Ursula Le Guin's confession

Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I'm jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I'm contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them — if I don't like their writing.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

That one writer should be jealous of another writer's success is no surprise. Aren't most people jealous of those who achieve what they themselves yearn to achieve — like, for example, the fellow actor who wins the Oscar, the teammate who hits the game-winning homer, the prettier girl who goes to the prom with the captain of the football team?

But two things do surprise me about what Ursula Le Guin writes in an essay called "About Anger," published in her book No Time to Spare. One is that she admits it. Most of us just put on a brave face and say something magnanimous in public, whatever our true feelings. Then we nurse our wounds in private or with those closest to us.

Le Guin tells us how she really feels. "I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce," she writes. "The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me." (I happen to agree with her on both of these points, though without the anger.)

The other things that surprises me is her final phrase: "... if I don't like their writing." Her jealousy, in other words, applies only to those writers she considers overrated and undeserving of their sales, their awards, their respect in the literary world. "I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf," she says. "A good article about Jose Saramago makes my day."

Thus what she terms jealousy actually seems less like jealousy than critical discernment. Aren't we all a bit disgruntled when a trashy novel reaches the top of the best-seller list while a novel we love and consider much better doesn't even make the top 50? Don't we hate it when a movie that bored us wins an Oscar, while the makers of our favorite film must pretend it was an honor just to be nominated?

So Ursula Le Guin makes a confession here, but it seems to me that her sin may be something less than the jealousy she confesses.

A mystery that rings true

Published in 1992, Wednesday's Child came relatively early in Peter Robinson's terrific series of Inspector Banks novels, a series still going strong.

As usual Banks and his team of investigators have two major crimes — perhaps related, perhaps not — to deal with at the same time. (How the English village of Eastvale can have so many major crimes is a mystery itself, on a par with the many murders that occur in Jane Marple's quaint village of St. Mary Mead.) A young couple pose as social workers and take away a woman's seven-year-old daughter, Gemma, supposedly because of suspected child abuse. Then the body of a man knifed to death is found.

At this point early in the series, Alan Banks is still just the No. 2 man among Eastvale investigators. In charge, though nearing retirement, is Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, who for personal reasons decides to take charge of the kidnapping case, leaving the murder to Banks. Readers follow both investigations step by step, waiting to see if the two paths connect.

Except for the abundance of evil in Eastvale, these books suggest realism throughout: believable characters, believable crimes, believable detective work and finally a believable outcome. Unusual for the series, Wednesday's Child includes both a chase and a shootout, yet even these seem real.

This novel will satisfy all those Robinson fans who, like me, get to it late.

Misunderstood

All that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All that violence was in the service of peace and serenity.

Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy

Few 20th century writers, or at least those writers taken seriously by literary scholars and taught in college classrooms, have been as committed to conveying the Christian understanding of grace and redemption as Flannery O'Connor. Yet her stories are so dark, so violent, so grotesque that few readers readily grasp what they are really about.

O'Connor, a devout Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, made no secret about what her goals were in her fiction, yet most of those who read her novels and short stories see something else in them. She hated reading reviews of her books because reviewers so rarely understood them.

Brad Gooch wrote an excellent biography in 2009, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, so perhaps another biography wasn't necessary so soon after, yet the much shorter The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor by Jonathan Rogers (2012) serves a different end. Rogers, while giving a good summary of her life and making good use of Gooch's book in the process, has another goal in mind. He seeks to discover what made O'Connor tick, what she believed and how those beliefs shaped her fiction.

"My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for," O'Conner once wrote in a letter. These, in fact, may have been the people who liked her stories best. Christians, especially those who were her neighbors in Milledgeville, Ga., either didn't read her books or didn't like them if they did. They were proud of her literary accomplishments but just wished she would write a different kind of fiction, something a bit nicer.

Rogers writes, "For O'Connor, the real horror was never violence or deformity, but damnation." Even her morally worst characters usually find sudden grace by the end of her stories, that "terrible speed of mercy" brought home.

O'Connor suffered from lupus for much of her short life. She was just 39 when she died. She left behind two novels and numerous short stories that will be read, and perhaps occasionally understood, for years to come.

