Style wins

Style wins every, every time.

Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing

Susan Hill

What separates the great writers from the pretty good writers? Style, says Susan Hill in Howards End Is on the Landing. It's not their story plots or their characters or even their message. It's always their style. Ultimately that's why we return to their books again and again, even long after their deaths.

She mentions several writers to illustrate her point. Raymond Chandler, for example. You may not always understand what's going on, but his writing style places him at or near the top of most lists of great hardboiled  mystery writers. John Le Carre holds that position for espionage novels for the same reason.

Mostly Hill writes about P.G. Wodehouse, whose plots, as I've mentioned before, are usually very similar. But one reads Wodehouse less for the plot than for the Wodehouse style, his humorous way of saying things that no other writer of comic novels has been able to equal. (Donald E. Westlake came close, I believe. And what's remarkable about Westlake is that he developed a very different style for his many serious, totally humorless novels.)

We can all think of writers we love mainly for their style. In my youth I devoured books by John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger for this reason. Ernest Hemingway's reputation has everything to do with his unique, often imitated but never equaled style.

For young writers trying to make it in publishing, developing their own style is usually the key. Often this is called their voice. The clearer, the more distinct the voice, the more the writer will stand out from others. Writers with style still have to have something to say, of course. But writers with something to say will be more likely to find readers if they also have a style.

Stop by anywhen

Anywhere is a common English word, as is anyhow. So why not anywhen? We say whenever, as we do both wherever and however. So again, why not anywhen?

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) did, in fact, introduce the word, but for some reason it never caught on. Instead we say sometime or anytime or whenever. Anywhen sounds funny to us, but then so would anywhere if it weren't so familiar. The same is true of most English words, including your own name. The more we hear a word, the more acceptable it seems.

Obviously we don't need anywhen, but there are numerous words we don't actually need. Teenager, for example. We could say adolescent or simply teen. Or we might even say teener. But somebody came up with the word teenager in the 1940s, and it stuck. We didn't need 24/7 either because we already had 24 hours and around the clock, but 24/7 came and conquered in the 1980s.

English has a huge vocabulary in comparison with most other languages. This is due to the way English speakers welcome new words, including those from other cultures. This is in sharp contrast with the French, who actively discourage new words, especially English words, from spoiling their beautiful language. Listen to Germans speak and you will frequently hear English words tossed into the mix. This happens much less commonly when French people talk.

Despite their welcoming attitude, English speakers don't embrace every new word that comes along, and we can be grateful for this or the English vocabulary might be twice the size that it is. Anywhen is but one of countless words that have been tried and found wanting, for whatever reason. Some words never get off the ground. Others, including many slang terms, have their day in the sun, then fade away.

Some words may be fairly common in one region, yet unknown elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This is especially true of slang terms, such as horse-pint, used in parts of Appalachia to be mean a large pint, something like a baker's dozen.

Or a word may simply fall out of use with the passage of time. When asked about why the war was going on for so long, Abraham Lincoln said, "If we just keep pegging away it'll turn out right." Today we would say pecking away.

Our language changes constantly, but also gradually, and that is a good thing. As James Greenough and George Kittredge said in their 1914 book Words and Their Ways in English Speech, "Both the purist and the innovator are necessary factors in the development of a cultured tongue. Without the purist, our language would change with extravagant rapidity. ... Without the innovator, our language would come to a dead stop ..."

Bewitched

Jodi Picoult gives her own unique twist to the Salem witch trials in her 2001 novel Salem Falls.

This time it's not a witch put on trial because of a community's mass hysteria but a man named Jack St. Bride. He has a doctorate in history, knows the question to every Jeopardy answer and was once a teacher and soccer coach but now feels lucky just to have a job washing dishes in a diner in Salem Falls, New Hampshire. That's because he was just released from prison.

Jack had taken his lawyer's advice to plead guilty to a lesser charge after being falsely accused of raping a student in another town. But now he must register as a sex offender in Salem Falls, and soon everyone in town is talking about him and warning their daughters to stay away from him.

