Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

•
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)
To Brenda Bowen and Mary Downs
Hearts of gold
Contents
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction 1
Part 1: Words
1. The Music of Prose 7
2. In Search of the Exact Word 19
3. The Secret Strength of Words 29
4. Some Things English Can't Do-and Shouldn't 39
5. The Nerve of Poetry 49
Part 2: Writing
6. Using the Techniques of Fiction to Make 63
Your Creative Nonfiction Even More Creative
7. Finding a Great Title 77
8. The Eminent Domain of Punctuation 87
9. It's About Nothing: Finding Subjects 99

for Creative Writing in Everyday Life
10. Maxims about Writing 107
Notes 119
Name Index 125
Title Index 129

Acknowledgements
Without the help, care, and guidance of certain people, this book
would not exist-or in any case it would be a much lesser book. I want
to thank Sena Jeter Naslund and the MFA in Writing Program at Spald-
ing University where some of these essays had their origins. I want
to thank my trusted friend and unerring critic, Deborah Attoinese for
her brilliance and generosity. I want to thank my erudite editor Larry
Mintz, for all his help. I also want to thank John Taylor, Erin McKean,
Roy Hoffman, Susan Tifft, Molly Peacock, Alex Jones, Robert Finch,
Martha Goodman, Kenny Cook, Kaylene Johnson, and John Thornton.
I want to especially thank Jo Boufford for her steadfast support through
the years. I am most grateful to her. Though she shares the dedic,ation
of this book, I want to say here how much my sister, Mary Downs, has
helped me through the years, in so many ways. I am lucky to have her
as my sister. And I want to thank my beautiful, brilliant daughter, Becky,
for all the light and love she brings to my life. Most of all I want to
thank Rick Moranis. In countless discussions after our squash games,
we talked about these essays. We also talked about them in e-mails, on
the telephone, and in various walks around New York City. His insights,
suggestions and comments were always incisive, smart, and inspiring.
And correct. He has consistently been a great, generous advocate for this
book, and I can't express my gratitude to him forcefully enough.
* * *
I have not included those eye-stopping numbers in the text to indicate
the source for a quotation. The citations are in the Notes section at the end
of the book, referenced by chapter and page number. While recognizing
the need to cite my sources, I also want the experience for the reader to
be as pleasurable as possible.
ix
Introduction
I think all creative writers realize at a certain point that language will
be the one friend and ally that will never desert them. There is a moment
when writers know they won't be making the journey alone, that they
will have a constant companion, and an astonishing one at that. Writers
sit down at the desk with very little. It used to be a pen or pencil and
some paper, or perhaps a typewriter. Now, many of us sit down to word
processors. But, still, it's the most meager of work stations when the
writer sits down to face the humbling blank page. Except that each time
he or she does, language is there, too. It's the other welcome, steadfast
companion in that silent room.
And what an ally it is. It's not just steadfast, but agile, muscular, re-
sourceful, subtle, untiring. It's been fashioned by thousands of anonymous
donors-men and women, scribes, rulers, soldiers, farmers, engineers,
sailors, explorers, poets, bakers, preachers, hobos, weavers, singers, ma-
gicians-everyone and anyone who has ever grappled with expressing
something and who has tried to articulate that concept or thing or action
with, first, sounds and then, later, with written shapes.
Language is owned by no one. Language as it exists in the dictionary
is a deep ocean of living words, as varied as undersea life, there for every
one of us. Land can be owned-it can be sectioned, fenced off. Water
can be owned-whole lakes, pretty and deep, are owned by individuals.
Even the sky can be owned. In New York, and in other cities, "air rights,"
the space above a building, are sold for millions of dol1ars. Language,
though, can;t be owned. It can be corrupted, true, and it can be prostituted,
and it can be regulated. But it cannot be owned. Each and every person
in this country-and this is true of course with every language in every
country-inherits the English language when he or she is born. It's an
enormous, complex, inexhaustible gift.
This book, then, is an expression of gratitude for that gift. Each of these
chapters is an attempt to illuminate the depth and subtlety, the muscular-
ity, the grace of our language. It is a homily to its qualities.
1
2 The Soul of Creative Writing
Writers love words the way a yachtsman loves boats, the way a car-
penter loves wood. Writers love language. Writers cannot be smarter than
language, however. They can never totally master it. Even the greatest
fall short. As T.S. Eliot wrote in "East Coker,"
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of ['entre deux guerres-
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
Billy Collins writes about poetry being the "result of a negotiation

between the poet and an essentially uncooperative language." Faulkner
spoke of The Sound and the Fury as his "best failure." The language is
uncooperative like the sea is. It cannot be tamed by one writer, it is not
meant to be tamed by anyone. Honest writers understand this relationship
with their language, and are humbled by it. As a sailor must be humbled
by the immense, unlimited power of the sea. Our efforts are imperfect, as
they must be. But the challenge is forever compelling, and interesting. Our
language forever inspires us, with its depth and beauty, to try again.
This book was written after a lifetime of working and struggling
with words, of coming into intimate contact with the English language.
Every day and every year, I have become more impressed with the
bounty of our tongue. I continue to be astonished at what other writers
can and have done with the language. Reading is more or less a tour of
a writer's efforts at manipulating the language to create art, to create
flesh and blood and mountains, cities, homes and gardens out of inky
symbols on the page. The great pleasure of reading is experiencing how
the most sensitive, inventive minds use language to create undiscovered
countries, to create "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," as
Marianne Moore described it. It's the heart's architecture fashioned by
words, by language.
Why did I become a writer? I think I can trace the origins of the kind of
writer I am to a few distinct sources. One of these is my mother. I didn't
realize this until the end of her life when we would talk on the phone, she
Introduction 3
in Florida, I in New York. At one point my ear began to speak to me, to

tell me, "How well she's using words! How interestingly! Listen to the
sentences she's creating, how direct and precise they are. Listen to how
she always chooses the right word." I realized that as a boy, this respect
for, and facility with, words she had must have seeped into my body as
surely as the Virginia air I breathed. She was my pre-Muse, without my
knowing it.
Then there was the church, the small, red brick Virginia Episcopal
church I attended-reluctantly. Those words and phrases I heard in church
from the King James Bible were not like any other I ever heard. Nobody
I knew ever said to me, "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters." Nobody informed me that words
could be arranged like that, made to express sounds like that. Nobody
ever expressed an idea like, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of
men." But when I went to church, I heard this music, again and again. I
didn't always understand a lot of what I heard. When the preacher said
that a house divided against itself cannot stand, I didn't know what he
meant, but my body responded to the music, and excited me somewhere
between my heart and my soul.
Then there was the moment when as a boy of twelve I was reading
Robinson Crusoe, and I saw Friday's footprints in the sand. There was
someone else on that island! You-Robinson Crusoe-won't be alone
anynl0re! I somehow knew after that words, mere words, could make
me feel great emotions. Words written in a book by a man from another
country and long dead could make my heart skip two beats. I learned
that any book I picked up might do wonderful things. Somewhere inside
me I wanted to possess that magic.
There were all these things, and more-libraries, teachers, an award
or two, and even the dictionary. The dictionary. It was the key to the
kingdom, the kingdom of words where I wanted to reside.
Ever since men and women began putting pen to paper, or bytes to
screen, they have struggled with this untamable ocean that is our lan-
guage. Writers have grappled with the same problems, with the same
"general mess of imprecision of feeling," T.S. Eliot spoke of, bemoaned
the same shortcomings of theirs, achieved some well-earned victories and
similar defeats in trying to describe, as Faulkner put it, "the problems of
the human heart in conflict with itself." Faulkner spent a lifetime "in the
agony and sweat of the human spirit," wrestling with the great English
language, just as all writers have, still do, and will do. Writers are linked
to the writers of the past, great and small, because of this. This is what
we do. It is a privilege, both humbling and endlessly inspiring, to work
daily, "trying to hit the head on the nail," as John Berryman wrote, with
this magnificence that is English.
This book is a testament to that struggle.
Part 1
Words
1
The Music of Prose
"Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or
how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event
and image."-Barry Lopez, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
Language is sound by which we communicate. You could say it's

organized sound. Or patterned sound. Or sound charged with meaning.
But it's still sound. You listen to me speak, and you're listening to sound.
But it's variable sound. It's sound with-pauses. With emphasis. With,
well, you know, a certain rhythm.
In writing, the kind of sound the writer makes on the page is crucial
to our liking his or her prose, or not. When we read prose, we hear it.
As Eudora Welty wrote in One Writer's Beginnings, "Ever since I was
first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line
read that I didn't hear. As ll1Y eyes followed the sentence, a voice was
saying it silently to me." How prose writers are different is, among other
things, the sound they make on the page. The sound of Raymond Carver
on the page is very different from the sound Henry James makes on the
page. A sentence is far more than information.
In another way of speaking about this, Jean Cocteau said he knew
Shakespeare was a great writer, even without Cocteau 's knowing a single
word of English. He could hear it in the sounds the words made.
At the highest level, the sound a writer makes on the page is music.
So you can say writing is music we can all read. Instead of clef notes,
sharps and minors, full stops or half stops, and all the other symbols
actual music employs, English has letters, syllables, and words. It has
many methods by which to control the sounds it produces. Some of these
methods are subtle and require great practice to use them expertly, like
playing an instrument well requires dedicated practice. What order the
words are placed in the sentence can determine what kind of sound, or
7
melody, emerges. However, that sentence will not stand alone and must
be taken in context with other sentences, so its individual music may be
sublimated to the larger melody of the paragraph. Punctuation is another
determiner of what kind of sound the sentence makes and how it makes
it. For example, I can. Make. You. Read. At. The. Pace. That. I. Want.
You. To. Simply. By. This. Little. Dot.
In fact, the English language is an enormous musical instrument. It's
made up of words which are in turn made of syllables that are stressed
or unstressed. So right there we have a basis for music-dissimilarity.
It is this simple concept-stressed and unstressed syllables-that is at
the heart of it all. The words, and stresses, are placed in combinations
and orders that produce a kind of melody. Think of the famous open-
ing to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: Dah dah dah dah. So much of the
drama comes from the simple idea of the last note's heavy stress. Despite
what Moliere had his bourgeois gentleman say, we actually speak quite
often in poetry-in iambics, or in blank verse. Or in some version of
stressed/unstressed syllabism. The music of prose has, in its own way,
the variety, scope, shadings, colors, melodies, and drama of music that
is played on instruments.
Why are we concerned with music in writing at all? Because we are
musical. We are essentially musical, we humans. We are musical for the
simple, profound reason that we have a heart. From the moment we're
born-no, actually, before we're born-we have a steady, consistent,
basic beat of our heart inside us: ba-bump ba-bump. Our blood surges
and retreats, like a tide. So inside us we have an unstressed and stressed
beat, the basis for music, a pulse. I believe that's one reason why we
respond to music and seek to create it. It comes naturally, by way of
our own body.
The two main elements of prose are music and meaning. It's a little
artificial to talk about the music of prose without talking about mean-
ing, as well. It's a bit like talking about the melody of a song without
its lyrics. That's really half a song. In reality, the prose writer's task is
to balance the two, and that balance may be equal or unequal, depend-
ing on the desired effect and on the relationship with other words and
" r
sentences. Sometimes music takes a back seat to meaning, sometimes
meaning has to move over for music. That's one reason why a good
writer has to have a good ear.
Cleanth Brooks asked Robert Frost about music in writing and its
ongIns:
The Music of Prose 9
"Would you say that even though the meter is based on the human
pulse or some kind of basic rhythm in our natures .. .it' s something to
be fought with, to be tussled with? It's not directly expressive-ta-DA,
ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA."
Frost replied, "No, it's doggerel when you do that. You see, and how
you save it from doggerel is having enough dramatic meaning in it for
the other thing to break the doggerel."
Good prose is musical. Like actual music, it can be lyrical, tender,
and soft. It can be dissonant, harsh, blunt. It can be grand. It can be
simple. It can be comic or tragic. It employs many of the same methods
as actual music: rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and balance. It can
produce sounds that, at the highest level, have a unique melody. Take
the beginning to Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best
of times, it was the worst of times." Why is that sentence remembered
by practically anyone who reads it? It's not because of the content. It's
because of the music. Every fine writer produces a kind of music with
his or her writing. It's also called style. A great writer will almost have
us humming the melody he or she makes on the page. Great writers are
great composers.
We know about the music of poetry. Poetry is supposed to be musical.
So, we want it to be read aloud, the better to catch its brilliant rhythms
and melodies, its cadence, its beat. The writer sings his or her creation,
in a way. I did read recently about a poet who said reading aloud robs
readers of the ability to make their own decisions about how and when to
place stress and emphasis on the words in the poem. But you can have
both, can't you? You can read the poem yourself. When we hear a poem,
we better understand that often the sound is the meaning, or that sound
and meaning together are what makes it poetry. When we hear "Shall I
compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more tem-
perate," can we really distinguish between sound and meaning?
We seldom think of prose in this way. But the music of prose is one
of the things that makes it unique and pleasurable. Some writers refer
to this as the style of a writer-E. B. White, for one. Here's \X/hat he
said in The Elelnen.ts of Style: "When we speak of Fitzgerald's style, we
don't mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his
words make on the paper." But you can see White chose to describe the
phenomenon of style with the musical word soun.d. So what others may
call style, I-and others--call music. Here's what Susan Cheever once
said in an interview: "When you write, you're creating music inside the
reader's head. One of the many important things about music is rhythm,
and that's sentence structure. If you're not paying attention to sentence
structure, it's like you're playing notes without rhythm. How crazy
would that be? You must pay attention to the rhythm of your sentences
and the rhythm of your words--each word has a rhythm. You should be
scanning your lines even in nonfiction prose."
One of the best ways of looking at the idea of rhythm and music
in prose is to write the same thing in three or four different ways.
That is, to experiment with a concept in which all the variations say
what needs to be said and the differences are matters of rhythm and
melody.
So, for example, let's tum to murder. Here are four ways of telling
the reader you shot a woman:
I picked up the gun and shot her.

I picked up the gun, and I shot her.
I picked up the gun. I shot her.
I picked up the gun. Then I shot her.
Each of these sentences provides the reader with all the information
about the killing he or she needs. But you can provide the reader with
various melodies with each of these choices, and each one is slightly
different. (I won't even go into different verbs--e.g., I picked up the
gun and I killed her.) So, if each of these sentences packs the same in-
formation, on what do you base your choice? On music. Of course, as
was mentioned, the music in writing is never isolated. But that's another
matter. Something in the melody will appeal to you more in one of these
sentences, and you'll choose it. When you do make your choice, you
usually have a sense of regret, because the other versions possess quali-
ties you wish your choice had, but you can't have everything. Writers
live with that.
As Thomas Pynchon wrote, "Writers are naturally drawn, chimpan-
zee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed
to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the
more vivid and tuneful among its words."
A deft use of punctuation can produce lyrical writing. Take the comma.
, '
; i
Just look at this masterful use of commas from Mark Twain. This pas-
sage is from Huckleberry Finn. Huck's way down the river at this point,
and he comes ashore and sees a circus:
It was a real bully circus. It was the splendidest sight that ever was, when they all
come riding in, two and two, a gentleman and lady, side by side, the menjust in their
drawers and under-shorts, and no shoes or stirrups, and resting their hands on their
thighs, easy and comfortable-there musi a' been tweni.y of theIn-and every lady
with a lovely complexion, and perfectly beautiful, and looking just like a gang of
real sure-enough queens, and dressed in clothes that cost millions of dollars, and just
littered with diamonds. It was a powerful fine sight; I never see anything so lovely.
And then one by one they got up and stood, and went a-weaving around the ring so
gentle and wavy and graceful, the men looking ever so tall and airy and straight, with
their heads bobbing and skimming along, away up there under the tent-roof, and every
lady's rose-leafy dress flapping soft and silky around her hips, and she looking like
the most loveliest parasol.
No wonder Faulkner said he had to wait five years each time before he
reread Huckleberry Finn. With his commas precisely placed to produce
a cadence like the gait of a horse, Twain guides and controls our eye.
The writing isn't excited or exclamatory; it's calm and easy, letting the
element of wonder, such a delicate thing, take precedence in our mind.
Twain also uses the word "and" to keep the writing connected and all
of one steady pace, even as he breaks it into an easy rhythm with those
commas. Hemingway learned a lot from Twain. A great writer will have
such control over his or her composition that he or she will force you,
the reader, to read it-and hear it-precisely the way he or she wants
you to. Twain does just that here.
Comedic writing, which may, at first, seem far from musical, is, in
fact, the most musical of writing in many ways. What is comedy but the
perfect use of caesura? What's the difference between: "Take my wife,
please," and "Take my wife. Please." Everything. Yet the difference is
a single musical note, or, rather, beat. These are exactly the same words,
but the reactions couldn't be more different. Comedic writing relies on
musical choices. A great comedic writer must have a great ear.
Music in prose isn't always mellifluous. That's because the music
really never stands alone. If the story is austere, the music can be, too.
You can see this plainly in detective stories. You may call this crime
writing or murder mysteries or whatever. But at its best, it's just plain
fine writing. Period. I love the music of good detective fiction. Because
it's about crime and punishment, you're going to get the kind of prose
that reflects the people who deal with that world. Here's the beginning
of The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain:
They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before,
down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I
needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when
they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out
and threw me off.
This is music without flourish, without trills. Not an extra note any-
where. That's the way it is throughout the lean 116-page novel. Ever
notice how taut and brief so much detective fiction is? Not a single
adjective or adverb here. Why this kind of writing is so terribly difficult
to do is that the nouns and verbs carry the tune, and you had better be
very attuned to your character and your story or the whole thing will
fall apart.
Now, compare James M. Cain's beginning to the beginning of William
Faulkner's story, "Barn Burning":
The store in which the Justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese.
The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled
cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed
with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not
from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the
sil ver curve of fish-this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat
which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and
brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because
mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood.
Here, the unusual sequences are mirroring the boy's thought process,
and yet it produces a unique music as well, so Faulkner has achieved the
great Flaubertian balance between the meaning and the music of words.
Faulkner always had sufficient dramatic meaning and worked incredibly
hard to insure that when he broke with the heartbeat, the ta-Da, ta-DA,
he did so with profoundly memorable song.
The introduction of detective fiction is a good place in which to talk
about a change of key. We know how the shift from a major to a minor
key in music can affect us, often with a sense of foreboding or melan-
choly. It can happen in prose, too. Take the start of James Crumley's
first-rate book, Dancing Bear. Crumley begins his 228-page novel with
a simple, easy sentence:
\Ve had been blessed with a long, easy fall for western Montana.
It's lyrical and short, ending with that sing-y word, Montana. Then
Crumley expands a bit, but still maintains his easy lyricism:
Two light snowfalls had melted before noon, and in November we had three weeks
of Indian Summer so warm and seductive that even we natives seemed to forget
about winter.
'.'
'!
But what next? Darkness and drama, and a clear change of key, be-
ginning with a hard conjunction:
But in the canyon of Hell Roaring Creek, where I live, when the morning breezes
stirred off the stone-cold water and into the golden dying rustle of the cottonwoods
and creek willows, you could smell the sear, frozen heart of winter, February, or, as
the Indians sometimes called it, the Moon of the Children Weeping in the Lodges,
crying in hunger.
The information here isn't what sends a warning chill through your
body. It's the foreboding music. Phrases of fear broken by comlnas: The
word "Hell" affixed to the narrator's home; morning breezes "stirred"-a
word associated with ghost and spirits; "off the stone-cold water"-we are
no longer in the world of "warm and seductive"; and then those dreadful
words, "dying, sear, frozen, Weeping, crying, hunger."
We are fairly certain we are not going to be treated to a pleasant book
about the changes of seasons in Montana. Clumley' s cold notes enter
the bloodstream, and we know something is afoot.
I love the unique dissonance of Marianne Moore's prose. This is the ar-
resting beginning to the "Foreword" from A Marianne Moore Reader:
Published: it is enough. The magazine was discontinued. The edition was too small.
One paragraph needs restating. Newspaper cuts on the fold or disintegrates. When
was it published, and where? 'The title was "Words and ... " something else. Could
you say what it was?' I have forgotten.
Music is often about counterpoint. In writing, dialogue is all about

counterpoint. When you discuss dialogue in American prose, you
eventually will arrive at Hemingway's door. At his best, as in stories
like "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," he pumps the heart of the story by
the crisp, cold dialogue of the two waiters hoping an old drunk sad man
will leave the cafe so they can go home. The dialogue is almost like a
call-and-answer chant. Whether they admit it or not, so many writers
have drunk from Hemingway's spring. A story like "The Sea Change,"
with its relentlessly moving yet delicately balanced point-counterpoint,
is still being written today. It begins:
"All right," said the man. "What about it?"
"N 0 ," said the girl. "I can't."
"You mean you won't."
"I can't," said the girl. "That's all that I mean."
"You mean that you won't."
"All right," said the girl. "You have it your own way."
"I don't have it my own way. I wish to God I did."
"You did for a long time," the girl said.
The dialogue goes on to reveal that the girl has had an affair with
another woman. She says,
"It doesn't do any good to say I'm sorry?"
"No."
"Nor to tell you how it is?"
"I'd rather not hear."
"I love you very much."
"Yes, this proves it."
"I'm sorry," she said, "if you don't understand."
"I understand. That's the trouble. I understand."
What a bitter tune the two of them play, back and forth, one taking
off from the other, as if it were a deadly jazz riff.
We get our doses of music in writing in unexpected ways sometimes.
In government writing, for example. No, we don't find it in our tax forms,
but in two of our most famous American documents, the Declaration of
Independence and the Gettysburg Address. We may have seen the poetry
in Lincoln's speech before, but what about Jefferson's composition?
We've been exposed to this writing for as long as we can remember. We
all know how it begins, "When in the course of human events ...." And we
also know so well the part that goes, "All men are created equal. They are
endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The word unalienable,
so hard for children to pronounce, and with a meaning that is hard for a
child to fathom, is nevertheless such a pretty sound. It takes six syllables
to make that sound, so you don't leave that concept easily.
Jefferson was a great lover of music, and I believe that one reason he
chose that word on that hot summer day in Philadelphia was for its mu-
sic. Now, what's interesting is that Jefferson had originally written "We
hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that
they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights."
It was Congress who made Jefferson take out "inherent," thus depriving
him of a nifty alliteration. They also, as you may notice, made him add
the 'Nord "certain" before "inalienable." Fven Jefferson had to get his
work vetted and approved.
By the way, what's also interesting is that in his Autobiography, Jef-
ferson has the word as inalienable in his version of the Declaration. How,
I wonder, did it get switched to unalienable?
So, there is more music around us in the writing we are exposed to
than we may think. Jefferson was deeply educated in English literature
as well as in Greek and Latin literature. Who knows what caused him in
the end to write "When in the course of human events"? I suspect that
his rhythms in English derived in no small measure from Latin, as well as
from English. Then a phrase kept slipping into my head, and finally made
itself known, "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita ... " In the middle
of the path of our life. The beginning of Dante's Inferno. The rhythm
is similar to the beginning of the Declaration, and so is the meaning. I
checked with Monticello, and they confirmed that Jefferson did indeed
possess a copy of the Divine Comedy in Italian. So we do know at least
that this poem was part of Jefferson's verbal musical heritage and that
he may have drawn upon it.
Music in writing is more than what happens in a single sentence. It's
how that sentence performs in balance with the sentences that precede
it and follow it. You may change or even eliminate a word or sentence
because it's out of tune with its neighbors. So, as a writer, comedic or
not, you have to develop a good ear. If you're lucky, you come from
the South, where its entire history is an opera and every conversation is
an aria. You will also be lucky as a Southerner in that your writing will
inevitably be influenced by the speech of African Americans, people
traditionally close to the land. The land informs and nurtures speech,
as much as anything. But you will find inspiration in the music of the
speech around you, wherever that is.
How do you become a better composer? Well, by writing, of course.
Just as important, you need to be a desperate reader. Read everything
that appeals to you, regardless of so-called merit. It has merit if you want
to read it. This way, you'll be absorbing the music, the different styles,
and you'll become aware of the vast possibilities. One critic speaking of
the late Harold Brodkey' s writing said that as a young man first reading
Brodkey his reaction was, "You mean you can actually write sentences
like that?" In the end we are all working to compose original music.
None of us can do this without absorbing the great music of the great
writers of the past.
It is often in the revision that we find the true melody and harmony
of our \vriting. That's because these things are often a matter of subtle
balances and intonations. We may not get it right on the first try. At a
certain point as a writer you'll be attuned to whether or not your writing
is on key or off key. I think it would be wonderful to hear a great writer
explain why he or she felt the melody in a sentence or paragraph of his
or hers was wrong. Then, right.
In the end, the creation of original music in prose-or style, if you

