Writing from home

At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do. That may be a gift not everyone has.

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

Ellen Gilchrist

Aspiring writers often think they must travel, experience hardship or know heartbreak to improve their art. Thus young writers flock to New York City, San Francisco or Paris. Young men go to war. Young women have affairs with married professors. They get involved with drugs and excessive alcohol.

Ellen Gilchrist, who has taught many aspiring writers, pooh-pooed that idea. She pointed out that such writers as William Shakespeare, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Ivan Turgenev achieved greatness without traveling far from where they were born.

Did they lack real-life experience? Hardly. They were readers. More importantly they were observers. Literature is about people, all different and yet in so many ways all the same. Stories are about people, how they act, how they feel, what they do, what they say.

Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene traveled to many places and lived in many places, then set their stories in these various places. Yet these places were little more than background for stories about people, people they could have imagined without leaving home because the people around home are much like those in Spain, Cuba, Paris or wherever else a writer might go to experience "life."

First novels, which often turn out to be authors' best novels, are typically autobiographical.  In other words, they are fictionalized accounts of the writers' own early lives. If these early novels are successful, it is because the authors were inspired by the "beauty and mystery in everything men and women do." And they didn't have to go anywhere else or do anything dangerous or exotic to accomplish this.

Lonely hunting

The title of the classic 1940 novel by Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, tips us off. Her characters are lonely people in search of something, even if they are not always certain what that something is.

In case you miss the significance of the title, McCullers makes it clearer in nearly every early chapter with lines like these:

"It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."

"The town seemed more lonesome than any place he had ever known."

"It was a queer thing to talk with a draft-mute. But he was lonesome."

"He was lonesome and he was an old man."

Loneliness seems to be universal in the novel, for McCullers has several central characters, and loneliness is a trait shared by most of them. These include a deaf-mute named Singer, whom other characters love to talk to even though he cannot hear them; Mick, a young girl who dreams of composing music until adult responsibilities come too soon; Doctor Copeland, a well-read black physician disappointed that his grown children have just ordinary intelligence; and Jack, a carnival worker who preaches socialism, drinks heavily and is always ready for a fight.

As lonely and seemingly independent as these and other characters are, they are nevertheless dependent on each other. When one of these dominoes falls, the others topple, or at least wobble, as well. Not even the lonely really stand alone.

Ridiculous words

We like ridiculous words for ridiculous ideas, just as we prefer beautiful words for beautiful ideas, beautiful things and beautiful people. Ridiculous is itself a ridiculous word, at least in comparison with more standard words such as nonsense and untruth, which simply mean the opposite of sense and truth.

There are an amazing number of colorful words to describe nonsense, some of them very old and others relatively new. You may have even made up your own such word on the spot. Even if you have never heard these words before, you know immediately what they mean because they sound so ridiculous. Here I present a sampling of such words. There may be hundreds more.

balderdash, poppycock, flapdoodle, tomfoolery, prattle, blather, drivel, twaddle, bosh, horsefeathers, gibberish, hogwash, piffle,  tommyrot, claptrap, humbuggery, fiddlesticks, malarky, hooey, codswallop, blarney, crapola, humbug, hoodoo, kookiness, hokeypokey and tarradiddle.

And then there are all those words that mean something else but have been borrowed to refer to something ridiculous or simply wrong: gas, moonshine, applesauce, hot air, rot, rubbish, garbage, beans, bilge, drool, garbage and nuts, among others.

Sometimes the best putdown of a ridiculous idea is to ridicule it, and we can do that easily with whatever word we choose to label it.

Names to remember

I was still a rookie in my newspaper career when I wrote an obituary for a man named Harley Zarley. I have long forgotten the names of most of my father's cousins, aunts and uncles, but I do remember Willow Dondillo, although I never met her.

For those with odd names, it may seem like a curse, but they are likely to live longer in memory than someone named John Smith.

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens realized this, which is one reason he gave odd names to so many of his characters. The other reason is that he simply liked odd names and collected them in the way someone else might collect stamps.

Some Dickens characters, such as Uriah Heep and Ebenezer Scrooge, are familiar even to people who have never read the stories in which they are found. But the strange names were intended for the benefit of his readers. Most of his novels were first published in serial form, a few chapters a month. In addition, there were many characters and many plot lines in each novel, making characters and their role in the story difficult for readers to remember. Outlandish names helped.

