The Bell Tolls for... Spain?

We don’t often talk politics here, but I know some of you writer-types are still smarting from the recent election.

No, no, no, not the U.S. Presidential election, I’m talking about the recent elections in Spain- and Catalonia in particular- which looked like it might finally be headed toward secession from the Kingdom of Spain.

See, earlier this year the Convergence and Unity party, which has ruled Catalonia for the past couple decades, finally made the switch from championing greater autonomy for Catalonia within  Spain, to outright support for a referendum on Independence (a majority of Catalans support Independence). Of course, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the central government in Madrid have said they will do anything necessary to block such an action, which sounds kind of like the makings of another Spanish Civil War, does it not?

Now, as we’ve said elsewhere, we would obviously never hope for war. But could a modern Catalan independence movement be the springboard for a new generation of writers, just as the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades was for Hemingway, Orwell, Dos Passos, Gellhorn, Garcia Lorca and countless others?

We may never know. Arthur Mas and the Convergence and Unity party actually lost seats in the November 25^th election. Other pro-independence parties gained new seats, but it was not the clear mandate that Senor Mas was looking for. Would-be writers may have to look to Scotland’s upcoming independence vote, or hope for Quebec to bristle again under the harsh oppression of Mother Canada.

Or, they could just write their stuff anyway. Also a possibility, I guess.

It's all been done before... even the experimental stuff

Having spent some time in art museums lately, the subject of originality has been on my mind.

In literature, as in the visual arts, one can probably make a good case that no matter what an author sets out to do, it’s all been done before. Plots, themes, devices, styles, character types- they all get recycled and repackaged- all the time. Now, this doesn’t mean that a work of literature can’t still reach us on some level if it happens to repurpose the age-old hero’s journey, or retell an old Greek myth, or follow every trope in a given genre. After all, we still listen to music and go see movies even though there are no new chord progressions and no new ideas in Hollywood.

But what if a writer wants to be an innovator and a visionary and a literary trailblazer? What is that author to do? Well, a few authors I’ve read this year spring to mind as examples.

I was bowled over, for instance, after plowing through 75 straight pages of powerpoint slides in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad  and realizing at the end of it that she had managed to form a pretty cohesive narrative that both moved the plot forward and revealed the innermost thoughts of one of the characters. Then in May of this year Egan serialized a short story on Twitter and it was… just okay. More than anything it struck me as a “gimmicky” publicity ploy.

Dana Spiotta’s novel Stone Arabia  is another book I read this year that aspires to innovate and break new ground. She employs a “collage” style that incorporates interviews, transcripts of YouTube videos, emails and other things into her regular narrative. I’ll admit that it worked for me, and it’s not something you see every day. But for all the praise these techniques inspire as 'experimental next steps in storytelling,' the problem with efforts like these is that- you guessed it, it’s all been done before.

Jump back 80 years and John Dos Passos was basically doing the same thing in the early ‘30s. His U.S.A  trilogy is peppered with newspaper clippings, song lyrics and biographies, intermingled with passages of his own stream of consciousness writings.

Jump back another 80 years and you’ve got Herman Melville spicing up his first-person narrative in Moby Dick  with historical treatises, zoology primers and all sorts of Shakespearean literary devices: soliloquies, asides and even stage directions.

I imagine that if you jump back another 80 years or more, you’ll find someone else doing something “new and innovative” in their day, as well. 

So You Wanna Be a Writer? Grab the Wheel...

… of your nearest war-zone ambulance.

 

Many an important war-time novel was dreamed up by the men who freighted the dead and dying from the terrible din of the battlefield. Men whose bad eyes, small stature, age or nationality were obstacles in the way of their heart-felt war-time duty, found they could make valuable contributions to the cause with their “hands at 10 and 2.” In his classic war-time novel A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway gives us a taste of what it was like to take the wheel of a converted Fiat truck on the Isonzo Front…

“Two caribinieri held the car up. A shell had fallen and while we waited three others fell up the road. They were seventy-sevens and came with a whishing rush of air, a hard bright burst and flash and then gray smoke that blew across the road. The caribinieri waved us to go on. Passing where the shells had landed I avoided the small broken places and smelled the high explosive and the smell of blasted clay and stone and freshly shattered flint.”

…and, a little later on in the story, he has the unfortunate opportunity to describe what it was like to be a passenger:

“I felt the engine start, felt him climb into the front seat, felt the brake come off and the clutch go in, then we started. I lay still and let the pain ride.

As the ambulance climbed along the road, it was slow in the traffic, sometimes it stopped, sometimes it backed on a turn, then finally it climbed quite fast. I felt something dripping. At first it dropped slowly and regularly, then it patterned into a strem. I shouted to the driver. He stopped the car and looked in through the hole in his seat.

‘What is it?’

‘The man on the stretcher over me has a hemorrhage.’

‘We’re not far from the top. I wouldn’t be able to get the stretcher out alone.’ He started the car. The stream kept on. In the dark I could not see where it came from the canvas overhead. I tried to move sideways so that it did not fall on me. Where it had run down under my shirt it was warm and sticky. I was cold and my leg hurt so that it made me sick. After a while the stream from the stretcher above lessened and started to drip again and I hear and felt the canvas above me as the man on the stretcher settled more comfortably.

‘How is he?’ the Englishman called back. ‘We’re almost up.’

‘He’s dead I think,’ I said.

The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone. It was cold in the car in the night as the road climbed. At the post on the top they took the stretcher out and put another in and we went on.”

Now, you can catch the flavor of the ambulance driver’s life in books like the one just quoted or in John Dos Passos’ 1919, but the literary magic of the experience seems to have permeated even the authors’ peace-time subject matter and was by no means limited to superstars like Hemingway, Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings or Somerset Maugham. A war-time stint in the ambulance corps quickened the talents of writers far and wide:

C. Leroy Baldridge, Louis Bromfield, William Slater Brown, Samuel Chamberlain, Malcolm Cowley, Harry Crosby, E. E. Cummings, Kati Dadeshkeliani, Russell Davenport, John Dos Passos, Helen Gleason, Julien Green, Dashiell Hammett, Sidney Howard, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Hillyer, Sidney Howard, Jerome K. Jerome, John Howard Lawson, Desmond MacCarthy, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, F. Van Wyck Mason, Somerset Maugham, Charles Nordhoff, William Seabrook, Robert W. Service, Olaf Stapledon, Sir Hugh Walpole, Edward Weeks and Amos Niven Wilder

Just look at that list. I’m not ready to say that the path of the war-time ambulance driver is a surefire path to literary greatness- but it definitely doesn’t hurt. And the resulting eminence doesn’t necessarily have to come in the world of letters. The French composer Maurice Ravel and American artist Waldo Pierce both spent formative years in the cab of a war-zone ambulance. Ray Kroc and Walt Disney were two others who drove ambulances in the Great War. Can you imagine a world without Kroc’s golden arches or Disney’s mouse ears? At some point the evidence crosses the threshold from anecdotal and coincidental to downright empirical. There’s something to all of this.

But maybe being a war-zone ambulance jockey just isn’t your thing. No problem. There’s still some literary magic to be found far behind the front lines. Gertrude Stein was a driver for French hospitals. National Book Award winner AJ Cronin was a Royal Navy surgeon. Famous critic Edmund Wilson was a stretcher-bearer. And both Walt Whitman and E.M Forster made a practice of sitting with the wounded during the Civil War, and World War I, respectively.

So, you wanna be a writer? Be a war-time ambulance driver. Grab your driver’s license and get your passport handy. Literary greatness awaits you.

 -photo by Barry Armer