Part 15 (1/2)

As Pemberton was drying one of the Baccarat gla.s.ses, it shattered in her hand, a happy accident in that she used it as the fulcrum of her piece.

Characteristic of another kind of nonfiction gutsiness is that of Seymour Krim, who wanted, as many writers do, to be a major novelist and instead made exemplary nonfiction his calling. ”One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind,” he says and means it, as he lays his life bare. Listen to the individual sound of his voice: You may sometimes think everyone lives in the crotch of the pleasure principle these days except you, but you have company, friend. I live under the same pressures you do. It is still your work or role that finally gives you your definition in our society, and the thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. I think what I have to say here will speak for some of their secret life and for that other sad America you don't hear too much about. This isn't presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I've lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog.

The voice picks up speed: America was my carnival at an earlier age than most and I wanted to be everything in it that turned me on, like a youth bouncing around crazed on a boardwalk. I mean literally everything. I was as unanch.o.r.ed a kid as you can conceive of, an open fuse-box of blind yearning, and out of what I now a.s.sume was unimaginable loneliness and human hunger I greedily tried on the personalities of every type on the national scene as picked up through newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, and just nosing around.

It should be evident by now that forthrightness doesn't involve sensationalism suitable for the exploitation tabloids. What it requires is honesty of a kind that gets self-suppressed by the public. Doctors are part of that public, but not doctors who are good writers. Witness Richard Selzer's chapter, ”The Knife,” in his book Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery. He does what no surgeon has done before, with precision, clarity, grace, imagination, and candor: One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip-by the stem. Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the fingers. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it waits, at the ready, then, go! It darts, followed by a fine wake of red. The flesh parts, falling away to yellow globules of fat. Even now, after so many times, I still marvel at its power-cold, gleaming, silent. More, I am still struck with a kind of dread that it is I in whose hand the blade travels, that my hand is its vehicle, that yet again this terrible steel-bellied thing and I have conspired for a most unnatural purpose, the laying open of the body of a human being.

Are readers ready for this kind of candor? In 1994 another physician who writes well, Sherwin B. Nuland, published a book called How We Die. It was selected by a book club, became a bestseller, and won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Did I have to search through my library to find the examples of frankness quoted in this chapter? They are all from one section of a single anthology I recommend to you, The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate. That book starts with the forerunners, Seneca and Plutarch, picks up Montaigne and Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt en route to the Americans of the present century, and that journey reveals an evolution toward the candor with which our writers tell us like it is.

The audience is ready. The question is ”Are you?”

The commercial novelist is a storyteller who is most concerned with plot and plot gimmicks, with maintaining a high level of suspense and physical action. The success of commercial novelists is usually derived from tapping an area of adventure, romance, espionage, or whatever may be popular at the time, creating characters with sufficient skill that the reader is willing to suspend disbelief and follow the hero as he triumphs over unambiguous antagonists. John Grisham's bestseller The Firm, for instance, is an adolescent fantasy, the story of a young lawyer straight out of law school who is offered a job with too much pay, an expensive car, a house, and finds himself working-of course-for the Mob, who won't let him quit. The rest is a chase scene. The market for adolescent fantasies is demonstrably huge. And it cares little about the quality of the writing. Mitch is the beleaguered hero of this fantasy: Mitch almost felt sorry for her, but he kept his eyes on the table.

In a box? What he kept on the table was presumably his gaze.

He stared at Royce McKnight and exposed a mammoth chip on his shoulder.

That's not a log, it's an att.i.tude.

Mitch ripped two ribs apart, slinging sauce into his eyebrows.

Did his wife, Abby, sitting across the table from him in the restaurant, notice? She says: ”We just moved in this morning.”

A fact he already knows, so Mitch says: ”I know.”

On a business trip, Mitch, happily married to Abby, is the object of seduction by a woman named Julia in words like these: Julia drooled at him and moved closer.

She rubbed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s on his biceps and gave her best seductive smile, only inches away. When a private school is mentioned, we learn: Affluent parents signed the waiting list shortly after birth.

Precocious as well as affluent? According to Grisham, the people Mitch meets have interesting though repet.i.tive characteristics: He frowned sincerely, as if this would be painful.

He was stocky with a slight belly, thick shoulders and chest and a huge, perfectly round head that smiled with great reluctance.

