Wrong, wrong, wrong

In my comments about Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections a few days ago, I didn't offer many examples of those rotten reviews and rejections. Let me do that now.

Here is what reviewers said about works now recognized as classics.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: "... the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read."

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: "We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story."

'Oblivion lingers'

The poetry of Emily Dickinson: "Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "... a book of the season only."

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: "Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville: "... an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact ..."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoi: "Sentimental rubbish ... Show me one page that contains an idea."

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: "Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language."

And here are a few comments made by publishers in their rejection letters:

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck: "Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China."

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle: "Neither long enough for a serial nor short enough for a single story."

Sanctuary by William Faulkner: "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail."

The Diary of Anne Frank: "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity' level."

"Unpublishable."

The Last of the Plainsmen by Zane Grey: "I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction."

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: "I haven't the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say."

The Blessing Way by Tony Hillman: "If you insist on rewriting this, get rid of all that Indian stuff."

A Separate Peace by John Knowles: "I feel rather hopeless about his having a future.:"

The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand: "Unpublishable."

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: "It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader."

Oh, well. We all make mistakes.

The cost of misjudging books

It is a much bigger problem when book editors and publishers misjudge a book than when book critics do. This thought came to me after reading Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections, edited by Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard, published 20 years ago. The book compiles negative comments made about books that later did very well and authors who later won fame.

A publisher once said of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre, "You're welcome to le Carre -- he hasn't got any future." A book reviewer for the Springfield Republican said of Ulysses by James Joyce, "That the book possess literary importance, except as a tour de force, is hard to believe." Of course The Spy Who Came in from the Cold went on to become a bestseller and John le Carre became perhaps the most important author of espionage fiction in history. Ulysses has often been ranked as the best novel in English ever written, which sounds like literary importance to me.

Yet the Springfield Republican reviewer was only expressing an opinion, an opinion that even today might be concurred with by 99 percent of those who read books. Joyce's novel is highly regarded by the literary elite, but the rest of us find it undecipherable and impossible to read.

That publisher (for some reason this book's editors identify the source of negative reviews but not the names of publishing companies) also expressed an opinion, but his opinion translated into dollars and cents. His inability to see the potential in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold cost his company money. Big money. The Springfield Republican lost no money because of the Ulysses review. The reviewer didn't lose any sleep.

I was particularly amazed to see how many publishers used as their excuse for rejecting someone's manuscript that this was not the sort of book that was selling now. For example, a publisher told Dr. Seuss that And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was "too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling." But books by Dr. Seuss later sold countless copies because they were different from other children's books. Being different, which is another way of saying being original, is what makes certain books, when well done, stand out from the others. Too many publishers only want books that are just like other books that have become bestsellers, but because they are less original they rarely sell as well.

Hardy in miniature

Susan Hill's Black Sheep reads like a Thomas Hardy novel in miniature. It is that much of a downer, beautifully written but still depressing.

She takes us to a British coal-mining town called Mount of Zeal at an unspecified time in the past. The Howker family, like most of the families in Mount of Zeal, is dependent on the mine. Boys grow up to become miners. Girls grow up to become the wives of miners. Most of the men work in the heat and filth deep below ground. The privileged few manage the work from above.

Except for a young daughter named Rose and a boy named Ted, Evie Howker has a house full of miners. Fortunately they work different shifts, so there is room for all in that small house and those few beds, but there is always somebody who needs a meal and so her work never ends. One son runs away without a word, never to be heard from again.

Years pass, and both Rose and Ted, like the brother who ran away, dream of a better life. Rose sees her chance in marriage to the son of one of those privileged families. Ted climbs over the hill and begs for a job tending sheep for a farmer. It pays less than mining coal, but the work is above ground. Hopes are dashed, however, in Hill as in Hardy. Rose's husband turns out to be a brute, and she begins to have eyes for another man. A mine disaster kills the Howker men. (I'm not sure how this happens if they are working different shifts.) Ted decides that to support his widowed mother, he must leave sheepherding and go down into the mine. Then things only get worse.

Hill covers many years in her powerful 135-page novel. Her title refers to Rose and Ted, the black sheep of the Howker family, who dare to defy convention and expectations by trying to live their own lives their own way. Yet as in Hardy, as well as in the Bible, the rain falls on both the just and the unjust.

Why some books endure

My first book did OK; meanwhile, books that I reviewed and loved in 1991 and 1992, books every bit as good or better than mine, are out of print, simply because they never found a readership then.

