A firm editor can send clothes and furniture to the Good Will and clear the table with a slash of the blue pencil. A harder litter to deal with is the ground-in kind caused by lazy evocation of the past.
The Our Song syndrome is a quick ‘n’ easy way to summon an earlier time. A notorious devotee of this dodge is Ann Beattie, whose Love Always opens with Barbra Streisand singing her threnodic version of “Happy Days” and proceeds to grow into an Ascapian mountain range of ditties.
Sara Davidson’s needle gets stuck in the same groove in Friends of the Opposite Sex. The first chapter, only seven pages long, contains six song titles from the sixties, and an argument between naked lovers over whether “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday” was on an album called Between the Buttons. The lovers get so excited during this passionate wrangle that they get out of bed and comb through the record cabinet in the middle of the night.
No matter where Davidson’s characters are or what they are doing, it always reminds them of a favorite song from their counterculture heyday. A cue arm hangs over their heads like the sword of Damocles. One expresses intense happiness with “I feel like I’m on the cover of an Eagles album, Hotel California.” The most unseemly plug of all comes when the heroine climbs a mountain in the Sinai and Davidson describes the deep feelings of a Diaspora Jew on first seeing the Promised Land: “A Jimmy Cliff song ran through her head: ‘I Want To Know.’”
Songs have literary work to do, and if they don’t do it they have no place in a novel. Suspense author Patricia Highsmith got enormous mileage out of a Gay Nineties lyric in her 1950 thriller Strangers On a Train. As the evil Bruno stalks through an amusement park, a calliope plays “Casey Would Waltz With the Strawberry Blond.” Highsmith very cleverly quoted the line “Her brain was so loaded it nearly exploded” because Bruno is planning to strangle Guy’s wife. A classic example of the literary technique known as “indirection”—describing something hideous by alluding to something innocent and pleasant—it raises the tension to an unbearable pitch.
Another example of lazy evocation is the Bijou syndrome. Sara Davidson lets one of her characters recite the entire plot of Picnic so that we might look into the heart of a disillusioned woman remembering the days when she believed in true love.
In The Women’s Room, Marilyn French made obsessive use of Stella Dallas to drive home the point—gratuitous considering the ongoing story—that women suffer:
Oh, God! I’ll never forget that last scene, when the daughter is being married inside the big house with the high iron fence around it and she’s standing out there—I can’t even remember who it was, I saw it when I was still a girl, and I may not even be remembering it right. But I am remembering it—it-it made a tremendous impression on me—any—way, maybe it was Barbara Stanwyck.
Besides being an inadequate way of bringing past emotions and impressions to life, letting characters describe old movies leads a writer into bad dialogue. Because people in real life tend to grope for names of stars and directors, the Bijou syndrome writer has her characters do the same, ending up with staccato sentences like: “Oh, who—wait … was it … yes, it was Paulette what’s-her-name … you know, she was married to Charlie Chaplin.”
Women’s Litter is full of such fits-and-starts dialogue. Alice Adams is a devotee of the trenchant grunt:
“Shall we, uh, share a cab?”
“It’s, uh, really spring now.”
“Country smells are, uh, really terrific.”
“I’m, uh, a friend of Janet’s.”
This sound is not the personal idiosyncrasy of any one character in Superior Women; they all do it, as does the author in her exposition: “She has never touched him there, touched his, uh, thing.”
Designed to serve verisimilitude—this is the way people really talk—this sort of writing grates on the reader’s nerves and violates Aristotle’s dictum that art must imitate, never copy, life. People do talk this way, but when they do it in novels it becomes the stylistic offense known as “second thoughts.”
Evoking the past does not require the genius of an Emily Bronte. All it takes is an awareness of something called the “brushstroke technique.” Edna Ferber, no literary titan but ever the professional, used it in So Big when she covered twelve years of Selena De Jong’s life on a hardscrabble farm with a one-sentence description of her hairpins: “She skewered her braid with a hairpin from which the varnish had long since faded, leaving it a dull gray.”
It’s undemocratic to say anything good about censorship, but why stop now?
Censorship makes writers try harder. In 1911 Edith Wharton could not write a cunnilingus scene, so she had Ethan Frome kiss Mattie’s knitting wool instead. The exquisitely subtle passage she turned out is enough to knock your socks off.
Being able to write explicitly about sex has made authors relax and grow careless in other areas of writing, from plotting and pacing to grammar and punctuation. Men do it, too, but the worst offenders are Women’s Litters intent upon proving how liberated they are. Exhausted from writing monumentally detailed sex scenes, they give everything else a lick and a promise.
When they have trouble making the story move, they fake action from behind a steering wheel to trick the reader into thinking that someone or something is going somewhere. In Smart Women, Judy Blume’s heroine “drove up to Fourth, left on Pearl, right on Sixth, across Arapahoe, up the hill to Euclid, right on Aurora to the dead end sign.” Also where the reader ends up.
