When May 1st came, the worst riot was in Cleveland, but there were demonstrations in other cities as well, New York included. F. Scott Fitzgerald was there to witness the mayhem. The Armistice had ended his military service without him ever being sent to fight and he was now struggling to make a living in the advertising business. Unlike his Princeton classmates, he was not among the sons of wealth who attended college in those days and he had to earn a living. Throughout his life, he had moved among that privileged class but he was not a member. His father had been a failed businessman. His mother had some small inherited wealth that kept him in private schools and in all the right social circles and had finally gotten him to Princeton, but he now had to work for a living. Perhaps because of that experience and his upbringing among that social class, he wasn’t particularly suited to working for a living. It was that lack of prospects that had prompted his fiancé to break off their engagement until he could prove he had the means to support her. He wasn’t making it in advertising and things didn’t look good for him.

In the fall and winter of 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald was anxiously awaiting the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.  The publishing contract with Scribner’s had come in just the nick of time for Fitzgerald.  Earlier in that year he had tried his hand in the advertising business and met with failure.  Unable to prove that he could support his fiancé, Zelda Sayre of Montgomery Alabama whom he had met when he was a soldier, the engagement had been broken off.  With the offering of a publishing contract by Scribner’s that fall, Fitzgerald could now claim to be a professional writer and the engagement was back on.  No matter how badly things turned out for Scott and Zelda later on, at that moment in time, he had a book coming out and had won the heart of the love of his life. Things were looking up. It had to be the most exciting and optimistic time of his life.

With Fitzgerald, however, happiness and satisfaction never came easy. He was always his own worst critic not only of his writing but of his own self-worth, and he always felt as though he was living on the edge of failure and tragedy was always looking over his shoulder.  To both his credit and to his later downfall, he embraced his self-doubt and forged it into art.  In one of his first efforts as a fulltime writer,  he wrote the most ambitious work of his early career, the novella May Day, inspired by his fears of failure and by the riotous events that he witnessed earlier in that year in New York City.

In retrospect, This Side of Paradise, isn’t very good, even for a first novel.  Today, it serves as a testament to Max Perkins’ judgment and intuition in identifying literary talent and to Scribner’s willingness to invest and nurture a young writer.  This Side of Paradise was successful and made Fitzgerald famous, but today it serves mainly as a biographical curiosity;  the investment that Scribner’s made in the young Fitzgerald wouldn’t pay off for the publisher until long after both Fitzgerald and Perkins had died.

May Day serves as a sort of missing link between the young embryonic talent first noticed by Perkins and the accomplished novelist he would become.  We can see him experimenting with naturalism as well as notice prototypes for the characters and themes of his later work: the poor outsider among the wealthy and privileged, the beautiful but shallow heroine, the ruthless and selfish rich.  The main character’s financial failure parallels Fitzgerald’s failure in advertising as well as the heroin’s rejection  parallels Zelda’s initial rejection. The novella also contains the some of th most pointed social and political statements that Fitzgerald ever committed to paper. His writing was very much “in the moment” and influenced by his personal circumstances, but it foreshadowed the riotous decade that would follow.  This novella and his masterpiece “Babylon Revisited” serve as bookends to the 1920′s.

More about The Art of the Novella

See larger image May Day (The Art of the Novella) (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $10.00 USD New From: $5.56 In Stock Used from: $2.09 In Stock Release date August 25, 2009.

See larger image Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Rev) (Paperback) List Price: $31.00 USD New From: $24.91 In Stock Used from: $11.68 In Stock

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Once again, John Gardner’s fictive dream, as articulated by novelist Ian McEwan.  No one does psychological realism better than McEwan.  There is no other art form that can envelop us so completely and embed emotions within us so deeply.  We don’t read great books, we experience them.

See larger image Atonement: A Novel (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $2.99 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 25, 2003.

See larger image On Chesil Beach (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $2.23 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 10, 2008.

See larger image Saturday (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $3.09 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date April 11, 2006.

