Favorite Books Bookshelf, July 31, 2018

I recently was forced to move masses of books off and then later back onto their shelves for a carpet cleaning project, and it occurred to me that it might be fun for me to create a record of the books that are on my hallowed FAVORITE BOOKS BOOKSHELF at this particular moment in time. The shelf is pretty packed, so the rule is that I can’t really add a book without subtracting one. The other rule is that I have to remind myself that some of these books may not be the “best” book ever, but that it’s on this shelf because it hit me at the exact right time, or the reading experience was extraordinary in some memorable way that enhanced the book, or, well, because I don’t really care that this isn’t the “best” book ever. Also, for sure, some actually ARE the “best” ever. Usually, I have a sort of feeling as I’m reading and finishing. If I have to ask myself if a book should go on this shelf, I know it shouldn’t.

A few words to remind everyone that I’ve been around about as long as a sequoia, and I’m sure this list reflects to some extent a reader coming of age during a certain time/place. So be it. That is who I am. And this is my secret place where I separate the art from the artist and try not to worry about writers who might be dicks in real life. Additionally, I try not to put books by friends in this area, because those books get their own special shelves. And I (mostly) resist including children’s books.

I’ll also say that I have shelves of other books that I absolutely love! But usually there’s a little something extra that makes me send a book to this shelf. I’m really loathe to remove (or even reread) books that have been here for a long, long, long time…so if you’re going to question me in a deep way about why a book is here, it’s quite possible that I may not be able to answer to your satisfaction or even coherently. Suffice to say that typing each of these titles, touching each of these covers as I unshelved and reshelved did so much more than spark joy, as Marie Kondo suggests: Each book reminded me of who I was, who I am, and how I got to here.

Oh, and for those of you worried that you’re not finding The Great Gatsby here--!!—it, and The Catcher in the Rye, are in with the writing books, due to their outsize influence on me and my writing life.

Presented alphabetically here, but PLEASE don’t think I have them alphabetized on the shelf? What, you think I’m crazy?!? (Also, forgive me for being too lazy to italicize titles.)

Abbott, Lee K.: Love Is the Crooked Thing

Ansay, A. Manette: Vinegar Hill

Austen, Jane: Pride & Prejudice

Baker, Nicholson: The Mezzanine

Black, Robin: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Bodsworth, Fred: Last of the Curlews

Boswell, Tom: Why Time Begins on Opening Day

Bronson, Po: Bombardiers

Campbell, Bonnie Jo: Mother, Tell Your Daughters

Canin, Ethan: The Palace Thief

Capote, Truman: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Cather, Willa: My Antonia

Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness

Didion, Joan: Play It as It Lays

Doerr, Harriet: Stones for Ibarra

Downham, Jenny: Before I Die

Eliot, T.S.: Collected Poems

Ellis, Bret Easton: Less Than Zero

Eugenides, Jeffrey: The Virgin Suicides

Ferris, Joshua: Then We Came to the End

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Pat Hobby Stories

Ford, Richard: Independence Day

Frazier, Ian: The Great Plains

Fried, Seth: “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre,” One Story magazine

Gilchrist, Ellen: Victory Over Japan

Hamper, Ben: Rivethead

Hemingway, Ernest: A Moveable Feast

Hemingway, Ernest: In Our Time

Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway, Ernest: Winner Take Nothing

Hempel, Amy: Reasons to Live

Ishiguro, Kazuo: The Remains of the Day

Jong, Erica: Fear of Flying

Krakauer, Jon: Into Thin Air

LaChapelle, Mary: House of Heroes

LeCarre, John: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird

Lowell, Susan: Ganado Red

MacLean, Norma: A River Runs through It

McCarthy, Cormac: All the Pretty Horses

McEwan, Ian: Atonement

McInerney, Jay: Bright Lights, Big City

McKinght, Reginald: The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas

Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick

Minot, Susan: Monkeys

O’Connor, Flannery: The Complete Stories

Plimpton, George: Open Net

Porter, Katherine Anne: Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Richard, Mark: The Ice at the Bottom of the World

Salinger, J.D.: Nine Stories

Shipstead, Maggie: “Astonish Me,” One Story magazine

Shriver, Lionel: We Need to Talk about Kevin

Simpson, Eileen: Poets in their Youth

Smith, Patti: Just Kids

Stafford, Jean: The Mountain Lion

Strand, Mark: The Continuous Life

Swarthout, Glendon: The Homesman

Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina

Townsend, Sue: The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

Townsend, Sue: The Secret Life of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾

Updike, John: Pigeon Feathers

Wakefield, Dan: New York in the 50s

White, E.B.: Stuart Little

Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass

Wolfe, Tom: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Woodrell, Daniel: Winter’s Bone

Yates, Richard: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

Lost in an Elaborate Dream with Real-Life Consequences: An Interview with Keith Lee Morris

I read Keith Lee Morris’s new novel Travelers Rest, under perfect conditions: during the recent Snowzilla snowstorm that shut down the DC area for several days. Perfect conditions because of course there is no better time to sink into a novel when you know you have all the time in the world, and perfect conditions because the story takes place in a mysterious Idaho town where the Snow. Never. Lets. Up. Ever.

