also try to summarize concisely the facts of the case in a way that tells a comprehensible story. I leave out extraneous facts to make the opinion more readable. If you keep to the key matters that are likely to be relevant later on, readers will find the opinion much clearer.
I then try to tell my audience what conclusions I will draw. My goal in the opinion is not to prove that my result is the only possible one, but to set forth clearly what my reasons are for reaching that result. My job in this part of the opinion is to articulate those reasons—my reasons—as well as I can.
Next, I consider the best arguments against my view. I set forth the arguments clearly, casting them in the best possible light. Then I say why those arguments—in all their glory—are ultimately nevertheless inadequate. If, in dissent, I think the majority is wrong, I will not say, “That argument is terrible.” I am more likely to say instead, “The majority seems to be construing the matter this way, but I am bewildered. How is it possible to view it that way? I do not understand.”
In writing, one must understate. Conversation invites overstatement. If I made an overstatement while teaching a class, the students would know I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect. They would think it was funny, and they would be much more likely to remember the substantive point. That is not true with words put on paper.
I frequently use words like ordinarily and normally in my writing, because there are always qualifications to any set of facts or circumstances. If you start using caveats or qualifying your statements in an opinion, the opinion becomes too complex and the audience often loses track of your point. My law clerks will sometimes say, “What about this scenario or that other scenario that’s contrary to your basic point?” And I’ll respond, “I did not say ‘absolutely’; I said ‘normally.’” If possible, I’ll try to use metaphors. Metaphors suggest the point and explain while leaving room for development.
I respect other writing styles that are different, yet effective. Justice Scalia, for example, has a dramatic approach. He is colorful and he doesn’t misplace his metaphors; he always has a good reason for using them as he does. I also very much admire Judge [Richard A.] Posner, who writes extremely well and with great clarity.
In my opinions, I try to aim for a conversational quality—not the way I speak, but how I would like to speak. I’ve discovered by looking at transcripts of oral arguments that my conversational words—as written without conversational pauses—appear inarticulate. At oral arguments in a recent case about extending the term of copyrights, the Solicitor General said that eighty-year-olds might find the copyright extension attractive because their grandchildren would be guaranteed royalties. I thought I had said this in response: “Do you mean to say that Verdi, when he composed Otello, was likely attracted by the possibility of three or four more cents for his grandchildren? I think not.” That is what I thought I said. What I did say, according to the transcript, was “So you think, say, Verdi, Otello, Verdi, Otello, eighty years old, the prospect of an extra twenty years way down the pike would have made a difference?” The Solicitor General responded to what I thought I had said. He understood my point, I suppose, because it was a logical point. And he probably thought I had said a complete and intelligible sentence, but when one looks at the transcript, I certainly had not.
In line with my effort at instilling a conversational quality to my writing, I follow the example of Justice Arthur Goldberg (and Judge Posner) and do not use footnotes. I believe most footnotes are distracting. The purpose of a citation in a court argument is not to prove what your source was but to add to the argument. If it doesn’t add to the argument, don’t put it in. So I place citations in the text. If I removed all citations from the text and put them in footnotes, the article or opinion might read better because the flow of argument wouldn’t be interrupted, and one’s eyes wouldn’t be distracted. I don’t do that, because I want to use the cited case as part of the statement I am making. There are instances in which the absence of footnotes becomes awkward—requiring me, for example, to reproduce a statute in an appendix at the end of the citation instead of placing it in a citation. But I think it’s better for me to maintain the rule against footnotes. It sets a good example.
I pay special attention to the very beginning and very end of an opinion, stating the heart of the matter, because I know many people only read the first or the last paragraph. In my dissent in Bush v. Gore, which I knew would be widely read, I tried to make a forceful statement at the end. I wanted to summarize my basic view of the issues, and I felt I had better put that summary in a place where people would notice it.
Finally, in writing an opinion, it’s important to be economical. People will not read long opinions. The genius of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes lay in his ability to convey meaning succinctly.
Narrative Nonfiction
The category of narrative nonfiction encompasses journalism, history, and biography. They all involve conveying masses of information, and, as you would expect, a clear, unobtrusive—a “transparent”—style is valuable and valued in all of them. David McCullough is probably the most popular biographer and historian at work today, and, no less than for his thorough research and thoughtful insights, he is esteemed for his crystalline prose. Similarly, what popular journalists, historians and biographers such as Richard Preston, Seymour Hersh, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Joseph Ellis, Bob Woodward, Robert Caro, and James Stewart bring to the table is information and interpretation. Their manner of writing is successful insofar as it is “transparent,” unsuccessful when it obscures the facts or the narrative, or makes the reader aware that he or she is reading. On the other hand, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Macaulay, Winston Churchill, Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, John Lukacs, Simon Schama, Edmund Morris, John McPhee, Calvin Trillin, Susan Orlean, and many others have shown that there is plenty of room in these genres for individual style, even to the point where it may overshadow the data it is conveying.
Even the most pronounced stylists have to play a game of peekaboo with the data: alternately hiding behind it and upstaging it. Richard Lanham frames this as a back-and-forth between unself-consciousness and self-consciousness and writes, “The great texts in Western literature have…sought for peace in governing the oscillation rather than shutting it down. Thucydides was the first of these and he set down the archetypal pattern of Western narrative structure, the alternation of historical event and formal speech about it, of an unself-conscious and self-consciously rhetorical style.” Judith Thurman, author of comprehensive biographies of Colette and Isak Dinesen, says, “Writing a biography is like a high tension wire (the narrative) between pylons (the moments of concentration and analysis).” A nice thing about that metaphor is that it allows for individual difference: some writers will only erect two pylons, at the beginning and end, whereas others put them up all over the place.
Born in 1955 and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Susan Orlean started her career as a writer for an alternative weekly in Portland, Oregon. She later was on the staff of the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe; since 1987 she has been a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her books include Saturday Night, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup and The Orchid Thief, the story of renegade plant dealer John Laroche and the basis of the film Adaptation. We spoke at her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. From The Orchid Thief:
A few days after Laroche and I went to the orchid show in Miami I drove to Hollywood [Florida] to visit him at his nursery. I turned on the car radio and tried to find a music station I liked but ended up listening to a talk show about how to keep pet snakes and iguanas happy, and when that was over I listened to an hour-long infomercial for some money-management audiotapes. The announcer had a big, hollow voice, and every few minutes he would boom, “My friends, you are about to enter the promised land of financial independence!” I drove past Carpet-Marts and Toy-Marts and Car-Marts and the turnoff for Alligator Alley and a highway flyover that leads to the stadium where the Super Bowl is sometimes played, and past signs for all those dreamy-sounding Florida towns like Plantation and Sunrise and Coconut Creek and Coral Springs. The highway median was a low-lying cloud of pink hibiscus bushes. The shoulders were banked with broom grass and sumac and sneezeweed and pennywort, and the road itself looked as if any minute it might just crack and buckle and finally disappear as things grew over it and under it, pushing the roadbed away. As it is, amazing things live on the highway now. Laroche once discovered a rare orchid species growing along an I-95 offramp, and so far no one has found it growing anywhere else in the world.
Writers I’ve loved, I always felt I could tell you exactly what they’re like, even if we’ve never met and they don’t even write that much in first person, because there’s some sense of being that kind of permeates the stories. It’s the style, the way they tell you about the world, that implies something about character. I always felt that way about John McPhee. Reading him, I would think, I know who he is. It just felt to me that there was a being that inhabited the stories. When I met him, he was exactly what I expected.
I was one of these kids who was told I was a good writer from the time I was little. Up to college, my inclination was to write purple prose, with lots of description. Then it was process of unlearning that. The writer who most hypnotized me as a reader was Faulkner—when you read a lot of him, you feel you can’t even think in your own syntax. I wanted to produce the same effect. In high school, I read TomWolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I carried it around with me for months. It electrified me, no pun intended. I thought in the same rhythms he was writing in for months. At that time, when I first started writing, everybody who was my age and starting to live was drawing from that: the playfulness, the fooling around with voice within the piece, the irreverence.
When I was a sophomore in college, a friend gave me a subscription to the New Yorker. It was such a revelation to me. More than anything else, it was the idea that here, people were writing about other people. I loved reading it, and the sound of it. Also at college, I learned that daily journalism wasn’t for me. I took one journalism course at Michigan and dropped out immediately. There was this incredibly gung-ho daily newspaper, but I never cared about knowing things first. I just didn’t care. Even now, I don’t even care if I’m not the first one to write a story. I know that I’m going to write it in a way that no one else would.
In my head I always heard the way I wanted pieces to sound. Even at my first writing job, I had some sense I drew from having read so much fiction—you read a great novel and you begin living it—I had in my head this idea that I wanted to create a feeling when you were reading the piece, that you would be feeling in body as much as absorbing it intellectually. It had to do with rhythm and words. I felt that from the very beginning I needed to have an active relationship with the person reading the piece. This game of seduction, and revealing, and teasing them on. I’ve always been attracted to stories that don’t automatically seem like they’re worth reading, where the writer is saying, “I want you to read this. I know you don’t want to. I’m going to pull you in, throw a few crumbs.”
My very first editor in Oregon emphasized the need to think, to think about what you’re trying to say. When you’ve been told as a kid you’re a good writer, you’re not writing from facts. He said, “Report, and then do more reporting, and then do a little more reporting, and then maybe you’re ready to write.” Even now, if I’m having trouble writing a section of a piece, it’s almost always because I haven’t done enough reporting. I don’t know enough—don’t know what I want to say. I really depend on my appetite and curiosity.
To find your voice, unless you’re a crazy genius, you work your way through a bunch of phases. At one point, I was committed to writing the tightest transitions in the world—every sentence was locked in, like that kind of carpentry that dovetails a joint into the next. No one could edit me because every sentence connected so intensely to the next. I used to do lots of paragraph breaks. I really loved coming up with the clever transition, kicker to one paragraph, draw into the next. Now when I see that, I react so negatively. It seems so phony to me. I had to learn to deconstruct a little bit. As I got more confident and grown-up, I felt that I could keep people paying attention, or bring them back in, not just by locking each sentence to the next but by putting in an aside, like saying, “By the way…”
What was happening was, I was moving more towards writing the way I talk. I began to think of writing as being like telling a story at a dinner party, learning to use timing, how much detail to tell, how much not to tell. It was theater. There was a period where friends would comment how much tighter the pieces used to be. I was moving towards something that was subtler, a little braver.
[Former New Yorker editor] Tina Brown once said to me, “As a writer, you do a high-wire act. It’s all execution. It’s a dare. You’re going out on this thin idea. People can’t take their eyes off of you—are you actually going to pull it off and get to the other side?”
When I teach, I tell students, when you’re telling a story to a friend, you never have any trouble thinking what comes next. You know what comes next, so why shouldn’t it be that way when you’re writing? And you don’t tell stories in a completely orderly way. You tell them in these sort of blurts and spurts. You bridge things together, then you backtrack and describe somebody, then you go forward with the story. If you’re a good storyteller, people stay with you that whole time. As a writer, I want to move closer and closer to that. I imagine I have an audience that keeps thinking they want to catch a train, and I keep saying, “Wait, let me tell you the rest of the story.”
I read my pieces out loud when I’m writing, and if something doesn’t sound like a natural sentence, I take it out. If something’s too boring for me to read out loud, I take it out. If you find it too boring to read, just think how boring the reader’s going to find it.
When I first started writing at the New Yorker, I would imitate the writers I admired the most. It felt like wearing someone else’s clothes. I could ape the sort of tone of voice, and almost caricature the style. Ian Frazier was the classic—his style seemed so evident that you’re tempted to imitate it more than a subtle voice. I remember when my editor, Chip McGrath, took out a Frazierism. He said, “I know what you’re trying to do. It’s not a bad thing, except it’s not you.” I was really embarrassed, because I felt I had been caught in my mom’s high heels or something. His point was that you go through the imitating into your own voice, and you have to be careful that you don’t get stuck in the phase that you’re imitating.
Chip was very important. He was the first person who I worked with at the NewYorker, and he embodied that sense of not doing the formulaic stories, without billboard paragraph and a cute, clever lead and a cute, clever closing. There was a real abhorrence for the phony conclusion kind of conclusion. I would turn in the piece, and Chip would say, “I loved it, but I’m just going to cut out the last paragraph.” And I would have spent hours crafting this little bubble of a conclusion. The result was that everything ended on a little bit of an off-kilter note. At first I found it so bizarre, then I found myself liking the slight jarring end without really an end.
