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.

Just friends?

Can men and women be "just friends"? Well, maybe, Or maybe not. Gabrielle Zevin explores the possibilities in her 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a line from Shakespeare's Macbeth.

The novel covers about three decades and takes us inside the video game industry. Sam and Sadie meet when they are both kids. Sam is hospitalized with a bad foot, that will be amputated later in the novel. He is uncommunicative and mostly just plays video games. Sadie likes games, too, and they play together, gradually building a friendship, a rocky friendship as it turns out.

They meet again a few years later, he a student at MIT, she a student at Harvard. They decide to build a game together, which leads to more games and then a thriving video game company.

Can they be more than friends? More than business partners? Both ask these questions but hesitate to bring them up with each other. Why spoil a good arrangement? But then Sadie takes lovers, both of them involved in their video game business. Why these others but not Sam?

Meanwhile there is a lot about video games and how the industry changes through the years. Zevin goes into detail about fictional games you might wish were real so you could play them along with the characters. Eventually Sam and Sadie develop a relationship in a game that they lack in real life. But this proves no more satisfactory.

The novel probably works better for readers younger than me. I haven't gotten much beyond playing Spider and FreeCell. But even I am intrigued by the question: Can you be "just friends"?

The things that offend us

In a three-way conversation with friends a few days ago, the subject turned to books and, in particular, the things we found most offensive in the novels we read. Although we are close friends of about the same age who attend the same church and share similar world views, we found we were bothered by very different things in the novels we read.

Is it the graphic sex that bothers us? Well, yes ... or no. The person I expected might be most bothered by the sex turned out to like it. Was it the bad language? Well, yes, but not to the same degree for each of us. Was it the violence? We all read thrillers, and no violence at all in a thriller can be dull. But even so, extreme and graphic violence can be offensive. What about certain social or political viewpoints? Well, it depends.

Isn't it interesting how different things bother different people in different ways? And if I am any judge, I think different things can bother the same person at different stages of life.

I have read Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolitia twice in my life, once as a college student when it was assigned reading for a class and again when I was in my 70s. Very different things bothered me in each reading, I noticed.

As a young man, the violence when Humbert Humbert kills another man disturbed me most. I hardly noticed the sex, probably because it was mostly implied and not explicit. When I read the novel again decades later, I hardly noticed the violence, probably because I have read so much fictional violence in the meantime, but the the sex between a middle-aged man and a young girl offended me. At this point in life I could read between the lines.

The novel had stayed the same, but I had changed.

The "aching urge" to write

John Steinbeck

Novelist John Steinbeck once wrote, "The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader."

We write, I suppose, for the same reason we talk — because we think we have something to say. Steinbeck uses the phrases "aching urge" and "something he feels important." These phrases seem to raise the stakes. They suggest that we feel compelled to say what we have to say. And it's not just important to us. It's important to others, as well.

This caused me to think about the various kinds of writing I have done in my life. Are Steinbeck's words true in these instances?

School essays and reports — What was most important here was the grade. The aching urge was more about satisfying the teacher or professor — producing the 100 words or eight pages or whatever was required by the assignment.

News stories — I was a newspaper reporter in my early professional life. Importance was a required for anything printed as news. The most important stories went on the front page and got a byline. But even minor inside stories were expected to have some importance to someone. The "aching urge," quite frankly, probably had more to do with keeping my job.

Editorials — I was an editorial page editor for much of my career. I wrote opinions, which in most cases were manufactured opinions. That is, I had to manufacture feelings about things I would not have otherwise cared much about. The best editorials I wrote, however, were those for which I felt Steinbeck's "aching urge."

Columns — I wrote many columns over the years, mostly book reviews but also columns of a more general kind, including many that were intended to be humorous. Many of these I wrote simply because I had to write them, yet quite often they were very important to me and I felt like I had something valuable to say.

Blog posts — For the first time, beginning more than 15 years ago, what I wrote was entirely optional. I wasn't being paid. Nobody could fire me or flunk me. Steinbeck's formula began to make more sense to me.

Sermons — For the past few years I have tried my hand at writing and often preaching sermons. Again this is optional, and yet I find myself writing what I feel compelled from something inside me to write, saying what I sense is important for someone else to hear.

Over the years I believe my writing has actually improved as it has become less a requirement and more an aching urge.