will-is that mysterious combination of everything you've learned, read
and practiced with who you are. It's unique, like your handwriting or
fingerprint, though achieved with blood, sweat, and tears. But worth it.
Because, in the end, as Flaubert said, "One must sing with one's own
voice."
As I said, the music of great writers can be as complex and difficult to
describe as actual music. Like any music by a great composer you love,
you can eventually come to identify it, though you may not be able to
describe how. Eventually, you are able to identify what is Hemingway,
what is Henry James, what is Faulkner. As your ear gets better, you will
also be able to recognize echoes of other writers' music in a writer's
prose. If you listen closely, you can hear the melodies of Ring Lardner
and F. Scott Fitzgerald in J.D. Salinger's prose just as surely as you can
hear Mozart in early Beethoven. Sometimes the task is to escape the
tunes of those who precede you, because their influence is so powerful.
I always felt that being a writer in Mississippi with Faulkner looming
over you was a bit like being Frank Sinatra, Jr. But Brad Watson has
done just fine.
Sometimes, as with Gerard Manley Hopkins, a writer will compose
in such as way as to override those natural stresses and create new ones,
resulting in an original melody. But Hopkins, a poet, was forced to actu-
ally employ stress marks to show us what he was trying to do, because
our inclination is to go with the norm. Robert Frost found this painful
("It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of
omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony"). Yet such was
Hopkins' great power that one could say he succeeded far more often
than not.
The attempts to set the work of writers to music America often seem
unnecessary to me. Take Samuel Barber's setting of James Agee's
"Knoxville: Summer 1915." Agee may have been our most conscious
composer. He was always composing music, and in fact you can often
sense his effort to create great music, and it can be distracting. In art, the
effort should never be visible. But he hits all the right notes in "Knox-
, i
ville: Summer 1915":
. "
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts .
We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.
Ii "
First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our
stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are
not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in
particular, of nothing at all.
What does that last sentence accomplish? Surely, it's not just a matter
of conveying information to the reader, is it? Agee is lulling us with his
music, lulling us into a state of dreaminess, so we can actually be with
him on that summer evening. Barber's rendition of this is lyrical enough,
but I submit that setting Agee's prose to music is gilding the lily. (Yeats
told Robert Frost that there was "nothing he hated more than having his
poems set to music .... It wasn't the tune he had in his ear.") I can see
why Barber was drawn to Agee's prose as a composer, though.
The music of a book or story or essay can be a stronger or lesser ele-
ment in it depending on the writer's predilections and talents. But the
music is always there, even if it can only be faintly heard. The music
of writing you encounter in books can be varied and different, and you
may not like all of it. Probably not all of it, in fact. In the end it is often
the music of the writing that turns you off, not what the writer is saying.
You may grow out of it, too. I think one of the reasons I can no longer
read Thomas Wolfe is that I no longer care for his music. I've grown
out of it. Those long, sighing, longing sentences. Just as while I once
thought Bolero was the greatest thing ever written, I'm not sure I could
listen to it all the way through anymore. That's not true for Mozart's
Haydn qua11ets, though, or for the BeatIes' music. Or for Faulkner's short
stories. Just so, you may not be prepared to listen to a certain writer's
music until you have reached a certain age.
I think it's al so important to point out that a writer's music will
change, develop and mature throughout his or her career. J ames Joyce
provides no better example. In the beginning, we have the somber, simple
rhythms of Dubliners. This is followed by a new freedom in A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man that is exhilarating. In the end, we have
Finnegans Wake, which you can say is one great huge Irish song that
seems to have no confines whatsoever. Which do you prefer? You may
be like the traditionalist Evelyn Waugh, who said Joyce started out fine
enough with Dubliners, but then, basically, went mad. Or you may be like
W. H. Auden, who liked the music of Finnegans Wake very much.
You \vill respond to music in your \vriting because of your body and
your ear, but you must also work at it, too, as a composer of actual music
must. You work at it as much with your ear as you do with your eye,
though in time the two become, to borrow once more from Robert Frost,
like your two eyes making one picture in sight. I think writing should
be pleasing to the eye, but more pleasing to the ear. When we read, as
Eudora Welty said, we hear the words, don't we? We may have stopped
mouthing the words as we read long ago, but that doesn't stop our inner
ear from listening. I think when we read we are more listening, in the
end, than seeing. To be conscious of the music in your writing is merely ·
an acknowledgement of how we read, of how we absorb words.
The novelist Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers and Damascus Gate,
got into a bit of a pickle some years back over his novel, Outerbridge
Reach. He was accused by an English writer of stealing facts from a
nonfiction book the man had written and using them in his novel without
proper acknowledgement. Stone wrote a letter of rebuttal in which he
said that, well, I probably should have expressed my debt a bit more
emphatically to your book, but that isn't the point. What's important,
he said, is that I supplied the music.
~: I
, 'i
2
In Search of the Exact Word
The exact word. Le mot juste, in French, is how it's expressed. Mot
meaning "word," and juste meaning "exact." Most everyone I've ever
talked to, or have read, attributes this phrase to Gustave Flaubert, the
celebrated nineteenth-century French perfectionist author of Madame
Bovary and Sentimental Education. Sven Birkerts, for example, wrote
this in the Alnerican Scholar, "Like many would-be writers, I had been
deeply influenced by stories of Flaubert's grail-quest for Ie nlot juste,
the exact word, which of course translated into the idea of the perfect
sentence, paragraph, chapter ... book." I've read the two-volume edition
of Flaubert's letters, translated so wonderfully by Francis Steegmuller,
at least seven or eight times, and I couldn't find the phrase. So I went
to the web. I found "Le Mot luste" Translation Service, "Le Mot luste
Communications," an e-zine named "Le Mot luste," and an on-line
dictionary with that name. I'm surprised I didn't find "Le Mot luste"
Escort Service.
There were lots of references to Flaubert and to Ie mot juste, but none
told me where to find it. I finally did find what I wanted in a book in French
by Charles Carlut, La Correspondance de Flaubert; etude et repertoire
critique. It's an inventory of topics in Flauhert's letters with, God be
praised, an excellent index. (It should be noted that Steegmuller did not
translate all of Flaubert's letters.) I found Flaubert uses the expression just
twice. He writes the critic Sainte-Beuve, "If I put "blue" after "stones,"
it's because "blue" is Ie nlot juste, believe me." In the other instance, he
says there has to be a rapport between Ie m.ot juste and Ie mot nlusical,
that is, between the meaning and the music of a word. That's it, at least
as far as I can determine. (I have since read somewhere that Flaubert
nlakes other references to Ie mot juste-or to Ie seul mot juste, "the one
and only right word"-but I haven't located them yet.)
19
Flaubert also uses the expression, Ie mot propre, "the proper word."
That didn't seem to catch on.
Flaubert does say, though, that, "all talent for writing consists after all
of nothing more than choosing words. It's precision that gives writing
power." He also says that, "perfection has everywhere the same char-
acteristic: that's precision, exactness." He says he spends hours looking
for a word. He expressed the struggle this way: "I am the obscure and
patient pearl-fisher, who dives deep and comes up empty-handed and
blue in the face." And at another point, he writes a friend that he spent
three days making two corrections and five days writing one page.
Practically anything Flaubert says about writing and art is interesting,
even if you disagree with him, though you are constantly reminded, as
Henry James points out, that "he felt of his vocation almost nothing but
the difficulty."
However many times he actually says Ie mot juste, Flaubert represents
the relentless search for artistic perfection, whatever the issue. Ernest
Hemingway-who admired Flaubert's discipline-actually uses the
phrase "the exact word." He called Flaubert "our most respected, honored
master." In his memoir about Paris, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway talks
about Ezra Pound, saying, "here was the man I liked and trusted the most
as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste-the one and only
correct word to use-the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives
as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations ...."
Hemingway was profoundly good at finding the exact word. It's all there
for you to see, this learning, in Hemingway's writing. "This was a man
to whom words mattered," Joan Didion wrote. "He worked at theIn, he
understood them, he got inside them." I'm a huge Hemingway fan just
for his deep understanding of words alone.
Mark Twain was memorably good at seizing the exact word, too. Most
humorists are. (Had Twain read Flaubert? I don't know. I would love
,i
to hear from a Twain scholar on this.) Their humor often depends on a
choice of word; in fact the whole laugh can rest on a single word choice.
When someone interviewed Evelyn Waugh for the Paris Review, they
asked him about the process of creating a character. He said, "I regard
writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use
i,
,; !
" of language." If you read the books of the comic writers just with this
idea in mind-So J. Perelman, Thurber, Twain, Waugh, even Woody Al-
len-you'll see how often the laugh comes from a single, well-chosen
;
!,
;,!
word placed exactly where it's liable to generate the loudest laugh. Of
In Search of the Exact Word 21
course, Twain wrote perhaps the most famous line about this particular
topic ever written, "The difference between any word and the 'right' word
is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
Writers don't normally lack for reasons to be depressed or jealous,
but in case you get low on fuel one day, think of this. Three of the best
at this nl0t juste game did not speak or write English as their mother
tongue. I mean Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen-I will draw on her work
later in this chapter-and Vladimir Nabokov. For Conrad, who grew up
speaking Polish, it wasn't even his second language, French was. Isak
Dinesen's first language was Danish, Nabokov's Russian.
What is the exact word? I think what we usually mean by that is a
word that not only conveys precisely what you, the writer, want to say,
but also does it in an unforgettable way, a dramatic way, either because
of its juxtaposition to its surrounding words or because it's employed in
a fresh way, or both. Something else, too, I think: when it surprises, it's
usually a surprise that's doesn't come out of a vacuum. It communicates
resoundingly, because somewhere the reader understands the word well
enough to appreciate its use.
So many things go into a writer's selection of a word. It's impossible
to break it all down precisely, because the reasons and influences of
your choices come from years of reading and assimilating other authors'
choices and reveling in their surprises and delights. But maybe we can
talk about a few of them. Each will have a different weight, depending
on the circumstances. There's meaning, of course. The word has to mean
what it is you want to say. Flaubert repeatedly says that if you really know
what it is you want to say, then you'll find the right word. But what is
meaning? Is it the dictionary meaning? Obviously, you can't use "blue"
if you mean "red." That sounds pretty elementary, but believe me, I've
put down words that don't mean what I thought they meant. It was only
after I looked them up that I realized I was wrong. Take the word livid.
What do you think it means? Now, look it up. Please get back to me
with your results.
But isn't meaning more complex? Doesn't it include music, drama
and mood? Doesn't it include physical appearance? Doesn't it include
surprise and context? Otherwise, why choose "crimson" over "red?" Or
"furious" over "angry?" There are shades of differences in their mean-
ings, to be sure, but there are other more prominent differences between
these words. Not only does "crimson" sound different than "red,"-and
we do "hear" words when we read them, don't we?-it looks different.
How a word looks on the page can be important; it can be pleasing or

annoying. That's part of its meaning, isn't it?
I would say it includes something else, something as important if not
more so-the "secret strength" of the word, as Milan Kundera expressed
it. (More on this later.) By that, he means its roots and derivation, its
history. I couldn't agree more. Which is why I dote on the dictionary and
lean on it like a cane as I go hobbling through my process of composi-
tion. I love the dictionary-not every single dictionary, but those at the
top of the lexicographic ladder: Webster's Third International, Random
House Unabridged, American Heritage Dictionary and, of course, the
vast Oxford English Dictionary, the OED. These are fat books-in the
OED's case, truly overweight-devoted entirely to single words. There
are no favorites in the dictionary; it's the ultimate non-discriminatory
book. At least, mostly. That's why you can have "slut" right next to
"slushy," "barfly" just before "bargain," and "steal" on the tail of "steak
set." True, the dictionary has taken more to using epithets such as "ob- .
scene," "pejorative," and "offensive," but in the end these apply to very
few words, and I for one don't always agree with the dictionary's opinions
and often ignore them. More on the dictionary later.
That's a lot to consider. But the fact is, some choices take more thinking
about than others. Some thinking takes longer than other thinking with
regards to the selection of a word. You can spend ten seconds choosing
a word or twenty minutes-or days, if you're as driven as M. Flaubert.
And everything in between and beyond. The thing is, though, there are
many pains in writing, but one of its most narcotic joys is putting down
a word you believe does the job extraordinarily well. It's just right. It's
juste. When you see it there, on the page, grinning out at you in all its
handsome self, you know it's been worth the effort. And when you return
to it, it will still be just as handsome.
I'd like to cite a few examples.
One thing about words is that some of them have developed an asso-
ciation specific to one gender. Words such as "pretty," "giggly," "flirta-
tious." If you did an informal poll and asked, for example, what gender
do you think of-quick-when you hear the word "pretty," what would
it be? By the same token, if you took the words "crude," "killer," and
"ravenous," what gender would spring to mind? The thing is, though,
• ,I these words inherently don't belong to any gender. I think a writer
, ·1.
should always keep his or her peripheral vision attuned to use one of
these pigeonholed words for the unexpected gender, sort of like cross-
dressing when you're writing. Boswell, in his life of Samuel Johnson,

describes a scene in which Johnson berates a poor servant girl: "You
blockhead!" Dr. Johnson says. Boswell, in an aside, says that at first he
thought it strange to call a woman a blockhead but, after thinking about
it, there was really no reason why you shouldn't. This role reversal in
one reason why the name "Pretty Boy Floyd" is so memorable. It's also
one of the reasons the word "handsome" catches the eye when applied
to a woman. And so on.
Another area that has not nearly been mined comes from the defini-
tions of the words themselves. In an essay about-who else?-Samuel
Johnson, T. S. Eliot wrote, "Nowadays we use words so loosely that a
writer's meaning may sometimes be concealed from us, simply because
he has said exactly what he meant." In my experience, this usually means
the writer is using the word in its original sense, or its first meaning in
the dictionary. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes eating some
oysters in a cafe:
I began my second dozen of the flat oysters, picking them from their bed of crushed
ice on the silver plate, watching their unbelievably delicate brown edges react and
cringe as I squeezed lemon juice on them and separated the holding muscle from the
shell and lifted them to chew them carefully.
The edges cringed. We associate that word now mainly with fear, but
that's not it's first meaning, which is, "to draw in or contract one's muscles
involuntarily." The word comes from the Old English cringan, "to fall,
yield." It's not that we don't understand Hemingway, it's that we might
be taken slightly aback. What do you mean-that the oysters were afraid?
But somewhere we know exactly what he means, and we see how aptly
he has employed the word, and we see those delicate edges retracting
when the lemon juice is squeezed on them. Hemingway, as we know,
liked simple words, basic, strong words. Because of that, when he uses
a more complicated word instead, it gets your attention. For example, he
often uses "commence" instead of "begin" or "start." He says that when
he first started writing, he "commenced with the basic things-birth,
death, love." Mark Twain has Huck Finn use that word, too.
Here's an example by that lovely writer Isak Dinesen, from Out of
Africa, a book even Holden Caulfield liked. She writes about shooting
an Iguana:
In the Reserve I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizards, as they were
sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but
nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap
of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you ap-
proach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the
colour seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.
Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things
from its skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten.
As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I
was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in
one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump
of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had
radiated out all that glow and splendour. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul
had flown, the Iguana was dead as a sandbag.
Well, the word I want to point out is "impetuous," but "sigh" is a beauty,
too. The color "dying out of him in one long sigh." The word itself is
like a soft exhale, and we can feel the life emptying from the animal then
and there. The use of "azure" here is effective, too, in "a flash of azure."
Exotic, like the animal. And flash-like in its saying.
Then there's the "live impetuous" blood. What does she mean by that?
Well, the first definition of "impetuous" is, "marked by force and vio-
lence of movement or action." The word comes from the Latin inlpetus,
meaning "attack, assault." So, she's emphasizing the force of the blood
thrusting through the system. I think we have a tacit understanding of
what she's saying, even if we aren't familiar with the primary meaning
of the word, simply because of the word's music, the four, nearly equal
syllables, beating out time like a pump. Also, the word, because it's a bit
unusual, and therefore prominent, makes us concentrate on the animal's
aliveness. J
I don't know if you would agree that this is the exact word, but I can
tell you I've never forgotten it.
I saw a production of Oscar Wilde's Salome on Broadway in New York
some time ago with Al Pacino, Marisa Tomei, and Dianne Wiest. It was
fascinating. Pacino played Herod. Marisa Tomei was mesmerizing as
Salome. I was struck by what she kept saying to the stem, rebuking John
the Baptist, "I will kiss your mouth, 10kanaan." She-or Wilde-doesn 't
say, "I will kiss your lips, 10kanaan" or, "I will kiss you, 10kanaan.': She
says, "I will kiss your m.outh." Boy, does that go straight to the gfoin.
Especially when Marisa Tomei says it. Thomas Hardy understood \~he
power of the word "mouth," too. He uses it in The Return of the Na-
tive when he describes Eustacia Vye: "On Egdon, coldest and meanest
:'
, I:
1
kisses were at famine prices; and where was a mouth matching hers to
be found?" Your inclination might be to think "lips" is sexier, especially
when "mouth" is often associated with "loud" and dental hygiene. But
"lips" isn't sexier; "mouth" is. And you know it when you see it, or read
it. This is one of the great pleasures of reading: that communication

between you and the writer-almost a complicity-where you both
understand precisely what's going on here. In this case, it's how sexual
these mouths are, how mortally sexual.
So, I would say, trust the word, and not necessarily what it's become
accepted to mean or to imply.
The complicated word, or complex word, can be the right one. Here's
one I like from Gilbert White's lovely book, The Natural History of Sel-
borne. White was a parson who lived in England in the mid-eighteenth
century, and his book, really a series of letters, was first published in
1789. He describes a mouse's nest as "this wonderful procreant cradle."
Procreant. I may be putting a bit too much into this, but it seems to
me the word has a bit of a gentle sag in the middle, like a hammock,
where someone might nestle. (Update: In doing research for another
essay, I found that White had taken the expression "procreant cradle"
from Macbeth. Well, he knew a good phrase when he saw one.)
No writer carne at words from such oblique angles, and put them to
better use, than Marianne Moore. If you haven't read her prose, especially
her essay on writing, "Humility, Concentration and Gusto," I urge you
to. She knew more than a thing or two about good writing, and I can't
for the life of me understand why she isn't referred to more in the new
legion of books about writing that gets bigger by the moment. She says
of sty Ie, for example, "Originality is any case a by-product of sincerity."
But the example I want is when she says, "If emotion is strong enough,
the words are unambiguous." What a deft way of using that word, un-
ambiguous. I think what makes this so emphatic is that what she wants
to say about the words is contained in one word, instead of two. Instead
of saying, for example, "the words are not ambiguous," she economizes
and, in a single word, gives us an example of precisely what she means.
"Not ambiguous" somehow implies the possibility of ambiguity. What
an insight to see that difference! Now, I don't think you arrive at this
kind of choice quickly, or easily. Our instincts, I believe, would be not
to choose "unambiguous." That's why I think reading is so important. It
will show you things you didn't think could be done (or you didn't think
you could do) and that can be done.
Moore, by the way, was one of the least snobbish writers when she
wrote about writing. She quotes from any and every source-even from
a Treasury Department memo.
One final so-called complex word. This is from John Cheever's splen-
did, moving book, Falconer. He speaks of "the utter poverty of erotic

reasonableness." That word "reasonableness" affixed to "erotic" for me
summons up all the cold, patterned sex one has experienced and the lack
of hope found there. Cheever knew a lot about that. It's hard to read his
journals and read about his having to barter with his wife for sex-he
offering to buy something for her if, as he wrote, "she would let me have
my way with her." Reason and Eros side by side. Where can you find a
more unhappy couple? .
Sometimes writers use words to describe something that couldn't hap-
pen, but nevertheless they make it happen. Truman Capote is describing
a ride on horseback in his book Breakfast at Tiffany's,
Very gently the horses began to trot, waves of wind splashed us, spanked our faces,
we plunged in and out of sun and shadow pools, and joy, a glad-to-be-alive exhilara-
tion jolted through me like a jigger of nitrogen.
Now, very few of us have downed ajigger of nitrogen, but that doesn't
matter, does it? We know what Capote means. I love the word "jigger,"
too. It's a word that immediately evokes one quick lethal shot of firewa-
ter thrown back and shooting through the system. The word takes you
directly to your hand picking up a shot glass.
You probably don't get to "jigger" on the first try. Maybe you need a
jigger to get to it. But it's out there, waiting, and Capote has reassured
you it is.
I'd like to talk a little about prepositions.
How can a little preposition be a candidate for the exact word? I think
the answer is the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was, truly, a marvelous
writer, and all you have to do is read his letters to prove it. In any case,
at the end of his speech Lincoln says the words we all know,
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that
from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they
gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.
Of the people, by the people, for the people.

,
I
.1
Of, by, for. The preposition that really hits home for me is "of." That
.1 :
government of the people. Not from. Of That our democracy flows out
of who we are. As if it's .. .inalienable.
I think it's not only the first meaning of words we should be aware of,
but what's inside them. We should be aware of their anatomy, what makes
them stand up and have life. And they do have life! What did Emerson
write about the American vernacular-"eut these words & they would
bleed." The etymology rests inside the word like a kernel inside a seed,
and it has the same genealogical potency as a seed's kernel. A seed has
within it the whole history of its species. So does a word. This is its
secret power. As Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of
Being, "The secret strength of its [a wor~' s] etymology floods the word
with another light and gives it a broader meaning." (Metaphors are mix-
ing here, so fasten your seatbelts.) I think that can be a reason, maybe
a subtle reason, for choosing one word over another-or at least a con-
tributing factor. Let's say you were down to a choice between "mystery"
and "enigma." As in the sentence, "Her carefree behavior following her
beloved husband's death was a mystery." Or: "Her carefree behavior
following her beloved husband's death was an enigma."
Which one?
Of course you have to consider the definitions. "Mystery," the dic-
tionary says, is "something that has not been or cannot be explained."
"Enigma" is an "inexplicable, circumstance, event or occurrence." But
let's go to the secret meaning. "Mystery" goes back to the Greek nlystos,
which means, "to initiate into religious rites," which in turn comes from
the Greek word nlyein, "to close the lips or eyes." "Enigma" is also from
a Greek word, ainigma, which means, "to speak in riddles," which in
tum is derived from the Greek ainos, "tale or fable."
So, what about it? Do we go with "close the lips or eyes?" Or with
"speaking in riddles?" Will it be: "Her carefree behavior following her
beloved husband's death was a mystery." Or: "Her carefree behavior fol-
lowing her beloved husband's death was an enigma." I really do believe
this counts in trying to find the exact word, and sometimes can even be
the deciding factor. It doesn't always playa significant role, but I think
it's important to know what rests inside the word, because that's a lot
of history, energy and creativity lurking. A lot of concentrated power.
Why not use it?
We'll explore this more fully in the next chapter.
Finding the exact word is often a hunt, like looking for the Holy Grail,
as Birkerts says, which, in legend, always seems to be over the next ridge.
Sometimes, you have to follow your leads down all the tributaries and
dead ends until you get what you want. I like to look up the definition of
a word, even if I think I know it, because usually I don't know it as well
as I think I do. Then I like to look at the synonyms, because though I'm
sure in general what I want to say, I'm not sure exactly how I want to say
it. Here are the shades of meanings, one word emphasizing one aspect
of the idea, another word another. I usually look up the synonyms, too,
because I probably don't know them as well as I think I do, and, besides,
there might be something, some word, in the definition that might be
what I'm looking for. It's impossible for me to carryall this inside my
head, so I have to go through this process. Even Stephen Sondheim uses
a rhyming dictionary.
As a reader, it's pure pleasure seeing a writer come up with word you
just know is right. Like Mark Twain at the beginning of Huckleberry
Finn. Poor Huck is grousing about living with the stern Widow Douglas.
He says,
The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me;
but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and
decent the widow was in all her ways.
"Dismal regular and decent."

The word this laugh turns on is "dismal" modifying "decent." I laugh
every time.
In the end, is it worth it? Well, we know the answer. But I want to go
back to the master, Gustave Flaubert. Here's what he wrote someone about
working on Madanle Bovary, the book that gave him so much pain:
Last Wednesday I had to get up and fetch my handkerchief; tears were streaming
down my face. I had been moved by my own writing: the emotion I had conceived,
the phrase that rendered it, and the satisfaction of having found the phrase-all were
causing me the most exquisite pleasure.
: ,~
3
The Secret Strength of Words
"The secret strength of its [a word's] etymology floods the word with another light
and gives it a broader m,eaning "-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of
Being
A word is a seed. It's alive, like the seed of a plant or tree. Inside, is
its entire history. If you could cut it open like the seed of a plant, you'd
see wonderful things. Or, better yet, if you could examine its DNA or its
genetics, you'd find thousands of changes and contributions distinguish-
ing the rocky, creative path from its beginnings to its present recognizable
form. Different forces of nature created a word than those that created
the oak's acorn, but there is a kind of Darwinism at work here, as well.
Words evolve. And still do evolve. Occasionally, they spring forth from
a creator's mouth fully formed, and we call them coined words ("seren-
dipity" is one, from Horace Walpole's The Three Princes of Serendip) ,
but, for the n10st part, a word takes a languid, fish-to-lizard journey that,
while not requiring millions of years, may indeed require hundreds before
it's fully realized and in the form we recognize.
Why bother? Why bother thinking or musing about what's inside,
or behind, a word? Just use it. Well, yes, but as the title of the chapter
implies, and as Milan Kundera says, there is a secret strength in a word's
etymology. Knowledge, as we know, is power, and so our knowledge
of what's inside a word increases our power as writers. We understand
the word better, like a person, if we know its background and its roots.
When we know why and how it was created-in so far as we can-we
have an added resource when we write where "every attempt / Is a wholly
new start," as T. S. Eliot said.
Fortunately, we don't have to be a literary botanist or geneticist, or any
kind of expert, to explore a word's roots. We have very capable people
who have done that for us, and the results of this digging are there for us
to see in a good dictionary. If we want to explore in more detail, there are
books specifically dedicated to etymology that will let us do that. Every

definition of a word in a respectable dictionary has a brief description of
the word's etymology.
And why don't we start with the word itself, with etymology. It gets
to the heart of the matter, or at least to one of its chambers. Here's what
my favorite dictionary, an old and trusted friend, the Random House
Unabridged, Second Edition, says. First, the definition of the word
etymology:
1. the derivation of a word. 2. an account of the history of a particular word or
element of a word.
Now, the etymology of etymology:

[1350-1400; ME < L etymologia < Gk etymolog{a, eqiv. To etymol6(os) studying the
true meanings and values of words (etymo(s) true + logos word, reason)
Notice: "meanings and values." The Greek etymon means "the essential
meaning of a word." So that we might say that etymology, from its very
beginnings, has been closely associated with the idea of truth. At its very
core, is the idea of "meanings and values," a search for "the essential
meaning." Therefore, when I look into the derivation, the etymology, of
a word, I am a truth-seeker. The simple meaning isn't enough. I should
seek the values that formed that word; I should seek its essential mean-
ing. It's a kind of ethical or moral pursuit. The creation-not to say the
use--of words is inextricably linked to human values. This it seems to
me is one great difference between the study of the origins of species
and the origins of words: it's an ethical one.
An etymologist, professional or dedicated amateur, then, is an
ethicist.
By bothering to split open a word, I believe I have a profounder under-
standing of the abstract concept or specific object that the word represents.
And, more important, of the human struggle, perhaps environmental,
perhaps ideological, that prompted its creation.
Since our language is like a tree with a vast, wide system of roots
that are spread across tracts of water and land, the derivations of words
. '! i have characteristics of a variety of landscapes and humanity. Words
with Greek derivations often have roots in philosophy-that word, for
example-in the idea of man's place in the world, as one might expect.
Words like democracy, theology, theory. Words with Latin roots often
have a ring of the official or the administrative, as befits a vast, strictly
f
:.
i,
efficient empire. Words like rational, legislation, consequence. Words
The Secret Strength of Words 31
with Anglo-Saxon births are often bluntly poetic, wonderfully hard and
harsh, with lasting power and presence, as if they'd been hewn out of
glacial rock with an ax. They are often words connected to violence,
aggression, power, force, physicality, and to the harsh weather and land
where these people lived. They often refer to the basic actions of the
body, of the arms, legs, lips, eye, and heart. They are words like blow,
run, dig, hurt, strike, kill, eat, stink. They are us at our most basic.
Greek-derived words are often amalgams of other Greek words that
already existed-like the two words that make up etymology. But where
did they come from? How does one come up with etymos for "truth"?
Or, specifically, the meaning, "true, actual, real." How does one signify
a sound for such an abstract concept? How does one even understand
what the idea of truth or true is? Then, how does one verbalize that?
These were artists who created these types of words. Philosophers and
artists. So, here we have the Greeks struggling with the idea of truth,
and with ideas and existential questions in a way hardly equaled since,
and certainly never more emphatically, except for perhaps in the eigh-
teenth century.
The Latin words we have incorporated into our language speak to the
need in us to have an order; they speak to the mind, too, and not so much
the heart. When, and why, would we use the word pulchritude?
The Anglo-Saxon words speak to the cold necessity of survival.
After using words for some time, and listening to them, absorbing
them, we are able to say, with some exactitude, what part of the world a
word derived from. We can often sense its pedigree.
Words are collaborations. Very few words in history have been cre-
ated by one person. They are efforts of multiple personalities. We know
that because there is a derivation. There is a progression that can be
traced. It's not an exact science, but there is a trail, neveltheless, that
can be followed from one stage to another. So in that sense words are
quite democratic. They not only belong to us, they were created by us.
They are the result of many anonymous minds and voices, each honing
the sound and meaning through the centuries until it finally seemed
there was nothing left to hone any more. As the Webster's New World
Dictionary so aptly says in its essay on etymology, "Seen as the product
of perhaps three thousand years of human experience, a word may have
not only many facets, but may somehow reflect with brilliant intensity
the concentrated experience or insights of the generations." Even mala-
propisln, which comes from a character in a play by Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, Mrs. Malaprop, a lady who has the tendency to misuse words,
or near-misuse them, in memorable ways (she spoke of "allegories on
the Nile")-even that word wasn't invented by Sheridan, but, rather, by
a Mr. or Ms. Anonymous who used the character as a basis for coining
the new word.
Wouldn't it have been fascinating to have been there when a new word
was born, its desire to be born thrusting it through the shell that encased
it, cracking the sides of its woody confinement, then splitting it apart and
emerging, flimsy at first, but then, eventually, firmer and thriving?
One of your-and my-ancestors, or several of them, no doubt con-
tributed to the creation of a word, or words. They might not have fully
comprehended what they were doing at the time, or maybe they did-who
knows? I had a fantasy about this. My ancestors are Germanic, so I
like to think that perhaps great great (etc.) grandfather, Ugar the Brutal,
might have spent long hours struggling with a way to refer to, to name,
what later became known as a hut. (I don't know why I picked that word.
Just came to me.) I see from the dictionary that the word ultimately has
its roots in the West Germanic word hudja, whose lneaning is akin to
the verb, to hide.
I can identify with Ugar, as a matter of fact. I often use my twenty-
first-century hut, i.e., my Manhattan apartment, to hide from the world.
It's a pretty small hut, too. So there he is, my ancestor, trying to survive
in a coarse, difficult world, with dangers all around him and his family.
Perhaps the only place he can go is to that skin-covered dwelling he
has built on a hill. There is no word for this place, however. There is
only the word, hudja, and every time he hudjas, every time he hides, it
is in this skin-draped place. One day, he begins to use the word hudja
not only to mean the action of hiding, but the pLace where the action
of hiding takes him. His family starts to use the word in the same way.
Soon enough, his brothers and sisters and parents begin to understand
that hudjii not only means to hide, but it also means that place where
Ugar and his family go when it storms, when it's night, when it's cold,
w hen it's threatening.
Ugar's relatives realize they don't have a word for their dwelling,
either, and that maybe they can use this same word, too, for where they
go to hudjii. So they do. Hudja, meaning hut, is born. A few years
later, many more people are using the new word, or, rather, using an old
, i
. .,~ , , word with its new meaning. By then, everyone has forgotten that it was
Ugar who started this trend. No matter how much he points to himself
and jumps up and down when people use the word to mean hut, no one
remembers, or really cares. Maybe someone else tries to take credit for
hudjii, meaning hut, and perhaps they even are recognized as the creator
and receive some sort of ceremonial recognition, the equivalent of a round
of applause. Ugar, alas, dies a bitter, disillusioned artist, mumbling to
himself, "I invented hudjii! I was the first one to use it that way-not
Thorak!"
Note: We remember the word hide is not only a verb, but a noun.
Hides are skins of animals, and it turns out that the derivation of this
word is Old High German hut and that it is akin to the verb, "to hide."
In other words, skins, hides, provided shelter but also a place "to hide,"
and so that place became a hut. The word might have developed in that
fashion.
I think, as Thomas Pynchon reminded us recently, it's good to be grate-
ful for "this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited." It's good
to think of all those anonymous builders and shapers of words who did
their part through the ages to bring this great language into full being.
I was thinking of Borges's fascination with, and love of, Anglo-Saxon,
and how delighted he was with discovering that, in Beowulf, the Anglo-
Saxon word for sea is "whale road," hronrade. As a poet, as a writer,
of course this would excite him. What a metaphor! It turns things on
their heels. The sea does not belong to us humans, but is-and here we
name it-a highway for enormous swimming mammals. The implica-
tion is that here we have peoples who, despite their lack of mercy, were
capable of outright awe, of perspective, of knowing their place in the
world. Though often murderous, they understood the sea was a place
where boats were, at best, uninvited guests.
Human frailty, human politics, human weakness and human short
sightedness are there for one to see in some of our words' histories as well.
Since the creation and development of a word is a human endeavor, it
must be marked with human shortcomings as well. A Greek-derived word
provides an example-hysterical. It comes from the word hysterik6s,
which means, "suffering in the womb." The Randonl House Unabridged
Dictionary elaborates: "reflecting the Greeks' belief that hysteria was
peculiar to women and caused by disturbances in the uterus." If you
have a womb, you are not in control of your emotions. Men, presumably,
are not subject to hysteria. Women are hysterical because they have a
womb. So even back then, from these most intelligent of peoples, we
have a gender-biased word. Like lunacy, the state of being made mad
because of the moon's influence, it derives more from fear and prejudice
than from facts.
By thinking of those people who created bits of sound that could
be repeated to others reliably, we link ourselves to the tidal struggle of
what it means to be human. We link ourselves to the effort of trying to
make sense and order of an often perplexing world in which we live. To
imagine this is to feel a responsibility. I think that, as with the seeds of
plants and trees, we are the stewards of words.
I'm more often wrong about the definition of a word than I'd like to
be. And if I knew more about the word's derivation, I might not make
that many mistakes. Take the word holocaust. With a capital H, we all
know it refers to the deliberate mass killings of Jews by the Nazis in
World War II. But somehow I had in mind that the word meant a kind
of natural disaster, like a hurricane, I suppose. I always found it odd that
such a calculated event had affixed to it a word that signified blameless
nature. I was wrong. The word means, "a great or complete devasta-
tion or destruction, esp. by fire." The second definition is, "a sacrifice
completely consumed by fire; burnt offering." A shudder went through
me when I read that. The etymology? From the Greek hol6kaustos,
meaning "burnt whole." Someone knew what they were doing when
they chose that word.
Etymology can not only throw new light upon a word, it can change
the way you use that word. Take the word kill. Kill is with us every day,
and has been since the earth was born. In the early part of Genesis, we
have a murder: Cain kills Abel. Well, the dictionary tells us that kill has
strong associations with the word quell. You can hear that. The RHUD
tells us that quell came into written English before 900 AD, even before
kill. The word is defined as "to suppress, to put an end to, extinguish."
Its origins go back to Old Norse, kvelja, to torment, and also to the Old
English cwellan, to kill.
Now I see the word "quell" differently. It's more deadly than it was to
me before. Up until now it seemed a word that was a bit on the light side,
,'1 compared to say, stop. Now, I look forward to finding just the right tin1e
and place for it, when I can use its added strength, its implication of kill.
I can actually feel the idea of kill in quell. I don't see it as a lightweight
word any more. I'm going to quell that opinion I had right now. This
knowledge of the word's soul helps me in my writing. It helps me in my
choices, and in my desire to use words correctlY ,and creatively. Does
a reader understand this? Does a reader feel any of this? I believe he
or she does. I believe a great deal of communication in writing, of our

