another stepping-stone of the artist

Yesterday I talked about my relationship with A. A. Milne's The World of Pooh as the earliest example of my being impressed and shaped by a work of literature. That was the first the literary stepping-stones that have influenced my own development as a creative writer.

The next stepping-stone was Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I first read when I was 13. I've mentioned my encounter with this book before, such as here and here, but I thought I might say a bit more about it.

I was enthralled by the book. Looking back on it, I would now say that a large part of my fascination came from the fact that the hero was a criminal. He murders two old women, one of whom is the pawnbroker who he feels has been exploiting him and his kind, the other the pawnbroker's innocent sister, who merely happens to be at the scene when Raskolnikov commits his crime. Thus Dostoyevsky makes it clear that Raskolnikov is guilty, even if you buy the idea that his murder of the pawnbroker is justified. He kills in cold blood, and to me, at age 13, the idea of making a cold-blooded killer the protagonist of a story was strange and chilling. For Raskolnikov is otherwise not a bad person: he's a poor but brilliant student struggling to make ends meet. Without realizing it, I had been introduced to a truly and deeply conflicted hero, and experienced the mesmerizing effect of sharing in the life and thoughts of such a person.

I felt the crushing, inescapable burden of blood-guilt as I read. Raskolnikov's psyche deforms and cracks under the pressure of it. There was a sense of this leaden guilt overshadowing all the action of the book, which has quite a busy plot with many characters and twists, all of which seemed somewhat irrelevant when the crime was remembered. Just as in real life, when we're guilty of something, we manage to forget for awhile, and then the memory returns, and the guilt is fresh and painful. This experience must be the mainspring of the criminal's frequent desire to confess.

I loved the characters, the vivid portrayal of the strange world of St. Petersburg in the 19th century, and especially Dostoyevsky's handling of Raskolnikov's relationship with money--the ostensible motivator of his crime. I felt the preciousness of each ruble-note, each coin. All blood-tainted.

I suppose I would say now that with Crime and Punishment I became conscious of literature as an art form, something that can affect one deeply and shape one's views and life. I glimpsed how the deeper, more moving stories would be about not physical peril, as I'd read about so far in my young life, but about moral peril and the effect of ideas on people's lives and actions. Raskolnikov's conscience and his soul were the real battlefield of this novel, and the experience was an eye-opener for me. To find the most powerful stories, the writer needs to look within.

Crime and Punishment was an influence in a stricter sense than The World of Pooh too, because in reading it I formed the desire to write like this. I formed a certain competitive desire to be able to create a work that would affect others as this one had affected me. Harold Bloom, author of The Anxiety of Influence and The Western Canon, would say that I developed an agon with Dostoyevsky, a desire not to be outdone by him--a driver of high-caliber literature throughout the history of literature, he maintains.

So there we are, the first two influential works in my artistic formation:

• The World of Pooh by A. A. Milne (age 6)
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (age 13)
  

The artist is being formed...

one man's trash

Getting a bit patchy in my blog-posts, here. Yesterday it was the delayed arrival of Bruce, the handyman from Homepro Handyman Service. At 3:30, two and a half hours after schedule (not bad by trades standards), he arrived: tall, friendly, talkative. We headed out back to look at our garbage-box, and developed a plan for proofing it against animal and human incursion (mainly surrounding its insides with half-inch wire mesh). Then, while he whisked away to pick up materials, I set about clearing the inside of the hot, dusty, garbage-impregnated, enclosed box. I emerged an hour and a half later, while Bruce was setting to work (he wouldn't call it quits until dark).

That's my excuse for yesterday.

Now: here it is 3:30 p.m. again, and I'm busy at my blog-post for my few but devoted and highly discerning fans.

After my morning notes (Alexander the Great, A History of Technology), I spent some time browsing the handful of blogs I keep tabs on. First up: the Grumpy Old Bookman, regular as clockwork every weekday with well-crafted, well-informed prose on the state of publishing in Britain. Today's post was a long entry in praise of a book called The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey, which evidently vilifies the British literary intelligentsia of 1880-1939, accusing them of inventing intellectual literature as a means of isolating themselves from and keeping themselves above the "masses"--people of the middle and lower classes who could now, mostly, read.