When he talked the water dripped from his nose and interfered with his enunciation.

Tammy arrived from trip three out of breath and with sweat dripping from her nose.

In this kind of commercial writing, lack of precision is not the only carelessness: Coffee? Yes, he said, black. She disappeared and returned with a cup and saucer.

The coffee itself was presumably forgotten by the author. And so it goes. The public was forgiving. Or, more likely, didn't notice as The Firm topped the bestseller lists.

The most distinguis.h.i.+ng difference between ”commercial” writers like Grisham and literary writers is the attention paid to the individual meanings and resonance of words and the respect shown for the reader's intelligence. In this chapter my concern is with the craft of the writer who aspires to permanence, who has not an occupation but a calling.

Publis.h.i.+ng, the work of bringing words to the marketplace, is, alas, sloppy in its attempts to distinguish books of a certain quality from everyday product that is designed to sell. The latter are called ”popular” and ”commercial,” though books of high quality are sometimes popular, and when they endure, prove their commercial viability by continuing to sell long after their commercial contemporaries are out of print. Both kinds of books can entertain and instruct, though they appeal to different audiences.

A prevalent way of describing the difference is calling the successful commercial book ”a good read,” whereas the other is likely to be referred to as ”a good book.” The implication is that one confers a transient experience on the reader, whereas the other may be durable, deserving the permanence of a hardcover binding and a place on a bookshelf, to remind one of the experience, or be reread.

I wanted to clarify the distinction for a practical reason. In the end, you write what you read. If you read literary fiction with pleasure, that's what you will attempt to write. If you read thrillers or romances, you will in all likelihood end up writing for the audience of which you are a part. The same is true for nonfiction-not merely the field of interest, but the quality of language and insight you require of your books, read or written.

The literary novelist is concerned primarily with character understood in depth and engaged in activities that are resonant with the ambiguities and stresses of life. The richness of the best literary fiction is derived primarily from the creation of characters who will persist in the reader's mind after the reading experience is over. Those novelists and nonfiction writers who strive to produce durable work share an interest in precision and freshness in the use of words, in insights into human nature and the physical world, and in resonance. These writers usually develop a ”voice” or style that is distinctive.

The writer of commercial nonfiction is often an expert craftsman in a hurry to meet a deadline who measures the effort put in against the monetary reward. He is writing not for the ages but to put bread on the table. Perfecting a piece beyond the requirements of the editor to him means more work for the same amount of money, work that could well go into another piece for another publication. Beyond a certain point, quality is not cost-effective for him.

Fiction writers who don't improve their work beyond the requirements of their editors or the public do not have an interest in perfection because they are deaf to the sound of words and have no instinct or training to hunt precise nuances. They are what they read.

I have edited and published both kinds of writers and both kinds of books. I have worked closely with writers of each kind who have made millions from a single work. What I have never witnessed is a writer's work succeeding notably in a field he doesn't habitually read for pleasure.

Diction is a word laymen a.s.sociate with clear p.r.o.nunciation. Its other meaning is the one that is important for writers. Diction involves the choice of words for their precise meaning and sound, the arrangement of those words, and their selection for effect. Excellence in diction is the most important characteristic of fine writing.

The precise meaning of words matters, a notion in disuse by the majority of people, including their presumptive leaders. The inattention to diction is pervasive, endemic, and has reached into surprising places.

On the morning that this chapter was written, the New York Times published a review of a biography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the leader of Desert Storm. The coauthors were both journalists. The review tells us that the authors, in their introduction, say they ”will paint a picture of a man who is 'human, blunt, clear, idealistic and swiftly effective.' ”

I was stopped by the first adjective: human. I hadn't thought of the general as vegetable, mineral, or other species of animal. What did these two journalists intend by leading with the word ”human”?

We'd have to guess. Surely they didn't confuse it with the word ”humane,” which means something quite different. Did they mean Schwarzkopf was what in colloquial parlance we call ”a regular guy”? And if so, what is meant by ”a regular guy”? It's a verbal trunk into which a hundred readers would pile many meanings relating to their own experience.

In the best of newspapers the best of journalists are usually forced to write quickly- ”off the top of the head” is the convenient expression-and that's where an imprecise use of ”human” comes from: speed and a minimum of thought, for surely both experienced authors of the Schwarzkopf biography know better.

