Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Art of Fiction (Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)

Gabriel García Márquez

I'm back from vacation, and I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

I went to Las Vegas for a family visit.  Few other places in the world have such an absurd relationship with reality.  It's fantasy run amuck, and I'm glad to have seen it once.  I rode the fake Eiffel Tower and the New York, New York roller coaster, then went into that pyramid that shoots a light up into the sky.  I saw more fake art than I could count at Ceasar's.  What's a person to do?  Snap pictures, grab a drink, and people watch.

To reground after such an experience, there seems no one more fitting to turn to than Gabriel García Márquez.  Márquez is perhaps best known for the magical realism lacing together the prose of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Colera.  Less known are the years he spent as a journalist, working on his novels in the late night hours after his shift, the sounds of the presses keeping him company.  

Given that magic realism as a fictional style seems so far removed from the work of a journalist, I found Márquez's comments on the links between fiction and journalism, or between fantasy and reality, most surprising and illuminating.  I feel as if the differences between fiction and nonfiction are over emphasized today.  Too often we define writers, editors, and other people involved in publishing as either "fiction" or "nonfiction."  Hopefully Márquez's remarks demonstrate that writing techniques -- and attentive, active writing -- cross the abyss.

Márquez: I don't think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same.  A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.

 

Interviewer: Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?

 

Márquez: In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work.  In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work.  That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer.  A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

While he does not see them as fundamentally different, Márquez emphasizes what each brings to the other once an author opens him or herself to both:

Fiction has helped my journalism because it has given it literary value.  Journalism has helped my fiction because it has kept me in a close relationship with reality.

Still, there is a specific technique that journalism has given Márquez that has been powerful in the creation of his magical realism -- that of rendering minute detail:

That's a journalistic trick that you can also apply to literature.  For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you.  But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.  One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing.  That's exactly the technique my grandmother used.  I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies.  When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house.  I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts.  My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies.  But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn't say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it.  When I was writing the episode of Remedios the Beauty going to heaven, it took me a long time to make it credible.  One day I went out to the garden and saw a woman who used to come to the house to do the wash and she was putting out the sheets to dry and there was a lot of wind.  She was arguing with the wind not to blow the sheets away.  I discovered that if I used the sheets for Remedios the Beauty, she would ascend.  That's how I did it, make it credible.  The problem for every writer is credibility.  Anybody can write anything so long as it's believed.

Even when Márquez discusses other sources of inspiration when writing stories, he turns to a commonplace art form with a strong relationship to reality and the everyday -- photography:

I've got a photography book that I'm going to show you.  I've said on various occasions that in the genesis of all my books there's always an image.  The first image I had of The Autumn of the Patriarch was a very old man in a very luxurious palace into which cows come and eat the curtains. But that image didn't concretize until I saw the photograph.  In Rome I went into a bookshop where I started looking at photography books, which I like to collect.  I saw this photograph, and it was just perfect.  I just saw that was how it was going to be.  Since I'm not a big intellectual, I can find my antecedents in everyday things, in life, and not in the great masterpieces.

Style–Who’s Got it (The Paris Review: Interviews, Vol. 1)

So let's get back to Paris, since it certainly has so much style.

Truman Capote (Photo by Irving Penn)

One of the biggest stylists in Vol. 1 has got to be Truman Capote.  His interview is the second in the volume, and I feel sorry for Hemingway who comes right after (I know! feeling sorry for Hemingway!) because Hemingway's direct talk of cello, literature, and work habits cannot compare to Capote's expansive musings and meandering tangents on thrillers, growing up in the South, and discovering how Europe could start "taking away" as much as it gives an American.  From the moment Capote comes on scene, digging into a crate to pull out a wooden lion, he shines as bright as a freshly scrubbed putti.  I envision him "horizontal" while chatting to the interviewer, exactly as he describes his work process in bed or on a couch.

When asked about writers who are stylists and writers who are not, Capote's attention, however, snaps into focus for maybe the first time in the interview:

What is style?  And what, as the Zen koan asks, is the sound of one hand?  No one really knows; yet either you know or you don't.  For myself, if you will excuse a rather cheap little image, I suppose style is the mirror of an artist's sensibility -- more so than the content of his work.  To some degree all writers have style -- Ronald Firbank, bless his heart, had little else, and thank God he realized it.  But the possession of a style, a style, is often a hindrance, a negative force, nost as it should be, and as it is  -- with, say, E. M. Forster and Collette and Flaubert and Mark Twain and Hemingway and Isak Dinesen -- a reinforcement.  Dreiser, for instance, as a style -- but oh, Dio buono!  And Eugene O'Neill.  And Faulkner, brilliant as he is.  They all seem to me triumphs over strong but negative styles, styles that do not really add to the communication between writer and reader.  

