by Donna Leon
“I can certainly understand that,” I said, “though I’ve never tried it. Is it easy?” I broke a breadstick in two and began to nibble on it.
“Well,” she began but was interrupted by the waiter bringing my water and her wine. She took a sip, a very small sip, placed her glass down, and continued, “You’ve got to get very close to them, you see. It would seem at first that it’s better to come at them from the back because it would be harder for them to push you away.”
I gave this the attention it deserved, and she continued, raising her hands in front of her, just at the level of my throat. “But since all the strength is in your thumbs, it’s really better if you do it from the front.”
This, too, I considered. Yes, yes, it would be much better that way. She lowered her hands and smiled up at the waiter, who placed our spaghetti with broccoli in front of us and wished us “Buon appetito.”
She put her fork into the center of the spaghetti and twirled it round. “What are you using now?” she asked.
Looking at my plate but speaking to her, I answered, “Last time I beat a man’s head in with a brick. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, ever since I was a kid. In fact, I always used to threaten people: ‘If you don’t stop doing that, I’ll beat your head in with a brick.’ But now I’ve finally done it, and it’s wonderfully invigorating.” A bit too much garlic in the sauce but still very good.
“Yes, bricks and stones are lovely, aren’t they? They feel so solid in the hand.” She ate another forkful of pasta. “What else?”
“Just this week, I was about to stab a man when I remembered I’d already done it, so I decided to use a garrote.”
“Hmm,” my companion responded. “Delicious pasta, isn’t it?” She raised her eyes to the middle distance. “I’ve always longed to use the garrote.”
I ate a bit more pasta. “You should try it, you know.”
She nodded. “I once used a long silk scarf. Same thing, really, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I’m sure it was. “What about guns?”
Obviously this touched a nerve. She put her fork down and looked up. “Oh, I hate them. I always get something wrong: the caliber or the type of bullet, and then people tell me what I should have used and what a mess I’ve left.”
She sipped at her wine again. “And you?”
“Same thing. I’m never sure which way the blood will splatter or how big the holes will be.” I thought about it for a moment, then added, “But I suppose it’s really the noise that puts me off them.”
“Yes, hateful things.” We finished our pasta at the same time. The waiter appeared and took the dishes away.
She lowered her head and wiped delicately at her lips with her napkin. She picked up her wine and took a sip. “I hate poison.”
I sipped my water. “I do, too.”
From the corner of my eye I saw the waiter approaching our table with menus in his hands. “Tell me, Ruth, before we order dessert, have you ever watched an autopsy?”
No Tears for Lady Di
On September 5, the day before the funeral, I flew to New York, changing planes in London. About three hours after we left London, I went to get a glass of water and was approached by one of the stewardesses. With a catch in her voice, suitably dewey-eyed, she approached me, put what I’m sure she thought was a comforting hand on my arm, and said, “We’ve just heard from the captain. You’ll be so glad to know. It’s going to be a beautiful day in London tomorrow.”
Steel-eyed, I replied, putting a note of vague confusion into my voice, “Excuse me, isn’t this plane going to New York?”
She tried not to gasp, but she did a bad job of it. “For the funeral,” she said. Was that a tear?
For the past week I’d been listening, watching, and reading as a planet convulsed itself over the very unfortunate death of a woman I had never, during the fifteen years the press had brought me the various chapters of her life, found in any way interesting. Sure, I was sorry she died, poor thing, but I’m sorry when any decent, innocent person dies. Maybe I’m a heartless brute, but I didn’t see why the death of this particular woman should have profound meaning for me, and so I snapped, threw up my hands, and said, making no attempt to disguise my irritation, “I can’t stand any more of this. I just don’t want to hear it,” and went back to my seat. I was sitting in business class (upgraded, though the stewardess didn’t know that) so she couldn’t be rude to me, and it was, after all, a plane, so she couldn’t very well ask me to leave, could she? But I did hear her moan to a fellow passenger, “Some people just don’t understand.” You got it, babe: some people just don’t understand.
Back in my seat, I continued reading the last fifty pages of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, a novel that tells the story of Lily Bart, child of a once-wealthy New York family with ties to high society. Raised with no education, raised with no higher purpose than to be socially decorative, her highest goal is to marry well, which meant, for the women of Lily’s time and class, to marry wealth. I’d read the book two or three times before, knew that Lily’s terrible power to see through the sham and falsity of her society, her ability to see just how cheap and vulgar it was, doomed her to perpetual failure in its terms. Given the chance to marry Percy Gryce, a man as dreadful and dull as his name, she tosses it away; given the chance to take vengeance on the woman who has destroyed her life, she refuses because to do so would be to act ignobly. Seconds after having heard herself disinherited from the will of the one relative who might have made her wealthy and thus free, she rises to her feet and congratulates the woman who has inherited what should have been hers.