When I was starting The Orchid Thief, I thought, Is it the most boring thing to start a book, “John Laroche is a tall guy”?* And then I thought, I kind of love that. It is the way people talk, and we’ve shied away from really simple, plain language like that. I like mixing formal and informal language. It’s a sort of life philosophy of mine. It’s the way I dress, decorate my house—it’s really of a piece. I love the thing that’s extravagant and gorgeous, and also the thing that’s so plain that it knocks you cold in its absolute plainness. I don’t care if a word like tall is used so often that it’s devalued—because then it becomes revalued in a way.
There’s a passage in Orchid Thief where I describe what’s on the radio while I’m driving. I have a very strong memory of working on it for a long time. I was trying to convey to the reader this strange cockeyed world that Florida seemed to me to be, and by extension, how strange and cockeyed the whole world is, Florida being an intensified version. I wanted to return to that in the book often. What attracted me to the book originally is knowing the area. My parents have this typical tidy condo, and three miles away, there are these iguanas and wild things happening. And that’s kind of what the world is like—this fractured place where you feel you know your world. But an inch outside your world everything is different. As a writer, I’m always saying, come with me one inch outside your zone of comfort and let me show you this other place. These sections where I’m just describing passing through layers of Florida were very important. Doing them as a list in a way reflected the experience of driving, things whipping past you.
I used to have a fetish for lists. I would rarely write a piece that didn’t have several. It got to the point where my editor would say, “You can have three, but not six.” Sometimes I like purely unadorned accumulation of facts, saying to the reader, “I’m not going to trick this up, I’m just going to lay it out for you.” I like playing with the rhythm in a list. Sometimes it’s fun to write one and see if you can tease people to read the whole thing. Maybe it’s a kind of way of looking at the world, of seeing just the accumulation of data. It surrounds you, sometimes overwhelms you. It can be revealing—you run a list of what a clown carries in his suitcase, and it’s very funny.
I never thought I would be as present in the book as I ended up being. But so much of the logic of the story only held together if I was there as your guide. The disembodied tone of an omniscient narrator seemed wrong to me. The publisher wanted to put in more details about myself—they said that the reader is going to wonder where you live, and so forth. I thought it didn’t matter, but I finally caved in and made a few specific statements. I thought I was already present spiritually. I didn’t want to characterize myself too much—people are legitimately sick of writers talking about being writers. There were certain things that happened that I ended up not putting in the book. As interesting as they were, they took you too far away; you risked making people impatient. I admire Joan Didion so much. Sometimes I wish I had more of a natural ability to talk personally, the way she does. But ultimately I don’t want to, so I don’t. And the truth is that my pieces are so fundamentally subjective that I feel like I’m in them even if I’m not.
And people who’ve read my stuff feel intimate with me. When I do a reading, people come up to me, and their manner is always that we’re friends. Sometimes that becomes a little uncomfortable. Even though Joan Didion tells you more about herself, I don’t think people would come up to her that way. Sometimes I wish I could write in a way that it is a little more haughty and frosty and off-putting. But it’s a good thing that I can’t—if I wrote that way, it would be an affectation.
Fundamentally, the most interesting writers are the most interesting people. I don’t think it would be possible to be an interesting artist without having a complicated, intriguing way of looking at the world. All you’re really doing is conveying that. It’s not technique. You can improve technique, tell yourself to think harder about choices with words and structure, read things and have new ideas. But you can’t do anything about that fundamental.
Fiction
Of all the forms, the toughest to nail down stylistically is fiction. Can something that contains both Beckett’s The Unnamable and King’s Cujo even be considered a genre? I’ve placed it next to narrative nonfiction because fiction also has heavy lifting to do: in its case, serving the needs of plot and scene and character and theme. Evelyn Waugh’s view of fiction was true to Judith Thurman’s pylon metaphor: he advocated sections of narrative written to conventional standards punctuated by moments when the author steps forward. In the former, he maintained, the most unobtrusive language was best, up to and including (gasp!) clichés:
I think to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners. It comes from keeping second-rate company. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an occasional unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. There are many occasions in writing when one needs an unobtrusive background to action, when the landscape must become conventionalized if the foreground is to have the right prominence. I do not believe that a serious writer has ever been shy of an expression because it has been used before. It is the writer of advertisements who is always straining to find bizarre epithets for commonplace objects.
John Irving has a similar theory, with the added wrinkle that the most distinctive voice—he calls it “the storyteller’s voice,” and though he casts it generically, he is really referring to a distinctive sound of his own—needs to be strongest at the beginning of a novel and at the beginning of chapters. In an essay for the book Voicelust, Irving wrote:
At the start of any story, at the introduction of any character, the narrative voice must take a firm grip on the reader and not let the reader’s attention wander; the voice, in the beginning, is full of promises—full of bluffing, full of threatening, full of hints. What the voice seeks to establish is a situation in which the possibilities for good stories are rich; the voice also needs to establish a character, or characters, to whom good stories can happen—people who seem vulnerable enough to have big things happen to them, yet sturdy enough to withstand the bad news ahead. What I always try to hear in the narrative voice is the sound of a potential myth, a possible legend….
When a story has developed, and—as importantly—its characters have been developed, one can afford a flat, matter-of-fact tone to the narrative (a less dense, less parenthetical style).
In his book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner made a useful distinction between what he called “realities narratives,” which demand a near-transparent style, and “tales,” for which a “high style” is appropriate. He initially was an adamant proponent of the former, and continued to insist that the story should take precedence over the storyteller, dismissing Hemingway, Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe as “bardic incantatory writers.” But, as he described in an interview with the Paris Review, over the course of his career he learned to make a place for voice:
It has always seemed to me that the main thing you ought to be doing when you write a story is, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, to set a “dream” going in the reader’s mind…so that he opens the page, reads about three words, and drops into a trance…. I used to think that words and style should be transparent, that no word should call attention to itself in any way; that you could say the plainest thing possible to get the dream going. After I read some early [William] Gass—“The Pederson Kid,” I think—I realized that you don’t interfere with the dream by saying things in an interesting way. Performance is an important part of the show. But I don’t, like Gass, think language is of value when it’s opaque, more decorative than communicative.
John le Carré, John Updike, Kingsley Amis, Richard Russo, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, and Iris Murdoch—not to mention Waugh, Irving, and Gardner—all traffic in realities narratives. Pretty Good Readers will, nevertheless, be able to recognize their styles: these writers all have characteristic and largely unconscious narrative voices, much like good essayists and critics. Fiction writers with less skill and less experience often find style an extremely tricky proposition in third-person fiction. Pure “transparency” is as much an illusion as it is in any other form of writing, but—more so than nonfiction, where writers rarely forget they have the floor—it’s easy in fiction to overlook the fact that someone needs to be telling the story, and to revert to an oblivious, unsure or inconsistent voice. When you are omniscient, you are playing God—but who knows what God sounds like?
One always-present option is mindlessly appropriating preestablished models. This is the way of professionals like Michael Crichton or John Grisham, whose wooden style seems appropriate and maybe necessary for the job at hand. In Robert Alter’s apt description, “A good deal of best-selling American prose…is written in a mode one might call Standard Contemporary Novelistic, representing, I would guess, a homogenization and formulaic reduction of certain features of robust and muscular style introduced in the twenties and thirties by Hemingway, Dos Passos, Farrell, and others.” The same thing takes place in the higher realms of prose. That is, a savvy reader can pick up any number of “literary” novels and short stories and (depending on the decade) hear the unmistakable cadences of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, or David Foster Wallace.
Of all forms of fiction, style is easiest to conceive (if not to execute) in the first person: it is, simply, the voice of the character telling the story. Though always a prominent strain of American fiction, first-person narratives have been especially popular since 1951—that is, since the publication of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s an appealing form for a conversational age and for writers, like Salinger, who have a sense of themselves as actors or performers. Elizabeth McCracken says:
I took three and a half years of playwriting at college with Derek Walcott. I was good at monologues. Dialogue was a disaster. Both my novels are in the first person, and so are all but one of the stories in my short-story collection. I think I’ve chosen to write in the first person so I can put on somebody else’s mask, and not write about myself. The third person is really about you. It’s a struggle for me; something about it is antithetical to my nature.
A kind of subset of the first person is point-of-view writing, where the style of the prose reflects the personality and is expressed in something like the voice of the character in the spotlight at that moment. Joyce Carol Oates said in an interview:
The character on the page determines the prose—its music, its rhythms, the range and limit of its vocabulary—yet, at the outset at least, I determine the character. It usually happens that the fictitious character, once released, acquires a life and will of his or her own, so the prose, too, acquires its own inexplicable fluidity. This is one of the reasons I write: to “hear” a voice not quite my own, yet summoned forth by way of my own.
Dialogue in fiction is a special challenge if the writer is interested in maintaining a notable style. The characters aren’t really supposed to sound exactly like the author’s exposition (Hemingway and James notwithstanding); so to the extent that they are chattering, the style of the author gets dissipated. This is not a bad thing. Novelists such as John O’Hara or Richard Price, who favor a lot of talk and render it variously and well, are like playwrights or (in the case of those who favor the present tense, like Ann Beattie) screenwriters of the page. Their own style is subservient to the sound of the characters’ talk. Conversely, the more distinctive and assertive stylists among fiction writers tend to go easy on dialogue (just as journalists with strong styles resist using too many quotations). Margaret Drabble says: “People have sometimes asked me why I have never written successfully for the theater. It’s because I need a lot of exposition, I need a lot of interior monologue, I need description. I can’t actually do dialogue just as dialogue; it has to be the result of everything else that’s happening.”
Michael Chabon (pronounced “SHAY-bahn”) was born in 1963, in Washington, D.C., and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Irvine, where he received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. He is the author of the short-story collections A Model World, and Other Stories and Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories, and the novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, Summerland, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001. We spoke in his office, a refurbished garage next to his house in Berkeley, California. From The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:
Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Lewis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: big-mouthed, perhaps not as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when someone called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and anti-gravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a thousand—of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus.
There’s a line from Wonder Boys—“Above all, a quirky human voice to hang a story on.” To me, that’s it. Not just as a writer, but as a reader. That’s what I have responded to my whole life in fiction is a voice—a strong, identifiable, interesting, intelligent voice telling a story. The first thing I can put my finger on is reading Ray Bradbury’s story “Rocket-man” when I was eleven. As I was reading it I found the language began to affect me. I was stopping, going over and rereading the sentences, thinking, that just sounds good. His lyricism gets a little too much sometimes, but he had this image of a family going for a drive in Mexico. The engine overheats, they stop and open the hood and all these butterflies get trapped in the grill. I remember thinking, Wow, that’s really good writing. I realized he was trying to write this way, that he was choosing his words to have an effect.
I always loved words. I used to read the dictionary for fun in the bathroom, checking out the synonyms, the antonyms, the etymology. There’s no question, writing is improved by etymology. Sometimes I coin a word—and find out there’s already such a word. I’ve thought of teaching a sort of paying-attention-to-language class, talking about the roots of metaphor and so forth. Almost every other art requires you to be more knowledgeable about materials—in ceramics, for example, you have to know the chemistry and physics of everything that goes into it. In the early days of the United States, the level of discourse was so much more elaborate. There was a greater sense of language and writing. Adams, Jefferson, Madison—their writing would echo of Cicero’s oration, which they had to memorize at school.
I had a high school crush on Henry Miller. That’s all he is, really, is a voice just endlessly yammering—saying, “Here is what I think about everything.” I went through John Updike and Donald Barthelme phases. It was always writers with diction and word choice and sentence structure. Plot has always been secondary, and character.
When I was studying writing in college and grad school, minimalism was king. Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joy Williams. I loved Carver, responded to him immediately, though I never would want to write that way. He has a very strong voice, and very funny. I always thought his humor was underrated. I was very much aware of minimalism, but I was following another path. I would read Barthelme, who would lead me to Calvino, then Borges, then G. K. Chesterton. I was in that area where writers are teachers and you let them instruct you on who to read.
