Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 807
With that one comes back round the circle of discussion that revolves round realism and romance.
People who want to write fiction should ponder deeply on these aspects of imaginative writing. It is all very well to speak of unconscious art, as if a writer with the proper gift would find a way to write, as a bird finds a way to sing. In a sense he will. But after all a great many birds sing badly. Any crow would have been much the better for a few lessons. The mocking laugh of the loon of the Canadian lakes, with just a little more training, would be valuable on the platform — and invaluable among the audience. Indeed most birds stop just where they ought to begin. So it is with writers. Only the greater are above the need for conscious and conscientious effort... and, generally, they use it most.
The description of scenes and of persons, of wind and weather, becomes an essential part of the art of narration. It gives the background of the stage where fiction walks. The cultivation of the art of description becomes a very necessary part of training in writing. The first thing, however, to remember is that description — outside of a summer-resort folder or a public list of persons wanted — is not the main purpose of fiction. It is an adjunct, not an end itself. It ought therefore never to be allowed to overdo its part. One of the worst and one of the most irritating errors in the use of description is to allow the description to block the current of the narrative and bring it to a full stop, just as the reader’s interest and excitement is being carried forward with a rush.
This is seen especially in the detective story in connection with ‘the finding of the body.’ There is a standardized scene in which Inspector Higginbottom and various attendant characters decide to break in the door of the library, convinced that Sir Charles must be lying murdered in the room within. They break it in (Higginbottom does it with his shoulder; always at the third heave): what do they find? The body? No — this:
The room thus revealed appeared of a size considerably larger than a less considerable room, rectangular in shape, its walls lined with books except on the north side which gave on to the garden.
(The body! The body! Never mind what gave on what — was the body there?)
.. A. large old-fashioned fireplace, the mantelpiece of which might easily have been Georgian, if not Jacobean, gave up the chimney...
But the body! Wasn’t it there?
Oh, yes, Sir Charles is there all right, lying across the hearthrug, dead. His body is the first thing which anybody, except a detective-story author, would see. But the author will only find it after crawling all round the room first.
Such a method is admirable for filling up space so as to turn a 10,000-word story into a 70,000-word book. The natural length of a crime story — based on the time during which you can hold your breath, the period of sustained attention — is about 10,000 words. That, however, is a bad length, commercially, too long for an article, too short for a book. Hence the enormous quantity of needless descriptive material written into crime stories to fatten them out. One favourite British author of the day takes care to lay his stories in market towns dating from the Crusades. In an English market town it takes twenty pages of description to work one’s way up the high street. Even then there’s still the Keep and the Close and the Crypt.
As compared with the swift unerring power of description in true art, such a mass of needless undigested detail is deplorable. It is not possible to call up vividly a scene in nature, a lonely wood, a windswept shore, a wild, dark night, by putting it together item by item. One grain of sand and then another grain of sand won’t make a desert. You cannot describe a house brick by brick, nor a wood leaf by leaf. Yet that is the method adopted, especially in poetry, by all of our second-rate writers, and accepted by some even of our first. Real descriptive power shows things in a flash, like a carriage wheel seen by lightning, or at least in a single sustained focus, not in a mosaic of little sections. Take this, for example (it is from the pen of Austin Dobson), as a vivid picture of a dead soldier lying in a wood:
Here in this leafy place,
Quiet he lies.
Observe the art of it — in this leafy place — the rest of it left to the reader’s own imagination. Your leafy place may be very different from my leafy place, but all are beautiful.
Take this:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row.
How many of us can recall our first reading of John McCrae’s immortal verse — the whole scene pictured in those two marvellous lines.
Even single phrases happily chosen and blending metaphor with fact may carry a marvellous descriptive power, such as is seen in the scriptural phrases of King James’s Bible: ‘the shadow of a great rock in a weary land’ — the word weary carries with it a wide vision, a desolation. ‘A rushing, mighty wind...’
But it must be remembered that good description can never be effected by mere oddity of detail, or mere accuracy of observation with nothing else in it except accuracy. At times a poetical genius uses a description that turns on some nice observation of sights and sounds which each of us has made, perhaps, but only in an unconscious way.
The shock of recognition renders vivid what is meant. Thus, Tennyson:
Her feet have touched the meadows and have left the daisies rosy.
That is, the pink side of the daisies shows when they are turned over in the morning dew. Of course, says the reader, so they are, and recalls a hundred mornings of his own lazy uninventiveness.
But no amount of such oddity of detail is of any value in description just of itself, not unless it is a thing that the reader himself has seen and known.... It is no use to talk with marvellous accuracy of the underside of an aspen leaf, or the top layer of a toadstool unless there is significance and recognition. Our poets, and perhaps especially over in Canada — if I may dare lump them together in sin — have erred especially in this respect. They have picked our words to pieces twig by twig, dissected them leaf by leaf, and for the most part, got no further.
