Write what you know, they say. So we can’t really complain when writers write about writers. Well, we can, but they’re going to do it anyway. Here are one hundred examples to identify. Some non-fiction. Translations marked [*].
Hints on request.
The authors:
Louisa M. Alcott, Dante Alighieri, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Paul Auster
John Barth, Ambrose Bierce, Roberto Bolaño, Flann O’Brien, Charles Bukowski, Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt
Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Thomas Carlyle, Raymond Carver, Constantine Cavafy, Raymond Chandler, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hart Crane, John Crowley
Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Lord Dunsany, Lawrence Durrell
T. S. Eliot
John Fante
William Gass, Stella Gibbons, William Golding, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Thom Gunn
Dashiell Hammett, Knut Hamsun, Seamus Heaney, Robert A. Heinlein, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Zbigniew Herbert, Horace, Ted Hughes
John Irving
Charles Jackson, Henry James, Robinson Jeffers, James Joyce
Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling
R. A. Lafferty, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Jack London, H. W. Longfellow
Norm MacDonald, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, Ian McEwan, Henry Miller, Czeslaw Milosz, L. M. Montgomery, Iris Murdoch
Vladimir Nabokov
George Orwell
Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Harold Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett
Philip Roth
J. D. Salinger, William Saroyan, W. G. Sebald
William Shakespeare, Varlam Shalamov, P. B. Shelley, Philip Sidney, Dan Simmons
Dylan Thomas, James Thurber, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, Anne Tyler
Kurt Vonnegut
Evelyn Waugh, Jean Webster, E. B. White, P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Wolfe, William Wordsworth
1)
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
2)
As much as he hated the travel, he loved the writing — the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remained in neat, terse paragraphs. He cribbed from other guidebooks, seizing small kernels of value and discarding the rest. He spent pleasurable hours dithering over questions of punctuation. Righteously, mercilessly, he weeded out the passive voice. The effort of typing made the corners of his mouth turn down, so that no one could have guessed how much he was enjoying himself. I am happy to say, he pecked out, but his face remained glum and intense.
3)
She guided the conversation in a different direction. ‘I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.’
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.
‘It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.’ She reflected. ‘I prefer stories about squalor.’
4)
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them. The roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.
5)
A bald man with strange tufts of hair over each ear interviewed me. “Yes?” he asked, looking at me over the sheet.
“I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.”
“Oh, a writer, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not.”
“What do you write?”
“Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.”
“A novel, eh?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“‘The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.’”
“Oh, I like that. What’s it about?”
“Everything.”
“Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?”
“Yes.”
“How about my wife?”
“She’s in there too.”
“You don’t say. Why do you want to work in a ladies’ dress shop?’
6)
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts. She returned the tablet to me a few years ago; the first entry is an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing to death in the Arctic night, only to find, when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she would die of the heat before lunch.
7)
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so — which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions.
8)
‘All I did was speak to you.’
I went on and wrote another sentence. It dies hard when it is really going and you are into it.
‘I suppose you’ve got so great nobody can speak to you.’
I wrote another sentence that ended the paragraph and read it over. It was still all right and I wrote the first sentence of the next paragraph.
‘You never think about anyone else or that they may have problems too.’
I had heard complaining all my life. I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises, certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon.
‘Suppose you wanted to be a writer and felt it in every part of your body and it just wouldn’t come.’
I went on writing and I was beginning to have luck now as well as the other thing.
‘Suppose once it had come like an irresistible torrent and then it left you mute and silent.’
Better than mute and noisy, I thought, and went on writing.
9)
Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,
I knew myself once more a poet
Guarded by timeless principalities
Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;
And presently dared open both my eyes.
10)
Francis Bacon once said, “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” We have all contributed our wonderful obstructions to the mind, have we not? I more than most. One of the twentieth century’s better, forgotten writers — that is better-comma-forgotten, once bon moted: “I love being a writer. It’s the paperwork I can’t stand.” Get it? Well, amigos and amigette, I love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words I can’t stand.
11)
Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ carries the sub-title: ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’ In Fat’s case, the ‘intimations of immortality’ were based on recollections of a future life.
In addition, Fat could not write poetry worth shit, despite his best efforts. He loved Wordsworth’s ‘Ode,’ and wished he could come up with its equal. He never did.
12)
“Anne, I’ve got a sick-making one. It’s about a little kitten that wanders into a church on Christmas Eve to get warm. Besides being starved and frozen and lost, the kitten has — God knows why — an injured paw. All right; start: ‘Snow had been falling since — ’ ”
“What pen name?”
“Mmm . . . use ‘Molly Wadsworth’; this one is pretty icky. Title it The Other Manger. Start again.”
13)
The ardor of those books, composed in the sunny stillness of his California canyon and seething with unbuttoned and aggressive innocence, seemed to have little to do with the author himself when he came coolly out into the fallen world he’d been so ardent about down in the canyon. In fact, the writer who found irresistible all vital and dubious types, not excluding the swindlers of both sexes who trampled upon the large hearts of his optimistic, undone heroes; the writer who could locate the hypnotic core in the most devious American self-seeker and lead him to disclose, in spirited locutions all his own, the depths of his conniving soul; the writer whose absorption with “the grand human discord” made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling — well, in the flesh he gave the impression of being out to lunch.
14)
Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions.
Let us express our envy for the man with a steady job and no worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs,
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.
15)
Large vistas opened before Auberon on the crowded streets. The scripts, his and Sylvie’s collaboration through long, hilarious and excited evenings, were shapely and thrilling, he thought, though not exquisite to look at, typed as they were on George’s old machine; no matter, no matter, his future was filled with expensive office equipment, and with long lunches, prize secretaries, hard work for great rewards. He would seize, from between the claws of the dragon who was denned in the heart of the Wild Wood, the golden treasure it guarded.
16)
“Is Latin poetry hard to read?” Eugene said.
“Well,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head. “It’s not easy. Horace — ” he began carefully.
“He wrote Odes and Epodes,” said Tom Davis. “What is an Epode, Mr. Leonard?”
“Why,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively, “it’s a form of poetry.”
“Hell!” said “Pap” Rheinhart in a rude whisper to Eugene. “I knew that before I paid tuition.”
Smiling lusciously, and stroking himself with gentle fingers, Mr. Leonard turned back to the lesson.
“Now let me see,” he began.
“Who was Catullus?” Eugene shouted violently. Like a flung spear in his brain, the name.
“He was a poet,” Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled. He regretted.
“What sort of poetry did he write?” asked Eugene.
There was no answer.
“Was it like Horace?”
“No-o,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively. “It wasn’t exactly like Horace.”
“What was it like?” said Tom Davis. “Like your granny’s gut,” “Pap” Rheinhart toughly whispered.
“Why — he wrote on topics of general interest in his day,” said Mr. Leonard easily.
17)
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
18)
She did work hard at what she wrote, — hard enough at any rate to cover her pages quickly; and was, by nature, a clever woman. She could write after a glib, common-place, sprightly fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.
19)
“Your promise is sufficiently devout
To leave a mark,” he said; “and one so clear,
Not even Lethe’s flood can blot it out.
But if the words you offer are sincere,
Explain exactly why, with speech and gaze,
You indicate you hold my name so dear?”
And I to him: “The lovely lines you phrased,
So long as modern usage keeps them young,
Will mean your writing’s very ink is praised.”
[*]
20)
He would give them what they wished, redeeming his craft to art. He saw in his mind’s eye a fair-hung stage shut in from sun or wind, fair languid creatures like these discoursing wittily, no Kemp grossness, no blood-bladders or Alleyn ranting. He would provide, he would lend words to these elegant puppets. But he sighed, knowing himself to be caught forever between worlds — earth and air, reason and belief, action and contemplation. Alone among all sorts of men, he embraced a poet’s martyrdom.