I first started figuring out what voice was towards the end of college. There were two strands. The first was slightly academic—Borges, Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain. I loved getting caught up in those elaborate sentences; getting to the end of one was a pleasure. The other strand was Barry Hannah—compressed, elliptical, colloquial, highly imagistic, skewed fiction. He writes sordid first-person narratives about trashy people, yet the word choice and imagery was lush and surprising. I tried to find a way of blending the two—mixing up formal diction with slang. I tried writing a story about punk rockers in Pittsburgh as if Henry James had written it. Part of the appeal of this mix is that it’s reflected in the way I speak and my friends speak. I feel I’m capable of discoursing at some length on weighty topics, but I fill it with ums and ahs, with slang and profanity. As time went on, the amalgam of conversational speech with a literary element has been the most common element of my writing, even in a third-person book like Kavalier and Clay.
I found Bloomsbury and Conan Doyle. I wrote lots of pastiches and imitations of people like Woody Allen, Perelman, James, Nabokov, Henry Miller, God help me. Adopting other voices, you find elements you really respond to. Then you take that and move on to the next writers.
I loved Pynchon, early Barth, Coover. The idea that it’s all a big game. We’ll peel off all the layers of fat and ornament, and show you it’s all a bag of tricks. They were saying, “We don’t expect you to enjoy the illusion.” The minimalists came after the scorched earth exercise, the shattering of all illusions. It was impossible to ignore Barth’s point, but I decided to go on anyway. I decided that even though you and the reader know it’s a bunch of tricks, it doesn’t diminish the pleasure one bit. I’m very strongly aware of a nineteenth-century legacy. Everything else aside, it’s essential to draw the reader in, keep the reader’s attention till the end. It has to be entertaining on several levels.
If you’re a lens with a particular grind, with warps and bumps, the writers you like are lights that can shine through that lens. Different lights are going to reveal different aspects. You end up with a map of your own lens—the things that come up again and again.
First person comes much more easily to me than third person. Maybe that’s true of most writers. I feel that I have immediate access to a character’s perceptions and emotions and personality, to his way of speaking. It’s such an effective way of characterizing someone. It’s so quick. When it came to my first novel, I didn’t think about it very much—it seemed like the path of least resistance. Plus, I started it immediately after having read The Great Gatsby and then Goodbye, Columbus. Both are strong, memorable first-person narratives, and both take place over the course of a single summer. They had a retrospective quality—as if you’re saying, “Looking back, this is the summer that made all the difference.” I hit on the tone fairly quickly. A little hyperbolic, a little show-offy, lyrical, kind of larky sort of tone.
Then I tried to write a third-person novel. It was called Fountain City. I was trying to write a kind of bildungsroman, about a callow youth who had experiences, who would mature and grow. I felt there should be a certain amount of ironic distance. I was thinking of books like Balzac’s Lost Illusions, about callow youths who take on the world. Those tend to be written in the third person. Or even in Jane Austen–like irony. It proved in the long term to be a fatal decision for that book. One of the things that were primarily wrong with the book was that I never connected with the main character. I never got a handle on who he was. It always felt very remote—I blame my failure to grasp how the third person would work in a book like that.
I blew five and a half years of my life on the book. After I finally gave up, I made the deliberate decision to go back to Pittsburgh and the first person, and an even more restricted narrative frame, of a weekend. As soon as I started writing, the voice of Grady Tripp just came. The first sentence of Wonder Boys is the first words I wrote: “The first real writer I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name August Van Zorn.” I just went from there. I wrote the first draft in seven months. I felt I had immediate access to Grady Tripp, to his mind and emotions, his perceptions, and that I could communicate them directly. Also, I liked the self-irony—it worked better than the irony in the unfinished book. No one’s more aware of his own limitations than Grady. He makes self-deprecating remarks, which is a very different thing from having narrator make deprecating remarks. I feel like that book would have been a harder, cooler, Waugh-like humor in third person. You get a kind of affection because he’s self-critical.
With Kavalier and Clay, I knew from the start that I would have to do it in the third person. I had this moment of trepidation. “Oh, shit, I already tried this. What if I’m just a first-person writer?” Possibly because there was such a strong historical and cultural context, the narrator was much easier to imagine than the narrator of Fountain City, who had to create an entire world. I got some of the tone from New Yorker “Talk of the Town” pieces from the thirties and forties. They had this omniscient quality: “We’re perched in this tower and can see everything from New Lots to Hoboken.”
But a lot of it I figured it out along the way, draft to draft. The fundamental question for me is always, Who’s talking? Is it one of the characters? Who is telling the story? What kind of intellectual apparatus do they have? I ended up with a retrospective omniscience, almost pseudo-scholarly, with all the footnotes. The narrator’s voice was similar to Joseph Ellis in Founding Brothers. That helped me in my fundamental task, which was to establish Kavalier and Clay as real people who really lived. The narrator could do that, then dip into all different points of view, including entering the world of the comic books themselves.
Whatever I’m writing, whether it’s a novel or a short story, I try to hit on the voice as quickly as I can. I will keep hammering away at the first sentence till I hit that tone, the sense of rightness that’s very intuitive. Eventually, this reflexive feeling dissipates, and I don’t have to think about it anymore. It becomes about work, about finishing.
It becomes a bit like modulating flow, as if the narrative is a kind of gas. I want to keep it the same way as in the first sentence, one sentence at a time. I’ll read the individual sentences over and over to myself. If I feel like I’ve lost the thread of what I’m doing or if I’ve lost the voice, the sense of who’s talking, I will read out loud and see how that works. The way I work is that I type up a sentence, look at it, read it, move parts of it around, look at it again. If I don’t like it, if it’s too antagonistic, pseudo-erudite or too whatever, then I’ll delete it and I’ll start again.
I had a writing teacher at Pitt named Eve Shelmutt. She said we had to throw away our pencils and pads, and had to write at a typewriter. She thought that only the neutral typeface of a typewriter would allow for dispassion, so we could look at our writing critically. We had to roll the paper in, type a sentence, then put in fresh paper. One sentence at a time. It actually worked. It forced me to incorporate rewriting into the writing process. Writing is rewriting. She invented word processing before word processors.
Fiction is concerned with illuminating states of consciousness. That can be overdone. But I would never want to dismiss that element of literature. I read to get into somebody else’s brain. It ties into escape, and that whole aspect of Kavalier and Clay. The ultimate prison is your skull. To me, Proust is an escapist.
Right now I’m working on the screenplay for Kavalier and Clay. It has an enjoyable problem-solving quality. But I miss the voice.
Personal Essays, Travel Writing, Memoir, Criticism
In my mind these forms, for all their difference, belong together at the next spot in the continuum of communicative to poetic writing. (As a result, I stack their representatives, Nicholson Baker, Jon Pareles, and Clive James, on top of each other like the layers of a triple-decker sandwich.) Just as in first-person fiction, we get the sense that a person is standing behind the words. Only in this case it’s a real person, and the reader is always conscious of the tone of his or her voice. True, there are expositional chores to carry out—plot summary, quotation, description, factual background, or narrative—but the better the critic, essayist or memoirist, the more economically they are performed, and the more consistent this material is with the style of the entire piece. And the style—more even than the opinions or feelings it expresses—makes readers feel they are listening to someone who is dull, witty, eccentric, mean-spirited, wise, decent, or possessed of any other quality. There is no getting around this. Writers in these genres who wrap themselves in the middle style, hoping it will grant them the power of invisibility, find that it actually reveal them as conventional, cautious, and timorous. So better to accept personality—indeed, to revel in it. Think of Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Rebecca West, and Bill Bryson describing the same Egyptian bazaar. Their accounts would be wildly and entertainingly different—and all because of style.
There is an odd corollary to the importance of style in these forms. I would say that the true signature of the writers, and the ultimate gauge of their worth, can be found in their descriptions and characterizations of style—whether of themselves, the people they encounter, or of literature, dance, theater, music, painting, movies, or cooking. I can’t explain why this is true, only to suggest that the more acutely one is aware of style in the world, the more carefully one will likely attend to it in one’s own work. Take a look at this passage from M. F. K. Fischer’s memoir Long Ago in France, about the meals served by her landlady when Fisher, as a young student, lived in Dijon:
The kitchen was a dark cabinet perhaps nine feet square, its walls banked with copper pots and pans, with a pump for water outside the door. And from that little hole, which would make an American shudder with disgust, Madame Ollangnier turned out daily two of the finest meals I have yet eaten. But cooks found it impossible to work with Madame Ollangnier, impossible to work at all. She was quite unable to trust anyone else’s intelligence, and very frank in commenting on the lack of it, always in her highest, most fish-wifish shriek. Her meals were a series of dashes to the kitchen to see if the latest slavey had basted the meat or put the coffee on to filter.
She could keep her eyes on the bottle that way, too. All her cooks drank, sooner or later, in soggy desperation. Madame took it philosophically; instead of hiding the supply of wine, she filled up the bottles with water as they grew empty, and told us about it loudly at the table, as one more proof of human imbecility.
The description of the kitchen is a technical task, and impersonal; if you came across that first sentence in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which also deals with French cooking circa 1929, you wouldn’t blink. But nothing that comes after it could have been written by anyone else, least of all Orwell.
Martin Amis’s collection of critical essays, The War Against Cliché, is a case study of the principle as it applies to literary criticism; style is the subject of all the best bits. In the course of fewer than 100 pages, Amis refers to Robert Bly’s “twinkly demotic”; says Bill McKibben “lacks weight of voice” and is “a puzzled and guileless presence; his thumbprints and inkspots, his false starts and rethinks, are in the margin of every page”; calls Andy Warhol’s voice “this wavering mumble, this ruined slur”; refers to “the hobbyist brio of [Angus] Wilson’s prose”; calls Iris Murdoch’s style “a hectic, ragged thing,” with “needless emphases and train-wreck adjectives”; says that J. G. Ballard’s prose is “simply the rhetoric of an obsession, as dense, one-colour and arbitrary as the obsession requires it to be; offers that “when Anthony Powell writes a phrase like ‘standing on the landing’ you feel that it is the result of mandarin unconcern or high-handedness”; and says that V. S. Pritchett’s prose “is quirky and nostalgic in its devices. He continues to write in a style that has not noticed the regularizing, the tidying-up, that accompanied the concerted push towards naturalism in the middle of the century. His punctuation is tangled, hectic and Victorian.”
Because this is just too fun to stop, I offer a longer, more admiring excerpt about a single writer: John Updike on J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical novel Youth, which has the bonus of quoting Coetzee on another writer’s style:
Coetzee, with his unusual intelligence and deliberation, confronted problems many a writer, more ebulliently full of himself, rushes past without seeing. His eventual path, via Beckett and the purity of mathematics, was a kind of minimalism, a concision coaxed from what he felt was his innate coldness. While he was still in Cape Town, his taste moved from Hopkins and Keats and Shakespeare to Pope, “the cruel precision of his phrasing,” and, even better because wilder, Swift; he feels “fully in accord” with Pound and Eliot’s attempt to bring into English “the astringency of the French.” In one of his courteous, admirably thorough reviews, Coetzee remarks that Doris Lessing “prunes too lightly” to be a great stylist, and his own paragraphs and plots feel sharply pruned, at times as brutally disciplined as Parisian lime trees.
Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. His novels are The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, The Everlasting Story of Nory, and A Box of Matches. His nonfiction books are U and I, The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, and Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the general nonfiction category in 2001. He founded and currently directs the American Newspaper Repository, a collection of nineteenth-and twentieth-century American newspapers. We spoke at his home in South Berwick, Maine. From U and I, a chronicle of Baker’s obsession with John Updike:
Halloween is taken extremely seriously in the town where I live: there is a Halloween parade on Main Street at which policemen enthusiastically tamper with through traffic, and hundreds of children visit every fit house, and the local medium-security prison advertises to X-ray all bags of candy for harmful objects until 11:00 PM on the big night. My wife told me about the X-ray ad (which she had seen in the local free weekly) the morning after, and I was crazy with regret. If John Updike were thirty-two years old and living in this town, I thought, he would have known beforehand about that incredible X-ray offer and he would have driven up there with his kids after going trick-or-treating with them and he would have talked affably with the prison guard about some of the concealed weaponry the guard had found in gifts to prisoners and whether there had ever in fact been any adulterated candy of any kind detected locally or whether it was simply a mythical precautionary thing intended to demonstrate the prison’s wish to contribute in whatever way it could to the happiness and welfare of the community in which it found itself, and Updike would have slyly looked around and caught a little flavorsome garniture of the X-ray room, perhaps a sign whose text would look funny in small caps, and he would maybe have jotted down a few comments his kids made as the image of the nuts in the miniature Snickers bars and the internal segmentation in the Smarties packets appeared on the gray screen, and then he would have driven home and in less than an hour produced a nice Talk of the Town piece that worked understatedly through the low-grade ghoulishness of driving to a medium-security prison to have your children’s Halloween candy X-rayed for razor blades, in an epoch when apples were so completely not a Halloween treat anymore, and when all candy bars had tamper-evident wrappers. No, no, worse than that: he wouldn’t have done it when he was thirty-two; he would have done it, better than I can do it now, when he was twenty-five. At thirty-two it would have been beneath him, too easy, too reportorial, too much of a typical Talk piece, whereas for me, I thought, it has the feeling of an outstanding topic, full of the exciting timeliness of nonfiction magazine writing. I, at thirty-two, had missed the story completely; the only piece (I dislike that journalismoid word “piece,” and yet it slips in all the time) I could possibly do was one about wanting to have written a bright little prison-visit piece: that is, about the adulterating of innocent children’s holidays by the writer’s hyperreceptivity to newsworthy small-town touches—and who would want to read that?
Getting it to sound right is always the big, crucial thing. When does it sound like me, but not like an imitation of me? Unless you’ve gotten the voice right in the beginning, the whole enterprise is hopeless—every other paragraph is going to lurch around, bumping into things. Once I manage to get the first couple of pages to move along, all my notes start to chirp and I’m happy.
Before that happens, I have the unpleasant feeling of being in charge of many drawers and cubbies full of useless unrelated stuff. There’s a French way of doing a book, or there was when I was a student, where everything’s in fragments. You celebrate disjointedness because life is like that. For a while it was kind of in vogue in American writing too—books were composed of little scraps, tiny paragraphs, numbered sections. But I like books to be the way I think events truly are, linked together, all part of one longer continuous thread.
I know I’m going to sound like myself whether I like it or not. There’s nothing you can do—you can’t take some chemical or read some book that will change you into a different kind of writer. I’ve seen writers and journalists fall under the spell of somebody and write strangely for a couple of months. But they go back to their own ways because their own ways are inescapable.
Each book you publish becomes a layer of novel usage—novel for you, that is—that you can’t repeat. When I sense that I’m getting too close to something I’ve done before, I try to squirm off in a different direction. I probably waste a lot of effort doing that, squirming away. A given word can become your enemy—I wrote about this in U and I. Once it was your most precious word, and you placed it prominently in the display window. But then it started to pop up on all sorts of inopportune occasions. Now you have to keep in your mind not to use it, not to succumb. And of course you have the whole literary tradition telling you that you must avoid doing certain things—you can’t use the word crap, much as you’d like to, because then it will sound like Salinger. So it can get complicated. And yet the joy is that the narrowing down forces you to discover some other avenue, some other spring in the mattress, not only of vocabulary but of rhythm.
I like Victorian prose writers, or even pre-Victorians like Thomas De Quincey and Edmund Burke—people who went for long unkempt sentences. As a kid I liked complicated steam engines, with lots of moving parts, and that’s something I try to carry into my sentences too; you can see flywheels and belts and levers. But really it’s not quite so mechanical as that sounds. I almost never say, “Okay, I’m going to write a long sentence right here.” Rather my short sentence starts to sprout secondary growths as it’s going forward, and little bits of it unfurl and they in turn reveal other bits that germinate, and suddenly I’ve got something that’s out of control, unwieldy, and I have to do just as the grammarians advise and break it in half. That can be an agonizing moment, deciding whether to bring out the big chisel or put your trust in a semicolon.
Something else about writing, which I talked about in U and I. If you start with a pared-down style, you’re giving yourself nothing to pare down from. It seems more natural to me, and more fun, to write as richly as I actually want to write and figure that later on I will tire of the finery and write with a hard-won austerity. If you live in a ritzy prose style for a few decades, you may begin to feel the need to pull down the plaster cornices.
For my first book, The Mezzanine, I hand-wrote a few sections at restaurants, I used a manual Olivetti typewriter at home, and I used a word processor at work—I was working as an evening-shift word processing operator at a law firm. In 1985, I bought a Kaypro computer, and I liked it because I could turn the screen’s brightness down with an old-fashioned dial like a volume dial, so that I could barely see the words as they appeared. I seem to need some degree of sensory deprivation as I’m writing: back then I would turn the lights off in the room and hook up the keyboard to the computer with a twenty foot telephone cord, so that I could sit across the room and see not paragraphs but faint gathering green spectral presences floating in space.
I do love typing—I just love it. Thinking and typing. I worked with this woman in a secretarial pool who said, “Typing is the love of my life.” I know exactly what she meant.
I write every day, and most of it is really not at all good, but I do try to file it away in different manila folders, hoping that there will be some biological change or some composting process that will take place between the two manila leaves, that will make the contents fuse together. I do less filing these days than I used to. From time to time I go through a folder and make little check marks or circles around a few passages that seem to be worth keeping and try to remind myself why I started that folder in the first place. And then I forbid myself to look at the notes and instead I write about the subject straight out of my head, afresh. That will either work, or it won’t, and if it doesn’t, it becomes a further set of pages, a further thickening of the file. At some point I finally find a way to begin a book with the right kind of appealing forward impetus, and the momentum generates its own static cling and empties the folder for me.
Often a book has a built-in deadline, which is that if I don’t write it right then, I’ll forget how everything that I want to include fits together. In the case of The Mezzanine, all those thoughts about escalators and date stampers and whatnot were part of what I’d been doing for a living, and when I stopped riding the escalator every day and instead began writing about it, I could feel the experiences start to break up and dissolve in my memory. That feeling of losing what I’ve lived, and losing it so fast—that more than any editorial deadline or financial pressure has given me the oomph I’ve needed to finish books.
I wrote The Mezzanine with a great rush of joy in the first person and then I wrote Room Temperature in the first person as well. I felt that I definitely couldn’t do another book that way. And then I thought, Well, the heck with it, I will because I want to. So U and I is in the first person as well. It’s my most autobiographical book, it’s the book that’s truest, that could well be my best book.
When I first see them set in type, my sentences sometimes seem to have Scotch tape and barnacles and wires and alligator clamps hanging off them. Then there’s a hosing-off period—memory smooths each sentence, wears it down. After a few years it becomes stone: the sentence that always was. When I look at a book that I’ve written a while ago, my first reaction is, What a miracle. Not that it’s miraculously good, just that it miraculously exists. I can look across the room now and see that there is a small pile of books that I have evidently written. It startles me. I think, How in the world did I ever manage to put all those words together?
A native of New Haven, Connecticut, Jon Pareles graduated from Yale in 1974. He was a freelance rock writer and critic until 1977, when he took a job as an editor at Crawdaddy magazine. He subsequently worked at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. He has been a rock critic for the New York Times since 1982, and the chief popular music critic since 1988. He is the author of The New York Times Essential Library: Rock Music. We spoke at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. From “Songs in the Same Key with Just a Few Guitar Licks,” the New York Times, October 3, 2000:
Boubacar Traoré, the Malian singer and guitarist who performed on Thursday night, could give austerity lessons to Minimalists. Mr. Traoré played an entire set of songs in the same key, each built around just two or three vocal phrases and a handful of guitar licks. The only accompaniment came from Sidiki Camara tapping a calabash with sticks and thumping it with the heel of his hand.
But the songs conveyed neither renunciation nor scarcity. Mr. Traoré made their self-imposed limits into a universe: a place to dance, to lament, to make his guitar tickle and bite. His voice had a kindly tone with a mournful undercurrent as he sang about a lost love or friends he left behind. And his intricate guitar parts, mostly played with thumb and fore-finger, could turn a two-chord vamp into a three-dimensional matrix of bass lines, upper-register replies, melodies shared with the voice, obstinate trills and high, light offbeats, with the calabash clicking along.
Most songs ended with long fade-outs, achieved without a volume knob, in which rhythms, vocal lines and guitar parts let their inner workings glimmer before disappearing into silence.
It’s not naive music. In the 1960’s Mr. Traoré had a rock hit in Mali, “The Mali Twist,” then turned to day jobs and an expatriate’s life in Paris. When he was rediscovered in the late 1980’s he had created a different hybrid music. He reached back to traditional music from Kayes, in the Khassonke region of northwestern Mali, where he was born; he was also aware of the blues, another style that makes bare-bones structures eloquent.
At Joe’s Pub, a few of Mr. Traoré’s songs used spiky blues licks and tempos as deliberate as slow Delta blues; one from his new album, “Macire” (Harmonia Mundi), toyed with flamenco guitar lines and quasi-Moorish modal scales. The others, with sharp, staccato picking, made the guitar sound closer to traditional West African harps and balafons (marimbas). The music was swinging and hypnotic, doleful and soothing, rooted and personal, as it transmuted basic elements into profound incantations.
I don’t know if I’m a natural writer, but I’m a natural editor. I’m a Strunk and White person. My copy comes in clean. Plus, I am inclined to write short. I learned concision from rock lyricists. There is an aesthetic that says do it in three minutes and get out. I am not Wagnerian. I am Chuck-Berryan.
I’m personally addicted to live performance. Records are piling up in my office even as we speak. They’re dull, because they’ll be the same next week. But at a concert, there’s always some feeling you saw a unique moment. When I started doing this, I thought, “Just the music, not the clothes, not the audience,” which was totally wrong. It’s essential to be aware of the reaction of the audience. It doesn’t happen behind a screen. You’re in it, and I do want to convey that. Everything is part of the performance. It may be that as I’m getting older I’m seeing more contradictions in the world. But every concert is vastly more complex than what I can explain, especially in four hundred words. So the gig is to get as much in as I can, and sort it out.
I was a music major at college. I started playing piano when I was six, and the flute when I was eight. My parents thought I was Mozart, but I wasn’t. I didn’t have the discipline to practice five hours a day, so I drifted into composition and musicology. Now I think what I do is something like being an ethnomusicologist of current music. I can write music notation, plus I have perfect pitch, so that unlike any rock critic I know of, my notebook is filled with the riffs. It’s like taking dictation.
Drummers are my style guide. I always want to think about rhythm. If you listen to a drum solo that repeats the same beat, it’s dull. You want something that surprises you, with some variation, snappy ending. Consciously try to put the most important word of a sentence at the end—it’s a punch word, like a punch line.
Music is notoriously prone to clichés and stock phrases. They’re all in my head, and I really try to avoid them. I will never call music from New Orleans “gumbo.” I very rarely or ever use the word beautiful even though there’s a lot of beauty in what I cover. The word itself just rings the thud meter for me. It’s either too strong or too clichéd for me to use. I try not to use the word liquid or the many flowing metaphors that are perfectly appropriate for music. It’s been overdone. I’m really inhibited! If you look at my stuff on LexisNexis, I’m sure all these words will creep in somewhere, because the other great inspiration is the clock—if my review isn’t done at three o’clock, I’m a dead man.
I want everything to be vivid. When I’m doing the first draft of a piece, I will write “verb to come” or “image to come” if I can’t think of something good enough at first. I try to use lots of verbs. Music’s really active, music is an action in time, and so it should be a verb if at all possible. Adjectives are a distant second. Music affects your mind and your body—it’s a verb. An adjective is for something static. If I were describing paintings, I’d use more adjectives. Nouns are important too. In the Boubacar Traoré review, I talked about the “calabash clicking along.” A calabash is really a gourd, but I like calabash better. It’s onomatopoeia, and the “clicking” gives you some alliteration.
David Bowie’s guitarist, Reeves Gabrels, once said people’s attention spans are really short now, so he has to do something every few minutes to get their attention. I identify with this. I put in lots of contrasts, like pairs of contrasting adjectives. A lot of the music I cover is all about contrasts, really. One of the beauties of African music is that it’s happy and sad at the same time. Spirituals—out of utter tribulation is redemption. Jazz, where you can be bluesy and celebrating and sexy. It’s multilayered music. I try to convey that with the adjectives that I do use.
