The Elegant Variation

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE WRITER'S NOTEBOOK

Well, you've had a chance to see for yourself this week what sort of essays you'll find in Tin House's The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.  In addition to Susan Bell's memorable essay on The Great Gatsby, you can check out Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, D. A. Powell, and others break down elements of craft and share insights into their own writing. With how-tos, close readings, and personal anecdotes, The Writer's Notebook offers all writers useful advice and inspiration. Included is a CD of workshop discussions and panels.

Some of the other terrific writers in this collection include Rick Bass, Kate Bernheimer, Lucy Corin, Tom Grimes, Matthea Harvey, Anna Keesey, Jim Krusoe, Margot Livesey, Antonya Nelson, Chris Offutt, and Peter Rock.

We're very pleased to be able to offer a copy of The Writer's Notebook, courtesy of Tin House, to a lucky TEV reader.  Everyone knows the drill - drop an email, subject line "I'M CRAFTY", and include your full mailing address, please.  We'll take all entries until Sunday, May 31 at 7 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will break all hearts but one.  Until then ...

UPDATE: Congratulations to Ned Resnikoff, winner of one of our most contested giveaways to date!

LITERATURE'S LOSERS

In honor of my protagonist Harry Rent, I've contributed a list of "Literature's Losers" to Bookforum's revamped website.  It begins thus:

Long before Amazon.com reviewers tyrannically demanded sympathetic and likable protagonists, literature was reliably populated by leading men of a less bland stripe. It’s hard for me to understand why someone would want to spend their reading hours in the company of the virtuous, the accomplished, and the capable, when failure is so much more interesting—and, sadly, altogether more common. Today, we call them antiheroes (it’s more polite), but to me, they will always be literature’s losers—tormented, feckless, sometimes lovable, sometimes not, but almost always heartbreaking.

To find out whom I selected, pop on over and have a look ...

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (IV)

Herewith, the conclusion of Susan Bell's marvelous essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found, along with a number of other superb essays on craft, in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtesy of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit and a considerably expanded version of this essay can also be found in her book.

Perkins’s influence was more or less limited to the macro-edit. Unlike his editing of Thomas Wolfe’s work, Perkins didn’t mark up Fitzgerald’s text word for word, didn’t roll up his shirtsleeves, dig in, and reposition the prose. The micro-edits of Gatsby were a solitary endeavor. Fitzgerald was a prose techie who could not merely polish but power up a weak passage, raise the ram of a slow sentence. Take this early one: “The part of his life he told me about began when he was sixteen, when the popular songs of those days began to assume for him a melancholy and romantic beauty.” This sentence may seem all right, but I dare any reader to argue its elegance or gravity. Fitzgerald would delete it altogether. In its place, he wrote:

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

Fitzgerald was driven to edit a sentence silly until it punched.

Inclined to clarity when he wrote, Fitzgerald’s first forays onto the page were at times—as for most mortal writers—blurred with ambiguity. As Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:

[A cause] of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not . . . exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea.

Sure enough, Fitzgerald seems unclear of his meaning in an early draft of the crucial scene at the Plaza Hotel. As Nick listens to Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby bicker, he tells the reader:

I was thirty. Beside that realization their importunities were dim and far away. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

A few paragraphs later, as he rides home with Jordan in a taxi, Nick adds:

I was thirty—a decade of loneliness opened up suddenly before me and what had hovered between us was said at last in the pressure of a hand.

Nick’s thoughts are opaque. A threat looms, but he does not say what it is. Fitzgerald is trying to conjure up the narrator, reveal his deepest concerns, but Nick remains hazy. The writer blankets the insufficiency with three multisyllabic words—realization, importunities, portentous—that sound smart and say little.

Now look at the final version of this same passage, after Fitzgerald dramatically reworked it:

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

That’s all. He deleted the rest of the paragraph to aim at one point. In the next paragraph, Nick is in the taxi as before, but this time Fitzgerald picks up the line he had held back—the undefined threat—and casts it:

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, the thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

Fitzgerald took a couple of wordy, imprecise sentences and transformed them into a limpid exposé of a single idea: the loss of youth. The danger of turning thirty is defined: “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” The theme of aging underscores the character descriptions and is not a coarse intellectual aside: “But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.” The final sentence was a detached commentary on a detached relationship; now it is a commitment to human tenderness, however flawed: “the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.” By changing “a hand” to “her hand,” Fitzgerald created a truer intimacy that offers the poignant conclusion that human affection alone can compensate for the indignities of growing old.