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

Nick Hornby ponders a question that I have pondered myself from time to time in this blog: Why do some books endure, or at least endure longer, than other books? Here are five factors that may help explain it:

1. Literary quality

Hornby is correct that some books endure (I believe his first book that he refers to was Fever Pitch), while others equally good, if not better, fall away. Yet as I pointed out on June 1 ("Not a horse race"), literary quality is mostly a matter of opinion. One person's idea of the great American novel will not necessarily be another's. There's no scale or measuring stick to measure which book is best. Still virtually everyone can agree that some books are better than some others. Most authors don't pretend to be writing great literature. They are just trying to sell a few books and make a living. In the book world, the cream doesn't always rise to the top, but often it does.

2. Timeliness

To endure, a book must speak to the times in which it first appears, but also to later times. It also helps if a book comes to represent a particular point in history, as All Quiet on the Western Front has come to represent World War I and The Sun Also Rises the post-war generation. I have commented in the past that a big reason for the success of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it appeared in 1969 when its style and anti-war message found an audience, especially among younger readers.

Yet to endure, books must also speak to generations to come. Writers like Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Dean Howells were once considered among the greatest American writers. Today few people read them.

3. Critics

Favorable book reviews, especially in publications like the New York Times, do make a difference. Critical praise excerpted on paperback covers help sell books. Authors often disparage critics, especially when they are critical, but even a negative review gains attention for a book. And a positive review from a respected critic can put an author on the literary map.

4. Teachers and professors

For many people, the only really good books they will read in their lifetimes will be those assigned in high school and college classes. I think To Kill a Mockingbird would have endured anyway, but it has certainly helped that the novel has been taught in so many classrooms. When we read a book for a class, we tend to regard it as great literature, even if we didn't particularly like the book. This probably explains why so many books considered great happen to be considered suitable reading for teens. Consider 1984, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men and so on. Somehow Lolita made the cut, but that has sometimes been assigned in college. That's where I first read it.

5. Popularity

This is the factor mentioned by Hornby, and he is right. Books sales translate into subsequent editions and then to keeping a book in print. Nowadays most books are being digitized, but previously a book had to be in print to be found by anyone who doesn't haunt used bookstores. Instructors couldn't assign books that were no longer in print. And publishers had no incentive to republish a book if there was no known market for it.

There are other factors involved in deciding which books endure and which don't. Movies based on books help keep those books around longer. Successful movies based on About a Boy and High Fidelity, among others, help explain Hornby's success. It also helps if the author is still alive and writing. When I was in Barnes & Noble after reading The Waterworks, I looked for other novels by E.L. Doctorow. I couldn't find any. He died in 2015, and already his books have apparently disappeared from bookstores. Books about authors, such as Tim Page's biography of Dawn Powell a few years ago, can renew interest in that writer's books.

Short novels or long novels?

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word,  compress, compress, compress.

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

Nick Hornby

Having liberally paraphrased the advice given by writing instructors everywhere, Nick Hornby goes on to rip it apart. He does this in his May 2004 column for Believer. That month the only book he writes about is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens because that is the only book he had time to read that month. Dickens could write short, as he did with A Christmas Carol, but mostly he wrote long, usually very long. Most of his novels were written under contract with periodicals that demanded so many words per issue for so many months. Thus the author, like others of his day, had to invent numerous characters and plotlines to keep his story going for the required length. Did he worry about chopping, hacking, pruning and compressing? Hardly. Was he a successful writer? You bet. People like Hornby are still reading him with pleasure.

I happen to be in the midst of a different Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, nearly 800 pages long with enough characters to populate a village. I'm loving it. Several years ago I listened to an abridgment of Great Expectations and felt something missing. It was the same story I remembered, but it didn't seem like Dickens. The characters were there, at least most of them, but they seemed stripped of their personalities. We can be glad Dickens never had a writing coach.

I also happen to be reading Susan Hill's Black Sheep, just 135 pages long. The story covers a period of several years, much longer than Our Mutual Friend. Certainly much is left out of Hill's narrative that other writers would have put in, yet her book works, just as those by Dickens do.

Hornby observes that short novels are usually humorless because jokes are the easiest things to cut out. Certainly Dickens mixes a great deal of humor into his novels, humor that can be neatly excised in abridgments, but I doubt that Hill ever cut any jokes out of Black Sheep. It just isn't the kind of novel to have had any to begin with.