I consider myself a reporter, and the temptation in a review is to do the details—I saw this, I saw that. I’m always trying to police myself, to say why it’s important. Donald Barthelme was one of my heroes. The man could make an entire story of a list. There is always a tendency to make lists, in journalism and in general. I could list songs, I could list instruments. I hate it and I try to fight it. I want to tell people why they’re reading the list first. If you watch a movie, there are closeups and long shots. A movie all in closeups would be boring, or Warhol. I like to touch down and bounce up.
I try to hover between the spoken and the literary. I do have a lot of contractions. In revision, I take out as many semicolons as I can. I love parentheses, and some of those go too. The other thing that comes out is the word seem. I’m a critic, godammit—it shouldn’t seem, it should be obvious. Rathers, somewhats, quites. There’s no need for ninety percent of qualifications, especially in a short piece. When I started writing for the Times, someone complimented me by saying Vincent Canby and I were the only ones that didn’t sound like we had an English accent.
I loved Canby. He had such seemingly casual, deeply erudite quality about him. My other model was Robert Palmer, my predecessor at the Times. He was a total natural. I saw him walk in, type in a review and walk out. My jaw was down to my knees.
I try to learn from what I write about. I shouldn’t be too serious, because rock is a big joke. I take it seriously, but don’t take myself too seriously. It’s stupid a lot of the time, but there’s a virtue in that. It’s like David St. Hubbins said in [This Is] Spinal Tap: “There’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”
I guess I’m always writing about flux—maybe too much. It’s never a still photo. I love changeability. In classical music I was a big fan of Bach and the Renaissance, but in theory I’m more of a romantic. I was a math major for a year before I went back to music. And I love order and structure and analysis, but my instincts lead me as I get older and more mature to the rhapsodic. I love the volatility.
Music, in my estimation, is everything. It’s your romance, it’s your food, it’s your culture, it’s history, it’s psychology. Any concert will have all those tendrils in them, and you can follow any single one. It’s infinitely deep. It’s a signal system. You pick up the traces. I should ideally convey that it’s as simple as somebody trying to get the girl to dance with them, and as complex as somebody trying to reach God or change the world. In Egypt there was a shaman called the haruspex that did divination from entrails. That’s what we’re doing. It’s all the entrails of the same animal. Comedy will reflect something, movies will reflect something. I like pop cause it’s faster. Movies are going to happen a year later, TV six months later, pop two months later. It’s all the same cultural id. It’s all the same desires that no one is expressing directly. That’s what you want to show people.
It should always be visceral. People don’t go to hear the theory, they want to have the feeling. I don’t want to be at such a remove from it that I forget to have good time. There’s an Ornette Coleman album called Dancing in Your Head. I think that’s what critics do. My joke is that rock critics are the people who went to the high school dance and were listening to the band. I can’t dance worth a lick. I’m a hazard on the dance floor. But I’m dancing in my head.
Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1939, Clive James has lived in London since the early 1960s and has published many volumes of poetry, fiction, literary criticism (most recently As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968–2002), memoir, and song lyrics. He was the television critic for the Observer from 1972 till 1982, and his pieces were collected in Glued to the Box and other books. Since the early 1980s, he has been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities, as the host of Saturday Night Clive and many other series, specials, and documentaries. We communicated by e-mail. From “On His Death,” written in 1973 and reprinted in First Reactions:
I was born in the month after Auden wrote “September 1, 1939,” and saw him only three times. The first time, in Cambridge, about five years ago, he gave a poetry reading in Great St. Mary’s. The second time, on the Cambridge-to-London train a year later, I was edging along to the buffet car when I noticed him sitting in a first-class compartment. When the train pulled in, I waited for him at the barrier and babbled some nonsense about being privileged to travel on the same train. He took it as his due and waved one of his enormous hands. The third time was earlier this year, in the Martini Lounge atop New Zealand House in London, where a reception was thrown for all of us who had taken part in the Poetry International Festival. Auden shuffled through in a suit encrusted with the dirt of years—it was a geological deposit, an archaeological pile-up like the seven cities of Troy. I don’t think anybody of my generation knew what to say to him. I know I didn’t. But we knew what to think, and on behalf of my contemporaries I have tried to write some of it down here. I can still remember those unlucky hands; one of them holding a brimming glass, the other holding a cigarette, and both of them trembling. The mind boggled at some of the things they had been up to. But one of them had refurbished the language. A few months later he was beyond passion, having gone to the reward which Dante says that poets who have done their duty might well enjoy—talking shop as they walk beneath the moon.
In Australia in the late fifties, when I was an undergraduate at Sydney University, the youngest member of a small group of would-be writers who passed books around, my master spirit as a stylist was George Bernard Shaw. Not so much the plays as the prefaces, and not so much the prefaces as the criticism, set my standards for the flow and brio of prose. Until he got garrulous in old age—by no concidence, that was also when he got insensitive—his prose was always much more concise than he was given credit for. Orwell called him a windbag but not without reading everything the old man had written. I still think the six volumes of the Standard Edition, which consist of Music in London and Our Theatres in the Nineties, are the greatest single critical achievement in the English language. Even at the time, however, I realized that the challenge would be to appropriate his effects without sounding like an imitator. I tried to avoid the knowingness that infected his tone: he worked from a position of sophisticated experience, so I tried to work from the position of the permanent tyro, which is the way I feel naturally anyway.
I got into the useful habit of following up on tips in the ancillary writings of a hero: for example, if Edmund Wilson mentioned Mencken in passing, I would find out who Mencken was. Eventually I found his style too wilfully forced in its pizzazz, but I was permanently influenced by the way Mencken got the vocabulary and the details of common life into his political reports, thus founding a sparkling amateur tradition that made Walter Lippmann’s supposedly professional commentaries look moribund, strangled in their own good connections. Mencken, in my view, was the start of everything in America’s version (I say America’s version because in Britain the heritage goes back to Hazlitt and beyond) of the literature that happens somewhere between literature and journalism. There was no Australian equivalent tradition when I was young.
With Scott Fitzgerald, whose Crack-Up essays bowled me over, I wanted the element of personal confession without the romanticized nostalgia. I have always liked nostalgia, but not as an indulgence: I like the hard edge made possible by admitting that what’s gone is gone, and the fun of admitting that I once liked it. Even today I can still recite the last paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, and as soon as I read them I formed the determination to work at a paragraph until it transmitted a poem’s air of inevitable word-order. I was put on to Fitzgerald’s essays, again, by Edmund Wilson, who became a lifelong model in everything except his prose. He had no particular rhythm, and in old age grew quite careless of his sentence construction: his great virtue was clarity, principally obtained by saying one thing at a time. It was a useful chastening for my own tendency to say everything at once. Given the choice of an overloaded sentence and one that says too little for its length, however, I would always choose the former, although to avoid the choice is the whole trick.
The man who taught me to load a sentence with cultural references and wisecracks, both at once, was S. J. Perelman. Before I left Australia, I had read everything he had written and possessed every book except the ultra-rare Dawn Ginsberg’s Revenge. There were, and still are, whole passages of Perelman that I can recite. I avoided aping him by a simple reversal. His basic technique was to write a joke and load it with culture, thus to make the reader feel clever. I wrote about culture and lightened it with a joke, thus to make the reader feel funny. Later on, in Fleet Street, when I was writing about television every week between 1972 and 1982, I was essentially employing the compound style that I lifted from Perelman, and that I disguised by rearranging the elements.
We all read the Americans avidly: we had the British culture officially, and the American as our school’s-out secret. One of the sweetest things about reading The Catcher in the Rye was that the professors hadn’t. It was like sneaking off to see “Rock Around the Clock.” When I first read the phrase “as cold as a witch’s tit” I saw my whole life before me. It wasn’t the calculated obscenity, it was the conversational timing.
Among the expatriate pleiade that later became collectively famous—Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, and, dare I say it, myself—Hughes was the only one I knew well at university. Most of my literary friends were destined for other careers. I should have realized that at the time, but had not yet learned to spot the difference between the fan and the performer: the fan reads for enjoyment, whereas the performer reads to learn.
The accepted influence on the prose of my generation of Australians was the great war correspondent Alan Moorehead, whose many books Hughes has, very rightly, praised at length. At one time or another, and especially in recent years, I read all of Moorehead—the AfricanTrilogy is particularly fine—but I doubt if I was ever influenced by him as I once was, almost fifty years ago, by the first few chapters of Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, in which he wrote about Sydney with an unforced vividness it had never been treated to before. When I came to write Unreliable Memoirs, it was undoubtedly Braddon’s play of light and water that I had in mind. Braddon has zero literary status now, even within Australia, and indeed there was nothing particularly striking, in the literary sense, about the way he wrote, except that it didn’t sound like writing. It sounded like speaking, which is my continuing ideal.
In addition to the American stuff, I myself was keen to absorb the modern British tradition of light-touch aesthetic journalism that culminated in the books of Osbert Lancaster: Draynefleet Revealed remains, even to this day, my ideal of the Kleinkunst masterpiece that has no reputation except among connoisseurs. I borrowed my first Lancaster books from Hughes and had memorized them all before I left Australia. Hughes himself, in his art criticism, was crucially influenced by Lancaster’s seemingly effortless, set-designer’s strategy of building up a verbal picture out of a few precisely observed but lightly sketched architectural details.
In Drayneflete Revealed, incidentally, the maraschino cherry on the fruit sundae is “Crack-up in Barcelona,” the best parody of Thirties poetry ever written. Hughes and I can both quote it from end to end, although not when we are together, because each shouts down the other. Like his eye, Lancaster’s ear was infallible, although not for his own dangling participles: a quirk that Evelyn Waugh occasionally shared, and which Anthony Powell had like a disease. It was because of too much Latin at school: the ablative absolute got into their English syntax.
The formative stage is the interesting one, but very hard to be introspective about, because you took too much in at the time to analyze it properly later. When I was doing my national service in the army, there was a drawling, grunting, lead-swinging lance-corporal called Grogan who could make me laugh just by the way he timed his pauses. First the long, slow drawing back; and then, and only then, the crack of the whip. For all I know, he was the biggest influence on my style; and he never wrote a thing, or was heard of again.
When I got to England, I spent three years down and out in London, before going to Cambridge, so Orwell was appropriate reading. From Orwell’s essays I received a long lesson in how to balance one sentence against the next within the paragraph, always preserving speech rhythms even when the sentence was cantilevered over three or four clauses. As one gets older, one is influenced less. I think the world of Gore Vidal’s plain style, but it never influenced me in the way that, say, Kingsley Amis’s did: I had to fight hard to avoid sounding like Amis, especially in his criticism. The same applied in the case of Larkin, whose critical prose enchanted me as much as his poetry. Even today, such dazzling young polymaths as Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik would disable me if I allowed myself to echo their easily omniscient tone. Did they suck encyclopedias in the cradle? Luckily age works like an armour plate.
Kenneth Tynan affected me deeply, less as a role model—I never wanted to be a theatre critic—than as a stylist. It should not be forgotten that the Fleet Street tradition of the media-criticism column was very strong before Tynan got there. I myself, in my television column, had Paul Dehn’s and Penelope Gilliatt’s film columns in mind, and they in turn were in a line that went back to C. E. Lejeune. But there could be no doubt that Tynan set a new standard for putting his own literary personality at the centre of the event, as if the proscenium, far from separating the auditorium and the stage, joined two stages. His first book, He That Plays the King, I practically got by heart. His reviews were often more dramatic than the plays they reviewed, and I tried to keep the same rule in my television criticism: make it a better show than the shows. My years in Cambridge Footlights helped me there: when I came to write a regular 1,000-word television column for the Observer, I was able to use many of the tricks of variation and compression that I had learned on stage. Tynan spotted what I was up to, and he took a flattering interest in my writing. In his last year alive, when he was cohabiting with an oxygen cylinder in one of the Los Angeles canyons, we had a long argument about Hemingway. Between drags at the face-mask, he read aloud one of Hemingway’s passages about the Gulf Stream absorbing all the garbage thrown into it and still running clear within a few miles. I took it at the time as a wish-fulfilllment: Tynan was reminding himself of what it had been like to breathe cleanly.
