Trying to understand Grandma

What would Susan Ward and Frank Sargent have said to each other in the two hours before Oliver and Ollie returned from town? Having brought them together, I find it difficult to put words in their mouths.

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

When it was published in 1970, Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose must have seemed like a contemporary novel and a historical novel wrapped into one, with hippies and miniskirts on one page and pioneers and corsets on another. Fifty years later it reads like a historical novel all the way through.

Lyman Ward is a historian still in his 50s, but because of an amputated leg and otherwise declining health he is retired from teaching. His wife has left him for the surgeon who cut off his leg, and now he is in the care of a neighbor woman, once a childhood playmate, who feeds him and bathes him. This woman's daughter, Shelly, full of hippie ideals and attitudes, comes over each day to help him organize his current writing project, a book about his grandmother, Susan Ward.

Lyman can't decide whether his book should be a biography or a novel. Stegner's novel takes the form of Lyman's recorded narrative, including both the details of his own life and that of his grandmother, as revealed in letters and other documents. But these papers cannot reveal the whole story. Sometimes they only hint at it. Many details, such as conversations, are omitted altogether, and Lyman must use his imagination to fill in the blanks.

Susan is a gifted writer and artist who views Eastern intellectual circles as her Eden. Then she falls in love with Oliver Ward, a mining engineer who is also from the East but whose career takes him West, where the mines are. Reluctantly she follows her husband, always dreaming of returning East and to her dear friends there. Her snobbishness prevents her from forming friendships with anyone in the pioneer towns where Oliver's job takes him.

It doesn't help that Oliver, for all his talent, finds success difficult to achieve. He is much too trusting of others, who then take advantage of him. He fails to patent his inventions, allowing others to make fortunes from them. Susan often supports their growing family herself with her writings and illustrations, much in demand back East. This further deflates Oliver's self-esteem.

Then there is Frank, a young man from the East who, unlike Oliver, can talk with Susan intelligently about books and other subjects that interest her. Frank makes clear his love for Susan. She tries to discourage him, but not in a way that actually discourages him. Her nos sound too much like maybes.

Finally Lyman reaches a point in his grandmother's story where he can't go on. The couple briefly separates after a family tragedy. When they reunite, they remain emotionally distant for the remainder of their long lives. They seem distant even in Lyman's own memories of them. So what happened? Was Susan unfaithful to her husband or not? He cannot decide. His feelings about his grandmother become confused with his feelings about his own wife, and he doesn't know what to do about either woman.

Stegner's it-was-only-a-dream ending spoils an otherwise classic novel. This may have worked for Dorothy, whose dream was in color and much more interesting than Kansas, but it seems cheap and easy here. Surely Stegner could have done better.

Wild life in the Tower

Reading Julia Stuart's 2010 novel The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, one might wonder how a book so melancholy can be so funny. Or how a book so funny can be so melancholy. Or even how a book so funny and melancholy can convey so much obscure British history.

At one time, before they were moved to the London Zoo, animals given to the British monarch by other countries were housed in the Tower of London. Stuart imagines that happening again. What if the queen, who often does receive unwanted gifts of animals from foreign governments, decided to move these animals from the zoo back to the Tower?

Balthazar Jones, a beefeater at the Tower, is put in charge of the menagerie. Beefeater is a term long ago applied to the uniformed guards at the Tower because at the time they were among the few British subjects who were regularly served meat at their meals. Today, Stuart assures us, beefeaters are more tour guides than torturers.

While the animals, including the ravens that have traditionally lived in the Tower (actually a fortress with many towers) and an aged tortoise named Mrs. Cook kept by Balthazar Jones as a pet, inspire much of the novel's humor, it is the wild life of the human residents that lies at the heart of the story. Everywhere Stuart turns there seems to be either excited romance or broken hearts, often both at once.