“I’m going to help you,” she said. “I can, too. Think of all the people I know who know people. I’m going to help you because you look like my brother Fred. Only smaller. I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen, that’s when I left home, and he was already six-feet-two. My other brothers were more your size, runts.”
22)
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry —
23)
After two or three stanzas and several images by which he himself was struck, his work took possession of him and he felt the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the relation of the forces that determine artistic creation is, as it were, reversed. The dominant thing is no longer the state of mind the artist seeks to express but the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the home and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of sonority but in terms of the impetuousness and power of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by virtue of its own laws, meter and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, which are even more important, but which are as yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and unnamed.
[*]
24)
You listen to the drivellings of a farmer’s wife?
Since I was the farmer, yes.
You were no farmer, sir. A weekend wanker.
I wrote my Homage to Wessex in the summerhouse at West Upfield.
I have never had the good fortune to read it.
It is written in terza rima, a form which, if you will forgive my saying so, you have never been able to master.
25)
He did not know how long an article he should write, but he counted the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the San Francisco Examiner, and guided himself by that. Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation marks. He had never thought of such things before . . .
26)
I’m afraid I never heard of Trellis, said Byrne, Who is Trellis?
A member of the author class, I said.
Did he write a book on Tactics? I fancy I met him in Berlin. A tall man with glasses.
He has been in bed for the last twenty years, I said.
27)
As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow on the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.
28)
If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night. I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturned, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book — the unconscious worked on it instead . . .
29)
Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,
He to the overbearing Boanerges
Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor,
Blessed be the vintage!)
Saying how, at an alehouse under Cotswold,
He had made sure of his very Cleopatra,
Drunk with enormous, salvation-contemning
Love for a tinker.
30)
The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this — that only *there*, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold — the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential — the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another?
31)
‘Well, of course, I must autograph it for you,’ she said, and at the same moment all was suddenly made clear to me. I had missed it at first, because I had been concentrating on the girl with the green face, but I now perceived at the bottom of the jacket the words ‘By Florence Craye’. They had been half hidden by a gummed-on label which said ‘Book Society Choice of the Month’. I saw all, and the thought of how near I had come to marrying a female novelist made everything go black for a bit.
32)
Afraid of a woman! Ha, great writer this! How can he write about women, when he’s never had a woman? Oh you lousy fake, you phony, no wonder you can’t write! No wonder there wasn’t a woman in the *The Little Dog Laughed*. No wonder it wasn’t a love story, you fool, you dirty little schoolboy.
33)
Mrs. Ariadne Oliver was extremely well-known as one of the foremost writers of detective and other sensational stories. She wrote chatty (if not particularly grammatical) articles on The Tendency of the Criminal; Famous Crimes Passionnels; Murder for Love v. Murder for Gain. She was also a hotheaded feminist, and when any murder of importance was occupying space in the Press there was sure to be an interview with Mrs. Oliver, and it was mentioned that Mrs. Oliver had said, “Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard!” She was an earnest believer in woman’s intuition.
34)
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.
35)
‘ . . . Write about your own people by all means, don’t be soft on them, turn them into figures of fun if you must, but don’t patronise them, don’t sell them short and above all don’t lay them out on display like quaint objects in a souvenir shop.’
‘I didn’t realise you felt that strongly,’ said Malcolm after a silence.
‘I don’t, I don’t feel strongly at all. Not my field. But I do think if a chap decides to make a living out of being Welsh he’d better do it in a show on the telly. Which I think Alun realises part of the time.’
‘Oh dear.’ Malcolm too seemed quite cast down. ‘And you see that in the poetry, in Brydan’s poetry too, do you?’
‘Yes I do. What’s that stuff about, er, the man in the mask and the man in the iron street. All he’d done was juggle two phrases about and had the Americans going on about childlike Welsh vision . . .’
36)
He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest-front free page and clicked his pen point.
Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:
*Both legs were broken. His pulped skull and jellied hip . . . *
He paused; he re-wrote:
*Both legs broken, pulp-eyed, jelly-hipped . . . *
Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the *ed*’s and reorder three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe.
37)
The young poet Eumenes
complained one day to Theocritus:
“I have been writing for two years now
and I have only done one idyll.
It is my only finished work.
Alas, it is steep, I see it,
the stairway of Poetry is so steep;
and from the first step where now I stand,
poor me, I shall never ascend.”
[*]
38)
After the foregoing conversations with Bertrand, Ebenezer’s dissatisfaction with his position was no longer confined to mealtimes; rather, he took to a general brooding and spiritual malaise. He could write no verse: even the sight of a school of great whales, which in happier times would have set his fancy spinning, now called forth not a single rhyme.
39)
In word choice too, the author must be delicate and cautious,
Embrace one, reject another; you will do well if a judicious combination
Gives an air of novelty to a familiar word.
[*]
40)
“One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.”
Silence returned, and with it the vague murmur of the prostrate town. Grand had put down the sheet and was still staring at it. After a while he looked up.
41)
Every time I sit down to write, and let my mind go easy, the words, It is so dark, or something to do with darkness. Terror. The terror of this city. Fear of being alone. Only one thing stops me from jumping up and screaming or running to the telephone to ring somebody, it is to deliberately think myself back into that hot light . . . white light, the light, closed eyes, the red light hot on the eyeballs. The rough pulsing heat of a granite boulder. My palm flat on it, moving over the lichens. The grain of the lichens. Tiny, like minute animals’ ears, a warm rough silk on my palm, dragging insistently at the pores of my skin. And hot. The smell of the sun on hot rock. Dry and hot, and the silk of dust on my cheek, smelling of sun, the sun.
42)
A cheerful youth joined Coleridge on his walk
(“Loose,” noted Coleridge, “slack, and not well-dressed”)
Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk
Of First and Second Consciousness, then pressed
The famous hand with warmth and sauntered back
Homeward in his own state of less dispered
More passive consciousness — passive, not slack,
Whether of Secondary type or First.
43)
Ross often summoned Hobart Weekes when a comma had popped up to worry him, and he would ask Weekes, ‘What is the rule?’ Then he would run into Weekes later in the hall and say, ‘There isn’t any rule.’ He had the volatile gift of shifting from rule-bound to rule-free, and once, in the same issue of the magazine, allowed Benchley to use ‘oblivious to’ and me to say ‘oblivious of’, since each of us was adamant about his preference. Ross wanted to know why we disagreed and I told him that Bob believed in the dative following ‘ob’ whereas I thought of ‘oblivious’ as meaning ‘forgetful’. He went away, shaking his head, to look it up in Fowler, I suppose.
44)
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
45)
In the same window: A Man Cut In Slices! Chapter one: the man in the eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in the eyes of his mistress. Chapter three: — No chapter three. Have to come back tomorrow for chapters three and four. Every day the window trimmer turns a fresh page. A man cut in slices . . . You can't imagine how furious I am not to have thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who writes “the same in the eyes of his mistress . . . the same in the eyes of . . . the same . . . ”? Where is this guy? Who is he? I want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had brains enough to think of a title like that — instead of Crazy wiener and the other fool things I invented. Well, frick a duck! I congratulate him just the same.
46)
“Have you anything interesting there?” asked Meg, with condescension.
“Nothing but a story, won’t amount to much, I guess,” returned Jo, carefully keeping the name of the paper out of sight.
“You’d better read it aloud. That will amuse us and keep you out of mischief,” said Amy in her most grown-up tone.
“What’s the name?” asked Beth, wondering why Jo kept her face behind the sheet.
“The Rival Painters.”
“That sounds well. Read it,” said Meg.
With a loud “Hem!” and a long breath, Jo began to read very fast. The girls listened with interest, for the tale was romantic, and somewhat pathetic, as most of the characters died in the end. “I like that about the splendid picture,” was Amy’s approving remark, as Jo paused.
“I prefer the lovering part. Viola and Angelo are two of our favorite names, isn’t that queer?” said Meg, wiping her eyes, for the lovering part was tragical.