Elegant yet accessible prose, vivid characters with thoughtful POV shifts, swirling snow carrying us through time, a creepy hotel…the writer in me was battling with the reader in me. What will happen next!? And how did he do this!?

Lucky for me, I know Keith, who has visited the Converse low-res MFA program several times, including one summer where we ran workshop together. He was kind enough to answer a few questions I had about the book and offer some writing tips…and if you do nothing else today, you MUST read his response to #6, where he reimagines The Great Gatsby in the age of smartphones. Hilarious!!

  

1.     Describe your book in ten words or less. (I’ll spot you the words of the title as freebies!)

Family explores old hotel, upsets fundamental balance of the universe.

2.     Much of the story in TRAVELERS REST takes place during a major snowstorm, and the falling, whirling snow is described many times, each time uniquely and elegantly. What advice can you give for writers who struggle with descriptive writing? How did you approach writing about this ongoing snowstorm and keep the writing fresh?

Because I'm one of those people who walks around with his head in the clouds most of the time, physical description is always a challenge for me. I don't pay much attention to physical detail as I go about my everyday business, so I have to really force myself to concentrate on it in my writing. The snow in Travelers Rest presented an extreme version of the problem--I knew from the outset that the snow was going to keep falling throughout the entire novel, and I knew that I was going to try to use it as a way to both create the overall mood and explore the individual characters’ perceptions. That meant I was going to end up describing it over and over again,  and I had to figure out how to keep it interesting, to make the snow feel like a constant presence without merely being repetitious. Add to that the problem that I now live in South Carolina, where we only see snow once or twice a year.

Ultimately, my memories of growing up in Idaho came to my rescue. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time standing at my bedroom window, in the dark, watching the snow outside in the hope that enough would pile up for school to be cancelled. I watched so often and so intensely (I really hated school) that I got to be an expert on the finer points of drifting and falling snow. When I had to write those descriptive passages in Travelers Rest, I would often just sit in a dark room and close my eyes and go back to that place by my bedroom window as a child and channel those memories; it was an exercise in making memories live in the present moment, which, perhaps not coincidentally, turned out to be a very important part of what the book is about.

As far as advice for younger writers goes, I’d say that being good at physical description is just like everything else in writing fiction—you have to be willing to slow down, concentrate fully, experience the world you’re describing with your own senses, and stick with the moment doggedly until you find just the right words to represent the tangible, real-world subject you’re attempting to bring to life on the page.      

3.     The book balances four major points of view. What advice do you have for those writers wishing to try multiple viewpoints? Did the book start with four voices in your original vision?

To me, by far, the trickiest element to deal with when you’re employing multiple POVS is not character, but plot. Yes—there’s always a danger that one of your characters will simply be more compelling than the others, or less compelling, so that readers find themselves becoming impatient when they’re not reading about the characters or situations that most interest them. I think that happens to some extent in Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which is one of my favorite novels published in the last few years, and was hugely successful, obviously—but as much as I was absorbed in the movement of the story, I couldn’t help feeling a slight sense of disappointment every time the narration switched to the character that I found the least interesting of the two. I was so caught up in one of the POVs that I didn’t want the author to take me away from it.

But I think the hardest part of writing from multiple POVS is managing the timing and keeping the plot from stalling out or becoming repetitive. There will, after all, almost certainly be some overlap in the shifting POVS, and one challenge is to navigate that overlap without making readers feel as if they’ve heard the same thing before—the trick there, to me, is to make each of the POV characters’ experiences and thoughts distinct enough that going over the same ground from inside one characters’ perspective feels almost nothing like covering that same ground from another’s (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is the quintessential example of how to do that effectively). And of course you have to keep the plot from feeling like it’s bogging down.

Another challenge when you’re working with multiple POVS—especially when that means as many as four or five—is to keep the character present in the reader’s experience of the story even when that character’s perspective isn’t being represented. For instance, there’s a stretch of about 100 pages or more in Travelers Rest in which the father, Tonio, doesn’t appear at all. That’s where the good old-fashioned notion of the cliffhanger comes into play a little bit—if readers aren’t going to see or hear from a character for a long time, it’s a good idea to leave that character in an interesting predicament that readers won’t forget or become tired of speculating about—it can even help to increase the tension, as long as you don’t try to stretch the situation out too far, in which case it can become frustrating or annoying. 

4.     I simply love 10-year-old Dewey! He’s smart yet vulnerable and always 100% believable as a kid. So many young literary characters feel overly-precocious and precious, but I never worried that Dewey was going to disappoint me. How did you capture him so wonderfully? Any tips for writing about kids?

