The quality of suffering

Well, I turn around to look at you — you're nowhere to be found/I search the place for your lost face — guess I'll have another round

Tom Waits, I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits once said, "The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of suffering."

The "quality of suffering" reaches a high level in the fine Tom Waits song I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You, one of his best-known. A man at a bar sees a beautiful woman sitting there with a man. Because she is taken, he struggles not to fall in love with her. Yet when her date leaves and he and the woman make eye contact, he holds back, and then she disappears while his head is turned.

When we hear the song, the man is not the only one who suffers. We all do. And the woman suffers as well. That's a lot of suffering in one brief song, yet it becomes quality suffering because of the quality of the lyrics.

Through the ages, good writing has raised the quality of suffering. This is why poetry is so often read at funerals. The 23rd Psalm is commonly heard. Beautiful hymns are sung. Many of us, at other times, read sad novels, listen to sad songs and watch tear-jerker movies.

Good writing doesn't  eliminate the suffering. It may sometimes, in fact, make the suffering worse. Yet it can somehow transform that suffering into something almost beautiful, almost uplifting, almost spiritual.

A life in rhyme

Ogden Nash wasn’t satisfied just being the American master of light verse. He wanted to be a novelist, a serious poet, a Hollywood screenwriter and the toast of Broadway. Mostly he wanted a Pulitzer Prize. And so he wasted a lot of years on other pursuits at a time when there was still a lucrative market for light verse and when he might better have focused on what he did best.

Even so, as David Stuart reports in his 2000 biography The Life and Rhymes of Ogden Nash, he produced hundreds of poems and numerous popular collections of those poems. He became one of the most prominent writers of the mid-20th century, even if few people today know who he was.

Many of his verses are universal and timeless — such as Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker — but many others were topical, and thus quickly dated. Even during his lifetime he often updated poems to make them more in step with current culture. Partly for this reason, much of his work means little to 21st century readers. That is unfortunate, for his poems can amuse us even if one doesn’t catch all the cultural references.

One thing that makes Nash’s light verse unique is his outrageous rhymes: perverseness and worseness,  useless and mooseless and sun around and run-around, to cite three examples from just one poem. He invented words as needed, and these creations were usually both comical and fitting. His poems could make a serious point even as they delighted.

Stuart’s book delights, as well. He includes generous examples of Nash’s work. He tells of Nash’s long courtship of a woman who seemed to spend most of that courtship in Europe with her mother. Even after their marriage she preferred living with her mother during the early years. Yet Nash could never be drawn to another woman. Stuart tells, too, about the man’s early years in publishing and his long career with The New Yorker until changing editors and changing times began to pass Nash by.

Get smart

Books should make you smarter than you are.

Richard Ford, quoted in The Writer's Library

Richard Ford

Often we read books not to get smarter but simply to be entertained. We are more interested in emotion — thrills, excitement, romance, laughter, sentimentality — than knowledge. We used to read textbooks for information, most of it quickly forgotten. Now we want a good time.

Yet just as we learned more from those textbooks than we think we did, so entertaining novels may be teaching us more than we realize. Even a murder mystery, especially if it's any good, can make us smarter. How do detectives solve crimes? What clues do autopsies provide? What drives ordinary people to commit murder? Even after we have forgotten the plot and the identity of the murderer, we may remember a little something about crime-solving.

We get smarter in small increments, which is why it took so many years to earn a diploma, after which we still knew next to nothing, as we soon discovered. And little by little the books we read do make us smarter, even though we may not realize it.

Some books, especially the nonfiction variety, are read for the very purpose of making us smarter. We want to know how to lose weight, how to make home repairs, what other parts of the world are like and so on. Yet I am convinced that fiction makes us smarter, as well. Why else would they make us read so much of it in school?

Richard Ford, a few pages after the comment quoted above, says something else just as wise: "The whole worth of literature is that it's trying to show us we're less distinct from each other than we thought we were." That, in a nutshell, is how reading makes us smarter.

When we read stories by black authors, white authors, Asian authors, South American authors, Scandinavian authors, African authors or whatever we find characters who, however different from us they seem, have so much in common with us. We have the same feelings, the same desires, the same pains, the same heartaches, the same joys as the people we read about. Their stories become our stories in one way or another. And that knowledge, reinforced in one book after another, makes us smarter.

The return of the wolf

He also taught us that compassion was the most important thing we could learn. If someone hurt us, we needed only empathy, and forgiveness should be easy.

Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

Which is more the wild beast, the wolf or the human? Which is more compassionate? Charlotte McConaghy makes you ponder such questions in her terrific second novel Once There Were Wolves (2021).

Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland on a mission to reintroduce wolves to the Highlands. With her is her twin sister Aggie, once vibrant but now silent and withdrawn after an abusive marriage. Farmers worry about the wolves preying on their livestock, while Inti tries to convince them the wolves prefer natural game.

When Inti discovers the bloody corpse of a man she has openly confronted because he beat his wife, a reminder to her of Aggie's husband, she hastily buries it, fearing her wolves will be blamed. But then she becomes a suspect in the man's disappearance, while she herself fears the murderer could be Duncan, the local police chief and also her lover and the father of the child she carries.

Adding to the complications, Inti suffers from mirror-touch synesthesia, a rare condition causing her to experience what those around her experience. If someone else is struck, she feels the blow. (This is a real condition, experienced by the novelist Siri Hustvedt, among others.)

McConaghy masterfully juggles all this and more, while giving her readers a bit of mirror-touch synesthesia that allows us to feel what her characters, especially Inti, are feeling. And then she shows us that wolves may experience this empathy, as well.

Poetry as prose

Richard Ford

When Nancy Pearl asks novelist Richard Ford if he reads poetry differently than he reads prose, Ford gives a surprising answer. "No, I try to read is as prose," he says in The Writer's Library.

Most of us read poetry in a certain sing-songy way that we learned long ago. Ford says, "I try not to read poems the way I was taught in high school. I try not to pay attention to the meter. I just try to read it conversationally."

The way in which poetry is written, of course, suggests an entirely different way of reading. Consider if one of Robert Frost's most famous poems, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," had been written as prose:

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year. He give his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

The rhyming scheme and the repeated last line still suggest poetry, yet when written as prose the text invites a different kind of reading. Does this help or hinder? In either case the same questions are raised: Why does the narrator stop by the woods? What might he be thinking about? Why does it matter whether the owner of the woods is around or not? What makes the woods so inviting when there are those promises to keep? What might those promises be? And so on.

In a different kind of poem, say something by E.E. Cummings, reading it as prose might lead to a very different result.

In another interview in the same book, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen views short stories as something of a midway point between novels and poems. "But short stories are something that to me are perfect because they have sort of the grace and insight of a poem and the narrative of a novel but, you know, much shorter, so you can have your fix in twenty or thirty minutes with a great short story."

One can imagine how a writer as talented as Richard Ford or Viet Thanh Nguyen might turn Frost's poem into a short story or even a novel. The poem is the condensed version. The novel would be an expanded version, filled with many characters and many details about those promises and the owner of the woods. A short story would be a nice compromise between the two

Where sweet dreams and sweet memories meet

One person's last fling can be another person's first fling, as Lee Smith shows us in her new novel Silver Alert (2023).

Smith's story finds Herb Atlas as a very old man, dying of cancer, taking care of the much younger woman who ideally would be taking care of him. Susan, his wife, has Alzheimer's. He hires Dee Dee, a young woman with a past she's trying to forget, to trim Susan's nails, but Dee Dee's vibrant personality brings the smile back to Susan's face and she gradually takes over more and more of Susan's care.

The past the younger woman is trying to put behind her involves sex trafficking, which she was forced into when she was just 14. With little schooling, no money, a baby on the way and a boyfriend about to abandon her, Dee Dee nevertheless tries to stay optimistic. 

Then Herb's family decides it's time to put both him and Susan where they can receive professional care, news the old man does not receive with grace. When he offers Dee Dee a ride home in his old sports car, which he is not supposed to drive anymore, the pair have so much fun that they keep driving, from Key West north toward Disney World, both having the time of their lives ... until the state of Florida puts out an alert for an old man in a canary-yellow Porsche.

In a short, surprisingly potty-mouthed novel, Smith contrasts youth, a time of dreaming of a brighter future, with old age, a time of remembering the brighter past. She demonstrates the two conditions may have more in common than one might think.

The meaning of life

Evolution wants us to solve things. It's why our brains get that hit of dopamine every time we experience that aha moment.

A.J. Jacobs, The Puzzler

A.J. Jacobs above is trying to explain the universal appeal of puzzles, but I think he has hit upon the meaning of life.

I differentiate between the "meaning of life" and the "purpose of life." The latter I see as more individual We may see the purpose of our life as being to serve God, to care for our family, to benefit mankind, to protect the environment, to create art, to design great buildings, or whatever. Most of us find multiple purposes that make our lives worthwhile.

