Showing posts with label Richard Gilbert. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

John Gardner’s killer sentence

April 22, 2012 | 5 Comments

I was reading the late novelist’s short story “Redemption,” based on the accidental death of his younger brother in a horrifying farming accident, and found its sentences beautifully crafted. John Gardner, at eleven, was driving a tractor when his brother fell under its towed cultipacker, a pair of giant rolling pins for mashing the clods in harrowed soil that weighed two tons. In the story, grief almost destroys the father, like Gardner’s father a dairyman, orator, and lay preacher; the surviving brother is tortured almost to madness by guilt.

This sentence is about the wife and mother—Gardner’s was an English teacher:

Because she had, at thirty-four, considerable strength of character—except that, these days, she was always eating—and because, also, she was a woman of strong religious faith, a woman who, in her years of church work and teaching at the high school, had made scores of close, for the most part equally religious, friends, with whom she regularly corresponded, her letters, then theirs, half filling the mailbox at the foot of the hill and cluttering every table, desk, and niche in the large old house—friends who now frequently visited or phoned—she was able to move step by step past disaster and in the end keep her family from wreck.

That’s 112 words. Virginia Woolf wrote longer ones, 140 words and more, but what Gardener kept aloft—the construction of his sentence and its clarity and beauty—and those double parenthetical dashes—amaze me. ‘‘Redemption” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1977, and Gardner later included it in his collection The Art of Living in 1981; the complete story is available on line.

There’s a famous quote by Gardner that seems to apply to this story:

By the time you’ve run your mind through it a hundred times, relentlessly worked out every tic of terror, it’s lost its power over you . . . [Soon it’s] a story on a page or, more precisely, everybody’s story on a page.

In the 1970s his novel The Sunlight Dialogues was everywhere I looked, but I didn’t read it, nor have I read what’s considered his masterpiece, the novel Grendel. I did enjoy as they appeared his books on writing—On Moral Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist, and The Art of Fiction—and later read two novels I much admired, October Light and Mickelsson’s Ghosts.

RICHARD GILBERT

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Richard Ford / The long & short of sentences

The long & short of sentences

June 28, 2017 

[Richard Ford stands between his loving parents.]

Ford’s spare, rhythmic style; Doyle’s long, aural ramblers.

Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford. Harper, 173 pp.

Richard Ford’s new memoir, a short book made of two long essays, is a vocal performance. And he’s in good voice. Forget scenes: he’s telling. The New York Times Book Review said Ford’s prose style in his novel Canada (which I reviewed here) is “so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next.” The same applies in Between Them: Remembering My Parents, though it’s Ford’s rhythms—how his sentences work together—rather than lone sentences that please you and lure you onward.

Here’s an early characterization of his father that slides into his mother:

His large malleable, fleshy face was given to smiling. His first face was always the smiling one. The long Irish lip. The transparent blue eyes—my eyes. My mother must’ve noticed this when she met him—wherever she did. In Hot Springs or Little Rock, sometime before 1928. Noticed this and liked what she saw. A man who liked to be happy. She had never been exactly happy—only inexactly, with the nuns who taught her at St. Anne’s in Fort Smith, where her mother had put her to keep her out of the way.

What various vocal rhythms here. Take just the first four sentences: a passive sentence—Daddy didn’t smile: his face itself was “given to” that act—followed by a great turn of phrase about that quality, his smiling nature; then a fragment; then another fragment—with a dash! More fragments follow. Their colloquial snap. Then, this passage about his father, in the essay about his father, pivots into his mother’s dire childhood. That’s a much longer sentence, with a kick at the end, though it relies on what’s come before. Relies on how Ford has set us up.

Ford seems ambivalent about the semicolon, using only a few in his new memoir, but plenty of dashes, short sentences, and sentence fragments. His style is undergirded by and reflects his forthrightly imaginative approach to his parents. Like they’re two of his fictional characters he’s made up. So he writes confidently, almost over-confidently. As in that great, cheeky (borderline smarmy) “only inexactly” line about his mother’s happiness. But we see in his judgments and generalizations the same confidence (and speculation and limits) we possess in musing upon our own ordinary yet mysterious parents.

