Insert Bad Joke Here

I hope to have some real posts up by the end of the week, but for now, enjoy (or suffer through) this article on puns.

One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty

The sensible thing to do would have been to read some of Eudora Welty's novels/collections and then start on her memoir (though I have read two or three of her short stories). But One Writer's Beginnings was already on my shelf, and I've wanted to read it ever since I was assigned excerpts in a college writing class.

This is the sort of memoir that very private people write--almost the opposite of a tell-all. My copy is only 114 pages (with photographs). One Writer's Beginnings is based off of three lectures Welty gave covering her childhood impressions and how these affected her writing self. And Welty is very careful to present her writing self instead of her "personal" self (as much as the two can be separated):

Around the age of six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word "moon" came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave to me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio (11).

The entire book is woven out of these small moments made beautiful by Welty's vivid but straight-forward prose (I couldn't help but fall in love with her line about "the insect murmur" of the electric fan). In contrast to these writerly details, Welty only briefly (though poignantly) mentions her father's early death to leukemia.

My father, I believe, was unconscious. My mother was looking at him. I could see her fervent face: there was no doubt as to what she was thinking. This time, she would save his life, as he'd saved hers so long ago, when she was dying of septicemia. What he'd done for her in giving her the champagne, she would be able to do for him now in giving him her own blood.

All at once his face turned dusky red all over. The doctor made a disparaging sound with his lips, the kind a woman knitting makes when she drops a stitch. What the doctor meant by it was that my father had died.

My mother never recovered emotionally. Though she lived for over thirty years more, and suffered other bitter losses, she never stopped blaming herself. She saw this as her failure to save his life (101).

This is the most revealing passage in the memoir, partially because this is the most difficult thing Welty says about anyone in her family, and partially because it reveals how determined Welty is to present herself as an observer only. She never tells the reader how her father's death effects her--there is a curious, ladylike distance between the supposed subject of the narration and reader. The reader is left with only a vague, ghost-like image of Welty herself. The real subject of the story is story itself.

If Welty had been more revealing, I might have found her story more interesting (I took my time finishing it--in spite of her skill and the book's brevity). In many ways, however, I appreciate Welty's determination to protect her in privacy. (She was, supposedly, pressured into writing a memoir by her friends.)

On the other hand, Carolyn G. Heilbrun (in the introduction to a book I haven't read yet--it's on the list) claims that Welty's memoir is overly nostalgic and a dishonest representation of life and writing to other aspiring female authors.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I don't particularly believe that anyone "owes" the world her complete, unedited life--if I ever wrote a memoir, I would certainly edit some scenes out, and I tend to expect memoir writers to do the same.

But is there a point where an incomplete truth joins the ranks of lies? I'd say yes. But I wouldn't say that One Writer's Beginnings has quite crossed that line. There is something uncomfortable about finding such large gaps in a memoir, but the gaps are so obvious, it's as if Welty is saying, "No, this isn't all. But really, is that any of your business, dear?"

(Image from Amazon.)

Inspiration at the Speed of a Bullet

Okay, I know this seems like it has nothing to do with anything, but if you're a writer, you somehow manage to pull everything back to your trade. Alan Sailer's high-speed photographs focus on colorful, almost tangible moments. There's a whole writer's block theory (and market) built around seeing and doing unusual things that spark new associations in the writer's mind, pulling him/her out of creative ruts. I certainly feel my brain stretching beyond its usual vocabulary as it recreates the sounds and sights that must have occured in Sailer's studio.

Plus, these are just cool. My favorite is the glass ornament full of sprinkles.


(Image from Enginoob.)

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

I'd like to thank Josh for recommending The End of the Affair and my mom for thinking it would make a good gift (it did). I would also like to thank Graham Greene for existing and writing books. And now that I've made it clear how very unbiased I am...

There were so many things to love stylistically about The End of the Affair, I'm not going to try to cover them all. Greene's narrative within a narrative was deftly employed. Greene's style is so tight, so refined, it appears almost accidental. One of things I most appreciated about The End of the Affair was Greene's ability to take the complexities of theme and characters one expects from literary fiction and combine them with the suspenseful plot structure of genre fiction.

