Peaceable Land 18 - Troubled water
Charge!
Rejecting a whimsical and allusive submission, an office editor once told me “Look, it’s literary and so on. I like it. But how many of us are there? Five-hundred total in London?”
Every evening since Dan’s guest entry came out last week, someone I have been with has mentioned doing their own. It’s exciting. Not all five-hundred are yet found and gathered, but many are. You can hear the buzz of great minds.
So I am throwing out this week a long-held doubt. One to mull.
An article on Philip Roth listed traits common to all his protagonists: jewish, irascible, priapic, and so on, but then ‘hyperarticulate’.
That last item felt ominous. The first were confines of interest: Roth wrote horny men because he was interested in male horniness. The last seemed like it could be a confine of ability. I worried Roth had to make his characters like that to make them work.
The problem is that we want all people in our books, but books are made of words, and it is easy to put words to wordy people – thoughts thoughts for thinky characters, expressions for the expressive. There is a risk of missing the unwordy.
Lots of people don’t much like or trust thought. If they are in, say, pain their instinct is not at all to try and articulate it but to turn away. So articulating it risks untruth.
But we want all people, so these hard-to-include people must be included. The question is how you do it.
The friend I first asked – on a great daytime walk from Regent’s Park to St James’s Park – suggested Dostoevsky and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles.
Here are a few snippets I have found, in a couple of years thinking about it, somewhat useful, about the positive and negative emotions of such people.
In the wonderful Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St Aubyn expresses the emotions of children with the full precision of an intelligent adult mind. Robert, five, “was mesmerized by the strange hollow friendliness of her manner.” That’s nice, and generous, but doing it for an adult of childlike articulacy it would be condescending and untrue.
Another idea is to describe the effects of the emotion that is turned away from. I read that you must describe not the sun beating on a stooped man’s back but the shadows it casts the ground he is bent to. In a terrible but brilliant story, David Foster Wallace’s The Depressed Person, “the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. … Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its—as it were—shape and texture.”
The positive emotion most astonishing to Roth a “simple and essential affiliation with what is going on”. Henry Miller’s narrator walks around Paris empty-pocketed and content: “For five days I have not touched the typewriter nor looked at a book; nor have I had a single idea in my head except to go to the American Express.”
I have a friend of immediately obvious wisdom and buoyancy. Early on I saw her close her eyes and smile when the sun came on her. Laterly I contrived the same expression and a passing dupe said “That’s brilliant mate, just enjoying the moment, thinking of nothing.” Recently she had a cancer scare. The results were clear, but even before they came I felt there was no one I would worry about less if they became brutally ill. She claims the best choice she ever made was to give up her journal. So maybe you would describe positive emotion for such people with simple, selfless observation of pleasant, passing things.
Anyway, I pass that doubt now to the five hundred. I am seated, alas, with the rest of humanity at present, in Heathrow departures. Next week I would love to do Ameirca but would also love to review the Booker shortlist. It depends whether it’s easier to read five books or get myself shot.
You can read my interview with legendary historian who has made me cry loads, Andrew Roberts, here. And I’ve got tickets to see him speak in Kensington on the 28th of November: tickets are here.
In the same venue, but quite a bit more embarrassingly, I am going on the 14th of December to ‘A Very Merry Hitchmas’ — a celebration of Christopher Hitchens, hosted by Richard Dawkins and two doofuses — tickets here.
Thanks everyone
GM