You know, I wish I had some really great secret to impart here, but I don’t. I don’t write about kids a whole lot, so I’m happy to hear you say that you liked Dewey. It helps, of course, to have raised kids yourself, or to be in the process of raising kids yourself. [Note: I do not recommend procreation for the sole purpose of writing more believable elementary school characters]. One thing I’ve always felt is that you shouldn’t try overtly to make children sound like children—just stay true to what kids do and think and let them interact more or less like adults, like your other characters. Nothing’s worse than a five-year-old character who prefaces everything she says with shouts of “Mooommmmy! Daaaaadddy!” Kids don’t do that anyway. It also really helps in writing child characters, I think, if you have vivid memories of your own childhood and can recollect clearly how you thought and felt at a particular age. But that’s obviously not something you can teach anyone.

5.     Why did you choose to include the supernatural element in this story? Was that your intention from the start, or something that showed up along the way that you initially embraced/feared?

For about twenty years, I’ve been writing what I like to call “dream stories”—narratives that are based loosely on actual dreams and that adhere to a kind of dream logic rather than what we think of as the operating principles of the everyday world. Travelers Rest was just the extension of that mode to novel-length form. I was shocked, honestly, when people started referring to it as a genre novel or even a cross-genre novel—that never occurred to me. I was just writing the same kind of fiction I’d been writing for a long time and publishing in literary magazines. There’s definitely something otherworldly in the novel, if not downright supernatural (I guess I’d be hard-pressed to explain the distinction between those two terms, but the first one sounds more appropriate to me for some reason), but the way I thought of it the whole time was that the characters were lost in an elaborate dream that nevertheless had real-world consequences.

6.     Technology had to be part of the challenge when putting this plot together, dispensing with cellphones and the like. Any thoughts about how modern technology helps/hinders writers today as they consider plot?

Oh, God, yes, this is one of my favorite things to whine about! 90% of the conflicts in literary history can be resolved in five minutes or less with a cell phone. Gatsby and Daisy have been in touch all these years as Facebook friends, so when he gets to West Egg he already has her number in his contacts list. He shoots her a text and she asks Siri for directions and heads right over. Meanwhile, Nick Carraway has run a Google search on Gatsby and turned up his past criminal history and fake identity and tweets something about how his new neighbor is f-ed up. Daisy follows her cousin Nick on Twitter, so she sees the tweet and aborts her trip, opting to call up her husband and Jordan Baker on speaker phone and propose a round of golf instead. The End.

Of course, one solution to the problem is to fully embrace technology and social media, keep up with all the latest trends and be able to employ them artfully in your work, but for this you need access to a 7-year-old. I only have an 18-year-old at home, and he’s long since grown tired of my ineptitude, so that he now answers my questions about technology with nothing but three-letter texts from behind the bathroom door, where he’s blow drying his hair—lol, idk, wtf? And then of course if you do go this route, unless you publish your story or novel online immediately upon completion of a first draft, everything you wrote will be outdated and all but indecipherable, capable of being dredged up only from the deepest caverns of cultural memory, by the time it ever gets to its first reader.

So yes, in this case, with Travelers Rest, it seemed essential to get rid of most forms of contemporary technology, and my editor, Ben George, and I spent way more time than probably either of us wanted to talking about what would happen in the magnetically charged atmosphere of the town of Good Night, Idaho (which was the explanation I came up with for why things don’t operate normally) if you were to, say, plug in a toaster. The problem did lead to some fun scenes, though—like the ones in which everyone in town keeps refusing Tonio’s credit cards, or how Robbie (Dewey’s derelict uncle) finds all the old 70s songs on the town’s one ancient jukebox.    

Buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/Travelers-Rest-Keith-Lee-Morris/dp/0316335827

Read an excerpt: http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/keith-lee-morris/travelers-rest/9780316335829/

About Keith Lee Morris

Keith Lee Morris is the author of two previous novels, The Greyhound God and The Dart League King, a Barnes & Noble Discover pick. His short stories have been published in New Stories from the South, Tin House, A Public Space, New England Review, and Southern Review, which awarded him its Eudora Welty Prize in fiction. Morris lives in South Carolina, where he is a professor of creative writing at Clemson University. 

"West of Sunset": Fitzgerald in Hollywood

How did I not know about this book until now, West of Sunset, by Stewart O’Nan, that imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s days in Hollywood?  Like, could a book be more perfectly written FOR ME?  Fitzgerald’s so-poignant Pat Hobby Stories, about an old, has-been hack of a screenwriter, has been on my Favorite Books Bookshelf for ages, and I’m pretty sure this one will never get squeezed off for lack of room.  These stories make my heart ache.

Best news of all:  Stewart O’Nan will be reading from the book on Wednesday, January 14, at 7 PM at Politics & Prose.  I will see you there!  (Unless the predicted snow/sleet/apocalyptic event actually happens as described.)  More info here.

