sewn paper
How Stories Mean
Anthology
1993
358 pages
ISBN 0-88984-127-6
$18.95
might help give some idea
of the sort of writing
we tend to publish.
Soaping a Meditative Foot:
Notes for a Young Writer
John Metcalf
1) If you write as balm for a broken heart,
if you find writing therapeutic, read no further.
2) If you find offensive the assertion
that writing has little or nothing to do with
`sincerity' and spontaneity, read no further.
3) Do not confuse politics with
writing. Party political positions are
necessary in the larger world; the literary
world is necessarily aristocratic.
Do not hope to write for the masses -- it
is a fate worse than death.
Don't write propaganda -- be warned by
the example of those who did. (Read the poetry
which came out of the Spanish Civil War. Or
worse, the bad poetry by some excellent
poets which came out of the Viet Nam
War.)
Do not feel ashamed that you are not
carrying a gun or digging a ditch. Let the
cobbler stick to his last.
Remember that all writing is political,
all great writing subversive.
4) Stories, novels, and poems are
neither idea nor opinion. They are
the distillation of experience.
If you have an idea, don't start writing
until you feel better.
5) ...
`To sustain, nourish and enrich the
climate for creative growth and progress,
Titanic is embarked on the most comprehensive
quest for new ideas in the company's
history.
`The formal vehicle for this quest is an
imaginative and long-range planning
programme that was launched last year
and is being executed with skill and
vigour. The programme is a continuing,
in-depth effort that is adding and will
add new directions and novel dimensions
to the on-going and imaginative activities
of the company's strategic planning department.' This is not merely effluent; it is
your active enemy, the tide against
which you must swim.
6) Take joy in the Placing of words.
Consider the word `looking' and its setting.
7) It is understandable but futile to
take the twentieth century as a personal affront.
8) Know the weight, colour, and texture
of things.
9) The real poetry -- the names of materials
and tools in the trades. Visit hardware stores.
10) Avoid, so far as possible, articles made
of plastic.
11) Certain foods should be avoided
on aesthetic and spiritual grounds. (E.g. all forms
of styrofoam `bread'.)
12) Do not watch television. It is debilitating
and leads to the belief that one or two programmes
are not really all that bad.
13) The consumption of vast amounts of
alcohol or dope or both is not necessarily the
outward and visible sign of genius.
14) Fill your mind with useless information.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
is invaluable.
15) Buy the SOED and Webster's.
16) Consult Fowler's Modern English Usage.
17) Read Jane Austen.
18) Avoid literary criticism which moves
away from the word on the printed page and
ascends to theories of God, Archetypes, Myth,
Psyche, The Garden of Eden, The New
Jerusalem, and Orgone Boxes. Stick to the
study of the placement of commas.
19) If your main interest is prose, study poets.
20) Good films are cross-fertilizing.
21) ...
22) Read Enemies of Promise.
23) Study Arthur Waley's translations
of Chinese poetry -- the modern short story
in capsule form.
24) Don't be pious about Literature. Take
what you need and don't feel too guilty
about what you leave. (With the exception of
Jane Austen.)
25) Approach Dylan Thomas with
extreme caution; he is insidious and, on
prose writers, a Bad Influence.
Avoid richness. A love of Keats
and a love of sweet sherry are not unrelated.
Tio Pepe for preference.
26) Study the Grand Masters. For years. After
you've decided who they are.
Shakespeare has been widely praised
for the audacity of his quintuple `Never' and
for the poignant simplicity of `I pray you
undo this button' but who has praised
P.G. Wodehouse for daring to write:
These masterly lines are enshrined in
the following context.
`Well, what I was about to say, when
I rambled off a bit on the subject of the
dear old days, was that though in the
course of the years most of the poem of
which I speak has slid from memory,
I still recall its punch line. The thing
goes, as you probably know,
Tum tiddle umpty-pum `and this brought you to the snapperoo
or pay-off, which was
Someone had blundered.
`I always remember that bit, and the reason
I bring it up now is that, as I stood blinking at this
pink-boudoir-capped girl, I was feeling
just as those Light Brigade fellows must
have felt. Obviously someone had blundered
here, and that someone was Aunt Dahlia.' `Grand Master?'
`Well, in one way, yes.'
The tragedy of Wodehouse is that he
is not a comic writer but, rather, a comedian. If
only C.P. Snow, Doris Lessing, or Joseph Heller
had shared his grace.
(Examine a few paragraphs of Heller's
lumbering humour in Catch-22; soggy as
old bread pudding.)
`But Grand Master!'
`Don't be pious!'
Here is Wodehouse doing Nature. It
is a performance, a comedian's routine,
but it can teach you more of the art of writing
than all the Writers' Conferences and Schools
advertised in the summer issues of Saturday Review.
`Personally, I've always rather barred long
descriptions of the terrain, so I will
be on the brief side. As I stood there that
morning, what the eye rested on was the
following. There was a nice little splash of
garden, containing a bush, a tree, a couple
of flower beds, a lily pond with a statue of
a nude child with a bit of tummy on him, and
to the right a hedge. Across this hedge,
Brinkley, my new man, was chatting with
our neighbour, Police Sergeant Voules, who
seemed to have looked in with a view to
selling eggs.
`There was another hedge straight ahead,
with the garden gate in it, and over this
one espied the placid waters of the harbour,
which was much about the same as any other
harbour, except that sometime during
the night a whacking great yacht had rolled
up and cast anchor in it. And of all the objects
under my immediate advisement I noted
this yacht with the most pleasure and
approval. White in colour, in size resembling
a young liner, it lent a decided tone to the
Chuffnell Regis foreshore.
