Reading and Dozing on the bus

There’s a book I’ve been reading this week, Rosemary Ashton’s 142 Strand*.  It’s about how the Strand used to be the base for journalism and publishers in Victorian times (especially radical ones, and some pornography), before Fleet Street took over.  Bohemian people galore.

I’m finding it fascinating though I’m not too far in yet.  It’s especially about the growth of one small publishing house and adjacent shop, owned by a Mr Chapman, that ended up catering to allsorts of radical thinkers (atheists, anarchists, socialists, fringe scientists – some of that science is now mainstream; some consigned to crankiness of the past) – and George Eliot and her not quite husband. Mr Chapman bought the booksellers and publishers in his little section of the Strand from a concern already going; published lots of famous religious thinkers of time – many Unitarians, and ex Unitarian minister and one of the founders of Transcendentalism – (mixture of Plato, Kant and Coleridge): Ralph Walso Emerson (backed by Carlyle, of Sartor Resartus fame). 

He carried on doing this sort of publishing, so had small but loyal following, who bought his books and published their own via him. A bit incestuous, like the Bloomsbury set later on, with Virginia Woolf.  He had very little money though, as it didn’t bring in much.  Reading this section, about his trouble paying bills, I was finding it strange how I simultaneously had a vision of the eternal romance of the idea of the striving artist or activist, going short for principle…and then being quite a bit surprised that it feels the same today in many ways.  Anything that is actually worth doing (aside from acting or other areas of art where you have genuinely hit it lucky and big) seem to pay a pittance.  Job security and a decent wage seem to come from jobs that if you really thought about them and lined up your beliefs next to them…might not mesh.

The earnest Mr Chapman tried a branch out with mesmerism books (seen as a lash-up of spiritualism and cutting edge science), which became a fad during 1840s (again as it had done in the age of Mesmer himself, sometime earlier).  Harriet Martineau, intellectual and political short story writer backed his ideas with a glowing review, believing it had cured her of a brain tumour.  It brought in few more readers.  Astute of him to back this fad just before it really got going.

There seemed to be many copyright problems in this age– copyright law was only just instituted, and was complex and unreliable – even lawyers despaired of making it mean anything – and that was the situation over here; in the US, piracy in publishing was completely standard at the time, as authors as famous as Dickens and Gaskell had found out.  There was practically no point taking it to court either, as it was so accepted as just what happened.  Now that’s something that has changed rather since then, in both countries.

The thing that really got his press and bookselling business noticed was Mary Ann Evans (soon to be George Eliot), translating a copy of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, which took an uncompromising and typically German thorough look at the Old Testament prophecies and their following through in the New Testament, and concluding the tome was mostly mythical.  (Some critics argued with him, and not all were strictly religious – James Martineau did, saying he used logic on something logic could not be used , which is a very Victorian and still enduring idea.  (That sometimes I agree with and sometimes I don’t…)

Also, in his early years Mr Chapman published the brother of Cardinal Henry Newman, Frances William Newman - the dissenter who got so dissenting people ended up thinking him an atheist.  He published The Soul and Phases of Faith – and so echoed the back and forthing and discomfort many Christians felt with their faith at this time, that George Eliot notes, only 30 years later, that whilst people like her used to thrill to hear him, he was now almost unheard of and unquoted, despite affecting so many lives, so “beneficiently”.  I haven’t got much further than Chapter 2, but the sudden sinking into the Victorian mindset of a few people and what they strived for is as always, fascinating.  I read it when I’m not too tired on the bus, when I’m not doing the head nodding thing.  Evening is best for this one, as in the mornings I like something lighter while trying to wake.

I sit in the coffeeshop in the mornings and try to do some writing exercises, before I go on.  Trying to shore up one part of my personality before the rest of it is sorely tried.  The fighting off of a cold all week and the taking care of Stanley and Fluffhead when I get in, who seem to be expiring of ManVirus (I don’t actually say that as a put down, I firmly do believe in manflu since I think I also get it!) has been causing a drought of writing; this week not much came.  Too tired and vague.  I did successfully complete one exercise, which was supposed to be a small flash fiction exercise – a snippet if someone’s life focalised by use of their tone, their attitudes shown through the tone of their voice.  I wasn’t sure how much I liked or rated it, and I didn’t like her tone – so I must have made her a bit real, as I was bothering to dislike her, but here it is, since I’m sharing my writing this year, for the most part, with you, O Faithful Singular Reader  (and where are all you people from Russia I used to have?!):

