On Writing (2 page)

Well, this little book is all one needs to face into the prevailing silliness. And if I may borrow the sense of a phrase from her old friend and peer William Maxwell, Eudora Welty’s heart is like a lovely cottage with all the windows and doors wide open. She reminds us, wonderfully, that “Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.”

That October evening, while she read “A Wide Net” to all those people, my mind wandered just for an instant: I had the thought that this is what true civilization really is; not the cities or the monuments or the statecraft or even the politics: but this. This slip of a lady, with barely the physical power to get around on her own unaided, holding a thousand others in thrall, threaded together on the silence by the force and power of her art, her being, her imagining.

—

R
ICHARD
B
AUSCH
is the author of fourteen volumes of fiction, including
Selected Stories
(a Modern Library hardcover), and, most recently,
Hello to the Cannibals
.

Looking at short stories as readers and writers together should be a companionable thing. And why not? Stories in their bardic and fairy-tale beginnings were
told
, the listeners—and judgers—all in a circle.

E. M. Forster, in
Aspects of the Novel
, described the great age of the narrative:

That suspense is still with us, but it seems to me that now it exists as something shared. Reader and writer make
it a double experience. It is part of the great thing in which they share most—pleasure. And it is certainly part of the strong natural curiosity which readers feel to varying degree and which writers feel to the most compelling degree as to how any one story ever gets told. The only way a writer can satisfy his own curiosity is to write it. And how different this already makes it from telling it! Suspense, pleasure, curiosity, all are bound up in the making of the written story.

Forster went on to distinguish between what Neanderthal man told, the narrative thread, and what the written story has made into an art, the plot. “The king died and then the queen died” is the narrative thread; “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. We have all come from asking What next? to asking Why? The word “which,” of course, opened up everything, or as much of everything as the writer is able to handle.

To take a story:

Jack Potter, the town marshal of Yellow Sky, has gone to San Anton’ and got married and is bringing his bride back in a Pullman as a dazzling surprise for his hometown. And while the train is on its way, back in Yellow Sky Scratchy Wilson gets drunk and turns loose with both hands. Everybody runs to cover: he has come to shoot up the town. “And his boots had red tops with gilded imprints, of the kind beloved in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New England … The only sounds were his terrible invitations … He comfortably fusilladed the windows of his most intimate friend. The man was playing with the town; it was a toy for him.” The train comes in, Scratchy and the marshal are face to face, and Potter says, “I ain’t got a gun on me, Scratchy,” and takes only a minute to make up his
mind to be shot on his wedding day. “If you ain’t got a gun, why ain’t you got a gun?” “I ain’t got a gun because I’ve just come from San Anton’ with my wife. I’m married.” “Married? Married?… Is this the lady?” “Yes; this is the lady.” “ ‘Well,’ said Wilson at last, slowly, I s’pose it’s all off now.’ He was not a student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains.” He picked up his starboard revolver, and, placing both weapons in their holsters, he went away.

Two predicaments meet here, in Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” You might say they are magnetized toward each other—and collide. One is vanquished with neatness and absurdity; as he goes away, Scratchy’s “feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand.” Here are the plainest equivalents of comedy, two situations in a construction simple as a seesaw, and not without a seesaw’s kind of pleasure in reading; like Scratchy Wilson, Crane is playing with us here.

In Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill,” there is only one character and a single situation; Miss Brill’s action consists nearly altogether in sitting down—she goes out to sit in the park, returns to sit on her bed. There is no collision. Rather, the forces meeting in the public gardens have, at the story’s end, passed through each other and come out at the other side; there has been not a collision, but a change—something more significant. This is because, although there is one small situation going on, a large, complex one is implied. Life itself corresponds to the part of Scratchy Wilson, so to speak. Not violent life, merely life in a park on Sunday afternoon in Paris. All that it usually does for Miss Brill is promenade, yet, life being life, it does finally threaten. How much more deadly to such a lady than
a flourished pistol is a remark overheard about herself. Reality comes to leer at her from a pleasant place, and she has not come prepared to bear it. And so she, who in her innocence could spare even pity for this world—pity, the spectator’s emotion—is defeated. A word is spoken and the blow falls and Miss Brill retires, ridiculously easy to mow down, as the man with the pistols was easy to stare down in “Yellow Sky” for comedy’s sake. But Miss Brill was from the first defenseless and on the losing side; her defeat is the deeper for it and one feels sure it is for always. So this story, instead of being a simple situation, is an impression of a situation, and tells more for being so.

Looking at these two stories by way of their plots in skeleton, we can’t help but notice something: their plots are not unlike. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” is its more unpretentious form, “Miss Brill” shows an interesting variation. It is a plot with two sides, or two halves, or two opposites, or two states of mind or feeling side by side; even one such in repeat would be a form of this. The plot is, of course, life
versus
death, which includes nearly every story in the world.

It could be said equally well that most stories (and novels too) have plots of the errand of search. An idea this pervasive simply pervades life, and the generality that could include in one quick list “The Bear,” “The Jolly Corner,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “Araby” doesn’t tell us really anything.