The proper length of a novel, it seems to me, depends on three factors:

The author

Some writers, such as Thomas Wolfe, are just long-winded. An editor once complained of Marcel Proust, "I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep." Other writers have a gift for saying much with few words. You might put Susan Hill in that camp.

The story

Lonesome Dove and Gone with the Wind were stories that took many pages to tell. The Old Man and the Sea not nearly as many. We can often sense when a novel seems padded because the publisher or author wanted more pages than the story demanded.

The reader

There may be two kinds of readers. One takes pride in the number of books read and so values shorter books, or at least longer books that can be read quickly. The other is more concerned with thrift. Why take two thin books to the beach when one fat book will do the job? Long books usually give a reader more pages for the buck. Hornby writes, "Go on, young writers -- treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! Have you ever looked at the size of books in an airport bookstall? The truth is that people like superfluidity."

That is, we readers like superfluidity when the writer is good and when the story is good.

Reading literary criticism for amusement

The best reason to buy Believer magazine has long been Nick Hornby's column. Each month he lists the books he has bought and the books he has read  (a good exercise for all of us who tend to buy more books than we can possibly read) and then writes about those read.

To most people literary criticism is not a comic art form, but it is to this British novelist, who dissects books of all kinds briefly with both wit and insight. The first fourteen columns he wrote for Believer, dating from September 2003 to November 2004, were collected in the slim book The Polysyllabic Spree, printed by the magazine.

The challenge for those of us who write about books is to write about them in such a way that people who might never have an interest in a book will nevertheless read and enjoy a review of that book. That has always been my goal in this blog. Hornby actually accomplishes it, at least most of the time. An example is the column in which he writes about On and Off the Field, a book about cricket by Ed Smith. Hornby acknowledges that most readers of his column are Americans who care nothing about cricket, but since he loves the game and the book, he writes about it first one month saying, "you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle." You still may not have an urge to either read Smith's book or sit through a cricket match, but you will love what Hornby has to say about both.

Hornby has diverse reading tastes, as his inclusion of both a book about cricket and Anton Chekhov's A Life in Letters might suggest. He reads older books by the likes of Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Wilkie Collins and John Buchan, as well as contemporary ones. Sometimes he goes on a binge, such as a month devoted to J.D. Salinger or another to Dennis Lehane. Mostly he seems to just pick up books at random, some recent purchases and some he has had on his shelves for awhile.

What confuses me is that as a writer of a popular book review column, publishers must send him loads of books they would like for him to comment on, yet there is little mention of this. Each month he just lists those books he has purchased. sometimes even explaining where and how he purchased them. So what happens to all those unsolicited books that come in the mail?

Forward and back on the Camino

Two Steps Forward may be the title of a recently published novel by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, but the novel itself completes the phrase, "Two steps forward, one step back."

Simsion and Buist's two main characters and co-narrators, Martin and Zoe, are both middle-aged and newly single, he because of a nasty divorce and she because of the death of her husband. They meet while walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient route taken by pilgrims that stretches from France across northern Spain. The way does not go smoothly, and we are not talking about the Camino. Like confused magnets, they repel, then attract, repel, then attract. They all but become lovers, then one or the other takes off alone down trail without explanation. Soon enough they meet again, only to repeat the process.

These sorts of things happen in romantic novels, but still it quickly gets old here. Fortunately the authors provide welcome diversions in the form of subplots. Martin, an engineer from Great Britain, devises a cart to carry his gear and uses his pilgrimage as a marketing tool, hoping to sell his idea to a manufacturer. He also has a teenage daughter back home entangled in an affair with a married man. The American Zoe, meanwhile, learns her husband's fatal accident may have actually been a suicide. Plus there's news she will soon become a grandmother. An international cast of supporting characters also helps keep things somewhat interesting.

Then Simsion and Buist give us an ending that helps us all but forget the on-again-off-again romantic silliness of the previous 300 pages.

Close but not involved

Having devoted my career to journalism, I perked up whenever E.L. Doctorow, or his narrator McIlvaine, reflected on newspapers, reporters or writing in general in the novel The Waterworks. Here are some of those reflections, as well as some of my own.

Professionally you try to get as close to things as possible, but never to the point of involvement.

Close but not involved. That’s a fine line for a journalist, but an important one. Obviously that reporter who made news herself recently by sleeping with her sources crossed that line.

We did not feel it necessary to assume an objective tone in our reporting then. We were more honest and straightforward and did not make such a sanctimonious thing if objectivity, which is finally a way of constructing an opinion for the reader without letting him know that you are.