understanding of prose, is implicit, as well as explicit. Which, I believe,
is how we understand all art.
Some etymologies are mysteries, and that can be vexing (Note to
self: look up the derivation of vexing). I just randomly came upon the
word "odonate," meaning belonging or pertaining to the order Odonata,
which comprises the damselflies and dragonflies. The derivation? Neo
Latin (i.e., some modem-day Linnaeus), Odonata, from the Greek, od6n,
"tooth." What? Do dragonflies have teeth? Does any insect have teeth?
Mandibles, maybe, but teeth? And even if they did, wouldn't another
characteristic-say those webby, filmy wings-be more suitable for a
Latin name? Wouldn't Odonata be a better name for, say, tigers or sharks?
Now, those animals have teeth. I called the American Museum of Natural
History, and a scientist in the Entomology Department said that, well,
he wasn't exactly sure. He thought that it might refer to a portion of an
insect's abdomen that looks like a tooth. He suspected, however, that it
was because of the insects' large mandibles.
Hold on. In the Entomology Department? I had to check to see if this
word is any relation to etymology. In fact, there is a world of difference
between entonl0(s)- and etynl0s-. Remember that etyl1l0S means "true."
Well, ento/nos means "notched," presumably referring to the abdomens
of insects or their segmented bodies--e.g., those "notched" caterpillars,
for example. Well, I had to check.
I asked another expert, Dr. Thomas Sappington, an insect ecologist
in Iowa State University's Entomology Department, about this vexing
word,Odonata. Here's his take:
I'm not entirely sure about the derivation of the word, but dragonflies do not have
teeth. My best guess is that the derivation is from "Odo" meaning "a way" or "swol-
len" in Greek, and "nat" meaning rump in Latin. Some insects in this order indeed
have a "swollen rump" as adults, in that the ovipositor (egg laying apparatus) is on
the underside of the abdomen near the tip, giving it a swollen appearance in females.
However, that is just a semi-educated guess. "Nata" means "birth" in Latin, but I
don't know how that would match up with the meanings of "Odo," You are COlTect
that "Odon" means "tooth," but as far as I know, "ata" doesn't mean anything, so
"Odo" probably is the COlTect root.
I have a feeling this could go on and on. It's a kind of madness, once you
get going. The point is, I think, that some etymologies get lost along the
way. Experts will make their best educated guesses, and in some cases,
coming to a derivational dead end, place a question mark at the close of
their etymological entry. They just don't know. When you think about
it, it's really a kind of miracle that they do know anything about where a
word derives from. It's not as if you had people taking notes while the
slow, indefinite process of development was taking place.
You will often see writers, particularly essayists, make a point about
a concept by introducing the etymology of a word, its root. In the N0-
vember 30, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books, for example,
an essay by Michael Tomasky about Barack Obama titled, "The Phe-
nomenon," begins:
The word "phenomenon"-from the Greek word phainesthai, "to appear," and related
to another Greek word that is the root of the English word "fantasy"-possesses a
unique potency in our culture. While scientists may use it to mean anything observ-
able, it is popularly applied to rock stars, movie stars, top athletes, and the like. Even
today, in our hype-drenched society, it is not used promiscuously. It is reserved for
that special minority of people who seem to have singular talent and potential; for
those with the ability, that is, to fulfill our collective fantasies.
Here we see that the author wants us, his readers, to know that he has
chosen the title of his essay very carefully, and that he means to use the
root of the word "phenomenon," its essence, as a springboard for talking
about Barack Obama's qualities.
Sven Birkerts, in his book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate ofReading
in an Electronic Age, begins an essay, "The Shadow Life of Reading,"
this way: "Reading: the term is as generous and imprecise as 'love.' So
often it means more than just the word-by-word deciphering of the printed
page. Although that definition is primary, the word's etymology (from
the Anglo-Saxon raedan, 'to make out, to interpret') points us toward
.' .
the open sea. We use the verb freely to denote diverse and nonspecific
involvements with texts." Here, too, the fulcrum of his point rests squarely
on the essential meaning of the word.
When writing about Montaigne, essayists inevitably point to the fact
that the word for "essay" derives from the French word, essai, which
means "attempts" or "trials," thus implying imperfection, reaching, a
quest for understanding. I take this knowledge to guide me in my es-
I,
,
says which I hopefully see as mere attempts, mere essays, to understand
something a little bit better.
I noticed in the delightful book, One Hundred Birds and How They
Got Their Names by Diana Wells, that a mystery about a bird's name
was solved by the etymology of the name. She was examining the Ruby-
.:
I
Throated Hummingbird and its scientific name, Archilochus colubris .
. "'i
• ".
,I,
~I It turns out that the" word Archilochus derives from an actual person, a
seventh-century Be Greek poet. This stumped Wells. She researched
Archilochus' life and found that, aside from his fame as a poet, he had
been branded as a coward for running away during battle. One night,
the author sat up in bed-presumably shouting out Eureka!-realizing
that the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards. So it was
named after a man who ran backwards. The irony is that the hummingbird
is far from being a coward, and is, in fact, quite intrepid, its little frame
flying great distances over open seas during its migratory period as well
as fiercely defending its territory from unwanted rivals. Anyone who
has ever witnessed hummingbirds battle in the air will have seen quite a
vicious struggle indeed. There is no backing down among them.
I remember one writer who, in an essay about traveling, reminded
his readers that the word travel has the same root as the word travail,
which ultimately means "torture." That is: travel implies hard times,
difficulty. The point he was trying to make was that genuine travelers
should experience some difficulty in getting to where they want to go,
or they really aren't traveling. This, then, goes back to the point I was
trying to establish at the beginning of the chapter. That is, if you are
looking for the etymology of a word, you are looking for "meanings and
values" and for "the essential meaning" of a word. You want to get at
the truth of the matter, to the heart of the matter.
Thoreau begins his essay "Walking" with a paean to the etymology
of the word sauntering. He writes:
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art
of Walking, that is, of taking walks,-who had a genius, so to speak for sauntering:
which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in
a
the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under the pretense of going La Sainte Terre," to
the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer,
a Holy-Lander.
Then he cites another possibility for the word's source:

Some, however, would derive the word from sails terre, without land or home, which,
therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at
home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in
a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good
sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously
seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most
probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade ....
I take that one phrase, "having no particular home, but equally at

home everywhere," to be one of Thoreau's most concise self-portraits.
The essay continues, building upon the basic idea culled from the word's
derivation: that walking is a sort of holy enterprise, "to reconquer this
Holy Land from the Infidels." This is an entire essay built upon the true
meaning of a word, upon its essence. Thoreau wants us to see that every
walk is a kind of pilgrimage. He concludes the essay by returning to this
idea, "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall
shine more brightly than ever he has done ... and light up our whole lives
with a great awakening light."
The first chapter of Henry Miller's book, The Books in My Life, is
titled, "They Were Alive And They Spoke To Me." This is how I believe
we should see words. Some of what they have to say to us are powerful
secrets, and they can only be heard by looking inside them, by awakening
them, and by asking them to speak.
, :
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4
Some Things English Can't Do-
and Shouldn't
English can't do everything. It can do a lot of wonderful things, but
there are some things it just cannot do. It cannot make certain sounds,
it can't express certain things, and it's ultimately limited in its musical
range, as any language is. The fact is that it shouldn't do everything.
A language is tied to the people who speak it, and vice-versa. So it's
more than just a repository of words that are used as tools in commu-
nication. It's the story of a culture. A language is a country's heritage,
its patrimony. It's the accumulated grace and creativity of a people.
It represents efforts to express and to mark and to signify over many
hundreds of years, but within the context of a people's way of living.
The words and expressions the French, Syrians, and Malaysians have
developed are different not only because they have different linguistic
roots but because their peoples have lived different lives.
There is linguistic and cultural history in the difference between the
Spanish word for butter, mantequilla, and ours. Lives led differently
produce different sounds. A people has a personality, an attitude, a phi-
losophy, and this is manifested in their language. It's not just that English
isn't Spanish because of the grammar and vocabulary and structure of the
language. It's also that English speakers have not seen and experienced
the world precisely the same way as Spanish speakers. Mantequilla,
which means "butter" in Spanish, (pronounced Inahn-tah-KEY-ah)
derives from the Spanish word manteca, which means "fat." Its origins
are pre-Roman-from a people indigenous to Spain before the Roman
Empire. Our word for this fat -based substance we spread on bread ulti-
mately derives from the ancient Greek, bouturon. These two words are
different not by some semantic accident, but by culture. As the translator
Gregory Rabassa wrote, "I contend that the sound of a language must
come from the cultural expression and evolution of a people."
Each language has its linguistic triumphs, its syntactical marvels and
beauties, its eccentricities and powers that are unique to that language.
Some of them are profound.
Some of these are pure pleasure to see and to hear; some are aston-
ishing.
Vladimir Nabokov said that the three most beautiful languages are
Russian, French, and English. He knew all of them well, having been
raised learning them. He knew some German, too, having lived in Berlin
for a while, but he was not as confident with that language. He was clearly
confident with the big trio. One might say arrogantly so, and he was
forever correcting translators. All you have to do is dip into his Lectures
on Literature and look at the reproductions of his copies of the books
he was lecturing on and read his notations. Many of them are slaps on
the hands of the translators with the correct English words written over
theirs, sometimes with acerbic comments. He even writes of Madame
Bovary's "dreadfully translated" hairdo: "This hairdo has been so dread-
fully translated in all versions that the correct description must be given
else one cannot visualize her correctly." This he proceeds to do.
Nabokov had enough Spanish to declare mariposa, "butterfly," a
gorgeous word. He would know that word, being the world-class
lepidopterist that he was. You cannot say mariposa, and have it mean
something, except in Spanish. It's pronounced-and here I wish a great
speaker of Spanish would appear by magic to say it the way it should
be said-"mar-ee-POS-ah." Mariposa! I'm not certain everyone finds
mariposa beautiful, though I'd ask anyone to say the word before he or
she comes to a conclusion. The question of a word's (or anything's)
"beauty" is as complex as the word beauty itself. Some words are more
amusing than they are gorgeous; some are wittier than they are pretty.
We receive the beauty of the immense sinuousness of the Great Wall of
China differently than the playful mathematics of a Paul Klee painting.
But the word beauty can certainly be applied to both. A word in Span-
ish like aunque, "although," delights because of what the mouth has to
do in order to say it. It has to twist and contort like a thrown lasso to
say, Ah-YOON-kay. Its beauty and pleasure are of a different sort than
mariposa's. I love to say mantequilla, because I think it's pretty, but
also because it means "butter." Part of the pleasure of saying the Italian
word, francobollo is, I think, that it means "postage stamp."
Beginning at the beginning, with the individual. You might write an
entire essay-or at least have a spirited conversation-on the first person
' :, ,
Some Things English Can't Do-and Shouldn't 41
pronoun in English and in Spanish. In Spanish, it's Yo. In English, 1. Yo

is pronounced, well, Yo, to rhyme with no. I, of course, is pronounced
eye. The mouth is shaped differently in speaking these two words, and
the sounds produced are different. The music is different. It's as if one
were playing with a flute on the one hand and a guitar on the other. I
seems to emanate from the nose. Yo comes from the chest. Since the
concept of "I" is so basic, when you have a linguistic and aural differ-
ence as basic as that between I and Yo, you can sense a philosophical
difference in the languages as well.
Picasso painted two remarkable self-portraits in 1901. One is titled,
Yo, Picasso. The other is, simply, Yo. The "Y" in Yo even looks like a
person, standing, arms spread in a "Here I am!" stance. You can annun-
ciate Yo with much more force than 1. You can shout the word "I," but it
hits a high register. But you can thunder Yo. You can say it with deep
rolling power. You can say it defiantly, with a sense of reckoning.
During the latter part of his reign, Philip IV, patron of Velazquez, and
witness to the decline of the Spanish empire, wrote letters to a nun in a
convent, probably to get his mind off everything collapsing around him.
He signed the letters, simply, Yo, el Rey. I, the King. This is Spanish.
Drama, force, directness. Spanish looks you in the eye. When you speak
Spanish, you feel like attacking bulls, or windmills.
What's slightly contradictory and somewhat puzzling is that often
in Spanish native speakers will leave out the first person pronoun-in
fact, leave out pronouns altogether. (You cannot do this in French.) It's
common to hear, for example, a Spanish speaker say "I believe that" as
Creo que, instead of Yo creo que. I'm not sure exactly what this means,
if it means anything at all-though I think every linguistic "decision"
has some meaning somewhere-but it seems paradoxical to have such a
simple, strong, assertive first person pronoun, perhaps the strongest there
is, and to drop it altogether, to put it away in a trunk somewhere. Are
the Spanish disarming themselves in a way so as not to be so forcefully
self-promoting? Are they de-Yo-ing themselves to say, look, I don't
want to come on too strong? Are they shy about using the full force of
Yo? Or is it much simpler? Is it the linguistic equivalent of the French
eliminating the "ne" in their negatives? Instead of saying, correctly, Je ne
mange pas, "I don't eat," most will simply say, Je mange pas, sloughing
off the ne like the skin of an orange.
Continuing with the Yo- I discussion. In French, the first person pro-
noun is Je. The differences in this case are even greater than between
Spanish and English. You cannot, in French, use Je in the same way or
in the same situations as the Spanish Yo. Each looks different, sounds
different, and behaves differently. Je is pronounced zhuh. In the example
of the Picasso painting, the difference is even more pronounced. You
cannot say, Je, Picasso. It would have to be Moi, Picasso. A world of
difference. (You could continue this comparison with the plurals of the
first person pronoun, with the French nous and the Spanish nosotros.)
To me, an ideal way to spend an afternoon would be to talk to a native
Spanish speaker about the fundamental differences between our two lan-
guages. What history did he or she think shaped the language? Is there
something at the very core of Spanish or French he or she can identify
that bespeaks a philosophy of a people? This is a subject where I wish
I had far more learning. The shelves of libraries humble you with the
delicious, arcane depth of the books about semantics, linguistics, and
the origins of language.
As I have said, each language has its own genius, something it does
better than any other language. French, for example, has a genius for
expressing abstract modes of human behavior, for describing how
people act. If you start with the simple expression, touche, you can get
a good idea of the language's wit and skill. It refers to fencing, and is
an acknowledgement that you have "touched" your opponent with your
sword, or epee, thus gaining a point. As an expression, though, it is an
acknowledgement that you have made a particularly sharp or effective
comment. Someone says something so apt, that couldn't be said better,
and so you acknowledge it with touche! The word carries with it the
force of a deft thrust of a blade-there is both skill and potential harm
involved in the words that were said and acknowledged. That the com-
ment is physical in its nature, that it goes directly to the body, to the
corpus of the person, is implied.
All of us have experienced a moment when someone says something
to us in response to something we said, or did, that is so right, so undeni-
able, so inescapable, that we feel it go directly into our body. We blush,
we cringe, we blink, we stammer, we're speechless. It's the French
genius to see this, and to find a way of expressing it perfectly. We don't
,;!
say touche much anymore-it seems out of a nineteenth-century novel
,I
and somewhat affected. But when we do-and sometimes we just can't
, 'I
" I
help ourselves-we have a quick, small understanding of the genius of
the French language. It's the perfect, the only thing to say. It's an ac-
know ledgement and a kind of surrender. There is an understanding that
you have been bettered by words. English can't do that nearly as well.
As Gregory Rabassa noted, "Some concepts seem to be the exclusive
property of one language and cannot be rightly conceived in another."
Not only that-and this is a common characteristic of the best of the
French expressions-touche is brilliantly concise. In fact, concision is
at the heart of all the most memorable French expressions. Concision,
and an almost pictorial wit. Some of these expressions almost seem as
if they were constructed by Le Notre, the creator of Louis XIV's geo-
metrically perfect gardens at Versailles. They look witty. You can see that
with an expression like arriere-pensee, which means "hidden motive."
Literally translated, it means "behind-thought." So there you have it: the
expression is sculpted to convey there is something, literally, behind, the
thought that is being presented for its face value. Behind that, is another
thought, the real thought. Look at the expression: the word arriere is
actually holding up, bolstering, the word pensee, so that, visually, it is
clear that this is the stronger, the more prominent concept. The closest
we have to this is "ulterior motive." At their best, the qualities of French
expressions are just as much visual as they are verbal. You look at the
words and you see the meaning, the inference, at the same time as you
ingest the meaning of the word or words.
Because French often places its modifiers after its nouns, there is a
kind of poetry that English cannot, because of how it works, achieve.
So, for example, there is the French expression, I' heure bleue, which
refers to that often shimmering time between the hours of daylight and
darkness. We say "the magic hour" for that concept. It's sort of sad to
write that next to I' heure bleue. French knows what to do here. French
knows that the concept of "blue" is critical; that time of soft, subtle wan-
ing is about hue. French knows that emphasis should be on the idea of
blue, but also that sufficient strength is given to the idea of the hour, to
I' heure. L' heure bleue sounds like subtle magic.
Every so often the right book comes along as precisely the right time,
almost as if it were fulfilling a need you couldn't express. The M ean-
ing ofTingo and Other Extraordinary Words From Around the World by
Adam Jacot de Boinod is such a book. It's a little tome, barely over two
hundred pages, and small in size at that, but it contains many delights.
It's a compilation of unusual, amusing, and surprising words that liter-
ally span the globe, and while there is great fun in reading the book, it's
also mighty instructive as well. "My interest in the quirkiness of foreign
words was triggered," writes de Boinod, "when one day, working as a
researcher for the BBC quiz programme QI, I picked up a weighty Al-
banian dictionary to discover that they have no fewer than twenty-seven
words for eyebrows and the same number for moustache."
De Boinod goes on to present some "wonderful words" from "the
Fuegian of the southernmost Chile to the Inuit of northernmost Alaska,
and from the Maori of the remote Cook Islands to Siberian Yakut."
What the author found were words that could only have come out of a
particular culture, such as nakhur, "a Persian word (which may not even
be known to most native speakers) meaning 'a camel that won't give
milk until her nostrils have been tickled.'" But he also found words like
touche-though much more amusing-that express sentiments we have
but that English does not capture in a single word. As he writes, "Haven't
we all felt termangu-mangu, Indonesian for 'sad and not sure what to do'
or mukamuka, Japanese for 'so angry one feels like throwing up'?" The
Meaning of Tingo is a highly entertaining argument for understanding a
country's culture through its language. And for maintaining linguistic
differences.
Writers often become enamored of foreign languages and try to
imitate, or mimic, the cadence and the flavor of a foreign language
when they write in English. Hemingway did this all the time, most
particularly in For Whom the Bells Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.
In the former, he tries to transpose the familiar form of "you"-tu-to
English, using "thee" and "thou." It sounds somewhat stilted, as if the
characters were Quakers, but he was trying to convey something about
the Spanish language to his readers. He was trying to see if he could
take that use of the familiar-which exists in other romance languages
as well-and import its significance and subtlety into his novel. It
means something when you speak to another person in the familiar
form, particularly in French. It's extremely intimate, and touching.
Hemingway wanted to capture that, because, one would assume, he
appreciated it.
In The Old Man and the Sea, he uses the way one describes things in
Spanish to comic effect, in what is now a famous part of the book where
the characters are talking about baseball:
. ',I
- -"II "The Yankees cannot lose."
"But I fear the Indians of Cleveland."
"Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."
"I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland."
"Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox
of Chicago."
. 'i
This is affectionate, and warm, and funny. Hemingway was, of course,

in giving a literal translation of the talk, trying to bestow on the prose a
unique sense of authenticity, as he was in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But
he is also cleverly pointing out what Spanish does and what English
does not do. Ultimately, this passage is as much about language as it is
about baseball. Hemingway loved the Spanish language, spoke it bril-
liantly according to those who heard him, and understood it as perhaps
few American writers ever have. This knowledge of Spanish, and his
knowledge of French and Italian-both of which he knew at least pass-
ably well-made him a fuller writer, a richer writer, I think, and helped
make him Hemingway.
Henry James, fiuent in French, and obviously mad about the tongue,
sprinkled his prose with French, like seeds. His assumption was that any
civilized reader would know what those phrases meant, and that was true
of his circle, but it's no longer true. He was more of a European writer
than an American writer, and you do not find those French seeds in the
writing of his contemporary, Mark Twain. So it's somewhat irritating to
come upon these French words and expressions in Henry James, which
are often not simple or well known, much like speed bumps on a lovely
country road.
We are watching a glacier right now. The glacier is English, and it is
moving with a steady inexorable force across the linguistic terrain of the
world overwhelming everything in its path. More and more people are
speaking English. The New York Tinles reported a few years back that
some in Europe fear their languages are in peril. This is because English
is the language of commerce. (Balzac said, "Money never misses the
slightest occasion to demonstrate its stupidity.") If you want to do busi-
ness on any scale, you need to speak English. English has become like
one of those foreign species, an algae or ivy, that is introduced either by
accident or with the foolish logic that it can eliminate some native pest.
(Florida and France can attest to that misguided concept.) It destroys
the native pest all right, but soon it takes over the entire lake or forest,
strangling weaker competition and spreading its presence everywhere,
until finally there is no more of the native species to be found.
Can we picture a France without French? Can we picture a future
Nicolas Sarkozy speaking to the French public in English? That seems
impossible, but as late as 1900 there were nearly ten million speakers
of Provenc;al, which is a separate language entirely than French, part
of the Occitan family, in the South of France. Many people spoke it
exclusively, and did not, in fact, even know French. Twenty years later,
there remained only a relative handful of Proven~al speakers. The
power of the French language, in this case imposed upon schools and
curriculums, while at the same time Paris outlawed the use of Proven~al
in schools, did the trick. This shows the fragility of a language. Ten
million speakers gone in a generation! The Basque language in Spain has
about 1,000,000 speakers, and the number is declining. But the Basque
people have steadfastly resisted much stronger restrictions against their
language than the Proven~al speakers ever had. They know that to lose
their language would be catastrophic. For them, it's as much political
as it is cultural. The language wars in Spain are fierce and meaningful.
The Basque and Catalan people know the stakes are mortal.
In fact, in 1904, France's second Nobel Prize for literature went to the
poet Frederic Mistral (1830-1914) who wrote exclusively in Proven~al.
There is a story that as a young man he brought some of his first poems,
which were written in French, to his mother who, not being able to read
them-she read only Proven~al-burst into tears. Mistral wrote only
in Proven~al after that. Mistral, along with six other writers, created
the Felibrige society in 1854 to try to promote the Proven~allanguage.
Their efforts were mostly in vain, but as part of this campaign, Mistral,
Samuel Johnson-like, compiled an enormous Proven~al-French diction-
ary. Only a few scholars consult it today. Otherwise, it's a dead book
for a dead language. Yet, two hundred years before Mistral, the young
Parisian playwright Jean Racine (1639-1699), author of Phedre, and one
of the icons of French literature, visited the town of U zes in the south of
France, near Avignon, where his uncle lived. In one of his letters home
he reports attending a trial and not understanding a word that was spoken.
It was all in Proven~al.
Today, no one speaks Proven~al, except a handful of people, and many
people have never even heard of it. The language is virtually gone, extinct,
and with it the speakers' culture. Can English do that? Is it so immense
as to be able to vanquish French or Italian? The news is bleak. Recently,
the New York Times reported "of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in
the world today, linguists say nearly half are in danger of extinction and
.. ,
are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are falling out of use
at a rate of about one every two weeks ... at a rate, researchers said, that
exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish or plants." English, with its global
influence, is doing more than its part to insure that other, less influential
languages disappear. You could argue that there is no conscious and of-
ficial suppression of native languages by English, but I would maintain

that the brute stupidity of money has the same effect in the end.
Before the Towel of Babel, "the whole earth was of one language, and
of one speech," as it says in Genesis 11. Presumably, this was a desirable
thing from the Lord's point of view. But this monolinguism brought out
in man a certain hubris, and with that, a desire to build a tower "whose
top may reach unto heaven." The Lord, sensing things would soon get
out of hand, decided to "confound their language, that they may not
understand one another's speech." Unable to comprehend one another
any more, the people abandoned the Tower of Babel.
I love English-I worship it-but I don't want it to be omnipotent. I
don't want to return to the time when the whole earth was of one language.
Or, rather, to see a day soon when that will be the case. I don't want
English to eradicate other tongues. We need to preserve all the world's
great, complex, unique linguistic music. Cultures depend on it.
5
The Nerve of Poetry
Have a listen to this story of mine.
I was walking the fields of my farm the other day when, suddenly, I
had a thought. It almost seems as if the earth doesn't want there to be
barriers between people. Did you ever notice how some stone walls in
winter are dislodged by the earth? When it freezes, the earth expands,
and that expanding force will often cause certain portions of a stone wall
to tumble over. Sometimes the earth's swelling is so pronounced that it
will cause quite a few stones to fall and leave a large gap in a wall. I'm
not speaking of the holes hunters purposely make. When their dogs think
they smell a rabbit there, they'll pull away stone after stone. No, I mean
those gaps that just seem to appear out of nowhere. No one ever seems
to see them created.
The other day, I had to call my neighbor to walk our property line
together to put back these stones. Down the line we went, putting the
stones back up on the wall, one by one. Some were small, some big-
ger. Some wobbled on top, and we had to cast a pretend-spell on them
so they would stay balanced. After a while, our hands were calloused
from handling so many stones. We came to a space in the land where
there is actually no reason to have a wall, or a barrier of any kind. I've
got an apple orchard on my land, and he's got pine trees on his. It's not
as if my apple trees need to be prevented from eating his pine cones.
Why have a wall at all? Neither of us have cows that could \vander
over to the other's land. I asked him about this, and he said,
"If we have a fence between us, why, there will never be any disputes
between us."
Here's how Robert Frost put it:
49
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
'"
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a storie grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
1;,1
And he likes having thought of it so well
-,'f
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
~I
, ;.,;
The Nerve of Poetry 51
So, why did he do that? Why did Robert Frost write this story as a
poem? What's in it for us? What can only be communicated in poetry,
or communicated far better than in prose?
"Mending Wall" is from Robert Frost's second book, North ofBoston ,
published in 1914 in London. (Frost was living in England at the time.)
It's the first poem in the collection. The poem is forty-five lines of un-
rhymed iambic pentameter and has become famous for the concluding
line, "Good fences make good neighbors." The poem is a whole lot more
than that. In an interview with the Paris Review in 1960 (when Frost was
eighty-six), the interviewer summarizes the poet Karl Shapiro who said,
"modern poetry is obscure and over difficult. .. but that isn't true of you
[i.e., Frost]." Frost replied, "Well, I don't want to be difficult. I like to
fool-oh, you know, you like to be mischievous. But not in that dull way
of just being dogged and doggedly obscure."
Then the interviewer pointed out something quite interesting: "The
difficulty of your poetry is perhaps in your emphasis on variety in tones
of voice."
So, when dealing with Frost, we are dealing with a poet who does not
want to be obscure or difficult but who will play with us, who will sing in
different voices. Now, whereas there is music in prose, poetry is music.
So, with that in mind we turn to the first lines of "Mending Wall."
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall" is not a good prose
sentence (if you were to end it there). It has a musty, slightly tortured,
nineteenth-century feel to it. But it is a singularly memorable and satis-
fying line of poetry. The same can be said for the beginning of Frost's
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening": "Whose woods these are I
think I know." If this were prose, we might wince. We might even have
the urge to rewrite the line to something like, "I think I know who owns
these woods." But, as poetry-very different.
So, why torture these poor words like that? Frost does this for several
reasons, but first and foremost, I believe, is for the music, for the song.
There is a lilting tune here, combined with the lyrics- i.e., the words-
that is so seductive. Every good poem is about melody, about music, and
in fact this leads to a profound truth about poems and poetry. Seamus
Heaney put it well. He said that in lyric poetry, "truthfulness becomes
recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself." In other words,
to alter Keats's line for our purposes, "Truth is Music, Music, Truth."
So, in that first line, Frost gives us:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall.
Which is very easy to hum in our head. So, when we read the first
line of "Mending Wall," we are reading music. And we like Frost's tune,
above all. But let's look at the first word, "Something." This is the hero,
the subject of the first line, or the culprit, depending on how you look
at it. It's vague and mysterious. Even Frost doesn't know who "some-
thing" is. (Though later he playfully suggests it might be elves.) And
what does he mean, "doesn't love a wall"? How can a "thing" not love
anything-much less a wall? Frost is if anything a curious poet, and that
curiosity is infectious.
We go on to the second line, then, because we like Frost's music and
would like to hear some more of it. And because we're curious. The
second line, "That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it," has some
miracles in it. The hyphen-connected phrase, "frozen-ground-swell"
looks like a kind of wave itself, mimics the rising tidal earth. So, because
of the hyphens, we get that rolling sensation of the up-pushing earth.
Then that mischievous, clever Robert Frost places the phrase "under it"
literally under the word "wall" from the previous line, thus:
a wall,
under it,
So the concept "under" is actually under the wall. We see the thing
itself happening in a kind of verbal pictogram.
How do you do that in prose?
As readers of poetry we know a lot more than we think we do. Our
bodies know the Frost lines are appealing, and no critic or professor has
to tell us that. It goes inside us, this pleasure. Every poem is a kind of
lullaby in the sense that it harkens back to that time in our lives when
music soothed us. However, the music of poetry has changed. Poetry's
music-its harmonics and its tunefulness-has changed as much as
that of actual music's. Sometimes we like what we hear, sometimes we
don't. But we do know with Frost's "Mending Wall,"-quite traditional
music-as Seamus Heaney puts it, that we feel "repose in the stability
conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds." Heaney, by the
way, loved, as a young poet, the "farmer's accuracy" of Robert Frost
and his "wily down-to-earthness," both of which we can see very well
in "Mending Wall."
Again the question is: How does poetry have the nerve to be-poetry?
How does it have the nerve to look and act the way it does, with its odd
shapes, bizarre language, unfathomable ideas, complete unpredictability
and general incomprehensibility? How does it have the nerve to create
books with titles like, Tracheal Centrifuge, The Stupefying Flashbulbs,

