Irish in the West

Dublin-based novelist Kevin McCarthy sets his 2019 Irish novel in the American West in 1866.

Many Irish immigrants to the United States in the middle of the 19th century quickly found themselves caught in the American Civil War, fighting for one side or the other. The war has been over for a year as Wolves of Eden opens, and the victorious army has moved west to face a new enemy, Indian tribes who react violently when settlers and miners invade what was supposed to be their land.

Thomas and Michael O'Driscoll have re-enlisted and adopted a new surname to escape some trouble they have gotten into. They are sent to Fort Phil Kearny in Dakota Territory, where they promptly get into more trouble, this time involving an Indian prostitute who had her nose chopped off. Tom, who himself had his faced disfigured in the war, falls in love with her, leading to conflict with the married couple who run the brothel as well as sell supplies to soldiers at inflated prices.

In alternate chapters we read Michael's confession — although we don't discover until the end exactly what he is confessing to — and the story of Lt. Martin Molloy, also from Ireland originally, and his Jewish aide, Daniel Kohn, sent to hang someone — anyone will do — for the murder of a Cabinet secretary's brother-in-law, the brothel-keeper. Molloy is less interested in catching a murderer than in drinking, and then he breaks a leg. Thus the investigation falls to Sgt. Kohn, who seems more brutal than either of the O'Driscolls.

McCarthy mixes a murder mystery in with an Indian war and reflections on the strong bias against the Irish and Jews, not to mention Indians, into a mostly satisfying western novel. He seems to be the kind of novelist whose idea of resolution is to kill off his characters, which is my main complaint.

McCarthy's book, while solving one mystery, raises another with me. He describes Indians stealing oxen owned by settlers in a wagon train, while Richard S. Wheeler in Easy Street, another western novel I read recently that is set in the same time and place, tells how there was no need to guard oxen at night because Indians didn't want them. So who's right? Wheeler lived in the West, not in Dublin, so I am inclined to believe his version, but why wouldn't hungry Indians eat oxen? Or were they just too slow to make a fast getaway?

The draft

My drafts tell me what I have to say.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer who also wrote nonfiction about everything under the sun, supposedly didn't bother with drafts or revisions. He just sat down and wrote, which is why he was able to churn out so many books. If any editing needed to be done, that's what editors were for. He was always more interested in content than style, so if his writing lacked grace, he didn't care. He had too much to say to worry about how he said it.

Most writers, however, repeatedly revise their work, sometimes right up to publication, and in Walt Whitman's case even after publication. Harper Lee wrote just one novel in her life, To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman, published decades later supposedly as a second Harper Lee novel, was actually just her first draft. She learned from that draft, rewrote it and produced a classic. Publishing her draft was unfair to her.

Roy Peter Clark has much to say about drafts in Murder Your Darlings. His most important point may be simply that first drafts don't have to be any good. It helps simply to get something down on paper (or on a computer screen, as the case may be). Drafts tell him what he has to say, as he puts it. Later he can figure out a better way to say it. 

Drafts help writers spot weaknesses and inconsistencies. Rereading them often leads to new insights, ideas that take the work off in new directions.

Clark quotes Anne Lamott as, in turn, quoting a friend of hers who calls the first draft the "down draft," because you get it down. Then comes the "up draft," because you fix it up. Finally there is the "dental draft," where you check every tooth, which is what I call fine tuning. Later Clark writes about the "zero draft" and even the "subzero draft," referring to what comes before even that first draft — notes, outlines, diagrams, sketches, whatever.

I am wondering, however, whether the very idea of a writing draft may be becoming obsolete, simply because so many writers now work on computers, rather than with typewriters or pen and paper.  Revision still takes place constantly, but without leaving any trace of earlier versions. In the future we may not be able to tell how a Go Set a Watchman became a To Kill a Mockingbird.

Bad choices

It is a melancholy thought that men who at first will not allow the verdict of perfection they pronounce upon their sweethearts or wives to be disturbed by God's own testimony to the contrary, will, once suspecting their purity, morally hang them upon evidence they would be ashamed to admit in judging a dog.

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes

"If only ..." is a phrase that comes to mind when reading most Thomas Hardy novels. If only Tess had done this or not done that. If only Jude had made better choices. Bad choices are also at the heart of one of Hardy's early novels, A Pair of Blue Eyes, published in 1873.

