A discerning elimination.

We’ll begin with Sam Spade sneakily entering a room in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

He put his hand on the knob and turned it with care that permitted neither rattle nor click. He turned the knob until it would turn no farther: the door was locked. Holding the knob still, he changed hands, taking it now in his left hand. With his right hand he brought his keys out of his pocket, carefully, so they could not jingle against one another. He separated the office-key from the others and, smothering the others together in his palm, inserted the office-key in the lock. The insertion was soundless. He balanced himself on the balls of his feet, filled his lungs, clicked the door open, and went in.

In Rex Stout’s The League of Frightened Men, the reclusive criminological genius Nero Wolfe answers a criticism from his assistant that he has neglected to follow certain promising leads in their current case:

“In the labyrinth of any problem that confronts us, we must select the most promising paths; if we attempt to follow all at once we shall arrive nowhere. In any art – and I am an artist or nothing – one of the deepest secrets of excellence is a discerning elimination. Of course that is a truism.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes. Take the art of writing. I am, let us say, describing the actions of my hero rushing to greet his beloved, who has just entered the forest. He sprang up from the log on which he had been sitting, with his left foot forward; as he did so, one leg of his trousers fell properly into place but the other remained hitched up at the knee. He began running towards her, first his right foot, then his left, then his right again, then left, right, left, right, left, right…As you see, some of that can surely be left out – indeed must be, if he is to accomplish his welcoming embrace in the same chapter. So the artist must leave out vastly more than he puts in, and one of his chief cares is to leave out nothing vital to his work.”

Wolfe is obviously correct, at least insofar as his observation applies to the art of writing. (How it applies to the art of detection, I couldn’t say.) But I would extend it by adding that the amount of detail the artist elects to put in or leave out is a question of style.

I’m not sure if the theorists of literature have devised a name for this element of a writer’s style, so let’s call it granularity. The fine-grained writer will include more details of his characters’ actions, of their inner thoughts, of their surroundings, while the coarse-grained writer will include fewer. The parodic extreme of the fine-grained technique would be Wolfe’s narration of the hero’s tortured progress toward his lover in the forest: “First his right foot, then his left, then his right again…”

(…Which, as shown by that excerpt from The Maltese Falcon, is not that much of a parody.)

Its polar opposite, the quintessence of coarse-grainedness, would be a bare plot outline: “She meets him in the forest. They make love. Afterward…”

This isn’t to say that the fine-grained style is more precise, let alone better. A fine-grained but clumsy writer will include every detail of a character’s action but the one that matters; a talented coarse-grained writer will include that detail and no others, and the reader will be perfectly satisfied.

The famous quip about Henry James, that he “chewed more than he bit off”, could be applied to most fine-grained writing. But while James may too often have tried to stretch a stare, a blush, and a fluttered eyelid into a four-course meal, he was no more fine-grained than hard-boiled, hard-drinking Dashiell Hammett. Fine-grained writers are alike only in their high estimation of their readers’ level of wakefulness. One may be fine-grained on matters of psychology, another on sociology, another on technology. The one who transcribes every flicker of a character’s flow of consciousness won’t say a word about that character’s appearance, while the one who’ll specify which hand the hero uses to pluck his keys from his pocket will expect you to deduce said hero’s emotions from actions alone.

Assuming a work of finite length, the more fine-grained the writer’s treatment of any aspect of the story – internal or external, personal or historical, metaphysical or concrete – the more coarse-grained must be the treatment of all the others. The trick is to choose the degree of magnification, adjusting to the length of readers’ attention spans and to the overall size of the story you want to tell.

By these means, a story of any size can be shrunken or enlarged to fill any number of pages. Nicholson Baker’s intensely fine-grained 1988 debut The Mezzanine describes an office worker returning from lunch, crossing his building’s atrium, and heading up the escalator to the mezzanine floor, reflecting on the mundane events of his morning. Many a science-fiction work has narrated the rise and fall of a galactic civilization in fewer words.

You might quibble with my use of the word “size”; you might say that The Mezzanine‘s visit to the CVS for a new pair of shoelaces is no bigger or smaller, literarily speaking, than Frodo and Sam’s march to Mordor. To me it’s obvious that stories do come in different sizes – that Ulysses’ wanderings around the Mediterranean are bigger than Leopold Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin in Ulysses, that To Kill A Mockingbird is bigger than Catcher in the Rye. A “normal-sized” story would involve two or three main characters, take place in an area no smaller than a neighbourhood but no larger than a city, encompass a timespan of between a few days and a few weeks, and have an outcome affecting people besides the characters themselves…but not too many people.