See larger image The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $6.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 4, 1991.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

On an early summer afternoon in the tiny village of  North Dormer, Charity Royall sees from the distance a handsome young man, his manner and his clothing indicating that he is a wealthy city person.  Later, he stops in at the library that Charity unenthusiastically manages, in search of books about the local architecture and introduces himself as Lucius Harney.  Although his reason for visiting the library is entirely proper, and he has no motive for seducing or even flirty with the librarian, he is momentarily and involuntarily flustered by her beauty.  There is no flirtation at all in this meeting, but Charity notices Harney’s brief reaction and in the hours and days after that she repeatedly reflects on that moment even as her own obsession with Harney grows.

As the story unfolds we gradually learn more about Charity’s background.  She is the ward of Lawyer Royall, a prominent member of the community of North Dormer.  This is a somewhat dubious distinction considering how humble the village is; the only church in town lacks a fulltime minister and has services only every other Sunday. Its backwardness is revealed somewhat comically in Charity’s thoughts.

Charity was born into abject poverty in a place referred to as “The Mountain.”  Her destitute mother gave her up to Royall after her father had been convicted of manslaughter.  All that Charity can remember of her earlier life are fleeting images and she knows neither of her parents names.

As a work of naturalism, the behavior of all the characters in this story is driven by innate desires of which they are not entirely aware that conflict with the constraints and expectations of society.  Free will, if it exists at all, is exercised by negotiating in the path between conforming to the requirements of civilization (the nearby city of Nettleton) and giving in to primitive passion (“The Mountain”).  North Dormer, like Charity, exists somewhere between these two.  We see these internal conflicts play out not only in Charity but also in the two other main characters: Royall and Harney.

Wharton is one of the great literary stylists of naturalism (unlike, say, Theodore Dreiser), and of American Literature in general.  In Summer, her rendering of the landscape and season evokes the moods and desires of the characters.  The effect is poetic and, at times, intoxicating:

There had never been such a June in Eagle County.  Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations of belated frost and mid-summer heat; this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty.  Every morning a breeze blew steadily from the hills.  Toward noon it built up great canopies of white cloud the threw a cool shadow over fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the western light rained its unobstructed brightness on the valley.

On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her.  Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid its frail white flowers and blue-green leaves against the sky.  Just beyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled between the beaded shoots of grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine.  This was all she saw, but she felt, above her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones on countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of sweet-fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasture beyond.  All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance.  Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalations to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.  (Chapter V)

Wharton was born into incredible wealth and most of her work focused on the rites and rituals of New York Society.  She moved comfortably and at ease in those circles, yet her work reveals a discerning and critical eye for passions and desires that beneath polite and tasteful manners.  The two works that are set in humble rural settings, Summer and Ethan Frome, take place in western Massachusetts.  She lived there, in Lennox, for some years in a magnificent house that she had built, but by the time she wrote Summer, she had been living in France for some years .  The landscape and its less affluent people had made an impression on her.  There are elements of harshness in her portrayals of them, but never is there any condescension in tone and it is clear that she had great affection for the land and its inhabitants.

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

Books Referenced:

See larger image Summer (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $5.99 USD New From: $4.19 In Stock Used from: $5.98 In Stock

See larger image Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.00 USD New From: $3.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date October 25, 2005.

See larger image The Age of Innocence (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.98 USD New From: $7.00 In Stock Used from: $1.49 In Stock

See larger image The House of Mirth (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $4.95 USD New From: $2.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 1, 2000.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

In the years since then, two more of my stories were published there as well.  These were new stories and I think they were much better than the first one.  “Brothers” was the next one and it turned out to be the first of a cycle of stories that I’ve been working on over the past few years.  The third, “Truths,” was a short fictional vignette about  tryst that I composed from several fragments of stories that by themselves had fizzled out and were never completed.  I never throw anything out.  The writing challenge that I gave myself was to write an explicit bedroom scene to help tie the pieces together.  It’s the kind of writing that I’d always avoided doing in the past, even when a story obviously needed it.  A friend who read an early draft of “A Couple” remarked, “Fred, the best parts of this story happen in the white space between the scenes.”