“Who wrote it?” asked Beth, who had caught a glimpse of Jo’s face.
47)
The conference had operated in the light of certain beliefs. One was that you can understand wholeness by tearing it into separate pieces. Another was that there is nothing new. The question to be asked when reading one book is, what other books does it come from? I will not say that this was a blinding light – indeed, what are academics to do? – but I did see what an economical way there was for me to write my next book.
48)
Overwrought by the trying and precarious work of the forenoon — which had demanded a maximum wariness, prudence, penetration, and rigour of the will — the writer had not been able even after the noon meal to break the impetus of the productive mechanism within him, that *motus animi continuus* which constitutes, according to Cicero, the foundation of eloquence; and he had not attained the healing sleep which — what with the increasing exhaustion of his strength — he needed in the middle of each day. So he had gone outdoors soon after tea, in the hopes that air and movement would restore him and prepare him for a profitable evening.
[*]
49)
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years —
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of *l’entre deux guerres*
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
50)
“By my little point I mean — what shall I call it? — the particular thing I’ve written my books most *for*. Isn’t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it’s that!”
51)
“You know something? I’m a liar. My heroes are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses on their bottoms from lying in bed with their knees up. Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to write it that way.”
52)
A WEARY ECHO
A Convention of female writers, which for two days had been stuffing Woman’s couch with goose-quills and hailing the down of a new era, adjourned with unabated enthusiasm, shouting, “Place aux dames!” And Echo wearily replied, “Oh, damn.”
53)
“I think it’s degrading of you, Flora,” cried Mrs. Smiling at breakfast. “Do you truly mean that you don’t ever want to work at anything?”
Her friend replied after some thought:
“Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as ‘Persuasion,’ but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, ‘Collecting material.’ No one can object to that. Besides, so I shall be.”
54)
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn’d brain.
55)
“Are you — who make your living snooping — sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?”
“We're different,” I said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”
“That's not different,” he said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”
“Yeah, but what good does that do?”
“God knows. What good does putting them in jail do?”
“Relieves congestion,” I said. “Put enough people in jail, and cities wouldn't have traffic problems. What do you know about this Gabrielle?”
This is not the first time this letter has been embarked on. I know neither how to start nor how to proceed. A Circumstance has arisen — no, I know no longer how to write, neither, for how could a circumstance arise, or what appearance might such a creature — bear?
Dear Sir — your Letters have not reached me — for a Reason. Not your Raven-ous letters — nor yet, to my infinite loss — your Poem.
I fear — I know, indeed, with all but oracular proof positive — they have been Taken.
57)
The dwarf stuck out his tongue as he piloted the errant quill across the ink-speckled page. He’d found room for the star-crossed lovers, the comic gravediggers and the hunchback king. It was the cats and the roller skates that were currently giving him trouble . . .
58)
“My poor father. I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious brain gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my vulture self, one day I understood that I might go so far as to publish excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren’t unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I would never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say that literature doesn’t consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. I was wrong. There’s actually no such thing as a minor work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn’t Mr. X or Mr. Y. Mr. X and Mr. Y do exist, there’s no question about that, and they struggle and toil and publish in newspapers and magazines and sometimes they even come out with a book that isn’t unworthy of the paper it’s printed on, but those books or articles, if you pay close attention, are not written by them.
“Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces . . . ”
[*]
59)
So when storms of wild emotion
Strike the ocean
Of the poet's soul, erelong
From each cave and rocky fastness,
In its vastness,
Floats some fragment of a song:
60)
Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.
“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” he remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening, instead of — well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down — if it’s only just the rhymes.”
>And 67 is DH Lawrence
Right. Essay on Walt Whitman. We don't usually endorse the reading of lit crit, but when it's by a real writer it's another matter.
>And 67 is DH Lawrence
Right. Essay on Walt Whitman. We don't usually endorse the reading of lit crit, but when it's by a real writer it's another matter.
They’re my 2 favorite writers. If I see your quizzes I’ll see if any answers are writers I really like. If I get a chance later I’ll take a closer look. Even if I don’t always participate in your quizzes I still appreciate the work you do
61)
A Celtic spearman forcing the cromlech-builder's brown daughter;
A blond Saxon, a slayer of Britons,
Building his farm outside the village he'd burned; a Norse
Voyager, wielder of oars and a sword,
Thridding the rocks at the fjord sea-end, hungry as a hawk;
A hungry Gaelic chiefling in Ulster,
Whose blood with the Norseman's rotted in the rain on a heather hill:
These by the world’s time were very recent
Forefathers of yours. And you are a maker of verses. The pallid
Pursuit of the world's beauty on paper,
Unless a tall angel comes to require it, is a pitiful pastime.
62)
A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.
“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.
63)
That’s a poet
not an angel
he has no wings
just a plumed
right hand
the hand beats the air
he flies up three feet
and falls back down
[*]
64)
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
65)
Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though . . . Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth — I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can’t help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that?
66)
We found *Two Figures by a Fountain* arresting enough to read with dedicated attention. I do not say this lightly. We cast aside a great deal of material, some of it by writers of reputation. There are some good images — I liked “the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer” — and you both capture a flow of thought and represent it with subtle differences in order to make attempts at characterization. Something unique and unexplained is caught. However, we wondered whether it owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf . . .
67)
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there’s so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.
68)
I had to laugh when I thought about the rest of that year. I went to the chemistry class five times a week and didn’t miss a single one. Mr Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheatre, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test-tube into another and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the coloured fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.
69)
Be Homer’s works your study and delight,
Read them by day, and meditate by night.
70)
What fun they had had! How the sunshine and mirth of those olden summers returned as she read. Not all the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was Rome could weave such wizardry as those funny, tearful tales of the Story Club. Among the manuscripts Anne found one written on sheets of wrapping paper. A wave of laughter filled her gray eyes as she recalled the time and place of its genesis. It was the sketch she had written the day she fell through the roof of the Cobb duckhouse on the Tory Road.
Anne glanced over it, then fell to reading it intently. It was a little dialogue between asters and sweet-peas, wild canaries in the lilac bush, and the guardian spirit of the garden. After she had read it, she sat, staring into space; and when Stella had gone she smoothed out the crumpled manuscript.
71)
“He’s supposed to have a particularly high-class style: ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’... would that be it?”
“Yes,” said the Managing Editor. “That must be good style. At least it doesn't sound like anything else to me. I know the name well now you mention it . . . ”
72)
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
73)
And what, after all, can it be other than modesty that makes him even now write to the reviewers of his books, thanking them for their praise, and ask them to luncheon? Nay, more: when someone has written a stinging criticism and Roy, especially since his reputation became so great, has had to put up with some very virulent abuse, he does not, like most of us, shrug his shoulders, fling a mental insult at the ruffian who does not like our work, and then forget about it; he writes a long letter to his critic, telling him that he is very sorry he thought his book bad, but his review was so interesting in itself, and if he might venture to say so, showed so much critical sense and so much feeling for words, that he felt bound to write to him. No one is more anxious to improve himself than he and he hopes he is still capable of learning. He does not want to be a bore, but if the critic has nothing to do on Wednesday or Friday will he come and lunch at the Savoy and tell him why exactly he thought his book so bad? No one can order a lunch better than Roy, and generally by the time the critic has eaten half a dozen oysters and a cut from a saddle of baby lamb, he has eaten his words too. It is only poetic justice that when Roy's next novel comes out the critic should see in the new work a very great advance.
74)
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
75)
I’m going to be good and sweet and kind to everybody because I’m so happy. And this summer I’m going to write and write and write and begin to be a great author. Isn’t that an exalted stand to take? Oh, I’m developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines.
That’s the way with everybody. I don’t agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness. I have no faith in misanthropes. (Fine word! Just learned it.) You are not a misanthrope are you, Daddy?