Here’s Maureen Corrigan’s review from the Washington Post and an excerpt:

What interests him about Fitzgerald’s exile in Hollywood is not so much the glitter (although Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich and other stars make appearances), nor his love affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham (whose blond good looks evoked the young Zelda), but rather Fitzgerald’s anxious commitment to his work as a screenwriter. Most of the movies Fitzgerald was assigned to were dreck (although there was a short stint on “Gone with the Wind”). Nevertheless, sitting down every day in his office or the various furnished cottages and apartments he rented in and around Hollywood, Fitzgerald fueled himself with cigarettes and Cokes (or, frequently, something more potent) as he labored to make flimsy scripts better. Fitzgerald was always a worrier, relentlessly tinkering with “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night,” even after the publication of those novels. It’s that F. Scott Fitzgerald — the worn-out yet relentless craftsman — whom O’Nan compassionately evokes in “West of Sunset.” 

Fitzgerald's Trimalchio Now Available as an Ebook

In what must be the worst marketing email ever written, I have discovered that Simon & Schuster has made Trimalchio, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early version of The Great Gatsby, available as an e-book/Kindle.  We own the hardcover, which was $40-something when we bought it(!)—and are happy to have it—but this is a much better bargain at $9.99.

While the bones of The Great Gatsby are clearly there, as a writer and a reader it was shocking to come across a number of changes and rearrangements.  For example, there’s a scene where Daisy shows up at Jay’s house and is ready to run away with him (she even has a suitcase).  He refuses, saying that the point is that she needs to renounce Tom or some schoolboy ridiculousness that barely seems plausible.  Another early flaw is that we don’t learn Gatsby’s background until the book is almost over, in Chapter Eight (of Nine), when (IMHO) it might be a little late to gin up some sympathy for him.  And that awful title, of course.

If you’re a Gatsby fan, Trimalchio is a worthwhile investigation.  Here’s where you can order it and (supposedly) read more, though there’s not much to read.  But the cover looks great! (And here it is on Amazon, again without much explanation or text.)

Catching Waaaay Up: Converse Low-Residency MFA and Asheville, NC

Hmmm…I can barely remember the beginning of this most recent road trip to the Converse MFA program in South Carolina (and I’m already thinking ahead to the next venture, The Hambidge Center in Georgia in July), but surely I can scrape together a few quick notes:

--It all started with an amazing artisan pizza in Durham, NC, at Pizzeria Toro with my sister and her partner, Tanya Olson, celebrating the publication of her new book of poetry, Boyishly, which opens with one of the most haunting poems I’ve ever read.  I also had a great drink: a spicy mix of rye and the infamous hot ginger ale made by Blenheim’s.  

--And it seems impossible for me to spend the night in Durham without stopping at Biscuitville.  I was lured in by the new pimento-cheese & bacon biscuit, but I would recommend sticking with the basics:  sausage biscuit, hash browns, sweet tea.

--Despite the fortification of that excellent breakfast, I had to stop for lunch at Jimmy’s in Lexington, NC, for a “tiny” plate of chopped barbecue.  “Only give me a few hush puppies,” I begged, and luckily they translated a “few” to mean five, all of which I ate.  Oh, and that vinegar-based cole slaw didn’t stand a chance either.

--Working some health into the picture, I stopped at Abbott’s in Gaffney for a bag of peaches.  Inhaling the overwhelming perfume, I couldn’t help but sigh, “Ohhhhh, this smells so fabulous,” which inspired the teenage boy behind the counter to note, “First peaches of the season, ma’am,” and they were INCREDIBLE! Lovely to start each morning with peach juice dribbling down my arms into the dorm sink…and then walk to the cafeteria for more breakfast (biscuits and gravy day the definite highlight!).

--Okay, I was in Spartanburg to teach, not only to eat, and I was very pleased with the fiction workshop.  My co-teacher, Marlin (Bart) Barton, was as brilliant as ever, and with our class composed entirely of third and fourth semester students, I felt we discussed the work under review with a great deal of perception and insight.  I was pleased to introduce them to my collage exercises, and the results from their homework collages were really artful and surprising.  So—smart students and a very smart class!  I was sad to say goodbye on the last day, especially knowing that for many of them, this was their last workshop at Converse.

--My craft lecture was about the difference between writing short stories and novels, and I used The Great Gatsby as my model of the well-structured novel, and it’s always a joy to talk about that book.  I had seen the movie two days before heading to SC, so I felt prepared for all questions! 

--So many stunning readings, so I hate to single any out in particular, but I’m afraid I must note that our visiting poets/editors (and husband/wife) Jon Tribble and Allison Joseph set a new standard for what one might expect from a reading.  It’s a cliché, but truly: I laughed, I cried.  I think everyone in the room felt as though we were at An Event.  Jon and Allison shared new work and old favorites; the between-poem-patter was illuminating rather than distracting; the flow of work crescendoed beautifully; both were excellent readers; and both exuded personal intimacy and affection—for each other, for writing, for the audience—that I found moving.  Oh, and lots and lots of poems about food!  A wonderful evening.