The pair of blue eyes belong to Elfride Swancourt, who gets caught in a difficult love triangle. But she isn't the only one who makes bad choices. The same is true of the two young men, Stephen Smith and Henry Knight. (Actually there are also two other men who love Elfride, but they play relatively minor roles.)

Elfride meets Stephen first and falls desperately in love with him. They even run off secretly to be married, but she changes her mind at the last minute and returns home, but now with a compromising overnight stay with a man with whom she is not married. Then Stephen sails away to India for several months, a terribly unwise move as it turns out, for Elfride then falls in love with Knight, a casual friend of Stephen's.

Stephen returns to find the woman he thought he was engaged to now engaged to another man. He remains silent, as does Elfride, and Knight believes he will be marrying a totally innocent woman, one who has never even been kissed. Gradually the truth leaks out, and he feels betrayed and abandons Elfride.

Months pass, the two men meet and discuss the situation, then each independently races back to Elfride in hopes of a second chance.

All this might make a delightful romantic comedy, but this is Thomas Hardy, in whose books bad choices almost always lead to tragedy. Some critics have rated A Pair of Blue Eyes among Hardy's best. I wouldn't go that far, but it is a fine, if wordy, novel that offers a revealing glimpse into an earlier time so different from our own.

The truth behind the truth

Authenticity isn't so simple, as characters discover in Clare Pooley's rewarding 2020 novel The Authenticity Project.

The novel's concept is simple enough. Julian Jessup, a lonely old artist still living in the past when he was at the center of London's swinging art community, confesses his situation in a notebook that he labels "The Authenticity Project" and invites others to do the same before leaving it behind in Monica's Cafe. Monica herself, a woman in her late 30s dreaming of marriage and a family,  finds the notebook and tells about herself in it, then leaves it behind in a bar.

And so it goes, those who find the notebook adding their own truths and passing it on, then seeking out those individuals they read about and forming a close-knit group of friends with seemingly little in common. In this respect the novel is much like Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, in which four very different people meet on the top of a building on New Year's Eve, each planning to commit suicide, and then begin to care about each other and support each other.

What makes Pooley's book distinctive is that most of the characters aren't really as authentic in their confessions as they pretend to be. Julian, for example, is older than he says and isn't even a widower. Thus the story becomes more complex than it first appears, as the characters discover more about themselves and about each other.

You may be somebody afraid to be caught reading a soppy, feel-good novel in public, but be more authentic and take this one with you on the plane or to the doctor's waiting room.

Write music

Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Write music.

Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing

Gary Provost

Roy Peter Clark includes the above lines from Gary Provost's book in his own book Murder Your Darlings. He also quotes a similar idea from Steering Your Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin: "Every sentence has a rhythm of its own, which is also part of the rhythm of the whole piece. Rhythm is what keeps the song going, the horse galloping, the story moving."

I have never put it so eloquently, but I have long believed it. Writing should have rhythm. We expect it in poetry, but the same thing is true in prose, any kind of prose short of a shopping list. You might accomplish this with beautiful words, beautiful metaphors and such tricks as alliteration, but the best tool may simply be variety: words of different length, sentences of different length and even paragraphs of different length.

Many of us of a certain age learned to read with Dick and Jane, where every sentence was something like "See Spot run." In these readers it wasn't just the stories that were dull. All these brief sentences filled with one-syllable words became tedious, even for first-graders. Even six-year-olds like a little music in their books, which is why so many children's books have lines that rhyme. Not all words and sentences need to be short, but some should be. And some should be longer.

Ernest Hemingway was famous for his short sentences, but he threw in enough longer sentences and longer words to create a rhythm that became famous and even distinctive.

"A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind's ear," LeGuin wrote. This means, I think, that good reading involves listening to the music in the writing. The better the writer, the better the music. For writers, that means reading one's work aloud, whether to another person or not, or at least reading it silently as if to an audience. Listen for the music. Listen for false notes. Then go back to work until it sounds right.

Surprising words

Barbara Ann Kipfer's Word Nerd (2007) may look at first like just another dictionary, comprised as it is of a list of words in alphabetical order. But it is more than that — or less. A lexicographer, Kipfer has throughout her career kept notes of interesting facts about words, and her book is essentially a collection of these notes.