76)
Frost is the author of one of the greatest short poems in the English language, a poem that every American boy knows by heart, about the wintry woods, and the dreary dusk, and the little horsebells of gentle remonstration in the dull darkening air, and that prodigious and poignant end — two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical and universal. I dare not quote from memory lest I displace one small precious word.
With all his excellent gifts, John Shade could never make his snowflakes settle that way.
77)
Quite instinctively, I had again gotten paper and pencil into my hands, and I sat and wrote mechanically the date 1848 in every corner of the page. If only a single scintillating thought would come, grip me utterly and put words in my mouth! It had happened before after all, it had really happened that such moments came over me, so that I could write a long piece without effort and get it wonderfully right.
I sit there on the bench and write 1848 dozens of times; I write this number crisscross in all possible shapes and wait for a usable idea to occur to me . . .
[*]
78)
The poet had been dying for so long that he no longer understood that he was dying. Sometimes a thought would pass painfully, almost physically through his brain, a simple, strong thought — that they had stolen the bread he had put under his head. And this was so acutely terrible that he was prepared to quarrel, to swear, to fight, to search, to prove. But he had no strength for this, and the thought of the bread became weaker . . .
79)
“I thought you were going to be a wrestler,” Cushie said to Garp.
“I *am* a wrestler”, Garp said. “I’m *going* to be a writer.”
80)
In the old days, which were my younger days, I could sweep her off her feet and onto her back every time I tried, even when her flowers were upon her, with a dizzying flow of honeyed words that left her dazed and flattered and brought a glistening rush of blood to her face. Oh, the dauntless skill with which I could always conquer her, gushing fluently:
“Open to me, my sweetheart, my love, my dove, my undefiled. Kiss me with the kisses of thy mouth. Thy love is better than wine, I will remember thy love more than wine, O, thou fairest among women. Thy banner over me is love. I have compared thee to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.”
You think I always knew what I was talking about? It made no difference. Down on her back she would go every time in a flow of sighs, spreading wide her legs and lifting her knees, opening her arms in her enraptured swoon as though to hug me inside herself.
“Oh, David, David,” I would hear her moan. “Where do you get such wonderful words?”
81)
Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is! — so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful. When I walked in Hyde Park yesterday, I felt unspeakably wretched and outcast amongst the colourful crowd. As if from afar, I watched the beautiful young English women with the same ardent bewilderment of my senses that I used to feel in an embrace. And today I do not raise my eyes from my work . . .
[*]
82)
While other people wore like clothes
The human beings in their days
I set myself to bring to those
Who thought I could the lost displays;
It didn’t work for them or me,
But all concerned were nearer thus
(Or so we thought) to all the fuss
Than if we’d missed it separately.
83)
There is only one thing a writer can write about: *what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing* . . . I am a recording instrument . . . I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity” . . . Insofar as I succeed in *Direct* recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function . . . I am not an entertainer . . .
84)
I worked early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a Story, with a purpose growing, not remotely, out of my experience, and sent it to Traddles, and he arranged for its publication very advantageously for me; and the tidings of my growing reputation began to reach me from travellers whom I encountered by chance . . .
85)
Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.
86)
I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work. You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party. We barbarians from Asia Minor are hairy people: when we need a haircut, we need a haircut. It was so bad, I had outgrown my only hat. (I am writing a very serious story, perhaps one of the most serious I shall ever write. That is why I am being flippant. Readers of Sherwood Anderson will begin to understand what I am saying after a while; they will know that my laughter is rather sad.) I was a young man in need of a haircut, so I went down to Third Street (San Francisco), to the Barber College, for a fifteen-cent haircut.
87)
Better to write than to dare live, even if living means merely to buy bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.
Later, perhaps . . . Yes, later . . .
88)
He made carbon copies of nothing he wrote. He mailed off manuscripts without enclosing stamped, self-addressed envelopes for their safe return. Sometimes he didn't even include a return address. He got names and addresses of publishers from magazines devoted to the writing business, which he read avidly in the periodical rooms of public libraries. He thus got in touch with a firm called World Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn't even have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of salacious pictures.
They never told him where or when he might expect to find himself in print. Here is what they paid him: doodley-squat.
89)
. . . . But, oh, dear Friend!
The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts: his mind, best pleased
While she as duteous as the mother dove
Sits brooding, lives not always to that end,
But like the innocent bird, hath goadings on
That drive her as in trouble through the groves;
With me is now such passion, to be blamed
No otherwise than as it lasts too long.
90)
There’s a million things in this world I can’t do. Couldn’t hit a curve ball, even back in high school. Can’t fix a leaky faucet. Can’t roller-skate or make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit. I have tried twice to be married and couldn’t do it either time. But if you want me to take you away, to scare you or involve you or make you cry or grin, yeah. I can. I can bring it to you and keep bringing it until you holler uncle. I am able. I CAN.
91)
He unrolled a page of *London Pleasures*. In the middle of the labyrinthine scrawlings a line caught his eye. Momentary regret stabbed him. After all, parts of it weren’t half bad! If only it could ever be finished! It seemed such a shame to shy it away after all the work he had done on it. Save it, perhaps? Keep it by him and finish it secretly in his spare time? Even now it might come to something.
No, no! Keep your parole. Either surrender or don’t surrender.
He doubled up the manuscript and stuffed it between the bars of the drain. It fell with a plop into the water below.
92)
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
93)
We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper’s books “reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention.” As a rule, I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews’s literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless your heart, Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and I don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.
94)
Poetry, seasoned with satire, clowning,
Jokes, still knows how to please.
Then its excellence is much admired.
But serious combat, where life is at stake,
Is fought in prose. It was not always so.
And our regret has remained unconfessed.
Novels and essays serve but will not last.
One clear stanza can take more weight
Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.
95)
Nights when he had finished a poem, what could have been more natural, more necessary and urgent, than to go and look at himself to see if he had changed? Here at this desk, this night, one of life’s important moments had occurred. Humbly, almost unaware, certainly innocent, he had sat there and been the instrument by which a poem was transmitted to paper. He was awed and truly humble, for all that he must look in the mirror to see if the experience registered in his face. Often tears came genuinely to his eyes. How had it come about — why should it have been he? He asked himself in humility and gratitude. He read the poem in fear and read it again. Now it was fine; would it be so tomorrow?
I spread them out on the table, and as I touched them my hands were trembling like the hands of a water diviner. I began to glance through them, looking with surprise on what I had done. There was a long poem, the fragment of a novel, a number of curious stories. It seemed to me that I had written them long ago. These things were mediocre; I saw it. But I saw too, as it were, straight through them, the possibility of doing better; and this possibility was present to me as a strength which cast me lower and raised me higher than I had ever been before.
97)
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
98)
. . . But this morning I awoke with the plan; I bounced to the floor, showered, shaved, and put on my best shirt. I carefully read my novel as if I had never written it. I had to be sure, absolutely sure. I have just finished the last line and I am as certain as ever. It is pitch-perfect.
And now I put a fresh page in the old Underwood and begin composing another work. Although the task of writing has always been a laborious process for me, there is no tedium this time. The words come easy, and very fast. Perhaps I have found a genre perfectly suited to my skills: the suicide note.
99)
If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we’d never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood?
100)
THE ASSIGNATION
Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by.
And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song to deck her forehead in the courts of Time; and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.
And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.
And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: “Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not forborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you, and you mock me and pass me by.”
And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder at him and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:
“I will meet you in the graveyard in the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years.”
Write what you know, they say. So we can’t really complain when writers write about writers. Well, we can, but they’re going to do it anyway. Here are one hundred examples to identify. Some non-fiction. Translations marked [*].
Hints on request.