The narrator is writing about newspapers of the 1870s from the perspective of old age, sometime in the 20th century. In the 19th century objectivity was not the journalistic ideal it later became. It seems to me that, especially in the Trump era, newspapers have been returning to the avoidance of objectivity that McIlvaine idealizes. No longer are editorial opinions confined to editorial pages. Front-page headlines often suggest positive or negative inferences to be made from the news, and there seems to be more partisan selectivity in which stories are told and which are ignored. At my newspaper, especially during the 1970s and 1980s when I was the editorial page editor, we even tried to keep the editorial page somewhat objective by endorsing a mix of both Republicans and Democrats and maintaining a balance of liberal and conservative syndicated columnists.

He was appreciative! God forgive me — I could only think this spells ruin for him as a writer.

Elsewhere McIlvaine writes that a journalist never apologizes for a story. It’s the same idea, and close to the idea above of remaining uninvolved while staying close. A reporter doesn’t want to owe anything to a news source, and both appreciation and apologies imply debt. And debts must be repaid.

Did that mean I found myself prepared to put the interests of the story ahead of the lives of the people involved in it?

Doctorow’s story ultimately challenges the narrator’s fine journalism principles. To print his story will adversely affect the lives of people he has come to care about. I have been in that situation as a journalist, if not quite as dramatically. Most reporters have. One’s ideals as a journalist can sometimes conflict with one’s ideals as a human being.

Paradise in captivity

“Who knew that being kidnapped was so much like attending university?” Gen said.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

In Ann Patchett’s magical 2001 novel Bel Canto, a prolonged hostage situation in an unnamed Latin America country turns into an educational opportunity for both hostages and terrorists. A tiny ragtag liberation army composed mostly of teenagers, including two girls, crashes a birthday party for a prominent Japanese businessman, Katsumi Hosokawa, held at the vice president’s home. The featured guest is the celebrated American opera singer Roxane Coss, because Hosokawa loves opera. The terrorists had planned to kidnap the country’s president and trade him for the release of political prisoners, but the president has stayed home to watch his favorite soap opera. So Roxane becomes the big prize, along with all of the male party guests, who come from a variety of countries and speak a variety of languages.

The negotiations drag on for months, during which time the situation becomes not just the normal but the ideal. Roxane falls in love with Hosokawa, even though they cannot speak the same language. Gen, the translator and thus the most valuable person in the house, falls in love with Carmen, a pretty soldier whom he teaches to read and write. Another young soldier learns to play chess, while another, with Roxane’s instruction, learns to sing opera. The vice president, who has never done manual labor in his life, develops skills at both housekeeping and gardening. And so on.

As one of the generals says near the end of the novel, “It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

Yet as prevalent as this education theme may be in the novel, it is not the dominant one. That has to do with service, grace, second chances and the power of music. The vice president becomes a humble servant after his servants are released. Gen, the translator everyone depends on, becomes everyone’s servant, as well. Beatriz, the other female soldier, confesses to a priest for the first time in her life, discovering the freedom in forgiveness.

Then there is Roxane. Again and again we find lines like these when she sings, something that becomes the highlight of everyone’s day: “God’s own voice poured from her,” “such a voice must come from God” and “she sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.”

If captivity can become a paradise, then rescue paradoxically becomes paradise lost. Patchett’s ending brings the harsh real world back and disappoints for that reason. Readers, like both the captors and the captives, much prefer the captivity of the book’s first nine chapters.

Understated horror

The best historical novels read as if they were written in the time they are being written about. It can’t be easy to create that illusion, while at the same time producing a story contemporary readers can appreciate, understand and identify with. E.L. Doctorow does all this nicely in his 1994 novel The Waterworks.

Doctorow’s narrator is McIlvaine, a now aged newspaperman remembering his best story, one he couldn’t dare tell in his newspaper back in the 1870s when it all occurred. Now, after so many years, it doesn’t matter whether anyone believes it or not.

Martin Pemberton, a freelance or what we would today call a freelancer, mentions one day that he has seen his father. No big deal, except for the fact that his father, Augustus Pemberton (a wealthy, disreputable businessman) is dead and buried. McIlvaine assumes his reporter is just mistaken, until Martin disappears and the newsman learns that when the old man’s grave is opened the body of a boy is found inside. To help find Martin, McIlvaine enlists the services of one of the few honest cops in New York City during the Boss Tweed era,  Capt. Edmund Donne. When they find Martin he is being held captive in, of all places, an orphanage.