These parameters, you’ll notice, are distantly descended from Aristotle’s three unities, but unlike Aristotle I don’t mean to suggest that stories adhering to these rules are somehow superior. They are, I think, easier to write. To successfully tell a very small or very large story requires special skill as an author; for large stories, Nero Wolfe’s discerning elimination – knowing what to leave out – and for small stories, what I’m calling magnification – the enchanted lens that allows a Nicholson Baker to expand a broken shoelace or a stop at the men’s room to chapter size without losing his readers.

The master of magnification is that proverbial padder of word counts, Charles Dickens. In an old post on Sentimental Education I compared Flaubert unfavourably with Dickens:

[When Flaubert’s hero] fights a duel with a flighty aristocrat, or attends a ludicrous meeting of a radical political club, or serves an evening on duty with the National Guard, one wishes for a bit of Dickens’ comic expansiveness, his eagerness to digress, his concern to endow every character, no matter how minor, with a quirk or a verbal tic or, at the very least, a funny name. The fleas that harass Frédéric while he huddles in the guardhouse would have been good for a couple paragraphs in Dickens; Flaubert mentions them and moves on.

But whether you’re eliminating or magnifying, the key is to do it discerningly. Henry Fielding in Tom Jones compares a good writer to a tourist,

who always proportions his stay at any place to the beauties, elegancies, and curiosities which it affords. […] The woods, the rivers, the lawns of Devon and of Dorset, attract the eye of the ingenious traveller and retard his pace, which delay he afterward compensates by swiftly scouring over the gloomy heath of Bagshot or that pleasant plain which extends itself westward from Stockbridge, where no other object than one single tree only in sixteen miles presents itself to the view[.]

Inappropriately fine-grained writing, then, we might visualize as a slow, rattling buggy-ride across the naked prairie, with an overfamiliar driver directing our attention to every shrub and hillock as it passes.

Fielding is in my view guilty of the opposite impropriety, whipping his horses too briskly through the final chapters of Tom Jones, crammed as they are with revelations and reconciliations which the reader would enjoy the luxury of examining at greater length.

Take the reaction of Squire Western upon learning that the penniless bastard Jones, whom he has been damning and blackguarding through the preceding 800 pages, is to be reinstated as Squire Allworthy’s heir. Western’s profane rants against those who would undermine his sacred right to tyrannize his daughter are some of the novel’s most hilarious passages; we chuckle as we wonder how he will step down from his habitual perch of enraged dignity. But Fielding only informs us that

No sooner, then, was Western informed of Mr. Allworthy’s intention to make Jones his heir than he joined heartily with the uncle in every commendation of the nephew, and became as eager for [his daughter’s] marriage with Jones as he had before been to couple her to Blifil.

One sentence! This is the same Fielding who expended four entire chapters on the life story of a random hermit Jones encountered on a hilltop outside Gloucester. Discerningly, my good man, discerningly.

M.

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Update, July 28, 2020: Added cover images and linked to Bibliography page.

Good books in ugly covers.

I’ve just finished Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, about his early writing days in Paris.

Here’s a passage that made me happy. Hemingway has just been befriended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who brings him a copy of his newly-published The Great Gatsby to read:

A day or two after the trip Scott brought his book over. It had a garish dust-jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book-jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn’t like it. I took it off to read the book.

Of course, Hemingway loves the book and decides because of it to forgive Fitzgerald for being a huge pain in the ass.

I did some Googling and this must be the book cover Hemingway was referring to:

On the blog from which I borrowed this image, Sexuality in the Arts, the author describes the cover as “marvellous”. I tend toward Hemingway’s view, that it’s kind of atrocious.

One pictures Hemingway as one of those guys who doesn’t give a crap what anyone thinks of him. So it’s touching to hear him say he’s “embarrassed” by an ugly book cover. Possibly he means that he’s embarrassed on Fitzgerald’s behalf – embarrassed that Fitzgerald didn’t have the good sense to veto this ugly cover art – but that doesn’t explain why Hemingway removes the book-jacket before reading the book. I think he doesn’t want to be seen in the cafés reading a book that looks like “bad science fiction”. Hemingway is an artiste, after all. He’s got to keep up appearances.