[Richard Ford]

He’s skating beautifully for us, in the southern Scots-Irish rhetorical tradition, on thin ice. Take his parents’ early days together. Sprung from loose-limbed, garrulous, backwoods clans—with stomping grounds and boon companions, and surely also with fresh collards and raw elbows—they drank companionably, and sometimes to excess, and in those sepia honeymoon years they “roistered.” His father settled into a bland career as a traveling starch salesman, and his mother accompanied his excursions across the South, until Richard came along.

You keep opening Between Them for their boy’s vocal performance. You can feel Ford’s implicit wink at us as he conjures his parents. His manifest love is how he escapes sentimentality in asking us to share simple affection for them. These ordinary forgettable people from Arkansas, who landed in Jackson, Mississippi, left no trace aside from their gifted only child. And as he talks them to life, rather than dramatizes their narrative arc—well, he does, inexactly—they melt away when you shut the book.

•

[Brian Doyle on his home turf at the University of Portland.]

Rhetorical & other reasons for Brian Doyle’s long sentences.

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

—Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras,” The American Scholar

Brian Doyle was a prolific writer, of novels and narrative nonfiction, and a master of the short, tight essay made of long, loose sentences. His shortest essays verge on, or become, poetry. A devout Catholic, he saw life suffused by love. He took rapture in the ordinary, which he showed is extraordinary. He wrote the best essay about the 9/11 attacks, “Leap,” only 572 words. He died at the end of May of a brain tumor, aged 60. Early last week, I came across his essay “His Last Game,” reprinted by Notre Dame Magazine, and bookmarked it. Only 1,184 words, it’s about an outing with his older brother, who was dying of cancer, in 2012.

It feels almost wrong to analyze some of his essays rhetorically, since they’re about what’s sacred. But such study leads to imitation, and that’s what makes writers, even before they know they’re doing that lowly, necessary act, so that, when the greatest joy blesses them or the hardest fate befalls them, they can sing truthfully in their own voices. Craft is the necessary portal to make what’s called art from experience.

In the case of “His Last Game,” Doyle makes long, loose, plain, rambling sentences that put hard emphasis on conjunctions, which further imparts movement. He and his brother are in a single unfolding scene, driving around during an ordinary day. Which we see isn’t ordinary at all—the brother is sick. Very sick. Maybe he’s not going to make it. And Doyle’s looking at that, with his brother looking at it—their conversation and what they see is all about that, sometimes overtly but mostly between the lines. Enough for us to get and to feel all the implications.

Here’s the opening in paragraph in which Doyle plants his brother’s refrain: mock concern over remembering to pick up his medication, at this point pointless:

We were supposed to be driving to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, but he said just drive around for a while, my prescriptions aren’t going anywhere without me, so we just drove around. We drove around the edges of the college where he had worked and we saw a blue heron in a field of stubble, which is not something you see every day, and we stopped for a while to see if the heron was fishing for mice or snakes, on which we bet a dollar, me taking mice and him taking snakes, but the heron glared at us and refused to work under scrutiny, so we drove on. We drove through the arboretum checking on the groves of ash and oak and willow trees, which were still where they were last time we looked, and then we checked on the wood duck boxes in the pond, which still seemed sturdy and did not feature ravenous weasels that we noticed, and then we saw a kestrel hanging in the crisp air like a tiny helicopter, but as soon as we bet mouse or snake the kestrel vanished, probably for religious reasons, said my brother, probably a lot of kestrels are adamant that gambling is immoral, but we are just not as informed as we should be about kestrels.

[One of his many books.]

When an “unapologetic Catholic” blasted Portland, the magazine Doyle edited for Catholic Portland University, for covering the marriage of two men, Doyle replied that Catholics are “called to compassion, not to judgment.” Doyle’s spiritual outlook seemed inextricable from his stance as a writer—one who sees and weighs—and his response to life urged him to make his sentences in the first place. In other words, his inner vision determined what he looked at, and hence wrote about, and that ethos also fueled his need for expression. You can’t easily imitate such aware mental or emotional states, but you can aspire to them. You can earn them. And, as a bonus, that artist’s job is simply a human task.

