Control over chaos

Henry James

Leon Edel wrote that Henry Janes "joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence."

I like that.

I have sometimes said, only half joking, that I had a disorganized desk and an organized mind. At one time I had three disorganized desks, one at work and two at home. Yet I have a mind that seeks order. I don't know if this trait helped make me a writer or if a lifetime of writing has shaped my mind in this way. But I think the two are related. Writing is all about trying to make sense of things.

This seems especially true of those who write history or biography. So many things happen, many of them all at once, that it can be a challenge to describe events in an understandable way. It requires putting things in order, even if that order is arbitrary.

I have started reading a book, surprisingly short, called Dawn of D-Day. So many things were all going on at once on June 6, 1944, that it must be difficult to describe it all in a meaningful way. What was going on in western Europe that morning could easily be called chaos. Yet David Howarth brings it under control by focusing on individual soldiers doing particular tasks, such as parachuting into France or landing on Omaha Beach. He may not be able to tell the whole story — nobody can — but he tries to tell a complete story with little stories that help make sense of the whole.

Novelists such as Henry James do something similar. They try to tell a story with many characters and many actions and conversations, while bringing it all together in a meaningful way.

I recently reviewed Helen Macdonald's book H Is for Hawk, in which she says bluntly that making sense of her life, especially the death of her father, was her reason for training a goshawk and then writing a book about it.

Writing, or at least good writing, is a struggle to achieve "a victory of order and clarity."