Reality disguised

The people you know actually dread reading the novel you are about to write — they don't want to read about themselves, they don't want to be bored, and they fear embarrassment for everyone. You are, therefore free,

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Novels, and especially first novels, are often an embarrassment to those who know the novelists. Just ask the women who were close to Philip Roth. Just ask Pat Conroy's father. And so on.

First-time novelists tend to retell the key story from their own early lives. Their difficult childhoods. Their first awkward stabs at romance. Their most traumatic high school or college experiences. All this and more often winds up, slightly disguised, in first novels.

But even experienced novelists, who may have run out of profound personal experiences to write about, will still base characters on the people they know and base episodes in their novels on events from their own lives or the lives of people they know. Fiction is often the truth reimagined.

Flannery O'Connor was famous for her outrageous, often evil, characters. Yet she is said to have based these characters on the people she knew in the town where she lived. She simply exaggerated their flaws to such an extent that the individuals they were based on rarely recognized themselves. And few people in her town ever read her stories.

To know a novelist, as Jane Smiley observes, is often to fear being recognized in one of those novels. Serious novelists must steel themselves to not be overly intimidated by the concerns of others. These are the ones, in Smiley's view, who are therefore free.

Baby talk

Apparently speaking baby talk does no harm, and it may even be a valuable aid in the early stages of acquiring a language.

Peter Farb, Word Play

The English word infant apparently stems from a Latin word meaning "speechless." True enough, when a child begins talking we usually stop using the word infant, replacing it with toddler. Albert Einstein didn't begin talking until he was about 3, perhaps meaning that he was considered an infant longer than most other children with lesser brains.

We begin learning a language before we begin speaking it. Children begin learning language as soon as they are born, if not before. They learn, for example, the sound of their mother's voice. They learn that human sounds have meaning, even if they do not understand that meaning.

Peter Farb

The question Peter Farb deals with above is whether parents and other adults using baby talk help or hinder a child's speech development. Many people do speak baby talk around small children, yet most of those children grow up speaking their language as the adults around them speak to each other, not baby talk. When adults do speak baby talk around other adults it is usually an affectation, such as a woman trying to appear cute around men.

I have often prided myself on speaking like an adult around children, under the belief that this might help them learn to speak properly. Yet, I confess, I often used baby talk around my own son. More accurately, I adopted some of the pronunciations he used. For example, he pronounced certain words beginning with an S as if they began with the letter P, such as pasgetti for spaghetti. I started doing the same. He liked Fritos but called them Friggytoes. I have been calling them friggies ever since. In fact, I still sometimes say pasgetti when no one else is around.

Yet my son grew up speaking perfectly good English. Only I, apparently, was adversely impacted by baby talk.

Eugene Peterson at his best

Eugene H, Peterson

Eugene H. Peterson, who died in 2018, may be best remembered today for transforming the Bible into The Message, a popular paraphrase that puts Scripture into language Americans can better understand. Yet he was mainly, for many years, the pastor at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Md., and a very fine preacher.

In 2023 some of his sermons were collected in the book Lights a Lovely Mile: Collected Sermons of the Church Year. The book makes good reading.

Many preachers, and perhaps most preachers, base their sermon on gospel texts, but if this collection is any indication, Peterson favored passages from elsewhere in the New Testament, especially Paul's writings. And the word passages is misleading, for usually these sermons are based on just a single verse. And it is amazing how much he could find in that single verse.

He said this in one of his sermons, "Paul. Why do I like him so much? An opinionated man, verging on cockiness, quick tempered, and capable of soaring anger. He wrote on subjects that are of surpassing importance to me: God, my eternal salvation, the meaning of my life, how to think of Christ. These are things I very much want to get clear and straight."

As the subtitle suggests, the sermons cover the church year — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, etc.

Like any good preacher, Peterson sometimes said surprising things. He began one sermon, called :"The Most Dangerous," by saying, "Do you know that the most dangerous thing you can do is go to church?" He went on to say, "The temptations that take place inside church are much more severe and have much bigger consequences than those outside." What sins did Jesus most condemn? Well, sins like spiritual pride and hypocrisy, sins more likely to be found in a church than at any bar on a Saturday night.

Want a good sermon without having to step into a "dangerous" church? Give Eugene Peterson a try.

Sealing the deal

The other day I ate lunch with my family at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa, a striking downtown restaurant with both a bookstore and a tea shop, both as attractive as the food to me. I bought some tea, my granddaughter bought a book, everyone enjoyed lunch.