Doyle also advised the University of Portland’s student journalists at The Beacon, their newspaper, and, upon his passing, its editor Rachel Rippetoe used a run-on sentence to make her own point about his animus toward periods—an existential and spiritual one: “Brian had a contentious relationship with punctuation. He had a special distaste for periods and the way they interrupt thoughts needlessly and arbitrarily, he said they give a sense of absolutism to an indefinite world.” Doyle told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2015, “I get teased a lot for my style. People are saying, ‘Wow, a sentence will start on Tuesday and it doesn’t end ’til Friday.’ But I want to write like people talk. I want to write like I’m speaking to you.”

And so he did.

I resisted reading “His Last Game” until this past Saturday, fearing it might be sentimental, that he couldn’t earn from us his desired response, that it couldn’t be that good, but it is.

RICHARD GILBERT

Monday, July 24, 2017

Richard Ford’s ‘Canada’

Richard Ford
Poster by T.A.

Richard Ford’s ‘Canada’

September 14, 2012 

A retrospective narrator gives a masterful novel the feel of memoir.

Canada by Richard Ford. HarperCollins, 420 pp.

The hand of a master storyteller . . .

. . . “Canada” is blessed with two essential strengths in equal measure — a mesmerizing story driven by authentic and fully realized characters, and a prose style so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next.—Andre Dubus III in his Times review

I’m reading two memoirs now, one an immersion and the other postmodern, but the book that’s riveting me is Richard Ford’s acclaimed new novel, Canada. I’m about halfway through and eagerly return to its world. I say about halfway because it’s in two big acts, and I’ve finished Part One; but there’s a tiny Part Three, maybe one more short chapter. Meaning, in other words, it’s really an epilogue, and it annoys me, when writers do that, call an epilogue an act. But that’s my problem, I guess, and may only mean I want to do it myself and annoy some irritable someone. I’ll find out, when I get there, whether Ford earns his designation. Which I doubt, fervently, in advance. Yet maybe, after all, an epilogue would make this great novel seem too much like a memoir, and act could be the correct literary term here.

That’s what struck me right off, how much like a memoir Canada is in its presentation of story. Along with Ford’s pleasing sentences, of course: their balance and his deft dashes, employed the way his narrator would use them—the classic parenthetical, sure, but also how he jogs with them at the end of sentences—and the way the man who tells the tale misuses “who” for “whom” and uses “only” in place of but. (The latter feels so true and colloquial, or at least individual and believably and unconsciously idiosyncratic.)

The narrator is a middle-aged schoolteacher, Dell Parsons, whose parents robbed a bank in North Dakota when he and his twin sister were fifteen. Ford exploits the dual narrator (Dell then, a young fifteen, and now, when he’s about sixty) to great effect. Mostly the story is told through the boy’s eyes. Ford smoothly explains how Dell knows some things by having Dell tell us his mother wrote a memoir in prison. A big difference between this novel and a memoir, so far, is we don’t get any wailing by the adult Dell of how his parents and their crime messed up his life. It’s clear it would, and did, to a point, but that’s implied. And worlds reside in that phrase “to a point,” for Dell is an individual and individuals are, in good fiction as in life, unpredictable.

What really hooked me at the start was the way Ford-as-Dell depicts and describes his parents. They are ordinary middle-class postwar people: only they are not so ordinary, like anyone when looked at closely. And Ford manages to set them in motion in your mind’s eye so you feel like you know them—or, rather, don’t know them in the same way we know-and-don’t-know anyone we meet. How we place and then imagine a person by appearance, countenance, dress, and voice. How we notice in an instant and largely unconsciously their shoes, complexion, smell. Ford has looked closely and he’s thought carefully; you feel yourself, for so many reasons, in the hands of a master.

RICHARD GILBERT

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Gornick’s ‘Fierce Attachments’ / What happened to the writer is not what matters

Vivian Gornick
Poster by T.A.

Gornick’s ‘Fierce Attachments’

"What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened"

Vivian Gornick

September 30, 2013 |

Vivian Gornick’s classic memoir’s serendipitous braided structure.

For Gornick, who has been teaching writing for 15 years, the important thing in organizing a personal narrative is figuring out ”who is speaking, what is being said and what is the relation between the two.” Once you’ve discovered who you are at the time of writing, then the rest of your memoir or essay will fall into place: ”Get the narrator, and you’ve got the piece.”

