Ever
since I started to write for a living in 1945, I have been devoted to the
English language, and astonished by the many forms in which good writing can
appear. I admit I am no model of writing, but I have always had before me the
hope that I can express clearly what I am trying to say. In that I have always
thought Bertrand Russell is a model, because it seemed he could take any
subject and make it comprehensible to any reader.
I think I can say I have read widely, although
my preference has always trended away from really serious writing such as great
novels (I am an extravagant admirer of, for example, Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal
and Tolstoy, although I am very far from having read all of their works, or
even having studied any of them in extenso.)
I grew up with a ridiculous prejudice that held
that only fiction was serious writing, only fiction was “creative”, and I have
expended a lot of energy fruitlessly in writing novels and plays, of which I
have hidden away somewhere in drawers probably as many as 10 or a dozen. It has
taken books such as “Memory of Fire,”
Eduardo Galeano’s monumental and thrilling three-volume history of Latin
America, and such a masterwork as “The
Age of Extremes: a Short History of the 20th century,” by Eric
Hobsbawm, a book that seemed to be describing my own life, to convince me that
“creative” writing need not be works of the imagination, as fiction is so often
described.
Recently I have begun reading a work that has
been enthusiastically recommended to me by my partner, The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence. I once interviewed this remarkable woman
author, child of a poor family in Manitoba, and I also interviewed another
Manitoba woman novelist, Adele Wiseman, whose
Afterword in the edition of Laurence’s book explains in letters she received
from Laurence, the agony, uncertainty, self-doubt, and yet ferocious certainty
that always seems to accompany the birth of a real work of literature. I
interviewed Wiseman because I was a reporter in Winnipeg when her first novel The Sacrifice was published in 1956, establishing what became a theme in her
career, that of the experience of immigrants from the Old World, especially of
Jewish immigrants, and their difficulty in coping with the New World in which they
found themselves. She, too, like Laurence, went on to become an important
figure in Canadian literature as a chronicler of the life of the Jewish ghetto,
as it might be called, in North Winnipeg. She was born in the same year as me,
1928, and I was surprised to discover that she died at the age of 64 in 1992.
(Incidentally, I myself dipped into the life of
North Winnipeg on one occasion when I wrote a 40,000-word unpublished monograph
about the father and mother of a friend of mine, a wonderful couple whose early
life was lived in such intense poverty that as a child the husband’s family used to change their residence every
month because they could never pay the rent. The mother worked for years in laundry
sweatshops; the father worked for 50 years as a printer for the same company. Yet
they put all three of their sons through university. So much for the common
prejudice that Jews are all rolling in money!)
The Stone Angel purports to have been written by a
90-year-old woman, Hagar, and to reveal by stages everything about her life. I
have read only 30 or so pages so far, but already I am beginning to doubt that
I have the stamina to see it through. Perhaps if I had been younger I might have
taken more easily to it, but I am myself almost as old as the heroine of the
book, and I am not sure I want to examine any dying life in such detail, just
for pleasure. With similarly meretricious argument, I keep on putting off
reading more of the novels of Dostoevsky, although I have been a great admirer
of those few I have already read. I feel it would probably be just too hard a slog
to get through them. I need something lighter these days.
Which brings me on to the purpose of this
essay: to defend two lesser writers whose skills I immensely admire, even though
I know some critics would say that neither of them plumb the depths of human
experience as do the master novelists.
First of these is Patricia Highsmith, an American
who spent most of her life living in Paris and Switzerland, where her 22 novels
(of which I find I have read 12), are regarded as psychological novels in the
full sense of the term, although classified as mere thrillers in Britain and
the US. She was a master in creating characters
who found themselves trapped by circumstance and forced to do things that they
would never normally consider doing, thus creating a sense of mounting horror,
as her characters struggled to fulfil what began to seem to them like their destiny.
Her first popular success in 1950 came with Strangers
on a Train, in which a perfectly innocent man became embroiled in a weird
conversation with a stranger that led to sickening and horrifying results when
his new-found “friend” turned up and forced him to fulfil some promises that he
claimed were made during their casual conversation. I found Hitchcock’s film of the novel, though
still a highly regarded one, not a patch on the terror of the novel. And when I
began to read others she subsequently wrote, I found she had perfected the
genre so that one became caught up in the self-imposed trap the characters had
created for themselves to the degree that it became entirely rivetting,
impossible to put down. In her later years, the criminal element of the stories
disappeared from her work, it seemed, and what was left, as in the book I
recently read, People Who Knock on the Door,
were simply the horrors into which family life can descend. It is the story of an ordinary family living
in a small American town, an inadequate father, insurance-salesman type, pompous
and self-important, an obedient wife, and two sons. The eldest son Arthur is
clear-eyed about his parents’ weaknesses, and refuses to follow his father when
he ascribes the youngest son’s miraculous recovery from a severe illness, to the
work of God. The father almost overnight becomes a born-again Christian, and
the book is a pitiless examination of the horrendous consequences that this
kind of absolutist belief can have on everyone connected with the believer. The eldest son opposes his father at every turn,
but the youngest son becomes a believer even more fanatical than his father, and
when the father disappoints him the result is truly tragic.