Bone Strings and Fish De Jour-all actual recently published titles-and
ask us to read them? How does it have the nerve to ask us to wade through
all the contortions and obscurities? How does it have the nerve to just lie
there, without so much a helping hand, with a look of smug satisfaction
on its face, as if to say, "Go ahead-just try to understand me"?
We turn to Philip Larkin for answers. Larkin (1922-1985), was an
English poet who worked as a librarian most of his adult life. His poetry
often demonstrates Seamus Heaney's thought that "Poetic form is both
the ship and the anchor," and one of Larkin's poems in particular, "Talk-
ing in Bed," shows what poetry can do so well that prose simply cannot.
Poetry, by the fact that it is an extreme distillation in vocabulary and
form, focuses us to an extent as we can never be focused in prose. Prose
will occasionally focus us with the certainty of poetry, but only rarely.
Poems tell stories or focus emotions with such laser-like precision that
it's as if we've fallen into a black hole and everything is so dense we can
hardly stand it. Here's the Larkin poem:
Talking in Bed
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Not everything is easy to understand in this poem, but some things are
painfully apparent. This is the poet's hand in evidence. We see and we hear
a few things right away that we do not have to ponder. Our body tells us
so. The poem is brief, a mere twelve lines, and each of those lines is, in
itself, brief. The poem is rather lonely-looking there on the page, small
and vulnerable. (You can't create that impression with prose.) We feel a
kind of subliminal tenderness toward it, wondering if it can stand up for
.~ I
itself, wondering if we even can call it a poem. But indeed it is a poem,

and we know poems can be short, because in that respect, poetry's rules
are very open-ended. A poem can be extremely short, like Ezra Pound's
"In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
. i
Or it can go on to the book-length of the Odyssey. So, the effect of this
brevity-and again I think these are things we don't necessarily verbal-
ize even to ourselves-is that there isn't a lot to say. That there won't
be a lot of talking in bed. That these people in fact don't really talk in
bed, or, at least, don't talk freely. The poem's language is stark, and its
images are as well: "time passes silently," "the wind's incomplete un-
rest," "None of this cares for us," and "isolation." Ideas and thoughts are
conveyed indirectly, "incomplete unrest," "not untrue and not unkind."
Communication is strained and painful in every aspect of this poem. It's
also marked by absences: There are no names of people. No affection.
No kisses. No pillows. No sheets. No lamps. No books. No bodies. Just
sadness. Just the not knowing.
Here Larkin is showing us a sad portrait, not to say: "Ah-ha, I know
your marriage is dead, and there is no love between you two." But: "How
hard it is to be human!" And also: "There, there. I know." He does this
with shape and music and by his choice of words and by absence, one
of the great advantages of poetry. That is, because a poem is so starkly
there, on the page, naked in all that white space, and so brief, many things
. ,
'.
can be put into focus-including that of the absence of something. We
I.:,:
It,;:; leave "Talking in Bed," with a far longer resonance inside us than the
actual length of the poem itself.
This leads us to another fundamental aspect of poetry, a fundamental
difference between poetry and prose-shape. Not form, so much, but
the actual physical shape of a poem. It's important, because it's often so
prominent. A poem not only sounds different than prose, it looks different
than prose. Some poems can actually be identified by their shape. You
can identify a sonn~t by its shape as easily as you can identify certain
animals-a pelican, a cat-by their shape. Keats' odes can be picked out
of a lineup of variously shaped poems. We know those Odes partially
by their shape. Poetry, then, is much more visual than prose. There is a
I
kind of sculptural aesthetic going on, in which shape, physical design, is
,l,
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an important part of the communication. Our ear and our eye are alerted
~! ::
in reading a poem. If we don't read poetry consistently, we are not used
.:: ~i
to this. This is one reason why poetry can seem foreign to us. But if we
can regard a poem with some of the same pleasure and wonder as we do
a statue, something three-dimensional, this may help us adjust.
We can't read or hear poetry with the rules of prose. We need to think
of it like that profound underwater singing of whales that we cannot
hear walking on dry land. This is music that we now know is meant for
con1munication, meant for another world. Just because we can't hear it
when we walk around on the earth, doesn't mean it isn't there in all its
low-pitched glory. Yet, when we do hear it, when we listen to the record-
ings that have been made, we are moved by its heroic effort to reach over
hundreds of miles of murky, thick, frigid resistant ocean to another whale.
We are moved in much the same way by the idea of the great thumping
of the elephant's foot, shaking the land to send waves of greeting or sor-
row or longing through the earth to a fellow elephant miles away, and
unseen, crossing all barriers and entering its foot and body. Poetry enters
us in much the same way, whether we realize it or not.
The range of poetry is limitless. There is for every situation a poem, or
a poem in waiting, from a child dying to a bird walking on the sand to a
note of gratitude to the clothes we wear. I mean fully formed, meaningful,
and essential poems that enlighten us, soothe us, or excite us, and confirm
"that our very solitudes and distresses are credible," as Heaney says.
Poetry also has a tremendous power that I think many of us saw after
September 11. Again, I want to turn to Seamus Heaney, who has so many
brilliant things to say about poetry: "There are times when we want the
poem not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surpris-
ing variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We
want the surprise to be transitive like ... the electric shock which sets the
fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm." That's what poetry provided
to so n1any of us after September 11. We were dying on the table, and
poets set our hearts right again. Or at least they-the old poets-did their
best. And they did that I believe partially because poets are determined
seekers of truth. Yeats did that for Ireland after the Easter Rebellion when
he wrote "Easter 1916" with its widely-quoted line, "A terrible beauty
is born." Since no poets have written for us yet great soothing, re-tuning
verse about September II-and I'm not sure Why-we have to turn to
Yeats and to Whitman and to Auden (his "September 1, 1939" flew all
over the Internet after the disaster) and others for our aid.
It was Philip Larkin who wrote that "readability is to a great extent
credibility." The title of Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize lecture, which I
have been quoting from so often, is titled, "Crediting Poetry." The cred-
ibility of a poet is I think closely tied to morality and to truth, and we

"hear" that in the music of the verse. As W.H. Auden wrote in speaking
about the poetry of C.P. Cavafy, "Poems made by human beings are no
more exempt from moral judgment than acts done by human beings ....
One duty of a poem, among others, is to bear witness to the truth." We
are attuned to certain voices, and the fact of the matter is that we will be
attracted to a poem's music as we will be to a person's character.
A poem feels a bit like an oracle. It feels a bit like someone who appears
briefly and speaks the truth, but reveals that truth in metaphors or symbols.
The oracles statements were often open to interpretation. Which is why,
I believe, some poems have different truths for different readers.
Poems do have character. When we hear or read a poem, part of us
is asking, is the poet truthful here? Is he or she courageous? Is the poet
being him- or herself? Is he or she sincere? Is he or she compassionate?
Does he or she have a sense of pity? Is he or she openhearted? As Theo-
dore Roethke wrote, "Nakedness is my shield." Is he or she sensuous?
Funny? In other words, does the poet admit fully and openly his or her
humanity? We can see these qualities very clearly in a poet like Wilfred
Owen who wrote so bravely and compassionately about the "pity of war"
in his poems about World War I. We can see it in Yeats. But this seeking
of truth and this open admission of humanity is not always so readily
apparent in some of the poems we encounter, which aren't about war or
rebellion or death, but about so many other things. But we can hear it.
We can hear it if we listen. And a wonderful example of this is the poetry
of Elizabeth Bishop.
And so to a poem about a bird walking on the sand. It's called "Sand-
piper."
).!'
Sandpiper
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
1
. ".1
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet

of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
: [
I
,,;1
I
-Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,

where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is

minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed~ he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
From the very first line, we trust the poet completely. Why? When
we read, "The roaring alongside he takes for granted," we sense wit,
a keen eye, imagination, and sympathy. We sense the fact that we're
welcomed. We do not feel exclusion as we do with some poets. This
is because Bishop is saying, "You're savvy enough, you're curious
enough, to know I don't have to point out that "roaring" refers to the
ocean's noise." (We already know, from the title, it's about a bird that
feeds near the ocean.) That's inclusive. She also is saying to us that,
"I think you'll enjoy the fact that I'm going to instantly put him in ac-
tion on the wet sand doing his sandpiper thing, and so you know what
I mean when I say, 'alongside.'" This is focus, with fun. This is what
poetry can do, it can focus your eye, like the prison searchlight on the
escaping criminal. So Bishop is saying, you're easily as smart as I am,
so I want to show you this picture I've drawn. I've left out some of the
dots, but the fun of it is that I know you can fill them in and will like
filling them in yourself.
I think her most smile-inducing phrase of this kind in the poem is
the first line of the second stanza, "The beach hisses like fat." This line
is actually half written by the reader. When Bishop writes "like fat,"
we instantly know she means fat in a frying pan being cooked. It's the
leaving the pan and fire out that makes the line thrilling, not the least
of which we see that it can be left out. The second brilliance is that it's
the beach that hisses, not the ocean. Our minds most likely think of the
ocean making the noise in its withdrawal, but it's the beach that hisses
after the ocean's leaving. I don't think prose can provide us with this
powerful sense of arm-in-arm between writer and reader as poetry can,
and on such a consistent basis.
r J'
Elizabeth Bishop was actually a fine drawer of real pictures. One of

her delightful watercolors is on the cover of her Complete Poems. She
draws another welcoming picture in a poem called, "The Shampoo":
The Shampoo
The still explosions on the rocks,

the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend

as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair

in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
-Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
Even before the explanatory second line, "the lichens, grow," you know,
with the first line, "The still explosions on the rocks," that you are seeing
something new. Or, really, that you knew, but never really saw. One of the
oldest, most durable and least dynamic living things, lichens, suddenly
become a "still explosion." We see the essence of the lichen's behavior,
its concentric expanding circles, and suddenly our mind snaps awake.
Now we think of the millennium-moving lichens as having a spread-
ing, tsunami-like quality to them. The poet says, I can describe this.
, ,'I
And as with any revelation we have through art, somewhere we knew
this already. Seamus Heaney loved the "pure consequence of Elizabeth
Bishop's style."
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So we trust Bishop completely. Our mind has fallen in love. And we

do the same with Pablo Neruda and his Odas Elementales, Elemental
, 'I,
I ! ~
:,!'
Odes. Now we come to the poem of gratitude for the clothes we wear.
It's called "Oda al Traje," Ode to the Clothes. Yes, it's a translation
we're discussing here of the great Chilean poet's verse, but we are less
concerned with Neruda's music than with his welcoming, and with his
heart. It begins,
Ode to the Clothes
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
for my vanity,
my love,
my hope, my body
to fill you,
In these first lines, we feel sweetness, sympathy, humanity and perhaps

above all, mortality. We know there will be a time when the poet will be
gone-as he in fact is-and will not put himself in these clothes. Are we
not more than willing to put ourselves in the hands of this poet who honors
his everyday clothes? I think with both Bishop and Neruda there is also a
sense of rectitude that flows through their poems, borne out by this sym-
pathy and openheartedness and compassion. So, as with a person whose
character is strong and that we admire, we are better people for having
spent time with him or her. So it is with certain poems and poets.
Poetry, because of its heightened condensation and its special music
can shock us, too. Prose can hardly approach it in this sense. This will
often happen at the close of the poem. Here is an example from the great
Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), who spent his life working and
writing in Alexandria, Egypt. The poem is called "The City":
The City
You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, a better one than this.
Every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate;
and my heart is-like a corpse-buried.
How long will my mind remain in this wasteland.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years destroying and wasting."
You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
and you will grow gray in the same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other-
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.
Those last two lines! Truth stares us in the face. This is the honesty
and rectitude of a great poet as truth-seeker. I don't know how prose can
match poetry's ability to give such a punch to our moral solar plexus so
quickly, as demonstrated in these mere sixteen lines. There is no way
to escape the poet's gaze, his prison searchlight, in this tightly confined
space. We must look ourselves in the eye. If it's painful, well, the great
poet will never compromise with the truth. That's something, painful as
it may be, we can rely on with the best of our poets and their poetry.
I
"
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1
I,
Part 2
Writing
6
Using the Techniques of Fiction to Make Your
Creative Nonfiction Even More Creative:
Character, Setting, and Drama
A great irony of creative nonfiction is that one of its chief assets is also
one of its chief liabilities. This is the fact that in nonfiction everything
actually happened. It's all true. One of the reasons we eagerly tum to
nonfiction is because we have it on reliable sources-most often, in any
case-that the events on the page actually took place and the people who
did them were, or are, real. A good part of our astonishment at reading
Ernest Shackleton's account of his eight-hundred-mile open boat voy-
age from Elephant Island across the terrible frigid sea to South Georgia
Island, for example, is that real men went through this, with real fears
and real hopes, who had real families at home and real men left behind
cold and hungry depending on their success. This happened.
This is what makes the book, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survi-
vors, so strong, as well. The story of an airplane crashing in the Andes
and the survivors resorting to eating the flesh of their dead comrades in
order to survive moves us deeply. Real people, not so unlike us, went
through that experience. Who is to say that one day something like that
might happen to one of us? We wonder how we might act. If this were
in a novel, we might easily dismiss it, and it probably wouldn't plague
our hearts and minds with sympathy and horror in so intimate a way as
it does in Alive.
But the cold clear fact is that no matter how astonishing the story,
there is no guarantee that it will be interesting writing. Many writers
of nonfiction, particularly in the ever-burgeoning category of memoir,
seem to believe the strength of their subject is enough to keep the reader
captivated. After all, if you slept with your mother, or father, or both, and
your dog, shouldn't that be sufficient to keep the reader turning the pages?
More seriously, the stories of memoir, and of nonfiction in general, are
63
J'
often desperately sad, even tragic-and in some cases, as with Ernest

Shackleton's, heroic-and so writers, under the sway of the powerful
emotions associated with those events, often feel that simply by spilling
out those events on the page, like the contents of a toolbox, the reader
will experience these emotions as clearly and strongly as the writer.
Not so. Or, often enough, not so. So, the fact that something actu-
ally happened is both the boon and the bane of creative nonfiction. It's
a terrific asset, because so many of the things that happen in real life
would just not be plausible in fiction. How many times have we heard
someone say, "If this were an idea for a novel, it would be laughable. But
it really happened." The great historical novelist Patrick O'Brian said,
in speaking of the exploits of the Royal Navy of the eighteenth century,
"So very often the improbable reality outruns fiction." So, you can tell
those implausible stories in nonfiction, because, by the very nature of
the genre, they did indeed happen. However, the fact of a crash in the
Andes, or a climb up Everest, or a battle against cancer, or living under
a cruel and repressive government, is not enough to make the writing
good. In too many cases, the subject matter can work against the writer.
It can lull the writer into a false sense of literary security.
Here's something else: The fact that the characters in the story are, or
were, actually alive can be an inhibitor to good prose. Especially when
these characters are well known-and often related-to the writer. They
are quite embedded in the writer's consciousness, and exist in a kind
of shorthand in his or her mind. Invented characters do not, because
the writer has to start from scratch. They are built brick by brick, as it
were, gesture by gesture, opinion by opinion, act by act, strand of hair
by strand of hair, so that they are almost as fresh to the reader as they
are to the writer.
In the case of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury, for instance, it began
with Faulkner seeing in his mind's eye a picture of the young girl's muddy
drawers as she climbed a tree. He built his character from there. In other
words, the reader, in one sense, knows the characters nearly as well,
or for nearly as long, as the writer. That is not the case with nonfiction
,.
characters. The writer often knows them much better than the reader ever
. "'1
:',,:; will. The reader doesn't know them at all, to begin with, while the writer
may have been living with them for years, either literally-or figuratively,
through research. So there can be an enormous gap between reader and
,";
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writer. If the writer isn't conscious of this gap, then he or she can leave
• . jll
,', the reader behind, looking at a shell of a character and wondering where
the rest of the body is.
Using the Techniques of Fiction 65
Think of your conversations with your siblings or parents about a rela-

tive or a close friend. You don't have to explain anything to each other.
If, for example, you have an uncle who likes to steal ashtrays at social
occasions, you don't have to say, "Well, you know how Berty likes to
steal ashtrays at parties." If you did, you'd be telling the other person
something he or she already knows, and it would be more of a conver-
sation opener than anything else. You could just declare, "Well, Berty
took another one. And this time he really outdid himself." This common
accrued knowledge allows for a kind of emotional code, or shorthand.
Sometimes nonfiction writers write this way, as if their readers know a
lot more about the character, or characters, than they actually do. They
can be far too assuming. It may be unintended assuming, or subconscious
assuming, but it is assuming nevertheless.
So, the nonfiction writer must step back and consider his or her
characters as strangers. He or she must introduce them to the reader, as
if the character or characters stepped out of a novel, or out of thin air,
as it were. This can be difficult. How do you look at your father, your
mother, your husband, your children as strangers? Well, you can. And
you must. It's imperative to make your characters-and this seems quite
paradoxical-as real as any fictional characters. They must be built from
the ground up.
You can do that with the help of the techniques of fiction, and by being
continually aware of the need to make them real.
These same commitments to achieving the realism fictional characters
possess apply as well to other aspects of fiction-to setting the scene; to
creating a sense of drama; to choosing the exact word; to creating a kind
of music, or melody, in your nonfiction prose; in fact, to all the subtle-
ties of fine fiction. This chapter aims to point out some of these areas
and to demonstrate, with examples from the world of fiction, how your
nonfiction writing can become more dynamic. In short, how it can have
the advantages of nonfiction with the proven techniques of fiction. The
fact is, many nonfiction writers I've taught are often mystified why their
story isn't as well received as they think it should be. "But. . .it's such a
tragic story! It's so full of pain and sorrow!" Yes, for you. Now, you have
to make the reader feel that as well. That's a different story.
It all begins with character. Character is at the heart of any story. We
remember books by their characters. In very rare cases, as with Ivan
Turgenev, we may remember the landscape as fixedly as the characters,
but there are not many writers with the sensitivity and deep connection
to nature-not to mention genius-as he. We remelnber Don Quixote,
f' I
David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Nathan

Zuckerman, and so on. The question, for the nonfiction writer, is how,
and why.
Often the most important character of all in nonfiction is the narra-
tor, especially in memoir. The narrator, of course, is you. But you as a
character. Some writings recently have taken pains to demonstrate why
and how you, as the writer, need to separate yourself from your basic
everyday ego and to mold yourself into a character. One fine example
is Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal
Narrative. It's difficult having this ego tied to us, to borrow from Yeats,
"as to a dog's tail." I think it's a good idea to distance yourself from
you ego-as a character, I mean-as much as possible. You need your
ego, naturally, to write. The ego provides all that confidence you require
to justify putting pen to paper. But when your self lacks perspective
and humility, then you, the narrator, can become overwhelming, if not
downright boorish at times. So, how do you keep yourself a respectable
character who doesn't chew the scenery or simply become too overbear-
ing-a kind of tyrant in ink?
There's no better example than The Great Gatsby. It's written in the
first person-but what a sweet, somewhat diffident, wonder-filled narrator
,I:,
Nick Carraway is. From the opening lines where Nick harkens back to
some words of wisdom from his father, the tone is set:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've
been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any
one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the
advantages that you've had."
"
: "
And shortly after, Nick says, "In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve
all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me
and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores."
So, right away we know we're dealing with a sympathetic nature.
We're dealing with someone whom people confide in. We all know these
kinds of people. We feel safe with them. They aren't going to judge us.
0"
That doesn't make them any less inteBigent or perceptive. It just roeans
,,'
they have a generous heart. This is Nick Carraway, the man-the nar-
rator-with whom we are going to pass several hundred pages. And we
are most pleased to be in his company. Now, can we say Fitzgerald was
Carraway? Not really. They may have things in common-an obsessive,
worshipful curiosity about wealth, perhaps. But Nick Carraway must be
separate from Fitzgerald; he will live forever, and he must perform his
job each and every time a reader picks up The Great Gatsby.
Nick is an excellent role model, as far as narrators go. The traits of

diffidence, courtesy, sympathy, and a sense of wonder can go a long way
toward creating a narrator that is likeable and effective. Your story may
require a tougher narrator-the Dorothy Allison of Skin: Talking About
Sex, Class and Literature, for example. But I think you will notice that
her narrator is still extremely vulnerable. So you may be able to have
both. The idea is to look at Gatsby, at its narrator, and see what you can
use in developing your own narrator.
As a narrator, you certainly want to distance yourself from self-pity,
that most lethal of emotions, especially if you are telling a pitiful story.
You can look to The Catcher in the Rye for a good lesson on how to
avoid that. This is a novel about that inherently dangerous field mined
with self-pity-adolescence. How does the first -person narrator, Holden
Caulfield, save us from a roomful of hand-wringing angst?
With humor. With the sub-category of lacerating sarcasm, much of it
directed at himself. We remember, for instance, Holden pledges that he
won't try to kiss or fondle any girl he doesn't like:
I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last
year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down,
gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it-the same
night as a matter of fact.
This kind of wry confession can go a long way toward endearing

the reader to the writer, particularly in trying circumstances. Hardly
anything is so serious as to preclude humor. If you don't think so, then
pick up a copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus, that incredible graphic novel
about the Holocaust. Full as it is of great pity and compassion, it also
has its share of humor, much of it at the nan ator's expense. It's also a
4
good book to examine to see how Spiegelman distanced himself from

himself-in this case, with a mask of a mouse over his face. Though
he is so wry as to make himself visible to us beneath the mask. It's not
a very good mask. So there is both tenderness at his obviousness and
wryness, as well.
I think it might be a good exercise to think of yourself, to think of
your narrator, with a large dollop of self-deprecation. Not to take your-
self so seriously. Pick out a fault of yours, or a mistake. Make it obvi-
ous to the reader. Make yourself human. Omniscient, perhaps, but not
omnipotent.
A third way a writer can make us feel sympathetic toward his or her
narrator in nonfiction is with honesty, with truthfulness. This isn't about
facts. This is about nakedness. This is not about being selectively con-
fessional-and aren't all confessions selective? This is about standing

nude before the reader. To see that, you need just to turn to the work of
Jean Rhys. She is an amazing writer, she defies category, and I'm sure
she must confound critics by being so uncontritely miserable. Many of
her books are about self-degradation and humiliation, but God she can
write! This is from Good Morning, Midnight:
On the contrary, it's when I am quite sane like this, when I have a couple of extra
drinks and am quite sane, that I realize how lucky I am. Saved, rescued, fished-up,
half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set. No-
body would know I had ever been in it. Except, of course, that there always remains
something. Yes, there always remains something .... Never mind, here I am, sane and
dry, with my place to hide in. What more do I want? ... I'm a bit of an automaton, but
sane, surely-dry, cold and sane. Now I have forgotten about dark streets, dark riv-
·1:' ers, the pain, the struggle and the drowning .... Mind you, I'm not talking about the
struggle when you are strong and a good swimmer and there are willing and eager
friends on the bank waiting to pull you out at the first sign of distress. I mean the real
thing. You jump in with no willing and eager friends around, and when you sink you
sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter.
If that doesn't put a shiver down your spine, I'm not sure what will.
It also has another effect on the reader-one of deep sympathy for this
writer's bravery. I think the idea is to be less protective of yourself as
nalTator. Vivian Gornick does an admirable job of this in her memoir,
Fierce Attachments. This is not a woman who is at peace with herself,
and perhaps may not even like herself. You trust this narrator, because
she doesn't hide. I say this even in the face of the fact that Gornick has
stated that she "composed" some scenes-that is, combined several events
into one-in this book. I can disassociate this act of the writer, and its
controversy, from the narrator.
Now, let's turn to characters other than the narrator: To your characters
in your story. Character in fiction is defined, basically, in five ways: By
what a person says or thinks; by the dialogue that person has with other
characters; by what a person does; by what others say about that person;
and by the physical description of that person. There are likely more
methods, but these seem to me sufficient, at least to begin with. Here's
how Joseph Conrad shows us his Lord Jim for the first time:
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight
'I. at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under
t I~
stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his
manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive
in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as
at anybody else.
These three sentences bear scrutiny. The details are fascinating, start-
ing with the height, "an inch, perhaps two," which, in its indefiniteness,
makes it absolutely precise and indelible. Moreover, there is, in the
physical description, a foreshadowing of what we will come to know.
The "deep, loud voice" has "nothing aggressive in it" and "was directed
apparently as much at himself as at anybody else." This is the man who
left hundreds of pilgrims to die on the open water and must live with that
decision inside himself for the rest of his life. The aggression is turned
inward. His deep, loud voice is meant for him.
Not many of us can write like Conrad; however, that shouldn't pre-
clude us from drawing our nonfiction characters more vividly. Conrad
is a good model for us in that effort. There's no reason at all you can't
describe your grandfather or brother or uncle with more dramatic preci-
sion by simply paying very close attention to how they walk, talk, sit,
run, eat, etc. In fact, there may even be a way to link this to an aspect of
their personality, Lord Jim-wise.
As for making a character more three dimensional by showing us how
he or she thinks, one of the classic examples of this is Dostoyevsky' s
Notes Froln Underground, perhaps the most famous rant in literature. A
passage which demonstrates the wonderfully bizarre humor of the novella
comes toward the end of Part I:
I'd feel better if I could only believe something of what I've written down here. But I
swear I can't believe a single word of it. That is, I believe it in a way, but at the same
time, I feel I'm lying like a son of a bitch.
"Then why have you written all this?" you may ask.
Well, I wish I could stick you into a mousehole for forty years or so with nothing
to do, and at the end of that time I'd like to see what kind of state you'd be in.
Too true. And what are we to believe at this point?