After this remark, Capote's wit keeps unfurling, and so we meet the styleless stylist ("which is very difficult, very admirable, and always very popular: Graham Greene, Maugham, Thornton Wilder, John Hersey, Willa Cather....") and, then, the nonstylist (or "sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with formless, eyeless, earless messages" whom he doesn't name).  But I'd like to emphasize the end of the quote above.  Capote begins to draw a distinction between strong styles that add to the communication between writer and reader and those that don't.  

As any reader, writer, and editor knows, differing takes on style can bruise egos and rupture friendships.  That discord may be one reason why style, at least in the way Capote means it, has fallen out of favor in higher education, replaced by an emphasis on The Chicago Manual of Style or whatever rule book an institution decides upon.  I have had my own experiences with folks who think commenting and line editing mean adjusting everything to fit the preferred guidebook and nothing else, and I've seen friends battle the twenty-something-year-old copywriter across numerous drafts.  But how can one approach it otherwise when, as the saying goes, you know it when you see it?

In an attempt to take a stab at that, I want to pull two quotes together.  The first is by Bob Gottlieb.  I posted this last Friday: 

If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.... You can't have only one way of doing things; on some instinctual level you have to respond not just to the words of the writer but to the temperament of the writer.

This advice seems a propos of style as much as of responding to the writer as a person.  Why?  Because as Capote points out, style is really about personality:

I don't think that style is consciously arrived at, any more than one arrives at the color of one's eyes.  After all, your style is you.  At the end the personality of a writer has so much to do with the work.  The personality has to be humanly there.  The writer's individual humanity, his word or gesture toward the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader.  If the personality is vague or confused or merely literary, ça ne va pas.  Faulkner, McCullers -- they project their personality at once.

I admire this definition greatly: style is the projection of an author's personality through word and gesture.  That definition, of course, makes it all the more difficult to start poking around in someone's style when something is hindering that precious communication between writer and reader.

But poke around I do.  I'm an editor.  I try to do it as gently as possible.  I offer up a comment.  I scribble alternative words or phrasing in the margins.  Sometimes I devise an argument about this approach or that effect upon the reader.  Now, mind you, I'm talking about words and gestures that project style and personality, not flabby prose.  Unless -- wait for it -- flabbiness is what fleshes out, what makes corpulent, the personality of the author.  

And it is this dance with style that makes me wonder: What would happen if we reemphasized that style just is that personality of the writer?  Would that bring any relief for anyone?  Because for all I've read and dissected, the greatest threat to strong style is the overwriting of authorial or narrator "voice."  It is the pushing of voice, the stretching of it, until it is so distended it covers up all the other parts of a story -- including the other characters.  It's the making of something innate to the prose and story and author artificial.  It's working -- or doing something -- too hard.

Borges had an opinion on this.  All the greats did -- or, really, an author worth her or his paper.  On style, then --  on how even great stylists can overdo it and on why letting himself just be himself worked for Twain (most of the time):

Look here, I'm talking to an American: there's a book I must speak about --  nothing unexpected about it --that book is Huckleberry Finn.  I thoroughly dislike Tom Sawyer.  I think that Tom Sawyer spoils the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn.  All those silly jokes.  They are all pointless jokes; but I suppose Mark Twain thought it was his duty to be funny even when he wasn't in the mood.  The jokes had to be worked in somehow.  According to what George Moore said, the English always though "better a bad joke than no joke."

I think that Mark Twain was one of the really great writers, but I think he was rather unaware of the fact.  But perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact.  You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.  I remember what Bernard Shaw said, that as to style, a writer has as much style as his conviction will give him and no more.  Shaw thought that the idea of a game of style was quite nonsensical, quite meaningless.  He thought of Bunyan, for example, as a great writer because he was convinced of what he was saying.  If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.  In this country, though, there's a tendency to regard any kind of writing -- especially the writing of poetry -- as a game of style.  I have known many poets here who have written well -- very fine stuff -- with delicate moods and so on -- but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be kind of a sideshow.  They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge.  They were not really poets or writers at all.  It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly.  They had the whole thing at their finger ends.  But most of them -- except four or five, I should say -- seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it.  They take things for granted.  They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic.

Borges offers many lessons here.  For now, I'll take this one: "You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes."  After all, to err is only human.

Joan Didion: The Art of Nonfiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Joan Didion

This interview with Joan Didion took place in her New York apartment in 1996.  The year before she'd published the best-seller The Year of Magical Thinking, a meditation on grief; her husband had died in 2003.