By this time, however, Addie Peabody, his boss at the diner, has already fallen in love with him. Addie herself had been raped years before — as it happens, by the cop who will eventually arrest Jack for the same crime — and she is torn over what to believe when a Salem Falls teenager accuses Jack of raping her.

Gillian, the girl, had been playing at witchcraft with friends on the night in question, thus creating a situation where a "witch" falsely accuses someone else of a crime, reversing the Salem situation. Also, it is Jack who bewitches, because of his good looks, teenage girls into falling in love with him and turning their imaginations into a false reality. I don't think I am giving anything away, for readers will be confident of Jack's innocence all along, even though the evidence appears to be stacked against him. 

Most the rest of the novel takes place in the courtroom, where Jack's attorney must first convince himself, then the jury, that his client did not really rape Gilliam. But if not Jack, then who? In the end, that is the novel's most enticing mystery, unresolved, or even mentioned, until the very last sentence.

Birthing words

George Orwell

Writers use words, of course, but they also invent words, as George Orwell did with such terms as big brother, newspeak and thought police. The title of his book Nineteen Eighty-Four itself became a part of the language.

William Shakespeare was the king of invented words. His plays brought hundreds of words into the English language, including lackluster, compulsive, excitement, eventful, priceless and frugal. Lesser writers have done their part, as well.

Henry Hitchings documents many of the contributions of writers to word creation in his book The Secret Life of Words. Here are some that he mentions:

Chaucer — accident, intellect, galaxy, famous

Bible translator William Tyndall — larceny, feasible, endowment, advertisement

Francis Bacon — versatile, prescient, ignorable, acoustic, juvenile

Ben Jonson — strenuous, retrograde, defunct

Philip Sidney — bugbear, hazardous, loneliness, pathology

Thomas Hobbes — complaisance

Robert Burton — feral, hirsute, literati, meteorologist

Fanny Burney — tea party, grumpy, shopping

Laurence Sterne — lackadaisical, muddle-headed, sixth sense, whimsicality

Sir Walter Scott — winsome, guffaw, faraway, uncanny, wizened, kith and kin

It is possible, of course, that some of these words were already used in speech at the time and that these writers were simply the first to put them in writing. Scholars who study these things cannot very well trace word origins back to conversations that took place centuries ago, but they can discover when certain words first appeared in books, or even in some cases letters, magazine articles or newspaper articles. And so writers like Bacon, Burton and Burney, whose works have survived the passage of time, get the credit for birthing all those words into the English language.

Behind the fiction

We criticize movie producers for their endless sequels and remakes. Why can't they ever come up with something new? Yet even the best novelists also have difficulty coming up with something new. Time and again novels are based on real events or classic stories such as King Lear or Greek myths.  Or they write about their own lives disguised as somebody else's lives.

The characters in novels so often are not original creations but based upon people authors have known.  Back in 1985 Williams Amos, a British journalist, wrote a book called The Originals: The A-Z of Fiction's Real-Life Characters that still makes fascinating browsing for readers. He identifies who characters in fiction were actually patterned after.

Ring Lardner 

The baseball writer turned short-story writer Ring Lardner, for example, inspired the character Abe North in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown came about because of an incident Chesterton witnessed involving Monsignor John O'Connor and some students.

Ernest Hemingway based many of his characters on people he knew, including so many of the main characters in The Sun Also Rises. His friendships tended to be short-lived because of this practice. Yet other writers, including Ford Madox Ford and John Dos Passos, returned the favor by putting Hemingway in their own fiction.

Allan Pinkerton

The pulp hero Nick Carter was probably based on the famous detective Allan Pinkerton. I read David Lodge's amusing novel Changing Places several months ago without realizing the character Ronald Duck was actually Ronald Reagan in disguise.

A.A. Milne supposedly based his character Eeyore on Sir Owen Seaman, the dour editor of Punch when Milne worked there.

Margaret Mitchell turned her first husband into Rhett Butler. Mario Puzo's Johnny Fontane was, of course, a fictional version of Frank Sinatra. Thomas Berger made Eldridge Cleaver into Brother Valentine in Reinhart's Women.