***

The thing is, he has no idea I’m watching him most of the time.  He sits there, in the periphery of my vision, all day, to the left, working with the others.  Just one month a year.  I wait all year for this, and just the one month.  But I can see him everyday then!  He wears pressed blue shirts, good thread weave – he’s classy.  He’s bred, you can see the public school in his manner and confidence.  In the way he holds himself, the way he’s skinny.  You can see his parents brought him up right, he’s friendly but not too friendly.  He chats to me, but then he chats to the others.  But I think he chats to me more.  While he’s here I try and wear the clothes I think he will like the most, so that he can see that I am like him – well, not like him, but similar to him.  That I am one of him.  I wear the newest of my shirts, with the necklines that dip, but not too much.  The trousers that look most executive.  I won’t wear a skirt as I’ve only got short, and for a start I don’t like my legs, and for second, I think my boots with them would look wrong, a bit slutty.  Though some of those girls in there with him, they don’t seem to care that they really haven’t got the legs for their little high shoes; or that their skirts are too short.  They totter through the office and you think, who do you think you are?

Earlier, he asked me if I wanted something from Starbucks, as they were going on a coffee run.  He asks me this every day – joking with me.  None of the others ever do this.  I never carry on the conversation long.  I think that would be obvious, and the others might see.  And what would they think – posh lot, someone like him taking a serious interest in someone like me?  So we keep it subtle.  I chat a little bit, and then get on with my typing.  Its enough.  And if I turn around and do filing, I can see him anytime I want.  I have to be careful to not watch his arse when he goes out.  He’s so well formed…

Anyway, he offered me a drink, and I accepted a frappacino, and then he sent one of the other more junior ones to do it – he’s in charge, I think, after the one in the suit jacket (never takes that jacket off), that comes in and out every day.

He smiles at me when I catch his eye.  He asks if I like the drink.  This is it.  I can’t really be with him, because we come from different places.  But he likes me, and I like him.  It is enough to know it.  And here he comes, smiling and looking purposeful.  Soon I go home to my husband, sitting in his old clothes on the sofa, watching his programmes.

(507 words)

***

See?  She’s not really a nice person.  So I felt like I did make her exist, but I wouldn’t want much more to do with her or to write a story with her in it.  That’s what bamboozles me about some of these exercises…I write them but it feels like to no purpose, as I don’t like what’s produced and won’t use it again.

Anyway.  I hope Stanley and Fluffhead get their ManVirus gone soon; and I hope Mum comes back too (as she’s sick also), as I feel life is on a pause of nothing much but getting up early, being stressed at work and coming home, with no decompression time and very little rest, with the lack of her help and the added caring for of the two men.

I have nothing much left to do but to observe people on the bus, and play out their stories in my head in between dozes.  Or sometimes at the same time as dozing.  There was a particularly ordinary looking woman on the bus on Friday, going home from work early due to a temporary Fluffhead emergency (now sorted).  Obviously in a rush, and no personal stuff done all day, only working, she was holding a few letters that still needed opening.  Balancing them haphazardly on her rucksack as she sat opposite me, trying to get her hair sorted and her snack crisps out.  She settled to opening her post about 5 minutes later, and the rustling she made disturbed me momentarily from that odd half there and half not dream state you get into on transport.  I couldn’t decide if my memory of her reaction to one of the letters was totally overblown and half dreamt, or if she really was this transformed by it.  Needless to say, I was most perturbed I didn’t get a nose at what the letters contents actually were…But this is what I remember when I think of that journey that day:

A woman looks up, and her face shines.  She puts down the letter.  She is smiling in a moment of personal truth and freedom, and her hands are fisted on the letter, crumpling the edges she’s holding it that hard.  It’s a moment of vindication, and she breathes in, her cheeks wide on her face, with the smile held inside her, no teeth, but it’s all over her face. She blooms in this moment, softly pink, softly cream – she is a rose wearing peaches in the sudden burst of sunlight from behind a tree, that breaks over her face as we move down the street.  Her honeyed brown hair, held back off her face, shields her head from the warmth of the sun: its afternoon now.  She glints with sunlight and she knows that finally, summer will come. 