Fitzgerald, Berg writes, “is generally regarded as having been his own best editor, as having had the patience and objectivity to read his words over and over again, eliminating flaws and perfecting his prose.” But The Great Gatsby would be a different book, and very possibly a lesser one, without Perkins’s counsel. Many consider editing as either the correction of punctuation (copyediting) or the overhaul of a book such as Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. The editing of The Great Gatsby sits between these extremes—a testimony to a writer’s discipline to edit himself and his wisdom to let himself be edited by someone worthy: that is how he crossed the gulf.

(Return tomorrow when we'll be giving away a copy of The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.)

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (III)

Herewith, Part Three of Susan Bell's essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtest of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit.

Fitzgerald edited his way out of this clump once Perkins pointed it out to him. He broke up the thick block of data into smaller pieces he judiciously distributed throughout the text and enmeshed in the dialogue and drama. The improvement can be seen in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom. In the manuscript, this scene carried no reference to Gatsby’s Oxford claim or his army career; in the revised proof, Fitzgerald fully explains and seamlessly weaves the Oxford and army stories into the drama. The final version reads:

Gatsby’s foot beat a short restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.

“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”

“Yes—I went there.”

A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:

“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi [a poseur who’d falsely claimed he’d gone to Yale] went to New Haven.”

Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice, but the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.

“I told you I went there.”

“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”

“It was in nineteen-nineteen. I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”

Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.

“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.

The editor had helped the writer reconceive the information as dramatic.

Fitzgerald obliged his editor with no hint of defensiveness or anger. The writer had gone very far on his own with Gatsby and was ready for the last editorial push—one he freely admitted he was incapable of envisioning alone. He wrote to Perkins, “Max, it amuses me when praise comes in on the ‘structure’ of the book—because it was you who fixed up the structure, not me. And don’t think I’m not grateful for all that sane and helpful advice about it.” In fact, it was Fitzgerald who did the fixing, but the writer needed his editor to point the way and was not embarrassed to say it.

It helped to have an editor as astute and courtly as Perkins and one who knew how to balance general commentary with specific suggestions. It was Perkins who pointed out the importance of the character-defining phrase “old sport,” when in a letter he wrote: “Couldn’t you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase ‘old sport’?” Fitzgerald had used the phrase only four times; now he ran with it. In the revised proof, Jay Gatsby says “old sport” incessantly and through it displays an absurd yet endearing self-consciousness. The phrase eventually becomes a spoil of war for Tom and Gatsby:

“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.

“What is?”

“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick it up?”

And a few pages later, Tom shouts, “Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” Fitzgerald, then, edited an ornamental detail so that even as it remained ornamental, it would matter. “Old Sport” had been a cute effect: now it was Gatsby’s weapon, armor, and Achilles’ heel in one.

(Essay concludes tomorrow.)

MUNRO WINS MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL

Another worthy intrusion - Alice Munro has won the Man Booker Internation Prize.

Judge Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist, admitted that selecting a winner from the 14 longlisted authors – who are assessed on their bodies of work and the contribution they have made to "fiction on the world stage" – had been a challenge, but that Munro "just won us over".

"Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise," said Smiley. "Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated."

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (II)

Herewith, Part Two of Susan Bell's essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtest of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit.

Besides research, the writer used visual imagery to flush out his hero. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda’s drawings of Gatsby must have made Gatsby more tangible, because after spending time with them the author added several superb physical descriptions. Among them: “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.” This is a good deal better than the original, ultimately (and thankfully) excised description of Gatsby, which is chock-full of generic adjectives and adverbs: “He was undoubtedly one of the handsomest men I had ever seen—the dark blue eyes opening out into lashes of shiny jet were arresting and unforgettable.” Finally, after the Perkins critique, the Fuller research, and Zelda’s drawings, Fitzgerald came up with this description of Gatsby’s smile:

[Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

Fitzgerald wasn’t satisfied making his hero only more physically palpable. With one smile, he exposes the entire range of Gatsby’s character: the sincerity and generosity of the man who flips unpredictably, tragically into blankness and self-absorption. It is safe to say, then, that Jay Gatsby was not written so much as edited into a physical—and metaphysical—presence.