Today the Grumpy One lived up to his handle, vehemently supporting Carey's thesis, and getting quite a few licks in of his own for good measure against the hypocritical, parasitic, narcissistic, racist, sexist, wife-beating crew responsible for English high-brow literature of that and subsequent periods. The Grumpy One has never made any secret of where he stands on the issue of "literary" fiction: it is fiction at its most obscure, least readable, and least enjoyable. Its small share of the market is well earned, and would be smaller if its sales were not artificially boosted by the efforts of self-serving eggheads to promote it. He has no use for it.

I found myself experiencing mixed feelings as I read the post. While I have little doubt that the evidence presented in the book is true (Nietzsche was not a very pleasant person; H.G. Wells worried about a world overwhelmed by dark-colored races; George Gissing whacked his wives with stair-rods), I wasn't persuaded of the truth of the underlying thesis: that high-brow fiction was invented by these people specifically to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, as a kind of circle-the-wagons gesture--a laager of intellectuals trying to stay above the barely literate. I haven't read Carey's book, but if this is what it's saying, then I think it's probably just too reductionistic for me.

The key question is about quality. What is a good piece of writing? What makes it good? Who says so?

The GOB takes the view that a regular reader's enjoyment of a good mystery or romance novel is in no way inferior to or less than that of an academic reading a "difficult" work of literature. By whose decree is one better than the other? Whose enjoyment is of higher quality?

I would agree that there's no way of measuring this. Indeed, quality by definition is that which cannot be measured: it refers to the nonmeasurable aspects of something, which in their turn fall under the label of quantity. There is no way to make a case that one work is absolutely better than another.

But what about relatively? Is Crime and Punishment no better than, say, Valley of the Dolls? Many would say not: they can read Valley of the Dolls, but not Crime and Punishment, because the latter is too boring, is set in a faraway place, has no sex scenes. But I mention it for a reason: that, as I've said before in this blog, when I first read Crime and Punishment at age 13, I was aware that I was reading a new and higher, better type of literature. I didn't enjoy it less than the science-fiction that had been the staple of my reading diet thitherto, I enjoyed it more. At 13 I was not a university-educated egghead; I was an elementary-school-educated boy living with his single working-class mother. I was a member of the masses. I wasn't trying to "better" myself or fit in with a higher-class set; reading this book was a private experience of communion between my mind and Dostoyevsky's. It's not an overstatement to say that it changed me.

Crime and Punishment was a step in my literary education. I didn't accept that it was good because somebody told me so; its quality was part of my direct experience--an experience, I realized, that had been shared by many before me.

We accept as natural that the tastes of a 40-year-old will usually be different from those of a nine-year-old. Education and life experience cause us to change our view of things. An important part of the difference is that the 40-year-old has already had the nine-year-old's point of view, while the nine-year-old has yet to arrive at the 40-year-old's. They are not merely different; one is a more evolved view than the other.

Literature (and I use this term in contrast with the different idea of "literary fiction") is that more evolved point of view as it applies to writing. As we mature, we engage with life on a deeper, more subtle level. As our understanding and appreciation of life deepens, we will need writing that speaks to that deeper understanding--indeed that helps us go further with it.

And what of "literary fiction"--the highfalutin stuff that is the real target of GOB's wrath? Here I emphatically agree with him. To me, the whole deconstructionist/postmodernist project of the 2nd half of the 20th century is a dead loss. But I'm not sure that even this product of frenetic academic inbreeding was the result of a desire to elevate its producers above the "masses". I suspect it has more to do with power struggles within academia, in which certain factions ("women", "minorities") got their hands on new weapons with which to attack their supposed oppressors. (The GOB does engage in some politically correct white-male cringing.) Harold Bloom in The Western Canon and other works describes how the "politics of resentment" has infiltrated and rotted the literary academic world in the U.S. I've never visited literary academia--and I don't want to. But the product of such an establishment, with such a program, can only be dreck.

In sum: my impression is that while there may be some substance to the idea of a coterie of turn-of-the-20th-century eggheads inventing an abstruse literature to keep themselves apart from and above the unwashed masses, the idea that this was a prime mover in non-pulp literature seems far-fetched and, dare I say it, cynical. Even popular writers can be not very nice (how about Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, reputed to beat blacks more harshly than he beat Jews, who in turn got rougher treatment than fellow WASPS?). And Malcolm Lowry, living in a squatter's shack only a few miles from where I sit, idealized the common man while writing Under the Volcano, one of the most difficult literary novels of the 20th century--and one of the best.

books, Father's Day

Might as well start a post between my semi-activities.