And so, plainly, we must distinguish plots not by their skeletons but by their full bodies; for they are embodiments, little worlds. Here is another: let us try to distinguish it as if it were literally a little world, and spinning closely now into our vision.

Now, the first thing we notice about this story is that we can’t really see its solid outlines—it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what obscures, at first glance, its plain real shape.

We are bearing in mind that the atmosphere in a story may be not the least of its glories, and also the fact that it may give a first impression that will prove contrary to what lies under it. Some action stories fling off the brightest clouds of obscuring and dazzling light, like ours here. Penetrate that atmosphere and the object may show quite dark within, for all its clouds of speed, those primary colors of red and yellow and blue. It looks like one of Ernest Hemingway’s stories, and it is.

A story behaves, it goes through motions—that’s part of it. Some stories leave a train of light behind them, meteorlike, so that much later than they strike our eyes we may see their meaning like an aftereffect. And Faulkner’s seem not meteors but comets; they have a course of their own that brings them around more than once; they reappear in their own time in the sense that they reiterate their meaning and show a whole further story over and beyond their single significance.

If we have thought of Hemingway’s stories as being bare and solid as billiard balls, so scrupulously cleaned of adjectives, of every unneeded word, as they are, of being plain throughout as a verb is plain, we may come to think twice about it, from our stargazer distance. The atmosphere that cloaks D. H. Lawrence’s stories is of sensation, which is pure but thick cover, a cloak of self-illuminating air, but the atmosphere that surrounds Hemingway’s is just as thick and to some readers less illuminating. Action can
indeed be inscrutable, more so than sensation can. It can be just as voluptuous, too, just as vaporous, and, as I am able to see it, much more desperately concealing.

In one of Hemingway’s early stories, “Indian Camp,” Nick goes with his father, a doctor, to see a sick Indian woman. She is suffering in labor and the doctor operates on her without an anaesthetic. In the bunk above her head, her husband lies with a sore foot. After the operation is over and the child successfuly born, the husband is found to have slit his throat because he had not been able to bear his wife’s suffering. Nick asks, “Is dying hard, Daddy?” “No, I think it’s pretty easy,” his father says.

Is this still a red and blue world? I see it as dark as night. Not that it is obscure; rather, it’s opaque. Action can be radiant, but in this writer who has action to burn, it is not. The stories are opaque by reason of his intention, which is to moralize. We are to be taught by Hemingway, who is instructive by method, that the world is dangerous and full of fear, and that there is a way we had better be. There is nothing for it but, with bravery, to observe the ritual. And so action can step in front of reality just as surely and with more agility than even sentimentality can. Our belligerent planet Mars has an unknown and unrevealed heart.

Nevertheless, this is not where we stop seeing. For what comes of this, his method? In a painting by Goya, who himself used light, action and morality dramatically, of course, the bullring and the great turbulent wall of spectators are cut in diagonal halves by a great shadow of afternoon (unless you see it as the dark sliced away by the clear, golden light): half the action revealed and half hidden in dense, clotting shade. It’s like this in Hemingway’s plots. And it seems to be the halving that increases the story.

One power of his, his famous use of dialogue, derives as well from the fact that something is broken in two; language slips, meets a barrier, a shadow is inserted between the speakers. It is an obscuring and at the same time a revealing way to write dialogue, and only great skill can manage it—and make us aware at the same time that communication of a limited kind is now going on as best it can.

As we now see Hemingway’s story, not transparent, not radiant, but lit from outside the story, from a moral source, we see that light’s true nature: it is a spotlight. And his stories are all taking place as entirely in the present as plays we watch being acted on the stage. Pasts and futures are among the things his characters have not. Outside this light, they are nothing.

Clearly, the fact that stories have plots in common is of no more account than that many people have blue eyes. Plots are, indeed, what the story writer sees with, and so do we as we read. The plot is the Why. Why? is asked and replied to at various depths; the fishes in the sea are bigger the deeper we go. To learn that character is a more awe-inspiring fish and (in a short story, though not, I think, in a novel) one some degrees deeper down than situation, we have only to read Chekhov. What constitutes the reality of his characters is what they reveal to us. And the possibility that they may indeed reveal everything is what makes fictional characters differ so greatly from us in real life; yet isn’t it strange that they don’t really
seem
to differ? This is one clue to the extraordinary magnitude of character in fiction. Characters in the plot connect us with the vastness of our secret life, which is endlessly explorable. This is
their role. What happens to them is what they have been put here to show.

In his story “The Darling,” the darling’s first husband, the theatre manager, dies suddenly
because
of the darling’s sweet passivity; this is the causality of fiction. In everyday or real life he might have held on to his health for years. But under Chekhov’s hand he is living and dying in dependence on, and in revelation of, Olenka’s character. He can only last a page and a half. Only by force of the story’s circumstance is he here at all; Olenka took him up to begin with because he lived next door.