Yet Dickens wanted more than just an odd name. He searched for just the right odd name. In his book The Artful Dickens, reviewed here a few days ago, John Mullan (whose name would never have made it into a Dickens novel) says Dickens made lists of possible names for characters before deciding on the perfect one. Often he would take two unrelated words and stick them together. Before settling on David Copperfield, for example, he tried such possibilities as Trotfield, Copperboy, Flowerbury, Topflower and Copperstone.

Before Martin Chuzzlewitt, there was Martin Chuzzlebog, Martin Chuzzlewig, Martin Chuzzletoe and even Martin Sweezlebach.

I am presently reading Bleak House and discovering such names as Bouncewell, Pardiggle, Bayham Badger, Skimpole, Lady Dedlock, Tulkinghorn and, my favorite, Prince Turveydrop. The novel might still be a pleasure to read even if the characters had names like Smith and Jones, but certainly not as much of a pleasure.

Breaking the rules

This book tries to do justice to Dickens's inventiveness, his ingenuity, his experimentalism — above all, to show the daring of his fiction.

John Mullan, The Artful Dickens

What was true of Pablo Picasso was also true of Charles Dickens. When you know what you're doing, breaking all the rules can actually work in your favor.

John Mullan makes this point in The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist (2020), a scholarly book that will appeal equally to anyone who values Dickens novels.

Writers aren't supposed to repeat the same words in the same paragraph. Dickens did this again and again and again. Writers should avoid cliches. Dickens used them like they were going out of style. Writers shouldn't switch tenses. Dickens does.

Mullen gives countless examples of the great British writer's passion for making lists. Because his novels have so many characters and because they were originally printed in monthly installments, Dickens used unique names and unusual speech patterns to help readers remember those characters.

Why do so many people drown or nearly drown in Dickens novels? Mullen explores this phenomenon. Why does he write so much about the sense of smell? Why are there so many ghosts? How does Dickens so often use the phrase "as if" to his advantage?

Unlikely coincidences are often a turnoff for serious readers, yet Dickens used then often, and his novels are still taught in college courses. Charles Dickens got away with a lot of supposedly unforgivable sins. Mullen gives us so many examples that his book sometimes becomes tedious — another unforgivable sin — yet in the end it helps those who appreciate Dickens to appreciate him all the more.

The bookstore as a pleasure palace

Independent bookstores across America continue to close their doors. Why? Too few customers buying too few books. It's just too easy and too economical to buy books online and at large chain stores.

And so it comes as a bit of shock when Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, says in his 2022 book In Praise of Good Bookstores, "The good bookstore sells books, but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience."

For its motto, the Seminary Co-op lifted a line from Epicurus: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry. Here our greatest good is pleasure." Yet this store has remained in business for many years and obviously sells enough books to keep its doors open and its staff paid regularly.

Imagine that. A bookstore with the same philosophy as a good restaurant, a good bar or, for that matter, a good topless club. Give the people who walk in a pleasurable experience and they will keep coming back, they will tell their friends, they will spend more time there and eventually spend more money.

Deutsch seems more interested in selling a pleasurable experience than selling the thousands of books on his shelves. In a bookstore, the pleasurable experience is not eating, drinking or looking a pretty girls but browsing. Book people may enjoy looking at books as much as they enjoy reading them, perhaps even more in some cases. And if there is anything more pleasurable than searching for the books you desire, whether you know what you are looking for or not, it is finding them.

It is hard to beat finding something totally unexpected in a bookstore. The other day I happened across a single paperback copy of Ann Patchett's book of essays These Precious Days. I hadn't even realized the book was in paperback yet. I felt like celebrating. And so I spent some money. But what I was really paying for was the browsing experience, the joy of the search.

Morality guide

All his life, when things had gotten really tough, or confusing, or almost too beautiful to bear, Jack had gone fishing.

Peter Heller, The Guide

Peter Heller does it again in The Guide (2021), his novel about a fishing guide who becomes a morality guide in a world gone crazy after a series of deadly international viruses.

Jack, still mourning the deaths of both his mother and his best friend, takes some time off from his father's ranch to work as a guide for millionaires at an isolated fishing lodge. He is assigned to Alison, a famous singer whom Jack has barely heard of. Jack is more into Japanese poetry than American popular music. Yet he and Alison make a connection, however brief there time together might be.

He quickly realizes that things don't add up at this high-class resort. Why do so many of the millionaires and billionaires at this fishing resort never do any fishing? Why all the cameras? Why all the fencing that seems designed more to keep people in than out? Why does the wealthy owner tolerate a neighbor who sends warning shots at anyone who gets too close to the property line?