While there I picked up a bookmark with a quote from Edgar Degas: "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." 

After lunch we walked across the street to the University of Tampa, where we saw the Sticks of Fire sculpture by O.V. Shaffer. I confess I did not see much beyond several slender metal pillars pointing toward the sky. I am sure the sculptor saw something more, and if you read about the sculpture you will find it has a deep meaning for the campus. All this escapes the casual viewer, however. The sculpture is clearly more impressive at night, as the accompanying photograph shows.

Whether one is talking about sculpture, literature, painting, theater, film, photography or any other art form, a kind of transaction takes place. Others complete the transaction. A book is no good without a reader, a painting no good without a viewer, a play no good without an audience. Thus, what the artist sees is only part of the deal, as Degas suggested. Someone else must complete it. And what others see is at least as important as what the artist sees.

So was the sculptor of Sticks of Fire a failure, according to Degas? Or was I the failure? Or did I simply view it at the wrong time of day?

Invisible detectives

Now You See Us (2023) by Balli Kaur Jaswal is partly a murder mystery, but that's only a small part. Mostly it is a novel about how those in the servant class live invisible lives, or perhaps they are just seen differently.

Cora, Angel and Donita are Filipina domestic workers in Singapore. Cora, older than the others, works for a rich widow whose daughter is getting married. The woman, embarrassed by her late husband's infidelity that everyone but her seemed to know about, treats Cora like her only friend, which both Cora and the daughter find inappropriate for different reasons.

Angel has an elderly employer. Donita works for a woman who treats her more like a slave. Both of these young women are involved in tumultuous love affairs in their one day off each week.

Then a fourth domestic worker, Flordeliza, is arrested for the murder of her employer. The other three women don't believe it. One of them says she saw Flordeliza elsewhere when the murder occurred. The three of them play detective in their limited spare time. When they find the answer, will anyone believe them?

A significant number of women from the Philippines work as domestic workers elsewhere in the world. The author, who was born in Singapore and lived in the Philippines, knows this story from both sides.

Facts can spoil stories

The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give-up accuracy in pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

That sentence by Jane Smiley in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is packed with lessons.

Don't expect historical novels to be completely reliable.

Don't expect historical accounts told in story form to be completely reliable either. Is it possible that the more interesting a history book is, the less accurate it is likely to be?

Don't expect memoirs and autobiographies to be completely reliable.

Don't expect the stories people tell, whether in divorce court or at parties, to be completely reliable.

To tell a good story, one must, to some degree, fudge the facts. We tend to make ourselves the hero of our own stories. We eliminate anything that might spoil the story or that make us look bad. We exaggerate anything that makes the story more entertaining or that makes us look better.

The more we tell favorite stories the more we embellish them, and the more we embellish them the more we believe the embellishments. Our memories gradually conform more to our stories than to what actually happened.

When I worked for newspapers, a favorite insult was, "He didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story." That was funny because it was often so true.

Fear not ... and read

President Eisenhower (left, center) at Dartmouth College

Not long after he became president of the United States in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College. He said, among other things, "Don't join the book burners. ... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."

Perhaps he should have said any book. I think I would fear trying to read every book in a public library of any size.

But let's take apart Eisenhower's words. Book burning in any form — actual book burning, censorship, protests, refusal to add to a public library's collection or to a bookstore's shelves — doesn't work. You have probably noticed that bookstores and libraries everywhere often have a table of "banned books." Most of these books have never actually been banned, certainly not in the United States, but they have been frowned upon publicly by somebody. The result is that these very books become highlighted, put on display and made more attractive to those who otherwise might never be drawn to them.

The best way to sell a book is to have somebody raise a fuss about it.

And so book burning is counterproductive. You can't burn every copy. You can't ban everyone from reading a book, printing it or selling it. It simply makes more people want to read it. And in a country with a free press, it would be illegal anyway.

This is not to say that there are not certain books that can be controversial in certain circumstances. A prominent man recently drew controversy when he was exposed on the Internet leafing through a lingerie catalog on an airliner. Carrying a book by a prominent conservative author on a liberal college campus could get a person in hot water with friends and professors. Reading a book denying the existence of hell, as was published a few years back, might raise eyebrows in certain churches.

Eisenhower was right. Don't be afraid to read any book. But you might want to be careful where you choose to read it.