Unless It Moves the Human Heart

by Roger Rosenblatt

  Before this class gets to writing their personal essays, I know they will ask what the difference is between an essay and a short story. And I’ll tell them that an essay deals with something that really happened. And they’ll ask, “Can’t a short story be about something that really happened?” And I’ll say, “Yes, but in fiction you treat facts differently. You dream into them and make them works of art.” And they will say, “But there are beautiful personal essays that give facts an artistic feeling.” And we’ll go back and forth like that and compare examples of each form and understand why the pig or the moon a writer has imagined is different from one he’s actually seen. And I will tell them what Shelley said in his “Defense of Poetry”—that we must learn to imagine what we know, and that that applies to fiction and essays as well as poems. And the discussion will be painstaking, but in the end we’ll be grateful for the original question that led us to examine the essential elements of both forms. You can’t be too clear—especially when trying to teach a subject as murky and intuitive as writing. The poet Tom Lux, who has taught in our summer program, told his students that poetry is mixed feelings expressed clearly.

  “Would you say something about how many drafts one should expect to do?” asks Veronique. “I hate finishing a first draft of a piece because I know it’s just a first draft. There’ll be a second draft, and a third . . .”

  “And a fifth, and a ninth. That’s the way it goes. Which is why our first drafts, and probably our second and third, ought to be written in pencil or ink. It’s better for us to cross out the wrong words or phrases or sentences, and be able to see the wreckage by the side of the road as we go along. Cover the work with X’s. Slash and burn! Bombs away! Our pages ought to look like Dresden.”

  I never fail to say “we” to my students because I do not want them to get the idea that you ever learn how to write, no matter how long you’ve done it. You need to remind yourself continually that every word counts, and to take Twain’s dictum to heart—that the difference between the word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. “We are in the lightning business,” I tell them. “You need to remind yourself what not to do, as well, and to recognize when you’ve done something effectively the first time, so as not to say it again, poorly.” I tell them the right word is often the unmodified word, and that the adornment of adjectives may suffocate the body under the clothes. Most nouns contain their own modifiers, what Emerson called “the speaking language of things,” and they will not be improved by a writer who wants to show off by making them any taller, fatter, happier, or prettier than they are. I tell them never to hold back, not to husband information and be coy. “Spill the beans. It’s the only way to get more beans.” I tell them not to stretch to find a different word for the sake of difference. “Read Hemingway’s short stories, where he uses the same words over and over, and the words gain meaning with every repetition. If you have someone say something, let him ‘say’ it—not aver it, declare it, or intone it. Let the power reside in what he says.” I will elaborate upon these and other matters in future classes, when their work illustrates a particular problem. For this first meeting, I just want to plant ideas in their heads.

  “Work toward anticipation in your writing, not surprise. We stare at a stretch of land over which the sun is expected to rise, and we see the moon rise instead. Big deal. So what? But we stare and wait for the sun to rise, and it does rise. My, my!” I tell them to favor imagination over invention. Invention is easy. “A three-eared camel who speaks French and studies international diplomacy is one thing. But a real camel—humped and diva-eyed—is really strange.” I tell them to value form, which often rescues content. “Wall-E, the little robot of the animated movie, discovers a box with a ring inside, and he throws away the ring, because the box is more worthwhile.” Richard Wilbur said that the power of the genie comes from its living in a bottle.

  “Write your pieces as you would write your lives—with restraint, precision, generosity toward every point of view including the wicked ones, and in the service of significant subject matter.”

  “Yeah, right,” says Diana.

  MFA programs are supposed to be professional schools, akin to business, law, or medical school, but they are really schools for amateurs. With everything you write, it’s as though you have never written a word before. Edgar Doctorow, who sometimes teaches in our program, describes his novel-writing process as driving at night and seeing only as far ahead as the headlights illuminate. This feeling of perpetual newness and disclosure keeps you from “learning” a craft in the commonly used sense, but it offers at least as many thrills as anxieties.

  For the teacher, the process of recurrent learning staves off adamancy. You don’t want even your most cherished ideas about writing to puddle and harden into orthodoxy. Every rule of good writing I can come up with presents exceptions that may or may not prove the rule. As a writer, I would never lock myself into set patterns. It would be foolish and misleading, not to say boring, to do so as a teacher.

  “How do you tell the lightning bug from the lightning?” asks Ana.

  “If you’re going to write, you must think about words more seriously than you ever have. Learn to pick your spots, to choose when to use ordinary language and special, heightened language. But every word must be the only one for its place, and it must function in every way, not just adequately.” Blank faces. “Okay. Here’s a quotation from a T. S. Eliot poem, ‘Sweeney Erect.’” I go to the board and write:

  Sweeney addressed full length to shave,

  Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,

  Knows the female temperament . . .

  When I get to the last line of the quatrain, I write, “And wipes the ______ around his face.”

  “What’s going on in these lines?” They talk about a man shaving in preparation for an evening out. “What picture do you get of this man?” They conclude that he is lecherous, animalistic, full of himself. “Does he drink?” They think so. “Champagne or beer?” They think beer. “Anything else about him?” Some suggest that Sweeney is a wild man, uncontrolled, a big ape. “So he’s comic?” Yes, they say, but darkly comic. “Is he mad?” They think, possibly.