The meaning of life, on the other hand, I view as universal. All life, plants as well as animals, must solve problems to survive. A tree in a drought solves that problem by sending its roots deeper into the ground. When in the shade of other trees, it solves that problem by growing taller or sending branches out farther to find patches of sunlight. Some trees simply wait as long as necessary, a century or more, until older trees die and they can find their own place in the sun and then grow to maturity.

All animals must find food, shelter, water and a mate. They raise their young and hide from danger. Their entire lives involve trying to solve these problems.

We humans confront problems from the moment of birth. As babies the solution to every problem is always the same: we cry until until someone, usually our mother, solves our problem for us. As we grow older problems became more challenging, but we also develop skills to solve more of these problems by ourselves. Instead of crying about that toy across the room, we learn to crawl to fetch it ourselves.

Eventually we are old enough to get a job, where we are paid to help solve somebody else's problems by mowing lawns, babysitting children or making french fries. We devote our entire careers to problem-solving.

Our lives are so wrapped up in problem-solving that, as Jacobs observes, we devote our leisure time to problems, as well. Thus we do crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles. We play games, where the problem consists of beating other players. Or for entertainment we simply observe others solving their own problems. The novels we read, the movies and situation comedies we watch, the sporting events that occupy us all make problem-solving a spectator sport.

Many of us daydream of that island paradise or that cabin by the lake where there is absolutely nothing to do but relax. But after a day or two of doing nothing, we start yearning for problems to solve. And so we take a 15-mile hike or climb a mountain or try to catch the biggest fish in the lake or reorganize the cabin cupboards or whatever.

Without problems to solve, our lives would be empty and, in fact, meaningless.

Puzzled

In the middle of The Puzzler (2022), A.J. Jacobs writes, "As a kid, I suffered from mild OCD and I had many strange rituals." That explains a lot. Maybe Jacobs hasn't entirely outgrown that obsessive-compulsive disorder. That may, in fact, be the secret of his success.

Jacobs has written a series of popular books that perhaps only someone with "mild OCD" could have written. In The Know-It-All he describes his experience of reading through the entire Encylopaedia Brittanica from beginning to end. In The Year of Living Biblically he tells of trying to follow every law in the Hebrew Bible, including all those dietary ones, to the letter. And so on.

Now in The Puzzler, he writes about all the major forms of puzzles, from crosswords and sudokus to jigsaws and Rubik's cubes. More than that, he seeks to obtain and solve the hardest of them. He participates in an international jigsaw puzzle contest. He tackles nearly impossible mazes and purchases a puzzle that, even if a person knew what he was doing and worked at it nonstop, would take billions of years to solve.

Yet it is the author's immersion in these puzzles that makes his book so fascinating. His sense of humor also helps.  He interviews puzzle creators and the best puzzle solvers. He even interviews the great chess champion Garry Kasparov about chess puzzles.

One need not be either obsessive or compulsive, or even enjoy puzzles, to find pleasure in this book.

History on the move

The past never stays still. It changes, which is why the task of the historian changes with each generation.

A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Perhaps there is a reason our history teachers seemed to focus so much on dates — 1066, 1492, 1776. Dec. 7, 1941, etc. Dates are just about the only bits of history that never change. All the rest is subject to different interpretations by different historians with vastly different points of view.

We say we can learn from history, yet one thing we learn is that history is as open to interpretation as a Charles Dickens novel.

A.N. Wilson is writing about a Charles Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, when he makes the comment quoted above. The novel was inspired by his own history, his own difficult boyhood, yet the author gives his life an interpretation from his own middle-aged and upper-middle-class point of view, his own twist, as it were.

In Florida, where I now make my home, controversy swirls over proposed standards for teaching slavery. Was there any silver lining at all about the black cloud of slavery? And even if there was, should students be taught about it? Did slaves learn anything at all that benefited them after they won their freedom? The slaves themselves seemed to think so, but some modern interpretations suggest they were wrong. Slavery was 100 percent bad and absolutely no good came out of it, they insist, apparently not even Louis Armstrong, Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey.

Another question, usually ignored, is that if Florida schools give so much attention to teaching about slavery, as both sides of the argument seem to agree they should, how much of the rest of American history is going to be ignored completely?

The past never stays still, especially in American schools.

The potency of the unreal

A.N. Wilson

In his book The Mystery of Charles Dickens, A.N. Wilson uses the phrase "potency of the unreal" to describe not just the power of Dickens's fiction but virtually all fiction — novels, movies, TV shows, folk tales, whatever. 