As for Balthazar Jones (Stuart always mentions her characters by their full names), he and his wife, Hebe Jones, seemed to have lost their love for each other when they lost their beloved son, who simply died in his sleep. Now Hebe Jones leaves her husband and the Tower, devoting her life to her job at the London Underground lost and found office, another great inspiration for the novel's humor (and not a little extra melancholy).

Like Stuart herself, her characters all seem fascinated by the oddities of British history, certainly a handy asset for tour guides. In fact, whenever romance blossoms, odd historical facts serve nicely as terms of endearment and museums as the ideal place to impress a date.

The novel makes wonderful reading, every bit as odd and interesting as the most peculiar British history.

The greatest kindness

"Don't tell me too much," Henry James is supposed to have said, when some anecdote vibrated him to the prospect of a story. "Don't tell me too much!"

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Like Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), Christina Baker Kline's A Piece of the World (2017) offers a fictional exploration of the story behind a famous painting. Both novels are exceptional, but there is one essential difference in the writing of the two books.

Nothing is known about the girl in Johannes Vermeer's famous painting. Chevalier made up virtually the entire story, except for some historical details known about Vermeer himself and the Dutch city of Delft in the 17th century. Christina's World, on the other hand, was painted by Andrew Wyeth in the mid-1940s. Much is known about Wyeth, about Christina Olson, the woman in the painting, and about the house in the background where most of Kline's story takes place.

So which author faced the greater challenge, Chevalier who knew next to nothing about her painting or Kline who started writing with the outline of a story already in place? Kline had the advantage of a place to start, the disadvantage of having so many possible plot options closed off to her. Chevalier  had the advantage of being able to take her story in any direction she chose, the disadvantage of not having any story at all when she began her work. From the comment by Henry James that Wallace Stegner gives us in his own novel Angle of Repose, we see that he would have favored a middle position, knowing just enough of a story to fire his imagination, but not so much that it would stifle that imagination.

As I indicated, both novels impress me, but my subject here is Kline's novel. It begins with a young Andrew Wyeth being drawn to the old house on a Maine hill where Christina lives with her brother Al. He sets up a studio in the house, where he returns each summer. At the novel's end he unveils his painting of Christina on that hill. In between, however, the main focus of the novel is Christina's life, lived under the curse of a hereditary disease that gradually weakens her limbs until eventually she can only crawl from one place to another, up and down stairs.

There's an unhappy love affair and strained relationships with family members and neighbors. What others see as kindness, she rejects it as pity. She is too proud even to sit in a wheelchair, too stubborn to seek medical care. Her brother stays by her, though with his own reasons for anger and resentment.

Christina loves Emily Dickinson poetry and finds many of the poet's lines meaningful to her. Kline gives Christina, our narrator, some meaningful lines of her own as she tells her story. For example, "This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting." Or, "The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance." Much of her life she seems to spend waiting for Andrew Wyeth and Betsy, her former neighbor who becomes his wife. And then their acceptance brightens her little piece of the world.

Wise advice for writers

Dani Shapiro

In my brief review of Dani Shapiro's Still Writing earlier this week, I didn't mention any of her advice for writers, the whole point of her book. Much of what she says is wise, even inspired, so let me list a few of these points now.

1. Writing, after all, is an act of faith.

How true. When one begins writing anything, even with a pretty good idea where you are heading, you never really know where you are going to wind up. Or even if it will go anywhere. So many writing projects turn out to be dead-ends.

2. I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing.

This relates to her comment above about acting on faith. Overconfidence can be risky in any endeavor, but I'm not sure that is entirely what she means here. She frowns upon outlines, preferring instead to follow where her story and her characters take her. Sometimes our best vacations are those where we don't follow an itinerary. Elsewhere she says that writing from an outline is like painting by numbers.

3. Write the words "The Five Senses" on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk.

When Shapiro writes fiction, she wants to know what her characters are seeing, hearing, smelling, etc., on every page. Not that all these sensations find their way into her story. Most of the time they don't. But she wants to know what they are.