I am well aware that exception might be taken to this apparent denunciation of lengthy descriptive passages. I might be reminded of the use of sustained description by those great writers of fiction in the nineteenth century, both in Britain and America, whom we begin now to regard in retrospect as classics. Here are Fenimore Cooper’s matchless descriptions of the primaeval forest in which lurk the last, and the worst, of his Mohicans; or his wonderful sea pictures of the days of the full-rigged ships staggering under a cloud of sail. We think of Washington Irving, and feel drowsy at the very thought of Sleepy Hollow. Even more intimately do we connect Sir Walter Scott with the Highland pictures of ‘Caledonia, stern and wild.’
But mere accumulation of detail can never carry this descriptive power. It becomes merely one example, one subdivision of the general dullness that goes with garrulousness of all kinds — too many words for too little said. But the point is one to reserve for the later discussion of how not to write poetry.
Everybody knows how garrulous old people become in their conversation. They can’t begin without going backwards and beginning again: they can’t end because there is always something more to say. Their talk is their first taste of eternity. Time is fading, it no longer matters.
Now there is the same garrulousness in writing. Pecuniary motives favour it, since a ‘book’ needs seven shillings and sixpence worth of words to make it, commercially, a book. One can understand, too, that authors paid by the word naturally tend to get prosy. There used to be in bygone days a set of writers, hired to write stories and paid by the line, ‘penny-a-liners’ they were called. Naturally their stories ran to such dialogue as the following:
The rivals met:
Hold, sirrah!
Who bids me hold?
I!
You?
Yes!
Ha!
Bah!
Yah!
Draw!
The steel clashed.
We can laugh at the mote in the eye of the penny-a- liner, but the beam is at times in our own. Even quite apart from any pecuniary motive, sheer conceit favours a garrulous style. The writer seems to hug himself over each sentence, expanding it and keeping his story waiting while he lingers over it.
Here is how it is done.
Let us say that the statement to be made is — Father decided not to shave till after dinner.
Here’s how it is expanded into garrulousness:
An important question now arose. The problem was whether father should shave before dinner or wait till dinner was finished and then shave after it was over. Hither course presented certain definite advantages. But on the other hand each alternative was accompanied by certain equally definite disadvantages. To shave before dinner had the advantage of getting it over and done with. Yet it involved an initial effort, a firm determination and a resolute execution. In other words it was a nuisance. Nor could it be done by halves. As against this, even if father did not shave before dinner, he would still have to shave after dinner — or else go to bed in his whiskers. The difficulty would merely grow with delay. In the end, after much cogitation and many half-formed resolves, father decided not to shave till after dinner.
But is the garrulous writer done with it at this? Oh, no, he goes right on: Had father known what profound consequences were involved in this seemingly simple postponement, he would have...
Quite so. He’d have cut his throat in despair. But we don’t care if he does.
These fits of long-windedness are due, I repeat, very likely far more to the conceit of authorship than to motives of advantage. The writer thinks the situation so interesting that he loves to dwell on it. These interpolations, so fascinating to the author, are the parts of stories that people skip. Indeed the skipping habit arose out of their existence. An analysis of them would show that they occur and recur in regulation situations, as when the heroine wonders whether what she is making of her life is what her life ought to be made: or when the great detective having viewed the body starts to play the concertina.
There is a queer elusive quality that makes for success in the art of narration which one may call, for lack of a better name, verisimilitude. No rule can be given for how to achieve it. But, as with all other factors, the recognition that it is there to achieve, is the first step towards its achievement. It means the power of making a thing seem true, even though it isn’t. It carries a sort of sincerity about it by putting into the narrative a certain amount of exactness of dates and details. In and of themselves a mere mass of dates and details will never help to make fiction sound like truth. A story that begins with an elaborate family tree is unconvincing from the start. It doesn’t make the existence of Mr. Hewetson (in Chapter One) any more real to us to say that his name was really Huitson, and that his greatgrandfather who had been in the Baltic timber trade, but had changed his name when he went into Newfoundland fish business. Nor does it help to say that he may have got some part of his character from his maternal grandmother. He may. I don’t care if he did. That sort of overdone accuracy and superfluous detail falls flat.
I always think that Conan Doyle possessed this quality, this ability to seem to tell the truth in a high degree. He showed it especially with his Sherlock Holmes stories. He did it with incidental touches, put in after this fashion:
It was, if I remember rightly, on the evening of the day when Holmes had just been awarded the Rum ford medal... etc.