Gatsby was not the only character that needed work. Unprompted by Perkins, Fitzgerald amplified Daisy by stacking a metaphor of paralysis that betrayed her inability to grow up emotionally. In chapter seven, Nick arrives to find Daisy and her friend Jordan lying on a couch in the excruciating summer heat. Referring to the torpor, the women say only, “We can’t move.” After this scene was written, in galley proofs, Fitzgerald returned to chapter one to thread in a prescient phrase that underscores the one above: on seeing Nick for the first time in years, Daisy says, “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” Daisy’s inability to move in chapter seven reverberates with her paralysis from chapter one. The metaphor, begun in the writing, gets built up in the edit.

The Great Gatsby’s problems exceeded the need for character definition. In one section, the manuscript, as Perkins put it, “sagged.” Fitzgerald had sensed a drag in the prose but couldn’t see its cause. Perkins did:

I think you are right in feeling a certain slight sagging in chapters six and seven . . . I thought you might find ways to let the truth of some of [Gatsby’s] claims like “Oxford” and his army career come out bit by bit in the course of the actual narrative.

In giving deliberately Gatsby’s biography when he gives it to the narrator you do depart from the method of the narrative . . . , for otherwise almost everything is told, and beautifully told, in the regular flow of it,—in the succession of events in accompaniment with time.

Perkins diplomatically complained of a common structural flaw: clumping. Fitzgerald had shoved a clump of biographical information into one place. Actors have an expression to describe the mere facts an audience must know to understand the story: they call them the plumbing. “I’m not doing the plumbing,” some will protest, when asked to say a few lines that explain plot or a character’s history but stick out from the action like the proverbial sore thumb. At its best, a book’s pipes are laid into the work so suavely that the reader simply feels them function and never notices their cold, hard nature.

But pipes protruded in the original version of the scene in which Nick visits Gatsby after the fatal car accident. The two men go to the terrace and sit “smoking out into the summer night.” Into this static setting, Gatsby gushes his life story. “Suddenly he was telling me a lot of things,” Nick says. The line is a warning to the reader: be patient, you are about to be hammered with “a lot of” information. Yawn. The historical details of Gatsby’s life are given up in a monotonous drone. He explains his Oxford claim, then recounts his teenage reveries, his subsequent apprenticeship with yachtsman Dan Cody, from which followed his army career, during which he met and fell in love with Daisy Fay, after which he received a letter at Oxford telling him he had lost her to Tom Buchanan. Are you with me?

(Essay continues tomorrow.)

INTERLUDE: MENDELSOHN COMMENCENT

We normally don't like to break up special week-long series, but Daniel Mendelsohn's lovely UC Berkeley commencent address is very much worth it, so here you go.

Exactly thirty years ago today, on a warm day in the middle of May of 1979, at the end of my freshman year at college, I picked up the telephone in my apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, and called my grandfather in Miami Beach, Florida, to announce that I'd decided to major in Classics.

The news did not go over well.

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (I)

We get all manner of books on writing around here and they tend to blend together but the offerings from Tin House always stand out.  They've just published The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, which includes terrifically useful essays from the likes of Dorothy Allison. Rick Bass, Aimee Bender, Jim Krusoe, Antonya Nelson and Jim Shepard.  The collection also includes a bonus lecture CD.  But what immediately caught our eye is Susan Bell's terrific essay on revisions, using The Great Gatsby as her example.  Bell is most recently the author of The Artful Edit, which no less a language authority than William Safire called "original" and "helpful."  Bell and Tin House have graciously allowed her essay, "Revisioning The Great Gatsby" to be serialized here this week on four parts, and we'll be giving away a copy of The Writer's Notebook come Friday.

We all know The Great Gatsby. We were forced to read it for high school English. And like most books thrust upon students as another cut in the key that would release them from the prison of formal education, it has an ambiguous luster. We remember we liked it, but we’re not sure if our admiration was sincere or derived from a desire to please the teacher—and get out.

An informal survey of my acquaintances suggests that few adults have read Gatsby lately. When I reread it in the spring of 2002, at the age of forty-three, I hadn’t looked at it in almost thirty years. My early readings of Gatsby had been supplanted by images of Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, film having usurped literature, as Fitzgerald himself predicted it would.