4. We're so vulnerable when we share new work.

She tells some horror stories about herself and other writers sharing their work too soon or to the wrong person. In one case, a promising young writer never recovered from the experience. A good reader can find something, such as a repeated word or an illogical series of events, that the writer missed.  But a good reader also knows how to point out flaws without damaging the writer's confidence.

5. It never gets easier. It shouldn't get easier.

Good writing should just look easy. Paul Theroux comments in Figures in a Landscape that Ernest Hemingway's writing looked so easy that it gave other writers the illusion that they could do as well. They couldn't.

6. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope for is that we will fail better.

Perhaps that is why near-perfection put the careers of young writers like Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger on ice. How could they hope to improve on To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye? Everything and everyone can be better. That's what keeps all of us going, trying to do better next time.

The writing life

Most tasks — whether one is baking a cake, building a birdhouse or taking out the garbage — have beginnings, middles and endings. Each stage of the process is a little different from the others. This is true of any writing project as well, and Dani Shapiro approaches her advice to writers in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life (2013) in this way.

Whether one is writing a book, an article, a term paper or a blog post, the problems, doubts and pressures are a bit different at each stage. How do I get started? How do I stay focused with so many distractions? How do I wrap this up when there are still so many obvious imperfections? Shapiro deals with such questions in a logical, if meandering, manner.

Like most of her books, including her novels, Still Writing is part memoir. Having grown up in a home with troubled, secretive parents, Shapiro remains haunted by her experiences, and those memories pop up frequently in illustration of her points. So this is not your typical self-help book.

The wisdom of an experienced writer blends in seamlessly with that writer's life story. Any aspiring writer who reads this will not only learn helpful hints but also be forced to shed illusions about what a writer's life is like.

When writers had power

Graham Greene lived, and thrived, in an age when writers were powerful, priest-like, remote, and elusive.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Graham Greene

In my youth certain authors on the order of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, Saul Bellow and Ernest Hemingway were held in something approaching awe. Even if you had never read one of their books, you knew who they were. Their very names had clout, and their names and their books were about all we knew about them. Do such writers exist in today's world? I can't think of any.

Yes, we still have outstanding literary writers, and we still have best-selling authors. People like Stephen King and James Patterson are stars in the publishing world. We know their names and their faces, perhaps even their voices if they have appeared with Oprah or on NPR. Still it's not quite the same. Stars are not gods.

The very familiarity of today's writers is the source of the problem, as Paul Theroux suggests in his essay on Graham Greene in Figures in a Landscape. "Until the past twenty years or so, writers were not accessible to the reading public," he writes. "They did not turn up for readings at bookstores; they did not give free talks at the library or sign your book. They were not visible. They were the more powerful for being somewhere else, only whispered about."

At some point publishers, by now mostly owned by big corporations, decided that writers should sell their own books. Instead of spending money on big publicity campaigns, they sent writers on multi-state book tours. These writers began showing up at every Barnes & Noble, book fair, reading festival and public library event, signing even books that nobody purchased. At one time a book bearing the signature of a major author was a very big deal, the book itself a treasure. Nowadays a signed copy, especially if it's a paperback, means little. Writers, like rock stars, even make their own videos to promote their books.

Writers, it turns out, are just ordinary people, and ordinary people are usually good at one thing or another. Writers happen to be good at writing. When we meet authors at bookstores and book fairs we see they are mostly introverted, self-conscious, self-doubting, middle-aged people not that different from those we pass on the street every day.

Life lived on television

A whole life lived on television, that's what I'd be good at.

Carolyn Parkhurst, Lost and Found

Anyone who likes reality TV will probably like Carolyn Parkhurst's 2006 novel Lost and Found. This may be why I didn't care for it. I didn't find it nearly as compelling as either The Dogs of Babel or The Nobodies Album, Parkhurst novels that sandwiched this one.