Poetry and fiction share certain characteristics. In fas.h.i.+oning poetry, a common beginner's mistake is to emote instead of to evoke, to convey the writer's emotion rather than to stimulate an emotion from the reader. One way to a reader's emotion is to bring two words together that have not been together before. Therefore precision is achieved in poetry by the creation of a new grouping of words rather than by using each word for its exact meaning. Precision in poetry is abetted by the sound of words, which is why poetry is sometimes so difficult to translate. The work of Dylan Thomas, possibly the best poet in the English language of this century, is full of newness, words juxtaposed for the first time to create a new meaning. In one, ”Fern Hill,” he speaks of ”the lilting house.” Lilt means a tune having a pleasant rhythm. A poor poet might have written ”happy house,” which is direct and obvious. The ”lilting house” evokes the happiness. If it's hard to judge out of context, treat yourself to some time with Dylan Thomas's poems.

Poetry usually involves austere compression. The most famous poem of Delmore Schwartz, ”In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave,” mixes ordinary description (”A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding”) with fresh metaphor (”The street-lamp's vigil”). The street-lamp is given a human characteristic-vigilance-with a single word. In fiction, the group of words that evoke an emotion in the reader can range from a few words, as in poetry, to paragraphs or sections.

In commercial fiction, the sound of words is rarely considered except for the occasional-and inaccurate-”splat” or ”rat-a-tat-tat.” In literary fiction, the sound of words can contribute to the effect, though that is rarely noticed by readers. Literary fiction thrives on subtlety and particularity.

”Particularity” is a word my students hear often. Once the word from editors was ”be concrete.” But to be specific is not as precise as to be particular, which is much more advantageous to the creative writer. Particularity deserves its own chapter, which comes next.

In his book On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner said, ”Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.” My only quarrel with that statement is that detail is also the lifeblood of nonfiction. And I want to go a step further. It is not just detail that distinguishes good writing, it is detail that individualizes. I call it ”particularity.” Once you're used to spotting it-and spotting its absence-you will have one of the best possible means of improving your writing markedly.

During the decades that I served as an editor and publisher, what drew my attention to a piece of work more than any other factor was the use of apt particularities, the detail that differentiates one person from another, one act from another, one place from any others like it.

Let's look at some examples of particularization in sketching characters, actions, and places. To characterize, particularity is used to show how an individual looks, dresses, or speaks without resort to cliches or generalizations.

Early in The Touch of Treason, the lawyer Thoma.s.sy is confronted by Roberts, the patrician district attorney. Watch for the words that particularize: Thoma.s.sy could see Roberts's handshake coming at him all the way down the aisle, above it that freckled face proclaiming I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich.

Roberts's smile, Thoma.s.sy thought, is an implant.

The cop-out would have been to say that Roberts had a fake smile. That is a tired expression and a generalization that doesn't particularize. The particularization is achieved in two steps. First, his freckled face proclaiming I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich. Then Thoma.s.sy's thought, that the smile is an implant. Note the use of metaphor to particularize. It doesn't say Roberts's smile is like an implant, Thoma.s.sy thinks it is an implant. Of course, Thoma.s.sy doesn't believe that literally. In just a few sentences, we know that in Thoma.s.sy's view, Roberts is a pretentious prig. The particularization, though brief, is enough to convince the reader. That helps set up the adversarial exchange that follows. Let's observe an action that particularizes: Thoma.s.sy moved his gaze from Roberts's confident eyes to Roberts's blond hair, then Roberts's chin, then Roberts's left ear, then Roberts's right ear. The four points of the cross. It was what made witnesses nervous. They couldn't figure out what you were doing. You weren't doing anything except making them nervous.

The reader quickly understands that Thoma.s.sy disconcerts his opponents. Roberts must loathe Thoma.s.sy, the arrogant son of an Armenian immigrant. When they encounter each other in the courtroom, the reader is prepared for a battle that is motivated by more than the case.

Now let's examine the use of particularization in describing a place: The renting agent said it was their last best chance of finding an apartment in the neighborhood that wasn't as cramped as the place they had now. Elizabeth and Joe hurried up the stone steps to the parlor floor. The agent stepped aside to let them in. Their first impression was a vast emptiness in which the echo of the agent's voice reverberated.

”It's fourteen feet high.”

They followed the agent's gaze to the ceiling, with its tiny plaster angels around the perimeter.