That being said, however, I would list Hemingway near the top among the stylists I did my best not to echo. Once submitted to, his influence is hard to shake: not even Mailer could fight his way free without a struggle. (Nobody has ever survived copying Mailer, either, and the same applies to Salinger and Roth, both of whom I love, but have never made the mistake of trying to echo.) I admired Cyril Connolly, especially in the parodic mode best showcased in The Condemned Playground, but his claims to omniscience were patently false: I learned from him, by negative example, the necessity and good manners of acknowledging your limitations. I was powerfully attracted to Terry Southern’s journalism as collected in Red-Dirt Marijuana, but luckily his mannerisms were few and easily staved off. Later on I wondered what the Hunter S. Thompson fuss was all about: Southern had already done all that, and done it on the quiet. But of course it’s the noise, and usually the noise of a blatant chromium exhaust pipe, that attracts journalists to write about other journalists: they want to write about personal mannerisms, the very thing I think should be avoided, because stylistic quirks are predictable, and predictability is the enemy. Stunt writers like Tom Wolfe came too late to attract me even momentarily towards their tone, although the younger commentators in England were quick to assume that my own eclectic strategies, if not my style, must have been reacting to Wolfe in some way: they knew nothing about the tradition he came from. A young English journalist who interviewed me in the 1980s had never heard of A. J. Liebling (to whom Wolfe paid due homage) and when I mentioned Mencken’s name he asked me how it was spelled.
Incidentally, I am still on my knees to Liebling after all this time. In his first Wayward Press collection there was a piece on Colonel McCormick and the Chicago Tribune that gave me the tip on how a public figure, without being belittled, could be employed as a clown. The secret was to give him even more importance than he claimed. In Liebling’s reports, the Colonel made a stately progress, like a king. Liebling could make you laugh just by the way he copied down the names of professional wrestlers. He could make you laugh because he never made the mistake of speaking in a funny voice; and, after reading him, neither did I. To the extent that I could rig the circumstances, I never tried to be funny in a funny context: only in a serious one. Humour as an exclusive genre I simply loathe. I don’t even much like the wit that parades itself as wit. Dorothy Parker’s epigrams I always found less interesting than the comic points made in her short stories.
A lot of the people I regard as stylistic influences never wrote in English. The supreme exemplar would be Alfred Polgar, the greatest of essayists in the German-speaking countries up until the Anschluss [Hitler’s 1938 annexation of Austria], after which he went into frustrating exile in the U.S. Polgar, for me, is the magician: nobody could pack so many detailed perceptions tight together while still making the argument flow. I have often thought of doing a selected translation but it would not be easy to do Polgar justice: not so much because my German isn’t good enough, as because I still have some way to go with English. Kurt Tucholsky called Polgar’s sentences “filaments of granite.” If anybody ever said that about mine, I would be very pleased.
In French, my models are Camus, Raymond Aron, Jean-François Revel, and (for the way he could write about sport, art, and ordinary life all at once) Jean Prevost, who was killed in the Resistance, thereby leaving a clear field for the suffocating punditry of the Sartreans. (Considered collectively, the French literary theorists provide the most conspicuous example of everything I try to avoid as a writer.) In Italian, Eugenio Montale’s criticism—and especially his music criticism—is the model. And so on. Naturally one does not get the techniques of writing an English sentence from foreign writers: but a foreign writer’s practical approach to a subject can be a useful vade mecum. Does he get an example in first, before launching his argument? How does he place his quotations? Does he tag a paragraph with his best maxim, or does he throw it away on the way in? It is too often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It isn’t: imitation is a form of theft. The sincerest form of flattery is to appropriate another writer’s strategic and tactical discoveries while leaving his tone untouched. Ideally, only he will be able to spot that he has been robbed, and he will not press charges.
The influence of shared conversation on individual style is necessarily underrated because it is impossible to measure, and people rarely admit it when they have pinched things. At the time when Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Christopher Hitchens, and I were lunching together every week, the pearls bounced all over the table. I can’t remember stealing anything, although I might have indirectly. I can certainly remember being stolen from. I once described my little daughter as being so short it was a wonder her legs reached the ground. The phrase turned up in one of Martin’s novels. I also opined that going to bed with two women must be like going through a car-wash. Julian got hold of that one. There was no acknowledgment in either case, and I eventually realized that I was playing in a crap game with spotless dice. But when you consider how much got said between us over the years, and how little got recognizably transferred from one player to another’s pocket, I suppose influence came down more to rhythm than figures of speech. Rhythm and compression. Expansiveness was not tolerated, and the anecdotal tendency was firmly stamped on. A story had to be told in a few phrases or not at all—except by Hitchens, who developed a technique of interrupting his own stories with elaborations which were each successively more entertaining than the story itself, a stunning instance of assembling architecture out of decoration.
Finally, all the influences in the world serve only to refine your given qualities, which have mainly, I am convinced, to do with rhythm and tonal control. The first of these is a simple matter: either you’ve got it or you haven’t, and if you’ve got it, all your admirations are only to set it free. The second is the most complicated thing there is, and I don’t see how it can be obtained except as a distillation of all the voices that attracted your attention while your own voice was coming into focus.
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting. The best reason not to overdo the hoopla, then, is that the result would lack interest: an excess would be even worse than a deficiency, because it would look nervous, and nervousness, in prose as in seduction, repels. Otherwise, I try to make every sentence in an essay as attractive as the first. This is the main reason why I find American magazines so difficult to write for. Acting as journals of record, they have a habit of injecting pellets of factual material without reference to the writer’s rhythm. No doubt it is a service to the little lady in Dubuque or the barber from Peru, but for the writer from Australia it is a disaster, because it breaks the grip. The grip, gently but firmly applied to the reader’s collar in the first sentence, should drag him inexorably through to the last. Properly done, it can get him all the way from the street to the bar and back out again without his realizing that he has paid for the drinks.
Humor
The project of humor is the statement of more or less familiar truths in comically unexpected ways. That is, it is about style. Like poetry, it is typically expressed in a short form, but it carries a bit more of a burden of communication with the reader; an obscure humorist would find it hard to get published, whereas many obscure poets have won the Pulitzer Prize. Written humor is usually in one of two modes. The first—seen in the work of Dave Barry, David Sedaris, Roy Blount Jr., Sandra Tsing Loh, Nora Ephron, and Bill Bryson, who speaks below—is a kind of transcription of a particularly smart and literate stand-up comedian’s routine. Style is critical in the construction of both the comic persona and the comedy. That is to say, the universally known truth that airline food is bad becomes funny only when it is expressed with the right examples, phrasing, exaggeration, timing, and attitude.
The second kind of humor, which I call comic ventriloquism, requires even more attention to style; once upon a time it was widely used in the lost art of parody. But that form has a tough time of it in a dumb-downed age, limping on only in Bad Hemingway contests. Indeed, now that Woody Allen is a highly serious cinematic auteur, the only standout comic ventriloquists are Ian Frazier and Steve Martin. What Frazier brilliantly does in his New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly pieces is take one of the thuddingly banal voices floating around in the verbal atmosphere—psychobabble, journalese, bureaucratese, academese,-ese’s that don’t have a name yet—mimic it with precision, and sic it on something totally unexpected. In his “Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father,” the style is a venerable one, never before applied to this subject:
And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke. Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away. When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck; for you will be sent away.
Bill Bryson was born in 1951 in Des Moines, Iowa, where his father, also named Bill Bryson, was a longtime sports columnist for the Register. After graduating from Drake University, he moved to England, where he worked as an editor on the Times and other newspapers, and eventually as a freelance writer. Bryson has published 14 books, most of which are either about language (The Mother Tongue, Made in America) or travel (A Walk in the Woods, In a Sunburned Country). In 1995 he moved back to the United States with his English-born wife and their four children, settling in Hanover, New Hampshire. (He has since moved back to England.) We spoke over breakfast at Lou’s Restaurant in Hanover.
The following is from Notes from a Small Island: An Affectionate Portrait of Britain. Here, on a visit to Dover, Bryson is recalling his first days in Britain in 1973, when he had the misfortune of staying at a guest house there “owned and managed by a formidable creature of late middle years called Mrs. Gubbins.”
Over the next two days, Mrs. Gubbins persecuted me mercilessly, while the [other guests], I suspected, scouted evidence for her. She reproached me for not turning the light off in my room when I went out, for not putting the lid down on the toilet when I’d finished, for taking the Colonel’s hot water—I’d no idea he had his own until he started rattling the doorknob and making aggrieved noises in the corridor—for ordering the full English breakfast two days running and leaving the fried tomato both times.
“I see you’ve left the fried tomato again,” she said on the second occasion. I didn’t know quite what to say to this as it was incontestably true, so I simply furrowed my brow and joined her in staring at the offending item. I had actually been wondering for two days what it was.
“May I request,” she said in a voice heavy with pain and years of irritation, “that in future, if you don’t require a fried tomato with your breakfast, you would be good enough to tell me?”
Abashed, I watched her go out. “I thought it was a blood clot!” I wanted to yell after her, but of course I said nothing and merely skulked from the room to the triumphant beams of my fellow residents.
After that, I stayed out of the house as much as I could…. Within the house, I tried to remain silent and inconspicuous. I even turned over quietly in my creaking bed. But no matter how hard I tried, I seemed fated to annoy. On the third afternoon as I crept in, Mrs. Gubbins confronted me in the hallway with an empty cigarette packet, and demanded to know if it was I who had thrust it in the privet hedge. I began to understand why people sign extravagant confessions in police stations. That evening, I forgot to turn off the water heater after a quick and stealthy bath and compounded the error by leaving strands of hair in the plughole. The next morning came the final humiliation. Mrs. Gubbins marched me wordlessly to the toilet and showed me a little turd that had not flushed away.
We agreed that I should leave after breakfast. I caught a fast train to London, and have not been back to Dover since.
One of my father’s lifelong hobbies was tracking down the derivation of baseball words, especially ones that have entered general usage, like rain check, southpaw, straight out of left field. He developed a substantial library of books about language. I inherited an interest in language, and also the library. He had a good collection of books by people working from, say, 1910 to 1940, so they became my big influences. P. G. Wodehouse, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. I loved S. J. Perelman because of that elegance. He was everything that a kid in Des Moines, Iowa, wanted to be. Robert Benchley was hugely influential; my dad had all his books. I loved his silliness, the sense of seeing the world as others don’t see it.
Newspapers were the family business. My mother worked for the Register. My brother worked there too, and later for the Associated Press. Plus, English was the only thing I was ever any good at in school. It never occurred to me that I would ever make my living in any other way than fooling around with words.
I worked part time after school and on weekends at the Register, starting at my sixteenth birthday—answering phones, getting coffee, dividing up wire stories. Little by little they gave you responsibility, and I started covering high school football games. I worked on the copy desk, which was kind of unusual for a kid, but I found that I really enjoyed it. I did it all through high school and college. Eventually I was going to college and working full time, which was murderous but lucrative.
Working at newspapers, especially working as a copyeditor, is really, really good training for other kinds of writing. You learn not to waste words. Right now I’m working on a writing project where I’ve been reading a lot of textbooks, scholarly type books. I keep thinking, Get to the point. There’s a story here.
When I first started living in Britain, all the differences between British and American English were quite interesting to me. There was so much nuance you wouldn’t have been aware of if you haven’t lived in another English-speaking country. And the way journalism was done was so different. In the U.S. we have the inverted pyramid, which tells you to put the most important things at the beginning of the story. My favorite marginal comment from my years in Britain was when I was working as a subeditor at the Times: “If you have to cut this, cut from the top, because all the good stuff is at the bottom.” I almost had that framed. This was the same writer who on a Sotheby’s story wrote acres of bilge, then in the last paragraph put in that the sale of such and such “was unable to go forward because it was stolen over the weekend.”
Living on a small provincial income, I started doing magazine articles in my spare time as a way to make some extra money. I realized that something that gave me an edge was that I could write amusingly. This also meant that I was asked to do observational stuff, so I wouldn’t have to leave home. When you find something you’re good at, you tend to cultivate that. I can’t do anything else, so this is it. Clearly, I wasn’t going to be a heavyweight thinker or write the most lyrical prose you’ve ever seen. I could never be an investigative journalist—I would be creamed by the opposition every time. If I was going to make a living at writing, this is what I could do.
One of the things that made me fall for Britain in a big way was the humor. I remember instantly responding to it. There were types of jokes that I had never heard growing up in Iowa. The Monty Python, The Goon Show, off-the-wall, and the deadpan, dry understated. I started playing around with those kinds of jokes; it seemed very sophisticated, Noel Coward to me—a kind of classiness. The British really do love to be funny. It’s a quality that they cultivate and that they admire in people.