Of course, the master of the interior monologue was Shakespeare, but
we'll leave the Bard and his fellow dramatists alone and stay with our
writers of fiction.
In a variation on this, you can demonstrate qualities of your character
by showing your readers letters they have \-vritten. This has been done in
fiction consistently. There is an entire genre devoted to this. In nonfic-
tion, Russell Baker uses this technique ably by quoting from a series of
poignant letters from a suitor of his mother's in his book, Growing Up.
The letters were written during the Depression, and finally, at a certain
point, the writer, a man whose English is not perfect-and this makes
the letters even more touching-simply is swallowed up by the hard
times, and disappears. His letters reveal matters of the heart that even the
surest writer couldn't capture. Letters are often available to memoirists.
They can make a strong addition to a story and show us more of who
that person really is you're trying to tell us about.
Now, how about the idea of making a character stronger on the page by
showing what people say about him or her? I think of Charles Dickens' A
Christmas Carol. We all remember when the spirit of Christmas to come
takes Scrooge to a conversation between two men who are speaking about
Scrooge himself. Scrooge doesn't realize who they are talking about as
he eavesdrops, and the men say things none too kind about him. Then,
of course, he realizes they are speaking of him posthumously. What a
literary device that is! Now, you can't have your characters reveal the
future, but you can certainly record conversations that other people have
about them. An example of an entire book constructed this way is Edie:
American Girl, edited by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, which is the
story of Edie Sedgwick, an Andy Warhol girl, as told by people who knew
her. (A movie, Factory Girl, was made about her in 2006.) I don't think
Edie herself utters a word in the book. It's one of the most effective and
original American biographies ever written, and by proxy, as it were. I
think especially of people you want to write about who have recently
died. There often are others who knew them and are living, and who can
speak about them. This is what Laura Hillenbrand found out in writing
her book, Seabiscuit: An Anlerican Legend. The three main characters
in her book had passed away, but there were plenty of people who knew
,'I
them, and who had seen the great Seabiscuit race. Her greatest source,
Hillenbrand has said about her book, was living memory.
We can again tum to Conrad for an instance of drawing a character
by what other people say about him-to Heart of Darkness and the in-
famous Kurtz. As the narrator Marlow's boat edges further and further
down the Congo, we hear more and more about the fabled ivory hunter
Kurtz-and we hear that wonderful line, "The man has enlarged my
i: mind!" uttered by one of Kurtz's worshipful minions. His reputation
grows more grotesquely huge until Kurtz becomes both a god and a devil
in our minds. We know him chiefly by what others say of him, and that
makes his legend even larger and more dramatic. When we finally do
meet him, he is nothing like his legend. The jungle has made a shadow of
III'
"I ' him. This is the carefully planned shock Conrad gives us. In Apocalypse
Now, when Francis Ford Coppola actually shows us his Kurtz in the form
of Marlon Brando, I think there is a palpable letdown. He develops Kurtz
'.
,"
i"
the same way as Conrad does-by having others speak of him in great
"
and awesome detail. No living being can equal that reputation, and we
might be better off, perhaps, never meeting the man.
This technique of building a character by what others say about him
or her seems to me quite accessible to writers of any stripe. And quite
a good way to create a sense of drama. If, for example, you begin your
story with comments and anecdotes about your character told by others,
and bide your time before you actually bring this character physically
on the stage, you already have a sense of built-in drama and expecta-
tion. This was certainly the case with Harry Lime in the 1949 movie,
The Third Man. The entire film is one fine exercise in anticipation. We
hear all about Harry Lime from various characters in the movie's post-
World War II Vienna, but we don't in fact actually see him-played with
wonderfully cynical aplomb by Orson Welles-until the film is almost
two-thirds over. By then, we can hardly wait. The screenwriter, Graham
Greene, knew what he was doing.
We can know a character by what he or she does. And for that, look
to Henry Miller. As Paul Theroux wrote in an obituary about Miller, he
had one subject and that was himself. But he wrote novels, he wrote
fiction. He is narrator and main character in most of his books, if not in
all. (Even in his critical books. The poet Karl Shapiro said Miller's study
of Arthur Rimbaud, The Tilne of the Assassins, is as much about Miller
as it is about Rimbaud.) So, here you have a narrator whose actions are
doubtful to say the least. In The Rosy Crucifixion, his mistreats his wife
terribly and abandons his child. He considers his only responsibility to be
that toward his own talent. He borrows money from anyone who breathes,
fully intending never to pay it back. He glorifies himself in conversation.
After a while we get a pretty good picture of the man. The fact that some
of us still find him worthy-and I am one of them-is a measure, I think,
of other more admirable aspects of his character.
I remember how in Susan Cheever's memoir, HOlne Before Dark, she
speaks of how her famous father, the writer John Cheever, was poorly
paid by the New Yorker and yet chose to remain with the magazine, even
in lieu of a much more lucrative offer from I think it was the Saturday
Evening Post. He had a family to support, and didn't make much money,
and so the revelation of this decision carries great weight with the reader.
We learn something significant about the man by what he did.
As for dialogue revealing character, a strong example is Hemingway's
short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." This story is set in a cafe in
Spain late at night, near or even past closing time, where two waiters are
waiting on an old man to finish his drink so they can close up. But the
old man doesn't want to leave. He wants another drink. He likes the cafe,
where he feels comfortable, and can maintain a sense of dignity. Most of
the story is a dialogue between the two waiters about the old man. What
we learn, just by what the men say, is that the two waiters are very differ-
ent. One is ultimately sympathetic toward the old man, and the other is
not. Hemingway constructs the dialogue in such a way as to show us the
lack of sympathy in one waiter and the tenderness and compassion in the
other. All with conversation. So, let your nonfiction characters develop on
the page with dialogue. Their words will reveal themselves.
Nonfiction has done a much better job in terms of setting the scene, I
think. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that so much of it takes
place outside---or in houses or cabins or tents in or near the wilderness.
Think of all the splendid nature writing, and adventure writing-from
Thoreau to Muir to Dillard, from Shackleton to Saint-Exupery, where
we have fine settings of scenes. I think memoirists need pay heed here.
Setting the scene precisely and well is too often overlooked in memoir.
I'm not sure exactly why. But we-the readers-want to be grounded.
We want to know where we are. What kind of world we're in. Not only
that, it is so often the case in nonfiction that the scene itself is a kind
of character. Take the Kansas of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, for
example. Capote takes pains right at the beginning of his book to set
the scene of his multiple murders on the plains and wheat fields of the
Midwest. I think the movies of his book were influenced by this em-
phasis, as well.
Photography can help here, as well. If you look once again at the aston-
ishing photographs Walker Evans took as part of what would become Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, you will have a memorable
lesson. The people are heartbreaking, yes, and some will stay with you
until the day you die. But look at the setting, look at the scene, look at
the black and white photographs of the houses and the rooms and the
porches these people lived in. Look at their beds, at their chairs, tables,
walls. That is in many ways as heartbreaking as the people themselves.
They tell a story. There is one photograph in particular that has seared
itself into my heart. It's a simple shot of the inside wall of one of the
, i: ~
I'
sharecropper's houses. The wall is probably pine, rough-hewn, unpainted
and unvarnished. There is a small piece of wood nailed against it, leav-
ing a space where the owner has crookedly put seven or eight knives
: ;; '" and forks. This is all you need to know about how they live. Sometimes,
';:;,"
,
presenting a life indirectly is the most effective way.

Nonfiction writers should show the reader where the story takes place,
and in vivid detail. John Knowles' A Separate Peace is an example how
of one can set a scene. Here's how that novel begins,
I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer
than when I was a student there fifteen years before. It seemed more sedate than I
remembered it, more perpendicular and straight-laced, with narrower windows and
shinier woodwork, as though a coat of varnish had been put on everything for bet-
ter preservation. But, of course, fifteen years before there had been a war going on.
Perhaps the school wasn't as well kept up in those days; perhaps varnish, along with
everything else, had gone to war.
This not an especially dramatic opening; in fact, it's very calm, and
easy. What one notices, though, is the soft personification of the school.
It is "more sedate," and "straight-laced." Right away, the school is being
likened to a person, perhaps to a typical boarding school teacher, who
knows? I think the point here is that this kind of method can be applied
to any place, to any building, to any store, and so on. When I spoke to
some students recently about setting, I asked them to describe the build-
ing we were all in-which happened to be an old wooden church-as a
person. They were to do this in the form of a metaphor, not a simile; in
other words, the building was the person, or vice-versa. Any nonfiction
writer can employ this method in describing the house they grew up in,
or the school he or she attended. It gives more bounce to the prose. It
makes it stronger.
Let's compare this to the beginning of Guard of Honor by James
Gould Cozzens, an author best known for his book, By Love Possessed.
Guard of Honor is a fine book, and you will often see it on "Neglected
Novels" lists that are compiled every once in a while. Here is its begin-
ning and scene setting:
Through the late afternoon they flew southeast, going home to Ocanara at about two
hundred miles an hour. Inside the spic and span fuselage-the plane was a new twin-
engine advanced trainer of the type designated AT-7-this speed was not noticeable.
Though the engines steadily and powerfully vibrated and time was passing, the shining
plane seemed stationary, swaying gently and slightly oscillating, a little higher than
the stationary, dull-crimson sphere of the low sun. It hung at perpetual dead center
in an immense shallow bowl of summer haze, delicately lavender. The bottom of the
bowl, six thousand feet below, was colored a soft olive brown; a blending, hardly
distinguishable, of the wide, swampy river courses, the overgrown hammocks, the
rolling, heat-shaken savannas, the dry, trackless, palmetto flatlands that make up so
much of the rank but poor champaign of lower Alabama and northwestern Florida.
Within the last few minutes, far off and too gradually to break the illusion of standing
still, the dim, irregular edge of an enormous, flat, metallic-gray splotch had begin to
appear. It was the Gulf of Mexico.
Aside from the extended alliteration, most of it with "s's," and quite
surprisingly successful, one can find in this long paragraph some good
ideas for setting the scene. Now, granted, the scene is being painted from
a perspective far above, but just look at the wonderful "enormous, fiat,
metallic-gray splotch" that is the Gulf of Mexico. A splotch! The idea
that you can transform an enormous body of water into a mere splotch
is not just an act of creativity, but a leap of faith. You have to be more
than simply creative, you have to be bold. You have to trust yourself.
Somewhere inside, you are telling yourself, well, it looks like a splotch,
like some ink I spilt. Perhaps another part of you is saying, don't be ab-
surd, this is a gigantic body of water, you can't call it a splotch. Cozzens
listened to the right voice, and we, his readers, benefit from his courage.
Let this be a lesson for our nonfiction.
Now we come to drama.
We writers all want it. We all need it. We want our readers to be thrilled,
excited, moved, and, most of all, not bored. In creative nonfiction, we
need drama at least as much as in fiction. That's because, to return to
the opening premise of this chapter, the subject matters for nonfiction,
and especially memoir, are inherently dramatic-dying of cancer, being
molested, falling off a mountain-but the writer may too often decide
the fact these things actually happened is sufficient drama in itself. That
can be a fatal mistake. The question is how can we take these events
and produce a drama that extends far beyond ourselves to the rest of the
';
unknown world.
Drama comes in all shapes and sizes. I believe drama is best produced
"'I
quietly, rather than by shouting or by weeping and wailing. It often takes
a while to produce. There is a memorable example in a Sherwood Ander-
son short story, "Adventure," from Winesburg, Ohio. The main character,
Alice Hindman, makes love with a young man one reckless evening, only
to have him leave for Chicago to seek his fortune. He promises to return,
or to send for her, and then they will be married. But he never does. Still,
"
",
'1
: she keeps waiting through the years. Her behavior becomes more and
,
,!
"
,I
more erratic. Finally, one stormy evening, "a strange desire took pos-
session of her," and she undresses and runs naked out of the house into
the rain. A drunken old man wandering by sees her:
, ,I
I
",:
Alice dropped to the ground and lay trembling. She was so frightened at the thought
., : ,',
I
of what she had done that when the man had gone on his way she did not dare get
'I " to her feet, but crawled on hands and knees through the grass to the house. When
",
she got to her own room she bolted the door and drew her dressing table across the
doorway. Her body shook as with a chill and her hands trembled so that she had dif-
ficulty getting into her night-dress. When she got into bed she buried her face in the
pillow and wept brokenheartedly. "What is the matter with me? I will do something
dreadful if I am not careful," she thought, and turning her face to the wall, began
trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die
alone, even in Winesburg.
That last sentence! It explodes with drama, quietly on the page, but
hugely in our hearts, because of all the dashed hopes and delusions that
have preceded it, step by quiet step. Anderson is a master at telling a
story simply and surely.
The opening line of your story can have as much drama as the last
line. I don't mean to suggest that every story you write need have a
dramatic opening line and ending line, but, well, that wouldn't be bad,
either. Your first line should, though, capture the reader's attention and
force him or her to read onward. This can be accomplished by making
it a kind of ultra-condensed piece of information. Take the beginning of
Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat:" "None of them knew the color of
the sky." We understand, from the title of the story, that there is an open
boat. We infer the said open boat is on the sea, or on some large body
of water. We also infer there are people in it. So, when we are given the
information that none of them knew the color of the sky, we also infer,
and rightly, because the sentence is so precisely constructed, that they
are too weary to raise their heads to determine the color of the sky. So,
ultimately, we conclude that they have been in this open boat for a long
time, which is exactly what Crane wants us to conclude. All done with
a mere nine words.
One more example of the calm before the storm-again, from In Cold
Blood. At one point Truman Capote is relating the killer Perry Smith's
account of the Clutter family murder. Smith is calmly and evenly talking
about Herb Clutter, the father. Up to thus point, we know Smith is the
killer, but he's never admitted it. Then, he says, simply, "I didn't want
to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken.
I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat." Nothing else, no
exclamation marks. No, "Oh my God's!" from Capote. Just that-naked
for us to see. Then on to the next paragraph. This seems to me a perfect
example of how to convey something horrible (or sad, tragic, miserable)
to the reader-calmly and clearly, without editorializing.
Creating drama, then, is often a case of letting the act speak for
itself.
Of course, if you do have something really dramatic to reveal, some-
times the best way to reveal it is with a big, fat splash. In Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's The Hound o/the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes is being told the
details of the death of Sir Charles Baskerville by his friend and doctor,
James Mortimer. This is how Conan Doyle ends Chapter II:
'''But one false statement was made by Barrymore [the butler] at the inquest. He said
that there were no traces upon the ground round the body. He did not observe any.
But I did-some little distance off, but fresh and clear.'
"'Footprints ?'
" 'Footprints.'
'''A man or woman's?'
"Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to a
whisper as he answered:
"'Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!'"
Some things you don't want to leave to the imagination. You don't
want to whisper them. There is absolutely nothing wrong about being
emphatic when you need to be. Notice, though, how that scene, that
entire chapter, builds up to this dramatic revelation, and how it leaves
us hanging, almost falling in anticipation. There is no reason why you
cannot think specifically of drama when writing nonfiction in the way a
fiction writer does, by creating a sense of surprise for the reader, either
softly or lOUdly. This is far more effective than just spilling the events
on the page.
The fact that your story is true is a powerful weapon to have on your
··1
side. The idea, though, is not to take the writing of it for granted. And
for that lesson, there is no better place to tum than to the world of fiction.
The very best creative nonfiction writers always have, and you feel that
• I.
world reverberate through their stories like a bell .
,·1
7
Finding a Great Title
The real beginning of your book-or essay, poem, story-is its title.
Think about it. The title is the first word or set of words the reader reads.
This isn't just a linguistic trick, it's an important distinction. Someone is
browsing in a bookstore. What do they see? The cover, of course. They
see an illustration or a photograph-and then: the title. This is where
they actually begin to read your words. The same is true with someone
thumbing through a magazine, or an anthology. They come to a story,
or to an essay. The first words they read are those in the title. If your
title is arresting, it can get them to open the book and to read on. If it
isn't, it can lose them, right then and there.
Nance Van Winckel, in her absorbing and meticulously researched
essay, "Staking the Claim of the Title," says, "We can't exactly 'read' the
title at the outset-i.e. get a sense of its meaning or relevance-because
it doesn't yet have enough context to allow for that. So we glance at the
title, perhaps muse a split second, then store it away." I see her point,
especially when she's referring to titles whose meaning is obscure until
you have read the text. (Jude the Obscure, for example.) However, I
think this is much more the case with poetry-the main focus of Van
Winckel's essay-than with creative nonfiction or fiction. Writers of
creative nonfiction, for example, are much more likely to affix a revela-
tory subtitle to their titles.
If you take a title like The Perfect Stornl: A True Story of Men Against
The Sea, it's true that you do not know from just those words that it's a
book about swordfishing and men who go down in a swordfishing boat.
However, you certainly do know that it will be about one hell of a storm,
that it's a true story, and that some sort of big struggle is involved. More
than that, though, you already have an idea of the writer's sty le-concen-
trated, yet lyrical; simple, easy to comprehend, strong-and his sense of
irony. In other words, of what kind of guide and companion you'll have
the next few hundred pages. You have begun reading.
77
From a practical point of view, too, the title is the way your book, or
story, is remembered. It's the way the book is spoken about in conversa-
tion. It's the way your book is ordered in a bookstore, and, hopefully,
re-ordered-and, if you're lucky, nominated for prizes. It should be
memorable, don't you think, if you want people to remember it? Sounds
simple, but there are many titles that just aren't that memorable. Does
anyone doubt that the title Moby-Dick has been a powerful asset in as-
suring eternal life for Melville's masterpiece? Short, simple, exotic, and
strong, this title of a mere two words and three syllables has become
nearly ineradicable from our memories.
And tell me, wouldn't you find it hard to resist opening the covers of
these books-which is, of course, the point:
Girl, Interrupted; Autobiography of a Face; The Killer Inside Me;
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Sex, Faith, Mystery; Dry Guillotine;
Sailing Alone Around The World; They Shoot Horses, Don't They?; The
Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes; Carol InA Thousand Cities; Coffee Will
Make You Black; Last Exit To Brooklyn; The True Story of a Drunken
Woman; Beautiful Swimnlers, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women; and
an all-time favorite, She.
Has anybody read She? "She who must be obeyed!" The book is by
H. Rider Haggard, who also wrote a more famous book-King Solomon's
Mines. Imagine the brash inspiration to title your book just-SHE.
(Henry Miller loved Rider Haggard, by the way.) Now you tell me. Is
that not good? And if it is, why is it?
A lot of writers don't take their titles as seriously as they should.
Yes, many do, but I can tell you from experience teaching writing at an
MFA in writing program, many do not. They will go with the first title
that comes to mind. Or, with the second. They don't devote the time
and effort required to produce a good title, because, I think, they don't
see it as crucial. Further, their thought process behind selecting a title
is often haphazard, or disorganized. It's not focused. It's not directed.
They don't have a strategy, or a sense of purpose. This seems to me one
of the biggest problems. That is, writers don't establish a set of goals
for finding their title. The fact is, the title should represent the heart and
soul of your book, story, or essay. Finding it isn't always easy, but it's
well worth it.
"',i
The tradition of giving of titles in Western literature really came into

its own with the novel. Titles existed before that, certainly, but it really
wasn't until the novel emerged that titles took on a major importance
of their own. For discussion's sake, let's say that tradition begins with
.' II
Finding a Great Title 79
Don Quixote. You'll find disagreement here, but the novel as we know
it wasn't around in a significant way before Cervantes took up his pen.
(I'm referring to Western Literature, so this would exclude the much
earlier Tale of Genji from Japan.) In any case, it is what comes after
that that we need to examine. And examine we should. Tradition is the
foundation upon which we build our own originality.
The novels that followed, the ones we know so well and have read
and enjoyed, drew their titles from three basic sources.
One, the authors named their books after their main characters. In
this category, we have many familiar books: David Copperfield; Tom
Jones; Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders; Jane Eyre; Henry Esmond;
Oliver Twist; Silas Marner; Huckleberry Finn; Tonl Sawyer; and so on.
It continued into the twentieth century with books such as Martin Eden
by Jack London; Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser;
Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather; and, as recently as 1963, John O'Hara's
Elizabeth Appleton. Oddly, this major tradition has largely disappeared
from contemporary fiction. I wonder why? Couldn't The Catcher in the
Rye have been titled Holden Caulfield? Couldn't Light in August have
been called Joe Christmas? If not, why not?
I don't think anyone would have a problem naming three or four
novels from the eighteenth or nineteenth century that are named after
their main characters. Can you name three or four others from the
twentieth century-particularly after 1950-or the twenty-first? Of
the top of my head, I can think of only a few: Kate Vaiden by Reynolds
Price; Elizabeth Costello by J .M. Coetzee; I Am Charlotte Sinunons by
Tom Wolfe; and, recently, Roddy Doyle-who gave us the irresistibly
titled Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha-published a novel titled Paula Spencer.
Maybe this will signal a comeback for the eponymous novel. I suppose
we can include Franny & Zooey as first names and Mr. Bridge and Mrs.
Bridge, as last.
This tradition, by the way, obviously extends to other countries and
languages. Think of Anna Karenina; Nana; Eugenie Grandet; Therese
Raquin; and lv/adanle Bovary.
There are subcategories within this first general category that actually
have very strong traditions, as well. Or maybe they might be better called
different species within the same genus. In any case, there is a tradition
of naming books after places. Think of Wuthering Heights; Barchester
Towers; and, easing nicely into the twentieth century, Winesburg, Ohio;
Tobacco Road; Cannery Row; and the once-infamous Peyton Place.
There are books named after songs, namely, The Grapes of Wrath and
Bright Lights, Big City. There are books and stories named after weather
systems, "Rain;" Typhoon; and The Perfect Storm. Death has inspired
quite a few authors, and undoubtedly will continue to do so: Death
Comes for the Archbishop; Death of a Salesm.an; Death of a Hornet;
"The Death of the Moth;" Death in Venice; and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Phone numbers have even been called upon: Butterfield 8 and Dial M
for Murder. You could take this down some mighty strange roads. But
the point is that authors will-and should-do anything and everything
to find the best title for their book. And if it's lurking on your telephone
receiver, so be it.
The second major category for naming novels is naming them with
quotations from other, outside sources. The two deepest wells from
which authors have drawn are the Bible and Shakespeare. But it's not
limited to just them.
The Bible has supplied, and continues to supply, authors with great
material for book titles. Think of The Sun Also Rises; East ofEden; Lilies
of the Field; Vile Bodies; and two plays, The Little Foxes and Inherit the
Wind. Shakespeare has provided authors with a treasure trove of mate-
rial. The Sound and the Fury is probably the most famous Shakespeare-
inspired title. We have The Dogs of War; Pale Fire; Brave New World;
The Winter of Our Discontent; Ape and Essence; The Bubble Reputation;
and, in the 1940s, To Be or Not to Be, which was a movie, and a comedy
at that. John Updike titled a story of his, "I am Dying, Egypt," which is
from Anthony and Cleopatra. Let's not forget Remembrance of Things
Past. But, wait, that's not even a correct translation of Proust's title, A
la recherche du temps perdu. I guess it's actually the translator's--C.
, h
. 1', K. Scott Moncrieff's-title by way of Shakespeare .
Writers have drawn on other literary sources, of course. Fitzgerald
got Tender is the Night from Keats. Think of For Whom the Bell Tolls, for
example, which Hemingway took from John Donne. William Styron's
Darkness Visible from Milton and Lie Down in Darkness from Thomas
. 'i Browne. (Styron has a darkness theme going here.) J.D. Salinger went
to Sappho, the Greek poet, for Raise High the Roojbeam, Carpenters.
John O'Hara lifted A Rage to Live from Pope. Evelyn Waugh found A
Handful of Dust in T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."
The third major tradition, and the one we are now within more so
than any of the others, is titles made up by the author-original titles
:,
I , '. , that come from no place else other than the writer's mind. The title
,.r·
may be something uniquely used on the cover-and not within the
I,
main text of the book. Or the author may draw from his or her own
words and slap them on the cover. Again, think of Salinger's The
Catcher in the Rye.
The state of titles today? Decide for yourself. How many titles can
you roll off the tip of your tongue, titles that have stayed with you? I
think of a few favorites: Me Talk Pretty One Day; A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius; Disgrace; and The Hunlan Stain.
Now, here is the New York Tinles fiction bestseller list for the week of
September 10, 2007, beginning at the top: A Thousand Splendid Suns;
The Wheel of Darkness; Dark Possession, The Elves of Cintra; Play
Dirty; The Quickie; Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade; Away;
Sweet Revenge; Power Play; The Sanctuary; Loving Frank; Sandworms
of Dune; and The Secret Servant.
Which of these titles, do you think, will be immortal? If so, why? If
not, why not?
Now, you may say, I'm not interested in those first two traditions.
They belong to the past. I'm not going to take the nineteenth-century
route and name my book after a person. How quaint! And I say-why
not? Why shouldn't you title your book with the name of your main
character? You forget that no one knew who David Copperfield was
when Dickens put the name on the cover. It was someone's name-a
character's name-that's all. Say you had a book titled Steve Stannerson.
I just made it up. Not very good, I know. But the first thing I would ask
myself when I see this on a book cover is who the heck is Steve Stan-
nerson? Maybe I'll open the book and find out.
Then your title has done its job-or at least part of its job. I think it's
patently clear that Reynolds Price was drawing upon that older tradition
when he titled his book Kate Vaiden. By doing so, he immediately gave
his book an aura of a journey and of a large struggle, both of which
were normally attached to fat, eponymous novels of the past. And why
shouldn't you search for a title from the Bible or from Shakespeare's
works? I know that if I ever wrote a book, or an essay, on suicide, my
title would be: The Undiscovered Country. Those are words spoken by
the most fanlous near-suicide in history, Hamlet, and I don't think I could
do any better on my own.
What makes a good title, then? I think for a title to be good it has to
fulfill two main tasks. First, it has to be memorable. Easier said than
done. Second, it has to be true to the essence, to the soul, of the book.
A title can't possibly capture every emotion or action in a book, but it
should, I think, at least represent some main artery, pUlsing with blood,
that flows through the book. If it doesn't, it's a kind of betrayal.
Here, I disagree with Nance Van Winckel. About what the title should
be, she writes, "Although few creative writing textbooks offer aspiring
writers much advice on titles, one I perused suggested that a poet try to
find a title which would sum up what the poem was about. Please con-
sider that a giant X has been drawn through this last sentence. I would
rather aspiring writers get no advice at all on titles than this advice!"
However, you can't escape this, nor should you. In fact, in the very next
paragraph, Van Winckel writes about her own search, "During the time
1'm on the hunt for the perfect title, I know certain operations are tak-
ing place. I am mulling over-and often on a subconscious rather than
conscious level-what the poem or story is about. This seems to be part
of directing those antennae."
I want to make clear that the purpose of this essay is not to refute Van
Winckel's words. Her essay is absolutely wonderful, extremely learned,
diverting, and helpful, and I highly recommend it. Her writing, as I said,
is mainly about poets and poetry, though. From her, you'll get a good
taste of the titles of Wallace Stevens, who sometimes, at least from his
titles, seems more like a carnival barker or a Delphic Oracle than the
sober, erudite, philosophical poet he is. (For me, it's telling that no one
I know has ever quoted Wallace Stevens to me, as one would quote, say,
Yeats, Frost, or Eliot. The titles are quoted, yes.) Speaking of poets, this
reminds me of another of my favorite titles, Allan Ginsberg's Howl. I
can't think of a better one. Forty-five years after the poem's publication,
that one great from-the-gut title still has all its strength and unchained
energy. Where did that come from, one wonders? How fascinating it
',,! would have been to have looked over Ginsberg's shoulder as he went
through the process of naming this poem. Van Winckel also brings in
titles of paintings, which is helpful.
So, let's take She. Is it memorable? God, I would hope so. Rider
'.t'
Haggard uses a pronoun to stand for a proper noun, and uses one that
everyone has used thousands of times. This is same principle behind nam-
ing a movie Them-a real title of a real movie. She is also short-three
letters, one syllable. And it shoots out of the mouth iike a snake's forked
tongue. Does She represent one of the main great pulses in the book?
Well, once you read the book, you know that it does. All the drama, all
the force, all the strange mystery of the title is more than compensated
for in the woman who has lived for 3,000 years.
And, indeed, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women in fact is about
learned pigs and fireproof women. It's a history of carnival life through
the ages, about hoaxes and con men. The learned porker in question is the
nineteenth or eighteenth century-I forget which now-Toby, the Sapient
Pig. Toby was foisted unto the British public as a pig who could not only
think, but read and write. In fact, he wrote his autobiography, which the
author Ricky Jay quotes and I have to say is quite good, for a pig.
Let's return to The Sound and the Fury and to Macbeth. Here is the
source for Faulkner's title, spoken by Macbeth himself:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
What do you notice about the quote and the Faulkner title? They
aren't precisely the same. Faulkner added the article "the" twice where
Shakespeare does not have it. Is that ok? Sure, it's ok. Does anyone
think Faulkner is trying to deny he took the title from Shakespeare? Of
course not. He just knew, taken out of context, the words would do bet-
ter with two "the's" when it became a title, standing alone. Consider it
perfectly acceptable if you throw in an article or two to make a quotation
work for you.
Robert Frost went to this same passage for the title of his poem of a
boy being mangled by a buzzsaw, "Out, Out-".
What's also important about titles taken from quotations is that the
context be relevant to the story to which the title is affixed. The Sound
and the Fury is indeed, at least in part, "a tale told by an idiot"- he is
Benjy. East of Eden is another example. The title comes from Genesis.
It refers to Cain who, as we all know, slew his brother, Abel. Rebuked
by God, Cain "went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the
land of Nod, on the east of Eden." Steinbeck's book largely deals with
the strife between two brothers, so the title takes on a profound, primal
resonance, even majesty.
Now, as I mentioned, a trend in contemporary nonfiction titles is to
attach a subtitle to the title. (Which, by the way, nineteenth-century
novels employed regularly.) With a subtitle to straighten things out, you
can have the freedom to be a bit arty, melodramatic even, or mysteri-

ous with your title. Here are a few, with their subtitles in parenthesis:
Into Thin Air (A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster); The
Peifect Storm (A True Story of Men Against The Sea); The Gutenberg
Elegies (The Fate of Reading In An Electronic Age); Beautiful Swim-
mers (Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay); Undaunted Courage
(Meriweather Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American
West). I would bet that not many of us remember a single one of these
subtitles. If the book is good, and has a life, the subtitle eventually is
cast off in the mind. Like the discarded first stage of a rocket, it drifts
away forever, leaving just the main body of the missile. But when the
book is first published, this helps the potential reader understand what
the subject is, and makes the publisher and bookseller happy.
This is true of modern biographies, too. You don't just call a book,
The Life of Robert Moses. You call it The Power Broker. You don't say
you've written the biography of Winston Churchill. You say you've writ-
ten The Last Lion. The subtitle and the picture on the cover will make
things crystal clear, and you get to have your dramatic title. What these
two titles do is to single out a particular facet or aspect of the person
whose life has been written to create the image the biographer believes
is essential. The Last Lion. Well, in three words we know William
Manchester thinks Churchill is fearless, noble, terrifying and, in a way,
beautiful. And there will never again be anyone like him.
• I
A personal aside, if I may. I believe it's relevant to the subject at hand
and may be helpful, and that is why I'm including it here. When I was
trying to come up with a title for my own first book, I presented myself
with three main goals. I didn't think it was right, or possible, to try for
more. That, I reasoned, would simply weaken any title as it tried to satisfy
more and more requirements, like a decision made by committee. The
book is about living in a small village in the South of France and about
having a vegetable garden there. The garden helped me connect to the
villagers, and to the village, and to the land of Provence. What I told
myseif I should accomplish with my title was
1. To let people know the book was about France.