It was true.  In my stories, three asterisks (“***”) could mean a movement in time, or a movement in space, or it could mean that somebody’s getting laid.  Given the nature of some of the stories I write – exploring intimate psychological and emotional relationships – the absence of these scenes is noticeable, kind of like Lucy and Ricky sleeping in twin beds.

Writing sex scenes in literary fiction is fraught with danger.  Somewhere between vulgar and clinical is a place where eroticism and sensuality and metaphor intertwine.  That place is very elusive.  Finding it is extremely difficult.  All that is certain is that when it’s bad, it’s really bad.  There’s even an annual award for bad literary sex that’s been won by some very respected writers and the offending passages cited are always cringe-worthy.

Novelist Elizabeth Benedict has written a book specifically about this challenge for writers called  The Joy of Writing Sex. It was this book and studying with Benedict at The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute that encouraged me to take this on.  To face the music.  To open the kimono. To put it out there.  After all, if John Updike could make a fool of himself and win several bad sex awards, what was I so afraid of?

I didn’t quite get there in actually depicting specific act or technique, but I did at least try to deal with the challenge of anatomy.  As these things go, it’s still fairly timid but I was nonetheless nervous when I sent the story out.

I had always been impressed by the high quality of writing in The Square Table, excluding my own contributions, so I assumed they wouldn’t accept anything that would end up being embarrassing to them or me.  Surprisingly, it was accepted and published.

Last year, after many years of publication, The Square Table shut down.  I’m not sure, but the editor and publisher, having completed law school, was now consumed by a career that leaves no time for labors of love.  Because my stories there were effectively “unpublished” I began looking for new homes for them, or at least two of them (“Absolutely Fourth Street” can safely fade away).   I sent “Truths” to the Loch Raven Review, an online journal that had previously published one of my rare poems.  I don’t write much poetry, I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, but occasionally something strikes me.  I’m never sure of the result, so submitting them to journals is always frightening for me.  This was definitely the case with the poem that they published, so when it came time to find a place to republish this story that made me nervous I thought of them.

I am pleased that they have confirmed what The Square Table had told me.  The story is valid.

“Truths” is appearing in the winter issue of Loch Raven Review.

In the meantime, here’s a link to the poem they published a few years ago: “A Victorian in 1990“

Elizabeth Benedict’s inimitable guide:

See larger image The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers (Paperback) By (author) Elizabeth Benedict List Price: $18.99 USD New From: $4.85 In Stock Used from: $4.86 In Stock

She practices what she preaches:

See larger image Almost (Paperback) By (author) Elizabeth Benedict List Price: $13.95 USD New From: $0.01 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

An astronomer and astrophysicist by trade, Sagan’s books, written over the course of his lifetime, covered the whole spectrum of human knowledge and achievement.  In addition to astronomy, his books delved into biology, evolution, psychology, theology, philosophy, politics, and public policy.  Never willing to absolutely declare himself an atheist, he nevertheless was the world’s most famous agnostic.  He was always respectful of religion, but fervently believed in rational argument based on provable facts and argued that the worlds of science and religion should neither encroach on one another nor negate one another.  He was, in the truest and noblest sense, a humanist.

His books and in his groundbreaking series Cosmos, were always based on not only his own research, but also the research of scientists throughout history.  This was part of his lesson in how science works: hypotheses tested by observations over time, advancing and refining human knowledge and understanding.  No matter how far he travelled across in his video presentations and essays,  he always brought us back to the personal, the human element of the story.  He argued for rationality and skepticism to displace fear and superstition.  He remained unconvinced of any divine being controlling human history and humanity’s future (“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”) but found a beautiful and comforting harmony in natural laws that drive the universe.

The exploration of space is primarily the work of engineers and scientists.  As a member of that group, Sagan understood that their work and their discoveries needed to be shared and have meaning to all of us and he used his prominence help us feel that we were also participating.  When the first unmanned probes that would permanently leave our solar system to wander through space, he successfully argued that they should contain a greeting and information about the people who sent it.  The odds of any extra-terrestrial intelligence discovering one of these plucky little spaceships hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of years in the future are too astronomical to calculate, but it was his way of capturing our imaginations and helping us to feel like we were participating in the adventure.

