My writing ability, I felt, was put to shame when I read a snippet of John Agee’s, A Death in the Family. I found his choice of words to describe a scene, exact. The stream-like sentences flowed w/o much effort (which revealed to me how much work had had to do to pull this off. Never mind writing well, how about inserting a style of writing as well that has to appear in every sentence, every paragraph, so that now it has layers of meaning to it beyond the original story. Some guys have that in-born talent. I yet, have to work at this) and finally, his ability to rekindle in me a child’s delight of an early summer evening. I read a short passage of Agee’s memory of a summer dusk when he was a child and it managed to invoke in me those same memories and feelings. Talk about being able to convey well enough to evoke a response in me, via a memory from 109 years ago.
The snippet:
“But it is of these evenings, I speak. Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out.
The children ran out first hell bent and yelling those names by which they were known; then the fathers sank out leisurely in crossed suspenders, their collars removed and their necks looking tall and shy. The mothers stayed back in the kitchen washing and drying, putting things away, recrossing their traceless footsteps like the lifetime journeys of bees, measuring out the dry cocoa for breakfast. When they came out they had taken off their aprons and their skirts were dampened and they sat in rockers on their porches quietly.”
How I write: “See Dick run. Run Dick run. See Sally watch Dick run.”
OK, I’m being flip but I do not have that ability to write like Agee did. I suppose I could after many, many years of practice but I am 60 now and my fishing rod has spooled out most of it’s line. There isn’t a career’s worth left before the final end of that strand hastily slips through hoop guides out into the Atlantic.
My first English class at Rhode Island College was with Paul Anghinetti who taught “Major World Literature” aka: English 101 which gave us texts of long since dead Greek authors to read.
We read The Odessey which was about some Greek warrior written 800 years before Christ showed up in Galilee. I wasn’t one for liking extant works and this monster (12,000 lines worth) was a long, slow. boring slog that had references to Greek gods and myths I had no familiarity with. What 20th century kid from Pawtucket does? Once done, we had to write a simple five page impression about it.
A week later we get our papers back and on the top of mine, written in red felt pen said, “This Sucks...D+ at best.” Anghinetti was known for not being too polite in his criticisms. In his defense though, he was a tough but fair marker.
I wasn’t the only one who blew it, nearly the entire class did. That day we got the papers back he said, “I’m going to do what I haven’t done since 1972, and that is teach you all the basics of writing...though I gave it up then because you Boomer kids seem hopeless...a real college education died in 1968!” Anghinetti was rather elitist but he had a point. College at one time truly winnowed out the chaff and “Sink or Swim” was ruthlessly applied. If you couldn’t do it, “Sorry kid, there’s no Head Start program here to get you and the other mediocrities up and over the obstacle. We do not graduate peasants, we graduate quality.”
For a week we get off the ancient works and he shows us how to write cleanly, to accurately convey meaning and to write economically. If you can say it in five words vs ten, do so. Instead of a grade for this he gave us a cheap paperback version of Strunck’s The Elements of Style, which is the Bible for all writers, had we shown improvement.
I got my copy. I passed that section of the class and I realized how terribly the Pawtucket school system had failed to teach us kids any real English other than to find the verb in a sentence. Hell, in public school I had done far better than the oafs I shared the class with. It wasn’t rare for the system to graduate kids who were mostly illiterate too. Even though I did well in a small local pond against other frogs, I wasn’t as advanced as I thought I was in the bigger ponds of the world.
Why Do I Write?
I find it amusing, fun and I’m exposing the inner dialogue I run at times as I experience life. I love telling stories in person and writing them sort of concertizes them forever here. I notice I seem to be uploading many moments of my life and that’ll be my legacy, if the internet survives and does that it purports to do, which is to forever record whatever you do on it. At Google, Facebook and the NSA, they now have my bequest in the form of memories.
Like I said, I write of memories, of stories of people I have known, things I have done and how life feels to me. I do it sarcastically, tongue in cheek but that’s how I respond to some of the absurdities of life, by making fun of it. It’s a very Mark Twain thing to do and I have aped it. He once chuckled about a sad story he heard by saying, “I haven’t laughed this hard since I heard that the orphanage had burned down.” OK, it probably was wrongly attributed to him but it shows how I look at life at times, through black humor. It’s a common defense against life’s land mines we all occasionally mistakenly step on or the silly irrational way life slams into us (by life I mean, mostly other people).
I have toyed with the idea of writing about far more revealing things I have experienced or done. And consequently, more entertaining for you to read. I could do the same with other’s lives but that requires dropping their mask that we too all wear in public to protect our social standing. Upon learning a new scoop about someone, we tend to think differently of them after.
Truman Capote, at a loss for his next great book finally created and wrote Answered Prayers, in which he exposes people he knew intimately in Manhattan’s First Class social world. Not too long after publication, he was shunned by New York’s High Society and his writing career fell off a fucking cliff. He wasn’t heard from again and luckily wasn’t sued for what he had revealed in a slightly bitchy “Tell All” gossip piece.
I’ll
see what I can do for
a more interesting pieces that aren't shitty first drafts.