2. To give them some idea that it was about the land.
3. That the title be brief, and strong.
",1:
,I";
j,:
And, it goes without saying, I wanted it to be unforgettable.
,,'
All the while I was trying to think up a title, I tried to keep the spirit,
·t I
the soul, of my book within me, close at hand. I let that guide me. After
.. ;,1
three days of head scratching and mulling, I came up with two words:
French Dirt. To me, those two words accomplished what it was I had
set out to do. I stopped there.
My agent hated it. So did my editor. I was completely thrown off by
this. My agent even went so far as to say, "My mother hated that title,
and she's never wrong." They were so certain it was bad, that I began to
have my doubts. To appease my editor, I tried to write other titles and
showed her some I had discarded. She didn't like any of them, and neither
did L So, we temporarily dropped the matter. The title didn't have to be
decided on right away, and so all of us, gratefully, put that issue aside.
Some four months later, as the time neared for the manuscript to go to
press, I reluctantly brought the title question up again.
"Uh, what about the title?" I asked my editor.
In her singy Southern voice she said, "Oh, hell, you might as well call
it French Dirt. That's what everyone down here is calling it anyway!"
What I hadn't realized was that as the manuscript circulated amongst
the staff at my editor's office, the people who looked at it had to call
it something. Since the only name it ever had was French Dirt, that's
what they called it. I guess after a few months, it didn't sound that bad
to my editor. "You have to give me a subtitle, though!" she ordered.
"Otherwise, people will think it's an erotic novel, or some damn thing."
And that's how the book ended up being titled French Dirt: The Story
of a Garden in the South of France.
Finally, there's a whole category of titles whose main characteristic is
that they are patently, dramatically, unabashedly direct, and obvious. I
like these titles very much. They never assume literary airs. They also
are incredibly democratic; they communicate their message to every
single person on the planet, without exception. I'm referring to titles
like, How to Win Friends and Influence People; Everything You Wanted
to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask; and, in a literary vein, a
once-popular popular book used by some aspiring playwrights called
Write That Play! (Notice that exclamation mark.) What's to be learned
from these titles? The power of plain English. The power of directness.
The power of simplicity_ In a way, the titles of Emerson's essays are
the archetype for this kind of title: "History;" "Love;" "Friendship;"
"Intellect;" "Self-Reliance;" etc. We are grateful for his Yankee thrift and
no-nonsense directness. Thoreau, too, was economical within Walden,
as E. B. White noted, with chapter titles such as "Economy;" "Sounds;"
"Solitude;" and "Visitors." We might take a lesson from these writers and
reject the temptation to be artfully obscure or pyrotechnically brilliant

with our title so as not to be accused of being a simpleton.
To wit: I found a wonderful title in Michael Ondaatje's book, The
English Patient. It's mentioned in the "Acknowledgements" section,
where the author credits a book called Unexploded Bomb. The two words
handed to us in the form of a title carry with them the tension of a bomb
that hasn't been diffused yet. Notice, too, it's not "The" Unexploded
Bomb. That would make it particular to one bomb. What seems a some-
what ungraceful expression becomes an amazingly direct, memorable
title that makes you slightly nervous. The author of Unexploded Bomb
had the focus and the confidence to write exactly what the book is about
without trying to make it "literary."
So, what can you do to put some memorable words on the cover?
I think there are several things you can do. The first thing I would
strongly recommend is that you leave finding the title until after you've
finished the book. I really think it's something that should be done in
reflection, with the completed manuscript before you. That doesn't mean
you can't have a working title. But books change as they're being written.
Even if you know you're writing about the Great Fire of 1908, how can
you be sure exactly what you've said about the fire until you've finished
saying it?
Second, I would set aside a definite block of time uniquely devoted to
thinking about your title. Only work on the title, nothing else. That way,
• ;-1
you dignify the task. That way, you acknowledge its significance .
Third, I would scratch out on a piece of paper what it is you believe
'I ,I your book (or story or essay) is about, what it is you've discovered. This
can be in the form of a paragraph or several sentences. Then, from there,
it will be easier to distill, to boil it down to its essence.
Fourth, I wouldn't settle on the first, second or third title you come up
with. Work at it. Revise. Put your efforts away for a day. Then look to
see which of your efforts are, as Ezra Pound characterized art, "news that
stays news." Remember, once it's on the cover, you can't take it off.
I:
'I
,I
Fifth, be bold. Be dramatic. You may not have spent time in a mental
hospital and so can't come up with Girl, Interrupted. But that shouldn't
stop you from writing a great title. You've got your main characters.
You've got Shakespeare. The Bible. Milton. John Donne. You've got
I '
your own imagination. That's a powerful arsenal.
; '01
I',
8
The Eminent Domain of Punctuation
"There are some punctuations that are interesting and there are some punctuations
that are not."
-Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America
"Are you kidding?!?"

This line, which I still find incredibly funny, is from Terry Southern's
masterpiece, The Magic Christian. It's a wonderfully, joyfully, politi-
cally incorrect book. Thank God, Southern wrote his stuff before the
"Commissars"-as Alan Cheuse calls them-could get to him with
their pitchforks. Southern was a master, perhaps our greatest master, of
the multiple exclamation mark and multiple question mark, as well as
of italics. In fact, he was a black belt in punctuation, period, as it is used
as a writing weapon. Others in this league are Mark Twain-well, he
stands alone-and J.D. Salinger, and now David Sedaris-writers who
use punctuation for more than its mere utilitarian purposes. They use it as
one of the arrows in their writing arsenal, like nouns, verbs, adjectives.
Punctuation, while not precisely a major subject in the arena of writ-
ing' is, I think, a highly under-discussed and under-examined subject.
(Well, perhaps used to be, what with Eats, Shoots & Leaves.) Especially
with regard to how it can contribute to the style and content of a work. It
is a wonderfully agile and resourceful tool, and goes far beyond simple
grammar. And so, without further ado, here they are:
The question mark ?

The exclamation mark
The period
The comma
The semicolon
Quotation marks ""

Parentheses ()
Ellipses
The dash
The hyphen
Brackets []
And assorted minor players ....

Each of these marks or symbols has its own personality, its own
character. As Rimbaud spoke of the vowels in his poem of the same
name, Voyelles, I think you could try to, as he said of them, "tell your
latent birth." In fact, some poets have tried, notably Maurya Simon in
her book, A Brief History of Punctuation. This is an excerpt, about the
question mark:
I. The Creation of the Question Mark

It grew slowly, atom by atom, curving
its serpentine line around a doubt.
For eons it hung suspended in the air,
like a shepherd's crook, an ebony cane
a blind woman hung out at midnight
'·1 on an invisible clothesline.
It did not form itself from Adam's mouth,
it did not sprout as a kinky white hair
from Gilgamesh's never-trimmed beard,
it did not electrify loose ganglia
into synaptic fright in God's mind,
nor curdle the earthworm, nor shape
the sickle that mows down everything.
Like a lily, it roused itself to life,
unfurling into reason's limbo quietly,
and it left in its wake a single teardrop,
a tiny pin-prick of dew, a dab of salt
for the air minions to lick eternally-
'I
that minute mirror begetting wonder.
, ;-,'
1
• I .
We'll return to poetry and to writing about punctuation.

Punctuation, that spine of grammar, is drilled into us as relentlessly
:~ :
and as frequently as the parental, "Stand up straight!" During the first

years when we begin writing, we forget periods; commas are a mystery;
The Eminent Domain of Punctuation 89
and quotations marks are another galaxy, far, far away. The whole idea
of punctuation is odd, when you think about it. That's because we learn
language by speaking. Nobody taught us to say "period" at the end of a
sentence. We just stopped. In other words, it's not natural to have these
signs imposed upon us. It's a code we have to learn, and the learning of
it takes time. Some of us never quite do learn it.
To hear what it would sound like to be taught punctuation by sound,
we only have to turn to some old Hollywood movies. In the 1940s and
50s, when female assistants were still called secretaries and when they
took dictation, it's not so unusual to corne upon a scene in which a boss,
in a boxy brown suit with his moustache and brilliantined hair, is dictat-
ing a letter. His body language says, "I'm important," and the secretary
carefully notes his every word as if he were Lincoln. He might go on
something like this:
Dear Mr. Andrews comma. It is my sad duty to inform you that your client comma
Mrs. J period Grenville Harthwell comma is dead full stop Here is a list of her effects
colon Two sets of ivory chopsticks semi colon one silver trophy for second place in
the Pinecrest Garden Club annual tulip extravaganza cOl1una hybrids semicolon one
lottery ticket for the Irish Sweepstakes semicolon and one quotation mark Win With
Wilkie close quotation mark presidential pinjul/ stop Yours very sincerely comma R
period Ripley Fansworth comma Esquire full stop
But we are not taught this way. The fact is, punctuation is order imposed
upon the chaos of the written word. There are established rules--obvi-
ously, or it couldn't be taught with any certainty-but it is not an exact
science. Not everyone agrees with how or when a comma should be
employed, for example. This is why publishing companies have their
own style books. It's also why there are three or four major, big-selling
and often contradictory Manuals of Style-Chicago, MLA, AP, etc.
Grammar, and specifically punctuation, like any other subject we learn
as a student, can seem unfair.
Poets often bend, twist, and cavort with punctuation in ways a prose
writer simply couldn't. e. e. cummings comes to mind. (See how, even
with his name, he makes a fool of capitalization?) cummings left periods
and commas, and especially parentheses, floating in white space all by
themselves, or itself, the effect of which is to slow you, the reader, down
considerably, if not to a full stop. It also makes you see said punctuation
mark as being as important as any of the words that dangle in air. Here's
a brief example:
l(a
Ie
af
fa
11
s)
one
I
Iness
The champion of champions of the dash is Emily Dickinson:
'Twas love-not me-

Oh punish-pray-
The Real one died for Thee-
Just Him-not me-
But poets have their own rules, and they are not always the rules of
prose writers. So, with some reluctance, we must leave them now. In
prose, the all-time dash champion has to be Laurence Sterne, the eigh-
teenth-century English novelist who wrote Tristram Shandy. He employs
the dash, or what might be called the superdash, almost as bizarrely as
Louis-Ferdinand Celine does ellipses in his later works.
Like Miss Stein, I have my favorite punctuations and my not so fa-
vorites. But it's more a matter, I think, of trying to understand how these
marks are employed and determining how they can be used in creative
ways. These symbols are nearly hieroglyphic. The question mark? cer-
tainly would fit very neatly into any Egyptian hieroglyphic panel. (In
fact, it's not too far from the hieroglyphic symbol for "u.") Brackets [ ]
would, too. Where did these symbols come from? They seem so assured,
, 't so right for what they do. It almost seems as if they sprung full blown
from the punctuational womb, or from Zeus' head, or thigh.
I",
, I The question mark. Reading a sentence for the first time, sight read-
ing, as it were, before you know it's a question, can cause you, once
you see the familiar mark at the end, to intone upward to indicate the
interrogative? (That's a trick, to prove a point.) Gertrude Stein would
disagree with that. She said, "It is evident that if you ask a question you
ask a question but anybody who can read at all knows when a question
is a question as it is written in writing. Therefore I ask you therefore
wherefore should one use it the question mark." Of course, she cheats
by beginning that second sentence, the fulcrum of her argument, with, "I
ask you." I think the point is that quite a few other writers have deemed
it necessary to employ the question mark, and it doesn't seem to have
caused mass confusion.
In Spanish, they take no chances. When a sentence is a question, the
Spanish tell you right from the beginning, placing a question mark, upside
down (not to compete with its concluding partner) right at the start. So,
"How are you?" in Spanish would be: "~Como esta usted?" No confu-
sion there. They do the same thing with an exclamation. "I love you!"
would be: "iTe amo!" I have no idea how that got started, or if other
languages do anything like that. I remember learning Spanish as a kid
and thinking, How strange.
Referring back to the Terry Southern example, you can see how the
question mark, or multiple question marks, can make you laugh. It's per-
haps odd and maybe impossible to analyze, but in some cases the more
question marks you add, the funnier the idea is. Beginning with one,
Late?
Then two,
Late??
Then three,
Late???
I have no idea why two is funnier than one and three even funnier.
Southern uses multiple questions mark, sometimes separated by an
exclamation mark, throughout The Magic Christian. He learned from
a master, William Burroughs, one of the very few writers who made
him laugh. They worked together at one point to try to turn Burroughs'
most celebrated book, Naked Lunch, into a screenplay. (The book was
later made into a movie, but not using the Southern/Burroughs script.)
So, Southern knew Burroughs'-or, as some style books would have it,
Burroughs's-work well. And what he saw in Naked Lunch was italics
(another Southern favorite), ellipses and multiple question marks and
multiple exclamation marks used to great comedic effect. At one point,
Doctor Schafer, "the Lobotomy Kid," one of Burroughs' many mad
doctors, feels betrayed,
Schafer wrings his hands sobbing: "Clarence!! How can you do this to me?? Ingrates!!
Everyone of them ingrates! !"
The Conferents start back muttering in dismay:
"I'm afraid Schafer has gone a bit too far ...."
"Brilliant chap Schafer ... but. .. "
"Man will do anything for pUblicity ...."
The exclamation mark has great potential for comedic effect, as you
can see. No one knows this better than David Sedaris. He takes it to the
limit in his story, "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!"
This is from his book, Holidays on Ice. It's in the form of one of those
Christmas letters we all have gotten from a family, usually written by
the mother, summing up what went on in the Jones (or whatever) family
this past year. In this case, it's the Dunbar family, and a lot has gone on.
This is how it begins,
Many of you, our friends and family, are probably taken aback by this, our annual
holiday newsletter. You've read of our recent tragedy in the newspapers and were no
doubt thinking that, what with all their sudden legal woes and "hassles," the Dunbar
clan might just stick their heads in the sand and avoid this upcoming holiday season
altogether! !
You're saying, "There's no way the Dunbar family can grieve their terrible loss
and carryon the traditions of the season. No family is that strong," you're thinking
to yourselves.
Well, think again!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, twelve exclamation marks. And I have a feeling Sedaris played

around with this before coming up with the number that would reveal this
woman's character the best and set the stage for this bizarre story. More
exclamation marks to follow in this story, I assure you. Sedaris also makes
hay with question marks in this essay in the great Burroughs/Southern
tradition. The letter tells the story of a hysterically perky housewife who
finds herself host to her husband's daughter, Khe Sahn, the product of
a liaison during his stint in Vietnam years ago and unbeknownst to all
until now. The whole essay is a delight of over-emphasis. As the coiled
Mrs. Dunbar writes in her letter,
"Out of nowhere this land mine knocks upon our door and we are expected to recog-
nize her as our child! !!!????????"
There are funny exclamation marks and funny questions marks

throughout.
I'm pretty certain that Nick Hornby read The Magic Christian, because
he acts very Terry Southern-like at one point in his book about reading,
Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, published in 2006. He's writing about Bob
Dylan's book, Chronicles, telling us that when he heard Dylan was pub-
lishing a book about his life, he "found it hard to imagine what it would
look like. Would it have a corny title-My Back Pages, say, or Times,
They Have A-Changed? Would it have photos with captions written by
the author? You know the sort of thing: 'The eyeliner years. What was
that all about?! !?'"
Yes, punctuation is funny.
Let it be stated here, in its own paragraph, that Tom Wolfe has received
the Lifetime Achievement Award for the Creative Use of Italics, Dashes
and Assorted Original Uses of Punctuation to help create his singular
style.
You could write pages about the comma and about the period. But first
I want to talk a bit about brackets. [ ] I love brackets. I love them on the
one hand because of their shape. For some reason, speaking of marks
that indicate some sort of an aside, I'm more attracted to this shape than
to the shape of the parenthesis ( ). (By the way, one of the most original
and effecting uses of parentheses is, I think, in the form a book title: In
Parenthesis by David 10nes, which is an account of his time as a soldier
in World War I. A life in parenthesis.) I doubt I can explain why, and I'm
sure it's utterly personal. I like them more because they formally allow
personal interventions. Parentheses do, too, but I feel with brackets I'm
more comfortably able to make a comment on the goings on in the es-
say-much like someone commenting on a film to a partner in a theater,
supplying a piece of information without which the friend would miss
something that, while not necessarily critical, would certainly mean he
or she would go without a small, delicious pleasure.
Samuel 10hnson had negative feelings about parentheses, and they
revolved around the matter of clarity. He felt they were interruptive.
"1 ohnson' s attention to precision and clearness in expression was very
remarkable," Boswell writes. "He disapproved of a parenthesis; and I
believe in all his voluminous writings, not half a dozen of them will be
found." I have twice that many in this essay alone. So much for clarity.
rill not a big fan of the semicolon. I think of it as the hermaphrodite of
punctuation. It's both a period and a comma, with neither the personality
nor the passion of either. It even looks like a hermaphrodite, with both
organs, as it were. And when it is used, it generally has a tentativeness
to it that seems to me to indicate it doesn't know which part of itself to
emphasize. So often a period, or a comma, would be better to use than
a semicolon. I think one of its only consistently legitimate uses is in a
series of lists in which commas and conjunctions are seriously involved.

There, they can save the reader from confusion. Otherwise, I leave it in
storage.
But now we come to the big boys. As Gertrude Stein put it,
So now to come to the real question of punctuation, periods, commas, colons,
semi-colons and capitals and small letters.
I have had a long and complicated life with all these.
As indeed anyone who has tried to be a writer has, too.

Stein's entire essay is fascinating and worth reading. She has thought
about punctuation profoundly, albeit from her own particular vision,
and this vision she sees as the vision. Here's what she has to say about
the period:
When I first began writing, I felt that writing should go on, I still do feel that it should
go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that
writing should go on and if writing should go on what had colons and semi-colons
to do with it, what had commas to do with it, what had periods to do with it.. .. In-
evitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on, physically one had
to again and again stop sometiIne and if one had to again and again stop some time
then periods had to exist.
Gertrude Stein may have come around about periods-"Beside[ sic]

I had always liked the look of periods and I liked what they did."-but
she never did about commas. She didn't like them. She said that "com-
mas are servile and they have no life of their own, and their use is not a
use, it is a way of replacing one's own interest. ... A comma by helping
you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps
you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for
many years ... the use of them was positively degrading."
Did you know that punctuation could be so personal?
Indeed, it seems to be. Paul Robinson, a professor at Stanford Univer-
sity, published a highly opinionated essay in the New Republic twenty-five
years ago titled, "The Philosophy of Punctuation." It begins winningly,
"Punctuation absorbs more of my thought than seems healthy for a man
who pretends to be well adjusted." Robinson states categoricaliy that the
period and the comma "are the only lovely marks of punctuation ... be-
• i
cause they are simple." Well, he also readily confesses to being "anal,"
as he puts it, so perhaps "neat" might be a more appropriate word than
"simple" to describe the comma and the period. In any case, I don't agree
with his aesthetics. I think the question mark is lovely, although I think
it also possesses other qualities as well. It embodies gracefully three dis-
,,1 1
parate typographical elements: the circle- in this case, half a circle-the

straight line, and the period. I love its shape. Robinson admits he keeps
a "neat house," and so perhaps the question mark seems unlovely to
him because it's not neat. It's open-ended, incomplete, unfinished. And
curvy. (Robinson might be pleased to read that Gertrude Stein said of
exclamation marks, "They are ugly.") But this is all a matter of opinion,
and I find it somewhat amazing that r m writing about the loveliness of
punctuation in the first place.
I enjoyed reading Robinson's essay-which is mainly a cry for the
proper use of punctuation, and what he deems that to be-because he
cares. He has strong, sincere feelings about, and for, punctuation. He
understands each of these symbols has a character. (I see he's not a
fan of the semicolon, either.) But when he says, "Good punctuation,
we feel, makes for clean thought," I pause. I think it's the other way
around. That seems to me the more interesting statement. And I fer-
vently disagree with him on "the use of italics for emphasis," as he
describes it. He says, "Italics rarely fail to insult the reader's intelli-
gence. More often than not they tell us to emphasize a word or phrase
that we would emphasize automatically in any natural reading of the
sentence." This is definitely not true in comedy. Look at J.D. Salinger.
Here's a bit from The Catcher in the Rye. Holden is talking to a girl
named Sally and proposes that they run away together. She declines,
and offers this logic, "'In the first place, we're both practically children.
And did you ever stop to think what you'd do if you didn't get a job
when your money ran out. We'd starve to death. The whole thing's so
Ian t astlc
~ . .... ,,,
Look at Terry Southern. ("Are you kidding?!?")
Look at Mark Twain! The grandfather of all American writers, as
Faulkner declared. His use of punctuation is probably, overall, the most
masterful of any American writer who has ever lived. You could go to
school on his use of the comma alone, for example. But we are talking
of italics. One small example from Huckleberry Finn. The king and the
duke have just given one of their theatrical salads to a group of towns-
people who live along the Mississippi. It appears the performance was
too brief:
"Twenty people sings out:
"'What, is it over? Is that all?'"
In the case of comedy, the reader would often most definitely not
emphasize the italicized words naturally.
Actually, I believe you have to have a sense of humor when you write
about punctuation. It's an inherently funny subject. Just look at the title
of this essay. How in God's name did a series of punctuation marks,
more or less randomly put down, come to mean swearing? I do have
concern about the right use of punctuation, but I'm far more interested
in the way certain writers use punctuation creatively. In how they use it
as part of their writing arsenal.
James Joyce-who has probably been dragged into more literary
brawls than he would care to recall-made what may be the most
memorable use of the period in the history of the English language-by
eliminating it. This occurs at the end of Finnegans Wake. (By the way,
Joyce scholars, why no apostrophe in "Finnegans"?) These are the last
lines of the book: "Take. B ussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee.
Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the" Yes, there
is no period. Which leads us right back to the start of the book: "long
the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle
and Environs." So, it's Finnegan beginagain. Which means, I suppose,
that you' 11 be reading this book forever.
So expectant are we, so accustomed to the presence of the period that
its absence is almost, or was almost, inconceivable. You end a sentence,
you place a period. You end a book, you clearly place a period after the
last sentence. Not Joyce.
A period is not just "simple" as Robinson describes it. It's also strong,
undeniable. I love its simplicity, but r m in awe of its strength. Its force.
You can't deny a period. You can't rebel, or overthrow its authority. Try.
Try. Try. See? You can't. The period is It. Who. Must. Be. Obeyed. Noth-
ing comes close to having that Authority in punctuation. Not the comma,
which, if you like, eventually, as these things go, can, by its repetition
and, apparent unstinting use, be ignored, or at least overridden, or have
its authority diminished. Attempt to diminish the authority of the period.
Good luck. Even the question mark hasn't that same authority. What do
I mean? I mean, even a question 111ark can be disobeyed. It says to you:
raise your eyebrows at the end of the sentence. And you reply, Maybe I
,/i will, maybe I won't. Or maybe not as high as you would like. A period
"
"
says, Stop. And you stop.
"
'"
"
Not only that, but the period plays a major role in the creation of a
sentence for writers. That is, in deciding how a sentence will look, and
,I
what it will say. With the period, you know you will have made a complete
,i
I :,1:
'It'
sentence, you will have a clear, definitive, unmistakable end. I hate Jim.
Think of that without a period. I hate Jim It's a floating entity. I mean
to say that a writer forming a thought will think of that thought in terms
of a sentence-that is, in terms of a unit with a definitive beginning and
end, and so part of his or her creative process, creative deliberation, is
based on that simple fact (among others, of course). They are thinking
within boundaries.
Joyce is a good transition when it comes to quotation marks. Much
could be written about quotation marks, but I'll just comment on a small
subculture-their gradual elimination. I'm not sure where it started, but
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, James
Joyce replaced the traditional quotations mark with a dash. This practice
he continued in Ulysses. The singular is correct here, because Joyce put
a dash at the beginning of the sentence instead of a quotation mark but
understood that a second dash was not needed as a conclusion. It was
easily inferred. His former employee, Samuel Beckett, perhaps sensing
an opening here, eliminated quotation marks, dashes, and everything else
but the period when he had his characters speak in his 1953 novel, Watt.
Though not a widespread practice, this total quotational nudity has been
followed by some authors who are writing today, notably Tim O'Brien
in his 1990 novel, The Things They Carried. The novelist Cormac Mc-
Carthy eschews quotation marks, as well. I'm not sure what the benefit
is to the reader here, other than the simple idea of: Hey, we may not need
these things. It would seem that the question is: At what point does all
this stripping down start to make things unclear and unnecessarily dif-
ficult for the reader?
Just a few words about ellipses. They indicate something that has
been left out. The dictionary definition is: "a. The omission of a word or
phrase necessary for a complete syntactical construction but not necessary
for understanding. b. An example of such omission. A mark or series of
marks ( ... or * * * , for example) used in writing or printing to indicate
an omission, especially of letters or words." Their use is pretty unexcit-
ing, almost legal in feeling. But not always. Like any other punctuation
mark, it can surprise you. It can be used by a gifted, daring writer in a
way that takes it to another level, to where it becomes a new color for
his or her palette. This is the case with Jean Rhys's use of ellipses in
her novel, Good Morning, Midnight, in a passage we referred to earlier.
(The title is from an Emily Dickinson poem, by the way.) But now we
can examine it more closely in terms of what she's doing artistically
with ellipses.
We come upon the narrator in a sad state. She's hit bottom in Paris.
She has no money, or friends. She has a complete lack of self-esteem, of
amour propre. She's a wreck, in short. She's having a drink after dinner,
all by herself. And here Rhys makes ellipses absolutely mystical. Their
use is unique. They say a huge amount about the narrator's life and her
state of mind:
I stayed there, staring at myself in the glass. What do I want to cry about? ... On
the contrary, it's when I am quite sane like this, when I have had a couple of extra
drinks and am quite sane, that I realize how lucky I am. Saved, rescued, fished up,
half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set. No-
body would know I had ever been in it. Except, of course, that there always remains
something. Yes, there always remains something .... Never mind, here I am, sane and
dry, with my place to hide in. What more do I want? ... I'm a bit of an automaton,
but sane, surely - dry, cold and sane. Now I have forgotten about dark streets, dark
rivers, the pain, the struggle and the drowning .... Mind you, I'm not talking about
the struggle when you are strong and a good swimmer and there are willing and
eager friends on the bank waiting to pull you out at the first sign of distress. I mean
the real thing.
This is not nonfiction, to remind you. This is not a case where we look
to ellipses to inform us that some part of the text is unnecessary for us
to grasp an argument. In fact, the ellipses here do not refer to any prose
that we know of that has been eliminated. They refer-to what? To
drunken or emotional pauses the narrator is literally making? To psychic
gasps of breath? Or are they a kind of sad, forlorn rhythm of a wasted
life? Or are they tears? Whatever they are exactly, they communicate a
sensation of desperation, of barely hanging on. How Rhys came upon
that possibility for the use of ellipses, I don't know, but I would say it's
inspired. It's poetry.
Authors with as diverse literary backgrounds and times as Edith Whar-
ton and John Rechy have used ellipses for creative, stylistic purposes,
far beyond their basic yeoman's job. Add the aforementioned William
Burroughs and Louis-Ferdinand Celine to that company as well. I'm sure
you can find plenty of others.
Good writers will use anything and everything to tell their story. For
some, more than others, that means that odd typographical crew that we
employ every day, dutifully, perhaps even resentfully, page after page.
"
,I
9
It's About Nothing: Finding Subjects
for Creative Writing in Everyday Life
The story goes that the nineteenth-century French short story writer
Guy de Maupassant once claimed that he could write a story about any-
thing. A companion took him up on that and challenged him to write a
story about a piece of string. What could be more banal, more uninspiring
than a piece of string as a subject? The result? "The Piece of String," by
de Maupassant, a now classic short story by the French master.
De Maupassant was showing off, but the story does have relevance to
you and to your writing. Because there will come a day when you might
find nothing to write about, and you will despair. The first few works
you have in you probably will spill out like a dam burst. That doesn't
mean writing them will be easy; it just means that you will know what
you want to write about-more or less-and the struggle you have with
it has to do n10re with craft. So, you write your memoir. You write your
novel. So you write four or five personal essays or stories on subjects
that have always enthralled you. So you write the profiles of three or
four people you admire. What next? You're presumably in this for the
long haul. Well, if you don't have a problem finding subjects, God bless
you. All I can say is that writers I know often struggle finding subjects,
particularly if they've been at it for a while. Sometimes to the point that
they are in despair and think, well, Ijust don't have anything to say. I'm
done. I'm finished. The well's run dry.
What are you going to do if the well runs dry? Where will you find
your inspiration? Well, maybe you'll be lucky like the nature writer
Robert Finch. His subjects come to him. A small, most interesting and
unusual bat flies down his chimney and into his study-the very same
study where he is sitting and trying to write. A subject for a Robert Finch
99
essay, "A Visigoth in the Study"! Another day, a hornet gets stuck behind
his windowpane and vainly tries to get out. In the very same study where
he's trying to write. Another subject for a Robert Finch essay. In fact,
it's called, "Death of a Hornet," which is the title of the book from which
those two essays are taken. What will fly down his chimney next, one
wonders, and present itself to Finch as he idly searches for a subject? I
am tempted to write him to see if he would consider renting out his studio
to me on off hours. I'll just sit there and wait to see what tumbles down
the chimney or flies through the window, then write about it.
But the point is this. Other people sitting in that same chair where
Finch sits could have the same bat fly down the chimney and the same
hornet fly against the windowpane and it would do nothing for them. It
wouldn't inspire them at all. Oh, perhaps they might be curious about
this little bat, and maybe attempt to free it and maybe tell their friends
about it. But would they write an entire essay about it? And even more
unlikely, would they write an entire essay about a hornet? Well, Finch
did, for two reasons, I suspect. One is: it's clear he loves these kinds of
things. He responds to them. He genuinely likes to write about them.
The second reason is that, and you can tell this by the writing, Finch is
obviously a very curious fellow. Passionately curious. He needs to find
out everything he can about this little bat and this fierce insect. That
leads him to many fascinating places, and gives the writing substance
and allure. We, the readers, are charmed and delighted by his infectious
j:
curiosity.
But the most important thing to observe here is that Robert Finch is
absolutely unafraid to write about something as "insignificant" as a hor-
net. In fact, he's confident that it's significant enough to warrant writing
about. Why? Because he trusts his own predilections and lets them go
w here they will lead him. And here we tum to Emerson, one of our great
wise men, to give this idea some big-name clout. In his famous essay,
"Self-Reliance," Emerson writes, "To believe your own thought, to believe
that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is
genius." When in doubt, tum to Ralph \Valdo Emerson.
The fact is that some of your deepest, most fervent passions can
show themselves in little things, in ordinary matters. This, I think, is
especially true if these things have a tradition to them, a history, if they
are among the "old verities," as I heard one writer say, describing put-
ting her wash out to dry on the line and watching the wind billow the
, ", clothes. Speaking of domestic chores, there is a wonderful description
of housecleaning in Walden:
Finding Subjects for Creative Writing in Everyday Life 101
Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early and, setting
all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget,
dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then
with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken
their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in
again, and my meditations were almost unintelTupted. It was pleasant to see my
whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack,
and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink,
standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and
as if unwilling to be brought in.
Thoreau on sweeping up. Literature.