In 1990 when one of those spaceships, Voyager 1, was leaving the solar system, Sagan suggested to NASA that they turn the ship around for one last photograph of the earth.  NASA supplied the photograph.  Sagan provided the poetry, answering a question he had asked many years earlier, “Who speaks for earth?”

See larger image The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Paperback) By (author) Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan List Price: $17.00 USD New From: $8.24 In Stock Used from: $1.98 In Stock Release date February 25, 1997.

See larger image Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (Paperback) By (author) Carl Sagan List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $6.00 In Stock Used from: $0.97 In Stock Release date May 12, 1998.

See larger image Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Paperback) By (author) Carl Sagan List Price: $16.00 USD New From: $7.60 In Stock Used from: $2.75 In Stock Release date September 8, 1997.

See larger image Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Paperback) By (author) Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan List Price: $18.00 USD New From: $6.90 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date September 7, 1993.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Thus begins Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella, First Love. At age sixteen while living in the country, Vladimir meets twenty-one-year-old Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, the daughter of a titled but very poor family living on the adjoining property.  Zinaida is a beautiful and spirited young women and Vladimir falls hopelessly in love with her.  Zinaida toys with him mercilessly, enticing him with hints of a deep and romantic affection and, alternatively, pushing him away and treating him with condescending, sisterly affection. (Perhaps the 19th century equivalent of “Let’s just be friends.”)  At one point, she even asks Vladimir to look after her twelve-year-old brother, emphasizing the their age difference and that Vladimir is still just a boy.

Adding to Vladimir’s frustration are the numerous suitors who come calling on Zinaida every evening.  They are all older than Vladimir and superior to him in either wealth or social class.  She plays them all off one another, but occasionally indicates that she favors Vladimir.  On these occasions the young man’s heart swells and there is no joy greater than the joy felt by a young man in love for the first time.  There is also no sadness greater than the sadness brought on by unrequited love.

Vladimir is a sensitive and observant young man and he is able to see through Zinaida’s extreme coquettishness and notices a gradual change in her manner.  Beneath her façade, he can see that she truly is in love, but not with him.  Nor is it one of the other suitors, although at first he suspects it is one of them.  The penultimate heartbreak for Vladimir is that Zinaida’s secret love turns out to be Vladimir’s own father.  In the final chapters, this heartbreak story, as all good heartbreak, turns tragic.

Turgenev is one of the early practitioners of literary realism.  First Love is told in first person and adheres strictly to the limitations of omniscience that that point of view requires.  Turgenev uses that to his advantage in several specific places, such as when Vladimir witnesses an altercation between his father and Zinaida.  He is unable to hear what they are discussing, but his visual observation provides enough for for us to understand the depth nature of their relationship.

The true artistry of this novella is revealed at the conclusion when the reader reconsiders the entire story once again, this time taking a far more sympathetic view of both Zinaida (and really, the first time through she’s very hard to like) and Vladimir’s father.  What is finally revealed is that this story is not only a tale about a youthful unrequited love but also about Zinaida’s place in society, society’s expectations of all of us, and ultimately about the nature of love itself.

Turgenev’s influence is even more apparent in the development of psychological fiction.   He has a gentle touch that captures complex and nuanced emotional states in his characters and can be seen as a precursor to Henry James and Joseph Conrad.  This same approach to fiction can still be seen in such contemporary works as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.

Turgenev lived during changing times in Europe.  Later events would sweep away the aristocracy in his native Russia, but during his lifetime the social order, and the aristocracy that it supported,  was already crumbling.  The characters in First Love reflect this along with the very nature of the story that the older Vladimir tells to his shallow and passionless companions.

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

See larger image First Love (The Art of the Novella) (Paperback) By (author) Ivan Turgenev List Price: $10.00 USD New From: $5.58 In Stock Used from: $0.06 In Stock Release date September 1, 2004.