The entire novel is a reality show called Lost and Found in which participants travel around the world following clues that lead them to objects, such as parrots and ski poles, they must then carry with them for the remainder of their journey. Several of these participants narrate their stories, although the main characters are Laura and Cassie, a mother and her teenage daughter. Cassie feels guilty about giving up her baby girl for adoption a few months before, while Laura feels guilty about not even noticing her daughter's pregnancy. The show's producers, feeling guilty about nothing, hope to expose their story to improve ratings.

Finding and exposing secrets, its own game of Lost and Found, seems to be what the reality show is really all about. A couple of Christian homosexuals, married to each other in hope of beating what they view as an affliction, are others with secrets just waiting to be found. Cassie, too, has lesbian feelings she tries to keep hidden.

The line quoted above, about "a whole life lived on television," comes from Juliet, a former child star who hopes to use the reality show to springboard back into the limelight. She's frustrated to discover the producers find others in the game more interesting than her.

The novel makes easy reading. We feel compassion for most of the characters and disgust at the way the mostly faceless producers manipulate them. Yet we sense Parkhurst doing the same with her characters, making her novel, like the TV show, feel like something less than reality.

The problem with great sentences

"You know you have a beautiful sentence, cut it," (Georges) Simenon said. "Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut."

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Georges Simenon

This sounds like the worst possible advice for writers. Cut out your most beautiful sentences? When I reviewed The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage at few days ago, I commented on the many beautiful sentences. If she had cut them all out, her short novel would have been a short story.

Yet Dani Shapiro says something similar in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life. She recalls being a student in a writing class taught by Grace Paley. "'If I love a sentence I've just written enough to get up and go into the other room to read it aloud to my husband, I know I should cut it,' she once said."

Georges Simenon and Grace Paley were hardly mediocre writers, so maybe their advice is worth listening to. But what did they mean?

I can recall a number of occasions when I was editing newspaper copy, trying to get a story to fit into a hole on a page. With a deadline approaching, I searched desperately for something to cut out without harming the story. Often what had to come out was the best sentence in the entire story, something I especially hated when it was my own story. Yet great sentences are often nonessential sentences. They may just illustrate a point already made. Or they may just be showing off.

Unless one is another Thomas Wolfe, length is usually not a problem for a novelist. Simenon, in fact, wrote relatively short novels. Paley wrote short stories. One more beautiful sentence should not have been a problem. Still, essential must have been an important objective for both of them. Is this fancy sentence really necessary? A good writer writes short by eliminating the nonessential.

Shapiro interprets Paley's advice in this way: "Don't admire your own work, not while you're writing it." That makes sense. A hitter thinking about his last home run is likely to miss the next pitch. A singer remembering the quality of her last high note may stumble on the next one. First finish the job, then admire your work.

As for Simenon, Theroux comments that "he sometimes lets slip a pretty sentence, but generally his writing is so textureless as to be transparent and never calls attention to itself ..." Whether we are talking about writers, magicians, jugglers, teachers or plumbers, the best ones are those who make something difficult look easy. We appreciate the end result without even noticing how it happened. Beautiful sentences get noticed. That can be a problem. When a reader stops to admire a pretty sentence, as I often do, it can interrupt the flow of the story being told.

All this may be true. Yet still I like beautiful sentences. What would Bartlett's Familiar Quotations be without them?

Tackling the tough questions

Some pastors would prefer to avoid the really tough questions parishioners have about the Bible. Adam Hamilton, pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the world (near Kansas City) tackles such questions head-on in his 2014 book Making Sense of the Bible.

Is the Bible inspired by God? What does that even mean? Is it infallible? Were Adam and Eve real people? What does the Bible really say about homosexuality, women in leadership positions and other controversial issues? Not every reader will like every answer Hamilton gives, but they should all appreciate his willingness to offer his answers frankly, while admitting they are not necessarily the correct ones.

Hamilton describes himself as an evangelical, while conceding that his views have changed over the years, especially on the homosexuality question.