Obviously…I must have been a bit dreaming during that sudden overthinking of her business.  Though, I hope it was a good moment for her…and I do wish summer would come.  It was lovely going home that day and it still being light outside.

I doze off again, and have a hazy memory of Stanley and I in our old Stratford house where we used to let all the neighbourhoods cats come in and play, as we are Very Much Cat People. Kittens chasing string; mouse chasing – what do they chase?  But they do go fast…right over Stanley’s foot, the other day, and through the room and out.  Ever since, we have been looking for this mouse, and its friends.  And not leaving crumbs out.  Are they running within the walls, little Samuel Whiskers and friends, mice, rats, cats, all looking for each other, and make roly poly puddings?  It’s the opposite of me now, sitting here turgidly, bumping back and forth on this bus, ever getting toward home, but never quite making it. Dream cat rubs soft fur against my cheek and I smile, or do I just twitch, the way sleeping people do?  Another day, another day, same as the last, same as the last.

 (*142 Strand - by Rosemary Ashton, Vintage, 2008)

Things That Annoy Me, No.2

Style Fascism in Creative Writing Courses, and Taste in General about Writing in this Century

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.[1]

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs[2].

What I mean here is that lovely dictum we’ve all been hearing for a number of years now:  Show, Don’t Tell!

I’ve been having a bit of a fit of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century novels lately.  I get faddy.  I’ve been re-reading eighteenth century bits I read for my dissertation; not the whole of them (Time!  Time!  Woe!), but segments.  And Jane Austen has been having regular visitations from me, as has George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. 

I have always found the ‘Show, don’t Tell’ dictum annoying.  It assumes that all the big fat epic novels of the past did nothing but tell, and never showed.  It also assumes that the telling voice must have been so blisteringly boring or annoying that you will be done with narrators’ altogether.  It implies we will have no more of middle men, those narrators coming over here, stealing our stories and telling them to us, when we could equally envision them for ourselves (were we only given the words)!  Pish!  This sounds all very good.  Full of independence.  Nice pioneering spirit, hmm?

But how about the idea that it also plays into the laziness of our age, our generation?  The fact we all spend so much time in front of the TV, or out at films (less so, but still a nice popcorny treat when you can…).  The fact that unless we can see something, have it right in front of us, it just can’t seem to be processed?  People seem to give very little thought to the fact that when watching anything, they are watching a process of careful construction.  Somebody picked the images, the lighting, the composition, the mood music over the top.  The editor alone, had a huge impact on what you see, that looks at once so artless, but is obviously very artful.

Film and TV are obviously visual mediums.  The reading of fiction is also visual, but in a very different way.  The words relate and tangle with the images the writer gives you, the sense of an atmosphere.  These create your own interpreted vision in your head, of what the writer said.  (This is why we get annoyed if we see a dramatisation of a book we like but the hero or heroine look wrong, not how we imagined).  Peter Shaffer[3] rightly said, in his play Amadeus, that when twenty characters talk at the same time in a book or a play, its noise; but in music it’s the most beautiful harmony.  If someone makes an adaptation of a book you like, to film or TV, and it’s not as you envisioned at all, then its noise to your mind.  The weaving together of your imagination, the visual descriptions of the author, and the words they used are the ingredients that give you your scrumptious cake of reading.

Now, I did several Open University writing courses, and all were excellent, and helped me a lot.  (One taught me to love the Edit and not fear it; another taught me to love the Critic, for he too has his place, for example.)  But one spent far too much time telling me how much drama had to teach the writing person[4].  ‘Course, drama has loads to teach the writing person – many techniques are useful: pacing and plot arc-ing etc, to just name two.  But there was such an emphasis on visual description of every aspect of the story, and this was mirrored in lots of otherwise helpful writing books I read in conjunction with the course, that I began to feel annoyed. 

For example, if your character cries, don’t describe why she is crying, or even the tears on her face.  Describe by her actions alone, why she is crying.  If your hero is triumphant after previous desolating circumstances, don’t tell us why, don’t even tell us how…just show us his joy in his actions, convey it to us like a camera, moving over the scene, make visual links that tell us the story that way.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a very exciting way to tell a story: so that it is all immediately visible in the mind, as clear pictures.