--Two of our fabulous faculty read from new, hot-off-the-presses books:  Susan Tekulve from her novel, In the Garden of Stone, and Denise Duhamel from a book of poems, Blowout.  I’ve already read most of Blowout, which is amazing (you can read a sample here), and In the Garden of Stone will be my treat when I’m on residency in Georgia next month.

--I have a 40-page story that I spent more than a year working on, that I’m very proud of.  On the other hand, what can one do with a 40-page story?  So I decided to read from it at my reading.  How happy I was to share at least that little bit of it with a corner of the world and a wonderful audience.  And such an honor for me to read with the director of the MFA program, Rick Mulkey, who shared some exciting new poems he wrote while on sabbatical last fall.

--No cornbread salad in the dining hall, but we had lemon squares on more than one occasion.  And the key lime pie was excellent, too!  (Someone in the kitchen really understands “tart.”)

--Our visiting agent, Melissa Sarver from Folio Literary Management, was smart and generous with her time and offered interesting observations on the publishing biz.  She was also hopeful, mentioning a resurgence of interest in short story collections!

--After the residency, I met up with Steve in Asheville, NC, where he was at the tail end of a business meeting.  This will sound like such a hard life, but I joined him at the Inn on the Biltmore Estate, which is, simply put, a beautiful hotel in a beautiful setting.  We had a gorgeous view of the mountains; I was entranced, and spent more time than usual staring out the window. I walked around the grounds, finding various spots to sit in and read poetry when I could tear my eyes away from the mountains.  There was a casual buffet dinner that night where we were treated to truly excellent fried chicken—yes, in a hotel buffet!!!  Yes, really!  I would drive many miles for that chicken.  (Topped off with great mixed berry cobbler for dessert.)

--In Asheville, Steve and I toured Thomas Wolfe’s house, a rambling boarding house still containing many of the Wolfe’s family possessions, despite a fire in the late 1990s that did significant damage.  Sadly, the arsonist was never caught, though the woman leading the tour floated a theory that the fire was set by a descendant of one of the townspeople who were p.o.ed by Wolfe’s portrayal of the citizens and town.  We’ll see what happens, but at least I was inspired to buy Look Homeward, Angel. 

--Foodwise, we found some goodies in Asheville:  12 Bones Smokehouse, along the river, for pulled pork with jalapeno cheese grits, cole slaw, smoked potato salad, and buttered green beans—all of which were amazing, even the “buttered green beans” which were about as rich as dessert.  Oh, and for dessert:  a homemade strawberry pop-tart.  And for brunch, we went to Chestnut in the downtown area:  chicken and waffles!!!  Perfect balance of carbs and grease and salt and molassey sweetness—and a couple dabs of sausage gravy.  (Who invented such a clever combination?)

--Then it was off to the Grove Park Inn for the night where we stayed in THE VERY ROOM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD STAYED IN.  Yes, for real--!!!!!  In 1936 he stayed at the Inn to try to write while Zelda was in Highland Hospital there.  So, perhaps not the happiest time of his life—there was a misguided suicide threat while there—but we still felt the vibe in the room as we watched part of the Redford Gatsby movie, and I read out loud these fascinating Fitzgerald facts.  (He asked for a room that overlooked the entrance so he could check out the young women as they arrived…I sort of wish he had wanted a mountain view, but oh well.)

--And on home, finding another Biscuitville and introducing Steve to the joys of the burgers and the 40 flavors of milkshakes at Cook-Out!

Thomas Wolfe's Beautiful Deathbed Letter to Maxwell Perkins

This has to be one of the most moving letters ever written, the letter Thomas Wolfe wrote to Maxwell Perkins on his deathbed, by hand, against doctor’s orders, after Wolfe had had a falling out with Perkins and Scribners and had moved to another publisher, though Perkins remained loyal to Wolfe and was the literary executor of his estate:

August 12, 1938

Dear Max:

I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.

I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and a wiser one—If I get on my feet and get out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back.

—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4^th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below—

Yours always,

Tom

(from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock)

"Seeing, Hearing, and Reading": Maxwell Perkins on How to Write

Here’s some excellent writing advice via Maxwell Perkins, gleaned from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock:

The editor notes that this letter was written to a “writer of distinction” who had to stop working for a while and take a rest for health reasons.

March 11, 1941

Dear ---:

…And turning things over in your mind, and reflecting upon them and all, is something that a writer ought to have to do in quiet circumstances once in a while. That is one of the troubles with writers today, that they cannot get a chance, or cannot endure to do this. Galsworthy, who never over-rated himself as a writer, but was one of great note in fact, always said that the most fruitful thing for a writer to do was quiet brooding….

 

Being bitter about all the too-many accomplishments of your Facebook friends doesn’t count as brooding!