The shocking story Martin later tells involves a mad doctor of the Doctor Moreau school of medicine who convinces dying old men of great wealth to, in exchange for passing that wealth on to him, gain, if not immortality, at least extra years of blissful existence as guinea pigs in a great scientific experiment. How the doctor makes use of the orphans is another part of the horror.

Other writers might have taken Doctorow’s plot, doubled the length of the novel (Doctorow’s goes barely 250 pages), added more deaths and sex and shocks, and gotten a bestseller in the horror genre. Doctorow earned his bestseller with an understated literary novel in which most of the horror comes secondhand. For someone like me who doesn’t go for horror anyway, secondhand is more than good enough.

Almost like a novel

To that list of creative historian/biographers that includes Erik Larson, Candice Millard and, way back when, Truman Capote, you can add the name Brad Ricca, whose recent Mrs. Sherlock Holmes proves that the earlier Super Boys was no fluke.

By the use of the word creative I mean to suggest that these writers write history and biography in the manner of novelists. In the second chapter of Ricca's newer book, for example, we read "Twenty-year-old Christina wiped away the steam and scraped at the spidery frost on the window." Well, 100 years later, how do we know Christina wiped away steam and scraped frost from the window. Perhaps because we know it was a frigid February day in New York City and that is what one would do in order to look out a window, and looking out a window is what one might do if one's sister is very late coming home.

Ricca gives pages and pages of notes and references to justify such sentences as this. A reader feels confident that if this isn't exactly what happened, it must be close to what happened.

The real problem with Ricca's book about a female lawyer who a century ago won brief fame for her detective skills is that while he may tell the story as if it were a novel, the story itself doesn't quite cooperate. Most people's lives don't have plots, as I mentioned in a blog post a few weeks ago ("Story vs. plot," June 8, 2018). Grace Humiston makes quite a splash, then fades into relative obscurity. The book ends with more whimper than bang, but the first couple hundred pages make excellent reading.

The case that occupies most of the book involves a young woman, Christina's sister Ruth Cruger, who never returns home from ice skating. Her father insists his daughter is a good girl who would never run away from home. The police think otherwise, but they do search a motorcycle shop owned by Alfredo Cocchi where Ruth is believed to have stopped. No evidence is found, yet later Cocchi himself disappears and turns up in Italy, leaving his wife behind in New York.

Henry Cruger, the girl's father, hires Grace Humiston to investigate. She becomes convinced that Ruth is dead and that Cocchi is involved. The body must be in the basement of his workshop, which Mrs. Cocchi guards zealously. Eventually Humiston’s team of investigators do find the body exactly where she knew it would be.

Cocchi makes two confessions, one that he killed Ruth to stop her screaming when he sexually assaulted her and a second that his wife killed her. Yet he is never returned to New York to stand trial. Various police officers are held accountable, however, both for failing to find the body when they searched the shop and for showing Cocchi favoritism because he often worked on their motorcycles and was a friend of theirs. This turned the police against Humiston.

Other reversals follow, and her reputation suffers. She remains a champion of missing girls, but with diminishing success. Ricca tells the story well, much like a novel, but because it is true, it cannot end like one.

Periods are a good idea. Period.

Like most of the other students in my college American literature class, I was taken aback when we got to William Faulkner's "The Bear," from his novel Go Down, Moses, for in this story the author has sentences that go on for pages, and even paragraphs. Here is a brief example:

"He could say it, himself and his cousin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land which was to have been his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin, his grandfather, had bought with white man's money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered, or believed he had tamed and ordered it, for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and ..."

Notice that Faulkner, or Faulkner's narrator, makes use of commas and apostrophes. Later in the same sentence one can find colons, semicolons and quotation marks. So the author was not averse to punctuation in general, just the use of periods. One of his sentences goes on for more than 1,600 words.

Literature professors love this, perhaps because it justifies their worth in being able to decipher what it all means. Most of the rest of us, however, and certainly my fellow students and I, would appreciate  a period once in a while. We like to come up for air. If a sentence expresses a single idea. we prefer ideas we can wrap our minds around. That's hard to do when we have forgotten the beginning of the sentence, or even the middle of the sentence, by the time we have gotten to the end.

Sentence length, like the number of syllables in the words used in those sentences, is used to determine the reading level of a piece of writing. Ben Blatt discusses this topic in Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve. His studies show that the grade level of American literature, both literary fiction and popular fiction, has been in decline in recent years. This may have something to do with the deaths of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and few other wordy writers of yore.

