Here's a problem: what do you do when you're lyrically minded, write (primarily) in English prose, and don't swing? By which I mean, I've been spending day after day with this manuscript, looking back over things I once perceived as finished, thinking, Jesus, maybe it isn't too late to eradicate every copy in existence...

Two problems, actually:

1. That clause up above, "things I once perceived as finished," as plain a piece of lumber as you could want, flat pine board or off-the-shelf 2x4, read, in the first draft, "things I perceived as finished three or four months ago." Which is OK as far as conveying information goes, but then adopts this quacking tone that I detect in every first draft, and in much published work, too. Same thing with "every copy," which read, six or seven minutes back, "every copy of this." This st- st- st- stuttering tone, stating and re-stating and re-stating, just in case anyone missed the idea on the first go-round.

2. Building's an OK metaphor, so's bricklaying. Trades that consist of doing one thing properly, then the next, then the next, and suddenly there's a structure that won't fall down when you put your shoulder against it. A prose paragraph. I keep looking for admirable models of lyrical realism and coming up sadly short. Henry Green, George Orwell, the Updike who wrote the Rabbit books, Dubliners' Joyce, Zukofsky and Wallace Stevens. There are run-on sentences in Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March that make me shake my head in amazement every time I read them, but I don't have the showboating lyrical chops that Martin Amis repeatedly quotes in his great Atlantic essay on Augie. What's left? Compression, I guess, trying to pack each sentence dense with information, like the freeze-dried meals they sell down at Mountain Equipment Co-Op. Late 50s Miles, the way the trumpet illuminates the all the empty space around it. Or Carl Andre and Donald Judd, who wring astonishing changes out of 'minimal' materials through contextual placement, or variations of rhythm and scale. As opposed to, say, Ms. Stein and her disciple Mr. Hemingway, or their legions of sadly inbred kids' endless catalogs of "linguistic statements" which, taken together, supposedly constitute "meaning."

(One last model: Roald Dahl's short story collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which, along with Danny, The Champion of the World are two books I remember very clearly from childhood, especially for Dahl's long, proto-Sebaldish illustrated essay, "How I Became a Writer", which I recall reading aged seven or eight or thereabouts, trying to figure out how its only apparent stylistic simplicity had been constructed. I've been reading a lot of Dahl lately, trying to pare Michelina's prose back into something approaching legibility, and his seamless construction of certain scenes -- Danny driving the Baby Austin to rescue his poacher father in the middle of the night; the little boy in "The Swan," tied on the rail tracks, waiting for the vibration of the oncoming train -- leaves me wide-mouthed, smitten all over again).
- posted by cjb @ 9:55 PM