But it isn’t the only way, and it’s certainly not the best way, alone.  It’s just a style, a good style, but a style fad like any other style fad.  I say, LOUDLY, take from it what you want, use it when it suits you, and mix it up with other ways of story telling. That’s my opinion, and it’s how I write.  DO NOT let anyone tell you how you should be writing, and that one way is Best!  I say Fiffle, to that.

I know lots of people who still enjoy those rolling thumping epics of the nineteenth century, like Middlemarch (the mythically wondrous George Eliot), to pick a great fat one at random.  Or even the monstrously rambling and quite idiosyncratic doorstops of the eighteenth century, like Tom Jones (Henry Fielding), or Tristram Shandy (Lawrence Sterne) or Clarissa (Samuel Richardson).  The people I have spoken to (my own small sample, yes, it won’t stand up as a sociological survey, I’m quite aware) have said what they love about these enormous tomes are the love of words the authors display, and the Narrative Voice.

People forget how fun it is – and how common it was, in the days before mass literacy – to be read to, to be spoken to – to be included; drawn close and talked to as a confidante.  Here, the absolutely awful (really) villain, Lovelace, from Clarissa, is writing a letter to his best friend, defending his dread plans of raping (yes, isn’t it graphic subject matter for the 18^th century?) the poor Clarissa, and describes his life playfully:

Who knows but in her time, poor goody Moore may have met with a Lovelace, or a Belford, or some such vile fellow? – My little harum-scarum beauty knows not what strange histories every woman living, who has had the least independence of will, could tell her, were such to be as communicative as she is– But here’s the thing–I have given her cause enough of offence; but not enough to make her hold her tongue[5].

Now what’s this I hear you say?  That that isn’t a narratorial voice, but a character voice?  That’s more or less the point.  Those enormous tomes were filled with character voices.  They were as direct as direct could be.  They played with form, they played with voice.  After the rape (yes, Lovelace was very dastardly indeed, I spent the whole book sighing and getting cross and shaking my head – it was a bloody good read), poor Clarissa writes various letters to people, trying to get them to believe what has happened to her.  Lovelace has cleverly separated her from her family and friends, so she is alone.  She has a bit of a breakdown, loses her sense of self for a while.  Here, in one of her little fragments, she tries on Lovelace’s thoughts, blames herself for what he did to her:

A LADY took a great fancy to a young lion, or a bear, I forget which […] She fed it with her own hand; she nursed up the wicked cub with great tenderness […] so that like a lap-dog, it would follow her all over the house.  But mind what followed.  At last, somehow, having […] disobliged it on some occasion, it resumed its nature; and on a sudden fell upon her, and tore her in pieces–And who was most to blame, I pray?  The brute, or the lady?  The lady, surely! – For what she did, was out of nature, out of character at least: what it did, was in its own nature[6].

Isn’t that chillingly persuasive? Relevant?  (We still have arguments about rape today: this justification falls into the ever disgusting and puerile ‘she asked for it’ category.)  But see how it’s written?  There’s no images as such here.  Yet you see it, in flashes, you hear it in your mind, you hear the male voice overlaying the female.  You are there, in the story.  And the thing about Richardson and some of his eighteenth century compatriots, was that all the voices are the narrator, really – all the novels were a big soup of their own ideas on morals and how life should be lived: it was ALL narrator, when you got down to it.

Some of the best novels of the nineteenth century made great fun with the whole concept of narrator.  In the Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins, the female protagonist is menaced through most of the book by another marvellous villain.  She tells the story.  Then (SPOILER ALERT!!!) at a brilliant and vital moment of the story, he abducts her.  The next entry you read is by him!  The complete change of tone and the shock of realising what has happened and the intimacy of suddenly hearing and feeling this dread character speak himself is wonderful!  (I gave a great gasp and had to get up and go and tell Alias Troubadour, who I was with at the time.  The cat was disinterested; so was Troubadour, but still.  I found it genuinely thrilling.)