The authors:
Louisa M. Alcott, Dante Alighieri, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Paul Auster
John Barth, Ambrose Bierce, Roberto Bolaño, Flann O’Brien, Charles Bukowski, Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt
Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Thomas Carlyle, Raymond Carver, Constantine Cavafy, Raymond Chandler, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hart Crane, John Crowley
Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Lord Dunsany, Lawrence Durrell
T. S. Eliot
John Fante
William Gass, Stella Gibbons, William Golding, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Thom Gunn
Dashiell Hammett, Knut Hamsun, Seamus Heaney, Robert A. Heinlein, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Zbigniew Herbert, Horace, Ted Hughes
John Irving
Charles Jackson, Henry James, Robinson Jeffers, James Joyce
Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling
R. A. Lafferty, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Jack London, H. W. Longfellow
Norm MacDonald, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, Ian McEwan, Henry Miller, Czeslaw Milosz, L. M. Montgomery, Iris Murdoch
Vladimir Nabokov
George Orwell
Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Harold Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett
Philip Roth
J. D. Salinger, William Saroyan, W. G. Sebald
William Shakespeare, Varlam Shalamov, P. B. Shelley, Philip Sidney, Dan Simmons
Dylan Thomas, James Thurber, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, Anne Tyler
Kurt Vonnegut
Evelyn Waugh, Jean Webster, E. B. White, P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Wolfe, William Wordsworth
1)
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
2)
As much as he hated the travel, he loved the writing — the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remained in neat, terse paragraphs. He cribbed from other guidebooks, seizing small kernels of value and discarding the rest. He spent pleasurable hours dithering over questions of punctuation. Righteously, mercilessly, he weeded out the passive voice. The effort of typing made the corners of his mouth turn down, so that no one could have guessed how much he was enjoying himself. I am happy to say, he pecked out, but his face remained glum and intense.
3)
She guided the conversation in a different direction. ‘I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.’
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.
‘It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.’ She reflected. ‘I prefer stories about squalor.’
4)
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them. The roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.
5)
A bald man with strange tufts of hair over each ear interviewed me. “Yes?” he asked, looking at me over the sheet.
“I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.”
“Oh, a writer, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not.”
“What do you write?”
“Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.”
“A novel, eh?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“‘The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.’”
“Oh, I like that. What’s it about?”
“Everything.”
“Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?”
“Yes.”
“How about my wife?”
“She’s in there too.”
“You don’t say. Why do you want to work in a ladies’ dress shop?’
isn't 4 Ulysses?
>isn't 4 Ulysses?
It isn’t, but I agree it sure sounds like it.
6)
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts. She returned the tablet to me a few years ago; the first entry is an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing to death in the Arctic night, only to find, when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she would die of the heat before lunch.
7)
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so — which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions.
8)
‘All I did was speak to you.’
I went on and wrote another sentence. It dies hard when it is really going and you are into it.
‘I suppose you’ve got so great nobody can speak to you.’
I wrote another sentence that ended the paragraph and read it over. It was still all right and I wrote the first sentence of the next paragraph.
‘You never think about anyone else or that they may have problems too.’
I had heard complaining all my life. I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises, certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon.
‘Suppose you wanted to be a writer and felt it in every part of your body and it just wouldn’t come.’
I went on writing and I was beginning to have luck now as well as the other thing.
‘Suppose once it had come like an irresistible torrent and then it left you mute and silent.’
Better than mute and noisy, I thought, and went on writing.
9)
Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,
I knew myself once more a poet
Guarded by timeless principalities
Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;
And presently dared open both my eyes.
10)
Francis Bacon once said, “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” We have all contributed our wonderful obstructions to the mind, have we not? I more than most. One of the twentieth century’s better, forgotten writers — that is better-comma-forgotten, once bon moted: “I love being a writer. It’s the paperwork I can’t stand.” Get it? Well, amigos and amigette, I love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words I can’t stand.
Where to start?
11)
Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ carries the sub-title: ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’ In Fat’s case, the ‘intimations of immortality’ were based on recollections of a future life.
In addition, Fat could not write poetry worth shit, despite his best efforts. He loved Wordsworth’s ‘Ode,’ and wished he could come up with its equal. He never did.
12)
“Anne, I’ve got a sick-making one. It’s about a little kitten that wanders into a church on Christmas Eve to get warm. Besides being starved and frozen and lost, the kitten has — God knows why — an injured paw. All right; start: ‘Snow had been falling since — ’ ”
“What pen name?”
“Mmm . . . use ‘Molly Wadsworth’; this one is pretty icky. Title it The Other Manger. Start again.”
13)
The ardor of those books, composed in the sunny stillness of his California canyon and seething with unbuttoned and aggressive innocence, seemed to have little to do with the author himself when he came coolly out into the fallen world he’d been so ardent about down in the canyon. In fact, the writer who found irresistible all vital and dubious types, not excluding the swindlers of both sexes who trampled upon the large hearts of his optimistic, undone heroes; the writer who could locate the hypnotic core in the most devious American self-seeker and lead him to disclose, in spirited locutions all his own, the depths of his conniving soul; the writer whose absorption with “the grand human discord” made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling — well, in the flesh he gave the impression of being out to lunch.
14)
Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions.
Let us express our envy for the man with a steady job and no worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs,
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.
15)
Large vistas opened before Auberon on the crowded streets. The scripts, his and Sylvie’s collaboration through long, hilarious and excited evenings, were shapely and thrilling, he thought, though not exquisite to look at, typed as they were on George’s old machine; no matter, no matter, his future was filled with expensive office equipment, and with long lunches, prize secretaries, hard work for great rewards. He would seize, from between the claws of the dragon who was denned in the heart of the Wild Wood, the golden treasure it guarded.
16)
“Is Latin poetry hard to read?” Eugene said.
“Well,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head. “It’s not easy. Horace — ” he began carefully.
“He wrote Odes and Epodes,” said Tom Davis. “What is an Epode, Mr. Leonard?”
“Why,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively, “it’s a form of poetry.”
“Hell!” said “Pap” Rheinhart in a rude whisper to Eugene. “I knew that before I paid tuition.”
Smiling lusciously, and stroking himself with gentle fingers, Mr. Leonard turned back to the lesson.
“Now let me see,” he began.
“Who was Catullus?” Eugene shouted violently. Like a flung spear in his brain, the name.
“He was a poet,” Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled. He regretted.
“What sort of poetry did he write?” asked Eugene.
There was no answer.
“Was it like Horace?”
“No-o,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively. “It wasn’t exactly like Horace.”
“What was it like?” said Tom Davis. “Like your granny’s gut,” “Pap” Rheinhart toughly whispered.
“Why — he wrote on topics of general interest in his day,” said Mr. Leonard easily.
17)
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
18)
She did work hard at what she wrote, — hard enough at any rate to cover her pages quickly; and was, by nature, a clever woman. She could write after a glib, common-place, sprightly fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.
19)
“Your promise is sufficiently devout
To leave a mark,” he said; “and one so clear,
Not even Lethe’s flood can blot it out.
But if the words you offer are sincere,
Explain exactly why, with speech and gaze,
You indicate you hold my name so dear?”
And I to him: “The lovely lines you phrased,
So long as modern usage keeps them young,
Will mean your writing’s very ink is praised.”
[*]
20)
He would give them what they wished, redeeming his craft to art. He saw in his mind’s eye a fair-hung stage shut in from sun or wind, fair languid creatures like these discoursing wittily, no Kemp grossness, no blood-bladders or Alleyn ranting. He would provide, he would lend words to these elegant puppets. But he sighed, knowing himself to be caught forever between worlds — earth and air, reason and belief, action and contemplation. Alone among all sorts of men, he embraced a poet’s martyrdom.
21)
“ . . . Tell me, are you a real writer?”
“It depends on what you mean by real.”
“Well, darling, does anyone buy what you write?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m going to help you,” she said. “I can, too. Think of all the people I know who know people. I’m going to help you because you look like my brother Fred. Only smaller. I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen, that’s when I left home, and he was already six-feet-two. My other brothers were more your size, runts.”