Back in the 1960s, most bestsellers were at about the eighth grade reading level. Today they are around the sixth grade level. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury had a grade level of 20. Not too many of us have had that many years of education. But even that novel makes simple reading compared with one of Faulkner's longer sentences with its score of 551.

In the newspaper business we strived for short paragraphs, short sentences and relatively simple words. The goal was to write stories virtually anybody could read and understand. The whole purpose of language is communication, and if your intended audience cannot understand what you are saying, it is you, not they, who has failed. This is not to say that literary fiction of the kind Faulkner wrote should not be more difficult than your typical runaway bestsellers. Still, an occasional period would be nice.

Stephen Railton

I've noticed that periods, or implied periods, are often missing in speech as well. Some people routinely speak in partial sentences. Listeners have to guess where each sentence is heading because the speaker never gets there, having moved on to the next partial sentence.

Lately I have been listening to a series of Great Courses lectures on the life and work of Mark Twain by University of Virginia professor Stephen Railton. It is good stuff, and I am enjoying the lectures very much ... except for the fact that you can't hear the periods at the end of Railton's sentences. You can hear when the next sentence begins. There is always an implied capital letter. But the previous sentence always ends with his voice implying there is more to come.

Sometimes the professor puts his period before the end of a sentence, such as, "... for the lyceum. lecture ..." One reason this is annoying is that when I have to pause the CD, I prefer to do it at the end of a sentence. With Railton, that is a challenge because you know one sentence has ended only when the next one has begun.

To be avoided like the plague?

All writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart.

Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche

Martin Amis

Ben Blatt points out in his book Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve that all writers, at least all the writers he has surveyed, use cliches. As I mentioned last time, bestselling author James Patterson uses the most on Blatt's list (160 cliches per 100,000 words), while Jane Austen uses the fewest (just 45). This might lead you to assume that the best writers depend less on the cliche than lesser authors. To some extent this is true. Keeping Austen company at her end of the list are the likes of Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. Yet there are also some pretty fair writers keeping Patterson company: Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon and George Orwell, for example.

Writes Blatt, "Of all Pulitzer Prize winners between 2000 and 2016, the median cliche rate is 85 per 1000,000. If we look at the top ten bestselling books per year between 2000 and 2016 according to Publishers Weekly, the median cliche rate is 118 -- almost 40% higher." So maybe our very best writers do use fewer cliches than other writers, and let us hope so, but they do use some. Is their work weakened by the inclusion of these cliches, as Martin Amis would seem to suggest? Not necessarily. Sometimes a cliche can be forgivable, justified or even a deliberate artistic choice.

Consider Vonnegut as an example. One reason he is on the high end of cliche usage is his repetition of certain phrases like "and so it goes" in his novels. Almost every novel he wrote has a repeated phrase like that, and the repetition adds to the artistry of the novels, or so we could argue.

Sometimes novelists have characters who, for the sake of realism, speak in cliches. Real people do use cliches in their speech, and such speech should be reflected in fiction about supposedly real people.

Not all cliches are created equal. There are some like "black as pitch," a favorite phrase used by George R.R. Martin, or "dead of night," often used by J.K. Rowling, that we have all heard too often. Good writers should be able to avoid them. Yet other phrases strike me as less serious infractions. Take "the last straw," a favorite of Salman Rushdie, or "sooner or later," one used by Faulkner. They too are often heard, but one reason they are so often used is that they are so useful. Each expresses in three words an idea that might take several more words to say in original language that might not be as effective. Some cliches are phrases that act as words, quickly and clearly conveying ideas when other, more original phrases used to say the same thing might be confusing and complicated. Sometimes a worn cliche can be the best alternative.

When I reviewed The Message, Eugene Peterson's translation of the Bible in contemporary English, several years ago, I called it a collection of cliches. Here is how Peterson translates some verses in the 12th chapter of Hebrews: "So don't sit around on your hands! No more dragging your feet! Clear the path for long-distance runners so no one will trip and fall, so no one will step in a hole and sprain an ankle. Help each other out. And run for it!" Try counting all the cliches in those lines.

And yet at the churches I attend in both Ohio and Florida, The Message is the most commonly used Bible translation in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, and I may be the only one in the congregation who feels uneasy about it. Like them or not, cliches are useful for conveying meaning. And sometimes that means more than art.