By the way, Robert Finch isn't alone in his fascination with vespids.
Others have been inspired by stinging bugs. Seeing wasps in the snow
led Loren Eiseley to ruminate about life, and especially about death,
and to write the essay, "The Brown Wasps." Finch is also obviously
drawing on-or harkening to-Virginia Woolf's essay, "The Death of
the Moth." In Finch's case, a spider seizes the hornet and dispatches it.
In Woolf's case, the moth in her window is trying to escape but cannot
and wearies itself unto death. Woolf wrote that "this gigantic effort on
the part of an insignificant little moth against a power of such magnitude
[i.e., death] to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved
one strangely." This ordinary incident, which we all have witnessed
countless times, provoked Woolf to speculating about the unknowable.
And then to write.
Now, I don't mean to suggest you should run out and write about, say,
caterpillars, or mice. But if they fascinate you and you want to write
about them, by all means. I know a WOlnan who wrote an entire book
about earthworms. It's called The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable
Achievenlents of Earthworms. She received good critical response, too.
No, the lesson here is not that you should write about things that weigh
less than a pound, but that you should follow your passions, wherever
they take you. The point is, you should want to write about these bugs
or whatever. That's something you need to be aware of in daily life.
These passions are often engaged in just a fleeting moment. The trick
is to be aware of your eagerness and curiosity and to respond to it. You
have to allow yourself to see.
Despite the fact that W.H. Auden declared that he did not know "of
anyone in the United States today who writes better prose," M.F.K. Fisher
still had to answer to those who felt that she was just a "food writer." This
seems absurd, but it's true. Here's what she said: "There is a communion
of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And
that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger,
and not wars or love." This was far before the time when a writer might
sit down and write about the ecstasies of peanut butter and have readers
recognize it as literature. M.F.K. Fisher dared to write about food-its
pleasures and subtleties-at a time when that seemed odd. The result?
The Art of Eating, an American literary masterpiece.
I believe in the importance of the inspiration of other genres of art.
So, I want to turn to the great American painter Edward Hopper. No
one that I know of took daily life and turned it into the most breathtak-
ing art more memorably than he did. I would suppose the most famous
painting of his is The Night Hawks, that study of light and loneliness
in an all-night diner. You also may remember his portraits of people in
hotel rooms, of people sitting disconsolately on beds, of people staring
vacantly from chairs on porches. Hopper also frequently painted the
facades of ordinary buildings in ordinary towns. He seems almost de-
liberately not to have chosen dramatic events as his subjects. Just look
at the titles of his paintings: Drug Store; Gas; Railroad Train; August in
the City; Summertime; Hotel Lobby; Barber Shop; East Side Interior;
Hotel Roonl. There is not a "Raft of the Medusa" or a "Judith Beheading
Holofernes" in his work.
These subjects suited his dedication to, and fascination with, light
and form. He painted the light of dusk, of early morning, of night, and,
most difficult, of mid-day. Again, some titles: Seven A.M. ; Early Sunday
Morning; Morning in a City; High Noon; Cape Cod Afternoon; House
at Dusk; Night Shadows. He seemed to have given himself the task of
painting the light of every hour in a day, and may, in fact, have done
just that. And what a love affair he had with lines and angles, with the
geometry of shapes!
Now, one of the first things you notice here, it seems to me, is that
the subjects are very ordinary. People in a diner late at night. A woman
usher taking a break in a theatre. A woman seated by herself having a
cup of tea or coffee. A couple in their apartment building, seated, the
man reading the paper. A JufuJ at a gas pump. An empty street in the
early morning. A woman seated on her front porch. Yet, would anybody
here deny that any of these paintings are art? And extremely fine art, at
that-even some of the finest art ever produced by an American painter?
Moody, reflective, mysterious, measured, lonely-yes, lonely-but
painted so gloriously, with such a grasp of color and of composition.
They also seem to reach us very deep within, to a place where all of us
are a bit lonely, and a little afraid, and very human. They celebrate life
through their beauty, and yet they point out the fragility of it, too. All
through the mundane.
But you may say: Edward Hopper is a painter! It really doesn't mat-
ter what he chooses to paint. He's only concerned about composition
and color. Not me. I'm a writer. I have to say something about these
people, this damn gas station you've thrown in my face. I can't just put
them on the page and expect people to jump up and down and say that's
brilliant writing.
Well, the point is that Hopper was drawn to these subjects because it
was through them that he could best express his beliefs and his art. It
was certain aspects of these subjects that inspired him to greatness. He
saw things in them. Or he allowed himself to see things in them that
inspired him to paint them. Maybe he fell in love with the strange harsh
lighting of the late night diner. Who knows? Well, the point is, he al-
lowed himself to envision that as worthy of a painting, worthy of his
highest efforts and hardest labor.
Ok, you'd like an example from a writer? Let's tum to Pablo Neruda,
the great Chilean poet. In 1954, he published a book called Odas El-
elnentales, "Elemental Odes," which is about common things in life.
r m very happy to see that these odes have been issued in a book of their
own in English, called Odes to COln1110n Things. You can also find many
of these odes in any anthology of Neruda's work. Neruda's odes have
titles like, "Ode to a Fallen Chestnut," "Ode to the Tomato," Ode to the
Clothes." Others subjects include books, bird watching, even laziness.
These are not arch poems of the intellect. These are passionate, believing
poems expressing gratitude and wonder. Let me quote again just a few
delectable lines from "Ode to the Clothes." You can't get much more
basic in your subject matter than a pair of pants, now can you?
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
for my vanity,
my love,
my hope, my body
to fill you,
I have scarcely
left sleep,
I say goodbye to the water
and enter your sleeves,
my legs look for
the hollow of your legs,
and thus embraced

by your unwearying fidelity
I go out to tread the fodder,
I move into poetry,
I want to emphasize here again that this chapter is not necessarily about
urging you to write about button-down shirts or flip-flops. Although,
again, if they inspire you, go to it. I think flips-flops are a terrific subject
for a poem, actually. It's about allowing yourself to feel sympathy, pas-
sion, and tenderness toward our little lives and how they are led.
All right, you say. Pablo Neruda's a poet. Poets can write about
anything. They're supposed to get all dewy-eyed over lockets their dead
wife left behind and leaves falling off trees and even clothes. Forget the
fancy-dancy poetry. Give me some meat and potatoes. Give me some
prose.
Let's tum to E. B. White. All roads of nonfiction and, actually, fic-
tion (remember Charlotte's Web) eventually pass by his doorway, even
if only fleetingly, at one time or another. Now, I don't know how many
of you have read White, or how many of you are fans, but whatever the
situation, I recommend you read his essay, "Here Is New York." Writ-
ten over fifty years ago, it's still the best thing ever written about New
York. But that's not the essay I want to refer to. This essay of White's
is about-a pig. No, not about that famous pig, Wilbur, that appears in
Charlotte's Web, but a real pig that lived on White's farm in Maine. The
essay is called "Death of a Pig."
It's a simple story, really. White had a pig. The pig got sick. White
didn't know what was wrong with him. He called the vet. The vet came
and treated the pig. Nevertheless, the pig died. That's it. That's the
story. No plot, other than that. And just a few characters, one of them
being White's dachshund, Fred. Yet. Yet! Let me quote a small selec-
tion, somewhat ridiculous, but that's the point. White has given the sick
pig some castor oil to cure him, and that has not worked. He has been
advised to give the pig an enema, which he does:
I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back,
no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles. The pig's lot and mine
were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From
then until the time of his death I held the pig steadily in the bowl of my mind; the
task of trying to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession.
Each time I read this essay, and I have read it many times, I find myself
a bit weak in the knees at the end. The compassion of it!
All right, you say. E. B. White lived on a farm. He had all those ani-
mals to inspire him. I don't live on a farm! I live in a house in suburbia!
The only pig we ever see is Porky. My cat is useless. I need an example
that's relevant to my life.
Ok, I'll give you one: by Robert Benchley.
In case you don't know Benchley, he was a sweet, self-effacing man
who frequented the Algonquin Round Table in New York in the 1930s
and 40s and had a small but wonderful career in the movies. I highly
recommend his short film, The Sex Life of the Polyp. (Yes, The Sex Life
of the Polyp.) Among the things Benchley wrote were theater criticism
and essays. One of the most delightful of these essays is called, "My
Face." (You can find it in Phillip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay.)
Now, I ask you, is that not something you have, too? A face? I'll wager
you do. Look what he does with his own visage:
Some mornings, if I look in the mirror soon enough after getting out of bed ... 1 turn
quickly to look behind me, convinced that a stranger has spent the night with me and
is peering over my shoulder in a sinister fashion, merely to frighten me. On such oc-
casions, the shock of finding that I am actually the possessor of the face in the mirror
is sufficient to send me scurrying back to bed, completely unnerved.
There you were, every day, looking into the mirror, not realizing there
was a subject for a delightful little essay.
One final example that gives new meaning to the word "ordinary."
I give you Nicholson Baker and his book, Double Fold: Libraries
and the Assault on Paper. It's a book that grew out of an essay he wrote
about the disappearance of-ready for this?-card catalogs in libraries.
Read the book if you don't think anyone could be passionate about such
a thing. Or write more than a hundred words about them. Now, consider
this. Suppose you went to your inner self, or to some friends who are
already a bit skeptical about this career of yours as a writer, and you
informed them you were going to write an essay, maybe even a book,
about the disappearance of card catalogues. (Let's imagine Baker's
book doesn't exist.) And not only that, you were passionate-angry
and outraged-about the disappearance of card catalogues. You were
going to write your heart out about-card catalogues. Hmmm, nods
you inner self. Oh, boy, say your friends. I hope his-or her-parents
don't find out about this. Such a shame all that money they spent on a
college education.
Now, this is the moment you, as a creative writer, have to be acutely
aware of, I think. Because it's right at this moment when your inner self,
or inner whatever, is liable to say: Who cares about card catalogues--es-
pecially with Iraq, AIDS, terrorism, global warming .. .1 mean what is with
you? But the point is: you do. You know and believe it is something to
write an essay or even a book about. So, this is what I mean about daily
life. These moments. I can't say they will come to you all day, every
day. I can't say every strong feeling you have will be worthy of writ-
ing about. Some things just don't accommodate themselves to lengthy
discourse. But I can tell you something for certain. You'll never know if
you tum away from those moments, in which your authentic self reacts,
the light goes on, the heart responds, the passions fire. As Marianne
Moore said, "The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and
admit that we do."
So, if you find yourself looking at, say, the pencil in your hand and mar-
veling at how such a simple instrument has changed the world in so many
ways, why, you just may want to write about it. And you should.
It' s got at least as much going for it as a piece of string .
•1
10
Maxims about Writing
A maxim, as defined by the Random House Unabridged Dictionary,
is "an expression of a general truth or principle." The fonn and spirit of
this section is based on the famous book of maxims by La Rochefoucauld,
the seventeenth-century French nobleman . La Rochefoucauld's maxims
cover a wide area of moral territory. Each maxim is a world unto itself,
and his book can be read from any point whatsoever. These maxims
cover a multitude of aspects of writing, from simple how-to suggestions
to trying to find the courage to write to the feel of the pencil on a page.
One maxim, one thought. They are easily assimilated-hopefully-taken
in small doses. The reader can read casual1y, flipping through until
something catches his or her eye. Ideally, there should be something to
satisfy whatever mood the writer is in, or whatever need or curiosity he or
she has at that moment. The principle is to isolate a general truth about
writing and to dralnatize it. These are words to help boost a writer.
* * *
Reading, for a writer, is a practical matter. How do you know what can
be done unless you've seen it done by others?
Good writing is like the transfer of impulses via the synapses of the brain.
There should be a leap between writer and reader, like the electrical leap
that bridges the gap between synapses. The completion of the writer's
message is made by the reader's imagination and passion.
Keep a good dictionary next to you. Employ it often to track down the
best word with the vigilance of a bounty hunter.
Distance =Clarity2. Give yourself a day between the editing and rewrit-
ing. For clarity like the light in the South of France, give yourself two
weeks.
107
If you have a motto as a writer, it might be, "In my heart I trust."
If you have a thought, an idea, a change, don't ever delay putting it

down-not even for three seconds. It will escape forever. No amount
of pleading, prayer, or cursing will bring it back. A small part of your
mind will be like the Flying Dutchman, searching fruitlessly for the lost
thought for all eternity.
There is no good or bad subject, no inherently dull or interesting subject.

The subject is not that critical. The passion is. Proof: read Beautiful
Swimmers, a book about crabbing that won the Pulitzer Prize.
Consider a writing group. Anything to help legitimize your quest, and

to assuage your loneliness and paranoia.
Attend a reading. It's important to see the word made flesh.
Don't judge yourself as a writer. You have plenty of relatives, friends,

and acquaintances to do that for you.
Try not to think of your work published. That greedy dream will eat up
everything in its path, including your penchant for truth.
Warm up before you begin to write. Hemingway sharpened pencils with

a knife. Understand that you'll be cold at first, like a car engine. It takes
a while to get the machinery going, to be at full throttle.
If you want consistently striking examples of the use of a specific word

towards a desired effect, look to the humorists. There, a whole paragraph
can tum on a single word.
Don't be afraid of outright enthusiasm. Remember William Blake:

"Exuberance is Beauty." Do you need a mOie iighteous authority?
Bad grammar will expose you as an incompetent writer as blatantly as

cutting in line will expose you as a deceitful person.
,j A person who criticizes other writing thoughtfully will tend to write

,J
,! that way.
Maxims about Writing 109
Ask yourself after you've written something: Do I want to claim proud

ownership of this? Or do I want to disown it? Will I, like Peter when
asked if he knew Jesus, deny ever having known this man-deny this
piece of writing?
If you find a book you love, don't hoard the discovery. Reading is not
a contest.
"I write to make sense of my life," John Cheever said. So, a normal part
of the writing experience is to be in a state of ignorance.
Most anything you do in writing can be improved.
Before you settle on a word, look it up. Make sure of its definition. See
what its synonyms are. Look them up. Is there a better word lurking
in a shadowy corner somewhere?
Read Flaubert' s letters and step into the mind of a man gripped at the
throat by writing.
Do you think writing should be easier than it is? Why? Why should
it be easy to write a sentence that will thrill people today, and twenty
years from today?
When you are writing, when you are in it, the work is not just mental,
it's physical. Hemingway used to grunt like a warthog when he was in
the thick of it. Flaubert had what he called his "Shouting Room." Give
way to those groans, cries, and shouts.
Write some of whatever you're writing in longhand. Sculpt the words

with your ink or lead. Experience the connection between your mind
and your pen or pencil. You are an artificer as well as an artist.
Revision is writing.
"We learn how to write when we react vigorously to what we have written,
discovering in the process that we are able to improve our own writing or
to feel satisfied with what we have written." -Paulo Freire. The second
part of that equation-to feel satisfied with what we have written-is
the most difficult to assume, and the most satisfying.
You do not see the chips and dust and hack marks on Michelangelo's
Pieta, but you know they were there. Look at gorgeous sentences in the
same way.
You want to find your voice? Listen: "Originality is in any case a by-
product of sincerity."-Marianne Moore.
What is the truth of your past? "A memoir is _how one remembers one's
own life."-Gore Vidal.
Can't I change things in memoir? Can't I mix fiction and fact? "Tamper-
ing with the truth," writes Judith Barrington, "will lead you to writing a
bit too carefully-which in turn will rob your style of the ease that goes
with honesty."
Getting at a subject indirectly is often the most powerful way of ap-

proaching it. Gertrude Stein said something to the effect that "you get
to know the Seine best by not looking at it."
Stop writing where you know what's going to happen next. The next
day when you begin again, you'll have a place to go. That's what
Hemingway did.
Flaubert asked what is a writer but a triple thinker? What did he mean
by that? He meant, I think, that you are first the artist, the creator. You
are second the critic who steps back and examines the writing with a cold
clear eye. You are third the characters on the page with their thoughts
and emotions-and, eventually, their independence.
Much of writing is purely mechanical, like wiring a house. Skill is often

what's needed, not genius or talent.
vVhat is the difference between quick and fast? A question like that
should mean the world to you.
,' ,' 1
Think of this. If you write Y2 page a day for 365 days, you'll have 182
pages-an impressive stack-in front of you.
The heart of all storytelling is character.

The most memorable, most efficient way to create character on the page
is through dialogue.
How can we make a distinction between fact and truth in writing? We

must, as Hemingway said: "A writer's job is to tell the truth. His stan-
dard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of
his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can
be. For facts can be observed badly, but when a good writer is creating
something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth."
Imagination is a muscle. If you haven't used it often, it's flabby, like

any untested muscle. You have to get it in shape. That takes disci-
pline. It's like going to the gym-just as painful, and ultimately, just as
rewarding.
You can do a lot worse than take to heart what Hemingway has to say
about writing. Writing meant everything to him. He worshiped it, and
what he has to say rings with sincerity, acumen, and truth.
Only rarely has landscape or nature come close to haunting the mind like
a character. In Turgenev, for example. But where else?
Sometimes you get lost. Completely. You feel as if you've been aban-
doned by every instinct, every skill, every bit of experience. It's as if
you fell overboard a ship, and no one knew. Treading water, you watch
helplessly as the ship slowly moves off into the distance, getting smaller
and smaller, still smaller, then disappears. You're alone. Nothing around
but empty sea. There is only one thing you can do. Have faith. Have
blind faith.
Clarity in writing always returns to passion. Marianne Moore said it well:

"When emotion is strong enough, the words are unambiguous."
Try cutting out the first paragraph of your story or memoir, or whatever
you're working on. Just as an exercise. Pretty surprising, isn't it? And
pretty humbling.
When you cut out something from your work, it doesn't disappear. An
energy stays. The leaving-out provides a force all its own. The pruning
channels the creative sap to the prose that remains. Cutting is not delet-
ing then, it's adding.
You can get sick of any character you write about, and will.
Read the Brothers Grimm. They're more Freudian than Freud. They
have incomparable insight about deep secrets inside, about our most
murderous desires, plus a transporting imagination to bring us the relief
that we are not alone.
The road is long. We are discouraged often. When that happens, find
solace in this poem by C.P. Cavafy, the great twentieth-century Greek
poet from Alexandria:
The First Step

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
',"!
"
·1 and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."
IT
r Maxims about Writing 113
If you think you're the only one who has been repeatedly humbled
by writing, read this section from "Burnt Norton," one of T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
And, from "East Coker":
That was a way of putting it-not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.
In order to write well, you need to focus, and you cannot focus unless
you have fiercely guarded writing time.
You can take something from every good writer. One useful thing is
enough. You shouldn't expect more than that, even from the best.
Don't feel odd or discouraged because you don't like or understand a

certain author-particularly if the author is renowned. It could be the
wrong time for you to be reading this author: It could be too early. Or
it simply could be that you'll never like this author. So what? Do you
like all places? Can't you tolerate the fact that someone loves glaciers,
and Germany, and you don't? Is that any reflection on your acumen, on
your sensitivity, on your values?
What to write? A character-Buddy, I think-in one of J. D. Salinger's

books says, "Think of the story you'd most like to read. Then go out
and write it yourself."
You have to throw everything you have into your writing. Literally.
Balzac, who certainly did that, said it well: "If the artist does not throw
himself into his work like ... a soldier against a fortress without counting
the cost; and if, once within the breach, he does not labor like a miner
buried under a fallen roof; if, in short, he contemplates the difficulties
instead of conquering them, one by one ... then the work remains unfin-
ished, it perishes, is lost within the workshop, where production becomes
impossible, and the artist is a looker-on at his talent's suicide."
Be brave. (Easier said than done.)
Read only five or six maxims at one time. After that, the element of
surprise is lost.
Your heart will guide you, not your brain. "The mind cannot for long
play the role of the heart," said La Rochefoucauld.
Stay loyal to the writers you love. Don't disavow them because of cultural
fashions or the latest politics. Don't deny your love and enthusiasm.
That's the first step to denying your passions about your own work.
Good prose is not only like music, it is music. It has a pace, rhythm,
cadence, even a melody. It may not be as evident as a tune by Mozart,
but it's there. Part of the pleasure in reading a passage by Conrad or
Proust or even Hemingway is musical. You can almost picture yourself
humming the words.
Some things others have said better. Sometimes it's best to stand back
and let them speak:
"How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page!

-William Styron, Sophie's Choice
"0 the thousand appliances one needs for writing even a sentence !"-Vir-
ginia Woolf, Diary, v. I
"One has to go into the most remote corners of a subject in order to

."
'1,1 discover the simplest things."-Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of
'.
Hadrian
.,'.'j
;'1
"And besides, I like its name [Siberia], like Borneo, Abyssinia, and Lab-
.,'
" ,'
I
Ii"!
• I
;
rador, without knowing exactly why. This power of syllables will seem a
waste of time to many, but it is rare that poetry does not uncover earthly
powers."-Franc;ois Mitterrand, The Wheat and the Chaff
"Trash is the inevitable result whenever a person tries to do for himself or

for others by the writing of poetry what can only be done in some other
way, by action, or study, or prayer."-W.H. Auden, "Tennyson"
The quiet, cool early morning; the open notebook; the simple pen-all
these forever, and still hold great significance and appeal. How much
more can you reduce your life, your work? How much more can you
essentialize it?
If you can't see what's next, trust your heart. As the Yiddish proverb has
it, "The heart is half a prophet." This is what Philip Roth placed at the
beginning of his first book, at the beginning of his career.
Marianne Moore said it right-again. What you need to produce good

writing is humility, concentration, and gusto.
A writer can take almost any criticism about his or her work except if
you say it's boring. Then he or she wants to jump off a bridge.
No critic who ever lived will cause you as much doubt or anguish about
your writing as yourself.
Never hesitate. Put it down. Now. This instant.
When you go to stay at someone's home, don't take any books with
you. Hungry for a read, you' 11 encounter books you've never read. The
potential for disappointment is there, true, when you go this route, but
so is the element of discovery and wonder.
Writing will never abandon you. As long as your mind is lucid and
you can push a pen or pencil across the page, writing will be there for
you. It's constant-unlike almost any other profession or calling you
can think of.
Read The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly for lovely maxims.

r
I
,t
Creeds and stances will go in and out of fashion. It may take longer in
the universities, because those with power have tenure. Even they are
eventually deposed, however. But "the human heart in conflict with
itself," as Faulkner described our condition, is not subject to politics.
Remember that in the maelstrom. That's your subject.
Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, knew about fear:
Fear
Everyone is after me to jump through hoops,
whoop it up, play football,
rush about, even go swimming and flying.
Fair enough.
Everyone is after me to take it easy.

