Conscious Choice: On Writing

August 2002 | Choice Books

On Writing

by Mark Harris

In 1989 I drove from San Francisco to visit the Napa Valley an hour and a half north. On my itinerary was a visit to the Glen Ellen Winery and the nearby Jack London State Park. I was visiting my mother in San Francisco, and we decided the drive north would be a pleasant day trip. I was eager also to visit the Jack London Bookstore, in the small town of Glen Ellen a mile or so from the state park. I had been on a London reading frenzy, devouring everything from The Call of the Wild and Martin Eden to The Iron Heel and memorable short stories such as "To Build a Fire" and "The Apostate."

As usual, my enthusiasm had spread out to ensnare, at last count, nine friends or acquaintances who were then all reading one London book or another. I myself had become fascinated with the writer’s life after reading Clarice Stasz’s American Dreamers, a biography of London and his wife, Charmian Kitteridge. At the state park, we toured London’s old ranch; looked at the ruins of the Wolf House, the home he was building that mysteriously burned down only days before its completion; and visited the writer’s grave, which was marked only by an unadorned boulder.

Later, we drove into Glen Ellen to visit the bookshop, run by Russ and Winnie Kingman. The late Russ Kingman was author of a book on London and one of the world’s experts on his life. Remarkably, the store then still offered a direct link to the writer, who had died in 1916 at the age of forty. I’d heard a rumor that living in a side room of the shop was one of London’s daughters, Becky, then in her eighties. A few minutes’ conversation with the store’s proprietors had them convinced that I was a true London fanatic, and my polite inquiry about the rumor of London’s daughter living nearby led to a coveted invitation to the back room.

There we met Becky London, a friendly woman with her father’s face. "Daddy would have loved airplanes," I recall her saying at one point. "I think he would have loved to fly. He had such a passion for new inventions." All these years later her face glowed as she recalled this man so famous in his day, who fleetingly and yet so enduringly and intimately had once touched her own life.

A passion for invention. Yes, that’s it, I thought; it made perfect sense. For what was Jack London the writer if not the quintessential inventor? An architect of the imagination. A man who could hammer words into dramatic action with the strength of the day laborer he had once been — or touch the heart with images tender enough to make you believe he just might be the most sympathetic human being ever.

London wrote some of the great stories of American literature. He also tasted the bitter chalk of six hundred rejections before his first magazine story was ever published. Later, he sometimes wrote forgettable potboilers that were probably inspired more by malaise than even the huge sums of money publishers were then dangling before the marketing machine that was his name.

Mostly, London’s writing was an expression of his passion for life and love of humanity. Even in the more interior, personal work, there was always the eye looking outward, to some universal gauge of human experience that operated like radar in his artistic sensibility. He had that capacity, as Henry Miller once commented about great writers, to forget himself in his work, allowing inspiration to flow from some deep wellspring of his creative consciousness. Julia Cameron calls it in The Right to Write the process of "getting over myself," letting go of the stifling effects of self-consciousness in writing. London had such a gift. But in forgetting himself in his work he would also find himself — and us, his public. London’s work at its best spoke beyond the narrow conventions of the day, to deeper, more timeless truths as captured in stories that resonated with a natural feel for the dramas and dreams of the common people.

Why Writers Write

I was reflecting on my own discovery of London’s stories and ensuing passion for his work as I read Writers [on Writing], a collection of forty-six essays by some of today’s best-known writers, originally published in the New York Times. As is usual with literature in general, you have to plow through the fields here a while before you gather up enough grain for a good meal. Writers [on Writing] reveals what is perhaps a sort of truism in literature: gather up any group of writers and ask them why they write or what writing means to them, and the answers are going to ricochet off the walls, in all directions. Some of this will result in interesting, profound reflections on writing and the search for meaning, and the artist’s role in society. Some will be more tangential, essays on this or that aspect of the writing life or the writer’s process, clever and self-absorbed and perhaps of interest only to those already committed fans of the contributor.

What is perhaps true is that writers as a group are a creatively dissatisfied lot. "All writers come to their craft from a sense of being on the margins of life, of seeing the world with an outsider’s eye and needing to make sense of it," observes Sara Paretsky. Yet Paretsky herself doesn’t write books of social or political commentary. She’s pulled by stories, not ideas, especially stories of the voiceless and powerless. It’s just that writing mysteries in which the most primitive of human impulses collide with law and justice is, as Paretsky understands, inherently political.

I’m pulled by stories and ideas and the matter of art’s intersection with society. It is a particularly disagreeable American notion that "true art is above politics" and therefore exists only for its own sake. As veteran journalist and novelist Hans Konig remarks, this line of thinking is frequently just another way of describing art that has made its peace with the status quo.