May 17, 1945

Dear Mr. Mulliken [a young man who was in the service at the time and wrote asking for career advice]:

…I think, in truth, that the best writing of all is done long after the events it is concerned with, when they have been digested and reflected upon unconsciously, and the writer has completely realized them in himself….Long ago I went to visit Ernest Hemingway, after he had been a couple of years in Key West. We went fishing every day in those many-colored waters, and then also in the deep blue Gulf Stream. It was all completely new to me, and wonderfully interesting—there was so much to know that nobody would ever have suspected, about even fishing.  I said to Hemingway, “Why don’t you write about all this?” and he said, “I will in time, but I couldn’t do it yet,” and seeing I did not get his meaning, he pointed to a pelican that was clumsily flapping along, and said, “See that pelican? I don’t know yet what his part is in the scheme of things.”  He did know factually in his head, but he meant that it all had to become so deeply familiar that you knew it emotionally, as if by instinct, and that only came after a long time, and through long unconscious reflection….

(It would be interesting to see if there's a pelican in The Old Man and the Sea, just for kicks.)

June 22, 1945

Dear Jim [another young man in the service who wrote for career advice]:

…You see plenty, and you hear plenty, and that is much more important even than reading. You remember how when Swift was a young man he would go to the inns on the highways and sit in the bars and listen to the teamsters and coachmen talk. He never used the language that he heard—and I suppose he really listened just from interest anyhow—but the rhythm, the tempo of living speech is in the talk of the regular run of people. And so, though you can’t write as you wish now, you are probably going unconsciously through the best education you could have.  Seeing, hearing, and reading….

 

And, to quote the master:

January 4, 1946

Dear Jim [the same man as above]:

I delayed answering your letter because I wanted to quote from Scott Fitzgerald, and it took me a long time to find the paragraph:

“So many writers, Conrad for instance, have been aided by being brought up in a métier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of material and, more important, an attitude from which to view the world. So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life.” …

 

Okay, seriously…no more Facebook today for any of us!

Rejection Letters by Maxwell Perkins

What’s it like to be rejected by legendary Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins?  Here are two examples, both pretty cutting under that veneer…and both offering excellent advice on writing, relevant still today.

[Note: the redacted names and titles are due to the book’s editor, not me; I’m reading Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, edited by John Hall Wheelock, published (by Scribners,natch!) in 1950. I suspect later editions of the letters contained the recipients’ names.]

Jan. 10, 1936

Dear —:

            It is hard to be obliged to tell you that “----”does not seem to us acceptable for publication. The fact that we also feel that it is now unlikely that it can be made acceptable compels us to speak plainly about it.

            We ought to tell you at the outset that we think you are both creating and writing too hurriedly, which is not fair to your considerable talent.  Your novel seems to us to show the consequences of this in both conception and execution.  We were not disturbed by faults apparent in your original rough draft of the first half, because you told us that it was the product of the time you could spare from income-bringing writing in the course of several weeks only, and we felt that they would be taken care of in a more leisurely rewriting. But the faults, we think, are still there, in the second half of the story as well—which we now read for the first time.

            The story still seems superimposed upon its background , and not in any real sense to grow out of it.  Many characters are introduced who do not touch the story.  It is as if you had carefully gone over the local newspaper files of the [eighteen] eighties, made copious notes, and used this background material valiantly, with the result that much of it seems dragged in, and awkwardly handled. Very often, too, your exposition is disproportionate: things really important to the story are set forth briefly and indirectly , whereas some of the local and political detail, of no real consequence in the novel as such, is given the emphasis of exposition by dialogue.

            The fact that we were willing to pay you an advance, provisional upon acceptance, is evidence enough that we believed in your talent. Empathetically, we still do. But we apparently over-estimated your faculty for self-criticism. It seems to us now that you must have written this book when you were only half ready to begin it.

            If you were to rewrite it now, from stem to stern, we don’t think that it would come to life, even though you might succeed in integrating story and background more effectively.  Your right course—unless we are wrong in our opinion of this manuscript—seems to us to be to put it aside, take up one of the other novels in the plan you outlined to us, and then write this entirely anew a few years from now.  If you write another novel, we believe that you ought to put it away, once you have finished it, until the impulse that led you through it has gone quite cold; then take it up again and see if you are ready yourself to accept it.

            All of this gives you brutally less than your due; you have created some sympathetic characters, and done much effective writing.  But we think that your rapid writing for income has got you into an attitude toward your material that you will have to lose….A novel of this kind should come out of long reflection upon the characters and upon the scene, so that the background and the people and the events all, in the end, become part of a true unit. It is a harder kind of novel to do quickly, perhaps, than any other. …

March 6, 1936

Dear —:

            I have read over your “----” several times. I do not think it is successful, but it is very hard to explain to you why, except that it has the technical disadvantage of being told by a character within the story. That always somewhat diminishes the vividness and sense of actuality by removing the reader further from the things recounted. But it is, of course, a method that has been followed by the best writers.* Otherwise, I think the story failed mostly in not giving the reader a keen enough sense of the reality of what happened, so that he is moved in reading.  This has nothing to do with technique, or structure, or anything of the kind, but only in the ability of a writer to feel with intensity himself, and then so express himself as to make the reader feel in that way too.  If this is the case, I do not know of any way of telling a writer how to get the result. Some men can do it by nature, even though in every technical way they write badly. It has been learned by many, too, who did not seem to have it at first, but they had to teach that to themselves entirely, for it is not at all a technical matter.  Many of the very best writers of narrative, such as history, etc., have been unable to succeed with fiction. You write very well, but this story is not successful, in spite of that.