***

Of all the books in my collection, the one I’d be most embarrassed to be seen reading in public is Kingsley Amis’ Collected Short Stories:

The illustrator’s name is Arthur Robbins. Robbins illustrated the covers for a number of Amis’ books when Penguin reprinted them in the early 1980s. They’re all more or less ugly:

Unfortunately these ugly Penguins are the ones that turn up most frequently in secondhand book stores, at least the ones I visit. I’ve been trying to avoid them as I piece together my Kingsley Amis collection.

***

My friend Jenn hates what she calls the “short, fat” paperbacks. By which she means “mass market” paperbacks, thick and wrapped in shiny covers, the kind you find on racks near the checkout counter in Wal-Mart. I gather she finds the Wal-Martish associations embarrassing. I don’t share this particular embarrassment, but I can see where she’s coming from.

My friend Olin likes the smell of book glue, and he always subjects his books to a sniff test before purchasing. I don’t have an olfactory response to my literature – or if I do I’m not conscious of it – but again, I can see where Olin is coming from.

Some book collectors collect first editions. Others collect “sets”, preferring to display a uniform, monochrome shelf of hardcover Dickenses or Jane Austens. Me, I don’t like hardcover books; they can’t be comfortably held open to the light while lying on one’s side in bed, which is how I usually read.

There are a handful of authors that I like well enough to wish to own all their works: Philip Roth, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis. But I prefer to put together my collection from used paperbacks bought for a few bucks apiece. Greene and Waugh can both be acquired cheaply in handsome orange-bound Penguins. Roth’s novels from the ’50s through the ’70s are easily found used in Bantam paperbacks, while his more recent novels are published by Vintage in trade format.

Amis has given me more trouble. I believe all his books are available in Penguins, but unlike the Waughs and Greenes, the Penguin Amises aren’t handsome at all. Depending on when they were printed, many of these Penguins are too ugly to own.

Panther published a number of Amis’ novels in the ’70s, often with naked or half-naked girls on the covers. Although they look a little like stroke books, these are less embarrassing than the Penguins. Unfortunately they’re also harder to find:

I own Amis’ most famous novel, Lucky Jim, in the baby-blue Penguin Classics edition:

At least I’m not ashamed to be seen reading it. But I don’t like the baby-blue Penguin Classics. There’s something stuffy and uninviting about them. The covers murmur, “I’ve been accepted into the canon. I deal with serious themes and may be taught as part of a college curriculum.” This studious dressing looks particularly wrong on a light comic novel by Kingsley Amis. At least the naked girls on the cover of the Panthers seem to go with the contents of the books. Even the Arthur Robbins drawings on the ugly Penguins are a better fit.

***

As gaudy as the first edition of The Great Gatsby is, I would have no problem reading it in public. Why? Because everyone knows Gatsby is “literature”. Even people who’ve never read it. Even people who couldn’t tell you who wrote it. It doesn’t matter what they put on the cover. Anyone who sees you reading The Great Gatsby knows you’re a Reader of Serious Books.

It was different for Hemingway back in 1925. Fitzgerald was a new writer, not well-known outside of America. If Hemingway wanted to preserve his rep among the arty denizens of the Left Bank, they couldn’t get the idea that he read (ugh) science-fiction.

As for Kingsley Amis, the name might be vaguely familiar to literate people, but what are the odds that the waitress at the coffeeshop, or the cute girl sitting across from you on the train, will recognise I Want It Now, with its photo of a nude blonde girl sprawled across the cover, as a Serious Book? Sorry, buddy, but you’re going to have to find some other way to differentiate yourself from the ballcap-wearing herd with their iPods and Maxim magazines. Better pull out a Penguin Classic and save Kingsley Amis for when you’re at home alone.

M.

Update, Nov. 19 2017: I was reminded of this old post while re-reading Nicholson Baker’s 1988 debut novel The Mezzanine. In an aside about how novelty coffee mugs have been supplanting dainty cup-and-saucer sets in people’s kitchen cupboards, Baker observes that

you develop a fondness for each mug as an individual, and you try to give even the ones you like least a chance to contain your coffee once in a while – you feel about ugly mugs that you have been given the way you do about bad book-cover designs on paperbacks whose insides you really like – you begin to cherish that slight grit of ugliness and wrongness.

I need to cultivate a Nicholson Bakeresque affection for my ugly paperbacks. The cover of my Vintage trade edition of The Mezzanine is neither ugly nor pretty enough to summon up any emotional response.

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Update, July 26, 2020: Redirected a dead link to Archive.org, added cover images for A Moveable Feast and The Mezzanine, and linked to Bibliography page.