Heller keeps the tension building, both that between Jack and Alison and that involving the resort with something to hide. Alison turns out to be a resourceful country girl and Jack's match when the time comes to break out of the luxury resort that has become a prison.

If you are looking for a literary thriller that mixes poetry in with the action, you won't go wrong with The Guide.

The joy of insults

Reading Bill Bryson's 1992 travel book Neither Here nor There I was reminded of a book I read several years ago called The Clumsiest People in Europe. This tells of Favell Lee Mortimer, a 19th century Englishwoman who wrote travel books for children without hardly ever leaving her own home.

Her books were full of insults. Italians are "ignorant and wicked," for example. The people of Greece "scream like babies."

Bill Bryson often sounds like Favell Lee Mortimer. Consider:

"The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience."

"Brussels is a seriously ugly place."

"Cologne is a dismal place, which rather pleased me. It was comforting to see that the Germans could make a hash of a city as well as anyone else, and they certainly have done so with Cologne."

"Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks."

"The Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven."

Bryson's writing is superior to Mortimer's in at least three ways.

1. He actually visited the places he writes about.

2. His work didn't take a hundred years or more to become funny. It was funny when he wrote it and remains hilarious three decades later.

3. He praises as much as he criticizes. Praise is rarely as amusing to read, however, unless you are the one being praised. So as a result his sharp jabs tend to be more memorable than his many positive comments. He often delights in the very same cities and countries that he humiliated in a preceding paragraph. It is obvious that he loved his solo excursion through Europe. He points out whatever he likes and dislikes along the way, but when he ends his journey in Istanbul, he seems tempted to continue into Asia.

The reader knows Bryson doesn't actually regret the terrible food, the dreary hotel rooms and the unfriendly people he finds along the way. Those are the very things that make his book so much fun.

Stylebook lacks style

For many years the Associated Press has printed an annual revision of the legendary AP Stylebook, which is something of a bible for journalists. It provides guidance on such things as spelling, punctuation and capitalization.

The newspaper where I worked rarely purchased new stylebooks for staff members, but that didn't seem to matter because style didn't change that much from one year to another. If there was a big change, we were sent memos.

At some point the stylebook went online, and my newspaper stopped purchasing paper stylebooks altogether, but I rarely, if ever, consulted the online version. I preferred the old, now-outdated book, which I still kept nearby.

One problem with an online stylebook, like an online dictionary, is that it is too easy to change. Instead of making revisions every year, the AP can revise it at whim, every day if they choose. The AP Stylebook may be the bible for journalists, but do you really want a Bible in which the 10 Commandments change every time you read them?

And that brings us to the recent controversy over the AP advising journalists to avoid using the word the, except apparently when referring to the AP. Specifically the AP now advises journalists to avoid lumping people together with phrases like "the poor," "the disabled," and "the mentally ill," as if this were somehow dehumanizing.

More dehumanizing, it seems to me, are the phrases the AP recommends to replace them, such as "people with mental illnesses." For people with mental illnesses, the change makes no difference, except perhaps among the ultra-sensitive politicized few. The wordy favored phrases, on the other hand, are dehumanizing to those advised — thankfully still not required — to use them and to those, all the rest of us, who must read them and hear them.

Human language should be direct and understandable. Convoluted euphemisms, such as those now so popular with government bureaucrats and academia, seem more intended to obscure meaning and confuse the public, while pacifying a few complainants, at least for a time.

In its original revision the AP included "the French" as an example of a usage to be avoided. This example was quickly dropped from the online stylebook after much ridicule, much of it coming from "the French." Considering how quickly that particular change was made, maybe an online stylebook isn't all bad.

The stories behind the stories

There are always stories behind stories. Stephen King doesn't remember writing Cujo because he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time. Mark Twain's attitude toward slavery changed just as Huck Finn's does in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Diana Gabaldon's Outlander was inspired by Doctor Who.

If you are curious about such stories, then The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels and Novelists (2021), edited by Erin McCarthy, was designed for you. And designed is the right word, for this Mental Floss book is beautifully designed and artfully presented. Scads of notable books, from 1984 to War and Peace, are explored in bite-sized chunks with fascinating tidbits about each book and its author.

There are a number of extra features that add to the pleasure of the book, including rejection letters sent to authors for books that later won acclaim and a group of books that were self-published before some publisher finally got wise. And there are lots of illustrations.