22)
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry —
23)
After two or three stanzas and several images by which he himself was struck, his work took possession of him and he felt the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the relation of the forces that determine artistic creation is, as it were, reversed. The dominant thing is no longer the state of mind the artist seeks to express but the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the home and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of sonority but in terms of the impetuousness and power of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by virtue of its own laws, meter and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, which are even more important, but which are as yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and unnamed.
[*]
24)
You listen to the drivellings of a farmer’s wife?
Since I was the farmer, yes.
You were no farmer, sir. A weekend wanker.
I wrote my Homage to Wessex in the summerhouse at West Upfield.
I have never had the good fortune to read it.
It is written in terza rima, a form which, if you will forgive my saying so, you have never been able to master.
25)
He did not know how long an article he should write, but he counted the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the San Francisco Examiner, and guided himself by that. Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation marks. He had never thought of such things before . . .
26)
I’m afraid I never heard of Trellis, said Byrne, Who is Trellis?
A member of the author class, I said.
Did he write a book on Tactics? I fancy I met him in Berlin. A tall man with glasses.
He has been in bed for the last twenty years, I said.
27)
As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow on the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.
28)
If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night. I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturned, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book — the unconscious worked on it instead . . .
29)
Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,
He to the overbearing Boanerges
Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor,
Blessed be the vintage!)
Saying how, at an alehouse under Cotswold,
He had made sure of his very Cleopatra,
Drunk with enormous, salvation-contemning
Love for a tinker.
30)
The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this — that only *there*, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold — the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential — the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another?
31)
‘Well, of course, I must autograph it for you,’ she said, and at the same moment all was suddenly made clear to me. I had missed it at first, because I had been concentrating on the girl with the green face, but I now perceived at the bottom of the jacket the words ‘By Florence Craye’. They had been half hidden by a gummed-on label which said ‘Book Society Choice of the Month’. I saw all, and the thought of how near I had come to marrying a female novelist made everything go black for a bit.
32)
Afraid of a woman! Ha, great writer this! How can he write about women, when he’s never had a woman? Oh you lousy fake, you phony, no wonder you can’t write! No wonder there wasn’t a woman in the *The Little Dog Laughed*. No wonder it wasn’t a love story, you fool, you dirty little schoolboy.
33)
Mrs. Ariadne Oliver was extremely well-known as one of the foremost writers of detective and other sensational stories. She wrote chatty (if not particularly grammatical) articles on The Tendency of the Criminal; Famous Crimes Passionnels; Murder for Love v. Murder for Gain. She was also a hotheaded feminist, and when any murder of importance was occupying space in the Press there was sure to be an interview with Mrs. Oliver, and it was mentioned that Mrs. Oliver had said, “Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard!” She was an earnest believer in woman’s intuition.
34)
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.
35)
‘ . . . Write about your own people by all means, don’t be soft on them, turn them into figures of fun if you must, but don’t patronise them, don’t sell them short and above all don’t lay them out on display like quaint objects in a souvenir shop.’
‘I didn’t realise you felt that strongly,’ said Malcolm after a silence.
‘I don’t, I don’t feel strongly at all. Not my field. But I do think if a chap decides to make a living out of being Welsh he’d better do it in a show on the telly. Which I think Alun realises part of the time.’
‘Oh dear.’ Malcolm too seemed quite cast down. ‘And you see that in the poetry, in Brydan’s poetry too, do you?’
‘Yes I do. What’s that stuff about, er, the man in the mask and the man in the iron street. All he’d done was juggle two phrases about and had the Americans going on about childlike Welsh vision . . .’
36)
He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest-front free page and clicked his pen point.
Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:
*Both legs were broken. His pulped skull and jellied hip . . . *
He paused; he re-wrote:
*Both legs broken, pulp-eyed, jelly-hipped . . . *
Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the *ed*’s and reorder three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe.
37)
The young poet Eumenes
complained one day to Theocritus:
“I have been writing for two years now
and I have only done one idyll.
It is my only finished work.
Alas, it is steep, I see it,
the stairway of Poetry is so steep;
and from the first step where now I stand,
poor me, I shall never ascend.”
[*]
38)
After the foregoing conversations with Bertrand, Ebenezer’s dissatisfaction with his position was no longer confined to mealtimes; rather, he took to a general brooding and spiritual malaise. He could write no verse: even the sight of a school of great whales, which in happier times would have set his fancy spinning, now called forth not a single rhyme.
39)
In word choice too, the author must be delicate and cautious,
Embrace one, reject another; you will do well if a judicious combination
Gives an air of novelty to a familiar word.
[*]
40)
“One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.”
Silence returned, and with it the vague murmur of the prostrate town. Grand had put down the sheet and was still staring at it. After a while he looked up.
“What do you think of it?”
[*]
41)
Every time I sit down to write, and let my mind go easy, the words, It is so dark, or something to do with darkness. Terror. The terror of this city. Fear of being alone. Only one thing stops me from jumping up and screaming or running to the telephone to ring somebody, it is to deliberately think myself back into that hot light . . . white light, the light, closed eyes, the red light hot on the eyeballs. The rough pulsing heat of a granite boulder. My palm flat on it, moving over the lichens. The grain of the lichens. Tiny, like minute animals’ ears, a warm rough silk on my palm, dragging insistently at the pores of my skin. And hot. The smell of the sun on hot rock. Dry and hot, and the silk of dust on my cheek, smelling of sun, the sun.
42)
A cheerful youth joined Coleridge on his walk
(“Loose,” noted Coleridge, “slack, and not well-dressed”)
Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk
Of First and Second Consciousness, then pressed
The famous hand with warmth and sauntered back
Homeward in his own state of less dispered
More passive consciousness — passive, not slack,
Whether of Secondary type or First.
43)
Ross often summoned Hobart Weekes when a comma had popped up to worry him, and he would ask Weekes, ‘What is the rule?’ Then he would run into Weekes later in the hall and say, ‘There isn’t any rule.’ He had the volatile gift of shifting from rule-bound to rule-free, and once, in the same issue of the magazine, allowed Benchley to use ‘oblivious to’ and me to say ‘oblivious of’, since each of us was adamant about his preference. Ross wanted to know why we disagreed and I told him that Bob believed in the dative following ‘ob’ whereas I thought of ‘oblivious’ as meaning ‘forgetful’. He went away, shaking his head, to look it up in Fowler, I suppose.
44)
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
45)
In the same window: A Man Cut In Slices! Chapter one: the man in the eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in the eyes of his mistress. Chapter three: — No chapter three. Have to come back tomorrow for chapters three and four. Every day the window trimmer turns a fresh page. A man cut in slices . . . You can't imagine how furious I am not to have thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who writes “the same in the eyes of his mistress . . . the same in the eyes of . . . the same . . . ”? Where is this guy? Who is he? I want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had brains enough to think of a title like that — instead of Crazy wiener and the other fool things I invented. Well, frick a duck! I congratulate him just the same.
46)
“Have you anything interesting there?” asked Meg, with condescension.
“Nothing but a story, won’t amount to much, I guess,” returned Jo, carefully keeping the name of the paper out of sight.
“You’d better read it aloud. That will amuse us and keep you out of mischief,” said Amy in her most grown-up tone.
“What’s the name?” asked Beth, wondering why Jo kept her face behind the sheet.
“The Rival Painters.”
“That sounds well. Read it,” said Meg.
With a loud “Hem!” and a long breath, Jo began to read very fast. The girls listened with interest, for the tale was romantic, and somewhat pathetic, as most of the characters died in the end. “I like that about the splendid picture,” was Amy’s approving remark, as Jo paused.
“I prefer the lovering part. Viola and Angelo are two of our favorite names, isn’t that queer?” said Meg, wiping her eyes, for the lovering part was tragical.
“Who wrote it?” asked Beth, who had caught a glimpse of Jo’s face.