  I take my seat again. “With this picture in mind, what word is missing in the last line? It has to be a word that makes sense in terms of what Sweeney is doing, and that satisfies the impression you’ve taken of him—lecherous, comic, beer-drinking, out of control, possibly mad.”

  They consider for a moment. “Cream,” says Donna.

  “Good. ‘Cream’ connotes lechery, and it fits with shaving. But that’s all it gives us.”

  “Foam!” says Suzanne.

  “Better. ‘Foam’ gives us madness and beer. But not the dark comedian.” They kick around several possibilities. “The right word, the lightning in this instance, has to pack everything in. Yet, as you’ve figured out, it has to be simple, and one-syllable.”

  “Suds!” says Nina.

  I clap and give her the thumbs-up. “And why did Eliot use ‘suds’? Because of the lechery, the comedy, the potential madness, and the beer.”

  “That’s the lightning,” says Ana.

  “Ain’t it?”

  “Any reason you’re beginning with the short story?” asks George.

  “Stories are central to life. They’re everywhere: in the law, where a prosecutor tells one story and the defense tells another, and the jury decides which it prefers. The only reason O. J. Simpson got off in his murder trial was that the jury preferred Johnnie Cochran’s story to Marcia Clark’s. In medicine, a patient tells a doctor the story of his ailment, how he felt on this day or that, and the doctor tells the patient the story of the therapy, how he will feel this day and that, until, one hopes, the story will have a happy ending. Politics? He who tells the best story wins, be it Pol Pot or FDR. The myths of businesses. The foundations of religions—the ‘greatest story ever told.’ Everything you write here is a story. Short storie
s tell stories, of course, yet so do essays and poems. An essay is the story of an idea or of a true event; a poem the story of a feeling.

  “We start with the story because it is basic to human nature. It’s like a biological fact, an inborn insistence. In the last days of the Warsaw ghetto, the Jews knew what was going to happen to them. They had seen their mothers and neighbors hauled off to the extermination camps, and were themselves dying of diphtheria and hunger. And yet they had the strength and the will to take scraps of paper on which they wrote poems, fragments of autobiography, political tracts, journal entries. And they rolled those scraps into small scrolls and slipped the scrolls into the crevices of the ghetto walls. Why? Why did they bother? With no news of the outer world available to them, they assumed the subhumans of the so-called Master Race had inherited the earth. If their scraps of paper were discovered, the victors would laugh at them, read and laugh, and tear them up. So why expose their writing, their souls, to derision? Because they had to do it. They had a story to tell. They had to tell a story.”

  I tell them about Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle who suffered so massive a stroke that the only part of his body he could move was his left eyelid. Yet with that eyelid, he signaled the alphabet. And with that alphabet, he wrote an autobiography, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And about the skipper of the mackerel schooner in The Perfect Storm, who wrote a message by lantern light as his ship was going down. And about the messenger in the Book of Job, who had a story to tell. And about Melville’s Ishmael, who alone was left to tell the tale.

  “We like to distinguish ourselves from other animals by saying we’re a rational species. That is sort of a commonly shared joke. But a narrative species? That, one can prove.”

  They are beginning to wonder why I am spending so much time on this subject. “And yet, if stories lie at the center of experience, indispensable to our being, there still must be those people responsible for telling them, those self-elected few who are the chief storytellers, and keep the race alive and kicking. And do you know who those people are?”

  They stare at me, surprised. Someone asks, “Us?”

  Chapter 2

  Throat-Clearing

  “George? You gonna stay on the wagon this term?” A blizzard has arrived with February. The classroom windows are frosted, the glass so cold it looks as if it is about to crack and shatter. We all are in boots and heavy sweaters. George has snow dust on his sleeve.

  He smiles. “Yessir.” Suzanne smirks. They both know the “wagon” refers to clean, clear writing. George is cursed with an enormous vocabulary, a wealth of arcane knowledge and wit, some of it gained from his part-time work as a limousine chauffeur to rich and dangerous people. He will make a very good book of this experience someday, but only if he tempers his verbal excesses and keeps his style intelligible.

  “No binges, George.” He nods.

  His problem is a bit unusual, but it falls within a wider, more general category of student mistakes. Most of my students suffer bouts of throat-clearing—overwriting and hesitating at the beginning of a piece, instead of plunging in. The mistake derives from their not knowing what they mean to say. “What is this about?” I ask them over and over. “If you can’t say what your piece is about, start from scratch. Find someone you trust to ask that question of you when I can’t badger you. A friend, a spouse, a lover, a partner, anyone who will be hard on you. What is this about? You’ll be happily surprised to find that most of your cloggings and chokings will vanish if you know what you mean to say.”

  “How do you know what something is about?” asks Nina. “When I’m in the middle of writing something, I often have no idea what it’s about.”

  “Then wait till the end. If your piece is complete, it will be about something, and it is never about what happens in it, never about its plot.”