They all make doctor's appointments for me,
eyeing me in that quizzical way.
What is going on?
Everyone is after me to take a trip,

to come in, to leave, not to travel,
to die and, alternatively, not to die.
It does not matter.
Everyone is spotting oddnesses

in my innards, suddenly shocked
by radio-awful diagrams.
I do not agree.
Everyone is picking at my poetry

with their relentless knives and forks,
trying, no doubt, to find a fly.
I am afraid.
I am afraid of the whole world,

afraid of cold water, afraid of death.
I am as all mortals are,
:,1 unable to be patient.
I
And so, in these brief, passing days,

I shall not take them into account.
I shall open up and closet myself
with my most treacherous enemy,
Pablo Neruda.
Memorize a passage of poetry or prose that takes you. Get it inside

your body.
Jealousy is unavoidable when you are a writer. There is always someone

undeserving getting the prizes and the money. Just make sure jealousy
is only an appetizer and not a main course.
Still stymied by lack of a subject? Look at Ruth Orkin's book of pho-

tographs, A World Through My Window. What beauty, just from her
apartment window, that she allowed herself to see.
For a reading list, look to the books the authors you admire praise in
their own novels or essays.
You should not try too hard to escape God or religion in your work. You
don't have to believe to write fervently about belief.
Writers have an array of names to describe their first drafts: vomit, puke,
garbage, shit, trash, drivel, crap. Well-known writers. Somehow, though,
they seem to tum lead~r garbage-into gold.
Write every day if you can. Why should Sunday be any different than
Thursday if you're a writer?
When you no longer have heroes, how can you make yourself one?
Remember the poet Theodore Roethke, "I learn by going where I have
to go."
There are people who will understand and love your work. Not neces-
sarily your mother and father. Probably not, in fact.
Sometimes your "failure" as a writer is simply due to not admitting to

the real emotions you're feeling about the subject.
The last word to Marianne Moore: "The thing is to see the vision and
not deny it; to care and admit that we do."
Notes
Introduction
P. 2, T. S. Eliot, "East Coker."

In The Complete Poelns and Plays (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1971), V. 1-11.
P. 2, Billy Collins, "75 Needles in the Haystack of Poetry," The Writer's Chronicle
(September 2006), 19.
P. 4, John BelTyman, "A Strut for Roethke." In 77 Dream Songs (New York: FalTar,
Straus and Giroux, 1971), 20.
Chapter 1
P. 7, BatTY Lopez, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 13.
P.7, Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003), 11.
P. 9, Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, eds. Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose,
& Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 853-54.
P. 9, William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (New York: Longman,
2000),66-7.
Pp. 9-10 "An Interview with Susan Cheever," The Writer's Chronicle (May/Summer
2005),43.
P. 10, Sarah Lyall, "Novelists Defend One of Their Own Against a Plagiarism Charge in
Britain," New York Times, December 7,2006.
P. 11, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Classics, 1992), 280.
Pp. 11-12, James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (New York: Vintage,
1989),3.
P. 12, William Faulkner, "Barn Burning," Twelve American Writers (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1962), 75l.
Pp. 12-13, James Clumley, Dancing Bear (New York: Vintage, 1983), 7.
P. 13, Marianne Moore, "Foreword," A Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Viking,
1974), xiii.
Pp. 13-14, Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1987), 302-3.
P. 14, Merrill D. Peterson, ed. Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America,
1984), 19.
P. 16, Robert Frost, 776.
P. 16, James Agee, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," The Best American Essays of the
CentulY, Joyce Carol Oates, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 174.
P. 17, Robert Frost, 857.
Chapter 2
P. 19, Sven Birkerts, "Flaubert's Anatomy." American Scholar (Winter 2004), 138.
P. 19, Charles Carlut, La Correspondence de Flaubert, etude et repertoire critique (Paris:
A.G. Nizet, 1968),421. All translations, save for those from Steegmuller's book,
are mine.
P. 20, Ibid., 415.
P. 20, Ibid., 421.
p. 20, Ibid., 421.
P. 20, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857, Francis Steegmuller, trans. (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 83.
P. 20, Henry James, Literary Criticism: Volume Two (New York: Library of America,
1984),315.
P. 20, Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, Carlos Baker, ed. (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1981), 624.
P. 20, Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Collier Books, 1964),134.
P. 20, Joan Didion, "Last Words," New Yorker 9 November 1998, 76.
P. 23, T. S. Eliot, "Johnson As Critic and Poet." In On Poetry and Poets (New York: Far-
rar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957), 195.
P. 23, Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 126.
Pp. 23-24, Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], Out of Africa (London: The Folio Society,
1980), 198.
P. 24, Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: New American Library,
1959),75.
P. 25, Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (London: Oxford University Press,
1974),46.
P. 25, Marianne Moore, "Interview With Donald Hall," A Marianne Moore Reader (New
York: Viking, 1974),271.
P. 25, Ibid., 271.
P. 26, John Cheever, Falconer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 119.
P. 26, Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's (New York: Random House, 1958),87.
P. 27, Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: HarperPerennial,
1991),20.
P. 28, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 158.
Chapter 3
P. 29, Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: HarperPerennial,
1991), 20.
P. 29, T. S. Eliot, "East Coker." In The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1971), V. 3-4.
P. 30~ Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House,
1993), s. v. "etymology."
p. 31, William E. Umbach, '~Etymology." In Webster's New World Dictionary ofAmerican
English (New York: Webster's New World, 1988), xxvi.
P. 31, Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "hut."
P. 33, Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s. v. "hysterical."
p. 34, Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "holocaust."
P. 34, Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s. v. "quell."
P. 35, Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "odonate."
P. 35, Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "entomology."
p. 35, Thomas Sappington, e-mail to author, November 30,2006.
Notes 121
P. 36, Michael Tomasky, "The Phenomenon." New York Review of Books (30 November
2006),14.
P. 36, Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 95.
Pp. 36-37, Diana Wells, One Hundred Birds and How They Got Their Names (Chapel
Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2(01).
P. 37, "Walking." In The Essays of Hen!)) D. Thoreau (New York: North Point Press,
2002),149.
p. 37, Ibid., 149-50.
Chapter 4
P. 39, J. Corominas, Diccionario Cdtico Etimol6gico de la Lengua Castellana, v. 3

(Madrid: Gredos, 1954), 242.
p. 39, John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (New York: Arcade, 1990), 89.
p. 39, Gregory Rabassa, lfThis Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents [sic] (New
York: New Directions, 2005), 19.
P. 40, Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1980), 134.
P. 43, Rabassa, lfThis Be Treason, 6.
Pp. 43-44, Adam Jacot de Boinod, The Meaning ofTingo and other Extraordinary Words
from around the World (London: Penguin, 2005), viii.
P. 44, Ibid, viii-ix.
P. 44, Ibid, viii.
P. 44, Ibid, ix.
P. 44, Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 2003), 17.
P. 45, Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984), 123.
P. 46, John Noble, "World's Languages Dying Off Rapidly." New York Times, September
17,2007.
Chapter 5
P. 50, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays (New York: Library of America,
1995), 39-40.
p. 52, Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1995), 50.
P. 52, Ibid., 51.
P. 53, Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber,
2003),100.
P. 55, Seamus Heaney, 54.
p. 55, Ibid, 20.
P. 56, W. H. Auden, Forewords & Afterwords (New York: Vintage, 1974), 336.
Pp. 56-57, Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (Nev.'York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1984), 131.
P. 58, Ibid., 84.
P. 59, Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 333.
p. 59, The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1976), 27.
Chapter 6
P. 63, Ernest Shackleton, South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition (Lon-
don: W. Heinemann, 1938).
P. 63, Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (Philadelphia: Lippincott,
1974).
p. 66, Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
P. 66, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Edi-
tions, 2007), 49.
P. 67, J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991),63.
P. 68, Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 10.
P. 68, Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979), 9.
p. 69, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (New York: New American Library,
1961),120.
P. 73, John Knowles, A Separate Peace (New York: Dell, 1963), 5.
p. 73, James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 3.
Pp. 74-75, Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 64.
p. 75, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its
Consequences (New York: Random House, 1965), 244.
p. 76, Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in The Complete Sherlock
Holmes, v. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1930), 679.
Chapter 7
P. 77, Nance Van Winckel, "Staking the Claim of the Title" in The Writer's Chronicle
(March/April 2004), 38.
P. 82, Ibid, 42.
Chapter 8
P. 87, Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935),214.
P. 87, Terry Southern, The Magic Christian (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 120.
P. 88, Maurya Simon, A Brief History of Punctuation (Winona, MN: Sutton Hoo Press,
2002).
p. 90, E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems (New York: Liveright, 1991),673.
p. 90, Emily Dickinson, "394" in Twelve American Writers (New York: Macmillan,
1962),621.
P. 91, Gertrude Stein, 214-15.
p. 92, William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 94.
P. 92, David Sedaris, Holidays On Ice (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 45.
P. 92, Ibid., 49.
p. 93, Nick Hornby, Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2006),
23.
P. 93, James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Random House, [nd]),
1034.
p. 94, Gertrude Stein, 216.
p. 94, Ibid., 217.
P. 94, Ibid., 219-220.
P. 94, Paul Robinson, "The Philosophy of Punctuation" in The New Republic (April 26,
1980), 28.
p. 94, Ibid., 29.
P. 95, Ibid., 28.
P. 95, Ibid., 30.
P. 95, 1. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 132.
Notes 123
P. 95, Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions,
2001),283.
P. 96, James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1947), 628.
P. 98, Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York: Harper & Row, 1982),10.
Chapter 9
P. 100, Robert Finch, Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays (Washington, DC:
Counterpoint, 2000).
P. 100, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" in Essays: First Series (New York: John
W. Lovell, n.d.), 43.
p. 101, Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Walter 1. Black, 1942), 137.
P. 101, Virginia Woolf, "The Death of the Moth" in The Art of the Personal Essay, ed.
Phillip Lopate (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 267.
P. 101, W. H. Auden, "The Kitchen of Life" in Forewords & Afterwords (New York:
Vintage, 1974), 485.
Pp. 101-2, M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating (Cleveland: The World Publishing Com-
pany, 1954), vii.
Pp. 103-4, Pablo Neruda, "Ode to the Clothes" in Selected Poems (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1990), 333.
P. 104, E. B. White, "Death of a Pig" in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper &
Row, 1977), 21.
P. 105, Robert Benchley, "My Face" in The Art of the Personal Essay, ed. Phillip Lopate
(New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 511.
P. 106, Marianne Moore, "Humility, Concentration, and Gusto," in A Marianne Moore
Reader (New York: Viking, 1961),130.
Chapter 10
P. 109, Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), back
flap.
P. 109, Paulo Freire, Letters to Cristina (London: Routledge, 1996), 2.
P. 110, Marianne Moore, A Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Viking, 1974), 271.
P. 110, Judith BalTington, Writing the Memoir (Portland, OR: The Eighth Mountain
Press, 1997), 28.
P. Ill, Ernest Hemingway, "Introduction," in Men at War, ed. Ernest Hemingway (New
York: Crown, 1942), xv.
P. Ill, Marianne Moore, 271.
p. 112, C. P. Cavafy, The Complete Poems of Cavafy (New York: Harvest, 1976), 6.
P. 113, T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971),
121.
P.113,Ibid.,125.
Pp. 113-114, Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette (Harmondsworth, ~1iddlesex, UK: Pen-
guin, 1984), 215-6.
P. 114, La Rochefoucauld, Fran<;ois, Maxims (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine'S
Press, 2001), 22.
P. 114, William Styron, Sophie's Choice (New York: Random House, 1979),35.
P. 114, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, v. 1, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harvest,
1978), 297.
P. 114, Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963),
338.
Pp. 114-115, Fran~ois Mitterrand, The Wheat and the Chaff (New York: Seaver Books,
1982),20.
P. 115, W. H. Auden, "Tennyson" in Forewords & Afterwords (New York: Vintage,
1974),225.
P. 116, Pablo Neruda, "Fear" in Selected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990),
358.
P. 117, Theodore Roethke, "The Waking" in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1975), 104.
P. 117, Marianne Moore, 130.
Name Index
Agee, James, 16-17,72 Conrad, Joseph, 21,68-69, 114
Allen, Woody, 20 Coppola, Francis Ford, 70
Allison, Dorothy, 67 Cozzens, James Gould, 73-74
Anderson, Sherwood, 74-75 Crane, Stephen, 75
Archilochus,37 Crumley, James, 12-13
Auden, W. H., 17,56, 101, 115 Cummings, E. E., 89
Baker, Nicholson, 105 Dante (Alighieri), 15

Baker, Russell, 69 De Boinod, Adam Jacot, 43-44
Balzac, Honore de, 113 Dickens, Charles, 9, 70, 81
Barber, Samuel, 16-17 Dickinson, Emily, 90, 97
Barrington, Judith, 110 Didion, Joan, 20
Benchley, Robert, 105 Dillard, Annie, 72
Berryman, John, 4 Dinesen, Isak, 21, 23-24
Birkerts, Sven, 27, 36 Donne, John, 80, 86
Bishop, Elizabeth, 56-58, 59 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 69
Blake, William, 108 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 75-76
Borges, Jorge Luis, 33 Doyle, Roddy, 79
Boswell, James, 23, 93 Dreiser, Theodore, 79
Brando, Marlon, 70 Dylan, Bob, 93
Brodkey, Harold, 15
Brooks, Cleanth, 8-9 Eisley, Loren 101
Burroughs, William, 91, 98 Eliot, T. S., 2, 3, 23, 29, 80, 82, 113
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 27, 100
Cain, James M., 11-12 Evans, Walker, 72
Capote, Truman, 26,75
Carlut, Charles, 19 Faulkner, William, 2, 3, 10, 12, 16, 64,
Carver, Raymond, 7 83, 116
Cather, Willa, 79 Finch, Robert, 99-100,101
Cavafy, C. P., 56, 59-60, 112 Fisher, M. F. K., 101-102
Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 90, 98 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 16, 66
Cervantes, Miguel de, 79 Flaubert, Gustave, 16,19-20,21,22,28,
Cheeve~John,26,71, 109 109, 110
Cheever, Susan, 9-10, 71 Freire, Paulo, 109
Cheuse, Alan, 87 Frost, Robert, 8-9, 17,49-52, 82, 83
Churchill, Winston, 84
Cocteau, Jean, 7 Gornick, Vivian, 66, 68
Coetzee, 1. M., 79 Greene, Graham, 71
Collins, Billy, 2 Grimlll, Jacob, 112
Connolly, Cyril, 115 Grimm, Wilhelm, 112
125
Haggard, H. Rider, 78, 82 Perelman, S. 1.,20

Hardy, Thomas, 24 Picasso, Pablo, 41, 42
Heaney, Seamus, 52, 55-56,58 Plimpton, George, 70
Hemingway, Ernest, 11, 13-14, 16, 20, Pope, Alexander, 80
23,44-45,71-72,108,109,111,114 Pound, Ezra, 20, 54
Hillenbrand, Laura, 70 Price, Reynolds, 79, 81
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 16 Proust, Marcel, 114
Hopper, Edward, 102-103 Pynchon, Thomas, 10, 33
Hornby, Nick, 92
Rabassa, Gregory, 39,43
James, Henry, 7, 16, 20,45 Racine, Jean, 46
Jay, Ricky, 83 Rechy, John, 98
Jefferson, Thomas, 14-15 Rhys, Jean, 68, 97-98
Johnson, Samuel, 23, 93 Rimbaud, Arthur, 71, 88
Jones, David, 93 Robinson, Paul, 94-95, 96
Joyce, James, 17,96,-97 Roethke, Theodore, 56, 117
Roth, Philip, 115
Keats, John, 51, 54, 80
Klee, Paul, 40 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 19
Knowles, John, 73 Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, 72
Kundera, Milan, 22, 27, 29 Salinger, J. D., 80, 81, 87, 95, 113
Sappington, Thomas, 35
La Rochefoucauld, Fran<;ois, duc de, Sarkozy, Nicolas, 45
107,114 Scott-Moncrieff, C. K., 80
Lardner, Ring, 16 Sedaris, David, 87, 91
Larkin, Philip, 53-54 Sedgwick, Edie, 70
Lincoln, Abraham, 14,26 Shackleton, Ernest, 63, 72
London, Jack, 79 Shakespeare, William, 7, 80, 81, 83, 86
Lopez, Barry, 7 Shapiro, Karl, 51, 71
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 31-32
Manchester, William, 84 Simon, Maurya, 88
Maupassant, Guy de, 99 Sondheim, Stephen, 28
McCarthy, Cormac, 97 Southern, Terry, 87, 91, 92, 95
Miller, Henry, 38, 71,78 Spiegleman, Art, 67
Milton, John, 80, 86 Steegmuller, Francis, 19
Mistral, Frederic, 46 Stein, Gertrude, 90-91,94,95, 110
Mitterrand, Fran<;ois, 115 Stein, Jean, 70
Moore, Marianne, 2, 13,25, 106, 110, Steinbeck, John, 83
111,115,117 Stevens, Wallace, 82
Muir, John, 72 Stone, Robert, 18
Styron, William, 80, 114
Nabokov, Vladimir, 21,40
Neruda, Pablo, 58-59,103-104,116 Theroux, Paul, 71
Thoreau, Henry David, 37-38, 72, 101
O'Brian, Patrick, 64 Thurber, James, 20
O'Brien, Tim, 97 Tomasky, Michael, 36
O'Hara, John, 79, 80 Turgenev, Ivan, 65
Obama, Barack, 36 Twain, Mark, 10-11,20-21,23,28,45,
Ondaatje, Michael, 86 95
Orkin, Ruth, 117
Owen, Wilfred, 56 Updike, John, 80
Name Index 127
Van Winckel, Nance, 77, 82 White, E. B., 9, 85, 104-105

Velazquez, Diego, 41 White, Gilbert, 25
Vidal, Gore, 110 Wilde, Oscar, 24
Wolfe, Thomas, 17
Walpole, Horace, 29 Wolfe, Tom, 79, 93
Waugh, Evelyn, 17,20,80 Woolf, Virginia, 101, 114
Welles, Orson, 71
Wells, Diana, 36 Yeats, William Butler, 17, 55, 56, 82
Welty Eudora, 7, 17 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 114
Wharton, Edith, 98
Title Index
About This Life: Journeys on the Thresh- "Clean, Well-Lighted Place, A" (Heming-
old of Memory (Lopez), 7 way), 13,71-72
"Adventure" (Anderson), 74-75 Coffee Will Make You Black (Sinclair),
Alive (Read), 63 78
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 79 Correspondance de Flaubert; etude et
Ape and Essence (Huxley), 80 repertoire critique, La (Carlut), 19
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 70 "Crediting Poetry" (Heaney), 55-56
Art of Eating, The (Fisher), 102
Art of the Personal Essay, The (Lopate), Damascus Gate (Stone), 18
105 Dancing Bear (Crumley), 12-13
Autobiography (Jefferson), 14 Dark Possession (Feehan), 81
Autobiography of a Face (Grealy), 78 Darkness Visible (Styron), 80
Away (Bloom), 81 David Copperfield (Dickens), 79
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cath-
Barchester Towers (Trollope), 79 er),80
"Barn Burning" (Faulkner), 12 Death in Venice (Mann), 80
Beautiful Swimmers (Warner), 78, 108 Death of a Hornet (Finch), 80
Beowulf,33 "Death of a Hornet" (Finch), 100
Books in My Life, The (Miller), 38 "Death of a Pig" (White), 104-105
Brave New World (Huxley), 80 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 80
Breakfast at Tiffany's (Capote), 26 Death of Ivan Ilyich, The (Tolstoy), 80
Brief History of Punctuation, A (Simon), "Death of the Moth, The" (Woolf), 80,
88 101
Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney), 80 Dial M for Murder (Knott), 80
"Brown Wasps, The" (Eisley), 101 Disgrace (Coetzee), 81
Bubble Reputation, The (Pelletiere), 80 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 15
"Burnt Norton" (Eliot), 113 Dog Soldiers (Stone), 18
Butterfield 8 (0' Hara), 80 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 79
By Love Possessed (Cozzens), 73 Double Fold (Baker), 105
Dry Guillotine (Belbenoit), 78
Callnel1' Row (Steinbeck), 79 Dubliners (Joyce), 17
Carol in a Thousand Cities (Aldrich),
78 Earth Moved, The (Stewart), 101
Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 67, "East Coker" (Eliot), 2
79,81,95 East of Eden (Steinbeck), 80, 83
Charlotte's Web (White), 104 "Easter 1916" (Yeats), 54
Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 70 Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Truss), 87
Chronicles (Dylan), 93 Edie (Stein and Plimpton), 70
"City, The" (Cavafy), 60 Elements of Style, The (Strunk and
White),9
Elizabeth Appleton (O'Hara), 79 1 Am Charlotte Simmons (Wolfe), 79

Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee), 79 In Cold Blood (Capote), 72, 75
Elves of Cintra, The (Brooks), 81 In Parenthesis (Jones), 93
English Patient, The (Ondaatje), 86 Inherit the Wind (Lawrence and Lee),
Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), 79 80
Everything You Wanted to Know About "In the Station of the Metro" (Pound),
Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (Reu- 54
ben),85
Jane Eyre (Bronte), 79
Falconer (Cheever), 26 Jennie Gerhardt (Dreiser), 79
"Fear" (Neruda), 116 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 77
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thomp-
son),78 Kate Vaiden (Price), 79, 81
Fierce Attachments (Gornick), 68 "Knoxville: Summer 1915" (Agee),
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 17, 95 16-17
"First Step, The" (Cavafy), 112
For WhOln the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), Last Exit To Brooklyn (Selby), 78
44,45,80 Last Lion, The (Manchester), 84
Four Quartets (Eliot), 113 Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women
Franny & Zooey (Salinger), 79 (Jay), 78, 82
French Dirt (Goodman), 85 Lectures in America (Stein), 87
Lectures on Literature (Nabokov), 40
"Gettysburg Address" (Lincoln), 14, 26 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee),
Girl, Interrupted (Kaysen), 78 72
Good Morning, Midnight (Rhys), 68, Lie Down in Darkness (Styron), 80
97-98 Light in August (Faulkner), 79
Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 80 Lilies of the Field (Barrett), 80
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 66-67 Little Foxes, The (Hellman), 80
Growing Up (Baker), 69 Lord Jim (Conrad), 68-69
Guard of Honor (Cozzens), 73-74 Lord John and the Brotherhood of the
Gutenberg Elegies, The (Birkerts), 36 Blade (Gabaldon), 81
Loving Frank (Horan), 81
Handful of Dust, A (Waugh), 80 Lucy Gayheart (Cather), 79
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 70
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Ge- Macbeth (Shakespeare), 25, 83
nius, A (Eggers), 81 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 19, 28, 79
Henry Esmond (Thackeray), 79 Magic Christian, The (Southern), 87,
"Here is New York" (White), 91
Holidays on Ice (Sedaris), 92 Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, The
Home Before Dark (Cheever), 71 (Constantine),78
Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Conan Marianne Moore Reader, A (Moore),
Doyle),76 13
Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (Hornby), Martin Eden (London), 79
92-93 Maus (Spiegelman), 67
How to Win Friends and Influence People Me Talk Pretty One Day (Sedaris), 81
(Carnegie), 85 Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordi-
Howl (Ginsberg), 82 nary Words From Around the World,
Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 10-11, 28, The (Boinod), 43-44
79,95 Memoirs of Hadrian (Yourcenar), 114
Hunlan Stain, The (Roth), 81 "Mending Wall" (Frost), 50-52
"Humility, Concentration and Gusto" Moby-Dick (Melville), 76
(Moore),25 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 79
Title Index 131
Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway), 20, Remembrance of Things Past, (Proust),

23 80
Mr. Bridge (Connell), 79 Return of the Native (Hardy), 24
Mrs. Bridge (Connell), 79 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 3, 79
"My Face" (Benchley), 105 Rosy Crucifixion (Miller), 71
Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 91-92 Sailing Alone Around the World

Nana (Zola), 79 (Slocum), 78
Natural History ofSelbome, The (White), Salome (Wilde), 24
25 Sanctuary, The (Khoury), 81
North of Boston (Frost), 50 "Sandpiper" (Bishop), 56-57
Notes From Underground (Dostoevsky), Sandworms of Dune (Herbert and
69, 70 Anderson),81
"Sea Change, The" (Hemingway),
Odas Elementales (Neruda), 58, 103 13-14
Odes to Common Things (Neruda), 103 Seabiscuit (Hillenbrand), 70
"Ode to Clothes" (Neruda), 58-59, Secret Servant, The (Silva), 81
101-104 "Self-Reliance" (Emerson), 100
Old Man and the Sea, The (Heming- Sentimental Education (Flaubert), 19
way),44 Separate Peace, A (Knowles), 73
Oliver Twist (Dickens), 79 "September 1, 1939" (Auden), 55
One Hundred Birds and How They Got Sex Life of the Polyp, The (Benchley),
Their Names (Wells), 36 105
One Writer's Beginnings (Welty), 7 Sex, Faith, Mystery (Gilman), 78
"Open Boat, The" (Crane), 75 "Shampoo, The" (Bishop), 58
Out of Africa (Dinesen), 23-24 She (Rider Haggard), 78, 82
Outerbridge Reach (Stone), 18 Silas Marner (Eliot), 79
Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 79
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle), 79 Situation and the Story, The (Gornick),
Pale Fire (Nabokov), 80 66
Paula Spencer (Doyle), 79 Skill (Allison), 67
Perfect Storm, The (Junger), 77, 80 Sophie's Choice (Styron), 114
Peyton Place (Metalious), 79 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 2,
"Philosophy of Punctuation, The" (Rob- 64,83
inson),94 "Staking the Claim of the Title" (Van
"Piece of String, The" (Maupassant), Winckel),77
99 "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve-
Play Dirty (Brown), 81 ning" (Frost), 50
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), 80
(Joyce), 17,97 Sweet Revenge (Davidson), 81
Postman Always Rings Twice, The
(Cain), 11 Tale of Genji (Murasaki), 79
Power Broker, The (Caro), 84 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens), 7
Power Play (Finder), 81 "Talking in Bed" (Larkin), 53-54
Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald), 80
Quickie, The (Patterson and Ledwidge), "Tennyson" (Auden), 115
81 Therese Raquin (Balzac), 79
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Mc-
Rage to Live, A (O'Hara), 80 Coy),78
"Rain" (Maugham), 80 Things They Carried, The (O'Brien), 97
Raise High the Roojbeam, Carpenters Third Man, The (Reed and Greene), 71
(Salinger), 80
Thousand Splendid Suns, A (Hosseini), Vile Bodies (Waugh), 80

81 "Visigoth in the Study, A" (Finch), 100
Three Princes of Serendip, The (Wal- "Voyelles" (Rimbaud), 88
pole),29
Time of the Assassins, The (Miller), 71 Walden (Thoreau), 100-101
To Be Or Not to Be (Lubitsch), 80 "Walking" (Thoreau), 37
Tobacco Road (Caldwell), 79 Watt (Beckett), 97
Tom Jones (Fielding), 79 Wheat and the Chaff, The (Mitterrand),
Tom Sawyer (Twain), 79 115
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 90 Wheel of Darkness, The (Preston and
Typhoon (Conrad), 80 Child),81
Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), 79
Ulysses, 97 Winter of Our Discontent, The (Stein-
Unbearable Lightness of Being, The beck),80
(Kundera),27 World Through My Window, A (Orkin),
Unquiet Grave, The (Connolly), 115 117
Wuthering Heights (Bronte), 79

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2. In Search of the Exact Word 19

3. The Secret Strength of Words 29

4. Some Things English Can't Do-and Shouldn't 39

5. The Nerve of Poetry 49

7. Finding a Great Title 77

8. The Eminent Domain of Punctuation 87

9. It's About Nothing: Finding Subjects 99

10. Maxims about Writing 107

Name Index 125

Title Index 129

Billy Collins writes about poetry being the "result of a negotiation

in Florida, I in New York. At one point my ear began to speak to me, to

Language is sound by which we communicate. You could say it's

I picked up the gun and shot her.

Music is often about counterpoint. In writing, dialogue is all about

In the end, the creation of original music in prose-or style, if you

How a word looks on the page can be important; it can be pleasing or

dressing when you're writing. Boswell, in his life of Samuel Johnson,

it. This is one of the great pleasures of reading: that communication

did, moving book, Falconer. He speaks of "the utter poverty of erotic

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

"Dismal regular and decent."

books specifically dedicated to etymology that will let us do that. Every

Now, the etymology of etymology:

or she does. I believe a great deal of communication in writing, of our

Then he cites another possibility for the word's source:

I take that one phrase, "having no particular home, but equally at

pronoun in English and in Spanish. In Spanish, it's Yo. In English, 1. Yo

This is affectionate, and warm, and funny. Hemingway was, of course,

ficial suppression of native languages by English, but I would maintain

books with titles like, Tracheal Centrifuge, The Stupefying Flashbulbs,

Yet more and more time passes silently.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

It becomes still more difficult to find

54 The Soul of Creative Writing

itself, wondering if we even can call it a poem. But indeed it is a poem,

ibility of a poet is I think closely tied to morality and to truth, and we

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet

-Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,

The world is a mist. And then the world is

looking for something, something, something.

58 The Soul of Creative Writing

Elizabeth Bishop was actually a fine drawer of real pictures. One of

The still explosions on the rocks,

And since the heavens will attend

The shooting stars in your black hair

So we trust Bishop completely. Our mind has fallen in love. And we

In these first lines, we feel sweetness, sympathy, humanity and perhaps

64 The Soul of Creative Writing

often desperately sad, even tragic-and in some cases, as with Ernest

Think of your conversations with your siblings or parents about a rela-

66 The Soul of Creative Writing

David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Nathan

Nick is an excellent role model, as far as narrators go. The traits of

This kind of wry confession can go a long way toward endearing

good book to examine to see how Spiegelman distanced himself from

fessional-and aren't all confessions selective? This is about standing

Too true. And what are we to believe at this point?

presenting a life indirectly is the most effective way.

The tradition of giving of titles in Western literature really came into