The great argument FOR the showing and not telling, is that it is very immediate, it places you right in the centre of the action, and doesn’t tell what to think about it.  It lets you make your own mind up. That is very true of the good examples.  But what its made for in reality, is a lot of very lazy shorthand writing (and film, tsk tsk), and a lot of telegraphed emotion.  The whole point about writing is that it’s a lot more subtle and penetrating than dramatic techniques alone.  You can be in someone’s head – or everyone’s head, good old omniscient narrator, so much slagged today – or just one.  Or no one’s; you’re just an essence of the time, the area, a spirit of place.  The other point is that you will make your own mind up as to what to think anyway.  You aren’t stupid.  You’ll figure out that the narrator is Of Their Time, and bear that in mind when listening to the moral pronouncements especially.  

Moving to the present day (as most of the famous omniscient and semi-omniscient narrators are behind us), you’ll find some of the most loved works of now, tell as well as show.  The hugely successful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell (Susanna Clarke), was a marvellous throwback to the past ways of writing, spliced with writing more Nowishly, an obvious example.  Or…

Hear this:

Dear God,

Nettie here with us.  She run away from home.  She say she hate to leave our stepma, but she had to git out, maybe fine help for the other little ones.  The boys be alright, she say.  They can stay out his way.  When they git big they gon fight him.

Maybe kill, I say[7].

Do you feel that?  In my opinion, that’s the only way to dispense with a omniscient narratorial voice.  A very powerful ‘I’ voice.  That was the scarily strong and moving voice of Celie in The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker.  You can’t be more there than a direct hearing of a story.  You close your eyes and see it from the feeling of it.  Not just any images given.

Even in more popular women’s fiction – lets be rude and call it chicklit, as is so often done in that derogatory way – you’ll hear particularly in early Jane Green, and the mistress Lisa Jewell right until now, a fair bit of telling going on with the showing.  It’s mixed up – and very readable for it.  They haven’t thrown the baby out with the bath water.  Neither have brilliant current literary writers like, say, Sarah Waters (Fingersmith, Affinity, Tipping the Velvet etc).

I think maybe you’ll be saying to me: but you’re confusing omniscient narrators with character voice, altogether.  I say nope – the people who argue the Telling Vs. Showing case, they are the ones confused.  What they forget is that George Eliot and her summations, Charles Dickens and his pronouncements; they WERE characters.  All those overblown narrators, sailing over the main story, apparently robbing you of the right to think for yourself: they were characters in their own rights, albeit without a name, often.  They set a tone, they held the atmosphere, and sometimes they controlled the pace.  But they were just as valid as any other character.  Use them if you want.  Just because they are out of fashion doesn’t yet make them obsolete.

Novels are about hearing voices, as much as about seeing images.

I have to go and eat lunch and do the hoovering (just to pointlessly narrate myself here), but I’ll leave you with the original Miss Chicklit herself, and don’t you love the sound of her youthful voice, here loving to play with the idea of omniscient narrator:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.  Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition were all equally against her[8]. 

In addition to what has been already said of Catherine Morland’s personal and mental endowments, when about to be launched into all the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks’ residence in Bath, it may be stated, for the reader’s more certain information, lest the following pages should otherwise fail of giving any idea of what her character is meant to be; that her heart was affectionate, her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affectation of any kind – her manners just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing, and, when in good looks, pretty – and her mind about as ignorant and unformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is[9].

Well, don’t you love it? 

---

[1] George Eliot, Middlemarch, London: Penguin (1994; 2003), p.7.  Opening lines of the book.

[2] Ibid, p.838.  The closing lines of the novel, the summation.

[3] Peter Shaffer, Amadeus, London: Penguin (2007) – I refuse to give the page ref – read the whole thing!  And if you get a mo, do read his Equus as well.  It’s what the word Fabulous was overenthused for.  He is always Very Thought Provoking. (And shocking, so be prepared, specially with Equus.)

[4] This course will remain nameless, but anyone who has done it will recognise it immediately.  It also had the other major flaw of using one short story by one of the course authors, all the way through, as an example of various types of style and re-writing techniques.  I feel like being a bit cutting about that, but I won’t.  I will just say: more varied examples would probably have been a lot more helpful.

[5] Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, London and Bath: Penguin (1985), p.790.

[6] Ibid, p.891.

[7] Alice Walker, The Colour Purple, London: The Woman’s Press (1983; 1992), p.17.

[8] Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998 edn.), p.1.

[9] Ibid, p.5.