See larger image On Chesil Beach (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $2.23 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 10, 2008.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Nathan’s autobiographical short stories have upset his family, particularly his father, who believes they show American-Jewish family life in a bad light and confirm the worst stereotypes of Jews.  It is 1956 and Nathan is writing in the shadow of the Holocaust.  His family is offended by his telling of their internal feuds, portraying them as “conniving Jews,” confirming the worst stereotypes held by Gentiles.  They enlist a respected member of their community, a judge no less, for his opinion.  Nathan receives a letter from the judge asking him, among other things,  “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?”  Strong stuff.  Nathan, however, is devoted more than anything to truthfulness and art and refuses to take responsibility for the feelings of his family and to take on the weight of history which they are trying to impose upon him.

Estranged from his father, he seeks out a substitute in one Emanual Lonoff, a successful, middle-aged Jewish-American writer.  Citing his published stories and his magazine profile, he writes to Lonoff,  inviting himself because he happens to be in the neighborhood staying at a writer’s colony in upstate New York.  His girlfriend has left him, his family questioning his morals, he seeks the approval from a spiritual father, a fellow writer.  He gets far more than he bargained for.

Lonoff lives a quiet life in The Berkshires with his wife of thirty-five years, Hope.  Also visiting on the same weekend as Nathan is is the beautiful but mysterious Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s former student.  There is tension in the house.  While never explicitly stated, it is more than hinted at that Bellette is a former lover of Lonoff’s.  There are no doubts about in long suffering Hope’s mind.

Lonoff receives Nathan warmly, but still holds him at arm’s length.  The wisdom and affirmation that Nathan is seeking is meted out in tiny doses.  Like the writing that Nathan admires, Lonoff’s words are spare and while as an artist he reveals truths fearlessly, in life he is guarded.  He describes his approach to writing:

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Given Nathan’s romantic notions at the time about the noble cause of literature and art, that’s a little disappointing.  And yet, that’s pretty much what writing is.  For Hope, however, this describes her life with Lonoff as one of enforced solitude, and she’s had about enough of it.  That, along with the presence of Amy, brings about a crisis in the marriage and a confrontation that Nathan gets to witness.

Nathan, in the meantime, has fallen in love with Miss Ballette, or at least who he imagines her to be, none other than Anne Frank.  Her age is right, her look is right, and her background is unknown.  If only she would marry him, he could take revenge on his critics who attack his anti-Semitism.  Sadly, she is only Amy, not Anne, and well he tells her she looks like Anne Frank, she reacts with indifference.

The life Lonoff lives, devoted to his art, just as Nathan desires for himself, is not without its costs. The costs are paid not just by the writer, but also by the people in his life.  In the end, at the end of the tumultuous weekend, Lonoff’s knowing evaluation of Nathan is both praising of his talent but also a warning about the life he is choosing for himself:

“I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction. . . . You’re a different person.”

It’s impossible to read The Ghost Writer without thinking of Roth himself.  The setting of the story is in the same timeframe as when Roth’s career was beginning, at it was Roth’s unflinching portrayal, the the good and the not so good, of Jewish-American life that brought him both fame and controversy, first with Goodbye, Columbus, and then Portnoy’s Complaint.  The Ghost Writer was written on the other side of the fame and controversy and is imbued with the wisdom of a life having been lived.  The tone is genuinely wistful and, as a truth teller, Roth is willing to own up to the flaws, vanity, and shallowness of his twenty-three year-old self.  Among the larger themes of all of Roth’s work is the two-edged sword of heritage.   We are a nation of immigrants and while we attempt to purge ourselves from whatever identity that defines our ancestors, there are also times when the heritage that haunts is also the heritage that comforts us.  In The Ghost Writer, Roth shows us the birth of that dichotomy.

The Ghost Writer was selected by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the prize in 1980, but the Pulitzer committee overrode the decision and instead gave the award to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  It’s hard to imagine two books more different in style, subject and sheer heft.  Thirty years later, it’s hard to say anything about the comparative merits of the two books other than, “Wow, what year that was.”