The entries sometimes do what good dictionaries do — give definitions, pronunciations, word origins and the like, but each word is treated differently because different things are interesting about each word. Something that I've found interesting is how many words exist for things, even very common things, that I could have never imagined even needed words.

I am still in the early pages of Kipfer's book, so I offer some examples found just under the letter A:

abandannad — a pickpocket specializing in bandannas or handkerchiefs. 

abbeylubber — a lazy monk

abrazo — a greeting with a bear hug and a back pat

abulia or aboulia — the inability to make decisions

accismus — the pretended refusal of something actually desired

accubiutus — living together and sleeping in the same bed but not having sex

acephalist — someone who does not acknowledge a superior 

acrasia — acting against your better judgment

aeolian — a moaning or sighing sound similar to wind

aforcing — stretching food to accommodate more people

after-wit — a witticism that comes to mind too late 

agelast — someone who never laughs

agerasia — looking young for your age

anile — the female equivalent of senile

ansate — anything with a handle

ante-jentacular — coffee before breakfast

apercu — a perceptive comment

apophasis — mentioning a subject by saying one is not going to mention it

arval — supper served after a funeral

awk — the wrong direction

Not so easy

Easy Street (2012), one of Richard S. Wheeler's last novels, did not have a major publisher. As no publisher at all is listed on the book, it must have been self-published. To be sure, it is not among his best westerns, yet still it proves entertaining while, like his others, giving readers a glimpse at the real Wild West as opposed to the popular fantasy.

The story begins, and ends, in the East, where Jay Tecumseh Warren, son of a wealthy businessman, has just graduated from Harvard expecting to live comfortably off his father's money for the rest of his life. Instead when he gets home he finds $500, a train ticket to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and a letter from his father telling him to make his own way in the world.

In Cheyenne — although with $500 he could have gone anywhere — Jay, having a Harvard degree, expects to start at the top. The only available jobs, however, are those requiring hard physical labor, which Jay decides is beneath him. He changes his mind, somewhat, when his money runs out. He takes a job with a shipping company hauling supplies by oxen for gold miners in Deadwood. He abandons that job as soon as he can, joining a gang of men planning to jump the claims of miners.

One get-rich scheme after another, legal or not, fails to put Jay on Easy Street, until in the final chapters he finally learns the lesson his father had been trying to teach him — that hard work leads to success. Nothing comes easy.

It may all be a bit simplistic, yet even in his old age Wheeler could write an engaging novel. Easy Street at least deserved a publisher.

Who is a writer?

Roy Peter Clark

It may seem like a simple question that should have  a simple answer. A writer is someone who writes. But is a plumber someone who fixes a leaky faucet? Is a nurse anyone who puts an adhesive bandage on somebody's finger?

Twice in recent weeks I have come across discussions of this very question in my reading. Roy Peter Clark, writing in Murder Your Darlings, leans toward the anyone-can-be-a-plumber side. "If you write, you are a writer," he says.

In her tips for writers at the end of The Space Between Us, Thrity Umrigar says something similar but with her own twist: "The difference between writers and non-writers is just that writers write. Non-writers talk about wanting to write."

The narrator of Andrew Wilson's novel The Lying Tongue is a man who travels to Venice to write a novel, then decides to become a biographer. He is one of those people who likes to talk about being a writer, but in truth writes almost nothing. As Umrigar suggests, there are many such people. Toward the end of his life, Truman Capote became this kind of person. He liked to talk about being a writer, but he had stopped actually writing.

Surely one does not have to be published or even to make money from writing to be a writer. An amateur writer or an unpublished writer is still a writer. Yet it seems a stretch to call someone a writer who stopped writing years ago or who writes only an occasional letter or who adds a few paragraphs to a novel once every few months. I post something on this blog three times a week, but can I really call myself a writer? I would feel guilty if I did, as if I were somehow pretending. When I wrote for a newspaper I was a writer. Now I feel more like just someone who sometimes writes, like someone who sometimes fixes a leaky faucet or unclogs a drain.

A writer and an author are not quite the same thing. An author is someone with at least one published book.  Once an author, always an author. But is someone who used to write still a writer? Harper Lee was still an author when she died, but was she a writer or a former writer?

As you can probably tell, I am not entirely sure how to define the term. If a writer is someone who writes, then virtually all of us are writers. Is someone who writes a note to a neighbor or makes out a grocery list a writer? Or is a writer someone who attempts to write creativity? Or someone who writes for an audience? Or just someone who writes regularly for whatever purpose?