Mark Twain based Aunt Polly on his own mother, Amos says. As for Huckleberry Finn, he was inspired by Tom Blankenship, the town drunk in Hannibal during Twain's youth.

The William Amos book covers more than 500 pages and lists thousands of fictional characters based on real people. And these are only characters in the most notable works of fiction prior to 1985. An exhaustive current list would go on for thousands of pages.

All this suggests that when fictional characters are memorable it is usually because the real people behind them were also memorable.

Bottom of the heap

The most important datum about Western fiction is that it is at the absolute bottom of the literary heap, somewhere below pornography.

Richard S. Wheeler, Chronicles, November 1991

Richard S. Wheeler

The last two books reviewed in this blog — Jack Todd's Sun Going Down and Richard S. Wheeler's Anything Goes — have been western novels, so obviously I don't regard westerns as "the absolute bottom of the literary heap," as Wheeler himself put it his 1991 magazine article. Wheeler didn't really believe that either, but that is  apparently what he thought so many others believed.

Western novels, Wheeler pointed out, are not read by the most educated people. They are never reviewed in literary journals. If bookstores, especially in the eastern half of the United States, sell them at all, they are usually hidden away in a small, isolated ghetto somewhere back in the store. (I remembered being shocked when I found Anything Goes on a "new books" table at a Barnes & Noble in Toledo. It's the only copy of the book I've ever seen in a bookstore.)

To me the bias seems to be more against writers of western novels than western novels themselves. When writers like Thomas Berger, Jane Smiley, Larry McMurtry and Robert Coover have tried their hand at westerns, after building their careers writing more highly accepted fiction, their efforts have been welcomed by the literary community. Even mystery writer Robert Parker won attention when he wrote a few westerns. 

Wheeler himself made a distinction between realistic westerns (the kind he wrote) and what he called mythic westerns (the kind written by Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour and Max Brand). Many of the mythic westerns, he implied, may belong in that literary ghetto. Obviously he thought his own work deserved better, and I agree. When most people think of western novels, however, it is probably the mythic variety — featuring gunfighters, cattle rustlers and range wars — that come to mind.

He wondered if westerns will ever return to a place of honor, or at least acceptance, in the literary establishment, and then he concluded his essay by saying that "whenever Americans feel good about their country, you'll see a reemergence of the Western." Right now, 30 years after his article was published, the mood of the country suggests western novels will remain at the bottom of the heap for some time to come.

The real West

Right up to the end of his prolific career, Richard S. Wheeler wrote western novels that didn't seem like western novels. They were more about the real West than the fantasy West. His 2015 novel (he died in 2019), Anything Goes, must be one of those least like a typical western novel. Not among his best, it nevertheless offers a rich reading experience.

The West has been all but tamed early in the 20th century when a small vaudeville troupe braves harsh winter weather to bring entertainment to towns in the upper Rockies. The Beausoleil Brothers Follies is run by August Beausoleil, who has no brother and has put together a variety show composed of singers, dancers, comics, an animal act and a juggler. The show barely breaks even, but keeps going and usually finds an audience starved for entertainment.

Then troubles come, one after the other. The lead singer dies. One of the monkeys in the animal act dies because of the cold weather. Several of the performers get sick. Then  the Orpheum Circuit, which has taken over the best theaters in the East, starts doing the same in the West, spelling doom for this independent group of performers. Prominent theaters begin canceling August's bookings.

Then there's Ginger, an 18-year-old girl who has run away from home, or more specifically, from her dominating mother who wants her to become an opera star. Ginger, who has also changed her name, has other ideas. She joins the Follies and soon becomes its star, but then forced changes in the schedule take her unwillingly back to her hometown in Idaho.

Wheeler's story may be weaker than usual, but his characters are vivid and memorable. Show business novels usually turn me off, but not this one.

One family in the West

Jack Todd's Sun Going Down 2008) is an intergenerational novel  inspired by the author's own family. Names and other details have been changed — this is a novel, not a family history — yet a reader can sense Todd's affection for his characters and the truth behind his fiction.