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

See larger image The Ghost Writer (Paperback) By (author) Philip Roth List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $1.85 In Stock Release date August 1, 1995.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Tamkin’s council and Wilhelm’s inability to shed his burdens only serve to heighten Wilhelm’s sense of failure.  Wherever he seeks sympathy, whether it be his estranged wife who continues to make financial demands on him while refusing to divorce him or his father, a comfortably retired doctor, finds nothing but reminders of his failures.

Born Wilhelm Adler, he changes his name to Tommy Wilhelm to further his acting career.  His career never takes off and so he fails in his attempt to actually become Tommy Wilhelm, a failure he is constantly reminded of by his father who insists on addressing him as “Wilky,” his childhood name.

Seize the Day is a distinctly American story.  Whereas British fiction from Daniel Defoe on up through today’s Ian McEwan is preoccupied by social and economic class distinctions, American society prides itself on being free from class.  No matter what station we are born into, we believe that through hard work, perseverance, and strength of character we can succeed.  If we do not succeed, it is obviously due to some flaw in our character.  American fiction has always explored the chasm that exists between that Great American Ideal (and mythology) and the stark reality that the Universe has no concept of fairness.  American literary characters, unlike their British counterparts, are therefore imbued with a greater sense of anomie. While British heroes and heroines may struggle to overcome the rigid class distinctions in their society, and usually fail, there is at least the idea that there is a sense of order in the Universe, no matter how harsh it may be. American literary figures, from Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths to Fitzgerald’s James Gatz to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to Miller’s Willy Loman, fight not against society but against nothingness.

Years after writing Seize the Day, Bellow said in interviews that never liked Tommy Wilhelm very much.  Indeed, Wilhelm is not particularly likable and the reader is likely to feel as much sympathy for him as the other characters in the novella.  “Stop whining, be a man, get a job!” we want to say to him.  And yet, the story is compelling and unconsciously reaches those hidden parts of our psyche that fear the stark nothingness, and leads us to the novella’s surprisingly cathartic conclusion.

For more in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

Referenced books:

See larger image Seize the Day (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Saul Bellow List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $7.38 In Stock Used from: $3.05 In Stock Release date May 27, 2003.

See larger image An American Tragedy (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Theodore Dreiser List Price: $9.95 USD New From: $4.72 In Stock Used from: $5.50 In Stock Release date August 3, 2010.

See larger image The Great Gatsby (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $6.05 In Stock Used from: $2.73 In Stock Release date September 30, 2004.

See larger image The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback) By (author) J. D. Salinger List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $4.98 In Stock Used from: $2.46 In Stock

See larger image Death of a Salesman (Viking Critical Library) (Paperback) By (author) Arthur Miller List Price: $18.00 USD New From: $8.33 In Stock Used from: $1.34 In Stock Release date January 1, 1996.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Although BP has said that all is going as planned with operation “Top Kill,” nothing will be conclusively known about its success until sometime Sunday.    While most articles about this environmental catastrophe refer to this as a spill, that word hardly describes what has happened and what continues to happen.  The word spill implies that there is some finite amount involved, however large it may be.  The Exxon Valdez spilled its contents into Prince William Sound twenty-one years ago.  There was a finite amount of oil onboard and the flow eventually stopped.  When the flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon well is finally stopped, we can call it a spill.  Until then, it should be called what it is: an endless eruption.

The status reports issued by various sources since BP began pumping drilling mud into the well in an attempt to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  First there were reports that all was going as planned.  Then there were reports that the operation had been suspended sixteen hours before.  Then there were reports that the operation was resumed and again, everything is going as planned.  Since not one single thing about this drilling operation seems to have gone as planned since the very beginning, taking BP’s word, or the President’s for that matter, about what is happening requires a moon-sized grain of salt.

That this has been going on for over a month with one attempt after another to stop the flow or contain the damage failing is proof that we have inflicted damage to the environment far beyond our ability to control what happens to the gulf and to ourselves.