Today is Father's Day in those parts of the world that celebrate it. "Happy Father's Day," said Kimmie as we lolled in bed at 7 o'clock. I'm not a father, however.

"I celebrated Stepfather's Day on Friday," I said, meaning that that's when I took Robin to lunch.

Kimmie understood right away and giggled.

I rose to discover that there had been more traffic to my blog, notably from Jacqui Lofthouse, an actual historical novelist. For a writer, nothing beats the feeling that one is being read--not even the feeling that one is being paid.

I checked her blog and enjoyed the little inventory of books in one's life that Amanda Mann first used in her blog. I'd like to play too:

Number of books owned:
Nonfiction: 860
Fiction: 165
(Actual numbers may be slightly higher, due to books that have escaped inventorying.)

Last book bought: The History of Technology, volume 2, edited by Charles Singer et al.

Last book read: Rubicon by Tom Holland

Last book finished: Hillel the Elder by Nahum Glatzer

Five books that mean a lot:

- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- The Masks of God, especially volume 4, Creative Mythology by Joseph Campbell
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and, I don't know, how about...
- The Astrological Neptune by Liz Greene

I had to update my Book Inventory workbook in Excel to get it to total the books,something I'd never bothered to do (only the total dollar figure, for insurance purposes).

Kimmie and I went out for breakfast to Denny's, a local family-style restaurant on Marine Drive near the entrance to the Lions Gate Bridge. We'd never been there before. The place was jammed; we had to wait for 20 minutes to get a table. When we asked the bus-girl whether it was always this busy, she said it was only her second day on the job, but that it was after all Father's Day.

Ah yes, Father's Day. I did send Dad an e-mail, briefly referring to Father's Day. (I suspect that it's one of those synthetic holidays invented by Hallmark Cards.) Do fathers really have a preference for queuing up at Denny's every mid-June with their families, so they can tuck in to some pancakes and sausages?

A stop at Capilano Mall for sundry things, and now helping Kimmie sort and move furnishings from the upstairs bedroom to the new bunker sewing-room. It's sounding very quiet in there. I'll go see what she's up to.

endings

Afternoon reading: Rubicon, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, and From Eden to Exile.

Robin and Trevor stopped by last night; Trevor helped me move Kimmie's sewing machine and serger downstairs to the new sewing-room.

On Sunday I explored a bit further into the literary blogoverse, traveling via Grumpy Old Bookman (good reading) to a blog by Maud Newton. Her topic was "Ending Trouble", in which she mentions her dissatisfaction with the last quarter of most novels, and quotes James Wood in the Guardian on the same subject.

I agree (in my case, I also usually don't like the first three quarters either). The observation is not new; I remember reading E. M. Forster's discussion of it in Aspects of the Novel, published in 1927. The chapter or heading was "Worse Toward the End". I forget what his take on it was.

My own thought is this: the quality of the ending of a story--including a novel-length story--reveals the writer's command of storytelling. A story is about its ending; if you don't have an ending, you don't have a story.

In this I'm influenced by Robert McKee. He says that story design follows the age-old rule for dramatic presentations in general: save the best for last. Even James Joyce was trying to follow this rule by ending Ulysses with Molly Bloom's monologue. If a novel simply peters out, or suffers from a contrived, added-on ending, it's a sign that the writer did not know what his or her story was about. The novel was underworked, or the writer underskilled.

In my opinion there's a further problem: the 20th century saw the denigration of storytelling in the name of artistic fashions such as modernism, postmodernism, and so on. Forster, in the above-mentioned Aspects of the Novel, refers to story as the most primitive element of the novel--the thing that held the attention of shock-headed troglodytes gaping around the campfire. Regrettably, in his view, it must be there, but the novelist shouldn't soil his hands with it any more than necessary.

Joyce too, by the time Finnegans Wake rolled around, was fed up with the "go-ahead plot" and wanted to do something different. (He did--but when's the last time you read Finnegans Wake?) I remember reading things by writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Lawrence Durrell, Vladimir Nabokov, and many others who ripped up time and space to escape the drudgery of storytelling. One of France's New Wave filmmakers (probably Jean-Luc Godard) is reputed to have said, "A story should have a beginning, middle, and end--but not necessarily in that order." Clever--but is it good writing advice?