Nobility of instinct and action are as much a part of Lily Bart as are her laziness and financial irresponsibility. She often does the absolutely wrong thing, but she always does it for the finest of motives.
She dies—is it accident or suicide?—of a self-administered overdose of laudanum in a squalid apartment in a bad neighborhood in New York. As I read the passage describing her death and the finding of her body, I found tears running down my face, even though I had known what was coming, had seen Lily’s doom approaching for the last three hundred pages, and for the third time.
And I found myself struck by the seeming callousness of the fact I could cry for this fictional heroine while remaining Sahara-eyed over the death of the woman who was so much like Lily in so many tragic ways. Badly educated, raised with no higher goal than to marry well, trapped in a society the falsity of which she could see but which she failed to escape, Princess Diana resembled Lily Bart, and yet my tears fell for the fictional, not the real, woman.
In his introduction to Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes of the need for the reader of poetry to engage in a process he calls “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Unless we allow our imagination free reign, unless we allow ourselves, for the time it takes us to read a work of fiction, to believe that those people and these events are real, then we are doomed not to enjoy the experience.
To those of us who have spent the major part of our lives in books, fictional characters do become as real as human characters, perhaps more so. Certainly, in the hands of a genius, these fictional characters take on an enhanced reality and are known and understood more intimately than most of the people we meet in life. We know Emma Bovary better than we know most of our neighbors; we understand Anna Karenina better than we understand most of our friends. Antigone’s pigheaded, doomed pursuit of virtuous behavior will always inspire those of us who are less noble of spirit.
Lily Bart is great because Edith Wharton is a genius; Emma Bovary is real because Flaubert was another one; and Anna Karenina’s nobility is the result of Tolstoy’s magnificent talent. Princess Diana, alas, found only the shabbiest of hacks to tell her tale: the National Enquirer, Das Bild, Gente. In the pages of rags like these, her life could never be anything more than a succession of clich
és and photo opportunities. Though we’ve seen thousands of photos of her, read about the most intimate details of her life, we never knew anything about her, not the way we know Emma and Anna and Lily. Whatever substance might have been inside Di we never knew and probably never will know because her tale never found a genius to tell it.
Suggestions on Writing
the Crime Novel
Thucydides, I think it was, wrote that “stories happen to the people who can tell them,” and I suspect that’s true. I’m sure that all of us have had the fortune to meet the natural storyteller, the person who can come back from a recycling center and hold us spellbound for half an hour with the account of what happened between the wine bottles and the newspapers. Conversely, and much to the cost of our patience, we’ve also had the experience of the thundering bore, the person who could be kidnapped by space aliens and still tell a tale more tedious than the editorials in Famiglia Cristiana.
The reason for this is as obvious as it is dispiriting: either we’re born with it or we’re not, either we’re born with the gift for language and its use or we are not. Most students, when I tell them this, object; all of them are surprised. The bright ones ask how I dare, given this, teach a class in “creative writing.”
In the field of plastic arts or music, even sports, no one much objects to the proposition that the defining element between the good and the great is some inborn genius that is either present or not. Without it, painters or tennis players can be good; with it, they will be great. I see no reason why this should be any different in the world of words, though I realize how uncomfortable the idea makes most people. After all, not everyone is going to play tennis, or the piano, but everyone is constrained, by the very nature of humanity, to play with language, and so people can be expected to object to the unfairness of its being portioned out to us unequally before we even have a chance to decide whether we want it or not. Strangely enough, they seem perfectly ready to accept the idea that some people are born with the ability to run faster than others. This unfairness in no way changes the truth. I think.
Now to the question of how I dare teach so-called creative writing. There are two reasons. Just about anyone can be helped to improve the quality of their writing, to make it clearer, more correct, better organized. And those people who do have the gift of words can be helped to save time and energy in the solutions of problems by having suggested to them solutions they might not have considered. Finally, in both cases, I bring to the reading of their work the experience of forty years of reading and paying attention to texts. But—I’ll confess this from the start—I cannot teach anyone to be creative.
The most popular, well, the bestselling, form of writing (I refuse to call it “literature”) today is the crime novel. Most of the successful writers are either British or American. The great masters of the form, almost without exception, wrote in English. Okay, okay, there’s Simenon, but there really isn’t anyone else, is there? I think part of the reason, beyond the obvious one that we English speakers start reading these things when we’re kids, has to do with history. The policeman has always been the reading class’s friend, and the bobby has the history of being honest, so the idea of a policeman, either professional or private, who works for the good of society and its members is not one that an Anglo-Saxon public finds unbelievable. Further, Anglo-Saxons generally have enjoyed the perception that government is concerned with the good of the citizens; hence organs of the state are to be trusted. It is these historical facts that, I believe, fashioned a public willing to believe in the fiction of the dedicated cop or the honorable private eye. Splatter films and Rodney King have put an end to all of this, of course, and so contemporary readers seem more interested in reading autopsy reports than novels, or autopsy reports disguised as novels.