In 1951, Rachel Carson published the The Sea Around Us. The book sold over 250,000 copies in 1951 and went on to win the National Book Award in 1952. The Sea Around Us and the books that followed, especially her 1964 masterpiece, Silent Spring, became pillars of the modern environmental movement.

As I watch the streaming video documenting our supreme recklessness with Nature, I remember back to about 1970, when Earth Day made environmentalism cool, when my grandmother gave to me her book-of-the-month club editions of both those books.  I read them both that summer at my grandparents cottage on the north shore of Long Island.  That was years before mysterious plume of brown algae entered into the Long Island Sound and nearly obliterated the local scallop industry, and even more years before a second mysterious plume entered the sound again just as the scallops were recovering, delivering the final knockout punch to a way of life for generations (or centuries if you count the Native Americans who lived there before we did).

Carson was a gifted communicator and was able to teach science in very simple terms for non-scientists to understand.  Her writing style was beautiful and poetic.  In the very first section of The Sea Around Us, entitled “Mother Sea,” she describes the formation of the earth, its oceans, and the live upon it in a way that is scientific and at the same time as spiritual as any creation myth.  In her version of “Let there be light,” she describes the development of the food chain that binds us to our planet and to every other living thing:

All the while, the cloud cover was thinning, the darkness of the nights alternating more and more perceptibly with the palely illumined days, and finally the sun for the first time shone through upon the sea. By then, some of the living things that floated in the sea must have developed chlorophyll.  Now, in the sunlight, they were able to take the carbon dioxide of the air and the water of the sea and from these elements build the organic substances they needed.  So the first true plants came into being.  A group of organisms unable to produce chlorophyll arose, and found that they could live by devouring the plants.  These were the first animals, and from that day to this every animal in the world has followed the habit acquired in ancient seas, and, directly or through intricate food chains, has been dependent for food and life on plants.

When the oil gushing from this well is finally staunched, next week, next month or next year, where will we be?  What will we have learned?  How badly will we have damaged our only home?  We can already see where the oil has come ashore the destruction of the coastal wetlands along the gulf.  The local economies will be suffering for generations.  Beyond just that, however, are the massive plumes of oil deep beneath the surface.  Ironically, they may have been formed by the highly toxic dispersants that have been used, and continue to be used, by BP to prevent the oil from floating to the surface where they can be seen.  It’s the ultimate cover-up.  It doesn’t seem to have save the coastline from what may be irreparable damage and the long term effects to the health of the ocean, and with it, the food-chain and us.  The dispersants may very well have made it impossible for the oil to ever be removed.

This is all clearly the result of a powerful  industry aided by a regulatory system that is at best, impotent, and at worst, massively corrupted.  Fundamentally, the problem goes deeper than that.  The people of Louisiana are facing the destruction of their seafood industry.  Louisiana, long known for its shrimp, and its oysters, and its crawfish, is also long known for its even larger dependence on the oil business, and has long pretended that those two industries aren’t in conflict with one another.

The effects of these miles-long plumes of undersea oil are as of yet unknown and it may take years to determine.  They may live on for years, travelling around the world in ocean currents, leaving behind dead zones.

How many more times must this happen?  How much of our human habitat must we destroy? Where’s the tipping point?

See larger image The Sea Around Us, Special Edition (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Carson List Price: $19.99 USD New From: $6.15 In Stock Used from: $1.49 In Stock

See larger image Silent Spring (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Carson List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $3.71 In Stock Used from: $2.61 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

American novelist John Gardner (not to be confused with the British author of thrillers by the same name) is probably best known for his novels Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, and October Light, a story about a family and a rural community in Vermont, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1976. He died at age 49 in 1982 in a motorcycle crash.