47)
The conference had operated in the light of certain beliefs. One was that you can understand wholeness by tearing it into separate pieces. Another was that there is nothing new. The question to be asked when reading one book is, what other books does it come from? I will not say that this was a blinding light – indeed, what are academics to do? – but I did see what an economical way there was for me to write my next book.
48)
Overwrought by the trying and precarious work of the forenoon — which had demanded a maximum wariness, prudence, penetration, and rigour of the will — the writer had not been able even after the noon meal to break the impetus of the productive mechanism within him, that *motus animi continuus* which constitutes, according to Cicero, the foundation of eloquence; and he had not attained the healing sleep which — what with the increasing exhaustion of his strength — he needed in the middle of each day. So he had gone outdoors soon after tea, in the hopes that air and movement would restore him and prepare him for a profitable evening.
[*]
49)
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years —
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of *l’entre deux guerres*
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
50)
“By my little point I mean — what shall I call it? — the particular thing I’ve written my books most *for*. Isn’t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it’s that!”
51)
“You know something? I’m a liar. My heroes are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses on their bottoms from lying in bed with their knees up. Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to write it that way.”
52)
A WEARY ECHO
A Convention of female writers, which for two days had been stuffing Woman’s couch with goose-quills and hailing the down of a new era, adjourned with unabated enthusiasm, shouting, “Place aux dames!” And Echo wearily replied, “Oh, damn.”
53)
“I think it’s degrading of you, Flora,” cried Mrs. Smiling at breakfast. “Do you truly mean that you don’t ever want to work at anything?”
Her friend replied after some thought:
“Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as ‘Persuasion,’ but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, ‘Collecting material.’ No one can object to that. Besides, so I shall be.”
54)
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn’d brain.
55)
“Are you — who make your living snooping — sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?”
“We're different,” I said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”
“That's not different,” he said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”
“Yeah, but what good does that do?”
“God knows. What good does putting them in jail do?”
“Relieves congestion,” I said. “Put enough people in jail, and cities wouldn't have traffic problems. What do you know about this Gabrielle?”
56)
Dear Mr Ash,
This is not the first time this letter has been embarked on. I know neither how to start nor how to proceed. A Circumstance has arisen — no, I know no longer how to write, neither, for how could a circumstance arise, or what appearance might such a creature — bear?
Dear Sir — your Letters have not reached me — for a Reason. Not your Raven-ous letters — nor yet, to my infinite loss — your Poem.
I fear — I know, indeed, with all but oracular proof positive — they have been Taken.
57)
The dwarf stuck out his tongue as he piloted the errant quill across the ink-speckled page. He’d found room for the star-crossed lovers, the comic gravediggers and the hunchback king. It was the cats and the roller skates that were currently giving him trouble . . .
58)
“My poor father. I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious brain gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my vulture self, one day I understood that I might go so far as to publish excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren’t unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I would never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say that literature doesn’t consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. I was wrong. There’s actually no such thing as a minor work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn’t Mr. X or Mr. Y. Mr. X and Mr. Y do exist, there’s no question about that, and they struggle and toil and publish in newspapers and magazines and sometimes they even come out with a book that isn’t unworthy of the paper it’s printed on, but those books or articles, if you pay close attention, are not written by them.
“Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces . . . ”
[*]
59)
So when storms of wild emotion
Strike the ocean
Of the poet's soul, erelong
From each cave and rocky fastness,
In its vastness,
Floats some fragment of a song:
60)
Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.
“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” he remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening, instead of — well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down — if it’s only just the rhymes.”
45 is Henry Miller
And 67 is DH Lawrence
>And 67 is DH Lawrence
Right. Essay on Walt Whitman. We don't usually endorse the reading of lit crit, but when it's by a real writer it's another matter.
>45 is Henry Miller
Correct. Tropic of Cancer. Not the one I expected to be answered first, but they all count.
They’re my 2 favorite writers. If I see your quizzes I’ll see if any answers are writers I really like. If I get a chance later I’ll take a closer look. Even if I don’t always participate in your quizzes I still appreciate the work you do
61)
A Celtic spearman forcing the cromlech-builder's brown daughter;
A blond Saxon, a slayer of Britons,
Building his farm outside the village he'd burned; a Norse
Voyager, wielder of oars and a sword,
Thridding the rocks at the fjord sea-end, hungry as a hawk;
A hungry Gaelic chiefling in Ulster,
Whose blood with the Norseman's rotted in the rain on a heather hill:
These by the world’s time were very recent
Forefathers of yours. And you are a maker of verses. The pallid
Pursuit of the world's beauty on paper,
Unless a tall angel comes to require it, is a pitiful pastime.
62)
A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.
“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.
63)
That’s a poet
not an angel
he has no wings
just a plumed
right hand
the hand beats the air
he flies up three feet
and falls back down
[*]
64)
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
65)
Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though . . . Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth — I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can’t help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that?
[*]
66)
We found *Two Figures by a Fountain* arresting enough to read with dedicated attention. I do not say this lightly. We cast aside a great deal of material, some of it by writers of reputation. There are some good images — I liked “the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer” — and you both capture a flow of thought and represent it with subtle differences in order to make attempts at characterization. Something unique and unexplained is caught. However, we wondered whether it owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf . . .
67)
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there’s so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.
68)
I had to laugh when I thought about the rest of that year. I went to the chemistry class five times a week and didn’t miss a single one. Mr Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheatre, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test-tube into another and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the coloured fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.
69)
Be Homer’s works your study and delight,
Read them by day, and meditate by night.
70)
What fun they had had! How the sunshine and mirth of those olden summers returned as she read. Not all the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was Rome could weave such wizardry as those funny, tearful tales of the Story Club. Among the manuscripts Anne found one written on sheets of wrapping paper. A wave of laughter filled her gray eyes as she recalled the time and place of its genesis. It was the sketch she had written the day she fell through the roof of the Cobb duckhouse on the Tory Road.
Anne glanced over it, then fell to reading it intently. It was a little dialogue between asters and sweet-peas, wild canaries in the lilac bush, and the guardian spirit of the garden. After she had read it, she sat, staring into space; and when Stella had gone she smoothed out the crumpled manuscript.
“I believe I will,” she said resolutely.
71)
“He’s supposed to have a particularly high-class style: ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’... would that be it?”
“Yes,” said the Managing Editor. “That must be good style. At least it doesn't sound like anything else to me. I know the name well now you mention it . . . ”
72)
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
73)
And what, after all, can it be other than modesty that makes him even now write to the reviewers of his books, thanking them for their praise, and ask them to luncheon? Nay, more: when someone has written a stinging criticism and Roy, especially since his reputation became so great, has had to put up with some very virulent abuse, he does not, like most of us, shrug his shoulders, fling a mental insult at the ruffian who does not like our work, and then forget about it; he writes a long letter to his critic, telling him that he is very sorry he thought his book bad, but his review was so interesting in itself, and if he might venture to say so, showed so much critical sense and so much feeling for words, that he felt bound to write to him. No one is more anxious to improve himself than he and he hopes he is still capable of learning. He does not want to be a bore, but if the critic has nothing to do on Wednesday or Friday will he come and lunch at the Savoy and tell him why exactly he thought his book so bad? No one can order a lunch better than Roy, and generally by the time the critic has eaten half a dozen oysters and a cut from a saddle of baby lamb, he has eaten his words too. It is only poetic justice that when Roy's next novel comes out the critic should see in the new work a very great advance.
74)
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
75)
I’m going to be good and sweet and kind to everybody because I’m so happy. And this summer I’m going to write and write and write and begin to be a great author. Isn’t that an exalted stand to take? Oh, I’m developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines.
That’s the way with everybody. I don’t agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness. I have no faith in misanthropes. (Fine word! Just learned it.) You are not a misanthrope are you, Daddy?