I tend to have a hard time relating to characters in novels about affairs (and a large percentage of literary fiction involves characters having affairs), but I didn't have this difficulty with The End of the Affair. As a writer, I enjoyed Maurice Bendrix's (often wry) observations about the life of a novelist (he acts as a stand-in for Greene). As a reader, I related to him in ways I didn't expect. Bendrix is a selfish, almost cold, narrator, but I immediately understood his self-editing tedencies, his habit of admiting to certain flaws in order to distract from other failures, his ego, etc. From the opening paragraph, I was drawn to Bendrix's character.

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who--when he has been seriously noted at all--has been praised for his techinical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet' (1).

But the true kudos go to Greene for writing a believable female character (I'm reading Joyce and Dickens right now--I've definitely felt a need for this). In Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Sons and Lovers--I could appreciate the authors' redendering of certain psychological types, but I didn't really feel like I understood why (outside of a dry, textbook explaination) they did what they did. Through Sarah Miles' journal, I felt I could understand her affair because I could understand her.

But there's not a single person anywhere to whom I can even say I'm unhappy because they would ask me why and the questions would begin and I would break down. I mustn't break down because I must protect Henry. Oh, to hell with Henry, to hell with Henry. I want somebody who'll accept the truth about me and doesn't need protection. If I'm a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake? (75)

Moving beyond style and plot, I do question how important The End of the Affair would be to me if I didn't already accept the claims of Christianity. Greene's stretches, particularly at the end of the novel, seem acceptable to me because I was enchanted by his ideas well before I arrived at his last chapter.

Michael Gorra, in the introduction of my copy of The End of the Affair, claims, "[T]his book challenges the particular kind of truth-claims on which fiction conventionally relies. The End of the Affair does not simply ask us to suspend our disbelief. It instead demands that we do believe, and believe in the religious sense of the term" (vii). A friend of mine remarked, after reading a Greene novel I haven't tried yet, that Greene seemed a bit heavy-handed to her. To which I could only respond, "Yeah, he is sometimes."

Without giving away too much, I'll admit that in the last section Greene pushes belief on the reader in ways I doubt I could if I was writing the same sort of novel. I think the conclusion seems particularly "difficult" because it flips the typical question "Why does/should one believe?" to "Why does/should one doubt?" In this way, Greene's novel reminds me of C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces--the reader is faced with the assertion that doubt is no more rational or cool-headed than belief, that we doubt with the same blind desperation we attribute to those who believe.

(Image from Jalopnik.)

P.S. I apologize for the disjointedness of this post--I finally stopped waiting till I had a clear enough mind to do The End of the Affair justice and just gave up and wrote this silly thing.

Report on the Condition of the Inner Editor

I'm in the first stages of a very rough edit/restructuring of my novel, which means I switch a lot between writing new scenes and editing previously written scenes. This is like constantly crossing the border between the Creative Country of Associative Anarchists (where the road signs say things like "Beware Falling Carousels" and "Sudden Death/Life Possible," or they just consist of almost-identifiable, Rorschach-like silhouettes) and the forever war-torn Republic of Correction-Fluid ("Plot-holes Ahead," "Cliches Kill," "Just Say 'No' to Double Negatives," "Rogue Commas Will be Shot on Sight," and endless miles of red ink as tiny factions of prescriptionists and descriptionists and 6th grade English teachers wriggle through the mud, trying to claim a particular molehill).

This sort of right-brained/writing vs. left-brained/editing is oversimplified (I certainly need my left-brain to write). But I'm no longer in a job where I keep the Chicago Manual of Style closer than my cup of tea, so I'm starting to feel nervous. I'm losing that grammatical shine I used to apply so liberally to other writers' work. (I feel this loss most distinctly when I re-read my blog posts...)

I needed a bit of snarkiness to make me feel better about my dying skills, so today I spent some time over at Testy Copy Editors and The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

I laughed so hard that I decided my inner editor can't be completely dead--she just needs a little company.

An Expert Explains Why Bethany's Recent Posts are So Short

(Image from ICanHasCheezburger.)

This Would be Easier...

I like Debbie Ridpath Ohi's brilliant idea (on the left).