One online dictionary defines the word as "a person who has written a particular text." In other words, a student who writes a term paper (or has ever written a term paper) is a writer. A person who writes a letter or an email or a text to a friend is a writer. And I'm a plumber.

Writing all-stars

Dozens of writing guides have been written over the years, most of them full of sage advice for both aspiring writers and seasoned pros. Roy Peter Clark, who himself has written several of these guides, combines a number of the best tips from other writing guides into one volume in Murder Your Darlings (2020).

In 32 chapters he gathers advice on writing from about 50 different sources, including such people as Horace, Aristotle, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Anne Lamott, E.M. Forster, Ursula K. Le Guin, Rudolf Flesch, S.I. Hayakawa, William Zinsser, Mary Karr, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

Although the tips themselves may come from these others, Clark gives each of them his own spin, turning a self-help book that could have been a bit dull into sparkling reading. Some of the books he mines for their wisdom are no longer in print. Clark, who teaches writing, has gathered a large library of such books, shares the best they have to offer with the rest of us.

His book's title, Murder Your Darlings, is itself an old piece of writing advice. Clark writes, "Inspired by Samuel Johnson,  Q (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) encourages writers to cut from a draft those darling phrases that seem the most self-consciously elegant. In other words, stop showing off."

From Edward R. Murrow, Clark learns that writers must try to become the eyes and ears of their audience.

From Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon comes advice for writing for the digital age. 

From John McPhee we can learn to develop a plan before starting to write.

And so it goes. Those who want to write better could read dozens of helpful guides. Or they could read Murder Your Darlings.

Sci-fi jackpot

Although I no longer read much science fiction, I do make an exception for Connie Willis, whose entertaining stories display remarkable imagination, skill, humor and a willingness to do extensive research. Each of these is evident in Terra Incognita (2018), a collection of three previously published novellas.

In "Uncharted Territory," explorers from Earth trying to map the planet Boohte are joined on an expedition by an expert on mating habits who decides that the odd activity of their aborigine guide is just that — mating behavior. But who is he trying to impress?

"Remake" was written in 1995 and has almost come true already. Willis imagines a Hollywood that has ceased making movies — or at least real movies with real actors. Instead everything is done on computers, and old movies and long-dead actors are recycled in new ways. Cigarettes and booze are being scrubbed from old movies. Marilyn Monroe stars in a remake of Pretty Woman. Gone With the Wind gets a happier ending when Rhett Butler says, "Frankly, my dear — I love you, too."

Into this world comes Alis, a young woman who dreams of dancing in movies, preferably with Fred Astaire. Then the man who loves her discovers her actually dancing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and several other films? Is it time travel, or is something else going on?

Finally "D.A.," the shortest, newest and most amusing of the stories, finds a student accepted into Space Academy and whisked into orbit against her will. She never even applied for the academy and doesn't want to be in space. To explain what the title means would require a spoiler alert.

Each of these tales is great fun and full of surprises. The research I mentioned earlier is especially evident in "Remake," in which Willis goes into detail about a host of movies, even to the point of knowing at which point in a film a certain action occurs. 

It's all about sex

Modern science is all for evolution except when it comes to human behavior. They prefer to believe — and belief would seem to be the proper word — that differences between how men and women act are in every case a result of socialization. Raise children differently, they argue, and they will behave differently.

The 2007 book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa challenges that idea. The book was actually written by Kanazawa based on ideas formed by Miller, who died early in the project. Kanazawa generously listed Miller's name first.

The book, as the title suggests, uses a question and answer format. Why do men like blonde bombshells (and why do women want to look like them)? Why does having sons reduce the likelihood of divorce? Why are diamonds a girl's best friend? Why might handsome men make bad husbands? Why are almost all violent criminals men? Why do some men beat up their wives and girlfriends? Why is sexual harassment so persistent? Why are women more religious than men? And, of course, why do beautiful people have more daughters?

People in all cultures behave essentially the same, the book tells us. Studies that suggest that certain cultures are radically different are in each case either mistaken or fraudulent, as in the case of Margaret Mead's celebrated book on Samoa. So the answer to every question comes down to differing male and female reproductive strategies. Men can theoretically have hundreds of children; women can have relatively few. Women always know who their children are; men can never be certain (or at least not until recently). This explains almost everything, the authors say, although some explanations get a bit convoluted.