Why do stories we know to be untrue impact us as they do? Why do they stir us emotionally, bring tears to our eyes, make us want to re-experience them even if only in our minds? Perhaps it is because fiction concentrates life, bringing it into sharp focus, leaving out the routine.

For most us, one day tends to melt into another, relatively few days in a lifetime of days worth storing in our memories for very long. Even if our lives have been interesting to us, they usually soon bore others when we start talking about them.

Fiction, if it's any good, leaves out the boring parts. Characters in stories rarely stop to eat meals, brush their teeth, mop their floors, work eight-hour days or even go to bed (unless with a new lover). Meanwhile fiction gives us sparkling conversations, sinister villains, intense confrontations, dramatic love affairs and other experiences that, even we have them in our own lives, happen only rarely.

Thus, when we find a chance to relax, we open a book or turn on the television and allow the unreal to overpower the real.

Man of mystery

The life of Charles Dickens was as convoluted and as mysterious as any of his novels, which should not be surprising given that his novels were in many respects inspired by his life. A.N. Wilson explores all this in his 2020 book The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

Dickens, Wilson tells us, was in many respects as fictional a character as any he created on the page. He was, in other words, often a hypocrite, not always practicing the values in his own life that he so often preached in his fiction. His secret affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan, which did not become public until years after his death, is Wilson's prime example, to which he returns again and again. (Dickens wasn't alone in his deceit. After his death, Nelly lied about her age, pretended she had been just a little girl when she met Dickens and then married a clergyman.)

The great author hated his own mother and, after fathering 10 children, despised his own wife. He much preferred his wife's sister, who faithfully served Dickens for much of his life.

In successive chapters, Wilson writes about the mystery of Dickens's childhood, the mystery of his marriage, the mystery of his charity and so on, always paying close attention to the author's fiction to see what it reveals about each subject.

Sometimes Wilson can be as convoluted and as mysterious as anything relating to Charles Dickens, yet Dickens fans will find his book full of fascinating insights into both the man and his works.

Stories without stories

Việt Thanh Nguyen

Literary fiction, says novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a genre that pretends not to be. The very fact that we have the term "literary fiction" and know what it means suggests he is right. There are romance novels, westerns, thrillers, mysteries and science fiction novels, and then there is literary fiction, a separate category and thus a separate genre. Popular fiction might be another genre.

The Vietnam-born writer goes on, "My beef with a lot of literary fiction is that there's no plot." He describes a plot as fundamental to a novel. How can you have a story without the story?

His complaint is common among readers, most of whom ignore the kinds of novel he complains about, those lacking a plot or having plot so obscure that discovering it requires too much work. Yet these are often the very novels that win the literary prizes, even if very few people read them and even fewer enjoy them.

The plotless novel was primarily a 20th century phenomenon that still holds power in literary circles. Yet this certainly does not describe all literary fiction. Before the 20th century writers like Austen, Dickens, Hardy and Twain gave us literary fiction with plots even ordinary readers, not just the elites, could enjoy. The popularity of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck during the 20th century demonstrated that even during the age of Faulkner and Woolf plots and literary fiction were not exclusive.

More recently we have seen novels like Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See and Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins win over both literary critics and readers.

So perhaps literary fiction is not just one genre but two — those with vivid plots and those without.

Haunted by Dad

When first-person narration is discussed in literary circles, the subject of unreliable narrators often crops up. Should you believe everything the narrator tells you or not?

In Matt Haig's 2006 novel The Dead Fathers Club, there is no question but that the narrator is unreliable. Philip Noble is just 11 years old, and how many 11-year-olds really understand everything that is going on around them? His father has just died in a traffic accident, making the boy emotionally unstable. As the story unfolds it appears Philip may have psychiatric problems in addition to the current stress.

Told in a stream-of-consciousness style, the story finds Philip haunted by his father's ghost. The ghost, part of a dead fathers club in the spirit world, tells Philip he was murdered by his brother because Uncle Alan wants both the boy's mother and the pub the dead man had owned and where Philip and his mother live. The ghost tells Philip he must kill Uncle Alan within 77 days.

Philip's struggles to obey his father's ghost against his own conscience. The fact that Uncle Alan quickly moves into his mother's bedroom and takes over management of the pub strengthens the boy's commitment to actually commit the murder. Yet how can an 11-year-old boy kill a man and get away with it?

Readers may find a hint of Shakespeare's Hamlet in this novel, yet Haig's work remains strikingly original.