In addition to being a novelist, Gardner also wrote literary criticism and taught writing.  He held very strong opinions about just about everything and frequently stirred controversy in literary circles. He made harsh, judgmental statements about his contemporary authors (including some of my idols like John Updike) and never shied away from an argument.  He was also arguably  one of the greatest teachers of creative writing who ever lived.  At the same time that I was a student writer at SUNY Albany, Gardner was to the south of me, teaching at SUNY Binghamton.  From what I’ve read and heard, I think I’m glad that I was in Albany studying with Eugene Mirabelli, a teacher with extraordinary sensitivity for young writers with fragile egos.  Gardner, while inspiring for some, could also be extremely intimidating.  He either drove one to greatness or made one give up forever.

It was a year or two after I graduated that I finally picked up his Art of Fiction, and it was probably good that I read it after college and not before.  It’s intimidating as hell.  Gardner apparently read every book ever written, in every language, and he’s not shy in citing them in his lessons.  While I was then, and still am, a proponent of literary canon, Gardner left me in the dust.  When I read through the reader reviews of his book at Amazon, they are mostly glowing, but occasionally there are ones that are scathing indictments of his elitism.

Admittedly, his tone can be condescending, pedantic, and elitist.  He does, however, know what he’s talking about.  Once I was able to get over feeling like a complete ignoramus (a word he frequently uses), I found that I agreed with him.  So, I did what I had done in school when I was stuck in a class with a professor who love to hear himself speak, I “took what I could use and let the rest go by,” to paraphrase Ken Kesey.  (There I go, dropping names just like Gardner).

This is not a Writing Crime Fiction for Fun and Profit kind of book.  Gardner’s focus is on creating literary art, and even though the title says “Notes on Craft For Young Writers,” it’s not a book for beginners.  Or at least is not a book for beginners who don’t have the utmost seriousness and willingness to do what they must to become great writers: devote the rest of their lives to studying, learning, and practicing their craft.

The first part of Gardner’s book is a discussion of aesthetic principles and values.  While the reader may be anxious to get to the “Notes on Craft” part, Gardner takes the position that aesthetic principles and craft (the nuts and bolts parts of character, setting, and plot) cannot be separated and unless a writer has a clear understanding of what he or she is trying to achieve artistically, craft is irrelevant.

It is in this section of the book where Gardner is at his most pedantic and I can see where some readers will reject what he says.  Unfortunately, this is a mistake.  I have been in far too many workshops with writers who haven’t studied much great literature and indeed reject the idea that it is even necessary to read in order to be a writer.  Their writing shows it.

In the second part of the book, Gardner gets down to specifics of writing craft, but in the context of the artistic principles that discussed in the first part:

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of a vivid and continuous fictional dream.  According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters and events; that is he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of the, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths.  In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist.  We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or writing.

Gardner then sets out to show all the things that can interrupt that dream: a sudden change in point of view, imprecise use of language, an inappropriate change in narrative tone, etc.

When I first read it, it was that idea of fiction as a vivid and continuous dream that captivated me. It really is the best way to describe what reading is like and anything that disrupts that dream destroys the experience.  One of the reasons why real books, the physical kind made out of paper, have endured as a technology throughout the centuries, is that they “disappear” while we are reading them.  The dream takes hold and we are no longer conscious of the binding, the paper, the appearance of the type on the page.  The biggest challenge to designers of electronic book readers, such as the Kindle, is the ability to make the book disappear and not interrupt the dream.

The biggest challenge to the writer is to create a fictional dream and to sustain it.  All the elements of fiction—time, place, character, plot, dialogue—must be mastered to the degree that they become second nature to the writer in order to achieve that goal.

All in a life’s work.

I have to admit that I was put off a bit myself by Gardner’s continual use of the word ignoramus.  It’s a loaded term, and very pejorative, and Gardner, who teaches us to be precise in the use of language is making a point.  In Latin, ignoramus literally means “we do not know.”

Every few years or so, I open up Gardner’s book for a refresher course.  Ignoramus that I am, reading this book never fails to set me back on the right course when my writing has gotten sloppy or lazy.

He also still intimidates the hell out of me.

See larger image The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $6.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 4, 1991.

See larger image Grendel (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $12.95 USD New From: $4.95 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date May 14, 1989.

See larger image October Light (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $4.21 In Stock Used from: $0.02 In Stock

© 2009 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.