He doesn't believe God dictated the Bible word for word. Rather, he says, the Bible was written by people as fallible as anyone else. But Jesus himself frequently quoted passages from what Christians call the Old Testament, giving it authority for him and thus authority for his followers. As for the New Testament, it was written by those who either knew Jesus or knew others who knew Jesus. This proximity to Jesus makes these books more essential to the faith than books written in later centuries that may be no less inspired by God. Thus he is not bothered by the fact that the gospel writers told the same stories a little differently. They were only human, after all. What's important is that they agree on the important things, the Resurrection for example.

Hamilton takes a middle position between the two extremes of the Bible controversy. "Instead of assuming that the Bible is the result of God's word-for-word inspiration of its authors, or that the Bible is merely a human book, I've suggested that the scriptures were written by human beings who were inspired by God yet wrote in the light of their own experiences, the scientific knowledge they had access to, and the historical circumstances in which they lived."

According to John 1:1, Hamilton points out, the word of God is not the Bible but Jesus himself.

Theroux, too, a figure in the landscape

And these five-hundred-odd words are all I will ever write of my autobiography.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Just 10 pages later in the same essay in his 2018 collection Figures in a Landscape, Paul Theroux concedes, "What is more autobiographical than the sort of travel book I have been writing for the pasty forty years?" How true. And he gives us plenty of other autobiography, as well, even when he is writing about other writers (such as Graham Greene and Paul Bowles), show business personalities (Elizabeth Taylor and Robin Williams) and even geese.

His wonderful essay "Dear Old Dad: Memories of My Father" may be the most autobiographical of all. How can one write about one's father without writing about oneself as well? Theroux loved and respected his father, and clearly the feeling was mutual. Yet they never understood each other because they were such different people. (In this they have much in common with most fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.) He is still bothered by the fact that his father never read any of his books, even though the elder Theroux read few books of any kind. I don't think my own father ever read anything I wrote, except for some light verse I penned for his 80th birthday, but so what? Just the fact that this bothers Theroux tells us something about him.

Another excellent piece describes the everyday life of celebrated neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose behavior was at times so strange he might have been mistaken for one of his patients. Sacks returns in the article Theroux writes about Robin Williams. Sacks and Williams, both now deceased, became friends when Williams played Sacks in a movie (Awakenings), yet from Theroux's description we see the doctor just standing back to observe the actor's nonstop manic behavior as he walks down a New York City street.

Fewer of the book's 30 essays can be described as travel pieces than you might expect, but they are enough to make you hunger for more. In more than one essay he opines that Africa is being destroyed by kind hearts. People in the West feel sorry for starving children, so they send money that goes into the pockets of dictators. They send clothing that destroys the incentive for Africans to make their own clothing. They train African doctors and nurses, most of whom then move to the West. Theroux himself was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in his youth, giving him some insight into the negative impact of even that program. But that's just more Paul Theroux autobiography.

Where time is saved

In the library, time is dammed up — not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who came to find them. It's where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

Susan Orlean, The Library Book

Susan Orlean

Let's examine those three Susan Orlean sentences from The Library Book one by one:

1. In the library, time is dammed up — not just stopped but saved.

Orlean may be writing about public libraries, large or small, but I think the idea works for small private libraries, or even a shelf of books. Select any book, including Orlean's own book, and you can be taken back to the time being written about but also to the time when it was written. A book holds firm not just the author's ideas and imaginings, but also the words, phrasings and manners of the time. Chaucer wrote the way Chaucer wrote, and that doesn't change with time. The same with Shakespeare, Faulkner or anyone else.

2. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who came to find them.

I like her idea of a library as a gathering place for both books and patrons. It is where one goes to meet the other. A library with one but not the other isn't much of a library. That was true of the 1986 fire that destroyed many of the books in the Los Angeles Public Library. That was a case of patrons without books. Now, because of library closures caused by the coronavirus, we have books without patrons.

3. It's where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

It has occurred to me more than once that heaven, if it is not a library, should at least have a library in it. Orlean suggests a good library is a kind of heaven already, paradise without the bother of dying.