—from a New York Times review of The Situation and the Story

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 204 pp.

[A street in Florence, Italy.]

Fierce Attachments stands with another classic literary memoir, John Updike’s Self-Consciousness, and surpasses by dint of its warm humanity Vladimir Nabokov’s chilly Speak, Memory. I’m embarrassed it has taken me so long to read it, especially since I’ve read Vivian Gornick’s short book of memoir theory, The Situation and the Story, many times. I’ve always found the latter rather slippery—seemingly too simple, it suddenly drops into murky depths—but Fierce Attachments’ brilliant use of the memoirist’s dual persona (me then, me now) brings her theories into focus.

All the same, my current reading of Fierce Attachments, originally published in 1987, is shadowed by disaster. I have two classes of freshmen reading it and they hate it. That may be a slight overstatement, but they aren’t enjoying it—it’s not a book for kids. They want events, plot. In a word, story.

What was I thinking? There’s a story here, but one it takes an adult to see: a woman trying to understand her mother, herself, and how her past forged her. Gornick was affected especially by her mother—mercurial, unlettered, brilliant—and by Nettie, an overripe, artistic, emotionally damaged widow next door.

Freshmen can’t relate. How can they, when most don’t yet own their material? Their parents, for instance aren’t yet people, let alone people who can be forged into characters. For juniors and seniors, if they’re writing majors or at least avid readers, Fierce Attachments would be a good risk. And all MFA students, especially those in creative nonfiction, should read it. Not to mention all self-taught adult memoirists. For it’s a wonder of a book, as good as they say.

[Then: Vivian Gornick, who is now about 78.]

Gornick’s truths blaze off the page, her portraits of others transfix, her sentences and rhythms delight. What she remembers, she says, of growing up in a Jewish tenement in the Bronx, is a building full of women:

Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I—the girl growing up in their midst, being made in their image—I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face.

What a metaphor! It’s stunning, and resonates throughout the book. Her memoir is her struggle for consciousness.

The structure of Fierce Attachment bears special mention. There are two parallel or braided stories: Gornick in the past, growing up, and her in some recent present, walking with her “urban peasant” mother through New York. The pair walk and talk, mostly about the women they knew when Gornick was growing up.

In an interview with Sari Botton for the Rumpus, Gornick explains:

So I wrote about forty pages and I suddenly got horribly stuck and I knew I did not have a structure that would help me tell the story that I wanted to tell, and I did not even really know what the story was at this point. But I knew I had unfinished business with my mother and that telling this all in the past, as if I was telling a straight narrative since I was eight years old, would not work. For six months, I sat at my desk in misery, and then one day my mother called and told me one of these walking stories that I later repeated in the book. . . . And then, for fun, just to relieve myself of the writing block, I sat down and wrote this vignette out. And suddenly I realized that I had gold, that I could put my mother and myself in the present, walking the streets of New York, and alternate with the past, and that would help me create two sets of women who were slowly going to account for themselves, to each other. And in the walks, I was going to give my mother everything. In the walks, she’d be smart, funny, wise, warm, tart, all the things that she could be, and in the past, she would be neurotic and self-pitying.

Rumpus: So she had an arc.

She had an arc and that helped me make an arc. When I went back and re-wrote everything this way, slowly I began to see the story was not in how momma and Nettie made me a woman, but the story was that I had become my mother and therefore I could not leave my mother. That was the thing I really came to understand – what we all come to understand ultimately. It is all based on fear and misery and the inability to separate. And that I had mimicked so much of her. So much of her was inside me that I could not leave. Once I understood that, I knew that I was writing to dramatize that insight. After that it didn’t matter what the hell I wrote. There was nothing I was afraid of, because I knew I was not writing to trash her. I was not writing to aggrandize myself. I was writing to serve that insight.

It inspires—the way Gornick depicts her worlds and the way she fights to understand them and herself. And such a truthful writer. A couple times, I’ve closed memoirs in disgust, convinced the authors were self-serving liars. Gornick is a truth-teller, almost ruthless, yet something—her own depicted flaws, maybe—renders her compassionate.

She achieves the high aesthetic standard she mentions in The Situation and the Story:

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by the idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

RICHARD GILBERT