Highsmith was not a flowery writer, no purple
prose: she just had this intense concentration, told in simple plain language, on
the events happening in the lives, and usually in the minds, of her characters.
I have no hesitation in recommending her to anyone, especially to anyone
enjoying psychological novels.
A few years ago I developed a taste for the
detective novels of Robert B. Parker, whose character was Spenser, a wise-cracking
private eye in Boston who, whenever he got into a scrape that nothing could
save him from, had the benefit of an alter-ego black man of doubtful moral
stature, called Hawk, who could overcome anyone. I enjoyed them immensely, because they were
sparsely written, witty, and immensely readable.
Recently I picked up a couple of his books at a
remainder-table, and found both were about a new character, Chief of Police Jesse
Stone, in a small town called Paradise. I read all of the first of these, called Split Image, on a train journey to Toronto
from Montreal, something I would never have believed myself capable of. Much more than when I read Parker years ago,
I was impressed by his style: he seemed to have discovered a new style, written
around characters who seldom talked more than in monosyllables,
or short sentences, and yet somehow, by what seemed to me an infernal skill, he
managed to tell a story that was complex enough to maintain the interest to the
end.
I gave that book to my son Robert (with whom I
have exchanged many thrillers and the like over the years) and when I returned home
I found the second Jesse Stone epic lying there. This one is called Killing the Blues and once again I was
astounded by the brilliance of its writing technique. Jesse Stone, a police
chief who prefers everyone to call him Jesse, is a guy who really would have
liked to be a baseball player, but was stopped from making the show, as the
Major Leagues are called, by wonky knees. He had worked as a policeman with the
LAPD, but was severed from that in mysterious circumstances, the details of which
haunted him for the rest of his life. Early in this story, as he went through
his daily routine of dealing with minor crimes, he was advised that a man whom
he had viciously attacked as a Los Angeles policeman, had recently been released
from jail, and was expected probably to make his way to Paradise to exact
revenge on Jesse.
While steeling himself for this coming attack,
Jesse had to confront an incident in which a cynical high school student had
taken a gun to her headmistress and held her hostage. Against everyone’s advice, Jesse went in to
talk to the girl, discovered she had been mercilessly bullied at school, and was
exacting revenge from those she held responsible for having ignored her
plight. Eventually he talked her into
giving him the gun, and won her confidence as he told her those responsible
would be made to pay. Of course, in the end, the headmistress saw the error of
her ways, the class-master who had routinely abused girls was arrested, and the
bullying clique of girls offered to stand evidence against him, and to reform
their own practices against weaker students than themselves. “Wow,” said the young hostage-taker, the first
favorable or sympathetic thing heard from her, her conversation normally being
peppered with obscenities. The headmistress offered to resign, but Jesse told
her it wasn’t necessary, so long as she was determined to pay more attention to
the girls under her control. This was typical of Jesse, who, still, however had
a tendency to drink himself blind when something did not go as he expected.
Meantime Rollo Nurse was on his way, and like the
old convict he was, he was making life difficult by staging a series of crimes
--- such as breaking the necks of neighbourhood dogs --- that he knew would
unsettle the police chief.
Needless to say, Jesse emerges whole from all these
trials. But once again I was totally bedazzled by the technical writing skill
employed by Parker. It almost seemed that, like Damon Runyon, for example, whose
tales of New York low life of the 1930s were told in an entirely new kind of
prose, with his own manufactured tense that makes his prose instantly recognizable
--- imagine how rare that is! --- I was almost convinced Parker had invented a new form of prose that would be
instantly recognizable to anyone who had read him.
Parker’s Jesse Stone, I realized as I finished
the book, is unlike any police chief who ever has, or probably ever could be.
But he seemed to be a model for any chief of police who might be interested in
really doing the job he is chosen for. And maybe this book should be required
reading by all Chiefs of Police.
I could not be so presumptuous as to recommend
Robert B. Parker to anyone ---- his books have already sold millions of copies
---- I just put him forward as an example of mastery of a prose style, found in
a totally unexpected place, among the practitioners of popular fiction, from a
guy who wrote five hours every day of the week except Sunday, and produced 68
books of different style and content that reached an audience of millions.
Don't knock it: it was a phenomenal achievement
by any standard.
Good column ... such thoughtful observations.
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