I get accused from time to time of being very mannered, of intentionally using Britishisms, but it’s me. It’s become completely natural. I’ll write advert instead of ad not because I’ve decided to have a moment of Englishness but because I’ve forgotten that Americans don’t say that. My kind of device for writing is to be as natural as I can, and not to reflect on these things. I know that you might expect an editor to change that, but the terrible thing about success is that people stop editing you. Also, I am a little remote from the American language. Even though we’ve been back for six years, I still live in an English household, and because I work at home, I don’t see many people. You will probably constitute ninety percent of my actual American conversation this week. Most of the rest of it will be with an English wife and kids. I don’t watch TV much, only the Red Sox. I don’t listen to radio, and I’ve only recently and reluctantly gone online.
I fuss over words. I like writers who really care about choosing the right word at the right time, and the right rhythm, to really make a piece of text work. The person I first learned that from is J. D. Salinger. I was fourteen, fifteen, reading Catcher in the Rye and all his other stuff. His descriptive passages—the way a person’s face is reflected in the mirror, or the way a tablecloth hangs, or sunlight falls—sometimes seems labored, but it doesn’t matter, because at the time it was such a revelation that you could take language and use it in such a precise way. It’s something I still admire when I see it done by the Julian Barneses and John Updikes, who can take a thing and make it perfect.
Endlessly fussing is the only writing trick I know—never being quite satisfied. My anal quality is such that I cannot not write in consecutive order. That is, I can’t skip ahead to chapter four—I have to get over this hump, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. But I do allow myself to go back—to fuss and fiddle over something that was good enough to move on but not quite there yet. The thing that occupies me the most is trying to get jokes right. It’s so much a question of timing—the right word is so important. Only two or three times in all the years I’ve been writing did a joke just sort of pop into my head. Most of the time you know it’s there, but you’ve got to fuss over it endlessly.
The first time through, I’ll have a lot of parentheses and dashes. They’re effective, but they can become intrusive and a little manic as well. You realize that it would work better as two sentences anyway. I find it helps a lot to print things out, to take them to another place and read them. You find typos—somehow the moving around can be productive. Sometimes I’ll put it in my back pocket, and never even take it out of my back pocket, but just kind of walk it around.
I think you do have a duty to engage and hold the reader. The one thing I’m thinking about all the time in anything I write is Is this keeping the reader with me? Is this interesting? Is this worthwhile? So many writers seem not to care about those things. Travel writing tends to be terribly self-indulgent; the author’s feeling seems to be Well, I had this experience and I enjoyed it and I’m going to tell you about it, and really kind of fuck you whether you like it or not.
I write like I’m writing a letter to my brother or a good pal, and we’re talking in a way that’s informal and acquainted. We already know each other. What I didn’t realize until after I’d done this a few times is how many people read the books and think we really are acquainted now. They want to come and see me. The number of people who write and want you to come and travel with them is really amazing. They’re written in a personal way, and a number of people don’t realize that it can’t really be personal.
The I in my books is not me, really. Or it is, but only a relatively small part of me. It’s a sort of alter ego, I suppose. I’m there in the service of comedy in the books; I’m talking about the things I do that are stupid. I actually do those stupid things—I do get lost, say embarrassing things, unwittingly suck on a pen and get ink all over my face. What I do in a book is focus exclusively on those things. Everything that’s in there is true. If I say I was locked out of my hotel in England, that’s true. But humor involves measure of hyperbole, so the things that make you laugh are because I’ve inflated it. I didn’t really roll three and half miles down a hill. I did have a fall, but actually stopped after around four feet. Huge amounts are left out.
My approach has changed somewhat over the years. There are certain things I’ve intentionally tried to do to give my books more substance. I’ve made a conscious decision to reduce the number of jokes. Constant humor is hard to sustain—there’s a reason stand-up comics only do forty minutes. You can only laugh intensively for so long. A mistake I was making in the early books, and a lot of people make, is not realizing people can’t keep that up for hour after hour when they’re reading, that they need some relief. In my early books you’d be reading along and sense I’m saying, “This isn’t a very good joke, but I’ve got this quota to keep up, and it’s not too bad, so bear with me, and I’ll try to get a better one in a page or so.” I’ve sort of stopped putting in those holding jokes; I don’t worry that there’s three pages and there’s not a single joke in it.
But I don’t think I could ever become a serious writer. In A Walk in the Woods, near the end, my companion, Katz, and I have our epiphany on the mountain. He tells me he is drinking again, everything is going wrong, we—as it were—kiss and make up. All of a sudden, the book becomes serious, realistic. It became extremely uncomfortable for me to write. That was the one part where I felt I had to apologize to the real guy. Everywhere else I’m teasing him, making fun; everyone who knows him will know I’m exaggerating. Here, it was sort of like leaving the camera running when people didn’t know, and then using it. But I had to—that was the climax of our experience together, and I had no choice. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to writing seriously about something that really happened in my life. I don’t think that I could possibly do that on a regular basis. People would become very uncomfortable if I did, because it’s not what they expect. I could never write a book about a fight with cancer. That’s not me. I have to deal with people who are prosperous and comfortable and can be the butt of a joke.
Poetry
This book is (obviously) mainly concerned with prose, but it’s appropriate to spend a little time with poetry because prose becomes less prosaic—it develops style—when it has elements of poetry in it. As Jakobson’s terminology indicates, poetry is at the extreme end of the communicative–poetic scale: it has no “use” other than individual expression. It follows that poets who don’t own a distinctive and distinguishing manner of expression can never make it to the big leagues. Especially in its modern incarnation, poetry is all about style; every word represents a critical decision whose resolution reflects with finality on the poem and the author. As Billy Collins says, “In prose, every sentence could be rewritten 400 ways. A poem is inevitable.” The whole verbal apparatus of a lyric poem—rhyme, meter, expectation of metaphor, division into line and stanza, even the concentrated brevity it demands—places the emphasis on manner, not matter. Poets aren’t expected to convey data, and haven’t necessarily failed even if their meaning is a little or a lot obscure. We understand that their main enterprise is to put an internal colloquy onto the page. As John Stuart Mill wrote, “Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression of utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposed an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.”
Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and Columbia University. Her collections include Satan Says, The Dead and the Living (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Gold Cell, The Father, The Wellspring: Poems, Blood, Tin, Straw, and The Unswept Room. She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and was the New York State Poet Laureate for 1998–2000. We spoke in her office at NYU. From “Culture and Religion,” in the collection Blood, Tin, Straw:
When the witch flew up to the left right left I
remembered it—wasn’t there something
sharp which had soared into the sky on a spiral
like that over Jerusalem? The only other
movie I had seen, every Good Friday,
was the Crucifixion documentary,
noon to three, and wasn’t this
the cloud-cover, from over the crosses,
their delicate shapes thickened and distorted,
stuck with their grievous human gum,
above them the liquid dart of the witch
streaked. And wasn’t the witch’s home,
near Oz, Golgotha? Her broom had been the stick
on which they had stuck the vinegar sop, I
recognized it, the same prop, and the
field of poppies, wasn’t that
Gethsemane? And the witch wanted
to torture them to death, like Jesus
—blood, tin, straw—what they
were made of was to be used to kill them.
Thinking about voice, my first thought was that it’s about identity, recognizability, individuation. But then I thought, no, recognizability is not the point, it’s the result—of emotion, movement, kinetic thought, dance, fear, love. It’s the result of specific experience filtered through a specific sieve.
Being in high school, trying to dress like the girls I admired, I could never get it right. I still have trouble when I try to dress the way I imagine the others will be dressed. But at one point I came to the realization—whatever “originality” is, part of it may be an inability to understand what the regular way is. People have sometimes said to me, “You’re brave.” Well, I’m the most chicken person I know. I’m just a bit of a sociopath. As if I tried, but don’t get it, about what to do and what not to do.
Like so many of us, I was raised in a tradition of suppressed consciousness. When I was a kid, I thought that “God”—if he cared to—which he did not—would have been able to see everything that I thought. He had made this world and was going to roast it for sheer evil fun. But somehow I got the idea that art didn’t belong to God. Since I wasn’t allowed freedom of thought (or so I thought), I learned not to know what I was thinking (though I was “allowed” to see what I was seeing.) And now, it’s as if, when I’m writing, the God of my childhood can’t see what I’m doing.
As a child, through junior high school, high school, college and graduate school, I wrote poems. I wrote a lot in received forms—Whitman long reaches, Dickinson 4 × 4 rubixes, sonnet, sestina, villanelle—and I also tried to make up more constricting forms. Then, in my twenties, I tried to write like Gary Snyder and George Oppen—when I saw something so beautiful, which also was completely foreign to my abilities, I thought it must be the “right” way to write! I loved Oppen’s grammar. It made me feel that my brain was being pulled apart, with no pain. I would diagram his phrases. I tried to write without the sentence and with a lot of space on the page, but it was deeply alien to me.
The day that I picked up my actual Ph. D. diploma, from Columbia, I noticed that I was making a pact with Satan. I later realized it was my own unconscious, but at the time I thought it was Satan, and I said, “I’ll give up everything I learned, if I could write my own poems. They don’t have to be any good. Just let it be by one person trying not to imitate anyone.” (It was an uneven bargain—I had learned very little! I wasn’t well equipped to learn that way.)
When I got home that day, and every day after that (in the thirty to forty-five minutes I had free most days), I started writing. I hardly noticed how much I was enjambing, writing over the end of the line. The song was not pausing there. When I looked over what I had written, I saw that there were no commas or periods at the end of lines, not a one. The commas and the periods were in the middle. It was like a tectonic plate shift (to use a California earthquake kid example). Each time I wrote, the lines were configured in that same way.
Some of what I wrote then appeared in Satan Says—and it surprised me that people thought it was an angry book! I thought it was fun to sing and tramp tramp tramp along the line and disappear, then show up on the next line. It was the pleasure of music and dance and being alive. It’s not that I had anything to say. I don’t ever have much to “say.” The music of vowel, consonant, syntax is a lot of what’s going on for me in reading and writing poems. I love the sentence. Saying that, to me, is like someone on a ship in a storm saying, “I love the anchor.” I love the two musical beauties of the sentence and the line moving together. It feels to me like the heart and the lung in their counterpointing to each other.
I was thirty years old when I started writing anti-end-stopped. But when I was fifty, I saw that the “style” I had “made up” that day was the four-accent line, and the four-line stanza, of the hymns I was raised on in the Puritan church. I was annoyed—I wanted it to be something new. But I’d been hearing those rhythms before I was born.
I never thought I could be a part of a poetry world—a Gary Snyder–George Oppen world, a Muriel Rukeyser–Gwendolyn Brooks world, a teaching world. But my first book being taken by Pitt gave me a little hope. Then I noticed later that the second book was toned down, as if I suddenly thought, Oh, my God, am I going to be able to sit at the table? I’d better behave! Then with the third one, The Gold Cell—it’s as if I thought, Oh, come on, sometimes it’s not right to behave, and anyway you don’t want to.
Maybe in the last five years I have been a little less unsubtle. Without getting too subtle. I hope.
Voice: I hope to better avoid adjectives, elaborations, elaborateness. If it sounds pretentious, phony, arty, I have doubts about it. But I love some fancy words. I remember a period when I decided I would not let any more of them into my poems. I was at ShopRite, pushing a cart, looking at another woman pushing a cart. I thought of a word I had used and thought, What if she didn’t know that word? Would she see it as an angel (or devil) at the gate with a sword? So I began to use many repeated plain words. But eventually I thought, I don’t care—I’m crazy about those fancy words. So I’ll go to hell.
I love words with a lot of consonants. If you print out all the five vowels, they have six points—serifs—total. But x, k and t each have four points, like a young boy deer. To me, a word with a lot of consonants feels like a twig, like walking on the underbrush in moccasins, in the world before there were streets.
When I’m writing, sometimes it’s as if I’m food gathering. I’m foraging for berries (some four-footed or four-winged berries), looking, hunting—as if I think it could be of value to make a flawed “copy” of ordinary life, like a dollhouse. I don’t feel like I’m taking one person’s experience and sharing it with somebody who hasn’t had it (although that could be sometimes what it is). When writing, I don’t think we’re thinking of a reader, though maybe we’re secretly hoping there’ll be one. When I’m writing a poem, I feel as I do when I’m drawing, but I don’t feel that someone is looking over my shoulder.