I think not. When I was younger I appreciated artsy, intellectual movies (and to a lesser extent novels), but now that I'm older I appreciate a good story, well told. When I was 20 I was mesmerized by watching Luchino Visconti's film version of Death in Venice. I still like that movie, but I think its achievement is much less than, say, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. (Now there's an ending.)

In my opinion, the best stories of the past few decades are to be found in movies, because screenwriters are trained in storytelling. Novelists, by and large, aren't--and it shows. They tend to trust in talent and intuition, with mixed results. When I hear a novelist say that he or she doesn't know how to end a story, I hear a lost soul--one who hasn't begun to think about what his or her story means.

The best novels have strong endings. When I finished reading Crime and Punishment when I was 13, lying in bed down in my basement room, I remember having a deep, stirring feeling--a new feeling: something I'd never felt before. The ending gave a powerful new twist to a powerful story. Tears came to my eyes, and I marveled at the ability of a book, a printed thing, to evoke this response in me. How did he do it?

Likewise, when I first read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was 18 and it was a life-changing experience. The ending of that book too I found uniquely powerful and appropriate. It didn't involve surprise plot-twists or boy-getting-girl; it created the feeling of the launching of a freed soul into the sky of new possibilities, the joy of one who has burst the chains and is flying to his true life.

McKee estimates that of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75% or more of the writer's labor should go into designing the story. Of that 75%, 75% again should go into the climax (the ending). There it is: 9/16 of a writer's total effort should go into the ending of a story. Over half. How many writers put even 10% of that amount of effort into it?

I spent a year, maybe more, outlining my novel. I hope the effort was enough, and of the right type. I couldn't think of any way to improve it further. Now I'm committed.

length isn't important, but...

More halfhearted note-taking in the morning. I seem to be bored with it. Am I taking notes from the wrong places? Do I feel it's not applicable? Or am I finally just getting tired of it?

I continued my length-comparison with published works, using books from my own library. Using the same method, and entering the data in my Palm, here are today's results:

Dance of Knives: 142,000 (sci-fi novel by Donna McMahon, an old classmate of mine)
The Skystone: 194,000
Crime and Punishment: 207,000
Clan of the Cave Bear: 216,000
Moby-Dick: 224,000
A Fine Balance: 245,000
Ulysses: 260,000
The Magus: 275,000
Gravity's Rainbow: 305,000
Middlemarch: 332,000
The Eagle and the Raven: 334,000
The Brothers Karamazov: 342,000
Bleak House: 348,000
The Mists of Avalon: 416,000
War and Peace: 441,000
Cryptonomicon: 448,000

Next, I entered all these titles and lengths into my Mission Excel workbook, along with the ones I captured yesterday in the bookstore. I sorted them in order of length. I updated my own page data to reflect my latest changes to chapter 12, which put my estimated final word-count at 342,000: exactly the same as The Brothers Karamazov.

So there it is: if The Mission comes in at its currently estimated length, I will have a book the size of The Brothers Karamazov. This is large, but not catastrophic. I was afraid that my book might be longer than War and Peace--but no, only as long as Dostoyevsky's longest novel. Whew.

I was surprised to learn that Gravity's Rainbow is "only" 305,000 words long, and that Ulysses is a mere 260,000 words--beaten by The Magus at 275,000. Maybe the biggest surprise was how shrimpy Moby-Dick is, once you strip away the editor's introduction and commentary: only half the length of Cryptonomicon. I had no idea that A Suitable Boy is not only longer than War and Peace, but trumps it by almost 200,000 words--it's almost a Crime and Punishment longer!

I took out my Penguin Classics edition of The Brothers Karamazov and calculated how far into it 100,000 words is (my current coordinate in my own book). I reckoned it was at page 265. I pulled out the old bookmark folded at page 432, marking the spot where I bailed on my last attempt on Karamazov, and slid it in at 265. There. That's where I am in mine. I'd be delighted if my book had the look and feel of this copy of Karamazov, which I bought in December 1984. I like to read a nice, flexible, mass-market paperback. That's what I'd like mine to be.