The people we know best

A great part of the appeal of reading fiction is the discovery that the reader knows much more of the inner life of the characters in the book than of his or her own family members or friends.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Paul Theroux

This statement by Paul Theroux may seem startling at first. Can it possibly be true that I know Huckleberry Finn or Scout Finch better than I know my own child? How can I possibly know more about the people in that mystery I'm reading than I know about my best friends? They aren't even real people, but just fictional characters.

Yet of course it is true. The key is that phrase Theroux uses, "inner life," referring to thoughts, feelings and secrets. In the real world, the only inner life we can know anything about is our own. There are, of course, those people who seem always ready to share their thoughts, feelings and secrets with us, whether we are interested in them or not. Once they do, however, these revelations cease to be "inner life," and there will always be some thoughts, feelings and secrets that remain unrevealed.

Reading fiction is like reading minds. The reader quickly learns things about fictional characters that could never be known about a friend or relative. In real life we often don't understand why people do the things they do. In fiction we do because authors tell us. This insight does not transfer from page to screen, a big reason why movies are rarely as good as the books from which they were adapted. Showing an actor's face is about all a director can do to reveal what is going on in a character's mind, which is about all we have in the case of the people in our own lives. In real life we read faces, voices, actions and words and from this must deduce what a person is actually thinking. An author writing in third person can simply tell us.

Consider these opening lines from novels:

"Her first name was India — she was never able to get used to it." — Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell Jr.

"Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours." — Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

"Harmony is driving home, eastward out of Las Vegas, her spirits high, her head a clutter of memories." — The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry

"As Benedict Stone huffed his way to work, the sweet smell of the cherry scones in Bake My Day made him forget for a moment that his wife, Estelle, had packed her purple suitcase and moved out of their home." — Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone by Phaedra Patrick

In each case the words sound like fiction, not fact, and the giveaway is the inner life the lines reveal. Maybe someone writes lines like these in a biography, but not likely. The novelists take us inside a character's mind. India has never gotten used to her name. Hale knows someone wants to murder him. Harmony is happily pondering a clutter of memories. Benedict Stone momentarily forgets that his wife has left him. Were these real people, our friends perhaps or even members of our own family, we might never know these things about them.

All this makes reading pleasurable, even if those fictional people in our books can never really replace the real people in our lives.

A world without blue

Was Homer colorblind? With that question linguist Guy Deutscher begins his fascinating 2010 book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

That question perplexed scientists for many years, In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes the sea as "wine-looking," the same description he assigns to oxen. And he describes honey as green. But it wasn't just Homer. The Old Testament, in the original Hebrew, describes gold as being green. So was everyone colorblind back then?

The explanation, says Deutscher, is not that Homer and other ancient writers were colorblind but that they simply did not have words for all the colors. Even now languages used by people in isolated parts of the world often do not have words for blue and yellow. Every language has a word for red, he writes. Blood is red. Red dye is relatively easy to make. Red is an important color to everyone. Green, too, is an important color because so much of the natural world is green. The sky is blue, but not much else. Nobody in those cultures had blue eyes. And just as English-speaking people may describe both navy blue and baby blue as blue, so some languages have used the word green to cover a broad range of the color spectrum, including what we would call yellow or gold.

Although still a controversial idea, the author argues in the second half of his book that our language can affect how we think. Those who speak languages, such as Spanish and Italian, that assign a gender to each word — something English did until the 11th century — tend to give masculine or feminine characteristics to inanimate objects, studies suggest.

Deutscher, who is originally from Australia, discusses one nearly extinct Aborigine language, one of several found in the world, that has no words for left or right. Instead they use compass directions to reference everything, such as their north hand (which becomes their south hand when they turn around) or the jug on the east side of the table. Even when taken to a strange place by a roundabout way, they somehow know instantly in which direction everything is. And they can remember these directions when they share memories later. Yet when these people learn English, they have no trouble learning left and right. In their own language, however, they always think in terms of directions.

The research Deutscher discusses may not be conclusive, but it is suggestive. The language we speak may influence how we view the world. If we had no word for blue, what color would a clear sky be?

Behind a modern movie classic

The story of the film The Shawshank Redemption may not be as dramatic as the story in the film, but it comes close. Mark Dawidsiak tells about it in The Shawshank Redemption Revealed: How One Story Keeps Hope Alive (2019).