            It is also true that it is hardly the material for a short story, from an editor’s standpoint, but that has nothing to do with its intrinsic interest.

Ever sincerely yours,

*The Great Gatsby, perchance, Maxwell?

Maxwell Perkins: Great Guy, But He Didn't Think Much of Women and Huck Finn

Okay, my incendiary headline has done the trick and gotten your attention!

As I mentioned, I’ve moved on from Robert Lowell and legendary literary Boston to literary legends: I’m about a third of the way through Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock.  It’s one of those cool, old paperback Scribners editions with the gray cover and green and white rectangles that I love, published in 1950, so kind of hot off the presses, since Perkins died in 1947.

There are some frustrations, including a bad habit of redacting the titles of the books that (apparently) readers have written in to complain about—nasty language, immoral behavior, the general nastiness of life!—in the letters Perkins writes back to defend the author, Scribners, and writing/art in general.  I guess trolls were around before the internet age.

And I was taken aback by this snippet, early on, which sort of crushed my personal fantasies of having lived in another age and been discovered by Perkins:

March 31,1924

To Edward Bok:

…You have practically confessed, I think in The Americanization [of Edward Bok], or in one way or another, to a rather low opinion of woman (an opinion to which I have no objection, since I share it) but this would make still more interesting a chapter by you upon “Women who have impressed me.”  Of course, you have talked about various distinguished women whom you have met, but mostly you have associated with men and have written about them.  Could you not make a fine chapter on remarkable women you have known? I have known some extraordinary ones in vitality and will power and intellect too.  I think this would have a tendency to round out this book, and to once more bring out your views in these concrete terms….

 

[Oh, so sorry, Edward Bok, that the book Perkins is writing about, Twice Thirty, seems to be no longer in print…!  Though I confess to being impressed that Bok is the one who coined the word “living room.”  And I should note that Perkins does champion female authors, including (so far) Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Caroline Gordon. I'll imagine he was just trying to establish some ground so that Bok would listen to the editorial suggestion.]

It’s quite humbling to see that many of the books Perkins is writing about are ones I’ve never heard of.  It wasn’t all Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe…Steeplejack by James Huneker seemed to be a big deal.  And Perkins’ acumen was not infallible:

December 5, 1924

To Will James [suggesting what type of book to write for a follow-up to Cowboys North and South]:  

…Really, the book I have in mind—for unsatisfactory as comparisons are, one can never altogether avoid them—is “Huckleberry Finn.”  There was very little plot to it, you probably remember.  Its great interest was simply in the incidents and scenes of the trip on a raft down the Mississippi, told in the language of a boy.  Of course, “Huckleberry Finn” is primarily a boy’s book and it would be better if what you would do were not altogether that…

 

It’s also interesting how often the word “sales” comes up—and Perkins did start at Scribners in the advertising department—but it’s instructional that during this “golden age” of publishing, there was always much concern about how the book would sell and the various pressures of the industry:

June 3, 1930

To Thomas Wolfe:

…Everything is much as usual here except that the fiction market, which was bad enough as things were , has been rendered still worse by the Doubleday announcement that they are to publish novels at one dollar.  I am glad you worked hard  and we were able to get out “Look Homeward Angel” before this collapse came….

 

More to come…I haven’t even yet mentioned The Great Gatsby!!

Blog Vacation

Congratulations to Austin, who will be channeling F. Scott Fitzgerald in her Tigers Princeton T-shirt!  Thanks to everyone for entering.

And speaking of channeling…I’ll be channeling the two quarters of French class I took in college while I’m off visiting Quebec.  Back then it seemed like it would be fun to learn French, and it was…until I got to the irregular verbs, when I thought, “Why am I doing this again?”  Plus, it was a class that met every single day—and the language lab was dirty and disgusting....  Oh, youth!  So if I end up ordering “brains” on a menu by accident, it will be no one’s fault but my own!  (In Paris, I almost accidentally ordered “head cheese” because I recognized “frommage” as "cheese," so such things are possible.)

So, au revoir…and blogging will resume sometime after Columbus Day.

Princeton T-Shirt Up for Grabs!

Don't forget to enter to win a Princeton T-shirt, in honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday!

Details:  http://www.workinprogressinprogress.com/2012/09/happy-birthday-f-scott-fitzgerald.html

Link Corral: Be a More Productive Writer, Job Opportunity in SC, and F. Scott!

Weren’t we just talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald?  And yet there’s always more!