The person who wants to write crime fiction has a number of important decisions to make well before he or she begins to write. The first, I believe, is to resolve the matter of point of view. That is, the writer must determine whether the narrator is going to be a character in the novel and thus spend three hundred or so pages telling what “I” saw, felt, and discovered or whether the narrative will be presented in the third person. If so, will that narrator be an omniscient, distant voice or will the reporting consciousness be that of one of the characters in the book?
The practical danger resulting from the decision to use the first person should be immediately obvious: the acquisition of information. There are only so many ways a character can obtain information: he can hear it or see it or read it. (Okay, smell and taste, but let’s be serious here.) Does he hear or does he overhear? If he’s going to hear it, then he has to be a character who is sufficiently sympathetic to be trusted by many different people and thus trusted with their confidences. If he’s going to overhear, then he’s got to be lucky to be in the right place when the wrong things are said.
The right place. He’s got to spend a lot of time in it, wherever it is, so that he can see things that happen and the people who do them. He’s got to be in the company of other characters just when they are willing to talk; he’s got to have access to places where information might be hidden; he’s got to be bright enough to put the disparate pieces of information together before any of the other characters do or, more important, before the reader does.
Those are the practical considerations. There is also the aesthetic one. What sort of person will this narrator be? He or she has got to be sufficiently sympathetic or sufficiently interesting so as to keep the reader’s attention for the duration of the book. The reader has also got to sympathize with the narrator, like her, and rejoice in her success, especially if the writer is thinking of using the character in another book.
If it is to be a first person narrator, then the writer has to decide how much like himself or herself the character is going to be. The big one is sex: is the narrator going to be of the same sex as the writer? Next is the general level of education and intelligence of the narrator. I was the mystery critic at the London Sunday Times for two years and grew tired to tears of the pretensions, usually cultural, of the uneducated, with their “oriental carpets” and “oil paintings,” such blandness making it painfully evident that the writer is ignorant of the differences between Nain and Sarouk, Picasso and Degas. My advice is to create a narrator pretty much like yourself, at least as far as intelligence or level of education goes. It’s far easier to pretend to be of the other sex than to pretend to be smarter than you are.
What sort of family has the narrator got and will they be useful in terms of plot? How about work? What does the narrator do and what sort of specialized knowledge does the pursuit of that profession demand the writer have? Choice of profession also affects the way in which the narrator gets sucked into the plot.
The current fashion is for series novels that take the narrator forward in time and expose the reader to more and more information about his personal life. The beginning writer never knows if the success of the first book will summon up a second, or a third, and so it is wise to create a narrator who is either young or interesting enough to continue in future books all the time increasing readers’ interest.
If the narrative is to take place in the third person, as does most fiction, then there are different issues that must be resolved. Though they also apply to the first person narrator, they are less immediately evident, probably because of the absence of the telltale “I.”
What is the range of knowledge, information, and reference of the narrator going to be? This, I believe, is largely dependent upon and should be aimed at the target audience. If a person is writing for an American audience, then she must assume a certain pool of knowledge—alas, a very shallow pool in this case—different from that of a European audience. The writer cannot assume that the American reader will have much of a grasp of geography or history, and allusions to much that happened before 1970 run the risk of not being recognized. This is not true of a large
number of American mystery readers, many of whom seem to be very well-educated people, but it is certainly true if a person is aiming at mass market success. It can safely be assumed that the European reader is both more sophisticated and better educated.
The level of prose must also be considered. Will sentences be long and complex or must they be simple and declarative, in the manner of much contemporary crime fiction? Will the references be to Greek vase painting or to Baywatch? Nothing so angers a reader as an allusion they don’t understand, for it creates the image of the snobbish, superior writer and that’s the kiss of death.
Humor? What is the narrator going to find funny, and what is he going to expect his reader to find funny? It’s one thing to say that expecting a particular character to tell the truth was like expecting Mother Teresa to provide fashion tips, but it is another thing entirely to say it was like expecting her to have an orgasm. Even as I write it I am repelled by the vulgarity of the second, and I think any decent-minded reader would be too. All a wiseass writer need do is make one false step like that and the book will never get off the slush pile in the editor’s office or, if it gets past, never lure the reader past the page on which the reference is made. At least I hope this is true.
Another thing that must be decided is the ethical standards of the narrator and, by implication, of the author. Because most crime fiction ends with resolution of some sort—the capture of the bad guy, the vengeance of the injured—readers are conditioned to expect finality and closure, those two graces so rarely bestowed by life. The writer, thus, has to determine who will be punished and to what degree that will happen, knowing that the reader both seeks and wills this. A genius such as Patricia Highsmith managed to present a number of completely amoral narrators who, at the same time that they successfully committed their varied horrors, yet managed to retain the sympathy of the reader. But she was a genius; the rest of us are not.