`Well, such was the spreading prospect. Add
a cat sniffing at a snail on the path and
me at the door smoking a gasper, and
you have the complete picture.' 27) Do not expect much recognition
financial or critical for the years of hard
work ahead of you.
In 1968, Alice Munro gave us Dance of the
Happy Shades -- the finest collection of
short stories yet published in Canada. You
can still buy (and should) copies of
the first printing. Allen Ginsberg once said
that most critics couldn't recognize good
poetry if it came up and buggered them
in broad daylight. Canadian critics seem
equally insensitive to quality in the short story.
`Particular life is still the best map to
truth. When we search our hearts and strip
our pretences, we all know this. Particular
life -- we know only what we
know.'
- (Herbert Gold.)
- (Extract from Annual Report
of Titanic Oil Company.)
`How had he made his bad impression? The
most likely thing, he always thought, was
his having inflicted a superficial wound on
the Professor of English in his first
week. This man, a youngish ex-Fellow of
a Cambridge college, had been standing on
the front steps when Dixon, coming round
the corner from the library, had kicked violently
at a small round stone lying on the macadam.
Before reaching the top of its trajectory
it had struck the other just below the left
kneecap at a distance of fifteen yards or
more. Averting his head, Dixon had
watched in terrified amazement; it had
been useless to run, as the nearest cover
was far beyond reach. At the moment of impact
he'd turned and begun to walk down the
drive, but knew well enough that he was
the only visible entity capable of stone-propulsion. He
looked back once and saw the Professor of
English huddled up on one leg and
looking at him.'
- (From Lucky Jim. Kingsley
Amis. Gollancz, London, 1957.)
`For what seemed an immensely long time,
I gazed without knowing, even without
wishing to know, what it was that confronted
me. At any other time I would have seen
a chair barred with alternate light and
shade. Today the percept had swallowed up
the concept. I was so completely absorbed
in looking, so thunderstruck by what
I actually saw, that I could not be
aware of anything else. Where the shadows fell
on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep
but glowing indigo alternated with stripes
of an incandescence so intensely bright that
it was hard to believe that they could be
made of anything but blue fire. Garden
furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow -- these
were no more than names and notions,
mere verbalizations, for utilitarian purposes,
after the event. The event was this
succession of azure furnace doors separated
by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was
inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to
the point, almost, of being terrifying. And
suddenly I had an inkling of what it must
feel like to be mad.'
- (From The Doors of Perception. Aldous
Huxley. Harper and Brothers, New York, 1954.)
`substance of twenty books in as many
evenings. He will describe the central idea
of the book he means to write until it
revolts him.'
- (From Enemies of Promise. Cyril
Connolly. Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, Revised Edition, 1949.)
`Tum tiddle umpty-pum
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
Tum tiddle umpty-pum?'
`I don't know if you happen to be familiar with
a poem called "The Charge of the Light
Brigade" by the bard Tennyson whom
Jeeves had mentioned when speaking
of the fellow whose strength was as the
strength of ten. It is, I believe, fairly well
known, and I used to have to recite it at the
age of seven or thereabouts when summoned
to the drawing-room to give visitors a glimpse
of the young Wooster. `Bertie recites so
nicely', my mother used to say -- getting her
facts twisted, I may mention, because
I practically always fluffed my lines -- and
after trying to duck for safety and being
hauled back I would snap into it. And very
unpleasant the whole thing was, so people
have told me.
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
- (From Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit.
P.G. Wodehouse. Herbert Jenkins, London, 1954.)
`A thing I never know when
I'm telling a story is how much scenery
to bung in. I've asked one or two
scriveners of my acquaintance, and
their views differ. A fellow I met at a
cocktail party in Bloomsbury said that
he was all for describing kitchen sinks and
frowsty bedrooms and squalor generally, but
the beauties of Nature no. Whereas, Freddie
Oaker, of the Drones, who does tales of
pure love for the weeklies under the pen-name
of Alicia Seymour, once told me that he reckoned
that flowery meadows in springtime alone
were worth at least a hundred quid
a year to him.
- (From Thank You Jeeves. P.G.
Wodehouse. Herbert Jenkins, London, 1934.)
John Metcalf, editor
28) A reply to those who ask you what your stories mean ...
`There is easy reading. And there is literature. There are easy writers, and there are writers. There are people whose ears have never grown, or have fallen off, or have merely lost the power to listen. And there are people with ears....`"I write. Let the reader learn to read." I must be as skilful as I can. I am obliged to be the best craftsman I can be. I must be free to choose my subject and my language, and I am at liberty to experiment, to grow, to express, if need be, the complexity of my experience with whatever resources are at hand. I will talk baby talk to babies and dog talk to dogs, but I cannot tell you in baby talk or dog talk of the excitement of being an adult human being in a world so wondrous with hope and sorrow and loyalty and defeat and anguish and delight.
`All of us who write once made the decision to write out the best that is in us. It had nothing to do with Integrity, only with taste and preference. Loath to tape our ears to our skulls, we said, instead, We shall let our ears grow up and away and see what happens.
`We want to tell the jokes we want to tell, and we can tell them only to people with ears to listen, people who will bring to the evening talents to challenge our own, who will work as goddam hard to read as we work who write.'
- (From `Easy Does It Not'. Mark Harris. In The Living Novel: A Symposium. Ed. Granville Hicks. Macmillan, New York, 1957.)
29) Rewrite.
30) Rewrite.
First published in John Metcalf, ed., The Narrative Voice: Short Stories and Reflections by Canadian Authors (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972) and reprinted in How Stories Mean.