There are a few questions evolutionary psychology cannot yet explain, and Kanazawa frankly admits this in a final chapter? How do you explain homosexuality? Why do parents in advanced societies have fewer children? And a few others. To pose one more question, why must one theory explain everything?

Shirley's letters

Shirley Jackson

My review of The Letters of Shirley Jackson two days ago did not allow room for all the interesting tidbits I would have liked to have included. So I will mention some of them here.

— Except for formal letters, such as those to her publisher, Jackson did not use capital letters and she kept punctuation to a minimum. She typed most of her letters, and this style apparently allowed her typing to keep pace more closely with the speed of her mind.

— Both sets of parents disapproved of the marriage of Shirley Jackson to Stanley Hyman, although both came to accept it.

— She lied about her age because she was several years older than Stanley and wanted to minimize that age difference.

— Both she and Stanley were crazy about the Brooklyn Dodgers, listening to games on the radio and attending games whenever they were in New York City. After the team moved to Los Angeles, she doesn't mention the Dodgers again.

—The couple had many friends and acquaintances in the literary world, not surprisingly since they were both very much a part of that world. Ralph Ellison was a frequent guest in their home. Dylan Thomas once visited them in Bennington, Vt. They knew Peter DeVries, who lived near them for awhile. One of her letters was sent to James Thurber, who worked with Stanley at The New Yorker.

— They sometimes hired the daughter of Groucho Marx, while she was a student at Bennington, to babysit their children.

— An example of the light touch in her letters: She wrote to her agent, "I told all my children to go out and find plots for me." Her letters, in fact, often do reveal how the plots for some of her stories developed.

— Stanley spent much of his income on books. She writes that they once had 20,000 books in their home.

— Although he supported and encouraged her writing career, Stanley refused to read some of her stories. They were too scary for him. For the same reason he refused to see the film based on her novel The Haunting of Hill House.

— Stanley, a prominent literary critic, loved reading Ulysses by James Joyce, which "i frankly regard as a great bore," she writes. But she loved Jane Austen: "i always took PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to the hospital to have babies with."

Letters that live

A collection of someone's letters — even if it is someone one greatly admires — might seem like the dullest reading one can experience. You might rather read food labels or all the fine print that comes with your prescription. The Letters of Shirley Jackson (2021), however, are something else again. Reading it is as pleasurable as reading one of her novels.

Jackson, the author of one of America's best-known short stories ("The Lottery") and the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, was a natural, someone who could make anything interesting. Whether she was writing love letters to Stanley Hyman, her future husband, or letters to her parents (both of whom outlived her) or her literary agent, she was creative, imaginative and usually humorous.

"Shirley loved writing letters as much as she liked to write fiction," says her eldest son Laurence (often the subject of these letters), who edited this book. Her husband, himself a prominent literary critic and author, was the first to recognize their importance, and many of those blessed to receive her letters were encouraged to preserve them for the benefit of future biographers and readers.

In so many of these letters Jackson sounds like a typical New England housewife of her generation. She is occupied with her husband, her four children, preparing the next meal, paying bills between royalty checks and book advances and entertaining houseguests. They are so lively and gay that a reader must be alert for undercurrents suggesting that not everything is joyful and carefree in her life. She ate too much, drank too much, smoked too much and took too many drugs (legal and prescribed by her doctors, but still excessive). At times she was afraid to leave her own house. Only in her letters to Stanley, including those love letters, does she open up about his frequent unfaithfulness.

Like her contemporary, Flannery O'Connor (mentioned in these letters), Jackson was a gifted cartoonist, and many of her cartoons (most at her husband's expense) are included in the book.

The Hyman family seemed to depend on Shirley's sporadic income to survive, even though Stanley had a steady job teaching at Bennington College for most of these years. When a check did come in, they would often splurge on a new car or a new appliance, then wait for the next check. Even in middle age, Shirley was still receiving the occasional check from her parents. Both she and Stanley liked to gamble, perhaps another reason they were so often broke. Her stories usually sold quickly, and Stanley seems to have pressured her to keep churning them out so they could pay their bills. 

Jackson's books, including the humorous ones she wrote about her own family, will be read for years to come. Add to that list this wonderful collection of her letters.