Erica Jong’s Parachutes & Kisses sounds like a script for “Hardcastle and McCormick.” When not in bed, the lubricious Isadora Wing is in her silver Mercedes. She jumps toll booths on the Merritt Parkway, misses freeway exits while stoned, rushes her daughter to the hospital and her dog to the vet, rolls down an icy driveway, crashes into a stone wall—anything to convince the reader that the author is capable of producing some other forward movement besides a pelvic thrust.
Women’s Litter abounds with sloppy metaphors and ill-considered descriptions. Judy Blume calls our attention to “a battered Datsun pickup the color of infant diarrhea.” Sara Davidson gives us an unintentionally hilarious coupling:
She could feel the climax now, swishing its tail like a fish. He was pulling it up and out of her. Up and up it came, big, this fish was going to set records, they were going to weigh it, they would pose beside it for photographs. You could see its powerful form rising up through the water, navy blue.
This exquisite metaphor for passion’s culmination gets an even more memorable grace note when Davidson plunges in and describes love’s afterglow: “They lay spent, slumped together like two wet fish in a bucket.”
The increasingly difficult task of coming up with new and different ways to describe the same old sex act gets writers into the habit of straining for everything. Erica Jong tells us that “dawn dyed the Connecticut hills the color of fuchsined water in some recollected apothecary jar.” But the book more in need of a truss than a dust jacket is Diana Davenport’s Wild Spenders:
“She gave him a smile like gin splashed on hot coals.”
“Kate’s jaw hardened as if her inlays had just fused.”
“Bruce whinnied loud, reminding them he was still there, blood Rorschaching around him.”
“ … her mound shook and shimmied like a small mad dog.”
“ … mascara drooping from her lids like ant doody.”
Can it get worse? Yes, because Davenport tries to pun in Latin: “She cruised Will’s bookstore until he closed, and carped the diem by going home to make love.” This proves that Davenport has had some sort of tenuous encounter with Horace because carpe diem, meaning “seize the day,” is from his poem “Carmina.” The only trouble is, the Cosmo girls who can be counted on to devour Davenport’s novel will have no idea what she’s talking about. It’s ironic that she should have chosen this particular Horatian phrase to have fun with because the line preceding it in the poem is an apt description of how I felt while reading her book: “Dum loquimur, fugerit invi
da” (“While we are speaking, envious time will have flown”).
In the area of offenses against grammar and punctuation, Judy Blume gives us “Buck’s” County, Pennsylvania; he “hung” himself; and she “spit” out toothpaste. These errors occur not in dialogue where an ignorant character must be allowed to talk the way he talks, but in the author’s own exposition.
In Superior Women, Alice Adams’ sentences have the jerking, lurching feel of a train adding cars in the station. Instead of a cowcatcher, she uses parentheses to scoop up anything that gets in the way:
Like sexual addicts, which perhaps they are, or very young lovers, which clearly they are not (but perhaps with a kind, late-middle-aged persistence of vision they see each other as young: Jackson as hard-muscled, as taut, and Megan as smoothly voluptuous as when they first met, some thirty-nine years back), all afternoon they made love, in that room.
Adams also gives her sentences little kicks in odd places that send commas flying up into our eyes like cinders:
“In 1944, there are not many alternatives available, to marriage, for nice young middle-class girls.”
“The most unusual feature of their actually making love, to Megan, is the way Jackson uses his tongue.”
“Mid-seat they collide, then, their mouths, arms, breasts, and hands and legs all wildly seeking each other out.”
The couple in the last sentence are in a car, so that’s what “mid-seat” means, but do men have breasts? Are the alternatives in the first sentence available to marriage or to nice young middle-class girls? Who are the two or more people implied by “their” who are making love to Megan in the second sentence?
Adam’s novel was touted as a successor to The Group. But there is no reason to eat her heart out, for Mary McCarthy, then, because there is no comparison (absolutely none) at, uh, all.
The need to strike a balance between traditional womanhood and careers by cooking and decorating on paper is one cause of Women’s Litter. There are two others.
Feminism’s rigidly egalitarian stance has called into question the inherently discriminatory practice of selection demanded by all art. Sometimes the Left seems to be cranking up to a charge of “writism.” “Good writing is counterrevolutionary,” said Ellen Willis in the Village Voice. “Let all the people write,” said Strawberry Statement author James Simon Kunen. Doubtless they meant well, but the writer must function as an elitist, must pick and choose among characters and details, elevating this one and reducing that one, accepting some and rejecting others, all in the name of arbitrary standards. Don’t take my word for it; liberal Brigid Brophy said it first: “Art obstinately stands out as the one justifiably aristocratic system, which is reduced to nonsense the instant it abandons the aristocratic principle.”
Second, no one wants to write “like men.” Many women regard authority in any form as a male trait to be avoided at all cost. Made aware of the way men have controlled them, they no longer feel comfortable with literary control. Being “on top” of the story and characters, keeping everybody and everything in line, being the author-boss, are all reminiscent of male dominance.
But an author is, after all, an authoritarian. The ladies of Women’s Litter should exercise their feminist “assertiveness” by adopting the principle of “Le livre, c’est moi.”