  I tell them about Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter. On the surface the novel is about the driver of a school bus in upstate New York who, on a wintry day, avoids hitting a dog on the road. At least, she thinks she saw a dog. She swerves right and jams on the brakes. The bus rolls downhill into an icy pond. Fourteen children are killed. A lawyer comes to town. Lawsuits are prepared. The people of the town are suffused with anger and sorrow. So much for plot. But that is not what The Sweet Hereafter is about. It is about the need to assign blame, the urge to make explicable that which never can be explained. I have no idea whether Russell knew his theme from the start. But once he had discovered it, everything else in the novel worked in its service. All details accrued to it. All side roads returned to it.

  “What is this about? What is this about?” Students will write paragraph after paragraph before that question occurs to them. So eager are they to impress the reader that they are, in fact, writers, they will often tie themselves in knots in order to sound learned or clever or, worst of all, beautiful.

  About ten years ago, I hit upon a simple exercise that cures throat-clearing like a charm, at least for the moment of the exercise. I bring something to class that stimulates one of the senses—a rock to touch, a jazz recording to listen to, a teakettle or a similarly evocative object to look at. I ask the students to touch, listen, or see. “Sit quietly for a few minutes, and allow a thought or a memory to come to you.” Once I brought phlox to class, gave each of the students a flower, told them to take in the scent and then follow their noses toward something to write. Many wrote of weddings and funerals they’d attended. One young woman wrote about receiving her first corsage—the awkward boy pinning it to her lavender dress, and to her. Another young woman, whose arms were hidden by tattoos, recalled a job she had selling roses at the side of a highway. “Men stopped their cars to pick up a bunch or two,” she wrote. “No one bought roses for me.”

  When I taught a writing course in the personal essay at Harvard’s Kennedy School, in 2005, the class was full of bright, ambitious world-beaters who thought and wrote in orderly ways. But they had no idea how to reach what was individual to themselves as writers. Their writing lay flat on the page, unmoving. One day I walked into class, closed the door, and asked, “What did you just hear?” Someone said, “A closing door.” I said, “Good. Listen again.” And again, I opened and closed the door. I did it two or three more times, watching them listen. “Now,” I said, “write whatever comes to mind as a result of hearing the door close.” A gay man from South Africa, whose partner had walked out on him, focused on the sound of the lock as the door of their apartment closed. “He said we didn’t click,” he wrote. “But the door clicked.” A young man from Chicago, the class clown, wrote about the Sunday morning his father walked out on his family. After the door closed, he and his mother, brothers, and sisters all sat down to eat pancakes. “Blueberry,” he wrote. “They were blueberry.” A woman in her forties, a marine scientist who lived on Cape Cod, who had written nothing lively or interesting in the class up to that point, wrote of growing up in trailers on navy bases. She began her essay, “In my father’s house there were no doors.” I have a new throat-clearing idea to try out today, but I’ll hold it till the end of class.

  “Let’s look at a writer who knew exactly how to plunge into a story.”

  I hand out copies of James Joyce’s story “Clay,” from Dubliners. I do this often—give students the best examples of what they’re doing themselves, not to offer models, but to remind them that good readers make good writers. Our program requires students to take literature courses along with courses in writing. I ask them to look at the first sentence of “Clay,” about the main character, Maria. “Practically all you need to know about Maria and her story is in that first sentence. How much information, pure information, does Joyce give us? Count the facts.”

  They study the sentence: “The matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out.” They come up with eight discrete items of information regarding Maria’s station in life, where she works, what she does, what she’s about
to do, and hints of who she is.

  “What about the name?”

  “She has no last name,” says Nina.

  “And what does that tell you—the thing that isn’t there?”

  Nina says, “That she has no family.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “That she is alone,” says Veronique.

  “And if she’s alone, without a family, without even a family name, what does that mean?”

  “That Maria is unimportant,” says Kristie.

  “Yes yes yes. And since we know that Joyce would not write a story about someone unimportant unless she was important, we know that this is going to be a story that shows us the Maria, perhaps all the Marias, whom people fail to see. And it’s all in the first sentence. Be very careful with beginnings. Be compelling. Suggest urgency. Readers are impatient. You have to grab them by the lapels right away, like the Ancient Mariner with the wedding guest, and tell them that nothing in their lives matters as much as listening to your story. See Joyce’s little trick here. He’s saying, if Maria is looking forward to her evening out, you should, too. It’s going to be quite an evening. And it is.”

  I consider depressing them with the announcement that Joyce wrote this perfect story when he was eighteen years old. But I forbear. I remember my own depression when some cruel teacher told me.

  When I dive into an idea like this one, it always feels new to me, though over the years I have said the same things about “Clay” to my classes a couple of hundred times. I lose myself in the story, no matter how familiar it is. I worry about it all over again, and the students overhear me worry about it. In this I am unconsciously imitating teachers I admired when I was a student. John Kelleher, professor of Irish studies at Harvard, worried anew about Joyce every year, as did Douglas Bush, the great Renaissance scholar, about Milton. Teaching takes a lot of wheedling and grappling, but basically it is the art of seduction. Observing a teacher who is lost in the mystery of the material can be oddly seductive.