--Here’s a link to a Simon and Schuster, where you can enter to win a complete Fitzgerald Classics Library from Scribner:  http://pages.simonandschuster.com/fitzgeraldclassics

--Here’s a link to the first newspaper advertisement for The Great Gatsby (and it’s worth scrolling through to see the other ads…I especially liked the ad for Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays):  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/10/read-me-dwight-garner-book-ads/

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I find myself intrigued by this “system” of carving up writing time into blocks.  On Facebook, there were some compelling testimonials from some new believers.  Can you argue with something called “The Secret to Being a Productive and Focused Writer”?

For years I have set myself a goal of writing 2,000 words per day. Sometimes it felt like a prison sentence. I’d keep eyeing my word count, willing it to get larger.

Sometimes I’d be stuck in my office for eight to ten hours, and when I was finished, I’d feel hollowed out and weak, like someone who has given away too many pints of blood. Other times I’d write poor quality filler just to get the job done.

Much too often I’d become distracted; responding to the ding of my email like Pavlov’s dog, surfing the internet whenever I got stuck, hearing the damning words of Jonathan Franzen resound in my mind:

“It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

Luckily, all of the above ceased to be a problem when I found the Pomodoro Technique. An Italian named Francesco Cirillo invented the technique, and it can be used with any task but it works particularly well with writing.

 

http://magnoliamind.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-secret-to-being-productive-and.html

(Link via Karin Gillespie)

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Here’s a job for the right person…and it’s in Spartanburg, so I can meet you for lunch at the Beacon Drive-In during the Converse MFA residencies!

The Spartanburg, SC non-profit community program HUB-BUB seeks a dynamic, experienced leader to serve as its Executive Director. The Director will manage the flexible gallery and performance space at the Showroom and conduct innovative cultural programming, including coordinating artists, staff, and volunteers. Qualified candidates will have experience leading non-profit organizations or similar corporate experience and have strong skills in management, program development, fundraising, financial operations, communications, and planning. To apply, please send a letter and resume as e-mail attachments to office@hub-bub.com. Review of candidates will begin October 9 and continue until the position is filled. For the complete job description, go to hub-bub.com/opportunities.

Details:  http://hub-bub.com/opportunities

Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald!

This day has been marked on your calendar, right?  In honor of my guy, I’m going to celebrate his birthday by giving away a Princeton T-shirt from the official university shop.  (Entry details below.)

Here’s the vintage-feel one I had in mind (which comes in women's sizes), but if you don’t like it, I’ll put $25 toward any other shirt on the site:

And don’t worry about wearing a Princeton shirt if you didn’t graduate from the school…neither did Fitzgerald!

Here’s an interesting piece about Fitzgerald’s time at Princeton; apparently the school didn’t feel too warmly about him for quite a while—though he was reading the alumni newsletter when he had his fatal heart attack.  And his classmates put together a nice tribute to him in the newsletter:

Many of us of the Class of 1917 felt that a bright page of our youth had been torn out and crumpled up when we learned of the death of Scott Fitzgerald, who died of a heart attack in Hollywood, Calif., on December 21. Scott’s whole early career is typified in his very first face to face encounter with the authorities at Princeton. He needed extra points to be admitted to the freshman class, and, on his unconventional plea before the faculty committee that it was his seventeenth birthday, the members of the committee laughed and admitted him. ….

More than any other man in college in his time, he was aware of, and intensely interested in, every fashion and custom, the history and background of every undergraduate organization, and, above all, the personalities who composed these organizations, and who later became the characters in his most popular stories. His intense interest in every phase of the University’s social life and his eagerness to dissect it on every occasion made him a rare companion – interesting, amusing, provocative, sometimes annoying, but never dull. …

 

And here’s an essay on Princeton Fitzgerald wrote for College Humor in 1927.  Angry, nostalgic, cutting, melodramatic, amusing, complicated—just like college years tend to be:

In preparatory school and up to the middle of sophomore year in college, it worried me that I wasn’t going and hadn’t gone to Yale. Was I missing a great American secret? There was a gloss upon Yale that Princeton lacked; Princeton’s flannels hadn’t been pressed for a week, its hair always blew a little in the wind. Nothing was ever carried through at Princeton with the same perfection as the Yale Junior Prom or the elections to their senior societies. From the ragged squabble of club elections with its scars of snobbishness and adolescent heartbreak, to the enigma that faced you at the end of senior year as to what Princeton was and what, bunk and cant aside, it really stood for, it never presented itself with Yale’s hard, neat, fascinating brightness. Only when you tried to tear part of your past out of your heart, as I once did, were you aware of its power of arousing a deep and imperishable love.

 

As Amory Blaine said in This Side of Paradise, “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

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How to win this shirt, symbolizing the complex yearning of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre and life? Email me at Lpietr AT aol.com with “Scott” in the subject header before 5 PM EST on Thursday, September 27. Yes, it’s okay if you know me or if I teach/taught you.  Yes, it’s okay if you don’t. The man who came up with the idea to give away a Princeton shirt—my super-clever, Gatsby-loving husband—will draw a random winner who I will contact and make arrangements with.  No worries—I’m not going to put your email on any kind of list…I can barely pull it together to get that photograph on the blog!