19
LAND OF HOPEFULLY AND GLORY
If the practitioners of Lockjaw Choctaw in our midst had their way, America’s most beloved novel would sound like this:
Scarlett O’Hara was not a physically ideal human being but men seldom perceived it when informed by her life-enhancing qualities as the Tarleton twins were.
“What does it matter if we were expelled from the college of our choice, Scarlett? The hostilities are going to start any any day now. You don’t think we’d pursue career-enrichment opportunities with hostilities in progress, do you?”
“Hostilities, hostilities, hostilities! This hostilities dialogue has caveated every party this spring. Besides, there aren’t going to be any hostilities.”
“Not going to be any hostilities? Why, honey, after the first-strike shelling situation we instituted at Fort Sumter, the Yankees will have to engage in hostilities. Violence always begets violence.”
“If you boys don’t address another issue, I’ll go in the house and express my rage!”
“How about if we tell you a privileged communication? You know Miss Melanie Hamilton who’s based in Atlanta? Ashley Wilkes’s cousin? They say Ashley’s going to marry her. You know the Wilkeses tend to have meaningful relationships with their extended family members.”
“Devastating! I’m going to ask Pa if he has any input.”
“Do you mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O’Hara, that you neither advocate nor condone home ownership? Why, home ownership is the only viable alternative worth livin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only comprehensive program for stage-one social mobility.”
“Oh, Pa, you talk like a Hibernian-American.”
“‘Tis proud I am that I’m Hibernian-American, and don’t you be forgettin’, Missy, that you’re half Hibernian-American, too, and to anyone with a drop of Hibernian blood in him or her, the land he or she lives on is like his or her female parent.”
“Ashley, I-I love you.”
“You musn’t say that, Scarlett. It will serve no useful purpose.”
“But Ashley, I know you have a felt need for me. Say you have a felt need for me!”
“I have a felt need for you but it has no growth potential. Oh, Scarlett, can’t we put a voluntary ban on these things?”
“Don’t you want to have a one-on-one commitment with me?”
“I’m going to have a one-on-one commitment with Melanie.”
“But you just said you had a felt need for me!”
“I misspoke. My dear, why must you make me verbalize things that will only give you a negative self-image? You’re so young and unformulated that you don’t know what a one-on-one commitment means.”
“I know that I love you.”
“Love isn’t enough to construct a positive orientation for two people as polarized as we are. You, who are so autonomous and self-reaiizing—”
“Why don’t you articulate it, you wimp? You’re threatened by me! You’d rather live with that submissive little nurturer who can’t open her mouth except to say ‘affirmative’ and ‘negative,’ and parent a network of passive role players just like her!”
“You mustn’t say counterproductive things about Melanie. She’s part of my gene pool and we interact.”
“She’s a pale-faced, unassertive ninny and I’m unsupportive of her!”
“Miss Scarlett, I don’t have no baby-birthin’ skills!”
“As the Supreme Being is my witness, I’m going to effect a take-charge dynamic with a view toward making it unthinkable that I will ever be inadequately nourished again. I’m going to develop survival techniques, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be disadvantaged again. If I have to harass, victimize, utilize, or practice situation ethics, I’ll never be without my basic nutrients at any subsequent point in time.”
“Ashley, the Yankees want three hundred dollars to pay the taxes on Tara!”
“Why tell me? You know I can’t cope.”
“But Ashley, this is a worst-case scenario!”
“What do people do when they’re faced with a worst-case scenario? Some are able to initiate direct action to achieve full humanity, while inadequate personalities become victims of the winnowed-out factor.”
“Ashley, let’s relocate! They need non-combat advisors in the Mexican army. Oh, Ashley, we could have a restructuring experience!”
“I can’t leave Melanie. She has no job-training opportunities.”
“She has no reproductive capabilities, either, but I could give you—”
“Scarlett, this is totally and categorically unacceptable!”
“Then … we have no options?”
“N
othing, except … self-esteem.”
“Rhett, Ashley and I didn’t have a meaningful encounter at the lumber yard. We were just building bridges of understanding within a platonic framework.”
“Oh, I don’t begrudge him recreational sex with you. I can identify with that. Ever since you denied me control over your body, I’ve reaffirmed myself with surrogates like Belle. But I do begrudge him your consciousness becaue our value judgments are at same-stage. We could have communicated so well, Scarlett, but I couldn’t deal with your insecurities so I bonded with Bonnie instead. I’m into fathering now.”
“Promise me?”
“Anything, Melly.”
“Look after Ashley for me. See that he gets counseling, he’s so unstructured.”
“But Rhett, if you leave me, what will I do about re-entry?”
“Frankly, my dear, it doesn’t impact me.”
“I’ll go home to Tara and monitor the situation. I’ll think of some way to re-establish connectedness. After all, tomorrow is another time frame!”
As American lèse langage goes, the “less calories than” advertisements really aren’t so bad. True degeneration is found in the wordsmithery of small, unknown companies who can’t afford to hire the best and the brightest. Operating largely through mail orders, they don’t advertise on television or in the major print media. The literature that comes with their products sounds like this:
Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Page 17