"No writer can float in a void above the battle," writes Konig "There is a link between the potato famine and James Joyce’s Ulysses. There is a link between the heroes and heroines of Henry James and the basics of their society; if they had to run off to nine-to-five jobs, they would have lost most of their literary interest. There is even a link between the portraits of Rembrandt and the plundering of India by the Dutch East India Company."

Art, however indirectly, is always linked to the social order, concludes Konig. To be "above politics" in this most widely interpretive sense is neither admirable nor informed; it is possible only through either "appalling incomprehension" or "total indifference" to the world. But neither does this mean that literature has to scale grand arcs of social or historical drama to be considered valuable or great. In the hands of a talented artist, even the most banal of circumstances can evoke vistas of emotion and drama. It’s all about speaking to the human condition.

Debunking Pretentiousness

As I was reading Writers [on Writing] I found myself going back to reread "A Reader’s Manifesto," a provocative essay by critic B. R. Meyers on the state of American literature, which was published last year in The Atlantic Monthly Meyers takes to task what he considers a growing pretentiousness in "serious" American fiction. It was a scathing piece, full of a kind of populist disdain for the stylistic conceits of such celebrated writers as Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, David Guterson, and others. Not surprisingly, the essay sparked a small storm of protests and controversy.

For this critic, the paradox of modern America and its literary culture is that the more literacy skills reportedly decline in the population, the more ponderous, remote, and affected becomes the literary bestseller. Yet, ironically, all the more awestruck seem to have become the elite ranks of critics and those who give out literary awards and prizes, slipping into a mindset, as Meyers charges, that equates "smartness" with density and all sorts of stylistic convolutions or artificiality in voice as evidence of really great, sophisticated writing.

"Everything written in writerly, self-conscious prose," says Meyers, "is now considered to be "literary fiction" — not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance." According to Meyers, these days a good story told in unaffected English will at best earn a patronizing critic’s nod for it’s "workmanlike prose," while deliberately obscure writing that keeps the reader "at a respectfully admiring distance" evokes streams of laudatory oohs and aahs from dazzled critics.

I can’t comment on all the writers Meyers critiques. But I understand his larger point. He’s telling us that if our writers don’t make sense, or bore us beyond belief, maybe — just maybe — it’s because they really don’t make sense, or are just plain boring. When Oprah Winfrey cheerfully admitted she sometimes puzzled over Toni Morrison’s sentences, Morrison’s response was, "That’s called reading." Well, maybe, as Meyers suggests, it just might also be — dare we say? — something called bad writing? Meyers is right that great prose is not necessarily an "easy read" but it is always lucid. We should get over being intimidated by what publishing circles consider "smart."

What I find especially notable about Meyers’s critique is how rarely we even hear such thoroughgoing criticism. As publishing houses consolidate into ever-larger and ever-fewer publishing mega-warehouses, it’s as if independent literary criticism also becomes lost to the hype and hustle of marketing types, publicists, and literary agents, who themselves don’t even seem to realize that market savvy is not the same thing as literary intelligence or sensibility.

All this may also help explain a parallel phenomenon that’s been noted recently in publishing circles — the large number of bestsellers that go unread. Apparently, the public often buys books in response to a big promotional buildup, only to discover faltering enthusiasm once the reading starts. Maybe this also explains why a sophisticated newspaper like the Washington Post would organize an on-line discussion of Annie Proulx’s Close Range asking readers to choose their favorite sentence(s) from among the stories. As if a more encompassing conversation about what the stories mean were too much to ask of today’s busy consumers.

To Transcend Mere Words

James Salter observes in Writers [on Writing] that literature is just those books that people keep reading and rereading. It’s true. A great story endures. A truly great novel, short story, or work of creative nonfiction takes us to those places where falseness and contrivance fall away and life in all its beauty and brutality or even trivialness is revealed. A work of literature speaks to us of things that are neither empty nor meaningless, of the timeless rhythms of yearning and sorrow, joy and love, and everything that uniquely defines the human experience. And why we humans have the right to dream up words like spiritual to explain it all.

"Not to breathe your last looking at some TV sitcom," declares Salter, "but to die in the presence of great things, those riches, to look out upon the stars." This is what literature gives to us. The best writers take us to such locales, leaving us with a deeper, more closely held sense of our own relationship to the places where stars shine and dreams reside. We come away understanding on new levels something more about what it means to be alive.

Mark Harris is a contributor to The Flexible Writer: A Basic Guide, 4th edition, edited by Susanna Rich (Allyn & Bacon/Longman, 2003). 567 pages.

Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times. Introduction by John Darnton. (Times Books, 2002). 268 pages.

"A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose," by B. R. Myers. The Atlantic Monthly (July-August 2001).

The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998). 236 pages.

American Dreamers: Charmian and Jack London, by Clarice Stasz (St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 362 pages.

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

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