Lined grocery-notebook paper with a black Bic Medium ballpoint—that’s my set of tools. I type up the poems I like on a manual typewriter. I love the smoothness of the ballpoint. It almost makes me shudder to think of a fountain pen. Like a Blair Witch twig.
I love the craft of writing, and typing things up. Writing feels so private to me. I like that feeling—I don’t think I could write on a screen where what I was writing, first draft, might be seen by others. I love the godless solitude of the initial “creation.” I feel like I’m being carried around in a basket—woven of something like seawater—and of language, of music, of mortal solitude.
Online Writing
Here’s a coda, placed in the concluding spot not because online writing is strikingly poetic or welcoming to individual style, but because it is so beguilingly up for grabs. In its heady early days, the World Wide Web promised to offer a wide world of style choices. A thousand fonts, illustration of all varieties, any imaginable conception of a page’s appearance were at an author’s fingertips—and all of those things, one imagined, would have a massive impact on the feel, the sound, the style of a piece of text. A decade or more later, even more bells and whistles are available (the actual sound of bells and whistles, for instance), but they’re acknowledged to be part of a separate discipline, having less to do with writing than with design. Online writing has, instead, followed the example of e-mail. It will likely be presented in a font, a type size, and a column width, and against a background color, that experience has found to be visually pleasing. Maybe there’ll be a photo in one margin. But generally the presentation is plain vanilla. The style is in the words.
Anyone who gets and receives e-mail—that is, pretty much anyone—knows this is a genre with plenty of style, comparatively little of it typographic. Sure, there are those smiley-face emoticons, and the practice of writing “U R 2” instead of “You are, too,” and the people who write in all lowercase, which has always struck me as similar to wearing pajamas in public (seriously strange when you’re meeting a friend, seriously unhinged when you’re conducting business). The striking thing, however, is how much personality comes through even when the capitalization and typography are strictly standard. This is because e-mail has worked a legitimately new variation on the relationship between writing and speech. I made the point in Chapter III that all styles negotiate a compromise between these two forms of discourse. In the middle style, the style we don’t notice, they’re carefully balanced. E-mail is firmly on the side of speech. So thumbs up to slang, brevity, and contractions; thumbs down to long words, sentences, paragraphs, and texts.
This is not an unalloyed good. In some of its manifestations, all spawned by the e-mail culture, online writing takes the worst qualities of speech—the ad hoc, extemporaneous nature of it—and gives them a permanent home in cyberspace. So the Web—the bulletin boards, the blogs, the home pages, and so forth—is home not only to “U R 2” but to truly extraordinary sloppiness, misinformation, disinformation, exclusionary inside jokes and inside references, barbarous abbreviations, ad hominem attacks, and rants that make Hunter Thompson look like Miss Manners.
The good stuff, though, is truly good, and in unfamiliar and sometimes exciting ways. Most of us have had the experience: starting to e-mail back and forth with a friend and discovering that he or she is a really good writer, somehow able to replicate or conjure up in the written word the sound of their conversation, the sense of themselves. As Michael Kinsley points out, letter-writing gets talked up a lot, but it had more or less been killed by the telephone long before e-mail came into the picture. In fact, e-mail has revived written communication—funny, cutting, above all personal, with rhetorical notes that can be played not only in the text but in the subject line, the salutation, or an attached link. In its receptiveness to quirky individuality and typography, and its brevity, e-mail sometimes resembles lyric poetry.
The best writing that’s posted on the Web for all the world to see has a bit of this quality, and some others besides. One of the most evident is an almost palpable freedom. For something to be published in a newspaper or magazine or as a book, all kinds of people have to make all kinds of decisions: is it acceptable and appropriate for the publication, will it be confusing or offensive, does it need to be edited, and if so, how much? Although Web magazines like Slate and Salon operate on something resembling the traditional model, most Web writers publish what they want when they want, simply because they find it interesting. It’s significant that it’s free in the other sense as well: no charge. Web writers don’t ask a quarter and don’t give a quarter, and you can feel this in their style; it lacks what we’re used to in print, an implied obligation to justify and explain. As noted, this leads to more top-of-the-head blustering and bloviating and self-indulgent navel-gazing than anyone should be exposed to. But it also produces some captivating material. Since 1997, Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Jim Lileks has been chronicling, every weekday, his opinions, his comings and goings, the toddler he now spends his days with, his affection for the computer game SimCity, in a Web site he calls The Bleat (www.lileks.com). By my informal count, he writes about three times as many words for The Bleat as he does for his newspaper column. It is audacious for him to expect anyone to care that much about his actions and reactions; perhaps because of that, we do. In the Julie/Julia Project, accessible as I write at http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/, Julie Powell describes in great and somehow beguiling detail her attempt to prepare every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There would be no room for this “deranged assignment” (Powell’s term) in the world of print, a fact that reflects poorly not on the deranged assignment but on the world of print. Room is the one thing the Web has plenty of; a function of its Borgesian capaciousness is that one comes upon unexpected subjects approached in unexpected ways.
Nancy Nall writes a column for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel and also a five-times-a-week posting to her Web site, www.nancynall.com. In 2002, columnist Bob Greene was forced to resign after news came out about a sexual indiscretion. Nall wrote a blistering post for the site that named the
three things everyone [in the newspaper business] tells you about Bob Greene. Number one: he’s a hack. Number two: he’s a horndog…. Did I say three things? I was wrong. The third thing you learn with your own eyes: This man wears the second-most preposterous toupee in the history of hairpieces, bowing only to Jim Traficant’s. They all tie together, in my mind. The horndog requires the hairpiece, which is sort of a metaphor for his hack-ness, his false, treacly, icky prose that only fools the willfully blind.
This would never have found a home in a mainstream printed medium. It hit a guy when he was down and seemed to take some glee in the blow; it had rantlike qualities; it was…unseemly. Yet at the same time, it was good. The emotion, the conviction, the verve, and, yes, the word horndog all are not found enough in print. Jim Romenesko included a link to the post on his very widely read media news Web site, and Nall—whose page had previously gotten 130 or so visitors a day—suddenly was in the spot-light. She received a flattering e-mail from a Chicago Tribune editor who asked to see some of her columns. A few days later the editor e-mailed her: “I’m disappointed. There’s nothing here that matches the tone or voice of your Web page.” Nall was disappointed, too, but she had to acknowledge, as she wrote in an essay some months later, that the editor was right: “In print, I’m more likely to pull punches, equivocate, wring hands. But on the Web, I use stronger language. I run rings around the big ship in my inflatable rubber Zodiac boat.”
In an e-mail to me, she observed:
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the voice of the web is a matter of audience. The attitude on the web is, “Don’t like my page? Go start your own.” Because anyone can do it, because the technology is now so advanced that you really don’t need any more skills than those involved in web-surfing, it’s that easy. That sort of anarchic screw-you frees writers. Sometimes, it frees them in a bad way—to fling apple-sauce at one another in semi-literate prose. But for a good writer, especially one who’s spent a term working for a newspaper, it’s positively bracing.
The Web has not and will not either doom or redeem writing. But it has been a medium for some fresh and intriguing styles and voices; as new technology arrives and writers adapt to it, there will be more. It should be a good show. Stay tuned.
Michael Kinsley was born in Detroit in 1951. After graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he edited the New Republic and Harper’s magazine and for six years was a host of CNN’s Crossfire. In 1996 he became the founding editor of the Microsoft’s online magazine Slate, stepping down in 2002. He currently writes columns for Slate and Time magazine. We spoke in 2001 in his office at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. From “Pious Pair,” www.slate.com:
Back when I was a co-host on CNN’s Crossfire, Joe Lieberman and John McCain were known as “7:15 guys”—meaning that the producer could call either of them up at 7:15 p.m., and they’d be on time for a live show at 7:30. (At least, unlike another current senator, they asked what the topic was before dropping important affairs of state and rushing over.) McCain once even came back for a partial rebroadcast at 1 a.m. when, for reasons of verisimilitude, they needed the same senator wearing the same shirt.
To say that two members of the Senate are publicity hounds because they like to be on television is a bit redundant (find a shy senator) and a bit unfair (nobody had a gun to my head either). But even among the self-promoters of Washington, Lieberman and McCain stand out for their enthusiasm and their skill. An important part of that skill, of course, is making enthusiasm look like reluctance. Both are fond of the conceit that they are saddened or alarmed or deeply disturbed by whatever matter impelled them toward the microphones that particular day. The image in your mind, though, if you are an irritated fellow senator or even just a lay cynic, is of Joe or John perusing the newspaper over breakfast coffee as if it were a shopping catalog, looking for something to be saddened by today.
Half or a little more of the articles we publish are written more or less exactly as they would have been in print. Frankly, that’s because a lot of writers are behind the times. They’re not taking full advantage of, or even living comfortably in, the medium they find themselves in.
The other half of what we publish is the voice of e-mail. That has turned out to be, I think, Slate’s most significant, possibly only significant, contribution to the development of journalism and the language. The voice of e-mail, at its best, is the reflectiveness of writing combined with the spontaneity of talking.
I think e-mail is a wonderful medium. Nick Lemann, who’s more or less my best friend, Jim Fallows, and I and a few other people got on MCI mail very early on, in the very early ’80s. I remember that it cost $1.35 per message. Nick and I have been e-mailing each other since. It’s probably the intellectually richest relationship I have, even though we don’t talk on the phone that much, don’t see each other very often at all. It was all through e-mail. It was that experience, more than anything else, that was the inspiration for Slate. We felt that if we could replicate this in print, so to speak, we would have something really exciting. We’ve done it most of the time.
The one thing we’ve all forgotten about computers is how easy it made it to edit yourself, to change things. I suspect my e-mail is not only more carefully crafted than speaking orally, I think it’s more carefully crafted than letters I used to bang out, because switching a paragraph or rewriting something was so hard. There were all those agonizing discussions, long before the Internet: Were computers making prose better or worse? I think it’s pretty much settled. The answer is, Better. People say, “Oh, e-mail has destroyed the culture of writing letters.” No one has written letters since the invention of the telephone. E-mail replaced talking, not writing, and it’s a lot better thought out than talking. One interesting comparison is to online chat, which represents the worst of talking and writing. You type out everything, there’s no time for reflection. I can’t see any way it’s superior to a telephone call.
I know my column is going to be reprinted for a newspaper syndicate, which is a bit constraining. There are times I’d like to throw in a link, but that obviously wouldn’t work in a newspaper. Links are part of the style of Web writing, and some of our writers, like Tim Noah, are adopting to it more quickly than others.
There are even more radical things that can be done to develop new styles of writing for the Web, that add something print can’t supply. The one we’ve almost totally failed at is music pieces. An enormous amount of space is spent trying to describe in words things that are essentially nonverbal, and then you give your opinion of it in the space you have left. The Web should obviate that. We’ve made some headway in this, but it’s like pulling teeth to get critics to do it. They end up putting in the links, then describing it anyway. The argument I make is that no one would ever dream of publishing a book review without quotes from the book.
Overall, we’re a bit old-fashioned for the Web. If the theory is that on the Web the personal voice is more prominent than in print—people saying, “I’m really pissed off at Ben’s blue shirt,” instead of, “The problem with blue shirts is…”—that’s not really what we do. I don’t want to read a lot of that stuff. There’s plenty of self-indulgence in Slate, but the let’s-see-how-outrageous-I-can-be first-person stuff, we try to avoid that. In the early days there used to be arguments about what was the true nature of the Web, what kind of voice was true to the nature of the Web, and who was betraying it. We often got accused of betraying it. Sometimes the criticism was right. We had page numbers at first, which made no sense. But the argument was essentially ridiculous. The nature of the Web is that it’s limitless.
There does seem to be one inherent limitation—people will just not comfortably read a long piece on a computer screen. Someone once said a very wise thing to me: that the problem is not the computer, the problem is the chair. In any case, our definition of what a long piece is has had to get tougher and tougher. We started out thinking we could publish up to twenty-five hundred words. We now start to get itchy at about twelve hundred, and even that is extraordinarily long for the Web. That will change when tablet PCs are perfected, and there will finally be a screen you can take to the john.