On the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction:

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through.  The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction.  You have to sit down every day and make it up.  You have no notes -- or sometimes you do, I have extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer -- but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself.  In nonfiction the notes give you the piece.  Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.  Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors.  Every stroke you put down you have to go with.  Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.

A tip for analyzing the sentences or style of another writer (here, Hemingway):

I didn't think that I could do them [write those sentences], but I thought that I could learn -- because they felt so natural.  I could see how they worked once I started typing them out.  That was when I was about fifteen.  I would just type those stories.  It's a great way to get rhythms into your head.

The favorite book:

Interviewer: Do you do much rereading?

Didion: I often reread Victory, which is maybe my favorite book in the world.

Interview: Conrad? Really? Why?

Didion: The story is told thirdhand.  It's not a story the narrator even heard from someone who experienced it.  The narrator seems to have heard it from people he runs into around the Malacca Strait.  So there's this fantastic distancing of the narrative, except that when you're in the middle of it, it remains very immediate.  It's incredibly skillful.  I have never started a novel -- I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel -- I've never written one without rereading Victory.  It opens up the possibilities of a novel.  It makes it seem worth doing.  In the same way, John and I always prepared for writing a movie by watching The Third Man.  It's perfectly told.

Nonfiction and the significance of the everyday:

The nonfiction [of Naipul] had the same effect on me as reading Elizabeth Hardwick--you get the sense that it's possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it's worth doing.  That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something.  Naipaul is a great person to read before you have to do a piece.  And Edmund Wilson, his essays for The American Earthquake.  They have that everyday-traveler-in-the-world aspect, which is the opposite of the authoritative tone.

Methods as a reporter:

I can't ask anything.  Once in a while if I'm forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it's usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who's allowed to hang around for a while.  It doesn't matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don't trust it.  Sometimes you do interview where you get a lot.  But you don't get them from public figures.

When I was conducting interviews for the piece on Lakewood, it was essential to do interviews because that was the whole point.  But these were not public figures.  On the one hand, we were discussing what I was ostensibly there doing a piece about, which was the Spur Posse, a group of local high school boys who had been arrested for various infractions.  But on the other hand, we were talking, because it was the first thing on everyone's mind, about the defense industry going downhill, which was what the town was about.  That was a case in which I did interviewing and listening.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Guess what I got for my birthday.  All 4 volumes of The Paris Review Interviews.  Guess what I'm reading.  

Jorge Luis Borges

So here's a few words from Borges on writing.  The interview took place in 1967, but the writing advice is as helpful today as it would have been forty years ago.

On saying it direct:

Interviewer: You have said that your own work has moved from, in the early times, expression, to, in the later times, allusion.

Borges: Yes.

Interviewer: What do you mean by allusion?

Borges: Look, I mean to say this: when I began writing, I thought that everything should be defined by the writer.  For example, to say "the moon" was strictly forbidden; that one had to find an adjective, an epithet for the moon.  (Of course, I'm simplifying things.  I know it because many time I have written la luna, but this is a kind of symbol of what I was doing.)  Well, I thought everything had to be defined and that no common turns of phrase should be used.  I would never have said, So-and-so came in and sat down, because that was far too simple and far too easy.  I thought I had to find out some fancy way of saying it.  Now I find out that those things are generally annoyances to the reader.  But I think the whole root of the matter lies in the fact that when a writer is young he feels somehow that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament, under words taken from the seventeenth-century writers: he's inventing words all the time, or alluding to airplanes, railway trains, or the telegraph and telephone because he's doing his best to be modern.  Then as time goes on, one feels that one's ideas, good or bad, should be plainly expressed, because if you have an idea you must try to get that idea or that feeling or that mood into the mind of the reader.

On diction:

Borges: I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all the words should look the same way.  If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word.  One should be able to read smoothly in it even if you're writing metaphysics or philosophy or whatever.

On the fantastic:

Borges: I wonder if you can define it.  I think it's rather an intention in a writer.  I remember a very deep remark of Joseph Conrad -- he is one of my favorite authors -- I think it is in the foreword to something like The Dark Line, but it's not that ....

Interview: The Shadow Line?

Borges: The Shadow Line. In that foreword he said that some people have thought that the story was a fantastic story because of the captain's ghost stopping the ship.  He wrote -- and that struck me because I write fantastic stories myself -- that to deliberately write a fantastic story was not to feel that the whole universe is fantastic and mysterious; nor that it meant a lack of sensibility for a person to sit down and write something deliberately fantastic.  Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious.

Interviewer: You share this belief?

Borges: Yes.  I found that he was right.  I talked to Bioy Casares, who also writes fantastic stories -- very, very fine stories -- and he said, I think Conrad is right; really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.