I was reminded of this eminent yet largely ignored novel when I read the biography of Max Perkins, by A. Scott Berg. At the time, I was writing a book on the philosophy and practice of editing, and the legendary Perkins was my touchstone. He and Fitzgerald enjoyed one of history’s most rewarding editor-writer collaborations. Berg gives a fine account of how Perkins and Fitzgerald, together, refined The Great Gatsby. I reread the novel just to see how it matched Berg’s account of its making. It floored me. I hadn’t expected it to be that good. Its every sentence and event feel necessary. Fitzgerald succeeds at the unlikely fusion of ultramodern prose—taut, symbolic, elliptical—and gorgeous lyricism: ornate, fluid descriptions of parties, for example, that rival Tolstoy’s descriptions of war. Finally and heroically, Fitzgerald manages to maintain compassion for a humanity he portrays in the most sinister terms.

My interest was editing, though, not just writing, and the author’s painstaking edit of Gatsby distinguishes it. It is a tour de force of revision. So much so that critics, who rarely mention the edit of a book, commented on the quality of Gatsby’s rewriting, not just its writing, in reviews. For H. L. Mencken, the novel had “a careful and brilliant finish. . . . There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort. . . . The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.” Gilbert Seldes agreed: “The Great Gatsby is a brilliant work, and it is also a sound one; it is carefully written, and vivid; it has structure, and it has life. To all the talents, discipline has been added.” Careful, sound, carefully written, hard effort, wrote and rewrote, artfully contrived not improvised, structure, discipline: all these terms refer, however obliquely, not to the initial act of inspiration, but to editing.

Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat’s meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls “that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book . . . and a finished product”—in other words, editing.

In autumn 1924, Fitzgerald sent Perkins the Gatsby manuscript. The editor diagnosed its kinks, then wrote a letter of lavish praise and unabashed criticism. “And as for the sheer writing, it is astonishing,” wrote Perkins. “The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry are most extraordinary.” A crucial problem, though, was the hero’s palpability. Perkins explained:

Among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.

Gatsby’s vagueness was intentional, according to Fitzgerald’s December 1 reply: “[Gatsby’s] vagueness I can repair by making more pointed—this doesn’t sound good but wait and see. It’ll make him clear.” To make Gatsby too clear would make him too human and unheroic. Fitzgerald wanted to clarify Gatsby’s vagueness, not Gatsby himself. But in a fascinating turnabout, on December 20 the author wrote again, this time to confess that the vagueness was not altogether intentional:

I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in & you felt it. If I’d known & kept if from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know now—and as a penalty for not having known first, in other words to make sure I’m going to tell more.

Although Gatsby needed to be enigmatic, his mysteriousness had to suggest something precise behind it, and Fitzgerald had to figure out what that was. He needed to do as good actors do: learn his character’s whole history to show only a small piece of it.

Fitzgerald used two techniques to discover the full expanse of Gatsby’s character: real life models and visual aids. In a letter to Perkins, he wrote:

 . . . after careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind here) for the Fuller case and after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. . . . Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for awhile then lost him & now I know I have him again.

Fitzgerald had modeled Gatsby on his neighbor in Great Neck, Edward Fuller. Fuller was involved in various scams, including fraudulent stock dealing. Gatsby, wrote Fitzgerald, “started as one man I knew [Fuller] and then changed into myself.” When pressed to develop Gatsby further, Fitzgerald went back to the idea of Fuller and set out to learn more about his model’s real-life crimes and attitudes. The old nut goes, “Write what you know,” but often a writer is clearer about what he doesn’t know and must learn about. One easily gets lost in oneself. The detached concentration that research demands may have helped Gatsby come clear in Fitzgerald’s eyes.

(Essay continues tomorrow.)

OUR NEWEST READER

 

Please welcome my daughter and TEV's newest reader, Clara Grace Sarvas. (DoTEV, Baby TEV, something will be figured out.) She was born on Thursday afternoon, already appears to be a Banville fan, and mother and daughter are doing well.  All in all, a pretty good reason to skip BEA, eh?

GONE QUIET

 

(Artist's Daughter with Doll, Pablo Picasso)

We're observing radio silence for the next few days, for reasons to become apparent presently.  Posting will be irregular, if at all, but we do have two back-to-back week-long extravaganzas in the works: Next week, we'll be serializing Susan Bell's marvelous essay on revising and The Great Gatsby from The Writers Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, culimating with a Friday giveaway of same. 

The week after that, we should have the Joseph O'Neill interview fully transcribed and ready to go.  It will run Monday through Thursday, with a Friday giveaway of the paperback edition of Netherland.  All in all, much to stick around for.  So do pop back, and we'll be back in touch soon.