Following four generations of the Paint family from the Civil War to the Depression, the novel tells of their struggles against the elements, their rivals, tough economic conditions and sometimes each other. Ebenezer Paint sells his Mississippi riverboat early in the novel and buys land in Nebraska. Despite a loving wife and twin sons, he cannot control his wanderlust and frequently leaves them to fend for themselves.

As for the sons, Ezra inherits his father's need to keep moving, while Eli settles down, raises a large family (mostly girls) and builds up a huge, successful ranch. One of his daughters, Velma, carries the ball for most of the rest of the novel. She is not yet 16 when pregnancy forces her to marry a handsome cowboy, and Eli tells her he doesn't want to see her again. He regrets that decision, for she was his favorite daughter, but he is too stubborn to backtrack.

Velma develops TB and marries three times in her short life. One of her children, Emaline, fills in much of the rest of the story.

Except for the Eli-Velma split, the novel has little of what could be called a plot, yet the episodes in these characters' lives keep the reader engrossed from one chapter to the next, even when years pass in between.

Women in charge

Female writers may still complain, as Ursula de Guin does in Words Are My Matter, about unfair treatment in comparison to their male colleagues, but walk into any bookstore and you may get the idea that women have taken over the publishing industry. Some bookstores have become almost as girlie as lingerie shops.

Examine displays of new fiction and it may take awhile to spot any novels by male authors. Novels that appeal primarily to men, such as westerns, science fiction and war stories, tend to be hidden in the back. I've seen many paperback tables that were a sea of pastel, suggesting novels written by women for women.

Looking at the last two issues of Book Page, a free monthly book magazine available in many bookstores and public  libraries, I counted 61 novels by female authors reviewed, compared to just 21 by male authors.

Bookstores have become increasingly owned and/or managed by women. More women are publishers, editors and literary agents than ever before.

True, some important literary prizes still go mostly to male writers. Louise Erdrich won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but the previous six winners were men. Thanks to Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Donna Tartt and others, however, female writers have been winning a higher proportion of major prizes in recent years. The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded only to women. There is no equivalent prize just for men.

Readers of fiction have long been predominantly women. This was probably true even back in the 1950s and 1960s when most paperbacks, even the classics, had suggestive covers designed to catch the male eye.  If sleazy artwork couldn't attract enough male readers, frilly pastel covers are likely to send men running for the exits.

Drama on both sides of the screen

Most of Cathie Pelletier's Beaming Sonny Home (1996) takes place where so many people live most of their lives — in front of the television. So stationary is the novel that one is surprised by how much movement there is in the story, how much happens, how much changes in 284 pages.

Mattie Gifford's three grown daughters invade her home in Mattagash, Maine, and flip on the TV because their brother, Sonny, has taken two female hostages, supposedly at gunpoint, and is holding them in a mobile home in Bangor that belongs to his estranged wife. Why he does this is a mystery — something to do do with his wife, something to do with his dog, something to do with starving children, something to do with John Lennon. Sonny just seems to be having a good time.

For three days the standoff is at the top of each newscast, and these four women, plus various neighbors, friends and other relatives watch to see what happens next. The supposed hostages seem happy to be where they are, Sonny being a charismatic young man whom every woman loves. That is, except for his three sisters, who have always resented that their mother loves him best. Mattie doesn't deny this, and even now during this crisis she wishes her daughters would just go to their own homes and leave her alone.

Her love for Sonny seems surprising. for he is so much like her late husband — handsome, always smiling, unambitious, irresistible to women and faithful to none. Sonny may be the same kind of man as his father, yet Mattie loves him more than anyone else, certainly more than she ever loved Lester.

Pelletier is so gifted with imagery that she almost overdoes it, tossing out a new metaphor before a reader can digest the last one. Among these images is a jigsaw puzzle Mattie is working on in which the eye of Jesus is missing. Only when she finds the missing eye and places it in the puzzle does this story come together — or fall apart, as the case may be.