Observe the phrase, if I remember rightly. That is to say, it may have been a different evening, or a different medal, but at any rate it was one of those evenings and one of those medals. This sounds truer than truth. Indeed Conan Doyle stuffed so much verisimilitude into Sherlock that he presently stepped out of Conan Doyle’s pages and took on an existence of his own. The story is often told of how little French boys, visiting London and driven about the town, wanted eagerly to see the place where Sherlock Holmes lived. For the Latin Americans in South America Sherlock Holmes has become an entity in himself, a legendary character like King Arthur, about whom anybody may write stories. Conan Doyle was merely the first person who wrote about him. Under such universal treatment Sherlock Holmes no doubt would ultimately go to pieces like that tiresome half-dog, half-public nuisance that began so wonderfully as Tarzan. This attitude towards Sherlock bears evidence to the extraordinary amount of concentrated creation that was put into him. This may have been one of the reasons why, if the current story is true, Conan Doyle got sick of Sherlock, grew, one might say, to hate him — in fact, was jealous of him. Doyle killed him once by throwing him over a cliff in Switzerland but back he came; Doyle later on shot him, crippled him, turned his hair white — but it was no good. Sherlock beat him in the end.
I know of no fictitious character of the present hour who has thus, as it were, acquired an independent life, unless it be Charlie Macarthy. Whatever Mr. Bergen may claim in the matter, it has become clear that Charlie is a personality by himself with an independent mind and character. If precedent holds good his creator will become jealous of him, as Conan Doyle did of Sherlock, and may try to make an end of him. Charlie should be warned in time.
How strange it is to think of these characters of fiction — from the Charlie Macarthys and the Mr. Chipses and Mrs. Minivers of the present hour, back to the Huck Finns and the Pickwicks, all the way to Shakespeare.... Their life is in a way more real than what is round us — at least more known, and warmer.... The person who can still, as the years pass on, be ‘buried in a book’ (note the method; buried, lost to the world) is fortunate indeed.
It is all very well, however, to say; Make your fiction sound like truth. The trouble is to do it. Only Ulysses could bend Ulysses’s bow. But a writer may at least, if he cannot make falsehood sound like truth, avoid making truth sound like falsehood. Very many true anecdotes, memories and reminiscences are deprived of all appearance of truth by the manner of narrating them. The writer feels that he must suppress all references to actual places and actual people not necessary for his story — and in doing this reduces the story to a nullity. ‘The most remarkable linguist I ever knew’ he writes, ‘was a bishop of a certain church whom I will just call Bishop Q. I remember dining with him at the house of my friend F., where there was also in the company one of the most distinguished wits of the London bar whom I will merely designate as Wit X. X. asked Q. his opinion of the great philologist P. H., and Q....’
Quite so, but never mind what he answered. Better call the bar just B., and call the dinner off; there is no interest in any story told that way.
CHAPTER SIX. GOOD AND BAD LANGUAGE
ENGLISH SUPERIORITY AND American nerve — One steals a language, the other a continent — Canadians and Eskimos nowhere — Luxuriance of American slang — Seventeen kinds of duds in one Wisconsin high school — The American sky pilot and the English incumbent — The new realism — A hero with guts — How to swear in print — A foul oath, then a fouler, then the foulest — The Panorama man and the peasant in the Swiss more-ass.
QUITE apart from the technical aspect of the art of narration, there is the broader general question of good and bad language, of where speech ends and slang begins. To what extent must the language of literature and cultivated discourse accept and assimilate the innovations, the irregularities and the corruptions that perpetually appear in all languages as spoken by the mass of the people? To what extent are we to think of our language as a moving current, never the same except in its identity, and to what extent should we wish to check the flow of the current, so that stiller waters may run deeper? Obviously there is a limit in each direction. A current totally arrested means stagnation. Waters that run too fast end in the sand. Somewhere there may be a happy mean between the two.
Now this question arises for all languages. But it has a very peculiar importance for the English language since here the current flows in two parts, the American and the British; and many people are inclined to think that one tends to run too fast and the other tends to slacken. In other words we have here the problem of the American language and American slang. Every now and then controversy breaks out in regard to British English and American English — or it used to before the war stilled all babble — and it sometimes had a rather nasty edge to it. It carried in it one of the last faint survivals of the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party. Great quarrels die away to leave only generous memories’; little quarrels live on. Hence the question of ‘slang’ as between England and America (England, not Scotland; the Scots are not worrying) keeps its edge; all the more so, in that a lot of Americans think, in their hearts, that the reason why the English don’t use much slang is that they can’t make it up, and a lot of English people think that the Americans use slang because they weren’t brought up properly — or, no, they don’t think it, they know it. That’s the provoking thing about the English (say the Americans), they don’t think things, they know them. They did all their thinking years and years ago.
I can write on this controversy with the friendly neutrality of a Canadian. In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages without trying to invent slang, so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scots for sermons and American for conversation.
Perhaps the highest point of controversy is reached in the discussion whether there is, whether there ought to be, whether it is a shame that there isn’t, an ‘American’ language. Some people feel very strongly on this point. They think that having your own language is a mark of independence like owning your own house, driving your own car and having your own shaving mug in the barber shop. Gangs of boys make themselves up a ‘language’ and never in its obscurity. The leading boys in this respect are the Irish, so anxious to have their own language that they are trying to learn Gaelic. If they are not careful, first thing they know they’ll get to talk it and then they’ll be sorry.