76)
Frost is the author of one of the greatest short poems in the English language, a poem that every American boy knows by heart, about the wintry woods, and the dreary dusk, and the little horsebells of gentle remonstration in the dull darkening air, and that prodigious and poignant end — two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical and universal. I dare not quote from memory lest I displace one small precious word.
With all his excellent gifts, John Shade could never make his snowflakes settle that way.
77)
Quite instinctively, I had again gotten paper and pencil into my hands, and I sat and wrote mechanically the date 1848 in every corner of the page. If only a single scintillating thought would come, grip me utterly and put words in my mouth! It had happened before after all, it had really happened that such moments came over me, so that I could write a long piece without effort and get it wonderfully right.
I sit there on the bench and write 1848 dozens of times; I write this number crisscross in all possible shapes and wait for a usable idea to occur to me . . .
[*]
78)
The poet had been dying for so long that he no longer understood that he was dying. Sometimes a thought would pass painfully, almost physically through his brain, a simple, strong thought — that they had stolen the bread he had put under his head. And this was so acutely terrible that he was prepared to quarrel, to swear, to fight, to search, to prove. But he had no strength for this, and the thought of the bread became weaker . . .
79)
“I thought you were going to be a wrestler,” Cushie said to Garp.
“I *am* a wrestler”, Garp said. “I’m *going* to be a writer.”
80)
In the old days, which were my younger days, I could sweep her off her feet and onto her back every time I tried, even when her flowers were upon her, with a dizzying flow of honeyed words that left her dazed and flattered and brought a glistening rush of blood to her face. Oh, the dauntless skill with which I could always conquer her, gushing fluently:
“Open to me, my sweetheart, my love, my dove, my undefiled. Kiss me with the kisses of thy mouth. Thy love is better than wine, I will remember thy love more than wine, O, thou fairest among women. Thy banner over me is love. I have compared thee to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.”
You think I always knew what I was talking about? It made no difference. Down on her back she would go every time in a flow of sighs, spreading wide her legs and lifting her knees, opening her arms in her enraptured swoon as though to hug me inside herself.
“Oh, David, David,” I would hear her moan. “Where do you get such wonderful words?”
81)
Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is! — so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful. When I walked in Hyde Park yesterday, I felt unspeakably wretched and outcast amongst the colourful crowd. As if from afar, I watched the beautiful young English women with the same ardent bewilderment of my senses that I used to feel in an embrace. And today I do not raise my eyes from my work . . .
[*]
82)
While other people wore like clothes
The human beings in their days
I set myself to bring to those
Who thought I could the lost displays;
It didn’t work for them or me,
But all concerned were nearer thus
(Or so we thought) to all the fuss
Than if we’d missed it separately.
83)
There is only one thing a writer can write about: *what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing* . . . I am a recording instrument . . . I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity” . . . Insofar as I succeed in *Direct* recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function . . . I am not an entertainer . . .
84)
I worked early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a Story, with a purpose growing, not remotely, out of my experience, and sent it to Traddles, and he arranged for its publication very advantageously for me; and the tidings of my growing reputation began to reach me from travellers whom I encountered by chance . . .
85)
Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.
86)
I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work. You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party. We barbarians from Asia Minor are hairy people: when we need a haircut, we need a haircut. It was so bad, I had outgrown my only hat. (I am writing a very serious story, perhaps one of the most serious I shall ever write. That is why I am being flippant. Readers of Sherwood Anderson will begin to understand what I am saying after a while; they will know that my laughter is rather sad.) I was a young man in need of a haircut, so I went down to Third Street (San Francisco), to the Barber College, for a fifteen-cent haircut.
87)
Better to write than to dare live, even if living means merely to buy bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.
Later, perhaps . . . Yes, later . . .
88)
He made carbon copies of nothing he wrote. He mailed off manuscripts without enclosing stamped, self-addressed envelopes for their safe return. Sometimes he didn't even include a return address. He got names and addresses of publishers from magazines devoted to the writing business, which he read avidly in the periodical rooms of public libraries. He thus got in touch with a firm called World Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn't even have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of salacious pictures.
They never told him where or when he might expect to find himself in print. Here is what they paid him: doodley-squat.
89)
. . . . But, oh, dear Friend!
The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts: his mind, best pleased
While she as duteous as the mother dove
Sits brooding, lives not always to that end,
But like the innocent bird, hath goadings on
That drive her as in trouble through the groves;
With me is now such passion, to be blamed
No otherwise than as it lasts too long.
90)
There’s a million things in this world I can’t do. Couldn’t hit a curve ball, even back in high school. Can’t fix a leaky faucet. Can’t roller-skate or make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit. I have tried twice to be married and couldn’t do it either time. But if you want me to take you away, to scare you or involve you or make you cry or grin, yeah. I can. I can bring it to you and keep bringing it until you holler uncle. I am able. I CAN.
91)
He unrolled a page of *London Pleasures*. In the middle of the labyrinthine scrawlings a line caught his eye. Momentary regret stabbed him. After all, parts of it weren’t half bad! If only it could ever be finished! It seemed such a shame to shy it away after all the work he had done on it. Save it, perhaps? Keep it by him and finish it secretly in his spare time? Even now it might come to something.
No, no! Keep your parole. Either surrender or don’t surrender.
He doubled up the manuscript and stuffed it between the bars of the drain. It fell with a plop into the water below.
92)
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
93)
We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper’s books “reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention.” As a rule, I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews’s literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless your heart, Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and I don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.
94)
Poetry, seasoned with satire, clowning,
Jokes, still knows how to please.
Then its excellence is much admired.
But serious combat, where life is at stake,
Is fought in prose. It was not always so.
And our regret has remained unconfessed.
Novels and essays serve but will not last.
One clear stanza can take more weight
Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.
95)
Nights when he had finished a poem, what could have been more natural, more necessary and urgent, than to go and look at himself to see if he had changed? Here at this desk, this night, one of life’s important moments had occurred. Humbly, almost unaware, certainly innocent, he had sat there and been the instrument by which a poem was transmitted to paper. He was awed and truly humble, for all that he must look in the mirror to see if the experience registered in his face. Often tears came genuinely to his eyes. How had it come about — why should it have been he? He asked himself in humility and gratitude. He read the poem in fear and read it again. Now it was fine; would it be so tomorrow?
96)
I began to undo the parcel of manuscripts.
I spread them out on the table, and as I touched them my hands were trembling like the hands of a water diviner. I began to glance through them, looking with surprise on what I had done. There was a long poem, the fragment of a novel, a number of curious stories. It seemed to me that I had written them long ago. These things were mediocre; I saw it. But I saw too, as it were, straight through them, the possibility of doing better; and this possibility was present to me as a strength which cast me lower and raised me higher than I had ever been before.
97)
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
98)
. . . But this morning I awoke with the plan; I bounced to the floor, showered, shaved, and put on my best shirt. I carefully read my novel as if I had never written it. I had to be sure, absolutely sure. I have just finished the last line and I am as certain as ever. It is pitch-perfect.
And now I put a fresh page in the old Underwood and begin composing another work. Although the task of writing has always been a laborious process for me, there is no tedium this time. The words come easy, and very fast. Perhaps I have found a genre perfectly suited to my skills: the suicide note.
99)
If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we’d never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood?
100)
THE ASSIGNATION
Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by.
And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song to deck her forehead in the courts of Time; and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.
And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.
And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: “Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not forborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you, and you mock me and pass me by.”
And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder at him and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:
“I will meet you in the graveyard in the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years.”
2) The Accidental Tourist
22) Emily Dickinson
46) Little Women
76) Pale Fire
>2) The Accidental Tourist
Correct, Anne Tyler. Not a heavyweight work but it's not terrible.
>22) Emily Dickinson
Correct.
>46) Little Women
Louise May herself. A name-rich passage of course.
>76) Pale Fire
Correct. As above, ‘John Shade’ is a help.