Everyone who reads this book will wonder why certain books were included while others were not. I'll confess that some of the included books I had never even heard of. Those who compiled the book apparently had there own disagreements, for at the end four pages are devoted to novels "that didn't make the cut." Some of these I've never heard of either, but I agree A Confederacy of Dunces should have been included.

Read what you need

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

There are any number of reasons why Theodore Roosevelt deserves his place on Mount Rushmore, but for readers that line above from his autobiography might be reason enough. Read what you want to read, what you feel like reading, what speaks to you at the moment, what gives you joy, what stirs your heart and passions, what helps you relax. Read what you need, Roosevelt says. Don't think you have to read what others try to convince you to read.

To some extent this may be true even of students. Certainly those still in school should be required to read textbooks and great works of literature, yet some leeway should be given, especially at the lower grade levels, for students to read what they want to read. Better that than nothing at all, which may be the result when books are assigned that some children cannot or will not read. The objective in these early years is learning to read and developing a passion for reading, and for that a comic book may work better than something less appealing.

For adults, free at last from required reading, Roosevelt's advice is even sounder. Even adults may find themselves directed toward books they are not necessarily interested in reading. Enter a bookstore and stacks of certain books will greet you, subtly trying to convey the message that this is what everybody else is reading. Perhaps you should as well.

Friends sometimes push books on you. "You've got to read this," they'll say, often not even asking if you want to borrow the book but simply giving it to you, assuming you will obediently read it and like it.

Book clubs, too, may direct you toward books you don't necessarily feel like reading. (Although I can say from my own experience that a reading group can also help you discover wonderful books you would have otherwise never experienced.)

I rebel against books with titles like 100 Books You Must Read Before You Die, as if you won't be welcomed past the pearly gates if you haven't read Crime and Punishment. I love Crime and Punishment, as many others do, but that doesn't mean you cannot live a rewarding life without ever opening it.

TR, although an educated man and an author of many books himself, did not believe that what we call serious literature is for everybody, or even for anybody all the time. "There are enough horror and grimness and sordid squalor in real life," he said. What's wrong with a book with a happy ending? The Grapes of Wrath is a great novel, one I'm glad I've read, but most of us most of the time would rather read something like The Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency. And we have Teddy's permission to do just that.

Life with father

A comic novel in the shadow of Auschwitz? Somehow Lily Brett pulled it off in Too Many Men. She does it again in the even funnier sequel Uncomfortably Close (2006).

In the earlier novel New Yorker Ruth Rothwax, the daughter of two Auschwitz survivors, persuades her father, Edek, to visit Poland with her and return to the place where he lost so many friends and relatives. While in Poland the old man becomes enamored with Zofia, a busty and aggressive Polish woman, whom Ruth instantly dislikes.

Now in the second book Edek has moved to New York City from Australia and "helps" his daughter with her successful letter-writing and greeting card business. Mostly he just gets in the way, and Ruth tries to persuade him to get involved in some activity outside her office. Then suddenly he does, and Ruth becomes more frustrated by his absence than she was when he was purchasing office supplies she didn't need.

The explanation, she learns, is that Zofia and her quiet friend Walentyna have migrated from Poland and moved in with her father. Ruth had thought she was rid of Zofia when they left Poland, but now she is back in their lives, apparently to stay.

Zofia, in her late 60s and about 20 years younger than Edek,  turns out to be a terrific cook and a bundle of energy. Zofia, Edek and Walentyna come up with a plan to open a meatball restaurant in an unpromising part of New York City. Edek promises to support the project financially, but since Ruth supports Edek, that means her money will be needed to open the restaurant. She's convinced it can never succeed, but unable to say no to her father, she loans them the money anyway.

While all this is going on, Ruth is trying to start a group for middle-aged and older women to meet and talk about topics, like sex, they might not otherwise talk about, although from the conversations reported in the novel, women of all ages talk about these topics all the time with or without a support group. But if Ruth is so committed to supporting women, why does she have such negative feelings toward Zofia, whom her father obviously adores? Everyone else, including her husband, her children, her friends and her work associates, love Zofia and think the restaurant is a great idea. So why does Ruth feel she must protect her father from her?

Reading the first of these autobiographical novels helps us understand the second. Ruth still blames the Polish people, all of them, for what happened to her family members at Auschwitz. She must somehow soften the deep-seated biases that conflict with her love for her more forgiving father and her wish for his happiness.