I am not sure who she means by the word we. Patrons? No, patrons are the ones who "glimpse immortality." They have to go home by the closing hour, and Orlean writes about the surprising number of people who die in libraries. No, it seems more likely that it is the books and those who write them who live forever in a library. As an author herself, Orlean can say we.

But if you think God must be selective about admissions to heaven, public libraries are no less so. And most of the books awarded shelf space are there only temporarily. Most are eventually discarded to make room for newer books. So that is hardly immortality.

Yet there are some books and some authors who have won shelf space for the long term. Among them are Augustine, Charlotte Bronte, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walt Whitman and Flannery O'Connor. A thousand years from now? Who knows? But long enough to seem immortal to us. For those few time has been both stopped and saved.

The persistence of memory

Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

Susan Orlean, The Library Book

Susan Orlean's The Library Book, a book about a library and about libraries in general, might be viewed as double defiance. That her book has become a best seller may make it a triple.

Memories are stored in books, and books are stored in libraries. When people die, their memories go with them, but that is not quite true of people who write. Some of their memories live on, assessable to anyone who finds their books, perhaps in a libraries, and reads them. We are still reading the thoughts of people like Shakespeare, Austen, Dickinson and Twain.

And so the burning of the Los Angeles Public Library on April 29, 1986, like the burning of many other libraries down through history, was a terrible insult to memory, as well as to history, civilization and every person who ever used or worked in that library.

Orlean uses that fire as the central element around which she weaves the story of that particular library, along with details about how libraries work, how they cope with a changing society (the homeless now use them as daytime hangouts) and what the future might look like for libraries.

The author herself tries to solve the mystery of the library fire, which destroyed some 400,000 books, as well as magazines, microfilm, maps and other items. Was it the result of arson? If it was set, then by whom? She has no better luck than the arson investigators. For years the prime suspect was a loopy young man named Harry Peak, who actually confessed to the crime. The trouble was Harry told a different story to everyone, including at least seven different stories to investigators and a judge. With so little evidence against him, he was never convicted, although he eventually received a $35,000 settlement from the library after a battle of lawsuits.

Some of Orlean's book becomes autobiography. She recalls being taken by her mother to the Shaker Heights Public Library near Cleveland, where she would excitedly gather books to read over the next several days. Now those fond memories are gathered in this book, her own personal act of defiance.

Something to read

It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read.

Elizabeth Savage, The Last Night at the Ritz

Elizabeth Savage

Books are a frequent topic in Elizabeth Savage's The Last Night at the Ritz, which may be one reason I enjoyed the novel. At one point our narrator says "an encyclopedia can always cheer you up," a statement so odd it stops you in your tracks and makes you think about it? How might an encyclopedia cheer you up? She prefers the 1928 edition, she says, because "I'm really not all that interested in what's been going on since 1928."

I have always found an encyclopedia somewhat intimidating. There's just too much knowledge consolidated in one place. It might be useful sometimes, but cheery?

Earlier in the novel Savage says, "Like many old English majors, we don't hold staunch opinions about anything much but books." She later disproves that statement by voicing staunch opinions on all sorts of topics, yet still I appreciate her comment. I find opinions about books more interesting than opinions about most other subjects, too.

But the statement she makes about books I can most identify with is the one printed above. I might not say it is dangerous to get caught without a book, but risky sounds about right. The risk is being trapped in a waiting room, a long line or wherever with nothing good to read, nobody to talk with and perhaps even nothing to think about. Other people play with their phones; I read a book.

When I'm waiting to be served in a restaurant (and I'm dining alone, as I usually am these days), I don't fiddle with the silverware and watch people at other tables. I read a few pages, sometimes even a chapter or two, depending upon the promptness of the service.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a book, of course. Magazines work as well. Travel brochures might also do the trick. Or catalogs. But I prefer a book, and I always keep one in my car for this purpose. I read several additional books a year this way.