It was director Frank Darabont's first movie. With the exception of Rob Reiner's Stand by Me, adaptations of Stephen King stories had not been well received by either audiences or critics. The actors wanted for the lead roles were not available. The movie, when it was released in 1994, was a box office disappointment and was left in the dust by Forrest Gump when the awards were handed out. Yet today, more than 25 years after its release, movie fans, many of whom confess to watching it several times a year, rank it among the very best of all time, well above Forrest Gump.

The film became a success when it was released on home video and when television networks found that their ratings shot up whenever they showed it. 

Meanwhile Mansfield, Ohio, a city of about 50,000 people midway between Cleveland and Columbus, suddenly became a popular destination for tourists from around the world because that is where most of The Shawshank Redemption was filmed. The former Ohio State Reformatory, completed in 1900 and closed in 1990, had been scheduled for demolition, but that was postponed so Darabont could make his movie there. It had previously been used as a set for Harry and Walter Go to New York and Tango and Cash, but now that all prisoners had been moved to a new prison next to OSR, the entire property was available to the director. Afterward the striking old prison, sometimes called Dracula's Castle, attracted so many visitors that it was saved from demolition.

So popular has the movie become over the years that Dawidsiak had no trouble finding people eager to talk about it, including its usually reticent star Tim Robbins. He also talked with the other major star, Morgan Freeman, Darabont, Stephen King, other members of the cast and crew and many Ohio people who worked as extras or were otherwise involved in making the movie. He also spoke with many of those who have traveled many miles, in some cases halfway around the world, to sit on the bench where Brooks (James Whitmore) sat to feed pigeons and to walk down the country road where Red (Freeman) walked.

In fact, Dawidziak does a marvelous job of covering just about every aspect of the film. His book is filled with photographs, including stills from the movie and shots taken by Becky Dawidziak, his daughter.

As a personal note, I will mention that Mansfield is where I worked as a journalist for more than 40 years. As a rookie reporter I was given a sobering tour of OSR while it was a high-security prison. One of my colleagues, reporter Lou Whitmire, plays a newspaper reporter in the film. (This wasn't the only case of typecasting. Former OSR guards also appeared as Shawshank guards.) My son, then a college student, worked that summer in a prison uniform, an extra in the background of several scenes.

Truth in ambiguity

Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing.

I wrote a few days ago about the need for clarity in our speech and writing (See Misunderstandings, Oct. 28). Yet often people who are quite capable of clarity deliberately choose ambiguity. It is quite possible to tell a truth that amounts to a lie, something politicians, cheating spouses and teenagers become quite skilled at. Ambiguous statements are a useful tool toward this end.

Robert Frost

Yet there can also be truth in ambiguity. It is this truth that is the goal of fine literature. Our best poets and novelists are rarely crystal clear about what their works mean. What was Robert Frost getting at when he wrote those last lines in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"? "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." Is this simply a description of an event, or is there something deeper going on? Frost leaves it ambiguous and lets each reader decide what it means. Readers can — and have — interpreted these lines very differently. Or the lines can be appreciated just for the beauty of the language, never mind what they mean.

So it goes with most works of literature, prose as well as poetry. Often the more ambiguity, the more respected the novel or poem. Unfortunately, this allows some writers to write works that suggest great depth but which are actually nonsense.

Ambiguity is also one of the strengths of the United States Constitution. Had it been more specific, it would have had to be much longer. It might also have become obsolete years ago. Its ambiguity allows for changing interpretations as times change. That's why the Supreme Court exists — to tell us, for example, what the right of free expression guarenteed by the First Amendment mean in the age of the Internet and Twitter and what the right to bear arms means in the age of semi-automatic weapons.

And then there is Scripture. The appeal for many people of Eugene Peterson's The Message and other modern translations and paraphrases of the Bible is that they clarify what the most confusing passages actually mean. But clarifying Scripture can actually be misleading because one meaning is chosen over other possible meanings. Much of Scripture, such as the teachings and parables of Jesus, seems to be deliberately ambiguous, not to obscure meaning but to allow a range of interpretation by different people at different times in different places. Every sermon preached on the prodigal son is not the same sermon, and that seems like a strength, not a weakness.